Dying for a Clue

by Judy Fitzwater

  Handing that baby over must have been heart-wrenching. Was that why Beverly wanted to counsel surrogates, to make sure they knew? Did she want to make sure Paul never did to anyone else what he had done to her?

  Chapter 33

  “I don’t see how this could happen,” Jennifer insisted, peering over the high back of her airplane seat. “I’m sure when I made the reservations, our seats were all together.”

  Sam was so far back she could barely see his head past the rows and rows of people.

  “Must be some computer glitch, doll,” Johnny told her. “No big deal. Relax. Enjoy.” He sat with his hat cocked down over his eyes, a self-satisfied smirk on his face.

  A little too self-satisfied. Jennifer took note of the seat next to hers, the one against the window, the one with nobody in it.

  She settled back down and slid her carry-on bag out from in front of her feet toward the window. She barely had room to stretch out her legs, and the tightness of the seats put her closer to Johnny than she’d ever hoped to be. He’d already appropriated their shared armrest. It was going to be a long flight. She could tell.

  The seat belt sign went on, and she buckled up.

  The pilot’s voice came on over the intercom, smooth and competent. “I want to welcome you aboard our flight from Atlanta to Reagan National Airport in Arlington, Virginia. The weather is clear with temperatures close to a high of fifty degrees today. We’ll be in the air approximately fifty-nine minutes. I hope you enjoy your flight, and thanks for choosing us as your air carrier.”

  The engines started their whine and the plane moved forward, giving Jennifer that little thrill in the pit of her stomach she never quite got used to. She knew she was safer in an airplane than in a car, yet...

  Johnny leaned in. “You okay? You’re looking a little green.”

  “Fine. Great.” At least she would be once they got off the ground. “Where’d you go after you threw me out of your condo the other morning?”

  He tilted his hat back, and she could see his eyes. He needed to lay off of whatever it was he drank for his supper, let the blood in his eyes go back to wherever it belonged.

  “Threw you out? I must have been drunker than I thought.”

  He kind of groaned, and she noticed his hands starting to shake. He searched in his coat pocket and came up with something he popped in his mouth. Nicotine gum. It had to be. Thank goodness. She’d been worried about him trying to light up and getting them all thrown off the plane.

  “As I see it, we’ve got two principals.” He gave the gum a chew and then tucked it between his cheek and his gum, making a small bulge. “Paul and Donald Collier, especially with Donald’s involvement with the D.C. clinic. So I thought I’d do a little more snooping, see what I could find out about them. You know, what they’re into, that sort of thing.”

  “Yeah, and...”

  “And not much. The clinic keeps them hoppin’. Lots of clients. Lots of cash coming in. Paul likes the limelight. He keeps a presence in a number of civic organizations, gives them money more than time. Makes for good PR.”

  “He doesn’t go to church.”

  Johnny nodded. “No church. He hunts. Deer, mostly. But he’ll settle for squirrel, pheasant, most anything in season.”

  Jennifer winced. “Into killing things, huh?”

  “It’s legal.”

  “And Donald?”

  “He’s more the fisherman type. Freshwater. Lake mostly. Got a cabin on Lake Tobesofkee.”

  “A cabin? That’s pretty built up out there. Lots of really nice homes.”

  “Yeah. Well, seems he bought several acres when he first came out here years ago in an area away from all that development. The woods run back a good distance. Not all of it is lakefront property. Likes it feral.”

  Now there was a word she hadn’t expected Johnny to know.

  “Any run-ins with the law?” she asked. It’d be nice if it were that simple. Charged with a count or two of baby selling. Or baby stealing.

  “Not even a civil suit.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “Nope.”

  “Considering what they do, that’s hard to believe.”

  “Unless they’re in the habit of paying off anyone who’s not satisfied,” Johnny said.

  His hand brushed hers, and she drew back. Sharing an armrest was awkward. She hoped it’d been an accident.

  “You’re all business, aren’t you, Marsh?” He said it like it was a statement.

  Absolutely. As business as she could get.

