Chapter Four
Rachel and Jake shared a concerned look. Rachel charged across the ballroom to the door, while Jake sidled around the frame and into the hallway. As they left the room, Dr. Dave walked up the grand staircase, and waved at them.
“There you are!” Sarah said in relief.
“Where you been, Dr. Dave?” Jake asked. Dr. Dave was rarely late to any kind of medical emergency. After all, his receptionist was precognitive, so generally Dr. Dave knew when and where he was needed way before anyone else. It was at times unnerving to see the Doctor hand a bottle of aspirin to someone with a knowing look and tell them that they were going to need it.
Dr. Dave looked around the room as he spoke. “I just drove Average back to the diner when Mrs. Paulson told me to get back up here. Who’s sick?”
“It’s Mr. Prunella,” Sarah said. “I can’t rouse him.” She led them around the horseshoe-shaped second floor to the unfinished coffee bar. Then she gestured to a dust cover shrouded chair where the hotel manager sat.
His head was down, and he appeared to be resting. His entire posture slumped forward, arms dangling over the sides of the armrests. A mysterious, damp stain puddled beneath his fingertips. Jake might have believed that he’d simply fallen asleep, but for the blue lips. Jake stopped and grabbed Rachel and Sarah by the arms to keep them from getting any closer. Some instinct told him to study the room carefully and to make special note of any observations. His eyes ran a quick circular pattern around the room, starting with the space immediately surrounding the hotel manager’s chair. Dr. Dave made an impatient sound, which reminded Jake that, like him, the Doc still had a job to do as well. The officer stepped back and let the doctor pass him. As Dr. Dave did so, Jake’s eyes fell on a plastic potted plant back by the door leading out to the balcony. A strange, white shape in the pot drew his eyes.
Jake walked back to the pot. He parted the fronds of the plant, and was surprised to see a white coffee cup nestled therein. Meanwhile, Dr. Dave knelt so that he could see into Mr. Prunella’s face. He touched two fingers to a pulse point, then looked back at Jake with a frown. “Jake?”
“Yeah?”
“I’m going to try CPR.”
“Wait a minute, Doc.” Jake looked from the stain under Mr. Prunella’s fingers, to the coffee cup in the plant. Then he pulled an old red bandanna and an ink pen from his pocket. He used the pen to pick up the cup by its handle, and the bandanna to wipe at the inside lip. A black, sticky substance came away on the cloth.
“Be careful where you put your mouth, Doc.”
Dr. Dave gave him an odd expression. “Mrs. Paulson told me to bring a manual resuscitator. You don’t suspect poison, do you?”
Jake nodded. His mouth turned down in a grim line.
“It would be nice if Mrs. Paulson’s precog ability could’ve seen this coming so that we could prevent it,” Jake said.
“You know it’s unpredictable,” Dr. Dave said. “She can watch her soaps in advance and tell me what my schedule is going to be like. But she can’t stop anything from happening. The one time she tried, it actually made things worse.
Jake nodded. “Just — do what you can, Doc.” He stood, and backed away.
“What’s wrong with him?” Sarah asked Jake.
“Sarah, sweetie,” Rachel pulled her back away from the scene. “I think we’d better call an ambulance.”
“Ambulance?” Sarah turned and stared back at Jake, Dr. Dave, and Mr. Prunella. “What’s wrong with him?” she asked again.
“I have no idea,” Rachel hedged. “But better safe than sorry. Come on. You’ll want to direct them around to the fire escape and call off hotel security. That way you don’t upset all those space cadets downstairs.”
“Oh!” Sarah seemed to come back to herself. Like flipping a switch, Jake saw the control freak in her take over. “I’ll get right on that!” She bounced on the balls of her feet, turned, and rocketed down the hall toward the staircase.
Rachel dusted off her hands and walked up to stand next to Jake.
“He’s dead, isn’t he?”
“Yup.”
She shut her eyes and leaned into Jake’s shoulder. Jake held her as he watched Dr. Dave administer CPR on Mr. Prunella in a vain attempt to coax life back into him. The first thing that Jake saw of Winthrop Stevens as he led the paramedics and their gurney through the fire escape exit was a broad, half-moon grin. Win was a local farmer, well liked by everyone. Jake had known Win for years. His son, Bobby, had been a first string tackle the year Jake was captain of the football team. His two granddaughters were in school with Tommy. Win was also crazy as a catfish wearing a pair of hiking boots. About a year ago, he’d decided to get into specialty farming. Now he had about ten alpacas on his back forty. It had been funny, until one of them spit on the mayor.
