Dead Center (The Still Waters Suspense Series Book 2)

by Dawn Lee McKenna

  “What’s Michael’s last name?’ Evan asked, as he heard Goff’s pen scratching beside him.

  “Pittfield,” she answered. “But they’re doing great. I mean, great. They’re getting…planning on getting married.” Evan saw her hands start to shake as she lifted them to her face, but she didn’t cry.

  “What about family? Does she have family here?” he asked her.

  Carrie took her hands down and stared at the table. “Her mom passed away three years ago. Breast cancer. She doesn’t have a relationship with her father. But, um, she has an aunt. In Pensacola.”

  “We’ll need to know how to get in touch with her, just in case she’s not in Tina’s phone contacts.”

  “She is, but I have it, too,” Carrie said. She rubbed at her face like she was chasing away the last cobwebs of sleep. “Okay, wait. What actually happened? What happened to her?”

  “It looks like she was attacked as she was getting into her car,” Evan said. “She was stabbed.”

  Carrie covered her mouth, and tears appeared suddenly and slid down her cheeks. “Oh my—oh, Tina.” She shook her head and swiped at the tears. “Did you catch the guy?”

  “Not yet,” Evan said quietly.

  “Well, I mean—did somebody see it happen? Do you know who did it?”

  “No,” Evan said. “We do have some witnesses who might have heard something, but the camera by the back door was disabled.”

  “Wait!” she exclaimed. “There was something, but it, well it ended up being nothing.”

  “What’s that?” Evan asked.

  “Well, she lost her wallet,” Carrie answered. “This was…maybe a week and a half ago? She had to cancel all her cards, get a new license, everything. And then a few days later, she found it in her trunk. Her trunk’s a mess, you know, all kinds of beach gear and her gym stuff and everything. It was in there. But I guess somebody could have stolen it and put it back, right? No, that doesn’t actually make sense. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay. Everything is worth looking at,” Evan told her. “We want to make sure that whoever did this to her is punished.”

  The girl nodded at a space beyond Evan, maybe beyond the room.

  “Carrie, do you know a man by the name of Jake Bellamy?” Evan asked.

  She thought about it a moment, then shook her head. “No.”

  “Do you remember Tina ever mentioning the name, or someone named Jake?”

  “No. Why? Do you think he’s the one who hurt her?”

  “No, but we’re looking at a few different things.”

  “I don’t understand,” she said, her voice rising an octave. “Who is he?”

  “He’s someone else who was hurt recently,” Evan said vaguely. “I’m sorry, but it’s not something we can really go into at the moment.”

  She looked like she was about to ask again, but she stopped, mouth open, and then seemed to shift her focus.

  “Where is she? Somebody should be with her!”

  Carrie moved as though to stand, and Evan put a hand on her shoulder, but just barely.

  “Our people are with her right now. We’re taking care of her, I promise,” Evan assured her. “Ma’am, do you have someplace you can go, where someone can be with you?”

  She looked alarmed. “Do you think he’d come here?”

  “It’s unlikely, ma’am. But you’ve just had a big shock and you shouldn’t be here alone.”

  “We’re also going to need to take a look at her room, her things,” Evan added. “You can stay here for that if you’re more comfortable, but it might be easier for you if you didn’t.”

  Carrie’s eyes darted around the room for a few seconds. “I can go to my sister’s house. She and her husband live in Apalach.”

  “Would you like to call her?’ Evan asked. “Then if you want, we can have someone follow you there. For your own peace of mind.”

  “Okay. I guess.” She looked around the room. “I need to…I need to take some stuff for work. I go in at seven, and I’m not sure I’ll be able to call out.”

  “Where do you work?”

  “The hospital,” she answered. “I’m a NICU nurse.”

  “Would you like me to call someone, your supervisor?” Evan asked her.

  She shook her head. “No, I’ll do it. They’ll let me call out if they can. It’s just that we’re shorthanded.”

  Evan nodded. “Okay.”

