Shades of Deception

by Charlie Hudson

  Bev heard the harsher note used for Crystal and was struck with an idea. “Ah yes, well, Mr. Cunningham, we will want to talk with you. There’s a young man inside, Gary Fitzhugh, who worked with Crystal and is a witness to the ah, incident. Would you be willing for him to go with you and we’ll call when we’re ready? It shouldn’t be long.” That would get Fitzhugh out of the way and, based on what she knew at the moment, she didn’t think he’d done anything wrong, so she wasn’t concerned about putting him together with a lawyer. She didn’t want to wait long though to find out why Cunningham wanted to initiate a conversation with police.

  He’d already written his number on a slip of paper. “Yes, of course, if he’s willing to do so.”

  The ambulance was turning in and if she wasn’t mistaken, the Chief’s car was trailing it. Christ, just what she needed.

  She drew Cunningham into the trailer, gave a fast explanation to Fitzhugh, gave Kevin a look of I’ll-fill-you-in and hustled the two men out the back door. As always when he entered a space, Chief Taylor created a presence and he jerked his thumb to bring Bev to the dining table. The two EMTs moved past him to the body and Kevin retreated to the corner on the other side of the couch.

  “Anything they can do for her?”

  “No. It was a clean shoot, Chief.”

  “Never thought it wasn’t,” he grunted and waved away the weapon she tried to hand him. “We’ll take care of that shit later.” He swiveled his head to find Kevin. “Watch the goddamn door and make sure the uniforms are doing crowd control. We’ll be in the back if you need us.” He turned to Bev. “Let the techs do their job while you tell me what the hell happened.”

  Bev remembered the only room that wasn’t set up as a bedroom and led him there, noticing how clean and less cluttered the trailer was than the last time they’d been there. He didn’t interrupt and the scowl changed to neutral. “Son-of-a-bitch. Any idea what the guy — Fitzhugh? — knows or thinks he knows?”

  “I haven’t talked to him yet, but my guess is he somehow figured out the deal with Raney and came to confront Sharpe about it.” A text pinged on her phone.

  The Chief’s brow furrowed. “Well, better get to him if that lawyer hasn’t interfered.”

  “I went with my gut on that one,” Bev said calmly. “I think it will be helpful.”

  “Hmmf. Les on his way?”

  Bev held up her phone. “Fifteen minutes out.”

  “Okay. No sense me hanging around. I’ve probably got calls stacked up already on this one. I figured it was easier for me to come see for my goddamn self instead of waiting to hear a report.” His face almost softened. “You okay? I know she was a she and a kid, but she was an evil little monster. Don’t think for one second she wouldn’t have pulled the trigger and killed you both.”

  Bev didn’t try to hide the shudder. “Yeah, I know. I’m not sure how I’ll feel after I think about it more.”

  “You always think too goddamn much about most things,” he said and turned to leave. “I’ll call your Dad and tell him what happened.”

  “Thanks, Chief,” she said with genuine gratitude. The last thing she wanted was a frantic call from her mother who would hear no telling what kind of story. There were advantages to the two men having been on the force together. Her dad wouldn’t press for details he wasn’t supposed to have. Oh shit, she should call Kyle, too.

  After Bev gave Kyle as short a version as she could get away with, she went to see how Kevin was progressing with snapping multiple photographs from every angle. As soon as he finished, she wanted him to start a search for the pony bottle. Crystal not getting rid of it was going to be a major stroke of luck for them.

  Les hurried through the door and unlike the Chief, he didn’t try to hide his concern. “Jesus, are you okay? I had basically started my meeting with the lipreading expert when I got the call from Mrs. Plummer. I left the video clip with her and broke a record making it down,” he said. “I feel like I ought to apologize.”

  Bev gestured around the room. “I’m all right and it’s not like you could have known. We’ve got several things to do. I want to get to Mr. Cunningham’s. I’ll fill you in while we walk over.”

