by Lauren Carr
The packet was organized. It had copies of public records and news clippings about the murder of Rachel Burke in her beauty salon in Pittsburgh, and the suicide of Billy Robb in his apartment.
“Interesting,” Cameron said upon seeing the police report.
“What’s so interesting?” he asked her.
“I never noticed the name of the lead investigator before.” She shrugged. “But then, this all happened before I got to know him. Ralph Ellicott.”
“What do you know about him? Is he dirty?”
“If you consider a political player to be synonymous with dirty, yes.” Her brows furrowed with suspicion. “Being the lead in the Burke case didn’t hurt his career. He’s now the state police captain in the district.”
Joshua smiled at her. “You’re getting curious.”
While Cameron tried to decipher the contents of the police report, Joshua found the prime motivation for the mother on her search for her son’s justice. It was a letter inside an envelope that he found resting on top of the stack of clippings. The envelope had no return address. The postmark was Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and sent almost eighteen months after the murder.
The one page letter started out with an apology for not coming forward sooner.
But I cannot live with myself if I do not let you know the truth. I was close to the investigation into Rachel Burke’s murder and, based on my professional experience, I do not believe your son killed her. Nor do I believe your son killed himself.
Your son, William was framed and murdered and someone is covering up the truth! I’m sorry I can’t tell you who is behind this or why.
I don’t know what, or if, there is anything you can do to bring out the truth, Mrs. Robb, but I felt that I had to let you know that. Maybe in some way it can give you comfort knowing that your son was not a killer.
Cameron dropped what was left of her bagel onto her plate. “Did they say Billy Robb was framed and murdered?”
“Yep.” His finger on the words, Joshua held the letter over in front of her face for her to read. “Right there. F-R-A-M-E-D and M-U-R-D-E-R-E-D. Framed and murdered.”
“I’ll get my gun.” Cameron jumped out of her chair and ran up the stairs.
“You might want to put on some clothes, too.”
“I’m sorry. I can’t help you,” Peggy Hewitt said more than once when Joshua explained the reason for calling her out of the blue years after she had retired from the Pennsylvania State Police. “How did you find me?”
Joshua explained about using his role as Hancock County prosecuting attorney to get the state crime lab to lift her fingerprints from the letter and envelope she had sent to Gina Robb. The prints were matched to hers in the AFIS system under government employee database.
“Less than a week after you retired,” he told her, “Gina Robb received an anonymous letter saying her son was framed. You must have found something very intriguing while processing the evidence from Rachel Burke’s murder and Billy Robb’s death for it to eat at you for over a year. What did you find that was so compelling that you had to shoot her a letter as soon as you had your pension?”
The silence he heard across the phone line lasted so long that he thought she had hung up.
“Who did you say you were again?” she asked.
“Joshua Thornton. I’m the prosecuting attorney in Hancock County, West Virginia,” he said. “Gina Robb is dying and her last wish is to have her son’s name cleared. She gave me everything she had collected about his case. If he’s innocent, I’d like to prove it. I can’t do that unless you tell me what evidence you saw that made you write to her.”
Again, there was silence.
“I’m sorry, I can’t help you.”
Click.
With a sigh, Joshua hung up the phone.
“She’s not going to help us?” Cameron asked from where she was sitting on the sofa in his study. Irving had made himself at home in her lap.
“Nope.” Again, Joshua went over the information they had collected from the folder and the Internet about the Rachel Burke case. Cameron had also used her position to log remotely into the state police computer records to download their case file.
The death of a former beauty queen turned successful business woman draws a lot of attention. Forensics lab technician Peggy Hewitt had to have seen the physical evidence in the crime labs that proved Billy Robb was innocent.
While Joshua had no authority to compel the Pennsylvania State Police to reopen the case, he did have connections—a wife who happened to be a Pennsylvania State Police homicide detective. Cameron had access to almost everything they needed to look into the case on their own.
