Dead Center (The Still Waters Suspense Series Book 2)

by Dawn Lee McKenna

“He just left like five minutes ago,” Meyers piped up. “Been here since five. He went out to Weber’s.”

  Weber’s was a family-run donut place out on Cape San Blas, and it would have been the best place in the county even if it wasn’t the only one. Evan knew from experience that Goff had a thing about being there when they opened the doors at seven-thirty. He looked at his watch. Seven-twenty. Yeah, Goff was dusting the front window with his mustache about now. He didn’t begrudge the man the forty-minute jaunt; everybody had been putting in late, early, and extra hours, particularly Goff.

  “Okay, thanks guys,” Evan said. “I’m gonna go take a look at these people. Let me know when anything interesting comes up.”

  Vi was already at her desk when he got there. She was usually scheduled to work seven to five, but he’d been there as early as six and always found her already there.

  “Mr. Caldwell,” she addressed him, frowning over her bifocals. “The background checks you requested are on your desk.”

  “Good morning, Vi,” he said. “Thank you.”

  “You also have a message from James Quillen,” she added. “It’s urgent, as is customary.”

  “What does he want?”

  “He wants you to tell him that people have stopped stabbing other people, immediately.”

  “He wants me to tell him that immediately, or he wants them to stop immediately?”

  She stared at him a moment.

  “Do me a favor, call him back and tell him I don’t have time to call him back because I’m looking for stabbers.”

  He headed for his office door. He was about to close it when he heard Vi ask someone for Commissioner Quillen. He smiled as he shut the door.

  Evan spent the next hour going through the background checks run on the six males who had worked all three of the days the victims had been there. None of them had felony records, but Evan supposed that was a prerequisite for county employment. All of them also had clean licenses, which didn’t come as a surprise, either.

  Sam Kovacs, who had moved to the area in the nineties, when he was fourteen, did have a misdemeanor disturbing the peace, but it was from spring break in Daytona, 2001. Every male that had ever been there had one of those. Evan hoped he was their killer based solely on his dislike for the smirk the guy wore in his photo.

  He was going over Kovacs’ credit report, which was amusing, when his intercom buzzed. He reached out and pressed the button as he turned the page. “Yeah.”

  “This is Vi,” he heard Goff say.

  Evan smiled. “Where’s Vi?”

  “Smoke break.”

  “What’s up?”

  Goff opened his door. “We got us a common denominator, as it were.”

  “The videos?”

  “Yep.”

  Evan followed Goff down the hall and back to the office where Crenshaw and Meyers were sitting there smiling, each one holding a donut. Crenshaw had confectioners’ sugar on his uniform shirt, and Evan didn’t even mind.

  “What’d you get?” Evan asked as he and Goff walked in.

  “Look here,” Meyers said. Evan went to stand beside Meyers’ chair, leaned on his desk. Goff had apparently seen it already, or he had the eyesight of a mantis shrimp, because he stayed in the doorway, smiling.

  “This guy here,” Meyers said, pointing at a zoomed in and therefore pretty fuzzy picture of a man standing at the end of the counter. “The photographer. What’s his name, Pete?”

  “Waller,” Evan and Crenshaw said simultaneously.

  “Yeah. He’s the only one interacted with all three of our victims,” Meyers said. “Took all three pictures.”

  Evan straightened up and smiled over at Goff. Goff smiled back.

  “You want me to go stand in the window and surveil him?” he asked.

  Crenshaw snorted powdered sugar onto his desk.

  “Some days, this job is really, really crappy,” Evan said to the room at large. “And some days, it’s really, really good.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  GOFF FOLLOWED EVAN back to his office. Vi glanced up at them as she tapped at her keyboard but said nothing as they hurried past her. Evan quickly sat at his desk and pulled Waller’s file out of the stack.

  “Okay, the guy lives on Cypress Avenue,” Evan said. He looked up at Goff. “Where’s that?”

  “Over by the elementary school.”

  “He’s at two-thirty-three Cypress. What time is it?”

