She had already drawn a line through various suspects Brenda had blackmailed. They were crossed off if they had an alibi that was ironclad. That took out, for example, Jim Vance on Tangle-foot Road, who had an affair with Brenda and paid her four thousand dollars. But the night she died he was in an all-night poker game with a bunch of his cronies, all of whom vouched for him, especially since he had lost a lot of money to them. What a stupid thing to do. Married men. Why did they sleep with people who had less to lose than they had? Vance was in the lower echelons of city government at the courthouse. TJ had already crossed him off. He didn’t have the guts to kill anyone.
After Vance, she had written down Tom Mendez, a construction worker who definitely had the physical build to attract Brenda. Another married guy. Family. Relieved of several thousand dollars by Brenda. He also undoubtedly had the means since he worked with construction equipment and that included plenty of gasoline. But Mendez had been on a job in Wisconsin for a week prior to, and a week following, Brenda’s murder. Again, he had plenty of witnesses as to his whereabouts the night of the murder. So, cross him off too.
Dennis Weidemann, an “outsider” who’d moved to Endurance from Chicago, owned a computer software company and was doing quite well. He’d built a beautiful home up on the hill that overlooked a rolling meadow full of wildflowers and prairie grass on one side and the town on the other. His wife could have been a fashion model with her good looks, and she was involved in a lot of local charitable organizations. They had two kids, both in elementary school. What the hell was he doing playing around with Brenda? Weidemann was probably the richest of her marks. He didn’t say how much he had paid her, but he’d been on a vacation with his wife and kids at the time Brenda was killed. Her little black book indicated that he had made quite a charitable contribution. Another cross-off.
The list was long, and TJ had covered a lot of territory in the thirteen days since Brenda’s death. Corey Rafferty, a state cop, was lent out to her, and they had investigated at least twenty-five people on Brenda’s list. Corey agreed with TJ that many of the victims of Brenda’s little plan were not really viable suspects. She still felt that Sturgis and Shiveley were live possibilities. Neither had strong alibis. Sturgis was still fuming about the death blow Brenda had struck to his business, and he still couldn’t account for his whereabouts on the night of the crime. Where had he been? And was he capable of setting a fire like that? He certainly had a supply of gasoline and he wasn’t stupid . . . well, relatively speaking. Judging from his uncontrolled anger and his physical strength, he was definitely a possibility. But how to tie him directly to the crime?
Shannon Shiveley was a shifty little piece, and TJ didn’t for a minute believe that she had been with her grass-mowing, gasoline-buying boyfriend the night of the fire. She too was angry that she was supposed to have been in on the take from Brenda’s “business.” TJ had questioned Shannon a couple of days earlier. Brenda was too slick for Shannon and kept making her promises she hadn’t intended to keep. Finally, Shannon blew up and possibly killed Brenda, thinking she could find the hiding place of that book with Brenda safely out of the way. They had a huge argument the afternoon of the fire and Brenda taunted her one time too many. But what if Brenda had had the book at her house? Why burn down the house when Shannon didn’t really know for sure where the book was? Come to think of it, Shannon might have done something that stupid. Probably a good thing Shannon hadn’t hooked up with Sturgis. Now that would be a pair of tempers and stupidity to reckon with. Her alibi was like Swiss cheese. She and her boyfriend were home that night. Again, no physical evidence connecting her solidly to Brenda’s death.
Then, TJ thought, there was the actual fire. Whoever set it knew what he (or she) was doing and also was strong enough to knock Brenda out. He would have to know how to arrange the gasoline pours so the house would ignite fast enough to destroy the body. Obviously he hadn’t counted on the quick response of the Endurance Fire Department. Brenda’s body was meant to be burned beyond recognition. The fire examiners found no means of ignition for the fire, so whoever lit it took away whatever he used to start it. Smart thinking.
As she stared at the whiteboard, willing it to talk to her, a knock on the door disturbed her. Myers stuck his head in and said, “I think you’d better come out here, Sweeney.”
