Traces of Guilt

by Dee Henderson

  She wanted to talk with Phil Peters and his wife, Jenna. The wedding that had nearly not taken place was on the Florist family calendar for that Sunday, the event noted in a hot-pink marker. Susan and Jenna were good friends. They would have been confirming wedding preparations that week—flowers and cake, decorations and invitations. A lot of time spent together. If a problem was brewing, Susan likely would have let something slip—maybe not significant at the time, but what about from the perspective of looking back? Evie made a note to see Phil and Jenna in person.

  What else? Evie began cataloging what she knew.

  The Florist family had been accumulating cash and storing it somewhere. Could she trace where it had gone? Where was the money now?

  Scott had purchased new IDs for the family as Simon and May Carnoff—using their middle names—their son Joseph Carnoff. The accompanying birth certificates, the social security numbers, would pass a cursory check. So far, none of the alternate names appeared to have ever been used. Keep pushing to confirm the IDs were never used.

  The father and son had feared the other had murdered Ash. They both seemed to be innocent of any involvement. But plenty of others likely had a motive to want Frank Ash out of the way. Who did kill Frank Ash?

  The Florist family disappeared sometime between Thursday night and Friday morning. Had she ever pursued an interview with the friends they were meeting at the campground? Evie was stunned to realize she hadn’t even thought of them beyond that they had called the authorities to report the Florist family hadn’t arrived. Who are they?

  “Dublin,” she muttered as she shuffled quickly through the file . . . no, there it was. “Durbin.” William and Nancy Durbin, family on Scott’s side. Nancy was Scott’s younger cousin, the notes indicated.

  The Durbins certainly knew the Florist family’s travel plans. Evie felt a hot spark of interest. Any reason they could have been involved? That was a new direction—a nice big maybe.

  Evie circled it on her new page of notes. What better way to get away with a crime than to control when and how it was discovered? The Durbins would have been able to make sure everything was tucked away nice and neat before the cops were even called. It felt promising. Evie was relieved just at the thought. There were new avenues to explore.

  All right . . . She leaned back, clasped her hands behind her head. What better place to hide a camper and truck than in a campground full of campers and trucks? Maybe camouflage the camper—old decal stickers, dirty it up, swap it with another camper set in among the weeds so it looked as if it had been parked for months. The truck could simply have plates swapped, be left sitting at the lake’s boat launch in a row of parked vehicles. The first day or two of the search had focused south around the Florist house. Cops wouldn’t have been looking at campgrounds north of where the family had been traveling. That first night, drive the truck and camper another thirty minutes or so north, tuck the camper and truck into a campground full of other campers, leave those parts of the mystery hidden in plain sight. The bodies were still a problem, but Carin Lake is right there. Go out at night, weight them down, drop them over the side of the boat. The Florist family arrive at their destination, were murdered, vehicles moved, their bodies dumped—all taken care of before you call the cops at seven o’clock Friday morning to say your friends haven’t arrived. And you’re a whole bunch of cash wealthier if you knew about that money. . . .

  Evie whispered “Eureka,” wondering if she just might have it.

  She ran that thought out. This case maybe isn’t that complicated. They simply hadn’t looked in the right direction. Like Grace’s uncle being well-known in town but hiding his true colors, maybe these killers had done the same. William and Nancy Durbin . . . family, where she had gone so many times before in her thinking. Were they having money issues, and then suddenly had none?

  She picked up her pad and added more notes.

  How hard would it be to make a camper disappear, a truck? If William Durbin left the keys in the truck, the truck unlocked, how many hours would it remain at the boat launch before someone stole it? An hour maybe? It could have been driven away before cops were even looking for the truck. Park the camper on a weed-filled lot, it would be equally invisible.

  Evie felt a cold certainty as she wrote, for this was not only possible, it fit with the facts of the case. She needed to know a great deal more about William and Nancy Durbin, and fast. They might be good, salt-of-the-earth people, and this was a flight of fancy that would crash into a wall . . . or they might be the desperate people who had spotted a quick answer to all their troubles and murdered three people to acquire a lot of cash.