  “Almost nine-thirty.”

  “So, he’s at work,” Evan said. “Get somebody to drive over there, scope out where we can put surveillance. I want somebody on the house 24/7, and somebody on him, even if they’re just sitting out in our parking lot staring at the courthouse.”

  Goff walked out of the office, and Evan flipped through Waller’s background report for several minutes. It failed to give him anything more interesting than he’d read the first time he’d gone through it.

  The guy’s license picture told him nothing. He was thirty-four, six-feet even, moderate weight, and completely unremarkable. He had light brown hair, with a shock of it swept across his forehead. He was attractive, but he wasn’t particularly handsome. He looked like your average guy.

  Goff darted back into the office. “Okay, Sam Price from PD was right around the corner from this feller’s house. He knows the guy, too. Lives alone. Sam knows ’cause the guy filed a report of a trespasser that kept cutting through his yard at night. This was like six months ago. Turned out to be the sixteen-year-old girl lives behind him, sneaking back into her house.”

  “Okay.”

  “Anyway, he says there’s no car in the driveway. Also, you can see the house plain as day from the lot where they park the buses at the school.”

  “Excellent,” Evan said. “Have somebody get hold of the school and advise them we’re going to be hanging out in their parking lot all day and night for the foreseeable future. Also, get one of our guys out in our parking lot right now, ready to tail.”

  “Done already,” Goff said. “Meyers is out there already, pulled his own vehicle around from the back. Vi’s checking the schedule to see who all we got to relieve him, and who can take which shift on the house.”

  “Thank you,” Evan said. He puffed out a breath. “We need to know more about this guy. His records tell us nothing.”

  “See if he’s got a Facebook,” Goff said after a second.

  Evan swung around to the desktop computer on the credenza behind him. He went to Facebook, pulled up thirteen Scott Wallers, and had just found the right one when Vi walked in.

  “The surveillance details are being scheduled,” she said.

  “Thank you, Vi,” Evan said without turning. “Okay, so this guy has a girlfriend, looks like. I mean, judging by every other picture on his Facebook page.”

  Goff looked over his shoulder. “Pretty thing.”

  Vi came to stand behind Evan. “Somebody should call her mother.”

  “Doesn’t look like he posts too much,” Evan said.

  “Don’t have too many friends, either,” Goff said.

  “Well, that doesn’t mean anything,” Evan said, a little defensively.

  “Are you certain he still has this girlfriend?” Vi asked. “That last picture of them is from last year.”

  Evan checked, and she was right. He’d posted it from the previous summer. “How do we find out who she is?”

  He heard Vi sigh behind him. “There’s a tag. Her name is Elyse Leanne Price. If you click on her name, it’ll pull up her page.”

  Evan clicked on it. “It’s not doing anything.”

  Vi leaned over his shoulder. She smelled of cigarettes, Dentyne, and some kind of perfume.

  “They’re not friends,” she said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “They’re not Facebook friends. That’s why it’s not clickable.” She adjusted her bifocals. “Click on his friends list.”

  Evan did, and they scrolled down the short list. She wasn’t there.
<
br />   “She might have deleted her Facebook account, gone on a social media break. Or they might have split,” Vi said. “Put her name in the search bar up top, and let’s see if we can locate her.”

  Evan did, and there was only one Elyse Price who was also Elyse Leanne. He clicked on it, and there she was, the same girl. Her profile picture was of her and a German Shephard on what looked like Cape San Blas beach.

  “Scroll down,” Vi said.

  Evan did. The first post they saw was from Christmas Day, just under a month ago. It was from someone named Jimmy Price. The post was a picture of Elyse, which looked a few years old. She was standing in front of a Christmas tree with a smiling man in his fifties whose red hair matched hers. The post simply said, “Miss you, baby.”

  “Huh,” Goff said.

  Evan scrolled down a bit more, to find dozens of short posts from dozens of different people. They were from November, most of them the first week of November, and all of them were some sort of memoriam or message of sympathy. Goff whistled.

