A Wee Christmas Homicide (8 page)

T
he words of a lecture on crime scenes came back to Sherri as she stepped cautiously through the open front door of The Toy Box. “Think like a criminal,” the instructor had said. “Witnesses are not the most important factor. They’re unreliable. The
scene,
however,
does not change.”

It did if it had been messed with.

A strange man knelt next to Gavin Thorne’s body.

“You! Stand up and turn around. Slowly.” Sherri didn’t see a weapon, but she drew her own. Better safe than sorry.

The man blinked at her in confusion. Hands in the air, he tried for an innocuous smile and missed. He wore a dark gray wool coat that shouted expensive but the faint greenish tinge of his complexion was common as dirt. “I’m sorry. I think I’m going to—”

“Outside. Now!” She barely had time to get out of his way before he rushed past her to deposit his breakfast in the bushes beside the porch. She followed him, giving him a moment to recover before she spoke again. “You done?”

He nodded, eyes closed.

“Name?”

“Mark Patton. Innocent bystander. I swear.”

“Then why did you go inside?”

“Something upset that woman.”

“Try again.”

“I was looking for a Tiny Teddy, okay?”

“Okay. Stay put. You’ll have to give a statement.” She wasn’t sure she trusted him to follow orders, but she had his name and made a mental note of the license number on his car before she went back inside. If he took off, she could find him.

The basics of murder investigation had been drilled into Sherri at the police academy. There were only three departments in the entire state that handled them—the cities of Portland and Bangor and the State Police. The local P.D., however, had its role to play. Sherri was the one responsible for making initial observations. She might be asked to assist the state police further, if she had special knowledge of the case to offer. What she did in the next couple of minutes could be crucial, not only to solving Thorne’s murder but also to her career in law enforcement.

Secure the scene? No. Not until she’d made sure Thorne was really dead. Although she wasn’t in much doubt, she wasn’t supposed to take a civilian’s word for it. A few steps inside the shop she stopped to brace herself for the sight and smell of violent death.

It wasn’t as bad as she’d feared. There was blood, but not buckets of it. Thorne lay sprawled on the floor on his back. His Harry Potter glasses had landed a short distance away. One lens was cracked.

Her gaze shifted back to the body. Gavin Thorne had been shot in the chest. Good aim, Sherri thought. She wasn’t a doctor, but it looked to her as if the bullet had struck the heart, just as Margaret had said.

And just like the last victim she’d eyeballed in The Toy Box.

After one long stare to verify that there was nothing anyone could do to revive Thorne, Sherri turned her attention to her surroundings. She wasn’t the one who’d examine blood-spatter patterns or ballistic evidence or determine cause of death. The experts in those areas would arrive soon enough.

Quiet engulfed her, the silence of a building empty of life. No one, she was certain, was hiding on the premises. Whoever had killed Thorne was long gone.

It was warm in the shop. No doors left open, then. Not for long, anyway. Thorne might even have been killed the previous evening, since he was fully dressed and did not seem to have turned the thermostat down. It had been considerably chillier in The Toy Box the night she’d come to investigate the broken window and mutilated bear. On the other hand, he might have gotten up early and been preparing for the day when someone shot him.

Surveying the shop from her central vantage point, she tried to determine if anything had been vandalized or stolen. Thorne’s arm had struck a small table as he fell, knocking it over and spilling a display of American Girl products onto the floor. Other than that, nothing seemed to be out of place or disturbed.

Giving the dead man a wide berth, she approached the high sales counter and climbed the steps at the back to check if Thorne’s computer and cash register were still there. Both looked intact and untouched. Using only her fingertips, she opened the drawer where she’d seen him stash his gun. There was no sign of it now. That wasn’t good, but she knew better than to mess with the crime scene by continuing to search for it.

The distant wail of a siren warned Sherri that she didn’t have much time left for observation. From her lofty vantage point, she gazed down at the shop. The boarded-up front window cut out most of the natural light, but the overhead fixture showed her much the same arrangement she remembered from her previous visit with Liss and Marcia. If anything had been taken, the thief had been neat about it.

