Death of a Coupon Clipper (18 page)

It was snowing again the following morning. The forecast was bleak. At least ten more
inches, with temperatures dipping below zero. Hayley brought some hot chicken noodle
soup, which she made the night before at Randy’s house, so she wouldn’t have to leave
the office for lunch and spent the entire day working on her next column. She had
been so busy thinking about Candace’s murder, she had completely forgotten that the
Wild and Crazy Couponing
taping had been rescheduled after the murder to Friday morning.

Tomorrow.

She hadn’t even practiced since that ill-fated run-in with Candace at the Shop ’n
Save shortly before her murder. Mona hadn’t been doing any dry runs either. She was
keeping a low profile, hiding out at home and not venturing out much after she got
sprung from the local jail.

By quitting time Sal offered to drop Hayley off at the supermarket to get one last
practice in before the big show.

Sal could hardly contain himself; he was so excited. His wife was finally arriving
home from her trip this evening, so his life was finally going to get back to his
much revered routine.

No more frozen dinners in the microwave.

No more wrinkled shirts.

No more sleeping alone.

Now he was just worried the bad weather would delay her flight from arriving on time.
After dropping Hayley off at the store, he was going to drive straight to the Bar
Harbor Airport and sit there in one of those hard metal chairs near the baggage claim
area, where she would eventually emerge. He was not going to move until he saw her.
Even if her flight from Boston was canceled and she had to spend the night at Logan,
it didn’t matter. He was going to wait for as long as it took to finally bring his
wife home.

Hayley was happy for Sal. His poor wife was never going to be allowed out of his sight
again. But at least she loved him.

The store wasn’t busy when Hayley grabbed her cart, armed with a fresh stack of coupons,
and, after starting the stopwatch app on her phone, began to tick off to herself the
items she needed.

She knew household cleaning supplies were her best bet, so she rushed past the aisle
of spices and ethnic foods and veered down, past the laundry detergents and surface
cleaners, to the mops and brooms and sponges. She grabbed a couple of bottles of Pine-Sol
and Scrubbing Bubbles off the shelf and then quickly perused her coupons, finding
one with a whopping two dollars off a Lysol Toilet Bowl Cleaner Value Pack. She reached
down to grab it, when she noticed that a big bottle of Clorox Concentrated Regular-Bleach
had been stuffed in the wrong place behind a stack of Mop & Glo Multi-Surface Floor
Cleaners.

Hayley knew Clorox was on her list, so this happy accident would save her valuable
time in trying to find it in the aisle.

As she lifted it up, she noticed the white bottle was smeared with a red streak.

Upon closer inspection Hayley’s heart nearly stopped.

The red mark wasn’t ink.

It looked like dried blood.

Spanky McFarland had told her Ron and Candace were arguing in the household cleaning
supplies aisle. He also said it was close to closing time when he saw them, so the
place was probably close to being empty. Once Ron shooed Spanky away, he could have
grabbed the scissors Candace was undoubtedly carrying, being the consummate couponer,
and could’ve stabbed Candace. Then, perhaps, he dragged her lifeless body into the
stockroom, which was just a few feet away from where they were standing, and hid the
body until his staff working the night shift—Bethany, the cashier, and Spanky, the
bag boy—clocked out and went home.

He could have dragged the body to his car and then stuffed it in his trunk. Driving
over to Candace’s house, he might have dumped the body facedown in the snow on the
front lawn to make it look like she was attacked outside her home. Then he could have
conceivably returned to the store and used the Clorox to clean up any bloodstains
that might have splattered in the aisle. In his frantic attempts to scrub the crime
scene clean, a speck of blood got smeared on the bottle. When he was finished, he
stuffed the bottle behind the mops, and just forgot about it.

It made perfect sense.

But it was a wild theory.

And it depended on Ron Hopkins being a cold-blooded killer.

Hayley went to put the bottle of Clorox in her cart. She could have the police test
the red mark to see if it was, in fact, Candace Culpepper’s blood.

Suddenly a hand shot out and grabbed her wrist.

Hayley spun around and found herself, face-to-face, with a very agitated-looking Ron
Hopkins.

“You don’t want that bottle, Hayley. It’s only half full. I use that one to clean
up messes in the aisle. Kids dropping cartons of milk. That sort of thing.”

“It’s okay, Ron. I’ll take it anyway,” Hayley said, wrenching her wrist free.

“Why would you want a used product?”

That’s when he noticed the speck of red on the side of the Clorox bottle.

His eyes narrowed as he focused on it.

He made a grab for it.

Hayley anticipated the move and pulled the bottle closer to her breast, as if she
were a mother protecting a child.

