by Megan Goldin
‘It was Marcia’s idea to get married in the spring,’ he laughed. ‘You’ll have to take it up with her.’
‘I will,’ I answered with a smile. ‘How is Marcia?’
‘She’s doing great. Back at work today as well.’
‘She still works at the university admin office, doesn’t she?’
‘Sure does,’ he says. ‘Why’re you asking?’
‘I’m wondering if she might know someone I could talk to about a case I’m working on. We’re working on,’ I corrected myself. ‘I need to talk with someone who knows all the university gossip going back years.’
‘Which case?’
‘A decomp,’ I said. ‘We found the body earlier this month. The victim was a professor at the university, although that part is still under wraps.’
‘I’ll call Marcia. See if she knows anyone,’ Will offered. ‘Meanwhile, let’s get me up to speed on what’s been going on here while I’ve been away.’
For the next hour, I took Will through the open cases, starting with the discovery of Laura West’s body.
‘Don’t you think it’s strange that the killer left jewellery on the body but took her wedding and engagement rings?’ Will asked.
‘Maybe the killer kept the rings as mementos,’ I suggested. ‘But you’re right. It bothers me too. Usually the killer takes everything. Or takes nothing.’
‘How valuable was the jewellery left on the victim’s body?’
‘It was all gold. The real deal,’ I said. ‘Even fenced, it would have fetched a couple of grand.’
‘What about the missing rings?’
‘They would have been worth forty, fifty grand in those days. The engagement ring had a two-carat diamond. The wedding ring was diamond-encrusted.’
Will turned the pages in the file until he came to Matthew West’s profile. ‘You interviewed the husband. Do you think he’s good for it?’
Thanks to Joe’s meticulous observation of the conference video on the day Laura West disappeared, I knew that Matthew West left the conference room and didn’t return for the other sessions that Saturday afternoon. I also knew for certain he made it back by evening because the conference organisers emailed me a group photo from the gala dinner in which Matthew West appears prominently in the middle row. I figured there might have been as much as a six-hour gap during which Matthew West’s movements were unaccounted for. Or as little as a three-hour gap, depending on the accuracy of statements made at the time by a couple of witnesses who vaguely recalled seeing Matthew West in the hotel lobby that afternoon.
‘The husband is a suspect,’ I told Will. ‘There’s a six-hour gap in his alibi that has never properly been accounted for but in my view it’s not enough time for him to do the crime.’
I’d thought about the timelines on my way into work. It would be a serious stretch for West to make the two-hour drive home, find his wife, murder her and bury her body in a forest – all on a weekend in the full light of day – and still have enough time to drive back to Charlotte, get dressed and attend the gala dinner. He’d have broken speed limits to make the journey there and back in that narrow a window of time. His car plates didn’t come up on any speed-camera violations that weekend and there was no indication that he’d hired a rental car. His name wasn’t on any plane manifests either, so it was unlikely that he’d flown back home, killed his wife and disposed of her body, and then flown back to Charlotte to rejoin the conference.
‘We don’t know the time of death,’ Will said, looking through the file I’d put together. ‘That alone plays havoc with his alibi.’
‘There was no signal coming from Laura West’s cellphone from just after 4 p.m. on the Saturday. That’s the time I’m assuming she was taken.’
After going through the case files, we decided Will would focus on wrapping up the other homicides I’d been working on and handling any new cases while I gave most of my attention to the Laura West case.
I had a pile of boxes to go through to reconstruct the original investigation. It would take the best part of a week even if no other cases fell on my desk.
‘I almost forgot,’ said Will. ‘The medical examiner’s office left a message for you to call them back.’
When I called the ME’s phone, it rang through to voice mail. Thirty minutes later I finally got through.
‘Hey Mike, it’s Mel. I’m returning your call,’ I said when he answered.
‘Mel,’ he said, putting something metal down with a clatter. I’d caught him in the autopsy room. ‘I have an interesting development with regard to the Henderson case.’
