“Let me get this straight. You go to a bar and find out that your father is at the Holiday Inn lounge with a private investigator from Columbus. But you aren’t really concerned about that until you find out that the investigator happens to be some attractive woman and all of a sudden you can’t wait to check her out? Is that what I’m supposed to believe?”
“Jesus, when you put it like that, it sounds like I’m some kinda psycho! Like all I care about is chasing tail.”
“That’s why this doesn’t make any sense. I think you came solely for the purpose of finding out about the case. But before you could get anywhere, your father ran you off.”
“Not true.”
“I’m not believing you for a second. So level with me, Mark. You are very curious about this case, aren’t you? And it just so happens that since you and your dad don’t get along you figured you’d work around him with hopes that I might give something up about the case in the process. Isn’t that what really was going on last night?”
“Why in the hell would you think that?”
“Tell me this: when did you wreck your car?”
“A couple of weeks ago. How did you know I wrecked it?”
“Your dad told me—after I asked him why you were driving one of the sheriff department’s patrol cars.”
“I see. I guess that would be a reasonable question. So now that you know why I’m driving it, why do I have a feeling there’s more to this?”
“Were you by any chance driving this patrol car out on the west side the morning that Jodi Wilburn was murdered?”
“Hell no! Is that what this is all about? You think I might have killed her? That’s ridiculous!”
“I didn’t say that. I was just asking you a question. Your reaction is rather interesting, however.”
“Listen here. I was not driving this car anywhere near the Wilburn’s that day and I did not kill her. Period. What else was I supposed to think when you asked that question? My reaction was what anybody’s would be after being falsely accused.”
“But I didn’t ask if you were out by the Wilburns that day, Mark. I just asked if you were out on the west side. You’re the one who filled in the blanks. And frankly, that’s a problem.”
“You’re worse than some lawyer with your fancy talk. Shouldn’t be surprised, your uncle being a big time lawyer and all. What if I told you I can prove I was no where around the Wilburn’s that day? Would that satisfy you?”
“It wouldn’t hurt. I’m listening.”
“I was showing a house that morning. In town. I have a client who can vouch for me.”
“Wonderful. And how long were you with this client?”
“From about 10:00 AM until 11:00 or so.”
“And after that?”
“I went home. So there’s no way I could have murdered Jodi Wilburn.”
“How can you be so sure? Do you know what time she was murdered?”
“Not exactly, but definitely before I’d have enough time to drive out there to do it.”
“What if I told you the estimated time of death was between ten and noon? That would give you enough time to drive out after you left your client to murder Jodi.”
“Jesus, you sound like my goddamn father!”
“What do you mean by that?”
Amanda immediately sensed that he regretted his outburst.
“I mean, the bastard never believes a fucking thing I say! Just one of the many reasons I hate him.”
“Are you saying he thinks you may have murdered Jodi?”
Foley didn’t reply right away. Amanda thought he might be debating whether or not to give up something he was holding back.
“Yeah,” he finally said.
He drew in a deep breath. “Ain’t that a bitch? To think that my own father could actually believe I robbed and murdered somebody? He’s pathetic, but there you go. And no matter how hard I’ve tried to convince him I didn’t do it, he fucking won’t believe me. Screw him.”
“Why is he so convinced you did it? He must have some reason to think that.”
“It all started when one of the Wilburn’s neighbors told him they spotted a sheriff patrol car around the time of the murder. Dad thought this was unlikely so he checked with the deputies working that day and not a one of them had been on patrol out there. So he immediately thinks it was me who the neighbor had seen, since I’ve been borrowing this cruiser. And after I denied it was me, that started the ball rolling.
“I have a gambling problem, or at least he thinks I have a gambling problem. Like everything else with Pops, that’s bullshit, too. At any rate, he figures in his infinite wisdom that I needed money to pay off my supposed huge gambling debts so that’s why I went to the Wilburn house—to steal this small fortune that was stashed away in her house. So I asked him how in the hell he thinks I could have known she had all that loot there when nobody else in this whole town knew about it? Well, he didn’t have an answer for that. But he thinks I somehow found out and that was my motive.
