Dolled Up to Die (3 page)

“It’s just Effie! She must have gotten shut in my workroom. She likes to sleep on an old beanbag chair in there.”

Jo-Jo flicked on a hall light and headed confidently down the hallway. Cate followed. Jo-Jo barely got the door partway open when a calico cat even bigger and plumper than Octavia squeezed out and thudded down the uncarpeted hallway.

“Well, what in the world got into her?” Jo-Jo took off after the cat.

Cate turned to follow, then stopped short. No sound came from the room. No thud or thump, not even a rustle or squeak.
No drifting scent of male aftershave or feminine perfume. No movement in the skinny oblong of light cast on the bare hardwood floor by the hall light.

But that PI instinct that sometimes surprised Cate suddenly kicked in.

She knew with horrifying certainty that the room was not empty.

 3 

Cate looked up and down the hallway, frantically searching for something to use as a weapon. Rules or not, maybe she shouldn’t have ignored Octavia’s advice about the gun in the drawer. But all she saw was the dust mop leaning against the wall behind her. Challenge a gun-toting shooter to a duel with a dust mop? No way.

Retreat.

She moved one foot behind the other, lifting each foot so not even a brush of sole against floor made a sound. Paused. Listened again, ears straining for anything from a breath to a heartbeat in the room. Still nothing except her own hammering heartbeat.

What was his plan? Jump out and start blasting? Or slyly wait for his next victim . . . a live victim . . . to come to him? If so, he was in for a long wait. Because she wasn’t coming.

Another silent lift and plant of foot, hand on the wall to steady her balance. Back in the kitchen, Jo-Jo chattered to the cat. One more step and she could turn and run, grab Jo-Jo, and head for the car.

Her arm touched something. It moved . . . She turned, frantically aware that her shoe squeaked on the bare floor as she did so. The dust mop. She grabbed for it. Missed. The dust mop clattered to the floor. Cate went down with it. Her
knees hit the floor. Her head banged the wall. Her cell phone fell out of her pocket and skittered down the hallway.

Cate struggled to get up, but the ceiling spun in dizzy circles.

“What in the world?” Jo-Jo clomped down the hall in her sturdy shoes. “What happened? Are you okay?”

Cate heard something else. A car in the driveway, Maude braying to warn of an intruder. She groaned. In a minute, Mitch would burst in, find her sprawled on the floor, and be more than ever convinced she didn’t belong in the PI business. Cate scrambled to her feet. She put a
ssshh
finger to her lips to warn Jo-Jo not to say anything more.

“Where’s the light switch in the room?” she whispered.

“Right where light switches usually are. Just inside the door.” Jo-Jo gave Cate an impatient look and started to step around her. “I’ll get it.”

Cate flung an arm out to stop her. She picked up the dust mop and turned it so she held it by the mop end. Body hugging the wall so she wouldn’t make an easy target of herself in the doorway, she thrust out the handle and pushed the door open wider. No response.

Which meant—what? A patient killer? A tricky ambush?

Even more carefully, she slid a hand through the doorway. A click, and the light came on. Still no response. Jo-Jo apparently caught some of Cate’s apprehension because she made no move toward the open door.

How did they do it on those crime shows? Burst through a doorway and instantly step to the side. Of course they were usually wearing protective gear and were armed with something more lethal than a dust mop. A knock sounded at the back door.

“I’ll get it,” Jo-Jo said and sprinted down the hallway.

Mitch was here. At least she wasn’t ignominiously sprawled on the floor. Then, when she heard voices, Cate realized the
person at the door wasn’t Mitch after all. The deputies had arrived. She heard Jo-Jo bringing them down the hallway.

One officer stopped short when he spotted Cate. “This is the person who shot the dolls?”

“No, no, that’s my private investigator.”

Cate couldn’t think what else to do. She gave them a fingertip wave.
Cate Kinkaid, Belmont Investigations. Have dust mop, will investigate. Dusting optional.

“We think the shooter may be hiding in that room,” Jo-Jo added in a whisper.