“I can’t let you take that, Hayley,” Ron said, an urgency overtaking him. “There’s
plenty of bottles at the other end of the aisle.”

“I’m taking this one, Ron.”

He kept his eyes fixed on the red smear.

“What is that, Ron? What are you looking at?”

“It looks like . . .”

“Blood?”

Ron moved his eyes from the bottle to Hayley. “I’m not sure what you’re trying to
say. . . .”

“Is it Candace’s blood?”

Ron stared at her for a moment before a flash of anger hit him and he lashed out,
punching a fist into a display of Mrs. Meyer’s Clean Day Limited Edition Gingerbread
Dish Soap, sending a dozen bottles clattering to the floor.

“Give me that bottle, Hayley. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Hayley backed away from him, still clutching the Clorox, suddenly believing Lenora
wasn’t making it up when she told Hayley about her husband’s ferocious temper.

He moved closer to her.

Spanky McFarland, alerted by the crashing soaps, rounded the corner, got one glimpse
of Hayley’s showdown with Ron, and scooted back up front, pretending he hadn’t seen
anything.

“Do you think I killed her?” Ron asked.

Hayley shook her head. “No, Ron. Honestly, I don’t. But what happened here that night?
What were you two fighting about?”

Hayley put a hand up, making the point she didn’t want him invading her space by getting
any closer.

Ron immediately got the message and backed off.

He shook his head solemnly.

“I couldn’t stand that woman and she knew it. She was always in here with her coupons,
using them for everything, leaving with hundreds of dollars of free groceries. My
business was already in trouble, Hayley. I was losing money by the hour and she knew
it, and she took a perverse pleasure in bleeding me dry with her obsessive couponing.”

“You clashed over coupons?”

Ron nodded, embarrassed.

“Okay, so if I take this bottle to the police and have it tested, then it will turn
out that this speck right here is not blood?”

“No, it’s definitely blood.”

“But you can assure me it’s not Candace’s blood?”

“No . . . it’s Candace’s blood.”

“Ron . . .”

“Look, that night I came out of the stockroom and saw her cleaning out this whole
aisle. She was going to get everything here for something like a buck-fifty. I couldn’t
take it anymore, so I yelled at her to stop. I guess my voice startled her, because
she had her scissors out and was clipping a coupon out of a flyer and accidentally
cut herself. She was holding her hand and it was bleeding, and some of it must have
gotten on the Clorox bottle. She was cursing me out, and that’s when we really got
into it. I told her I was no longer going to accept any coupons from her, and she
just laughed at me and threatened to sue me, and that’s when I totally lost it.”

“Did you strike her, Ron?”

“No, Hayley. I did scream at her and, yes, I did threaten her. But I could never hit
a woman, despite what Lenora might tell you.”

“How did it end?”

“We both calmed down after a while and I apologized to her.”

“Did she accept your apology?”

“Yes. And believe it or not, she actually said she was sorry, too, and asked if we
could forget the whole thing. She told me that when she came into the store, she was
already upset about something that had just happened, and me yelling at her just caused
her to snap.”

“Did you ask why she was upset?”

“Yeah, but she said she didn’t want to talk about it. I saw tears in her eyes and
she had a hard time keeping it together. When I reached out and touched her arm and
asked if there was anything I could do to help, she just left her cart and ran out
of the store without buying anything.”

Hayley believed Ron.

Liddy was right.

He couldn’t hurt a fly.

Or spider.

The question now was why was Candace Culpepper so distressed when she arrived at the
Shop ’n Save with her coupons on the day she was murdered?

And who was responsible for making her feel that way?

“Donnie, what the hell are you doing?” Hayley screamed, startling Officer Donnie,
who flapped his arms frantically to keep himself from tipping over in his chair.

He had been sitting in Sergio’s office, feet up on the desk, casually cutting a picture
out of an old
Rolling Stone
magazine, when Hayley appeared in the doorway.

“Nothing! Sergio said I could use his office while he was in Brazil, so I’m not doing
anything wrong,” Officer Donnie whined, a bit too defensively, planting his feet on
the floor and sitting upright in the chair.

Hayley marched inside and over to the desk. “Using Sergio’s office is
not
the hot-button issue here.”

“Oh. Okay,” Donnie said, relieved. He thought for a moment and then looked up at Hayley
with a crinkled brow and a curious look on his face. “What’s the hot-button issue?”

Hayley pointed at the scissors in his hand. “What are you doing?”

