“Good,” Sid said. “You’re using ‘his,’ not ‘hers.’”
Bart laughed. “Whatever you say. If they can pull a print, maybe we can put this case to rest in a hurry.”
“I hope you’re not going to mention Jaz to the press.”
“They’ve already showed up, but I’m not talking. I made it clear any statements would have to come from the PR section, and I haven’t told them anything about Jaz.”
Sid clicked off and called Jaz to tell her what he had learned.
“That glove business sure sounds promising,” she said.
“I agree. TBI came up with an excellent glove print for us in Lewisville once that cinched a conviction. It may be Monday before they can get to it.”
“The sooner the better as far as I’m concerned.”
“I may take a run over to Inglewood and check out that house.”
“Just don’t get afoul of the media.”
Sid decided he might as well act like one of the media and take his camera along. He found the address in the phone book, an area not far from where he lived. Briley Parkway formed the demarcation line between Madison and Inglewood. As he approached the street that lead to Earline Ivey’s cul-de-sac, he saw a few commercial properties on Gallatin Road next to it. He started to make the turn but a conglomeration of traffic including police vehicles and TV trucks clogged the road ahead. He pulled into a parking area at a store near the corner and set off on foot.
Older houses, probably dating from the end of World War II, lined the street. The cul-de-sac featured a short stretch of pavement not quite as wide as a single house with two modest-sized ranch style structures bordering the turn-around. Yellow crime scene tape circled the house on the right. Two men with shoulder-mounted TV cameras stood around just outside the tape, where a couple of rookie-looking cops kept them at bay. Sid paused nearby and studied the scene. Standing back to one side, two women in casual dress talked with arms folded.
He approached them with what he hoped was a pleasant, non-threatening look. “Pardon me, ladies, but do you live around here?”
One of them, whose wind-blown white hair reminded him of how his grandmother had looked, nodded and pointed over her shoulder at the house on the left. “I live there.”
“I’m with an insurance company,” he said, inventing a cover story as he talked. “I wonder if you’d mind my going into your back yard to shoot some pictures of the rear of the Ivey house?”
“What for?” she asked.
“Apparently we may have some liability. I don’t really know. I was just told to come take the photos. I won’t bother anything. Would it be okay?”
She turned to her friend with a look of uncertainty. “I guess it would be all right, wouldn’t it, Martha?”
Martha shrugged. “Suit yourself.”
Sid didn’t wait for further comment. “Thank you very much. I really appreciate it. I won’t be long.”
He started around the house on the opposite side from the Ivey residence. The yard looked about like his had before he cleaned it up. There was a small out building in back. He moved beside it to where he had a good view of the rear of the dead woman’s house. Two concrete steps lead from the small back porch down to a brick patio. There appeared to be no line-of-sight from any of the nearby houses. A clump of trees began no more than ten feet back. When he looked around, he saw a line of trees that ran up to the businesses on Gallatin Road.
Sid walked close to the yellow tape that spanned the Ivey yard and started snapping photos of the area.
“Hey! What’re you doing?”
Sid looked around to see a young cop hurrying toward him from between the houses.
“Taking pictures,” Sid said.
“I don’t know…hey, Sarge!” he yelled toward Earline Ivey’s back door.
A Metro three-striper stepped out, followed by the familiar inverted V mustache of Detective Bart Masterson.
“What’s the problem?” the sergeant asked.
Before the young officer could reply, Bart stepped forward. “I’ll take care of this.”
He ducked under the tape and walked toward Sid.
Sid grinned and waved his camera. “Just taking some pictures.”
“What the hell for?” Bart asked, frowning.
“That’s what investigators do, when they don’t have crime scene techs to do it for them.”
“I thought you were one hundred percent sure Jaz had nothing to do with this.”
“I am, but as long as she’s the subject of a police investigation, I’m going to be looking into the big picture.”
“Like you’re doing with Djuan Burden.”
“Correct. Particularly since both murders involve the same MO.”
“You’re not suggesting—?”
“I can’t imagine any connection, but if there is one, I intend to find it.”
He saw nothing to be gained by bringing it up at the moment, but he had begun to wonder if somehow this murder could involve an attempt to get him and Jazz off the Burden case. The possibility was nebulous at the moment, but he tucked it back in a mental file drawer for later consideration.
Bart laid an arm on Sid’s shoulder. “You are one persistent dude, buddy. I admire the way you attack a problem. I just hope it doesn’t backfire. Incidentally, I’ve been asking around about your Mexican singer.”
“Thanks.” Sid motioned toward the house. “Find anything new in there?”
“No. The guy was pretty careful.”
“Except with his gloves.”
“They all make mistakes sooner or later. Homicide detectives would be in bad shape if they didn’t. Right?”
Sid nodded. He hoped they would soon find one made by the Omar Valdez murderer.
He stopped by his office to download the photos he’d shot, then headed for a nearby steakhouse for an early dinner. He got home just in time for the six o’clock news.
Jaz lay curled up on the sofa in her recreation room, devouring the latest Bangkok mystery novel by Tim Hallinan in a valiant effort to get her mind off of Earline Ivey. The phone rang beside her.
