He had wandered the sidewalk near the car, hoping to find a neighbor kind enough to answer Andy’s questions. But everybody that he saw was approaching retirement. He had little hope but was growing desperate.
Andy approached an elderly couple walking their Scottish Terrier. “Hi, excuse me?” The tiny ferocious beast snarled at him as he approached.
“Can I help you, young man?” The husband asked. He hushed the dog, whose snarl had turned into tiny cartoonish yelps.
“I hope so. I’m looking for my friend, Kyle. Kyle Pittman. Young man with brown hair and a short beard. About my height. Runs a lot. He lives somewhere in Cedar Pointe but I can’t remember which unit he was in.”
“Does he face the lake or the street?” The woman asked with a frown.
“I don’t know, I’m sorry.”
“Well, if you were his friend you would at least know that much. We can’t go about helping strangers,” she barked back. It reminded Andy a lot of the tiny Scottish Terrier next to her.
“We work together and he didn’t show up today. So, I wanted to check on him. Just make sure everything is okay, you know?”
Something in the air rubbed the woman the wrong way. Her face shifted into a scowl. “I don’t know the name.” She crossed her arms and nodded towards the parking lot. “Which car is his? Sometimes we know people by their cars.”
“Smart thinking, Margaret,” the husband added.
“Hush John, he’s talking.”
Andy pointed towards Kyle’s SUV. “The navy blue one there.”
“Oh, he’s one of those folks that are driving in and out of the lot at all hours of the night.” Margaret sighed. “His headlights flicker through our windows when we try to sleep. We’re on the ground floor in the 700 block. We’ve tried blackout curtains, but the lights at night still make their way into our bedroom!”
“I’m sorry. He works two jobs. I know—”
“I don’t know which unit is his. I’m sorry we couldn’t be more helpful,” John said and ushered Margaret away before she could shout at Andy again. Some luck.
Andy’s mind continued to race under the influence of nicotine and over-sugared energy drinks. He’s dead. The Fox killed him. And I’m next. Andy checked his watch and pulled out of the police station lot. He drove under the speed limit the rest of the way until an idea popped into his head. Then he pressed the gas.
Back at Pine Hills High, Andy popped in an old VHS tape from the History Channel and stepped out of the classroom. He jogged down the hall and smiled at the secretary. Andy had never cracked the icy exterior that protected Jessica Arwood from the world. Somehow, despite his irresistible charm, Jessica appeared immune. She often smelled of cigarettes, much like Andy, but he’d never seen her in the reserved smoking section for staff.
He wound up his biggest smile as he approached the desk. “Jessica! How are you? That’s a lovely blouse you have there—”
“What do you want, Andy?”
“Can’t a man compliment a woman without—”
“What. Do. You. Want,” the ice queen barked. Jessica seemed a lot like the Scottish Terrier from the parking lot.
“Okay, geez. I heard that Kyle Pittman was out today. No call in with plans for the sub either.” Andy smiled. “We’re friends and that doesn’t seem like him, so I was hoping to check on him after I’m done with practice.”
Jessica glared at him and crossed her arms. “Okay, go ahead. I don’t see why this needs to involve me.”
“Well, you see, Jessica…” Andy leaned up against the counter. “The thing is that I don’t remember which unit he lives in over at Cedar Pointe. I was there once to watch football, but that was last year. They all look the same.”
“You want his address?” She raised her eyebrows.
“Yeah, is that possible?”
“It’s no secret among the staff. There’s a directory that you get at the beginning of the year with everybody’s cell and address.” She looked him over and sighed again. “I’m going to guess you never took the time to read through it. Probably collecting dust on a shelf somewhere.”
“I’ve never needed—”
“No, I get it. Let me pull the address for you since we cannot trouble you to keep track of your things.” Jessica’s voice dripped with sarcasm.
Andy forced a smile so hard his cheeks hurt. “Thanks so much, Jessica. You’re a lifesaver. Now I see why everybody raves about how great you are at your job.”
