Full Disclosure

by Dee Henderson

  “It’s what’s possible.”

  “Yeah. Glad it’s done, wish it was a better result,” Kate said. “What Ann gave me went somewhere. I hear what she gave you is going somewhere too.”

  “It is. Where is Ann today?”

  “Missouri, I think.”

  “She doesn’t stay put for very long, does she?”

  “A day or two occasionally. I hear you and Dave had a conversation about her the other night.”

  “You don’t need to play matchmaker too.”

  “Moi?” Kate laughed. “Have you called her yet?”

  “Thinking about it.”

  “You should, you know. You’ll like her.”

  “I’m sure I will.” Paul smiled. “I appreciate the update. Anything else?”

  “That was my excuse to call. Safe travel home, Paul.”

  “Thanks, Kate.”

  Paul slid his phone back in his pocket.

  Ann was in Missouri. Given he was in West Virginia, the travel was relative. Ann was good at her job. He tucked away that fact and looked back at the house. So was he. He had a lady shooter to catch. The two safes and bank box had produced false IDs, valuable gold and silver coins, and several thousand in foreign currency. They didn’t have a name for the lady shooter yet, but they had paper to work. It was time to get back to Chicago.

  The plane trip back to headquarters was quieter than the trip out. His team was listening to music, sleeping, quietly chatting. The immediate work was done, and they deserved the break.

  Paul clicked on the overhead seat light and pulled over his travel bag.

  Dave’s box had been a stack of books with a note: Ann’s published works. Read the O’Malleys in order.

  Before he had packed, he’d spread them out on the table and reviewed the titles. The covers weren’t his style, and they were romantic suspense, which wasn’t his preferred category either. There were three military novels in the mix. She wrote under a pseudonym, but he had expected that.

  After some checking on the O’Malley series titles, Paul had stuffed three into his bag. Now he selected the first book and opened to the first chapter.

  Kate O’Malley had been in the dungeon since dawn.

  He’d found Dave and Kate’s story, if he wasn’t missing the mark.

  He looked out the window and considered waiting for another time to read it. He didn’t feel like getting disappointed, and he figured that was what was going to happen. Ann was a friend of Dave’s, and friendship made for a lot of allowances about what was good writing.

  What did you decide to write, Ann, when you sat down to tell Dave and Kate’s story?

  He settled in to read. He began to hear Ann’s voice in the telling, and then the story took over.

  Three hours later, the flight attendant’s voice announced they were landing soon. He rolled his shoulders to work out the tension. Ann had crashed a plane in her story. He had not seen that coming. She had worked at least one plane crash in real life to have caught the details she did. And right now he was about to land. He felt like chuckling at his serious wish that fiction didn’t come true.

  She had his attention, and she did not let go. He needed to read all her books. The more he read, the more convinced he was that he had best make the time.

  Who are you, Ann? And where did this storytelling gift come from?

  5

  Ann Silver landed at the airport in Alton, Kentucky, early Wednesday morning, and by nine o’clock was walking into the Alton Police Department. It wasn’t the first time she had routed from one MHI call to the next, and it wouldn’t be the last. Missouri had been raining and cool, while Kentucky was sunny and warm. She’d picked up a bagel and cream cheese for breakfast at the airport, found her sunglasses, and borrowed a car. If not for the weather, the day could have been a repeat of her prior one.

  “Thanks for coming, Ann.”

  “Glad to help, Ben.”

  She set down a hot chocolate for him, perched on the edge of the desk, and blew on hers to cool it. The murder board behind him was filled with photos and notes, and she scanned out of habit.

  “Her name is Elizabeth Verone,” Ben told her. “Fifty-two, divorced ten years, no children, a hairdresser for thirty years. She was shot in her home on May twenty-first. I’d rather you make your own judgment on the rest of it. The murder book is current as of last night, and I had a duplicate made for you.”

  “Let me read what you’ve got and get up to speed. I’m sorry for this, and the loss. It’s always bad when it is someone you know.”