Both officers unholstered their guns. Back against the wall, gun raised, one called, “Okay, whoever’s in there, come out with your hands up.”

No response. The officer repeated the order. Silence, except for Effie padding down the hall and sidling between an officer’s spread feet. She plopped down at the door and started washing a hind leg. The two officers exchanged glances, then one stepped forward and burst through the door. The second officer followed. Effie indignantly skedaddled down the hallway again.

No gunshots. No sound at all. Cate stepped up to the doorway and peered inside.

Her PI instinct had been right. The room was not empty. The body lay sprawled on the floor. Male. Dark gray suit. Burgundy tie. Iron-gray beard. Gun fallen to the floor by his hand. Bullet hole in his forehead. Cate’s stomach went queasy.

Jo-Jo looked over Cate’s shoulder, gave a little gasp, then pushed her aside. “Eddie!” she cried as she ran to him.

One of the officers tried to stop her, but he apparently didn’t expect speed or agility from such a grandmotherly-looking woman, and she adroitly ducked under his arm. Her foot hit the gun and she grabbed it, looked at it in horror, and dropped it. She slumped to her knees by the body.

“Oh, Eddie, you didn’t have to do this!” Jo-Jo moaned. “I’d have forgiven you for shooting Marianne and Lucinda and Toby.”

A surprised officer grabbed and pulled her away. “You’ll have to stay back, ma’am. We have to investigate this. You know this person?”

The officer braced Jo-Jo with an arm around her shoulders. She buried her face in her hands. Cate’s first moment of surprise slipped into sympathy. However Jo-Jo might bad-mouth Eddie the Ex, apparently she still had feelings for him.

“He’s Eddie Kieferson, my ex-husband. I don’t know why he shot my dolls, but he didn’t have to kill himself over doing it.”

Cate was doubtful about Jo-Jo’s conclusion that some overwhelming guilt had prompted Eddie to shoot himself, but she didn’t know enough to come up with any different explanation. She couldn’t tell what the officers might be thinking. One got on a cell phone and the other herded Cate and a protesting Jo-Jo out to the dining room.

A raucous bray from Maude announced that someone else had arrived, and a moment later Mitch and the officer almost collided at the door. The officer made Mitch produce identification and then planted him in the dining room with Cate and Jo-Jo. Raindrops glistened in his brown hair and darkened the shoulders of his denim jacket.

“You okay?” were Mitch’s first words to Cate. His blue eyes searched her face and he touched her cheek as if he’d like to expand that to a fierce hug, but he settled for a squeeze of hand on her shoulder.

Cate assured him she was okay, though that wasn’t totally correct. Queasiness still roiled her stomach, and she doubted she could walk a straight line, but she managed introductions—Jo-Jo Kieferson, Mitch Berenski—and gave
him a hurried update on Eddie the Ex and what had happened here. She left out the minor detail of the dust mop.

The sheriff’s deputies may have been slow to respond to a doll shooting, but the response to an ex-husband’s death was immediate and abundant. More vehicles arrived, officers in uniform and other people in plainclothes. Maude brayed until she began to sound more like a squeaky cartoon character than a monster.

Cate now suspected that when Jo-Jo called 911, they’d thought the doll shooting was vandalism. There’d been a lot of it recently. Doll shootings would undoubtedly have garnered a response soon, but they weren’t crisis enough to bring the instant reaction that murder would.

Although this wasn’t murder either. Eddie had apparently shot the dolls and then himself. Although . . . did suicides often shoot themselves in the center of the forehead?
Note to self: research methods of suicide.

Newly arrived deputies separated Cate, Jo-Jo, and Mitch for interviews. The questions Cate was asked seemed routine. Name, address, occupation. She explained why she was here and offered her identification card from Belmont Investigations. That didn’t appear to make her and the deputy instant crime-solving buddies. Mitch’s interview lasted less than five minutes.

“They told me they might have more questions for me later on, but I could leave for now,” he told Cate. Without asking for her opinion, he added, “But I’m not leaving.”