She waved him off. “Enough of that B.S. Looks like he’s at 712 Winterspoon Drive. That enough for you or would you like me to chauffeur you to his front door in a stretch limo too?”
Andy entered the address into his phone and saw that each unit had its own address. “Bingo. Thanks so much!”
“Yeah, and if you see him, tell him I will personally kick his ass if he disappears like this again,” Jessica shouted like a disappointed mother. “We’re all adults here. Just say you’re sick if you’re sick. He’s better off dead at this point.”
Andy gulped but ignored the ironic choice of words. He grinned and Jessica mumbled under her breath.
“Wiseass. Thinking he can outfox the system by not logging his sick days in the portal. You tell him!” Jessica’s voice rose to a shout. “I don’t care if he’s too hungover or—”
“Yeah, thanks, Jessica! Will do,” Andy said.
As he turned to go, Jessica whispered to him. “Also, grab yourself some gum before you drive anywhere. Not that it’s any of my business…”
Andy nodded. His cheeks flushed red, and he excused himself back to his classroom. The next few hours would drag on like the dull second act of Ava’s middle school presentation of Guys and Dolls. Anticipation and fear coursed through his veins. He had big plans for the evening.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Between half-empty coffee mugs and glasses of water, an officer laid out every email exchange between Dylan McQueeney and his source. Each message was brief, bordering on abrupt. Russo had sent the correspondence off to an electronic forensics team but warned that they move at a snail’s pace.
A three-hour nap had done more harm than good, and Casper’s eyelids were heavy as anvils. Between sips of coffee, he studied each thread of the case with great detail. He paused over every word, often rereading a sentence or two. Delaney followed close behind but took frequent breaks to check in on Zoe’s morale. The early reports were concerning, but things had taken a recent uptick.
“I’m alright, I swear, Laney,” Zoe promised. “It’s like a bomb just dropped on the park, but it’s not anything criminal yet. It’s just… weird.”
“We can handle these files if you want to go take a walk or take—”
“Laney, I’m in this. Hell, I think I’m closer to an answer than I ever was.”
“If you insist. Casper, you find anything yet?”
Casper jogged around the backside of the large oak table, grabbed one piece of paper from the pile, and handed it over to Zoe and Delaney.
“What am I looking at here?” Delaney asked.
“It’s a shift schedule of sorts. It has circles on certain nights of the week, but something is blocking the names of who is working when. Do you recognize this at all, Zoe?”
“Yeah, this is our shift schedule Mathias puts together. We have to submit things like PTO and all that, so there’s coverage at all times. The yellow highlight means that the ranger in that row is on call for the night.”
“What does that entail? Like a security detail?” Casper asked.
“It just means that if somebody has an issue or something out of the ordinary happens, that ranger is the person to get called. We trade off a little old flip Nokia phone that rings louder than a church bell when somebody calls. If you ever want to see Gil shiver, play that ringtone for him.”
“And if somebody calls, what then?”
“Often it’s somebody in the campground who missed the gate and needs to be let in. On the weekends it may be rowdiness or som
e kids sneaking around the park at night, but that’s rare. It’s just a plan for emergencies.”
“But if somebody saw something odd in the early hours?”
“They’d call the on-call number and whoever was responsible would have to get up and check it out. I only had one call about the sightings during my shifts. I think Clem had two. Maybe Ernest had one of them, I honestly forget.”
“Was there always a call?”
“No, it all depends on timing and who was around. So, I’d imagine that on more than one occasion something was seen but not reported. Or just not seen at all. People turn a blind eye to things when they’re still wiping the sleep out of their eyes, you know?”
“And eyewitness testimony is flawed, to say the least,” Delaney added.
“Can we track down the original copy of this to compare? I’d guess it’s this year. The month has thirty days so that would only leave April, June, and September since November is next month.”
