I stalked to his assistant’s desk, past the wall of dumb tourist posters with slogans like “Come for the Views, Stay for the Beer!” and “Lake Sanguis: Wisconsin’s #2 Tourist Destination!”
Kenzie herself graced the cover of one poster, balanced on one water ski behind a powerboat in the middle of the lake, her blond hair flying, her lipstick perfectly in place as she waved to the camera. I wondered how often Stokes had lusted over that picture.
My eyes fell on Stokes’s portrait, with his spongy red hair and smug smile, and it occurred to me I might not be able to control myself when I saw him.
“Get your cowardly butt out here!” I shouted again. I stalked to his door, Jude scurrying to keep up. His office was empty, but as I crossed the threshold, the hairs on the back of my neck stood straight up. My body realized something was very wrong with this office before my mind did.
That’s when I noticed his deck shoes, toes-up near the corner of his desk.
“Stokes?” I asked the shoes as I moved around the desk and saw they were, indeed, attached to the man.
Stokes lay on the ground, face up, his green eyes now cloudy andopaque, staring at the tiled ceiling. His lip was split as well, as if he’d been in a fistfight, but that wasn’t the real problem.
It was the pool of blood seeping out beneath his red hair in a puddle.
He wasn’t just hurt.
He was dead.
And lying next to his body was a single lemon.
Twelve
Some of the Canceled Killer’s victims turned out to be more sympathetic than they first seemed. His first victim, Heather Johnston, who knocked over a little girl’s lemonade stand, was later revealed to be under the stress of having to care for her mother, who was dying of cancer. Her mother complained about the traffic from the lemonade stand outside the window. Heather had asked the parents of the girl to move the stand away from her mother’s window several times. The parents refused and then even blasted music as an added insult.
—Crime Hivepodcast
Oscar wasn’t happy I found a body.
And he was doubly unhappy that body was Alec Stokes’s.
I got that impression when he separated me from Jude and grumbled, “Do not say a single word,” then stuffed me into a police car almost immediately after he got to the scene. Eventually, he had his deputy, Hector, drive me to the sheriff’s station and shuffle me into a tiny interrogation room. That had been more than an hour ago. The camera hanging from the ceiling would produce the kind of grainy footage a director would kill to get for a ripped-from-the-headlines Streamberry documentary. The bland beige walls and the slightly musty air with a hint of stale cigarettes in this room made me want to shout a false confession just to get out of it.
Also, the faint shouting from Wes Briton in lockup didn’t help put me at ease. Wes owned the landscaping business that serviced many lawns in town, including our neighbors’, but he spent more time in the holding cell at the sheriff’s office than he did on the job, usually for drunk and disorderly conduct. I strained to hear, but I was pretty sure he was singing “Can’t Touch This” off-key and as loud as he could.
I glanced back at the picture of the crime scene I’d taken with my phone. Something about it just didn’t add up.
I’d already gone through all Alec Stokes’s social media accounts but found no skulls. And whileIcertainly thought he should be canceled, there’d been no recent flare-up online about his abusing women. The last real scandal was the intern, over a year ago.
He hadn’t trended anywhere, as far as I could tell. He was just one more successful man with a trail of accusations behind him. I hated him, sure, but he was small fish, really, for the Canceled Killer. Plus, the Canceled Killer had marked Allen Gordon as the next victim. Not Alec Stokes.
Oscar burst through the door then, looking disheveled. Wes wailed the next bars of MC Hammer, off-key.
“What’s up with Wes?” I asked, nodding toward the door. “Did you tell him that you did, indeed, touch this, because he’s
in jail?”
Oscar groaned as he slipped into the chair across the table from mine. “He was pulled over for a DUI. On his riding lawnmower down Main Street.”
Under different circumstances, that would be funny.
“He’ll do the entire ‘Can’t Touch This’ dance, and then he’ll pass out. Hopefully, sooner rather than later.” Oscar rolled his eyes. Riding lawnmower DUI was what Oscar usually dealt with. Notmurder. “You want to tell me what the hell happened with the mayor?”
Oscar slumped into the chair opposite me as I glanced up at the camera in the corner.
“I thought you said not to say anything.”
“Well, I’m asking you to talk now. And don’t tell me this is the Canceled Killer’s fault.”
