by J. C. Kenney
“One hot chocolate with whipped cream and peppermint sprinkles, also known as the Cobb Special, for your sipping pleasure.” Diane handed me the drink, then settled into one of the chairs I’d just wiped off. We spent a few minutes catching up.
“When school lets out for the day, the rack fills up fast.” While it had only been in place a short time, the bike rack was paying dividends.
“Any idea who owns the bike out there now? It makes a statement.” The bike in question was a cruiser-style machine with a wide seat and chrome handlebars. What made it look like it belonged on a California beach’s boardwalk instead of an Indiana town’s main street was the shocking-pink paint job and the white tires.
“It ought to. That’s why I bought it.”
Her response was so unexpected I almost spit out my mouthful of hot chocolate.
She laughed and handed me a napkin. “My doctor told me I have arthritic knees, so if I’m going to exercise, a low-impact approach like cycling is the way to go. I special-ordered that beauty and picked it up Sunday. Now we can go on rides together.”
“Only if you remind me to bring sunglasses. That thing’s bright enough to blind someone.”
“Deal.” Her smile lingered for a moment before morphing into a frown. “Have you heard about the rash of vandalism in my neighborhood?”
“No.” In my defense, I’d been dealing with other issues, like murder, but mentioning that wasn’t going to be helpful. Something else might, though. “Do you want me to talk to Chief Roberson about it? See what I can find out?”
“Don’t bother.” She shook her head. “The police are looking into it. The reason I brought it up is that, in the past month, five homes have had their storage sheds broken into.”
“That’s awful. What was taken?”
“Nada. Nothing’s missing, so it wasn’t burglary. Nothing was tagged with graffiti, so it doesn’t seem to be gang activity. Here’s the thing.” She leaned toward me. “All the sheds had padlocks that were cut off.”
It took me a minute, but when I put the puzzle pieces together, I leaned back, bringing the front chair legs off the floor. “Holy samolie. You mean, cut off like by a bolt cutter?”
“Bingo. It gets more interesting, though. The last incident was reported the day before Georgie Alonso was killed.”
I returned the chair to a normal position and stared out the window while I processed the information. The Boulevard was quiet. A truck heading south honked its horn, and the driver waved. A couple of seconds later, the mayor rode into my field of vision, headed north on his bike, and returned the motorist’s wave. Once again, the combination of a bike helmet to go with his suit and tie made me smile. Then the scene returned to a tranquil state.
Inside, it was a different matter. Over the years, I’d edited enough thriller and mystery novels that I no longer believed in coincidences, especially when criminal activity was involved. To be sure, I asked Diane if she thought the timing was a coincidence.
“Not a chance.” She shook her head.
“Agreed. Which means Georgie’s killer cut the locks either as practice or to create a distraction.” I drummed my fingers on the table as I studied this new piece to the puzzle. It was an intriguing piece that indicated the lengths the murderer went to in planning the crime.
“I’ll need the dates the locks were cut. If I could get time estimates of when they were cut, even better.”
“Got you covered.” She took a piece of paper from under the cash register and handed it to me. “I know a lot of the time frames are pretty wide, but they all happened at night, when people were sleeping.”
“This is beyond amazingly helpful. Nice work, Watson.”
Diana scrunched up her nose. “Watson? No way. I am so not interested in being a sidekick. Think of me more as a confidential informant, someone wise and mysterious whom the detective visits in times of need.”
“You keep coming up with info like this, I’ll call you whatever you want.” The wheels were already turning inside my head. It would be simple enough to cross-reference the times of the vandalism with the work shifts of my newly designated prime suspect, Tommy Abbott.
One question kept nipping at my heels, though. “This is front-page news for the Beacon. Why haven’t I heard about this before today?”
“And you say you don’t believe in conspiracy theories.” Diane scratched her elbow. “Since my house wasn’t hit, the police won’t tell me anything. They told my neighbor they want to keep it out of the press so whoever did it will try to strike again. A patrol car cruises the neighborhood every night.”
“No security video, I assume?”
“Come on, girl. This isn’t New York City or Chicago. You know as well as I do. Probably half the people in this town still don’t lock their doors at night.”
“Just making sure. Awfully convenient for the perp.” A cop would likely know if a house had a security camera. I jotted some notes on the piece of paper. My hunch was growing stronger, but something told me to hold off on putting this puzzle piece into place.
Diane gave me a long, probing look, not unlike the look Dad gave me back in school when he asked about my grades. I tried not to squirm while I waited for her question.
“You know who killed Georgie, don’t you?”
I let out a long sigh as I leaned back. A car motored past, momentarily blocking Maybelle Schuman from my view. She was pulling an empty wire grocery cart. If I stuck around long enough, I’d see her coming the other way with the cart filled to the brim.
Maybelle was a lesson about maintaining discretion. She’d shot off her mouth about my alleged affair with Georgie without knowing any facts and embarrassed herself. That wasn’t going to happen to me.
“Not quite yet.” I slipped the paper into a pocket. “But I’m close.”
How close depended on the results of a phone call I needed to make.