‘The what case?’
‘The car accident vic found in Kellers Way in the first week of spring.’
‘That’s being handled by highway patrol. It’s not a homicide case,’ I said, perplexed.
‘Well, I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news, Mel. Looks like the case might be coming back your way.’ I hated it when Mike went cryptic on me.
‘Why?’
‘We have the toxicology tests back.’
‘And?’
‘That guy was pumped with scopolamine,’ he said, as though I was supposed to know what that meant.
‘What’s scopolamine?’
‘It’s a drug that comes from a tree in Colombia called borrachero. It’s a pretty white and yellow flower. The type of flower you’d put in a vase on your dinner table,’ he said. ‘Though I would highly recommend that you don’t do that.’
‘Mike, are you saying that this drug is what killed him? That he wasn’t killed in the crash?’
‘I have never before seen that concentration of scopolamine in a person’s blood. Scopolamine is used in low doses in prescription patches for motion sickness. Sometimes to treat Parkinson’s disease symptoms. Always in minuscule amounts.’
‘What happens when the levels are not that small?’
‘In large doses it can cause delusional behaviour and psychosis.’
‘And the driver had taken a large dose of scopolamine before he died?’ I asked.
‘A potentially lethal dose,’ said Mike.
‘Which means what? That he overdosed on motion sickness tablets.’
‘Not at these levels. He’d have had to consume hundreds of motion sickness tablets to get anywhere close to this concentration. It’s not just abnormal, it’s bizarre that he had that much scopolamine in his blood.’
‘Maybe that was his drug of choice, Mike.’
‘Not scopolamine,’ he said adamantly. ‘There’s no buzz from scopolamine. It’s like going down the darkest, scariest rabbit hole. It makes you manic in the worst possible way. I can’t imagine anyone taking it by choice in those quantities. It’s no surprise he crashed the car, with that amount in his blood.’
‘You think he might have been deliberately poisoned?’
‘I can’t think of any other explanation.’
‘Thanks for letting me know, Mike,’ I sighed. ‘I’ll let highway patrol know that we’re taking the case back. The good news is that Will’s returned from vacation. I’ll fill him in on my involvement, but he’ll take the lead from here.’
I don’t usually handle fatal car accidents, but I had gotten stuck with the Henderson case when it first came in.
Two days after Will left for Cancun, I got a call from Henry Dawson, a veteran cop in highway patrol. They’d found a body in a car in Kellers Way. This was a couple of weeks before we found what turned out to be Laura West’s body, so that didn’t mean much to me at the time. Henry told me it looked like a car accident but that there was something strange about the scene. He figured I might want to take a look. Henry was about two years from retirement; I trusted his instincts.
When I arrived at the scene, Henry was deep in conversation with a cyclist who was still wearing his helmet. Over Henry’s shoulder I saw a silver Toyota smashed into a tree. A body was in the driver’s seat, slumped against the window.
The cyclist’s name was Kevin. Early twenties. Tall, lanky. H
e would have been handsome if his cheeks hadn’t been pitted with acne scars. He was a student at the university. I could tell from the sweatshirt he wore with the university logo, and the suburban Boston accent.
‘I was riding past and saw the car wreck.’ Kevin started talking before my first question. He seemed to want to get it off his chest. I jotted down the raw flow of his testimony. It’s always more reliable getting an account from the gut, before witnesses have time to refine, or over-think by filling in gaps about what they assume happened, rather than what they actually saw.’
‘You approached the vehicle?’
‘I saw the driver’s head against the window. I couldn’t get to him because the driver’s door was pressed up against the tree. Like it is now. So I leaned through the front passenger door and took his pulse,’ he told me. ‘I didn’t need to, actually, but I did it anyway.’
‘Why didn’t you need to take his pulse, Kevin?’
‘Just by touching him, I knew the guy was gone.’ He was hesitant. Nervous. ‘I’m pre-med. I’ve done enough anatomy classes to know when someone’s dead.’
