Scared Stiff

by Annelise Ryan

  Ah, a serial heartbreaker then. “So how did you find out?”

  She lets forth with a throaty chuckle. “Actually, it was a fluke that brought him down. We’d been dating for several months and he was talking about making things permanent and planning for the future, that kind of stuff, you know?”

  “You thought he was talking about marriage.”

  “Exactly! And I was pretty darned excited by the proposition, no pun intended.” Again she laughs at her own joke. “I’m in my late thirties and the fruit ain’t as ripe as it used to be, if you get my drift. I want to have kids someday and that window is closing pretty damned fast.”

  Her comment makes me wince since I’m in the same boat. When my marriage to David was getting stale it didn’t seem right to think about having a child until we got things sorted out. Then he got someone else pregnant instead and the marriage ended. Now, like Sally, the big hand on my biological clock is hanging just before midnight.

  “So I’m all worked up and giddy like a damned fool schoolgirl,” Sally goes on, making me smile. “I’d heard about this place at the Dells that does weddings and it sounded nice, so I decided to take a little road trip and go check it out. But my car broke down on the highway and I ended up having it towed into some little Podunk town. That’s when I got hit with the good news and the bad news.”

  With perfect timing, the waitress chooses this moment to come and take our orders, leaving me in suspense. Sally and I both order sandwiches, but Bjorn goes for the pot roast plate with mashed potatoes, veggies, and carrot cake for dessert.

  As soon as the waitress leaves, Sally picks up her tale where she left off. “So the good news was that there was a mechanic in Podunk who could fix my car. The bad news was it was going to take him a couple of days because he had to order a special part. Then there was more good news because the guy had a loaner he was willing to rent me for only twenty bucks a day. So I did the necessary paperwork and was getting ready to leave when I got hit with the next dose of bad news.”

  Sally falls silent as the waitress returns with our drinks but resumes as soon as she’s gone. “It turns out that mechanic’s shop is right across the street from a little coffee shop. Want to guess who I saw walk in and sit down at a table just inside the front window, acting all lovey-dovey, kissy-kissy with some other woman?”

  “Luke Nelson?” I answer unnecessarily.

  “Damn straight. So I’m sitting there, shocked, wondering what the hell is going on and then I think maybe she’s a relative and I’m jumping to conclusions. But then he plants a kiss on her that no one outside of West Virginia would use on a relation. The kind that makes you want to tell them to get a room, you know?”

  I nod.

  “So I just sat there watching for a while, trying to sort it all out, feeling stunned and wounded. My first impulse was to hurry home, lock myself in, and lick my wounds, you know?”

  I did. I’d done just that for two months after catching David with Karen Owenby.

  “Then I considered walking across the street and giving Luke a piece of my mind. But I didn’t want to make a spectacle of myself and by now I was more curious than anything. So I waited. About half an hour later they got up to leave. I watched him plant another sloppy wet one on her lips and then they got into their respective cars and drove off. I memorized her license plate and then decided to follow Luke, thinking I would confront him back at his place. But he surprised me by heading north when he should have gone south. So I stayed behind him, realizing that the loaner car was yet another bit of good luck since he would have recognized my car.

  “Half an hour later we arrived in Podunk’s twin. This time he parked in front of an apartment building so I pulled in several spaces away and waited. He went inside and came out ten minutes later with another floozy on his arm.

  “They got in his car and drove to a nearby movie theater. I followed them inside, being careful not to be seen, and sat at the back of the theater. It was some stupid Sundance movie, one of those celluloid nightmares that’s supposed to have deep meaning but is really just some idiot’s ego masturbation, you know? It didn’t matter because I didn’t pay much attention to the movie. My eyes were glued on dickhead, and his lips were glued to the floozy. Even in the dark I could tell he had his tongue halfway down her throat most of the time.”