  Evie glanced at the time. Ann and Paul might not have taken off from the airport yet. She grabbed her phone and made the call. “Paul, I need a favor.”

  “Name it, Evie.”

  “Everything you can tell me about a local couple without Gabriel finding out I’m asking.”

  “Names?”

  “William and Nancy Durbin. She’s a cousin of Scott Florist.”

  “I’ll get back to you.”

  Evie put down her phone, feeling another surge of confidence. He didn’t even ask—it was there in his voice. This might be the answer, and he’d get her the information she needed. Knowing Paul, she’d probably get a call back later this evening.

  She wasn’t going to do a victory dance yet, but she felt like celebrating just the same. She should order in some supper. There were only so many pretzels that qualified as a meal, she told herself as she set them back on the table.

  “God, calm me down, please,” she whispered. “I want so badly to have this solved, I’m grasping at this idea. It could be the one, it feels promising and possible and right, but I need the facts to support it before I upset and maybe taint an innocent couple. Please don’t let me say anything to Gabriel about this until I know for certain. But I know something about you—the truth matters—and maybe you’ve led me to find it. If that’s the case, thank you, profoundly. If this isn’t it, move me off this idea and on to others.” She thought about something else to say, realized just whispering the prayer had begun to calm her. “Thanks again, God, that at least there’s hope an answer is here. I’m going back to work now. Thanks for this idea.”

  This could turn out to be like the counseling and the doctor—something that fit, but wasn’t the answer. Evie accepted that. Paul was the guy with the ability to get her concrete information. She’d have something in a few hours, a day at most, and she’d know. One of these ideas would pan out to be the right one sooner or later.

  She pulled out her phone to order something from the pizza parlor, studying the crime wall while she waited for her order to be taken. What else? William and Nancy Durbin seemed to be a brilliant possibility. Experience had taught her if there was one idea left to find, there were two. There would be something else here. What else? She started thinking again about the night the family disappeared.

  “Evie.”

  She looked around as the door pushed open. “Hi there, Gabriel.” The man looked like he’d aged years in the week she had known him.

  “It’s one a.m.” he told her, voice rough with exhaustion. She was surprised at the time. No wonder she was beginning to get bleary-eyed. “Finding something?” Gabriel asked.

  She bit her tongue so as not to tell him. She wanted to tell him it could be William and Nancy Durbin, but she didn’t have word back from Paul, and she refused to let herself give Gabriel a roller coaster of an idea that turned into a dead end, not after the week he’d had. So she went with what she was working on now—maybe it would cheer him up.

  She broke a breadstick in two and held out half. “I’m on a roll of sorts. I think I’ve located who did kill Frank Ash, so I’m going to push on that for a bit to clear that question.” She gestured to the pages spread out on the table as he walked over. “Names appearing on your violent list who have boys in their family, age fourteen to seventeen.”

  “Find the motive, fi
nd the person who did it,” he said, sinking into a chair beside her.

  “Exactly. It might not have been the two boys’ families we know about. If there were two, there likely were more. Your list of violent people in the county fits who could also murder Frank Ash.” She used a napkin to wipe a smear off her laptop screen. “A .22 is rather an odd gun of choice for this group. I’ve got gun permits for every type of weapon you can imagine for people on the list, but no .22 so far. But I figure someone had access to a .22 even if he didn’t own it.”

  “Yeah, I can imagine that.”

  “Anyway, I’m going on the assumption someone on the list did the crime and wouldn’t want to throw away a perfectly good gun. He might have used it again or at least still have it. The Ash murder is still open, the evidence on file, so I’ve sent the slugs through the lab again. Maybe we get a match to a later crime.”

  “An obvious step—one I wish I’d thought of first.” He tried to smile, but he was so tired it didn’t come off that well.

