Glenmore Park Mystery 3.5-A Death Not Foretold Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  About The Author

  A Death Not Foretold

  Mike Omer

  A Death Not Foretold Copyright © 2016 by Mike Omer

  All rights reserved.

  Chapter One

  It took her entirely by surprise. Her ears still rang from the blasts as she felt her knees buckle, her body refusing to obey her simple instructions. She crumpled to the floor, her mind trying to make sense of it all. She tried to piece it together, a sequence of events leading to the throbbing pain in her chest, to the weakness in her muscles. She heard something in the background, a movement. That’s right, someone was in the room with her, someone she knew.

  Who was it?

  She couldn’t concentrate, thoughts blinking on and off in her mind, none of them making any sense. How had she not seen this coming?

  Her surroundings were getting hazy, the world seen through a very long, dark tunnel. Was that movement? Someone crouched by her side. To help her?

  No, she knew, not to help her.

  She tried to cling to a thought, to a memory, to anything. Maybe, if she could only maintain this shred of consciousness, of being, she could stay alive.

  But the tunnel grew darker, the light dimmer, and still she couldn’t understand how it had come to this.

  The smell of incense, herbs, and blood intermingled together into a strange, unpleasant aroma. Detective Bernard Gladwin breathed slowly through his mouth, looking at the dead woman that lay on the floor. She stared upward, eyes vacant, wrinkled face twisted in shock and pain. Her blouse, originally bright yellow, was now mostly brown, its fabric soaked in blood. Bernard knelt by the body, examining it carefully, the image etched in his mind, joining a gallery of similar memories of dead men, women, and children.

  She seemed to be about sixty, her long hair gray and white. She looked like an aging hippie, her clothing loose and comfortable. No makeup, no jewelry except for a small pouch tied around her neck with a thin string and a beaded bracelet on her thin wrist. She wasn’t the type of person he’d usually expect to find shot dead in this area. Appleton Road was deep inside a crime-riddled neighborhood in the northern part of Glenmore Park, but the people getting shot were usually men in their twenties and thirties, their clothing and tattoos marking them as members of the local gang.

  On the other side of the body, the medical examiner, Annie Turner, was bagging one of the body’s hands, her fingers deftly wrapping the rubber band around the paper bag. Her bright red hair was tied back in a ponytail, her eyes intent on her work.

  “Are you done with the body?” he asked.

  “In a few minutes,” she said. “The body has two bullet holes in the chest. No rigor mortis yet—the body temperature is almost normal. She was killed in the past hour.”

  Bernard nodded. This matched the report of the shooting. He didn’t ask for a cause of death, knowing very well that even though there were clearly holes in the body, the methodical examiner would refuse to say anything definite. He fought the desire to close the victim’s eyes, to cover the body somehow. Fourteen years on the force, and he still had these urges every time. He knew better. These impulses were nothing but idiotic ways to make himself feel better, and to compromise the evidence in the process. The victim didn’t care if her eyes were open or shut. She was dead.

  He got up and looked at Matt Lowery, the crime scene investigator. The small man was leaning over the sink, taking pictures of its contents with his black camera. He had to stand on the tips of his toes to get the angle of the photograph right.

  “What did you find, Matt?” Bernard asked.

  “Shards of glass,” Matt answered after a second.

  “Matt, there are a few dried leaves by the body,” Annie said, looking closely at the blood-soaked floor.

  “I know,” he said. “I took a photo earlier. I’ll bag them in a sec.”

  Bernard walked around the room, inspecting each detail. There was something calming in disassembling the bloody kitchen into an array of small details. Taken as a whole, it was just a terrible, senseless act of violence, one of many this neighborhood had suffered over the years. But viewed separately, each item became simply another on a list of items to catalog.