She walked out to the front counter and saw Dan Wakeley’s wife, Jennifer, pacing up and down. Her red pencil skirt clung to her perfect curves like plastic wrap, but the look in her eyes said she was infuriated.
“Ms. Wakeley. What can I do for you?”
“You can look at this pile of garbage that I found in my husband’s tool box in our garage. I knew it! I knew he was cheating on me with some horny little piece of trash, but this really does it.”
TJ was shocked. She felt it would be wise to find a closed door. “Why don’t we go over to this room and you can tell me what’s happening here.”
Jennifer Wakeley followed her back to a conference room and sat down at a long, rectangular table. She crossed her tanned, shapely legs and leaned forward in her chair. TJ closed the door behind them and said, “Now what’s the story? Start at the beginning.”
Highly agitated, Jennifer Wakeley worked on pulling herself together. Her hands were constantly in motion, tapping fingers on the table, moving them to her lap. She had placed some papers in front of her, folded over in thirds. Then she took a deep breath. “I don’t quite know where to start.” She stood up again and paced around the table. “I’m so angry I kicked his lying ass out the door and I don’t ever want him to come near us again.”
“Okay. I assume this is Dan we’re talking about?”
“You assume right!” She sat back down. “That lying—angry—I’ve never been so—oh, I can’t believe how he lied to me!” She stood up again, practically knocking the chair over. The arm of the chair hit the wall and she turned and straightened it, setting it down again. “Sorry. You can see I’m just a little . . .”
TJ waited until Ms. Wakeley looked around, sat down, and then TJ repeated, “I can see you’re upset. Why don’t you let me look at those papers while you think about where to start.”
Jennifer Wakeley handed over three sheets of paper, each folded as if it had been in an envelope. While TJ perused the words on each page, Jennifer looked around at the interrogation room, willing herself to stillness. The detective could see her out of the corner of her eye. She checked out the two-way mirrored window, and then she looked toward the door.
TJ had never seen Dan Wakeley’s wife when she hadn’t been flawlessly coiffed and perfectly composed. When she finished reading the letters, the detective sat back and thought for a few moments in silence.
“I appreciate you bringing these in to me, Ms. Wakeley. We’ve been running down a whole lot of people Brenda Norris was evidently blackmailing. Looks like your husband was on the list too. Mind telling me how you found these and what your husband said when you confronted him?”
“It’s no secret, Detective Sweeney, that Dan and I have had our problems in recent months. I don’t know that he says anything when he goes to his shift at the fire station, but I’m sure we have some acquaintances who have figured it out. We’ve been married for twenty years and our kids are in that teenage period where we don’t always agree on what they should or shouldn’t do. I believe he comes down much too hard on them, but then he isn’t always home to deal with their problems like I am. You know, he does shifts at the fire station where he’s there for several days.”
“I understand.” TJ looked directly at her, wondering once again how Brenda could have been so persuasive with Jennifer’s husband. “That leaves a lot of responsibility on your shoulders.”
Jennifer opened her purse and pulled out a small package. She took one tissue out and put the rest away, placing her purse back on the table. She started twisting the tissue between her fidgety fingers. “Yes, it does, and he comes home after a couple of days and is often unhappy with h
ow I’ve handled things.” Then her voice became hard. “Well, maybe he should be around more,” she said, her voice rising while TJ waited patiently. “Anyway, that’s caused some huge arguments.”
“I can imagine.” TJ reacted. “Is he abusive?”
“Oh, no.” She quickly pulled back, moving farther from TJ as her back pushed against the chair. “It’s not that. He does have a temper, yes. But I’ve never been afraid he’d hurt me or the children. Some nights he just leaves the house and is gone for hours. I think he ends up at Tully’s and has a few drinks. Then he usually comes home sometime after they close and is much calmer. This, however, has been going on now for five or six months.”
“By ‘this’ you mean?”
“Brenda Norris.”
“So it’s mostly the kids you fought over until Brenda came into the picture?”