  “She was a pain in this department’s collective side with her fountain of collected gossip about crime tidbits she heard while cutting people’s hair, but she was our nuisance, someone killed her, and the days are running off the calendar. We need this one solved and off the board.” He looked at the photos a final time, shook his head, then turned and pulled together what she would need. He handed her a thick binder and a set of the photographs. “Want me to find you a desk?”

  “No need. I’ll find a quiet place to read, then find you and talk it through.”

  Having worked for the department before, she took the route most cops took when they needed a break, and she headed to the roof. If she was going to think murder, she would do it while she also got some sun.

  It took four hours to get through the weight of it, and she rubbed her eyes as she let her mind drift for a bit. This victim didn’t have family issues to tug. Family was states away with solid alibis, and that eliminated the easy answer for where to look. Their victim had told the police about enough crimes, real and imagined, that if Ann picked a file at random out of the history of this town, there would be a link of some tenuous nature to the lady who had died. No wonder the cops were hitting their heads against the wall trying to get this case to give ground. Many people would have strong emotions about this woman, and more than a few might prefer her to be dead. So who had acted?

  They hadn’t found the shooter.

  She mulled that fact around in the back of her mind while she let her thoughts sort out what was here. The cops knew their town, knew who to question, who to suspect as possible shooters, and they had done a solid job of doing that. The interviews were extensive, comments were cross-checked, and alibis had held.

  The cops hadn’t found a viable suspect for the shooting.

  Ann stopped on that thought again and let herself ponder the fact for a good few minutes, stepping back through the river of information the investigation had uncovered and mentally following the flow of it, looking at how the case had unfolded. The cops should have found their shooter.

  And that told her something.

  She looked one last time at the photos of the murder scene, then closed the murder book and went back downstairs.

  She brought in roast beef sandwiches for the cops working the shift, the meal a habit when she was a guest in their house. She settled in to share Ben’s desk and enjoy a really good sandwich.

  “You got through it all?”

  She nodded around a bite. “Fat murder book, good investigation, and you’re right. It’s going cold.”

  His partner, Greg Ornell, waved toward the murder board with his spoon from one of the coleslaw sides that came along with the sandwich. “It’s like this perfect crime. Shoot her, no one sees you, everyone we talk to maybe had a reason to want her out of the way—it’s too many needles. We’re finding the needles in the haystack, but there are just too many needles.”

  Ben nodded. “Too many people got rubbed the wrong way over thirty years of her life. A shooting is a cold way to end it. Someone thought about this for a long time, then got triggered somehow and said, Today I’m going to do it, and did it. She’s lived here her entire life, Ann. There’s too much here, and yet not enough of the right things. We don’t have the evidence that can focus us in on where to look.”

  “Then we work through it, and we look for what might narrow it in. Do you have a preference for how you want to do this?”


  “I’d like you to tell me the story of it, Ann,” Greg suggested. “Let me see it fresh, and maybe I can spot where I can tug next.”

  Ben concurred.

  Ann finished her sandwich and got herself a new drink. Since she was better off in motion, she moved to the murder board. “Okay. Story first.”

  Ann knew it would not be polished or smooth as she spun it out, but it would be useful, as all reviews were, to hear again the story and its mystery to be solved.

  “My name is Elizabeth Verone. I’m a tidy woman, with a generous laugh. I love to gossip and pass on what I hear and ask you what you know. I’m a woman of routine, same breakfast of a morning, same route to work, same station where I’ve cut hair for thirty-two years. I keep cards of useful people with handwritten numbers tucked along my mirror. I get business for people, and I’m proud of that networking I do for folks. You need a plumber, I’ve got a name of a good one. I’m a broker of information, that’s how I see myself, rather than a gossip. I want to help you out. You come and sit in my chair to get your hair shaped and styled, and I consider you one of my people. I want to know your troubles and your news, and I want to know what’s going on in your friends’ lives too.

