Streusel Creme Killer: Book 5 in The INNcredibly Sweet Series

by Summer Prescott

  The blonde’s producer made a slashing motion across his neck, letting the reporter know to terminate the interview, and she did, never even knowing that the cameras had stopped rolling moments after Dylan McClary had begun to speak.

  **

  Timothy Eckels certainly had his work cut out for him with the examination of Diane Fellman’s remains. It seemed that whomever had drawn the letters on her fingernails, had also injected the woman’s body with parasites, most likely through the incision in her bellybutton. The interior of the corpse was crawling with a variety of parasitic creatures, who were content to munch upon what was left of the entrails of their host. Oddly enough, some sort of chemical solution, also teeming with live organisms, had been injected directly into the blood stream of the Vice Mayor. Her entire inanimate form was crawling with parasites, inside and out, and it was taking both Fiona and Tim an inordinate amount of time to capture the critters and place them in specimen jars for analysis.

  “What kind of sicko would do something like this?” Fiona muttered, holding a couple of pinworms with tweezers and placing them carefully in a specimen jar.

  “People are strange,” Tim replied mildly, examining a creature that had attached itself to the eyeball of the deceased.

  “Well, yeah. I mean, each to their own and all, but why would someone do this? It just doesn’t make sense,” she shook her head. “There’s no point. If she was already dead, why introduce all these nasty things into her system?”

  “Perhaps they were trying to send a message,” her boss mused, extracting a wiggling, dark brown thing from the eyeball, and gazing at it under the magnifying glass before putting it in a specimen jar.

  “Well, the only message that I see in all of this, is that someone has too much time on their hands, and a very sick mind,” Fiona observed sourly.

  “Or a very clever one,” Tim shrugged.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, in most cursory examinations, these parasites would’ve been overlooked. The blood would have been drained from the body and replaced with embalming fluid, killing the parasites. Unless the examiner would have made an incision in the body prior to embalming, they never would have known what was growing inside,” he explained.

  “Okay, but…wouldn’t even the dumbest of criminals have known that there would be an examination to determine the cause of death? I mean, this lady was kind of a big deal in this town. Who wouldn’t have thought that she’d be examined carefully?”

  “That’s what makes me think that the killer was trying to send a message of some sort. If we can figure out what the message is, perhaps we can figure out who killed Diane Fellman.”

  “Whoever it was, I hope it was personal. I sure wouldn’t want someone doing this to me,” Fiona shuddered.

  “Then don’t run for Vice Mayor,” Tim replied.

  She wasn’t sure if he was joking or not, with her boss it was hard to tell.

  “So you think that what happened to her had something to do with her job?”

  “That would be my first guess, yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Because there’s nothing else remarkable about the woman that would make someone want to kill her. She’s not particularly wealthy, nor particularly beautiful, skilled, or accomplished, aside from getting elected, and that was only by a small margin. So she had to have done something in the context of her job that would make her a target,” Tim guessed.

  “You don’t think it’s just random?”

  “If it is…you and I are going to be very busy,” he replied practically.

  CHAPTER 8

  Missy was glad to be home at last, and ever so grateful for the warm broth that the visiting nurse had brought for her, Chas, Maggie, and Spencer. The Marine had weathered the illness with the help of the IV liquids given to him by the EMT, who came back later and replenished his supply, and the others had been released from the hospital that morning, well enough to leave, but still too weak to function in a normal manner. Echo had gone home the day before, and called Missy sounding depressed.

  “Carmen Feeney died this morning,” she told Missy, sniffling a bit.

  “Oh no!” Missy sat up straight on the couch where she and Chas had been lounging and watching movies all morning. “Was she…?”

  “Murdered? No, thankfully,” Echo replied. “She had salmonella like the rest of us, and her poor, fragile body couldn’t take it. She died at the hospital, and since she doesn’t have any family, I’ll be going through her things in the bookstore and trying to decide how to deal with everything. Apparently she listed me as her only contact for emergencies.”

  “Oh goodness, I’m sorry, honey. When are you going to do that? I can help you,” Missy offered.

  “Well, if you’re feeling up to it, I figured I’d make a start on it tomorrow morning. Maybe you can sort through her file drawers while I try to take inventory of the store’s contents. It’s a shame that the little shop is going to close – it’s such a nifty place to browse and relax with a cup of tea and a book.”

  “Maybe it doesn’t have to shut down,” Missy suggested. “Maybe it can be sold and operated by someone else.”

  “That’s a great idea, if the property doesn’t get tied up in probate. I’m hoping that we can find a will. It’ll make things much easier. Once we’ve gone through her store, we’ll need to go through her house as well.”

  “I wonder if she had an attorney.”

  “I suppose we’ll find out, once we start digging through her things,” Echo sighed.

  “Well, if she did, they’ll be the ones going through everything, so the sooner we find that out, the better.”

  “Exactly,” Echo agreed. “Call me in the morning to let me know if you feel well enough to get out, and we can get started.”

  “Okay, sweetie, I will. It’s not like I’ll be opening the shop for a while anyway, all of my customers are currently unable to eat cupcakes at the moment,” Missy smiled weakly.

