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  When I arrived at the crime scene, Adler, my partner, stood out front, listening to an elderly woman with her hair in rollers. She wore a shapeless shift of floral polyester and rubber thong sandals in DayGlo pink.

  Adler made the introductions. “This is Mrs. Eagleton, the one who called us.”

  The woman straightened her shoulders and thrust out her scrawny chest, hiking her shift to expose knobby knees. “Captain of the Azalea Acres Neighborhood Crime Watch. I take my job seriously.”

  “How did you discover the body, Mrs. Eagleton?”

  “I heard the howling of Precious, Edith’s Siamese. I tried going in, but the doors were locked.”

  “That’s when you called us?”

  “Of course not. I wouldn’t waste your valuable time unless I was sure there was a problem. I went home for my flashlight, came back, looked in the window to see if I could spot anything suspicious.”

  The window she’d indicated was at least six feet above the ground. “You looked in that window?”

  “I used a stepladder. And my flashlight.”

  Azalea Acres, I thought, must be the safest neighborhood in the state. I felt a stab of compassion for Mrs. Eagleton’s surviving neighbors. “Thank you. You’ve been very helpful.”

  “Is that it? This is a murder, isn’t it?”

  Charlotte Douglas

  USA TODAY bestselling author Charlotte Douglas, a versatile writer who has produced over twenty-five books, including romances, suspense, Gothics and even a Star Trek novel, has now created a mystery series featuring Maggie Skerritt, a witty and irreverent homicide detective in a small fictional town on Florida’s central west coast.

  Douglas’s life has been as varied as her writings. Born in North Carolina and raised in Florida, she earned her degree in English from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and attended graduate school at the University of South Florida in Tampa. She has worked as an actor, a journalist and a church musician and taught English and speech at the secondary and college level for almost two decades. For several summers while newly married and still in college, she even manned a U.S. Forest Service lookout in northwest Montana with her husband.

  Married to her high school sweetheart for over four decades, Douglas now writes full-time. With her husband and their two cairn terriers, she divides her year between their home on Florida’s central west coast—a place not unlike Pelican Bay—and their mountaintop retreat in the Great Smokies of North Carolina.

  She enjoys hearing from readers, who can contact her at [email protected].

  CHARLOTTE DOUGLAS

  Pelican Bay

  PELICAN BAY

  copyright © 2005 Charlotte Douglas

  ISBN 1-55254-357-9

  All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher, Harlequin Enterprises Limited, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, Ontario, Canada M3B 3K9.

  All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all incidents are pure invention.

  This edition published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.

  ® and TM are trademarks of the publisher. Trademarks indicated with ® are registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office, the Canadian Trade Marks Office and in other countries.

  TheNextNovel.com

  PELICAN BAY, FLORIDA

  Welcome to Pelican Bay, a picturesque little village nestled on Florida’s central west coast, where the gentle waves of the Gulf of Mexico lap its sugar-sand beaches and the sun shines brightly most days of the year. The town is a mecca for tourists, retirees, snowbirds and the occasional criminal, who flock to its antique shops, upscale restaurants, boat-filled marina and the jogging and biking trails that line the waterfront and bisect the business district. As in every paradise, trouble often lurks here just below the surface. That’s where Detective Maggie Skerritt comes in.

  Contents

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  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

  EPILOGUE

  COMING NEXT MONTH

  CHAPTER 1

  “Ma’am?”

  Dave Adler, the young patrol officer with the fresh-faced good looks of a teen idol, filled the doorway to my office with his six-foot frame.

  “It’s Detective Skerritt, or Maggie, remember?” When he called me ma’am, I felt like his mother.

  “Detective Skerritt.” His face reddened. “We got another home invasion. Sheriff’s crime-scene unit is there now, but I doubt they’ll find much. It was smash, grab and gone.”

  I slumped in my desk chair and stared at the half-eaten burger and grease-stained container of cold, soggy fries on the blotter. Working late to catch up on my ever-increasing mountain of paperwork, I’d been too busy to eat.

  “Where do they think this is, Tampa?” I swept the leftovers into the wastebasket beside my desk. “I’ve been with the Pelican Bay Department fifteen years and never had an armed intrusion. Now, within three weeks, we’ve had two. Same MO?”

  Adler nodded and scratched an earlobe protruding beneath his sandy hair. “Busted in the door. But only one perp. Adult male, according to the description the old man gave us. Not teenagers like the last time.”

  “Anything taken?”

  “A gun, .22 automatic.”

  “No money?” The previous home invaders had gone after cash, not bothering with anything that had to be fenced. I massaged my aching temples.

  “Just the gun. Didn’t seem interested in the old man’s wallet, and he’d just cashed a social security check.”

  I smiled at Adler. The kid did his homework, and without the cocky, smart-ass attitude of many of the younger recruits. “He ignored the money? Something scare this guy off?”