“So I said to him, ‘what about Nick Wilburn, Pops? He’s the only other one who knew about that money and there’s a ton of other evidence that proves he’s the one who did this. And you even keep insisting to everybody that Nick’s the one who did it. So what gives?’ That’s when he told me that he’s been accusing Nick to help save my ass. When he told me that, I about cracked up. I told him ‘you don’t need to do me any favors, Pops because I didn’t do it.’”
Amanda’s wheels were turning. Suddenly it all made sense. Why the sheriff was so hell-bent on arresting Nick for this crime. Why he was doing everything in his power to keep anybody from discovering the truth. To cover for his son, whom he believes is the real culprit.
Blood is thicker than water.
What wasn’t clear was why the sheriff was so worried about his son being caught. There wasn’t a shred of evidence Amanda knew of that incriminated him, except for his shaky alibi and the fact that one of the neighbors had spotted a sheriff’s department patrol car in the area around the same time Jodi was murdered. Has the sheriff been tampering with the evidence all this time to avoid something incriminating being found? That might explain why he kept showing up at the scene of the murder. He knows his son did it and has been making damn sure that nobody finds out.
“So how bad is your gambling problem, Mark?”
“Not bad enough to make me a murderer,” he replied. “I’ll admit I owe some money to some people. But it’s nothing that can’t be worked out eventually. Pops is just pissed off with me and won’t front me any more money. That’s what this is all about. He says he’s been enabling my gambling addiction by bailing me out all those times in the past. Then the bastard suddenly cuts me off. And now he thinks I can’t handle this myself so I’ve decided to rob and kill to pay off my debts before somebody puts out a death warrant on my ass if I don’t pay them back. Shit, he doesn’t have an ounce of faith in me.”
“How well did you know Jodi Wilburn?”
“Never met the woman in my life, and that’s the god’s honest truth. She was at least ten years older than me and living with her husband all that time. I never ran into her in town and didn’t even know what she looked like until the story ran in the newspaper. She lived in the sticks—I never go out to the west side unless I’m going fishing in the lake out there. Nope, didn’t know her at all.”
“If you didn’t know Jodi, then how do you know her friends so well?”
“Oh, you mean Summer and them? I used to go out with Summer’s younger sister in high school so I knew her from that. Summer and her friends are pretty much regulars in the bar scene so I doubt there’s anyone in this town that doesn’t know them.”
“And all this time you never once met Jodi in the bars?”
“Nope.”
Although this seemed hard to believe, Amanda supposed it was possible. From what she’d learned, Jodi didn’t go bar hopping nearly as often as the rest of the girls did.
“What about
Nick? Did you know him?”
“Met him at King’s Toyota when I was car shopping a while back, but that’s it. Tried to talk me into trading in my classic ‘Vette for one of those rice-burning Jap cars if you can believe that. Told him I wasn’t interested.”
“What I’m having trouble wrapping my head around is why your father seems so sure you committed this crime, Mark. If everything you say is true, it doesn’t appear he has much to go on. How do you explain that?”
“I probably shouldn’t be telling you this but what the hell? When you’re innocent, you have nothing to hide, right? Come with me and I’ll show you something.”
He opened the jeep door and got out and Amanda followed suit. He walked around to the front of the patrol car and waited for her to catch up.
“See that?” he said. He was pointing to a dent on the right side of the bumper.
“That dent? What about it?”
“Look close and tell me what you see.”
Amanda knelt down and examined the bump.
“Looks like gray paint,” she said.
“What color is Jodi Wilburn’s house?”
Amanda thought back. “Gray—similar to this.”
“My father thinks it’s an exact match. And that it got there when I hit the side of the Wilburn house during my alleged crime.”
