Chapter 60

“Circumstantial evidence is a very tricky thing,” answered Holmes thoughtfully. “It may seem to point very straight to one thing, but if you shift your own point of view a little, you may find it pointing in an equally uncompromising manner to something entirely different.”

-Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Boscombe Valley Mystery

I eased into a tight space at the 20th, parking by ear. Rushing through the double doors, Auntie Dragon’s voice rang clear above the rest of the shouting. Hers and Karl Patrick’s. He was trying to calm everyone down whilst she was keeping them all riled up, telling everyone she was caught in a tragedy of justice. Mother, too, was in the crowd and looked concerned. I waved, then pushed into the eye of the storm.

A police Captain surrounded by a lot of uniformed cops was addressing Glendy and Lucille and Auntie Elizabeth and George. “Show me somebody’s license,” he yelled at them. “Anybody’s!”

Glendy and Lucille held up their right hands and swore that they were part of the CrimeStoppers program. “We don’t need a license,” they said in tandem.

“We were only doing our nightly surveillance like we do all the time,” Lucille added.

“She’s right,” Glendy piped up. “We thought there was a perp in the area, and we were looking for him.”

Karl Patrick intervened. “These are just elderly citizens exercising their rights under the Constitution,” he said in his best lawyerly tones. “They certainly weren’t stalking anyone. It’s absurd to suggest that they were. I demand they be released immediately.”

Then Auntie Elizabeth spotted me. She pointed and exclaimed, “There she is. That’s my niece, the insurance investigator. That’s the one we were helping out. She’s got a license!” I felt like running.

Karl Patrick went through the crowd like a destroyer and took my arm.

“I need to confer with her,” he said to the Captain and walked me out of the melee to a far corner. The noise level behind us escalated as we walked away.

“DD, are you okay? What the hell happened to you? You look terrible,” Karl whispered. “You smell like you’ve been in a fire, and you’ve got blood on you. Does it have anything to do with this?”

“I’m okay. And no, this doesn’t have anything to do with the way I look. I was in a fire in Wisconsin.”

“Shhh,” he warned. His nostrils flared and his eyes narrowed. “We’ll talk about that later. No one here needs to know that. You’ve got to help me here. I can’t figure out what’s going on. What in heaven’s name were these people doing?”

“It all started because I was doing a surveillance job for United Insurance. I had to go to Wis... you know where. I didn’t get back in time to take my 6 am shift, so they were watching my subject for me. They really are in the CrimeStoppers program. By the way, who called in the stalking complaint to the cops”

Karl shook his head as he rifled through the paperwork he’d been given. “Lezze, here it is. A Mrs. Claudine Romani, at 37...”

“I know the address by heart. Oh shit. That’s my subject.”

“So the subject of your surveillance for United Insurance called in a stalking complaint against your relatives and your next door neighbors?”

“Can you get them off?”

“Is that all of it, DD? I know there’s more. You better tell me the rest.”

“Well, Auntie said something in one of her phone calls that they’d caught whoever was stalking me.”

“What? You never told me someone was stalking you.”

“Well maybe harassing is a better choice of words. I’ve been getting threatening notes slipped under my door. My tires were slashed, I got packages of dead shrimp in the mail, my phone rang repeatedly in the middle of the night, that kind of thing. It got so bad, I installed a nanny cam, but I didn’t get any video.”

Karl was thumbing the paperwork again. “Jesus, Mary and Joseph. Listen to this, DD. The twins and your Auntie Dragon made a citizen’s arrest at that same address. It was some guy named Harry Pinner. Do you know him?”

“No. I don’t think so.”

“Well they claimed he was the guy stalking you. Trouble is, they didn’t have a shred of evidence. Your Auntie kept insisting that he was the one who shoved a note under your door. But without anything more than that, the cops told her they couldn’t arrest him. They ordered the gang to let him go, but the twins and your Auntie wouldn’t. They were holding him at bay with a can of wasp spray. They told the cops they had to wait for CrimeStoppers or else they couldn’t collect any reward.”

“I know they’ve been tracking the wanted lists from CrimeStoppers on the Internet,” I informed Karl.

“Well CrimeStoppers didn’t show up. It turns out this guy wasn’t on anybody’s wanted list and there wasn’t going to be any reward, period. That’s when your clan finally agreed to release Mr. Pinner.”

I frowned. “I see what you mean. But in her defense, Auntie did see the guy who put the last note under my door. Who knows? Maybe this is the same guy. And as far as CrimeStoppers, the gang was doing what the tip line tells them to or they don’t get the $1,000 cash reward. They...”

‘I know the CrimeStopper procedures,” Karl said. “Unfortunately this Pinner threatened to sue the twins and your Auntie for being too rough while performing the citizen’s arrest.”

“Uh oh. That’s not good. They didn’t use the wasp spray on him, did they?”

“Well, no, but...,”

“So that won’t hold up in court, will it?”

“How the hell should I know? I wasn’t there, and your gang is proving it can’t shoot straight. Who knows what they did to the guy.”

“Karl, listen. I feel so guilty. I’m the one that’s really at fault here, not them. I’ve been fired and...”

“Fired?”

“Yes. What I’m trying to tell you is that I’m the one who got them into this trouble. Thankfully you love a challenge, Karl. Here’s your proving ground. You’ve got to get them off, if not for them, for me.”

“Frankly, I don’t know what’s going to happen. Our best strategy is to hope these cops want to get rid of everybody out there. I can just feel them getting ulcers, and I hope they’ll dismiss the charges all around. Let’s get to it. And don’t forget when this is over, we have to talk.”

“I know, I know.”

“Are you sure you’re going to be all right DD? You really don’t look well at all.”

I didn’t reply. It wasn’t the right time to tell him about last night.