Web of Silence: A Ray Schiller Novel (The Ray Schiller Series Book 4)

by Marjorie Doering

  Ray looked at Gail and patted his shoulder. “C’mon back. This space is still available.”

  Snuggling against him closer than before, she rested her knees on his thigh and uttered a tiny ‘Yay.’

  Fifteen minutes later, Gail whisked Joey upstairs for a bath before bedtime. Alone with his thoughts and his cell phone, Ray gave in and dialed Dunn’s number.

  “Mr. Dunn,” he said. “Detective Schiller. You wanted to talk to me—something about your ex-wife’s car?” Ray’s frown deepened as he listened. “Okay, I’ll be there sometime tomorrow morning. I’m going to want to talk to your mechanic.”

  With Gail still busy upstairs, Ray called Waverly. The phone rang three times, then four.

  “Come on, Dick, pick up.” If his call was interrupting an illicit entanglement, all the better. He was about to hang up after the fifth ring when Waverly finally answered.

  “Geeze, Dick, it’s about time.” He thought he heard Gail coming. “I’ve got to make this fast, so listen. Don’t go to the station in the morning. Meet me at nine at Dunn’s dealership. I’ll explain when I see you. Gotta go. ‘Bye.”

  23

  Ray and Gail’s evening had ended on a high note—‘F’ over high ‘C’. He should have slept like a baby—a contented baby, but he woke in the middle of the night and couldn’t switch his brain off again. Gail sometimes teased him about waiting for the ‘bulb’ to burn out, but what Dave Dunn told him over the phone the night before kept running through his head.

  In the morning, with a kiss from Gail and his thermos of coffee in hand, Ray left the house. He’d left his car parked in the driveway, but went through the garage to take a look through the SUV’s side window. The Men’s Wearhouse bag was gone. He laughed to himself. He had no idea when Gail had managed to sneak the bag out of the vehicle, but wasn’t surprised she had.

  Gail didn’t stand a chance of stumbling across his anniversary gift to her. Two weeks earlier, he’d arranged for the delivery of a dozen long-stemmed red roses and reserved a table for a romantic dinner at her favorite five-star restaurant, 112 Eatery. The flowers would die, and the fabulous meal might be forgotten, but the glittering ring, safely hidden in his glove box, would last forever.

  On his way to Dunn Motors, his focus shifted to the brief but potentially troubling discussion he’d had with Dunn on the phone the night before.

  Five minutes after his arrival at the dealership, he stood leaning against his car, waiting for Waverly.

  His familiar baritone voice came from behind Ray. “Morning, buddy.”

  As he turned to look at Waverly, his jaw dropped. “What the hell…?” Waverly’s upper lip was bare. “What happened to your mustache?”

  “I got rid of it.”

  “No kidding.” For a full five seconds, Ray couldn’t think of anything else to say. The next word out of his mouth was “why”?

  “Why not? So, whatd’ya think? You’re not saying anything.”

  Ray’s mouth opened, but nothing came out.

  “Okay, so without the mustache, the divot under my nose looks like an irrigation ditch. I know that.”

  “Then why shave it off?”

  “’Cuz.”

  “I’ve heard better arguments from Joey, and he’s only three.”

  “Who’s arguing? You asked me and I’m telling you.”

  “Did Phyllis want it gone?”

  “Nah,” Waverly said. “It was my decision.”

  “What prompted that?”

  “Look,” Waverly said, “whatd’ya say we just forget my mustache and get down to business. What are we doing here?”

  “Give me a second.” Ray had to look away before he continued. “All right. Last night I got a call from the station saying Dunn was trying to reach me. When I got back to him, he said there was a problem with the car. He had to have it towed here.”

  “Towed?” Waverly said. “What was wrong with it?”

  “He didn’t go into detail other than to say it couldn’t be driven. I didn’t have time to get into it with him. He had it brought here so he could have one of his mechanics check it out.”

  “What’d she do—leave the lights on and drain the battery?”

  “It sounded more serious than that. I want to know what’s wrong with it.”

  “What difference does it make?”

  Dave Dunn stepped outside before Ray could answer. “Detective Schiller, I thought I saw you out here.”