“Have you been watching the news?” Sid asked.
“No, I’ve been reading. What did they show?”
“Some shots of the cops around Earline Ivey’s house. They showed her sister’s place where the daughter is staying, but no pictures of her.”
“Somebody in human resources checked her file and said the girl’s name is Vanita.”
“The TV story gave the background of who Ivey was and how she had accused you of racial discrimination. They read a short statement from your company deploring what had happened.”
“Nothing about me personally?”
“No. I talked to Bart over at the Ivey house this afternoon. He assured me he was saying nothing to the media.”
Jaz sat in silence, the pain of the accusation and its aftermath palpably coursing through her body. “This whole thing is so unfortunate. I didn’t deserve what happened to me, and for whatever reason it was done, Earline Ivey certainly didn’t deserve to be the victim of a cold-blooded shooting. I’m sure it was devastating to her daughter.”
“I looked over the scene behind her house this afternoon,” Sid said. “I took some pictures. Bart told me he’s still asking around about a Mexican-named singer.”
“Be great if he could find our girl.”
“Other than that, sounds like our best bet is that tape Hattie plans to show us tomorrow. I’ll see you at the bank.”
Jaz punched the phone off and stabbed the TV remote. She saw a smiling, snappily-dressed young man pointing out what was happening weatherwise in Middle Tennessee. The details didn’t register in her mind, though. What they might learn tomorrow at the bank and what might happen to her credibility as a result of the Ivey murder kept her thoughts in a jumble. She let her gaze wander around the room where Jaques LeMieux had decorated the walls with hunting scenes. What would her dad have done faced with a situation like this? She kne
w. He would have sucked it up and faced the snarling tiger with confidence in his ammunition. Though Canadian by birth, he was not a royalist. He revered Oliver Cromwell and would quote his advice to “put your trust in God, but mind to keep your powder dry.”
She’d have to hold her powder high as the troubled waters rose.
Chapter 15
During his run Sunday morning, Sid puzzled over the slaying of Earline Ivey. He had seen the TV news reports last night, and this morning the carrier had thrown his newspaper onto the driveway just before he started out. There was no husband or boyfriend in the wings, the two most likely suspects. The police found no evidence of a robbery and made no suggestion of a motive. Acquaintances of the woman offered none either. Neighbors reported seeing no one around the house. The murderer apparently entered through the back door, as Bart indicated. Had Earline left it unlocked? Had someone knocked and been let in, or had they picked the lock? There was no mention of the glove found on the porch.
This morning appeared a clone of the previous day, with dark folds of cloud making the landscape resemble a dawn that wouldn’t break. It gave Sid an idea. As soon as he got home, he took a quick shower and dressed in black pants and a black sweater. He headed out to the garage and climbed into his vintage brown pickup, the transportation he preferred to use when it wasn’t necessary to appear the competent professional. A few blemishes in the paint job gave it the look of a workingman’s vehicle.
Gallatin Road would soon bustle with worshippers on the way to services at the area’s many churches, but for now traffic moved sparsely along the thoroughfare. He drove to the commercial area where he had parked yesterday and pulled in at the side of a small market. Seeing no one around, he locked the truck and walked behind the building. Locating the line of trees that ran through the neighborhood, he began picking his way between the trees, moving slowly to avoid attracting attention. He encountered a couple of fences, but neither blocked his path.
It took only a few minutes to reach the rear of Earline Ivey’s house. Yellow crime scene tape still circled the yard, but he was able to move close enough to see where a stalker could have crossed to the rear door. Looking around the area, he found nothing that might indicate who had been here. Of course, had there had been anything, Bart or his crime scene crew should have found it.
He turned around and made his way back through the trees to the market. Instead of returning to his truck, he walked around to the front and entered the building. It was a typical convenience store with gas pumps out front. Beer and soft drinks and an assortment of grocery items lined the shelves. A young man, early twenties, dressed in jeans and a plaid shirt, stood behind the counter, cleaning it with a large rag. His look was one of pure boredom.
“Were you working here yesterday morning?” Sid asked.
The man paused in mid-swipe. “Yeah. I open at seven in the morning six days a week. I’m a glutton for punishment. What’s the problem?”
“No problem.” Except for me, Sid thought. What he was about to ask would hardly even qualify as a long shot. But when you had absolutely nothing, anything was worth a try. “Do you recall if somebody came in here around this time yesterday morning? Maybe wearing an outfit like this?”
The clerk glanced up and down Sid’s full height, then continued wiping the counter. “He wasn’t nearly as tall as you. Had a black baseball cap, though.”
Sid felt his heart kick into overdrive. “Could you describe his features…hair, eyes, anything unusual?”
“Are you a cop?”
“Private investigator. Think about it for a moment. What did he look like?”
“Jeez, he wasn’t here all that long. Just bought a pack of Salems and left.”
“If you remember the brand of cigarettes, surely you can recall something about his looks.”
The young man stopped swiping the rag and stared. “Squinty eyes, oval-shaped glasses, wide mouth. He was black. That’s about all I remember.”
“Did you see what kind of vehicle he drove?”
“A black car pulled out into the street after he left, but I didn’t see him get in so I don’t know if he was in it.”
