Deadly Production (Mapleton Mystery Book 4) (26 page)

Gordon checked the time. After seven. He made an executive decision to wrap things up for the evening. His dinner was scheduled for a seven-thirty delivery, and there wasn’t anything else he could do tonight. Gordon glanced around the diner. The technical folks had left. Damien and Julie had put on their jackets and were standing near the door, chatting with a man in dark jeans, a white shirt and a leather jacket. He kept glancing toward Cassidy and Lily’s booth. Their driver?

Dawson was talking with Cassidy and Lily, poking at his tablet. Finalizing tomorrow’s schedule, Gordon assumed, because the actors kept nodding, glancing toward the door, and seemed eager to get away.

For that matter, so was he. He nodded to Cassidy and Lily as he passed, eavesdropping enough to confirm he was right about what Dawson was telling them. Gordon patted his pocket to make sure he had his personal keys, and started up the interior staircase to Angie’s apartment before realizing he’d left her gifts in his SUV.

He reversed direction, and when he went through the diner again, Lily had joined Julie and the others by the door. Dawson was seated across from Cassidy in the booth. Dawson’s expression was contrite. Was he coming clean, apologizing for searching Cassidy’s room? Cassidy’s expression said he wasn’t thrilled about what Dawson was saying, but there was no apparent anger.

At this point, it was none of Gordon’s business—unless Dawson showed up dead tomorrow, and Gordon chastised himself for even allowing a glimmer of that thought into his head. Dawson rose, shook Cassidy’s hand, and the actor shoved his hands into his pockets and shuffled across the room to join his companions.

Bart Bergsstrom, still at his booth, closed his paperback and walked toward the group. “Thought I’d grab a beer at Finnegan’s, want to join me?”

The four actors exchanged glances, shrugged, and spoke to their driver, who shoved the sleeve of his jacket up and checked his watch. Gordon assumed they’d made their arrangements for the rest of the evening, and he was ready to get on with his.

Gordon half-jogged the two blocks to his SUV and drove to the Village. His officer jumped out of his unit when Gordon stopped, and moved the barricade aside. Gordon rolled down his window. “All quiet?”

“Yes, Sir. Everyone’s packed up for the night.”

Gordon told him to expect a delivery from The Black Bear Chalet, which earned him a knowing smile, a quick salute, and a big, “Yes, Sir,” then drove through the lot and parked in his usual spot beneath the back stairs to Angie’s. Would anyone think he was doing surveillance on the Village? Not hardly. But he no longer worried about what people thought. He was entitled to a life. He grabbed the champagne and chocolates and trotted up the stairs, a smile spreading across his face, wondering how Angie would greet him this time.

Sleeping in
to Angie, Gordon discovered, meant six instead of four-thirty. She stretched, then leaned over him to open the curtains on the window above the bed. “We may be closed,” she said, “but I’m way behind in prep work. I’d like to get a head start before the movie people come back.”

“Are you saying it’s time to rise and shine?” he asked, shifting the covers. “Because I’m ready.”

She grinned. “I can see that.”

It was almost eight before he’d showered, had a home-cooked breakfast, and arrived at the station.

He started a pot of decaf brewing and went to the workroom for the night reports. Solomon sat at his desk, phone to his ear. Listening. Making notes. The occasional. “Okay, got it.” So much for the man taking the weekend off.

Gordon crossed to the duty officer’s desk and picked up the folder with his paperwork. Solomon stretched an arm out, blocking Gordon’s path to the door. The officer held up a
wait a minute
finger. Gordon hiked a hip onto the corner of Solomon’s desk, then leafed through the night reports to see whether anything urgent had gone down. No mention of Dawson being found dead.

Solomon said, “Thanks,” and hung up the phone. “Chief, you’re not going to believe this. We’ve got a possible Deadbeat Dad killing here.”

“What?” Gordon skimmed the reports again. No mention of a dead body.

“Not
here
here as in Mapleton, but in the county. I’ve been talking to Colfax, and it’s one of those new cases he was hit with the other day. We’ve been exchanging notes. But it fits the profile.”