‘So what did you do once you realised he was dead?’
‘I closed the door and cycled uphill to get a signal on my phone so I could call 911. I didn’t have cellphone reception here.’ Kevin inspected the screen of his phone. ‘I still don’t.’
‘Riding up the hill took what, five minutes?’
‘More like ten. It’s a steep ride. After I called 911, they asked me to wait for the police car.’ He motioned towards Henry’s black-and-white patrol car. ‘They met me at the top and I rode down to show them the location.’
Henry nodded his head to verify his part of the story. He slapped Kevin’s shoulder reassuringly. Kevin was trembling.
‘Are you ok?’ I asked.
He nodded and swallowed hard. Despite the initial bravado, he was clearly traumatised. ‘I thought anatomy classes prepared me for everything,’ he joked weakly.
I offered him a ride back into town but he declined. He scribbled his contact details in my notebook in an unsteady hand and then climbed on his bike and pushed off up the hill.
When he was gone, I put on gloves and examined the car. The driver was wearing a checked shirt and was unshaven. He looked to be in his thirties. There was an ugly cut on his upper arm that looked like a stab wound, which is what had prompted Henry to get me involved in the first place. Lying alongside the brake pedal was a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. The neck of the whiskey bottle was jagged and covered in blood. It had broken off in the crash. It explained why the car stunk of whiskey. And death. But mostly whiskey.
It also explained the cause of the nasty wound on the driver’s arm. I figured the whiskey bottle broke at the moment of impact, went flying and cut his arm. People don’t realise how dangerous loose objects in a car can be in a high-speed accident.
I’d seen enough bodies to figure the driver had probably only been dead for a couple of hours. I took photos and put the broken bottle in an evidence bag.
I checked the glove compartment and the driver’s pockets. There was no ID on the victim. No wallet. I found a thick wad of well-thumbed twenty-dollar bills shoved into the middle console. Deep in the glove compartment, I retrieved a ziplock bag with two joints rolled tightly in cheap cigarette paper.
I walked around the car wreck. There was no sign of any other vehicle being involved. Or an animal, for that matter. Deer sometimes run into roads and cause collisions. There was nothing here except a car wrapped around a tree.
I took photographs of the tyre marks on the road, in case the rain threatening in the sky washed away all traces before the accident investigator arrived. I figured the driver was swigging whiskey straight from the bottle while taking a notoriously dangerous road at speed. He lost control and hit a tree. Probably died on impact.
‘What do you think, Mel?’ asked Henry, leaning back against his patrol car as I wrote my notes.
‘We’ll have to run this past forensics, but from what I can see this is a fatal car accident, Henry. There’s no sign of a homicide here, unless you count a redneck idiot committing homicide on himself by driving under the influence,’ I said dryly.
That’s what I thought, right until the moment that Mike told me about the scopolamine. That changed everything.
I walked back into the squad room. Will was leaning back in his desk chair while chatting with one of his buddies in narcotics.
‘Don’t get too comfortable, Will,’ I told him. ‘I have a case for you.’
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Julie
It takes me three days to get to the downtown library. Three days of tricking Matt into thinking I am still medicated. Three days of indecision over whether to go looking for answers. Or to forget. Forgetting would be easier, but questions gnaw at me. In the end, I decide the answers couldn’t possibly be worse than the questions.
I arrive at the library not long after it opens, wearing jeans and a navy cable-knit sweater that makes me look thick and middle-aged.
I grab a stack of local papers from the last month and page through them next to an elderly man with Coke bottle glasses. His lips move soundlessly as he reads from a broadsheet newspaper that he holds in front of him, savouring every word.
I, on the other hand, race through each newspaper, efficiently scanning the headlines on each page before moving to the next. When I’m done with one paper, I fold it and put it on the floor by my feet, then flip through the pages of the next newspaper on my pile. And the next, until the pile of newspapers on my lap gradually dwindles, replaced by an unruly heap on the floor.
