Fact or Fiction_A Sam Prichard Mystery

by David Archer

  “The sheriff’s office has the hat, right now, but it’s on its way to a lab to be tested. What I’m hoping is that there will be residual DNA, maybe a couple of hairs that got stuck inside, something that might help lead us to the real killer. But you might as well know now, I’m also going to start Monday working on getting Millie Cameron exhumed. I want a true forensic pathologist to examine her injuries. I can just about guarantee you that his findings will turn your original investigation on its head.” Sam leaned forward across the table. “Weimer, I don’t know how you managed to become a detective in the first place, and I sure can’t believe you earned a shot at being chief of police. By the time this case comes to a conclusion, I expect Ross Cameron to be out of prison, and there’s a good possibility you will be without a badge.”

  “Are you threatening me?” Weimer asked, raising his voice so that other people in the restaurant looked their way.

  “Absolutely not,” Sam said, still maintaining his calm. “I’m simply stating a fact. You bullied a man who was not able to resist into confessing to a crime he did not commit, and then you wore that confession like a feather in your own cap. No matter how you look at it, you went for an easy conviction and didn’t even bother to do a proper investigation at all. If you had, you might have learned some of the things that I learned today.”

  “Like what?” Weimer demanded. “Oh, yeah, you found some kind of a hat. That still sounds pretty fishy to me.”

  “How about the fact that Jason Garrity was probably a pretty reliable witness? If you had actually talked to the boy back then, he would’ve told you that he’s pretty certain the person he saw hurry across the backyard that day was a woman, and his reasoning for thinking so is sound. That boy hasn’t stopped thinking about this case since the day it happened, and he’s actually done a better job of putting clues together than you ever did. Or you might have learned about Daisy Willis, the old woman everyone in Thompsonville thinks is a witch. She saw me looking at Millie’s house this morning and offered me the keys, but she tried to pass herself off as the ghost of a woman named Marie.” Sam grinned at him. “I figured out who she was, though, and went to her house trailer. Unfortunately, I got there a little late. A couple of hours earlier, somebody—apparently another woman—showed up there and forced Daisy into a car. They drove away, and nobody knows where she is now. Doesn’t that strike you as kind of odd? My own thought is that if she had the keys to the house, then she might know something about how that hat ended up inside the cabinet. And if she knows that, then she just might know something about who had originally worn that hat, and that makes me wonder if the person who pushed her into a car and drove away with her might be the killer.”

  Weimer was leaning back in his chair, and his eyes had gone wide. “Daisy Willis? You do know they call her Crazy Daisy, right? What makes you think she could know anything about the case at all?”

  “I think so because it would be almost impossible to come up with another reason for her sudden disappearance than the fact that someone saw her talking to me this morning. Now, if somebody doesn’t want me to find out what she knows, then I damn well want to know it.”

  Weimer stared at him for a long moment, and it was interrupted when Sam’s cell phone rang. He glanced at it and saw that it was Detective Moore calling, then held up a finger to tell Weimer to wait.

  “Prichard,” he said.

  “Thought I better call you quick,” Moore said. “We just found Daisy Willis.”

  Sam narrowed his eyes. “There is something in your voice that tells me I’m not gonna like what you say next.”

  “Probably not. She’s dead.”

  12

  “Dead? How…”

  “Same way Millie Cameron died,” Moore said. “Her head was bashed in. All the way around, just like Millie Cameron. I need you to come down to my office and give me an official statement about her dealings with you today.”

  “I’ll be right there,” Sam said, and then they ended the call. He put the phone back in his pocket and looked at Weimer.

  “Crazy Daisy is dead,” he said coldly. “Someone just found her body, and she died the same exact way Millie Cameron did. You know what that tells me, Weimer? It tells me that if you had done your job, then maybe you would have caught the killer back then, and maybe Daisy Willis would still be alive.” Sam got up and threw a ten-dollar bill on the table. “The coffee is on me.”

