“Sir.”
The DA shifted his chair over as Vargas and I sat.
Chester said, “Booth is playing hardball.”
“After you called her to come in, DA Thume heard from Marcus Knight.”
Thume said, “Knight advised me that Hannah Booth was refusing to come in voluntarily.”
Vargas said, “Does she know about the change in Hagan’s time of death? I didn’t mention anything about it.”
Chester said, “If someone leaked this, I’ll turn this place upside down to find out who. I promise you, they’ll never work again.”
Thume said, “She’s hiding something. Why else would she refuse to cooperate?”
I said, “Were we able to confirm the TOD change? Maybe someone in the coroner’s office tipped Booth off.”
Chester said, “I know Woller. he’s a good man, and no way he leaked this. Woller believes the TOD is in a narrower range, well within the time frame for her to commit the homicide.”
Vargas turned to Thume. “You going to issue an arrest warrant and force her in?”
Thume said, “Knight said he would organize a protest and televise it. He promised a turnout in the hundreds.”
Chester said, “We’ve got to be careful. It’s borderline, evidence wise. We arrest her, and she lawyers up—we learn nothing.”
“Then we’d have to file charges based upon what we have, or drop it for the time being.”
Chester said, “I need the two of you to nail the time line, support it with witnesses and CCTV footage. We take this to a grand jury; we have to be on sound footing.”
I said, “We’ll do our best, sir.”
“It’s gotta be ASAP. There hasn’t been a body in a couple of weeks, but the surveillance we have on her may have to stop. Knight said he was in touch with the American Civil Liberties Union and was going to file an invasion of privacy suit.”
I shook my head. “Maybe we can drop back, observe her from a distance.”
“I already instructed Gilby to pull back, cut their visibility.”
“You may want to consider dropping the daytime surveillance, pick her up at dusk.”
“I’ll consider it. meanwhile, it’s time to get to work.”
***
The sun was blazing through the window. Angling the blinds, I said, “We need to map every possible route from Hannah’s house to where she was picked up in Lee. We don’t even know where the hell Hagan got dumped in the water, but I’ll bet it’s either Clam Pass or Wiggins again.”
“I’ll check with the National Oceanography people, see if they can determine where it might be since he ended up in Pelican Bay.”
“Good. Check with the marine department at Gulf Coast U. They know the tidal stuff and flow better than the Feds.”
“I’m going to go over the whole thing about Hannah’s son’s death, talk to the Smyrna detective who thought it was suspicious.”
Looking through the case file for the detective’s name, I said, “You wanna go downtown tonight? There’s a jazz band at Cambier. We can grab dinner.”
“Sounds nice. It’s not supposed to rain, is it?”
“Nope.”
I grabbed the phone and called Georgia. Put on hold, I went through my emails. The teen’s autopsy report found no drugs, alcohol, or anything suspicious. A snake circled in my stomach at the thought of this fifteen-year-old believing things were so bad that he took his life.
Clicking up the case file from Appleton, Wisconsin, I skimmed the crime scene report and slammed down the phone. “Holy shit! This fucking Kelly guy was shot.”
On the phone, Vargas waved me off.
“Hang up, Vargas. Get off the phone—this changes everything.”
I kept reading as she finished her call.
“What are you so worked up about?”
“The driver who hit Dwyer, he was shot twice and dumped in the water. Sound familiar?”
“Oh my God. When was that?”
“About ten years ago. It’s Dwyer’s MO. This ain’t no coincidence. This is Dwyer taking revenge—it’s got to be.”
Vargas came around my desk and looked over my shoulder. “What evidence they have from the scene?”
“Not much. Holy shit, they recovered a shell!”
“Dwyer’s been careful to pick up the shells.”
“Maybe this was his first and he panicked.”
“Could be. Send me a copy. My back’s gonna go out reading over your shoulder.”
We printed hard copies and pored over them.