  Sally is making no effort to lower her voice and several other diners cue in on her when they hear the words dickhead and masturbation. It makes me want to slink down lower in my seat but I resist the urge. Part of me wishes the waitress would come with our food, thinking that might derail Sally for a few minutes, long enough for people to quit eavesdropping and staring at us. But another part of me is fascinated with her tale and anxious to hear the rest. So I let her run on.

  “I sat there the whole time watching them,” she says, shaking her head sadly. “Just before the movie ended I got up and went back out to the parking lot. They came out a few minutes later and I followed them back to her apartment. This time I got out and followed to see which apartment she lived in. I wrote down the name I found on the corresponding mailbox, then went back out and sat in my car until Luke left. And that wasn’t for another two hours. Based on the condition of his clothes when he came out, I’m guessing they weren’t watching TV together.”

  “Ouch,” I say, feeling her pain.

  “Yeah,” she says with a sigh.

  The waitress returns finally, this time with our food. Bjorn digs into his like he hasn’t eaten in weeks. Sally and I both take a couple of bites from our sandwiches before she puts hers down and continues talking.

  “Needless to say, I didn’t want to believe what I saw but the evidence was pretty overwhelming. I decided to try to get a few more facts before confronting Luke so I had a cop friend run the plates of the woman I saw in the coffee shop and got her name and address. Then I went to visit her.”

  Oh, how I would have loved to be a fly on the wall for that conversation.

  “Her name is Julie Mathers and she lives in Cambria. As you might guess, our initial meeting was a bit intense. But eventually I convinced her that we were both being hoodwinked and that there was at least one other woman I knew about, and who knew how many I didn’t. She finally got as angry as I was and I convinced her to follow me in my car over to the town of Randolph and the apartment of the second woman. There wasn’t anyone home when we got there so we sat together in the parking lot in my car, comparing notes, and planning all kinds of evil paybacks that we’d never have the guts to carry out, but which made us feel better nonetheless.”

  This I could relate to, having indulged in several revenge fantasies myself over the past few months, a fact that didn’t help my situation much when I became a suspect in Karen Owenby’s murder.

  Sally pauses and takes another bite of her sandwich. I realize I’ve become so enthralled with her story that I’ve momentarily forgotten about my own food. A truly historic moment! Bjorn, on the other hand, hasn’t been the least deterred and has almost cleared his plate.

  Once she has swallowed and taken a drink of her soda, Sally continues. “After an hour or so the second woman came home. Her name is Hannah Kvalheim, in case you’re interested.”

  I can see a bit of lettuce stuck in Sally’s teeth and a handful of crumbs resting on that shelf of a bosom. Though I’m tempted to tell her, I stay mum, not wanting to interrupt her flow of thought.

  “It was much easier to convince Hannah, given that there were two of us there. We stayed nearly two hours discussing that slime bag and the various promises he made to all of us. The other two were content to simply stop seeing him and write it all off to bad judgment on their parts, but I was determined to confront the bastard, you know?”

  “And you did,” I say, remembering Jackie’s description of the incident. “What was his reaction after that night?”

  Sally shrugs. “Nothing. The bastard couldn’t have cared less that he’d been caught. He never apologized, never attempted to call
again, and never showed up at my door. I’ve talked to Julie and Hannah since then and they both say the same thing. They called him, delivered their Dear John speeches, and he simply accepted them and went on with his life.” She pauses, finishes off the last of her sandwich, and then adds, “Clearly we were all gullible as hell, but I have to say the guy was really good. Very convincing.”

  “Did you ever talk to him again?”

  She shakes her head. “After I confronted him in the parking lot that night, I wrote him off. I got my rant in and that seemed to do it for me.”

  “How about the other girls?” I ask, digging a pen out of my purse and writing their names and towns down on a napkin before I forget them. “Do you know if either of them tried to contact him?”

  “I don’t think so, but I can’t be sure. If they did, they didn’t tell me about it. Then again, I haven’t talked to either of them in a while so who knows?”