Okay, it was still funny. Win had brought one to the Fourth of July parade with his granddaughters riding on it. Horace had bought a new suit for the occasion. When he said something about how the alpaca looked like a giant poodle, it spit on him in retaliation. The two old friends had patched things up quickly, once Win brought Horace an alpaca sweater. But the notoriety was enough to get the llama farmer elected as county coroner. Dr. Dave glanced up and then down again. “Uh-oh,” he muttered. “Its Mr. ‘Just put down cause of death as natural causes’ himself.”
“I’ll handle this,” Jake said. He started across the hall, and met Win halfway.
“Win.”
“Jake?” Win nodded. “I get to declare someone dead and earn my fifty dollars today?”
The coroner gig had definitely not gotten in the way of Win’s entrepreneurial spirit. Just last week, Jake had to go out to the old man’s farm and have a word with him about filing paperwork on dead cows. The old man didn’t seem to understand that cows were not under the jurisdiction of the county coroners’ office and therefore didn’t need to be declared dead. And also that he was going to have to pay back the extra fifty dollars per head that he got for declaring the cows dead.
“Listen, Win. There’s something funny about this one.”
“Funny? Like dead cow funny?”
“Like it might not be natural causes.”
“Really?”
“I’d like to hold this open for investigation. So I’d be obliged to you if you’d put cause of death down as unknown.”
Win grinned at him again. “How obliged?”
“Obliged enough to look the other way next time you brew up some of that whiskey of yours. Provided you don’t sell it.”
“Well.” Win scratched his chin. “What about barter?”
“No money changing hands, Win,” Jake said firmly. “This is a dry county. But if someone wants to paint your barn or fix your fence, it’s none of my business.”
Win nodded. Then he walked over to the late Mr. Prunella and bent down. He looked him over once, before nodding solemnly.
“Yep, that there man had a case of unknown, if ever I’ve seen it.”
Dr. Dave gave him a funny look. “Really. That’s your expert opinion?”
“Oh, yeah,” Win said with a firm nod. “I see people killed by unknown all the time. It leaves clear signs. By the way, he’s sure enough dead.”
“Okay,” Dr. Dave said with a shake of his head. “I’ll just let the paramedics take this guy away, then.”
Win and Dr. Dave both stood back to allow the paramedics to strap the body to the gurney. Then Win waved at Jake again. “Well, I’ve got to go check on the alpacas. It’s mating season, you know. I’ll see you later, Jake. Dr. Dave.” He nodded to the doctor as he followed the paramedics off. As far as Jake was concerned, the moment the paramedics took the body away, the coffee bar officially became a crime scene. There hadn’t been a murder in Tranquility ever. So Jake was a little out of his depth.
But this was his jurisdiction. And he wasn’t about to turn his town over to some detective from the state police. Out in the hall, members of the UFO convention were starting to wander up to the second floor to see what all the fuss was about. There was even a TV camera crew out there. Out of spite, Jake wanted to kick them off the floor. After all, they were wandering closer than fifteen feet to the site of his wedding. But he had a more practical reason for getting them out. Every single one of them could potentially contaminate the crime scene.
“Excuse us! Coming through! Hotel Security!”
Jake watched from across the second floor as Billy Kirkpatrick shouted over the assembled crowd while he bullied his way up the grand staircase. A second security guard—the one who had blocked Jake from walking in the front door earlier—followed quietly in Billy’s wake.
“What’s going on here?” Billy bellowed when he reached the gift shop.
Jake smiled at him as if he was actually glad to see him.
“Billy! Just the person I wanted to see.”
Billy looked at Jake with the same kind of wary expression a bunny might use before it walked into a clearing with a hawk circling overhead. “You been looking for me, Jake?”
“Absolutely!” Jake put a companionable arm around him. “I’ve got a murder investigation on my hands. You and your friend...”
“Emmet,” Billy prompted.
“You and Emmet are going to be the keys to helping me solve it.”
“You can count on us, Jake!” Billy seemed to puff himself up. Emmet copied the action.
“Good!” Jake pointed at the hallway. “I can’t work with folks running willy-nilly though here. I need you to get everyone off this floor until I release the crime scene.”
