Scraps of Evidence: Quilts of Love Series Page 10

  “Jim, were you raised in the South?”

  “Yeah, why?”

  “Then you know we don’t eat in front of someone without offering him some of what we’re having.”

  She shot a look at Logan. “Even though he’s a Yankee, I bet Logan was raised the same way.”

  The man studied her for a moment, then grinned. “Okay. Ham and cheese and a root beer?”

  “Sounds good. We’ll meet you there soon as we pick up the food.”

  She signaled and a marked car pulled up. “Don’t worry, Officer Graham here is just giving you a ride into the station for questioning. He has to make sure you don’t have any weapons, okay?”

  Jim held up his hands and submitted to the check. “I carry a pocketknife.”

  “Lots of men in these parts do,” she said, nodding. “You grow up a boy in the South you have to have a pocketknife for fishing and hunting. Don’t know what boys in Chicago carry. Logan? Brass knuckles?”

  “Very funny,” Logan told her. He waited until Jim, then Graham got into the car and drove away, before he started around the store to their car. “What’s your impression?”

  “We have a problem with the homeless here just like other cities,” Tess told him as she got into the car. “But you know the homeless don’t commit violent crimes any more than the rest of the population. Let’s face it, when you’re trying to take care of basic needs you don’t have much time to plot out a crime.”

  They drove to a sub shop, picked up three foot-longs and drinks, and continued on to the station.

  The minute they walked into the station Maria came rushing toward them, tears streaming down her face. “Paco! You found him!”

  Logan watched Tess struggle to hold the dog and keep him from flying out of her arms. She gave Maria the dog and then stood back, blinking hard as she watched Maria cry over the dog.

  Could dogs cry? Logan wondered. It sure looked like Paco had tears in his eyes.

  He must need his own eyes examined, he told himself.

  Maria turned and thanked them before she hurried down the hallway. A moment later they heard high-pitched, frantic barking, and a familiar voice bellowing to restrain the dog and get it out of the station.

  “That’s Gordon,” Tess said and hurried down the hall.

  Logan followed her, carrying the subs and drinks. They found Maria holding Paco as Gordon backed away and went into one of the interrogation rooms and slammed the door.

  “I don’t know what got into Paco,” Maria said, trying to soothe the dog.

  “Shh, Paco,” Tess said and she reached into her pocket for the portion of the hot dog left from earlier. “I’m sure he’s just a little unsettled about everything being so different.”

  The dog quickly scarfed down the rest of the hot dog. Tess looked at Maria. “I hope he doesn’t get sick from this, but I got it for him earlier.”

  “He can barf all over the seat of my car for all I care.” Maria kissed the top of the dog’s head. “I’m going to go ask my boss if I can get off early and take him home.”

  Tess opened the door of the interrogation room since Logan’s hands were full with lunch. He put the food down on the table.

  “Hi, Gordon,” Logan said. “I didn’t realize that you were joining us. Have you had lunch?”

  “Yes, thanks. But I’m not joining you. I was just keeping Jim company until you two got here.”

  He stood. “See y’all around.”

  Logan sat and watched Jim watch Gordon leave the room. Jim’s forehead appeared beaded with sweat when it hadn’t been as he sat out behind the convenience store. His hands trembled as he popped the top of his root beer and took a deep swallow.

  “I swear, I’m always thirsty here,” Logan said as he popped the top of his own Coke. “All this sun dehydrates me.”

  Tess popped the top of her Diet Coke and pulled out her notepad. “Better to sweat than to freeze, right, Jim? You couldn’t pay me enough to live someplace like Logan’s beloved Chicago.”

  Logan handed Jim his sandwich. “But you just don’t have decent deep-dish pizza here. If you had that, I’d think this place was perfect.” He paused. “Go ahead and eat, Jim.”

  The man tucked the sandwich into his backpack. “I’ll save it for later, if you don’t mind.”

  “If you want,” Logan said. “But we’ll be happy to drop you off at St. Francis House or one of the other homeless shelters if you’d like.”

