“Where are you hurting at?”
Emilia Carr, eight months pregnant, said, “My belly.”
Buie explained that he was going to be keeping her another several hours and was sorry it was uncomfortable, adding, “We got to find out what’s there at the house.”
The strategy the MCSO was working under (without sharing it with Emilia or Josh) was to get Josh out to the trailer to point some things out for them. If they could get him into the situation—and what they now believed was a crime scene of some sort—they could begin tossing hardball questions at Josh and maybe crack him. This was the virtual-reality version of taking a crime scene photograph as a suspect talked and sliding it across the table, placing the end result of a serious crime in front of a perp’s face, hopefully, to unsettle him. It often worked when you had a suspect on the verge of a major break.
The detective asked Emilia if she would be “okay” with them questioning her some more.
“Yeah,” she answered. “I hope to gosh she ain’t there.”
“You want a candy bar?” Buie asked.
“I just want to go home to my babies.”
Buie said something about how an investigation was ongoing; and because of that, and because of Emilia “misleading [them] a lot in this investigation, covering up and lying in this investigation,” she was a “potential suspect in this investigation,” too. Emilia had done this to herself, in other words. It was a warning to come clean and stop lying by omission if she wanted them to work together toward her needs.
Emilia said she understood.
Buie explained how she was now being “detained.” Her presence there at the MCSO was no longer voluntary. Emilia was being held by the MCSO.
She could no longer leave on her own.
The DNA question came next.
Emilia said the MCSO already had her DNA. “I was arrested a few years back on a felony charge and they did my prints and took a swab.”
Buie said he wanted a fresh swab.
Emilia said she was okay with that, adding, “I’m not going to let some sick man cost me my children.”
After Buie took the swab, he ended the interview.
CHAPTER 23
JOSH FULGHAM WAS drained and couldn’t really think straight. Yet, he was not tired enough to be interested in what Emilia had been saying. Detective Buie later noted, “The guy would not stop talking. All he wanted to do, once he got going, was talk and talk and talk.”
Buie told Josh he couldn’t share any of the information Emilia had given them just yet. Then he read Josh his Miranda rights again, surely trying to send a message that Emilia had divulged information causing the MCSO to believe Josh knew where Heather was and had been involved in her disappearance.
Josh then decided he wanted to go back to his jail cell and get some sleep before they continued. He was too tired. He wanted to be fresh.
“You wasting my time?” Buie asked. “Do you not want to do this?”
“Start over in the morning,” Josh suggested casually.
“Do you not want to do this?” Buie asked again. He was under the impression Josh had something important to share. That’s what Josh had told one of Buie’s colleagues while Buie was out of the room.
“I guess not,” Josh said. “’Cause I want to sleep and we’ll start over in the morning!” He sounded a bit more firm.
Buie decided to play a card: “I’m not coming back in this room.”
“Tomorrow can we?” Josh said.
“No,” Buie snapped back. He then stood and walked out of the room without saying anything more.
“Wait . . . ,” Josh said, pleading.
Buie had made it as far as the hallway outside the room, when he turned and walked back in.
“What?” Buie asked as he faced Josh.
“We’re done?” Josh asked. He sounded shocked—surprised that Buie had given up on him so quickly.
“Listen . . . Josh. I have no—I don’t want to play games.”
“I’m not trying to.”
Buie said he was finished with the dance they had been doing all night long. It was close to sunup on March 19. Buie was tired, too. He said he’d rather not talk at all if Josh was going to play him for a fool, adding once again how, if he left the room for a second time, Josh would be entirely on his own.
A look of worry came over Josh.
Buie sat down. “You want to talk to me or not?” the detective asked quietly.
“Yes, yes,” Josh said. Then he said if he was “going down for something, I don’t want to take somebody that might have did something down [too].... You see what I’m talking about?”
However confusing it had come out, Buie said he understood.
Josh admitted that what he had shared earlier during a conversation with Buie out in back of the building, while he was allowed to smoke a cigarette, wasn’t exactly the entire truth. In fact, Heather had never called Josh’s mother’s house on the day she went missing. Josh said he wanted to clarify this, because he had reported that to Buie previously. Apparently, Heather had never asked him to meet her at the Petro because she was taking off and wanted to leave the children with him.
“That was not the truth,” Josh admitted.
Detective Buie now knew they were getting somewhere and encouraged Josh to continue.
While at Heather’s house that night, Josh explained, he had sex with her (probably another lie). Afterward, he didn’t hang around. He left almost immediately. Things were okay between them. They were acting civilly toward each other. They were even talking about getting back together (also a lie). But now Josh had this other woman in his life, Emilia (who was pregnant), which posed a major problem for Heather. Josh never said whether Heather knew if Emilia was pregnant with Josh’s child, or if Emilia knew that Josh was thinking of getting back with his wife. These were two very important facts Josh did not share at this time.
Josh arrived home to Emilia that night, after supposedly having had sex with Heather, and Josh said his girlfriend never suspected anything. But two weeks later, long after Heather went missing, Emilia approached Josh and said something about Heather being gone. The way Josh told it was, although Emilia might have never come across as knowing Josh had slept with Heather, she certainly knew he was seeing her again.