The lead detective was a guy named Gunther Hendersen, and his summary read like surrender to me.
No arrests had been made, and they never identified a strong suspect. After vetting the alibi of a man Kelly had a running feud with and getting a zero from the informant community, Appleton stopped looking. As far as they were concerned, the case was ice-cold a mere four months after Kelly was shot.
The autopsy concluded that death occurred from drowning, even though the reason Kelly drowned was because he was shot. If he wasn’t in the water, he would have bled to death from the gunshot wounds.
A shell had two partial fingerprints but no match in Wisconsin’s database. The fingerprints looked grainy, making me wonder how good their forensics were.
There was a witness, a Bill Dorough, who was fishing offshore, close to where the killing happened. He didn’t see the killing, but when he heard the gunshot, he shined a light in the direction and saw a male run off.
He must have spooked the shooter, forcing him to leave before picking up both shells. It had to be.
“Vargas, we need to get our hands on the bullet fragments and that shell, fast.”
“Why not call this Hendersen? Maybe he’ll cooperate.”
“He probably will if we don’t show him up, but I can’t deal with the frigging bureaucracy. It’ll take two months. I’m gonna call Haines, see what he can do.”
“Haines?”
“What’s the matter?”
“Uh, you don’t like him to start with, and you were concerned he’d take the case away.”
“Nah, Haines is okay. He’s actually a good guy when you get to know him.”
Vargas raised her eyebrows and smiled.
“What’s the matter, Vargas?”
“Nothing. Go ahead, call him.”
Chapter 48
In the two days since I’d sent Haines a digitized version of the fingerprints from Dwyer’s water bottle and both ballistics reports, we made good progress on Hannah Booth.
The National Oceanographic Department was hesitant to state whether the Hagan corpse had floated south from Wiggins or north from Clam Pass, but Gulf Coast University had been steadfast in their belief that the body came down from Wiggins. That would mean that two bodies were dumped in Wiggins. That didn’t jibe with the killer’s MO—using different locations for each body. Were there two killers? Or was Hannah getting lazy? Or maybe it had to do with her bad back?
Vargas uncovered what I considered damning evidence: red-light traffic video of Hanna’s car on Vanderbilt Drive. You couldn’t see her face, but her blond hair was visible, and there was no doubt it was her.
Hannah was just several hundred yards from Wiggins Pass, and the time stamp was 7:09 p.m. There was a huge hole in the middle, but the jigsaw puzzle was filling up.
My pee-pee alarm buzzed, and like a five-year-old, I got up, marching to the bathroom. I was sitting on the throne, pressing my abdomen in an attempt to coax a leak out when my phone vibrated. It was Haines.
“Hey, how you doing?”
“Good, Frank. The boys up in Green Bay think we’ve got a match.”
“Fingerprints or ballistics?”
“Ballistics. they believe there’s no doubt the gun used in the last killings is the same one used on Kelly.”
“Wow. Unbelievable. What about the prints?”
“There were only partials on the shell, but they could b
e Dwyer’s.”
“How so?”
“They found eight matching points. Being partials, there just wasn’t enough data to be conclusive.”
Exhaling, I said, “Eight. The DA won’t introduce it as evidence unless we have more than a dozen match points.”
“I’m familiar. The bureau’s guideline is a minimum of twelve to twenty. We get twenty, there is no witness the defense can put up to dispute it.”
“What do you think of all of this?”
“It’s early yet, you never know what else you’ll learn.”
He was hedging. I said, “So we got a good hand but not a full house?”
Haines laughed. “Kind of, but in reality, a seasoned prosecutor could make a good case out of this.”
“I hope you’re right.”
“I’ll send over the reports.”
***
Bob Willis had retired after a thirty-five-year stint with the Tampa police department. In an attempt to fill his days and subsidize a passion for wine, Willis collected checks from defense attorneys to weigh in on fingerprint evidence. Even though he switched sides, I liked Willis; he was a witty bastard.