Zoe glanced at the sheet. “I’d be willing to guess it’s September. There’s a pink highlight over Monday the 7th. That’s Labor Day. I’ll ask Joanne to pull it from our records.”
Zoe stepped out of the room and left Casper and Delaney alone. Casper stared at the paper to discern a clue. Delaney nudged him with her shoulder.
“What?” he said with a grin.
“You’re cute when you’re focused.”
“Behave yourself, Shepard. We’ve got a case to solve,” Casper whispered.
“What if I don’t want to beha—”
Zoe walked back into the room. “That was some painful flirting, Laney. What are you, in middle school? ‘You’re cute when you’re focused’.”
“Shut up. I can still beat you up, you know.”
“Threatening an officer? You’re lucky I’ve got bigger fish to fry, ma’am,” Zoe laughed.
“Hate to break up a family squabble, but why did you suspect Clem right away?”
“Gut instinct, I guess.”
“Are you sure? Nothing more than that?”
“I mean, he’s detestable as a man, but I’ve gotten over that. The armchair psychologist in me has diagnosed him with severe insecurity around powerful women.”
“And he was first on the scene.”
“Yeah, I considered that too. But to be honest, he looked panicked. Not the panic that occurs when you’ve just screwed up. But the panic where he just didn’t know what to do. Plus, I could see his hands. Unless he had a weapon that was tossed into the lake, his hands were spotless.”
“He had a fishing pole, right?”
“Yeah, but Detective Russo said that the wounds appeared to be hand-to-hand combat. She also mentioned that Wade Buchanon had no defensive wounds. The forensics team suspects the attacker took him by surprise. He never stood a chance.”
“Jesus.”
“But I do have some good news. As I was leaving the station Russo mentioned that Buchanon seems to be turning the corner. They’re keeping the case marked as an assault with some guarded optimism.”
“Tough situation for a detective to be in. Stakes get a lot higher when it’s murder, but nobody wants that,” Delaney added. “If I may say so myself. I am, in my other life, a detective, after all.”
“You don’t say? You have failed to mention that in the entire three days that you’ve been here. That must be a record. You see, Casper, Delaney here was playing detective when she was a little kid. Her mom had given her a little play badge, and she’d run around interrogating kids in the neighborhood over the smallest things. What was your biggest case back then, Nancy Drew?”
“We had a lot of suspects in the missing ice cream incident of ’94.”
“And what was the verdict?”
“Jury is still out. Curious you’d bring that up after all these years, Laney. Guilty conscious?”
Joanne knocked on the conference room door and handed Zoe a file. “Here’s what you asked for. I had to print it out since most of the timesheets are digital these days. I don’t see why you needed the shift schedule though.”
“Thanks, Joanne. We’re exhausting all of our options here,” Zoe replied.
“But I thought you caught the man last night? It was all that anybody wanted to talk about this morning before you came in. Even Mathias cracked a smile.”
“We’re still piecing this together. I may need additional information, so I’ll buzz you if I do. That okay?”
“Sure is! Ooh! This feels just like one of those special episodes of CSI. Or Criminal Minds. I’ve always preferred Criminal Minds. Shemar Moore is a dreamboat. Phew. Okay, I’ll be alone upfront thinking of Shemar. Good luck, Zoe!”
Zoe placed the shift schedule next to the redacted one from McQueeney. When they matched up, the names labeled who had each shift. A handful of circles were on the page.
“What did the circles represent again?”
“McQueeney said they are the times he was told to head into the park and cause a scene from a distance.”
“Huh,” Delaney said.
“What’s up?”
“Well, maybe it’s the Nancy Drew in me, but something is suspicious here.”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, all the rows have circles except for one.”
“So, everybody but one ranger appears scheduled for the bullshit. Looks like somebody didn’t want to be jumping out of bed in the middle of the night.”