  This gets me to wondering if either of the other scorned women might have tried to patch things up with Nelson, only to discover there was yet another woman in the picture: Shannon. Could one of them have felt angry enough about it to try to eliminate the competition? I voice this question to Sally.

  “I don’t think either of those other two women would harm a fly,” she says, shaking her head. “I was mad enough to hurt someone, but it would have been that bastard Nelson, not a fellow victim.”

  “Do you think he’s capable of killing someone?”

  She leans back in her chair, folds her arms over her chest, and gives the question some thought. “I don’t know,” she says finally. “But he did have some rather odd impulses in the bedroom.”

  “Can you be more specific?”

  She leans forward and drops her voice several decibels. “Let’s just say he liked to play rough.”

  Chapter 30

  Bjorn drops me off at the ME’s office after we return from Smithville and when I tell him he can go home for the night he frowns.

  “What’s the matter?” I ask him. “You can handle your new bag okay, right?”

  “I guess,” he says. “But hanging with you is kind of exciting. You get into all kinds of things. I don’t usually get this much excitement in a day.”

  Or this much food, I think, suspecting that may be the bigger lure for him.

  “Well, I don’t have anything exciting planned for the rest of the day,” I assure him.

  “What about tomorrow?”

  I hesitate. Much as I’ve grown fond of Bjorn, it’s time to get my own set of wheels. “Tomorrow I plan to just hang in the office,” I tell him, though truth is, I don’t know yet what I’ll be doing tomorrow. But I don’t want to commit to anything with Bjorn yet because once he latches on to me, I’m not sure I’ll be able to shake him. “And you need to make some real money, so why don’t you plan on running your cab as usual and if something comes up and I need you I’ll give you a call. Okay?”

  He nods but looks crestfallen. For a moment I feel guilty but then figure that once the sun goes down, he’s unlikely to remember any of this anyway. Looking lonely and pathetic, he drives away.

  I find Izzy sitting in his office working on a stack of files taller than he is. I pull up a chair and start filling him in on my day, starting with the conversation I had with Sally Hvam. He listens but keeps working on his charts, making notes, looking at lab results, and filling out paperwork.

  “I don’t know what it is about Nelson,” I say once I’m done. “There’s something about him that bothers me. He’s a little too slick for my tastes.”

  “Just because he’s a philanderer doesn’t mean he’s a killer,” Izzy cautions. “And from what I understand, he has a pretty solid alibi.”

  “Speaking of alibis, I have a theory about Shannon that might change her time of death.”

  Izzy stops what he’s writing and looks up at me. “Really?”

  “I think so. Hear me out and tell me if I’m totally off base.”

  He sets his pen aside and gives me his full attention.

  “I noticed when we processed the crime scene that Shannon had an abrasion on the knuckles of one hand. But we didn’t find any foreign material there.”

  Izzy nods but says nothing, so I continue.

  “I also discovered she had a habit of eating a lot whenever she was working at Dairy Airs, and that she spent a lot of time in the bathroom. According to Erik and one of her coworkers, she claimed she had IBS, but when I looked through her medical records there was no mention of IBS, though there were several notes about her asking for diet pills. Then there are the contents of her medicine cabinet. There were several different kinds of laxatives in it. And Erik told me that Shannon was hoping to expand her modeling career but was always struggling with her weight.”

  I pause, letting Izzy put the facts together on his own. “You think she was bulimic,” he says.

  “I do,” I say, trying to contain my excitement.

  He thinks for a few more seconds and I see a light spark in his eyes. “It fits,” he says, nodding slowly. “The knuckle abrasions could have been caused by her teeth scraping over them when she stuck her finger down her throat. It also explains the hiatal hernia she had—bulimics often develop one. And if she threw up her last meal, then you’re right. It would change all of our assumptions about the time of death.”

  “And that might exonerate Erik.”

  Izzy gives me a cautious look. “It might, but to be honest I think it may simply widen the window on the time of death, rather than shift or narrow it.”