There was a new Cadillac SUV in the driveway of his Sarasota home. I rang the bell, and when Willis answered I pointed to the car. “The other side pays pretty good, huh?”
“That’s my wife’s, for her real estate business. Me? Only thing I care about in a car is if it starts.”
“I’m with you. It’s good to see you.”
“Same here, my friend. Come in.”
An open bottle of wine was sweating on the kitchen’s white island. Willis opened a cabinet, grabbed a glass and poured a splash of vino in it. “See if you like it. It’s a Portuguese white, an Alvarinho.”
Bringing the glass up to my mouth, I remembered to look at the color and smell it first. It had a floral scent. I sipped it. “It’s nice, light.”
“Perfect for a late afternoon in the Sunshine State. Let’s see the reports.”
Willis opened the manila envelope, spread the papers apart, and took a magnifying glass out of a drawer. Hunched over, Willis moved the magnifier between the photos, consulting the FBI report as he did.
I poured myself another glass to keep from asking what he thought. It was good wine, and I wondered how much it cost while walking to the back window. Like a lot of places in Florida, there was a nice view—a corner of a lake with a preserve in the distance. I knew Sarasota was pricey, a bit cheaper than Naples, and guessed this one-story home was worth six hundred thousand.
The clink from setting down the magnifying glass made me turn around. Willis was pouring the last of the bottle into his glass. “This can go either way.”
“I drove all the way up here for that?”
“Come here. I’ll show you what we got.” Positioning two of the photos together, he said, “These are the thumb prints.” He pointed a pencil at the full print I’d lifted from Dwyer’s water bottle. “Here we have a good tell, a bifurcation in the ridge line pointing down and here pointing up. That’s two solid match points.”
That sounded promising; what was the problem?
“And here we’ve got two very short ridges or dots. Again, almost an exact match, giving us four strong matches. Then we have these two swirls that are decent. Over here, the matches are slightly weaker, but it could be argued the pressure applied, perspiration, body oils, etcetera. Those are the things that get me the big bucks from defendants, but it can work against you. If you include them, you’ve got eight matches out of a about a half a print.”
“That’s pretty good.”
“Yes, but it doesn’t meet most prosecutor’s thresholds, and guys like us are paid to blow things up.”
“What about the other print, the forefinger?”
“I was saving the bad news for last.”
“You kidding me?”
“Wish I was, Frankie boy. There’s not much that does match. I could sell a couple of them, but if I was you I’d look to exclude this.”
“It’s not the same person?”
“I don’t see it.”
“But the thumb print is?”
“There may not be enough for a courtroom, but I’d say ninety, ninety-five of a hundred it would be the same person.”
Chapter 49
“You want to go to Chester with this, Frank?”
“Chester? What’s he gonna do for us? He hasn’t worked a homicide in ten years.”
“I thought he may be able make a suggestion, see something we don’t because we’re too close to it.”
She had a point, but going to the sheriff would make me look like a rookie. “We can do this without him. Let’s take our time and go over this again.”
“But we’ve been over it already.”
“Humor me, will you?”
“Okay, okay.”
“On Hannah Booth, we’ve got the gun in her office, her hair on a corpse, and her alibi for the Hagan murder is shaky at best.”
“That DUI seemed to clear things up, but all it did was keep us off her track.”
“Maybe. But because of it, we can place her close to where we believe Hagan was dumped.”
“She works at the church with each of the victims, and we know she argued with some of them.”
“I’m not a fan of hers, but I just can’t see her doing these killings.”
“Because she’s a woman?”
I shrugged. “I guess so.”
“I’ll let that slide, Frank, since you have bias training to do.”
“No, it’s not that. I mean, she’s pretty big physically, but if she had to push one of these guys around or move a body—”
“A, she had a gun in her hand, and B, there was no evidence any of the bodies were dragged.”
“All right, she’s a strong suspect, but what’s the motive?”
“Maybe she’s nuts.”
