Crime Scene Cover-Up

by Julie Miller

  “You shouldn’t be here, either.” She showed him that she was clearing the number off her phone and tucked her cell into the pocket of her jeans. “My family’s name is on the deed to this place.”

  “Huh?”

  “I have the right to be here. You don’t.” Blackened carpet, still soaked from last night’s fire hoses, stretched between them. This had once been the furnished living room, and though most of the furniture here was still in one piece, it had been ruined by smoke and water. Her steps squished as she crossed the room, heading toward the back of the house, where the hottest point of the fire had peeled wallpaper, warped floorboards and linoleum, and taken down interior walls and roof braces. She stopped in front of Richie, nodding toward the kitchen and bedroom at the back of the house. “What are you looking for?”

  He shrugged. “I’m not looking for anything.”

  “Then why are you here?” She moved around him into what used to be the kitchen. The appliances were black with soot, and the countertops had melted, but the surviving cabinets had been opened. She didn’t know enough about fighting fires to tell if that had happened during the fire or after. The air here was stale with the scents of sulfur and dampness, leftovers from the blaze and its aftermath. “Are you looking for copper piping?”

  “Like you use to make your funny creatures.”

  Amy nodded. She doubted she had a competing artist here. It wouldn’t be the first time someone had broken into one of the empty buildings over the years to steal metals that could be sold on the illegal market. “I know the copper is worth some money, but you can’t take anything from here, Richie. The police and fire department are conducting an investigation. You might be disturbing evidence.”

  She startled at the touch of Richie’s hand closing around her upper arm. “You shouldn’t be here, Miss Amy.” He parroted his greeting from earlier. His cheeks were redder than usual as he slid his hand down to hers and tugged. “I’ll walk you out.”

  While his tone wasn’t threatening and his grip wasn’t painful, Amy had suffered too many recent encounters to be comfortable with him touching her. She pulled her hand away and smiled. “That’s okay, Richie. I’d better check to make sure everything’s secure before I leave.”

  “You have to go.” He reached for her again, and Amy retreated a step. He ducked his head, his gaze darting back and forth across the floor. His voice came out on a whispered croak. “It’s not safe.”

  It certainly didn’t feel safe with a warning like that. “Richie, do you know something about what happened to Ms. Peterson? Or who’s setting these fires?”

  “There you are.” Brad Frick’s surly interruption sent Richie skittering several feet away from Amy. He strode from the front door to the kitchen, not caring what mess his work boots stepped in or tracked onto the ruined linoleum. Like a parent speaking to a naughty toddler, Brad snapped his fingers and pointed at Richie. “I told you to stay out of this place.” He pulled off his paint-stained ball cap and nodded to Amy. “Sorry, Miss Amy. Richie’s just curious about what burned-up places look like. He likes watching fires. Thinks they’re cool.”

  Richie’s downturned face finally lifted, and he laughed. “Fires are cool. That doesn’t make sense. Fires are hot.”

  “Get on out of there.” Brad jerked his head toward the front door, ordering Richie to leave. As his lighter-haired partner shuffled past him, Brad’s gaze darted toward the framed remains of the hallway and bedrooms beyond. Was he taking in the blackened scorch marks on the floor and standing timbers? Did he think watching something burn was cool, too? Had one of them set this fire? Set all the others?

  Amy couldn’t help but retreat another step as suspicion hammered through her pulse.

  “You didn’t take anything, did you, Richie?” Brad asked, his gaze coming back to Amy after he looked over his shoulder to his friend.

  Richie frowned. “I didn’t take anything. I didn’t find it.”

  Find it? Find what? Had Richie been in here looking for something specific? Did Brad know what it was?

  Before she could ask a question, Brad covered his receding hairline with his cap again and shooed Richie on out the door. “Come on. We’d better get over to O’Brien’s and get to work.” Once Richie was outside, he stopped at the door and glanced back at her. “Don’t pay him no mind, Miss Amy. He’s like a kid in the head. He don’t mean nothing by what he says. You’d better leave, too. You wouldn’t want to get in trouble with the police.”