  “Get some rest, sunshine,” Echo said softly.

  “You too.”

  **

  Missy and Echo sat in the office of Carmen’s bookstore, going through the files in her desk. Most of them were related to the operation of the store, but there had been a couple in a folder labeled “Personal,” and those were the records that Missy and Echo chose to look through first. While the files contained copies of Carmen’s birth certificate, as well as her late husband’s, and a copy of his death certificate, there really wasn’t any information of particular value in the folders, so they figured that, if a will did indeed exist, it must be at Carmen’s home. Making their way to Missy’s car, they headed for the little pink cottage to see what they could find.

  When they got to the house, there were newspapers piled on the porch, and the grass in the normally tidy yard was about four inches too long. It made Echo sad to see the cute little cottage in such a state – Carmen had been so proud of her cozy home. The two friends went up the front walk and onto the gracious, bright white porch with wicker chairs, ferns and an indoor/outdoor area rug covered in a pink and green floral pattern, and immediately noticed that something was wrong. The screen door was closed, but the front door was open at least six inches.

  Missy and Echo looked at each other, eyes wide, and then back at the door.

  “What do we do?” Echo whispered.

  “We go in and see what’s going on,” Missy said pragmatically. “But don’t touch anything. If a crime has been committed, we want the police to be able to get fingerprints other than ours.”

  “Okay,” Echo nodded, her heart thudding.

  She pulled the sleeve of her light cardigan down over her hand, and gingerly used it to pull the screen door open. Missy was right behind her as she pushed the already ajar door open with her hip.

  “Hello? Anybody here?” Missy called out, making Echo’s heart rate that much faster.

  Of course, there was no response, but once they stepped fully inside, the two friends
saw that someone had indeed been there, and had turned the place upside down. Every drawer in the kitchen had been pulled out and dumped, every cabinet door stood open, its contents strewn about. The cushions had been pulled from the sofa and the wing backed chairs in the living room, and they’d been sliced open, with little tufts of stuffing scattered about like pieces of a cloud.

  “Well, this isn’t good,” Missy observed, hands on hips.

  “I have a really bad feeling about this right now,” Echo worried. “I think we should check the rest of the house and see if anyone is here.”

  “Why would anyone be here? We announced our presence – if anyone had been here and heard us come in, they would’ve left by now.”

  “Unless they were waiting to hurt us,” Echo pointed out.

  “Don’t be silly,” Missy dismissed the very idea. “No one wants to hurt us. They probably found what they were looking for and got out as quickly as they could.”

  “I wonder what they were looking for,” Echo mused. “Can we please just look around the rest of the house? I have an idea, but I don’t want to get started on it until we make sure that we’re alone.”

  “Of course we can take a look. We need to find out where everything is in here anyway,” Missy shrugged, seemingly not bothered at all by the fact that an intruder had been inside the house.

  They did a quick walk-through, checking every bathroom, closet and nook and cranny, and realized two things. One – there was no one else in the house with them - that was a good thing. Two – whoever had been there before them had been very thorough – there wasn’t one room in the house left untouched. Every space had been gone through, in a manner that suggested that someone was either really determined to find something, or really angry that they hadn’t.

  “Okay, so now what?” Missy asked, gazing around at the mess that filled the formerly spotless pink home.

  Echo moved closer and spoke in a low tone.

  “Once Carmen and I got to know each other a little bit, she gave me this key,” she opened her palm, and showed Missy a small, gold key. “I asked her what the key was to, and all that she said at the time was that, “most secrets get swept right under the carpet, only to be walked on.”

  “What on earth does that mean?” Missy was baffled.

  “I have no idea, but, as we were walking through, I noticed that there’s only one room in this entire house that has wood flooring and an area rug.”

  “The bedroom?”

  “Exactly. I think we should lock ourselves in here, for our own protection, draw the shades and drapes so that no one can see what we’re doing, and then go see what’s under that area rug.”

  “We’re going to have to move the bed to do that,” Missy noted.

  “Are you strong enough to help?” Echo asked, concerned because her friend was still recovering from Salmonella, as was she.

  “I think I’ll be okay if I just sit on the floor and push with my feet,” Missy shrugged.

  “Great idea, I’ll do the same.”

  They went back down the hall to the Master bedroom, after locking the doors and making sure that no one could see inside, and sat down on the floor, Missy at the head of the bed, Echo at the foot, on the same side. They leaned back, bracing themselves with their hands on the floor behind them, placed their feet of the frame of the queen-sized bed, and pushed. The bed was fairly light, and moved readily, taking the soft pink area rug with it.

  Missy and Echo scooted across the wood floor on their bottoms, pushing with their feet, until the bed had been pushed completely away from its original position, with the area rug wrinkled up underneath it. After taking a moment to rest, the duo stayed on the floor and moved over to the area of the floor that had been under the bed, running their hands over the seams of the floor boards. Both women ended up frustrated, when their careful examination of the flooring yielded nothing. No loose boards, no wide seams, nothing that looked like it could even potentially be a hiding place.

  Missy sat cross-legged, thinking, then brightened.

