“To be questioned?” she asked.
“To sit with all of us and let us know what you can about Laurie. We’re going to need to get into contact with the rest of her friends and family as well and do the same—sit down and talk. Hopefully we can get a time line down. See where she was last, who she talked to or saw last.”
“I don’t really know what you want me to tell you,” she said. “I haven’t talked to her since last week.”
“Whatever you can think of. We need to gather whatever we can on her. I don’t know anything about her other than she’s popped over here a few times and you guys are friends.”
“She was pretty active on social media,” Amy said.
“Okay. Good. You can access your accounts and see hers? See what she’s been up to?”
“Sure,” Amy said.
“Great. That will be a start for us.”
“All right,” she said. “When are you leaving?”
“Ten minutes or so.”
“Let me get dressed,” she said.
Amy and I left the house a few minutes before eight, drove the couple of minutes to the station, then went inside and upstairs to my office. She sat in a guest chair across from me at my desk. I had pulled up on my computer one of Laurie’s social media accounts—she was quite the regular poster.
“How many of these things did she have?” I asked.
“How many what? Different social media accounts?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“I guess all the main ones. She had a video blog online as well. She’d get workout clothing and supplements and give her take on them for a little side money to go along with the personal trainer thing.”
“Whoever did this to her sure as hell didn’t have to try very hard to know exactly where she was or what she was doing at any given time. I mean, look at this from yesterday.” I turned my monitor so Amy could see it.
“I know,” she said.
“She updated this five times just yesterday.” I swiveled the screen back toward myself. “The last post here says she was going home for a shower, salad, and then walking Zoey. I guess Zoey is a dog?”
Amy nodded.
“This looks like it was around five. A few minutes before. Can you try logging in to whatever else you followed her on? I want to see if she put anything up after this.”
“Sure,” Amy said. “Let me do it from my phone. It’ll be quicker. If there is anything, I’ll pull it up on your computer too.”
I gave her a nod, and Amy tapped away at the screen of her phone.
A rap came at my office door a second later. I looked, and Dave was leaning into my doorway. Since it was around eight thirty, I figured he wanted to touch base before he and the night shift took off.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“Burns and Malone just ran out. They found Chris Mercer’s truck in the parking lot of a Superstore USA about a mile from Laurie Jillette’s house.”
Amy’s head snapped up and looked at me. She glanced over her shoulder at Dave in the doorway. “Chris Mercer?” she asked. “What about him?”
“You know a Chris Mercer?” I asked.
“Well, yeah. He went to college with us. Laurie dated him for a while. Technically, I guess I did too for a little bit.”
I punched Mercer’s name into my computer and pulled up his sheet. I brought his photo up on my computer screen and turned it so Amy could see. “This Chris Mercer?”
She looked for a second and nodded. “Yeah, that’s him. Laurie actually put his ass in jail, like, ten years ago, maybe a little longer. He beat her up. No one really saw or talked to him much after that. What does he have to do with any of this? Wait, do you think he’s responsible for what happened to her?”
There was no chance that it was a coincidence. “We’re looking for him in connection with multiple homicides,” I said. “You said she put him in jail?”
“Yeah, she pressed charges against him. She… well, she started seeing an ex-boyfriend again while she was still talking to Chris. He flipped and showed up at the guy’s house. Chris dragged Laurie out into the yard by her hair. He punched her and started choking her. I guess he and Laurie’s ex started fighting. It was really ugly from what she said. He went to jail for a couple months.”
I looked at Dave, who’d come into my office from his spot in the doorway. “Do you want to toss Chestnut on seeing what he can do about getting us that case file?”
“Sure,” he said. “Real quick, what are we thinking here? That he went after her for some payback?”
I shrugged, not having an answer for him. I looked at Amy. “Do you know if these two continued any kind of relationship?”
She shook her head. “I highly, highly doubt it. After that fight, I honestly don’t think she ever talked to him again.”
I turned my attention back to Dave. “I guess until we have something that says otherwise, we have to assume that yes, he was seeking some kind of revenge.”
“Okay. What about the guy?” Dave asked.
“What guy?” I asked.
“The guy that was involved with whatever that was. That fight Amy is talking about that ended up getting Mercer jail time. Do we try to reach out to the guy?”
“He’s dead,” Amy said. “He died a few years back. From what I heard, he’d gotten into drugs.”
“All right. Well, that takes care of that,” I said.
“Let me see what we can get on that case file. There should be someone in records by now.” Dave left my doorway.
“I never heard anything about any of this,” I said. “Laurie dating a guy that you once dated that got physical with her.”
“I don’t know. It’s not really something that makes good conversation material,” Amy said. “I don’t really know what you want me to say about it. It was when we were in college.”
“You dated him before this went down with Laurie, I’m assuming?”
“Before, yes. But I don’t really know if I’d call it ‘dated.’ We talked for a bit. Hung out. It was casual.”
I let out a breath and rocked back in my chair. I needed answers and wasn’t real excited about the questions that I was going to have to ask my girlfriend. “This was a romantic relationship?”
“I don’t know if ‘romantic’ is the right word,” she said.
