“Mom says to let things cool off. That Gran will come to her senses soon enough.” She shook her head. “I’m not so sure. Gran seems to like this new arrangement, and so does Dad.”
“Looks like your dad and grandma have reached a stalemate.”
Chase was navigating his pickup through morning traffic and had reached the town limit.“So why did you want me to bring a clothespin, exactly?” Odelia asked.
“You’ll see. It’s not pretty.”
“Don’t tell me he got blown up. I just had breakfast.”
“He wasn’t blown up. In fact, as far as we can see, he drowned. Or I should probably say he suffocated.”
“He drowned in his pool?”
“He drowned in a pool,” said Chase mysteriously.
“A pool… of his own blood?”
“Duck poop.”
“Duck poop?”
“Duck poop.”
“Huh. And you’re telling me this wasn’t an accident?”
Chase looked grim.“Absolutely not. Dick Dickerson was murdered.”
It only took them about fifteen minutes to reach their destination. Dick Dickerson lived in one of those huge McMansions right outside of Hampton Cove, built almost on the coast, with access to a private strip of beach, a heliport, a heated pool on the patio, jacuzzi, too many rooms and bathrooms to count, and a fleet of servants at his every beck and call.
When Chase had directed his pickup down the asphalt driveway and parked in front of the house, Odelia wondered why it was that all the celebrities who came to Hampton Cove had a habit of getting murdered at one point or another. Within the past few months she’d visited the homes of singers, reality stars, actors… This small Hamptons town of theirs was quickly becoming the murder capital of the state if this worrying trend kept up.
She admired the ivy-covered brick exterior of the tabloid magnate’s house, and the stone steps leading up to heavy oak doors.
“Security?” she asked as she followed Chase inside.
There was a hubbub of police activity, and Odelia nodded greetings to several Hampton Cove PD officers she personally knew. Having a police chief for an uncle awarded her a lot of advantages as a reporter for the Hampton Cove Gazette: often she was the first one on the scene, and the first one to glean interesting bits of information. And sometimes, like now, she was even invited to join in on the investigation. The only thing she didn’t have was one of those windbreakers with the word WRITER printed across the front and back.
“Oh, he had security,” said Chase, “only whoever did this was smart enough to know their way around the system.”
They walked through an ornate entrance hall, every bit of wall space covered in laminated covers of theNational Star. Clearly Dick Dickerson had been proud of his work.
They took a right turn past a huge statue of Dickerson dressed like Napoleon, complete with prancing black stallion, and walked into what looked like the tabloid king’s private study. And that’s when she saw it: a trail of greenish sludge on the floor, leading to the biggest safe she’d ever seen. It looked like one of those ginormous bank safes.
And then she caught a whiff of the smell and she winced.
“It gets worse,” Chase said when he saw her expression.
And it did. As they approached the safe, she saw that the floor was covered with two inches of the same green-and-white sludge, and the stench was beyond horrible. Inadvertently she brought a hand up to her face to cover her mouth.
Lying face up in all of that muck, was Dick Dickerson.
Chapter 6
Odelia was glad she hadn’t brought her cats. They didn’t need to see—or smell—this. Two people from the Suffolk County coroner’s office were examining the body. They were wearing face masks. Not a bad idea. She probably should have brought that clothespin.
“Poor guy,” she said as they walked back out of the safe. “Not a pleasant way to go.”
“No, it sure wasn’t,” said Chase.
“What was he doing in that safe?”
“We think he must have been lured there—did you notice he was dressed in his pajamas?”
Actually she hadn’t. She’d been too busy trying to fight the nausea the smell created. “So how did they do that?”
“We have no idea. But he didn’t lock himself up in that safe. And there are no signs of a struggle. So he must have walked in there voluntarily, then had the safe door close up on him.”
“How did the duck poop get into the safe?”
“They thought about this,” said Chase, as he led her out of the office and back into the hallway. “In fact this must have taken careful preparation. This wasn’t some half-assed job they put together at the last minute.”
“They? You think there was more than one assailant?”
“Oh, yes. This was not a one-man job.”
He walked her around the house, along a wood chip mulch path that snaked along the side. She saw several patches of nice-looking petunias, geraniums, million bells and impatiens. And of course some of the popular deer-resistant annuals like angelonia, snapdragons and helichrysum. Like everywhere on the South Fork, deer liked to roam wild and free in Hampton Cove, devouring whatever they could dig their hungry teeth into.
