Just as we were about to leave, he turned to face her and with a big smile asked, “By the way, do you own any guns?”
Cherise shook her head and frowned. “No. They terrify me.”
Alex seemed pleased by her answer. He gently squeezed her hand and said, “Please accept my deepest sympathies.”
Then he walked away, leaving me feeling like I was the only one not clued in to what was going on. I thanked Cherise for her hospitality and offered my own condolences on her loss before I jogged to catch up to Alex, who was already behind the wheel of the car.
Once I was in the passenger seat and my door was closed, I turned to him and gave him a glare. He looked at me with the expression of a naughty child who knew they’d misbehaved and asked, “What’s that look for?”
I rolled my eyes and squeezed his arm. “Please accept my deepest sympathies. Not our deepest sympathies. My sympathies.”
He chuckled at my disgust, irritating me more, but explained, “It was more a play on words, but I guess you wouldn’t know that since I didn’t tell you what that text said.”
“What did it say?” I asked excitedly, willing to forgive his partner faux pas if it was indeed that interesting.
“That text was from Craig. I asked him to check if Cherise owns a gun. That was the answer. She does. A .38.”
I looked back at the house where she’d all but convinced me she couldn’t be the murderer. “But she said she didn’t because they terrify her, and now we know she owns the exact kind of gun that killed Lee Reynolds.”
Alex started the car and smiled at me. “I guess she got over her fear of guns. Am I forgiven for my misstep?”
I wrinkled my nose at him. “This time, but next time, you might not be so lucky, Officer Montero.”
Throwing the car into drive, he nodded his understanding. “Then I’ll have to make sure I don’t make that mistake again, Ms. McGuire.”
Chapter Six
We returned to Alex’s office at the station to find the coroner waiting for us. Sitting in the chair in front of the desk like he was having a meeting with an invisible person, he turned to face us when we walked in and handed Alex a folder.
“I wanted to bring you this myself. I thought you might find it very interesting.”
Donny worked for the county, not the town of Sunset Ridge, so his bothering to come down to see us, especially on a Saturday, meant he found something important to our case. A little man with mousy features and a comb over, he’d worked with the dead for as long as I’d known of him. The first time I saw him at a crime scene I thought he was unwelcome there like me. He skulked around ducking in and out of shrubbery and avoiding the police, so I assumed he must be just a curious onlooker who’d been told by Dominick to stay away from his crime scenes.
Alex looked at me with curiosity in his eyes and took the folder out of Donny’s hands. “What’s this about?”
As he opened it, the coroner pointed at the top sheet of paper. “Take a look. This guy certainly did have people after him.”
My interest piqued by Donny’s claim, I sat down beside him and began to pump him for information. “What do you mean? Did you find something other than the gunshot wound that shows someone tried to kill him another way?”
“Tetrahydrozoline? What’s that?” Alex asked.
I looked at him and then back at Donny for the explanation. His smug expression told me he was pleased that we had no idea what that word meant and that he’d have to enlighten us. I understood that desire to be the one in the know. Everyone wanted to feel like they could add something to the investigation.
“That was found in his stomach when I did the autopsy. Any idea what that is?”
“Something watery?” I guessed as I wished I hadn’t disregarded much of high school chemistry in favor of my junior year boyfriend.
Donny turned to look at me with approval. “I’m impressed, Poppy. That’s not exactly it, but it is a liquid.”
Feeling particularly intelligent, I puffed out my chest and smiled at Alex. “He’s impressed by my guess. You have any idea what it is?”
Amused by our back and forth, Alex shook his head and smiled. “Nope. I leave that kind of thing to the science people like Donny here, who I’m sure is going to tell us what tetrahydrozoline is any minute now.”
“Your victim died from a gunshot wound from a .38 caliber gun, but someone was also poisoning him, albeit incorrectly.”
“Interesting, but we still don’t know what you say someone was poisoning him with,” Alex said in a voice that told me he was growing tired of Donny’s grandstanding.
“The tox screen found tetrahydrozoline in his system, which mean someone was making sure he ingested eye drops.”
I looked at Alex to see he was as confused as I was. “Donny, why would anyone want to see Lee Reynolds drink eye drops?”
“Whoever was trying to kill your victim had read too many inaccurate news reports that said putting eye drops into someone’s liquid would kill them. It just gives them nausea, high blood pressure, and diarrhea. But Mr. Reynolds definitely would have been feeling bad for a while. I’m just guessing here, but I’d say he’s been being dosed for a while, at least a few weeks.”
Eye drops in someone’s liquid? I’d never heard of this before. “Is this a thing now?” I asked, looking back and forth from him to Alex to see if I was the only person who was completely baffled by this.
“It is,” Donny said with a chuckle. “At least for people who have no real idea about chemical compounds and how they affect the human body. Eye drops won’t kill anyone, but someone around your victim thought they would.”
Alex closed the folder and looked over at me. “Now we just have to find out who and why.”
