It Takes Two to Strangle (4 page)

“The jockeys? I suppose.”

Damon laughed and twisted skin on Rebecca’s forearm. Rebecca sulked. Damon supposed she didn’t want him treating her like a sister.

Victor announced the next set of racers, which looked conspicuously like the first group. Damon saw his mother look up and give him a little wave. Damon flushed and waved back. After watching the purple-shirted number one pig win by a snout, Damon and Rebecca skipped the final race in favor of the petting zoo.

Despite a lack of rain, wet straw stuck to the kids’ clothing as they lay on the matted ground to get up-close views of the animals. Rebecca busied herself playing peek-a-boo with a cocksure rooster to the delight of a pair of identical twin girls decked out in matching Hello Kitty shoes and necklaces.

Movement caught Damon’s eye beyond the end of the zoo. Fifty feet away, near a line of Port-a-Johns, Lirim threw his hands in the air. Skipper appeared to be pleading to him. Between the distance they stood from the petting zoo and the din of a human-animal symphony, Damon couldn’t make out their words. Fifteen seconds later, Skipper stalked off toward the row of trailers shaking his head. Lirim plucked a blade of grass, popped it between his teeth and headed into a portable toilet without knocking.

Crawling into his double bed later that night, Damon pulled a sheet over his outstretched limbs, despite the heat. He turned onto his stomach and tucked his head under a flat dense pillow. A neighbor’s barking dogs during his formative years had prompted this silencing maneuver and it stuck. Drifting off to sleep, Damon felt an odd sensation pass through his body. He shook his head as if rebuffing a mosquito’s advances and fell into an uncomfortable sleep.

Chapter 3

Damon was momentarily dazed by the ringing telephone. He rubbed raw eyes and peered at blurry digits on the bedside clock.

“Hello?” he said groggily into the phone’s mouthpiece.

“Damon? It’s Gerry Sloman. What time is the fair supposed to open today?” The words rushed by.

“Gerry?” Damon mumbled. “It’s seven thirty in the morning. What’s going on?”

“Damon, what time does the fair open?” Gerry repeated with atypical urgency.

“Ten o’clock. Why?”

“I need you to call the county commissioner and let him know that the fair is cancelled until further notice. Then get down here to the fairgrounds. You’ve met a number of the Big Surf workers. I need you to give me whatever background you have on them.”

“Wait, what?” Damon interrupted. The morning fog quickly lifted.

“Just make the calls and get down here. I have a dead body on your fairgrounds.”

Damon froze momentarily, then quickly recovered and raced to the bathroom. He inserted contact lenses, which immediately scratched at his corneas, dressed and bounded to his Saab. Zipping through empty streets, he called the commissioner. The man let fly a litany of curses when Damon filled him in with the little he knew.

Damon then dialed Liz de la Cruz. She didn’t pick up and by the time he finished leaving her a message, he was parked at the fairgrounds. The lot was empty but for a throng of police cars and a large white truck that read “Virginia Medical Examiner.”

Damon jogged down the hill into the fair complex. After passing through the maze of games and rides, he saw yellow tape cordoning off the back lot where the trailers lined the woodlands. Two dozen unkempt pajama-clad carnival workers crowded the entrance of the nearby amphitheater.

“Hey you,” Damon heard as he surveyed the grounds looking for Gerry.

He turned to see a top-heavy redheaded woman briskly walking toward him.

“Who are you?” she barked.

“Damon Lassard. Gerry Sloman sent for me.”

“All right. I’m Lieutenant Hobbes. Gerry told me you’d be coming by. Follow me.”

Gerry was standing just inside the taped barrier talking in an animated manner to two men dressed in police attire. “Gerry, I have Damon Lassard here for you,” Hobbes interrupted. “The chief will be here in twenty minutes and I’m putting together a preliminary briefing for him. Once the medical examiner has taken away the body, let’s start interviewing the carnival workers. And make sure incoming fairgoers are blocked from getting down here. Mr. Lassard came in pretty easily.” She didn’t wait for a response and walked straight to the trailer at the far end of the fairgrounds.