“This? It’s Mila Kunis,” he said, holding up the picture from the magazine and showing
Hayley. “She’s an actress I grew up watching on this sitcom called
That ’70s Show,
but now she’s this, like, serious actress and she’s in all these big, important movies,
and she’s getting nominated for Academy Awards and stuff like that. But she’s even
hotter now that she’s gotten older, but she still seems really nice, and I’ve always
had this, like, big crush on her. . . . She’s so beautiful and she inspires me, you
know. She’s the kind of girl I’d like to settle down with someday—”

“Donnie . . .”

“And Sergio said it was okay to hang pictures in our lockers, here at the station,
and I thought to myself, ‘Whose beautiful, smiling face do I want to see every day
when I show up for my shift?’—”

“Donnie . . .”

“And that’s when I thought. . . ‘Mila Kunis!’ So I dug through some magazines and
found this old
Rolling Stone
article that called her the sexiest actress in Hollywood, or something like that,
so I decided to cut it out and—”

“I’m not talking about Mila Kunis, Donnie! I know who Mila Kunis is! I’m talking about
those! What are those?” Hayley yelled, pointing at the scissors in Donnie’s hand.

“Um, they’re scissors, Hayley,” Officer Donnie said, snorting and shaking his head
at Hayley’s stupidity. He demonstrated how to use them, before saying under his breath,
“Like, duh . . .”

“I know what scissors look like, Donnie. But those particular scissors look exactly
like the ones I found sticking out of Candace Culpepper’s back!”

Donnie’s face froze for a few seconds. When he opened his mouth to speak, his words
came out in a tiny squeak. “Well, they’re not the same ones.”

Hayley folded her arms and stared at him. “You’re lying.”

“Am not,” Officer Donnie said in a tiny whisper.

Hayley waited him out.

She knew he would crack.

Eventually.

Officer Donnie carefully set the scissors down on the desk and sat back in his chair.
He looked like a child caught red-handed trying to pilfer a Nutter Butter from the
cookie jar and ready for his scolding.

There was an unbearable silence.

Finally Donnie spoke. “What if they are the same scissors?”

“Then you’ve just used a murder weapon to cut out pictures for the collage in your
damn locker! That’s called ‘contaminating evidence,’ Donnie!”

“Well, I couldn’t find any scissors in Sergio’s desk, and then I went hunting in the
office supply closet for another pair, but we didn’t have any. So that’s when I remembered
logging these in as evidence, and I didn’t think it would do any harm just to cut
out one picture. I was going to put them right back.”

“Your fingerprints are all over them now, Donnie!”

“That doesn’t make me guilty!”

“I know,” Hayley said.

Only guilty of being an idiot.

But saying that out loud was not going to help matters.

“I suggest you take those scissors and go put them back in the plastic bag you found
them in and return them to the evidence room. Then you need to write a full report
informing Sergio what you’ve done.”

“Why do I have to tell him? It’s only going to make him mad!”

“Because if you try to bury the fact you’ve accidentally tampered with the evidence,
it’s only going to make the department look bad, and when I find the killer and he
goes on trial—”

“When
you
find the killer?”

Hayley stopped.

She didn’t blink.

She just kept going.

“I mean, when you, the police, find the killer and he goes on trial, a screwup like
this is bad enough. A cover-up is immediate grounds for an appeal.”

She had seen enough
Law & Order
episodes to know Donnie’s stalker-like fixation on Mila Kunis and his obsessive need
to have her image near him at all times was a potential disaster for the case.

“Okay, fine. I’ll type up the report. I wish I never touched these scissors. They’re
broken anyway.”

“What do you mean? They look fine to me.”

“They don’t work right.”

For a moment Hayley studied the scissors lying next to the copy of
Rolling Stone
on the desk and then she gasped.

“Are you all right, Hayley?”

“Yes, I’m great. There’s nothing wrong with those scissors. You’re right-handed, aren’t
you, Donnie?”

“Yeah. Why?”

“Those scissors are made for a left-handed person.”

“Oh, that explains why I had a hell of a time cutting out the picture.”

The significance of this discovery was totally lost on Donnie.

And Hayley was not about to bring him up to speed. He had botched things enough for
one day, and she didn’t need him to know that she had just zeroed in on a major suspect.

Hayley rubbed her jaw.

It still throbbed from her run-in with Candace’s mouthy, trashy sister, Cassidy Culpepper.
As Hayley replayed their big confrontation scene from the other night over and over
in her mind, she remembered assuming Cassidy was right-handed when Cassidy reared
back to take a swing at her.

That’s why she leaned into the punch and took a direct hit.

Because Cassidy came at her with a left hook.

She was left-handed.

And a left-handed person would most certainly own a left-handed pair of scissors.