Threads of Suspicion

by Dee Henderson

  David’s chuckle held a bit of sadness, yet he said, “I do like the image of that. Give me about ten minutes to walk the backyard and I’ll be ready to go.”

  Evie finally gave up looking for a television show to watch. I should have stopped and bought a book. She would have called Rob, linked up with him for dinner, but he was in New Jersey for a wedding his parents had talked him into attending. The plane trip there and back was one she was glad to have missed.

  She picked up her collection of facts and theories on Jenna, read through them again, but found nothing to spark another line of inquiry. They now had several hundred names across the five missing women, even before they considered fans related directly to Maggie. Odds were good they had the name of Jenna’s killer. Time and patience and a steady push would identify him.

  In some ways the case had turned boring—it was simply elimination work now, going name by name, the inevitable middle-of-the-case syndrome. Hours would be spent on it, but the answer would appear out of that effort. Evie had faith in the process, even if she couldn’t predict how long it would take. She sighed and set aside the notepad.

  She wrapped her arms around one of the pillows she’d tossed onto the couch. Quit ducking it, Evie, she told herself. Now’s the time to at least get started on David’s assignment.

  She reached for a new pad, turned halfway into it to provide privacy from casual glances at the top page. She divided the blank page into two columns, numbered the lines one through twenty, being optimistic on the number of entries. On the left side, she wrote Stay Friends, and on the right, Get Married. And then she let herself think about Rob Turney.

  She began with the right column, Get Married:

  1. He loves me

  2. He’s a good guy

  3. I trust him

  4. He wants to marry me—his decision is made

  5. Options to explore for a job change that would eliminate most of my travel—move to the local PD, work with a private security firm, or _____?

  6. I like his home, his lifestyle—more upscale than mine, but not impossible to bridge for my personal comfort

  7. I’m at ease with his core group of friends, even though we don’t have much in common

  8. If I want children, it’s time I marry

  She didn’t write I love him. Though it felt true, to say “I love you, but I won’t marry you” felt incredibly harsh. So for now she didn’t add it to the list.

  Under the left column, Stay Friends, she began with the obvious:

  1. His mother wants someone else for him—she’s in good health, I’ll likely see her weekly for the next thirty years—mother-in-law tension is a real issue—do I want to live under that cloud of being a disappointment?

  2. My indecision tells me I do not deeply want to be married or I’m not ready to be married

  3. I’ve already had three failed engagements—do I want Rob to possibly be a fourth?

  4. If we stay friends—a big “if”—I could remain a state detective with its required travel and no job change

  5. I could become head of BOI one day if I stay with the state—a dream of mine

  6. My dogs are going to hate Chicago

  7. Rob will always be a finance guy, and I’ll always see that world through a lens that says it’s not life-or-death—that’s not a very supportive-wife attitude

  8. Sam

  Evie stopped. If she and Rob stayed just friends, she wouldn’t have to tell him any further details about her brother Sam’s death. She felt relief wash over her just at the mere thought of not having to have that conversation.

  Eight Get Married items, eight Stay Friends. At least it was an equal-opportunity uncertainty, she concluded, reading over the lists again. “Jesus, what else should be on these lists?” She thought about it carefully.

  After a while, she added five more to Get Married:

  9. I would enjoy being a wife

  10. We could have fifty years building our shared history—the sooner the wedding, the deeper, more satisfying that history will be

  11. We’re already solid friends, know each other well

  12. Rob enjoys spending time with me

  13. I’d like to share my life with someone, and I could see doing that with Rob

  Under Stay Friends, she wrote:

  9. Ann has concerns about him, and I value her perspective as a trusted friend

  10. A lot of good guys have been in my life, and I’ve always moved on—something in me is deeply vulnerable in a way I don’t understand when I never let myself settle into “forever” with one of them

  11. I want Jesus to be the center of my life, but I’m already giving him less attention than I’d like. In my head I want more time with him, and yet I avoid making it happen. I’m not afraid of what he’ll say, as he’s always kind and wanting to help me. I think I’m afraid I can’t be fixed. . . .

  12. I marry Rob and he dies on me

  She felt God open her eyes even as she wrote it down, and she literally hurled the pad across the room. Of course that’s the problem. Jesus is safe because He’s already come back from the dead and isn’t going to die on me like Sam. The last thing she wanted was to wear a ring from someone who would die on her and leave her like Sam had.

  She got up from the couch, feeling like she wanted to kick something. She left the pad where it had fallen, scooped up her coat and keys. She was significantly behind on her gym and shooting-range time. She’d use the county sheriff’s facilities, burn through a couple of hours with some intense exercise.

  Her brother was dead—she’d already said goodbye to one family member. There was no way she was going to live with the fear of losing another person she loved. She’d rather stay single than survive that pain again.

  Fifteen

  Evie brushed her hair the next morning, a Wednesday, ignoring the tired face and eyes in need of makeup looking back at her in the mirror. She was relieved when her phone rang, interrupting her thoughts. “Yes, David,” she said absently, setting the brush aside.