Joshua was drinking his second beer while sharing a bowl of popcorn with Cameron when his administrative assistant, Mary, called from the office in New Cumberland. “Hey, Chief, I didn’t want to bother you at home during your vacation, but thought I’d check with you on this before I deleted it.”
Joshua was only half paying attention when she said that she had received an e-mail into the county prosecuting attorney’s info account from an unknown e-mail address.
Mary said, “It’s a hotmail account with the name Deep Throat and it’s addressed to you. It says in big red bold letters, ‘Eyes Only’ and it has a pdf attachment. I was about to delete it, but then, knowing you, there’s no telling what clandestine stuff you’re up to on your vacation. I thought I’d check.”
Sitting up in his recliner, Joshua wondered if Peggy was helping him after all. “Send it to me.”
After decades of working for the state police, she was afraid of having the information traced back to her. So she sent it to my office using a free hotmail account and probably from a wi-fi hotspot.
Like a teenage boy waiting for a call from the prettiest girl in his class, Joshua stared at his laptop until the ding signaled the arrival of an e-mail from his assistant. The e-mail she had forwarded contained one sentence to him. To Joshua Thornton. Eyes Only. From Deep Throat. The attachment was labeled Report. The scanned document was over a hundred pages, which included the forensics report and pathology report for both Rachel Burke and Billy Robb.
Now it was up to Joshua and Cameron to find what Peggy Hewitt had uncovered that proved Billy Robb and Rachel Burke were the victims of a murder conspiracy.
The sun had gone down on Cameron and Joshua’s third day of vacation when Tad and Jan stopped by on their way out to dinner to discover that the newlyweds had already eaten. The open pizza box covered the desk in his study. Snoring away, Admiral was sacked out on the sofa with Irving stretched out across his back.
In the center of the room, scattered paper covered the floor with what Tad recognized to be a forensics report. Bent over the paper lined Oriental rug, Joshua stared at it. Cameron was studying the police report for the umpteenth time.
“Did your printer explode?” Tad asked.
Seeing Tad and Jan wearing jackets, Cameron glanced out the window to see that during the time they had been piecing everything together, the sun had gone down and storm clouds had rolled in.
Jan said, “We were going out to dinner and wanted to know if you two wanted to come along.”
“We ate,” Joshua said, “but thanks.”
“Maybe you’d like to share your special sundae at Cricksters,” Jan offered.
“What is this?” Tad asked about the scattered papers.
Joshua picked up one page of the report and waved it over his head. “He didn’t do it.”
“Do you mean Billy?”
Anger seeped into Joshua’s tone. “He didn’t kill Rachel Burke. Gina has been right all along.”
Tad slumped onto the arm of the sofa. “Do you mean all these years that everyone has thought she couldn’t accept that her son was a monster? That everyone thought she was delusional saying that he was the victim of a conspiracy –”
“—and murdered?” Jan squeezed in on the sofa between Admiral’s butt and the sofa’s arm. “People have been t
elling her all these years that she had to accept it.”
“Someone framed her son, her only son, and killed him, and they got away with it.” Joshua clinched his jaws. “And I’m going to find out who was behind this cover up before she passes away.”
“We’re going to,” Cameron corrected him.
“Josh … Cameron,” Tad said, “Gina slipped into a coma last night. She can pass at any time.”
“She’s not dead yet,” Joshua said. “She has to die in peace with the world knowing that Billy didn’t do it.”
Jan asked, “How do you know he was innocent?”
Joshua gestured at the fan of papers that scattered the floor. “It’s all right here.”
“Exhibit A.” Cameron held out a sheet of paper to her husband, which he snatched to show Tad.
“Billy Robb had no carbon on his hands,” Joshua told him. “He didn’t fire a gun. So he didn’t shoot himself in the head.” He handed the report over to Tad.
Jan read the report over her husband’s shoulder.
“Then we have the matter of Robb’s clothes.” He grabbed another sheet of paper to add to the previous one in the doctor’s hand.
Jan asked, “What about them?”
