Palm Beach Taboo (Charlie Crawford Palm Beach Mysteries Book 10) Read online

  Palm Beach Taboo

  A Charlie Crawford Mystery (Book 10)

  Tom Turner

  Copyright © 2021 by Tom Turner

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Contents

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  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

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Killing Time in Charleston Excerpt

  Chapter 1

  Afterword

  Also by Tom Turner

  About the Author

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  One

  “Hello?”

  “Dispatch call you?” It was Charlie Crawford’s partner, Mort Ott.

  “No, why?” Crawford asked, squinting at his bedside clock. 1:15 a.m. “What’s up?”

  “A horizontal”—which was Ott-ese for a dead guy, usually in a supine position—“all the way up on North Lake Way. 1450.” Some said Ott was direct. Others said irreverent. A few said heavy-handed. Many said all three.

  “All right,” Crawford said. “I’ll be there in twenty.”

  “Okay,” Ott said. “Just wish people would be a little more respectful of our sleep. You know, like maybe do their killing during the day?”

  Ott got there first. Crawford, who walked into the house at 1:35 a.m., was directed to a second-floor bedroom by a uniform at the front door. There were two other uniforms in the foyer. He nodded to them, then walked past and into a large living room. He was surprised to see most of the chairs and sofas filled with people: two women on a sofa wearing bathrobes, speaking softly to a fully dressed man facing them. A woman in blue pajamas sat in a leather club chair, staring out the window into the black of night. A middle-aged woman on another sofa was being comforted by a younger man with his arm around her shoulder. Another younger woman wearing a sheer negligee and an older woman in a white terrycloth bathrobe, sitting side by side in a love seat, both texting on their iPhones. Who were they waking up at this time of night, Crawford wondered? And, finally, a man in jeans and a white T-shirt, who looked to be in his thirties, pacing back and forth in front of a large picture window. A gas fireplace cast flickering light around the room.

  Crawford proceeded directly up the staircase to the second floor. He heard voices at the end of the hall and followed them. He stepped through an open door, onto a thick carpet, and saw Mort Ott talking to a crime-scene tech named Sheila Stallings. He was happy to see her on-scene because she was thorough and experienced, second only to Dominica McCarthy. But then maybe he was biased.

  Ott and Stallings were staring down at a man’s bloody body lying in a king-sized, four-poster bed. The man’s head rested on one of four pillows. Judging from the straight cut on his neck and the blood matted on his chest and neck, his throat had been slashed.

  “Knife, huh?” Crawford said.

  Stallings, who hadn’t seen him, jumped. “Jesus, Charlie! Don’t sneak up on me like that. I’m still half-asleep.”

  “Sorry.” Crawford patted her on the shoulder.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Multiple stab wounds but a severed artery was what killed him.”

  Crawford turned to Ott. “Who is he?”

  “Name’s Christian Lalley,” Ott said.

  “And who are all those people downstairs?”

  “No clue,” Ott said. “They were here when I got here. Eight of ’em, right?”

  “Nine,” Crawford answered. Then to Stallings: “Find the murder weapon?”

  “No, and I’ve been all over the room. It’s not here. Maybe somewhere else in the house or outside. I’m gonna do a tight search.”

  “Hawes on his way?” Crawford asked, referring to the medical examiner, Bob Hawes.

  Stallings nodded. “Dispatch said they called him right before me.”

  Ott shrugged. “Guess he’s a slow driver,” then under his breath to Crawford, “slow thinker, too.”

  The ME was not high on their hit parade.

  “I’m going to go interview the people downstairs,” Crawford told Ott.

  “Decent chance one of ’em did it, wouldn’t you say?” his partner asked.

  Crawford shrugged. “Who knows? It’s just kind of weird. Nine grown people all living together in the same house.”

  “Yeah, used to be ten,” Ott said with a grim expression.

  A theory had popped into Crawford’s head.

  Hatching theories was basically what he did for a living.

  “I’ll be down in a few,” said Ott.

  Crawford walked back down the stairs and into the living room. Most of its residents glanced over at him. He raised his voice and said. “My name’s Detective Crawford." All eyes were on him now. “The man upstairs, whose name I understand is Christian Lalley, has been murdered.” Typically, Crawford went light on the euphemisms, avoiding terms liked deceased and passed away. “You have my condolences. Now, I would like to interview all of you individually in that room, the library, I guess it is.” He pointed to a smaller space off the living room. “But first, if you don’t mind, I’d like to take a look at your hands.”