  He waited as Carrie stared at her hands, folded in front of her on the table. He gave her a minute to say whatever she was thinking to say.

  She didn’t look at him when she finally spoke. “Did she suffer? Do you think she had time to be scared?”

  Evan saw a tear drip onto the back of her hand.

  “I think it was over very quickly,” he answered, and hoped that it was mostly true.

  Half an hour later, Carrie had packed an overnight bag. Evan watched her back out of her driveway and head toward 98, an SO cruiser behind her. She’d held it together really well, and Evan imagined she was probably a pretty good nurse to have around in a crisis.

  She’d shown Evan which of Tina Vicaro’s keys went to the front door of the house, then shown him to her room. Then she was gone, leaving Evan and Goff, standing like home invaders in the center of a dead girl’s room.

  “I could get by on my pension ’til my social security kicks in,” Goff said quietly, picking up a stuffed elephant from Tina’s nightstand.

  “I thought you didn’t want to retire,” Evan said half-heartedly.

  “Some days I do.” Goff put the stuffed animal down.

  The room, like the rest of the house, was simply furnished with mostly older furniture, but it was clean and cheerful and almost offensive in light of what had happened to its occupant. Every time he came to a scene like this, Evan always wondered if the person had had some inkling, something, even an unexplained goosebump, that hinted they would never be back. It amazed him, really, that most often, people were oblivious to their own mortality, their own bad luck, right up until they were looking straight at it. He supposed it was a blessing, but sometimes, when he thought about it, it made him nervous.

  It took Evan and Goff less than forty minutes to collect Tina’s laptop, her iPad, a notebook that was half-journal, half-drawing pad, several bank and credit card statements, and a small recent-looking photo album, the kind that drugstores and online places put together.

  Evan locked the door behind them as they left. The sky was just turning pink, and there was a light breeze coming from the west. It was going to be a beautiful day.

  TWELVE

  BEFORE HEADING TO THE SO, Evan had stopped by his boat for a quick shower, shave, and coffee. A violent murder in a quiet town like Port St. Joe strained the resources of any law enforcement community under the best circumstances, but a second murder compounded those demands exponentially.

  In the public’s eyes, a second murder, especially one as seemingly random as this, suggested the possibility of an imminent third murder, and a fourth. It was no longer good enough just to solve the case, Evan and his team had to solve it quickly, and Evan felt the pressure of it almost physically, like the building of a good swell behind him. He knew cops who, under the gun on a case, did better by going without sleep, decent food, or a break. Evan responded in the opposite way; he needed order, routine, and certain physical standards in order to think more clearly.

  Goff had headed straight to the SO with all the materials he and Evan had collected at Tina Vicaro’s home. Sgt. Peters was manning the station, working on the end of shift report.

  Barely two hours after leaving Tina Vicaro’s home, Evan had assembled a dozen deputies and PSJ Police officers in the SO’s small conference room. Goff had been busy collecting and organizing photos of their two victims as well as anyone closely associated with either. These he had pinned to the large corkboard on the wall. He had grouped the pictures to indicate which persons were associated with which victims.

  The Bellamy murder had
dominated the headlines since Saturday, so everyone in the room already knew his face well. Evan wanted the task force, which had doubled in number overnight, to be equally familiar with every other face connected to their investigation. PSJ’s population was small enough and friendly enough, that it would be almost impossible for any individual in town to go unrecognized by at least one deputy or officer in a room full of them. It was Evan’s hope that his team’s familiarity with the local faces would help connect the two victims in ways that he as an outsider might miss, no matter how focused he tried to be.

  He started to present a quick rundown of the new murder for the officers and deputies who had not been to the crime scene. Halfway through the details they were able to get from the scene, Evan noticed two officers visibly shaken by the news of Tina Vicaro’s murder. One PSJ officer coughed loudly, though the cough was obviously a cover for some less-manly noise, then excused himself and disappeared into the hall.