Time slips by until I find an article that makes me sit up. It’s in the top right hand corner of an inside page, in a paper from two weeks ago. The headline says ‘Motorist Dies In Fatal Accident’. Below it is a hazy photograph of a middle-aged man with a scraggly beard and uncertain features. ‘The victim,’ the caption says. ‘Alexander Henderson. Age thirty-eight. Unemployed.’
‘Mr Henderson,’ the article says, ‘drove his car into a tree on Kellers Way. Police say he was killed in the crash. There does not appear to have been any other vehicle involved in the accident. Police say his car may have skidded on ice, or swerved to avoid a deer. Police remind motorists to drive slowly, especially in the mornings and evenings on country roads, when frost increases the risk of skids.’
Alexander Henderson. I type the name into the search engine of my phone. I get hundreds of random results. I narrow the results by adding our location. That gives me the profile of an Alexander Henderson living in our town. The last time this Alexander Henderson was active on social media was seven months ago, when he posted a cartoon with a drug recovery message. His Facebook profile says he’s a graduate of the Carolinas Community College. He once managed Mick’s Burger Bar, an institution at the local community college. Within minutes I’m in my car driving towards the campus.
The Carolinas Community College campus hasn’t changed much since my time there. It’s on the opposite side of town from the academic universities with the big names and even bigger tuition fees. That makes plenty of sense because this working-class side of town is the community college’s catchment area. The vast majority of its students are juggling jobs and families, trying to finish a diploma or get credits towards a degree. They’re hoping for something better than dead-end jobs and a lifetime of debt.
Seven years ago, I was one of those students juggling work and studies. I had to pay my own way. There was no family to foot my tuition bills. I only realised the importance of education when I was twenty and facing the prospect of being a department store attendant – or, as they liked to call us, a customer service executive – for the rest of my life. Or until my legs couldn’t take the punishment anymore. You can’t know how hard it is standing on your feet for nine, ten hours a day until you’ve actually done it. It’s what made me realise there are choices in life. My choice was to try for something better.
I pass the admi
nistration buildings at the main entrance of the campus. The path is fringed by magnolia trees. Outside the library is a cafe with a canvas sun shade hanging over an outdoor deck. Students relax on sun chairs while they work on their laptops.
I keep walking until I reach a strip of campus restaurants. Mick’s Burger Bar has changed in the intervening years. The tinted windows are gone, along with the trademark red awnings of my time. Instead there’s a hipster vibe with chalkboard menus hanging on whitewashed walls and vintage tables that spill out onto a timber deck.
When I walk inside they’re preparing for the lunchtime rush. I head straight over to the college kid on the cash register. His head snaps up as I ask for the manager.
The manager comes out a minute later with a combative expression on his face. He thinks I’m here to complain. He lumbers towards me, a heavy-set man with a prominent nose and bunched up features. Mid-fifties, I guess. His name badge says ‘Paul’. I tell him that I’m a reporter and that I am writing an article on a man killed in a car accident a couple of weeks ago.
‘He used to work here,’ I say. ‘I’m hoping you might be able to tell me about him for my article.’
‘It depends,’ he shrugs. ‘What’s his name?’
I show him the copy of the newspaper article about the car accident that I’d photographed on my phone. He reads the article and hands back the phone with an audible sigh.
‘Used to be my shift manager. Years ago. Best I ever had. I thought he was going places. Then . . . ’ he breaks off with a shrug.
‘What happened?’ I push.
‘Drugs is what happened,’ he says. ‘Cocaine. And meth. And who knows what else. He’d been depressed for a while before he started using. Girl troubles.’
‘What kind?’
‘Got dumped. She was fooling around with someone else,’ he says. ‘Not long after that, he started drinking and then using. Eventually I had to fire him because I caught him pocketing money from the register,’ said Paul. ‘I can’t have a thief for a shift manager.’