Cross-Stitch Before Dying (22 page)

I
was sitting in the sit-and-stitch square working on the impressionist painting cross-stitch project as the afternoon wore on. I was beginning to feel like all of Tallulah Falls had turned in for an early nap and that I was the only one who didn’t get the text instituting the new policy. There wasn’t even that much traffic on the sidewalk.

“Maybe I’m just lonely without Angus here,” I said to Jill, the mannequin who is a dead ringer for Marilyn Monroe. “What do you think?”

She figured that was probably it—along with the fact that I was concerned about the Movie Murder Madness. Was that a good name for it?

“It’s as good as any, I suppose,” I said. Before you think I went entirely off my rocker, I was fully aware that Jill could not actually communicate with me. But when a person is bored, she’ll come up with all sorts of imaginative distractions.

“So, what’s your take on this movie murder madness, Jill? Do you think the gunman’s death is—as Ted suspects—tied in to the other two murders? Or is it completely coincidental that the gunman was killed near where Babs met her untimely death?”

Jill gave this some thought. She decided that we needed to deduce why each of the three victims was most likely killed.

“Good thinking,” I said. “Let’s start with the gunman. He was probably killed over a disagreement with his partner. No one has ever hinted at any other motive for his death.”

Jill reminded me that I wasn’t privy to all the information pertaining to that investigation but admitted that I was probably right. “Besides, we strongly suspect that the person leaving the area on the dirt bike was the gunman’s partner, do we not?” I sometimes imagined Jill putting a proper, Jane-Austen-y spin on her phrases.

“We
do
suspect that, Jill. Or, we might call the person on the dirt bike—as Deputy Preston pointed out—a mud slinger. I thought that was a clever moniker, didn’t you?”

“Indeed,” I imagined Jill responding. “And he had a similar button, which we now know to be a medallion, to the one Vera found. So now I’m wondering if the two men knew each other . . . if perhaps they were in the same mud slinging club.”

“I wondered that too, but if you’ll recall, I asked Deputy Preston about it. He denied knowing the young man.”

“He did. . . . Let’s move on to Babushka Tru. Why would someone want to kill her?”

“You mean, besides the fact that she was as mean as a snake?” I asked Jill.

“Now, now. . . . There simply has to be a better reason than that, or else there would be no hateful people in the world. And as I stand here immobile watching the public come and go, I realize that hateful people—even people as hateful as Babushka Tru—are allowed to remain alive all the time.”

Jill had an excellent point. Most often, our desire to stay out of prison is much stronger than our desire to strike a hateful person, even if we don’t intend the strike to result in said person falling off a ledge to her death.

“Jill, you’ve got me talking like you,” I said. I sighed and resumed stitching.

But Jill insisted we weren’t done. We needed to dig for the deeper motive behind Babs’ death.

“If it wasn’t out of sheer exasperation on the part of someone she was haranguing, then it had to have been because someone wanted her out of the picture . . . meaning the film—get it? Or it had to be that she saw something she shouldn’t have seen,” I mused. “Let’s say Ted is right in his assumption that Babs’ death is tied to the gunman’s death. She must’ve found some sort of evidence that pointed to the killer, or she might’ve connected him to the gunman.”

Jill pointed out that Babs’ phone had gone missing and that during that time two of Babs’ financial accounts had been hacked.

“What if Babs had learned who’d had her phone?” I wondered aloud. “Then she would’ve known who’d hacked her accounts. She’d have filed a police report, and the thief and his new computer hacker would have been in deep. That could be the motive.”

And what about Henry? Jill still didn’t see why he’d been murdered, and frankly, neither did I.

Could Henry have been killed over something—or someone—he saw with Babs? Mom had said she spotted Henry heading in Babs’ direction after she left the young diva that morning. Maybe Henry saw her with the killer.

But Henry was Babs’ father. He wouldn’t just let someone hit her on the head and knock her off the edge of the loft. And if he had witnessed the murder, he’d have surely reported what he’d seen.

I stitched while I contemplated Henry’s death. Finally, I came to two conclusions: he could have reported what he’d seen to Detectives Bailey and Ray and they’d sworn him to silence; or Henry might not have seen a thing, but the killer thought he did.

I giggled. “Maybe the killer is Deputy Preston, Jill. He’s a mud slinger, so it could’ve very well been him on the dirt bike leaving the scene of the first murder. And he was in Henry’s hotel room just before Sonny arrived. . . .” My voice trailed off, and my smile faded. The thought of Deputy Preston being the murderer wasn’t as far-fetched as it had first seemed.