  With that dubious warning, he left. A few seconds later, she heard the slam of two car doors at the back of the house and an engine turning over. With parts of the house damaged and missing, it was easy to see Brad’s old blue car bouncing up onto the asphalt road and driving away.

  Why had they parked behind the house in the dead grass? So they couldn’t be spotted from the house? There didn’t seem to be any good reason for hiding. Had Richie’s slip of the tongue been something important? Had he broken in to look for something specific? Brad had known he was here. Had he sent Richie in to find something for him? Or had he been indulging his friend’s dangerous fascination with fire?

  There were so many things wrong with this encounter that Amy wanted answers before she went to talk to Detectives Beck and Carson. At the worst, Richie or Brad was hiding something. At the very least, they’d sneaked into a crime scene and had possibly disturbed evidence the detectives or Mark’s dad would want to know about.

  And since Brad’s attention had been focused on the back bedrooms, and that was where Richie had come from, Amy crossed through the kitchen and walked into first one bedroom and then the next. The first had been burned from floor to ceiling, and there was a hole in the roof above her. But the second bedroom, the one where Lissette had been found, was in a whole other state of destruction.

  Piles of ash littered the floor where wood furniture had stood. And the double mattress, cordoned off by more yellow tape, rested at a wonky angle beneath the missing back window. Had KCFD broken that window? Had the fire blasted it out of its frame? Or had the arsonist—and Lissette’s killer—broken in that way? The wood slats beneath the mattress and box springs and plastic wheels on each leg of the bed were gone, leaving the metal frame supporting the hollowed-out mattress where Lissette must have spent her last moments.

  Amy’s coffee and breakfast bar curdled in her stomach. She didn’t have to be an arson investigator to recognize the dark black pattern zigzagging across the mattress and pooling at the center where accelerant had been poured to hide the body. Although every surface in this room was stained by smoke and soot, more pour patterns circled the floor around the bed.

  Moving closer, Amy remembered the absolute destruction of Jocelyn’s remains, and her hand automatically went to the pendant on her chest, feeling the bond that had once linked them. Would she find anything similar here where Lissette had died? A piece of heirloom jewelry? The purse that Mark said had survived the conflagration? Had Lissette Peterson been burned out of existence without any symbol of a good friend or loved one to cling to?

  If there was anything here for Richie or Brad or anyone else to find, she didn’t see it. No matches. No melted gasoline can. No lighter like the one she used to ignite her welding torch.

  Creepy though he might be, Brad was right about one thing. She didn’t need to be here, either.

  Amy turned to step away, to respect the dead and the crime scene, when her foot crashed through one of the charred, warped floorboards. “Ow!” She tweaked her ankle as her work boot glanced off something metallic and wedged her leg in up to her knee. “What the hell?”

  A couple of tugs only scraped her skin inside her jeans. The twinge in her ankle receded as her curiosity kicked in. Giving up on keeping her clothes clean, she sat down on the floor and turned on the flashlight of her cell phone. She shrugged off her backpack and shone her light down into the gap between the floor joists. The me
tal wasn’t part of the house’s construction. It was a box—a square metal strongbox that had been hidden beneath the floor. Had that been put there by an earlier resident? Amy glanced up at the door frame. Was this what Richie had been looking for?

  Would he and Brad come back for it the moment she left? Provided she could get herself out of here.

  Amy pulled her phone back to call the police, but she’d be going to the police station in a little while anyway, so she could mention it then. Dale O’Brien certainly hadn’t helped her reputation with the authorities any by pointing out that she, too, had set a fire. What if this box had nothing to do with Lissette’s death and the fires? Maybe she’d uncovered one of the former tenants’ stash of porn or pot. No, she’d make sure she had something significant here first, before she gave Detectives Beck and Carson any more reason to question her reliability as a witness or even a suspect in their investigation.

