by A. E. Howe
“Andy Bell,” he finished grudgingly.
“Does Dawn Hall live here?” I asked.
“I don’t know.”
“What do you mean, you don’t know? Don’t you live here?” The man was really irritating.
“Yeah, I live here, but I think Dawn left me. She’s been saying she would for weeks.”
“Does Dawn have any family?” Pete pushed. I think he was finding the whiny gnome annoying too.
“Doesn’t everybody? Come on, guys, I got things to do. What do you want?”
“What we want is an address or phone number for someone who cares about Dawn.”
“I care. She just doesn’t care about me. Witch hasn’t called or texted me for days.”
“You ever think maybe she couldn’t?”
“What you mean?” He really seemed puzzled by this suggestion. “Like her phone won’t work?”
“Can we come in?” I asked, then added, “We don’t care about drugs or drug paraphernalia. But we might if you don’t start cooperating.”
“Hey, I don’t have to let you in.” He bowed up.
“No, but I bet Bruce might not mind giving us permission.” I pulled out my phone and looked at him. “If we have to get Bruce’s permission, we won’t be happy. And unhappy deputies have very good eyesight. They see things that happy deputies might overlook.” Of course, all of this was bluff. A landlord can’t give the police permission to search a tenant’s home. But sometimes a bluff is as good as a full house.
“Stop, stop, whatever, man,” Andy said and backed into the house. Pete and I followed. The living room was disgusting. The carpet didn’t look like it had ever been vacuumed and the walls were stained by years of tenants.
“Sorry, didn’t have a chance to clean,” he said, dropping down on the sagging couch. He still didn’t seem concerned about Dawn.
“We need any information you have on Dawn’s family.”
“Ask her when you find her,” he said dismissively.
“Look, you little snot, Dawn is dead,” I tossed at him. Pete looked at me, a little surprised.
“What?” Andy sat up. For the first time, he seemed to be paying attention.
“We found Dawn’s body this morning. Now, are you going to start cooperating?”
“Dead. Really? Damn.” He seemed at a loss.
“We need to look through her things and we need some information from you.”
“Okay. I guess. I never thought…” His voice trailed off.
“Information on her family?” Pete encouraged him.
“I… I don’t know. I never met any of them. We’ve only been hanging out for a couple of months. Dawn needed a place to stay and I was living here. I just offered. Wasn’t like we were a couple or anything. Fact, most of the time she slept in her own room. Called me a filthy pig.” If the living room was any indication, I thought she’d hit the nail on the head.
“Come on, show us which room she used,” I said.
“The one in the back,” he said, pointing to a hallway that led off to the left.
“Did she have a cell phone?” Pete asked. The forensic team hadn’t found one on her body.
“Everybody has a cell phone.” He acted like we’d suggested she didn’t have a mouth or eyes.
“Use yours to call her phone,” I told him. Again he looked at me like I was speaking Greek, but he finally grabbed his phone off of the coffee table and pressed a few buttons. I listened and didn’t hear anything. He turned the phone toward us.
“See, voicemail.”
“Let me see that,” Pete said, reaching his hand out for the phone. Reluctantly Andy handed it over. Pete copied Dawn’s number into his phone and then casually scrawled through the text messages between Andy and Dawn. “We’ll need to keep this,” Pete told him.
Andy became animated for the first time since we’d met him. He rose up off the couch and came toward Pete.
“No way, man. No way. Give me my phone back.” He was trying to reach out and take the phone from Pete. I got between them.
“This is how all of this is going to shake out. You’re going to fully cooperate with our investigation. Right now we don’t believe that you had anything to do with her death. And you really, really don’t want us to change our minds.”
“I know my rights.” He said the first thing anyone who doesn’t know their rights says. “You’ve got to have a warrant.” He was still trying to reach past me and get his phone from Pete.
