The False-Hearted Teddy Read online

  Praise for

  The Mournful Teddy

  “Once you start, you can’t bear to miss a teddy mystery.”

  —Rita Mae Brown, New York Times bestselling author of the Mrs. Murphy Mysteries

  “Entertaining…a fun romp.”

  —The Richmond Times-Dispatch

  “Has the potential to quickly turn into a favorite series of many.”

  —The Mystery Reader

  “A smart debut.”

  —Mystery Scene

  “Fascinating…a delightful whodunit.”

  —Midwest Book Review

  “The Mournful Teddy is a cozy police procedural…with subtle humor…I look forward to many more in the series.”

  —Mystery News

  “The Mournful Teddy is a fur ball of fun. There’ll be no hibernating once you start reading it. Best of all, it’s the first in Lamb’s bear collectors’ series.”

  —Harrisburg (PA) Patriot-News

  “True to his roots as an investigator, Lamb masterfully weaves reality with fiction in The Mournful Teddy.”

  —The Massanutten (VA) Villager

  “Unique…[with] an element of fun that is hard to find…As the first in the Bear Collector’s Mystery series, The Mournful Teddy is an excellent start!”

  —The Romance Readers Connection

  “An exceptional mystery…Skillfully blends elements of the traditional cozy with the gritty instincts of a tough but tender ex-homicide detective.”

  —Ellen Byerrum, author of the Crime of Fashion Mysteries

  The False-Hearted Teddy

  John J. Lamb

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Group Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.) Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.) Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi—110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0745, Auckland, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.) Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  THE FALSE-HEARTED TEDDY

  A Berkley Prime Crime Book / published by arrangement with the author

  Copyright © 2007 by John J. Lamb.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  For information, address: The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014

  ISBN: 978-1-1012-0603-4

  BERKLEY® PRIME CRIME

  Berkley Prime Crime Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  The name BERKLEY PRIME CRIME and the BERKLEY PRIME CRIME design are trademarks belonging to Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  With love to my father’s sister,

  Patricia Lamb Puffer,

  my dear “Aunt Pat.”

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  A Teddy Bear Artisan Profile

  Afterword

  One

  It was just after seven o’clock on a Friday morning on the last day of March. The sky overhead was the same brilliant hue as a London blue topaz, but slate gray snow-laden clouds were oozing over the top of Massanutten Mountain and the freshening breeze was as brisk and chilly as an audit notification letter from the Internal Revenue Service. Up on the crest there’d be snow, but down where we were on the valley floor, the moisture would come in the form of more cold and sullen rain. Although the calendar said that spring was eleven days old, the persistent ache coming from the reconstructed bones and titanium hardware that comprise what remains of my left shin proclaimed it was still winter. That crippling injury and the blackthorn cane I use to get around are mementos from my former career as a San Francisco PD homicide inspector. I’d have preferred a plaque or a gold watch.

  Bradley Lyon is my name; however, there isn’t anything leonine about my appearance. I’m five foot eleven when I don’t slouch, I have blue eyes, and my drivers’ license lists my weight as 220 pounds. I might look a little heavier, but hey, if the Commonwealth of Virginia says that’s what I weigh, it must be true. I’ll be forty-eight years old in July, but there’s no denying the truth: I look much, much older. Getting shot has a way of aging you.

  My wife, Ashleigh, and I had just left our Shenandoah Valley hometown of Remmelkemp Mill and were driving in our Nissan Xterra westbound on Coggins Spring Road through dormant and muddy pastureland when I squinted into the rearview mirror and sighed. A Massanutten County sheriff’s cruiser was right behind us with its blue overhead emergency lights flashing and high-beam headlights wigwagging.

  Although I was a cop for a quarter of a century, I have excellent reasons for being apprehensive about any encounters with the local gendarmes. Shortly after moving to the valley less than a year ago, Ash and I discovered that some of the county cops believed the motto “to protect and serve” meant looking after their own shady dealings. We’d had a series of harrowing experiences that culminated in one of them trying to murder us. Things are a little better now. However, there are some local folks—including a few that still wear badges—who view us as troublemaking interlopers from California, even though my wife grew up along the banks of the South Fork of the Shenandoah River and her family has owned and farmed the land here for over two hundred years.

  When it became clear that the cruiser wasn’t going to pass us, I said, “Don’t panic but we’re being pulled over.”

  Ash looked up from the nutmeg-colored mohair teddy bear she was grooming with a small brush and shot a glance into the passenger side mirror. “For what? You didn’t break any traffic laws.”