“Amy,” I said. “You were sleeping with the guy, right?”
“Yeah,” she said. “I guess a couple of times.”
I held my hand up. “All the details I need. How did it end with Mercer?”
“Is that really important?” she asked.
“If it would give him a reason to come after you, I’d sure as hell think so.”
She pursed her lips. “It wasn’t even that big of a deal. Like I said, I never really considered myself and Chris, like, really dating or whatever.”
“How did it go?”
“I don’t know. I just stopped talking to him and started talking to someone else.”
“And that was it? Just stopped talking to Mercer and started talking to someone else?”
“Basically.”
I rubbed my eyes and ran my hand over the black-and-gray stubble on my cheek. Amy was working pretty hard at trying to keep things vague. “Just tell me the real, or whole, story. I don’t care. This asshole killed your friend. I’m not sitting over here judging you, I just need to know that he’s not coming after you.”
She shook her head. A look of shame, or maybe disappointment, covered her face. She looked down as she spoke. “I was young and stupid.”
“Just tell me, Amy,” I said.
“I was at a party and drinking. It wasn’t one of my finer college moments. Chris had asked me to do something else that night, and I made up an excuse for why I couldn’t hang out with him. I just wanted some space, and he was clingy. Anyway, I gave him an excuse and went to a house party a few doors down from where I lived. It was with another guy I knew named Jeff. Chris ended up showing up to the same party and caugh
t me kissing Jeff. I don’t know if someone called him and told him I was there or what, but there he was, and just in time to see me with someone else. Chris started screaming. The look in his eyes was off—it was more than anger or hurt feelings or whatever. He kind of shoved me out of the way and got in Jeff’s face. Chris took a swing at him, which didn’t turn out too well. Jeff was about a hundred pounds heavier than Chris. Jeff punched him and knocked him down. Chris got up and came back for more, again and again until Jeff stopped and some other guys dragged Chris out of the house and tossed him in the front yard. A few months later, Chris started talking to Laurie. I thought it was weird. I mean, she knew what happened with Chris and Jeff but wanted to date Chris, anyway. Laurie asked me if I cared, and I said no, if that was really what she wanted to do. As far as Chris, I kind of thought it was some way to get back at me by dating my friend or something.”
“And then the thing with her and getting beat up by Chris happened how long after that?”
“Maybe six months or so.”
“So he caught you both with other guys?”
“You make it sound really bad,” Amy said. “Like I said, I never really considered him and me a thing. He and Laurie were a couple, though.” Amy squirmed a bit in her chair. “You really don’t think that after ten or twelve years, he’d come out of nowhere and kill her, do you?”
“I don’t know,” I said. I sat in thought, saying nothing. If Chris went after Laurie after so much time had passed, it wasn’t out of the question that he’d set his sights on Amy as well.
“Maybe you should not go to work and go stay with Kelly for a few days,” I said.
CHAPTER 26
Before Amy left, I got as much information about Laurie as possible. Laurie hadn’t made any kind of social media post since the one about going home. In the one prior to that, she’d checked in from a gym.
After a little persuading, Amy had agreed to stay at her sister’s. She cleared the last-minute time off with her work and said that she was going to quickly stop by the house, pack a bag, and go. I offered to make a call over to patrol to ask if they could send a marked car after her to the house. She didn’t think it necessary. The house was a mile away from the station, and inside, I had a slew of firearms for protection. Amy had said that she would take her concealed carry weapon to her sister’s. She had a permit to carry and was more than proficient with the firearm. I told her to be safe, to make sure no one was following her, and to call me if anything, no matter how small or insignificant, seemed off. She agreed.
I sat at my desk with my phone to my ear. I was on hold with the PD in Virginia, where the prostitute lived, or at least where her ID came back to. Her sheet showed a couple of arrests by the same department. Contacting them was the only thing that I could think of to help us get in touch with her family.
“Lieutenant,” the female officer said.
“Yes.”
“Okay, I forwarded the information that you gave me on to our patrol captain. He put a call out over the radio, and it came back that there were a few officers familiar with the woman, and she does, in fact, have family in the area.”
“Good,” I said.
“Your information, as well as your medical examiner’s, will be forwarded to them, and we’ll make sure you get a callback with all of the family’s information as soon as we get it.”
“Thank you.”
“Not a problem,” she said.
The woman and I said a few more words, and I hung up. The help from the Virginia PD was about all that I could have asked for.
Halloway walked through my doorway as I hung up my desk phone. “I think we’re all set,” he said. “I just saw Colt go in.”
“All right. I just got off the phone with the police precinct that popped our Susanne Osborne, the prostitute, a few times. They have all of our information and are going to pass it along to the family when they make contact.”
“She has family there? Confirmed?”
“Confirmed,” I said. I rose from my chair, gathered the notes on my desk, and followed the captain from my office and over to our department’s big conference room. Steve sat inside with Garcia and Detective Ryan. Both detectives arranged paperwork before them. The room’s fluorescent lights glistened off the top of the bald head of Wade, the tech center lead. Dave and Chestnut sat on the far end of the table. Chestnut ran a knuckle across his bushy blond mustache as he spoke. Ryan and Garcia were firing back questions. The men were all talking about Mercer and the case. It seemed as if Chestnut was filling the guys in on what had happened overnight. I saw Colt seated on the small file cabinet near the coffee machine. The single-serve maker was brewing him a cup, which was exactly what I needed. I set the paperwork, which I had tucked under my arm, on the conference table and walked over to him.