I placed my cross-stitch project on the coffee table as I stood. As I walked into my office to get my laptop, I was wondering why the cyanide had taken so long to affect Henry. If Deputy Preston had, in fact, poisoned Henry, wouldn’t Henry have been dead when Sonny arrived? Before I rushed to judgment, I needed to know the answer to that question.

I searched one webpage after another. Frankly, I was beginning to fear that federal agents would burst into the Seven-Year Stitch at any moment and order me to step away from the computer with my hands up. Looking up all this information on poisons had to be a red flag to someone.

Then I found it—a Dr. Lyle had blogged about the length of time it would take for cyanide to affect a victim. The doctor had concluded that the length of time for the poison to affect the victim would depend upon the size of the dosage and whether or not the victim ingested the poison on a full or empty stomach. Dr. Lyle explained that after ingestion, the sodium or potassium cyanide reacts with stomach acids to form hydrogen cyanide in the stomach. The hydrogen cyanide is rapidly absorbed and kills the victim. However, in a full stomach, the acid would be diluted by the food and delay the reaction time.

I recalled Mom saying that Henry’s breakfast tray had been on the table by the window. If Deputy Preston had come along with the poison just after Henry had finished eating and maybe added the cyanide to Henry’s coffee, then that would explain how Henry was still alive when Sonny came to visit.

Sonny told me that Henry was jittery, sweating and breathing hard. He also said Henry kept putting his hands up to his temples as if he had a headache. I did a search for symptoms of cyanide poisoning—even though I knew the cause of death—just to make sure these were the stages Henry would’ve gone through before death.

So now I had deemed Deputy Preston a plausible suspect. It made perfect sense. He was attending the same junior college as the gunman. They could’ve either met there or been friends before enrolling in the school. Either way, when Preston had lost his first hacker—the gunman—he could’ve simply recruited another . . . unless, of course, there had been more than one hacker in the group to begin with.

When the movie crew came to Tallulah County to film, Deputy Preston saw the opportunity as too lucrative to pass up. From what I’d seen of Babushka Tru, I could imagine her leaving her phone lying around and then screeching orders for someone to find it. Plus, she was flirtatious, and Deputy Preston was a nice-looking guy. And I’d even seen him in the outtake footage—proof that he’d gotten close to the star.

But what would be his motive for killing Henry? And where would he have gotten the cyanide?

I put my head against the chair and stared up at the ceiling. What had Detective Ray said before he was aware I was standing in the kitchen? He’d said something about Henry’s poisoning being only the second cyanide poisoning the Tallulah County Police Department had investigated in five years. If the police department had not only investigated, but had gathered evidence and made an arrest, then wouldn’t the poison be stored in an evidence room or something?

I decided to call Ted and find out. My call went to voice mail so I left a message: “Hi. I need to ask you something. How long is evidence kept? In particular, I’m wondering if the Tallulah County Police Department would still have evidence from a five-year-old case. Please find out and give me a call. I want to run a hunch past you.”

I shut down my laptop and returned to the sit-and-stitch square to resume work on the Monet. I was thinking
oh, my gosh, it really could be Deputy Preston! He could really be the killer!

And then all of a sudden I was thinking of Sonny. Even if it was an outrageous theory and the killer turned out not to be Deputy Preston after all, shouldn’t I call and warn Sonny? After all, Deputy Preston—or the killer, no matter who he or she might be—could make the assumption that Henry had said something to Sonny that would be incriminating. Wouldn’t that put Sonny’s life in danger as well?

I was rising to get my cell phone out of my pocket when the bells over the shop door alerted me to the fact that I had a visitor. Too bad the visitor turned out to be Deputy Preston.

I was so afraid my face had given me away, even though I tried to unwiden my eyes and lower my brows and pretend that everything was hunky-dory fine.

“Hey!” I said as brightly as I could. “What brings you back by today?”

Deputy Preston looked grave. “It’s your mom, Marcy. There’s been an attempt on her life, and I need to take you to her right away.”

“Really?” No way was I buying that. I took the phone from my pocket. “Let me call Ted. He can be over at my house faster than we can get there.”

“She’s not at the house,” he said.

“Where is she?” I asked.

“She’d gone for a walk on the beach.”

“What happened to her?”

“I don’t know,” Deputy Preston said quickly. “Detective Ray didn’t give me all the details.”

I frowned. “Why did he call you in on your day off if he wasn’t going to tell you what was going on?”

