“I mean, she likely was trying to kill him by eye drop poisoning. Even if it was destined to be unsuccessful, she didn’t know that.”
“I wish more people believed nonsense like that so fewer people would end up dead.”
It wasn’t much, but at least he was talking, so I continued. “I guess that would be a good thing, but aren’t you thinking Jessica could have ended up shooting Lee? Maybe she got impatient?”
He shook his head and frowned, and for a moment I worried I’d said something to derail what little talking I’d succeeded in getting him to do. Then he said, “It’s possible, but I’m not thinking she was the shooter. Neither she nor Lee own a gun, and we have someone related to the victim who does own a .38, the gun used to kill him.”
Cherise, wife number one.
“Why haven’t you gotten a search warrant for Cherise’s house then? Aren’t you worried she might try to get rid of the gun before you can get there to find it?”
He turned right off the highway, and at the bottom of the exit, he looked over at me for the first time since we got into the car. “I will today. First I want to find out what I can about this phone. As for Cherise Reynolds getting rid of the gun, I’m not really worried about that. Derek’s had someone watching her around the clock, and Craig is there today. If she goes anywhere, he’ll be right there with her. When I’m ready, I’ll go out to her house and execute the search myself.”
More I’ll instead of we’ll talk. Whatever progress I’d thought I’d made, his use of the singular showed me we hadn’t gotten very far.
After leaving the car in a parking garage and walking no less than five blocks in complete silence, we stopped at a tiny store with a sign that merely said Computers Fixed Here. Alex opened the door for me, so I walked in as he followed but I immediately stopped at the sight of around a billion gadgets and pieces of other gadgets all around us on shelves, racks, and even on the floor. I wasn’t OCD by any means, but even I felt distressed by all the things around me as I stood there.
“We need to go to the counter,” Alex said as he gently nudged me forward. “We’re meeting my friend from my days on the force here and the guy he goes to whenever he needs tech help.”
Something touched the top of my head, and I looked up in a panic to see a million more things hanging from the ceiling not even two feet above me. As all those pieces of things began to feel like they were closing in around me, I stepped toward the counter and hoped to God I didn’t dislodge anything and cause an avalanche of stuff to bury us.
“Montero, how the hell have you been?” a deep voice I didn’t recognize called out.
I looked beyond the counter to see a huge man with dark skin and short black hair smiling at me like we were long lost friends. He turned his attention to Alex right behind me and laughed.
“It looks like your friend isn’t used to George’s set up here.”
Whoever he was, George clearly wasn’t OCD either. He may have been someone we needed to rescue from a hoarding situation, though.
Alex extended his hand through the cut out in the wall and shook the man’s hand. “Good to see you again, St. Clair. Rick St. Clair, this is Poppy McGuire, my partner these days.”
The man’s attention focused on me for a long moment like he was trying to figure out something about me, and then he asked, “Partner like work or something else?”
I smiled and shook my head. “Just work. It’s nice to meet you, Rick.”
He grabbed my hand and gave me a strong handshake. “Call me St. Clair. Everyone else does.”
I looked into the part of the store he stood in and saw it wasn’t floor to ceiling pieces of gadgets everywhere. “Any chance I can come back there with you? Out here is giving me the creeps with all this stuff all over.”
He pressed something under the counter and a buzzer rang to open the door. Alex and I walked into that room and my anxiety level quickly dropped in proportion to the amount of things and doodads surrounding me.
“George will be right back. He got an emergency call, but he said he’d be back soon. In the meantime, you can bring me up to speed with what’s been going on in your life, Montero. Still living out there in the sticks?”
I turned to see Alex smile. “Still there.”
“I was surprised when you called and said you were on the job again. Happy to hear it but surprised.”
Tapping me on the shoulder, Alex said, “I can thank Poppy here for that.”
As I smiled at the first sign of defrosting from Alex, St. Clair settled his gaze on me and folded his arms across his chest. “I’m intrigued. I didn’t think there would ever be another soul who could convince you to be a cop again. Who are you, Poppy McGuire, and how did you do it?”
I shrugged as I tried to think of a cool way to explain how Alex and I had become partners. I wasn’t a real detective, so I felt a little embarrassed to tell him that. “He tells the story better than I do, I think.”
Alex chucked St. Clair on the shoulder and laughed. “She’s got a sixth sense for crime I haven’t seen since you and I worked together in those beginning days on the force. Don’t let her modesty fool you. She’s got that gut thing you always said a cop should have.”
“I’m not a cop, though,” I said in a rush, not wanting him to think I was pretending to be something I wasn’t and disrespect him.
“I’m even more intrigued. What are you then?” he asked as he stared at me.
This time Alex didn’t speak up for me, so I had no choice but to admit the truth. In a small voice, I said, “I’m a reporter. Sort of.”
A look of surprise came over him, and after a few seconds he gave me a big smile. “Well, you must be something pretty fantastic to get this guy back to being a cop. Whatever it is you did, I’m glad to see him back doing what he’s good at.”
