The Best Laid Plans

by Judy Penz Sheluk

  She grew from pathetic to sympathetic after she agreed to email: “…the plants—they respond to my care. They don’t run away. They grow in a way that I would grow if the men…if I … No, that’s too egotistical, too egocentric.”

  And so he grew into his poised empathy: “But there’s nothing wrong with trying to find someone like yourself to respond to. It’s not your fault that so very few men are as caring as yourself, as nurturing. How is it wrong to wish men more like yourself?”

  And then, “Ironic, isn’t it, that I’ve got the whole world on my roof—240 species from literally everywhere, 241 if the mandrake survives—its root goes deeper than any planter—and not a visitor to see them. Well, only this Cassie—a shy one herself. I think she mistook my orientation at Caffe Ladro. She came home with me that day. She came by a few times after and couldn’t quite say what she had in mind, pretending some interest in the mandrake, the maca, the horny goat weed—the aphrodisiacs, I mean. I could have smiled at her or cried for her.”

  For Ivy, the whole world was ironic, and she was a shy soul in its bitter shell, but he could not acquiesce to her veiled, perhaps unconscious, plea to visit her.

  “Your garden, your plants—they can help you now…”

  It all sounded so absurd, even with the other two successfully rescued from themselves. Still, with this third girl, he had these wavering moments when he recalled again his surprise, his regret perhaps, that anyone would be taken in by suggestions that a healthy psyche would reject in an instant. But these three could not see through to an alternative, and so those moments, his wavering instants, passed into hours of shaping kind ways out for them.

  With Ivy, he had learned yet more of patience, and it paid. He told her he would give her a little time to sort through her thoughts, to search through her rooftop garden for that special plant which might bring her final comfort. No need for her to write back until then. And he’d write the end of the week in any case. Friday, he’d said.

  But Ivy was gone by Tuesday, according to the obit, and now a nagging point returned to him: It was a bit disconcerting that the police had not bothered to read Spark’s or Cobbie’s email, as far as he could tell, because their deaths had been declared accidental. Likely they wouldn’t check Ivy’s email either. Shoddy detective work really. Was it only the television cops who checked the deceased’s correspondence? Disconcerting, yes, and disappointing that all his hard work would go unnoted, unappreciated, even. Still, he could console himself, knowing contentedly that the girls had been thankful to him at the end.

  Kincade Havre, Seattle Medical Examiner, sensed that Detective Doorframe from Bellevue was halfway between impatient and bored, but she had done her work carefully and wasn’t going to waste it in a rushed explanation.

  “It was just a precaution I took in one of those ‘what if?’ moments—keeping the blood, I mean. I thought she just plain overextended herself, went out too far even for a competitive swimmer. Could have been a suicide though, and I couldn’t completely dismiss the mother’s opinion that it was. She claimed her daughter always wore those racing suits and a cap, never a string bikini like that one or a bow in her hair.

  “Team or no team, she was a loner and just a freshman, according to her mother, and this skimpy suit was ‘over the edge.’ But, hey, not even mothers know everything their daughters wear when they’re out on their own. Anyhow, I found nothing in the usual drug and toxin screens but, as a precaution, I kept a tube of her blood in the cooler.”

  Half a nod from Doorframe.

  “There was another ‘what if’ moment with the faller—or the leaper—that the Mercer Island Force sent over. Now, she’d had maybe a couple servings of wine. Plus, the two witnesses—junior high sweethearts—said it looked like she was balancing herself on that railing, but the more they got to talking about what they saw way up on that balcony, the more they thought she might have been daring death to come get her. I don’t know what happened on that balcony, especially since she had trained in ballet and could probably do quite a balancing act. Still, the silver sandals seemed wrong for a toe step on a railing.”

  Havre turned to open a drawer of a stainless steel refrigerator.

  “I kept a blood sample from her, too, even though she wasn’t drunk. I figured if anything turned up in the personals on her computer or phone, or from her family about her state of mind, I might have to reconsider a suicide and run additional tests. But no word from the family or the detectives who’d been too busy with the SAM sculpture heist and the Mercer boat launch shootings to think that these girls’ phones or laptops needed their attention.”