“We can do this one of three ways,” I continued. “One, you give us permission and cooperate fully. We go that route and we’re all friends working together to catch the bastard that killed Dawn. Two, we get a warrant, which will take about an hour and just piss us off. In that hour, we’ll spend time arresting you for crap we can see out in the open. Remember, you did let us into the house. I see several drug-related items just from where I’m standing. The third way isn’t much better than the second. We consider you a material witness and take you down to the sheriff’s office for a formal interview while we get a warrant to search your premises for evidence. Friend or foe. Your choice. I’ll count to three. One.”
“You bastards. I got to have my phone. I do… I got stuff to do.”
“I’m sure you do. Two. And the quickest way to get your life back to its bottom-feeder norm is to be our friend. Three. What’s your decision?”
“Okay, okay. When can I get it back?” Andy begged.
“As a friend, I can tell you we’ll return it as soon as we can.”
“Probably a day, maybe two,” Pete added.
“It’s Friday,” Andy said pitifully.
“I’m so sorry that Dawn’s death is inconveniencing you,” I said sarcastically. This guy really didn’t bring out the best in me. “Now, friend, can we look over the room she slept in?”
“Yeah, whatever.” He flopped back down on the couch and fell over, covering his face with a pillow. Pete rolled his eyes.
It was obvious which room Dawn spent most of her time in. It was the only one in the house that was clean and neat. The mattress and box spring sat directly on the floor, but the bed was made with care. There wasn’t any other furniture in the room.
A small stack of books sat on the floor next to the bed. Some of the books were for school—biology and chemistry mostly. Beside the textbooks were a couple well-worn paperback historical romances. Two large suitcases were in the closet and the clothes that must have come out of them were neatly hung up or folded and placed in a row of cardboard boxes. I thought that Dawn would have been an easy person to like.
“Do you see an iPad or laptop?” I asked Pete.
“No, which is a little surprising. Maybe in her car?”
“Did she even have a car? Dispatch couldn’t find any record of a car, but maybe it’s registered in a parent’s name. We’ll have to ask the mushroom in the living room,” I said, not really wanting to go deal with him again. “I wonder if we’re wasting our time looking through her stuff. The killer might have just picked her out randomly after he failed to get Tonya.”
“But we can’t assume anything. For all we know, all of the murders were committed by different individuals. Ridiculous, but certainly any one of the victims, including Dawn, could have been killed by someone who knew her. Maybe when the killer couldn’t get Tonya, he fell back and took someone he knew,” Pete said.
I raised my hand. “I know, I know. And I realize that with a case this big, we have to be particularly careful about crossing t’s and dotting i’s,” I admitted. “Let’s go shake down that twerp in the other room and get some answers.”
To my disgust, Andy was still lying on the couch with his head under the pillow. How proud his parents must have been. I kicked the couch. “Have you thought of any contacts?”
“She has a friend. Her name is Kelly. Kelly Baker. Her number’s in my phone. She’ll know all about Dawn’s family,” Andy said from under his pillow.
“Did Dawn have a car?” I asked the pil
low.
“Yeah, a piece of crap. It’s parked at the curb. But someone broke into it,” Andy said.
I’d had enough and jerked the pillow away. “Why the hell didn’t you tell us that earlier?”
“Cars are always getting trashed around here. Hell, it would have been more surprising if it hadn’t been broken into,” he grumbled.
“Come on. Show us her car,” I ordered. He groaned, but my tone told him that arguing with me right now would be a mistake.
We followed him outside. In front of the house next door was a ten-year-old blue Toyota with its window busted out.
“Why didn’t she park in the driveway?” Pete asked.
“I had some friends over for a little party Saturday.”
Pete and I walked around the car. The back passenger window facing away from the street was the one that was broken, but there were pieces of plastic on the ground near the driver’s window. I knelt down and looked under the car. Halfway under was a broken laptop. Several coins and a tube of lipstick were next to the tire. I also found some Kleenex and other debris that might have come from a woman’s handbag.
“Dawn dropped her purse and her laptop here,” I told Pete, who pulled out his radio and called for a patrol officer and crime scene techs.
