Mom Zone Mysteries 02 Staying Home Is a Killer (7 page)

“Anything else?”

“She was mad about the posters in the Hole. She wanted them taken down. She thinks they’re sleazy.”

“Okay. Anything else happen?”

“No. Oh, wait. I left the chocolate-covered espresso beans there.” Thistlewait stopped writing on his notepad and sat still, eyeing me like a strange creature he’d never seen before. “Penny gave them to me that morning. She said she couldn’t have them anymore.” Then I made the connection. “Because of the
baby
. No caffeine.”

Thistlewait didn’t say anything, just watched me. I shifted in my chair, uncomfortable under his intense gaze. “I’d completely forgotten about it until now. I don’t like espresso beans, so I took them in and told everyone that they were there, but no one ate any right then.”

“Describe the bag.” Thistlewait’s gaze bored into my face.

I shifted in my chair, suddenly uncomfortable with his intense scrutiny. I hadn’t done anything wrong.
Relax
, I told myself.

“It was a small gold bag with a top that folds down. It had a cursive font on the front. I don’t remember the brand, but Penny usually had a bag with her. She loved them.” I swallowed hard. There were too many questions about food. “Was Georgia poisoned?”

Thistlewait sighed again and rubbed his hands over his eyes. “It looks like it. Vomiting and convulsions, an apparent poisoning. They’re rushing the tox screens, but we don’t have the final word back yet. Her stomach contents and the food in her refrigerator look all right. Most of the foods she ate Tuesday and Wednesday, she ate with her roommate or went out with friends at lunch. No one else is sick.”

“I bet it was the espresso beans. Mitch doesn’t like coffee, so he wouldn’t eat the beans, and Tommy only drinks Folgers. He’s kind of a coffee snob in reverse. He thinks the fancy brands are just a rip-off and nothing is as good as plain old grocery store coffee. He wouldn’t touch gourmet coffee.”

Thistlewait pulled out his cell phone and punched a few numbers. He motioned for me to stay and wandered out into the hall. “Yeah.” His voice carried down the hall. “The food from the base. Especially the espresso beans.” His voice faded as he paced down the hall.

I sat looking at the freckled tabletop, but not seeing it now. Something was bothering me. My thoughts chased themselves around in my head. “Oh,” I said to myself and half stood, but then I heard Thistlewait’s voice growing louder as he walked back down the hall. “And you’d better send the results over to Jensen at the Vernon PD so they can compare it to the tox screen from the Follette woman. Right.”

I sat back down in the chair.

He returned as he slipped the cell phone back into its carrier on his belt. “Well, Mrs. Avery, thanks for the information. I’d advise you to stay out of this mess. Since I know you and I know you’ve shown an interest in bringing the guilty to justice, so to speak, in the past, I doubt you’d do something as stupid as try to murder a friend and then call the police in and help them with their investigation. But”—here he paused and leaned on the back of the chair across from me, arms braced—“not everyone around here is inclined to give you the benefit of the doubt. So, I’d advise you to act like any normal citizen and mind your own business.”

“Are you saying that I’m a suspect?” My heart skittered. He hadn’t read me my Miranda rights, so I couldn’t be an official suspect, right?

“We’ve had two incidents in four days, a murder and a poisoning. You’re linked to both of them. You gave Lamar a bag that may contain poison; we certainly can’t find it anywhere else. And you alerted us to the possibility that Follette might not have committed suicide, which was correct. We’re trained to look for the unusual connection, the discrepancy. You look like a pretty glaring discrepancy right now.”

My armpits felt damp and I pressed my hands down the front of my jeans to hide my trembling fingers. “But I had nothing to do with either thing. I just handed off the bag. I could have thrown it away. And I would never hurt Penny. She was my friend. If I’d murdered her, I could have erased the answering machine message.”

“But, in both cases, you didn’t. There are some strange people out there who do odd things like call the police with evidence that they’ve committed a crime. Arsonists do it all the time. They like to watch the furor their actions create. They get a charge out of it. Murderers do it, too. They leave little clues or call tip lines.”

A rush of emotions coursed though me. “But I would never—that’s absurd!” I couldn’t put a coherent sentence together as rage, anger, and disbelief converged.