  Doorframe’s eyebrows pinched into a little more interest.

  “I found the ‘what if’ in the third girl—actually she was older, in her late twenties, but she looked so young and girlish. She was obviously poisoned, and she had to know her last tea was lethal because she grew her own teas and she was something of an expert on plants, judging from the two hundred and some species on that apartment rooftop in Belltown.”

  Doorframe was definitely interested. Kincade continued.

  “When I heard about her garden, I went there yesterday to have a look for myself: teas, spices, too many herbs I didn’t recognize, flesh-eating flowers, aphrodisiacs alleged and actual, lots of poisonous stuff from mild to scary—oleander, nightshade, monkshood, and, of all things, poison hemlock, the Socrates brand. That was the tea root that finished her…funny though, the little patio table in the roof garden was set for two, but there wasn’t any tea in the second cup, just water…anyhow, hemlock can be a relatively easy way to go if the muscle paralysis comes on early, and it could have.”

  “Socrates? Hemlock?” Doorframe puffed a breath through his lips. “Death with dignity? And courage?”

  “Good guess, given her knowledge of flora and the library in her apartment. This time I ran drug and toxin screens for everything I could think of. That’s when I found the ‘what if’ in her blood. It’s some distant relative of the benzodiazepines, but I couldn’t find a name for this particular variety. Turned out it’s not on any market, legal or illegal. So I called my ex at Med Labs 21 over your way in Bellevue. Sure enough, this stuff is brand new, and it happens to be theirs. But it was shelved by Research and Development after the first ‘off-the-record’ human testing. It was supposed to be a breakthrough in anti-anxiety meds, among other things, to counter irrational inhibitions that lead patients to failure.”

  “Some kind of success drug?” A mutual smile from Doorframe and Havre.

  “Nothing’s ever going to be that easy. This drug works too well as designed and otherwise—virtually erases inhibitions and makes the subjects pliant, extremely vulnerable to suggestion. The labcoats at Med 21 were joking about selling this stuff to the carnival hypnotists. It’s as bad as—no maybe worse than—the date rape drugs.

  “So, as you’ve already guessed,” Havre concluded, finally satisfied that she had one hundred percent of the detective’s attention, “I screened the other two girls’ blood samples for this Fearless Fog as the lab techs are calling it, and there it was in both of them.”

  “You’ve done half my homework for me.” The detective smiled his first show of thanks.

  Detective Doorframe spent the latter half of his Thursday afternoon drinking coffee with Chief Lintel because it had cost him less than two hours after lunch to figure out who had taken the Fearless Fog off the shelf at Med 21 and slipped it to the three women: Wendell Swiver, the young custodian with full access to the labs and a penchant for boring his co-workers about his triumphs in computer gaming and landing dates with the hotties.

  Some of the coffee talk with the chief concerned the difficult and intriguing part: how to prove Swiver intended to murder the first two young women, since the drug itself was not toxic at the dosage levels in their blood. But that was a job for the busy suits in Seattle or Mercer where the women had died. They could pick up Swiver and plan their own strategy.

  “Impossib
le.” Used to talking to himself over the newspaper or at the screen, Timothy was suddenly wordless, except for “Impossible.”

  He dropped the local section of the Friday Times and checked the Post-Intelligencer on his screen. Same story:

  * * *

  A Seattle man, Wendell Swiver, was arrested Thursday in bellevue for the suspected homicide of a twenty-eight-year-old Belltown woman. The police described the deceased only as a botanist found dead Tuesday in her garden.

  Swiver is also being investigated in connection with the deaths of a female university athlete and a twenty-year-old mercer island woman. Their deaths in July and August, previously declared accidental, are now being re-examined as possible homicides.

  Swiver was described only as a custodian who worked in bellevue.

  Timothy had not gone to the rented storage bin in Queen Anne to check his cloaked email since Sunday night, when he’d told Ivy he’d give her time on her own, and after reading her obit yesterday morning, he felt no need to check. But now…Yes, she might have left him something that would explain.