“Yes. But he also acted different for much of that time too, as if he was feeling guilty about something. He’d pull away from me and brood as if he should be telling me something but isn’t. I know guilt when I see it. He isn’t good at hiding his feelings.”
“And then you found these letters. When did you find them?”
“Yesterday. I knew he was worrying about something. He just hasn’t been himself. So I searched around the house and figured that if there was anything to find it might be in the garage in his workshop area. The letters were in his toolbox. At first I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. An affair? He was having an affair with some little tramp and she was sending him blackmail notes? You notice she only signed her initial. I don’t know if he paid her, but I don’t always deal with the bills. I suppose he might have found some way to hide making payments to her.”
“But eventually you figured out that the initial ‘B’ might stand for Brenda, right?”
“Right.”
“And you’re bringing these to me because . . .”
“I came over here with these because I was so angry I just wanted to hurt him. Now I’m not sure. I know Dan didn’t have anything to do with Brenda Norris’s death. He couldn’t. He’d never do anything like that. And I figure she was probably sleeping with more men than I can count. In fact, Dan isn’t even going to come near me again until he agrees to have testing done for STDs and HIV. Who knows where that little tramp has been?” More twisting of tissues and hand-wringing. “If I ever get back on an even keel from all this, we will sit down and have a talk. And I mean everything. Where he met her and if he paid her . . .” And suddenly Jennifer Wakeley burst into tears and put her face in her hands.
TJ pulled a box of tissues from a desk drawer and handed her one, waiting for her to regain her composure.
“I imagine it’s accurate to say that your husband was not the only one that was caught up in her blackmail trap. But I have to tell you, Ms. Wakeley, I’ll have to question him and also ask about his alibi for that night.”
“He’s not at home right now. Good riddance. He’s probably staying at the fire station, figuring I’ll calm down in a few days.”
“I need to keep these letters.”
“You can have them. I don’t want anything that two-bit baggage has touched. I know she’s dead and you aren’t supposed to speak ill of the dead, but I hope she burns in hell.”
“You’re not the first person I’ve heard mention that,” TJ replied, standing up and bringing the interview to an end. She handed Jennifer Wakeley a business card and asked her to call if she thought of anything else she’d forgotten.
Ten minutes later, TJ had added Wakeley to her whiteboard lists. The fireman seemed a strong candidate since he was known to have a temper like Sturgis. But he also had firsthand expertise when it came to fire-setting. He could make sure he was never found out. But I’d think he could be smarter than gasoline pours. Unless he wanted to make it look like he wasn’t a pro. These letters put a new slant on things. Maybe Brenda was pressuring him more and more over the last couple of months. Dan Wakeley was another man with a great deal to lose. Wonder if he has an alibi for that night? He was at the Norris’s fire with the rest of the department but had been called in because he was off duty. Where had he been before the fire?
A call to the fire station indicated that Wakeley was not on shift at the moment. He also wasn’t at home. This would bear some looking into. TJ was about to walk out her office door when it opened unexpectedly and Myers stuck his head in.
“Sweeney, we’ve got a live one!” He paused, a confused look coming over his face. “I mean, we’ve got a dead one. Just called in. Dead body out by Shady Meadows Cemetery Road. Looks like a gun wound. Can you imagine? Here in Endurance? Backup is ready to head out there with you.” And he disappeared out the door.
Can I imagine? In Endurance? After Brenda Norris, our statistics are already running in the red. The question is how many more of Norris’s victims might be out there, and which one was first in line? She grabbed her gun, shield, and car keys and headed out the door. Why didn’t I just get my teaching certificate like Grace?
As TJ left for the cemetery, across town in a small, second-story apartment, a canine’s distressed and bereaved wailing drifted out the windows and into the night.
CHAPTER NINETEEN:
GRACE
* * *
On Friday morning Grace walked out her back door with an armload of trash bags, some newspapers, and her garden gloves. Dressed in an old mauve shirt and cut-off shorts that she didn’t mind getting dirty, she had decided she’d take the morning off from the newspaper and clean out a corner of her garage that had been driving her crazy. Besides, she needed to digest what TJ had told her when she called last night. After that call she hadn’t slept very well. This cleaning job was just the thing for stress relief and quiet thought.