“They weren’t his,” Cameron said. “All the witnesses who knew Billy Robb said he was a goth. Yet, he was found wearing a purple shirt and blue jeans.”
Joshua tapped his finger on a section of the report that she was referring to. “Goths don’t wear purple.”
Tad pointed out. “Maybe he decided to quit being a goth.”
“If we can find these clothes in evidence” Cameron said, “I think forensics will be able to determine if Billy was wearing those clothes or not.”
“According to these forensics reports,” Joshua said, “the clothes that Robb was wearing when he was killed—”
“The non-gothic clothes,” Cameron interjected.
“—the clothes that had Rachel Burke’s blood and tissue all over them, they were expensive and tailor-made. The pants didn’t fit him. The top button wasn’t even fastened.”
“What about the murder weapon?” Jan asked. “The scissors from the salon? Wasn’t that found in his room?”
Joshua said, “It had Robb’s fingerprints on it, but those could have been planted. That doesn’t prove he did it.” He gestured at the report scattered before them. “This proves he didn’t. His fingerprints weren’t found in the salon. Nowhere in any of these reports does it have one bit of evidence proving that Billy Robb was even at the crime scene.”
“If Billy didn’t do it,” Cameron said, “and there is no evidence to place him in that salon at the time of the murder, then someone else killed Rachel Burke and that someone killed Billy to frame him.”
Jan asked, “Could it have been a government conspiracy like Gina always said?”
Cameron’s mind was still working. “Whoever it was had enough power to get the state police to cover it up. Rachel Burke had some rich and powerful friends.”
“Rachel Burke was killed the week after Labor Day weekend,” Tad recalled. “I remember the news saying that she had a big swanky Labor Day party, a fundraiser for Senator Linda Pryor, the day before she was killed. The media made a big deal about all the big names in sports and politics that was there.”
Joshua gathered together more pages from the scattered report. “Which brings me to Rachel Burke’s autopsy report. It was never mentioned in the media that she had consensual sexual relations shortly before she was killed. Yet, she wasn’t married or raped.”
Taking the reports, Tad asked, “Did the police get a DNA profile from the semen?”
“No match in the system,” Cameron said, “according to the forensics report. And nowhere in this case file is there any mention of them ever identifying who she was with.”
“Based on that,” Joshua said. “Rachel Burke had sex with a man. Something went wrong and he killed her. Billy Robb, who had a long history with the police in the area, had a beef with the victim and our killer knew that. That made him an excellent patsy for our unidentified lover boy to frame him for killing the beauty queen.”
“She had a broken arm,” Tad said.
“What did you say?” Cameron asked.
“Broken arm.” Tad held up the report as if she could read it from across the room. “The ME mentions it in Rachel Burke’s autopsy.”
“Defensive wound,” Cameron said with a shrug.
“I don’t think so,” Tad said. “He says right here that it was at least a day old at the time of her death. A hairline fracture from her elbow down to her wrist. Must have been painful, but I have had patients, thinking that it was a bad sprain or pulled muscle, come to me only to discover that their arm was broken.”
Joshua knelt over the papers on the floor. “Well, with Gina Robb in a coma, we don’t have time to sit here speculating about who could have done it. The best way for us to get answers to our questions is to talk to someone who was there.”
“Who?” Jan asked.
Joshua said, “Rachel had a twin sister.”
Cameron was spoiled. Since living in Chester after marrying Joshua, she had grown accustomed to country driving. As soon as she entered the Pittsburgh city limits, she felt her shoulders tense when she went on alert. In her cruiser, she felt like she was driving a tank into combat while waiting for some wayward motorist texting their BFF to plow into her.
She was relieved when she finally found the bistro where Police Captain Ralph Ellicott was known to frequent lunch on a side street near PNC stadium. After putting fifty cents in the meter, she pasted a smile on her lips and stepped inside the restaurant.