Chapter Twenty-One
“Come on, come on. Pick up.” I tapped my index finger on the bike rack as I waited for Jeanette to answer. Given the request I was about to make, I’d moved outside so Diane couldn’t hear me. I didn’t want to drag her into this mess any further.
When the voice mail greeting ended, I left a message with the dates and approximate times of the vandalisms. I asked Jeanette to cross-check those dates and times with Tommy’s work shifts. I also asked her who’d been assigned to patrol the neighborhood.
As I ended the call, I imagined Tommy in a box. All six sides of the box were closing in on him, inch by inch. There was no escape.
With my mind so laser-focused on the case, I couldn’t sit idly by and wait for Jeanette’s call. I had to do something, so I took a walk to Winchester-Cobb Memorial Park. I could check on construction and get another look at the crime scene.
After a swing by the apartment to get my construction project file and my case notebook, I arrived to find the park bustling with activity. The playground equipment was installed. One set of workers was leveling the mulch that would give kids a soft and safe landing area as they jumped from slides, crawled through tunnels, and swung from climbing bars.
A different group of workers was finishing the excavation of a walking path from the parking lot to the playground. I checked my time line and did a fist pump. The playground was on schedule. Next week, a swing set would be installed adjacent to the playground, and asphalt would be laid for the path.
I made a note to confirm the date of the swing set delivery. After that, I made my way toward the fitness path that would run along the inside edge of the park. The advantage of having a wealthy benefactor donate the land and the funds to build the park meant we could go first-class all the way. That allowed us to build an asphalt path that was six feet wide, enough to accommodate two lanes of traffic.
The crew was using a backhoe to remove the dirt that would be replaced by the asphalt. I didn’t
want to bother them by getting too close, but by my estimate, they had only excavated a quarter of the path. I checked my time line again. The asphalt wasn’t due for another week. No need to panic.
The final stop on the tour was the gazebo or, to be accurate, the new location where the gazebo was to be installed. The discovery of Georgie’s body and the subsequent crime scene investigation had delayed construction of it by a week. During that time, the committee decided that erecting the gazebo at a murder site would be inappropriate. After a flurry of e-mails and phone calls, an area fifty yards away was selected as the new location.
According to the construction schedule, I should have been looking at a leveled piece of ground into which footers had been placed and the framing of the gazebo floor had been built. Obviously, the construction schedule hadn’t accounted for a horrific murder, so instead, all I had was the leveled spot of ground. No footers. No framing. Not even stacks of lumber.
I closed my eyes and counted to ten. It wasn’t the end of the world. The park’s grand opening was a month away. Still, a lot of work, like electrical service and landscaping, couldn’t begin until the gazebo was built.
I had a steering committee meeting on Friday. As the chair, I was responsible for an agenda, so I picked out a soft spot of grass nearby and put one together. The status of the gazebo was going to be the first topic of discussion.
A little while later, I had the project’s Gantt chart displayed on the grass to my left, the budget on the grass to my right, and a rough draft of the agenda in front of me. I was debating about whether to include a request for signage reminding dog walkers to pick up their pets’ droppings when someone blocked the sun.
“Excuse me, Ms. Cobb?”
I had to squint to make out my visitor’s features. It was Kim from the Beacon. I scrambled to my feet, and we shook hands. I had immense respect for journalists. They had a tough job to do in the best of times.
It didn’t matter that Kim was a reporter for a local, weekly paper with a subscription rate in the neighborhood of ten thousand. Her job was to investigate and report on issues of local importance.
It was a job she took seriously. She never missed city council and school board meetings. Though she was only twenty-six, she didn’t let people intimidate her, not even those twice her age. She was thorough, fair, and accurate. I liked her, even if I envied her shoulder-length silky, auburn hair.
More importantly, I respected her.
“Good to see you again. We’ve talked about this before. Call me Allie.”
She was sporting a new pair of horn-rimmed glasses that made her look smarter than she already was, which was saying something, since she’d gotten her journalism degree magna cum laude.
“I know.” She chuckled. “Trying to maintain that professional distance. And you are the Kickboxing Crusader, after all.”
I rolled my eyes. “Thanks to you and Sloane, I’ll never live that nickname down.” I gestured to my papers. “Looking for a scoop on the park’s progress?”
“I was going to take a few pictures and write something up, but since you’re here, care to answer a few questions?”
Any chance to talk about the park was free publicity, so I invited Kim to join me as I returned to my spot on the grass.
We spent a half hour talking about construction progress, grand opening plans, and Sloane’s vision for its future. Kim’s interview technique was impressive. She started with a few softball questions I was happy to answer. Then she moved to more challenging topics, like long-term funding for maintenance and the addition of more amenities.
“The park has a lot of space. There are rumors Ms. Winchester plans to sell the rest of her father’s property to a developer who wants to build a hundred or so homes on the site. If that happens, are you prepared to add features like basketball courts or soccer fields to the park?”
I suppressed a frustrated sigh. For one who wasn’t much of a fan of traditional stick and ball sports, I appreciated athletic facilities, but not at the expense of open spaces. I’d fought hard against the facilities Kim mentioned.
