The Claudia Hershey Mysteries - Box Set: Three Claudia Hershey Mysteries Read online

  THE CLAUDIA HERSHEY MYSTERIES

  by Laura Belgrave

  THIS BOX SET INCLUDES:

  In the Spirit of Murder - Book #1

  Quietly Dead - Book #2

  Deadly Associations - Book #3

  ISBN: 978-1-58124-337-6

  Copyright ©2014 by Laura Belgrave

  Published 2014 by The Fiction Works

  http://www.fictionworks.com

  [email protected]

  All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced without written permission, except for brief quotations to books and critical reviews. These stories are works of fiction. Characters and events are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Table of Contents

  In the Spirit of Murder - Book #1

  Quietly Dead - Book #2

  Deadly Associations - Book #3

  About the Author

  For Mary L. Belgrave, 1925-2001

  “The Good, Kind, Sweet,

  Wonderful, Loving Mother”

  It’s most certainly also for my husband,

  John C. Caramanica, Jr., whose spirited

  optimism and support made it possible.

  And for the most encouraging

  sisters I can possibly imagine,

  Linda Liska Belgrave and Leslie Curtis.

  You believed when I didn’t.

  You insisted when I couldn’t.

  I don’t know how this would have

  happened if you weren’t in my orbit.

  For that I will always thank you.

  And Marlene Passell? Thank you, too.

  Chapter 1

  Detective Lieutenant Claudia Hershey stood with her hands in her jacket pockets and looked at the woman on the kitchen floor. Sometimes dead people looked like they were only napping. An eyelid would appear to move. Lips might twitch. You’d know they were dead, but still they’d play some trick or another, just enough to make you suck in your breath.

  Not this woman. Her face had been obliterated along with her last breath. Blood was her pillow.

  Claudia’s eyes moved restlessly around the kitchen. It was just a little square room with the standard appliances and a small round table. The table had been upended like a gladiator’s shield, but it was the only evidence of a struggle. Claudia guessed the woman hadn’t gotten the first lick in.

  “God have mercy,” said a hushed voice behind Claudia.

  She turned and took in the chief’s spongy face. It still bore traces of pillow creases. “Worst I ever saw before this was some fella got pulled out of Little Arrow Lake three days after he went in. Gators’d gotten to him, that and fish and water, and whatnot.” Chief Mac Suggs pulled his eyes from the body and cleared his throat. “But this? A dog with rabies wouldn’t of gone this far. No one deserves to die like this.”

  The woman lay on her back, her right arm and wrist bent in a question mark. One leg was drawn up at the knee, the victim’s skirt hitched past her thigh. Claudia resisted an impulse to straighten the skirt for the woman, to do just that much.

  The characteristic rumble returned to Suggs’ voice. “Well, looks like you’re finally gonna earn your pay, Hershey. Hope you still know your way around a stiff body.”

  The comment didn’t call for a response. In the ten months since Claudia had arrived in Indian Run, Suggs had treated her like a mistake. In a sense, it was true. The burly chief had hired her in error, mistaking her name as Claude on the application. Claudia had learned to live with it. The chief, not quite.

  “Is the sheriff’s crime scene on the way?” Claudia asked. She pushed long fingers through her hair, thick stuff the color of rust. It fell in wayward curls to her shoulders.

  Suggs made a sour face. “Yeah, them and the medical examiner. Those clowns just been waitin’ for something like this. We’ll be tradin’ in our blue for their khaki after this one.”

  The chief’s battle with the Flagg County Sheriff’s Department was legendary. Every six months like clockwork, the sheriff made a pitch to the Indian Run Town Council to take over police service. The arguments were sound: Indian Run’s police department was small; its equipment was outdated; its officers poorly trained.

  True, all of it. But for all his plodding country ways Suggs was not a stupid man and until the last year he’d countered pretty well. Give up your own police, folks, and just watch your property taxes grow wings. That always shut them up. No one wanted to actually pay for their cops. And besides, crime in Indian Run rarely went beyond a stolen water pump from one of the orange groves or dirty words scrawled on the school walls.

