by Roger Bray
“Like what?” Alex wanted to know.
“There was a guy down in Jackson, a major from the 17th Cavalry Regiment at Fort Carson. Nice guy to hear people talk. A man’s man, all American boy. What the recruiting posters were all about. He was married. She was a good-looking girl, and he used to bring her down to all the regimental functions, best dress uniforms and the ladies dressed up in their best frocks. He was always so attentive of her. Making sure that she had a drink maybe a seat. He didn’t go off and leave her while he got drunk with a group of guys. He always seemed to prefer to be with her.”
“He sounds like a good husband.” Alex said.
“He sure does. All the ladies seemed to think so as well; always complimenting his wife on her wonderful husband. But something didn’t sit right with me. He was too attentive almost to the point of not wanting her to have any time with anyone else. And she, well, she had a sort of sadness about her. I didn’t like him at all and I felt that there was something off about him.”
“Which was.”
“She was terrified of him because he used to beat the crap out of her all the time. She was an arm decoration when they were out and a punch-bag at home. But he was clever and would never hit her face or leave marks that could be commented on. He didn’t want her to talk to anyone and when there were a few drinks, someone might ask an awkward question which she might answer if he wasn’t there to stop her.”
“What happened, did she finally get up the courage to leave him?” Alice wanted to know, upset and angry at the same time.
“One night she was found on the slip road of the Ronald Reagan Highway. She was in a bad way and the cops who found her were going to take her to the medical center at the fort. She managed to beg them not to take her back there, and they called up an EMT unit which took her to the emergency department of the Memorial Hospital. By the time they got her there her vitals were crashing, and they had to fight hard to save her. Once they had her stable and started looking, they found four broken ribs with evidence of many other breaks that had healed, a ruptured pancreas and a kidney which was so swollen and damaged it had to be removed. That was the important stuff, but they found so many other things, so many other signs of long-term and protracted assaults.”
Alice looked shocked and was shaking her head as Alex asked, “What happened to him?”
“We arrested him. He claimed it was an accident, and that she was a bit clumsy and had fallen over a lot. Yeah, she had. Usually after he had hit her. That last time was a little too long and a little too much for her. She knew if she stayed she would die. He beat her and left for a run, to calm down, he said later. She managed to get out of the house but collapsed where she was found. He was charged and found guilty of numerous offenses. Stripped of his rank and imprisoned, I think that he’s still in Leavenworth. I don’t think that he’ll get out for quite a while yet.”
“And his wife, did she recover?”
“She did, minus a kidney and with emotional scars that she’ll never get over, but she did. For three days she gave evidence against him while his defense tried every trick in the book to discredit her. She stood firm, and he was found guilty.”
“It must have taken a lot of courage for her to do that?”
Steve nodded, “Probably more than I have to be honest. But she did it, he was found guilty, and she divorced him. Then she left Carson and the area. Someone in the army knows where she lives, but she is safe, and they’re taking care of her.”
“And this is the same feeling you have about Todd?” Alex wanted to know.
“There’s something there. There’s something about him that doesn’t come together for me. It’s like he has a façade, a face that he puts out to the public but behind it he’s hiding something. I felt the same way about that major. To everyone else he was a great guy, but he was hiding behind a mask.”
“And you could see through it,” Alex said.
Steve shook his head, “Nope, I didn’t have a clue that he was doing what we eventually found out that he was doing. It’s hard to explain as it’s more of a feeling but it’s not seeing through him. To continue the mask analogy, I would say it was more like seeing the edge of the mask and realizing that there’s something false there.”
“And you think that Todd is hiding something, hiding behind his mask?”
“Hiding something, yes. But what that is, I have no idea. I would like to look into his life a bit more though. The girlfriend he had, Cheryl, is she still around or did she leave the area after college?”
“I don’t think that she went to college. She finished school and dropped out. I seem to recall hearing that she was working in north Eugene, secretarial or reception, something like that.”
“Married?”
Alex shook his head, “I have no idea, not when I knew about her. Maybe later, but I have no idea.”
“Why is this important?” Alice wanted to know.
Steve had gone quiet, and they stood there for a few minutes until he seemed to make a decision. He held up his finger to stop further questions.
“I’ll be back in a minute.”
He left through the front door leaving Alice, and a bemused Alex, standing in the kitchen.
“Is he always like this?” Alex wanted to know.
Alice shook her head.
“No, only when he’s thinking something through.”
“What?”
She shrugged, and they drank coffee and talked for the fifteen minutes it took Steve to come back.
He walked into the kitchen with his folio bag and laid it down on the worktop.
Before they could say anything, he said, “Don’t, I’ll be back in a minute.”
“Where are you going now? I have some beers if you want one?”
Steve smiled, “Actually I would love one, but that isn’t it. When I drove up, I saw that Todd had left his mom’s roll cart out on the curb ready for pick up. I want to see what he needed to come up here to throw out. He’s had four years to clean-up his mom’s house but suddenly, as Alex is released, he needs to throw stuff out.”