Thistlewait pulled back and headed to the door. “All I’m saying is I’m inclined to give you the benefit of the doubt, but you better stay out of trouble. Try to be that average citizen who never notices anything and doesn’t get involved.”

An Everything In Its Place Tip for Organized Closets

Don’t plan to organize every closet in your home in one day—an overwhelming thought. So overwhelming, in fact, that it may stop you even before you get started! Instead break your organizing task into several smaller tasks to achieve your overall goal. For instance, start with one closet, even one area of your closet, and use the “Keep, Throw Away, Give Away/Donate” model to get started. Then tackle changing the shelving or storage containers in your next organizing session.

Chapter Eight

“M
itch, I’m a suspect. Whether or not they read me my rights, I’m at the top of their list. I could see it. I could feel Thistlewait’s attitude shift as soon as I said I took the bag from Penny and brought it to the Scheduling Office. I can’t leave my future in the hands of some investigators. What if they get it wrong? What if they go with the easiest answer? That’s me. Like Thistlewait said, I’m connected to both Penny and Georgia. I got the feeling Thistlewait was cutting me a little slack, but what if someone wants a quick solution to this thing? I’m it.”

Mitch leaned against the kitchen counter with his arms crossed and his legs splayed out at an angle, propping him up. He looked like a mule with his tight, set jaw. He didn’t want to budge. “Thousands, no, millions of people, do just that. They trust the police to get it right. They go on with their lives and don’t think about getting involved.”

“But millions of people only have brushes with the police, a speeding ticket or something minor. Most people are not murder suspects.”

Mitch growled and marched over to the refrigerator. He jerked open the door, which set off a clatter of clinks and thuds. My shoulders tensed as I waited for Livvy to cry. We’d just put her in bed, and any little sound could wake her up. He pulled out a Dr Pepper, shoved the door closed, and guzzled half of it. Livvy must be catching up on her sleep, because the house stayed quiet. Mitch strode to the other side of the kitchen.

I took a sip out of my water bottle and doodled circles in the margin of my notepad. I had two headings across the top,
Penny
on the left and
Georgia
on the right. Under
Georgia
I wrote
Accidental
. I said to Mitch, “If those espresso beans were poisoned, they were intended for Penny. The fact that Georgia ate them is purely coincidental. There was no way Penny knew what I’d do with them once she gave them to me. They had to be for Penny.”

“Where did they come from?”

I shrugged. “You know Thistlewait is following that trail.” I didn’t mention Rachel, my friend who just happened to be the spouse of an OSI special agent. I made a mental note to call her later. Right now, I wanted to focus on my conversation with Penny. I’d talked to her shortly before she died. I wanted to get down on paper what I remembered. I couldn’t imagine anyone being angry enough with Penny to want to kill her, but someone had murdered her and there might be a clue in our conversation or in what Penny had done during the last few days before she died. I’d start with my conversation and then try to fill in the rest of her morning.

She’d looked so happy and I’d commented on it. I wrote
Happy/News
.

Then she’d given me the espresso beans. I wrote
Beans
. Under that word I wrote
Problem/Needed Help.
I’d forgotten about that until now. I drew some more circles. No matter what Mitch thought, I couldn’t let this go now. Penny had asked for my help before she died. She’d even mentioned the murder last year. She must have realized she was in danger and wanted my help. If only we’d talked right then. That dark feeling descended again. I wished we could go back and live that day over again, but this time I’d insist Penny tell me what bothered her.

Mitch tossed his empty can in the recycling bin and sighed deeply. He pulled out a chair at the table. “Okay, what have you got?”

“You’ll help?” I asked guardedly, unsure if he really wanted to help or if he wanted to see my notes.

“Ellie, you are the hardest-headed person I know. I’m not about to let you get into this without knowing what you’re thinking. I’ll help, if I can.”

“Well, you were looking pretty mulish yourself over there just a minute ago.”

“Yes, but I can be flexible. I can give in. Unlike some people.” He leveled a look at me and pulled the notepad toward him.

“I’m not going to give in until I know the police don’t suspect me and aren’t going to arrest me. I have no alibi for Penny’s death. I was driving home from lunch with you.”