  “Nothing stays confidential for long if I know it. My pleasures in life are to know information about you, and share information with you.

  “It’s cool on Monday morning, and I stop to find a sweater before I go to work. The car needs gas, so I stop to put in five dollars, then I stop at Parker’s Bakery for coffee and a donut and mention to him that Janet’s daughter got a scholarship to art school and isn’t that a grand thing?

  “I open the shop a few minutes early. Amy wants her hair trimmed and to talk about her boy getting in trouble with Henry’s boy Lou last weekend. Paula is next and wants her hair colored, and I nudge her into talking about what real estate has sold recently, and if there are any new homes coming up for sale.

  “I have two perms and then a lull, so I sit with Jenny and Karen by the dryers, and we read through the new magazines for this month. The talk turns to men. Nathan is back in town and that runs for ten minutes of reminiscing. Jeffery stayed overnight with Melinda, if the parked car was any clue. I mope about how I haven’t been on a date in ages and want a decent dinner out and movie, just to have a nice change of pace in my day.

  “I lock the shop door at five p.m. I’ve been on my feet most of the day and I’m tired, so I take myself straight home. I putter in the kitchen and fix myself a cheeseburger and salad. I eat alone while I go through the day’s mail. I trade off grocery shopping with my neighbor and we rotate the weeks each of us will shop. Since this is her week, I dump the store flyer into the trash with the other junk mail.

  “I start a load of laundry, towels and other whites. While they run through, I go out back and water the six new roses I planted this year around my patio.

  “I decide I should mow at least by the garage so I won’t have to do it all on Saturday. I get out the mower and do the stretch alongside the garage and in front of the flower bed. I need to bag the grass but don’t like to do the job, so I half rake at the tall grass and pile it by the dead stump and call it done. I put the mower and the rake away and I close the garage door. I come inside and drop my headphones and iPod on the dining room table.

  “Someone has been in my kitchen. There are groceries on the counter and ice cream ready to go into the freezer. I call out for my neighbor Susan DeMarko, thinking she came over while I was mowing. I hear water running in the guest bathroom. So I walk into the kitchen and open the refrigerator to finish putting the groceries away.

  “The window shatters and I’m shot.

  “Head shot kills me instantly and I drop right where I’m standing. The refrigerator door swings back and stops at my shoulder. The pickle jar in my hand shatters and splatters pickle juice over the lower cabinet doors.

  “My friend hears the shot, hears me fall, comes into the kitchen, sees the blood, and starts screaming. She goes flying out the front door shouting for her husband, who comes running. He calls the cops while the wife screams hysterical that Elizabeth is dead, someone shot Elizabeth. No one enters the house until the cops arrive.”

  Ann looked over the pictures on the board and wondered again at the horror of it. A nice neighborhood, not rich but not poor, quiet of crime, and a woman shot in the head without warning. A few more cops had joined them now, and she scanned faces to confirm she had the latest facts right. “There are no other sniper-type shootings anywhere in the surrounding states, no local shootings since this one. It wasn’t a random thing where she’s the first victim of many.” Nods around confirmed it.

  Ann returned to the story, thinking about the why of it. “All right, it was me, Elizabeth Verone. Someone wanted me dead. Does someone want my gossiping to stop? I knew about real estate, who was sleeping with whom, and who came and went from the town. That’s just what I happened to learn about today. Add up a year of days, and I know a lot of bits and pieces of news that might mean something if I put together the details.

  “I know something someone doesn’t want me to say. I talk about everything I know, so you’re going to have to kill me to shut me up. Maybe I’ve already talked, and you are paying the price for it. Maybe I’ve shattered our world with my gossip, and you hate me with everything that’s in you. I know something you don’t want me to tell, or I’ve said something already and hurt you bad, and you’ve decided you’re going to be the one to shut me up forever.” She paused to drink while she switched roles to the one who had come to kill.