  Bev led him out the back door to avoid the single reporter who’d picked up on the activity. “Kevin is senior enough to handle everything right now. You can come back to review the scene after the interviews. I want both of us in on this. Beau is with the guys outside and he called to tell me Sylvia Ruthven showed up. He knows her and she’ll stick with basic facts until we give her the rest.”

  “As long as you don’t make her wait too long.”

  “Exactly,” Bev said and knocked sharply on Cunningham’s door. She automatically took in the neat exterior appearance and profusion of plantings along the length of the trailer.

  He answered immediately and the interior was not what she expected. Unless he had the trailer custom-built, Cunningham must not have kept any of the original furnishings. Teak was the wood of choice and barrister bookcases flanked the entertainment center against the main wall. Books dominated, rather than the thin-profile television, and a variety of sculptures in stone, wood, and marble were interspersed among the hardback volumes. If he had paperbacks, they were not on display. The fabric of the sofa and two matching club chairs — no recliner — was hunter green rather than a tropical motif. Fitzhugh looked up from the square dining table, a second chair pushed back from where Cunningham had probably been sitting. Rosewood was what came to mind, the set done in clean lines although not quite contemporary.

  “I have fresh coffee if you’d like some,” Cunningham said and gestured to the chairs. “I imagine Gary could use something stronger, but we knew that should wait.”

  Fitzhugh started to rise. His expression was neutral, his eyes questioning. “Won’t you need me to come to the station for this?”

  “None for me, thanks,” Bev said as Cunningham pointed to his coffee mug. “Yes, we will, but we’d like to get the highlights first. You and Mr. Cunningham have been talking?”

  “Not to him as a lawyer,” he said quickly. “I don’t think I need one, do I? I’d just as soon tell you what happened.”

  Les had eased into the fourth chair. “It doesn’t sound like a lawyer situation from what I heard.”

  The young man pushed the mug to one side, splayed his hands on the table, and looked from one to the other. “Where do you want me to start? With why I was there?”

  They both nodded. “Okay, I’m not going to pretend I give a shit — you don’t mind if I say that? — about Matt being dead. How it happened was really weird though and none of us could understand. At the time, I was like everyone and felt sorry as hell for Crystal. It never occurred to me there was anything going on except some freak accident or one of those genetic medical conditions people have and don’t know about until it’s too late.” He pulled his hands back, loosely curling them, and swung his gaze to Bev. “I saw you coming out from talking with Laurie and I was curious because I thought everything was settled, but maybe there was some real information from like an autopsy. She acted a little weird when I asked her what was going on and just said there were some follow-up questions about stuff. She seemed almost embarrassed which wasn’t like her at all and changed the subject. I don’t know, I had this funny feeling about what she wasn’t telling me, I guess.” He turned to Les. “Not long after that, you’re in with Julio and he can’t keep his mouth shut about anything. Not that you said much to him, but what were the odds you would both be coming around again if there wasn’t something wrong?” The dark look flashed across his face and was gone almost before Bev saw it. “He told me about the pony bottle deal with Matt and Crystal and it hit me all of a sudden.”

  He moved his hands to hold the coffee mug as if he needed to do something with them and glanced down before looking at Bev again. “You’re the diver, right? You know what I’m talkin
g about?”

  “I didn’t until recently,” she said simply.

  He shifted his eyes to Cunningham, who gave a slight nod. “I was explaining what I suspected to Malcom. About how Crystal could have rigged the pony bottle with oxygen and gotten Matt to breath from it. See, when I went over everything in my head, slowed shit down, and focused on all the details, I remembered a few things. She’d helped fill tanks which wasn’t all that unusual. She had the pony bottle under her arm when she came on board, but it wasn’t with her gear when I put it away for her after we left the boat. She was carrying a larger than normal dive bag with her that day — more like a duffle. She would have had room to put the bottle in there and she didn’t let me take it into the trailer for her when I brought her home. As heavy as the thing is, I’m surprised she was able to carry it without it registering on me. Maybe I was more rattled than I realized with what had happened.” He paused for a breath. “It was smart as hell to set this all up and the whole thing seemed crazy except it wasn’t exactly a secret around the shop that Crystal had the hots for Matt. I mean, she probably thought people didn’t know, but it wasn’t hard to see, especially with Matt being how he was with women. Then I got to thinking about how she could have done it and it all made sense from a technical point of view. Him pissing her off in some way was easy to believe. It still didn’t seem possible she’d do something so drastic, but you guys wouldn’t have come around if there wasn’t a reason, right?”

