Death Takes No Bribes: An Endurance Mystery (Endurance Mysteries Book 3)

by Susan Van Kirk

  Just then, TJ saw Ron Martinez, the coroner, trudging up the main stairway. Normally, he was a pediatrician, but he doubled as the coroner in Endurance. Seeing TJ and Jake, he said, “You must be slowing down. Usually you’re about done with a crime scene when I get here. Too much pasta for lunch is undoubtedly the culprit. I keep telling you that stuff’ll kill you.”

  “Right,” said Jake, “I’ll try pizza instead.” He pointed to the chairs. “Have a seat while we take a first look.”

  “Sure,” said Martinez. He sat in the outer office, pulling out his cell phone. “I’ll call Woodbury. See when we can get him in for an autopsy.”

  “From what dispatch said, you’d better put an emphasis on toxicology,” TJ said.

  She turned and walked toward John Hardy’s office. Putting on some gloves, she looked back at Jake. “Not much room in the principal’s office.”

  Jake laughed. “You should know.”

  “Right. Ha, ha. I’ll check it out first, and when I’m done, you can give it a look-see. Then we’ll compare notes.” Standing in the doorway, TJ surveyed the entire scene. She noted the various items on the floor, then glanced at the top file cabinet drawer partly open, as Del had described. That would mean the cabinet was not locked, so anyone had access to all the drawers. The windows were closed, the thermostat was set around seventy, and the lights were on. She checked out the files on the desk. Nothing out of the ordinary, she thought. It looked like he was writing announcements for school the next day, but he had stopped in the middle of a word. Could have been interrupted by the killer. On the corner of his desk, in a calendar book opened to today’s date, was a printed note that said, “See Harrington Monday morning.”

  Treading softly around the desk, she studied Hardy’s face. This is a strange death, she thought. It looks like he didn’t stand much of a chance. Fast, fast. The items all over the floors, especially the overturned coffee cup, indicated he’d flailed around. Why didn’t he call for help? Need to check the coffee cup for prints. No blood…no other weapons…his face a ghastly mask of horror. His eyes were opaque, not unusual after death. TJ could understand Del’s fright. She looked over at Jake, lounging in the doorway.

  “Come on in,” she said, moving past the desk to change places with him. Watching her partner go through the same reactions she had, TJ thought she’d never seen a crime scene like this before. It had to be poison. What kind? Where might someone get it? What clues would it give them to the actual killer? This was not suicide. It looked as if he was disturbed in the middle of his work and, for whatever reason, took this poison—or whatever it was—willingly. It would mean the poisoner was a person he knew. She looked up and Jake nodded. Then both went back to the outer office to send in Martinez.

  They compared notes while the coroner was checking out the body. Either Martinez or an officer downstairs would accompany the body so the chain of evidence would remain in place until he was safely in the hands of the Woodbury coroner who would do the autopsy.

  Martinez came out, taking off his gloves and shaking his head.

  “What would you surmise with your usual early crime scene lucky guess, oh doctor of little people?” asked TJ.

  “Likely it’s some kind of poison. My instinct tells me it may be strychnine from the looks of his muscles and face. Doesn’t take long for that stuff. The victim is in agony, unable to speak. His muscles contort until he dies.”

  “How long?”

  “Could be as little as fifteen minutes for symptoms. Maybe an hour for death.”

  “What about calling for help? Could he have called?” TJ asked.

  “No way. He would suffer uncontrollable muscle spasms, eventually dying from asphyxiation or exhaustion from the continuous convulsions.”

  “Where did a pediatrician learn about poisons like strychnine?” asked TJ.

  “Oh, come on, Detective. Didn’t you ever read The Mysterious Affair at Styles or The Sign of Four?” he said, laughing.

  “What?” asked Jake, a quizzical look on his face.

  “Don’t mind my friend here. He doesn’t read books. Agatha Christie and Arthur Conan Doyle. Read them cover to cover. I thought this whole scene looked vaguely familiar,” said TJ.

