by A. E. Howe
“No, it’s hard to see the worst of people day in and day out. A lot of people can’t handle it. But it can happen to other professions too. Teachers can become callous and burned out over time.”
“The other problem is having someone I care about be at risk every day.” She placed her hand on mine as she said those last words.
“I promise, I’ll take good care of myself.” I leaned in and kissed her lightly, coming away with whipped cream on my lips. We both chuckled when I licked it off. “I think you should always have your lips covered in whipped cream when we kiss.”
She took a little bit of whipped cream on her spoon and gently flicked it at me.
“Don’t start,” I laughed, filling my spoon with fudge and cream and pretending I was going to send it flying at her. She raised her arms in surrender, so I stuffed the spoon in my mouth. We finished our sundaes while exchanging stupid smiles, then walked back to my car hand in hand.
We sat in the car for a while in front of her house. After a couple passionate kisses, she broke away. “I guess I can’t sit out here all night.”
“I’m not rushing you off.” I was somewhere between mellow and ecstatic, if there is such a place.
“Buddy, you have to go to work tomorrow, check your reports and give my father the okay to go back home.”
“You’re right. I’ll call you tomorrow afternoon.”
She got out of the car. “I’ll be at work, but don’t hesitate to call my cell phone.” She paused for a moment. “When everything is cleared up with Dad, I’m looking forward to spending time together.”
“You’re stealing my lines,” I told her. She smiled, turned and waved over her shoulder as I watched her get safely into her house.
When I got to the office Monday morning, I still didn’t have anything from forensics in my inbox. I had to call and poke the lab to get them to email me their preliminary findings. Toxicology showed exactly what you would expect. Blood alcohol level of .04, well below intoxication levels. Trace amounts of TCH, which translated to some pot smoked a few days earlier. Nothing that could have been used to knock him out.
Next I tackled the autopsy report. I opened it and then did what I usually did with Dr. Darzi’s reports: called him for the verbal CliffsNotes edition.
“Pretty much what I told you the first day. He was repeatedly hung by the rope that was around his neck when he was found.”
“And that would be consistent with him standing on a stool and having someone pull it out from under him and then replacing the stool several times?” I asked, remembering the indentations I had found under the tree branch.
“Yes, I said so originally and nothing discovered during the autopsy contradicted that.”
“No bruising or lumps on the head, that sort of thing?”
“The only bruising was around the neck and consistent with the scenario you just described.”
So he hadn’t gotten into a fight with his killer, which meant they must have had a gun or knife in order to make him climb up on the stool with a noose over his head. He would have had to believe that the killer could and would shoot him, but he must’ve thought the murderer might release him if he didn’t try to run. Interesting. Maybe it was someone he knew and trusted. Or at least someone he thought he knew. Unfortunately, this description still fit Henry.
I thanked Dr. Darzi and hung up. I didn’t have anything that would exonerate Cara’s father, but thinking about the gun gave me an idea. There weren’t any houses close enough to the road or the hanging site for the residents to have seen anything, so we’d only done a cursory canvassing of the neighborhood. We hadn’t expected anyone to see anything and no one had. But we hadn’t bothered to ask about gunshots because there wasn’t any indication that a gun was used. And the funny thing about eyewitnesses is that you usually have to ask specific questions to get decent answers. Asking Did anything unusual happen last night? wasn’t nearly as good as asking Did you see anyone or hear a gunshot?
Pete came in just as I had this revelation, so I asked him if he was up for doing some door-to-door.
“Hell yeah,” he said, looking at the pile of paper on his desk.
It took us about an hour to find someone who thought he’d heard a sound around five that morning, but he couldn’t decide if it was a gunshot or a car backfiring. The witness worked the early shift at the prison in the next county over, so he had to be up before dawn and was fairly familiar with what a gunshot would sound like.