Leaning over, she began to move various planters and pots into the center of the garage so she could clean out their dirt and debris and place them in a more organized row, smaller pots nesting in the larger ones. Then she’d stack them up in the back of the garage.
She spread out the newspapers and used a small hand spade to scrape the old dirt out on the newspapers. All the while she thought about TJ’s phone call yesterday.
Ronda Burke had been found in a ditch off the side of the cemetery road. Grace jabbed at the compact dirt, her mouth tightening in a grimace. Ronda—her Ronda with whom she had laughed so many times out at Tully’s and, before that, in her high school class. Grace could visualize the scene: police car lights flashing, early-morning darkness, dampness and standing water—it had rained the night before—and the thought of the dead watching them from the little knoll where the grave stones began. Grace had been there often when she ran more regularly. The cemetery had recently refinished the asphalt paths, which made them a smooth running surface. She shivered for a moment, remembering TJ’s call, even though it was the last day of June and the temperature was in the low eighties.
She reached over and put three empty pots together, trying to decide whether to rinse them with the garden hose, but she had trouble focusing. Her mind was on the repulsive scene TJ had described at the cemetery. Ronda’s body had been rolled off the road into a ditch, face down. When TJ and the coroner turned her over, the blood on her chest had largely washed into the ditch, leaving a bloody pool of water an inch deep. Her face had leaves and debris plastered to it and her eyes were closed. Grace shook her head and her chin trembled. She pulled a tissue out of her pocket and wiped her nose. Then, setting her jaw, she went back to her pots.
TJ said Ronda had looked peaceful. But it was hard to equate that description with the woman Grace knew who had laughed through most of her days and always had a joke to tell or a funny one-liner. Who had done this? And was it connected to Brenda’s murder? Two unnatural deaths had occurred within two weeks of each other in a town that seldom saw one homicide in thirty years. Normally, TJ didn’t describe such horrifying details to Grace, but she had been highly agitated when she called, and Grace knew she was under a lot of stress. Now, with two dea
d bodies, the chief was calling in even more state help.
TJ told her that Martinez, the coroner, determined that Ronda was murdered between midnight and two a.m. on Wednesday night. No defensive wounds on her hands or face—whoever killed her was facing her and shot her twice in the chest. Death would have happened right away. Thank goodness for that. She struggled to remember something else. What was it that TJ found? Oh, yes, two shell casings were left on the road, and Ronda’s car was parked off to the side of the cemetery with the keys still in it. No purse. Ronda was obviously meeting someone, but who and why? And why in the middle of the night? TJ said she’d know more after the postmortem in Woodbury, which was going on this morning. Poor Jake Williams got to go this time, and, according to TJ, he had an uncooperative stomach. She took a deep breath, frowned, and wiped her nose again.
Brenda spent a great deal of time at Tully’s. Grace remembered Ronda telling her and Jeff Maitlin that she was fascinated by Brenda’s and Tully’s conversations in the bar. If Grace were to believe Tully, Brenda practically considered the bar her office, and she drank way too much while she talked to everyone around her. Maybe she told Ronda something that sent her out on the cemetery road. Or maybe Ronda overheard a conversation that concerned whatever Brenda’s secret project was about. That was the only connection Grace could devise.
On the other hand, Dan Wakeley could also be involved. TJ had told Grace about his wife’s visit to the police station. Grace didn’t know Dan Wakeley at all, but she saw Jennifer about town and knew she was quite active in the school PTA for her kids. I think they have two—a boy and a girl. Whenever Grace saw Wakeley’s wife, she was reminded of a fashion magazine layout—perfect clothes that flattered her figure and hair and nails obviously pampered. Well, it wouldn’t be the last time a guy had a roving eye and ended up in the wrong bed. How humiliating it must have been for Jennifer to take those letters in to TJ.
Three May Keep a Secret (An Endurance Mystery) Page 14