“Morning,” Colt said. “We have Mercer’s truck getting delivered in a couple minutes.” He hopped down from his spot on the file cabinet and pulled his cup of coffee from the machine.
“Anything in it?” I asked.
“We don’t know yet. I got a call from Burns maybe a half hour ago while I was on my way in. He said the truck was locked up and wanted to know if they should attempt to gain access or just flatbed it back here to the lab. I told him the latter. We should be able to get going on it right away.”
I gave him a nod. “Good,” I said and grabbed a pod of doughnut shop coffee. I stuck it into the machine and hit the button after sticking a cardboard cup under the spout.
A moment later, and coffee in hand, I walked back to the conference room table and took a seat. The captain sat an open chair away on my left. Steve sat across the table with his elbows resting on the surface. My eyes went from Steve to Ryan and Garcia then Sergeant Chestnut and Dave.
“All right, guys. We’ve got a ton of shit that has happened since yesterday, and we all need to get on the same page,” I said. “First things first, Colt, anything new from the crime lab?”
“Not much. We have some irons in the fire, but right now it’s simply processing the things that we’ve collected. There’s a ton of little things on our to-do list downstairs. Sorting and cataloging evidence, developing photos from the scenes, entering fingerprints into the system, getting all of our notes and findings in order. Plus Mercer’s truck will have to be processed as soon as it arrives. I haven’t yet taken a look at what Craig put together last night, but in addition to Gomez and myself, I’ll have a couple more guys working today as well.”
“All right, good,” I said. “Wade, how are we looking in Tech?”
“The records for Nick Ludwig should show today, I’d think,” Wade said. “All we really have to get on this morning is the Laurie woman’s phone and what was brought over from Mercer’s house overnight.”
“Which was?” Halloway asked.
“A pair of computers, a tablet, and a phone. We don’t know who the phone belongs to,” Wade said. “Speaking of phones, we weren’t able to put in for records from the phone carriers on everyone overnight. That will have to get taken care of today. Same with banking. I’ll have someone get going on all the records and let you guys know what we get from the electronics.”
“Okay, good,” I said.
I looked at Steve and Detectives Ryan and Garcia. “I know Chestnut was filling you guys in, but let’s go over everything start to finish again. Dave, why don’t you bring these guys up to speed with what happened overnight.”
Dave scooted closer to the conference table and looked down at his notes. “Last night I received a phone call from Mercer. This was after he called Harrington. Mercer seemed to be fishing for information. We had the number tracked back to his property and headed out. Meanwhile, a Miramar patrol officer responded to Mercer’s home. The officer was held at gunpoint, and he forced her to allow him to use her cruiser’s computer to search for something.”
“What?” Ryan interrupted.
“We don’t know,” I said. “The computer was ripped from the vehicle and is curren
tly unaccounted for.” I looked back at Dave to continue.
“Chestnut and I were en route to Mercer’s home when we got word from Miramar that the officer was not responding to calls. Turns out Mercer had cuffed her, assaulted her, and locked her in her cruiser’s trunk prior to leaving his home. She was found, and she’ll be fine. Inside of the Mercer home, we found the neighbor murdered in the master bathroom.” Dave searched his notes. “The neighbor’s name was John Stanley.”
“The guy you talked to yesterday?” Steve asked and looked at me.
“Yeah. The guy from next door.”
“This John Stanley’s wife sent him over there to speak with Grace Mercer,” Dave said. “A wellness check of the neighborly variety, it appeared. His body was found, like I said, in the master bathroom with his throat cut. Also in the master bathroom, in the garden tub, was the plastic-wrapped body of Grace Mercer. She’d been bludgeoned and had been stabbed in the throat as well. We think he killed her in the kitchen, cleaned up, and moved her body upstairs.”
“So that was when? Yesterday morning?” Steve asked. “That’s when he went outside in his rubber gloves and boxers?”
“That’s what we’re thinking,” I said.
“Craig’s report says that he found clear signs of cleaned-up blood in the kitchen of the home,” Colt said. He took a sip from his cup of coffee. “Plenty of it. Cleaned up with bleach. He also found a roll of plastic in the garage that matches up with what the female Mercer was wrapped in. I’ll get some folders put together with all the information and photos that were taken from inside the home. As soon as we have everything set, I’ll bring it upstairs here so you can get some copies made.”
“Thanks, Colt,” Dave said.
Colt gave a nod and brought his coffee cup to his mouth again.
“So aside from the Mercer home last night, Burns and Malone were across town in Hialeah working something else. A murdered female name Laurie Jillette,” Dave said. “We think that Mercer may be responsible for her as well. There’s a history between the two, and Mercer did some time for assaulting her. I called records, and they’re going to bring the file over to the department as soon as they get it.”
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