  “Look, let’s get down to brass tacks, shall we?” Jim said in a weary voice. “It’s all well and good to be nice to me, but you brought me here for a reason.”

  Logan and Tess exchanged a look. “We brought you here to ask how you came to have the dog,” Logan said.

  “I found him. I didn’t steal him. He was hanging around a block or so from the convenience store. When he saw me sit down with a sandwich, he came over and wanted to be friends. So I’ve had him ever since.”

  And no matter what they asked him, he stuck to that story. Logan showed him a photo of Toni and asked if he knew her. Jim said he didn’t. Tess hammered at him about why he was in that neighborhood, and Jim said he sometimes slept in a shed at the rear of a home empty because of foreclosure.

  Tess excused herself when she got a call she had to take, and Logan let Jim take a break. They both drank from their cans of soda but neither of them touched their sandwiches.

  When Tess returned, she gestured for him to step out into the hallway and he did so, closing the door behind him.

  “Time to cut him loose, don’t you think? I don’t believe this is our man.”

  He nodded. “Let’s do that, and we’ll talk.”

  Jim looked up when they walked back into the room.

  “Thanks for talking with us,” Logan said.

  He laughed, but the sound was rusty and humorless. “Like I had any choice.”

  “An officer’s going to take you wherever you like,” Logan told him.

  Tess held out an envelope. “This is a little something for taking care of the dog.”

  Jim stood and lifted his chin. “I told you I didn’t want your charity.”

  “It isn’t charity, and it isn’t from me,” she said quietly. “You kept the dog safe and it means a lot to the woman we reunited Paco with. You see, her sister was murdered and the dog ran away. Having the dog back makes the woman feel like she can still do something for her sister.”

  Jim went still. “I didn’t know.”

  Tess nodded. “We could tell. So take her gift in the spirit it’s intended, Jim. It would mean a lot to her.”

  He took the envelope and tucked it in his pocket. Then he looked at Logan. “I’d like that ride to the shelter after all.”

  Logan gestured for him to precede him out the door and introduced him to an officer, then returned to the interrogation room. “Let’s go eat our lunch someplace else. I’d like to be out of this room, if you don’t mind.”

  “I don’t mind at all,” she agreed.

  But before they could gather up their subs, Gordon stuck his head in the door. “Did one of you ask that the homeless guy get a ride?”

  “I did,” Logan said. “Problem?”

  “You brought him in for questioning in a murder case, and you’re mollycoddling him with a ride?”

  “I wouldn’t call a ride to a shelter ‘mollycoddling’, but, yes, I did ask an officer to give Jim a courtesy ride.”

  “I don’t see the point of giving the homeless treatment like that,” Gordon returned. “There’s a man who’s panhandling instead of working, and even if he didn’t murder someone, no telling what he’s been up to.”

  “I figure we should see someone we asked to come in for questioning taken wherever they want to go,” Logan told him. “We should care about their safety as well as anyone else’s.”

  “What’s one homeless person more or less?” He turned on his heel to stride away.

  Tess looked mortified. She walked over and shut the door, and then turned to Loga
n. “I’d have spoken up, but it does no good with him. Gordon’s like a lot of people. He thinks he has reasons for his opinion, and there’s no changing him.”

  “Didn’t you tell me he and your aunt go to your church?”

  “Oh, he’s one of the board members,” she said with a tight smile. “Since when did church attendance mean someone’s a good Christian?”

  “Amen,” he muttered. “Come on, let’s go eat these outside somewhere. I could use some fresh air.”

  12

  Tess watched Logan hand over their tickets outside the Huguenot Cemetery. The cemetery was the oldest in the area and that was saying a lot since St. Augustine was more than four hundred years old.

  She was used to showing people around who visited her from another state. Florida was pretty much known as the “drop-in” state. Residents got used to out-of-state family or friends wanting to visit and stay, maybe take in a visit to see Mickey Mouse over in Orlando.

  Logan seemed to embrace his new city with a passion, wanting to know more about its history.

