Dark Water Under the Bridge

by P. D. Workman

  Margie smiled back at him, her face warm. “Thank you.”

  The door opened and Finkle stood there. He seemed a little better than he had been when Margie saw him last. A bit more color in his cheeks. He still wrung his hands, though it was less obvious.

  “Detective Pat. And…” He looked at Cruz. “Detective…?”

  “This is Detective Cruz. He’s helping me out today. We’ve taken a look around, and I wonder if you’re up to answering some questions now.”

  He nodded and escorted them into the building. He took them to a lobby where there was some seating. They all sat down in a close grouping.

  “Are you feeling a bit better?” Margie asked Finkle.

  “Yes, a bit, thank you.”

  “Have you had a chance to pull your security footage yet?”

  “I’m working on it.”

  She wondered whether they were ever going to see any footage. When he said that a lot of the cameras didn’t work, what did that mean? Did it mean there was no outdoor footage? Or nothing beyond a view or two in the parking lot? And if so, how many people knew that? Had the killer known that none of his movements would be recorded?

  “I told Detective Cruz that you were not able to identify the individual in the picture I showed you,” Margie said. “I wonder, though, whether it might have been an employee that you don’t know well, or that the water might have distorted her features enough that you just didn’t recognize her.”

  He looked nervous. Probably afraid that she would make him look at it again to make sure that he couldn’t identify the victim.

  “She was a young woman,” Margie said. “Mid to late twenties or early thirties. Blond, shoulder-length hair. No obvious scars, tattoos, or distinguishing features.”

  He considered this. “There are a few employees who could meet that description.”

  “Do you think you could give me their names and maybe call to make sure they are okay? You can say that there was a computer problem and you wanted to check when their next shift was. You don’t need to say it’s anything to do with the murdered woman or our investigation. We would just like to know that all of your employees are accounted for. The ones who could meet that description.”

  “Uh… okay.” Finkle nodded. “I can do that.” He looked at them for a minute uncertainly. “Right now?”

  “You said there were just a few employees who meet that description. It wouldn’t take long to check in with each one, would it?”

  “No. I guess not. I thought you would have other questions, though. Then I’ll call once we’re done.”

  “Okay. Have you had anything strange happen in the last week or two? It doesn’t need to be anything violent. Just whether there were any unusual occurrences. Arguments. Flower deliveries. Phone hang-ups.”

  “No, I can’t think of anything. The education center was closed until school started again, so it’s only been a couple of weeks. Everything… has seemed pretty normal. I mean, as normal as anything during the pandemic. It’s a bit different with masks, social distancing, and sanitizing anything that the kids might touch during a tour. It’s more work. But we’re doing everything we can to keep the students safe.”

  “Of course. Have any of the employees taken unexpected vacations? Called in sick? Just not been available when you thought they would be?”

  “No.”

  “Anyone sick at all?”

  “Of course we’ve had a few people sick. But not the virus. Everyone was tested.”

  “No, I didn’t mean that. It’s more about whether everything has just been routine or there have been unusual scheduling changes.”

  “I can’t think of anything. When you work with young people, there are always some changes. They decide they have to go away with friends for the weekend, and if you say no, then they call in sick at the last minute.” He rolled his eyes. “And you know very well that they aren’t really sick, they just wanted to make it to that party or wedding.”

  Margie nodded. “Millennials,” she offered.

  “Exactly. It isn’t the way we were raised, I’ll tell you. The work ethic just isn’t the same.”

  “And you didn’t have anyone do that the last couple of weeks? Since you reopened after the summer?”

  “No, I don’t think so. We haven’t been back for long enough.”

  “And everyone has been working together well? Nothing unexpected? No personality changes since you were last operational?”

  “Personality changes.” His brows came down like he didn’t like her choice of words.

  “Sometimes, when people are stressed about something or have had big changes in their lives, it shows up as changes in personality or behavior. Someone very patient before is suddenly blowing their top unexpectedly. A sloppy employee suddenly seems OCD or vice versa. Someone is jumpy. Has unusual fears.” She didn’t look at Cruz as she said this.

  Water was not an unusual fear. Well, maybe it wasn’t common, but people did drown. It was dangerous, even for people who didn’t think it was.

  Finkle thought about this. His hands slowly stopped their wringing motions, and he smoothed his fingernails with the pad of his thumb. “Well… there was Patty.”

  Margie nodded, waiting. She pulled her notebook out and worked the pencil free of the coil where she had stashed it.

  “She seemed overly emotional. I thought… maybe she was pregnant. Or she could just have PMS. I don’t know. It isn’t like you can ask a young woman these things. She just seemed like that. Hormonal.”

  “What is Patty’s physical description?”

  “She’s… medium height and build. Thirty or so.”

  “Blond?”

  “Yes, I suppose so. Light brown or dark blond.”

  “Do you have her number?”

  He shifted uncomfortably. “In my office.”

  “You don’t have it on your cell phone? Employees never call when you are away from the office, or you don’t need to phone them to line up substitutes if someone calls you after hours to say they can’t make it the next morning?”