  Martinez leaned back in his seat. “I can’t swear to you strychnine killed him,” he said, “but we’ll know more after the toxicology report. Autopsy will be tomorrow afternoon in Woodbury. I assume someone will be there from the department.”

  “We’ll flip a coin,” said Jake.

  “If it is strychnine,” the coroner said, “it can be obtained as poison for rats, but it’s highly controlled these days. Back in earlier centuries it was used to kill birds in the countryside or rats in the city. In Victorian days, they used a tiny bit as a stimulant. I guess you could say it was one of the first performance-enhancing drugs in sports…if you didn’t take very much.”

  Jake said, “This history is all well and good, Doc, but how does it work?”

  “It blocks a glycine receptor which stops motor nerves in the spinal cord from doing their job the way they should. It results in severe, continuous convulsions.”

  “That would explain the items all over the floor, as well as the broken cup,” said Jake. “Suppose it was in what he drank from the cup?”

  “Possibility. Of course, depending on who could get in or out of the building, the killer might have carried away the poison container after Hardy died. If it’s strychnine, it doesn’t take much at all,” said Martinez, packing up his briefcase. “Now, I have a question for you. Why is a silly, polka-dotted lampshade with little orange balls sitting on the floor?”

  TJ said, “It was on his head.” Looking at the coroner’s expression, she said, “Yeah. I know. Maybe a mentally ill person. Could be a way to present the body so the victim will be humiliated. My guess is the murderer thought this would be appropriate for the principal of a school, a job that usually lends itself to a conservative lifestyle and public image. Motive, so far, is a big question mark.”

  “This is a detail we won’t put out to the public,” Jake said. “Don’t you agree, TJ? I don’t think we want to give this murderer what he or she wants.”

  “Right.”

  “Well, one thing’s for sure,” the coroner said. “Whoever did this was cold-blooded, planned it in advance, and knew where he or she could get the poison.”

  “Do you think Hardy understood what was happening?” asked TJ.

  “Oh, yes. This poison doesn’t cross the blood-brain barrier, so the victim is conscious, but can do nothing about it. He can’t control the muscle contractions, which eventually stop his breathing. Frankly, this isn’t a way to kill someone you like. It’s cruel because it causes terror and painful suffering, so if you’re the victim, you’re aware of it. You can’t do a thing about it. It’s possible the murderer watched him die.” Putting on his coat and scarf, he added, “Good luck, people. You’re looking for a genuinely evil person here.”

  TJ said, “Great! Crazy people in schools. Oh, Doc, before you go—what about a timeline? When did it happen?”

  “I can tell you more after the autopsy and toxicology report are done. Tox will take a while.”

  Then the crime scene investigators arrived, and TJ waved them in, pointing toward the principal’s office. She followed them, giving directions to be sure they bagged the pieces of the coffee cup and checked them for prints and substances. Ditto with the nameplate under the desk. Also, she had them look for a file cabinet key for prints. It was a small crime scene and, with no blood spatter to contemplate, they finished in an hour. Martinez had the funeral home attendants take the body out, and then TJ and Jake began an investigation of items in Hardy’s office, skirting around the surfaces covered with black fingerprint powder. A cylinder of crime scene tape, along with an official sign, which would keep the door locked, lay out on the office counter.

  TJ began methodically with the filing cabinet, whose top drawer was noticeably open. Thumbing through the files
, she suddenly had a thought. “Jake, you know teachers have to get fingerprinted these days. All people who work in the building, like janitors or cooks, must be printed. We’d have everyone from here in the police database.” Jake nodded as he opened folders from the bookshelves, checking out their contents.

  A few minutes later, TJ announced, “Think I may have something interesting here.”

  “Oh?”

  “This top file drawer, the one that was slightly open, has personnel files in it. Several are flagged with red file tabs. Looks like they are questionable evaluations.”

  “Are there many?”

  “Nah. Only three, four.”

  “What’s so interesting?”

  “Look at what this one teaches.”

  Chapter Three

  The following day, just after noon, city workers were still plowing snow, but it turned out the weatherman was not quite accurate in predicting several inches of snow. Although the brunt of the storm went north of Endurance, even an inch of snow added a slippery layer of trouble to travel woes. Grace crept along, eyeballs glued to her car’s windshield as she inched her way home from the newspaper office. Despite her concentration, she almost slid through a stop sign.

