The Golden Girl

by Dana Perry

  “Oh, my gosh… I read that book! That was you?”

  “You’re interested in Civil War history?”

  “Ever since I watched that PBS series from a long time ago about the Civil War.”

  “The one by Ken Burns,” he said.

  “Right.”

  I wasn’t lying about that. I had watched the Ken Burns series on TV. And I’d read through some of Wright’s books before I came down to Florida, including the one we were talking about. I’d wanted to research Nathan Wright – find out as much as I could about him and his work – before I met him. I sure was glad now that I had.

  “There’s a lot of people today who want to remove all the Civil War monuments and memories because they believe it glorifies a period in our country when slavery of another person – based on their race – was legal,” Wright said, finishing off the beer he’d been holding since he came over to me.

  “I know. I read recently about a city in the South that tore down a statue of Robert E. Lee there because Lee supported the slave owners’ cause – and owned slaves himself.”

  “That’s right. The mayor and people said Lee should not be remembered as a legendary general, but as a disgrace. What do you think?”

  “Well, I understand what they’re saying. But I still feel that the Civil War – and all the things we have from that period – are an important part of American history that we can continue to learn from today.”

  He nodded, so I figured I’d said a good thing.

  I wasn’t sure how much longer I could keep talking intelligently about the Civil War, but it didn’t matter. We talked a few minutes more, and then Wright said he was leaving. That he came in here for one beer a night, no more.

  “Nice meeting you, Jessie,” he said. “And good luck with your story.”

  “Good luck with your books,” I said.

  He started for the door.

  “Mr. Wright!” I called out to him.

  “Yes?” he said, turning around with a quizzical expression on his face.

  I didn’t respond, I just kept staring at him.

  “Was there something else you wanted to say to me?” he asked me finally.

  There was a lot I wanted to say to Nathan Wright. I wanted to ask him about him and my mother. I wanted to ask him about him and the man I always thought was my father, James Tucker. I wanted to ask him if he loved my mother. I wanted to ask him if he was the reason James Tucker left her. I wanted to ask him why he didn’t stay with her. And, most of all, I wanted to ask him if he knew he had a daughter from that long-ago relationship. A daughter who was standing in front of him right now.

  But I didn’t say any of that to him.

  Instead, I just smiled and gave him a goodbye wave.

  “Have a nice evening, Mr. Wright,” I said.

  Maybe one day I would tell Nathan Wright the truth.

  Maybe one day I would have a relationship with the man who was my father.

  But not tonight.

  I wasn’t sure exactly why I’d just let him walk away like that. All I knew was that I’d gone my entire life without a father. Now I finally knew who that father really was. And I knew where my father was – here in Florida. And – just a few minutes ago – I’d actually met the man who was the father I’ve been searching after for a long time.

  That was enough for now.

  Sixty-Seven

  Lieutenant Thomas Aguirre told me that it looked like they were going to formally charge Charlie Sanders with Maura Walsh’s murder in the next day or so.

  “Do you really think he did it?” I asked.

  “The DA’s office does. They’re the ones who make the decision on whether to prosecute.”

  “But do you?”

  “It doesn’t matter what I think. I just hand over the evidence I accumulate in the case. And that evidence points directly at Charlie Sanders, and no one else.”

  Aguirre shrugged.

  “Jessie, there’s three things you look for in a murder case. Means, motive and opportunity. Sanders has the last two. Opportunity, because he met up with her in a bar just before she died so he could have easily followed her downtown afterward. Motive, he was in love with her and she’d rejected him – lots of murders happen by spurned lovers. Plus, he lied in the beginning about his alibi, which makes him look bad. The only thing missing is the means. We’ve never found Maura Walsh’s gun. But, except for that, the DA thinks they’ve got a pretty good case.”

  I nodded. It did all make sense. Except I didn’t want it to make sense. I liked Charlie Sanders. And I didn’t think he would have ever murdered Maura, no matter how angry he was. He loved her too much.

  “I still keep thinking it could be someone else,” I said to Aguirre.

