Stay Tuned for Murder by Kennedy Mary

Author:Kennedy, Mary
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: PENGUIN group
Published: 2010-11-08T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 18

I tossed and turned for at least an hour, my brain whirring with possibilities. My thoughts were muddled; everything was unresolved. I felt “stuck,” as the shrinks would say, my mind running in an endless loop, like a gerbil on a treadmill.

I finally switched on the light, grabbed a legal pad and a ballpoint pen, and decided to go over everything in detail. Writing always helps me focus my thoughts, separating what I know as cold, hard fact from my hunches or intuitions. Pugsley gave an annoyed little yip when the light hit his face, but I patted him and he went right back to his doggie dreams.

What I knew for certain was very little. Two elderly women had been murdered within the same week, both longtime residents of Cypress Grove. What did they have in common? Althea was murdered where she lived and worked; Mildred was murdered where she worked. In both cases, the murder weapon was left at the scene.

After that, everything gets murky, and I found myself drifting into the realm of pure conjecture. Was it significant that the weapons were left with the victims? Possibly. It might have meant that both murders were crimes of opportunity and not planned. If they were impulsive acts, did that mean that anger or revenge was the motive? Or was it a home invasion gone wrong? That might have been a possibility in Althea’s case, but I couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to steal anything from the Cypress Grove Library, where Mildred was murdered.

Both the library and the historical society were registered as historic buildings in Cypress Grove, but I didn’t see how that was relevant.

On to another question. How were the victims related? Two points of similarity jumped out at me. The victims knew each other, and they both knew a lot about Cypress Grove. Interesting, but what did it mean? What could I do with that information? Did that suggest that one killer had committed both crimes? Did the physical evidence collected by the CSIs point to one killer or two? I wrote the names “Althea” and “Mildred” and drew lines between them, noting all the connections.

When I worked as a forensic psychologist for the DA’s office back in New York, my boss always told me that a single fact didn’t mean much. You had to see the big picture and figure out where that fact fits in. He always taught me to think of a case as a jigsaw puzzle and to look at a fact as a puzzle piece. Maybe the piece fit right in the center of the puzzle, or maybe it was a bit of the background, something at the edges of the puzzle. You never knew how important a single piece might be, until you had the whole puzzle assembled.

A nice analogy, but I knew I didn’t have all the pieces for this one. From the looks of things, neither did the Cypress Grove PD. Radio silence from Rafe, and even Nick couldn’t get them to cough up any new leads.

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