  “Hey, what if we’re going the wrong direction with this?” she said excitedly.

  “What do you mean? The boards only run one way,” Echo was puzzled and dejected.

  “Carmen’s strange comment when she gave you the key didn’t say anything about the floor, but it specifically mentioned the carpet. What if the information that we need is on the back of the carpet?”

  Echo nodded. “It’ll take some finessing to get it out from under the bed, but it’s certainly worth a shot,” she agreed. “I’ll lift up the leg of the frame on the left, and you pull the rug out from under it, then we can do the same with the one on the right.”

  “Sounds good. Then we can do the same on the other side, and once we get the rug freed up from the legs, we can both get on one end and pull it out from under the bed,” Missy suggested, still breathing hard from the first round of exertion.

  Seeing her friend’s pallor, Echo volunteered to go get them both a glass of water first, so that they could have a drink and rest a bit before attempting to free the rug. When they were both refreshed and breathing more normally, they went to work on freeing the rug, both of them sneezing from the dust that had been trapped in the rug, despite the housekeeper’s best efforts. When they moved it out from under the bed, they took one side and flipped it over so that it was nap-side down. The only thing that they saw on the back was a manufacturer’s tag that was about ten inches square, and had a bunch of small print on it about the rug.

  Missy crawled over to look at the tag more closely, refusing to give up just yet.

  “Echo, c’mere, look at this,” she whispered excitedly, bending close to the backside of the rug, over the tag. “Look very carefully at the words in the second paragraph. Letters have been added to some of the words in pen.”

  “Oh my goodness, I see it,” Echo exclaimed, peering more closely at the tag. “The word “side” has been changed to say “inside,” and the word “close” has been modified to say “closet!” Wow, Carmen was clever, I’ll give her that.”

  “But, that’s kind of silly,” Missy frowned. “Whenever someone is searching for something, the first place they look is in the closet.”

  Echo smiled a knowing smile. “Not under the carpet. Do you remember when we were looking through the house…there were two places in the entire house that had carpet. One was the area rug in this bedroom, and the other was…”

  “…the Master bedroom closet, which was wall to wall,” Missy finished, remembering. “Let’s go!” she scrambled to her feet with a renewed sense of urgency. Echo followed closely behind.

  Missy opened the door to the large walk-in closet, which was covered in ordinary beige plush carpet.

  “Do we look for a seam or something?” Echo asked, surveying the tidy nook.

  “I say we just push these hanging clothes aside and start in the back corner, peeling it up until we find something.”

  “Okay,” Echo nodded. “I’ll hold the clothes back, you see if you can get the corner peeled up.”

  Missy tugged and tugged with all her might, breaking more than one fingernail in the process, but couldn’t get the carpet to budge, so Echo suggested trying the other corner, where they had more success. Once Missy grabbed hold of a corner, Echo let go of the clothing, and helped her pull. The used the leverage of the big piece of carpeting to pull the carpet away from the stubborn corner that had defied them initially, then each took a corner and pulled back as far as the center of the closet.

  “We’re going to have to get that pad off of there too,” Echo sighed, swiping a hand over her moist brow.

  “How are we going to get this put back so that whoever came here looking for something doesn’t see whatever we discover?” Missy worried.

  “Well, they didn’t think to do this the first time, so maybe they won’t even notice it if they come back. Let’s just try to get this over and done with in case they do come back,” her friend replied, tying her hai
r back.

  “Okay, heave ho,” Missy sighed, grabbing her corner of the carpet.

  What they discovered when they finally had pulled up every inch of the carpet in the closet, was that they had started at the wrong end. There were some loose boards in the front left corner of the closet, which yielded an intricately carved mahogany container about the size of a boot box. It had a small, gold keyhole on the front which looked as though it would fit the key that Carmen had given Echo. The two friends exchanged a glance, and Echo sat down on the pulled-back carpet and pad with the box in her lap. The key was a perfect fit, and there was a small clicking sound as the lock opened. She opened the box with a creak of the lid, and saw a pile of documents inside. Just as Echo put her hand in the box to take out the documents, they heard the creak of footsteps just outside the bedroom door, and both women froze. There was nowhere to hide, and no way to escape.

  Their hearts in their throats, the trapped friends glanced up, seeing the shadow of someone moving closer to the doorway, and nearly fainted in relief when they saw Chas appear at the door, weapon raised. A look of relief, mixed with annoyance crossed over his drawn features when he saw who had been snooping around in Carmen Feeney’s house, and he clicked the safety back on, holstering his weapon. He was still trying to recover from his illness, but was back at work, due to the high profile case that remained unsolved.

  “Oh, thank goodness,” Missy exhaled, her hand to her chest, as Echo wilted with relief.

  “I take it that you two weren’t the ones who tore apart the rest of the house?” he asked dryly.

  “Of course not,” Missy replied, sounding a bit defensive, as adrenalin continued to pump through her veins. “We just came over here to see if we could find Carmen’s will, because she gave Echo a key to something that we figured might be important.”

  “You do realized that this isn’t just a simple matter of an older woman passing away, right? Your friend Carmen was a person of interest in a murder investigation,” Chas reminded Echo.