  “Who? We’ve determined that Bennato and his people didn’t kill her. They killed the PI and Renfro – but not her. Walsh certainly didn’t murder his own daughter, not after the way he stood up to catch Bennato at the end. Sure, the wife killed the little boy back in Saginaw Lake – but that was an accident, not cold-blooded murder like this. Besides, she’s such a basket case she never even leaves her house, much less would trek into downtown Manhattan at night. Hell, we even checked out the ex-Saginaw Lake cop Greg Stovall you talked with. He admitted to us that Maura Walsh had come to see him too, asking the same kind of questions as you did. We thought maybe he got nervous afterward and was afraid she’d blow the sweet deal he had with Bennato that financed his landscaping business. But Stovall had an alibi, he was in Elmira when she died. And his alibi held up. He was attending a conference meeting of local business owners there. More than thirty people remember seeing him there. Stovall confessed to the rest of it, though. How he and Walt Palumbo covered up details about the Walsh boy’s death. How Palumbo felt guilty about it afterward and that’s why he left the NYPD job Walsh set up for him so quickly. But Stovall was happy to take the money – first from Walsh, then a lot more from Bennato. Yes, Greg Stovall is not an honorable person, but he isn’t a murderer. So that’s it. That just leaves Sanders. There’s no one else.”

  Aguirre started talking then about how glad he’d be to get off this special assignment – the hunt for Maura Walsh’s killer – and return to his normal job as a homicide detective. “We did pretty good again though, didn’t we, Tucker?” He smiled. “We make a great team. Even though I did have to save your life again. Or at least help save it this time. Remember, I was there when we busted Bennato and his mob. That’s the second time I’ve saved your life – so you really owe me—”

  I was only half listening to him though. There was something bothering me. Something that didn’t seem right. And then, all of a sudden, I realized what it was.

  “There is someone else,” I said. “You’ve left out one possible suspect who might have done it.”

  “Who are you talking about?”

  “The person who called Sanders that night and got him to go confront her at the East Side bar.”

  “But we don’t know who that was. Sanders never knew either. It was just a voice on the phone.”

  “Man or woman?”

  “Sanders said it was a woman.”

  Of course.

  “Think about it. Who would do something like that? Tell Charlie Sanders his girlfriend was having an affair with someone else. Try to make him jealous. Well, it likely was someone who was also jealous, but not jealous of the same person. Someone who could have been waiting at the bar too that night and then followed them afterward downtown to the pizza place in Little Italy. Someone who knew where Maura Walsh was because she was with this woman’s husband.”

  “You mean…?”

  “Billy Renfro’s wife.”

  It all fell into place pretty easily after that. Linda Renfro – or Linda Caldwell, as she called herself now – had no alibi for the night and the time of Maura Walsh’s murder. And later, under intense interrogation by authorities, she broke down and admitted she’d murdered Maura Walsh, the woman she thought was having an af
fair with her husband. They later even found Maura’s gun when they searched Linda Renfro’s home. She hadn’t even bothered to get rid of it. That’s how crazy and spontaneous this crime had been.

  “I just thought about her with Billy,” she said during her confession. “I couldn’t get that out of my mind, no matter how hard I tried. That’s why I told Sanders about them. I was hoping he’d do something to stop them, but he didn’t. So I went downtown and watched them afterward. My husband got out of the car and went to get her food, like they were on a date or something. I couldn’t take it anymore. So I walked over to the car where she was waiting and told her to leave my husband alone. She got out of the car to try to calm me down, and we started walking. She kept telling me there was nothing going on between her and Billy. But every time she said that – it just made me madder. There was a piece of wood lying in the alley from the construction going on next to it. When she turned away from me to head back to her car, I got so mad I picked up the board and hit her in the head with it. She fell to the ground. Then, when she was lying there still dazed, I reached down and took her gun. I pointed it at her. Just to scare her. That’s all I wanted to do, only scare her. But then…”

  “You shot her,” the police interrogator said.

  “Yes. The gun just went off.”

  “But you shot her twice.”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Was she alive when you left?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you didn’t try to get help for her. And you took her radio so she couldn’t signal for help on it as she lay there dying. Why?”

  “I wanted her to suffer. I wanted her to feel pain before she died. Real pain. Just like the pain I felt so much after she took Billy away from me.”

  “Maura Walsh wasn’t having an affair with your husband. She was working undercover on a special assignment. That’s all that was going on between them. Nothing personal at all.”

  “I know that now. But I was so angry when I thought she was… that’s why I called Sanders that night and all the rest.”

  “But you had left your husband. You were living in your own apartment. It seemed like you had already moved on from your marriage. So why did it matter so much to you if Maura Walsh had been involved with him? There’s a lot of things hard to understand about why you did what you did. But that’s the biggest one. Why did you even care?”

  She began to sob.

  “I couldn’t stop thinking about Billy being with her. It was driving me crazy. I thought that if she wasn’t there, everything might go back to the way it was. I fixed myself up to look beautiful again, like I did when I was young. I bought sexy clothes. I did everything I could to get Billy to notice me again. I loved Billy, don’t you understand? I just wanted him to come back to me.”

  Sixty-Eight

  It was a hot, muggy night when I finally left the Tribune office after filing the story.