  Her mind was not on the deadline for her latest historical column about the old feed store on South Main Street. Instead, she thought about the phone call a few days ago from her boss and boyfriend, Jeff Maitlin. She was not being irrational, she told herself. Whatever this mysterious trip, he seemed to indicate it had something to do with his past. “Seemed” is the right word, she muttered, as she gingerly stepped on the brakes, praying not to slide. As if I need to know why he kissed me on the one hand, and then left with little explanation, on the other.

  Nervously, she forced herself to focus, checking left and right. Grace noted the street department had plowed all the recent snow into a mountain in the median, which was their common practice, but it also caused her uneasiness because she was driving next to a wall of white. This jangled Grace’s nerves, and she clutched the steering wheel tightly. These white snow mounds would eventually be dumped into trucks, hauled out of town, and deposited in the countryside, but for now they made her nervous. Glancing up at the First Bank of Endurance, she noticed the American flag drooping limply from the flagpole. At least we don’t have to worry about blowing snow, she thought, letting out a sigh of relief. The winter had been especially brutal in the small Illinois town, so drifting snow was the last thing they needed.

  A maroon-colored car ahead of Grace stopped at the light on the corner of Main and Mulberry Street. She recognized Loretta Hildagoss, an adult now, but a girl Grace remembered as an adolescent in her high school class. Grace always connected Loretta with the year the home economics teacher did a project involving fake arranged marriages. The “parents” had to carry around a stuffed, seven-pound flour sack that was their pretend baby. The idea was to teach teenagers that parenting was a 24/7 job, laden with lots of emotion. That “job” required more than teenage maturity. Loretta began with all smiles, but after the first day, an increasingly irritated Loretta, screaming, threw her baby out the third-floor window of the science lab. Fortunately, maturity triumphed: she got married well into her twenties and had two children—both still above ground at last count.

  Grace laughed softly, asking herself, why do I remember all these silly episodes? So many years ago, and so many teenagers…I suppose it’s the discrepancy between their crazy teenage antics and their current adult behavior. Good thing they can’t read my mind because I see them everywhere and remember when they were young and foolish.

  She was still smiling when she pulled into her driveway at 1036 Sweetbriar Court, the home she and Roger had bought when they were first married. It was a Victorian house with white wooden siding above dark red brick masonry on a corner lot. Roger had put up a white wooden fence piece at the corner of the yard so Grace could plant flowers around it. Since his untimely death when the children were little, she had made various changes to the house, but its skeleton still resembled the home where they began their married lives. She perused the wraparound front porch, one of the best features of the house. Now in the winter it looked lonely and unused, but come summer, she, Deb, TJ, and Jill Cunningham would lounge on the porch in the floral-cushioned chairs or on the wooden swing, drinking margaritas or sangria. Deb got us started on the margaritas, Grace thought, smiling. She pulled into the garage and a few minutes later she was inside.

  “I’m home, Lettie,” she called out, smelling the savory goodness of whatever her sister-in-law was cooking today. After Roger died, his sister Lettie moved in to help with the children, and she was a fabulous cook. Her cooking was a way of loving the little family, and after she moved to her own house and the children grew up and left home, she still came to Grace’s every day to do what she did best: bake and cook.

  “A good thing, too,” called out Lettie from the kitchen.

  “Why? Something the matter?” Grace asked, standing in the doorway. Lettie had her arms crossed. Not a good sign.

  “Only TJ. She came by to see if you were here. Of course, you weren’t, so she stayed and had a piece of blueberry pie,” Lettie said. “I don’t know why that woman is skinny. How does she eat like she does but never gains an ounce?”

  “She’s young, Lettie. Unlike us, she’s only thirty-nine, so she works off all that food on her job. We were interrupted when she tried to call me earlier, but she said she’d call back.”

