Murder Goes to Market

by Daisy Bateman

  He had visited the main website for the marketplace, a couple of places that had posted the press release she had created for the opening, her out-of-date professional networking page, a moribund blog she had maintained when she was in college and under the impression the world was more interested in her opinions about classic television shows than turned out to be the case, and an archived obituary for a different Claudia Simcoe, who had died in Omaha in 1987. Nothing he found was private or particularly interesting, but Claudia was sufficiently creeped out to wonder if Neil’s death had really been such a bad thing.

  Whatever he had been looking for, he seemed to either have found it, or decided it wasn’t findable, because from there the history branched out, to a webmail page, from which he seemed to have sent and received several messages (contents unknown), then to a department store’s selection of brown shoes, then customer reviews of restaurants in and around San Elmo. Claudia worked her way diligently through them all, not wanting to miss anything that might be relevant.

  About halfway down, the list took an odd turn. First there was a fashion blog that had opened up its comment section for readers to chime in with stories of their worst dates, then a syndicated advice column from five years ago, followed by three different dating sites where he had narrowed the search to an area of about fifty miles around San Elmo. None of it made the slightest bit of sense to Claudia, but there was something familiar about some of the URLs. Then it struck her: they were from the list of links that Lori had sent him. Suddenly much more interested, Claudia dug deeper.

  She went back through the pages, reading them in detail to look for something that would tie them together. She found it, of all places, halfway down the page of bad date stories. There, intermingled with the tales of creeps and jerks and dates who spent the entire meal talking about the novel they were going to write and then walked out on the check, there was a comment by a woman with the username BeccaC, who had a different story to tell.

  “datingsucks. i used to use one of those sites and all i ever met was losers and then one time i thought i was with a good guy and he lied and took all my money. i never want to trust anyone like that again it’s not worth it”

  It was a sad story of broken faith, but that wasn’t what Claudia found interesting. In addition to their usernames, each contributor to the site was identified by their city and state, and while it was possible that it didn’t mean anything that both this BeccaC and the Rebecca Cobb on Lori’s list were from Palmyra, she wasn’t accepting any more coincidences at this time.

  Claudia leaned back in the chair and let out a gust of breath. So Lori had made a list of names that she kept hidden along with a picture of a former friend, and she had sent a series of website links that were related to that list to her ex-husband. And after her murder he had referred to those links, before being murdered himself. That had to mean something, but what?

  She thought about the theories that had been discussed earlier that night around her dining table, specifically, Carmen’s idea that Lori had been running from somebody. Could the names on the list be people Lori was trying to get away from, or other victims trying to make the same escape?

  Claudia went back over the other webpages, looking for more points of similarity to the list, but if they were there, she didn’t have enough information to recognize them. It occurred to her that the list she had might have been an earlier version that Lori had abandoned when she moved on to a different system—that would explain why it was in such an inaccessible place in her storage.

  Whatever the list meant, Claudia was more certain than ever that it was important. What she wasn’t sure of was how it was going to get her any closer to finding Lori’s killer.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  It was late, and Claudia was starting to get loopy, but inertia kept her in front of the computer. She had no reason to think that anyone else who was staying at the ranch might be involved in the murders, but she didn’t know for sure, and going through the rest of the recent browser histories was a thing she could do without getting up from her chair and going to bed.

  On some level, Claudia was aware that this was snooping beyond the level that Betty had agreed to, and her guests could reasonably be upset if they found out, but Claudia justified her actions by not really looking when she came across anything that didn’t look like it could be of interest to her. Which must have been how she didn’t notice that she had wandered out of the file for the guest users, into the family’s computers.

  Curiosity or not, Claudia absolutely was not going to look through what her friend’s family had been up to online. That was none of her business and, frankly, she didn’t want to know. At least that was what she was planning to think, until she came across a web search for a word with recent connotations. Not a question, just one word plugged into the search box: “garroting.”

  There were probably a lot of very good reasons why a completely innocent person might look that up, and then click through to a page full of images so unnerving that Claudia instinctively covered her face with her hands the moment they loaded, but thinking of one was causing her some trouble.

  There was no turning back now. It took less than a minute to determine that she was looking at the history for Roy’s computer, thanks to the farm-supply-focused browser history and the fact that it was identified in the software as “Roy’s computer.”

  Claudia’s first hope was that the search had been made after Lori’s murder was discovered, in a moment of gruesome but understandable curiosity, but no luck. The timestamps on both page visits put them clearly over a week back, and even a desperate theory about a calendar error that would have changed the date was easily disproved.

  No matter what Claudia tried, there didn’t seem to be any getting away from the fact that her best friend’s husband had been looking into the finer points of killing a person with a piece of wire a mere four days before Lori was murdered in exactly that way.

  For a hot moment she considered deleting the record, but better sense prevailed. She wasn’t positive, but that seemed like it might be the sort of thing that could be considered tampering with evidence, if there was any evidence to be tampered with. And, more disturbingly, it would be a clear indication that she had seen what she shouldn’t have seen, and that could be dangerous.