“You bet your drawers, Jake!” Billy and Emmet nodded at each other. Then they turned and began to wave their arms like turkeys trying to get airborne. “Okay, everyone! Back to the lobby! You’re dealing with the law now!”
Jake smiled in amusement. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Rachel turn to head off. Before she could get away, he grabbed her arm.
“Rae,” he said. “I’m going to need your help.”
“Are you nuts?” She glared at him. “I’m a vet! What can I do?”
Jake raised his eyebrows, then looked at the chair where Mr. Prunella had died. “This isn’t the first time you’ve helped out, sweetheart.”
She gave him an exasperated huff. “Sure, with parades and such!”
“Just think of this as crowd control.” Jake said while eyeing the rubberneckers who were gathered at the foot of the staircase where Billy and Emmet had herded them.
“What do you need?” she asked grudgingly.
“Run down to the patrol car and get the barrier tape and my recorder. Then tape off the elevator, stairs and the fire exit. Nobody gets in or out. Dr. Dave.” Jake turned to Dr. Dave and held up the coffee cup. “I’m going to send this to the state crime lab for testing, but that could take months. If you take a sample of the gunk inside, could you determine what’s in this cup?”
“I might if I can take it back to the office and run it through a couple of diagnostic tests.”
Jake nodded. “Could you make an educated guess?”
Dr. Dave paused and studied Jake’s face thoughtfully. “I don’t want to send you barking up the wrong tree.”
“At this point, I don’t have a tree to bark up.” Jake scratched his head. “I have a dead hotel manager, a coffee cup coated in a weird, sticky substance and a haunted hotel full of the biggest assembly of nuts and whack-jobs this side of Halloween.”
“In that case I think I can say pretty confidently what it is.”
“Seriously?” Jake leaned forward.
“I’ve seen enough of this stuff in my life to know.” Dr. Dave nodded. “It’s tar.”
“Tar? Like what you put on a roof?”
“More like what you inhale when you smoke,” Dr. Dave said.
“What makes you so sure?”
“I’m a doctor. By the time you get to this point in my profession, you’ve seen more than one set of lungs coated in this stuff.”
“Tar,” Jake said thoughtfully. “How did it get in Mr. Prunella’s coffee cup? Was he a smoker? Did he drop a cigarette in his drink?”
“Not likely.” Dr. Dave scoffed.
“Why do you say that?”
“There’s not enough tar and nicotine in a cigarette to kill someone if they just drop it in there. Just enough to make them really, really sick. There is enough tar and nicotine in a cigar that, if it was synthesized, it would kill two grown men. But in the kind of concentration you need, it would have had to have been synthesized over several days.”
“How do you do that?” Jake asked.
Dr. Dave scratched the back of his neck absently. “Take a few tobacco leaves. Then let them steep like tea for two days. After that you boil away the water. What’s left is a concentrated, fast acting poison.”
“How does it work?”
“It’s a contact poison,” Dr. Dave said. “The nicotine is a powerful alkaloid. It behaves similar to sodium in that it causes hypertension until the victim actually dies from paralysis of the repertory muscles, or atrial fibrillation.”
“In English, Doc?” Jake asked.
“It stops your ability to breathe and stops your heart from beating. A little of it on the skin would be all it would take. If the intended victim actually swallows it, it would absolutely work.”
Jake looked at the coffee cup thoughtfully. “If Mr. Prunella died of a heart attack and we never saw that he’d been drinking poison, then we might not think twice about it. Just assume that he died of natural causes.”
“But if someone poisoned him,” Dr. Dave reasoned out, “then hid the cup in the potted palm to make it look natural, then finding that cup is a very lucky thing.”
Jake watched as Rachel returned from the car with his tackle box full of investigative gear in one hand and a roll of police tape in the other.
“The TV crew is demanding to speak with you,” Rachel said.
“They’re being led by some guy named Michael Moder.”
“What do they want?” Jake asked.
“They want to film whatever happened up here for their show.”
“No.”
“I tried to tell them that, but they won’t listen.” Rachel smiled wryly. “They want to talk to you.”
“Do this: Ask them what their show is about. When they say it’s about ghosts, tell them that there are no ghosts up here.”
Rachel held her hands up in a Gallic shrug. “Whatever you say.”
