Crazy as a Quilt (A Harriet Turman/Loose Threads Mystery Book 8) (30 page)

“Shall we stitch for an hour and try to calm our nerves?” Harriet asked.

“‘Would it be okay if I ride along with Jessica in the observation car?” Sharon asked. “After all this, I’m not sure I can sit home and wait.”

Jessica smiled. “I’d be happy for the company.”

With that settled, they made their way to the studio to embellish their crazy quilt pieces for the next hour.

Chapter 27

Carla had called Harriet to tell her when Michelle was gone. Lauren and Harriet waited up the road from Aiden’s house until they got the call from Jessica that Michelle was in the legal aid building. Mavis had gone ahead into the house before Michelle left, since she was supposed to be there helping Carla with her crazy quilt block.

“It’s show time,” Lauren said when Carla answered the door. “Jessica and Sharon have eyes on Michelle’s car, and she’s inside her building.”

Aunt Beth handed out pairs of one-size-fits-all plastic food-handling gloves.

“Put these on,” she instructed.

Carla led them to Michelle’s sitting room and went to the corner by the window. She flipped the edge of the rug up. As she had reported, a shiny key lay on the rug pad.

“Let me pick it up, dear,” Beth told her. “We don’t want your fingerprints anywhere they shouldn’t be.” She picked it up with her gloved hand. “Well, let’s see if this fits.” She crossed the room to the bedroom door, slid the key into the lock and turned the knob. The door opened.

Weak light filtered into the room through the sheer lace curtains. Beth looked on the wall beside the door and found the switch. The room was bathed in yellowish light when she pushed the old-fashioned button switch.

Harriet followed her aunt into the room and was quickly joined by Lauren.

“Well, not quite as messy as I’d hoped,” she commented.

Lauren looked around. Michelle’s desk had a small note cube and one pen. Her dresser had a crocheted scarf and a painted glass lamp.

“I didn’t expect the surfaces to be quite so devoid of…everything.”

“Let’s not make any judgments here. And be sure you don’t leave anything out of place,” Beth told them. She began opening dresser drawers one at a time.

The women worked in silence for a few minutes.

“This is curious,” Beth said finally.

Harriet looked up from the desk.

“What?”

Beth pulled a large blue plastic bag from the bottom drawer.

“This looks like an electric blanket. How very curious.”

“What’s the problem?” Lauren asked her.

“First of all, as cold as it still is this time of year, if you had an electric blanket, you would be using it.”

“Maybe she doesn’t like them,” Harriet countered.

“You’re right,” Beth continued. “But if she didn’t like them, this house is so big and has so many closets, you’d put an unneeded blanket in a linen closet. Her dresser is crowded with clothes. This…” She pointed at the bag she was holding up. “…is out of place.”

Harriet stood silently for a moment.

“If Michelle killed Marine before we saw her driving around looking for her, she could have kept her body warm with that blanket. After she saw us, she could have gone back and taken the blanket off the body.”

Lauren turned away from the nightstand she was examining.

“I wonder if she was tracking Aiden.”

“Wouldn’t she have to have help?” Beth asked.

“Not really,” Lauren told her. “All she’d have to do is tape a cell phone to his bumper and use the track-my-phone function on her own phone. When he was a couple of miles away, she could take the blanket off, go back to her car and take off. Marine would measure as warm as toast, leading the medical examiner to believe she’d just passed.”

Harriet turned back to the desk.

“There are more sophisticated time-of-death tests, but I doubt anyone did any of them because they originally thought she was a drug overdose.” She pulled open a deep file drawer to the right of the knee well on the old oak desk. “Bingo,” she said and pulled out a stack of smallish white boxes.

Aunt Beth looked at the stack of boxes as Harriet placed them on the desktop.

“What have you got there?”

Harriet set each box down so she could read the labels.

“Remember a month or two ago when I was digging up all those photos for Lainie and Etienne? They were working on a school genealogy project.” She held up one of the white boxes. “They sent their DNA to one of those services that analyzes your sample and tells you what country or countries your ancestors come from.”

Lauren stopped what she was doing, holding a notepad in her hand.

“And the punch line is?”

“You send them saliva samples,” Harriet said. “There are five boxes here. There should be four—one each for Lainie, Etienne, Aiden and Michelle.” She started opening lids. “I’m betting one of these boxes still has its vial inside.” In the third box, she hit pay dirt. She carefully eased the stoppered tube from its foam cutout in the box. It was half full of liquid. “She sent in two vials of her own saliva and kept Aiden’s. I’ve seen the report. It doesn’t tell gender because presumably you know that already. It only tells you countries and percentages. She’s been planning this for a while.”

Lauren set the pad she’d been scanning back in the nightstand.

“So I guess that seals the deal for Michelle.”

Harriet carefully replaced the vial in its box and put the boxes back in the drawer. For the sake of completeness, she opened the shallow center drawer on the desk.

“Hello. I found the stash of burner phones.” She pulled the drawer wide. Four phones were side-by-side, sticky notes on their tops identifying them by number.

Aunt Beth had struggled to push the blanket back into the dresser drawer, then finished looking in the other drawers, finding nothing else of interest.

“Do we have enough? I mean, to convince ourselves Michelle is involved. Isn’t this when we should call Detective Morse?”

Harriet explained what she and Lauren and their roommates had discussed at lunch.

“So, we need to tell Detective Morse, but I think we need to get Jules to help us set a trap.”

“Let’s finish up in here and get out. We can call Morse when we have this place locked back up.”