“Can you do that? Go through his garbage?” Alex wanted to know. “I mean isn’t it his until it gets to the tip or something?”
Steve shook his head.
“There’s a long-standing Californian case which says that once you throw something out, you can longer expect privacy. And since the roll cart is out on the street, it's outside his property. You can’t go through it looking for anything but as a PI, I can look as my intention is to search for evidence.”
“And if you find anything?”
“Let’s have a look first, then we can worry about that.” He looked at Alice with a smile, “Ready to do some sneaky detective work?”
“I’m in,” she said with a laugh as she grabbed her coat from the back of the chair.
A few minutes later, Alice used the remote to raise the door to Alex’s now mostly cleared garage. Steve walked in first, pushing Mrs. Bailey’s roll cart which he set up in the middle of the floor. Alice followed him in, flicking on the lights and pressing the button to lower the door. Alex stood in the connecting door watching as the big door rattled down. He was shaking his head but smiling at the same time.
Steve found the roll of polyethylene that Alex had bought to repack the stuff in the garage. He rolled out and cut off a couple of lengths which he laid out on the floor next to the cart.
He opened the lid and looked inside, and Alice joined him and, unable to contain herself, she grabbed the pile of magazines at the top and put them on the floor. Steve laughed and shook his head.
“Keep your gloves on when we go through it in case we do find anything—we don’t want our fingerprints on it.”
Alice made a huffing noise and gave him a look.
“I have no intention of going through anyone’s garbage with bare hands.”
He leaned in and pulled out another stack of magazines, the earliest date was fifteen years ago and from the dust coveri
ng, they looked like they had been piled up in the cellar.
“It must have been some emergency to come over to get rid of these.”
Alex was standing next to them now, looking down at the magazines.
“They’re not what I’d have expected for Mrs. Bailey. I would have thought of her as more of a TV guide and National Enquirer type of person not these. They all look like fashion magazines. Girls and makeup, dresses and hairstyles.”
Steve nodded as he reached into the bin to grab a plastic bag that had been tied up. He placed it onto the plastic sheeting and Alice crouched down to untie it. There was a last stack of magazines, and he reached down into the cart to grab them.
He realized that the last few magazines were not in the bottom of the cart as he thought but were in an old cardboard box. The couple of magazines were put on the floor and he pulled the box out and placed it on the floor next to where Alice was now pulling old boxes out of the plastic bag and laying them across the sheeting.
When they finished, they looked at the piles of magazines and, from the plastic bag, a collection of hair dyes and some shampoos which advertised themselves to be safe to use on dyed hair.
“What color is Mrs. Bailey’s hair?” Steve wanted to know.
Alice laughed, “What there is, is gray and quite thin.”
“And you’ve never seen her with any of these colors through her hair?”
They both shook their heads.
“Some of these look quite old but a few look more recent. Why would Todd have these?”
Getting blank looks in response, Steve turned his attention to the last cardboard box. It looked as though it was the leftovers and bits from somebody’s sewing room. Full of pieces of material. None bigger than seven or eight inches square. Squatting next to the box, he pulled out each piece of material and flattened it out onto the ground. Halfway through the box, he looked up at Alice and Alex and whistled softly between his teeth.
“Hazel had her phone with her that evening?”
“She should have, she was never without it and she used it earlier in the evening to text me.”
“And it was never found?”
Alex shook his head.
“What sort was it?” Steve asked.
“A Motorola from Verizon. I’ve still got the manual somewhere.”
Steve lifted his hand out of the box and turned it over. In his palm, he held a black smartphone with the Motorola name across the top of and the Verizon name and tick below the dark screen.
“Holy shit,” Alex exclaimed.
“Is this it?”
“If it isn’t, it’s similar. Wait. I’ll find the manual.”
He went to the boxes along the far wall and quickly found the one he was looking for with “HAZEL—Misc. Bits” written on the packing tape that sealed it. He had left a box cutter on the top of the pile and he used it to slice through the tape until the box top sprung open. Searching through the box, he found the little parcel he was looking for and took it out. Using the box cutter again he ripped it open and removed a cell phone manual and a spare charger for Hazel’s phone he had found in the drawer of her desk.
“I nearly threw these out. They were in the maybe pile, I have no idea why but for whatever reason I kept them.”
Steve took the manual and flicked through it to the first page with a picture of the Droid X which showed a cell phone identical to the one he was holding.
They looked at each other and Alex shook his head. For the first time that Alice could remember, he didn’t look sad. He looked angry. Alice was glad that Todd was probably already out of town because if he had been close, Alex looked like he would beat the crap out of him. The look on Steve’s face told her that he wouldn’t do too much to stop him either.
She went into the kitchen and got a zip lock freezer bag, which she brought back and held open for Steve. He carefully dropped the cell phone into the bag and zipped it up.
They went back into the kitchen and Steve laid the bagged phone onto the work top.
“Why can’t we charge it up and see?” Alice wanted to know.