  He stomped out the door and called Indie while he headed directly to the Ridgeline. It took him only a couple of seconds to tell her what was going on, and then he was in the truck and headed east across town.

  The woman at the front desk recognized Sam when he walked in and simply pointed down the hall toward Moore’s office. Sam gave her a wave of thanks and leaned on his cane as he limped toward it. The door was open, and Moore was on the phone. He looked up at Sam and beckoned him in with his fingers.

  “What I’m telling you is that I need that crime scene gone over by professionals,” Moore said into the phone, “not by Barney Fife and Deputy Gomer. This woman may have been a witness in a cold case that I’m trying to reopen, and she was murdered in exactly the same way as the original victim eight years ago. That’s a little bit too much of a coincidence for me, and I don’t want our one lonely forensics tech to go out there and miss something that might be important.” He listened for a couple of moments, then nodded. “That’ll be great, and thank you.” He hung up the phone and looked at Sam.

  “That was the crime lab up at Mt. Vernon,” he said. “They got some of the best CSI people around, and I just talked them into working this scene. Give me a minute to get set up, and I’ll take your statement. Then you can ride out with me if you want, and they should be getting close by then.”

  “What about the hat? Are you turning that over to them?”

  “No,” Moore replied. “There’s a private lab down in Carbondale that we send all that stuff to. Trust me, if there is anything there, they’ll find it. Ready to do your statement now?”

  Sam nodded, and Moore set up a microphone on his desk and pointed it at Sam. He turned to his computer and tapped a couple of keys, then looked at Sam. “Statement of private investigator Samuel Prichard,” he said, adding the date and time. “Mr. Prichard appeared voluntarily to give his statement regarding interactions with murder victim Daisy Joanne Willis.” He touched the Space bar on his computer and then turned to Sam again. “When I let go of this, just tell me in your own words what happened, how you met her and all that.”

  Sam nodded and Moore released the bar.

  “At approximately eight thirty a.m. this morning, I drove to the former home of Millie Cameron, at 502 West Fifth Street in Thompsonville, Illinois. I have been engaged to investigate the possibility that Mrs. Cameron’s son, Ross, who was arrested and convicted for the murder, might be wrongfully incarcerated, and I wanted to get a look at the crime scene. When I arrived, I walked up to the house and looked through the windows on the front door, which allowed me to see the chair that Mrs. Cameron’s body had been found in. While I was looking through the window, I heard a voice ask me if I wanted to go inside and turned to find a short, heavyset woman standing near my vehicle. I approached her and said that I would like to see inside, and she handed me a set of keys. She identified herself only as Marie, saying that she was entrusted by Mrs. Cameron’s daughter Debbie to hold them. I went into the house and found what may be a piece of evidence from the original crime, then came back outside to find the woman gone.

  “At just after one this afternoon, I returned to the house to get another look at it, and that’s when I discovered that the cabinet in which I have found the possible evidence had been rigged so that it could be opened in a haunting manner from outside the house. I concluded that the woman I had spoken to had waited until I was in the kitchen of the house and hurried around at the side to pull the string that opened the door and exposed the evidence. Upon asking a neighbor, Royce Garrity, about a woman who might fit t
hat description, I had been told that Marie had died some years previously, but the description fit another woman named Daisy Willis. Mrs. Garrity told me where to find Ms. Willis’s house trailer, and I drove there immediately. I knocked on her door but got no response, and a neighbor, later identified to me as Rosie Parks, called out to tell me that she was gone. She went on to elaborate that she had seen a car pull up at Daisy’s trailer sometime earlier, and that she had observed what appeared to be a woman forcefully putting Daisy into the car and driving away with her. I reported all of this to Detective Moore.”

  Moore nodded at him and hit the Space bar again. “That’s very good,” he said. “Clear and concise. The computer will transcribe it and print it out, and then I need you to sign it. Now, I have to ask, but where were you for the last three hours?”