  Claudia didn’t like to think about it, but she had to. Personal bias and loyalty to her friend said there was no way Roy could be the murderer, but, thinking rationally, she knew she had to admit the possibility. He would have easily been able to overpower Lori and Neil, and she knew that his habit was to spend the evenings while the guests were eating dinner out in his shop, where he expected not to be disturbed, which would mean he had no alibi for the time of Neil’s death.

  And, unfortunately, probably not for Lori’s murder either. His wife would be the obvious one to provide that, but Claudia knew what a lot of people didn’t, that Betty had a snore that could raise the dead, or at least keep them up for a few hours, and because of it, she and Roy had slept in separate bedrooms for most of their marriage. It didn’t seem to have done much damage to their relationship, if the three children were anything to go by, but it meant that he could easily have slipped out in the night to kill a moderately annoying woman who, to the best of Claudia’s knowledge, he had never met.

  She couldn’t begin to fathom what his motive would be to kill two people, but what did she know about him? About anyone? And more to the point, what was she going to do right now?

  There was a good chance that Betty had told her husband what Claudia was up to; after all, someone accessing their guests’ Internet usage was something any responsible host would want to know about. He had been deeply uninterested when Claudia had tried to explain the monitoring system when she installed it, but she didn’t doubt that he had understood the basics, and if he had any concerns about someone seeing his browser history, it shouldn’t take him long to get worried now. The best Claudia could hope was that the possibili
ty hadn’t occurred to him, and to get herself out of the room and away from that telltale link as soon as possible.

  So that’s what she did, taking only the time to edit her own history. She kept Teddy close to her and hurried down the hall to her room, while simultaneously trying to look as casual as possible (which turned out to be not very). Fortunately, she didn’t meet anyone, and the pleasant, softly carpeted hallways of the ranch house remained as unmenacing as ever.

  Betty had invited her to let Teddy stay in the rather luxurious kennels her own dogs used, because the room was small and large dogs didn’t necessarily make the best roommates, but there was no way Claudia was going to take her up on it now. Fortunately, Teddy didn’t seem to mind the tight quarters, waiting patiently on the bed as Claudia tried to pull a chair in front of the door without making too much noise. The room next door was occupied, and she didn’t want to have to face questions in the morning about late-night furniture arrangement.

  Curled up on the bed, with the light off to not draw attention, the ridiculousness of her situation was not lost on Claudia. She was in her friends’ home, with their paying guests a thin wall away, and the idea of anything happening to her here was absurd. But a lot of absurd things had been happening lately, and here in the dark, with those coldly clinical images of strangulation fresh in her mind’s eye, being afraid didn’t seem very irrational at all.

  Claudia didn’t know when she fell asleep, or for how long, but she must have because eventually it was morning and she was woken by the alarm on her phone, with sunlight coming through an unfamiliar window and Teddy breathing gently and fragrantly into her face. She got up and changed quickly into the clean clothes she had brought, at the same time wondering how a person could so consistently forget to pack a hairbrush.

  Having done the best she could using her fingers as a comb, Claudia went to leave. She planned to leave Betty a note, explaining that she had to get back to get the market set up, which was true, if not absolutely honest. It was early, but not farm-early, and there was no good reason Claudia couldn’t have sought out her hosts to say goodbye. But she wasn’t doing good reasons these days. So she was just going to leave now, and apologize later.

  At least, that was the plan. Just in case, she was rehearsing in her head what she would say if she saw Betty on the way out, which probably would have gone fine except that the person she ran into was Roy.

  “Leaving?” he said. Roy was dressed in his usual work clothes of brown pants in heavy-gage denim and plaid shirt, both bearing a variety of unidentifiable stains. He must have been on his way to the stables, because he was carrying two pieces of a broken harness and a small, bladed tool that was probably somehow involved in harness fixing. Under normal circumstances, she wouldn’t have found it at all disturbing, just weird that anyone could be doing work that early in the morning, but right now the very last thing she wanted was to be around Roy when he was holding leather straps and a knife.

  “Yeah, um, gotta get back and get the market set up. Lot of work.” Claudia hadn’t meant to imitate his taciturn style, it just came out that way.

  Roy nodded.

  “Coming back?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so. We’ll see.” That was something she was going to have to deal with later, Claudia thought. In the meantime, it occurred to her that she wasn’t being a very good guest.

  “Thanks, by the way. For letting me stay. I really appreciate it.”

  “Any time. Take care of yourself.”

  Claudia had almost convinced herself that she was getting wound up over something that was no more than a bizarre coincidence, but the way he looked at her as he spoke, wary and like he was looking for some kind of response, made her deeply uncomfortable. Gripping Teddy’s leash a little more tightly, she thanked him again and headed down the hallway, only to glance back as she was rounding the corner and find him watching her.

  But why? Why would Roy want to kill Lori? That was the question that kept repeating in Claudia’s mind as she pulled out of the ranch’s driveway a little too fast. Had he somehow been involved with her scheme to sell the handbags, or some other fraud she didn’t know about? Was Lori someone he knew from his past? The mind boggled at the possibility—Roy and Lori weren’t the sort of people Claudia could ever imagine meeting each other, let alone develop a history.

