by A. E. Howe
“Not to you,” Marcy said, and I took that as a yes to the fact that she told Joel about a lead.
“Who else is involved in this gold hunt?”
“I’m not saying nothing else,” she said, folding her arms across her chest like a petulant child. I could have mentioned Eddie, but I didn’t want to spoil my CI’s cover.
“A man shot at me down by my gate on Wednesday night. What do you know about that?”
I watched her carefully, and she seemed really surprised and interested in the information. She leaned forward and put her arms on the table. “Someone shot at you? You sure it has to do with the gol… me?”
“I’m sure that the shooting has to do with the murders, and I’m pretty sure that the murders have to do with the hunt for gold,” I told her and watched her consider this information.
“I don’t know anything about a shooting,” she said simply.
“Did you tell him about the book?”
“I… Maybe… You know I kinda talk too much when I’ve been drinking.”
“Is there anyone else involved? Anyone you know of?”
“Can’t say. You said yourself that the story’s been around forever.” She paused, then added, “Joel’s got a big mouth when he’s been drinking too, and that’s like every night.” Marcy tried to keep her eyes from darting around, but she couldn’t. She knew a lot more than she was saying.
“What was your relationship to George Pike?” I asked.
“Who?” was Marcy’s totally unconvincing answer.
“Don’t be stupid. We can easily look it up.”
“Okay, he was my grandfather. He stole that gold. I know he did,” she said with pride.
I didn’t know what having that information did for me, but it helped explain some of her interest in the gold. Not that she needed any incentive to be interested in gold. She still hadn’t mentioned Eddie, who I knew wasn’t the shooter, but certainly seemed to be involved in this crazy gold hunt. Having a sit-down with Eddie was moving to the top of my to-do list.
I pulled up a picture on my phone of the white pickup that had been stolen, used to haul the backhoe, driven by my shooter and burned up at the county sandpit. The owner had sent us the photo. I showed it to Marcy. “Have you seen this truck?”
As soon as she saw the picture her eyes started moving all around the room again, avoiding mine.
“Marcy, this is really important. The person who was driving this truck is the same man who shot at me and is deeply involved in these murders. You need to help me. You need to separate yourself from him.”
“What are you saying?” She tried to sound tough, but I could hear a little hesitation in her voice.
“I’m saying that by coming clean right now, you can keep yourself from going down with this guy. I know that you’ve had your troubles, but nothing like what’s been happening this week. I’m throwing you a lifeline.”
The gears were turning slowly. She looked left, then right and back again. I was very surprised when she looked directly at Cara. They locked eyes for a moment before Marcy looked down at the table. I wondered what type of secret message had passed between them. I made a mental note to ask Cara about that.
“I don’t know anything about the truck,” Marcy said in a tone that I recognized from years earlier. She’d made up her mind not to talk about the truck and the person behind it, and I doubted that I could change that.
“Where were you on the night of March seventh and the morning of the eighth?”
“I don’t remember,” she answered sullenly.
“Come on, you aren’t even trying to answer my questions,” I said and, absentmindedly, moved the book a little farther away from her. Her eyes followed the book.
“I mean it. I don’t remember anything after about seven o’clock on the seventh.” I heard something in her voice that was new. She sounded confused.
“What happened?” I gave her a more open-ended question.
“I thought I’d been raped,” Marcy said, looking down at the floor.
“What?” I said, astonished at this admission.
“But I wasn’t. I just thought… Maybe.” She wasn’t making a lot of sense.
“What made you think you’d been raped?”
“I had a drink and just kinda crashed. I didn’t wake up till the next day, and I… I know what it feels like to be drugged. Someone had put something in my drink. So… I thought…”
“But they hadn’t? Who did it?”
“I don’t know, and if I find out they’re going to pay,” she said through gritted teeth. I didn’t think it was an accident that she’d been drugged on the night that someone had attempted to dig up the gold.
“Could it have been Joel?”
“I… He wasn’t there when it happened.” She looked defeated. I almost felt sorry for her.
“Marcy, you know more than you’re telling me. Maybe not about that night, but about other aspects of this case.”
“Says you!” The fiery Marcy flared up like a struck match.
“Marcy, this man may be dangerous. There are two ways that this could bite you in the ass. One is that you will be pulled in as some sort of accomplice and wind up in jail. The other possibility is that you’ll wind up like Hank and Joe Parrish.” I let that sink in. I thought for a moment that she might change her mind, but then her eyes narrowed and grew cold.
“I told you, I don’t know anything else. Give me my damned book!”
We talked for a few more minutes, mostly just me issuing warnings about Joel and trespassing before I reluctantly handed the book over to Marcy. As soon as she had the book in hand, she wanted to leave. Oddly, I had mixed feelings about seeing her run off. On the one hand, she was a loose cannon in my life that I really didn’t need. But on the other, she was someone I’d known most of my life, in a vulnerable moment, and I felt a bit sorry for her.
I turned to Cara after watching Marcy drive away. “Well?”