“My office,” Gordon said. “Bring your notes.” If Colfax was willing to listen, then Gordon could, too. He set the folder of night reports into his inbox, poured a mug of coffee, and settled behind his desk. After pulling a legal tablet from his drawer and a pen from the holder, he leaned back in his chair. “Shoot.”

Solomon recapped the crime. A man, one Franklin F. Fitzgerald found dead in his car in the parking lot of Red Rocks Amphitheater, engine running, a hose feeding the exhaust into the car. “At first glance, it looked like a suicide, but we’re cops, and we never judge based on a first glance.”

Gordon grimaced. “Ed. Get on with it.”

“Okay, okay. Now, Colfax had kind of put this on the back burner, waiting for autopsy results, since one of his other new dead bodies was obviously a homicide. Woman found with her organs cut out. Not a neat, surgical job, either. Her innards were tossed down the laundry chute at her apartment complex.

“The third, a guy’s shot by a doped up gangbanger, then his homeys drag the body into the woods and tie him to a tree and take turns shooting him. Everyone’s pointing fingers at the rival gang, as usual. County’s got a gang squad to help with that one.”

“Back to Mr. Fitzgerald.”

“Right. Well, the guy fits the pattern. Divorced three times, five kids between the wives, and he hasn’t paid alimony or child support in three years. The moms are squeaking by, but barely.”

“Inheritance? Life insurance?” Gordon asked. “If so, that would give any or all of them a motive.”

“Can’t get our hands on that information yet. But all three wives, according to Colfax, have ironclad alibis. All were elsewhere when he was killed. Way, way elsewhere. However, after what I’ve told Colfax, he’s going to see if he can ascertain the whereabouts of Paula from
Paula’s Places.
If we can put her anywhere in the vicinity, that would be a major step forward.”

“A step forward into
your
personal theory,” Gordon said.

Solomon shuffled his paperwork. “If Colfax hasn’t solved it by then, my money’s on a blog post about Morrison, or featuring Red Rocks, in three weeks.” He grew serious, pulled out some printouts. “A couple months ago, there’s a comment on the blog asking about Morrison. Fits with the blog’s focus on out-of-the-way venues, but has Red Rocks nearby, which is a draw. And now, there’s a death of a deadbeat dad. They’re starting to fit the pattern, wouldn’t you say?”

Gordon admitted there was a possibility.

“Something else,” Solomon said. “I got my first newsletter from
Paula’s Places
yesterday. It was straightforward, probably the one she sends to anyone who signs up via her website. But I got a second message thanking me for signing up, acknowledging I asked about Manitou Springs, and then it goes on to ask questions.”

“I don’t suppose one of them was
Who do you need killed?
”

Solomon glared at him. “No, but a few about why you think your suggestion would make a good post topic. Innocuous enough. Wants you to include specific points of interest, restaurants, lodging, scenery, activities. But I’ve got this theory.” He showed Gordon the printout. “See, there’s this field on the form where you’re supposed to fill in where you heard about the newsletter.”

“Common enough.”

“Yeah, but I was thinking. What if it’s where you give her the secret password? Let’s say you’ve heard about Paula or her blog as being the gateway to an assassination central for deadbeats. Step one. You go to the blog, leave the comment worded like all the others. Then you get her response and you go on to step two, which is answering her questions, which includes the field asking how you heard about them. Somewhere along the line, you’ve got the code word for that one, and you get admitted to the next level. I figure that’s where you start working out the details of who needs to be killed, making payments, and the like. It makes sense, right?”

Gordon gave it some thought while he sipped his coffee. “In theory, yes, it might—and I’m emphasizing
might
—be workable. What are you and Colfax doing other than seeing if Paula was in Morrison recently? Or at Red Rocks?”

“He’s going to put the geeks on trying to track the IPs of the people who posted comments asking whether the blog would cover a particular place where a homicide ended up happening. I’ve sent him all my data. But I’ll bet we’ll find there are a lot of layers to peel away. Like the Guinness Book of World Records for giant onions. Anyone who’s set up this kind of network—”

“
If
it’s for real,” Gordon said.

“Right.
If
it’s for real, there would probably be lots of safeguards. No matter how these people are finding out about it, they’re likely being told to send their comments from places like libraries, or other public computer sites. And they’re probably routing through two or three proxies. If she’s been getting away with this—”

“You’ve got her convicted already, have you, Ed?”

