by Timms, Marc
Additionally, she hadn’t heard the sounds of them being murdered either. In this case, she’d listened to the sounds, recognizable anywhere, of what had happened. She leaned over the bowl and threw up again.
When she returned, Marnie was on the phone. It was apparent that she’d been crying, but she was giving orders to the 911 operator like she was part of the police herself. She even dropped Detective Dempsey’s name into the conversation.
Within minutes, they could hear the sound of the sirens.
Marnie looked at her friend. “I told them that they didn’t have to send an ambulance, but they insisted. I wouldn’t look out the window if I were you.”
Johanna agreed with that assessment. She didn’t want to heave again from the sight of Carolyn’s body. She could hear the sounds and see the flashing lights outside the building, but she made no move to go downstairs. They would need to come up here to ask questions and obtain information.
“I’ll go down and let them know what happened. You can stay here with the dog. This might have been a ploy to get us away from Penny, so you’ll need to keep an eye on her.” Marnie closed the door behind her, and there was silence in the apartment. Not the peaceful silence that comes with a busy day, but the silence that made Johanna on edge, thinking that the noise would quickly follow. This killer had come for Carolyn and Thomas, and Johanna could only believe that she was next.
She scratched Penny behind the ears and tried to focus on what she knew about this latest killing. First, Thomas and Carolyn had been hit by the same driver. Johanna could not fathom another scenario where two different drivers would have stolen two of her cars and then hit two people with those cars.
The problem was that she had no idea why she was being targeted in this manner. Was it to torment her, or perhaps to drag her into these murders? If it was the latter, the killer was far too late. She’d been involved since the beginning, when she’d sprinted away from the man and the car in the park.
Johanna gave it some more thought and wondered if the killer was doing this to discredit her somehow. The police would not find her a credible witness, given that her car had been stolen before each of the hit-and-run accidents. Thomas had survived, but the sound she’d heard indicated that Carolyn had likely not been so lucky.
When Marnie returned, she was accompanying Detective Dempsey. They both looked at her with concern in their eyes.
“Is that Penny?” he asked immediately. Since he was still in the hallway, the question echoed down the passage.
“Yes, we found her and decided to keep her here until further notice.” Marnie had seemed to take control of the situation.
“And Lilly knows that?” he asked.
“Of course. We took her over to Lilly, but absolutely nothing is stopping them from doing this, again and again, if they know where Penny is.”
The little black dog recognized her name and went trotting to the door, where she received scratches behind the ears.
“You okay?” he asked Johanna, as they entered the room. Penny took a tentative few steps and sniffed at Dempsey’s outstretched hand.
“Is she?” Johanna asked. She was surprised at how small and quiet her own voice was.
Dempsey shook his head. “No way she could have survived that hit. They came straight at her, and there are no signs of skid marks or brakes. They went after her, and they got her.”
“They?”
Dempsey shrugged. “Sorry, just a figure of speech. You’re probably right. The MO of this crime is almost identical to what happened to Thomas. So what did you see?”
Johanna took a deep breath and started in on what she could recall. The driver’s face was not visible from her angle with the visor down. Obviously, that had been done, knowing what he had planned.
“The car was mine, and he’d taken it. He’d pulled it out of the driveway and then brought it back to wait. Since Carolyn was staying with me, she would be coming back here at some point.”
Dempsey had a notepad out and was scribbling notes to himself. “That’s good. We need to know where Carolyn was just before her death, and we’ll check the cameras at businesses around here to see if we can catch the car on camera. Then we’d have an idea of how he killed time. Maybe someone remembers him and saw his face. Keep going.”
“They just waited. It was terrible. That’s when we saw Carolyn. It was as if she didn’t notice a thing.”
“Maybe she was distracted by wherever she just was?” Dempsey offered.
“I had thought maybe she was at the hospital with Thomas. So that’s possible. He’s awake, by the way.”
“I knew that. I have a man down there now, talking to him. From a text I got on the way over here, Thomas remembers next to nothing. The car was much like the one here, the visor down to obscure the face. The concussion and the time unconscious have pretty much obliterated his memory of the events. He won’t be much help.”
Johanna had wondered what he would recall from the scene. She couldn’t think of anything worse than to actually remember the moment of near death. Maybe his brain blocked it out so that he wouldn’t have to deal with the memory, over and over.
“What happened then?”
Marnie piped up, and Johanna felt relieved. She wasn’t sure she wanted to continue.
“Johanna threw a vase at the car. It shattered, but it smashed part of the windshield. That might help in finding the car. But it didn’t stop the driver. He just kept coming, and Carolyn couldn’t get out of the way fast enough.” Marnie stopped too.
“I went downstairs to see if there was anything we could do for Carolyn, but it was too late. Johanna stayed here with the dog, in case the drivers were after the dog as well. Do you think that this is tied to the kidnapping or the deaths in the park?” Marnie asked.
“The kidnapping, possibly. The timing is such that it feels like the crimes are connected. The other murders, I’m not sure at all. We haven’t had a sighting of the man at the park since he chased you across town. I think that worries me more than if he was still at it. Now I want to know what he’s waiting for.”