  Evan watched him go, and suddenly felt guilty for not notifying the officers of the victim’s identity before placing them all in a room with her picture tacked to the wall at the center of a murder investigation. In his haste to get on top of the case, Evan hadn’t considered that any of his deputies, or the PSJ officers, might actually be close to the new victim.

  It took Evan only half a second to realize he had stopped talking. Before anyone else noticed, Goff stepped in and completed the case summary. “We can’t say for certain that one case has got anything to do with the other, but it don’t take a federal agent to figure they’re connected. We’ve got similar looking knife wounds. We won’t know for sure until the ME, or someone who actually works at the ME’s office, has a look at it, but we’re guessing same man, same knife.”

  Goff rubbed at his mustache, smoothing down the silver-dusted whiskers, then looked back up at the room.

  “Both attacks were brutal, violent, out in the open. No attempt to hide the body, no obvious robbery. Neither victim seems the type to make enemies, but somebody was madder than hell and took it out on them.” He motioned to the photos on the wall. “We’ve got to figure out why. We’ve got to figure out what connects these two.”

  “What if nothing connects them?” a voice called from the back of the room. “What if it’s just some random slasher?” It was a young guy from PD.

  Evan saw the corner of Goff’s jaw tighten. Nobody wanted the focus to go in that direction. He answered for Goff. “That would be a much less likely scenario. The timing and location of these attacks suggest the killer intentionally targeted these two victims.” Evan paused, then added, “The violence of the attacks leads me to believe he has a lot of rage. That type of rage feeds on itself, feeds on violence. Whoever did this was angry with these two people specifically.”

  Evan let his words settle, then turned and nodded to Goff. Goff hefted a stack of hastily stuffed manila folders.

  “Pass these around; everybody take one.,” Goff said. “I’ve been running since before the rooster and haven’t even had a chance to straighten my shorts yet, so don’t expect those files to be in any sort of order, but everything you’ll need is in there. I got guest records and an employee list from the hotel, phone records from about ten different phones, Jake’s client list, Tina’s Face Plant friends, Jake’s coworkers, Tina’s coworkers…just about every possible way these two could have crossed paths. Each folder has an assignment. Somebody’s gonna get the video from the hotel, somebody’s gonna get phone numbers to cross-reference. Don’t be choosy, just take whichever lands in your lap, and get to work.”

  “Please, though,” Evan interjected, “do let Vi know which assignment you pulled.”

  Goff nodded at him, then turned back to the crew. “Be thorough but do it quick-like. We don’t have room on this wall for too many more photos.”

  Evan didn’t want to go back to the Bellamy home. Telling someone their loved one was dead, and became so violently, was bad enough. Going back to ask uncomfortable questions about that loved one seemed worse, at least to Evan.

  He had called ahead, and Karen Bellamy had apparently been watching out the living room window for him. She was standing at the front door when he parked at the curb. The driveway held three cars in addition to those that belonged to the Bellamys.

  She stepped back and made room for him to come inside. Evan noticed that she looked ten years older than she had just a few days before. New lines circled her eyes and etched her forehead. The shadows beneath her eyes testified to a lack of sleep.

  Evan heard several voices, adults and children, coming from the back of the house as Karen led him into the living room. Karen noticed him noticing.

  “My mom and sister are here, and Jake’s brother and sister-in-law.” She gestured for Evan to sit in the same chair he’d occupied on his first visit to the home.

  Evan sat and leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. “Would you like one of them to come in here with you?”

  She sat down, knees together, hands folded tightly in her lap. “Do I need them to? I mean, should I?”

  “That’s up to you, Karen. I’m just suggesting it in case you’d be more comfortable, but I do have some sensitive questions to ask you,” he said. “Just so you know.”

  She thought about it for just a few seconds. “I think I’d prefer to talk alone.”

  “Okay.” Evan pulled out his notebook. “Karen, do you know a woman named Tina Vicaro?”

  She seemed startled by the question, and she gave it some thought. “No, I don’t think so.”

