6 Murder at the Art & Craft Fair Read online

  I called Lou first, told him what I’d learned. Then, I called Heather and asked if she and Dan would be willing to assist us with our arrest. I figured that all she had to do to check with Dan was turn her head, and I was right. After I fixed them up, those two started spending most of their non-working hours together. I expect that soon Lou and I will be invited to their wedding. Heather confirmed what I expected, not about the wedding, but that she and Dan would be delighted to assist us. I didn’t think the unsuspecting murderer was going anywhere, so I delayed the inevitable until the next day, Monday morning. We would meet in front of the police station at 7:00. We planned to eat and go to the bank before confronting the murderer. After making an arrest, our job would be over until someone else decided to commit a murder. Like everywhere else, that happened too often in Hilldale.

  Chapter Forty-Three

  The idea of another trip through the countryside so soon didn’t excite me a whole lot, but it was made more palatable by the fact that our case would be at an end. Lou and I would be back to our normal lives before the day was over. Well, I’m not sure how normal our lives are, but whatever is normal for us.

  We arrived at the police station a little before 7:00. It didn’t surprise me that Dan and Heather were already there. Just seeing Heather helped me hop out of Lightning a little faster than I normally would. I hugged her a little longer than I might have if Jennifer had been there. I wasn’t in love with two women. Heather was more like a daughter to me, but she looked good enough, and was sweet enough, that I would have tried to give Dan a run for his money if I’d been twenty to twenty-five years younger. Of course if I’d been younger, Dan wouldn’t have stood a chance.

  We agreed on a place to eat breakfast and wasted little time getting there. We ate and hopped back in our vehicles. We had work to do and we had a little drive ahead of us. At least Sirius XM Radio would make each of those minutes pass more pleasantly. We were in luck. Not only did we start our drive just before a new program started on Radio Classics, but I found out the next four shows were all detective shows, my favorite kind. Lou and I smiled a little more than we used to smile when we were on our way to apprehend a murderer, but that was before we discovered Radio Classics.

  We arrived at our destination and with a subpoena in hand, headed to the bank. I wanted to do it right, and arm myself with every piece of evidence I could before making an arrest. We had no problem at the bank, and a look at the account in question confirmed my suspicions. I was sure we had enough evidence for a conviction. We picked up another partner in crime solving and let him lead us to the murderer’s residence.

  A man came to the door.

  “Roscoe Collins?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Mr. Collins, I’m Lt. Dekker with the Hilldale Police Department. You are under arrest for the murder of Tom Kincaid.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Oh, but you do, Mr. Collins. You murdered Tom on Saturday night.”

  “I hate to burst your bubble, but I have witnesses as to where I was on Saturday.”

  “During the day, Mr. Collins. But I’m talking about Saturday night. Saturday night you were in Hilldale, and you murdered Tom Kincaid. Not only did you murder him, but you stole his money.”

  “That’s a lie.”

  “You might have been able to get away with it, Mr. Collins, if you hadn’t pulled out in front of a cop right after you committed the murder.”

  “You have a record of a ticket?”

  “No, just the say-so of the cop who stopped you. He took down your name and address.”

  We cuffed Collins and took him away. It was time to leave. We had another stop to make.

  We arrived at our second destination just as the woman in question was trying to back out of her driveway. Heather pulled up and blocked the driveway, prevented her from leaving.

  “Going somewhere, Mrs. Kincaid?”

  “That’s right. I have an errand to run. Who is this man, Sid?”

  I assumed that Sid must have been Sheriff Offutt’s first name. I could tell the woman was terrified, and she spoke to the only person she recognized.

  “Just listen to the man, Margie.”

  “Mrs. Kincaid, we have just arrested your brother-in-law for your husband’s murder. We are taking you in as an accessory after the fact. We might even find out that the murder was all your idea.”

  “Murder. He was murdered in Hilldale. I’m here in Murray. Roscoe was at a football game in Richmond. It would be hard for Roscoe to be in one place and murder someone somewhere else.”

