The Morelville Mysteries Collection

by Anne Hagan

  “Should I go with him Sheriff?” Mason asked me in a tone that seemed quite detached.

  Inwardly I thought, maybe this is how she handles violent crimes. To her, I said, “No. I need you here. We’ll have to do the evidence collection ourselves. It will take hours to get someone from the Columbus crime lab out here on a Friday night. Even if PD were to take this, they’d be in the same boat.”

  I paused and then thought of something else, “What you can do is get a hold of Shane and get him out here. It’s been you and me so far but now we’re going to need all hands on deck.”

  “Garcia,” I called out to him as he retreated back down the hall. When he turned back to me, I told him, “No press. None. It can't get out yet that there's been a fatality.”

  Chapter 9 – Stakeout!

  Saturday December 13th, 2014

  Muskingum County Sheriff’s Department

  It was a long night and Saturday was looking to be an even longer day. We'd spent the late evening and into the early morning hours canvassing the Powers’ neighborhood looking for any witnesses to anything.

  Unfortunately for Lorene Jarvis, the Powers' lived in the far northern reaches of a high class enclave. They were isolated from their nearest neighbors by a few acres of wooded land. Nobody saw a thing.

  Now I was camped out in the conference room with Shane and Janet. We were replaying a video of the Powers’ front door over and over at the slowest possible speed, praying to catch some little detail that would blow the case open for us. All we could see from the static of the footage though was a lone, black clad figure who approached the porch and took out the overhead outside light, probably with a shot from a silenced pistol. The video feed we could get didn’t have sound. Frankly, I felt like we were lucky to get anything at all the way things had been going.

  “It's a white male, probably about six feet tall,” Shane said.

  “Great,” I replied, “we've narrowed it down to only a couple of thousand guys in the county.” I didn't even want to think about the possibility that the perp wasn't local.

  “What now?” Mason asked.

  I scrubbed a hand down the side of my face. “I thought, by keeping the housekeeper's death out of the press, this guy might take a shot tonight when the biggest party of the year kicks off at the country club but now...I don't know. My gut tells me he's gonna' lay low.”

  Shane stood and stretched. “Respectfully, I disagree. We know how these guys think. They're not like you and me. If I've learned anything from you in the last couple of years it's that when the get stopped in their tracks in one place, they strike back even harder in another. It's all about the chase...all about the thrills.” He remained standing but leaned against the map wall we sometimes used as a pin board.

  Staring right through him, I gave serious thought to what he'd said. Deep down, I knew he was right. “Okay,” I said finally, “we'll set up surveillance around the far east and southeast sides of the club grounds, where most of the residences are, and we'll step up visible patrols right around the club too. Anyone would expect that from us anyway. Let's just hope he thinks our focus is there and we'll see if we can scare anything up.”

  Harding and Mason nodded in unison.

  “For now,” I told them, “both of you go home and get some rest.”

  ###

  Police unmarked cars still look like police cars and, in the rich developments around the country club, I knew my pickup truck would look just as out of place as any unmarked. Self-consciously, I borrowed my mother-in-laws Lincoln after telling her I needed a high class looking ride for a boring political function I couldn’t get out of. Only Dana knew the real deal.

  I put on another nice suit and implored Janet, Shane and Joe Treadway to dress up a little too. We’d make up the two surveillance teams for the evening. If we were going to be hanging out in the country club area, we all needed to look the part.

  “You really should smile more. You have dimples and your whole face just lights up,” Janet told me.

  I eyeballed her from the driver’s seat suspiciously. “I’m the Sheriff. I can’t go ‘round smiling all the time.”

  She flipped a backhand at me and laughed.

  She’s certainly had an attitude change since last night...I tried to turn the subject away from me. “How’s your mom been doing?”

  Janet waggled a hand into the space between us in the car. “She’s all right, I guess. She has days that are pretty bad. Right now though, she says she’s feeling fine after the last round of chemo.”

  “That’s good to hear. So she’s all right alone at home tonight?”

  “Oh, she’s still with her sister. When I told her I was working again tonight, she decided to stay with Aunt Leslie another day.”

  I nodded and expected things would fall silent again between us as we watched and waited. I was wrong.

  “You know, I really hate staying in that big old house alone. I mean, who knows when we’ll be done tonight, right? Probably when that party ends and all those folks head home. Then I’ve got to go back there and, it’s just so quiet and lonely...”

  “Your mom isn’t gone that much is she?”

  “It’s...it’s not that, so much. It’s a different kind of lonely. I’ve been single for a while now.” She chuckled softly.

  Oh boy...where are we going with this?

  After drawing in a long breath and then expelling it quickly, she reached into her hair from underneath and drew her fingers down through the strands to the ends which she grasped softly and played through her fingers and then she moved to repeat the motion.

  I looked away, out the windshield, trying to see from our vantage point far back in the driveway of a deserted – at least for the evening – home, if any sort of vehicle was coming along the road or if anybody was moving about at all. There was nothing. The night was a still as it could be.

  “I had a girlfriend my last year in the Army. We were pretty serious, Gevona and me. We still had ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ then though so we couldn’t be out. She was an MP too. Gevona was the one that convinced me to get out and move to Indiana. She was from Indy and she had the scoop on Hancock County. We both got hired.”