“But that’s not what happened?”
“Of course not. That dent was already there when he loaned this car to me. He says it wasn’t. So then I told him to check and see if the color matches up to the paint on the Wilburn house since he didn’t believe me. We went out there together and compared them side-by-side. I thought the color of the house was at least a shade darker; he of course disagreed and thought they matched. He even pointed out the place where I probably hit the house—an area where the wood was all really scuffed up. Shit, the whole edge of the house had dings and scrapes all over it, so that didn’t prove nothin.’ But try telling my old man that.”
“So why does your father have it out for you, then? Because if everything you’ve told me is true, he must have some major reason for his refusal to believe you.”
“It’s always been this way. Ever since I was in middle school Pops has thought of me as the black sheep in the family. I got into a lot of trouble with the law back then—breaking and entering, drinking, shoplifting, vandalism—that sort of thing. So I was an embarrassment to him. I was Mark Foley, the sheriff’s juvenile delinquent son.
“My big sister on the other hand was another story altogether. Made straight A’s, never got in any trouble and was the apple of the old man’s eye. The sun rose and set in her—still does for that matter. So there you go. I was cursed from the moment I became an adolescent.”
“Hmm. Does anybody else know he suspects you in this case?”
“No way—this is just between him and me. He has done a great job of keeping me out of the investigation altogether.”
“I’m wondering, why are you telling me all of this, Mark?”
“I don’t know, I guess I thought you might want to know that Nick Wilburn isn’t the only suspect in this case. And that my father is a corrupt cop. And if this somehow backfires on me, maybe you’ll testify on my behalf that we had this little conversation.”
Amanda wasn’t sure what to say. She already knew that his father was a self-righteous, dishonest law officer but he was no idiot. The fact he was convinced that his own son robbed and murdered Jodi Wilburn was compelling and not something to take lightly. It was possible that Mark was diluting the facts in an attempt to appear innocent when he was in fact guilty. There was more than he was letting on. Otherwise it just didn’t make sense that a father would accuse his son of such a heinous crime without being convinced it was true.
Funny thing was, Amanda almost believed Mark Foley. She wasn’t sure why, but there was something so unusual and unbelievable about this whole situation that it might actually be true. One thing was for certain: Mark had nothing to gain and everything to lose by telling her what she had just heard.
“Can you think of anyone who may have murdered Jodi, Mark?”
He snickered. “Sure—Nick did it. The ex-husband is always the guilty one. It’s a no-brainer.”
Amanda wanted to punch him for saying that. She somehow managed to remain cool as she drew in a deep breath.
“I have to go,” she said.
And with that she turned and walked away, got into the Jeep and left Mark Foley standing there in the middle of the road.
CHAPTER 16
Alan paid Rachel for house-sitting, made a pot of strong coffee and plopped down on the recliner. Pan jumped up and joined him, happy to have her master back home.
He picked up his iPad and began reading the new ebook he had recently downloaded. Five minutes later he shut it off, realizing that he was totally unable to concentrate. He stared at the device and thought of how much the world had changed in the last decade or so since technology had taken the driver’s seat and now dictated how the world turned and people lived. Virtually gone were the days of payphones, a real human voice at the other end of the line at Sears, and warm, fuzzy chats with the neighbors. Smart phones and the internet had put an end to all of that. Humans continued drifting further and further away from each other while the world became smaller and smaller. The irony was almost comical.
And as much as he appreciated the good things that technology afforded, it seemed the bad things outnumbered them by a margin of at least two to one. Bad news from any place on the globe popped up on the screen within seconds of inception thanks to a battery of satellites orbiting the earth and an infinite number of invisible “wireless” signals darting all around. Good news on the other hand traveled much slower with a lot less frequency. The old saying, “no news is good news,” was now the journalist’s credo. No one was particularly interested in hearing the good news going on in the world. But bad news? It got lapped up quicker than desert sand sucks up a drop of water.