  Then faces on the town council changed. People Suggs hadn’t grown up with began to control the gavel. Developers looking to buy up another patch of Florida sniffed around, never mind that Indian Run was nothing more than a smudge in the middle of the map. Everybody wanted more cops, and better cops. So after the last go-around, Suggs had hired Claudia sight unseen in a desperation bid to upgrade his department with a bona fide detective—one that until now had never been needed.

  * * *

  Suggs and Claudia moved just outside of the kitchen. Orange and black crepe paper sagged listlessly from tacks in the ceiling in a perfunctory salute to Halloween. A cardboard skeleton, the cheap sort available at drug store checkouts, decorated the wall below. The garish arrangement would have been visible to trick or treaters at the door. A nice touch for the kids.

  “Hershey,” said the chief, “what’ve we got here? The sheriff’s boys’re gonna be all over the place like fleas on a dog. I don’t want to scratch in front of ’em.”

  Claudia shrugged. “It’s a little too early to—”

  “Hershey, don’t bust my chops like that,” Suggs said irritably. He pulled at his shirt, already sticky with perspiration. “God knows why in hell you left Cleveland for a cracker town like this, but you did, and you came with enough awards and citations and ribbons to wallpaper a room, so don’t tell me you don’t have some notion of what in hell went on here.”

  Claudia waited a beat, gauging the chief’s expression, settling him down with her own. Then: “All right. You’re right. I do, and none of it’s good.”

  Tall and thin and sharp of elbow, Claudia was neither beautiful nor plain. Her face mercifully lacked the sharp geometry of her body, but it was dwarfed by oversized glasses that gave her eyes an unsettling depth and authority. Those who met her stare pulled away first, shrinking from the penetrating orbs that were sea green in color, the right marginally smaller than the left. Indeed, back in the days when Claudia’s daughter Robin still spoke to her in a civil manner, she liked to joke that people could walk on her mother’s line of vision.

  Claudia recognized the power her eyes held, just as she recognized the prerogative of her height. Six feet spoke its own language.

  “All right,” she said again. “Here’s where we are. I did a preliminary poke through the house and whatever she was killed with—” Claudia shook her head “—it’s not here, not now. Could have been a rock, a stick, a two-by-four, anything solid and hard.”

  A motorcycle rumbled down the street. It slowed when it drew alongside the house, hesitated, then roared away in sudden urgency. Claudia waited for it to pass, mentally calculating the size of the spectator crowd.

  “Anyway,” she continued, “I’ve got a couple of uniforms searching the grounds. Maybe we’ll get lucky.” Claudia glanced at her notes, words crimped tightly on a small spiral tablet. “I also found her appointment book.”
/>   “Amen,” said Suggs.

  “Maybe,” Claudia said cautiously. She pursed her lips. “I haven’t had time to look at it in any detail, but it’s going to be a problem to sort out. The people who came to her for spiritual advice or whatever, they’re listed only by initial. No first names. No last names. And if she went anywhere last night, there’s nothing written down.”

  “Some cozy night in,” Suggs murmured.

  “I also did a fast interview with the woman who called when the victim didn’t answer her phone or respond to the door. They were supposed to meet at seven this morning, hit the road for Orlando by eight. They were going to make a day of it, shopping; that sort of thing. The woman who found the body, a friend named Irene Avery, called the switchboard a little after seven-thirty. Officer Ridley got to the scene first.”

  Claudia handed Suggs a business card. “I found a batch of these on the coffee table in the living room. Victim’s name is Donna Overton. According to Avery, she lived here for some twelve years.”

  Squinting at the card, Suggs grunted. “The Reverend Donna Overton, certified medium.”

  “Most of the psychics and mediums—those certified, anyway—call themselves ‘reverend,’” Claudia explained. “A lot of them are spiritualists. I’m told it’s a religion.”

  “Great,” Suggs mumbled. “The press’ll have a field day with this one. Couldn’t be just anyone who gets killed.”

