The Countertenor Wore Garlic (The Liturgical Mysteries) Page 15

  "You know," said Elaine, trying to come up with a definition. "The white tunic thingy that we wear over the choir robes. It has sleeves... It's sort of flowy..."

  "Oh, yeah," said Dave, with a nod of recognition. "Surplice. Got it."

  "Anyway, I was picking up the surplices in the corner. There was some trash and this."

  She put her brown package on the counter. It wasn't really a package. It was a brown leatherette fanny-pack.

  "I opened it up to see whose it was," said Elaine. "I hope I didn't do anything wrong, but I really didn't even think about it. I read the driver's license and called Dave right away. I've been waiting at the church for you to come in and when I saw your truck pull up, I rushed right over."

  We didn't need to see the driver's license. We all knew who it belonged to.

  Flori Cabbage.

  ***

  I dumped the fanny-pack onto the desk, picked up the cell phone and handed it to Nancy. She flipped it open and punched a couple of buttons.

  "It's dead," she said.

  "Well, charge it up," I said.

  "Not that easy," said Nancy. "Cell phone manufacturers all use different chargers. This is an LG. I don't even know anyone that has an LG. We might have to order one."

  "Or," I said, speaking very slowly, "Dave could go over to her apartment and... get... hers."

  "Oh, yeah," said Nancy. "I guess that'd be easier."

  "On my way," said Dave, picking up a second bear-claw before hitting the door.

  There was nothing else of interest in the pack. A granola bar, her set of keys, her driver's license in a black slipcase, a package of tissues, a comb, some Burt's Bees lip balm, a small embroidered coin purse with some bills stuck in it. Elaine helped herself to a bear-claw. I thanked her and she left the station, looked both ways, then crossed the street and headed across the park toward St. Barnabas.

  "So where's Rob Brannon?" said Nancy.

  "I don't know, but I don't like this. Not one little bit. Why would he have killed Flori Cabbage? So what if she knew him from Charlotte?"

  "Maybe she had something on him," Nancy said. "He's only been in prison for four years. There are a lot of crimes he'd still be liable for. In fact, most all of them. The statute of limitations is seven years."

  "If she did, I think she'd have given him up long ago. No reason to wait."

  "Let's say that he had some stolen money in a bank account—a lot of money. Money that Flori Cabbage knew about. If they had been involved, she might have thought that they'd get back together when he got out of prison and split the take. Then she saw Rob Brannon in Boone, realized he'd gotten out and hadn't called her, and told Ian about it."

  "That's a plausible scenario," I said.

  "When Brannon got out, he decided that he didn't want to split that money with Flori Cabbage, but he also knew that if he didn't share the loot, she'd turn him in. He killed her and put the pumpkin on her head in case she was discovered prematurely, thus giving him time to ransack her apartment and steal the laptop, figuring that any info that Flori had concerning him would be on it."

  "Brilliant," I said. "One thing. What was Flori's fanny-pack doing in the choir dressing room at St. Barnabas?"

  "Umm..." said Nancy, thinking. "I've no idea."

  "And where are Bud and Elphina?"

  "Huh," said Nancy.

  "And why was Dr. Ian Burch, PhD, really wearing garlic?"

  Nancy looked at me, confusion clouding her face.

  "I was just kidding about that last one," I said. "The phone?"

  Nancy nodded. "The phone."

  ***

  Dave came back into the police station about an hour later. "Sorry," he said. "It took me this long to find the stupid thing. Her place was upside down. Know where I finally found it?"

  "I couldn't care less, Dave," said Nancy, taking it from his hand. She plugged it into an outlet and stuck the round nib into the bottom of the phone. It beeped, the screen turned a bright fluorescent blue and a message came up. "Please enter your password."

  "Dammit!" said Nancy. "Hang on. I can do a carrier search and find out what company she uses. What's her phone number?"

  "I have no idea," I said. "Look on Ian's phone. It's on my desk."

  Nancy got the phone, returned to her computer and banged on the keyboard for a minute, then gave us the info.

  "U.S. Cellular," she said. "We'll need a warrant to get her password, though."

  "I'll call Judge Adams," I said.