Had the light been on when Thorne was shot? She hadn’t flicked the switch beside the door, but Margaret might have. Or Mark Patton. Sherri frowned, staring at Patton through the still-open door. There was something familiar about him. It came to her a moment later. He was the disappointed customer who’d been swearing so creatively because Thorne’s prices were too high. When had that been? Sunday, she thought. The day the news crew came to town. She couldn’t help but wonder what would bring Patton back to Moosetookalook three days later.

She was about to go out and ask him when she realized something
was
different about The Toy Box. She didn’t see a Tiny Teddy anywhere. Sherri hadn’t expected clowns or ballerinas—they’d sold out—but Thorne had supposedly acquired a new supply. Could they all have been bought up so quickly? More likely, having learned his lesson, Thorne had put them elsewhere for safekeeping overnight. She moved cautiously toward the back of the shop, intending to take a peek into Thorne’s storage closet.

“Officer Willett?” Jeff Thibodeau’s shout came from just outside the front door.

“In a minute!” she hollered back.

“Get out of there,” he ordered. “Now.”

Jeff knew the ropes, particularly what
not
to do. He had no intention of entering the crime scene himself.

“I’m just making sure the killer isn’t still on the premises,” Sherri called, using the first reasonable excuse she could come up with. “I want to check the apartment upstairs.”

“You need backup?”

“I’m okay. Just being thorough.”

“Don’t mess anything up. Go up from the inside of the building but exit by way of the outside stairs.”

“I knew that,” Sherri muttered, but she didn’t sass her boss.

Jeff had been in law enforcement for a long time. He’d been the policeman who’d visited the local elementary school as Officer Friendly when Sherri was a kid. Even then he’d had a Santa Claus build and a distinct shortage of hair. Granted, his promotion to chief had been more reward for long service than vote of confidence in his ability to run the department—the selectmen had been looking for someone whose salary wouldn’t break the budget—but Jeff was no dummy. He’d heard too many cautionary tales of murder scenes contaminated by local cops who didn’t know what they were doing to let any of his officers be careless.

Sherri made her way around the perimeter of the shop, careful not to touch anything except the doorknob and the stairwell light switch. Someone else would have to examine the contents of the storage closet.

Like most of the old Victorian houses around the town square, The Toy Box had started life as a private home. Over time, a business had taken over the lower floor and the upstairs had been turned into living quarters.

Thorne’s apartment had a Spartan appearance, with few pieces of furniture and no curtains. Only shades covered the windows, pulled down so that the whole place was full of shadows. At a guess, although he’d won the contents of his old toy store in the divorce settlement, his ex wife had kept the household goods.

Sherri didn’t take time to inspect the boxes and cartons that filled the spare bedroom and half the space in the living room. Instead, she poked her head into the master bedroom. She couldn’t tell how recently the bed had been slept in. A spread had been haphazardly thrown on top of the blankets and pillows. It might have been left that way only hours earlier or be untouched since the morning before.

In the kitchen, the dish drainer next to the sink was full of clean, dry dishes. Did that mean he’d had supper last night and washed up before he was shot? Sherri had no idea. She wasn’t familiar with Thorne’s habits and didn’t know what was normal for him. Maybe he never put dishes away.

She glanced at the coffeepot—a French press. There was no indication he’d made himself a cup that morning. Then again, maybe he didn’t bother with breakfast. She couldn’t imagine starting a day without coffee herself, but she wasn’t Gavin Thorne.

With no excuse to linger—no perpetrator; no conveniently discarded gun with fingerprints; no Tiny Teddies—Sherri unlocked the apartment’s back door and made her way carefully down the slick, snow-covered outer stairs. Her boots sank down a good five inches, adequate proof that no one else had come this way since the storm. Relieved that she didn’t have to worry about messing up evidence on her descent, she hurried as fast as she could, anxious to report to her boss.

It took some time to circle the house. The wind during the night had swept much of the snow off the stairs only to deposit it in drifts three times as deep elsewhere. Sherri’s steps slowed even more when she saw that Jeff Thibodeau had been joined by Pete Campbell, her fiancé.