  She patted his arm resting on the table beside her. “You’ve had a few other things on your mind. Eat something.” She pushed the pizza box his way, took another slice out for herself to encourage him to do the same. “I’m going to go see Phil Peters and his wife on Friday. They already have family in town for Thanksgiving, but they’ll send the last ones off to the airport Friday morning. I told them I’d be over their way about one o’clock. Want to come along?”

  He pushed up the pizza box lid, took a slice. “If things are quiet here, sure.”

  “I want to have that conversation in person rather than on the phone. Not just because Scott and Phil partnered together. Susan and Jenna were friends. I think Jenna would have known about Decatur—maybe not the specifics, but about the counseling. I’m curious why she never said anything about it. Or if she told Phil, why he didn’t say anything. And if she never told Phil, why not?”

  “Good questions to ask them both.”

  Evie decided it was time to change the subject. Gabriel needed to sleep, but he also looked like he needed to talk. “How’s Grace?” she asked gently.

  He sighed. “I left her watching a movie with Josh at my parents’ place. The media—thankfully—haven’t bothered her. Maybe they’ve heard my dad would run them off. Having Rachel around for the weekend helped—you can tell Grace and Rachel and Ann click well together. Grace was lighter in mood than I thought she’d be.”

  “I’m glad. The weather looks good for this coming week. Clear skies, windy, but not too cold.”

  Gabriel nodded. “Josh will be out there with the dogs in the morning. Grace still wants to be the one doing the map work, and so far none of us have been able to talk her out of it.”

  “For her own reasons, Grace knows what she needs to do.”

  “I get that . . . it’s just so painful to watch. I’ve got a press conference tomorrow at one p.m. Hopefully it will satisfy the last of the lingering media. You’re welcome to attend. We aren’t naming the person of interest in the Dayton girl case, so speculation is all over the place. But the questions about Kevin Arnett have been minimal. The Dayton family has agreed to stay quiet about what we’ve told them in order to give Grace breathing room.”

  “That’s kind of them.”

  “They understand better than most what she’s going through.” Gabriel pushed his chair back. “Don’t work too late, Evie. Well, I guess it’s already beyond late,” he said after a glance at his watch.

  “Just until I get through these names,” she promised. “I’ve left the top up on the convertible, so I won’t freeze going to the house.”

  He smiled. “I saw that. Call if you need me in the morning. I’ll be around.”

  “Thanks, Gabriel.”

  She’d tell him to get some sleep, but it would sound too much like his mother. Gabriel had family, and they were going to provide that support and strength he needed to get through this. She saw him off, then locked the door.

  God, I’ll mention what you already know. That is one man carrying more weight than is good for him. Help me give him answers. It’s not much, but it’s what I can do.

  Not for the first time she felt like she was in the middle of having that prayer answered tonight. William and Nancy Durbin might be the key to the Florist family disappearance. Evie stretched her arms back, looked again at the names spread across the pages, thought she was looking at solving the Frank Ash murder, a case she hadn’t even come here to work. It felt good, being useful. She pulled over the list of names and went back to work.

  While Evie ate breakfast Monday morning—after a very short night—she perused the report on William and Nancy Durbin, which Paul had emailed to her. The report was still preliminary, more info was coming, but already it proved useful.

  The Durbins had been married for four years at the time the Florist family went missing. Longtime residents of Carin County, both had attended the local high school. They made a respectable living farming, he also worked as a notary and did earth-moving jobs with his backhoe to bring in extra cash, and she tutored in math and gave piano lessons, had won awards for her pies. No debt on the property—the mortgage paid off the year before the Florist family disappeared, Evie noted from the date.

  William had a long string of DUI arrests going back to his teens. Nancy had been arrested twice on minor drug violations. They were divorced now. An unusual distribution of assets had occurred. The cash and investments had been split, but they still jointly owned farmland, cattle, and horses, and lived on the same property but in separate houses on opposite sides of the land. There had been two domestic-disturbance calls since the divorce, both involving a shotgun being fired at the pet of the other.