  A small wooden table sat in the corner, three chairs around it, all of them scratched and worn after years of use. The floor tiles were simple, square, off-white. The part that wasn’t drenched in blood was meticulously clean. He turned towards the counter and looked at it. Several jars sat on it, containing various herbs, dried mushrooms, and spices. There was no microwave, and hardly any electric kitchen appliances. An old-fashioned kettle sat on the gas stove.

  The body of the woman was lying in the doorway between the kitchen and the room beyond. The back door, to Bernard’s left, stood closed. Behind him were the living room and the bedroom. Detective Hannah Shor, his partner, stood in the doorway separating the living room and the kitchen, staring at the entire scene silently. Unlike him, she always took a moment to take in the entire scene.

  “Want to take a look in the rest of the rooms?” Hannah asked him, stepping inside the small kitchen.

  “Yeah,” he said, relieved at the suggestion. “Let’s check that one first.” He indicated at the room beyond the body. The woman had been shot midway between the kitchen and that room.

  They stepped carefully around the stain of blood and into a small, dimly lit storage room. The smell of herbs intensified dramatically. Dozens of shelves surrounded that room, full of jars containing assortments of herbs, seeds, and roots. Each jar was labeled carefully with small white stickers, the labels written by hand.

  “Aconite,” Hannah read aloud, walking alongside one of the shelves. “Adder’s tongue, elm, ginger, belladonna, hibiscus…”

  Bernard checked one of the lower shelves. Rows of tiny bottles filled with liquid dotted the shelf. They were labeled as well. He picked up one with his latex-gloved hand. “St. John’s wart’s herbal oil,” he read. “You think she sold medicinal oils and herbs?”

  “Well, belladonna is poisonous,” Hannah muttered. “And there’s incense here, and candles… I don’t know.”

  Bernard noticed a small box containing an assortment of cloth pouches, similar to the one that had been tied around the victim’s neck. He checked one, then another. They were all empty.

  They stepped out of the storage room, back to the kitchen. Matt was taking pictures of the back door’s knob.

  “Where’s Violet?” Hannah asked.

  “On her way,” he said, lowering his camera. “Morning traffic.”

  The idea of Violet arriving separately from Matt was alien to Bernard. The investigators nearly always arrived to the scene together. “It’s a good thing you got here so fast,” he said.

  “I got around the morning traffic going via Esperanza Drive,” Matt said. “I saw there was some really heavy traffic at Clayton Road, so I took a right on Sixth Street, and—”

  “You know what my mom used to tell me?” Hannah interrupted him.

  “What?”

  “Never tell anyone about your dreams, or your driving itinerary. No one cares.”

  Matt grinned at Bernard, who smiled back at him. “I’ll keep that in mind,” he said.

  “Anyone find any ID so far?” Bernard asked. “Is this really Jacqueline Mune?”

  Matt sho
ok his head. “Not yet. There’s no ID in her handbag.” He motioned with his head to a flower-patterned cloth handbag hanging on one of the chairs. “But the purse is inside, and it has cash in it.”

  “Okay.” Bernard nodded. “Any signs of forced entry?”

  “None, but the killer left through the back door,” Matt said.

  “How do you know that?”

  Matt turned around from the sink, the evidence bag in his hand, the tweezers in the other. “Check out the doorknob. It has a blood smear on it. The entire doorknob is almost devoid of fingerprints. I think the murderer used some sort of cloth to open the door.”

  “A blood smear? The victim’s blood?”

  “I don’t know yet, Detective. Might be.”

  Bernard walked over to the door and took a look at the doorknob. Sure enough, on the right side, there was a clear brown smear mark. Dried blood.

  “Let’s check the living room,” he said to Hannah.

  The living room was a cozy space, all the furniture in warm colors of brown and red. There was a comfortable-looking chair and a sofa, both in the same shade of cherry, on opposite sides of a light brown coffee table. Just like the kitchen, Bernard thought, shades of brown and red. But unlike the bloody kitchen floor, the colors belonged here. They made this room feel welcoming, comfortable. The room was clean, just like the rest of the house. A large window in one of the walls let in the sun, illuminating the room in the easygoing, playful light of a nice spring morning.

