Denise Swanson - Murder of a Small-Town Honey

"Sorry, I didn't know Mr. Reid was the coroner, and he frightened me when he got into the car without any warn­ing."

Deputy McCabe gestured toward her with his thumb. "Yeah, she thought he was the murderer. She shot outta that squad like a bat outta hell."

"What do you find so amusing, Deputy?" Chief Boyd asked. "That seems a sensible precaution, considering we don't have any idea who the killer is and he might think Miss Denison saw more than she did."

Skye shivered. She hadn't considered that the murderer might think she was a witness.

Chief Boyd turned to her. "Why don't you go back and introduce yourself to Simon? He has some questions he wants to ask you. I think he moved to town after you left. His uncle, Quentin Reid, up and died about eight years ago. Quent never married, and he didn't have any kids, so Simon inherited the funeral home. Simon is Quent's brother's boy."

She nodded to the chief, understanding his reasons for the genealogy lesson. In Scumble River you were an out­sider, and not to be trusted,, unless you could prove your connection to someone from town.

Gritting her teeth, she walked over to Simon and held out her hand. "I'm Skye Denison. Chief Boyd said you wanted to speak to me?" It was hard having to face a per­son you had just run away from.

Simon straightened and took her hand in a firm but not crushing grip. "It's nice to meet you. I'm Simon Reid, the coroner."

Raising her eyes to his, Skye discovered that he was well over six feet tall and very attractive in a Gary Cooper

sort of way. The silence lengthened, and she realized that she had been staring at him for several minutes. Blushing, she looked away.

He did not seem the least bit uncomfortable with her in­spection. Instead, he leaned back against the fender and crossed one long leg over the other. His next statement sur­prised her. "Miss Denison, tell me about the blood you had on your hand."

For some reason his self-confident attitude irritated her. "I prefer Ms. Denison. Why do you need to know about the blood, Mr. Reid?"

"Do you know what a coroner does, Ms. Denison?"

"No, Mr. Reid, I do not know what a coroner does. Something with dead bodies, I presume."

His slight smile did not reach his eyes. "To save a lot of time explaining why I'm asking the questions I'm asking, I'm going to explain the duties of a coroner to you, Ms. Denison."

Nodding, she waited for him to continue.

"The number one duty of the coroner is to conduct the inquest, but at the crime scene we take vital signs, draw blood—directly from the heart if possible—and take urine samples from the bladder."

"You don't perform the autopsy?" Skye shifted from one foot to the other. This was getting a little more graphic than she liked.

"No, we need a licensed medical examiner for that. We hire a guy from the county hospital to do the actual cutting. He uses the specimens I've collected at the scene to run toxicology screens and lab tests."

"So, what do you want to know? I was in the trailer all of five minutes, so I didn't see much. I can't even tell you what the victim looked like."

"I'm most interested in your description of the blood. Wally mentioned that you had quite a bit on your hand when he arrived." Simon moved closer.

"Yes, I must have stuck my fingers right next to the wound while I was trying to find a pulse, but I couldn't see what I was doing because the body was under the vanity. I know you're not supposed to move injured people, so I didn't want to drag her out from the knee-well." Skye explained all this in one breath, still feeling as if she should have done more.

"All I want you to do is to picture the blood on your hand right after you first saw it."

Skye closed her eyes and tried to think about the earliest instant she looked at the blood on her hand. After a long pause she said, "It was bright red. At first I thought I'd cut myself."

"Good. It looked like new blood. What was its consis­tency?"

She tried to reconstruct the scene in her head. "It was runny, more like chocolate syrup than molasses but not as thin as oil."

"Great. That's exactly what I needed to know."

"Why?"

"It will help pinpoint the time of death," Simon said, then added, "I hope."

"I don't understand why it took you so long to get here. It was over an hour and a half since I found the body and reported it to Chief Boyd."

"The police have to take all their pictures and gather their evidence before they call me to take the body. I've tried to convince them that they should notify me immedi­ately and let me examine the scene, but we have so few homicides I haven't been successful."

"How many murders have you handled as coroner?"

For the first time Simon looked uncomfortable. He cleared his throat before answering. "This is the first mur­der, but I've done suicides and accidental deaths."

Skye raised one eyebrow. "That's not quite the same thing. You must be feeling somewhat anxious. There have

been so many cases lost in court due to the evidence being spoiled at the scene. I read an article in Time magazine a few years back that said something like sixty-five hundred murderers each year go free, most because of coroners who were not well trained. I didn't realize at the time that many were not physicians."

"The only thing I'm nervous about is you. We didn't get off to a very good start." His golden-hazel eyes sparkled. "The reason the funeral director in small towns is usually also the coroner is simple. We own the hearse and we have a place to store the body."

He was attractive, and as everyone kept pointing out, there were not many appropriate men Skye's age in Scum­ble River. She surreptitiously glanced at his left hand. He wore no wedding band. Of course, that didn't prove any­thing. One strike against Simon was that he reminded Skye of her ex-fiance. It had been only a few months since they broke up, and the pain was as sharp as ever.

She smiled. "I'm sure you didn't mean to scare me ear­lier, and I am sorry for screaming and running away when you got into the car."

He waved away her apology with a gesture of his hand. "No problem. After what you've been through, I'm sure most girls would have been frightened."

Girls! Biting her tongue, Skye managed a thin smile in response to his chauvinism and decided to change the sub­ject before she was forced to tell him what she thought about that remark.

The shock of finding a body had worn off, and her nat­ural curiosity was beginning to take over. Tilting her head to the side, Skye looked up at Simon through her eye­lashes. "Why, how gallant of you to be concerned for my feelings."

She wondered what he was honestly thinking as they smiled at each other. She would bet money he couldn't fig­ure out her real thoughts.

After a few minutes of silence, Skye opened the door of the cruiser. She sat sideways, with her feet still outside the car. "How did Mrs. Gumtree die? Is there any way it could have been an accident? I realize the trailer was trashed, but could she have done it herself, then fallen somehow?"

"I don't see how it could be anything but murder. She was stabbed in the jugular vein. That's why there was so much blood."

Skye paled slightly, but her inquisitiveness won out. "Was she robbed?"

"They don't think so. It looks more like a search than a burglary."

"Isn't that odd? What would anyone be looking for? Who around here would even know what she had with her?" Skye leaned forward, intent on the puzzle.

"That's not all that's odd. When we finally got her out from under that dressing table, she turned out to be in her thirties, not her sixties."

"Are you sure it's Mrs. Gumtree? When I saw her per­forming yesterday, she looked like Granny from The Bev­erly Hillbillies, only shorter."