Behind us, Derek cleared his throat and stepped into the office. His handsome face wore a stern look that told me finding out about someone attempting to kill Lee Reynolds added to the fact that someone already had wasn’t making his day any better.
Before Derek could say a word, Donny made some excuse why he had to leave and quickly got out of the office. For a second, I considered doing the same since I wasn’t technically one of Derek’s employees and would have a hard time keeping my mouth shut if he began to ride Alex about the case. I didn’t leave, though, because he was my partner, and even if I wasn’t really a cop, I knew about this case.
“What’s this I hear from him about someone trying to poison Lee Reynolds?” Derek asked, crossing his arms in a clear sign that was the last thing he wanted to hear about this case.
Alex stayed relaxed in an effort to offset the emotions practically flowing off his chief. “He just told us. We’ll check into it and see if who was trying to kill him is the same person who actually shot him.”
A look of disgust I’d rarely seen from Derek settled into his face, making him look years older than his early thirties. “I want this case solved fast and hearing there’s another crime associated with our victim doesn’t make me happy.”
“Then how about hearing that the victim’s ex-wife owns the exact caliber weapon that shot him?” Alex asked in a hopeful voice.
“How likely is it that the ex-wife was poisoning him, though?” Derek asked in return, making all the hope I shared with Alex dissolve.
Neither of us said anything. It wasn’t likely at all that Cherise would have the opportunity to poison her ex-husband for weeks on end. Unless we found there were other gaps in his time with his wife or at work other than one afternoon each week, Cherise just wouldn’t have the chance often enough.
“I didn’t think so,” Derek said with a sigh. “Find out who was behind the messy poisoning of the victim before you go blaming his ex-wife. It sounds like the current wife had an ax to grind.”
With that, Derek left us with our case no clearer than it had been as the morning began. After that trip out to Waynesboro, I really thought we’d made headway and finally had a lead that meant something. Now with Donny’s eye drop report, everything about the
case of who killed Lee Reynolds seemed muddled once again.
We sat silently, the two of us lost in thought until an idea came to me. Excited, I blurted out, “What if the wife and the ex-wife were in it together?”
I knew it sounded more like something from a Lifetime movie than a real theory, but Alex’s eyebrows moving north up his forehead told me he thought it was pretty ridiculous.
“Really? Why?”
At least he was willing to entertain my outlandish idea, so I ran it through my mind a moment and then explained it all to him. “Say Jessica found out he was seeing Cherise every Thursday afternoon for a quickie out at her farmhouse with her in those red silk panties. She confronts Cherise and they have it out.”
He interrupted me and shook his head. “This doesn’t sound very promising, Poppy. Now if one of them had killed the other, this theory might work.”
“Wait, it gets better. So now Jessica decides she wants Lee dead for being a two-timing cheating bastard. She doesn’t know how to do it, but she sees one of those inaccurate news reports about how eye drops killing someone if they drink them and figures there’s her answer. She begins putting them in her husband’s orange juice every morning and waits.”
Still skeptical, he leveled his gaze on me and asked, “And then when it didn’t seem to be working, she went to the woman her husband was cheating on her with and asked her to shoot him, which of course Cherise said yes to?”
I opened my mouth to continue explaining my theory, but his question had just shot it full of holes. Crestfallen, I slouched in my chair and sighed. “Okay, you’re right. That doesn’t make sense.”
“Nice try, though. I think we have to approach these two crimes as separate. I don’t think whoever was dosing Lee Reynolds with eye drops was involved in his murder. I do want to know why the eye drop poison person wanted Lee dead, though.”
“So let me see if I have this straight. Someone shot him and left a bullseye around the wound before leaving him there to die in the woods. The guy was widely popular for his controversial opinions he voiced on air, but he also had enemies because of these opinions. However, we haven’t spoken to anyone who can say a bad word about him in his personal life, and we have no sense that this murder was committed by an angry fan. Am I right so far?”
Alex nodded somberly. “All that fan mail has been checked and there were no threats to kill Lee Reynolds. For all his bluster, his audience wasn’t exactly full of raving lunatics, it seems. But you just brought up an important point. I haven’t heard anything about that chalk used to draw that bullseye on the victim’s back.”
He picked up his office phone and pressed Craig’s number. After waiting a few seconds, he said, “Craig, did you find that piece of chalk at the murder scene?”
I couldn’t hear his answer, but Alex’s frown told me it was no. He hung up the phone and stood from his desk. “We need to find that chalk before it rains and it’s washed away.”
“But what if the murderer took it with him?” I asked as I stood to leave with him.
“Then we don’t find it, but I can’t see someone keeping it on their person. For now, though, we have other things to keep us busy. Derek likely will give me a hard time getting a search warrant for Cherise’s place to look for that gun before we check out this eye drop business, so it looks like we need to go visit Jessica Reynolds again.”
“Off to Jessica’s again,” I said with a chuckle. “I have to admit I have a hard time imagining her trying to poison her husband, though, Alex.”
He stopped to look at me as we walked out to get back into the squad car again. “Too much in love with him?”
