The Homicide Report: A Nell Matthews Mystery (InterMix) Read online

  Also by JoAnna Carl writing as Eve K. Sandstrom

  Nell Matthews Mysteries

  The Violence Beat

  The Homicide Report

  The Smoking Gun

  Also by JoAnna Carl

  Chocoholic Mysteries

  The Chocolate Cat Caper

  The Chocolate Bear Burglary

  The Chocolate Frog Frame-Up

  The Chocolate Puppy Puzzle

  The Chocolate Mouse Trap

  Crime de Cocoa (anthology)

  The Chocolate Bridal Bash

  The Chocolate Jewel Case

  The Chocolate Snowman Murders

  The Chocolate Cupid Killings

  Chocolate to Die For (omnibus edition)

  The Chocolate Pirate Plot

  The Chocolate Castle Clue

  The Chocolate Moose Motive

  The Chocolate Book Bandit

  The Homicide Report

  JoAnna Carl writing as Eve K. Sandstrom

  INTERMIX BOOKS, NEW YORK

  INTERMIX BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) LLC

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  USA • Canada • UK • Ireland • Australia • New Zealand • India • South Africa • China

  penguin.com

  A Penguin Random House Company

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  THE HOMICIDE REPORT

  An InterMix Book / published by arrangement with the author

  PUBLISHING HISTORY

  Onyx trade edition / September 1998

  InterMix eBook edition / March 2014

  Copyright © 1998 by Eve K. Sandstrom.

  Excerpt from The Smoking Gun © 2000 by Eve K. Sandstrom.

  Excerpt from The Chocolate Book Bandit © 2013 by Eve K. Sandstrom.

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

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  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  For information, address: The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) LLC,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-698-14810-9

  INTERMIX

  InterMix Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group

  and New American Library, divisions of Penguin Group (USA) LLC,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  INTERMIX® and the “IM” design are registered trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) LLC

  Version_1

  Contents

  Also by JoAnna Carl

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Special Excerpt from THE SMOKING GUN

  Special Excerpt from THE CHOCOLATE BOOK BANDIT

  About the Author

  For Ruth, John, and Betsy

  Who patiently put up with a journalist mom

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  In writing fiction I often use the research technique of a reporter meeting a daily deadline. I find a “source”—somebody who can explain what I need to know and who can provide good quotes while they do it. For this book I relied on the advice and expertise of Inspector Jim Avance of the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation, who not only tells me what my detectives do wrong, but also how they can do it right and still make the plot work. I also relied on the skills and help of the pressroom crew at the Lawton Constitution—Michael, Benny, Rusty, Paul, Ron, Monte, Bill, Pat, and Mike—true-life characters more colorful than any fictional creations could ever be.

  Chapter 1

  Mike and I were standing on a metal grille, hanging twenty feet in the air. Beyond a spidery-looking railing, duct work snaked around the ceiling, only a few feet above our heads. Heavy electrical cables hung down, looped and tangled like tropical vines. Beneath us, rows of giant cylinders extended into infinity, blasted by glaring lights that cast harsh black shadows between them. Most of the cylinders were standing on end, but some were lying on their sides, looking like a building set abandoned by some mammoth child. A flimsy-looking circular iron stairway twisted from our perch down to the concrete floor.

  “I call it the Hellhole,” I said.

  “Not a bad name.” Mike’s voice was tense. “There, way at the back—that’s where we fall off the edge of the earth and the dragons eat us up, right?”

  I laughed. “You’ve got it. You’re seeing the secret dungeons of the Grantham Gazette. All those offices, computers, and meeting rooms upstairs—that’s just a facade. The real story is down here.”

  I leaned close and whispered. It wasn’t hard to put an ominous note in my voice. “Newsprint. Paper storage. Printing presses. Ink by the barrel. All that dangerous stuff.”

  “Scary as hell,” Mike said. His shoulders were rigid, and his knuckles were turning white from clutching the iron railing. “My God, Nell! I’d hate to have to come out here all the time.”

  “Reporters don’t have much business in the storage areas, but when I was covering the violence beat I came this way a lot. This landing is a shortcut from the break room to the Fifth Street loading dock. It’s the quickest way from the newsroom to the fire department and the courthouse.”

  “It looks like a quick way to Hades.”

  I realized Mike wasn’t kidding about his reaction to the Hellhole and to our unsubstantial-looking roost above it.

  Mike is six foot two, redheaded, and athletic. He’s a cop who’s earned medals for wrestling armed bad guys into submission with his bare hands. But I realized that he was scared stiff by the see-through flooring and fragile-looking railing of the little iron balcony we were standing on.