“Okay, I’m not a hundred percent sure I’ve got it right, but damn, the pieces seem to fit.”

“You know better than to make the facts fit your theory. Take it slow, document everything, and don’t do anything without informing Colfax.”

Solomon’s eyes lit up like a kid coming downstairs on Christmas morning to finding Santa had given him everything on his list. “You mean I’m free to pursue this? Officially?”

“
After
your responsibilities to Mapleton PD have been satisfied.”

“I’m on my own time this weekend,” Solomon said. “I know there are rules about unauthorized overtime, but—”

“But you’re not working for Mapleton until Monday.” Gordon finished his coffee and set the mug down. He gathered Solomon’s paperwork and put it into the folder. “Make me copies.”

Gordon couldn’t help but smile as Solomon practically danced out of the office. A happy officer was a good officer.

But now, he had his own case to deal with. His pool of suspects was going to be leaving soon, and he was no closer to finding the person who’d broken into Marianna Spellman’s trailer and taken her computer than he’d been the day they’d discovered it.

The phone interrupted. Gordon checked the caller ID. From the county lab. Calling on a Saturday?

Gordon snatched up the receiver. “Chief Hepler.”

“Xander Lewis. Crime Lab. We got the report on your rush jobs from TechLabs, so I pushed ours through to compare.”

Why did Gordon get the feeling it was to prove the private lab wrong? “I take it you found something?”

“Yes. You do know this won’t hold up in court until we get the paperwork filled out, but I thought you’d want to know there were traces of citalopram hydrobromide in hot chocolate taken from cups in what was designated as lounge number one.”

Ignoring the remark that hinted Gordon didn’t know how things worked in putting together a case, he grabbed the files and found his diagram of all the vehicles in the Village. Lounge number one was the trailer where the higher-echelon Seesaw people hung out. Not high up enough on the totem pole to warrant their own RVs, but high enough to consider themselves above the
little people
. Or so Mai Phan had explained it. She’d also said there were no fixed admission policies, so finding something in that lounge didn’t eliminate anyone.

But they’d been looking at coffee. Finding the drug in hot chocolate was a new path to follow.

“Can you determine whose cups they were?” Gordon asked. “Prints, DNA?”

“In the works,” Xander said. “However, unless these people are in AFIS or another database we have access to, you’re going to have to give us exemplars if we’re going to identify them. I can tell you, one of the cups had bright red lipstick on it.”

Marianna wore red lipstick. Then again, Gordon had noticed a number of the people on camera, both actors and extras, wore lipstick that would fall into the red category. “The contents of the victim’s purse included a lipstick. Can you run a test to see if they’re the same? If they match, we’d have a pretty good indicator of how she ingested the drug.”

Gordon realized he probably sounded like he didn’t think the tech knew his job, either. But one couldn’t ever assume anything. And he had no idea how things were divvied up for processing, whether the tech had even seen the contents of Marianna’s purse.

“I’ll do that,” Xander said. “Should have results later today. The DNA will take longer.”

Gordon explained the DNA samples and fingerprints he’d collected during interviews. “If you run those as well, they’ll serve as your exemplars. Or, I can call the studio, see if they’ll authorize their private lab to run the additional tests, if you can’t handle it right away. With the understanding the job’s not court-ready until the paperwork is done, of course. But these people are going to be leaving here soon, and the more information I have, the better the odds we can find our suspect before everyone disappears.”

After a drawn-out sigh, as though a balloon was deflating, Xander responded. “My wife’ll kill me—I told her I’d be back by noon—but our kid’s got a stomach bug, and I figure making it up to her later beats dealing with puke and crap all day.”

“As if you don’t do it on the job?” Gordon said.

“Yeah, but that’s
evidence
. It doesn’t cry, and cling, and puke
on
you. It’s just there. And I don’t think I can sit through
Frozen
one more time.”

Gordon grinned and left it at that. The guy’s relationship with his wife was none of Gordon’s business. Which, of course, had him thinking about what it would be like if he and Angie had kids, and who would be the one taking off work when they were sick.