“Yeah, I thought it could be a gunshot, but that’s a weird hour to hear one. ’Course, if someone gets up and the raccoons are raiding his trash cans…” He shrugged. “I heard it clear, but it was pretty far away in that direction.” He pointed in the general direction of the crime scene.
“We were lucky he was home,” I said to Pete.
“It’s getting close to the holidays so people take more time off.”
“Want to push our luck?” I asked. He looked over at me and raised his eyebrows. “We could go look around and see if we can find where the bullet went.”
“If there was a bullet, the odds of us finding it are…” He pretended to calculate. “Four trillion, one hundred ninety-five billion, eight hundred fifty-five million to one.”
“Yeah, don’t be a wet blanket.”
But Pete was right. We walked around looking at trees and imagining possible lines of sight for about an hour before we admitted that we weren’t that lucky.
On the way back to the office, my mind was going round and round about letting Henry go back to Gainesville. I knew I was letting my heart have too big of a say, but what little bit of law enforcement intuition I’d developed told me that he didn’t kill Tyler. We did have one bit of evidence that spoke to his innocence. If the witness really did hear that gunshot, and if our murderer fired it, then it happened around five, before Henry left Cara’s duplex. I made up my mind.
I parked in my favorite spot at the office and let Pete go inside ahead of me. Then I called Cara. “Tell your dad he can go back to Gainesville, but nowhere else.” Let the crap fly, I thought. If I’m screwing up, I’m screwing up for a good cause.
I climbed out of the car and was passing the second row of parked cars when something caught my eye. It took me just a minute to realize what I was looking at. It was a dark burgundy Toyota sedan. I stopped and looked around to see if anyone else was in the parking lot. A couple deputies were cutting the fool near the building, but they weren’t paying any attention to me. I leaned over and took a good look at the tires. I closed my eyes and thought about those hubcaps that I’d spent the better part of an hour staring at. I opened my eyes. This could’ve been the car. No guarantees, even if it was the same make, model and color, since Toyota would have sold tens of thousands of them. But what were the odds?
I walked up beside the car and tried to nonchalantly look through the windows. There was a notebook and a blue light, the kind that you stick on the dash and plug into the auxiliary outlet. This was definitely a deputy’s personal car. But which deputy?
I took out my phone like I’d just gotten a call. Talking out loud to an imaginary caller, I activated the camera and, as discreetly as possible, took a picture of the car’s tag. I could have just memorized it, but I was already thinking of the file full of evidence that I might have to put together.
I could run the tag, but that would open me up to questions later. You can’t run tags for personal reasons and, right now, I didn’t have a case to tie this to, or even a good reason for running it. I could just wait until I saw who got into it, but I really wanted to know sooner rather than later. I could ask around, but then whoever’s car it was would probably find out. That’s when one of those little light bulbs went off over my head. I had to come up with a reason to go in and say, “Hey, someone’s Toyota is something or other.” A flat tire might be too over the top. I looked around again and bumped it pretty hard. Nothing. So it didn’t have a sensitive alarm system.
Back to the tire. I
looked around to make sure no one was watching, knelt down, unscrewed the valve cover and started letting air out. I just had to let out enough that it was noticeable. I didn’t want to do anything too bad as this might not have even been the car I’d seen the other night. Finished, I stood up and looked. It was definitely low enough that anyone might notice it.
I went into the office and told the front desk sergeant that a burgundy Toyota in the parking lot had a tire that looked pretty low. He got on the intercom and announced the information to the office.
I casually went into a conference room on the back side of the building. I knew it had a window that faced out onto the parking lot. I watched. Ten minutes clicked by and I was beginning to think that the person was going to wait until they were ready to leave before checking on their car. And then I saw him, walking determinedly out to his Toyota. When I saw him and the car together, I finally remembered that I’d seen him driving it. It was Matt.