“She really believes that she can find the gold, and no matter what her brain is saying about the dangers, she’s going to go forward at full speed,” Cara summed up.
“That’s what I’m afraid of.”
I pulled out my phone and called dispatch. After some quick chitchat with the dispatcher, I told her that I wanted patrol to make regular swings by the property near the railroad tracks and to keep an eye out for anyone trespassing.
“What was that look that passed between you two?” I asked Cara after I hung up.
“I think she was just looking for some support.”
“It’s been an interesting day.”
“I could probably get out to the range with Pete sometime soon,” Cara said suddenly.
I’d been wanting her to take firearms training with Pete for a few weeks now. “I’ll let him know,” I said, hiding a smile.
Chapter Fourteen
Darlene arrived a few minutes after I got to my desk on Monday morning.
“You’re in early,” she observed.
“Want to have our ducks in a row when we talk to Joel, or be ready to hunt him down if he doesn’t show,” I said, clicking the print icon on my screen so that we’d have a large picture of the stolen truck to show him. As the page printed, I filled Darlene in on my meeting with Marcy. She nodded and shook her head at all the right places.
“The gold. That’s just crazy…”
While we waited, I emailed a picture of Joel Patrick to Albert Griffin and asked him if he could be the man that broke into his home. He answered back immediately with an apology that he just couldn’t be sure.
Joel was half an hour late. Darlene and I were just getting ready to ride out to the Roads Best and see if we could find him when we got a message from the desk sergeant that Joel was waiting.
We brought him back to an interrogation room. Sometimes I like to do preliminary questioning in the more informal atmosphere of one of the conference rooms, but with Joel we decided that it would be best to skip the frying pan and throw hi
m straight into the fire.
“Hey, I’m right here, just like I told you,” he bragged as we took him back. “Wow, am I under arrest or something?” he asked when I opened the door to the small, windowless interrogation room.
“Don’t try to kid a kidder,” Darlene told him. “We’ve seen your record. You know when you’re being arrested and when you aren’t.”
He sat down with both of us across from him.
“This conversation is being recorded, and I’d like you to say that you are here of your own free will.” I stopped and looked at him. He shrugged. “You need to say it out loud.”
“Mostly, I’m here of my own free will,” he allowed.
“Are you willing to voluntarily answer questions?” Darlene pushed.
“Yes, yes, yes, I love talking to you all. I really want to be here with such a lovely lady and a great guy like Deputy Macklin.” He paused. “How’s that?”
“Fine,” I said, and we had him go through the rest of the introduction stating his name and vital statistics.
“Marcy told you I was with her when the murders occurred,” he stated.
“Funny, but no, she didn’t,” I responded. He looked aggravated at this news, but not surprised.
“Following up on that, I’d like you to give me the names of anyone else who can back up your story.”
“There was Marcy… Let me think… A couple of other people, but I can’t recall their names.”
“I suggest you think hard and try and come up with them,” I said, already tired of his conman persona.
“No. Nothing,” he said.
“I think you should know that we are investigating two homicides,” I told him and took out the autopsy photos of both victims. I laid them out on the table so that Joel would have to look up or turn his head to avoid looking at them. He winced and began talking to the space above my head.
“I don’t know anything about these people or how they died.”
“Would you be willing to take a polygraph test to prove that?” I shot back.
He frowned and looked directly into my eyes. “You and I both know that those tests are not proof of anything. So, no. I won’t take one.”
I wasn’t at all surprised and, honestly, a man as comfortable at lying as he was could probably have passed one anyway.
“Have you ever fired a crossbow?” Darlene asked.
She and I had agreed that our main strategy for the interview would be to throw questions at him from all directions constantly, trying to keep him off balance by asking the unexpected. From the look on his face, so far so good.
“Ehhh, maybe once when I was a kid.” He glanced around nervously and I wasn’t sure if it was caused by the pictures on the table or the question itself.
“Let’s go over your history with Jane Parrish and her family. When did you meet her?” I asked.
“Jane? Wow. That’s ancient history. I guess that was at Panama City Beach. I must have been in my early twenties and Jane was a little younger. She turned heads in a bikini, I can tell you that. She had me from the moment I saw her.”
“What was the nature of your relationship?” Darlene asked dryly.
“She called and I came.” He actually blushed. “No pun intended. I swear. What can I say? I was smitten. In fact, I followed her all the way back here.”
“Where you met her family?” Darlene asked for clarification.
“That didn’t go so well. I didn’t realize that they were big fish in a small pond. Every one of them told me to go away at one point or another. Kind of stupid for me to hang out, really. Jane just put up with me in Panama City, but when she saw her family’s reaction to me, she decided that she wanted to be with me. Works that way sometimes,” he said, sounding very pleased with himself.
“You argued with her family?” Darlene was being cold as ice to this has-been Lothario.
“You could say that. First off, her father tried to work me to death on his farm. But in those days, I was seriously buff. It’s ruined my skin, but all those days on the beach kept me fit enough to keep up with these country boys. I even got where I kind of liked the work. I read a lot back then too. Kind of got the whole back-to-earth thing going.”