  And, if they did mind… well, tough.

  The seven looked around at each other—then back at Crawford—with expressions ranging from surprise and disbelief to curiosity, irritability, and annoyance, but no one displayed what he was hoping to see: fear.

  “If you’d all get in a line, please,” Crawford said.

  Slowly, they did, and without being told, held out their hands.

  Crawford walked past them, inspecting the seven sets of hands. Aside from one obvious nail-biter and another with a slight tremor, he saw nothing out of the ordinary, and zero blood. Not that it meant they were off the hook.

  “Thank you very much,” Crawford said as he reached the end of the line. His gaze went to the woman who had been staring out the window and was now eying him with great interest. “Ma’am, how ‘bout you and I talk first?”

  Without saying a word, she stepped out of
the living room and into the library, which had floor-to-ceiling bookshelves on three sides.

  Crawford followed her to a beige wing chair and sat opposite her in a love seat. He pulled out his iPhone, which he used to take notes. “What’s your name, please?”

  “Jennifer Parker, but I’m known here as Belletrix.”

  O-kay, thought Crawford. “Please tell me what you saw or heard earlier this morning.”

  Belletrix was around forty and had long, dark hair with a few strands of grey mixed in. She had intense blue eyes and a small scar above her lip. “I didn’t see anything. I just heard Christian scream bloody murder,” she said, hitting the nail on the head, “and naturally, I was terrified. I didn’t know what to do so I got up and locked my door and hid in my closet.”

  Crawford nodded. “Besides him screaming, did you hear anything else?”

  Belletrix cocked her head. “I heard lots of footsteps, then I heard another scream. A woman’s scream.”

  “Do you think that may have been her discovering Mr. Lalley?”

  “I guess so. Maybe. I was just so scared. I was just trying to protect myself, to be safe.”

  Crawford nodded. “I understand. Do you happen to know who it was? The woman who screamed.”

  She frowned. “No, I don’t.”

  Crawford tapped a note into his iPhone. “So, what happened next?”

  “Well, about ten minutes later, someone knocked on my door. I didn’t say anything. I was still so terrified. Then I heard a man shout something, but I didn’t understand what he said and didn’t move. Then I heard a crash and a man shout, ‘This is the police!’ He’d knocked in my bedroom door, broken the lock. It was a policeman in uniform, so I came out of hiding. He told me to go down to the living room.”

  Crawford was dying to know whether his theory was correct.

  “Ms. Parker, who are you…people?” he asked. He couldn’t think of a better way to ask the question.

  “We’re a congregation.”

  “A congregation?”

  She nodded. “Dedicated to the advancement of society through altruistic sacrifice and illuminating a productive path to others less fortunate and less intellectually gifted than ourselves.” She laughed. “Sorry, I know that sounded like a canned speech. Well, it kind of is. Put simply, we’re a group of people who live together and do our best to help others.”

  Belletrix was careful not to say it was a cult, but it sure as hell sounded like one to Crawford.

  Two

  Next to be interviewed was the woman in the sheer negligee, except she’d gone somewhere—Crawford guessed to the coat closet in the foyer—and put on a trench-style raincoat to cover up.

  She told him her name was Samantha Mayhew but that she was known as Cressida, and she had long, red hair, with jet-black eyebrows. Not a combo you saw every day. Like Belletrix, she claimed she hadn’t seen anything but heard footsteps running down the hallway on the second floor immediately after she heard Christian Lalley’s scream.

  “So, you think that might have been his killer? The person running down the hallway.”

  She shrugged. “Maybe. Or could have been someone responding to his scream. Trying to help, you know. I couldn’t be sure. But I heard it right after the scream.”

  “Tell me about Mr. Lalley. I mean, do you have any idea why someone might have done this? Did he have any enemies that you know of? Anyone at all who might have had a motive to…kill him?”

  “I have absolutely no idea. Until a while ago, Christian was number two in the congregation. He had a lot to do with how everything ran here,” Cressida said, looping a strand of hair over her ear.

  “Number two? Who’s number one?”

  Cressida turned as she heard footsteps.

  Ott walked into the library, a paper cup of coffee in hand.

  “This is my partner, Detective Ott,” Crawford said. “This is Ms. Mayhew. To catch you up, Ms. Mayhew heard what she thinks were feet running down the hallway above right after she heard Mr. Lalley scream.” Ott nodded. “Oh, and these people here are part of a…congregation, you call it, right?”

  Cressida nodded.