  It was the kind of acrimonious split suggesting each would be of a mind to implicate the other in a crime if given the chance. Evie wanted to interview them both as soon as possible. But her night of restless sleep had raised some questions she was mulling over now, and it was cooling her certainty that this was the answer.

  Why had Scott arranged to go camping with the Durbins, of all people, on a last-minute vacation when the focus of the trip was to repair the relationship with his son? There weren’t boys the same age in both families. To go camping beside a huge lake and not go out on the water didn’t seem likely. So maybe the Durbins had the boat? Or had Scott been planning to rent a boat once they arrived? That seemed equally as likely. If not for a boat, why plan to meet up with the Durbins? Maybe a social thing, a family thing that just sort of happened? You’re going camping? Oh, so are we, let’s park together and share meals. Good luck getting out of that when it was a family relationship. Evie could see a scenario like that playing out.

  The Durbin marriage couldn’t have been too rocky back then. If they were heading toward a nasty divorce, they wouldn’t have been going camping, staying together in a twenty-some-foot camper. So the marriage was probably okay at the time. No doubt volatile on occasion, but reasonably peaceable.

  Ample assets were in play when the couple divorced, suggesting forty thousand wouldn’t have seemed like a life-changing amount. But maybe that amount in cash was significant at the time of the camping trip? She needed the rest of the report from Paul’s researchers to answer that question. Money was often a motivator for murder, but three killings, one of them a child? The need would’ve had to be acute.

  The Durbins fit the crime. They could control when the police were informed, they had the means and the time to get rid of the car, camper, and bodies. But she shook her head as she tried to picture them taking it as far as a triple homicide. If there was trouble between the relatives, Scott would not have agreed to the camping trip. He was a cop, so he wouldn’t have been blind to tension that acute. If money had been that strained, Scott would likely as not have made them a loan. And my biggest problem with this report, she told herself, tapping the page of notes, the Durbins divorced in acrimony. If there was a murder in their past, one of them would have tried to frame the other to get the entire
estate.

  With that realization her solid idea felt like it died.

  She’d interview them. She’d find out how tight money had been for them back then. But on a second look, her hot lead of the night before was turning cold. The Durbins had no obvious reason to murder the entire Florist family. Killing a child truly changed the equation. The DUIs William Durbin had racked up were as much a reason for her doubts now as the acrimonious divorce. A drunk couldn’t keep this kind of secret for thirteen years, nor could a bitter ex-wife.

  Monday morning was turning out the way she feared her week was headed. She would spend the next few days interviewing people on Gabriel’s list who had kids, see if she could firm up something about the Frank Ash murder. She’d see if the doctor would talk to her once more. She wanted to pursue further the new IDs Scott had acquired. She’d interview the Durbins, and later in the week, Phil and Jenna Peters. But she might not find her answer, she had to admit to herself.

  Killing a family of three—and one of them a kid—requires something unique as the trigger, Evie acknowledged, reading the report again, and she knew in her gut she didn’t have it yet. She’d convinced herself this was solid, and now the roller coaster headed back to reality. She’d push on the Durbins, but it was beginning to wobble. The interviews would be interesting, though. She’d head that way first. Maybe the idea would turn hot again when she met William and Nancy Durbin in person. She could always hope.

  She smiled to herself and poured coffee to go, headed out to the car. She’d take hope wherever she could find it, knowing it would be a long week. Luck was mostly perspiration. She’d keep digging until there were no more questions to push and something gave. It usually did.

  Gabriel Thane

  Gabriel pushed aside another branch threatening to slap his face as he followed his brother back to the vehicles. Tuesday’s search was over, another dozen flags had been set, and Gabriel—once Josh and Grace were safely out of sight—had dug up the ground to check what the dogs had found, but had discovered only animal remains. He watched Grace striding ahead of them, carrying the maps, while the dogs, happy to be free from further responsibility, circled around her.