by Lee Hollis
She was weak.
Disoriented.
Confused.
Unable to move.
Like a deadweight.
Someone dragged her slowly across the floor.
When her eyes fluttered open, they hurt from a blazing fluorescent light. She brought her hand to her face, covering them until they could adjust to the harsh light.
She finally managed to focus on someone standing over her, a woman, holding a stack of blankets. When she knelt down to wrap Hayley in them, trying to bring her body temperature back up, Hayley saw her face clearly.
“Tiffany . . .”
“How the hell did you lock yourself inside the freezer, Hayley?”
Hayley coughed. Her body was still spasming from the shivering cold.
“I didn’t. . . . Someone . . . put me there—”
“What? Are you serious? Who?”
“I don’t know. . . .”
Hayley was slowly coming back to life.
She checked her hands for frostbite, but they looked okay.
Tiffany scooted to the kitchen and made some hot coffee and cranked the heat in the warehouse to eighty degrees. After about twenty minutes Hayley started to feel a little better.
“We should get you to the hospital so they can check you out,” Tiffany said. “Can you walk?”
“No, I’m fine, Tiffany. I don’t need to go to the hospital. How did you find me?”
“The building’s owner called this morning and said if I cleared out Garth’s belongings by New Year’s Day, he would let me out of the lease. So I dropped by to take a quick inventory and see what kind of moving job I was going to be faced with. Then I went to rent a U-Haul and decided to start with the freezer first, and there you were balled up on the floor, passed out.”
“If you hadn’t come along . . .”
“You would have frozen to death. Yes, I saved your life. You see? Even adulteresses can have a good side.”
Hayley nodded. “Thank you.”
“Are you sure you don’t want to go to the hospital?”
“Yes. Tiffany, when you got here, did you see anyone else around?”
“No. No one suspicious anyway. Just one of Lex Bansfield’s crew, but he works right next door, so it wasn’t exactly out of the ordinary.”
“Which crew member was it?”
“The foreman, I think. Nick something.”
“Nick Ward?”
“Yes. Him.”
“What was he doing?”
“He was getting in his truck as I pulled up. I waved at him, but he didn’t see me. He looked like he was in a hurry. Do you think he was the one who put you in the freezer?”
“I can’t say for sure, but right now I’m betting on it.”
Hayley climbed to her feet. She stumbled and swayed a bit, and Tiffany held her arm to steady her.
“I need to go—”
“Look, Hayley, we haven’t exactly been the best of friends lately, and I wasn’t quite prepared for you to dig so deep into my personal life, but I’m worried about you.”
Hayley stumbled toward the door that led outside the warehouse.
“Where are you going?” Tiffany asked.
“I need to get inside Lex’s workshop and look around.”
“You need to see a doctor!”
Hayley limped out the door, leaving Tiffany to start her inventory, and crossed to the entrance to Lex’s half of the warehouse. She tried the handle. It was locked. Frustrated, she jiggled it again.
“You could just ask me to let you in,” a man’s voice said from behind her.
Hayley whirled around.
It was Lex.
He was climbing out of his truck as he struggled with his crutches.
“Lex, I know you’re angry with me, but I just need five minutes inside your workshop. If I don’t find anything, I promise I will let the whole thing go.”
Lex laughed. “Don’t make promises you can’t keep.”
He noticed her gripping the door handle to keep her balance.
“Are you all right?”
“Yes. Please, will you help me?”
He ambled over to her, using his crutches, while fishing a ring of keys from the pocket of his corduroy pants. He inserted one of the keys into the lock and swung open the door.
“After you.”
Hayley straightened herself and marched inside, taking great pains not to let on that she had nearly died twenty minutes earlier.
Lex flipped on all the lights and followed Hayley as she poked around, checking for clues. “Where is Nick Ward’s desk?”
Lex pointed to a small metal table and chair in the corner. There was no file drawer or pencil holder or even a stapler nearby.
“Nick’s not one for paperwork. He prefers banging nails and sawing wood. He spends more time out in the field than he does here.”
Hayley nodded and carefully scanned the workshop from top to bottom.
“What are you trying to find?”
Hayley shrugged. “How one man could kill another man when neither of them was in the same room.”
“That’s crazy.”
She was just about done when suddenly she spotted something.
On the wall opposite Nick Ward’s desk.
A few inches above another metal desk and chair.
“Who sits over there?”
“My intern, Hugo. Why?”
She walked over and examined it.
It was putty or some type of caulking.
“What happened here?”
“What are you talking about?”
“This. It looks like some kind of hasty repair job.”
Lex shuffled over and stood behind her, looking at the dried paste. “Beats me. Never noticed it before. Maybe it was here when we moved in.”
“Did you paint the walls when you rented the place?”
“We did. They were pretty scuffed up.”
“So this has to be a relatively recent repair. And this is the wall you share with Garth’s kitchen next door, am I right?”
“Yeah. So? What are you getting at Hayley?”
“Come on.”
She led Lex back out of the workshop, not as fast as she would have liked, since she was still woozy from being in cold storage and Lex was following her on a pair of crutches.