  “But if we don’t base the time of death on Shannon’s stomach contents, then couldn’t she have been killed much earlier than we originally thought?”

  “Yes, but it’s just as possible that our original time frame is correct. The things we use to estimate the postmortem interval—the degree of rigor, body temperature, vitreous potassium levels—all have variances of several hours. So all this does is give us a broader window of time.”

  It’s not the exoneration I was hoping for but at least it’s a bit of hope.

  “If nothing else, at least it increases the pool of potential suspects,” Izzy says. “Have you shared any of this with Hurley?”

  “Not yet. I wanted to run it by you first, to make sure my thinking was on target.”

  “I’d say you’re spot on and we should let Hurley know ASAP.” With that, he picks up his cell phone and dials Hurley’s number. After listening for a few seconds, he says to me, “It’s flipping over to voice mail.” He then leaves a somewhat cryptic message, saying only that I have uncovered some critical new evidence in Shannon’s case.

  “Kudos,” he says with a smile as he snaps his phone closed. “This should impress Hurley. It’s a brilliant bit of detective work.”

  “Thanks,” I say, blushing and hoping he’s right. “In the meantime, I could use a favor. I need to get some new wheels. I have a little bit of cash saved, thanks to the generously low rent you charge me and what little I have left of my hospital severance pay. But it isn’t much so I’m going to have to get something used.” I pause and reflect on the paltry balance in my bank account. “Really used,” I clarify.

  “I can front you a small loan, if that would help.”

  I shake my head. “You’ve done enough for me already.”

  “What about an advance against your wages? We can set up a payment plan so it’s deducted from your paycheck each week.”

  I consider this idea, which would give me a little more money to play with while still saving some face, and agree. “Thanks,” I tell him.

  “No problem. Will two thousand be enough?”

  I have no idea but I nod anyway. I want to get up and kiss him but I know how much he’d hate it. Izzy isn’t a very demonstrative person.

  “Consider it done,” he says.

  “There’s one more thing,” I say. “I could use some help picking something out. I have no idea how to tell a good engine from a bad one.”

  Izzy gives m
e an apologetic look. “Sorry, I don’t know my way around these modern engines any more than you do.”

  “What about Dom?”

  Izzy snorts. “He might be able to help you pick out a color and upholstery, but that’s about it. Tell you what I can do, though. I can give you the name of a reliable mechanic. That way, if you find something you like, you can have him go over it for you before you buy.”

  “I guess I can do that if I have no other options but I’d rather not. Any money I spend on a mechanic is money I can’t spend on a car. Plus, if I pick a lemon on my first try, that means paying for at least two visits to a mechanic . . . and on from there. It could get expensive very fast.”

  “I see your point. You need someone who won’t mind working on your engine for free before you commit.”

  Behind me the door opens, and I hear Hurley’s voice. “Somebody call me?”

  I turn and watch Hurley’s long legs stride into the room, admiring the way his jeans hug his thighs. Izzy’s last words hang in the air and suddenly they take on a whole new meaning as I imagine the many ways Hurley could work on my engine.

  “Hi, Steve,” Izzy says. “Did you get my message?”

  Hurley shakes his head. “I was already on my way here and was pulling into the garage when you called. So I figured I’d come in and talk to you in person. What’s up?”

  “We have a few new things in the Tolliver case to tell you about,” I say.

  Hurley settles into a chair, takes a notebook and pen from his shirt pocket, and starts writing as I tell him about my luncheon date and the scorned women who were romantically involved with Nelson. Izzy takes over when I’m done and fills Hurley in on my discovery of Shannon’s eating disorder and the potential impact it could have on the case. As Izzy is talking, Hurley turns sideways in his chair, stretching those long, blue-jeaned legs toward me. My eyes follow the line of his inseam until I reach a spot that makes my face feel like it’s about to burst into flames, and I force myself to turn away and focus on Izzy’s face instead, resisting the urge to fan myself.