Flowers for Her

Flowers for Her

D. A. Ratliff

A Detective Elijah Boone Mystery

I came home to an unexpected vase of flowers, and my hands trembled as I opened the attached note. This wasn’t the first time that flowers had arrived at my door. Each time I received flowers, another young woman died.

The note repeated the exact words I had seen before.

Flowers for the dearly departed. You can’t stop me. You didn’t stop him.

But that was what the city of New Orleans paid me to do. I’m Detective Lieutenant Elijah Boone, and I’m paid to stop killers, but whoever sent the note was correct. I hadn’t stopped him yet.

I called Hank Guidry, my partner, and notified Captain Lourdes, who dispatched a forensics team. There was no need for uniforms to canvass the neighborhood. The four times before, when receiving flowers, no one saw anything. My doorbell camera and newly installed surveillance cameras should be enough. I accessed the footage from the cameras on my laptop. No one approached the house except one lone guy, who drove up in an older car, placed the vase of flowers on the porch, and left. The camera located on the corner of the house caught his license number. While waiting for the team to arrive, I ran his plates—Joshua Chandler, eighteen, lived in the neighborhood. I called for a unit to pick him up and take him to the station for me.

Then the call I didn’t want came. A dog walker found another body in a city park, a young woman who matched the description of four previous victims. This had to stop.

I diverted my partner to the crime scene and joined him after the forensics team arrived at my house. Yellow tape surrounded the area, and a small tent stood over the body. A young woman in her twenties, with long brown hair, under five foot five inches, strangled just like the others. ME Jullia Marrow glared at me as I ducked into the tent.

“Stop this, Eli.”

I’m trying.

Leaving Detective Cardia Fleming in charge of the scene, Hank and I returned to the Major Crimes squad room. Joshua Chandler waited in an interrogation room. We grabbed coffee and headed there.

The kid was scared. He had no outstanding warrants and no record. He jumped a mile when we walked in. “Settle down. You aren’t in trouble. We have a few questions.”

He knew nothing. A man he had never met stopped him at a service station and said he would pay him twenty dollars to deliver the flowers. He didn’t know who lived at the house. I believed him. He just delivered the flowers.

As we turned to leave, Joshua asked me a question. “Detective, is there something special about those flowers?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Something he said as he handed the flowers to me. She loved those flowers.”

“That’s all?”

“Yeah, I figured he meant who he gave the flowers to.”

Back at my desk, I pulled up the photos of all the flowers delivered to my house. Each vase was a mix of yellow tulips and red Gerber daisies in the same shaped glass container. We searched everywhere for a connection to the flowers but found none. There had to be one.

She loved those flowers.

A little voice nagged at me. Who was she? At least, we now knew ‘she’ was important. A thought came to me. “Hank, I want you and Cardi to start checking all florists within the area of the murders. They are all within the same section of town. See if anyone ordered red Gerber daisies and yellow tulips for a funeral.

While they made calls, I started looking through unsolved murders. Three hours later, Hank yelled, “Eli, I found a florist.” He came to my desk. “This florist created a casket spray for a twenty-two-year-old woman eleven years ago. Her name was Sandra Westerhaus. A city maintenance worker found her body in a park. She died from strangulation. We never found the killer.”

I remembered her. “It was one of the first cases I worked on as a newly promoted detective, and I mean, worked barely on it. I mostly observed. It was Dave Blythe’s case.”

“Blythe just died, didn’t he?”

“Yeah. And there was an article with an old photo in the paper about the cases that haunted him.”

Hank shook his head. “Sandra Westerhaus. I read that article. You were standing next to him in that photo.”

“Yeah.”

~~~

We confirmed with a local florist that James Westerhaus, Sandra’s father, had recently purchased the same flowers on five separate occasions. Joshua Chandler identified him as the man who paid him to deliver the flowers. After searching for several hours, we found him at his daughter’s tomb in St. Louis Cemetery No. 3.

He didn’t flinch as we identified ourselves. “I was expecting you. I figured you’d find me, but you never found the man who murdered my daughter. I saw your photo with that bastard who promised me he’d find him, and he died without doing it.” He turned to face me.

“I thought if I killed the same way, you would think that he was killing these women and find him. But you found me. You should have been the detective in charge when my daughter died.”

Hank read Westerhaus his rights and led him away. As I followed, I decided that I would do my best to find Sandra’s killer. All those women deserved that from me.

~~~

Written for What's Next?, a weekly prompt on Writers Unite! on Facebook. The exercise provides an image and first sentence, and you write what's next!