  His mouth tightened. “Like I said, Matt was a son-of-a-birch, but if she did set everything up, that’s still crazy, right? I mean, you can’t have someone like that running around, can you? The more I thought about it, the madder I got that she would use us — the dive shop I mean — to do this. I guess I should have just called you, but the thing is, she would need to either completely empty the bottle or toss it and…” He trailed off for a moment and shook his head. “I guess I thought I would surprise her and she would admit it. That was pretty stupid and I sure as hell didn’t expect what happened. It all seemed to make more sense when I came up with the idea.” He frowned. “I’ve been thinking about that thing you said about her maybe killing Deena. How could Crystal have been involved? Was it connected to Matt in some way?”

  “We’re still putting all the pieces together,” Bev said carefully and held up her hand when a text pinged through from Kevin. Got the bottle.

  The three men looked at her expectantly. “They found the pony bottle,” she said. “Okay, Mr. Cunningham, if you don’t mind waiting, I’ll take Mr. Fitzhugh to the station to get his official statement. Detective Martin will check on the search and then come back here.”

  “I am at your service,” Cunningham said politely.

  Bev would have preferred both of them to be with Cunningham, but finding the pony bottle was critical to the investigation. Since she’d been involved in the shooting, it was better to let Les handle the scene. Dammit, she hated to sit on the sideline for any part of this. The fact was, the shooting of a young girl and the bizarre revelations connected to it were going to cause a sensation. The reporter outside, Sylvia Ruthven, was as fair as any she knew, but it was a hell of a story and they had to be careful of protocol. In thinking about it from that angle, she was going to send Fitzhugh to the station with one of the other officers instead of him riding with her.

  They exited Cunningham’s trailer and, even though Bev didn’t see the reporter, she suspected she was interviewing nearby neighbors for background. She no doubt also had a television station crew on the way from Miami — or at least on standby. Bev briefly regretted the decision to be alone in the car with no one to distract her. With everything happening, she hadn’t had time to think about having killed an eighteen-year-old girl.

  You always think too goddamn much about most things was what the Chief had said. How was she supposed to do anything else?

  Bev briefly debated between another mug of coffee or a Diet Coke as she waited for Les to come in. She and Gary Fitzhugh had completed their separate, taped interviews and she was beginning to feel the effects of the strain of the day. The fact she’d been in previous shootings didn’t make this any easier. She took that as a good trait, although the Chief might argue otherwise. She brought Kyle up to date when he called to tell her he expected to be there soon. He would come by the office to see what he could do to help.

  “You must have been reading my mind,” Les said, dropping his notebook on the desk and going to the coffee pot. “Cunningham makes a nice brew, too. Discerning guy and quite a background.” He looked at Bev with more of a paternal expression than he probably realized. “How are you doing?”

  “I’m okay,” she said simply. “You talk to the Chief?”

  Les handed her a mug of coffee and took the chair next to her desk. “I poked my head in. He was on the phone and told me to come back later.”

  Bev took a tiny sip of the hot liquid. “Cunningham?”

  “Let’s call it a triple instead of a home run. Specifically, he saw Crystal riding her bicycle out of the trailer park around ten-thirty the night Catherine died.”

  Bev might consider it a home run. “No shit?”