  Ray introduced Dunn to Waverly.

  “Good to meet you, Detective Waverly. If the two of you want to follow me, my head mechanic can tell you what he found out.”

  As they walked through the door, Ray nodded a hello at the customer service girl behind the counter. It had to be the young woman he’d spoken with on the phone the day before. He noticed the intensity of her gaze as she watched Dunn lead them through the reception area. Having seen that look directed at others dozens of times before, he assessed it and filed it away in his head for future reference.

  The smell of grease and oil surrounded them as they entered the repair bay.

  “Detectives Schiller and Waverly, this is my head mechanic, Steve Winchell.”

  The man looked at home in coveralls, like he’d spent most of his thirty or so years wearing them. His broad back and shoulders put a strain on the seams. Engine oil and hair cream might’ve shared joint responsibility for his dark, slicked-back hair.

  Winchell shook their hands without issuing a word.

  “What’s wrong with the car?” Ray asked.

  Winchell walked the three men to Elena Dunn’s topaz blue Impala. “The car’s done for. Finished.” He popped the hood and stepped back. “The bearings, the top piston rings… Shot. The head gasket’s cracked. You can kiss this baby goodbye.”

  “Overheated engine,” Ray surmised.

  “Oh, hell yeah,” Winchell said. “The engine seized up.”

  “What happened to the coolant?” Ray asked.

  “The radiator hose got ripped right off. That’s bad enough, but there’s a hole in the bottom of the radiator about the size of my fist. This car hit something.”

  “Must’ve been a moose to do that kind of damage,” Waverly said.

  “Some kinda road debris probably,” Winchell said. “A hubcap or someone’s muffler sitting in the road maybe. Anyway, the coolant drained out in a hurry.”

  “How far do you think the car coulda gone like that?” Waverly asked him.

  “A few miles maybe. Probably less.”

  “So the car’s toast?” Waverly said.

  “Yeah, it’s done for.” Winchell stood wiping his hands with a shop rag. “Not even I could fix that engine.” He noticed Ray looking at him. “Something else you want to know?”

  “No, I guess that about covers it. Thanks.”

  “Thanks, Steve,” Dunn said.

  As he walked them back to the waiting area at the front desk, Ray asked, “Why did you call me about this?”

  The question seemed to catch Dunn off guard. “I… I thought it might be important. Would you rather I hadn’t?”

  “No, but I’m curious.” Ray looked toward the service desk and noticed the twenty-something-year-old service girl riveted to the conversation.

  Before Dunn could answer, Winchell strolled from the repair shop and leaned against the service counter. His eyes were focused on the young woman with the doe eyes and chestnut hair, but he was clearly as tuned into the discussion as she was.

  “I called you,” Dunn said, “because you’ve accused Ellie of being a drunken, abusive parent. This should make it clear there was another explanation for her leaving the car the way she did when—”

  Ray stopped him. “We’re not pinning a label on your ex-wife, but we have to look at this thing from every angle to make sense of what happened.”

  Waverly looked perturbed when he reached up to stroke his mustache and found nothing but bare skin. “The condition of the car might explain why she left it the way she did,” h
e said, “but it doesn’t explain her abandoning your son in that theater.”

  Dunn’s face paled.

  “We’re still looking for any reasonable explanation for that,” Ray told him. “Thanks for getting in touch.”

  As he followed Waverly outside, Ray looked through the dealership’s floor-to-ceiling windows. Dunn had already disappeared, but the mechanic and customer service girl seemed to be engaged in some kind of discussion, and it didn’t appear to be friendly.

  “I don’t get it,” Waverly grumbled. “One minute I’d swear Elena Dunn had to be drunk and the next… It’s like being stuck on a seesaw. I’ll tell you this much: when I was seventeen, I was riding with a friend in his beater of a car when his engine seized up. It sounded like a coffee can full of ball bearings. She’d prob’ly have heard the same kind of racket. Unless she was ‘blotto,’ Elena Dunn should’ve pulled over. Anyone with an I.Q. half a point higher than my friend’s would’ve.”