Pete worked as a patrol deputy for the Carrabassett County Sheriff’s Department. He was supposed to be off duty but she wasn’t surprised that he’d heard the call on the police-band scanner he left on 24–7. That he’d come running both pleased and annoyed her. She was a big girl now. She didn’t need a protector. She had her own gun and everything.

“You okay?” Pete slung one arm around Sherri’s shoulders and hauled her up against his side.

He had eight inches of height and a good seventy-five pounds on her, but she managed to squirm out of the embrace by elbowing him in the ribs. At a distance of a few feet, she glared at him. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

His dark brows lifted into a hairline of the same deep brown shade. “Defensive much?”

“Sorry. Long night.”

Pete let it go, but she knew she’d be hearing about her testiness again later. The engagement ring he’d given her the previous February weighed heavily on her finger. This murder had happened on her watch. She wanted in on solving it. The last thing she needed was her fiancé hovering like a mama bird watching a fledgling take its first flight.

Pete backed off when Gordon Tandy showed up. As the local state police detective, he was in charge of the case. That meant he decided who stayed in the loop and who got booted out. First off, he wanted to talk to the witnesses—Margaret, the “innocent bystander,” and Sherri.

While Jeff and Pete secured the scene, making sure no one except the medical examiner and the officers Gordon had called in from the state crime lab entered The Toy Box, Gordon questioned and dismissed Mark Patton. Then he turned to Sherri.

“Officer Willett.”

“Detective Tandy.” She met his steady stare with one of her own.

He had eyes of such a dark brown, except for a few lighter flecks, that they almost looked black. Now that he was in his early forties, the fact that he looked younger than he was no longer created problems for him. Liss found those “boyish good looks” sexy, but Gordon was a bit intense for Sherri’s liking.

“Want to fill me in?” he asked.

Standing a little over six feet tall, Gordon Tandy looked every inch a cop. It didn’t matter that his job allowed him to wear a suit instead of a uniform. He had the walk, the attitude—he even kept his thick, reddish brown hair trimmed military short.

“The first thing you should know,” Sherri said, “is that this is the second shooting this week at The Toy Box.”

“You don’t need to stick around, Dan,” Liss said when she heard the clock in the cozy corner of the Emporium strike nine. “Gordon said you could go.”

He caught her arm as she started for the stairs behind the sales counter. “And he told you to stay put in the shop while he questions your aunt.”

“It’s pretty horrible to find a body.” Liss knew that firsthand. “She’s upset. Having me with her might—”

“You can go up after Tandy’s done with her. Stay out of it, Liss.”

She rounded on him, slapping his hand away. “It isn’t as if I
want
to have anything to do with investigating Thorne’s murder.”

“Good. Let’s keep it that way. The less you know, the better.”

“I really hate high-handed men,” she muttered.

Part of her agreed with him, but another part was afraid she wasn’t going to be
able
to stay out of it. It had been her bright idea to force bear collectors to come to Moosetookalook and she had the feeling that, somehow, the shooting was tied to the Tiny Teddies.

“Did you see
anything
on your way home?” she asked him.

He rolled his eyes. “I give up. If I tell you what I told Tandy, will you give it a rest?”

“If I can.”

“Come and sit down, then. You’re as nervous as that kitten.”

“Poor little thing.” Liss let Dan lead her to the cozy corner and settle her into one of the comfortable chairs. Sherri had been halfway out the door after Margaret’s announcement before she’d remembered she was still holding the black kitten. She’d all but thrown it at Liss, who had promptly passed the cat off to Dan so she could look after her aunt. “Sorry about the scratches.”

“At least it doesn’t bite ankles.”

“Maybe Lumpkin will teach it that trick, if he ever stops hissing long enough.” Rather than talk about murder, she found herself filling Dan in on Lumpkin’s opinion of his new housemate. “I had to bring the kitten to work with me. I was afraid to leave it at the house.”

“Sounds like you plan on keeping it.”

“Oh, no. I mean…well…I don’t know what I mean.” She ran one hand over her face. “I’m babbling. I hate it when I babble, but I just can’t seem to take this in.”

“Do you really want to know what I told Tandy?”