This was a needle I needed to thread with care. When dealing with public funds and publicly owned facilities, I believed in transparency. Here, the issue was that private dollars, my best friend’s dollars, were being used to build and sustain the park. While that distinction mattered to me, it probably didn’t matter to the public.
“Sloane and I may be very close, but she doesn’t tell me everything about what’s going on in her life. I know she doesn’t want to keep her father’s land long-term. Anything beyond that, you’d have to ask her.”
“Hypothetically, then, if the public identified a need for recreational athletic facilities here, would you support that?”
“I prefer to stick to hypotheticals in the stories my clients are working on.”
Kim flashed a half-smile. “Indulge me.”
“Okay.” I scratched an ear. “To be honest, I don’t know. When Sloane donated the land, she wanted a place for people who weren’t involved with mainstream team sports. That’s why the park has a multi-purpose trail, for walkers, runners, cyclists. Groups like that.”
“What about the open space? That’s a lot of grass to cut.”
Aha, here was a chance to talk about the benefits of unstructured play and open spaces. It was a topic close to my heart. After a decade living in the concrete jungle of New York City, I considered open green space to be as precious as gold or platinum.
“Some parts of the park aren’t paved or bordered with white lines, but that doesn’t mean they won’t be used. The trail, the playground, and the gazebo will bring people here, and then they’ll use the open spaces to picnic, throw a Frisbee, have fun.
“I believe there’s a part of the community that will be grateful to have a place where they can go fly a kite or have a family picnic. I worry those folks may lack the voice the ones involved with organized athletics have. Besides, nothing says people can’t come here for informal games of soccer or flag football.”
“The Kickboxing Crusader, continuing the fight for those who can’t fight for themselves.” She ran her fingers through her hair. “Sorry. I shouldn’t editorialize like that.”
“I get where you’re coming from. My sister was a cheerleader. My brother played sports. My niece and nephew are in the youth soccer league. I see the value organized athletics provide. I just want to make sure there’s a place in Rushing Creek for those looking for something different, like musical performances at the gazebo.”
Kim nodded as she wrote. She’d expressed her skepticism about my argument before, but I trusted her to report my comments fairly.
“On a different topic, since you mentioned the gazebo, do you have any new information on the Alonso matter?”
Oops. For a second, annoyance bloomed in my gut at giving Kim an opening to a subject I didn’t want to discuss. I organized my papers as I debated how to respond. Could I afford to give her my full thoughts while asking her to keep it off the record? That seemed problematic at best and unethical at worst.
On the other hand, after being so open about the park, how would it look if I suddenly clammed up? It would look like I was hiding something. Which I was, a few things actually, but Kim didn’t need to know that. I’d play it safe and see how things went.
“I heard someone contacted the police suggesting they look into Georgie’s bank records. Something about money being unaccounted for.”
Kim held a downward gaze as she tapped her pen on her notebook for a few seconds. She took a deep breath and lifted her head until we made eye contact. “Come on, Allie. Don’t stonewall me. I know you’re looking into this. People deserve to know the truth.”
“The truth?” I organized my response while I ran my hand down my sleeve. “I want to find Georgie Alonso’s killer as much as anyone. I have this recurring nightmare where Georgie’
s corpse digs himself out from under a mulch pile and follows me around, moaning, while I turn over rock after rock after rock.”
Her eyes went wide. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”
“What didn’t you mean? You basically accused me of withholding information related to a murder investigation.” I wiped away a tear from my cheek with the back of my hand. “I don’t know who killed him, but if it’s the last thing I do, I’m going to catch whoever did it.”
“It wasn’t my intent to accuse you of anything. You’re a true hero in this town, and deservedly so, after all you did to catch Mr. Winchester’s killer. Let me try again. Is there anything you can share about your efforts to find Georgie Alonso’s murderer?”
Kim was persistent. I had to give her that. It was a trait I admired, and one I was proud to possess.
“I believe the murder was premeditated. I also think money was the killer’s motive. I think Roger Parke deserves a lot of credit for giving the police the tip about the missing money. I can count the number of credible suspects on one hand.”
“How do you know Roger was the tipster?”
I had to give Kim credit. She’d noticed my slip-up and seized on it. I hadn’t meant to use Roger’s name. Now was the time for quick thinking, not lamenting poor word choice.
“Looking for a potential motive, I checked federal and state court records to see if Georgie had sued anybody. The only lawsuit I could find was one he filed against Roger in federal court. It’s plausible that if anybody was going to be paying Georgie a large sum of money, it would stem from that.”
“Good point. I checked state court records but didn’t think about federal court. Lesson learned.” She wrote something in her notebook then leaned toward me. “You have a list of suspects, though, right? Can you give me their names?”
The odds were better that I’d beat Serena Williams in a tennis match than that I’d give up the names of my suspects, but I had a brain blast that might help my cause. I hadn’t heard from Al yet. Maybe he was still trying to pump Willie for information. Regardless, this was a chance for me to rattle a few cages.