Dead Center (The Still Waters Suspense Series Book 2)

by Dawn Lee McKenna

  “Thank you.”

  She preceded Evan to the door and let him out. It had gotten back up into the forties or fifties, and he took in a great lungful of the fresh air, relieved to be back outside, away from Karen Bellamy’s pain and any part he was playing in it.

  When he got to his vehicle, she was still in the doorway, staring at something across the street. When he looked, he saw a couple in their sixties or seventies, in the driveway of a neat, ranch-style home. The husband was putting two overnight bags in the trunk of a late-model Toyota sedan, and the wife was slapping him on the shoulder. They were both laughing.

  When Evan turned back to the front door, Karen Bellamy was gone.

  He got back to the SO at just past noon. He checked Tina Vicaro’s laptop and both victims’ cell phones out of evidence and carried them and Bellamy’s laptop with him as he entered Vi’s office. Vi was out to lunch, apparently. He closed his office door behind him, set the laptops and phone on his desk, and set aside his paper files before sitting down in his chair.

  He pulled out his cell and called Goff. Goff answered on the first ring.

  “Goff,” he said.

  “Goff, where are you right now?”

  “My desk.”

  “Could you come to my office for a few minutes? I’ve got something for you.”

  “Is it lunch, or should I bring mine with me?”

  “It’s not lunch. Feel free to bring yours.”

  A couple of minutes later, Goff gave one knock and then walked into the office. He held a legal pad in one hand and an old-fashioned lunch box in the other, one of those with the domed lid that held a metal thermos.

  “Hey, Goff, have a seat,” Evan said, opening the plastic envelope that contained Tina Vicaro’s laptop. “Just move those files over so you have room to eat.”

  “I’m almost afraid to eat in here, clean as this desk is,” Goff said, sitting down.

  “I eat in here all the time,” Evan said.

  “Yeah, but you eat like an elderly British lady,” Goff countered.

  “What do you mean?”

  “If you’ve ever dripped Miracle Whip anywhere, I wasn’t there to see it.”

  Evan tossed him a look. Goff ignored it, flipping the clasp on his lunch box. He took out the metal thermos, then smiled at his lunch.

  “My bride takes good care of me,” Goff said. “Never the same thing twice in a row.” He unscrewed the cap on his Thermos, and a fragrant steam crept out of it. “Nothing for a cold day like tomato soup and a tuna fish sandwich.” He looked up at Evan. “Ya eat yet? There’s plenty.”

  Evan couldn’t help smiling. He’d never met anyone more comfortable in his own skin. “No, thanks, you go ahead,” Evan answered. “I grabbed something on the way back,” he fibbed.

  Goff unfolded a paper placemat with a Christmas tree design and placed a low, square piece of Tupperware on it. Then he pulled out a matching napkin and stuck it into his collar. Once it was situated, he took out a small piece of notepaper, unfolded it, and smiled as he read a few words. Then he bowed his head for just a second before opening the container. The sandwich was wrapped in wax paper, with a couple of pieces of iceberg lettuce on the outside. Goff tucked them into his sandwich and took a bite.

  “How long have you been married, Goff?” Evan asked.

  Goff chewed and swallowed before answering. “Gonna be forty years in July. Got married right outa high school.”

  “That’s impressive.”

  “Nothing to it,” Goff answered. “Long as you’re married to my wife.”

  Evan had met Goff’s wife once. She wasn’t five feet tall, and she was even skinnier than Goff. She wore her long, graying red hair in a frizzy braid that hung down her bony back and not an ounce of makeup, but he’d seen Goff watching her like she was a supermodel. It was at that moment that Evan had decided Goff might be one of the better men he’d ever met.

  “So, what have you got for me?” Goff asked.

  “I got Bellamy’s laptop from his wife,” Evan said. “She doesn’t have any idea who Tina Vicaro is, and she’s pretty convincing in her belief that Bellamy didn’t know her, either. But there’s got to be a connection somewhere, even if it’s innocent.”

  “Okay,” Goff said, polishing off the first half of his sandwich.