  He pulled out his phone, with the picture of Tina’s driver’s license. “Do you recognize this woman? Have you seen her anywhere?”

  Karen took his phone and studied the picture. Evan guiltily saw the shadow pass over her face, saw her notice how young and how pretty Tina Vicaro had been.

  She shook her head finally. “No, I’m almost positive.” She handed the phone back to Evan. “Why? Who is she?”

  “She was attacked and killed leaving her work last night,” Evan answered quietly.

  “The same as Jake?”

  “Pretty much, yes,” Evan answered. “Did you and your husband ever stay at the Mainstay Suites over by the hospital? Maybe when you were visiting or looking for a new home?”

  She was shaking her head before he finished. “No. We came every weekend for almost a month when we were looking for this house, but we had a vacation rental. The company paid for it.”

  Evan made a note, though he really didn’t need to. “Did your husband ever come here alone? Maybe for an interview with Seminole?”

  “No. We came with him.”

  “And you stayed at the vacation rental that time?”

  “Yes,” she answered. Her hands twisted in her lap. “Can you—why are you asking?”

  “Well, Port St. Joe isn’t exactly a hotbed of murder, or violent crime, for that matter,” he answered. “Now we have two murders, with a number of similarities, so we have to assume it’s likely there’s some connection.”

  “Between the victims, you mean.” Her voice had gone flat.

  “Yes.”

  Karen Bellamy took a long, even breath, then let it out slowly. “Well, she might belong to our church, I don’t know. Or be a client. But I don’t know her personally.” She sat up a bit straighter. “And I don’t think Jake did, either.”

  “Karen, understand that I’m not implying there was anything untoward going on, or that Jake was doing anything wrong at all,” Evan said gently. “They might have gone to the same gym, or they might even both know the attacker without knowing each other. But there’s almost certainly something that ties them together.”

  That wasn’t completely true; the most likely connection was some kind of relationship, and either someone in Jake’s life objecting, or someone in Tina’s. However, that wasn’t a fact, as yet, and Evan didn’t like the idea that he might well be planting a hurtful untruth in her mind.

  “Sheriff Caldwell,” she said after a moment. “I know
fidelity isn’t very popular, and I’m sure you see a lot of cheating spouses in your line of work. But Jake and I were best friends as well as a couple. I knew his character.”

  “I understand,” Evan replied quietly. “Please understand that these are questions I have to ask.”

  After a moment, she nodded.

  “Karen, did your husband have a computer at home?”

  “He has a laptop.”

  “I’d like to borrow it for a couple of days. We might be able to find something there that will tell us why he was targeted.”

  “Like what?”

  Evan shook his head. “We don’t know. An argument with someone in an online group, an email that seems threatening or angry; we won’t know until we see it. If we see anything.”

  “Okay,” she said, but he knew she was offended.

  She stood up. “It’s in the den. I’ll go get it.”

  Evan stood and remained standing after she’d gone. He tucked his notebook and pen back in his blazer pocket, then turned around and found himself facing a small console table. On top were several framed photos of Jake Bellamy. His wife and kids were in all of them. Evan had to admit the man looked content to be where he was in those pictures. Evan had noticed sometimes, that a subject was wearing a big smile in a picture, but their eyes looked like their mind was somewhere else. He didn’t see that in Jake Bellamy’s photographs, and while the lack of a relationship between Bellamy and Tina Vicaro would make his job harder, he hoped, for Karen Bellamy’s sake, that he didn’t find one.

  “Here you go,” Karen said behind him.

  She held out a modest, black 17-inch HP. Its power cable was looped in a bundle on top. Evan took it from her.

  “The password is ‘Bahamababy2002’,” she said. She gave him a small smile. “Our honeymoon. He wasn’t exactly secretive.”

  Evan nodded, almost apologetically he hoped. “Thank you.”

  He tucked the laptop under one arm and held out a hand. She took it, and her grip was firm without making a point. “Thank you, Karen. I’ll let you know as soon as we know anything important.”