  Dusk was falling and with it, temperatures were dropping. She’d brought a sweater just in case, although she didn’t think she’d need it. She’d also brought bug spray, and she knew without a doubt they’d need that.

  Logan slapped at his arm. “Geez, the mosquitoes are as big as pelicans.”

  She pulled the bug spray from her purse and handed it to him. “Imagine not having something like this back in the ‘good old days.’”

  When they got there, a small group had already assembled at the cemetery located near the old city gates. Tess thought it was interesting that the city’s welcome center had been located next to the cemetery; so many visitors made a point of visiting its historic cemeteries.

  “I don’t believe in ghosts,” she whispered.

  “Me neither. But this is supposed to be something a little different about the people who were the first residents of the city.”

  “And the tickets were being sold for a good cause,” she said tongue-in-cheek.

  The tour guide began telling them about how the cemetery opened so those who weren’t Catholic had a place for burial. An outbreak of yellow fever had struck St. Augustine, so another cemetery became necessary .

  A woman appeared in the long, flowing dress of the French Huguenots—the French Protestants—of the sixteenth century. She spoke of the horrors of entire families wiped out by the terrible disease as others watched helplessly.

  Survivor guilt. That’s what she’d heard it called. Tess glanced up at the lighthouse peeking through the trees. It was all well and good to say she didn’t believe in ghosts, but in a way, Sam’s death had haunted her. One afternoon when she’d been grieving, she’d gone for a walk on her campus. She’d found herself at the student center talking to a counselor. The woman had listened and told Tess she wasn’t just grieving for her friend—that she was experiencing survivor’s guilt.

  It made sense. Too much sense. She and Sam had switched dresses that night, and Tess had wondered if the killer meant to kill her instead of Sam.

  “If this is going to make you sad, we’ll go,” Logan said.

  She dragged her attention back to the present. “No, it’s fine. I was just thinking of something.”

  “Someone,” he corrected “Sam?”

  She nodded.

  A man in the formal dress of the 1880s introduced himself as Judge John B. Stickney. He sat on a tall gravestone, regarded them solemnly, and then began to talk. The tour members chuckled as he dispensed legal advice to a couple he chose from the group.

  They moved on to another cemetery a few short blocks away. “When we were kids, we called it the Tomato Cemetery,” Tess whispered to Logan. “We couldn’t pronounce Tolomato.”

  A man dressed as a Franciscan monk came out to talk about converting the Indians to Christianity, and how the cemetery was a final resting place for former slaves who fled bondage in the Carolinas. Ed, a fellow officer, stepped forward and talked of freedom and raising his family here—children who helped build the city.

  “I didn’t know he was going to be in this,” Tess whispered to Logan.

  “Me, neither,” he whispered.

  As Ed walked past them, he winked at them.

  Then a woman stepped forward and talked of walking seventy miles to ask for refuge from the British governor who ruled over St. Augustine. “I am from Minorca, an island in the Mediterranean,” she said proudly, her voice ringing out as the group stood, enthralled. “We came to this country as indentured servants, promising to work to pay our passage. But we were enslaved, worked like animals, until we fell in the fields south of here. Governor Tonyn granted us refuge, and some of us lie here now in these grounds.”

  “That concludes our tour,” the tour leader said. “I hope you enjoyed it.”

  The group applauded the volunteers and then dispersed, chatting about dinner and shopping.

  “So what do you think of our town?” Tess asked Logan.

  He reached for her hand and she let him take it.

  “I think I like it a lot,” he said. “Want to walk a little more? It’s such a beautiful night.”

  She nodded and they strolled down the street. A car pulled up beside them and Tess glanced over.

  “Playing tourist?” Pete Orman, one of their fellow officers, called through the open window.

  Logan grinned and waved. “She’s showing me around.”

  The radio squawked, and the officer’s attention was immediately riveted.

  “Break-in,” Tess murmured when she heard the code. “I know that address. Potter’s Wax Museum. Pete, we’ll go with you.”