Gerry slapped Damon on the shoulder and followed his gaze. “That’s my superior officer,” he said. “And yes, that’s Lirim Jovanovic’s trailer. He was strangled to death last night.”

Gerry led Damon to the exhibition pavilion, grabbing two cups of coffee from a bespectacled patrolman carrying a cardboard tray laden with steaming Styrofoam cups.

Once inside, Gerry and Damon found a pair of folding chairs in a dark corner near the taxidermy entries. Gerry wiped his eyes with his palms. “This is a mess,” he started. “We got a call at about a quarter to six this morning from Victor McElroy stating that Lirim was lying dead in his trailer. Lirim’s trailer that is, not Victor’s.”

“What was Victor doing there at that time of the morning?” Damon asked.

“He said they start that early every morning on days the carnival is operating,” Gerry said, taking a long drink. “By the time we arrived, there was a crowd of carnival workers collected outside of the trailer.”

“He was strangled. Did you see him?”

“I did. He was in boxer shorts and socks lying in bed on his stomach. His head was twisted to one side so we could see red and purple mottling on his neck. I didn’t see much blood so I’m pretty sure he was strangled. The medical examiner, Grace Chu, will be able to confirm.”

“And the fair?”

“We’ll see if the chief allows it to reopen tomorrow, but for today, the whole place is a crime scene.”

“Too bad for the county, but it makes sense. Of course, here in Hollydale, there’s no way you’ll be able to investigate in peace. Everybody will know about it.”

“I know. I assigned two officers the glamorous task of fighting off onlookers and the press until the chief is ready to make a statement. Not that he’ll say much until the next of kin is notified.”

“Have you spoken with his daughter, then?”

Gerry noticeably perked up. “No. We hadn’t started looking for the next of kin yet. You know of a daughter?”

“Her name’s Clara. She and her boyfriend are staying at the Sheraton.” Damon blew over the rim of the Styrofoam cup. “Rebecca and I were having dinner at the Fish Barrel a couple of nights ago and sat at a table right next to them. Lirim and Victor came in and joined them. She and Lirim were arguing pretty loudly.”

“What about?” Gerry asked, his eyes gleaming.

Damon recounted as much of the conversation as he could recall, including Clara’s demand for money from her deceased mother. “You think that gives her a motive?” Damon asked, willing himself not to think of a woman as lovely as Clara strangling her own father.

“Money is always a motive. Did you get a sense that she was in a serious relationship with the boyfriend? He could be a suspect, too.”

Damon recalled the touch of Clara’s fingernails on his wrist and Jordan Hall’s reaction. Had she just been trying to get a rise out of her boyfriend? “It looked like he was pretty serious,” Damon said. “I’m not so sure about her.”

Gerry gave his friend a curious look but let it pass. “All right, stay here and give me a minute. I want to tell Margaret about Clara so we can notify her and make sure she and her boyfriend don’t leave town.”

As Gerry stepped outside, Damon took a deep breath. If anyone he knew was a good candidate for a horrific death, Lirim would have been toward the top of the list. In the short number of days since Damon had met the man, he’d sensed tension in the air between Lirim and his business partner Jim Riley, saw him argue with his daughter, act condescendingly toward her boyfriend and have an altercation with Skipper. Given Lirim’s temperament and his attitude towards women, looking at them like a crow eyeing carrion, there must have been scores of people who disliked the man.

Damon wasn’t sure he fancied being involved in a murder investigation. But was he really involved? He was just talking to Gerry about his experiences with Lirim.

Gerry returned with two French crullers and handed one to Damon. “This is stressful,” he said. “A year and a half as a detective and I’ve never been pulled into a murder. The county only gets two or three every year.”

Damon bit into a cruller.

“Tell me what you know about the others working here,” Gerry said. “We both met Victor who comes off as unscrupulous. Tell me about Jim Riley.”