He thought of today’s youth and how much their worlds differed from his own when he was a kid. He grew up with a clunky three-pound landline phone, a square-screened TV with maybe a dozen channels to choose from and spent most of his quality time outdoors, tooling around the neighborhood on his bike. The kids today seemed to emerge from the womb clutching a Kindle or a smart phone in their tiny hands. They preferred pecking a miniscule simulated keyboard on a tiny screen to actually speaking into a phone to their friends. You’d think the phone had been invented before the telegraph. Like, why talk when you can tap out Morse code instead?
Alan sighed, fully aware of what had brought on this grim outlook on today’s society. Ever since Ron Fleming had told him Gracie’s story, he hadn’t been able to stop thinking about it. He tried to imagine what it would be like to have a child swept away by some scumbag to be rented out or sold as a sex slave to perverted old men. Or women. Or to be forced into sex acts while some sick fuck videotaped the action and sold it to a bunch of insatiable pedophiles.
The limitless growth in technology was to blame for much of this activity. The internet was an enormous enabler. With its seemingly endless multimedia offerings the monsters who controlled the sex market had a worldwide forum in which to pander and sell their products. Innocent kids became helpless victims by engaging in social media and opening the door to predators in search of raw materials for their trade.
And because the online sex market was so profitable, predators stopped at nothing to snatch up fresh young bodies to stock their warehouses. Young kids like Gracie Mueller.
If he had a young daughter and something similar happened to her, what would he do? Would he be able to just stand by while the police searched the streets trying to locate her before it was too late? Hell no. He’d draw his final breath trying to find her. Do everything in his power to get her back safe and alive.
So was it any wonder why Ron Fleming did what he did? He knew that the authorities couldn’t possibly move quick enough to save an abducted c
hild. It wasn’t their fault, it was just the way things go in our bureaucratic world. Fleming didn’t give a rat’s ass if what he was doing was illegal or that he was invading some asshole’s right to privacy. What mattered was to get the job done as quickly and efficiently as possible to save a child. Period.
Now Alan was in a position to be a part of Fleming’s crusade. And he was looking forward to it.
He checked the time. Just past noon. He decided to take Pan for a walk to clear his head. He got to his feet, and stared down at his furry little friend.
“Wanna go for a walk?”
Pan barked and excitedly led Alan to her leash.
It was sunny and comfortable so he opted to take the long route. Breathing in the fresh air, he wondered how Amanda was doing in Milldale and if she had found out any more about the sheriff’s son. He wasn’t thrilled that she had crossed him by casing out the sheriff but he couldn’t really be angry with her. She was a big girl and could take care of herself. And the last thing he wanted was for her to feel suffocated in their budding partnership.
He resisted the urge to take out his cell to call her and realized he hadn’t heard from Charlie since he’d sent him Jodi’s laptop computer. He would call them both when he got home. Right now he needed to forget all of these distractions and enjoy his walk.
Later that evening he finished dinner, rinsed off the dishes and put them in the dishwasher. After pouring himself a cup of fresh Kona, he went into the office and sat down in front of his iMac. Taking out the flash drive Ron Fleming had given him, he plugged it into his keyboard and waited for the computer to boot up.
He had called Amanda and learned about her conversation with Mark Foley. Like Amanda, he doubted that Foley was the one who had murdered Jodi. It just didn’t fit, despite the fact that Foley’s old man thought otherwise. Either there was a more to the story than the younger Foley knew about or he was holding something back.
Whatever the situation was, Alan was not feeling any better about the Wilburn case. If the sheriff’s son was indeed not guilty, the evidence pointed back to Nick. In his frustration, he gave Charlie a call, hoping to hear some promising news. As it turned out, Charlie had not yet had enough time to give Jodi’s laptop a thorough going over. He promised to finish it tonight and contact Alan the moment he was done.
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