Mitch ignored me; well, technically he acknowledged my statement with a grunt as he read over the list, which I took to mean he gave me a little on the alibi point, but he didn’t want to concede that in words. “This is what you and Penny talked about?”

I explained my notes. Then I said, “She was about to tell me something, but then the door opened and a flight crew came in and she looked…funny.” I paused, trying to remember her exact expression. “She was afraid, but there was something else there, too. Defiance?”

I wrote,
Flight crew
and listed the names as I spoke. “Zeke Peters was there. Pilot?” Mitch nodded. The squadron didn’t have hard crews, so once copilots upgraded to pilot and flew in the left seat the Air Force kept them dual qualified, so they could fly as either a copilot or a pilot, depending on what the needs of the moment were. I remember Zeke’s towering figure dwarfed the others as they labored up the ramp.

“Then Aaron, our new neighbor. He didn’t say anything. Do you know his last name?”

“Reed. He’s our newest co.” Mitch meant copilot. Aaron and Bree had moved into the property left vacant when our neighbor requested a transfer after his wife died last year. A management company now rented the bungalow, and the Reeds were the first to live in it. I’d met the couple one day when I was planting ground cover in a flower bed. They seemed polar opposites; Bree had spiky tomato-red hair and was an artist, a painter. She’d chattered nonstop about the local art scene while Aaron stood mute in the background. “Is he as quiet at work as he was that day I met them?”

“Quieter. We call him ‘the Stealth Co.’”

“Oh. I almost forgot. Rory was there.” Barrel-chested and with a thatch of blond hair over his owlish round glasses, he’d powered up the ramp.

“Rory Tyler? Yeah, he was on it and someone else hopped on that flight.” Mitch left the kitchen and then returned with a small packet of paper, the week’s flying schedule. Now that everything’s computerized, the hard copy should have faded away, but the wing commander liked to see it on paper, so a hard copy went out every Friday for the next week.

Mitch scanned the blocks filled with data. “No one else is on here, but I remember someone came in that morning, wanting to fly.”

I wrote a question mark as Mitch said, “Willy. It was Willy. But it wasn’t this flight. The same crew flew the week before, Friday, I think. He hopped on the Friday flight with Zeke, Rory, and Aaron the week before.”

“Will Follette? Wasn’t he just back from the deployment? Penny said something about being glad he’d be home for a few days.”

Was it only last week? Things had changed so quickly. Will had been gone on the first rotation to the “sandbox,” or “SWA,” pronounced “sa-wah,” an abbreviation for Southwest Asia. Mitch was scheduled to leave in three weeks for his turn. Usually, you had some time off when you returned from a deployment. Sometimes it took a while to get readjusted to the time zone after being halfway around the world for months.

“What was Will doing hopping on another flight right after he got back from a deployment?”

“Don’t you know why we call him Willy? Because he always wants to be on the road.” Mitch tossed the schedule in the recycling bin and sat back down. “No matter how much he’s flown, he always wants on another flight.”

“But doesn’t everyone? You always want to fly. There’s not enough hours to go around, is there?”

“Well, no. We’d all rather be flying. But Willy takes it to an extreme. He never has any conflicts. Most people have
some
time they don’t want to fly, you know, a kid’s basketball game or family reunions or something. I can’t remember Willy ever blocking out any of his schedule. He even requested a trip during the weekend of that Frost thing. Penny put up flyers around the base, so I asked him if he wanted to be off and he said, ‘No, it’s not a problem. Penny won’t mind.’”

I tossed down my pen. “And all this time Penny thought it was the schedulers who were working him to death, but he was requesting it.” I picked my pen up again and scribbled Will’s name, but anger distorted my handwriting so that I could hardly read it. “How could he do that to Penny?”

“There’s three reasons to go TDY,” he said, referring to the acronym for Temporary Duty. I’d never understood the acronym. Why not just TD? Too easily confused with a touchdown in football? Did some committee tack on the
y
to baffle spouses and friends of military members? Mitch ticked the reasons off on his fingers, “To travel. You know, ‘join the military, see the world.’ Of course, the only problem with that idea is that military bases are the only part of ‘the world’ we usually get to see. Number two, to party. That’s Willy. For him, a few beers and everything’s a party. And number three, to make money, the per diem. That’s me, by the way, I go for the per diem.”