“Look here.” Pete had gone back to looking over the car. He was pointing to a spot on the driver’s side between the front and back windows.
“That’s blood.”
“Looks like it. You figure someone else broke into the car after she was abducted?” he asked.
“In this neighborhood, yep. And they probably took her purse or bag.”
“She dropped it when she was attacked and some scavenger picked it up later.”
It was dark and the temperature was dropping by the time the techs showed up. Pete agreed to stay and secure the scene and get the car towed in while I interviewed Kelly Baker and tried to get a line on Dawn’s next of kin.
Andy was sitting in his front yard, watching everything. I went over to him.
“I’ll call you when you can pick up your phone. No, wait. Can’t do that because I’ll have your phone,” I teased him, a little cruelly. But I pulled out a card and dropped it on the ground next to him. “There’s my number. Call me on Monday and I’ll let you know when you can get your phone.” He didn’t say anything and I walked away.
When I got in touch with Kelly Baker, she was getting ready to go out for the evening. I told her I was with the Adams County Sheriff’s Office and needed to speak with her about Dawn. She started to ask questions, but I told her I’d rather explain everything in person and asked her to wait for me.
While I was on the way to Kelly’s house I got a call from a TV reporter, wanting to know the name of the victim. I told her that the family hadn’t been notified, but that we were working on it and should be able to give it to them for the eleven o’clock news. No doubt, Dad had given them my number.
Kelly lived with her parents in a very nice home on the edge of town.
“What’s this all about?” she asked, opening the door for me to come in. She had high cheekbones and dark hair, like a teenage Jacqueline Kennedy, though her attire was more Britney Spears than Mrs. Kennedy.
“You’re friends with Dawn Hall?” I purposefully used the present tense, but she was smart enough to know that we didn’t visit people’s friends for overdue parking tickets.
“What’s happened?” She’d forgotten she had someplace to go. Dawn had better taste in girlfriends than roommates.
“Could we sit down? I’m afraid this is very bad news, and I have a few questions.”
Wordlessly, she showed me into the living room, which adjoined the dining room where her mother, father and brother were sitting at the table. Her parents quit eating and stared at me. I sat in a chair while Kelly sat across from me on the sofa.
“I’m afraid we found Dawn’s body this morning. It appears that someone killed her,” I said as gently as possible.
“Oh, no,” Kelly said. “I told her she should move in with us. That neighborhood is sooo bad. And that guy is worthless.” She bit her lip and hit the cushion next to her. Her mom came over and sat beside her on the sofa. Kelly leaned against her mom’s shoulder.
“Dawn was a wonderful girl,” Kelly’s mother said sadly.
“We need to contact her family,” I said.
“She doesn’t have much family. Kelly went to high school with her, and she was living with her aunt then,” the older woman said, cradling her daughter.
“Her dad died of a heart attack when she was in middle school and her mom had already been diagnosed with cancer. She fought it and lived until Dawn’s junior year. I can’t believe this.” Tears were flowing down Kelly’s cheeks.
“What about her aunt?”
“She moved over to Jacksonville and got married a year ago. Dawn and I went to the wedding. She’ll be devastated.” Kelly gave me an address for the aunt. She didn’t have her phone number.
“When was the last time you talked to Dawn?”
“Saturday. She was going to go to her job at Roma’s in Tallahassee. Dawn was working her way through college. She refused to take out loans. She’d work and save up, go to school for a semester or two, then take time off from school to work full time again and save more money.”
“Is it unusual for you not to hear from her for a week?”
“Dawn was a very independent person. She called when she needed to call, but not to chit chat. And we’d gotten into some arguments lately. I thought she was being stubborn about money. Living with that cretin to save on rent. I told her I didn’t think that was smart.”
I didn’t get much more out of Kelly, who was still crying and had cancelled her plans for the evening by the time I left. The folks in dispatch were able to dig up a phone number for Dawn’s aunt, and I was finally able to deliver the grim news. Like Kelly predicted, the woman sounded broken-hearted over the death of her niece.