  Finkle hesitated. Margie was beginning to get impatient with him. She wasn’t sure why he didn’t want to call any of his employees, but he needed to get with the program. They needed to identify the woman out in the water. Patty? Another employee? Someone not associated with the park at all?

  “Mr. Finkle. I want her number. Give it to me now, or go to your office and get it. Now.”

  He started to flush red. Not angry. A lot of men would have been furious to be spoken to like that by a woman. Or a cop. But Finkle wasn’t the aggressive type. He was embarrassed or scared. He ducked his head, reminding her of a turkey.

  Finkle pulled his phone out of his pocket. An older model, small screen, not one of the modern oversize ones. He tinkered with it for a moment, presumably finding the contacts app and then filtering down to Patty’s name and checking her contact information.

  “Do you want me to call her? Or do you want to?”

  At this point, she was worried that he would completely screw it up if she let him make the call. For whatever reason, he didn’t want to call his employee in front of Margie. Were they having an affair? Had he made up the part about her being moody or hormonal?

  “Just give me the number, please.”

  He read it out to her. Margie wrote it down. “Okay. Give me a minute.” She got up from her seat and walked away from Cruz and Finkle, turning her back on them. She walked far enough away that it would be difficult, if not impossible, for Finkle to hear what she was saying in a normal tone of voice. She dialed the number into her keypad and took a deep breath, unsure what she would say if Patty answered the phone. Apologize and say it was a wrong number? Explain that she was with the police and just doing a welfare check? Say that something had happened at work and she didn’t want Patty to come in without knowing that there was something wrong?

  The first three rings went unanswered. Most people, if they were going to answer, would do so with
in three rings. But sometimes the phone was across the house, or they were already on a call with someone else, or the phone started ringing on Margie’s end before a connection was made. She had no idea what the cell coverage was like at the education center. She pulled the phone away from her ear for a moment to check the bars. Weak, but still connected. She put it back to her ear and waited. The tone continued to ring, and ring, and ring.

  Patty wasn’t there. Or she wasn’t someone who answered unidentified phone numbers. Plenty of people screened by the Caller ID and wouldn’t chance talking to a stranger. Especially Millennials.

  Eventually, the call clicked through to voicemail. Patty hadn’t recorded a message of her own, but let the default automated message answer. Margie hung up. She could try again later when they had identified the victim. Or when they hadn’t.

  She walked back to Finkle and Cruz. “No answer. Does she usually answer her phone?”

  Finkle thought about it. He nodded slowly, hesitantly. “Yes. I think she was pretty good about it. It’s hard to remember, you know.”

  “Yes. I’m sure you have a lot of people to keep track of. Can you give me the names and numbers of the other women who might answer the general description I gave you? Patty and who else?”

  He worked through a few names, spelling them out for her and digging their numbers out of his phone.

  Chapter Six

  When they left Finkle, Margie tried Patty’s number once more. She looked at Cruz while she waited for an answer she didn’t expect to come.

  “What did you think of Finkle?”

  “Nervous guy.”

  “Definitely. Very anxious.”

  “But… at the same time, not the type I would expect to be involved in a homicide. I don’t think he’s anxious because he did something. Just because he’s a naturally anxious type and doesn’t know how to react to a police investigation.”

  Margie nodded. She hadn’t picked up on a lot of deception flags from him. A few, but not a lot. More hesitant and unsure of how he was supposed to act than lying or being evasive.

  The call went through to voicemail again. This time, Margie left a message. Very generic, giving her name and asking Patty to call her back. No mention of police or an investigation. It could be anything from a telemarketer to a bank manager or a schoolteacher wanting more information about booking a class program. She hung up.

  They were walking in the direction of the forensic techs to see if they had found anything or needed any additional assistance or direction. Which Margie was sure they didn’t need. Instead, she called Detective Jones, who she hoped would be at her desk with the computer in front of her.

  Kaitlyn Jones answered, her tone cheerful but not too bouncy. “Detective Pat?”

  “Hi, I wonder if you can check for me and see whether there is a missing person report filed on Patty Roscoe.”

  “Sure, hold one minute.”

  They continued to walk as Jones looked it up. She was back a couple of minutes later. “Yes. Entered just this morning.”

  Margie looked at Cruz. “Bingo.”

  “You think this is our victim?” Jones asked.

  “I think it is. She’s an employee at the education center out here who might have been under some additional stress lately. Fits the description of the deceased. We couldn’t reach her on the phone; I took a chance it might be her.”

  “I’ll follow up on this end. Get as much information as I can.”

  “Get whatever pictures you can, any background, criminal history, social networks. Who reported Patty missing?”

  “Husband.”

  “He just reported it this morning?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where was he last night?”

  There was silence from Jones as, Margie assumed, she read through the highlights of the report that had been filed. “He figured he couldn’t report it until she’d been gone for twenty-four hours. Then he decided he couldn’t wait that long and made a call.”

