by Lauren Carr
“Yes, I have.”
“Belle is very upset about it,” Royce said. “Now, nothing against Tracy. She’s a very nice girl. Lovely. But don’t you think this timing is the worst? We’re still trying to get Mike’s body released by the medical examiner—” He pointed his finger at Joshua. “—your cousin Doc MacMillan, I might add.”
“You may add that.”
“And then for those two kids—they’re only kids—Belle thinks they’re too young. They hardly know each other—”
“They went all through high school together,” Joshua said. “They’ve kept in touch all through college.”
“You approve of this?”
Joshua was aware of Cameron’s eyes on him. She was waiting for his answer. No one had yet to ask him if he did approve. It took a full moment for him to come to an answer.
“Yes, I give them my blessing,” Joshua said. “Hunter’s father was my best friend growing up. Hunter has a good head on his shoulders. He’s shown nothing but respect for my daughter.” He stood up straight. “It would be an honor to have him in my family.”
Royce’s face twisted with emotion. “You have no idea what you’re doing!”
“Yes, I do,” Joshua replied. “I’m counting my blessings. Do you know how many jerks there are out there? I see them every day in my job. Just this week Cameron caught a monster who raped and killed his girlfriend in front of her young son. The world is full of monsters, Royce! I pray every night that they don’t gobble up any of my children. Yes, ideally, I would have liked Tracy to be a few years older and settled before marrying anyone. Obviously, that wasn’t God’s plan. But considering that He has chosen a good man like Hunter … yes, to answer your question, Royce, yes, I know exactly what I’m doing and …” he pointed at Royce, “if you’re smart, you’ll give them your blessing, too. You’re right, Tracy is a lovely young woman, and you and Belle should be proud to have her for a daughter-in-law.”
Royce gritted his teeth. He worked his jaw before responding in a tone that rang of forced calm. “Look at it from Belle’s point of view.”
“If this is so important to her, why isn’t she here?” Cameron interjected to ask.
“She’s too upset,” Royce said quickly. “I—we thought this whole thing with Mike was over. He’d been declared dead.”
“He is dead,” Cameron said, “because someone killed him.”
“And now Hunter has it in his head that he’s going to find his father’s killer.”
“Do you blame him?” Joshua asked.
“Like there’s any chance of that happening,” Royce said. “Hunter is upsetting his mother, asking her over and over again the same questions about what his father was doing those last few days before he disappeared. What did he say? Who did he call? Who did he talk to? Where did he go? He’s putting her into an emotional blender. She’s snapping at me. She can’t sleep at night. She’s been taking sedatives every day since this all came up.”
“If you were murdered and your body was dumped in a lake for twenty years, wouldn’t you want your family doing everything they could to find your killer?” Cameron asked.
“Not if it was going to drive them crazy,” Royce shot back. “Belle had moved on. She’s with me.” He pounded his chest with his fist. “After years of waiting and hoping— taking chances—doing whatever it took—I finally won the only woman I have ever loved, and she was mine. Everything was perfect!”
“Until Mike’s body showed up,” Cameron said.
“Yes!”
“And your apple cart has been toppled over,” she said.
“We can’t not investigate Mike’s murder, Royce,” Joshua said. “I’m sorry you’re upset—”
“Not me. Belle.”
Joshua and Cameron exchanged knowing grins.
“Belle,” Joshua corrected himself. “But the law dictates that Mike’s murder must be investigated, and when we find the killer, I intend to prosecute him to the fullest extent of the law.”
“And it goes without saying that since Hunter is now going to be your son-in-law, you’re going to work with him on this,” Royce said.
“This case was personal to me even before Hunter and Tracy got engaged,” Joshua said. “Their engagement only gives me additional personal motivation.”
Royce let out a sigh that sounded like a bull snorting before charging. “And now, this woman that we never even knew existed has left Hunter all this money and he’s running off and getting married and leaving me with his mother on the brink of a breakdown.”
“Maybe if I talk to Belle,” Joshua offered.
“No!” Royce shouted.
Neither of them was prepared for his abrupt outburst.
Everyone in the kitchen was still.
Even Irving had stopped grooming himself where he was sprawled out in the floor in a sunbeam.
“Belle just wants to be left alone,” Royce said. “I think that’s best for now.”
Arching an eyebrow, Joshua glanced over at Cameron, who was cocking her head in Royce’s direction.
Royce Fontaine was a man with an agenda.
Joshua let out a deep sigh. “Royce … what do you want me to do? I’m not going to split Hunter and Tracy up. I’m unable to put an end to Mike’s murder investigation. What do you want from me?”
Royce’s eyes narrowed. He then turned to glare at Cameron, who cocked an eyebrow in his direction while waiting for an answer.
Joshua folded his arms across his chest. With questions about the true motivation of Royce’s visit, his expression changed from perplexed to suspicious.
The tension in the room became so thick that it was suffocating.
Royce spun on his heels and stomped out of the kitchen. Seconds later, they heard the front door slam.
After a long silence, Cameron asked, “Has he always been like that?”
“Strange? Yes,” Joshua murmured while replaying Royce’s unusual visit in his mind. “That strange? No.”