She turned and headed back toward the staircase. Jake pinched the bridge of his nose. “I need to start by interviewing anyone who was up on this floor and work back from that,”
he said.
“Anything I can do to help?” Dr. Dave asked.
“Nah,” Jake said. “I’m going to deputize Rachel. I’ve done it before for special occasions. She’s mad as a wet hen, but if I put her to work doing something, then she can’t focus on how far behind this investigation is going to push the wedding planning.”
“In that case, I’m going to take a swab from that cup and head back to the clinic,” Dr. Dave said. “I’ll call you when I’ve confirmed that its tobacco tar.”
“Do me a favor, Dr. Dave?”
“Yes?”
“Take another one of those swabs over to the drug store and have Jimbo take a look at it. He could probably identify the poison as sure as you could.”
Dr. Dave nodded slowly. “Good thinking. I’ll do that.” He paused and shot Jake a funny look. “Jake?”
“What?”
“He’s not going to try to make me eat snake again, is he?”
“He wouldn’t keep asking if you didn’t keep turning him down.”
Dr. Dave scoffed.
“Seriously. Half the fun of offering is watching your face twist up like you got your drawers in a bunch.” Jake grinned. “Now git. Call me when you know something for sure.”
The doctor chewed his lip thoughtfully as he headed for the stairs.
Jake watched as Rae taped off the area then returned to the gift shop.
“This is a crime scene. So I’d better start by officially deputizing you, Rae.”
Rachel’s eyes widened. “You’re kidding, right?”
“‘Fraid not, darlin’,” Jake said. “I think Mr. Prunella was poisoned. So I need to do a thorough job with the crime scene. I can’t trust Mutt and Jeff ”— he pointed to the hotel security guards down in the lobby—“the way I can trust you.”
“You need to turn this over to the state police, is what you need to do,” Rachel said angrily.
“Rae, Mr. Prunella is dead. Doesn’t that bother you?”
“Of course it bothers me. I’m not cold hearted.” She shut her eyes in an attempt to calm herself. “But Jake, you’re the only cop in town. And you mainly write traffic tickets and make sure folks behave themselves at the ball games.”
“Tranquility hasn’t had a murder case before.”
“Bloody Sunday.”
“That was over a hundred years ago, it was a riot and no one died. Rae.” Jake crossed his arms. “I’m not turning this over to some state investigator. Not someone who doesn’t know the town and doesn’t know the people. I’m not going to let some stranger come in here and mess this up.”
She frowned. “I feel the same way about this as you do.”
“Do you?” He tilted his head sideways.
“You saying I don’t?” Rachel let her posture mirror his. “All I’m saying is, look at this objectively, Jake. We’re getting married Saturday. That’s only three days away. And you can’t even walk into the ballroom without doing some kind of crazy right-angled thing because of the UFO convention downstairs.”
“Actually, technically I can’t walk into it at all right now because the floor is held up by a crime scene.”
“Great!” Rachel threw her hands in the air. “And you want to put everything on hold because—hot dawg! You got you a gen-u-ine murder on your hands. And I can’t even have my wedding in that ballroom because the guests won’t be able to walk down this hall without thinking, ‘That’s where Mr. Prunella died.’ You think I want that, Jake? You think I want to be known as the woman who had the dead-guy wedding? You think I want to be the dead-guy bride?”
Jake waited patiently for Rachel to run out of steam. When she finally calmed down, he pinned her with a reasonable expression.
“Feel better?”
“Shut up.”
He sighed in weariness. “Rae, there has to be some kind of outclause in our contract for everything that has happened. I bet that if you talk to Sarah, you can renegotiate our contract. Maybe get the wedding moved somewhere else.”
She gave him a tiny smile. “That would be nice,” she whispered.
“You think they’ll knock a thousand off our hotel rental, too?”
“Hope so,” Jake said. He still had to pay for Lord Valentine’s retinue.
“Okay,” Rachel said in a much calmer voice. Her posture relaxed, and she gave an affirming nod. “What do you need me to do?”
“Take some of the masking tape and make an outline on that chair where we found Mr. Prunella.”
“Don’t they do that in chalk?” Rachel asked.