  When I didn’t offer any response to any of her rambling, she apparently took it as a sign of my interest and she continued. As she combed through her hair again and again, she told me, “We were good for a year or so, all wrapped up in each other and then she started talking about getting on Indy’s department. She wanted bigger and better but I was happy with Hancock. Before you know it, we were splitsville and she took a job with Indy.”

  She made a clicking sound with her tongue. “Anyway, I dated a little bit after that but then I threw myself into the job and gave up on all those beautiful butches running around out there for a while.”

  Janet’s eyes were on me, I could feel them. I knew what she was doing and I didn’t dare look her way. No encouragement was going to come from me.

  I called the whole deal off at 1:30. By then, between patrol and surveillance, we’d witnessed many of the party goers return to their homes and absolutely nothing out of the ordinary. I’d also had enough of the endless flirting from Mason. I didn't know what sort of games they played out there in the bigger cities, but I'm happily married and I wanted to stay that way and Mason was my employee. She'd be a damn good detective too if I could convince her to get her head out of her ass and drop the crap.

  ###

  I tried to be quiet but Boo heard me coming in. She came flying into the kitchen from the direction of our bedroom and bounced all around when she realized it was me.

  “Shhh!” I told her in a stage whisper. “You’re going to wake your mommy up.”

  “Mommy is still awake,” Dana called out from the bedroom.”

  I wandered in there, Boo nipping at my heels, to find Dana propped up on a stack of pillows, reading. “Baby,” I said, “It's after 2:00. Please tell me you're doing book research or something and not up, wor
ried?”

  She set her tablet aside and patted the bed next to her. I slipped off my suit coat and lay down beside her. Boo immediately hopped up and took her usual place near the foot of the bed, between our feet.

  “So how did it go?”

  I shook my head. “Dull and boring, boring and dull.”

  “Well that's good right? No one hurt tonight and all...”

  “Yes; you're right, that's good but we're back to square one. I really hoped we'd catch a break tonight. We need to nail this guy.”

  “You're sure it's only one person?”

  “I flicked my left shoulder and shook my head slightly. “That's just it, we don't even know that much.” I flopped over on my back. Dana reached a hand out to rub across my stomach. Boo took that as a sign that she should be rubbed too and she drug herself up toward between our hips and rolled over, belly up for some attention of her own.

  I picked my wife's hand up and moved it over to Boo who was writhing in wanton anticipation. “I'm going to get out of these clothes and take a quick shower. Maybe you'll still be awake when I get out?” I asked hopefully.

  I could wait. The puppy was a different story.

  Chapter 10 – Family Time

  Sunday Morning, December, 14th, 2014

  The Crane Family Farm

  “Please tell me you're not working today?” Dana stuck her bottom lip out in a mock pout.

  “Not on your life! Not if I can help it; that's for sure.” I pulled her in close and nibbled on the lip she'd curled just moments before.

  Boo, who'd been relegated to her actual dog bed on the floor for the night – the one she almost never used – now looked up at us and whined.

  “Oh, I suppose you think you need to go outside right this very minute?” I asked, leaning back and looking over my shoulder at her. At the word 'outside' she bounded up and circled by the open bedroom door.

  I looked back at my wife, her lip starting to curl again. Hold that thought,” I told her as I tapped my finger lightly against it. “I'll be right back.”

  “I'll take her.” She started to rise but I put my hand back out to stop her.

  “No, no; you stay right there all nice and toasty warm. I'll be back before you know it.”

  Outside, it was shaping up to be a pretty nice day for mid-December. The air was cool but not cold and the sun was peeking through the bare tree branches as it rose in the eastern sky. I was comfortable in the light jacket I'd grabbed while I waited for Boo who seemed to feel the need to sniff the entire yard to find a place to do her thing.

  Finally settling over a patch of grass that was a little higher than the rest, she took care of business and then scampered for the door. As I climbed the steps behind her and swung the kitchen door open, I told her, “I'm going to get you fed and then your mama and I have an appointment to keep.”

  “Only if it's an appointment at the farm,” Dana said from half way across the room, as she waved the phone handset in the air.

  I could feel my face fall. “No...”

  “Oh yes, it's ‘Family Fun Day’. Your dad phoned it in.”

  Groaning, I repeated the phrase my twin sister, her kids and I had used so many times in the past, “There's nothing fun about Family Fun Day!”

  ###

  Sunday afternoon, December 14th, 2014

  Crane Family Farm

  Mom and dad had commissioned their Amish carpenter friend John Gingrich to tear down their old barn and haul away the wood and tin. Since the weather had been fairly mild for an Ohio December, John, using nothing more than hand tools and his trusty draft horse, had been able to get the job done fairly quickly, before the first snow flew.

  Dad, never one to waste a nice day, decided that Sunday afternoon Family Fun Day festivities didn't have to stop when the leaves were down after all as had always been the cutoff point in the past. He saw a sunny December day with a temperature in the mid-forties as a prime opportunity to clear the land where the barn had been of the scattered bits and pieces of debris left over.

