In which the circle is completed
She was Velia Solano the elder, but not quite. She had the same face like an olive, the same dark eyes, the same cast of the mouth as Velia Solano the younger, but she looked no more than fifty. A third Velia Solano. Velia Solano the middling.
And yes, they were truly all one. He could see it in those eyes, just as Juan Garza had said. It wasn’t a hoax after all.
“Who are you?” Caldicott asked.
She smiled, not without sympathy for his confusion. “I…
In which everything and nothing is solved
An early morning following a sleepless night spent digging through all those binders and boxes and files without finding one damn thing. Detective Sergeant William Caldicott watched the sun rise through his east-facing kitchen window while his coffee cooled on the table beside his folded hands.
Velia Solano, time traveler.
Right.
His morning mental fog slowly burned off. If time travel technology existed, it would be the most powerful weapon ever created, top secret, heavily guarded, probably not even much used lest the secret be stolen. …
In which the chickens come home to roost
“Velia Solano’s cousin was one of Judge Perry’s victims.” Caldicott had stopped for a cheeseburger on the way back to HQ and picked up one for Satterleigh. But rather than bring it inside, he called and told her to meet him for lunch in his car.
A weird request but Satterleigh complied since free food was involved. Unwrapping her sandwich, she said, “So you think she’s after the lawyer.”
“I think she’s after your lawyer, Hope. What the hell happened to your neck?”
She had inspected the small bruises in the…
In which the deceased returns
Dark clouds scudded overhead as Caldicott pulled into the gravel drive, rocks crunching under his tires. Inside the well-maintained gray farmhouse, a shadow moving across the kitchen window paused to look out. The old couple who lived here, Tom and Angie Claymore, were expecting him. He’d called ahead and asked them to see that their boarder, Juan Garza, stayed put.
Cladicott turned off the car, got out, and shoved the door shut. The dull thud echoed off the farmhouse, the big detached garage, and the barn in the distance. The effect was oddly…
In which darkness gathers
Half an hour north of Benton, the county seat, an old farmhouse’s windows glowed pale yellow long into the black night. Within, a detective sifted through boxes of unofficial records, seeking answers.
Detective Sergeant William Caldicott had bought this place at auction sixteen years ago after his wife Denise left him for a college professor two states away. He’d never figured out how she had met the bastard, much less how they had carried on a ten-month affair without his knowing. She sprang it on him from the safety of a cell phone two hundred…
Why the world didn’t suddenly change
I’m not excessively old yet, but I’m not as young as I used to be. Over the course of my life, thirteen men have now been president of the U.S., and although I remember nothing of Eisenhower and very little of Kennedy, that’s long enough to have learned not to expect too much of the changing of the guard.
Yes, different leaders have different agendas, different ideas, and different styles. Some prove more effective and others less. But at the end of the day, their administrations are, in the grand scheme of things, as fleeting as a heartbeat. …
In which a community is shown not to be so innocent
Read: Part 1
“Too melodramatic.”
The assessment, rendered by Detective Hope Satterleigh, was delivered with a finality that defied objection. Caldicott would have agreed had he not seen Velia Solano’s tricks with purses and licenses, not to mention her vanishing act. How had she done that?
Standing with her at the edge of their cramped office, where a folding table next to a sink served as a makeshift coffee counter, Caldicott watched Satterleigh pull the pot from the ancient office coffee maker and swirl the dark liquid. She peered at it with a scientific scowl. …
In which the body is discovered
Two things caught Detective Sergeant William Caldicott’s attention. First, a puff of musty wind escaped from an old house whose windows and doors, shuttered for a decade, had suddenly been thrust open. And that was strange because this stretch of the riverbank was devoid of homes. The land rose from the pebble-strewn shore to a gravel road that hugged the base of a thirty-foot slope awash in ankle-high grasses and shaggy stalks crowned with tiny flowers of red, yellow, and blue. Across the river, a state highway passed behind broken stands of oak and maple in full summer leaf. This…
202Done
Tools and techniques for reaching more readers this year
When 2020 began, I set for myself the goal of revamping my languishing author platform. I had several problems. My email list was stuck at about 120 subscribers, most of whom never opened a newsletter. Worse, I hardly ever sent a newsletter. My website featured a stale blog, and my social media accounts fared little better. In many ways, I may as well not have had these tools.
Not being a marketing genius, I signed up for a free email marketing course. I then formulated a simple plan based on what I learned and, early in January, began to execute…
By now you’ve probably heard that Jupiter and Saturn are approaching their “great conjunction” on December 21, 2020. The two largest planets in our solar system will be a mere tenth of a degree apart in the sky that evening, only one fifth the width of the full moon. Nobody has seen the pair this close since 1226, 794 years ago!
So you really ought to see it. Because weather can play havoc with the event, look for the pair every evening from now until the end of the year. They appear in the southwest once the sun has set…
Dale E. Lehman
Purveyor of mysteries, science fiction, humor, and more. Get “The Fibonacci Murders” free: https://www.daleelehman.com/free-ebook-offer.