  “Well, three hours ago I was having lunch with my family. At one, my mother-in-law rode with me back over to Millie’s house, so she can vouch for my whereabouts at that time. When we got back to my hotel, I was there for about five minutes, and then the police chief, Weimer, knocked on my door. I was having coffee with him and telling him—well, frankly I was telling him he’s an idiot—when you called.”

  Moore’s eyebrows shot upward. “Ray came to see you? How did that go?”

  Sam shrugged. “He basically wanted to try to convince me he had closed the case eight years ago. I told him about finding the hat and that Daisy had apparently been snatched, and that I didn’t believe he did a very good job. We were just getting good and warmed up into a friendly session of trading insults when you called. I walked out on him and came straight here.”

  Moore leaned back in his chair and looked up at the ceiling for a few seconds, then turned his eyes back down to Sam. “I can’t help but jump to the conclusion this is the same killer,” he said, “but that’s not gonna be easy to prove. I checked you out, Sam. I know you were a detective in Denver, and I know you worked homicide for a few years. I’ve dealt with a total of four murders, including Cameron, over the last ten years. This will be my first as a detective, so don’t you even hesitate on giving advice. Okay?”

  Sam nodded. “I’ll do what I can.”

  The printer made noises, and a moment later a single sheet of paper slid out. Moore picked it up and glanced at it, and then passed it to Sam. “Read through that if you would, and if it all sounds correct, then I need you to sign it. Just sign it anywhere under the printing and add the date, if you would.”

  Sam read through the statement and saw that it was exactly as he had given it, so he signed and dated it, then slid it back across the desk. Moore made a couple of copies of it, then put both the original and the copies into a folder and stuffed that into a drawer. He looked up at Sam while he got out of his chair.

  “I’m headed out to the scene, now,” he said. “You want to ride with me?”

  “No,” Sam said, “but I can’t offer any advice if I don’t know what’s going on. Lead the way.”

  He followed Detective Moore out of the building and got into the passenger-side front seat of an unmarked car. He barely got his seat belt buckled before Moore drove out of the parking lot and turned east.

  “Was she found near Thompsonville?” Sam asked.

  Moore nodded. “Couple of boys out riding dirt bikes found her,” Moore said. “Couple miles north of town off Amos Road. There’s a pond just off the road, and a bunch of the local kids have made themselves some dirt trails out there. These boys actually stumbled across her accidentally, because one of them lost control of his bike and ran into some thick brush. She was laying right beside it, covered up with branches and leaves and stuff, but the bike hit some of it and they saw her hand sticking out. They pulled the rest of the crap off and realized who it was, then one of them called his dad. Daddy told him to check for a pulse, but when they didn’t find one he told the boys not to touch anything else and to just wait for him and the police. He called in and one of our deputies was close enough to get there within twenty minutes.”

  Sam glanced at the speedometer and saw that the car was moving at about ninety miles per hour, but he didn’t say anything. Moore obviously knew how to handle the machine, and it only took them about ten minutes to get to where Daisy’s body lay. A sheriff’s patrol car and an ambulance were already there. Sam got out and leaned on his cane as he followed Detective Moore through the tall grass.

  Two boys, not more than fourteen by Sam’s estimation, were sitting on their dirt bikes not far away. A couple of men were standing beside them, and it was apparent that these were their fathers. Moore walked up to the two men and shook hands with both of them.

  “Bob Harris, Jim Ellman, this is Sam Prichard. He’s a private investigator who’s been looking into the old Millie Cameron murder case. He’s also a former police detective from the big city, so I asked him to come out and give me his opinion on this.”

  Sam shook hands with both men and then followed Moore deeper into the brush. A moment later, they came to where the body was still partly covered, and Sam leaned hard on his cane as he knelt down to get a better look.

  Even with the damage done to her head and face, Sam could see enough that his heart sank in his chest. “Yeah, that’s her,” he said. “The one who gave me the keys, I mean. The clothes are the same, and I recognize that purplish mark on the back of her hand.”

  Moore nodded as he glanced at his watch. “I don’t want to bother anything,” Moore said, “until the CSI team gets here. Shouldn’t be more than another ten or fifteen minutes.”