Right then, the man we waited for came through the back door of the shop. George was the only person St. Clair trusted when it came to tech issues, even more than the force’s tech guys. As St. Clair told us about how he’d helped him solve a case involving some stolen laptop ring, I took stock of the person he thought so highly of.
George looked like every computer guy I’d ever met. Short with disheveled brown hair and a nondescript face, he wore thick black glasses and clothes that didn’t exactly work together with the blue stripes in his shirt not at all matching the brown pants he wore. He had a mousy look, but by the way St. Clair talked about him, he sounded like some kind of superman with anything involving computers, including cell phones.
He made the introductions, and then Alex set the baggie with Lee’s phone on his work bench. “I’m hoping you’ll be able to help me find out whatever I can from this phone. It was our victim’s, and I think whoever killed him did this to it.”
George lifted the bag and looked in at the damaged phone. “It looks like a herd of elephants trampled it,” he joked. “But I have a feeling we might be able to find something on it. Let me take a look.”
He slid on the kind of gloves Alex and I wore when we went to crime scenes and began to gingerly lift the pieces of Lee Reynolds’ phone out of the bag. He placed each one onto a stainless steel tray and began picking at them with a pair of tweezers like a bird pecking at a feeder.
Within seconds, he held up a tiny square chip and smiled at Alex. “I love the older phones with SD cards.”
I looked over at him and shook my head. Lee’s phone was only two months old. Why would George call it an older phone? Alex said nothing as the tech slipped the card into another phone he had nearby and began looking through the pictures he found on it.
“Pretty lady,” he said as he showed us all a picture of Jessica. Scrolling to the next pictures, he said, “Niagara Falls last summer with pretty lady. Pretty lady with younger guy not at Niagara Falls before that.”
On the phone I saw a picture of Jessica and Jack in a room that looked a lot like her living room at the townhouse. Curious how George knew when the picture had been taken, I
asked, “How do you know when that picture’s from?”
He smiled and pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “It’s all on the card. Lots of data most people don’t even think of when they take pictures. Like when, where, what phone number they’re associated with.”
Alex knitted his eyebrows and asked, “How did pictures that old get on a new phone he bought two months ago?”
“When you’re talking SD cards, it’s just a matter of taking it out of one phone and putting it into another. Your guy didn’t get a new phone two months ago, if this is the phone you’re talking about, though. New phones don’t have SD cards.”
I turned to face Alex. “But Jessica just identified that phone as Lee’s new one.”
He raised his eyebrows and answered, “She might have been mistaken in her grief, but it’s just as possible she lied. Again.”
“So now we need to find another phone too?” I asked in exasperation.
Alex just nodded. “One step forward and two steps back.”
George packed up the phone pieces and SD card in the plastic baggie and handed it back to Alex. “Don’t forget to check the guy’s voicemail and text messages. Texts might be really useful, and if your vic was like 99% of the world, he never checked his voicemail and there’s likely a wealth of information there.”
St. Clair slapped the tech on the back and grinned. “Told you he was good. This is why I come to George when I need help with any of this tech stuff. The guys on the force who do this would still be asking me about the details of where I found the damn thing while George cuts to the chase.”
We thanked George for his help and then St. Clair, Alex, and I left the shop. St. Clair needed to get back to work, but as he was saying his goodbyes, he leaned in and whispered in my ear as he hugged me, “Thanks for getting this guy back where he belongs.”
He stepped back and shook Alex’s hand. “You know you can call sometimes when it doesn’t involve some poor bastard’s death. Bryer’s going to be angry he didn’t get to see you, but I’ll make sure to tell him you look good.
Happier than I’d seen him in days, Alex smiled broadly and chucked his friend on the shoulder again. “Tell him I’ll call one of these days, and next time you hear from me I swear it won’t be because I need help with anything involving a dead body.”
“Good,” St. Clair said with a smile. “Poppy, it was a pleasure. Don’t you be a stranger either. Next time we’ll get some beers and talk about how a reporter gets partnered up with Montero out in small town America. I have a feeling that’s a story best told over drinks.”
I smiled, liking the way St. Clair thought. “It’s a deal.”
He left to return to his precinct, and we made our way back to the parking garage. It had been a short but productive road trip, but even more than that, it had changed Alex’s mood for the better more than I’d expected. As much as I considered him right at home in Sunset Ridge, he looked like he belonged in Baltimore too.
As he started the engine, Alex turned to me in the passenger seat and asked, “So what do you say we head back home so we can get those voicemails and try to figure out which wife offed poor Lee Reynolds?”
I laughed at his attempt at gallows humor. “So you’ve zeroed in on the wives of Lee Reynolds as our murderer?”
“I don’t know if I’d say zeroed in, but all the evidence we have points to one of them. I’m hoping what we find in the texts and voicemail messages will tell us which one.”
Poor Lee. I couldn’t help but feel bad for the guy. Two wives and it seemed neither marriage was ultimately successful. He definitely hadn’t lucked out in the marriage department.