  He shrugged. “The victim was real rattled. His wife was in shock and couldn’t talk. Maybe tomorrow when they’ve calmed down, you can get something useful out of them. I gotta get back on the road. Natives are restless tonight. Full moon.”

  I didn’t see him leave. I was staring at the mountain of folders in my in-basket and feeling older by the minute. Too damned old at forty-eight. I’d put in my twenty years, and then some, but every time I thought about retiring, I wondered what the hell I’d do without the job. The pile of papers before me represented drug dealers, car thieves, convenience-store robbers and child abusers. Reentry into so-called normal society was a bigger adjustment than I was prepared to make.

  I slid the top folder from the pile, pulled up a form on my ancient computer and typed the date. I typed Columbus-style, find it and land on it. One of these days, I kept promising myself, I’d sign up for a computer class at the junior college and learn to type.

  I finished the first report, left my closet they called an office and walked up the narrow hallway to the front of the station. While I poured a cup of coffee with an uncanny resemblance to industrial sludge, Darcy Wi
lkins, the only other female on the force, was speaking into the mike at the dispatch desk.

  “Contact a Mrs. Eagleton at 234 Grove Street,” Darcy said. “She’s concerned about her next-door neighbor. Thinks she might be ill and need assistance.”

  “10-4,” Adler’s static-laden voice replied. “Almost there now.”

  Darcy switched back to the telephone and assured the caller that help was on the way.

  Some in Pelican Bay would claim that Darcy, an attractive young African-American, and I obtained our jobs only by the grace of affirmative action, but they would be dead wrong. We were both damned good at what we did, especially since doing our jobs meant bucking the prejudices of one of the oldest good-old-boys clubs known to man, the small-town police department.

  I stirred sugar into my coffee and lifted the disposable cup to Darcy in mock salute. “Back to a life of drama and high adventure.”

  I was halfway to my office when Adler’s voice crackled over the radio. “Contact Detective Skerritt. I’ve got a signal seven here. And I’m gonna need Animal Control on this one, too.”

  “Tell him to ring me on a landline,” I called to Darcy. “No need to alert all the little old ladies glued to their police scanners that we have a dead body in Pelican Bay. Let ’em read it in tomorrow’s Times.”

  When I arrived at the address on Grove Street, just a few blocks from the station, Adler stood out front beneath the streetlight, listening to an elderly woman with her hair in rollers, who wore a shapeless shift of floral polyester and rubber thong sandals in Day-Glo pink. She spoke like a Chatty Cathy doll wound too tight and pointed first to the address where we stood, then to the house next door. Adler scribbled furiously on his clipboard.

  I scanned the quiet residential street, overhung with live oaks and camphor trees that puddled the street with darkness between the streetlights. A full moon, framed by tall palms, floated in the cloudless sky, and the sea breeze retained remnants of the day’s heat. The night was a chamber of commerce dream, the kind tourists paid thousands of dollars to enjoy. If the signal seven turned out to be a murder, the chamber was not going to be happy. Pelican Bay’s homicide rate was the lowest on Florida’s West Coast.

  The only sounds besides the high-pitched chatter of Adler’s witness were the papery rattle of palm fronds in the breeze, raucous laughter from a too-loud television down the block, the blare of an approaching siren, and the piercing wail of an unhappy baby. Its cry made the hair stand up on the back of my neck.

  The house where the body had been reported was unlighted. A car, too shrouded in darkness to identify, stood in the carport. Everything else appeared normal, until I realized the baby’s cries emanated from the unlighted building.

  I interrupted Chatty Cathy’s monologue. “Is there a kid in there?”

  Adler shook his head and nodded toward the old lady. “This is Mrs. Eagleton, the one who called us.”

  The woman straightened her shoulders and thrust out her scrawny chest, hiking her shift to expose knobby knees. “Captain of the Azalea Acres Neighborhood Crime Watch. I take my job seriously.”

  An ambulance turned the corner at a clip and headed toward us, lights flashing. It slowed to a stop behind Adler’s cruiser and throttled its siren mid-wail.

  “You said she was dead.” Mrs. Eagleton glared at Adler accusingly.

  “Officer Adler,” I said, “assist the paramedics, will you?”

  Looking as if he’d been released from hazardous duty, Adler scurried to lead the paramedics toward the rear of the house.

  “Now, Mrs. Eagleton, how did you happen to discover the body?”

  “As crime-watch captain, I keep my eye on the comings and goings of my neighbors. I saw Edith come home as usual—”

  “Edith?”

  “Edith Wainwright, the dead woman. She works for the telephone company, and she came home at her usual time today. I didn’t think any more about her until after dark, when I noticed she hadn’t turned on her lights.”

  “Outside lights?”

  Mrs. Eagleton shook her head, bouncing the pink foam rollers. “The light’s always on in the living room, because Edith watches TV after supper or sometimes reads those self-help books. You know the kind.”