  “I came with a rifle to the back of your house planning to kill you. I came during the daylight hours rather than at night, so I stay in the woods to avoid being seen by neighbors. I don’t want you to see me in case I miss.

  “You’re outside in your yard. So why don’t I shoot you when you mow, when your back is turned as you walk back and forth and your attention is on the ground in front of you?

  “I don’t shoot you in your backyard because I’m in a perch quietly tucked away and already zeroed in on your kitchen window. I know I won’t miss that shot, so I’m just waiting for you to appear in the window at the kitchen sink. My nice little target and right there in my rifle sights.

  “So why didn’t you shoot me while I was fixing myself dinner? I was in the kitchen for quite some time. You hadn’t set up behind my house yet? You weren’t there before I got home from work? You came in afterwards? You shot me in the side of the head as I looked in the open refrigerator. You didn’t want to see my face when you killed me?”

  Ann closed her eyes and put herself into the mind of the shooter. “I was looking for just the right opportunity to kill you. I didn’t kill you in the backyard. I waited for you to go back inside. I shot you through the kitchen window when you opened the refrigerator to put away the groceries. Was I really planning to kill the neighbor who came over with the groceries, and I shot you by mistake?”

  Greg pointed at her and interrupted—“That’s interesting. That is interesting, Ann. The neighbor was the intended target, not Elizabeth.” He pivoted toward Ben, and his partner was already nodding.

  “Why shoot your wife in your own home? Quite a mess to clean up and it’s a crime scene for a long while. Shoot Susan next door. Nice solid alibi. I want my wife dead, and I know exactly where she will be five minutes from now. Guy was right there on the scene when the cops roll up.

  “His wife goes out the door carrying the groceries over to Elizabeth’s. He’s got to get his rifle, get around the back of the house to the woods, get lined up for a shot in the kitchen window, and take that shot while Susan is still in the kitchen with the groceries. A rifle with high-powered scope, all you’re going to see in the scope at that distance is brown hair and a lot of it. They’re both brunettes. The shot could have been meant for either brunette in the house. Run it that way, Ann. See where it goes.”

  She mentally reoriented what she knew about the crime as she nodded. “My n
ame is Kevin DeMarko and I’m an angry man. I’ve been married to a woman I’ve grown to hate, and I want her gone. Divorce means alimony and maybe it comes out I’m sleeping with someone else. I kill my wife and get away with it, problem solved.

  “My wife goes out the door carrying groceries to the neighbor. Murder is on my mind, and I see the opportunity in an instant—see all the potential of it. The one person in the county most people would love to see gone is the gossipy lady next door who is into everyone’s business. Kill my wife over there and everyone will assume the shooter made a mistake and the person who was supposed to have been shot is the hairdresser.

  “Susan goes out the door with the groceries, and I’m up from the table and running to take advantage of my opportunity. I grab my rifle and go through the backyard. I glimpse my wife at the window unloading the groceries. I find a spot where I can brace and steady a shot. I’m breathing hard and anxious to get it done. I have to wait while Elizabeth pushes the mower around to the garage so when she hears the shot she won’t turn this direction and see me in the trees. I hear the garage door going down, I see brunette hair enter my rifle scope, and bam, my wife is shot in the back of the head and goes down. I run back to my home and ditch the rifle somewhere fast, shove it into the gutter extension or bury it in the stack of two-by-four scraps in the garage. I get into the house. And I hear screaming.”

  Ann stopped, looked at the murder-board picture of the husband at the scene. “You hear screaming. Only it’s your wife screaming that your neighbor is dead, rather than your neighbor screaming that your wife is dead. And you have really screwed up your life.

  “You call 9-1-1 while your wife stands there sobbing. You have an alibi of sorts as you were home and you came running when your wife screamed—you’ve been standing there on the driveway with her while the cops arrive. You get through the first search, the second search, without them finding the rifle. You get to the night when you can move it to a safer place, and another day when you can dispose of it. Get that far, you know you’re okay on the murder. It doesn’t point towards you. But you have really screwed up your life.