  “You ought to learn how to play a little, ease up some.” He shifted in his seat and stared at her, an intense, get-my-drift kind of stare.

  “You know the food on these flights is great,” she said, pulling her snack bag out of the seat-back pocket in front of her. “Just look what all we’ve got. Bagels,” —it looked like it had been sat on, but that was because she’d crammed it into the pocket with no intentions of eating it— “cream cheese, orange juice, banana. Yummy.” She grabbed his bag and shoved it into his hands.

  “Eat your bagel,” Jennifer insisted. Translation: put something in your mouth so you can’t talk.

  The flight attendant started her demonstration of the oxygen masks and the flotation devices. Fifty-nine minutes, huh? Only fifty-seven left. It was going to be a really long flight.

  “You know what I like most about you, Marsh?” Johnny asked, stuffing his unopened snack bag back into the pocket.

  She didn’t know, and she really, really didn’t want to.

  “You’re smart,” he said, and settled back into his seat.

  Maybe it wouldn’t be such a long flight after all.

  Fortunately, most things have an end, and so did that flight. Once on the ground, Jennifer insisted they split up. She’d had about all she could tolerate of her so-called partner for the time being. Johnny went off to check out the clinic where Donald Collier had once been an associate, and Jennifer and Sam to meet with Lou Myers, Montgomery County Police.

  “How’d you get Myers to agree to see us so soon?” Sam asked, stirring his strawberry milkshake with a straw in the slick gray-and-pink booth at the Silver Diner on Rockville Pike.

  “Simple. I told him I had the little girl that disappeared from the Turners’ home the night of their deaths.”

  “Jennifer, you know you can’t—”

  She nudged him under the table with her foot. “Dark blue suit coming in at twelve o’clock. He’s scanning the place. I think he’s our man.”

  She waved at him, a big, barrel-chested man, and he came over.

  “Ms. Marsh?”

  She nodded. “Detective Myers?”

  Sam moved over and Myers slipped in beside him. His hair was gray and thin with peach fuzz on top, most likely the result of Rogaine. He adjusted his tie as though his collar were a little too tight and then ordered a cup of coffee from the waitress, who had followed him over.

  “So, you know where Cynthia Turner is?”

  “I think so,” Jennifer told him.

  He nodded. “The disappearance of that child always bothered me. It didn’t add up.”

  “How so?” Sam asked.

  Myers looked him up and down.

  “Sam Culpepper. I spoke with you by phone.”

  “Right.” They shook hands. “Why was she missing? If the father shot the mother, then killed himself, why wasn’t the child still in the house? The door was locked. It wasn’t as if a kid that size would let herself out and then lock the place back up.”

  “A third party,” Sam offered.

  He nodded. “Had to be.”

  “You think somebody else killed them?” Jennifer asked.

  “Don’t know. Turner fired the gun, no doubt about it. He had powder residue all over his right hand. We didn’t find any stray bullets, and only two were missing from the clip. And it appears he shot himself. The bullet went in at close range. But who shoots himself in the chest to commit suicide?”

&nb
sp; “Any evidence of a struggle?” Sam asked.

  “Sure. But that’s to be expected. This wasn’t no suicide pact. Mrs. Turner didn’t go down willingly.”

  Jennifer sucked hard on the straw of her chocolate shake. “So who was the other person?”

  He shook his head. “We questioned friends, neighbors, coworkers. Never came up with anything that led anywhere. How’d you find the girl?”

  “She sort of found us,” Jennifer said.

  Myers signaled the waitress to refill his coffee. “So what makes you think it’s her?”

  “She was adopted at age three under less than normal circumstances,” Sam explained, “and she told her adopted mother that her name was Cat.”

  “Yeah, and…”

  “And there’s a tag.” Jennifer pulled it out of her pocket and showed it to Myers. “We need to know if that phone number belonged to the Turners fourteen years ago.”

  Myers rubbed his fingers over the metal, studying the engraving.