  “I’m going to go through their laptops, try to find some communication between them, or barring that, shared Facebook friends, common online groups, something. I’ll also look through her stuff to see what I can find out about her boyfriend and their relationship. Any luck with him?”

  “Yep. Caught him at work,” Goff answered. “He works over at the electric company. Says he was home in bed when Tina was killed. Nobody to corroborate, so we’ll have to keep looking at him. Seems like a decent sort, although I’ve been wrong before.”

  “How’d he seem about Tina’s death?”

  “Pretty genuinely wrecked.” Goff took a sip of his soup. The bottom of his mustache came back trimmed in red. “But like I said, I’ve been fooled before.”

  “Where are you going next with him?”

  “Got an appointment at two to talk to her aunt, see what she knows about their relationship. She got in from Pensacola little bit ago, but she’s going to the morgue. Insisted. I offered to go with her, but she said no.”

  Evan nodded. “Okay. Meyers and Crenshaw still talking to her contacts?”

  “Yep. So far, nothing. Nobody saying she had any problems with anybody, and nobody saying she had any relationship trouble, either.” Goff wiped at his mouth. “Oh, hey. Paula called while you were gone. DNA from the hair on Bellamy? Not in the system.”

  “Figures,” Evan said.

  All that meant was that he hadn’t been in the military, at least not recently, nor had his DNA been collected as evidence in another case. It would have been really nice if the database had yakked out a name for them, but Evan’s luck didn’t run that way, so he hadn’t been expecting it.

  “Okay. Do me a favor,” Evan said. “Give Meyers and Crenshaw the cell phones. I know neither Tina nor Bellamy had each other in their contacts or recent calls, but let’s see if they have any overlapping contacts. I don’t care if it’s their hairdresser. There’s a string in between these two people, even if they never heard of each other.”

  Goff pulled the evidence bags containing the cell phones over to his side of the desk. “Will do.” He took another drink of his soup and watched Evan stare at the wall, tapping his pen against the desk.

  “So, we know what we know, and we know what we don’t know, and there’s a whole lot more of that,” Goff said. “But what do you think?”

  Evan considered his answer for a moment. “I think if we don’t find the connection between these two people, no matter how small, we have no chance in hell of finding out who killed them. We don’t have enough evidence. No witnesses, other than the hotel guest who heard something and saw nothing.”

  “What if there is no connection?” Goff asked.

  “Then our problem gets a whole lot worse,” Evan said.

  THIRTEEN

  ONCE GOFF HAD TAKEN his lunchbox and his leave, Evan buried himself in the electronic comings and goings of Jake Bellamy and Tina Vicaro. The task at hand was necessarily laborious. Without some IT genius available to run that data from both computers to look for commonalities, Evan was forced to pull up Jake’s email and search for emails from Tina’s, then pull up Tina’s and search for emails to or from Jake, just in case one of them knew how to scrub their emails better than the other. It took almost two hours to find out that, unless they had email accounts that weren’t showing up in their histories, neither of them had ever emailed the other.

  Evan then moved on to searching through both email accounts to see if any weird, mean, or otherwise suspicious emails had been sent or received. Evan was done with Jake, who had dumped his email more regularly, within an hour, and had just started on Tina’s when his intercom buzzed at him.

  “Yes, Vi
,” he answered tiredly.

  “This is Vi,” came the reply. “Danny Coyle is on line three for you.”

  “Thank you,” Evan said and switched buttons. “Hey, Danny.”

  “Oh, hey!” Danny exclaimed, like Evan had unexpectedly called him. “So, I slaved away, and I have your autopsy report in hand. Do you want me to email it, tell you over the phone and then email it or do you want to hear it in person?”

  “I take it you’ve finally been granted permission to transmit reports via email.”

  “Oh, yeah, no. But I figured out Grundy’s password,” Danny said. “Rumrunner II. It’s the name of his boat.”

  “Grundy has a boating license?”

  “Scary, I know,” Danny replied. Evan could almost feel him nodding. “So, email?”

  “Yes, but I’ll be there in a few minutes anyway.”

  When Evan walked into the autopsy lab, it was empty, save for the body of Tina Vicaro and whoever was loitering in the stainless-steel body drawers, of which there was a bank of eight. He walked over to the table where Tina Vicaro was lying, her body covered head to toe in the thick, opaque plastic sheeting that made every body look sinister.