That question had not crossed Johanna’s mind, but now it did. Why had he stopped at two women? If he was a serial killer, then he would want to kill again. If the women were part of a particular pattern, why had he stopped at two?
“What does Thomas say about this?” Johanna asked.
“Not much at all. He reiterated several times that they were divorced, and he hadn’t known her movements or her actions for the last two years. It wasn’t beneficial.”
“You think that she might be caught up in this?”
Dempsey shrugged. “That is how perfect this would be. She’d have access to everything you do and think. They could be prepared for any possibility.”
“There you go with that ‘they’ again,” Johanna pointed out.
“In this case, it’s accurate. Carolyn couldn’t have done everything. In some cases, she was with you, and she couldn’t spy on you and spend the time to cover their tracks. She needed some help with that.” Dempsey looked at them. “Do you have any idea who might be helping her?”
Johanna looked at Marnie and then at the detective. “Arthur, Thomas’s dad. She had a lot to say about him, and not much of it was pleasant.”
Dempsey seemed to mull this over for a minute. “That could be it. Sometimes when people are working together, they bad-mouth each other to throw others off the trail. No one suspects that you’re working together if you appear to hate each other.”
Marnie smiled at him. “This one is more your forte than ours. I have no idea how to find out if two people know each other.”
Dempsey looked at Marnie and then at Johanna. “You know Thomas. You might ask him about the relationship between the two.”
Johanna sighed. It had already been a long and emotionally exhausting day, and now she’d have to tell Thomas about the death of his ex-wife and then quiz him about her relationship with his father.
She had to
admit that all she knew about Arthur was from Carolyn. Thomas had said little to nothing about the man. Carolyn had tainted Johanna’s opinion of him via her anecdotes about the man. What if she had been playing them? What if Arthur had worked with her?
She pulled out her phone and pressed the number for the hospital. A nurse came on the line and told her to hold. Johanna waited for what seemed like an interminable time. Maybe he was being tested to see if the accident had done any permanent damage to him.
The nurse came back, breathless and speaking shrilly. “He’s not here.”
“Can you leave him a message?” Johanna asked. Now that she’d begun this, she did want to try to spare him the pain of learning that Carolyn was dead.
“He’s gone,” the nurse said, louder this time. “I don’t know where he’s gone.”
Chapter 6
Johanna disconnected the call and looked at Detective Dempsey. “He’s not there. Apparently, he was supposed to be taken to a test, and he never returned from it. They’re trying to find out if he disappeared before or after the testing.”
Marnie shouted out. “Arthur! He was at the hospital and swiped Thomas’s wallet.”
Dempsey looked skeptical at the woman’s words. “Do you have any proof of that?”
“The wallet was missing, though the nurse had said that it was there when he was admitted. We asked one of the people there at the hospital, and they recognized a photo of Arthur. That seems to put him at the scene at the time.” Marnie crossed her arms over her chest, as if this proved her thesis.
“Where did you get the photo of Arthur?” Dempsey asked.
Marnie stuttered out the answer. “Carolyn’s phone.”
Johanna gave a wan smile. She had told Marnie the story, and now she was repeating it as if she’d been there. She admired her friend for getting all the details right. Marnie could definitely argue the situation with the best of them.
Johanna decided to speak up, even though she was now exhausted from Carolyn’s death and Thomas’s disappearance. “She had a photo of him—the man she called Arthur—on her phone. We don’t have any way to prove that it was him.”
Dempsey took notes on the situation. “I’ll take it over from here. We don’t know if Thomas just was struck with homesickness and went home, or if he was taken by someone else. It’s not something we can rule out based on the current situation. The police can easily find photos of both men and make sure that they’re safe—and we can do that faster than you two can.”
Johanna nodded, but she wondered if the police would be able to find either man. No one had found Arthur yet, and now he might have actually kidnapped his son. She had the sickening thought that the older man might have been behind the death of his former daughter-in-law.
Dempsey left them after telling Johanna to come to the station tomorrow for a statement. She was eternally grateful that she didn’t have to do that today. She needed some quiet time to herself.
Marnie looked at her friend. “We’re not really going to wait for the police to do something, are we?”
Johanna took a deep breath. She had known that Marnie would want to continue their quest to solve these crimes. “What do we do with the dog?” she asked.
“Leave her here. Give her some treats. Put her in her crate, and she’ll be fine.” She gave Penny a rub behind the ears. The dog had appeared again after Dempsey had left.
“Fine, we can go to Thomas’s place and look around. But after that, I need to rest.”
Carolyn had mentioned where Thomas lived, and Johanna had seen it on the paperwork at the hospital. So she felt comfortable in not just relying on the dead woman’s word, especially now that her statements were being questioned.
Marnie got out of the car and walked to the door. She rang the bell before Johanna had even gotten out of the driver’s seat.
No one answered, and from her vantage point, no one had come to a window to look out.