  “Oh, crap,” Evan said quietly.

  “Go further down,” Vi said.

  He did, all the way back to July. There weren’t as many posts as he would expect from a young woman, and the last post she made herself was July 10.

  “Where are the pictures of him?” Vi asked.

  “What do you mean?” Evan asked her.

  “All of those pictures he had of the two of them should be here somewhere as well,” Vi said. “When you tag someone, it shows up on their page. Her photos are set to public, so they should be here.”

  “How do you know so much about Facebook?”

  She frowned down at him like he was a simpleton. “Everybody over six knows about Facebook.”

  “I don’t.”

  Vi sighed. “If I communicate with my relatives and ex-husband on Facebook, I don’t have to actually spend any time with them in person.”

  “I thought your husband had passed away.”

  “Three of them did,” she replied. “One is still living. Please wait to amuse yourself with black widow jokes until you get home. I’ve heard all of them already.”

  Evan made a point of not smiling as he stared at the screen. “Okay, so what about the pictures?”

  “May I please drive?” she asked with a sigh. “It takes longer to give you instructions.”

  Evan stood up and let Vi take his seat. Goff grinned at him over Vi’s head, but Evan pretended not to see it.

  Vi clicked on the ‘Photos’ tab, and a new screen popped up with three different categories that Evan couldn’t read from that distance. Vi clicked one, and a bunch of pictures came up. She scrolled through them at the speed of light.

  “He’s not here,” she said with finality. “Not in the pictures he posted on his page, and not in any others, either.”

  “What are you saying? He Photoshopped pictures of his fake girlfriend?”

  Vi turned around in his chair. “You’re just being obtuse,” she said sternly. “She deleted him. I suspect that at some point before she passed away, they broke up. Since he’s still got pictures of her, I’d say she was the party who ended the relationship.”

  “Click back on his page, let’s look at those pictures again,” Evan said.

  She did and clicked something to make all of the photos come up.

  “Well, I was thinking maybe it was an imaginary relationship, or maybe just a friendship, but it does look like they were a couple,” Evan said.

  Vi clicked on a picture of the two of them at some kind of table. When it came up full-size, it turned out to be a picture taken in a restaurant, someplace expensive-looking. Waller was beaming and had an arm around the back of her chair, but she had a wan smile, and her hands were in her lap.

  “Look,” Vi said, pointing at the one comment on the photo, made by Waller. “Happy Valentine’s Day, baby,” Vi read. “She didn’t reply.”

  Evan straightened up. “Okay. We need to know what the situation was between Waller and this woman, and we really need to find out how she died. Vi, can you track down this Jimmy Price and find out what the story was with the relationship? Then call the ME’s office. If she was local, and she died of anything other than cancer or something, she might have been autopsied.”

  “Maybe he stabbed her, too, I’m thinking,” Goff said as Vi left the room.

  “Wouldn’t that be convenient?” Evan asked, then felt like a horrible human being. He reached for his cigarettes. “You know what I mean. Come smoke with me.”

  “I don’t smoke,” Goff said, following Evan.

  “Come chew gum.”

  Evan was on his third cigarette. Goff was still on his first piece of gum.

  Evan felt like a coiled spring, ready for something to do besides give orders and wait. “Hey, did we check to see if Waller’s DNA is in the database?”

  “Nope, but the DNA we got isn’t in the system, remember?”

  “Right,” Evan said thoughtfully, then took another drag. “Let’s check anyway.”

  “If his DNA is in there, it means he’s not our guy,” Goff said. “Might kill your good mood.”

  “Kill my mood?” Evan asked. “I’d probably have to take some time off.”

  The back door scraped open and Vi came outside.

  “Very well. I didn’t reach Mr. Price, but I did reach his wife,” she said as she joined them. “Her daughter was seeing Mr. Waller, for about three months, but she ended the relationship because she just wasn’t as serious about it as he was. He wanted to settle down, and she wanted to travel. She was an English teacher, and she was thinking about teaching abroad.”