  “Unless,” Ray said, “she had good reason to keep going.”

  “Like what?”

  “Maybe she couldn’t stop.”

  “Why not? You think she was being chased or something?”

  Ray leaned against his car and folded his arms. “I’m saying it’s a possibility. What happened on Sixth Street might have started somewhere else.”

  “Well, Derek Printz was busy puking his guts out in the back of a cab, so we know it wasn’t him chasing her.” Waverly reached for his missing mustache again, but stopped just short of his bare lip.

  “That doesn’t mean it couldn’t have been someone else,” Ray said. “Let me bounce this off you, Dick. For the sake of argument, let’s say she was one hundred percent sober, okay?”

  “Fine. She can walk a straight line on her toes, like a ballerina. Go ahead.”

  “Because she had Nathan with her,” Ray said, “we know she went home after she left Redstone’s. Once she got there, what if something happened and she was forced to grab the boy and make a run for it?”

  “Like what—a home invasion or something?”

  “Okay, for the sake of argument, let’s say that’s it… a home invasion.” He scratched his neck and said, “Suppose she heard someone breaking in. Being mute, she couldn’t scream or yell for help. She—”

  “Don’t forget, Ray, there is an emergency number for the speech-impaired she could’ve used.”

  “Okay, but say she couldn’t for some reason: it’s too late; someone’s already coming through the door; there’s no time. Whatever. She grabs the boy, races to her car and gets the hell out of there.” He waited for a response. “You can see the possibility of that happening, can’t you?”

  Waverly shrugged. “Say our sober-as-a-judge victim is startled by one or more thugs breaking into her house. She’s got no time, or maybe she can’t get to her phone. She has to fly up the stairs, snatch the boy outta his bed, make it all the way back down again and manage to get outside to her car without the goons stopping her.” He shook his head. “She’d have to be Wonder Woman to pull that off. Even if she did, why the hell would they chase her clear into Minneapolis? Why not just grab everything in sight and take off like other good little home invaders?”

  “It could’ve been someone she knew—someone she recognized.”

  “Then why choose her house in the first place?”

  “If it was someone high on drugs, they probably wouldn’t have given a damn.”

  “Yeah, but you’re forgetting something, buddy. This version leaves a big loose end. Where does Lundquist fit in?” Waverly shook his head. “No. Whether he texted her or she texted him, I still think Elena Dunn and Lewis Lundquist arranged to get-together like we figured at first.”

  “Maybe, but we’re not getting anywhere attacking this case from that angle. We know it wasn’t a mugging, but nothing we’ve turned up on Lundquist would make him the target of a shooting. He was a dedicated family man—married to one woman for nearly forty years—four successful adult children. The man was well-respected personally and professionally.”

  “Right, but if he was messing around with Elena Dunn, ‘Sir Galahad’ definitely had cracks in his armor.”

  “Are you saying you’re ready to look at Marguerite Lundquist as a suspect now?”

  “What?” Waverly scrunched his face up. “No. Dave Dunn is still at the top of my list.”

  “All right, then we need to find a new jumping-off point—a fresh perspective. Elena Dunn’s house is only a couple of miles from the crime scene. Distance-wise, engine damage and all, she’d have been able to make it downtown from there.”

  “Yeah,” Waverly said, “that fits with what Dunn’s mechanic told us.”

  “Okay, time to think outside the box,” Ray said.

  “Or maybe we just need a bigger one,” Waverly replied.

  “Yeah, maybe. Listen, there’s no point in using two cars, Dick. Ride with me. I’ll run in and make sure they don’t mind us leaving your car parked here for a while. We can pick it up later.”

  24

  Steve Winchell left the customer service desk as Ray reentered the building and gave the girl at the desk a smile. “Workplace wars?” he asked.

  She made no attempt to deny she and Winchell had been arguing. “As soon as you leave, he’ll probably be back here for round two. Every time I talk to a man as handsome as you, he gets crazy jealous.”

  Ray let the comment bounce off him. “You’re a couple?”

  “Sort of.”

