“Religious? Personal decision? No family history…?” In Zachary’s experience, people weren’t teetotalers for no reason. It was the society norm to have a drink now and then, particularly on social occasions, and people didn’t fall outside the norm without a conscious decision.
“He just didn’t think it was a good idea,” Ashley said primly. She took a sip of her own drink and picked up her fork again. “There’s nothing wrong with that.”
“No,” Zachary agreed, glancing down at his own glass of water. “Nothing wrong with that.”
“So would you take the case?” Ashley asked him tentatively. “Would you look into it, dig down deeper than the police did, and prove that it was really an intentional homicide, not an accident?”
“I can’t guarantee the results,” Zachary said. “I can’t tell you what my findings are going to be or whether you’re going to agree with them. Is there really a case to be made for intentional homicide? What are you reasons for thinking it wasn’t just an accident?”
Ashley took a bite of her salad and chewed it slowly. “The driver got out of the truck and went to have a look,” she said. “That tells me that he knew exactly what he had done. He got out to make sure Richard was really dead.”
“Or he got out to look for the animal he had hit, but not seeing one, decided to go on his way.”
“I know Richard. He would never be careless like that, walking with his back to traffic. He would have walked on the other side of the road so he was facing oncoming traffic. He would have gotten off of the road if there was a truck coming. He was very careful to avoid traffic accidents. He would never have let something like that happen.”
Zachary scratched down a couple of notes and closed his eyes, thinking about it. “Were you there that night? Did the two of you live together?”
“I have my own place, but I stayed over with him a lot. It just depended on what our schedules were like. That night… I went home.”
“Because you wanted to? He wanted you to? Whose idea was it?”
“I don’t know… I don’t think either one of us said specifically. It was just one of those things… mutual. I had things to do, he had things to do. So I went home.”
“And you realized he was missing when? The next morning.”
“Yes.” Without prompting, she went on to give him the details. “I called him every morning. We always chatted for a few minutes over coffee. Just touched base, talked about how our days were going to be. Couples stuff. It didn’t matter whether we were together or apart, we always had that talk.”
“So you called and he didn’t answer.”
“Right.”
“How often had that happened before?”
“It wasn’t unusual… he would be getting breakfast ready or shaving and he would call me back once he was free.”
“But he didn’t.”
“I waited a while, then called again. Over and over. He still didn’t answer. I texted him. I didn’t know what else to do. I went to work for the morning, but I couldn’t keep my mind on my work, I was so worried about why he wasn’t answering. So I took the afternoon off and went to see him. I thought… maybe he was sick in bed. I really couldn’t think of anything else. It never occurred to me that he might have left the house.”
“He didn’t normally go for a morning jog or walk?”
“No. We both thought that was a little silly. Not that there’s anything wrong with it if that’s how you choose to get your exercise! But we both had fitness equipment and club memberships. No need to brave the weather and the traffic if you could just take a spin on the stationary bike while watching the morning news. It just seemed a lot more… civilized.”
Zachary looked at Bowman. “How was he dressed?”
“Comfortable, casual. Not dressed for the office, but not dressed for bed or for a jog either. Jeans, t-shirt, warm jacket. Sneakers, not loafers.”
“Where did he work? Did he have a stressful job?”
Ashley gave an uncomfortable shrug. “He was… a janitor. Well, somebody has to be! It was a good, steady job. It paid his expenses and he was putting a little away. I bring in good money from my job, so if we got married…” Ashley swallowed hard and didn’t finish the thought. She was still in the process of figuring out how to manage without him. She still thought of him as being there, present with her, and the thought that they didn’t actually have a future together anymore was startling and tragic.
“Nothing wrong with a good, honest job,” Bowman asserted. “We checked him out and there were no indicators that he was into anything illegal on the side. One hundred percent legit.”
Zachary was glad that the police investigation bore out what Ashley had to say about her deceased partner. But that didn’t mean he wouldn’t find something more when he had a chance to really look for any issues. He smiled and nodded at Bowman.
“Good. It helps with an investigation when I’m told everything.”
He looked at Ashley. She didn’t jump in with more details. He had a feeling she was holding back, but he didn’t know what kind of information it was she was holding back. She claimed that Richard was clean, no drugs or alcohol, holding a custodial position. No problems with the law.
“What was Richard’s background?”
“What do you mean?”
“Custodial jobs are usually entry-level. People don’t stay there unless they don’t have a choice. Did he have any education? Did he grow up with his family or in the system? It doesn’t sound from his name like he was an immigrant whose qualifications were not accepted here.”
“No. He just… I don’t know. That’s what he could get, so he stayed there. He and his family grew up in Minnesota.”
“Are they still around?”
“No.”
“Hobbies?”
Ashley’s brows drew down. “I don’t understand what that has to do with anything.”
“I wonder how he spent his time. If he wasn’t doing something he enjoyed for work, then I assume he was getting satisfaction from something else he was doing at home.”
She gave a helpless shrug. “No… no hobbies. I guess he just… we did things together. Went out to eat or watched TV. Nothing… special.”