  She tried to remember what Betty had told her about the early days of her and Roy’s relationship. She knew they had met on a blind date set up by Betty’s roommate when Betty was working as an event coordinator at a Napa restaurant. According to the account told over an afternoon of slightly too much wine, it had been a brief but intense courtship, culminating three months later when the two of them had headed to the courthouse to make it official. Claudia remembered having trouble reconciling that story with a man who seemed to think that multisyllabic words were an unnecessary indulgence, but at the time she had simply credited it as another example of life’s rich tapestry.

  Now, of course, every unusual thing took on a sinister air. Had her friend been rushed into marrying a psycho? Were there other unsolved deaths in San Elmo that nobody knew about? Wouldn’t a successful psycho already know how to garrote someone, without having to look it up on the Internet?

  Back at home, Claudia could easily have spent the rest of the day trying to answer those questions, but she had a lot to do and, as early as it was, the day was already getting away from her. Reluctantly, she decided that anything to do with the murders would have to wait for a more convenient time. She hoped the murderer would agree.

  That was the plan, anyway, and she was getting her last minute to-do list in order when the phone rang. At this point, Claudia was expecting so many calls that she didn’t even check the caller ID, just grabbed the receiver and mumbled “Hello?” through a mouthful of paperclips.

  “Hi,” said the uncertain voice on the other end of the line. “This is Kara Young. Are you the person who called me the other day?”

  Claudia’s heart leapt into her throat and got stuck there.

  “Yes, I am,” she said, trying not to croak. “I’m sorry if I said something to offend you. I didn’t know, well, anything really. I was just trying to find some answers.”

  “Yeah, I looked up that lady you mentioned, Lori Roth. She got murdered?”

  Claudia admitted that was true.

  “Do you think it had anything to do with, with that list you said you found?”

  “I don’t know,” Claudia said. “That was what I was trying to find out. Have the police been in touch with you? They’re the ones who have it now.”

  “No, I haven’t heard anything. But I, I think I know what it was about.”

  Claudia held her breath, not wanting the least sound from her to derail the revelation.

  “It was a man,” Kara went on, her voice thick with bitterness. “The best, worst man I ever met. Left me with a broken heart and a pile of debt.”

  “Um, wow. I mean, I’m sorry.” She cast her mind quickly back over Kara’s entry in the book. “Is that what the ‘5k cousin cancer’ thing was about?” The produce truck was supposed to arrive in twenty minutes and Claudia’s cell phone was buzzing with a call from Julie, but for the moment her real-life responsibilities were dead to her. She cradled the phone with both hands, as though she could coax the answers out of the receiver, and waited for more.

  “Yes, that’s how I knew what you were talking about,” Kara said. “It was a guy I was dating for a while. He’d borrowed some money from me before, small amounts here and there, but then one day he comes to me with this story about his little cousin who has cancer, and she’s going to die if they don’t get her this experimental drug. So, like a chump, I totally fell for it. Gave him all the money I could scrape together, held up my family and friends, the whole deal. I even passed around flyers at work. Anyway, long story short, there was no cousin, there was no cancer, and as soon as he cashed the check there was no man.”

  “What did he l
ook like?”

  “Tall, Caucasian, brown hair, and the most amazing green eyes you’ve ever seen. Seriously, I think those eyes got me for at least two grand on their own. He said his name was Steve Mann, but I’m pretty sure that was an alias. After he left with the money, I tried to track him down, and none of the info he gave me about himself checked out. I guess I could have done more, filed a report with the police or something, but I was just so damn embarrassed, you know? I never thought I could be that stupid. That’s why I hung up on you last time. I couldn’t deal with the idea that anything about him was coming back into my life.”

  “When did this happen?”

  “About ten years ago now, I guess. It doesn’t seem like that long.”

  “Do you have any photos of him?”

  “Not really. We met online, and there was a photo on his profile, but it wasn’t very good quality, and when I went back later he had taken it down. Actually, a lot of our relationship was on the phone and the Internet, and when we were together he was always the one offering to take the pictures. It didn’t seem like anything at the time, but after it was over I went and looked, and it seemed like any time I was taking a photo he had his back turned, or was just out of the frame. I guess having a bunch of pictures of him with different names floating around would really cramp his style.” The bitterness in her voice was blended with anger, though whether it was at herself or the alleged Steve was unclear.

  Claudia hated to press her, but she couldn’t let it go at that.

  “Do you think there’s a chance that someone else might have gotten a clear shot of him? The number of pictures people take these days, he must have slipped up at some point.”

  “I’ll ask around, but I’m not sure it’ll do much good. Steve tended to avoid hanging out with my friends, and he didn’t want me to either, which I totally didn’t think was a problem, because I’m an idiot. Actually, we didn’t see that much of each other at all, even after we met in person because he had so many work commitments. Honestly, there were so many red flags there, I could have started a semaphore school.”