  “Evie, I just got a fascinating call from Sharon. There’s a body in Englewood, or more accurately, a skeleton.”

  It took a moment to reorganize her thinking away from her own problems and Jenna’s disappearance. The missing PI. “Bones?”

  “In a wall. A classic wall-up-the-problem crime scene. Want to come?”

  Her mood brightened at the question and the total change of focus. “Sure. I can meet you in the lobby in ten minutes.”

  “I’ll have the heater on max.”

  “Thanks.”

  Evie added another layer of socks before pulling on her boots. “God,” she whispered, “if you arranged this just for David, it’s so cool. I appreciate the distraction too.” She needed the break. She could put both Rob and Jenna on the shelf for a while.

  She made sure a pair of gloves were in her coat pockets, picked up a new notebook, ignored the pad now resting upside down on the table, and headed out.

  The directions Dispatch provided led to an older section of Englewood and a long, brick three-story building surrounded by a high chain-link fence. The multiple dumpsters, debris chutes, and scaffolding anchored to the roof on the north side all indicated the place was undergoing a much-needed renovation. A gathering of marked and unmarked cars at the south end of the building told them this was their target.

  David pulled in beside the coroner’s vehicle, and Evie got out with him, turned up the collar of her coat. The press was already on-site, for she recognized the vans with logos and call letters. The officer holding the logbook for the scene wrote down their names and badge numbers at the door. “You’ll find the excitement on the second floor, south end,” he said, waving them toward a stairway.

  Upstairs, it was easy to locate the crowd at the end of the hall, clustered around a small restroom, one marked with a W. The toilets in the four stalls and the wall with sinks remained, but construction workers had cut out a side wall and taken down the stall doors—with ha
ste over neatness from the looks of it. They had more carefully cut out a six-by-six-foot section of the concealing drywall for better visibility. That piece, along with what looked like a hammered-out hole in it, was being examined by crime-scene technicians with bright handheld lights.

  “Those are definitely skeletal remains,” David said dryly beside her, and Evie couldn’t help but smile.

  The skeleton leaned to the right, held up by the collar of a leather jacket that seemed to be caught on a nail. The rest of the clothing had disintegrated for the most part, with some short strands of hair remaining around the skull. The bones were still mostly in place and visible because gravity had been stopped by something that appeared to be chunky gray clay.

  “Is that cat litter?” David asked as they got closer and could see the detail of what had solidified into honeycombed chunks around the skeleton.

  The technician worked something out from the wall at about the height of the skeleton’s pelvis, turned at the question, held out a handful of the gray matter. “About twenty bags of it is the working theory.” Other technicians were carefully removing more of it from either side of the remains, placing softball-sized lumps of the material in rows on a clean piece of canvas laid out on the floor.

  Evie glanced around. The scene had been a busy one for at least a couple of hours, she thought. Cops were now mostly waiting for assignments, the newness of the discovery worn off, but still interested in watching the work while doing other business by phone or text. The detective in charge stood off to one side, supervising the process.

  David walked over to make introductions, Evie following more slowly since it wasn’t her case.

  “Captain Whistler,” David said, reading the man’s nametag, “I’m David Marshal with the Missing Persons Task Force. My partner, Evie Blackwell. You’re the one who called our boss, Sharon Noble?”

  Whistler nodded. “They found a wallet with an expired driver’s license about where his back pocket would have been. It made sense you’d want to see the body in context”—the captain passed over an evidence bag—“seeing as how you’ve been trying to find this guy.”

  David checked the license. “That would be my Saul Morris.” Obviously relieved, he offered the evidence bag to Evie, then looked again at the skeleton. “I’m going to guess he was dead before he went inside that wall.”

  “I’d say shot in the chest, then the drywall went up,” Whistler said. “A lot of stuff was shoved in there with him.” He indicated a makeshift table sitting under a window. “That’s where we’ve put what’s been lifted out so far.”

  “Thanks,” said David.

  Evie moved to the table with David. Items were being cleaned off by hand, using a small, soft brush to remove the cat-litter gunk. Another technician was taking photos and writing up an inventory. Evie was elated to spot a litter-caked camera, one of the older professional types with a motor drive. “One of Saul’s cameras was with the remains? That’s going to be a rich find if any photos can be recovered.”

  The technician paused to point with his brush. “The lab might be able to restore some images either from the film or the memory card, depending on which he was using. It’s a dual-type camera. The battery compartment looks like battery acid ate through it, but the vacuum seal of the body has held together.”

  “Care to give odds?”

  “Better than seventy if he was using film. An exposed negative is going to be good until it decays. Forty percent might be high if he was using the memory card, but images on those older cards are actually more retrievable since they used thicker memory cells.”

  “I’ll take those odds.”

  They saw the wallet’s leather had mostly survived, including its contents of ruined cash and business cards, plus two stained credit cards. David used his pen to gently shift a photo still intact under the plastic sleeve. “Cynthia and her son. Saul’s sister,” he noted when the technician glanced over. “This wire spiral”—David pointed with the pen to an encrusted ball of gunk—“is it the edge of a notebook? The guy was known to carry one.”