The officer’s face hardened. “Put the phone on the counter, Marcy. You’re coming with me.”

“I don’t think that’s such a good idea,” I said.

He took a revolver from his pocket. “I don’t care what you think. You and I are going for a ride.”

He had me there. Rock beats scissors. Scissors cuts paper. Paper covers rock. Truth defeats darkness. Revolver trounces truth.

“Why’d you kill Babs and Henry?” I asked.

“Come on. Put the phone on the counter and walk slowly toward me.”

This time I did as he asked. I needed to figure out a plan, but I was going to have to think outside of the comfort zone of the Seven-Year Stitch. I looked at Jill and gave her a silent good-bye. I imagined her quoting her doppelganger: Dogs never bite me. Just humans.

Amen, sister.

Deputy Preston grabbed my upper arm and propelled me toward the door. I looked up, down, and across the street. Surely, if Sadie, Blake, Todd, or even the mean old aromatherapy shop owner saw me, they’d know something wasn’t right.

“Can I lock up?” I asked. “I don’t want the shop to be burglarized.”

“Leave it. Getting robbed is the least of your problems.”

I nodded.

He pulled me along to his car—a blue, four-door Saturn sedan—and opened the passenger-side door. Before I got in, I looked through the back window. Sonny Carlisle had been bound and gagged and was lying on the seat. I gasped.

“Yeah, say hello to your good friend Sonny,” Deputy Preston said. “Now get in.”

I got into the car. Sonny had met my eyes, and I’d read the fear and dread in his face that I realized had probably been mirrored in my own. Judging by the bruise forming on the right side of his face, Sonny had taken a hard hit. I wondered if he’d been knocked unconscious. Sonny was a big guy. He could’ve held his own with Deputy Preston in a fair fight.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“You ask a lot of questions. You know that?” He turned on the ignition, put the car in reverse, and backed out into traffic.

Could I cause him to wreck the car? Probably not without getting myself shot and possibly hurting someone innocent. Despite the lack of foot traffic on the sidewalk, there were still plenty of people on the streets. Maybe I could make Deputy Preston lose control of the car when we got onto a more deserted stretch of road.

“You still haven’t answered the first question I asked you,” I said. “Why did you kill Henry and Babs?”

“Just shut up. I don’t want to have to kill you in my car.”

Sonny somehow managed to kick the back of my seat. I didn’t know if he was warning me to be quiet or trying to reassure me that he had a plan. If it was the first one, I heeded the warning . . . but I hoped the kick was signaling the latter.

A
s Deputy Preston sped down the highway toward the movie location, I tried to remain calm and assess the situation. Since I was in the front seat with the deputy, he was watching every move I made. Any attempt to open the door and jump out could be thwarted or could otherwise end badly. I could be run over by the car or shot by Deputy Preston.

Sonny was also unlikely to make a successful escape. Even if we stopped at a traffic light and he managed to open the back door and roll out of the car, it’s unlikely he’d even be able to get to his feet before Deputy Preston sped away. As in my escape scenario, this could result in Sonny being run over by either the Saturn or another vehicle. Besides, I had no idea whether or not Sonny was even weighing his escape options.

What other recourse did I have? I could wait until Deputy Preston stopped the car and got out, but that was risky. What if he made me get out first, kept the gun trained on me, and then followed me out the passenger side? But if he
didn’t
make me get out first, and if he got out but kept the gun on me, I could maybe put my leg over like I was getting out and then press the gas and take off, thus saving myself and Sonny. No . . . the fact that Deputy Preston was more than a foot taller than me meant that I’d have to slide nearly under the dashboard to be able to both reach the gas pedal and avoid the bullet the crazy officer was sure to fire.

And then it hit me like a wave of nausea. Actually, it
was
a wave of nausea, which is what made my acting so believable.

“I’m gonna be sick,” I said, heaving dramatically over Deputy Preston.

“Don’t you dare puke on me,” he said.

“I . . . can’t. . . .” I gagged again. “Can’t help it. . . .”

He pulled over to the side of the road and stopped the car. When he did, Sonny brought up his bound fists and smashed Deputy Preston over the head. I pushed the gun away from me. The gun discharged and shot through the front of the car. Sonny continued clubbing Deputy Preston over the head. Despite being moderately incapacitated, Sonny was doing a decent job.

I bit the officer’s wrist in an attempt to make him drop the gun. He didn’t drop the gun; he brought his wrist up and hit me in the mouth. I still held his arm with both hands.