  But there was no message from Ivy, and just one message dated Thursday at 10:31 a.m.:

  Hey Programmer,

  Nice chicks, really, they were, Spark, Cobbie, and Ivy. But they were just GIRLS in a GAME, and I told you: I know how to talk to girls and how to play the GAME, SET, and MATCH. As you know, that comes right after “LoveFortyMatchPoint.” But I have to give you credit: a good modus operandi on your part. Set up things nicely for me. One thing though, Mercury’s sandals were not silver. Thinking of quicksilver maybe? Better luck “BEfriending” your next set of girls.

  * * *

  Gamer

  * * *

  Oh yeah, P.S., I wiped all their mail between you and them. Kind of incriminating, don’t you think? Even with all those precautions against tracing it to you, you never know what might get back to you—me, for instance. I’d close up that little basement office over in Queen Anne. And you should definitely check your credit card bill this month. It’s been a little tight for me, and I had to put a few downloads on your tab.

  Timothy grimaced. Hacked by a mere gamer—and none of the girls thankful to him in their last thoughts.

  C.C. Guthrie

  C.C. Guthrie’s short stories appear in several anthologies, including Fish Out of Water, Busted! Arresting Stories From The Beat, Landfall: The Best New England Crime Stories: 2018, Fishy Business and Me Too Short Stories: An Anthology. A member of Sisters in Crime International and Guppy Chapter, she lives near Fort Worth, Texas. Find her on Goodreads.

  A Sure Thing

  C.C. Guthrie

  The job offer came as another late season storm took aim at winter-weary Buffalo. Faced with the prospect of more snow, Rocco Sakarian only had one question for the caller: “Where’s the hit?”

  He’d heard of Oklahoma, thought there was a song about it, but had never been there. Wasn’t even sure if it was in the south or the west. He ignored the voice squawking from his cellphone and pulled up the Oklahoma weather report. The state’s forecast high temperature sealed the deal.

  With thoughts of clear sixty-degree days clouding his judgment, Rocco didn’t question why someone wanted him to kill an eighty-year-old cattle rancher. A job was a job. No worries about confronting a marathon runner, a weightlifter, or a tech-savvy millennial. It was a sure thing.

  The prospective client went into justification mode, as they all did, so Rocco switched his phone to speaker, lowered the volume, and settled in to watch the live-action pinball game outside his front window. While a snowplow worked its way up the street, moving a mixture of dirty and newly fallen snow onto parked cars and sidewalks, the rival rancher spewed out complaints about Abigail Hawkins.

  “…don’t underestimate her,” the voice said. “It has to be done before her kids get back in town on Sunday. You got that?”

  Rocco pumped a fist when the plow slammed into a car.

  The voice bellowed from the phone. “Hey, you still there?”

  “Still here,” Rocco said. “Heard every word. No worries. Gotta plan.”

  When the caller’s litany of grievances slowed, Rocco seized back control and presented his fee and payment demands. Eager to rid himself of a troublesome competitor, the client accepted the terms.

  Tulsa was flat as Rocco expected, but the scenery changed as he drove southeast, and small mountains appeared on the horizon. In the town nearest the Hawkins ranch, he checked into an anonymous chain motel, and went in search of lunch.

  He waited for his food, and checked out the location of the Hawkins place, something he’d meant to do before he left Buffalo. The map app showed the ranch on a minor county road several miles off a state highway. But the app didn’t have a street view, so he couldn’t see the surrounding area. Then he remembered, it didn’t matter. Hawkins was an eighty-year-old woman. While he ate, he planned a side trip to Dallas to celebrate the successful kill.

  Rocco left the restaurant and drove to Hawkins’ property, where he had his first inkling this kill wouldn’t be like all the others. Her house, perched high on a bluff, overlooked a river valley. One glance and he knew surveillance tactics that worked for hits in Trenton, Hartford, and Providence wouldn’t work in rural Sugarloaf County, Oklahoma.

