Gina Cresse - Devonie Lace 05 - A Deadly Change of Luck

by Gina Cresse

  “Did your guys ever come up with anything on the e-mail message sent to Arthur Simon?” I asked as I gingerly unfolded a slimy, disgusting piece of paper that turned out to be a grocery store receipt.

  “No luck. This guy really covered his tracks.”

  I frowned as I picked out another gooey bit of trash from the pile. “Did you get the class list from the university?”

  “Got it. Sixteen hundred and forty-eight students. I’ve got my guys cross-checking it with students from classes that have access to cyanide in their lab work.”

  Sam grimaced as he pulled an old, black banana peel out of the heap. He tossed it aside.

  We’d separated the items that didn’t seem totally without worth into categories. Receipts went into one stack, notes and lists into another, bills and correspondence into a third. Anything that didn’t fall into any of those categories went into a miscellaneous pile.

  By the time noon rolled around, I was ready to get up off that hard concrete floor and regain some circulation in my lower half. “You hungry?” I asked.

  “I was, until I found that moldy sardine sandwich,” he replied, nodding toward the heap of useless trash in the corner.

  I headed for the door. “Well, I’m starving. There’s a little grocery store around the corner. I’ll get some drinks and stuff to make sandwiches. What do you want?”

  “Anything but fish,” Sam said as he struggled to get to his feet. “I’ll stay here and keep working.”

  I walked into the quaint little Mom and Pop grocery store and smiled at the sound of the clanking cowbell hanging on the door. I recalled from a news report that this was the store where the winning lottery ticket had originally been purchased. I grabbed a basket from a stack near the entrance and searched the aisles for bread and mayonnaise and plastic forks and knives. I found fruit juices in the cooler, and to my amazement, the little store boasted a full deli. I added the sliced turkey and ham and provolone cheese to my basket and grabbed a head of romaine lettuce from the produce section.

  The tiny store had two cash registers, but only one was open. A large, bald headed man wearing a green apron stood behind the counter, putting groceries into a bag for his customer. I stepped to the back of the line and waited, enjoying the smells of the produce and the fresh bread that had just been delivered.

  “Thanks, Margie,” the big man said as he handed the little old lady her bag of groceries. “You need help out with that?” he asked.

  Margie’s bony hand shook as she grasped the handle of the bag. She smiled and waved him off. “No thank you, Otis. I can manage.”

  Before Otis could help the next customer in line, a bell rang from somewhere in the back of the store. Otis stretched as high as he could to see who was at the back counter. The bell rang again. “Be right with you!” he hollered to the impatient customer.

  “I just want to buy a lottery ticket,” a voice called back from a distant corner of the market.

  The man in line in front of me placed his groceries on the belt and gave Otis a sympathetic smile. “Hey, Otis. You a one man show today?”

  The counter bell rang again. Otis clenched his teeth. “I said I’d be right there!”

  “I’m sort of in a hurry,” the impatient voice called back.

  Otis’s customer stretched to see who the annoying man was, then turned back to Otis. “Go ahead and help that guy. I’m not in a hurry.” Then the man turned and noticed I was in line behind him. “Oh, sorry. Maybe you are?”

  I smiled and shook my head. “No. Go ahead and help him before he has a seizure.”

  Otis smiled. “Thanks, folks. I’ll be right back. Sorry about this.”

  I set my basket on the floor while we waited for Otis to return. The customer in front of me whistled and gazed at the collection of tabloid papers stacked in a rack next to the checkout stand. “Look at that,” he said, pointing to a hideous photo of a woman standing next to some alien creature. “Woman is visited by alien and loses fifty pounds overnight. Gee, and I thought diet and exercise were the only way to do that,” the man said, chuckling. I laughed with him.

  Otis rushed back through the aisles to get to the checkout stand. “Sorry about that.”

  “No problem. Where’s Casey? Why are you all alone here today?” the customer asked.

  I thought I could see steam coming from under Otis’s collar. “Don’t get me started,” he said as he passed a can of corn across the UPC scanner.