  I nodded. “Then what?”

  “I went outside to check if her car was still there, and that’s when I heard it.” She jerked her thumb over her shoulder toward the house. “You can hear it yourself. Hard to miss, isn’t it?”

  The howling sawed on my tired nerves, and I longed for a switch to shut it off. “What is it?”

  “Precious, Edith’s Siamese. When I saw the car still there and heard Precious crying, I knocked on all the doors but Edith didn’t answer. I tried going in, but the doors were all locked.”

  “That’s when you called us?”

  “Of course not.” She shook her head until her rollers threatened to take flight. “I wouldn’t waste your valuable time unless I was sure there was a problem.”

  Properly chastised, I plowed on. “Then what?”

  “I went home for my flashlight, came back and looked in the windows to see if I could spot anything suspicious.”

  Azalea Acres, I thought, must be the safest neighborhood in the state. Nothing got by this one.

  “As you can see,” the woman said, “her draperies aren’t closed.”

  Lamps had been turned on, and light streamed through the uncovered windows of the Wainwright house where Adler and the paramedics had gone inside.

  Mrs. Eagleton pointed with a bony finger. “When I looked through the dining room window, there, I saw Edith on the floor in the hallway with Precious beside her. That’s when I called the police.”

  The window she indicated was a wide, shallow opening at least six feet above the ground, and the woman couldn’t hit five-two on tiptoe. “You looked in that window?”

  “I used a stepladder. And my flashlight.”

  I felt a stab of compassion for Mrs. Eagleton’s surviving neighbors. “Thank you. You’ve been very helpful.”

  “Is that it? This is a murder, isn’t it? Aren’t you going to ask me about suspects or motives or anything?”

  “What makes you think it’s murder?”

  “Well, you’re here, for starters.” Her face took on a lean and hungry look.

  “We’re just following procedure. Probably a natural death. Most of them are.”

  Disappointment washed over Mrs. Eagleton’s sharp features.

  For starters, she’d said. “Any other reason you thought of murder?”

  “No, it’s just that—” She squirmed and curled her toes in her flip-flops.

  “Just what?”

  “Edith Wainwright was…well…”

  Playing around on her boyfriend, wealthy with a greedy heir, drug dealer gone rogue? “What was Edith, Mrs. Eagleton?”

  “Fat.”

  I shook my head, thinking I’d heard wrong. “Fat?”

  She nodded, sending the pink foam into motion again.

  “What does fat have to do with murder?”

  “Fat people are repulsive. Lots of folks can’t stand ’em. You know these crazy young hooligans these days. Don’t need more than a dislike to kill somebody.”

  I clamped a lid on my disgust. “I’ll be in touch, if we have any more questions.” I turned my back on the woman and headed toward the house.

  God save us all, I thought. Mrs. Eagleton’s gaze burned between my shoulder blades. If obesity was a motive for murder, over a quarter of the population was at risk of being whacked. I considered Mrs. Eagleton’s skinny frame. Unless someone had a contract out on the terminally nosy, she, at least, was safe.

  “What have we got?” I asked Adler as I entered the house.

  “A strange case. No sign of forced entry, no sign of a struggle, no sign of anything except a dead woman and a damned screaming cat.”

  I plunged my hands into the pockets of my blazer and began my inspection. Edith Wainwright lay like a beached whale a
cross the threshold between the living room and the hallway, her dark, sightless eyes staring at the ceiling. Neither the extra pounds nor the trauma of death disguised the beauty of the woman’s face, the product of good bones, flawless skin and youth.

  “God, she’s just a kid,” I said.

  “Yes, ma’am. Twenty-two, according to the neighbor.”

  Younger than Adler. Less than half my age. Retirement was looking more attractive by the minute. “Can’t you shut that cat up? And don’t call me ma’am.”

  Luckily, I didn’t know then that the Siamese would wail for almost two more hours before Animal Control showed up to carry it away.

  Doris Cline, the medical examiner, arrived. Wearing gray sweats and Reeboks, with her thick gray hair cropped close and her trim body tanned and fit, she looked more like a physical education teacher than an M.E. as she started her preliminary examination.

  “Poison. Cyanide,” Doris said when she’d finished, and pointed to a thin trail of vomit at the corner of the victim’s mouth. She stripped the latex gloves from her hands. “That musty, acrid smell confirms it. Time of death probably between 5:30 and 6:30 p.m.”

  “Any idea how the poison was administered?” I scanned the room for a syringe, a glass, plates or other utensils, but found nothing.

  “Ingestion,” Doris said, “judging from the condition of her mouth and pharynx.”

  “Murder?” Continuing my search, I threw the question over my shoulder while Doris gathered her equipment and prepared to leave.

  She shrugged. “From the looks of things I’d bet suicide, but finding out for sure, that’s your job, my friend. I am going home to bed.”