  One thing was clearly missing—a television set. For a moment, Bernard wondered if this was a robbery gone wrong after all, but no. The chair and sofa were pointed at the table, as if that was the room’s center. Bernard quickly walked across the room and poked his head into the bedroom, a tiny room completely taken up by a double bed. No television there either.

  He returned to the living room and approached a small dresser in the corner of the room. Sometimes, homes looked clean on the outside, but the chaos was merely hidden inside the drawers and the cupboards. Bernard’s own home was like that, the mess shoved into any available closet. He opened the dresser’s top drawer. This was not the case. The drawer had no clutter inside, just a few wooden boxes and a cloth pouch.

  He flipped open the lid of one of the boxes. A deck of tarot cards sat within, face up, the top card displaying a large sun. “There are tarot cards here,” he said.

  “I’m not surprised,” Hannah said, joining him. “She definitely looks the type.”

  Bernard said nothing, feeling a bit irked. He didn’t think there was a type that owned a deck of tarot cards. He was pretty sure that Carmen, his wife, used to own one.

  Hannah picked up the pouch and loosened the cord tying it. She looked inside. “Bones,” she said. “Small bones.”

  Bernard glanced into the pouch. The small bone fragments were barely visible inside the dark cloth. He took it from Hannah and poured the contents on the table. There were several bones, a tooth, a key, a bird’s foot, some shells, and a foreign coin.

  “Ever seen anything like that?” he asked Hannah. She shook her head, shifting the items gently with her gloved fingers.

  A couple of men walked through the front door, carrying a stretcher between them.

  “Where’s the victim?” one asked.

  “Over there.” Hannah motioned towards the kitchen.

  Bernard collected the small items back into the pouch, tied the cord, and put it back in the dresser. He opened the bottom drawer. There were a few photo albums inside. Bernard flipped through one of them. The first page had a picture of a middle-aged woman hugging a teenage girl in a park. Both were smiling. The woman was clearly the victim, even though she was twenty years younger in the photo. Bernard took a long look at the photo and sighed. There was a motherless daughter now, and chances were he’d be the one to inform her of her mother’s death.

  “Time to talk to the person that called this in,” he said.

  Chapter Two

  Jenna Terrel’s black-and-gray roots peeked at Bernard through her dry auburn hair. Her plump face sat atop a thick neck, and it wore a mask of cultivated concern that was as fake as her hair color.

  “Is Mrs. Mune okay?” she asked as she led Bernard and Hannah to her living room. A small, white poodle sat in the middle of a large sofa, eying them with interest. It licked its lips in a manner that Bernard found disconcerting, though he wasn’t sure why.

  “Can you please tell us exactly why you called the police, Mrs. Terrel?” Hannah asked, sitting down by the dog.

  “Well, I heard a couple of very large explosions from nearby. It sounded like it came from Mrs. Mune’s home. I phoned her—”

  “You have her phone number?” Bernard asked, still standing. The dog didn’t seem to be about to move aside and let him sit.

  “Yes, of course. She never answered. So I called the police.” Jenna sat down on a sturdy wooden chair by the sofa.

  “Did you try to knock on her door before calling us?” Bernard asked. The dog opened its mouth, its tongue lolling. It seemed as if it leered at him.

  “Of course not. Oscar, get off the couch!” Jenna said sharply.

  The dog turned to look at her, blinked, and hopped off.

  Bernard sat down on the lumpy sofa. “Why didn’t you knock on Mrs. Terrel’s door?”

  “In this neighborhood, if you hear gunshots, you don’t leave home straight after,” Jenna answered dryly.

  “Are you sure it was gunshots?”

  The dog sniffed his leg with interest. Bernard moved it a bit.

  “I’m pretty sure. It was very loud, and sharp. I can’t think of anything else that would make that noise.”