“I don’t think it matters,” Jake said. “It’s just a reference for crime scene photos anyway. Once you do that, then take my recorder and start talking to the folks downstairs. If anyone saw Mr. Prunella after he brought us up here, I want you to take them into the ballroom and get a statement. While you do that I’m going to search for evidence. If I find something then I’ll mark it with the little tented numbers that are in the crime scene kit. Number one is that puddle next to the chair. Number two is going to be the potted plants where I found the cup. When I’m finished with that, I’d like you to take pictures while I question anyone you’ve pulled aside for me in the ballroom. Then I’ll bag and tag the rest of the evidence.”
Rachel nodded, and then turned to go to work on the scene. While she taped off the outline from memory Jake pulled a notebook out of his pocket and made a checklist of crime scene procedures. He’d been keeping a note pad with him to help keep up with Rachel’s honey-do list. Now he crossed out the latest things on the list and underneath the x-ed out find alternative to tights, and why did Iagree to do this again? , he started a new heading. The death of Mr. Prunella.
He thought about it for a moment as his eyes swept the floor. Inexorably they were drawn to the corner above the elevator. A black security camera hung there. The dangling wires told Jake that it had been unplugged at some point.
Find out from Sarah when the security camera was unplugged and if thereis a tape.
Then he continued scanning the floor. From what he remembered of his classes, solving a murder was just like any other kind of crime. Establish who had a motive, the means of committing the crime, and an opportunity to carry it out.
He chewed on the end of his pen as he thought this through. His criminal deductive work thus far had been limited to a few stolen hubcaps during a ballgame last year. Beyond that, there was the whole big bird thing So: motive, means and opportunity.
He took the pen out of his mouth and wrote down on the paper, Motive. Then, thinking about it again, he underlined it. Below that heading, he wrote Why Mr. Prunella?
That about summed it up. Still, he needed to be more specific. Subclassify the whys.
Why number one Why end a life? Anger? Crime of passion? The poison in the coffee cup suggested that this couldn’t be the case. If Dr. Dave was right and the poison was tobacco, then it would have taken days to synthesize. Jake shivered at the thought of someone taking days and days to make the poison, their thoughts dark and murderous the whole while.
Jake wrote the word premeditated on the pad and circled it. Why premeditated murder? He wrote next. To remove a person from this world. Their existence is inconvenient? Their actions counter to the wants desires or beliefs of the murderer? What did Mr.Prunella know? What did he do? What were his beliefs? What were his ac-tions?
Jake figured that was enough to start with. He moved on to a second heading. Means. He also underlined this one. Note the coffee cup: Tobacco poisoning? How? Who would have knowledgeof this type of poison? In coffee pot? In cup? Given directly to Mr. Prunella?
Was Mr. Prunella handed the poisoned coffee by his murderer? Or wasthere a third party involved? Was he the intended target?
That was something new to think about. If Mr. Prunella was poisoned, it could be that someone else was the target. Jake went back up to the Motive header, and wrote in Collateral victim?
By now, Rachel had finished taping off the chair and returned to give Jake a questioning stare.
“Rae,” Jake said. “Before you question anyone, I need you to find Sarah and have her check all the coffee pots. Make sure that there isn’t any more of that tar stuff in them. If you find some, cordon off the area twenty feet around the pot, and then come get me.”
Rachel nodded in wordless understanding. She turned and took off for the stairs.
Now that it was just him, Jake turned back to his notebook. He looked over his list and realized that a lot of his motive questions were actually opportunity questions. He went back up to his Motive heading and rewrote it as Motive/Opportunity. Then he considered the questions again.
Did Mr. Prunella know his murderer? In all likelihood, this was the case. Jake wasn’t sure what the statistic was, but he seemed to recall that over two-thirds of murder victims knew their murders. Given that this looked premeditated, that meant that the killer had time to plan out in detail what they wanted to do. They had time to consider their victim and to stew over their reasons for taking his life.
Who did Mr. Prunella know? Jake was back to this again. Friends?
Family? Coworkers?
He was pretty sure that he’d have a better idea once he’d looked over Mr. Prunella’s personal affects.
Get access to his office, his car, his home. Jake was going to have to talk to people in the same way he was going to have to work this crime scene—starting with the ones closest to Mr. Prunella and working his way out. Beginning with people who were physically near him at the time of death, and then the people who were near him in his life. And until Jake could eliminate them, everyone who was in the hotel today was a suspect. Well, everyone except himself, Rachel and the seven Renaissance wedding planners. Though if he could pin it on Lord Valentine, he would save himself a bundle of cash.