She hurried back through the door into Garth’s side of the warehouse, with Lex trying to keep up.
Tiffany was in the kitchen, stacking plates and saucepans she had laid out on Garth’s long stainless-steel worktable.
“Excuse us, Tiffany, we just need to check something.”
“Oh, hello,” Tiffany said, noticing Lex.
He gave her a distracted half smile.
Hayley charged over to the far wall and started feeling it with her hands.
“Hayley, there’s no way Nick somehow killed Garth Rawlings when Nick wasn’t even here,” Lex said, sighing impatiently.
“Here. Look at this,” Hayley said, pointing to a small, neat hole in the wall opposite the kitchen area.
“So you think this place has termites?” Lex asked, snickering.
“This is the exact same spot on this side as the patched-up hole in your workshop.”
“I’m not following.”
“Hugo knew what happened. He slipped and said Garth was shot. And it was Nick Ward, I strongly suspect, who killed him.”
“What? How?” Tiffany asked, scurrying over to join the conversation.
“He pulled the trigger on the other side of this wall, and the bullet came through this hole into the kitchen and struck Garth as he cooked over here at his workstation.”
“But the coroner said someone beat him to death. She never said anything about him being shot,” Tiffany said, examining the neat hole in the wall.
“You have to admit, Hayley, that poses somewhat of a problem with your theory,” Lex said.
“She’s wrong. She has to be,” Hayley said, grabbing her now-working cell phone. “I have to
call Sergio.”
Chapter 34
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Sabrina said huffily, marching away from Hayley and Sergio, her high heels clicking on the tiled floor of her medical lab. “Now, if you excuse me, I have a lot of work to do.”
“Sabrina, wait. I’m convinced Hayley is onto something here. Would you at least take a look at the body one more time before the burial and see if you missed a bullet?”
Sabrina straightened her white lab coat and threw her chin up in the air as she stared daggers at Hayley. “I can’t believe you are doing this to me again! Is it your life’s mission now to ruin my reputation? My God, Hayley, I thought we were on the road to being friends again. I confided in you and fed you information on this very case, and now you’re going to turn it all against me?”
“This has nothing to do with you, Sabrina. This is about getting Garth Rawlings the justice he and his family deserve,” Hayley said calmly, trying hard not to antagonize Sabrina more than she already had.
“Please, Sabrina. . . ,” Sergio said, a puppy dog look on his face. “One more examination, just to be sure.”
But not even his charm and South American good looks were going to work on her. Sabrina was refusing to budge.
“No. It’s impossible.”
“Sabrina, nobody’s trying to make you look incompetent,” Sergio said.
“I can’t do it,” Sabrina said.
“I can always get a court order,” Sergio said, quickly losing patience.
“No, I mean I literally cannot examine the body. He was cremated yesterday.”
Hayley gasped.
It was like a blow to the solar plexus.
“What? How? Who?” Hayley sputtered.
“His wife,” Sabrina said.
Tiffany!
Hayley turned to Sergio. “Maybe Tiffany knew her husband had been shot and wanted to get rid of the body quickly in order to make it impossible for anyone ever to discover the truth, so she ordered her husband’s body to be cremated.”
“Tiffany did no such thing,” Sabrina said, folding her arms and shaking her head at Hayley. “She was simply executing the wishes of the deceased, who clearly stated in his living will that he did not want to be buried.”
“Does she have the ashes in her possession?” Hayley asked. “Maybe we can find a piece of the bullet there or in the oven, where the body was cremated.”
“The ovens are hot enough to destroy metal fragments,” Sabrina said, desperate to put this matter to rest. “We’re done here.”
“What do we do now?” Hayley asked Sergio.
“Take one more look at the autopsy photos,” Sergio said, pivoting to face Sabrina, whose mouth was already open and ready to protest. He raised a hand for her to keep quiet. “I’m chief of police here, Sabrina, and it’s part of your job to assist me in any open investigation. I have yet to close the case on Garth Rawlings—so, until I do, you are obligated to provide me with any information I request.”
Sabrina mulled over his words for a few seconds, ultimately deciding she didn’t have much of a choice. She turned swiftly on her heels and marched over to a filing cabinet on the other side of the lab.
High heels clicking, clicking, clicking.
“They haven’t been uploaded to the computer yet, so you’ll have to settle for the hard copies.”
She heaved a big sigh as she yanked open the top filing drawer and snatched a manila folder out before making a big show of slamming the metal door shut again. Then she hurled the folder down on top of a desk, forcing Hayley and Sergio to walk over to her instead of her bringing the photos to them. She was at the point where she would no longer go out of her way to help them.
Sergio picked up the folder and flipped it open, going through the autopsy photos, one by one, before handing them off to Hayley to examine.
“What is she, your deputy now?” Sabrina asked, adding a healthy dose of sarcasm.
They ignored the comment.
Sergio’s eyes fixed on something in one of the photos. “What’s that?”
Sabrina wrested the photo from his hand and gazed at it. “What? I don’t see anything.”
Sergio pointed with his finger. “That.”
“That’s the liver,” she scoffed.
“Yes, but look at that black dot. What is that?”