Zachary tried to think of what else to say. He still didn’t know what made her so sure that it hadn’t been an unfortunate accident. Was she in denial? He didn’t like to take a case just based on the fact that she was in shock over Richard’s death. She’d come around to it and then wouldn’t want to pay him.
“I’ll need a retainer,” he said. “If you really want to go ahead with this. But I don’t hear anything that leads me to believe it was an accident. I’ll need money up front, and you need to be prepared for the fact that I might not find anything that supports your feeling that it was accidental. The police are pretty thorough…”
“But you’ve solved cases before that they thought were accidental when they were really murder.”
“Yes. I have.”
“That’s why I need you. I need someone who is willing to suspend disbelief and not just follow what the police say. If you come back with it being an accident… I guess I’m going to have to live with that. But I’m not going to find out anything if I don’t pursue it. I really need to know. I need to know what happened to Richard. He wouldn’t have just gone out walking in the middle of the night and gotten in an accident like that.”
“Okay.” As Zachary’s dinner got cold, he outlined the financial terms and conditions for Ashley, and she nodded and ate her meal and didn’t blanch at the rates he gave her and the upfront retainer. Eventually, Zachary had given her all of the warnings he could think of. “Well, if that sounds okay to you, I’ll write it up. You sleep on it tonight and make sure it’s really what you want. If you wake up in the morning and have changed your mind, no harm done. Just let me know. If not… I’ll start in on what the police have gathered, and see what else needs to be done.” Zachary looked at Bowman. “Can I get access to the
case files?”
“You know how it is. It’s an active investigation, so no. But talk to the right people and push the right buttons, and that could change. Your friend Joshua Campbell is on the case, so it probably won’t be too hard. He was happy with the work done on the Salter case.”
Zachary nodded, relieved. There were plenty of cops at the police station who didn’t like him or didn’t want anything to do with a private investigator, but Campbell was not one of them. He’d always been civil toward Zachary. Sometimes, like in the Salter case, he had even given Zachary a tip or given him leave to investigate in a direction he knew his own officers wouldn’t be able to pursue.
“That’s great. He won’t give me any trouble.”
“Good,” Ashley approved. “You always hear stories about how cops and private eyes can’t get along together, or cops and the FBI. I’m glad to know that’s just pulp fiction.”
Zachary exchanged looks with Bowman. “Oh, it’s not always fiction. But it shouldn’t be a problem on this file.”
Chapter Two
T
he first thing for Zachary to check, once he had his retainer from Ashley and was sure that he was okay to go ahead and begin his investigation, was what Richard had been wearing the night he had been killed. There was a big difference between a jogger out with a headlamp and reflective vest and a man walking down the shoulder wearing black pants topped by a black hoodie. In the middle of the night, with no streetlights, a vehicle would be almost on top of him before their headlights picked him out, and then it would be too late. It was easy for a quickly-moving vehicle to outrun its headlights, especially a big, heavy, fully-loaded rig with a deadline to meet.
After talking to Joshua Campbell, Zachary sat down in a meeting room with the first file from the case box, and read through the description of the body and the initial evidence gathered at the scene.
Richard Harding. White, six foot one, one hundred sixty pounds. Body found in the ditch of a secondary highway that ran along his property line. Probable cause of death, pending the autopsy results, blunt force trauma from an MVC. The pictures of the body at the scene did not show a lot of bleeding or bruising. Death had probably been instantaneous.
He was in stocking feet. One shoe had been recovered at the scene and the other was missing. Fashionable red sneakers. Zachary didn’t want to guess what they had cost him. Dark blue jeans, white t-shirt, dark green winter coat. The coat would have covered up the white t-shirt and didn’t appear to have any reflective embellishments.
The evidence suggested that he had been hit with a powerful force, which had blown him right out of his shoes. Zachary knew from his past investigations and accident scene reconstructions that it indicated a fast-moving vehicle. Had Richard not even heard it coming? Zachary didn’t see anything in the file indicating that he’d been wearing earphones that might have blocked the noise of the approaching vehicle. His phone was in his pocket. If he’d been wearing earbuds, they had been torn from his body by the force just the same as the shoes had been.
What reason would he have had to be walking or standing on the road at that time of night? Had he been meeting someone? Walking to a neighbor’s? Had he pursued a trespasser or burglar from his property out to the highway? Was he investigating a sound or an animal? Or had he just been out for a walk, unable to sleep and hoping that the exercise and fresh air would help him to reset and get some sleep?
It hadn’t sounded from his discussion with Ashley at Old Joe’s that walking outside had been a normal activity for Richard. He did his workouts inside where there weren’t big rigs to mow him down.
Then what had made him decide to go out the night he had died? Zachary made a note in his notepad to check later and see if there had been any trouble Ashley wasn’t aware of. Threats or a break-in. Any previous police reports or alarms with his security company. Just because Ashley said there wasn’t anything going on, that didn’t mean it was true. Richard might have hidden it from Ashley or Ashley might be hiding it from Zachary. He never could understand why a person would want to hire a private detective on a case and then keep secrets from him. But everyone seemed to hold something back.