Cameron turned to the box resting on the kitchen table. “Mike was missing for how long? Why did Hunter just bring this box of stuff from his desk now?”
“What?” Her question startled Joshua out of his stare at the spot Royce had been standing.
Cameron pointed with the spoon from her grapefruit to the box resting on the table. “Hunter brought that over this morning when he picked up Tracy. It’s his father’s stuff that his mother gave him from his desk. Where has it been all these years? Why didn’t Belle give it to you before?”
It was the first time Joshua had noticed the box. “Good question.”
Cameron abandoned her less-than-satisfying grapefruit to join him at the other end of the kitchen table.
Joshua tossed the top aside and peered inside at stacks of folders filled with papers. “Maybe we’ll get lucky and Mike’s notebook will be in here,” he said. “I doubt it. Officers carry their notebooks with them to take notes while interviewing witnesses. It would have been in the cruiser.”
“But this was his own personal case.” Cameron reached into the box to remove a stack of used yellow legal pads that had been placed upright on their side against the long side of the box. “He may have kept his notes at home, especially if he didn’t want the sheriff to know that he was working on a murder case involving Dolly’s.”
A slow grin crossed her face when she noticed the blank page on the top of the used notepad. “He did the same thing I do.” She flipped back the first page to reveal handwritten notes. “I leave the top sheet blank and start on the second page. Then, when I’m done, I flip it over so that someone walking past my desk can’t read what I’ve been working on.”
She flipped the top sheet back over. “But this top sheet isn’t blank. There’s a note scribbled on it.” She turned it around for Joshua to read. “Friday, four pm T R Park.”
“T R Park is Toml
inson Run Park. He disappeared on a Friday.” He took the notebook to observe that the “4” had a single slash through it and a “1” written in the line above it. “Looks like the meeting was originally scheduled for four o’clock and then changed.”
“I wonder which of them changed it,” she asked. “Maybe the confidential informant got nervous that someone was on to him and that’s what got Mike killed.”
“We need to find that CI.” Joshua flipped through the stack of folders. “These are copies of reports from case files.” He read the name across the top of the page. “It’s an accident report for a single car accident. The driver was killed. A woman. Her name was Sabrina Collins.”
“Died March tenth, nineteen eighty-two,” Cameron said.
Joshua looked at her.
She turned the notepad around for him to read. “It’s a list of names, followed by a ‘D’ and a date.” She counted the list, which totaled eight names. The last one, listed as “Rachel,” had no date beside it.
Joshua set the folder aside and went to the next one on the pile. “This is a suicide in Columbus, Ohio. Drug overdose for a woman named Morgan Bates.”
“December eighteenth, nineteen eighty,” Cameron read from the list.
Their eyes met.
He went to the next folder. “Fatal stabbing during a mugging in an alley in downtown Pittsburgh. The victim’s name is Jaclyn Jones.”
“Died July sixteenth, nineteen seventy-nine.”
Joshua tossed the folder aside to move on to the next. “Bambi Crawford died in a home fire.”
“On January fifth, nineteen eighty-two.”
“In Newark, New Jersey, Farrah Monroe was beaten to death and strangled,” he told her. “Her boyfriend swore he came home from a night out with the guys and found her dead. Detectives suspected he did it, but there was not enough evidence to prosecute him.”
“October twenty-third, nineteen seventy-nine.” Cameron ticked on the name to find only two left. “We have Ava Tucker already. Do you have a Bianca there?”
“Bianca Stephens was found with her wrists slashed in a bathtub at a hotel in Charleston, West Virginia.”
“She died on September twenty-fifth, nineteen seventy-six,” Cameron said. “The only woman listed here that doesn’t have a death date is Rachel.” She gazed at him. “There’s eight names here. Dolly had eight girls. Rachel Hilliard is the only one who’s still alive.”
“All of these women were dead when Mike started looking into Ava’s murder,” Joshua said. “He must have started out trying to contact them for statements about what happened the night Ava was murdered and realized that they had each died suddenly.”
“Except the one with the most to lose if it had come out that she had been a common call girl,” Cameron said. “That would be a very heavy motive for her to kill him.”
The doorbell prompted Admiral to race up from the family room downstairs and for the foyer. Irving rolled over from where he had almost fallen asleep in the sunbeam and scurried after him.
“I guess Curt is here,” Joshua said.
Chapter Nineteen
“Well, let’s get the worst part over with,” Curt replied when Joshua asked which envelope and tape they wanted to listen to first.
The envelopes were bundled together with rubber bands into two packages. Congresswoman Rachel Hilliard’s and Colonel Henry MacRae’s envelopes were bound together. Russell Null and Philip Lipton were bound together as well. A cassette tape was attached to each package.
The old-fashioned cassette tape prompted Joshua to dig through the desk drawers in his study for a dusty cassette player on which to listen to the recordings.
While Cameron slipped Hillard’s tape into the player, Joshua referred to the transcript that was written out in an ink pen. He recognized the elderly woman’s penmanship from numerous cards and notes she had sent him throughout the years.