  “It’s perfectly solid,” I said. “See.” I jumped up and down.

  “Quit that!”

  I grinned. “I didn’t know you had a problem with heights, Mike. You go up that climbing rope at the gym like a monkey.”

  “Yeah, and I look at the ceiling all the way up. I’m not good at looking down. Particularly when I can see through”—he repeated the word—“through the floor I’m standing on. Not when
there’s concrete down there.”

  I moved close to him and rolled my eyes. “What? We’re finally alone, and you’re not going to take me in your arms?”

  “Not unless I can do it without letting go of this pipe.”

  I ducked under his arm and came up between him and the railing. “How’s this?”

  “Probably pretty interesting to whoever that is down there in the Hellhole.”

  “Somebody’s down here?” I ducked back under his arm and moved away. I’m sure everybody I work with has figured out that Mike and I sleep together. But we try to restrain ourselves from handholding in public.

  “Nobody should be down here this time of the evening,” I said. “Nobody except Martina, and she wouldn’t be out in the Hellhole.”

  “I couldn’t see who—or what—it was. Just movement.” Mike stared into the bowels of the block-long basement.

  “I hope it wasn’t a rat.” I shivered. “I’ve been told they call in the exterminator once a month to keep the creepy crawlies out down here.”

  “Maybe it was my imagination,” Mike said. “The Hellhole could make you imagine anything.”

  I shivered again. I might have teased Mike about his reaction to the Hellhole, but that was because I didn’t want to admit the big basement storage area had always given me the willies, too.

  “I guess I’d better do my errand,” I said. “City editors must be obeyed. Especially by junior copy eds.”

  Three months before, I’d been moved from a reporter’s slot to the night copy desk at the Grantham Gazette, working hours two p.m. to ten p.m. A week later Mike had started an eleven p.m. to seven a.m. rotation with the Grantham Police Department. These hours made it hard for us to see each other. So we had developed the habit of eating dinner in the Gazette break room, snatching a few minutes together over pizza, hamburgers, or carry-out Chinese.

  As a result, the city editor had known where I was when she needed a message delivered. We had barely picked a table for our submarine sandwiches when she called down to the break room and asked me to find Martina Gilroy, the Gazette’s chief copy editor and head busybody.

  Martina was another creature of habit. She always took a nap during her dinner break. She did this in the only ladies’ lounge in the Grantham Gazette Building which contained a couch—a facility that happened to be in the basement. There was no phone there, and the operator couldn’t page in that particular lounge.

  Martina’s lounge was just down the stairs from the classified and circulation departments, an area that in the daytime was more populated than the Hellhole. But the quickest way from the break room to that lounge led through the big storage area and skirted the pressroom. That was the route Mike and I were using.

  “Just where did Martina go?” Mike asked.

  “The lounge is at the opposite end of the basement, near the stairs to the side door—the one that leads to the parking garage.”

  Mike pointed at the winding, flimsy-looking stairway leading down from our perch. “Martina went down those stairs?”

  “Yeah. She does it every night.”

  “She has more guts than I do.”

  “Maybe she floats down. I’ve always thought she looks like a helium balloon bobbing around on a string. One of those funny character balloons with acrylic hair on top and accordion-pleated legs and arms dangling down.”

  Mike laughed. “Pretty good description. Why does everybody dislike her so much?”

  “She’s professionally officious and personally snoopy. But I guess I’d better find her. Do you want to wait in the break room?”

  “Anything to be with you. I’ll brave the Hellhole and come along.”

  I moved toward the stairs. “You’re the guy with the medals. Pretend there’s a bad guy to be arrested down there. Come on. I’ll hold your hand.”

  “Thanks, but I’ll use both hands to hang onto this railing. It feels firmer than it looks.”

  Mike followed me, and we edged down the winding black metal stairs, each with a strip of industrial yellow painted along its edge.

  “Whew!” Mike said when we were standing on the concrete floor. He looked back up the stairs. “What a place to take a header!”

  “Martina goes down it in high heels.”

  “She must be part acrobat.”

  “Yeah, and the rest is witch with a capital B. I’m not looking forward to disturbing her rest. She’ll pay me back with snide remarks for a week.”

  We started down a pathway outlined with yellow paint. It wandered through an underground Stonehenge formed by giant rolls of paper.

  And a noise came from behind the rolls.

  It was a crumpling noise, as if someone had stepped on a piece of paper.

  Both our heads snapped toward the sound, and we both stopped in mid-step. I couldn’t see anything except solid walls formed by rolls of newsprint.

  “You said nobody’s down here this time of the night,” Mike said.