It didn’t make sense. Matt was the last person I would have thought would be tied up with a drug gang. And I wasn’t just thinking that because he was a nose-to-the-grindstone kind of deputy, but for practical reasons. He didn’t have a wife or kids that were costing him money. It was laughable to think of him gambling his money away. I had never seen him take a drink. He’d never had any chronic pain, like the type that might get you hooked on painkillers. I knew that he’d put in applications to both the FBI and the DEA and had gotten as far as the interviews, which meant that he’d undergone very extensive background checks that would have revealed any financial difficulties or bad habits, like spending a fortune on prostitutes.
No, it just doesn’t make sense, I thought as I watched him frown at the tire for a minute and then get in and drive off slowly. No doubt he was driving it across the street to the filling station to put air in it. Now that I thought about it, Matt had been a lot nicer to me the last month. I assumed it was because of my hostage ordeal and solving the Kemper case, but maybe not. Could he have been trying to curb his acerbic personality so that he would fly a bit more under the radar? I was going to have to mull this over. And keep an eye on Matt, I thought. How the hell am I going to manage that?
Chapter Ten
I spent the next two days working on the half dozen cases that I’d been neglecting while working on the Tyler murder. On call Tuesday night, I had to disturb Ivy’s sleep when I was called out for a burglary of the lowest type. Someone had broken into the First Methodist Church and stolen a pile of toys that was being stored for a Christmas charity. Normally a burglary doesn’t warrant an investigator on the scene in the middle of the night and Deputy Edwards apologized for calling.
“I’m sorry, Larry, but jeez, what kind of Scrooge would steal toys for kids at Christmas? We’ve got to catch this guy.”
“I’m with you,” I said with all sincerity.
We didn’t wake up the crime scene techs, but Edwards and I did a very thorough job collecting fingerprints and photographing the scene. We even found a shoeprint and some tire tracks where the idiots had run off the driveway. I knew Dad would want to do a personal Crime Stoppers PSA on this one.
My phone rang early on Thursday morning. I hunted for it, irritated because I figured it was Dad reminding me that I had to pick up Mauser, but then I realized that it wasn’t his distinctive gunfire ringtone. I looked at the caller ID and a chill went down my back. It was Cara.
“Something’s happened.” Her voice was high and tense.
“Take a deep breath and tell me,” I said, trying to wake up.
“Dad… There’s been another murder,” she said, and now my heart was racing.
“Where?” I stood up and headed for the kitchen to get a pen and paper.
“Gainesville. And…” She didn’t seem able to get the words out.
“Tell me.”
“Dad’s been arrested. Please, can you go down and see what’s going on?” I was already trying to think of anybody I knew who worked for law enforcement in Alachua County.
“Of course.”
“I’m already headed that way.” What had we ever done before we had cell phones?
“Listen to me, be careful. Keep your mind on your driving.” Every year people are killed driving to help someone who’s in trouble.
“I’m okay. But I think I really need you. Dad was confused and angry. He wasn’t making a lot of sense and I’m afraid they won’t listen to him.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll be there,” I said, not knowing if I’d be able to do anything. Departments can be pretty hostile to outside officers coming in and sticking their noses into another department’s jurisdiction. Dad would probably know someone down there who could help, but that meant I was going to have to tell him everything.
“I’m getting my things together now. I’ll call you when I have an ETA.”
“Thank you. Thank you.”
“Just drive safe.”
I got cleaned up and put out the automatic feeder and waterer for Ivy. Depending on how long I was gone, I could call on a neighbor to look in on her. Next I packed a bag for a couple of nights. Done with my prep, I started to call Dad, then remembered about Mauser. Damn. I got in the car, deciding the best way to deal with it was to talk to Dad in person.
I was greeted by Mauser, bounding over and bumping into me as though he knew we were supposed to be roommates for the next few days. Hell, he probably did know since I could see the two suitcases Dad had packed for him.
Dad came out of the back when he heard Mauser bouncing around. “You’re here early. Good.”
“Dad, I’ve got something I need to talk to you about.”
“Fine, as long as it doesn’t involve you trying to get out of watching Mauser.”