  “That’s easy enough to do.” He pulled a cell phone out of his pocket and dialed. “Hey, Pete,” he said into the phone. “Do me a favor and get the file on the Turner case. It’s on my desk…Yeah. The fourteen-year-old murder/suicide that happened in Bethesda...No, man. Now. It won’t take you five minutes. Just check out the home phone number of the victims. Then call me back.” He stuffed the phone back into his jacket.

  “If we get a match, I want an interview,” he told them. “If the child was there that night—and as best we can tell she must have been—she might have seen what happened.”

  Jennifer could feel her cheeks grow red. “She was only three. She doesn’t remember anything.” She really hoped that was true.

  He looked at her as though he wasn’t so sure he believed her. “Children remember more than we think they do. Something that traumatic—”

  “We haven’t told her how her birth parents may have died. We want to know for sure before we hit her with something like that,” Sam said. “But short of a DNA test—”

  “We have her fingerprints,” Myers interrupted. “They were all over the house, along with half a dozen other three-year-olds. And the parents had them done at one of those safety programs at the mall. Left them in a home file. If you can get me this girl’s prints, we’ll know. Could be off a glass, almost anything smooth she’s handled.”

  “Okay,” Jennifer agreed. “I’ll send them to you.”

  The waitress refilled his coffee. Myers only had time to drink about half a cup before the phone in his pocket rang. Jennifer was into the last third of her shake. Sam had long since finished his.

  “Yeah,” Myers said into the mouthpiece. He fingered the disk as he listened. “Okay. Thanks.” He hung up and looked straight at Jennifer. “We’ve got a match.”

  Myers’ words took her breath away. She knew she was right. She had to be right. What other explanation could there have been? But having it confirmed...

  “You said something to Sam over the phone about grandparents,” she managed. “Are they still living?”

  “One. The woman’s mother. Last I heard she was still around, but you’ve got to remember we’ve had no movement on this case for years.”

  “Would it be all right...I mean, I’d like to speak with her, if you think...” She was groping.

  Sam frowned at her, probably a little more concerned than he should be about her state of mind.

  Myers studied her. “I could take you over there, but you’ve got to be careful what you say. You can’t show up on somebody’s doorstep and start opening up old wounds without a bandage to hand them.”

  She looked at him funny.

  “We get what we can, but we tell her nothing. No false hopes,” Myers insisted.

  She nodded. The last thing she wanted was to cause more pain to what was left of Diane’s family.

  Chapter 34

  “Detective Myers,” Mrs. Owens said, opening the door to the modest townhouse in Gaithersburg and drying her hands on a dish towel. She looked flustered and then wary. “You’ll have to excuse me. I was just finishing up my lunch dishes. Won’t you come in?”

  There was a bit of the South in her voice. Not Georgian, Jennifer decided, maybe Virginian, most likely coastal.

  Mrs. Owens ushered them into a small sitting room brightened by windows that ran across the front of the house. She was petite, painfully thin, with a gray cardigan over a simple tailored dress. She showed them to a floral print sofa and then sat, folding the towel across the arm of her upholstered chair.

  She asked no questions, and Jennifer could guess she’d had more answers from Myers than she’d ever wanted.

  “Miss Marsh wanted to speak with you,” Myers told her, sitting back.

  Jennifer leaned forward, daring to touch her hand. “I’m sorry about your loss,” she said. Stupid, inadequate words, but she meant them.

  The woman drew back and peered at her as though she didn’t care a fig about what Jennifer was sorry about. Her armor was well in place.

  “I...I wonder if you’d mind telling me about your daughter and your son-in-law.”

  “You’re not starting up another investigation, are you?” Mrs. Owens turned to Myers. “Has something happened? You said it was cut and dried...Oh my...Cynthia. You’ve found Cynthia’s body.”

  The woman went chalk-white.

  Jennifer vigorously shook her head. “Nothing like that.” Myers had warned her. He shook his head ever so slightly at her. “You called your granddaughter Cynthia?”

  “Of course. That was her name.”

  “Did she happen to have a stuffed pink cat?”