“It’s liver damage, probably from the beating.”
Sergio’s finger moved across the photo. “And what’s that?”
“The intestines. I’m not here to teach you a class on the human anatomy!” Sabrina bellowed.
“Hear me out, Sabrina,” Sergio said. “I heard about a similar case once up in Toronto. If Garth was shot—”
“He wasn’t,” Sabrina said emphatically.
“Okay, but for the sake of argument, let’s just say he was.”
“He wasn’t.”
She wasn’t about to give an inch.
“Sabrina, would it really hurt just to hear what Sergio has to say?” Hayley asked as gently as possible.
“Fine. Whatever. Okay. Hypothetically, he was shot.”
“Now, what if the bullet entered somewhere down here, near the scrotum, and tore up through him?” Sergio asked, tracing the trajectory with his finger. “Couldn’t it cause roughly the same damage as blunt-force trauma?”
This caught Sabrina off guard. She remained silent as she thought it over. Her face was a mask of professional indignation. However, there was a crack in her veneer. A few seconds of doubt showed in her eyes.
Still, she was holding firm.
The wait for her response was interminable.
Sabrina shrugged finally. “I suppose so. If he was shot. But I stand by my autopsy results. Garth Rawlings’s injuries were consistent with a savage beating.”
“In a locked room that showed no signs of a struggle while casually smoking a pipe,” Sergio said before thrusting the photo in Sabrina’s face and pointing at the black spot on Garth’s liver. “Take another look, Sabrina. Isn’t that a bullet hole right there?”
Her lips quivered as she glanced once more at the photo, and then, a slight, almost imperceptible, nod.
“Yes,” she whispered.
“Thank you,” Sergio said, relief in his voice.
“I am so going to get fired over this,” Sabrina said under her breath.
Hayley tried to put a comforting arm around her, but Sabrina ducked away and dashed out of the lab in tears.
Chapter 35
Hayley stood outside the interrogation room, straining to hear what she could, as Sergio questioned Billy Parsons, who had just returned from his Massachusetts shrimping job earlier that morning. She was now convinced beyond a doubt that it was Nick Ward who shot Garth Rawlings through the wall of the warehouse and killed him. However, without the murder weapon or a viable witness, there was no way Sergio could prove it enough to warrant an arrest.
The plan now was to get one of Nick’s coworkers, either Billy or Hugo, to turn on him, to tell the truth of what really happened that night. Hugo was a scared kid, whom Nick had successfully intimidated into keeping his mouth shut. Billy was now their best bet. He was a bit surprised when Sergio called him and asked him to come into the station and make a statement, especially since he had already told everything he knew about the incident at the scene. Billy was an agreeable man, though, and certainly wanted to stay on the chief of police’s good side, so he offered to come in and go over the facts one more time.
Although the door to the interrogation room was closed and their voices were muffled, Hayley could make out most of what the two men were saying.
“Not sure what else I can tell you, Chief,” Billy said calmly. “Like I said before, me and the guys were just kicking back, drinking some beers, and didn’t hear anything until the sirens. That’s when we walked outside to see what was going on.”
She heard some faint clicking.
Sergio was obviously typing on a computer. He was writing up Billy’s statement as it was happ
ening.
“So you swear you’ve told me everything? You’re not forgetting any details?”
“No, sir.”
“You were drinking alcohol that night, and we both know that can sometimes make your memory a little fuzzy.”
“Trust me. I remember everything, Chief. I may have slammed down three or four beers, but I’m a big guy and it takes a lot more than that to get me drunk and sloppy.”
“Okay, then,” Sergio said. “If that’s everything, let me just print out your statement and have you sign it.”
There was a whirring as the printer spit out a piece of paper. Hayley heard Sergio’s chair squeak as he stood up to retrieve the statement.
A moment of silence as Hayley assumed Billy was scribbling his signature and handing the piece of paper to Sergio.
“Is that all, Chief?”
“Looks good. You can go now, Billy. Thank you.” Billy’s chair squeaked as he stood up.
Hayley was about to dash down the hall to avoid Billy catching her eavesdropping at the door, when Sergio spoke again.
“Wait. There is one more thing.”
“What’s that, Chief?”
“The coroner reexamined the autopsy photos and has changed her conclusion about Garth Rawlings’s death.”
“Oh?”
“Yes. Mr. Rawlings was shot.”
Another moment of silence as Hayley pictured the blood draining from Billy’s face.
“Shot?”
“That’s not all. We found a patched-up hole right in the office where you were drinking with the boys. That’s where the bullet entered the wall. And wouldn’t you know, we found the exit hole on the other side in Garth Rawlings’s kitchen, a few feet from where he dropped dead.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about—”
“Of course you do, Billy. You were there. You know exactly what happened, and I think you better tell me. Right now.”
More silence.
Hayley pictured Billy shaking his head in defiance.
“Go ahead. Mussel up on me.”
“Excuse me?”
Clam up. Sergio is mixing up his shellfish.
“You can always get yourself a lawyer and stick to your story, but here’s the problem. Eventually the real facts are going to come out. And when they do, I have this.”
The signed statement! Of course! Sergio is a genius.