  “She have finals this week?” the customer pressed.

  Otis shook his head. “Not that she told me. Had her on the schedule to open with me this morning, but she never showed up. Darn kid. If I weren’t her father, I’d fire her. Maybe I will anyway.”

  “Can’t you get someone to come in for the day to help you out?”

  “Leslie’s coming in at one. Mark went to lunch, but he’ll be back soon. She couldn’t have picked a worse day to be a no-show. I had deliveries this morning, and yesterday was government-check day, so we’ve been twice as busy as usual.”

  Another customer walked in and headed for the back of the store. Otis scowled at the man’s back, waiting to see if he went toward the lottery ticket counter.

  “Thanks, Steve,” Otis said, handing the customer his change and receipt.

  I placed my basket on the counter and gave Otis a sympathetic smile. “So Casey’s your daughter?” I asked, politely.

  “Not today she’s not,” he barked, grabbing the bread out of my basket and squashing it as he waved it across his scanner. I wondered if it would ever regain its original shape.

  “I hope she’s not sick,” I said.

  Otis snatched the mayonnaise from my basket. “She ain’t sick. Saw her bright and early this morning, eating a bowl of oatmeal and reading the paper. My paper, as a matter of fact.”

  Otis took the last item from my basket and totaled my bill. “That’ll be nineteen forty-six.”

  I handed him a twenty.

  “You got the forty-six cents, by chance? I’m running short on change and I can’t get to the bank until Leslie gets here.”

  I dug through my change purse and produced forty-six cents. Otis handed me a dollar bill and my receipt.

  I put the change away and stared at the receipt while he bagged my groceries. The receipt looked the same as the ones I’d dug out of Lou Winnomore’s trash. He probably shopped here regularly. It was close to home and convenient.

  The counter bell at the back of the store rang again, and Otis rolled his eyes as he handed me my bag. “Thanks for being patient,” he said. Then he rushed out from behind the counter and disappeared behind a stack of paper towels.

  I started out the front door, then stopped. Something Chuck had said instantly replayed in my head. You could wallpaper his house with that box full of all those tickets he bought. Those were his exact words. I turned and went back into the store.

  I wandered down an aisle to the back counter where Otis was busy selling another lottery ticket. When his customer left, he smiled at me. “Forget something?” he said.

  “Yeah. I need a lottery ticket,” I said.

  “Quick pick?”

  I nodded. “That’s fine.”

  I placed the dollar bill on the counter as Otis handed me the ticket.

  “Your daughter’s a student at UCSD?” I asked, making small talk.

  “Yeah. Probably the biggest waste of money I ever spent,” he complained.

  “Education’s never a waste of money. What’s her major?”

  “Get this. Undeclared. Tell me what she’s gonna do with that?” he replied, rolling his eyes.

  I smiled politely and looked at the lottery ticket in my hand. “Well, I’m sure she’ll think of something. Thanks again,” I said, then headed back to the front of the store. Over the door was a large poster with Otis’s smiling face beaming down on the customers. Under the picture, the caption read: OTIS BIGGSMUTH, YOUR FRIENDLY PROPRIETOR.

  Otis Biggsmuth. Casey Biggsmuth. I made a men
tal note as I hurried out the door to my car. It took me less than two minutes to get back to the house, where I found Sam babbling to himself about rotten eggs and moldy cheese. I left him working in the garage.

  I headed toward the back of the house, then rechecked every cupboard, every closet, every nook and cranny that might hold something I missed. I stood in the center of the master bedroom, perplexed. Then I pushed my way into the closet and stared at the ceiling. There it was—the access panel to the attic. I reached up, grabbed the string and pulled the spring-loaded panel down. A second string attached to a set of steps dangled within reach. I grabbed it and pulled. “Sam!” I shouted.

  He came racing into the bedroom. “What?”

  “I never checked the attic.”