  That one hit home. “We never found it. The police asked me to go through her clothes to see if I could tell what she’d been wearing that night. Do you know how impossible that is? It’s like looking at one of those pictures and trying to figure out what’s different, only I didn’t have anything to compare it with. The child had enough clothes to dress a village. But the cat...She always had hold of that shabby old toy. I missed it right away.”

  “Could it have had a tag, maybe around its neck?” Jennifer asked.

  “It said, ‘Cat’s cat.’ Her father called her Cat. My God. You found it.” The woman covered her mouth. The control she had so firmly in place disappeared. She looked very old and terribly vulnerable.

  “Mrs. Owens, we don’t know what we’ve found,” Myers explained.

  “Oh no, you don’t,” Mrs. Owens insisted with the strength of the righteous. “You will not come into this house and mention my precious granddaughter and think you can walk back out without telling me a word. That child was Colette’s whole world. She and Robert had been trying to conceive for years before she finally became pregnant—”

  “How had they been trying?” Sam asked quietly.

  Jennifer was sure of the answer before she heard it.

  “They went to a fertility clinic, two actually. The first one couldn’t help them.”

  “Was one in Washington, D.C.?” Sam asked.

  “The second. How did you know?” Mrs. Owens studied Sam.

  Sam shrugged. “Just a guess.”

  “Did your daughter know a Doctor Donald Collier?” Jennifer added.

  “Collier?” Mrs. Owens repeated.

  “He specializes in fertility procedures,” Sam explained.

  She seemed to be mulling the name over in her mind, but then she shook her head. “She could have. I don’t remember her ever mentioning that name.”

  “Obviously, someone was able to help. Your daughter did get pregnant,” Jennifer said.

  “It wasn’t her problem; it was her husband’s. I’m not sure what they did, but Cynthia was born less than two years after they found the second clinic. We were all thrilled.” Mrs. Owens took up the dish towel, plucked at it, and then folded and unfolded it on her lap.

  Myers nodded toward the door.

  “We’ve got to be going,” Jennifer said, standing up.

  Mrs. Owens grabbed he
r hand. “You still haven’t told me. Is my granddaughter alive or dead?”

  What should she say? Diane was quite alive, and, with every fiber of her being, Jennifer felt sure she was Cynthia. But it wasn’t her call. False hope could be a kind of death of its own. She looked to Myers.

  “We should know soon,” Myers told her.

  “After fourteen years...” she said. “That poor baby. I don’t even know if her leg healed.”

  “Was she injured?” Jennifer asked, sitting back down on the edge of the sofa.

  “The week they...the week this all happened, Cynthia was playing on the jungle gym in the backyard. She fell, suffering a compound fracture to her lower leg. Lost a lot of blood. Scared us all half to death. She’d have a scar somewhere about mid-calf. I think it was her right leg. It’s funny. That’s what I tend to wonder about. Not if she’s alive, but if her leg healed all right.”

  We all have our defense mechanisms.

  At the door, she turned and thanked Mrs. Owens.

  “I don’t know what for,” Mrs. Owens said. “I don’t really mind talking about it. It’s not like I don’t think about it most every day, one way or another. If I could only understand...”

  “Understand what?” Jennifer asked.

  “Why he killed her. Why he killed my daughter.”

  Chapter 35

  Jennifer insisted that Myers take them past what had been the Turners’ house. She didn’t know why she had to see it, only that she did. As if viewing where the horror had occurred would somehow make her understand.

  It was a brick colonial in an older Bethesda neighborhood full of stately homes and lots of trees beginning to shed their leaves. A wreath of dried, burnt orange flowers and leaves in yellows and browns hung on the front door. A child’s bike and some push toys rested on the front stoop.

  It all seemed so sad. So totally unnecessary. Once she’d seen it, she couldn’t get away fast enough.

  Their flight left at 5:45 P.M. They’d barely had time to meet up with Johnny before boarding. They carried along their “snack” supper as they made their way through the boarding tunnels to an all-too-familiar row of claustrophobia-inducing seats. She didn’t know how commuters did this on a regular basis. Twice in one day was way too much for her.