  Interesting phraseology. Maybe her blatant flirting was the kindling that got Steve Winchell’s anger fired up in the first place. He checked the name plate resting on the counter in front of her: Rhonda Stark. “Would it be a problem if my partner leaves his car parked here for a while, Ms. Stark?”

  “It’s fine with me.”

  “What about your boss?”

  “I’m sure Dave won’t care.”

  Either the office staff operated on a first-name basis or she had been given, or was taking liberties. That along with her visible interest in Dave Dunn made his cop instincts tingle. “Maybe I’d better check with Mr. Dunn. Where can I find him?”

  She leaned across the counter, giving him a glimpse of her cleavage as she pointed to the left. “Dave’s office is down there.” Stark was close enough for him to get a whiff of her strawberry-scented shampoo. “It’s the second door on the left.”

  Dunn looked up, surprised, when Ray stepped into the office’s open doorway. “Forget something, Detective Schiller?”

  “Ms. Stark out there… How long has she worked for you?”

  Dunn didn’t have to think about it for long. “Just over two years. Why?”

  Ray closed the office door. “She’s a friendly little thing, isn’t she?”

  “Did she say or do something to offend you?”

  “No,” Ray said, “In fact, she was very… complimentary. Does she use that approach on all of your male customers?”

  Dunn shoved his paperwork aside. “If Rhonda was less than professional with you, I apologize. I’ve talked to her about that, but flirting just seems to be part of her DNA. Rhonda does her job. She may be too forward, but as far as I can tell, it hasn’t done any harm.”

  “Most employers wouldn’t take that chance.” Ray paused. “Is something going on between the two of you?”

  “Between me and Rhonda?” A smile replaced the initial shock on Dunn’s face. “You’re kidding, right?”

  “You make it sound like a crazy notion, but workplace romances have been around since the first workplace. I hear your ex-wife worked here before the two of you got married.”

  “Well… yes.” Dunn fidgeted with his tie. “We’re talking about two entirely different situations, though. That was Ellie. This is Rhonda. Actually, my father hired Ellie. She was working for him before I ever came onboard.”

  “And after the carjacking incident, Rhonda took over?”

  “No, someone else took Ellie’s place before Rhonda.” Dunn’s fac
e blanched.

  Although not exactly a Freudian slip, Dunn’s reaction to his own clumsy choice of words suggested his affair had been an office fling.

  “Anyway,” Dunn said, “another girl took over after Ellie. She worked here for two years and when she left, I hired Rhonda.” He sat back, laughing again. “Rhonda and me… Now that’s just funny.”

  “I get the feeling she doesn’t think so.”

  “Look, nothing’s going on between us. She’s a flirt by nature. It doesn’t mean a thing.”

  “Unlike your in-between service girl?”

  Dunn stood and paced behind his desk. “I haven’t spoken to Susan since we parted ways. The last I heard, she was married and living in Antigua, or Alabama. Some damn place. I don’t even know or care.” He took his seat again. “I’m a fast learner, Detective Schiller. Besides, it’s Rhonda we’re talking about. She’s nice to look at, sure. Outside of that, she holds no interest for me. Even if she did, Steve’s got dibs on her anyway.”

  “Winchell, your mechanic?”

  “Yeah. He’s pretty possessive when it comes to her, but that’s between the two of them.”

  “Just because you’re not interested in her doesn’t mean she’s not interested in you.”

  “Even if you were right, that would be my problem not yours, Detective Schiller.”

  “Ordinarily I’d agree with you.” Ray picked up two framed photos from the corner of Dunn’s desk. He set down the picture of Nathan, and held up the other. “Nice photograph of your ex-wife.”

  Dunn snatched it from his hand. “I’ve told you how I feel about Ellie.”

  “Yes, I know. And keeping that picture of Elena on your desk must make it clear to Rhonda, too.”

  “All the more reason she wouldn’t have any interest in me.”

  “Logic has little to do with a woman’s feelings, or a man’s for that matter. Rhonda could consider your ex-wife her rival.”

  “If you’re suggesting Rhonda had anything to do with what happened to Ellie…” Dunn dismissed Ray’s concern with a wave of his hand. “I’m not even going to waste my breath arguing the point with you anymore.”