  Moments later, I found myself crawling into a dark and dusty attic. I clicked on the flashlight Sam gave me and let it sweep across the sea of fluffy pink insulation and cobwebs. I found another string, this one connected to a light bulb in the rafters, and switched it on. A few plastic bags and boxes were stacked on a single sheet of plywood that had been set next to the access opening. I reached for them and handed them down to Sam, one by one. When I’d emptied the attic, I climbed back down the ladder. Sam had already begun rummaging through the boxes.

  I tore open the plastic bags, but only found old sleeping bags. I knocked over a shoebox, causing the contents to fall out. Piles of papers, tied into small bundles with rubber bands littered the floor. I picked up a bundle and inspected it. “Look at this,” I said to Sam. It was a stack of lottery tickets. I gazed at the entire heap. There must have been hundreds of tickets. He picked up a stack. I leafed through them quickly, glancing at the dates and the numbers. They were all for Lou’s same special numbers. My heart pounded a little faster. We gathered up all the tickets and put them back in the box, sorting them chronologically. There was a ticket for nearly every draw—two a week for the entire seven years.

  I pulled the ticket I’d just bought from Otis out of my pocket and handed it to Sam. “I just bought this today, from the store where the winning ticket came from. Look at the store code, then look at the codes on all these tickets.”

  Sam took the ticket and studied it, then he filed through the newly discovered box of tickets. “He bought them all from the same place—like clockwork.”

  “It gets better,” I said. “The owner’s daughter works there. She’s a student at UCSD, and she didn’t show up for work this morning,” I said, almost out of breath. “She read this morning’s paper, then disappeared,” I added.

  “You get her name?” he asked as he reached in his pocket for his cell phone.

  “Casey. Her last name’s probably Biggsmuth, same as her father,” I said.

  Sam punched some numbers into his cell phone and waited for an answer. “Yeah. Johnson. You got that list of Champion’s students?

  Check for Casey Biggsmuth, would you?”

  Sam looked at me. “Spell it,” he said.

  I wrote it down on a piece of paper and handed it to him. He spelled it out for Johnson.

  I paced the kitchen while we waited for an answer. It didn’t take long, since Biggsmuth would have been near the top of the alphabetized list.

  “Great! Put out an APB. Try to get a photo from the university. Get someone to the airport, the bus station, and I want someone at the border crossings. She’s on the run.”

  Sam shoved his phone back in his pocket. “I’m going to that store to talk to her father.”

  I grabbed my purse and followed him out the door.

  Otis Biggsmuth, for all he complained about his daughter, became her biggest advocate when it looked like she might be in trouble. He forced the police to get a warrant to search her room, which allowed her even more time to escape.

  By the end of the day, with officers combing the airport, bus station, and the major border crossings, it looked like Casey Biggsmuth might have slipped through the cracks. She had a million dollars in cash and a lot of incentive to stay away from San Diego.

  Chapter Fifteen

  I know Sam Wright, and when he gets his mind set on something, he’s like a pit bull with its teeth clamped firmly on a mailman’s leg. When the search of Casey’s room didn’t turn up any clues to where she might have gone, he obtained a warrant to search the entire Biggsmuth household. The crew started with the family’s trash.

  Sam called me the next day to give me the good news. A spunky new officer, eager to make a good impression, picked the tiniest piece of paper out of the mound of garbage and excitedly gave it to Sam. It was a deposit slip from a Mexican bank, with a branch right in Tijuana.

  The bad news was that Sam didn’t have any jurisdiction in Mexico. He couldn’t legally cross the border to arrest Casey, but if she stepped one foot back into the United States, he’d have her behind bars faster than you can say Tijuana Brass.

  I munched on a carrot stick while I listened to Sam speculate on all the ways he could trap her, if only she’d come back.

  “What if I could get her back here?” I said, halting his non-stop ranting in mid-sentence.

  “I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that,” he replied.

  “I mean it. What if I could get her back here, to San Diego? Wouldn’t that solve your problem?”

  “Now you listen to me. I’ve had enough of your antics for a lifetime—“

  “I won’t do anything crazy. You already owe Craig and me dinner. If I pull this off, we’ll renegotiate the deal.”

  Sam didn’t say anything for a long time. I wondered if he’d worked himself up into a stroke. “Sam? Are you there?” I asked.