  “Which, as I understand it,” Crawford said, “means you’re a group of people who basically try to make the world a better place. And help disadvantaged people. Is that pretty much it?”

  Cressida nodded again and smiled.

  Ott nodded. “So, you mean a cult, right?”

  Cressida frowned. “I resent that characterization.”

  Which didn’t seem to bother Ott, whose expression didn’t change.

  Crawford kept going. “So, Mr. Lalley used to be second-in-command here to a someone I was just about to hear about.” He extended a hand for Cressida to continue.

  “His name is Crux,” she said.

  “Say what?” Ott said.

  “His name is Crux.”

  Ott nodded as an impish grin cut across his face. “So, you’re saying the head of your cult is named Crux? As in, crux of the matter?”

  Her face hardened. “That’s an insult. It’s not a cult. Far from it.”

  Ott put up his hands. “Okay, sorry, congregation.”

  Cressida looked back to Crawford, her expression now sullen and tense. “For the third time, yes, his name is Crux. His real name is Lucian Neville.”

  “I’m just curious,” Ott said, “where the name Crux comes from? Do you know?”

  Cressida was ready with the answer. “It’s one of the best-known constellations in the southern hemisphere. It’s also known as the Southern Cross because of the formation of its five brightest stars.”

  Crawford nodded. “So, where is Crux? The man, I mean.”

  “He’s up at 1500 North Lake Way. We own five houses in the area. All pretty close to each other.”

  Crawford was caught off-guard. He figured that any local religious group that owned five houses in Palm Beach would have crossed his radar at some point. “So, how many members of… sorry, you haven’t told us the name of your congregation yet.”

  “SOAR.”

  “S-o-a-r?” Crawford asked.

  She nodded.

  “Is that an acronym or something?”

  “No, it just means, you know, ascend, rise… mmm, climb.”

  “Gotcha.”

  Crawford heard footsteps and turned toward the library door. A short man with a neatly trimmed beard walked in. He was wearing khakis and a pressed, dark sports shirt.

  Cressida ran to him and threw her arms around him. “Oh, my God, it’s so awful what happened to Rigel.”

  Crawford got to his feet.

  “I know, I know,” the man said, patting Cressida’s head, then turning to Crawford and Ott. “My name’s Crux. Do you have any idea what could have happened to my brother, Christian?”

  Crux had a slight accent, which Crawford pegged as Australian.

  “In plain English, his throat was cut while he was in bed,” Crawford said. “I’m Detective Crawford and this is my partner, Detective Ott. How did you hear about it? It’s Mr. Neville, correct?”

  “Yes, it is, but just call me Crux. Josie called me on her cell. She’s one of the women down in the living room.”

  “And as I understand it, you live in one of the neighboring houses.”

  “Yes, I do,” Crux said. “1500 North Lake Way.”

  “And you were there—at your house—when this happened...” Crawford glanced at his watch. “Approximately an hour ago?”

  “Yes, I was.” Crux cocked his head.

  “Not in this house?”

  “No,” said Crux, squinting his eyes. “Wait, you’re not thinking—”

  “We’re going to be asking everyone where they were when it happened,” Crawford said.

  Cressida stood. “I’ll go make some coffee. I’m sure we can all use some.”

  “Thank you,” Crux said as she walked.

  Ott stepped toward Crux. “Let’s get right to it. Do you know if Mr. Lalley had any enemies? Anyone
who may have threatened him? Someone he may have had a dispute or disagreement with?”

  “No, I do not. Rigel, the name he was known by, was a gentle, mild-mannered man. He’d be the last person I’d expect to be a victim of something like this. I mean, this is just inconceivable.”

  “Rigel,” Ott said, scrunching his eyes. “That’s an unusual name.”

  “It refers to a star in the night sky.”

  “Like your name does,” Crawford put in.

  Crux nodded.

  “How many members are in your congregation?” Crawford asked. “And can you tell us a little about it, please?”

  Crux ran his hand through his beard. “I’m not sure exactly how that’s relevant, Detective.”

  Ott inhaled to speak, but Crawford subtly waved him off. “We just want to understand a little better what you do and who you all are.”

  “Why is that?”

  Ott gave him a look; even Crawford was starting to lose patience. “Because the most likely killer is someone in SOAR. It is highly unlikely that someone from the outside broke into this house then made their way upstairs and killed… Rigel.”

  “Yeah, and I was told all the doors were locked and could only be opened by a resident here,” Ott said. “So, obviously, the most likely suspect is someone who was in the house tonight.”