  ***

  That afternoon, we had a warrant in hand and a promise from U.S. Cellular to get back to us as soon as possible, or if this is an emergency, please hold for the next available operator.

  Chapter 18

  Marilyn had finished the bulletin and I'd gone to the church to look it over before it was printed. Friday mornings were usually slow for the police force. Oh, who was I kidding? Every morning was sort of slow: that is, unless we had a murder, and we seemed to have plenty. Anyway, Friday mornings were my mornings to practice. I never did get in as much organ practice as I'd like, or maybe that was just the standard line for a part-time organist happy to play most of the notes.

  I walked from Marilyn's office into the church by way of the sacristy and saw Carol Sterling at the sink, busily preparing communion for Sunday. She looked up from her work and waved. Beside her, on the floor, were two large cardboard boxes of books. I bent over, picked one up, and blew some dust off the cover. Book of Common Prayer, 1928.

  "We're using these Sunday?" I asked.

  "Yep. Clarence is supposed to put them into the pews."

  Carol had the flatbread wafers out on the counter in a giant ziplock bag. The wafers were made by a group of women in the church that saw it as their ministry. No Styrofoam communion wafers for us. Carol had also brought in two bottles of the wine we used for communion from the storage closet in the kitchen. In the old church, the closet had a lock that could be picked by any competent first grader. We'd had that problem fixed when the church was rebuilt.

  Carol took the wine opener, one of those fancy new ones, inserted the needle straight through the cork, pressed once on the top of the low pressure propellant cartridge and, pop, the cork eased out of the bottle like a Baptist out the side door of a Bingo parlor.

  "Neat, eh? The only downside is that you have to rinse it off every time before you use it."

  "I definitely am going to get one of those," I said.

  "I'm going to need another bottle of wine. Will you get me one?" She dug in the pocket of her apron and came up with a key on a pink ribbon. "Here you go. Bring me back the key."

  "Sure. No problem."

  ***

  Mattie Lou Entriken, Wynette Winslow and Wendy Bolling were cleaning out the refrigerator, one of two industrial giants that seemed to hold as much food as a refrigerated truck. Elaine Hixon was standing warily behind them.

  "Here," said Mattie Lou, pulling her head out of the fridge. "You two do something with these, will you?" She greeted me with a plate of something that might once have been tuna salad. She handed the other one to Elaine.

  "Eew," said Elaine, holding her plate at arm's length. "Is that hair? Is this tuna salad growing hair? This is like an advertisement for 'The Hair Club for Men!'"

  "Well," said Wynette, "it has been in there for a few months. It was in the back, behind that Fourth of July sheet cake."

  "I'll just set mine here in the sink," I said. "Before it develops sentient thought. The garbage disposal should take care of this nicely."

  "Take mine, too," said Elaine walking her plate over to me. "Anyone who doesn't believe in evolution never saw this."

  "Here," said Mattie Lou, handing me two plastic covered bowls filled with macaroni and cheese. "Put these in the freezer, will you? Behind those boxes of coffee."

  I went over to the freezer, opened it up, and put them behind the two big boxes labeled 'Kopi Luwak Coffee.' There was a hand-lettered sign taped to one of the boxes: All Saints' Day. Given
in memory of our beloved Junior Jameson. Keep frozen until ready to use.

  "Hey," I said, closing the door of the freezer behind me as I came out. "Coffee from Kimmy Jo Jameson. That's a nice gesture."

  Junior Jameson was a race car driver who had ties to St. Barnabas. We'd blessed his race car right up into the NASCAR "Top Ten" before a tragic accident on the track cut his life short. His wife, Kimmy Jo, although now remarried, always made the pilgrimage to St. Barnabas at least once a year.

  "Yes, sir," said Mattie Lou. "Kimmy Jo's a sweetheart. The boxes were on the counter last week when we came in. We put them right into the freezer."

  "Hey, you know who helped us with it?" said Wynette. "It was that girl who got herself killed. Cabbage something. She'd come by looking for the fellow with the ears and the nose. You know, Ol' Snorty."

  I laughed. "Dr. Ian Burch, PhD."

  "If you say so," said Wynette. "Anyway, those boxes weren't light and you know with my back..."

  "Your back?" said Mattie Lou. "What about my back?"