  “Hmm.” Margie knew that many people still thought that they had to wait twenty-four or forty-eight hours before they could report someone missing. But they usually started the process early anyway. Or started making calls to hospitals and were told by them to make a police report. “Okay. Well, start gathering what you can. Have someone bring the husband in for an interview. We’ll get there as soon as we can.”

  “Will do,” Jones agreed.

  Margie hung up. She looked at Cruz. “How long would you take before you started making calls about your missing wife?”

  He considered. “I’d probably be calling the last place she was supposed to be once she was an hour late. Then calling her friends, colleagues, anyone who might have known what her plans were. By the time it was a couple of hours, I’d be pretty worried. Of course, my wife doesn’t go out a lot. If she was someone who was routinely unreachable for hours at a time, or who had a history of disappearing for a night here and there, then I might not call until the next day.”

  Margie made a mental note of these details. It was always good to see it from someone else’s perspective. There were people that you would start worrying about if they were twenty minutes late for an appointment, and there were people you wouldn’t start really worrying about for a day or two. It depended on the person. But the way that Finkle had talked about Patty, he had made it seem as if she was a usually dependable employee who had only started having problems recently.

  They reached the tape perimeter, and Margie and Cruz stood outside of it, waiting for the opportunity to talk to someone. The tech who seemed to be in charge, Mitchell, according to his name badge, drifted over to them. He had a clear face shield, so Margie wasn’t concerned when he lowered his mask to speak with them.

  “How is it coming, detectives?”

  “We’ve probably done about as much as we can here. How are things going with you?”

  “Going to be a while yet. Calls in to see how long it would take to get equipment here to pump out some of this water and drag for any larger foreign objects. May not be feasible, but we’ll see.”

  Margie indicated the hill with the monoliths on it and pointed out about the screens not being enough to keep prying eyes from the body, if it had still been there when visitors had started to arrive on the site. Mitchell looked up at the hill, chewing on his lower lip, and nodded.

  “Hadn’t even thought about that. But it was early. They got her out of here before there was a lot of foot traffic.”

  “That’s not always the case, though. I’m just as much to blame; I never thought to look up there and see what the sightlines were.”

  “Next time, we’ll both be wiser.”

  Margie nodded. “Yeah. We may have a name. It probably won’t make any difference to your work, because you’re not going to throw anything away that has another name on it, but our victim may be Patty Roscoe.”

  “Patty. Okay.” He did a rapid mental review of whatever they had found thus far. “I don’t think I’ve seen that name or any P initials on anything we’ve pulled today.”

  Margie’s surprise must have shown.

  “You’d be surprised at how much stuff gets thrown out in these garbages. School assignments, employee shift schedules, coffee cups and lunches with names or initials on them. But I don’t think we got any Pattys.”

  Chapter Seven

  One of the tragedies of murdered or missing cases was that the people who were closest to the victims, those who ended up reporting their friend’s absence or death, were the people who were most suspect in any violence against them. Spouses and significant others, parents, children, best friends. They all worried about their loved ones, called the police to try to get some help, and ended up under the microscope themselves.

  So while Margie always went into an interview with the knowledge that they might be talking to a murderer, she also kept in mind that they might be completely innocent, genuinely grieving the loss of a loved one. And, of course, many people were both the culpri
t and the chief mourner. They weren’t exclusive.

  At the police station, Scott Warner had been welcomed, given a bottle of cold water, and settled into an interview room pending Margie’s return. She looked in on him before entering the room. He looked around the room restlessly, not distracted by his phone, and also not crying or banging the table, insisting that someone deal with his missing persons report. There was no outrage over being left alone in the room while they looked into his report. No obviously guilty behavior.

  “I’m just going to freshen up for a minute,” Margie said. “Then we’ll see what he has to say.”

  She took a quick washroom break, splashed water on her face, and chugged a mug of coffee before re-masking and entering the room to speak with her suspect.

  “Mr. Warner. I’m sorry for keeping you waiting. We have been investigating. My name is Detective Patenaude. May I…?” She gestured to the chair opposite him as if she needed his permission to sit down. Put him in a position of power. Make him feel like he had control over the interview.

  “Yes, please. Have you found anything out? I called the hospitals, but they won’t say anything over the phone. And I worried about what if she was brought in unconscious or had amnesia, how would they even know who she was then? Have you checked?”

  “If she was taken to the hospital, she would have had her ID, wouldn’t she?” Margie countered. “They would be able to figure out who she was.”

  He looked confused for a moment, then nodded. “Yes. Right. Of course. They would know. But they wouldn’t necessarily talk to me. More and more patient rights these days, they won’t tell you anything without the patient’s permission, and if she is unconscious and can’t give it, then what?”

  “We haven’t heard anything back from the hospitals yet. You’ll have to wait a bit longer.”

  Warner sighed and nodded. He looked down at his phone, thumbing it on, looking at it, waiting for it to ring. Maybe Patty would call him to tell him her car had broken down. Or that she’d been hit on the head, but was okay. Something that would mean she wasn’t gone from him forever.