  Dana, given her somewhat limited mobility, took up a position that was becoming familiar to her with my mom and her mama: cooking up a storm for a big family dinner while all of the rest of us, including Dana’s dad who'd made it in for the weekend, worked ourselves silly clearing the ground. We all knew it would just need cleared again and then leveled in preparation for the new barn, come spring but that didn’t faze dad in the least.

  “Dinner! Dinner! Come and get it!” mom called down to us in the field from the front porch. “Get on in here and wash up, the lot of you.”

  Beth and Cole, my niece and nephew who, at 13 and 15, are far younger than the rest of us, dropped what they were doing immediately and sprinted from the pasture to the house. My twin Kris and I followed her kids a little more slowly, stiff from a few straight hours of stooping, picking and scooping.

  When we reached the porch, I looked back to find that my dad, Kris’s husband Lance and my father-in-law all still standing in the spot where the barn had been, staring at a piece of re-bar as if, by their very wills, they could get it uprooted from where it stood and out of their way. Kris looked back to see what had my attention.

  “Come on guys,” she yelled, “Leave that for now. Mom's gonna be mad.”

  We hustled into the house ourselves rather than face her wrath. The delicious smell that hit my nose as we entered the kitchen made my stomach leap, my hunger growing instantly. “What on earth are we having?” I asked grasping my wife around the waist and looking over her shoulder at the dish she was dipping a knife into on the counter.

  “It's the famous Rossi lasagna, of course.”

  “Oh boy...you know I love that. But, um...”

  “But what?” Mama Rossi asked as she passed by me and swatted my shoulder.

  “Well it's Sunday and we always...”

  She didn't bother to let me finish. “Jesse always has to have chicken on Sunday out here at the farm. I know that baby doll,” Chloe said. “I've been around long enough and I've got it covered, literally.” She picked the lid up off a covered crock sitting on the stove.

  I peered inside, but, looking at the steaming sauce and cheese, I was at a total loss.

  “That's chicken Parmigiana in there, silly,” my wife took pity on me and clued me in while her mama smiled smugly.

  “You two are amazing.” I gathered them both in for a quick squeeze.

  “Hey, don't leave me out of that,” my own mother jumped in briefly too. “Now scoot. Go wash up and get back out here and get a plate before those men get in here and eat everything in sight.”

  “So sorry, my apologies...I've got to take this,” Marco said to us all as he checked his buzzing cell. “Chloe?” He got his wife's attention, “it’s Ross.” He pushed his chair away from the dinner table and headed for the front porch and better reception with Chloe trailing right behind him.

  Around the table, we were all silent except for my nervous spouse, “That's good, right?” she asked to no one in particular. “I mean, when an agent calls you on Sunday after a couple of scheduled showings, it must be good...”

  “I think so, babe” I told her as I dropped a hand and patted her leg. She fell silent and kept a watchful eye on the two figures on the porch.

  “We did it!” Marco said as he burst back through the door. He moved straight to Dana and grasped his daughter's shoulders. “We did it kiddo! Not one, but two offers today, one all cash for more than the asking price.”

  “Mama, dad, that's great!” Dana jumped up from her seat and hugged them both in turn.

  “Everybody be on the lookout for houses,” Chloe told us all as she pointed a finger around the table. “The Rossi's now need a place to move to in Morelville!”

  “I think this calls for cake,” my own mother said as she too jumped up from her seat. She and Chloe had become fast friends. She was as happy as anyone that their plans were moving right along.

  My duty cell rang as we lounged around the
sitting room, enjoying the Christmas tree and downing cake and coffee over top of bellies already full of homemade Italian food. “Now it's my turn, it's Shane.”

  “Oh that lovely young man, you have to invite him to Christmas, Melissa,” mom begged.

  My reception was okay in the house so I just waved her off, stepped into the next room and took his call right there.

  “Hey Shane, please tell me you're not calling with something I have to run out to right now.”

  “Well, I don't know Sheriff; it's just that we got another one of those sheep painting incidents. Dispatch was going to send patrol out but this guy's irate. He says these are 'heritage sheep'...some kind of long wool deals. What do you want me to do?”

  “Is Treadway in?”

  “No, he's off today.”

  Drat! “Okay, I'm sorry but you'll have to go take his statement. Let him know I'll follow up personally in the morning.” I smiled back through the doorway at Dana, who was listening in, as I said that last bit.

  “Okay Sheriff.”

  “I'm sorry Shane.” I hung up the phone and walked back into the sitting room, my head hung too.

  “What is it babe?” Dana asked.

  With everyone else looking on, waiting to hear my response, I briefly sketched for them what was happening as I resumed my seat. I caught my mother and mother-in-law shooting looks at each other. “Oh no, no,” I cautioned them, “don't you two even think about it! This is all kids playing harmless pranks. It doesn't require the Faye and Chloe investigative team to get involved.”

  “We're thinking no such thing dear,” mom said unconvincingly. Chloe picked a spot on the floor to stare at while she tried to hide her grin. Mom went on, “And Melissa, I didn't hear you invite Shane for Christmas.”

  “He's my employee mom and he has a mother in town.”