  She reached into one pocket of her short, caftan-like top, something with lavender flowers all over it. It matched her lavender capris, and the bright green Keds really pulled the outfit together, Evan thought. He watched her pull out one of those cases for cigarettes that he didn’t know women still used. It was straw, with little palm trees on it, and “Barbados” embroidered on the front. She withdrew a Virginia Slim, and he leaned over and lit it for her.

  “Thank you,” she said, and blew out some smoke. “In any event, the family only met Mr. Waller twice, the mother said. Once at a barbecue early on in the relationship, and then at the funeral service.”

  “Did you ask how she died?” Evan asked her.

  “I’m sorry. I was about to, but she became very upset and ended the call. I did, however, put in a call to young Mr. Coyle. He’s in the middle of something, but he said he’d call you within the hour.”

  “Well, if it had been violent, you’d think she would have put two and two together with your calling her,” Evan said. “What did you tell her you were doing?”

  “Well, when we first started speaking, I simply said it was a background check,” Vi answered. “But later, she asked me if there had been a problem with another woman. Of course, I told her it wasn’t, but I find the question telling.”

  “It is,” Evan agreed. “She didn’t say anything about him being abusive or stalky or anything?”

  “No, she did not, but I think she must have had some misgivings about the man, or her daughter shared things with her that she didn’t choose to disclose to me.”

  “Okay.” Evan lit another cigarette, which he really didn’t want. He just needed the prop to help him focus.

  He looked over at Goff, who was being unusually quiet. Goff was chewing slowly, staring at the back of their building.

  “What’s on your mind, Goff?”

  “I lost one of Vi’s husbands,” Goff said without looking at him. “I can only count three.”

  Evan looked at Vi, who was frowning over at Goff. “You’ve really been married four times?” Evan asked her.

  She turned her scowl on him. “I’ve now learned never to marry a poor Scrabble player, Mr. Caldwell. You simply can’t ever respect them.”

  She ground her cigarette in the can of kitty litter they had for that purpose, then started back for the door. “I’ll go see h
ow that surveillance schedule is coming.”

  Evan took another drag. “I really want to go check this guy out. Just get a feel for him.”

  “I suppose you could go hang out at their urinals and hope he stops by,” Goff said.

  “I need a reason to go over there that wouldn’t make him nervous.” He ground out his cigarette. “I wish I hadn’t already changed my license over.”

  “Want me to steal it?” Goff asked.

  Evan gave him half a smile, then felt something fall into place in his head, with a very satisfying click.

  TWENTY-TWO

  EVAN WAS SIXTH in line, but it went surprisingly fast. He had no more than thirty minutes to watch Scott Waller as he waited, though there wasn’t much to observe from across the room.

  When it was his turn, he stepped up to the terminal of a young, blonde woman. Her nameplate said she was Emily Dermott. It didn’t say she was the tallest woman working there, but he remembered.

  When she asked how she could help him, he handed her his application for a replacement license and both halves of his current license.

  “Oh, goodness, what happened here?” she asked him.

  He tried to look sheepish without overdoing it. “I was cutting up my credit cards.”

  She smiled at him. “Oh, well, let’s get you fixed up, Sheriff,” she said.

  He tried not to wince when she said it, but nobody was listening, and he figured it really wouldn’t matter. He and other law enforcement officers were in the courthouse all the time. They were probably all easily recognizable.

  She looked up from his application. “Oh, you forgot to check yes or no on whether you’d like to be an organ donor.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll need you to check it, sorry.”

  She slid it over to him, and he checked the correct box. She spent a couple of minutes tapping away on her keyboard, then looked up at him. “Since this one’s so recent, do you want to just keep the same picture?”

  “No, I didn’t love that one. I look sinister,” he said, smiling.

  “Oh, you look just fine,” she said without flirtatiousness. After a moment, she made a final tap on her keyboard. “Okay, I’ve sent it down to the photographer. Go ahead and wait over there behind the green rope, and he’ll be right with you.”