“Actually—” I barely managed to get the word out before Dad’s face flushed. It was like watching the clock on a bomb counting down 3, 2, 1. “Okay, no, wait,” I said. “Listen to me first. Please.”
Dad looked me hard in the eyes at the word “please.” It isn’t a word that either one of us uses with the other much. “Okay. Talk.”
I explained about Henry. I had to go into a little more depth about my relationship with Cara than I wanted to, but I knew I didn’t have much choice.
“You just let him go back home?” Dad yelled.
“All I had was circumstantial evidence against him. And my hunch says he didn’t do it.”
“That’s not your hunch talking,” he said, giving me the eye. Then he held up a hand. “Enough. Okay. What’s done is done. I’ll leave it up to Lt. Johnson as to whether you should be called on the carpet for this. You do remember that you have a supervisor?”
“Yes, sir,” I said meekly.
“Good.” He was sounding calmer. I hoped we weren’t just in the eye of the hurricane. “Now, what’s not negotiable is you taking care of Mauser for the next four days.”
I started to open my mouth and protest, but the hand went up again. “But I’ll make a deal with you. You can go down to Gainesville. You just have to take Mauser with you. You can take his van.”
How gracious of you, letting me take the ratty dog van, I wanted to say, but I held my tongue. Getting to Gainesville and helping Cara was the important thing.
“Okay. Can you use your contacts in Alachua County to get me a liaison position on the investigation?”
He got real quiet. “Listen, we kid around and give each other a hard time. That’s all part of the father/son thing we’ve got going, but I want you to sit down for a minute.” He indicated the couch. Dad seldom let his good old boy mask slip and I wondered what was coming.
He sat in a chair across from me. Mauser, glad that the yelling was over, came and put his head on Dad’s leg. Dad scratched the dog’s ears as he talked. “When your heart gets tangled up in something this serious, you have to stop and step way back. Hardest thing you’ll ever have to do is look into yourself and evaluate your motives when your heart is telling you one thing and the facts are telling you another. I don’t wa
nt to help you get involved in something that’s going to either ruin your career or break your heart. Or both.”
I took a deep breath before I answered. “I know what you’re saying. And I know you’re trying to protect me, but I’m seeing this clearly. Strangely, when I’m with Cara, I see things clearer than I ever have.”
“Love can bring clarity or confusion. Your mother brought clarity to my life, but I’ve seen many men and women that love delivered nothing to but bewilderment and conflict.”
He looked at me hard, trying to evaluate… what? My maturity? My skills? Finally he said, “Enough. I trust you. I know you’ll do the best you can. I’ll talk to a couple people down there that owe me favors. Should be enough to get your foot in the door. Up to you if it gets broken.”
“Guess we’re going on a road trip,” I told Mauser, who left Dad and came over to give me a single lick across my face with his giant slug of a tongue.
Once we were on the road to Gainesville, I called Cara. “I’m on my way,” I reassured her.
“I don’t know what to do.” She was choking back tears. “A deputy told me they’re holding Dad at the sheriff’s office until the investigators are done at the crime scene. But they couldn’t tell me how much longer it would be, or when they might release him.”
“Just stay calm. We’ll get it all sorted when I get there.” I decided that I needed to lower her expectations concerning what I would and wouldn’t be able to do. “We might not be able to get your dad out right away. It might even be a day or two before we can see him. Have you called a lawyer?”
“The co-op has a lawyer. Dad and he are great friends. He’s trying to get in to see him, but according to the deputies, Dad hasn’t asked to see a lawyer yet. If I know Dad, he’s just clammed up. That’s what he does when he’s under too much stress. He just shuts down.”
“Just hold on. I’ll be there in about three hours.”
After I rang off, I caught sight of a big, black blockhead in my peripheral vision. “I hope you’re happy,” I said, half turning to see Mauser’s slobbering jowls sticking between the seats. He just looked at me and I passed a treat back to him.