“Small guy with a goatee and an ear infection. I sensed tension between him and Lirim, but I don’t know what it was about.”

“Money would be my guess. I noticed that Victor and Lirim were alone doing the accounts the other day. Maybe Jim wasn’t invited.”

“That would be my guess, though Jim has a lackey of his own, albeit a much nicer one.” Damon described Skipper and the curious comment Jim made about Skipper being his meal ticket.

“How did Skipper respond to that?”

“He didn’t. And I saw Skipper and Lirim in a heated debate last night at the fair.” Damon outlined what he had seen from outside of the petting zoo.

“Good. Who else do you know here?”

“Nobody. I’ve seen some of the other workers, but I didn’t talk to any of them. Are you going to question all of the temps, too?”

“Temps?”

“College kids home on break who are working the concessions,” Damon said.

“I hadn’t thought of them. I’ll get a list from Jim Riley and we can check them out. Of course if they just started a day or two ago, I can’t imagine Lirim did something so bad so quickly that it would lead to murder.”

“I guess not, though some work multiple weeks at nearby fairs.”

Gerry cracked his knuckles nervously. “All these years on the force and for the first time, I think this job just got really hard.”

The men left the exhibit hall. Surveying the space in front of him, Gerry spotted Margaret talking to the police chief and county commissioner and left Damon to join them.

Damon watched two lab-coated men wheel a gurney from Lirim’s trailer toward the medical examiner’s truck, which had been moved to just outside of the taped off area. There was a sizable body underneath a white sheet. A petite Asian-featured woman trailed the cart, presumably the medical examiner Grace Chu. As the gurney bumped along the hardened dirt toward the back of the truck, Damon noticed an assemblage of reporters and cameramen gathered among a nearby grove of fruit trees.

He instinctively looked for Bethany. Of course she wasn’t there. She was a weatherperson not an investigative reporter. A myriad of news cameras laser-focused on the men loading the sheet-covered body for transport while the carefully coiffed reporters spoke with appropriate gravity impressed on their faces.

Damon drained the last of his coffee, reflexively crushed the cup in his hand, and headed over to Liz de la Cruz who stood alone watching the scene.

“Quite a morning,” Damon said, forcing a smile.

“Like you wouldn’t believe. And my husband is out of town for work. I had to find a neighbor to come over and pack the girls off to preschool.”

“Sorry about that.”

“It’s not your fault. So that Lirim guy we met a few days ago was murdered?”

“Strangled. What have you heard?”

“Just the commissioner and police chief arguing about how long they need to close down the fair. The commissioner was pushing to reopen it tonight, but the chief laughed and said he’d be lucky if it they allowed it to reopen by Saturday.”

“Two days will sure take a toll on the profits.”

“I’m sure Jim Riley isn’t pleased about that,” she said. “I wonder who gets Lirim’s share of the business?”

“I imagine his daughter, unless he has other kids.”

“I’m sure the police will find out. Isn’t there always some insurance money at stake in gruesome murders?”

“I don’t know whether there’s any insurance money, but you’re right that strangulation is pretty gruesome. It makes it seem like there was a personal vendetta. As if someone really wanted to show Lirim how much they hated him.”

The group of county employees standing near them broke up. The commissioner and police chief strode off toward the television cameras, Margaret Hobbes started toward the amphitheater and Gerry came over to Damon and Liz.

“The plan for now is to allow you to reopen on Saturday morning,” he said without preface. “The carnival crew can go about the town but we’re not letting any of them leave Hollydale. We’ll have a twenty-four hour police presence here while we investigate. Margaret went to tell Jim Riley and the others.”

“Is there anything we can do?” Liz asked.

“No,” Gerry said with gratitude. “We’re going to start interviewing people one by one and the chief wants you both to take off. I’ll keep you up to date.”

Gerry left them to join Margaret in the amphitheater where she was engaged in a discussion with Jim Riley. Damon couldn’t decipher the look on Jim’s face in the distance but if he had to guess, Lirim’s former business partner appeared more pleased than saddened.