My pee-pee alarm sounded, and I hit snooze. “She seems pretty damn sane to me. Now, Dwyer. The guy who smashed into him is dead, along with the guy who killed his mother. That’s a shitload of motivation.”
“No doubt. But first off, Bobby Hagan was the son of the creep who killed his mother, and the time line is all wrong. Dwyer waits years to kill the drunk who hit him, and then decades to kill the son of the guy who killed his mother? It doesn’t make sense.”
“The way you say that almost makes me forget we have what looks like his print on a shell.”
“It’s a partial, Frank. And you’re forgetting the other print that’s no match.”
“It’s a partial, Vargas.”
Vargas sighed. “What am I gonna do with you, Frank?”
I lowered my voice. “I have a couple of ideas.”
She smiled. “If you’re a good boy, maybe later.”
I gave her a thumbs-up. “I promise.”
“Back to business. Hannah Booth seems a lot stronger than Dwyer. This whole thing with the drunk driver killing, I don’t want to take a shot at anybody, but the guys up in Appleton might not have the tools nor the time to track down who killed him. Don’t get hung up on him, Frank.”
She could be right, but my gut had a heavy leaning toward Dwyer. Were my instincts failing me again? Last night, Mary Ann said I was hung up on the types of movies we watched. I liked to watch shows that were realistic. How could people watch all that fantasy stuff? It was silly. It was a preference, not a hang-up. She also said, and not for the first time, that I was hung up on the types of food I ate. I hated Indian and Chinese food, that’s all.
Hang-ups. Was I hung up on Dwyer? My reminder to go to the bathroom sounded. I got up. Sitting on the throne I did some of my best thinking. “I gotta go to the boy’s room.” I sat on the bowl, thinking it’d been almost two years since cancer changed my urinating ritual. Early on, it was weird sitting like a girl, but it ended up being another lesson in how adaptable humans can be. My doctors taught me how to apply pressur
e using my abdominal muscles, and I used the tactic. About ten minutes later, my makeshift bladder slowly but surely released a trickle that turned into a stream.
Pressure. If there was something to release, pressure would ultimately get it out, I thought as I zipped up.
Washing up, I was taken aback by my image. I stepped back a bit, hoping it was the light, but I still looked tired and older than my forty-two years. No one had given me the George Clooney look-alike thing in a while, and there was no reason to. I ran a hand through my hair, forcing my attention back to the killings.
Swinging the door open, I announced, “Vargas, we’re gonna bring both of them in. Apply pressure and see what breaks.”
“But they’ll have lawyers with them.”
“Probably. Way I see it, we lay it on, and see their reaction when we tell ’em we got them.”
“I donno, Frank. I can’t see it working.”
“People lie to us all the damn time. There’s no law saying we can’t do the same.”
“If they take the fifth, then what?”
“We learn what they’re afraid of. If someone didn’t do something they won’t hide behind the fifth.”
“That’s not always true, Frank.”
“I don’t care about any other case but this one right now. We’ve got two pieces of indictable infor—”
“Incriminating, not indictable.”
“Okay, okay. Geez, we on the same side or what?”
Vargas shook her head. “You done?”
I shrugged.
“Good. Let’s get back to grunting this, as you like to say.”
“Okay, did you check to see if there was any record of Dwyer having a SunPass or E-ZPass?”
“I put out the requests, like you asked, including the airlines who operated between Fort Myers and Green Bay around the time the murder took place. It’s a moon shot.”
“Good, good. What about any video footage? Ten years ago, there were hardly any cameras around. But maybe in a canvas of the area where the murder occurred, there might be something like a school, a bank, or maybe an ATM.”
“Did they even have ATMs ten years ago? Anyway, I made the request to Appleton and Green Bay to see what might be out there. This Detective Donofrio—he was really helpful, said he’d normally dismiss the request based on how long ago it was, but he promised to look into it.”
Third Chances Page 19