  “Hmm. I’ll bet she works it off a few other ways from the looks of the spiffy truck that’s often in her driveway these days…at night. So, what’s the latest?” Lettie said, sitting down at the kitchen table, inviting Grace, with a sweeping gesture, to sit across from her. “Here, I already made you some hot chocolate when I figured you’d be coming home.”

  “Lettie, you are amazing. How did you know when I was on the way home? My hours are always screwy now that I’m retired.”

  Lettie smiled mysteriously. “I have my ways.”

  “Did you put a GPS tracking chip under my car?”

  “A UPS what?”

  “Oh, never mind.” Preoccupied with the reason for TJ’s call, Grace wondered if the detective planned to check out some of the teachers. She knew many of the high school faculty, but in the past year several new teachers had been hired whom she didn’t know.

  “I told Gladys at the coffee shop it was an inside deal. Suppose it was a teacher? Someone you know?”

  Grace laughed. “Seriously? We’re talking about a high school. Teachers are supposed to mold children’s minds.”

  “Yeah, well, in their off time I’m sure they mold other things,” Lettie said. She stood up and went to the counter for a napkin, but came back with a smirk on her face. “Look at all those teachers who are doing jail time in minimum-security prisons for molding other things. I rest my case.”

  “You know, Lettie, teachers aren’t always saints. They’re supposed to be good role models, but they’re human just like everyone else.”

  Lettie shook her head. “I don’t think saints or good role models murdered the principal. I’ve known a lot of people in my time who were angry with the principal of a school, but I think poisoning him is beyond the bounds of sainthood.”

  Grace’s eyes narrowed. “We have no idea who did this, and it might not have been anyone involved in the school. Lettie, you haven’t talked to people about this murder, have you? You know TJ would boil you in oil if she caught you doing that.”

  Lettie looked away from Grace and shrugged her shoulders. “Only Gladys at the coffee shop and Mildred at the bakery. I didn’t tell them anything I shouldn’t say, just that I figured it was an inside job; maybe it was the cuckoo play director, or that randy driver’s training instructor, or the strange French teacher. Well, actually, Mildred added the French teacher since he always comes into The Bread Box Bakery and orders croissants. Aren’t they some kind of French thing?”

  “Lettie. Lips zipped.”
/>
  Then it was quiet, Grace drinking her hot chocolate and Lettie biting her lip.

  “I was over at Del’s this morning making sure he took his heart pill. Of course, he didn’t listen to me when I warned him not to take that job at the high school. The building is creepy on the weekend. A homicidal maniac is on the loose, but Del won’t tell me a thing. Says it’s a rule from TJ.” She paused, thoughtfully, tapping her fingers on the table. “I should cut off her pie supply.”

  “That’s TJ’s job, to figure it out. I mean it, Lettie. You can’t talk to anyone about this. It would jeopardize TJ’s case.” Suddenly, Grace’s phone played “Wanted Dead or Alive.” She walked quickly back to the living room, where she’d left her purse, locating it before the song stopped. “Yes, TJ.” Listening for several minutes, she finally said, “Sure. What time?” Then, “Yes, I can. No problem. I know those people. I’ll see you at the meeting. Let me check.” Then she walked to the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. “Yes, Lettie still has some blueberry pie left.” She glanced at Lettie, who stuck her tongue out. “Sure thing.” She hung up the phone, turning to Lettie.

  “Well,” Lettie said, “now what?”

  Grace checked the clock. “I have to run over to the high school. Faculty meeting in a half hour, and TJ wants me to keep an eye on people’s reactions.”

  “So, who’s in charge over there today?”

  “My guess is Alex Reid. Not a good situation since he is the world’s most disorganized person. But in a pinch, he’ll have to do.” She raced around gathering her purse, electronic notepad, and car keys.

  “Have you had any lunch?”

  “No, but I don’t have time for that. I have to run up and change clothes.”

  Ten minutes later, Grace was on her way across town to the high school while she munched on a sandwich Lettie had thrown together. She thought about TJ’s reasoning. Grace knew the other teachers at the high school, but even though TJ was going to be at this meeting, she figured Grace might notice any unusual reactions or nervous mannerisms of people she knew better than the detective.