  Claudia let it pass. Donna Overton was one of about twenty-five psychics and mediums who lived in a six-block neighborhood that pinched off the northwest boundary of Indian Run. She didn’t know much about them, except that they’d been a mild curiosity in the early ’70s when there were twice as many. Several had moved to a similar community near Deland called Cassadaga, which still attracted a lot of visitors. A few had simply retired. Some continued to live in Indian Run, but of them most held more conventional jobs and rarely gave readings. Claudia explained that according to Avery the victim had been an exception; Donna Overton’s livelihood depended on income from spiritualist counseling.

  “This Avery woman, she a medium, too?” asked Suggs.

  “Yes.”

  Suggs rubbed his eyes irritably. “Okay, what else, what else? Give me chapter and verse, Hershey.”

  “Avery tells me Overton was forty-two and lived alone,” said Claudia. “She’d never been married. She has one surviving relative—her mother, and the mother lives in a nursing home somewhere in upstate New York.”

  Suggs exhaled slowly. “So family—the idea that maybe this was just some kind of domestic thing—that’s out.”

  Claudia nodded.

  “What about boyfriends? Was she shackin’ up with anyone?”

  “Avery says not lately. But there was a guy, someone we’ll need to take a look at”—Claudia paged through her notes—“a man named Tom Markos. Avery says he and Overton were an item until about two weeks ago. Markos works at the fish camp. Avery met him once; didn’t much like him. Said he looks like a gorilla.”

  “Yeah, well half the fellas who work over at the camp look like gorillas,” Suggs murmured. “Don’t mean much by itself.”

  Claudia looked up sharply. “You know the guy?”

  For two years in a row Suggs had taken trophies in the town’s annual bass fishing tournament at Little Arrow Lake. What time he didn’t spend at the cramped police department he spent on the lake. So did two-thirds of Indian Run’s male population.

  “Don’t believe I’ve ever spoken direct to Markos,” Suggs said, “but I might could say which one he is. If my recollection is right, he’s a big man, hairy, not much the type for sharin’ a beer.”

  Claudia jotted a note. “I’ll see if I can round him up today, get him to share information instead.”

  “Forget about that for a minute,” said Suggs. “What about a break-in? A burglar? Some stooge hell bent on fast income for a drug habit coulda connived his way in. Some of ’em are pretty slick. I’m even starting to hear rumors of drugs bein’ sold at the goddamned high school. Coulda been someone strung out like a set of Christmas tree lights.”

  Already, Claudia was shaking her head. “I don’t think so. I can’t see that she’d open her door to someone she didn’t know, and as far as I can tell there are no signs of forced entry—”

  “Now hold on a second,” said Suggs, his voice incredulous. “How the hell can you tell that? Ridley flexed his shoulders on the goddamn door to get in. It’s hanging from one hinge.”

  “The hardware’s intact,” Claudia replied matter-of-factly. “When Ridley got the call he apparently knocked and peeked in windows. When he didn’t get a response he assumed the door was locked and he came through like a battering ram. But the locking mechanism shows the door was open all along.”

  “Aw, come on.”

  As if she hadn’t heard, Claudia said, “Anyway, unless she’d accidentally left the door unlocked—and Avery says no way—the victim either knew the killer or for some reason believed it was safe to open the door.” Claudia adjusted her glasses. The damn things were too tight. “Maybe it was a burglar or someone doped up, but I don’t think so. My guess is we won’t find anything missing here. Her purse has”—Claudia sought her notes—“ninety-seven dollars and change in it, and a handful of credit cards.”

  While Suggs thought about that, Claudia glanced around the living room. Neat as a pin. Little to suggest that violence had visited.

  “Hershey,” said Suggs slowly, “she might not’ve opened her door to an adult she didn’t know, but what about the possibility of a kid? Some damned fool trick-or-treater? Some punks playin’ their Halloween roles to the hilt? How about some kids who just didn’t like what she was handin’ out? Could be more’n one.”

  Simultaneously, Suggs and Claudia looked toward a half-empty bowl of candy on the coffee table. Overton had provided a nice mix, it looked like: Mars bars; Snickers; Tootsie Rolls.