  The sun was gone, but the humidity had remained. There were people sitting out on stoops in front of apartments I passed. Kids played in an open fire hydrant on one block. A group of teens sat on a parked car with music blaring at full blast.

  Summertime in New York City.

  The death of Maura Walsh had turned out to be a completely senseless crime – the result of a complicated series of events that began a long time ago. For years, all the isolated incidents had been dormant. Waiting for the right moment. Waiting for a catalyst to pull them all together. That catalyst had been Maura Walsh herself.

  There had been so many what-ifs, so many interlocking pieces.

  If Patrick Walsh hadn’t died. If the police in Saginaw Lake hadn’t covered up the real story of what happened. If Maura Walsh had been allowed to follow her dream of being a marine biologist instead of joining the police force. If she hadn’t gone undercover to try to expose her father’s wrongdoings. If Billy Renfro’s wife hadn’t hired a private investigator to see if her husband was cheating on her. If Matt Wysocki hadn’t died so that Maura Walsh became Renfro’s partner. So many ifs…

  The results had been staggering. Three people were dead – Maura Walsh, Frank Walosin, and Billy Renfro. Other lives and careers – most notably, Deputy Commissioner Walsh – were ruined.

  So many lives intertwined, so many repercussions.

  The “Summertime Blues”, as the cops in New York City called it.

  Because so much crazy, senseless crime like this always seemed to happen here in the summer heat.

  Almost like a perfect storm.

  A storm that could be unforgiving at times, cutting a swath of death and destruction across the city. Like a hurricane bearing down on the island that Manhattan was. Some people died, some people lived. Just like it had always been in the summertime. Son of Sam’s deadly terror spree. Robert Chambers strangling Jennifer Levin in the Preppie Murder Case. And the near-fatal attack on me in Central Park on a hot night twelve years ago. It was as if there was a price in blood that sometimes had to be paid, and the reasons for it never seemed to make much sense.

  But it was August now.

  In a few weeks, fall would be here.

  The city had survived the storm.

  So had I.

  If The Golden Girl had you gripped from the very first page, you will absolutely love The Silent Victim. Jessie Tucker is assigned to a shocking murder in Central Park that is unsettlingly similar to her own attack twelve years before…

  Order it now!

  The Silent Victim

  Order it now!

  The woman’s golden hair is spread out beneath her on the bed of leaves where she’s fallen, her beautiful blue eyes open wide. The police are calling it a random attack, but Jessie Tucker isn’t so sure – she’s seen this crime scene before… she was the victim.

  Twelve years ago, Jessie Tucker was attacked as she made her way home from an outdoor concert. She still walks with a limp from that night, and every day since has been a struggle to rebuild her life. The police told her she was unlucky – that she was safe after they charged a local man for the crime. But Jessie has never managed to shake the feeling that there was someone else in the park that night… someone she knew.

  But then Margaret Kincaid’s murder file lands across her desk, and Jessie knows she can’t keep silent any longer. Margaret’s wounds so exactly match her own its spooky – but Jessie’s attacker is in prison, and Jessie has never met the victim. What links her to Margaret Kincaid, and why did the attacker let one woman live, and the other die?

  Nail-biting, gripping and absolutely unputdownable! Perfect for fans of Lisa Regan, Kendra Elliot and Gregg Olsen.

  Get it here!

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  A Letter from Dana

  I hope you enjoyed reading The Golden Girl. If you’d like to keep up to date with all of my latest releases, you can sign up at the following link. Your email address will never be shared, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

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  I was inspired to write this book because I work in the New York City media, and I wanted to show how a journalist – in this case, newspaper reporter Jessie Tucker – can become personally involved in a front-page story she’s covering. As Jessie digs deeper into the baffling murder of police officer Maura Walsh, she begins to identify more and more with the slain woman – and finally goes looking for answers about her own life as well as answers about Maura Walsh. That’s the story I wanted to tell in The Golden Girl.

  If you have time, I’d love it if you were able to write a review of The Golden Girl. Reader reviews on Amazon, Goodreads or anywhere else a
re crucially important to an author and can spread the word to new readers. If you’d like to contact me personally, you can reach me via my website, Facebook page, Twitter or Instagram.

  Thank you for reading The Golden Girl.

  Best wishes,

  Dana Perry

  Published by Bookouture in 2020

  An imprint of Storyfire Ltd.

  Carmelite House

  50 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DZ

  www.bookouture.com

  Copyright © Dana Perry, 2020

  Dana Perry has asserted their right to be identified as the author of this work.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in any retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publishers.

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-83888-266-2

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events other than those clearly in the public domain, are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.