In her black slacks and leather jacket, the police detective, with her tousled brown hair, looked out of place in the restaurant that catered to those known and wanting to be known in the political arena. Cameron could tell without looking at the price list that this was out of her range.
Why didn’t I ask Josh to take this and I take the sister of the victim?
She spotted Ralph Ellicott in a corner booth. If it weren’t for his expensive suit with a blood red tie and a gold watch that caught off the light shining down on it from over their table, the police captain would have looked like the squirt Cameron’s friends had said he was. He was short, skinny, with thin hair that was as pale as his face with its weak jaw and beady eyes.
He reminded Cameron of a lizard.
She hated him before even meeting him. You need to stop that, Cam.
She passed by a table filled with a party of women dressed in brightly colored suits and pumps. Spotting the detective’s gun holstered on her hip, they paused in drinking their margaritas to watch Cameron make her way to the corner booth.
“Captain Ellicott?” Cameron asked.
The state police captain jerked from where he was in conversation with a young man with light brown hair dressed in a gray suit with a blue tie. An expression of annoyance crossed his face.
Cameron offered her hand, which he ignored. “Detective Cameron Gates.” She flashed him her badge which she wore clipped to her belt next to her gun. “I’m from the state police barracks in Beaver district. Could I have a moment of your time?”
“The Beaver District?” After looking the female detective up and down, a smirk crossed his face. “You’re a little out of your way, detective.”
Even though he didn’t offer, Cameron slipped into the booth to sit on the very edge of the cushion. The couple of men on her side were gentlemen enough to squeeze over to give her some room, but not much. “I’ve been going over some of the old cases from our district to prepare them for archiving,” she lied, “and found one of yours. The Rachel Burke murder.”
“Oh, I remember that case well,” Ralph Ellicott said with a wide smile, the first one he flashed since Cameron approached their table. He took a sip of his drink, which Cameron could tell was a scotch—double. After uttering a gasp of satisfaction, he added, “That case made my career.”
“
Even though there was no physical evidence to connect Billy Robb to the murder scene,” Cameron said.
The smile dropped from Ralph Ellicott’s face.
The other men at the table inched away from her as if the tension that dropped down onto the party was contagious. They all feared falling victim to the fallout that was surely to come.
In contrast, the young man in the gray suit sitting next to Captain Ellicott stared straight across the table at her. The corner of his lip curled.
“What do you want, detective?” Ellicott demanded. “Why are you here?”
“Before this case can be permanently closed and archived, I want to know if there’s any possibility of a mistake.”
“Mistake?” the police captain shouted.
The men to her right squirmed. With no way out of the booth, they were trapped to witness the scene that was unfolding.
“Let’s face it,” Cameron said, “based on the lack of physical evidence putting Billy Robb at the murder scene, if he had lived to stand trial, he would have gotten off, and most likely you wouldn’t be sitting here wearing the captain’s badge. So, my question, before I archive this case, is to you: Who did you not question in the murder of Rachel Burke?”
“Billy Robb committed suicide because he knew I was closing in on him?”
“Actually, the evidence says he didn’t shoot himself in the head,” Cameron said. “According to the forensics report that I uncovered in my investigation, the real one, there was no carbon on his hands. How do you shoot yourself in the head without getting carbon on your hand? Billy Robb was murdered and framed for Rachel Burke’s murder. Whoever did it had the forensics report that was put in the official case file altered to read like he did do it. The only thing I don’t know is if you were in on it and got rewarded with being put on the fast track to where you are now, or if you’re fool enough to have been duped along with everyone else.”
Ellicott stood up as far as he could while trapped in the corner of his booth. “Get out of here!”
Out on the street, Cameron looked up from where she was opening her car door when she saw the man in the gray suit. He glanced over his shoulder before going around the front of her SUV to step up to her. With his back to his friends in the restaurant, a wide grin crossed his face. “You have a lot of guts, lady.” He clasped her on the shoulder on his way past. Feeling his hand make contact with her hip, she thought he was trying to grope her, which made her jump back.