His mocking tone telegraphed how unlikely he thought that possibility was. Shaking my head, I answered, “No, actually. I think she did love him, but I can’t imagine her doing that for the simple reason that I just don’t see her as someone who would kill anyone. She just doesn’t have that kind of passion in her.”
“This may not have been a crime of passion, Poppy. It might have had nothing to do with love.”
“I didn’t say it did, but I still can’t see her as a murderer.”
As usual when I made my proclamations, he merely smiled and walked away. Whether he believed me or not, I couldn’t put my finger on it, but my gut said Jessica Reynolds could never kill anyone.
Halfway there, my cell phone rang with a call from my father. Since he rarely called during the day, I quickly answered it, afraid something bad had happened.
“Hey, Dad. What’s up?”
“Why do you always sound frightened when I call you? I would think a call from your father would make you happy.”
He was right, and I was happy to hear from him whenever he called me, but usually the first emotion I felt was dread. Pure, unadulterated dread at the mere thought that something had happened to him. I knew it stemmed from losing my mother and I had to get a handle on it, but that didn’t change the fact that I worried about him.
“I’m always happy to hear from you, Dad. What’s going on with you today? Having a good Saturday?”
“I am, but not as good as you, I think.”
His singsong voice made me wonder what he was up to. “You sound particularly happy this morning. What’s going on, Dad?”
“I just got a delivery at the bar a few minutes ago. For you.”
Why would someone send me anything to the bar?
“What are you talking about? No one would send me a package to your place. I’m sure it’s just a mistake by the mailman. You know how he is. He figures since we’re related, he can take shortcuts. Do you remember that one time he decided to deliver my magazines to your house for a whole month because he had to get to his part-time job at the packaging plant a few years ago?”
I felt Alex’s gaze on my left cheek and turned to see him staring at me with a strange look on his face. Shrugging, I covered the phone and said, “Sorry. My father got something for me at his house. I’ll end the call and talk to him later.”
He waved off my concern. “No need. We still have at least a couple minutes before we get to the Reynolds’ house, so you’re fine.”
Putting the phone to my ear again, I said, “Dad, I have to go. Alex and I are working on a case right now. I’ll come by and see you later after we’re done, okay?”
“Poppy, this isn’t some mistake by the postman. The delivery is from Carson’s.”
“The flower shop?” I asked, even more confused. Someone had sent me flowers?
“Yep. So who is Jack the guy from the corner?”
A giggle escaped from my lips. “Is that what it says on the card? Jack the guy from the corner?”
“So you know this mystery man,” my father said with a tone of approval. “Who is he?”
I felt my cheeks warm from a blush and admitted who Jack was. “Remember the guy you said was checking me out at the bar last night? His name is Jack. I actually saw him this morning, but he didn’t mention anything about sending me any flowers.”
“Well, well. And here I was worried about you being too afraid to make a move. You must have made quite an impression on him last night.”
“I don’t know how. I didn’t even talk to him. We didn’t have our first real conversation until this morning when I saw him at the Madison Diner.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Alex’s expression morph into a frown that drew his entire face downward. I knew how he felt about my having any contact with Jack since he could be a potential suspect in our current case and didn’t want to go against his wishes on this.
“Dad, I have to go. I’ll drop by later to get the flowers. Thanks for letting me know.”
For a moment, the phone fell silent and then my father asked, “Is everything okay, Poppy? I thought you’d be happy to hear about the delivery. It’s a dozen red roses and pretty nice. He seems like someone who’s interested in you.”
I looked over at Alex, who had transformed his face into a true grimace. “Oh, I am. Thanks for calling, Dad.
I just have work to do, but thanks. I’ll talk to you later, okay?”
My father said something else about how beautiful the flowers were, but I ended the call as soon as I could. Stuffing the phone into my purse, I avoided looking at Alex and instead just stared out the window at the brilliantly colored leaves and pumpkins decorating the homes we passed in the car.
Finally, he spoke and I knew for sure Jack’s flowers had made him unhappy again about him. In a voice barely more than a growl, he said, “It’s nice that you still help her father out at the bar even though you have a full-time job and work cases with me.”
I had a feeling what he really wanted to say was that he didn’t like how I was acting concerning Jack Reynolds, but he didn’t say those words so I didn’t say anything about it either.
Still staring out the window, I said, “I do it to spend time with him because I know he’s lonely since my mother died. She was his whole life, and now all he has is me.”
Alex said nothing, and when I turned to look at him, I saw he still wore a deep frown. I didn’t know why he didn’t tell me what he really felt. That no matter how flattered I was to get flowers from Jack, I couldn’t encourage him to show me any more attention because he very well could be a suspect at some point in our case. I didn’t want to hear that, but I knew it was probably the truth.
What I didn’t know was why everything about Jack Reynolds seemed to create such tension between Alex and me.
Chapter Seven
Just as we had the first time, we parked in front of the Reynolds’ upscale townhouse on Colonial Drive and knocked on the door, expecting to speak to our victim’s widow. The person who we encountered was nothing like the Jessica Reynolds we met just two days earlier.
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