A call to Dolly’s lawyer confirmed that she had given him the package to mail several years earlier—shortly after Joshua had returned to Chester and was elected Hancock’s prosecuting attorney.
“The date on this transcript is February thirteen, nineteen seventy-six.” Joshua handed the transcript to the sheriff.
“That’s the date that Ava Tucker and Virgil Null were killed,” Curt said.
“We also know that Dolly bugged the parlor at the gentleman’s club,” Cameron said. “Let’s see what she got on the congresswoman and police superintendent. How much do you want to bet it’s an affair?”
“Now let’s not make assumptions,” Joshua said.
“According to this transcript, they start out kissing,” Curt said.
“See,” she said with a smug grin before hitting the start button on the cassette player and turning up the volume. As indicated by the transcript, the tape started out with several moments of kissing and moans of pleasure along with the rustle of clothes.
“Oh,” a man’s voice groaned, “I missed you so much. I couldn’t wait to be with you.”
There were more sounds of heavy kissing.
“This is the only thing that keeps me going, darling,” she said. “Being with you, like this—when I’m with him, I picture you holding me. When we are together, I pretend that it is you I am with. Otherwise, I’m afraid that he would see the disgust in my eyes.”
“Don’t talk about him.” He kissed her again. “I can’t bear the thought of him having you this way.”
“Neither can I … anymore.”
Silence.
“You aren’t thinking of divorce, are you?” There was fear in his tone. “Your plans—”
“Our plans,” she said. “I can’t wait anymore. I don’t like waiting in the wings to have what I want while playing the dutiful wife.” Her tone was cold.
“If you divorce Rod, then you’ll get nothing—we won’t get anything. All of our hard work will be for nothing. You’ll end up back here at Dolly’s—flat on your back.”
“I’m not talking about divorce,” she giggled. “What kind of fool do you think I am? The solution to our problem is simple. Instead of waiting for this overweight old man to kick the bucket naturally, he has an unfortunate, horrible accident. With all the years that he has served this state in Washington, to die suddenly, then there will be a lot of publicity, which will put me in the spotlight to show the voters what a formidable, intelligent woman I am. By the time I am through, Rod’s friends in the capital will be begging me to take his place, finish his term, and then run for his seat.”
Her voice dropped seductively. “And then, I can use my new influence to bring my favorite man in blue down to Charleston to take a position of power with the state police. No more patrolling around in your cruiser, my love.” She kissed him.
“How do you propose to do it?” he asked in a rasping voice.
“I was thinking about—” She kissed him. “—A plane crash. Rod thinks he’s so cool flying in his own private plane to Washington. It should be easy enough to make that aerial go-cart drop down out of the sky and go boom, don’t you think, darling?”
Henry laughed. “I used to fly in the air force. Do you know that a simple break in the seal on the door could cause a problem with the pressure in the cabin that can knock everyone, including the pilot, out and bring the plane down in the Appalachian Mountains—”
Joshua snapped off the recorder. “That’s how it happened. Congressman Roderick Hilliard and two assistants crashed in his private plane in the mountains. If I recall, the FAA called it a mechanical failure.”
“Caused by Henry MacRae and Hilliard’s wife tampering with the plane,” Curt said. “This is a case for the feds. They conspired to kill a United States Congressman.”
“I know some people at the FAA,” Joshua said. “Before we go throwing accusations at a congresswoman, let’s make sure we have all of our facts straight. For one, the
date on this tape is February thirteen, nineteen seventy-six. Congressman Hilliard died in the fall.”
“People like Congresswoman Hilliard don’t go acting rashly,” Cameron said. “According to this recording, they seem to be just hatching this plan. It’s conceivable that they spent six months planning and making sure they had all their ducks in a row.”
“MacRae is a former state trooper,” Curt said. “He would have known everything necessary to pull this off.”
“Except for a madam with a tape recorder,” Cameron said.
“But why kill Ava Tucker?” Curt asked.
“Maybe she overheard their plan,” Cameron suggested. “She happened to be going by the doorway—”
“No,” Joshua said. “Congresswoman Hilliard is not that sloppy.”
“According to Mike’s files, it looks like Hilliard has been killing off all of her former co-workers,” Cameron said. “Why not start that night with Ava?”
Joshua ejected the cassette from the recorder and slipped in the next one. “Before we go slapping cuffs on killers, let’s take a listen to this tape that’s marked for Russell Null and Philip Lipton.”
“Russell is Virgil Null’s brother,” Cameron said.
“He’s also on the board of county commissioners,” Curt said.
“More dirty politics?” Cameron cocked an eyebrow in Joshua’s direction. “Am I sensing a theme here?”
Ignoring her, Joshua referred to the transcript. “It starts with Russell Null.”
“What are you doing here?” a hushed voice demanded.
They heard a door slam in the background while a younger man’s voice answered, “This is a bordello. What do you think I’m doing here? How did you know I was coming?”
“That’s Virgil Null,” Joshua said hurriedly while sitting down to move his ear closer to the player’s speaker.
“Be serious,” a third male voice said.
“That’s Philip Lipton,” Curt said. “I recognized his voice. What’s—”
Joshua hushed him.
“Do you have any idea what you’re doing?” Russell asked.