  The lock clicked open on the car doors.

  Pete radioed in two off-duty officers were joining him, and then they were off, speeding down the narrow city streets to the museum.

  “I’ve been here so many times,” Tess told them. “We were always coming here for school field trips. I know the place like the back of my hand.”

  She turned to Logan. “Kids like to break in for a prank, steal something like a prop. Sometimes break off a finger and show it off at school.”

  They listened to the dispatcher report that the K-9 officer was on the trail of a hit-and-run driver. He’d be sent as soon as he became available.

  “I’ll go in and check it out,” Tess decided. “Could be a faulty alarm.”

  “You don’t have a radio,” Pete pointed out.

  She pulled out her cell phone and set it to vibrate. “You do the same,” she told Logan. “That way I can let you know if there’s any problem. Don’t come in or you could get your kneecaps shot at. Or worse,” she said with emphasis.

  “I’ve seen her on the firing range,” Pete said. “You want to listen to her about that.” He glanced at Tess. “You take the flashlight since you’re going inside.”

  Tess nodded and reached for her weapon tucked in her purse. She was out the door the moment Pete stopped the car in the parking lot.

  Sure enough, the back door bore marks of tampering. The three of them noted it, looked at each other and signaled Pete would walk around the building to the left, Logan to the right.

  Tess went in, holding her gun in a defensive stance.

  Most of the lights were out. The interior of the museum looked dim and eerie. Tess moved slowly, going by memory rather than turning on the flashlight in her left hand and alerting anyone who might still be inside.

  Quiet had its own sound. She heard a faint hum of traffic outside. But as much as she strained to hear the sound of breathing or a footfall or the creak of a floorboard there was nothing.

  Tess turned a corner and a line of figures she could recognize as presidents caught her attention. Their eyes followed her as she walked past, squinting to make sure a real man didn’t stand among them. President Clinton smiled toothily at her, almost making her smile back. Funny, President Lincoln seemed shorter than he had when she visited as a middle schooler. Well, she’d grown quite a bit since t
hen.

  Kings and queens held court, with Henry the Eighth seeming to leer as she passed. Marie Antoinette looked pale, beautiful, and haughty as ever in her sumptuous dress of silk, lace, and velvet.

  She felt a sneeze coming on. Marie hadn’t sent her dress out to for cleaning in at least a century or two. Tess tucked the flashlight under her left arm and ruthlessly squeezed her nose. She moved faster, her eyes sweeping from one side of the room to another.

  The figures of Hollywood film stars stood waiting for their fans but no human stood with them. Tess walked into the exhibit of film villains and felt chills creep over her skin. Her heart beat faster as she moved past Freddy and Dracula. She froze and her fingers tightened on her gun. Had the scythe held by the Grim Reaper moved?

  She shook her head. Imagination was getting the best of her. The cell phone vibrated, her signal to check in with Logan. She stepped into a room of European historical figures, backed into a corner, and pulled out the phone. Hiding the lighted dial with one hand, she hit speed dial for Logan, a silent signal faster than texting, then broke the connection since she couldn’t talk inside the building. She couldn’t be sure the burglar wasn’t still in the building.

  Then she saw the rose on the floor. She bent to pick it up, certain she’d find it was a silk one from the vase of flowers near Lucretia Borgia, the medieval poisoner. But the rose was a fresh one, felt dewy against her nose, and smelled divine.

  She looked up into the proud, arrogant face of Machiavelli. Something stirred in her memory, something someone had said. Frowning, she moved past him and on down the hall to the back door.

  Tess walked out just as Logan punched in the speed dial to call her again.

  Mixed emotions rose up in him. He wanted to shake her for making him worry; he wanted to kiss her and hold her and know that she was all right.

  He could do neither with the officer standing there beside him.

  She holstered her weapon and looked at Pete. “I can’t say for sure no one’s in there—it’s just too full of hiding places.”

  “K-9’s on the way,” he told her. “Thanks, Tess, Logan. Sorry you had your evening interrupted. Want a ride back to your car?”