  He glanced over at the granite counter beside him, grabbed a pair of gloves from an open box, and pulled them on. Then he pulled the sheeting back, uncovered Tina’s face, and folded the plastic over her chest.

  It always surprised Evan how rapidly any signs of life disappeared from the physical body. The night before, Tina’s skin had been richly tanned, though not terribly dark, and her hair had been shiny and sleek.

  Today, Evan looked down at a face that was gray and drawn, the skin looser and as dry as a lizard’s. Her hair had lost its luster overnight and looked stiff and unhealthy. She had been a pretty girl, pretty enough that it would still be apparent even if he’d not been to the scene. Evan had only glanced at her photo album before he’d bagged it, but Tina Vicaro had had an open, welcoming smile, one that said she didn’t expect anything hurtful and terrible to be headed her way. It made him sad, but he’d been sad when he got there.

  “Oh, hey!” Danny said behind him.

  Evan looked over his shoulder as Danny let the door to the back of the lab, whatever that contained, fall slowly closed.

  “Hey, Danny,” Evan said. “Just having a look. Hope you don’t mind.”

  “No, no, I know you know what you’re about, right?” Danny pulled on his own gloves and stood on the other side of the table. He looked down at Tina’s face, his expression somber. “Sad, seriously. The whole time I was working on her, I couldn’t help thinking that if I’d met her out there somewhere, you know, like The Pig or 7-11 or something, she would have been one of those girls that made me really anxious.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know, nerves. Social dysfunction and whatnot,” Danny said. He looked back down at Tina. “But I would have wanted to at least say ‘hi.’”

  Evan didn’t know what to say to that. He wasn’t sure if he was touched or uncomfortable. “She was a pretty girl,” he said, just for something to say.

  Danny heaved out a big sigh. “Yep, she was.” Then he looked up at Evan, his face suddenly animated. “So, autopsy, though! Very interesting!”

  “How so?”

  “Well, first of all, and I don’t know if you were expecting this or if it’s going to kill your day, but the knife that killed this girl is the same one that killed Jacob Bellamy.”

  “Given the low rate of stabbing deaths in Port St. Joe, I pretty much expected that.”

  “Yeah, I figured. Anyhoodles, same knife. I compared the slides meticulously.”

  “I believe you.”

  “Now for some dissimilarities.”

  Danny pulled the sheet down to Tina Vicaro’s hips. Evan felt badly, wanted to cover her small breasts for her.

  “Okay, so, first things first,” Danny said. “There are fewer stab wounds, though they’re all concentrated in pretty much the same area as with Jacob, in the upper right quadrant. Five wounds. Two punctured the liver, one the right lung, and the other two missed vital organs. However, one of those nicked the lateral thoracic artery pretty thoroughly. That was most likely the wound that killed her, though the others would have killed her shortly thereafter anyway.”

  He looked up at Evan apologetically.

  “It’s difficult to nail down when death is so quick and all of the wounds would have caused enough blood loss, right, but I think that one was probably either the final wound, or one administered seconds after her heart stopped beating. I saw the pictures of the scene, and there wasn’t as much blood as you’d see if that had been the first or even second wound. You know, arterial. Bad.”

  Evan sighed and rubbed a hand over his face. Every now and then, it occurred to him that his choice of occupation wasn’t really all that normal. What kind of people were he and Danny and Goff and Trigg, to choose to deal so closely with violent death?

  “Okay,” Danny went on. “So, another variance. This attack was from behind.”

  Evan looked up at him. “Are you sure?”

  “Oh, sure, yeah,” Danny said. “The angle of the wounds is markedly upward, but the attacker is at least six feet, probably six one or two. In order to achieve this trajectory with the knife from the front, he’d almost have to be on his knees. But from behind, reaching around her, like this,” Danny said, demonstrating in the air, “the upward angle is very natural.”

  Evan nodded, understanding.