  “Not if the football game was in the afternoon, and the murder happened at night, about an hour away from where the football game took place. Now, let me read you your rights before you say anything else.”

  +++

  Sheriff Offutt put Margie Kincaid in the back of his cruiser, and everyone headed to the Sheriff’s office. We kept the co-conspirators separated and tackled the widow first. She admitted signing her name to the one check and endorsing her husband’s name on a second check. It was part of a deposit that totaled a little over $1,300, although she wouldn’t admit that the money came from his Saturday sales at the art and craft fair. Not bad for one day of work. I needed to see if I could turn anything I could do into money, and then I realized I couldn’t do much of anything except solve murders.

  We kept after Roscoe Collins for a couple of hours until he broke down and confessed. He said he didn’t go to Hilldale to murder his brother-in-law, but that he stopped by there on Friday and saw Tom eating dinner with some woman. He followed the two of them back to the motel and planned to confront his brother-in-law then, but said he noticed that a police cruiser had driven by a couple of times and the officer was eyeing him. He left and didn’t return until Saturday night after the game. He got to the art and craft fair just as Tom Kincaid rescued a woman falling from a stepstool. He noticed it was the same woman he had seen his brother-in-law with the night before, and that they were slow in separating. He was about to confront his brother-in-law when a man walked up and he and Kincaid went into Kincaid’s tent. They were there quite a while. During that time, a woman walked up, followed by a man with some kind of statue. Collins recognized it as one of his brother-in-law’s puzzles. The man left quickly and Collins admitted that he made a noise to frighten the woman, who ran away as quickly as she could. When the second man in his brother-in-law’s tent finally left, Collins waited a few seconds, then went over to confront Kincaid. On the way, he picked up the Statue of Liberty puzzle, which he had planned to return to his brother-in-law. When Kincaid angrily denied any wrongdoing and turned away, Collins lost control and hit his brother-in-law in the back of the head with the statue. When he realized that he had killed him, he hit him a few more times and picked up the cashbox, hoping that the police would think Kincaid was murdered when he confronted a robber. When he returned to Murray, he handed the cashbox to his sister-in-law and told her what he had done. She didn’t seem too upset, particularly after she counted the money. Collins admitted that he stole his brother-in-law’s keys. Since it was late, he decided to spend the night in the room he knew his brother-in-law had rented at the motel, and left for home just before daylight on Sunday morning.

  +++

  When I learned the name of the man who had been stopped on Saturday night, it meant nothing to me. When I found out he lived in Murray, I called the sheriff, who identified the man as Kincaid’s brother-in-law. I remembered that his brother-in-law was a big MSU football fan and had gone to an away football game, and when I thought of the clue “the eagle has landed,” I realized the saying meant the space capsule had touched down, which reminded me of touchdown, and football. Then I realized that Richmond isn’t that far from Hilldale, and Collins could have taken in a football game in the afternoon and murdered his brother-in-law at night. If Roscoe Collins had lived a good distance from Murray, I would never have realized that the man a fellow officer had stopped f
or pulling out into traffic on the night of the murder had any connection to Kincaid. Without that connection, I wouldn’t have considered him to be a likely murder suspect.

  +++

  It was 4:18 when we left Murray. We stopped by a KFC on the way out of town. We had a long road ahead of us. The trip back would take longer. We would be losing an hour. I contemplated stopping at Sutton’s or Carrabba’s as we drove through Lexington, maybe even take a side trip to Danville and introduce Dan and Heather to Burke’s Bakery and The Twisted Sifter. Then I realized that the two bakeries would have long since closed before we arrived anywhere near Danville, but Carrabba’s would be open until 11:00 and Sutton’s until 2:00 in the morning. We could eat while our prisoner gnawed on some KFC chicken bones in the back seat. It didn’t matter how late we got back. While we might not return to Hilldale until after midnight, our prisoner had nowhere to go, and I planned to sleep late on Monday.