  “The pressmen are the only ones who work in the basement during the evening, and we just left the whole crew upstairs on dinner break.”

  “Maybe one of them wasn’t hungry.”

  “That could be,” I said. “I don’t know how many are on the crew, so I guess somebody could have stayed behind. That might explain the movement you saw.”

  Having assured ourselves that the noise hadn’t been anything important, we walked on down our yellow-edged path.

  “This paint always makes me think of the road to Oz,” I said. “But it winds up at the witch’s castle, not the Emerald City. I guess the yellow is an OSHA requirement. The forklift zips back and forth through here during the day.”

  The Gazette Building covers a square block, and the Hellhole is a block long and half a block wide. It’s filled with rolls of paper in a variety of sizes—from full rolls, which are nearly as tall as I am and are a whole lot bigger around, down to quarter rolls, the ones the pressmen call “dinks,” which are about the size of coffee tables.

  An ax murderer could squat down and hide behind one of the half rolls. A dozen full rolls, lined up, could hide a band of terrorists. And twenty rolls, stacked ten on top of ten, could hide a band of terrorists riding in an armored personnel carrier. Even a dink could hide a rattlesnake or a rabid rat.

  Quit being silly, I ordered myself. I didn’t want Mike to see that the Hellhole made me jumpy, so I began to talk.

  “Martina is simply the nosiest person I’ve ever known,” I said. “Once she cornered me in the break room and told me she wanted to know all about you and about our ‘hopes, plans, and dreams.’ ”

  Mike laughed. “I’d like to know about those, too.”

  “Or, like that first time you and I went to Dallas. I didn’t tell a lot of people we were going, but Martina got wind of it. She followed me into the ladies’ room and quizzed me like the D.A. going after a third-strike-and-you’re-out criminal. Had you gone on the trip, too? Where had we stayed? Did we have a suite or a double? Did the room have a king-size bed? She wanted to know all the details—and I don’t mean about the Dallas Museum of Art.”

  “What made her so curious?”

  “She wanted me to know that she knew that we were sleeping together. It gives her some perverted sense of power to know other people’s private business.”

  Mike’s voice sounded suspicious. “Just what did you tell her?”

  “Oh, I was sweet as sweet. And I told her all about the Treasures of the Tsars exhibit. Believe me, I didn’t tell her about the hotel, or the suite, or exactly what happened to the chocolates on the pillow.”

  Mike leaned close and whispered in my ear. “I’ll never forget those chocolates.”

  “You nut!” I laughed, but I could hear a tremble in the sound. I had heard another unidentifiable noise.

  I walked on quickly, tugging Mike’s hand. When he flexed his fingers, I realized I was clutching him the way he had clutched the metal railing at the top of the stairs. I tried to relax my grip before I sprained his fis
t.

  No one was there, I told myself. No ax murderer, no band of terrorists. Not even a rabid dog. Only a noise. Noises happen. Buildings shift. Or they do get mice. Mice are more afraid of people than people are of mice. The noise had been nothing. It had no importance. It was my imagination. And we had nearly reached the other end of the Hellhole without meeting disaster.

  The path among the monoliths turned, and we neared the back hall. “The press is around this next corner,” I said. “You’ll have to come down here sometime when it’s rolling. It’s an interesting sight.”

  But as we turned, sight was not the sense that we used. Smell came into play. We both gasped and covered our noses.

  “Dang!” I said. “What is that odor?”

  “Paint thinner?” Mike said. “Kerosene?”

  “Ooh!” I said. “I’ve smelled it before. It’s some chemical they use on the press, but it’s never been that strong.”

  “Why did it hit us as we came around that corner?”

  “I don’t know. But let’s get out of here before we suffocate!”

  Mike ignored my remark. He pointed ahead, down a short passageway, toward a box lying on its side in the middle of the floor, beside a pile of red industrial rags.

  “Those rags must be where the fumes are coming from,” he said. “What’s back there?”

  The rags were heaped up in front of a door.

  I gasped, and this time it wasn’t the fumes. “That’s the door to the ladies’ lounge!” I said. “Martina’s in there!”

  Chapter 2

  I kicked some of the rags out of the way and opened the door to the ladies’ lounge. The fumes were fierce inside, and Martina was laid out on the couch. All she needed was a satin pillow and a blanket of roses.

  She was flat on her back. Skinny ankles and legs stuck out from under the floral dress that covered her broad hips and round stomach. Her white linen jacket had fallen open, and her left arm trailed onto the floor. Her fake blond hair was teased into a bush around her wrinkled face. Her eyes were closed, and she wasn’t moving.