  "I need to get a bottle of communion wine," I said.

  "Help yourself," said Elaine. "You have the key?"

  "Yep." I twirled the key on my finger. "Carol gave it to me."

  "No more chit-chat," said Wendy, sticking her head back into the refrigerator. "We gotta get busy. Wynette, hand me that paint scraper."

  ***

  I went up to the choir loft and played through Bach's D major fugue, my postlude for Sunday, and one of the staples of my now-dwindling repertoire. I'd learned the piece in college and it had been 'under my fingers,' as they say, for thirty years. I played through the subject, first in D, then in the relative minor, then the mediant minor. Playing a Bach fugue was like walking through a house admiring the architecture. You'd go into one room, stay for a moment or two, then wander into another room. By the time you were finished, you'd experienced the whole structure. Even if you didn't know exactly what was going on, the beauty was still there and you could appreciate it for what it was. Knowing how it was built made it that much more fun. Playing Bach also helped me think. I finished the piece, pulled out my cell phone and dialed Kent Murphee's office.

  "Morgue," said Kent when he answered. "You stab 'em, we slab 'em."

  "Hey, how about some professionalism? You should say 'Watauga County Coroner.'"

  "What do you want?" said Kent. "I'm extremely busy."

  "More dead bodies?"

  "This is Boone, not St. Germaine. If you must know, I've got a poker game going in the autopsy room and I'm looking at aces over tens."

  "You wish. Anyway, I know how Flori Cabbage was killed. Can I come down?"

  "I was just about to call you," said Kent. "Well, right after I've skinned these EMTs and sent them home without their alligator wallets."

  "Yeah? Why?"

  "I finally got the tox screen back from the lab. She had traces of tetrodotoxin in her blood. It didn't kill her, but there certainly is something funny going on."

  "How about this afternoon?" I said.

  "See you then."

  Chapter 19

  I walked into the coroner's office, brown bag in hand, just as Kent Murphee was bidding his poker buddies farewell. I knew two of them. EMTs. Their expressions told it all. Mike's face was long enough to wrap twice around his neck and Joe gave "hangdog expression" a whole new meaning. I had no idea who the fourth guy was, but he seemed to have fared no better.

  Kent had his pipe clenched between his teeth and was smiling broadly. "C'mon in," he chirped. "These boys were just leaving."

  They grumbled past me on the way to the front door and once outside, with the door shut firmly behind them, huddled together and started gesturing at each other in an accusatory fashion. I turned and followed Kent into his office carrying my package with me.

  "Just look at this," I said, starting to open the bag.

  "Hang on," said Kent. "Business before pleasure. Or is it the other way around? No matter... it's four o'clock and I'm up seven hundred dollars. Cocktail time."

  "I think we're going to have an intervention for you, Kent," I said. "All your friends."

  "Friends? I have no friends."

  I laughed. "Nothing for me, thanks, but don't let my temperance stop you."

  "I can assure you that it won't," said Kent, pulling open his bottom desk drawer and coming up with a bottle of bourbon. He spit in a tumbler sitting on his desk, mopped it out with his handkerchief, and poured himself two fingers of Maker's Mark.

  "I thought you were onto port," I said.

  "That's my breakfast drink," said Kent. "Have you no couth?" He nodded toward my package. "Now, let me see what you have there."

  I opened the bag and pulled out the gas-powered wine opener that I'd picked up in the sacristy of St. Barnabas.

  "Ah, I've seen those," said Kent. "I almost bought one. You think someone plunged that needle into the victim's neck, eh?"

  "I do," I said. "Then gave her a double shot of carbon dioxide. One in each of the holes."

  "You pull any prints?"

  I shook my head. "Nope. The church ladies wash it every time before they use it. Standard procedure."

  "Well, that'd kill her, sure enough," said Kent, leaning back in his leather office chair and dropping both his feet onto the desk. He took a long puff and the scent of apple and tobacco filled the office. A good smell. It made me think that I might switch from cigars to pipes. "Say, if that is the murder weapon, may I keep it? I mean, you won't want to be using it back at the church..."

  "Fine with me," I said. "Providing we don't need it as evidence."