  “Also, this.” He gently turned her face toward Evan. “These scratches here? To the right of her mouth? Happened at the time of her attack, owing to the very light bleeding and lack of scabbing. There’s a good deal of her own skin and a bit of blood under the nails on her right hand. She was right-handed, by the way. So, yeah, she scratched her own face, which tells me the guy had his hand over her mouth. Difficult to do effectively from the front, especially given that he was right-handed as well. We’ve also got additional DNA from her nails.”

  Evan nodded. “We need to see if the DNA you pulled from her nails matches what we got from the hair on Bellamy.”

  “Oh, done deal, right? Much faster than searching for a match in the database. I sent it to Officer Trigg—Deputy?”

  “Lieutenant.”

  “Excellent, so I sent it to her over an hour ago, and she’s running it. They’ve got much cooler equipment over there, I hear.”

  “Maybe she’ll invite you for a field trip some time,” Evan said distractedly.

  “That would be seriously exciting,” Danny said.

  “Okay, so anything else notable?”

  “Not really. Tox screen is negative everything, save for some Claritin. She had a chicken sandwich for dinner, about three hours before she died. Fried. Fried chicken sandwich.” He stared up at the ceiling. “What else?” He looked back at Evan. “Nothing that’s really pressing.”

  Evan reached out and gently turned her face to the front again.

  “Her aunt was here earlier,” Danny said. “That was bad.”

  “I’m sure it was,” Evan said.

  “If I hadn’t gotten fed up with Bones, you know the forensics show? If I hadn’t gotten so aggravated with it, I might have gone into forensic anthropology. That might have been more soothing than what I’m doing right now.”

  “Maybe you need a little break, Danny,” Evan said. “You have any vacation time coming?”

  “Oh, right, no. I used it last month to go to a conference on gunshot wounds.”

  “That sounds less than refreshing,” Evan said. “Try the Caribbean next time.”

  Danny nodded and pulled the plastic sheet back over Tina’s face before putting a fist on his hip and looking up at Evan. “That’s where the conference was. True enough. Trickery, really.”

  FOURTEEN

  THE NEXT TWO DAYS, Thursday and Friday, were taken up with checking and cross-checking the electronics, mail, financial records and other data collected from the lives of Ja
ke Bellamy and Tina Vicaro, studying the crime scene photos and autopsy reports, and catching up with contacts of both victims who hadn’t been available or findable sooner.

  None of that turned up anything promising, but Evan and Goff had gone deeper into a background check of Tina’s boyfriend, Michael Pittfield, and found that, four years ago, he’d worked for the fishing charter owned by Cindy Babcock’s father; the same Cindy Babcock who’d been thrilled to get Evan and Meyers out of her living room.

  It was the only connection that they’d been able to find between Bellamy and Vicaro, and it was a weak one in a place the size of Port St. Joe, but it was two-hundred percent more than they’d had the day before.

  Evan had assigned deputies to surveil Pittfield round the clock. With any luck, they’d catch him trying to pawn his still-bloody knife, but Evan wasn’t planning a party yet.

  The DNA under Tina Vicaro’s nails had in fact matched that recovered from the hair on Bellamy’s body. By Friday evening, Evan was still waiting for a judge to sign a warrant allowing the SO to collect DNA from Michael Pittfield. He wasn’t holding his breath.

  He got home to his boat just before dark, case files in one hand and two pounds of fresh Gulf shrimp in the other. As he walked down the steps between the Dockside’s patio and the fire pit, both already full of people starting their weekends, he saw the back end of Plutes trotting down the dock toward Evan’s slip. Evan used to think Plutes wandered around looking for Hannah, but now he wondered if he was just looking for any company better than what he had.

  By the time Evan slid his shoes off and went aboard, Plutes was already back inside, stationed at his window. Evan put his shoes in their cubby, noticing as he did that Plutes had once again peed directly in front of his litter box.

  Evan opened the glass door into the salon and looked over at the cat, who was looking at him, one ear spasmodically bending toward the back of his head, like something more interesting was right behind him.

  “Hello, fatass,” Evan said. “I see that you’ve become bored with peeing inside your litter box again. Perhaps you’d like me to just follow you around with my hand out, so you could pee in my palm, at no inconvenience to yourself.”