Beach Blanket Homicide (Lucy McGuffin, Psychic Amateur Detective 1)

He sighs. Maybe we’ll never know exactly what happened. Maybe some cases just aren’t meant to be solved.”

“Like your Angel of Death case?” I ask softly.

“That case is one of the reasons I put off retirement. I wanted so badly to be able to look at the families of the victims in the eye and tell them that I’d caught their loved one’s killer. But after all these years it’s all gone cold.”

“Weren’t most of the victims terminally ill?”

His eyes harden. “Yes, but that didn’t give her the right to take their lives.”

“I agree.” I don’t want to bring up bad memories for him, but I really am curious, so I ask as delicately as possible, “What made the case so difficult to solve?”

“There were six known victims, but the FBI and my department think the number might have been almost double that. Most of the time the clue to finding a serial killer is the information we get from the first victim, and we simply don’t know who he or she was.”

Even though this is all a little ghoulish, I can’t help but be fascinated.

“I watched the episode when it was featured on America’s Most Vicious Criminals, but I have to admit, I’ve forgotten the details.”

“The first victim was probably someone important to her. A patient or family member she cared about and didn’t want to see suffer anymore, so she slipped them a little extra morphine. Since the victim was probably very close to dying anyway, no one would have thought to do an autopsy or check their blood for the presence of excessive drugs.”

It’s coming back to me now. “The victims all died of narcotic overdoses, right?”

He nods. “Easy enough to do fifteen years ago when hospitals didn’t have the kind of security measures they do now. She could have easily upped their dose through a drug pump and then recalibrated the machine back to the normal dose before anyone checked.”

“But you do know that the murderer was a she?”

“The truth is, the murderer could be a man for all we know. The only thing I’m certain of is that he or she had enough medical knowledge to be able to manipulate a narcotics pump. They might have worked for the hospital, or one of the temp agencies, or hell…they could have even come in as a visitor. And it wasn’t limited to one area of town. The murders occurred in multiple hospitals.”

“What was the motive?”

“Most likely, in her delusional mind, she probably thought she was helping them. Unless we’re lucky enough after all these years to catch a break in the case, we’ll never know the exact motive. We interviewed hundreds of people, watched hours and hours of surveillance tapes, but we never had enough evidence to arrest anyone. Our Angel,” he says mocking the nickname, “was clever. We know very little about him or her.”

“How do you even know it was the same person?”

He hesitates. “This was never released to the press or featured in the T.V. show, but our Angel left a note each time they struck.”

I swallow hard. “What did it say?”

“R.I.P.”

“Rest in Peace?”

“Yep. Always written in pencil on a paper towel from the victim’s hospital room in block style letters.”

I fidget with the straw on my drink. “In your experience, Jim, what would you say the number one motive for killing someone usually is?”

He shrugs. “Depends. Money, anger, jealousy, power. Every murder is unique.”

“But money is a big one?”

“Oh yeah. It’s straight out of the Detective 101 handbook. Follow the money trail and chances are, you’ll find the killer.”

Which would make Derrick Delgado the most logical suspect.

“Can I ask you a few questions? As a professional?”

Jim’s green eyes sparkle with humor. “Shoot.”

“According to Travis, Abby died sometime between midnight and two a.m. The surveillance cameras caught Sebastian leaving the building a little after twelve-thirty, and since he left Abby very much alive, that would narrow the time of death to sometime between twelve-thirty and two.”