  Sam nodded. “You said the boys found her,” he said. “Were the two of them out here alone?”

  Moore looked up at him, then turned and walked back to where the boys waited with their fathers. “Boys,” he began, “was it just you two out here today? Was anybody else out here with you?”

  The two boys looked at each other, then one of them shrugged. “We didn’t see nobody else,” he said. “Pete Talley was supposed to come out with us, but he got himself grounded yesterday. Just us, I guess.”

  Sam leaned on his cane and looked at the boy who was speaking. “When you got here, did you see anything unusual? Any cars around, maybe?”

  Both boys glanced at Detective Moore, and he grinned. “Don’t worry,” he said. “Today you get a free pass for riding motorcycles on the road without a license. You think we don’t know how you get out here?”

  The boys grinned sheepishly, and the second boy looked at Sam. “There was a car,” he said. “It was parked out on Amos Road when we come around the corner, but then it took off right after we hit the trails. Took off fast, too.”

  “Could you tell what kind of car it was?” Moore asked. “Or did you see who might have been driving it?”

  “Didn’t really pay no attention,” the first boy said. “We was just out for a ride, you know?”

  The second boy scrunched up one side of his face in thought. “It was white,” he said. “I think it was a Chevy, maybe, an older Chevy. Like maybe ten years old, something like that.”

  Moore turned to the deputy who was first on the scene, and who was still standing close by. “Ned,” he said, “let the boys show you where the car was parked. Don’t tramp around through the grass, though, just kinda mark the spot. We’ll need to figure out how the killer got from where the body is back to the car, especially if the boys didn’t see them.”

  Both the boys walked off with the deputy, and their fathers chatted with Moore and Sam until they came back. They all agreed that while Daisy was a strange old bird, she didn’t deserve to die like this.

  A large van arrived while they were talking, and four crime scene technicians climbed out of it. One of them spotted Moore and walked up to him.

  “Detective Moore? I’m Ron Caldwell, state police crime lab.” The two men shook hands.

  “I’m Moore,” Moore said, “and this is Sam Prichard. He’s consulting on this case for me. We haven’t touched the body at all, and I kept everyone back away from it. When Sam and
I got here, we only walked in spots that were already trampled down, so we didn’t actually get up to the body itself. The boys who found her said there was a car out on the road when they first rode up here, and it took off shortly after the got on the trails. I had them show my deputy where it was parked; he can show your people.”

  “Sounds like good work,” Caldwell said. He turned to one of his techs and told him to go with the deputy, then turned back to Moore. “Which way is the body?”

  Moore led the way, and then he and Sam stood off to the side and watched as the CSI team did its job. Photographs were taken for several minutes, including photos of the body, all of the brush that had been piled on it, the tracks made through the tall, mostly dry grass, and even the black marks left by the car when it departed so suddenly.

  Surprisingly, it only took them about thirty minutes to decide they were finished. Caldwell told the EMTs to go ahead and retrieve the body, then walked back over to Detective Moore.

  “This lady was bludgeoned to death with something heavy,” he said. “Coroner will make the final determination, of course, but it looks to me like cause of death will be extreme head trauma with penetrating cranial fractures.”

  Moore nodded. “Yeah, that’s what we thought. You find anything that might help us identify the killer?”

  Caldwell frowned. “Not a lot,” he said. “There are some footprints that might belong to the killer, in which case you’re looking for somebody wearing sneakers who weighs around one sixty-five.”

  “There’s a witness,” Sam said, “who thought it was a woman who took this lady away from her home. Find anything to indicate the killer might have been female?”

  “The footprints aren’t huge, but they are not so small. I’d be comfortable saying it’s definitely a woman. From the extent of the damage done to the victim, I’d think the perpetrator was pretty strong, but the weapon could have been anything from a rock to a baseball bat, so its length and weight could compensate for lower strength.” He shook his head. “I don’t think I can seriously speculate as to the gender of the perpetrator, not at this point.”