  "Well, if you're right, I'd never find any trace of the gas embolism it probably produced. It might have travelled to her heart and caused the infarction, or it might have travelled to her brain before causing the infarction. Either way, the CO2 would have dissipated long before I got around to discovering the cause." He took a sip of his drink. "Very clever," he conceded. "So you want to check and see if the needle holes fit the murder weapon."

  "Yep," I said. "What do you think?"

  He lifted his feet off the desk, put his lit pipe in his pocket and picked up his drink. "C'mon."

  I followed him into his morgue and waited for him to open the vault containing Flori Cabbage's body. He tugged the tray out of the vault with some effort, since he was performing the task one-handed, then slid the sheet down to her breastbone. "Here," he said, passing me his drink and taking the wine opener from my hand. "Switch."

  He walked across the room, retrieved a large illuminated magnifying glass on a wheeled stand, and rolled it over to the body. Then he switched on the light and held the needle close to the holes in Flori Cabbage's neck, comparing the diameter.

  "We'll never be able to say for sure," he finally said, "because there are no trace substances around the wounds, and, of course, now her skin has shrunk a good bit and she's lost a fair amount of fluid. If you'll look closely, you can see that these holes in her neck are noticeably smaller than they were when she came in. Trying to match the holes with the needles just isn't going to work. How'd you come up with this theory, anyway?"

  "We found Flori's fanny-pack in the choir dressing room in the sacristy. This was sitting just outside on the counter."

  "If it's any consolation," said Kent, "I don't doubt you have the murder weapon here. I just don't think you can prove it."

  "Yeah," I said dejectedly. "Thought I had something."

  "But here's some other news," said Kent brightly. "I have the tox screen report. Back to the office, Sherlock." He set the wine opener on the counter. "And gimme my drink back."

  ***

  "See, here," he said, pushing the report across the desk to me. "Like I told you on the phone. Flori Cabbage's blood had traces of tetrodotoxin, also known as tetrodox, also known as 'zombie powder.' It's a potent neurotoxin with no known antidote."

  "Zombie powder? You're kidding me?"

  "Nope. The poison is found in many widely differing animal sp
ecies, including pufferfish, newts, toads, the blue-ringed octopus, trigger-fish... well, you get the idea." Kent pulled his pipe out and puffed it back to life.

  "Yeah, I do. Fugu. Deadly pufferfish sushi. But we don't have a sushi place in St. Germaine."

  "There was no sushi in her stomach," said Kent. "It wasn't pufferfish."

  "Did she have enough in her body to kill her?"

  "I don't think so, but we'll never know for sure. She would have been pretty sick at the very least, and probably paralyzed from the toxin, but sometimes people don't succumb. They have sort of a natural immunity. She wasn't alive long enough to find out."

  "Huh?"

  "She'd been dosed with the poison, but that wasn't what killed her. She'd probably been only recently exposed. Sometimes this stuff can take up to four hours, but most people feel the effects within thirty minutes. It may be that she hadn't even felt any effects from it before she died. She died of a heat attack."

  "Would this zombie powder cause her to be immobile? You know... paralytic?"

  "It most certainly could have."

  "So, if she was immobile, someone could have easily stuck the corkscrew in her neck and finished her off."

  "Yep, but it's a stretch if you're thinking about premeditation. No one would be able to calculate when that drug might take effect, or how efficacious the dosage was." Kent looked up at the ceiling and studied the pattern his pipe smoke was making. "Well," he said, "maybe a Voodoo priest in a zombie movie could have figured it out, but it would have been much easier just to give her ten cc's of the stuff and kill her quickly."

  "Hmm. Yeah, you're right. How do you think she got dosed?"

  "I have no idea," said Kent. "Maybe ingestion, maybe injection. You can smoke it. You can even get it from skin contact, although it's not as potent. It's a nasty compound, a hundred times more powerful than potassium cyanide. I looked it up and the stuff is quite interesting from a medical perspective. For example, did you know that the poison isn't produced by the animals themselves, but by certain symbiotic bacteria that live inside them? Here's another thing. When it's not refrigerated, the poison loses its potency within a few hours. TTX has proven useful in the treatment of pain and was originally used in Japan in the 1930s for such diverse problems as terminal cancer, migraines, and heroin withdrawal."