“Thanks,” Sid said and headed back to his truck.
He thought about calling Bart but drove home for breakfast first. Normally he’d eat after his run and shower. He was starving now. His time in Special Forces, when he could exist on hardly any food for days at a time, was only a distant memory. As he sat at the kitchen table downing a bowl of oatmeal, he thought about what he had just done and what might have happened if some homeowner had spotted him and called the police. But nobody did, which proved to his satisfaction that some murderous individual had made the same trek through the trees.
It was around nine when he got Bart on the phone. “You working today?” Sid asked.
“What do you think?”
“I think you’re probably pulling your hair out trying to get a handle on this case.”
“Are you peddling handles?”
Sid laughed. “I might be.”
He told Bart what he had done and the information the store clerk had given him.
“You realize if we’d gotten a call, you and Jaz both would now be persons of interest.”
“I know. And I know it’s long odds, but this guy could be your man.”
“So all I have to do is find a black guy wearing a black outfit, squinty eyes, glasses, and a wide mouth, smoking Salems, and I’ve got my murderer.”
Sid’s voice had a cheerless ring to it. “You’re hard as a walnut this morning, Bart. Must have been a rough night.”
“Yeah. We walked our asses off and talked our heads off in that neighborhood. Checked tree lines and sight lines and came up with nothing. Your market boy must only work mornings because he wasn’t there for us.”
“Most likely. He said he opens at seven o’clock six days a week.”
“I don’t want to sound ungrateful, buddy, but it’ll take a lot more than that sighting to pin the tail on this donkey.”
Chapter 16
They met at the bank’s main office in a downtown high-rise. Hattie Jordan unlocked the door to let them in.
“Hi, Sid, good to see you again,” she said with her usual exuberance.
She opened her arms and Sid moved into her embrace, remembering she was a major league hugger. He’d only seen her a couple of times but knew all about her from Jaz.
Hattie reached out with one arm and pulled Jaz in. “Don’t think you’re gonna get left out, girl.”
“I didn’t expect to,” Jaz said, grinning. “Lead us to your lair.”
They followed her down a long corridor to an office labeled security, where she slid her badge through a card reader and opened the door. The room held several desks and banks of monitor screens. A young man in slacks and an open-collared dress shirt sat in front of a computer.
“Hi, John,” Hattie said, “what’s up?”
“All quiet on the western front,” he said without looking up.
“Let’s stir things up then. Meet my friends Jaz LeMieux and Sid Chance, private investigators par excellence.”
The young man spun around in his chair, stood, and stuck out his hand. “Glad to meet you.”
“Don’t let us disturb you,” Sid said as he shook hands.
“You don’t know disturbance until Hattie Jordan gets on your case.” He grinned as he said it.
“Back to your knitting,” Hattie said. “We got work to do.”
She led them over to a console where she consulted a directory and pulled up the Green Hills Branch cameras on a screen. She punched in an ID and the view outside the drive-in window appeared.
“This is a live view,” Hattie said. She pointed to a light pole in the background. “That would be the alley there, wouldn’t it?”
“Right,” Jaz said. “If the car turned away from Hillsboro Pike, we should be able to see the license plate.”
Sid rubbed his beard. “I’d think that would be his
choice, taking the less traveled route out of there. Lower the odds of being noticed.”
“But the license plate image won’t be very big, and these videos are compressed, so they get distorted when you do much enlarging.” Hattie started typing on the keyboard. “They’re backed up daily. Let me put in last Monday’s date and we’ll start at three o’clock.”
After a couple of false starts, a picture appeared with the date-time stamp showing 15:00:00, three p.m. on the 24-hour clock. A car sat beside the ATM. Hattie began scrolling forward slowly and the car moved out of view. After a lull period, three vehicles in succession shuffled up to the drive-in window, paused, then moved on. When a car suddenly appeared beyond the driveway in the alley, she slammed her finger onto the keyboard and the video paused.
“It was black,” Jaz said from a chair beside Hattie. “But it’s already gone.”
Sid leaned forward over her shoulder. “Hardly slowed when he got to the street.”
“Okay,” Hattie said, “let’s back up.”
The picture began reversing, frame by frame. The car slowly backed into view. When it reached the point where the rear bumper showed squarely, Hattie hit pause again.
“There you go. You can see the tag, but you can’t read it. Let’s enlarge it a bit.”
She kept hitting a key to enlarge and shifting the picture to keep the license centered. When it got large enough to see detail on the plate, the image was too distorted to read the letters and numbers. The colored squares on the right edge looked like the state and county decals that would show the year on Tennessee plates.
Hattie replayed the scene backward and forward again. A few frames caught the driver looking to the left before he entered the street. He had a full head of black hair and a beard to match. Sid thought he looked white but well-tanned. One thing appeared certain. The car was a black 2011 Ford Fusion. The time stamp showed 15:24:34.
“If you’ll put that sequence on a disk,” Sid said, “I’ll see if Agent Eggers can help us out. The FBI has a program to enhance moving images. Maybe it can make the license number readable.”
The Good, The Bad and The Murderous (Sid Chance Myseries Book 2) Page 9