Zoe furrowed her brow and kicked the chair in front of her. She hollered for Mathias to join them in the conference room. He instead called for her to step into his office. She glanced back into the room before she departed. “If I still have a job after this conversation, we’re going after Ernest Henley with everything we’ve got.”
Chapter Thirty
Mathias glared with such intensity that Zoe thought he may bore a hole through the wall. He tugged at his mustache with unusual ferocity and opened his mouth but no words escaped. She took the lead instead.
“Mathias, I know that I—”
He raised a hand. “Did I ever tell you about my first week on the job here?”
Zoe shook her head. “I’m not even sure when you got here.”
“It was early 2001. I came in as a Ranger 1. Eager to make a difference. Spend some time in nature. I was a lot like you are today.”
“Not sure if that’s a compliment or-”
“On my third day, a tropical storm came in and crushed the region. It came with an intensity that the meteorologists didn’t predict, so things took a turn. We had a massive oak take a fall right over the main road between the parking lot and the exit. Cars were backed up, trying to evacuate, but the trunk blocked their path. I rushed into action. I was in there, knee-deep in the puddles from overflowing culverts. The other rangers were all there too. But they were calmer. Stoic, almost.”
Zoe nodded. “As if they’d been there before.”
“Exactly. Within a half-hour, I had run out of gas. The other rangers had stepped in with chainsaws and moved swiftly. Before long, I was on the sidelines. Watching. No better than anybody sitting in their cozy car waiting for relief.”
“I get it,” Zoe said with a grin. “You gained a reverence for experience. It’s why you respect Ernest so much and—”
“More or less. But I also learned that there’s an order to the park. An intentional structure to how we make decisions and handle unusual circumstances. When that tree fell, I was acting like I was in it alone. I was not. I was part of a team that had my best interests in mind. But I failed them.”
Zoe nodded. “And I failed you.”
Mathias sighed. “You did and you didn’t. When I heard about your little sting operation in the woods, I boiled with rage. But I was even angrier that you got results.”
“But we needed answers. We needed—”
“You needed to respect my orders and stay out of it. But you didn’t. I thought I saw potential in you. A future Superintendent. But you found those answers you were searching for,
anyway. So, the lesson you learned was not that you should have listened but that you can skirt around the rules and it’ll work out. I doubt that will take you very far.”
“Sir, I don’t think that’s the case. I don’t know why this got ahold of me but I—”
“Save it. We can discuss your future when this all wraps up. But for now, you’ve opened Pandora’s box. We’ll have to reckon with what follows.” He stood and dropped his hands to his side. “What did you all find in there, anyway?”
Mathias analyzed the papers with the same care a retiree reserved for their crossword puzzle. Each detail counted. Each box filled correctly. Zoe paced across the room. The facts didn’t add up. Ernest could be a jerk, but he was no criminal.
Zoe’s patience wore thin as she watched him take in the evidence. “What do you think?”
“It’s compelling.”
“What do we do now?” Zoe said. “Where is Ernest today?”
Mathias glanced at his phone and then looked up. “Home, I believe. Clem is on for the rest of the day.”
“Do you have concerns about confronting him? Does he have any violent tendencies?” Delaney asked. Mathias and Zoe both shook their heads.
Mathias let out a chuckle, which surprised everybody in the room. “I’d be hesitant to confront Ernest with an extra carton of ice cream. He’s not exactly the friendliest of the bunch. But he’s never been violent around me.”
“Something about this is still off,” Casper said.
Zoe glared at him. “It’s the only lead we’ve got.”
“It just feels too convenient. Too easy.”
“I’ve never heard a detective complain about a case being too easy,” Zoe said with an eye on Delaney.
“Maybe we can find something else. Something to add to the pile,” Delaney said. She sorted through the stacks of paper and avoided eye contact with both her cousin and Casper.
Casper flipped through the papers again. Once he found the email log, he stopped and read through all the correspondence. “What about the email address?”
Trouble Afoot (Shepard & Kelly Mysteries Book 2) Page 14