  “Could be,” the technician answered. “There are some remains of his shirt in there. You can see the collar, the front line of the pocket. We’ll peel apart the layers at the lab. Maybe you’ve got a readable notebook inside.”

  “And this?” Evie asked, studying a larger piece.

  “That looks like what came out of a car’s glove box. You can faintly make out a vehicle registration card on top, and on the side, part of an insurance card—see the logo? I think the thick mass at the back is a car manual.”

  “So,” David said, “they tossed everything he had with him into the wall, cleaned out his car and threw those items in as well. Both efficient and fast.”

  “What else might be here with him?” the technician asked.

  “A phone is likely, and maybe some folders of case materials,” David guessed. “He wasn’t one to regularly carry a handgun, but he was licensed for concealed carry.”

  “We’ll keep you informed on what gets found.”

  Evie walked with David back over to watch the work being done at the wall. Technicians were carefully recovering items around the bones. If they removed a piece too soon, the lattice of cat litter would cascade down in a heap, and with it the bones. The lead technician eventually took hold of the skull and with great care eased it out of the vertical tomb. Evie turned away, not needing to see this part.

  Captain Whistler came to join them. “How far along was your investigation?”

  David slid hands into his back pockets but kept watching. “I’d filled in the timeline on Saul’s disappearance to Saturday, eight p.m., when he was looking for a card game here in Englewood. A client’s wife thought her reformed gambler of a husband had relapsed but didn’t want to confront him without being certain. I’d guess from what we see here that Saul was working that case when he ran into trouble.”

  “A useful lead,” the captain responded. “It’s going to take the day to get the remains out of there, factor in lab time on the recovered items, medical examiner’s report, putting together the history on this building to figure out who might have thought it harmless to entomb him here. We’re looking at several days just putting our arms around this scene and what it can tell us. Consider this a shared investigation for now. I’ll want your take on the items found with him, whatever else you have for leads. So talk to anyone you like, read any reports you want to see. In a few days we’ll have more information to guide how everything proceeds.” He paused, smiled. “I’m guessing we take the bones and homicide off your hands once you’ve done all the work and can tell us what this all means. Your boss is on her way to sort that out.”

  David simply smiled. “You’ll find me in agreement with that plan, Captain. I’d like to stay with the case long enough to see the details, button down some open questions I have, but you’ll find me eager to hand it off to your homicide detectives. I’m one guy, and this is going to get very involved. We’re in the middle of a hot chase on another missing person that equally needs my attention.”

  “Good enough.” The captain nodded to the group off to their left. “Detective Jenkins will coordinate getting you anything you need. He’ll be running point for both of us.”

  “Thanks, Captain.” David stepped over and swapped business cards with Jenkins.

  The detective said, “I’ll stay on the body and scene recovery. Once we wrap up here, I’ll find you so you can fill me in on the case details.”

  David nodded. “That works. Who was first on scene?”

  “That would be me.” An officer stepped away from the watching group of cops to offer a hand. “Frank Taft, my partner Owen Nevins. We took the dispatch call.”

  “Who found the body?”

  The officer pointed down an intersecting corridor. A woman was sitting at a makeshift plywood table set up near the other end of the building. “Lori Nesbitt. The man pacing around is her boss, Nathan Lewis. He owns the building. Lori says s
he found the body, called 911, called building security, then her boss. Time on her call to us was 5:38 a.m. She was standing with a security guard at the first-floor doorway when we pulled up. Her boss arrived about twenty minutes behind us. We found that wall mostly intact. She’d punched a large hole in it with a hammer, and the skull was visible if you looked in with a flashlight. It was still a functioning bathroom then; construction workers didn’t start to dismantle it until crime-scene guys directed what they wanted done.”

  “Okay, thanks,” David said.

  Evie’s attention had spiked at the mention of Nathan Lewis, and she saw David’s had as well. Saul had been working for Nathan Lewis, looking into his wife’s murder. And Ann had said someone was working inside The Lewis Group right now and pursuing the same question.

  Evie followed David as he headed down the corridor toward the two. Rob had done business with Nathan on occasion, admired him, while Evie had never had an opportunity to meet him.

  It was quieter at this end of the building, the echo of voices subdued. “Ms. Nesbitt, Mr. Lewis, I’m Detective David Marshal. This is my partner, Lieutenant Evie Blackwell. It’s been an interesting morning for you, I take it.”

  The woman gave a ghost of a smile. “That’s one way to describe it.”

  Evie caught Nathan’s surprised look in her direction, gave him a brief smile but didn’t extend the introduction by mentioning either Rob or Ann as common friends.

  David turned to Nathan as he got out his notebook. “How long have you owned the building?”

  “Maybe thirty-seven days? Around there. I doubt the contract lets me void the deal for including a crime scene.”

  “We’ll be looking into all prior owners,” David assured him.

  “Between 2008 and 2012, it would have been RB Electric,” the woman interjected. David gave her an attentive look. “The officer gave me the date on the recovered driver’s license. I was rather insistent they tell me something. Had I uncovered a man or woman, dead a year or a decade?”