  “I don’t want to know what you’re up to, and if you get yourself into any trouble, don’t expect me to bail you out,” he finally said.

  I smiled and took another bite of my carrot. “Don’t worry. By this time next week, little Miss Casey will be safe and sound behind bars.”

  When I told Craig my plan, he didn’t exactly jump on my bandwagon.

  “Honey,” I pleaded with him. “She killed that poor man and now she’s gotten away with all that money. Someone has to stop her.”

  “What about Sam?” he suggested.

  “He can’t do anything as long as she’s in Mexico. You know what it’s like to get someone extradited, even if they’re already in custody, which she isn’t,” I insisted.

  “But what if something goes wrong?” he asked.

  “What could go wrong?”

  “What could go wrong? You could wind up in jail, for one,” he reminded me.

  “Sam won’t let that happen,” I assured him.

  “Wait a minute. Isn’t Sam the one who put you in jail for interfering with an investigation? Have you forgotten?”

  “He won’t do that again,” I said.

  “He told you that?”

  “Well, not in so many words, but you know how he is. Come on, Craig. She killed that man, and she’s going to get away with it if we don’t do something.”

  Not surprisingly, I couldn’t even get Craig to support my plan. I’d just about given up, since I couldn’t pull it off by myself. It wasn’t until Sam’s search of the Biggsmuth house turned up a ceramic mixing bowl and pestle, with traces of cyanide on the surface, that things changed. That was the clincher that proved Casey’s guilt to Sam. He called me as soon as the lab results were in and asked me to elaborate a little more on my plan to get Casey back to San Diego.

  I didn’t think Casey would go further than Tijuana, since it’s close to home. I would have been surprised if she traveled as far as Mexico City or Puerto Rico. Even though she was a cold-blooded killer, she was also a nineteen-year-old girl who’d never lived anywhere but her parent’s house.

  I spent the next three days hanging out at a little sidewalk taco joint across the street from the bank in Tijuana where Casey made her last bank transaction. I sat under an umbrella and sipped bottled water I had stashed in my purse as I watched people come and go. I pretended to read a book or do crossword p
uzzles so I wouldn’t look too conspicuous. When it felt like I’d spent enough time there, I’d move to another spot down the street. I kept alternating between locations that gave me a constant view of the front door of the bank.

  After two days of people watching, I began to wonder if my plan was full of holes. Maybe Casey was more independent than I thought. Maybe she’d travel further south—Brazil, perhaps. Maybe she’d buy an airline ticket and get off the continent altogether. I started to doubt my instinct, but I told myself I’d stick it out till the end of the week. If she didn’t show up by Friday, then I’d throw in the towel and admit defeat.

  Finally, on the third day, an elf-like character with big, dark sunglasses and a baseball cap walked nervously into the bank. I launched myself out of my seat and hurried across the street. When she exited, I fell into step a few yards behind her. It was Casey. My luck was changing.

  I followed her for miles. She walked in circles sometimes. She was lost most of the time. She stopped to ask directions from a couple of locals, but it seemed her Spanish was not any better than their English. I worried that she’d notice me every time she turned around, but she was so intent on getting to wherever it was she was headed, she never even looked back.

  When she finally found her destination, I had to reconsider just how lucky I really was. She’d walked into a car dealership. She must have made a withdrawal at the bank to buy a new car. If she bought a car and drove off the lot, I’d lose her. My car was parked somewhere miles away, near the bank, and I certainly couldn’t run in and buy a new car myself, just to follow her.

  I chewed my bottom lip and scanned the area. I spotted a couple of taxis parked a block away on the opposite side of the street. I jogged up the road and picked the one with the fewest dents. The driver was confused when I asked him to drive me to the car lot, which was only a block away. I asked him to wait there while I watched from the back seat as Casey shopped. She disappeared into the sales office. I was tempted to follow her inside, but I was afraid I might lose my taxi, so I waited. I figured she wouldn’t be long, since she had cash and didn’t have to wait for a credit approval.