Thomas lived in a single-family ranch-styled home that looked to be about forty years old. The landscaping in the front of the house was well done and green, as though the plants had been recently watered. Someone cared about this home.
“Are you sure we can do this?” Marnie asked, as they strode up the path to the house. “Isn’t it illegal?”
Johanna shrugged. “It’s felt for a while like other people have been taking the lead, and I’m just following from one incident to the next. Now I want to lead, and one thing that I want to do is confuse the killer or killers. I’m going to do a few unexpected things—things that they won’t see coming. If it shakes them up a bit, then so be it. I might get an idea of what is going on here.”
Marnie struggled to keep up with her. They stopped at the front door. “What now?” Marnie asked.
Johanna lifted the edge of the flowerpot on the front porch. No key there. She hadn’t expected anything that easy if the family was really as sneaky as Carolyn had suggested. She picked up a few stones in the flower bed. The fourth one she lifted was lighter and didn’t feel like the others. The surface was cold and smooth. She turned it over, and a key was inside the faux rock.
“This ought to do it,” she said, as she pushed the key into the lock and turned it. The door opened.
Johanna walked in, looking around. The house was unnaturally quiet. Wherever Thomas was at the moment, he was not here. They looked in the front room, which was a formal living room. The room was devoid of personality.
The furniture was new, a matched set in a generic color. The carpet was a light beige with sweeper marks across it but no stains from having lived in the space.
Marnie had walked farther on into the house, and she now called Johanna’s name. “You need to come to see this,” she said, with firmness to her voice.
When Johanna got to what appeared to be a more lived-in family room at the back of the house, Marnie was staring at a wall of pictures. Johanna started scanning them slowly, trying to determine the relationships and the ages of the images.
She saw a few with Carolyn in them, and she used those for her touchpoint. Since she’d actually met the woman, she could determine when the photos were snapped from the woman’s age.
“So, how old do you think this is?” Johanna asked Marnie. She knew that the two women could nail the age within a year or two.
“Six years old, maybe?” Marnie pointed to the hairstyle and the outfit.
“And then this is Thomas?” Johanna asked. Carolyn looked far too chummy with the man in the photo for it to be just a friend. However, the picture bore little resemblance to the man she knew. The man was approximately the same height as Thomas, with the same hair color and general mannerisms, but something was different.
“You don’t think it is, do you?” Marnie asked. “I’ve only seen him a few times and not for as long as you have. If it was just me, I would think the photo and the man were the same. What’s different?”
“I can’t put my finger on it, but something has changed.”
“But that’s definitely Carolyn?” Marnie asked, this time pointing to another photo. This one had the woman standing between the man who looked like Thomas and an older man.
“Yes, definitely. It's funny because, on the whole, women can change their appearance more than men. So you’d expect the woman to look less like she had six years ago, and the man would look more similar to now. But that’s not the case here. Carolyn is a dead ringer for these photos.” Johanna paused, realizing her use of words. She paused for a second and then restarted. “Carolyn looked nearly identical to the pictures from six years ago. The men don’t look the same.”
“Any ideas yet on why Thomas looks different?”
Johanna shook her head. “Not yet. It will come to me when I’m thinking about something else.”
“So if that’s Thomas and Carolyn, then is this Arthur?” Marnie said, pointing to that third person in the photo.
Johanna caught her breath for a second. “That’s not the same as the photo she had at the hos
pital: not even close. That man was short, scattered—you know, hair out of place, unshaved—this guy is none of those things.”
“Maybe we’re just reading the photos wrong. These could be two other men that Carolyn knew.”
“Why would they be on the wall in Thomas’s house then? I doubt that anyone puts up photos of their ex-wife and strange men. That’s just odd. They have to be family or close friends. Unless Thomas had a twin, it’s likely supposed to be him.”
“And the other man isn’t the Arthur whose picture you saw?” Marnie’s voice held a note that Johanna couldn’t quite recognize. Did her friend think that she was off the tracks here? Maybe Marnie was right, and Johanna imagined that these people are not the same. Too much stress and too many people being killed. The difficulty in getting past those memories could be making her see things.
“Arthur looks nothing like the photo. Thomas looks similar, but there’s a difference that I can’t put my finger on. And I have to say that Arthur looks familiar too, but not in the same way as Thomas. Arthur, I’ve seen before, but I can’t figure out where.”
They heard a noise at the front door. Marnie put a finger to her lips and then pointed at the sliding glass doors in the room. They made their way to the doors, slid them open quickly but quietly, and let themselves out. They had already agreed that they would not approach them if they encountered anyone but would instead report them to the police. The afternoon’s attack on Carolyn had made them both skittish of any interaction with that family.
They had just pushed the doors shut and stepped out of view, when they heard a noise coming from inside the house. They stood in place for a minute until the sounds appeared to move to another part of the house. Then, and only then, the two women made their way to their car.
Chapter 7
Marnie poured Johanna a stiff drink when they went back to her apartment. They now had more puzzles to solve. Not only was Carolyn’s death a clear case of murder, but none of her relatives were who they appeared to be.