Josh explained to Buie that he asked Emilia on that night if she knew anything about Heather’s disappearance. She had made remarks that led him to believe she might.
According to what Josh told Detective Buie, Emilia had responded to Josh as follows: “She’s ‘gone and not to worry about her.’”
Was this a tit-for-tat situation? After he realized Emilia had obviously told the MCSO something and had used his name, was Josh now putting the onus back on her?
Buie, who didn’t care one way or another how Josh felt about their conversations with Emilia, asked Josh if he had questioned Emilia further about that particular comment.
Josh said he didn’t, adding, “I don’t know. . . . I didn’t believe her. I figured Heather would be back by [then] and take the kids. To be honest with you, I really did. . . .”
So Heather had never left the kids with Josh?
That much, it appeared to Buie, Josh had just admitted.
“Do you think Emilia had something to do with it?” Buie asked.
“I don’t know.”
According to what Josh said next, Emilia told him Heather’s boyfriend, James Acome, along with a friend of James’s, were both involved in Heather’s disappearance.
“And Heather told me something, too,” Josh said.
“What’s that?”
“That them two boys were offering money to get rid of her.”
None of this made sense to Buie. He questioned Josh further about it. Josh said he never took any of it seriously because Heather was known to take off and leave “for a long period of time.” So Josh never really worried too much that something awful had happened with her being gone all that time. But now that he’d had
a period to think it through, considering that James and his friend were involved (as Emilia had implied and Heather herself had seemed to back up with that comment), Josh said he believed they might have tossed Heather into Orange Lake to be eaten up by the gators. He concluded that thought by saying, “I don’t want to believe something bad happened to her.”
Buie broke into a long rant about Emilia and how pissed off he was at her for running him around in circles, clearly using Josh’s feelings for Emilia—and these new admissions—against him. Buie could tell Josh was on the fence with Emilia: Josh was ready to give her up totally, and, at the same time, he was trying to keep her close by, as an ally.
Near the end of a long back-and-forth between the two men, as Josh noticeably felt completely comfortable with Buie and surely understood Buie was on his side, the detective said, “Listen to me . . . hold my hand. Let’s get through this. It’s late. You owe it to your kids.”
Josh nodded yes.
“It got out of hand.... Be a man.”
Josh nodded yes again. He was slipping, falling into Buie’s arms.
“Let’s go get this girl . . . ,” Buie suggested. “Let’s do the right thing. You got me to fucking tear up here ... ’cause I know how you feel.” Buie talked about how Emilia didn’t “give a fuck” about Josh or the fact that Heather was “the mother of your child.... She gave birth to your children.”
“Can I get a phone call—and I will find out right where [Heather’s] at?”
What?
Buie thought he had Josh on the ropes. What did he mean by “phone call”?
“Who are you going to call?” Buie wondered.
By then, Josh was under the impression that Emilia had been driven back home and was no longer across the hall.
“Emilia,” Josh said. That’s who he needed to call in order to find out where Heather was. According to Josh, she would know.
Buie said he was going to get Emilia picked back up and Josh could speak to her once Emilia returned to Major Crimes.
Josh wanted to know if Buie was going to be speaking with Emilia as soon as she arrived.
“I’m not talking to Emilia,” Buie said. “Because . . . you know what? She’s a coldhearted bitch, and you don’t owe Emilia shit. She done set sail on you already. . . . Think about your daughter. Think about your son. Let’s do the proper thing for their mother. You ain’t gotta tell me nothing in between. Nothing. Just take me to where she is. I just want to see her. I just want to get her from where she is.”
Josh paused. He was thinking about what Buie had said. Then: “Well, say I did something to her—I didn’t have nothing to do with it.”
Detective Buie breathed a sigh. His suspect appeared ready to give it up.
CHAPTER 24
EMILIA WAS WITH Detective Sergeant Brian Spivey at her mother’s house in Boardman, Florida, an Orange Lakeside small town just north of McIntosh, Reddick and Ocala. But they were not at Emilia’s for a social visit or a break from Emilia being questioned. Spivey and Emilia were conducting a “walk-through” of that property, specifically the abandoned trailer in the backyard. A lot had gone on behind the scenes with several detectives working the case as Buie and Spivey kept their focus on questioning Josh and Emilia. The MCSO had learned many new bits of information about the case overnight, all of which pointed to one conclusion.
The house was a lime green clapboard, small, box-style ranch, with obvious roof decay (a blue tarp covered a portion of it). The house required some much-needed renovating or, rather, a large bulldozer to push it down so they could start over. Paint crumbled off the clapboards, the doors, the windowpanes. It seemed that invasive vines had overtaken the back of the home and sections of the carport. To the right of the front door were two signs: PRIVATE—KEEP OUT and BEWARE OF DOG. There were several ficus trees loaded with hanging Spanish moss, giving the yard your typical Deep South feel, as if Spivey and Emilia were wading through the swamps of Louisiana.