“You got in a fight with Hank Senior?” I prodded.
“Yes. Likely coming to the farm was a mistake. Jane wanted someone that would take her away from her yokel family. When I got into the work, she started pushing me away again. Look, I was young and didn’t think my stink stunk, if you know what I mean, so after putting in all the hard work, I was a little pissed that I was getting the heave-ho. Her father caught me hanging around the house once too often and decided to teach me a lesson. Believe me, he started the fight.”
“He started it and, from what we heard, he finished it,” I pushed.
“Not really. I decided that if it looked like he was the big bad man beating up on her poor boyfriend, Jane might go back to wanting me. Maybe we could go somewhere away from this redneck retreat,” Joel finished, but I wasn’t so sure I believed him.
“How did that work out for you?” Darlene asked, her voice dripping with sarcasm.
“Not well. But that’s how she’d twisted my brain all up.”
“Sounds like she’d twisted some other part of your anatomy.”
“Very funny.”
“The point of the story, though, is that you got kicked to the curb by father and daughter?” I asked.
Joel looked at me, unwilling to allow that he’d been beat. But after a ten count he looked down at the floor. “Pretty much.”
“So you were pissed.”
He laughed. “Sure I was, twenty years ago. If you’d dug the old man’s body up from a grave twenty years old, you might have a point. Jeez, if I held grudges for that long, I wouldn’t have time for doing anything else except updating my blacklist.”
“I guess you’ve made some enemies over the years. Conmen seldom make friends,” Darlene stated. She’d spent quite a while that morning going over Joel’s arrest and conviction records.
“I like to think of myself as a businessman.”
“And I like to think of myself as Miss America,” Darlene muttered, almost causing me to laugh out loud.
“On to the second murder,” I said, to cover up my laughter. “Where were you Friday morning?”
“Ha!” Joel exclaimed, looking like he’d just bowled a strike. “I was in an argument with one of your lot.”
“How’s that?” I asked, already sure that he must have a pretty good alibi by the way he was acting.
“That bastard at the motel was trying to get me evicted. Some deputy pounded on my door at seven-thirty in the morning. The damn manager wanted me gone before the weekend, like that dump was going to have a rush on it. Luckily, I’d gotten some cash and was able to settle up. But just check your records,” he said triumphantly. I made a note to do just that, but I figured he had this one locked up. Though it wouldn’t necessarily rule out the break-in at Mr. Griffin’s.
It was time to shake the conversation up again. “When did you first hear about the gold?” I asked.
Joel’s mouth fell open. I think he’d planned on saying something, but couldn’t think of what. “What gold?” was the not-very-clever answer he finally came up with.
“The gold that you were looking for on the Parrish property down by the railroad tracks. The gold that you were looking for when you fell into an abandoned well,” I shot back.
“Damn it, Marcy,” he said and looked down at the table. His eyes landed on the pictures of the corpses of the two Parrishes, causing him to look away. For the first time since I’d met him, he had lost his composure. Even after spending the night at the bottom of a well, he’d seemed more together than he was now.
“Yep, damn Marcy. Did she get you into this snipe hunt?” I asked.
“I’ll talk about the murders. Murders which I have nothing whatsoever to do with, but if you continue to ask about gold, I’m going to walk out of here.” Joel
had lost his humorous demeanor. I was sure that he was an expert on jailhouse law, so pushing the point would only leave me with an empty interrogation room.
“Forgetting the gold for the moment, what is your relationship to Marcy Pike?”
“Just friends.”
“Do you know of anyone that might have been involved in these murders?”
“No.”
I put the picture of the truck next to the ones of the bodies. “Do you recognize this truck?”
Joel took a quick glance. His poker face was too good to tell me anything. “No,” he said.
“You’ve never seen this truck?” Part of the point of this interview was to get him to give answers on the record that could be used later.
“I can’t say that. This is the boondocks of the boondocks out here. Everybody drives a truck.” He tapped the picture without looking down at it. “I could have passed this truck ten times and not remembered.”
Of course, he had a valid point, but I was pretty sure he knew a lot more about this particular truck.
“Who else have you and Marcy been hanging out with while you’ve been in Adams County?”
“Mostly friends of Marcy’s. But she’s spent quite a bit of time with her family at the nursing home. You know her dad’s dying?”
When he mentioned Marcy’s dad, it made me think of her relationship to George Pike and that’s when the proverbial light bulb went on.
“You’re related to James Patrick!” I blurted out. Darlene had started to ask a question, but my mind had gone down the ancestor rabbit hole and I hadn’t been listening.
Joel Patrick and Darlene both stared at me. It only took Darlene a second to catch up. “What is your relationship to James Patrick?” she fired at him.
“Who?” Joel asked weakly.
“James Patrick, the man who in 1946 was shot while trying to desert an Army train passing through Adams County.”
“He was not trying to desert,” Joel said before he could stop himself.
“But you don’t want to talk about the gold,” I asked, enjoying seeing him squirm.
“He didn’t desert,” Joel repeated.