Sonny made a sound that I later learned was supposed to be “Run!” With the gag in his mouth, I couldn’t understand the command. I wouldn’t have obeyed it anyway, because I wouldn’t have left Sonny alone with a killer. One, it wouldn’t have been the honorable thing to do. Two, the most likely outcome of my running was that Deputy Preston would first shoot me and then turn and finish off Sonny, dumping us both out there on the side of the road like garbage bags waiting to be picked up by jailhouse trustees.

After hearing Sonny’s muffled cry, the next sound I heard was a keening wail. I considered that Sonny might be screaming. . . . Or I might be. . . . Was it
me
making that sound? No. No, thank God, it was sirens. Help was here.

•   •   •

Ted had received my message and had driven to the shop. Finding the door unlocked, no cardboard clock announcing when I’d return, and me nowhere in the building had sent his alarm bells into overdrive. He’d already come to the same conclusion I had about the possibility of Deputy Preston being the murderer. He’d called Detectives Ray and Bailey. He explained his theory that Deputy Preston had been integral in the hacking and theft ring and that he believed the deputy had not only murdered Babushka Tru and Henry Beaumont but that I could be his next victim.

It just so happened that Detectives Bailey and Ray were on that same track themselves. The fact that Deputy Preston had asked to work extra shifts at the initial crime scene and then at the movie set had raised red flags with them. When searches of my property and Sonny Carlisle’s hotel room didn’t turn up any products containing cyanide, they’d checked the evidence logged on the earlier case and found that the container had been tampered with and that some of the poison had been taken. As soon as they got the call from Ted, they’d put out an all-points bulletin (APB) on Deputy Preston’s personal vehicle. Ted, guessing Deputy Preston would take me to the original crime scene, was already en route there when he was joined by Detectives Bailey and Ray.

Detectives Bailey and Ray later informed Manu—who told Ted, who told me—that Deputy Preston had confessed to killing Babs after she deduced he’d taken her cell phone. It seems that although she might have been malicious, spiteful, and disrespectful, she was not stupid. No one among the movie cast or crew would have stolen her phone and then hacked into her accounts. Had they had that intention, they’d have done it while they were still in San Francisco. She knew it had to be her latest conquest, Deputy Preston. He’d been at her beck and call, and she was furious when she realized that his attention had been a ruse to get her financial information. When she confronted him, he hit her in the back of the head with a two-by-four and knocked her to her death.

As Deputy Preston was walking away from the crime scene, he met Henry. He stopped Henry and asked if he’d heard anything. Henry said no, but Deputy Preston insisted he’d heard something from the direction of the loft. Together, they went and “found” Babs’ body. When he got home from work that evening and took off his uniform, Deputy Preston noticed a small amount of blood on his right sleeve. He began to wonder if Henry doubted the story of his hearing something from the loft, so he made it a point to watch Henry closely. He eventually convinced himself that Henry did, indeed, suspect him, so he murdered Henry.

With regard to Sonny and me, Deputy Preston planned to set Sonny up to look like the murderer. He had the rest of the cyanide he’d taken from the evidence room, and he’d planned to plant it on Sonny’s body after Sonny and I were dead. He thought he could shoot me, shoot Sonny, and then put the gun in Sonny’s hand—the intention being that everyone would think I’d caught on to Sonny’s nefarious deeds, confronted him, and that he’d killed me and then killed himself.

Sonny said that was the stupidest thing he’d ever heard. If he was the killer, why would he murder me—the last remaining loose end—and then turn the gun on himself. No screenwriter worth his salt would write such a thing, and no detective would believe it. Ted agreed with that last part.

Carl Paxton was devastated to learn that Babs had been pregnant and that he was the father of her child. Rather than take on Mita Trublonski as a client, he canceled the tell-all book. The last Mom heard, he’d left Hollywood and returned to his hometown somewhere in the Midwest where he’d become an insurance salesman.

A couple days after what she referred to as “the incident,” Mom returned home to San Francisco. She quickly found a new movie needing an expert costume designer. The new movie didn’t have any buzz about any huge awards, but Mom decided she didn’t want the media to pay close attention to her ever again. If need be, she could live without accolades. I knew she was deluding herself, but for the time being, it was what she needed to do. She did tell me the last time we talked that she’d been doodling a little on that clothing line.

It took a little while for my mouth to heal. Fortunately, I didn’t lose any teeth or suffer any scarring, or any of that jazz. Ted had to be especially tender when kissing me for a couple days, but that was okay.