Chapter Fourteen
I finally headed for home at eight o’clock, but I didn’t make it. Dad called and asked me to stop by his house. Luckily I didn’t have any plans with Cara that night as we were going to spend Saturday afternoon together, but Ivy would give me hell for being so late with her dinner.
When I pulled through the gate at Dad’s place I saw that the light was on in the barn, Dad’s silhouette going back and forth between Mac and Finn’s stalls. Ivy wasn’t the only one being fed late tonight. I helped him put out two piles of hay in the paddock and gave each of the horses a couple of alfalfa cubes as we turned them loose for the night. They’d both earned my respect last month when they’d managed to remain sane while the world went crazy around them.
Dad and I headed back to the house. He walked a bit more stiffly these days, but no less proudly. When we got to the door, he stopped and turned to me. “Go in by yourself,” he told me with a prankster’s glint in his green eyes.
“Why? What’s up with Mauser?” I asked suspiciously, wondering if the joke was going to be on the dog or me.
“That big lout’s had his dinner and I bet he’s snoring away on the couch. I just think he needs a little lesson about sleeping while on guard duty.”
“Do you really think the he needs a shock to the ticker like that?” I joked. It was good seeing Dad this relaxed. The last couple of months had been hard on all of us, and I still wasn’t sure how the resurfacing of an old nemesis was going to affect him.
“Go on.”
I opened the door and walked through the kitchen. I could hear the giant snoring as soon as I entered the house. I made it halfway across the living room before his head bounced up off of the couch and he let out a window-rattling bark. For a moment he wasn’t sure who I was and the hair along his back stood up while a low growl came from deep in his throat. In those few seconds, the look he gave me caused my stomach to tighten, but in a flash it was over. He recognized me, gave me a couple happy how are you? barks, wallowed his way off of the couch and
threw himself against my legs.
“He could have been a burglar or a murderer, you lazy dog,” Dad playfully chastised the black-and-white Dane. Mauser just danced for joy. Finally, after a couple unearned treats, the monster settled down on the floor of the living room, his head across Dad’s feet.
“You’re in a good mood,” I told Dad, sitting down across from him.
“Yes, I am. A chance to close unfinished business. Not that I’m happy we’ve had two murders. Don’t get me wrong. But for sixteen years I’ve felt like the bastard was out there, laughing at us. Now I’ve got another chance to get him.”
“He grabbed Dawn outside her house. It was only two blocks away from the Sweet Spot.”
“I just wish Tonya had gotten a good look at him. Is there any chance?”
“I don’t think so. The old man was pretty sure that she didn’t see the blow coming. And Ray’s not expected to survive much longer. His body is failing.”
“Bad luck all around. But we’ll get him.”
“Why are you so confident? Not getting on your case, but if you couldn’t catch him sixteen years ago…”
“He’s given us a lot better chance this time. With the killings spread over such a long gap of time, we can use that to eliminate suspects. We had about a hundred persons of interests that we narrowed down to twenty-five likely suspects last time. We’ll start with those and a lot of them can be eliminated pretty easily now. They’re either dead, they’ve moved, or they’re not able to commit the murders for other reasons—health, alibis, whatever. It’s simply easier to catch a serial killer who kills in locations that are separated by place or time. Of course, that’s after you make the connection that the same killer is at work.”
Dad got up and went to the dining room table, picking up a list with almost a hundred names on it and handing it to me. “I made a copy of the original list of one hundred. I didn’t want to take a chance that we were wrong when we narrowed the list to twenty-five. He might not even be on that list at all, but I think it’s a good start.”
I looked over the names. I don’t know why, but I was surprised when I recognized some of them. “Pete and I will start on them tomorrow,” I said, thinking that my plans to spend the day with Cara were going down the drain fast. At least with this case, we didn’t have to wait for current forensic data from the labs because we could start by reviewing all the information that had been collected previously. Just reading and comparing all of the old information would take time.