  “And your point is? Sweetheart, you know as well as I do that we aren’t going to win any popularity contests with some of the older deputies who were loyal to the former sheriff.”

  “But Tina—”

  “Is doing a great job as sheriff
and wouldn’t allow this sort of crap. But she can’t be everywhere at once and, as much as she wanted to, she couldn’t fire deputies just because they liked their old boss.”

  “If they knew what he was up to and didn’t do anything to stop him, they shouldn’t be deputies. I’d fire them.” Ash’s normally warm blue eyes were as hard and cold as sapphires. Like me, she loathed corrupt cops.

  “I agree, but who’re you kidding, honey? You’d fire at them…with a twenty-gauge shotgun loaded with rock salt.”

  She smiled as if I’d paid her a compliment. “Mama used to say that the sharper the sting the better the lesson.”

  Come September, Ash and I will have been married twenty-seven years and although we spent over twenty-five years living in San Francisco before returning to rural Virginia, she remains a country girl at heart. Her creed is as simple as it is wholesome: be kind, work hard, be honest, always strive to do the right thing, and give other folks the benefit of the doubt—once. Cross the ethical line twice and the best you can hope for is that you cease to exist in her universe, which—believe me—is preferable to becoming her enemy.

  The bottom line is that Ash is a fiery woman, strong and full of conviction and it’s the main reason I adore her, although the fact she’s strikingly beautiful, with long wavy golden blond hair and an exquisite full figure, doesn’t hurt.

  Behind us, the patrol car’s siren sounded for a second.

  “I guess I’d better stop before we get a warning shot across the bow.”

  I switched the turn indicator on, steered to the side of the road, and shut the engine off. Then I put my hands back on the steering wheel where they’d be in plain sight. The cruiser pulled in behind us, the blue lights were switched off, and the door swung open. A tall cop, wearing tan trousers and a brown car coat, climbed from the squad car.

  I relaxed and said, “It’s okay. It’s Tina.”

  With her dark curly hair, soft brown eyes, and porcelain doll-like pretty features, Tina Barron didn’t fit the conventional image of a county sheriff, yet we knew from personal experience that she was a brave and skilled cop. She’d assumed office as acting sheriff in October in the wake of our unofficial investigation and was elected by a landslide the following month. Since that time, she’d impressed everyone with her commitment to serve the community and repair the department’s tarnished reputation. And if she was a good sheriff, she was an even better friend, to Ash in particular.

  I rolled down the window and cranked up the heater a little to balance against the influx of cold air. Both Ash and I said, “Hi, Tina.”

  Tina bent over to look inside the SUV. “Hi, you guys! I wanted to say good-bye before you left for the bear show.”

  She was referring to the Baltimore Har-Bear Expo, one of the premier teddy bear conventions on the East Coast. It was being held at the Fell’s Point Maritime Inn, a large hotel in a neighborhood just east of the inner harbor. We’d been preparing for it all winter and the back of the Xterra was packed with teddy bears and stuffed tigers.

  “Wish us luck,” Ash said.

  “You won’t need luck. I’ll bet Hilda Honey Crisp takes top honors.”

  “I wish I was as certain as you are, but thank you.”

  Hilda was a fourteen-inch-tall, ivory-colored plush bear dressed up as a wedge of apple pie and was a member of Ash’s new “Confection Collection,” an assortment of teddies attired as decadent desserts. Don’t ask me how she did it, but my wife designed and created costumes for the bears that looked exactly like pieces of pineapple upside-down cake, peach cobbler, and carrot cake. In fact, Brenda Brownie resembled the genuine article so much that I imagined I could smell the chocolate and that set my left shin throbbing—an extreme aversion to the scent of chocolate is one of the unpleasant psychosomatic side effects resulting from my having been shot in Ghirardelli Square back in San Francisco.

  “And thanks for letting Kitch stay with you while we’re gone,” I said.

  “It’s our pleasure. The kids love having him around.”

  Kitchener is our Old English sheepdog. He usually stays in a big plastic crate while we’re away from home, but since we’d be absent until Sunday evening, that wasn’t an option this time. Fortunately, Tina had agreed to babysit him because there’s no way we could put him in any of the local kennels. They looked far too much like doggie interment camps to me.

  Tina continued, “And now I want to see it, Brad.”

  I assumed an expression of shock and embarrassment. “Jeez, that’s a mighty personal request, especially with my wife here.”

  “Brad!” Ash sounded genuinely scandalized.

  “And it’s cold.”

  “You know I’m talking about your bear.” Tina was blushing furiously.

  “Oh, the bear! I thought you were talking about, well, you know, something else.”