  The roads around the ranch were also a problem. The paved ones had potholes that looked large enough to swallow his rental, but the dirt roads were the real threat. An encounter with a tricked-out black pickup drove home the danger when the big F150 blew past, the percussive blast echoing like a drive-by gunfire barrage.

  Instinctively, he slammed his car into park and drew. Heart pounding, he swiveled, ready for a firefight, only to see gravel ricochet off the truck’s wheel rims and rear fender as the truck disappeared into a blooming cloud of dust. He waited for his heart rate to return to normal and stared up at the bluff. The house at the top mocked him. There wasn’t enough traffic on the road for him to blend in, and he couldn’t sneak up undetected. From her high perch, Abigail Hawkins would either see him approach or hear the clatter of rocks bounce off the car on his drive up. He had to adjust the plan.

  Blind without a street view on his map app, he was forced to explore the surrounding roads for a way to access Hawkins’ land. Finally he chanced on a rutted track along the river near her land, hid his car behind a cluster of junipers, and set off on foot. Two bloodied hands and a torn sleeve later, he mastered the art of climbing through barbed-wire fence. He paused above a fast flowing creek to savor the triumph. Seconds later, the ground crumbled beneath him. An explosion of dirt, dead leaves, and old tree limbs engulfed him in an eight-foot drop that ended on a muddy spot beside the water. Debris rained down and he gasped for breath. But when he saw a large brown and tan snake four feet away, air exploded from his lungs. The snake’s tail was raised and vibrating.

  Rocco locked eyes with it and stared in trance-like fascination. Then he heard the sound. Faint at first, but it grew louder, more persistent, and closer. His eyes bulged at the strain to remain still. A snake bite might kill him, but an insect buzzing in his ear would drive him crazy. Without warning, the snake moved. It zigged left, zagged right, and slithered between a knot of twisted tree roots beside the creek. The moment the tail disappeared, he raced up the embankment and into the sunlight, his only thought to get away from the creek.

  By the time he realized he was running in the wrong direction, away from the Hawkins land and back to the river, he didn’t care. Primitive roads and wild kingdom adventures were not part of his plan. Fed up, ready to call it a day, he hurried across open pasture, on alert for other animal encounters, but all he saw were birds. They ran beside him and skittered ahead. High above, a dark shadow hovered, darted, and emitted a repetitive thrum. In the distance, a long-legged gray bird took flight and made a slow, lazy turn over the river.

  Motivated by images of cold beer and rare steak, he picked up the pace when he saw the scrubby junipers that camouflaged his rental. Intent on
returning to civilization, he didn’t notice the car’s pronounced tilt toward the river until he opened the door. After a series of savage kicks at the fender, he maneuvered the rental away from the river’s edge so he could access the flat. While he changed the tire, the sun retreated behind gray clouds and a cool breeze chased off the afternoon humidity.

  In the time it took Rocco to put away the flat tire and jack and return to the highway, the weather changed again. A pronounced green hue replaced the pewter-colored sky, and in the distance a bank of clouds formed a towering wall that darkened like a fresh bruise. Wind howled, rain sluiced down his windshield and oncoming drivers switched on headlights. Rising water prompted others to pull off the road, but he plowed through, never noticing that the time between lightening flashes and thunder crashes grew shorter.

  After parking at the motel, he grabbed the door handle, ready for a sprint through the rain, when his car shuddered violently. Thunder rumbled, the sky lit up and an electrical transformer exploded in front of him. A glowing fireball shot sparks across the parking lot. Rocco peered through the top of his windshield, up at the storm that showed no sign of moving. He waited out the weather in his car and used the time to revise his plan to kill Abigail Hawkins.

  The next morning, evidence of the storm’s ferocity littered the motel property. A deflated soccer ball, part of a kayak, and a tricycle missing wheels were smashed against the fence that surrounded the swimming pool. A splintered tree branch with burn marks lay across the shattered windshield of the pickup next to Rocco’s rental. But he saw the cloudless blue sky as a sign his luck was about to change. His optimism lasted until he spotted a flat on his car.