Chapter Thirteen
As I waited, Alex called Judge Dardon to get a warrant for Lee’s phone records. Dardon was known locally as the most cop-friendly judge, and even though the warrant Alex wanted wasn’t anything out of the ordinary, he wanted it quickly. The judge’s willingness to sign just about anything for the police meant he’d get it and get it fast.
His secretary put him on hold, so I took the chance to ask what I hoped wasn’t a dumb question. “Why do you need a warrant to search a dead man’s records?”
Cupping the phone receiver, he answered, “Because the phone was in both Lee and Jessica’s names. He’s dead, but she isn’t.”
“Ahhh, okay. I didn’t know that. I learn something new every day working with you,” I said with a chuckle.
The judge began speaking and in less than a minute, Alex had his warrant. Without even hanging up the phone, he contacted the cell phone company and an hour later, we had the records of Lee’s text messages.
Alex handed me a copy of the faxed pages and I asked, “What about the voicemails? They can’t give us transcripts of those?”
“The voicemails are going to take longer because there was some kind of system-wide blackout with his cell phone carrier a few hours ago and things are a mess,” he explained as he began to read through the documents. “All we can have are the texts for now.”
I thumbed through my stack of Lee Reynolds’ texts and couldn’t help but notice he didn’t text a lot. “I guess he was more of a phone call guy?”
Alex gave me a look of resignation, as if he had hoped the text messages would have been a bit more plentiful too. “You never know. We might find the key to the entire case in one of these texts.”
“Maybe,” I said as I began to read a text from Lee to Jessica from right after he got his new phone.
I felt awkward, like I was intruding on their private life. Looking up from the perfectly benign text about what time dinner would be that night, I watched Alex scour another of Lee’s text for any clue.
“Can you imagine what it would be like if someone sifted through your texts like this? I’m not sure I’d be okay with it if it were happening to me.”
Alex smiled. “That’s what the warrant’s for—to make it okay.”
That didn’t make me feel better about what I was doing. “I’m not kidding. What do you think someone would think if they read your messages? I don’t think mine give the correct impression of who I am. It’s so easy to take things out of context.”
He stopped and looked across the desk at me for a moment before smiling. “I think if someone read my texts they’d think I spent a lot of time with you, and they’d be right.”
“Are you telling me you don’t get texts from anyone else other than me?”
He thought for a second and shrugged. “A few from other people, but most of my messages are from you. You text me a lot.”
I had to smile at the mention of how frequently I texted him. At least four or five times a week, I woke him up with some message about the case we were working on. I couldn’t help it that I had brainstorms first thing in the morning. Then I’d text him practically every day to let him know I was running late for coffee. And then I often texted him late at night right before I went to bed with more ideas about our current case.
“Well, I’m the kind of partner who likes to share my ideas. I could be like you and only write OK in all my texts,” I said, teasing him about his all-too-common habit of sending me back that one tiny word in response to my much longer messages.
Alex reached into his jacket hung on the back of his chair and pulled out his notepad. He flipped to the beginning of the tablet and placed it in front of me on the desk. There on the pages of the notes he took on each case were my texts written out in his handwriting.
I looked up from reading my words I sent at all hours of the day and night and saw him smiling at me. “You handwrite all my texts to you? Why?”
“Because you have good instincts, for the most part.”
“Why not just keep the texts in your phone?” I asked as I flipped through page after page of my ideas on a case from months ago.
“I do, but I like to write them in my notes too so I can have all our notes on a case in one place.”
Handing him the notepad, I was struck by how he called them our notes. Never
before had he referred to all those ideas he carried around in his pocket as anything that included me. Not that I ever expected him to. It was his way of keeping the facts of the case, not mine, but it felt nice to be included nonetheless.
“If I were you, though, I’d probably be more worried if someone was reading my texts. With how much you text me, and I’m just one person in your life, I can only imagine the volume of messages an officer would have to sift through if they got a hold of your phone records.”
I tapped on the stack of papers in front of him and twisted my face into a fake grimace. “Just get reading there and never you mind my messaging habits. I know better than to put anything incriminating into writing. Any intelligent female who remembers high school back before cell phones knows that.”
He laughed at my teasing and shook his head. “As you command, boss. All I’m seeing is what amounts to a grocery list in this second text. Lee messaged Jessica about wanting to make her a special meal and she asked what she could pick up from the store so he’d have the ingredients ready when he got home.”
I read the same message on my page and had to admit they sounded pretty happy. “He seemed like a nice guy, didn’t he? She seems to love him too. I don’t understand why she was trying to kill him with those eye drops then, though. The guy dotes on her and she tries to murder him.”
“You never know, though, Poppy. These texts may not be the whole context, like you said before. What if he beat the hell out of her that morning and when he was messaging about wanting to make a nice meal that was his way of trying to make up for what he’d done to her before work that day? These aren’t the whole picture.”
I hadn’t thought of that, but I had a hard time imagining Lee Reynolds as a wife beater. “I guess, but these along with everything else we’ve learned about the guy tells me he was one of the good ones. Even you have to admit that.”
“Even me?” Alex asked as he looked up from the page of messages.
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