  “Maybe, but not a strong maybe,” said Claudia. “The coroner will fix a time of death but I don’t think Overton was killed much before midnight, maybe one. Blood’s still clotting and rigidity is just starting to settle in. It’s unlikely there were any kids still trick-or-treating past nine o’clock—ten at the latest. And I just don’t think that’s it.”

  Suggs groped in his pants pocket and pulled out the stub of a Tums roll. He grappled with the wrapper and popped two of the medicinal candies in his mouth.

  Claudia watched, waiting.

  “What else?” asked Suggs. “Can we at least assume we’re dealing with an amateur? There’s bloody footprints all the way from the kitchen to the front door. Couple of splotches on the walls, too. Whoever did this left a trail a blind man would find.”

  Claudia inclined her head. “I don’t think we can assume anything. Crime scene might find prints. Maybe they’ll vacuum something we can use. But the tracks and those smudges on the wall—”

  Claudia shook her head. “No good. They’re Ridley’s.”

  “What?”

  “Here’s the problem,” said Claudia. She sighed, thinking about the young officer. She’d spoken to him briefly outside, his boyish face still white. “Bobby panicked. He’s what? Twenty-one, maybe twenty-two? Three months out of the academy?”

  “Wait, wait, wait . . . What are you tellin’ me, Hershey?”

  “I’m telling you that Bobby blew in here like a cowboy—maybe showing off for Irene Avery, who was right behind him—then he found the body in the kitchen and went nuts.” Claudia gestured at the tracks. “He slipped in the blood on the linoleum, fell, got up, and made a beeline out of here. I’m told that he got outside, heaved his breakfast donut, and yelled for someone to call the cops.”

  “Oh, hell. That it?”

  “Not quite. You see the pair of jack o’lanterns Overton had set up on TV trays alongside the walkway to her door?”

  Suggs grunted. “Didn’t stop to admire the lady’s holiday decorations on my way in, Hershey. So?”

  “So only the
one on the left was still on a tray. The one on the right was smashed to pulp, quite possibly knocked off by someone anxious to get the hell away. There’s a beauty of a shoe print square in the middle of it. And it looks to me like there’s a trace of another right under it. Unfor—”

  “Well, then, hot damn! The killer left his calling card!”

  Impatiently, Claudia shook her head. “No. Officer Ridley left his calling card. On his way out he stepped on the pumpkin—right smack over the trace print, which probably did belong to the killer, and which we’ll probably never get a line on.”

  A car door slammed outside the house. Voices carried in the early morning air. The crime scene techs had arrived.

  The chief’s jaw tightened. “Boy, Hershey, you’re havin’ a good time with this, aren’t you? Far as you’re concerned, it’s just one big hoot an’ a holler. You—”

  “Wait a minute. I—”

  “No, you wait!” Sweat slicked the chief’s face. “Tell the truth, Hershey. You just been hopin’ for a chance to show us what boneheads we are out here, what corn-shuckin’, tobacco-chewin’ boneheads we are. You look at us and you see two-bit security guards who couldn’t cut it on a real police force.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Claudia said evenly. “If I believed that for a minute I wouldn’t be here myself.”

  She wondered if that were true, though. Burnout propelled her from Cleveland. Serendipity and a defeated muffler stopped her in Indian Run, a tree and sky community of eight thousand souls and fourteen sworn police officers.

  A mile past the lake, cattle ranchers anchored the western and southernmost reaches of Indian Run, their vast property curling north around the town’s small commercial and government district until it abruptly ended where acres of citrus groves began. Scattered residential pockets fanned northwest from the town’s center, the newest and most contentious such neighborhood named Feather Ridge. Those who called Feather Ridge home commuted as far north as Orlando for jobs. They built country houses in the low six-figure range, erected a private school for their children, finagled a small airport, saw to their recreational needs with tennis courts and a membership-only golf course, and periodically upset the balance of Indian Run by pushing for more of the same. Developers loved Feather Ridge’s residents; most of Indian Run hated them. And though Claudia didn’t live in Feather Ridge, she was viewed with the same suspicion as all outsiders.