  Instead of calling the police, she texted Mark.

  Running a little late. I got caught at the rental house where the fire was last night. “Caught.” She shook her head, grinning wryly at the literalness of her choice of words, before finishing and sending the text. My two handymen were checking the place out. I had to shoo them away.

  Then she snapped a picture of the hole in the floor, the box and her boot. It didn’t take her creative mind long to figure out a plan of escape. She dug the old trowel out of her backpack and wedged it between the floorboards, prying one loose on either side of her leg. They came up more easily than she’d expected because this section of flooring wasn’t nailed down. Nails didn’t burn. So, these boards had been loose before the fire. Before Lissette’s murder. Someone had made themselves a secure hiding place for whatever treasures were inside that box.

  With more wiggle room now to move, Amy reached into the hidey-hole and untied her boot. Pulling her foot out released the tension that had trapped her and allowed her to twist her boot onto its side and pull it and the strongbox up. She scooted away to a sturdier stretch of charcoal floor to examine the metal box. It, too, had been blackened by the fire, but not destroyed. Scrubbing away the soot with the butt of her palm, she uncovered the familiar O’Brien Construction logo.

  “What have you done now, Dale?” she murmured. Maybe he’d paid Brad and Richie to come here to find his stash of buried treasure. She took another picture before sinking back onto her heels and pulling the box onto her lap. The simple lock was no match for the trowel blade and she quickly pried it open. “What the...?”

  Inside the box was a cigarette lighter. She also found a half-empty jar of petroleum jelly that had cotton balls stuffed inside. Her grandfather had once taught her that trick on a camping trip—petroleum jelly burned, even in rainy weather, providing enough tinder with the cotton to ignite a fire for thirty seconds or so. Enough to burn until kindling could be added to build the blaze. Were they enough to set an entire building on fire? Maybe if another accelerant was added to the mix.

  But even those simple tools for starting a fire weren’t what made the bile rise in her throat.

  There were other items inside, yellowed with smoke damage and frayed at the corners, but she had no trouble identifying a stack of photographs printed out on cheap card stock. She took one more picture before tucking her phone into her jeans and lifting the pictures from the box. “Oh, my God. Oh. Oh.” She felt like she might truly be sick as she sorted through the tainted photos. If these were Dale O’Brien’s, the man had some serious issues. They weren’t images of architectural works the contractor had built. They weren’t pictures of fun-loving get-togethers or even scenery from a family vacation.

  They were pictures of women.

  A lot of women. All taken from a distance. All snapped without any of the women knowing.

  Pictures of Jocelyn Brunt and Lissette Peterson.

  Pictures of her.

  Chapter Eleven

  Amy’s phone vibrated in her pocket, but she couldn’t look away from the haunting images to answer the text.

  Her hand shook as she identified the familiar scenes of Jocelyn in her Jeep, driving through the hills on the north end of the farm. Jocelyn bent over equipment, analyzing a soil sample and entering the data onto her laptop. Lissette Peterson coming out of the construction office. Sharing a conversation with a group of workers on the Copper Lake site, smiling.

  There were images of Amy, hiking alongside the fence that bordered the old orchard, gathering discarded items from the nearby highway that she could use in her sculptures. Another picture of her standing on the front porch, leaning away from the scaffolding and turning her face to the warmth of the sunset.

  There were other women she didn’t know. Standing on the corner of a crosswalk in the city. Walking across a parking lot at a shopping mall. There was a dark-haired woman sitting at a desk in an office somewhere, as though the picture had been covertly taken across a waiting room. None of the pictures were lewd. But they were all...invasive.

  Her phone buzzed again, and she absently took it out of her pocket. Mark.

  Get back to the house. On my way.

  He understood the threat. All those times she’d felt as though she was being watched, she had been.

  These women had been spied on. She had been spied on. Now at least two of those women were dead.

  Were there other bodies out there? Would there be more bodies in the future?

  Amy couldn’t quite seem to catch a deep breath.