“Detective Morse said she can meet us in a half-hour at the coffee shop.” Harriet slid her phone back into her pocket.

“Has anyone called the watch team?” Aunt Beth asked.

Mavis picked up her coat and bag.

“We can call them from the car. I know they’re watching, but it still makes me nervous being in Michelle’s house. Especially if she really is capable of killing someone.” She shivered. “I hate to even think about that.”

Harriet turned to Carla.

“Can you come with us?”

She touched her phone screen to see the time.

“Wendy’s going to be playing at DeAnn’s for another hour, but I’ll take my own car, in case Detective Morse is late.”

At the Steaming Cup, Detective Morse picked up her coffee at the bar and joined the group, who were once again seated around a large table.

“Your message was pretty cryptic. Do I want to know what you think you know?” She sat down across from Harriet and looked at each one of them. No one smiled at her comment. “Okay, something has you spooked. Who wants to tell me what it is?”

No one spoke at first, then Harriet began.

“We came across some information that Aiden’s sister was seen talking to Marine’s dad. We were reviewing the evidence we knew about. We know Aiden didn’t deposit his saliva on Marine.” Morse started to speak, but Harriet stopped her. “Let me get this all out at once, or it won’t make sense.”

“Fair enough,” Morse said.

“We figured the people in Aiden’s house are the most likely to be able to get his saliva. We know it wasn’t Carla.”

Carla’s cheeks turned pink, but she didn’t say anything. Morse leaned back in her chair.

“We asked Carla where the police searched when they executed their warrant on Aiden’s house, and she mentioned that Michelle kept her bedroom locked at all times.”

Harriet sipped her tea and set her cup down again. Mavis took up the story.

“We were getting antsy sitting around doing nothing. Carla, here, knows where Michelle hides her spare key, so we decided we’d take a peek in her room. We figured we wouldn’t find anything, but at least we could eliminate her as a suspect.”

Morse ran her hand through her short hair.

“What did you find?” she asked.

“A couple of things,” Harriet said. “First of all, I was looking in her desk, and I found the boxes from the genealogy test kits Aiden, Michelle and the kids did a few months ago. There should have been four kits. I remember when the kids were doing their ancestry project for school; they only talked about testing themselves, their uncle and their mother.

“Anyway, I looked in all the boxes. Four had empty foam and papers. One box had a vial half full of saliva. We have no way of knowing, but my bet is Michelle sent in two vials of her own spit, since she and Aiden would have the same heritage. She kept Aiden’s actual vial for her own purposes.”

“Don’t forget the blanket,” Aunt Beth reminded her.

Morse drank a sip of her coffee.

“There’s more?”

“I found an electric blanket in her dresser drawer. This is out of our realm, but we’re wondering if Michelle could have used it to keep Marine’s body warm while she came to ask us if we’d seen her, then took it off before Aiden got back to find the body.”

Detective Morse looked thoughtful.

“It’s possible, I suppose. But you know there are problems with your illegal search of her room. I mean, I can go see if blanket fibers were found on her clothing or body, but even if you call in an anonymous tip about what’s in her room, it’s not going to take a genius to figure out it was one of you, and probably Carla will be accused of illegally entering her locked room.”

Harriet’s mouth lifted on one side in a half-smile.

“Oh, no. Here it comes,” Morse said.

“We have an idea about getting Michelle to confess,” Harriet told her. “Marine’s half-brother was the one who told me he saw Michelle talking to his dad. He runs with a rough crowd.

“I haven’t talked to him about this, but I’m willing to bet Jules would go to Michelle and tell her he saw her and Marine going into Aiden’s apartment at the critical time. He could say he was trying to find Marine and was waiting for Michelle to leave so he could talk to her. He could claim he went up to the door when he saw her leave, and no one answered. Then he can ask her for a payoff to keep quiet.”

“We assume you could wire him for sound?” Aunt Beth added.

Morse sipped her coffee thoughtfully. The Loose Threads stared at her intently. She set her mug down and sighed.

“You guys never make it easy, starting with the fact that it’s not my case.”

“But you can help?” Mavis persisted.

“Let me do some checking. I can find out about the blanket fibers. What color was the blanket, by the way?”

“Blue,” Aunt Beth said.

“I can talk to the genealogy company and see if they can tell us the gender of the samples sent by the Jalbert family. For your part, give Jules my number and ask him to call me. If it goes that far, and the detectives assigned to the case agree, we can set it up. In the meantime, are you sure you didn’t leave any sign that you were in Michelle’s room?”

They all nodded.

“Stay away from Michelle. We don’t want to spook her. I know you all think you’re Miss Marple but trust me, you’re not, and if you see her, there’s a good chance at least one of you will act different enough to tip her off.”

“I asked Tom to get the Renfros to make an excuse to keep Michelle’s kids,” Harriet told her. “I’d like to think she wouldn’t hurt her own kids, but I’m not positive.”

“It’s sad to say, but I think that’s a good idea. If she
is
guilty, she’s sick and sick people sometimes do terrible things.”

Mavis rested her hand on the back of Carla’s chair.

“Honey, whenever this all goes down, I think you should go stay with Connie. I’ll call her, but I’m sure it’ll be okay.”

“That’s also a good idea,” Morse said. “If she realizes we’re on to her before she’s arrested, it could be dangerous for anyone around her.” She finished her coffee and crumpled her napkin. “I’d better get going. I’ll check with the crime lab and see what they’ve got.”

“I’ll call Jules and see if he’s willing to go along with our plan.”

Aunt Beth stood up.

“Let us know what he says.” She picked up her purse. “We better get going.”