In the evening, he was transcribing his notes from his notepad to the computer. He supposed he should make notes on his phone or get a tablet or a notebook that he took to the police station or other research sources with him, but he preferred the notepad. It was idiot-proof, the batteries didn’t run down, and he hadn’t yet lost his notes taken in a physical notepad, other than the ones he lost in the fire, along with everything else. If he’d taken those notes on a cloud-connected app, he wouldn’t have lost them, and would still have been able to get them back. But he hadn’t had anything backed up to the cloud. Not his computer, not his photography, nothing. He was happy to find that his phone had automatically saved his contacts, and he’d had his email, but that was about it. Everything else had been lost in the fire, and Zachary had once again been left vulnerable and homeless, just like after the first fire, when his mother had decided that she couldn’t take it anymore and had kicked him out of her life.
Zachary’s phone buzzed. It was a few moments before he could tear his eyes from the computer screen to look at the display on the phone. His heart leapt when he saw Bridget’s name. He swiped quickly before picking it up, to catch it before she hung up.
“Bridget?”
“Oh, you’re there. I was beginning to wonder, Zachary.”
“Sorry. I was just in the middle of writing reports. Needed to finish my thought.”
“Are you home, then?”
“Yes.”
“Mind if I stop over for a few minutes? I have something to give you.”
Something to give him? While she still sometimes tried to take care of him, monitoring whether he was taking his meds and eating properly, he couldn’t think of what it was that she might want to give him. But he didn’t really care. He still welcomed any opportunity to see her again. No matter how many times Kenzie told him that he needed to just cut off contact with his ex, he couldn’t do it. Bridget was a big part of his life, and even as an ex, she still had a place in his life.
“Sure, Bridget. I’m around all night.”
“Great. I’ll pop by a little later, then. Maybe an hour or so.”
“I’ll see you then.”
The call had completely broken his concentration and he wasn’t able to focus on the case notes again. He tried for another twenty minutes to get back into them and eventually gave up.
He went to the fridge and looked for something he could serve Bridget when she stopped by. But he didn’t entertain much and he didn’t think she’d be interested in a frozen dinner. He should start keeping a few bottles of her favorite drinks on hand so he’d always be prepared in case she decided to stop by.
He could just hear what Kenzie would have had to say about that plan.
It wasn’t much past the predicted hour when Bridget got there. Zachary could hear her footsteps in the outside corridor and looked out his peep hole to make sure it was her, then opened the door as she drew closer. Bridget raised her eyebrows.
“Well, you didn’t need to wait right at the door for me,” she said dryly.
“I just happened to be there. I was looking to see if I had any drinks.” He motioned to the fridge, giving a little shrug. “Not really anything interesting… maybe some tea?”
“No, I’m not going to be here for that long.”
That was one of the reasons Zachary had been hoping to have something for her. Having a drink would encourage her to stay longer than she would otherwise.
“Oh. Well, come on in.” He led her to the couch and the two of them sat down side by side. Zachary was careful not to crowd her too much. He didn’t want to make her uncomfortable.
Bridget settled into the couch, taking a minute to look around the room for something to compliment or comment upon.
“It’s starting to look lived-in,” Bridget said. “Not like you just m
oved in.”
“You mean it’s a mess?” Zachary tried to keep his possessions orderly, knowing that they would quickly get out of control if he wasn’t disciplined about putting things away where they belonged. But his home didn’t have the decorator-magazine look of Bridget’s home with Gordon. He couldn’t function in something that was so antiseptically neat. He would find it just as distracting as an apartment with clothes and food wrappers on the floor.
But he didn’t always succeed at keeping everything tidy, especially if he were working on a major case.
“No, I don’t mean it’s a mess. I mean it looks… like it’s yours. Like you’ve settled in a little bit.”
Zachary nodded. “Yeah. It’s starting to feel like home.”
“That’s good. I didn’t like it when you were at Mario’s. I mean, it was nice to know that there was someone around to keep an eye on things and notice if you were going off the rails, but I think it’s important for you to have a place of your own. It really is important for you to…” She shook her head, wrinkling up her nose as she fished for a way to explain her thoughts. “It’s important for you to have a home base. An anchor.”
Zachary nodded his agreement. He had lived so many years with uncertainty and unstable living arrangements, it was one thing that he craved and really couldn’t live for long without. With his own place, he felt better mentally and was better at taking care of himself. Relying on someone like Bowman had allowed him to let things slip, and that wasn’t good. He didn’t have a lot of room to slip before hitting bottom.
He looked at Bridget, waiting for her to announce the reason she had showed up. She had said that she had something to give him. Bridget stiffened her backbone and reached for her purse.
“This was sort of strange. I didn’t know what to make of it.”
She inserted two fingers into the mouth of her purse and came out with an envelope. Not a number ten envelope, but the personal size, like grandmothers used when they wrote long rambling notes on flowery stationery. Bridget hadn’t opened it, and Zachary’s eyes immediately narrowed, wondering if she was worried about a letter bomb or harassing note. She handed it across to Zachary. He held it by the edges, not wanting to get his fingerprints on any evidence.
He was Walking Alone Page 2