  Would one of those bodies be hers?

  “Frick! Sterling!” The sharp male voice shouting from the front of the house startled her from the terrible portents of her imagination.

  She typed a quick text to Mark. Only one word. Hurry.

  At the sound of approaching footsteps, Amy moved as fast as she could. She shoved her phone into her pocket. She stuffed the photos she held into her backpack, along with the trowel. She closed the lockbox and grabbed her boot and backpack. But she couldn’t handle all of them at once. She couldn’t handle any of them like this. Dropping her boot, she opened the main compartment of her backpack and tried to stuff the box inside, to keep searching or spying eyes from knowing she’d found it. But the box was too big, and the footsteps were too close. She unzipped the expanding feature on her pack, but with the laptop and her own things inside, there still wasn’t enough room. She shoved the box into the top as best she could before slipping the straps around her arms and pushing to her feet.

  “I thought I told you to meet me at...”

  Amy spun around at the voice from the doorway. The box tilted in the top of her open pack and she squeezed her shoulders back, trying to keep it hidden from view. Her breath gusted through her nose as she tried to appear composed, unassuming, not worried one whit about Dale O’Brien standing there, snorting a laugh at her expense.

  “Crazy Amy.” He propped his hands at his bulky waist and stepped into the room, eyeing her from head to toe. “One shoe off and one shoe on. Nothing weird about that. At the scene of another fire. If the police ask, I’ll have to tell them I found you here.”

  “I’ll have to tell them you were here, too,” she countered, sounding bolder than she felt. “Why are you looking for Brad and Richie? Why did you think they’d be here—on my property?”

  “I saw Brad’s car parked behind the place. Thought I’d come over and chase them back to work.” He swiped his finger along the charred frame of the door, studied the soot that came off and then pulled out a white handkerchief to wipe off his skin. “Some of my men are less inclined to come early or stay late with this rash of fires.”

  “And murders.”

  “And murders.” He walked over to the bed. Amy picked up her boot and scuttled away, keeping more than an arm’s reach between them. “I hear this is where your boyfriend found Lissette. Shame to die like that. She meant somethin’ to me. She was a good employee. And she was...sweet. My men all l
iked her.”

  She thought of the pictures in her bag. Someone had liked her a lot. “Lissette was friendly to me.”

  “She would be.” O’Brien studied the burn marks around the mattress, breathing in deeply, before he pulled off his hard hat and wiped the sweat from his forehead and cheeks with the soiled handkerchief. Or was he dabbing at tears? Could he be remembering Lissette’s last moments? Or was he truly grieving for a friend? “Always friendly, that girl. Always sticking up for the underdog.”

  Amy’s phone buzzed in her pocket again, but she didn’t want to take her eyes off O’Brien as she drifted half a step toward the door. “You and Lissette were close?”

  “You mean, was I boinking her?” He plopped the hard hat back on his head, his crass response erasing even that small bit of compassion she’d thought about feeling for him. “Nah. Wasn’t for lack of trying. She said I was too old for her.” Amy kept inching toward the door but found him circling the bed to keep the distance between them from increasing. In fact, whether it was intentional or not, he was moving her toward the back wall now, away from the exit, unless she wanted to try to muscle her way past him. Muscling hadn’t worked against Preston Worth. It hadn’t worked against Derek Roland. She doubted it would work against a man O’Brien’s size, either. “Besides, she had a strictly hands-off policy with the men she worked with. Most of them respected that.”

  “Most of them? Who didn’t?” Was climbing onto the mattress and diving out that window an option? It couldn’t be that far to the ground outside a single-story house. As long as the mattress didn’t collapse beneath her. And she could move faster than the overweight man. Amy shifted closer. “Did you respect her wishes?”

  Instead of getting an answer to her probing questions, the metal box chose that moment to shift out of her bag. Her scrambling efforts to catch it before it hit the floor only rattled the contents and pushed it away from her. It tumbled to a stop at O’Brien’s feet.