“I’m going to give Phil a ring and see if he’ll take a look at it. He’ll know the best thing to do and I would rather he didn’t shout at me for doing the wrong thing.”
Alex still looked angry but was silent which Alice knew was a bad thing. He had never been one to get angry but on the few occasions at school when she had seen him do so, he had gone silent rather than rant or shout. He stood there shaking his head and muttering—mostly curses and mostly aimed at Todd.
“I might have that beer now.” Steve said, going to the fridge and getting three out. He opened each and handed them around. Alex took a long drink from his and put the bottle down taking a deep breath as he did. He seemed a little calmer and looked at them both.
“It might not be her phone. There was a lot of this model around, I seem to remember.”
“That’s true, it may not be but I’ll try to get hold of Phil and we can be sure.”
Alice looked shocked as she listened to the conversation. Finally, Steve took the bagged phone and laid it onto the workbench with the manual and the charger. He went outside to his car and returned with a collection of evidence bags with tamper proof seals. Not bothering to remove the phone from the freezer bag he placed it inside an evidence bag and sealed it up.
Working methodically, he gathered up the boxes of hair dyes and put them into one of his largest bags, sealing them all in, followed by the mug that Todd had drunk from earlier. When he was sure he had everything he thought would be useful, he put it into a bin bag Alice gave him. He tidied up the garage, put his collection into his car and walked Todd’s roll cart back to where it had been. It looked as though nothing had happened, but it was a few pounds lighter than it had been.
He came back into the kitchen and looked at them both before pulling a folder out from his folio bag.
“Is this what you wanted to talk about before?” Alex asked.
“Yes. I don’t know what I expected from the garbage, but a cell phone wasn’t it. Which is quite ironic because from the start of this, from talking to Alice about Hazel going missing it always seemed to me a little strange that there was no real evidence. The evidence that we have managed to put together is more about Alex’s innocence rather than what happened to Hazel.”
“If the DA had had any real evidence that someone else was involved, he wouldn’t have been able to charge me.”
“No, he wouldn’t. Or at least it would have made it more difficult if not impossible.”
“And you now have some evidence, apart from the cell phone?”
“If it’s Hazel’s”, Alice said quietly.
“If it’s Hazel’s,” he conceded.
Steve was tapping his finger on the worktop as he thought before he continued, “No, not at all. Not evidence, but definitely a theory.”
“Of what happened to Hazel?”
“Not specifically what happened to her.”
Steve could see that Alice was both interested at what he was saying but also frustrated that he wasn’t saying too much.
Before he started though, Steve wanted to make sure he wouldn’t be making things worse for Alex. He had intended to talk to Alice about this when they were on their own. The only time that they had spent apart was when he had had to go into a class or quickly put an assignment together for his university work. He had managed to do some research in the meantime but hadn’t wanted to share it with her until he had been sure he was actually on to something.
Meeting Todd and finding the cell phone had hurried things up a little, but he still wasn’t sure his theory amounted to much.
A few links here and there but not coming together to form anything concrete. Crime investigation was usually quite straightforward. If there was a crime, there was a victim and a perpetrator. The investigation was usually about joining the dots between those things, often with some detours along the way.
Hazel’s di
sappearance was not straightforward at all. Rather than a nice linear investigation, it had turned into a jumble of hidden truths and fragile lies. This is what he had needed to pick through and some unraveling secrets had got Alex out of jail. The rest of it was a few dots with big gaps between them.
But he had wanted to bounce this off Alice but hadn’t had the chance. In the few weeks since Alex had got out of jail, they had seemed to have spent all their time with him either here or at Alice’s.
He decided to push on.
“Alex, before we go any further I need to know that you’re good with this.”
“With what? Looking for Hazel? I have no problem at all in looking for my wife. I still love her, and I still want her back. There’s a slim to no chance of that, I know, but I want to know what happened to her.”
Alice laid her hand on his arm and smiled encouragement at him. He placed his other hand over hers and smiled back.
“This could all be nothing or there could be some substance to it and take us a great leap forward. We might rake up memories or regrets that you don’t want to think about.”
Alex shook his head slowly and looked at the floor, he sighed deeply before looking at Steve.
“My life ended that night. I thought it had ended, and I had been buried. I thought I would come out of that place in a box. Now I’m out, and my life has become a lot better again, but whatever I do, I’m always back at that night. I may move on from here or I may not, I don’t know. What I do know is that if there’s even a slight chance of finding out what happened then I want to take it. If nothing else to give everyone involved closure. I can exist like this but until I know, it won’t be a life.”
Steve nodded and smiled sympathetically at Alice who he could see was tearing up a bit. She nodded and smiled back, quickly rubbing her eyes with a handkerchief.
“OK,” Steve started, “We’ve got Hazel missing from, we now believe, the front of her own house and everything that the police, the DA, the whole investigation concentrated on was Alex. Now Alex is out of jail, proven to be innocent but Hazel is still missing and where does that leave us?”
Alice shrugged, unsure where this was going.