  “No shit. He apparently often takes a before-bedtime walk around the neighborhood. He was certain of the time because he was startled she would be going out so late on her bike. He was shocked of course about Catherine, but here’s the really interesting part.” Les wasn’t bothering with his notes. “He wanted to pass on his impressions of Crystal and some conversations he’d had with Catherine. He understands they have no legal bearing, as he put it, and went on to basically reinforce what we think about Crystal. His legal specialty was maritime and admiralty law, by the way. His brother took the route into criminal defense work and he clearly remembered one of his cases remarkably similar to what we were looking at. Similar in the sense of a teenage girl about the same age. Killed her younger sister and both parents and, get this, set the house on fire to try to pass it all off as a tragic accident.”

  “You mean like the story Catherine told about what happened when she was a kid?”

  Les nodded. “Forensics has taken huge technical leaps and there was a time when badly burned bodies didn’t yield any useable evidence. In the case he was telling me about, it was the same deal with lots of sympathy for the only surviving member of the family. When they first suspected arson and there was a short list of suspects, there was a feeling a girl of her age couldn’t possibly have done something so gruesome.”

  Bev lifted her mug. “You mean like we did and everyone involved with Catherine’s mother?”

  Les shrugged. “Yeah. Anyway, to cut through everything about that case, Mr. Cunningham had a fair amount of exposure to the girl because of his brother and all the publicity. He stressed there was nothing romantic about his relationship with Catherine. He thought of her as much like a niece, as anything. They were close enough so she eventually told him about her childhood and why she left Kansas. The comparison to Catherine’s situation and the other case was unsettling, to use his term. He said it was difficult to pinpoint exactly why, but the contact he had with Crystal always gave him an uneasy feeling about her. Bottom line is he felt the same way about the mother-daughter relationship as what the lady bartender told you. Not near as much affection as Catherine wanted people to think. Him jumping in to help her was the proverbial two-sided coin.”

  “As in?”

  “If it was a legitimate accident, the least he could do for Catherine was help her daughter deal with everything she would be going through. If, however, there was more to it, being close to Crystal might give him the opportunity to find out what.”

  Jesus, she knew she’d wanted to hear Cunningham. “He isn’t aware him seeing her leave that night is a big plus for us, is he?”

  “No is the short answer. The main point from his perspective is, he became convinced she did it and couldn’t figure out how. He said Crys
tal was pretty good at putting on a show, but not good enough to hide all the signs of not remotely grieving. He admitted it also didn’t mean she’d done anything except be cold-blooded about losing her mother. He said it wouldn’t be appropriate for him to ask me for details of the investigation and if he was completely in error, he was sorry he wasted my time.”

  Bev raised her eyebrows. “What did you say?”

  Les didn’t try to hide a slight smile. “I told him I appreciated his observations and maybe we could have a cup of coffee again in a few weeks.”

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” Bev said. “Assuming Cunningham was correct about the time Crystal left, she was with her mother at home and she definitely lied to us. What do you figure? She sweet-talked her into the heating pad and pain patch?”

  “Sure, why not? We have nothing to go on other than Crystal’s statement about her mother using pain patches before. Even if that piece of her version happened to be true, remember what Doc Cooper said about people not paying attention to all the warnings on packages. I mean, hell, the tiny print they use and all the legal mumbo-jumbo doesn’t make for easy reading. If Crystal was looking for something common place to serve as what was basically a poison, you can bet she read every word.”

  Bev’s elation nudged out her fatigue. Cunningham had nothing to do with the police and he’d come to the same conclusion about Crystal being a psychopath. “We have her laptop. The county team will put someone on it tomorrow. They’re good and I have no doubt they’ll find a search history to support every damn thing we speculated about.”

  “Probably,” Les agreed. “I’d just as soon have as many connections as we can find. I don’t care that it’s circumstantial — I want the file as thick as possible.”

  “No argument there,” Bev said and cocked her head. “I am curious though. Cunningham sounds like a pretty smart guy. The trailer park they live in isn’t the kind of place you’d think some big time Boston lawyer would wind up in.”