Flowers

Part 3 of 3 - The Killer

Unlike Alfonse Swanson, no one ever thought Derrick Lane was destined to become somebody special. In fact, from a very early age, it was clear that he would never amount to anything good. Although raised in a stable middle class home, he had a penchant for getting into trouble, and he dropped out of high school with a juvenile record few mothers would be proud of.

After losing his younger sister Henriette to a suspected drunk driver, Derrick's plunge into the criminal underworld started in earnest. Those who didn't know him tried to attribute his subsequent felonious endeavors to the emotional turmoil he suffered as a result of his sister's death. But the truth was he had been a bad kid for a long time, and her death merely shone a spotlight on that fact. He spent the next forty years of his life in a constant skirmish with the law. Even when having a regular job, he never managed to stay completely clean, but he also never got caught doing something so severe that the local magistrate was not willing to give him one last chance.

That is, until the State Police, assisted by officers of the New Grace Police Department, came crashing into a derelict cottage out in the middle of the woods, which housed enough stills and mash to keep New Grace intoxicated through Independence Day. Moonshiners have been a fact of life in the Carolinas since long before the prohibition, and law enforcement seldom expend resources on finding them, unless required for public safety reasons. In the case of the distillery operated by Derrick, he had a habit of spiking his products with various substances, and a large batch shipped to Lexington had made dozens of people seriously ill.

As the State troopers handcuffed him and put him in the back of the cruiser, Derrick must have realized his days of skirting the law were over. Not so much because of the moonshine operation or even the accidental poisoning of the Lexingtonians; no, the real trouble came from what the state troopers found growing in a field behind the derelict shed ... about an acre of pretty, light purple flowers, carefully planted in neat rows. Poppy flowers, the first casual inspection suggested. Opium poppy flowers, they turned out to be upon closer analysis.

Alfonse Swanson was a murder investigator, and was not involved with the moonshine case. But his natural curiosity sometimes compelled him to read interesting case files or memoranda prepared by his fellow detectives. As he was browsing through the file on the moonshine case, he noticed something that looked very familiar to him. It took him a moment to make the connection, because it was a detail he had not paid much attention to during the past forty years. In pertinent part, the report stated:

In conjunction with the distillation operation, the suspects appear to have been cultivating and growing poppy plants of the Papaver somniferum species, and conducting at least a limited opium extraction and heroin production process...

That was the moment when everything came together for him. He went back to check the case files to make absolutely sure; it was one of those details he had never bothered to memorize. But the words just jumped right back into his head as soon as he read the report.

Alfonse dug out the report from the initial examination of Elaine's crime scene. Among the exhibits was a list of the flowers found next to her body at the bottom of the quarry. He had read it a hundred times for no reason other than thinking it may provide some insight into the perpetrator's mind. But right there, in black and white next to the wingstems, ozarks and foxgloves, were the poppy flowers.

But there was more, and Alfonse next opened his copy of the case file from Conway, of the girl found dead in the mine shaft. The Conway medical examiner was an amateur botanist, and he had also made a list of the flowers found next to the dead girl's body. But the list was in Latin, and not until that moment had it held any significance to Alfonse. But it ended up breaking open the case for him, because the very first species listed was Papaver somniferum.