Spivey and Emilia were outside now, in the back, standing near the trailer they had talked about at Major Crimes. That trailer, located not far from the house (maybe a two-minute walk), had also seen better days. It had a film of mildew and organic growth all over the outside. It was white at one time, but now had taken on a greenish, black, moldy color. Much of it had been overcome by brush and weeds. There were beautiful palm trees all around, but it was hard to see them because the forest had grown in so thickly.
Revealing a fact she had held back until now, Emilia explained how she had walked out there just after Heather went missing and noticed that the door was closed. It seemed to Major Crimes that every time they spoke to Emilia, they learned more about this case—a fact that told Spivey and Buie that Emilia was holding out and possibly knew what had happened.
“I opened the door and came in,” Emilia clarified.
“Was there anything outside?” Spivey wanted to know. (Though he didn’t let on to her, during this interaction, Spivey believed Emilia was playing the role of “Oh, my gosh . . . I cannot believe this is happening. I had no idea. I didn’t know what Josh is capable of. . . . I’m afraid of him”.)
“Her stories began to sound self-serving,” Spivey said later, “which made me think that she was involved in some way. She played the role of the poor, little, innocent girl.”
It was all bullshit.
“Glass,” Emilia answered Spivey’s question, “. . . and I looked down and I saw glass, and I came in and that’s when I looked up and I saw the broken window.”
It was that broken window initially sparking Emilia’s interest, she explained to Spivey as they stepped into the trailer. She had walked by and noticed the broken glass and eventually looked inside the trailer to see if there was anything out of place. That is, the broken window was the impetus for her to go inside the trailer—it led her to believe something was wrong. Or something had happened inside.
Spivey expressed some concern after Emilia revealed how she and her mother had gone out into the trailer the previous week (the week before her interviews with the MCSO) to move a desk.
What were they doing? he thought.
The timing seemed odd.
Or maybe convenient.
With a quick cursory look inside the trailer, however, once Spivey walked in, he could tell that the family definitely used it as a storage facility. There were bags of clothes, bikes, toys, garbage, old bed frames, furniture, boxes of diapers, old electrical appliances, shoes, coolers, art supplies and crafts items, box springs, a refrigerator, empty food boxes, cleaning products, suitcases, and other household furnishings strewn all over the place, even stacked in the corners, on top of tables and chairs, some turned over as if someone had ransacked the place. Emilia told Spivey she had moved the desk and some other items “to get to the kids’ clothes,” which were in boxes. It was the main reason why she and her mom had gone out to the trailer to begin with.
Now it made sense.
But there was something inside the trailer she saw on that day, Emilia explained as they walked around, that was shocking.
Something terrible.
Something horrific.
Spivey asked Emilia to elaborate.
“I just kept walking and that’s when I came in here”—another room inside the trailer—“and I saw her in the chair.... She was taped to it. I just kind of stopped for a minute. I didn’t know what to think or what to do. And then I just went up to her and I was checking for a pulse.”
Saw her? Heather? Was Emilia now saying she had seen Heather strapped to a chair and checked her body for a pulse?
Quite the revelation Emilia had been holding on to.
Spivey turned a corner, walking down a short hallway, and there in front of him was a black desk chair, some used gray duct tape on the floor nearby, and a large, black, leaf-type plastic bag next to the tape. They were not simply tossed into this section of the trailer like all of the other junk; these items stood out. Something had happened here. A space had been clea
red: the chair in the middle, a blanket or sheet of some sort on the floor, next to the bag, and the tape. It had a Mafia feel to it, as though a hit man had put a snitch in a chair and had tortured him before killing the son of a bitch.
Spivey looked at Emilia. What the hell happened in here?
CHAPTER 25
IF THAT HAD been some sort of admission from Josh Fulgham, it was poorly worded and vague, to say the least. Detective Buie needed more than “Well, say I did something to her—I didn’t have nothing to do with it.”
In the scope of the night and the interviews he’d conducted with Josh, Buie wondered, just what in the hell did this mean? Was Josh trying to say he knew where Heather was, what happened, but he had no hand in getting her there? How could he expect the MCSO to buy both: Josh had done something to Heather, but he didn’t have anything to do with it at the same time?
“That’s fine . . . ,” the detective said at one point, clearly frustrated yet again at Josh’s unwillingness to be straight with him.
“What would happen to me, though?” Josh wanted to know.
Buie explained that he didn’t want to make any promises. All he needed from Josh was for him to show Major Crimes where Heather’s body was located. That was the most important action Josh could take for himself at this point. Stop all the nonsense of Heather being kept captive somewhere. Buie indicated that they all knew Heather was never coming home. She was dead. So there was no need to talk as if she had been kidnapped by James Acome and his buddy and was being held in a warehouse somewhere, like some rich man’s daughter would be. That was all nonsense.
Get to the damn truth.
“I’m worried about losing my babies for life,” Josh said. Then he changed his story once again, adding, “I don’t know what they did with her, but I can find out. I give you my word. I can find out.”
It took Buie some time to explain to Josh that nothing else mattered except locating Heather. He ignored Josh’s previous statement and instead asked: “Is she in the water? Is she in the dirt? Is she in a building? Is she in a car?”
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