  “Brad.” There was a warning note in Ash’s voice now.

  “Sorry, Tina. I’ll be good. Let me get him.”

  I reached behind Ash’s car seat and retrieved Dirty Beary, my fabric and polyester stuffing tribute to San Francisco’s most famous cinema cop. I’d been working on the bear in utter secrecy throughout most of the winter, which was why Tina was so eager to see it. Beary was a lanky twenty-inch-tall, bronze-colored mohair teddy dressed in slacks, a brown tweed sports jacket, a dress shirt, and a little necktie. He also sported a small pair of sunglasses and wore a miniature seven-pointed SFPD gold star on his belt. I’d spent almost three weeks just working on the placement of his glass eyes and agonizing over the downward curve of the embroidered frown, trying to capture the essential spirit of Clint Eastwood.

  I handed the bear to Tina and rasped out an altered version of the famous monologue from the film, Dirty Harry: “I know what you’re thinking. Did he make five bears or six? Well, in all the excitement, I kind of lost track myself. But being that this is Dirty Beary, the most intimidating stuffed animal in the world, you’ve got to ask yourself, ‘Am I feeling lucky?’ Well, are you, Tina?”

  She gaped in disbelief at the bear. “He’s amazing.”

  “Thanks, but most of the credit belongs to Ash.”

  “Don’t believe him, Tina. He made Beary all by himself,” Ash said.

  “Yeah, but you spent how many hours teaching me how to use the Bernina?” I asked, referring to our futuristic sewing machine which can do everything but sing the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” (although you could embroider the words to the song by simply pushing a combination of buttons).

  “But he made the bear and the clothes himself,” Ash said proudly.

  Tina pulled one side of Beary’s tiny sports jacket open. “Oh my gosh, he’s wearing a leather shoulder holster with a tiny forty-four magnum!”

  “I have a constitutional right to arm bears.”

  Ash and Tina groaned.

  “Bad puns aside, do you like him?”

  “I absolutely love him. Do you think you could make me one just like him? I’d pay you.”

  “Of course I’ll make you a teddy bear, but you aren’t going to pay me.”

  “But—”

  “No argument. You saved our lives. If you’d been a second or two later, Trent would have killed us.”

  “Sergei helped.”

  “Then I’ll make him a nice little teddy bear, too.”

  While Ash and Tina chuckled at the absurd notion of Sergei Zubatov wanting a stuffed animal, I merely smiled, knowing that I’d come perilously close to revealing a secret about the retired Soviet military intelligence agent who owned the local barbecue restaurant. After seeing Dirty Beary the previous afternoon, Sergei had cautiously asked me if I’d consider making him a similar teddy bear dressed in the authentic dress uniform of a Red Army colonel. However, fearful of damaging his local reputation of being more cool and remote than the Ross Ice Shelf, he’d sworn me to silence about the project, with the understanding that that silence wouldn’t include Ash. That was because I’d need her help with the uniform and, more impor
tantly, I don’t keep secrets from my wife—not that there’s any chance I actually could if I were foolish enough to try.

  Tina handed Dirty Beary back to me. “I know you’ve been busy, but have you had the chance to give some thought to my offer?”

  “I have, and I’m sorry but I still haven’t made a decision.”

  “If it’s the money…”

  “No, that isn’t it at all. There are just a couple of issues I’m trying to resolve. I promise I’ll give you an answer soon.”

  “There’s no rush.”

  Tina’s offer was that I become a paid consultant to the Massanutten County Sheriff ’s Department. If I accepted, I’d provide training to the deputies on analyzing and investigating crime scenes, and would also be available for call out in the event of a murder or other major felony to provide expertise. Although it meant some extra income, which was always welcome, I was hesitant to accept because, to my shock, I wasn’t certain I wanted to return to police work. I’d been away from the job for almost two years and enjoyed not having to gird myself in invisible armor to deal with the toxic environment cops operate in on a daily basis. Not attending horrific murder scenes or “grand openings” at the medical examiner’s office, where business—because it’s lying on stainless steel tables—is always looking up, was also a nice change. Besides, I was enjoying my new career as Ash’s partner in Lyon’s Tigers and Bears.

  Still, admittedly I missed some aspects of being a homicide inspector, but for bad and selfish reasons. I longed for the intellectual excitement of hunting a killer, the pleasure of outmaneuvering my prey, and the satisfaction of being thought of as the very best at what I did. So, can you see my Faustian dilemma? The egoist in me wanted back into cop work while the rational part of me knew that any return could be at a serious cost to my soul.