Right now, Cate didn’t argue with that protective stance. She might not want to admit it, but his male presence was reassuring.

During the time that Jo-Jo’s questioning went on and on, a deputy with both digital and video cameras spent considerable time in the room where Eddie’s body still lay, then photographed the dolls and living room from all angles. Someone
dug bullets out of the walls behind the dolls. Each bullet went in a separate plastic bag. Another person put the dolls in big plastic bags and carried them away.

When the officer finally returned Jo-Jo to the dining room, she grabbed the back of a chair for support and dropped onto the padded seat as if her knees were wobbly.

“They wanted to know all about Eddie and what kind of relationship we had and how long we’d been divorced and was he depressed or had he talked about killing himself. As if I’d know!”

“You weren’t in touch with him?”

“I never heard from him except when he objected to some bill he had to pay. Then the officer wanted to know who he was married to now and where they lived. How long I’d lived here and did I have any visitors today. Where I’d gone and when and for how long, what I was doing and who I was with. How Eddie got in the house.”

“How did he get in?”

“Probably looked in the dirt in that flowerpot on the back steps. That’s where I’ve always kept a house key, wherever we lived. I wanted to call a funeral home, but they said his body wouldn’t be released for a while.”

“I think someone from the medical examiner’s office has to look at it.”

“They said there’d have to be an autopsy. An
autopsy
.” Jo-Jo’s daze flared into anger. She jumped out of the chair, hands on hips. “Why do they have to do that to him? He has a bullet hole in his head! He shot himself. What more do they need to know? And they said they might have more questions to ask me later.”

“You don’t have to answer their questions if you don’t want to. You can tell them you want your lawyer present. And then let your lawyer advise you about saying anything.”

“Why didn’t you tell me that before?” Jo-Jo skewered Cate with a vexed look, as if Cate had neglected a duty, but a moment later she sagged back into the chair. “Never mind. It doesn’t matter. Why would I want a lawyer? I didn’t do anything. Eddie shot himself,” she repeated.

Yes, that was what it looked like. The gun was right there by Eddie’s hand, and the deputy’s questions about Eddie’s state of mind suggested suicide. But the deputy’s other questions sounded as if they might have other suspicions. As if they were checking to see if Jo-Jo could account for her whereabouts at Eddie’s time of death.

Reluctantly Jo-Jo added, “I suppose I should call Kim and tell her.”

“I think the officers will take care of that. Kim is Eddie’s new wife,” Cate added by way of explanation to Mitch.

“Will you stay with me after they leave?” Jo-Jo asked Cate suddenly. “I don’t want to be alone here.”

Cate had the feeling that wasn’t how this evening was going to play out. She glanced at Mitch again. She knew what he was thinking.
No, no, no. Do not stay here.

Cate started to say that Jo-Jo could come to the house and stay with her for the night, but Rebecca had recently moved the bed out of the guest room and started using the room for sewing and crafts. With Cate and Octavia moving out soon, their room would then become the guest room.

So instead Cate said to Jo-Jo, “I’ll be glad to stay with you.” She ignored Mitch’s scowl.

As it turned out, staying or leaving wasn’t either her or Jo-Jo’s decision. A deputy informed them that the house would be sealed off during their investigation. He said he’d accompany Jo-Jo to her bedroom so she could pick up a few items, but he couldn’t say when she’d be allowed to return.

“But I don’t understand,” Jo-Jo said. Her earlier flare of
anger had fizzled into bewilderment, and the lines in her face drooped with both emotional and physical weariness. “Maude needs feeding. And Effie too. I can’t leave them here alone.”

“Maybe you could take the cat with you? I’ll see that the burro is fed. And maybe your friends here could take you somewhere?” The deputy gave Cate a questioning glance and in an aside said, “I don’t think she should drive tonight.”

“I’ll be glad to do that.”

“But where would I go?” Jo-Jo lifted her hands and looked around, as if the deputy had doomed her to join the homeless under a bridge somewhere.