  “Did you hear any…” Bernard stopped talking, feeling rhythmic movement on his leg. He glanced down. Oscar was humping his leg enthusiastically. “Uh…”

  “Oscar! Stop that!” Jenna said.

  Oscar looked up at Bernard with adoration, still humping.

  Jenna got up and tore Oscar from Bernard’s leg. “I’m very sorry,” she said. She walked to the edge of the room and put Oscar in the corner.

  “Did you hear anything else after the two shots?” Bernard asked, trying to recuperate.

  Jenna sat back down. “I may have heard a door slamming shut, but I’m not sure if it came from Mrs. Mune’s home.”

  “But you are sure that the gunshots came from there?”

  “Almost sure. Is she okay?”

  “I’m sorry,” Hannah said. “Mrs. Mune is dead.”

  “Oh!” Jenna’s hand rose to her mouth. “How horrible!” she said, her voice trembling. She whimpered, a tear rolling down her cheek, clearly distraught.

  At that point, Oscar wisely decided that it was safe to return to Bernard’s leg. The humping began again. Bernard wondered if the dog’s excitement had increased due to his owner’s distress.

  Bernard cleared his throat, hoping that Jenna would notice his predicament, but her eyes were shut, lips quivering as more tears materialized in her eyes. Finally, he bent to remove the dog from his leg. Oscar snarled and nearly bit one of his fingers.

  “Oh, Oscar,” Jenna said. She got up, untangled the dog from the leg and, to Bernard’s chagrin, placed him in the corner of the room again.

  “Mrs. Terrel,” Hannah said, “do you have any idea if Mrs. Mune had any enemies?”

  “Not that I know of,” Jenna said, getting her voice under control.

  “Was she tense lately? Did she seem fearful to you, or—”

  “We don’t really talk much. We just say hello when we meet each other on the street.”

  “But you had her phone number.”

  “Well, yes. She is my neighbor. And I once asked her for a reading.”

  “A reading?” Bernard asked.

  “A tarot reading. Mrs. Mune was a psychic. Though not a very good one.”

  “Why do you say that?” Bernard asked.

  “Well…” She fidgeted uncomfortably. “It’s wrong to speak ill of the dead… I’m s
ure that some people were satisfied with her.”

  “But you weren’t?”

  “I asked her about a certain… man I knew. And she looked at the cards and told me that she didn’t think we had a future together.”

  “And she was wrong?” Bernard asked.

  “Of course she was! We were clearly both attracted to each other, and we had a lot of common interests… I just wanted her to tell me how long should I wait.”

  Bernard looked around the house. There were several high-heeled shoes by the door, one pink coat on a nearby hook, and one plate and glass on the coffee table in the living room. This woman and her lecherous dog were the only occupants of this house.

  “When was this reading?” he asked.

  “Two and a half years ago.”

  “So did you and that man end up together?”

  She looked at him angrily. “No, we did not. But there were reasons.”

  He decided to let the matter slide. “Did you notice anyone suspicious hanging around here lately? Anyone out of the ordinary?”

  “This isn’t a very good neighborhood, Detective, and the cops aren’t doing much to make it any better. Suspicious people hang around here all the time.”

  “Anyone hang around Mrs. Mune’s home?” Bernard asked. “Any…” He stopped. His leg was being molested again. “Mrs. Terrel, your dog…”

  “Oscar!” She picked him up and put him back in the corner. “No!” she said sharply, admonishing him with a finger.

  The dog waggled his eyebrows at Bernard and licked his lips again.

  “Maybe you could put it in a different room and close the door,” Bernard said.

  “Oscar has to learn to do what he’s told!” she said, her voice rising high.

  Bernard breathed steadily through his nose and gave the dog a menacing look. As far as he could tell, the dog found it arousing.

  “Did you see anyone—” he started again.

  “There was a young criminal that came to Mrs. Mune’s house frequently,” Jenna said.

  “What criminal?”