by Kathi Daley
“Didn’t Ryan say that Gina’s car was in her garage when he went by to see her the second time that night?” Vikki asked.
“He did,” I confirmed. “I’ve learned that her old Ford was in the garage when Ryan stopped by to look for her.”
“If Gina had a new sports car, why would she keep her old Ford?” Vikki wondered.
Alex spoke. “Maybe she was going to sell it but hadn’t gotten around to it yet.”
“So if Gina did in fact have two cars, the red sports car and the old Ford, she may have left the house on her own,” I said.
“That’s true,” Alex said. “Ryan only assumed she had been picked up because her car was in the garage, but if he didn’t know about the new car, he might not have realized she could very well have driven away from her home on her own.”
“How can we confirm that the red sports car that Tina is certain that Gina purchased even exists?” Garrett asked. “So far it seems that Tina is the only one who mentioned it.”
“If she had a new car, she most likely drove it to work,” I said. “I guess we can ask her coworkers.”
“Or we can just check with her insurance company,” Jack inserted. “If she had a second car, she would have wanted to insure it.”
Jack was right. Checking her insurance policy would be the easiest way to confirm the car’s existence, as well as the make and model.
“Assuming for a moment that Gina did have a second vehicle and that she did drive it when she left her house on the night she disappeared, where is it now?” Garrett asked.
“Good question,” I said. “Maybe if we can find the car, we can find the killer.”
“Okay, so maybe we should be asking ourselves where Gina would go if she left on her own,” Jack said. “If she wasn’t with Ryan and she wasn’t with Marvin Newman, who might she have gone to see between eleven p.m. and one a.m.?”
“Maybe her boyfriend,” Vikki said. “She’d had a fight with Ryan and she had been drinking. I suppose she might have felt the need for comforting.”
I looked at Alex. “Was Andy Fallon asked whether he had seen Gina on the night of her murder?” I asked.
Alex looked down at the stack of papers in front of him. He took a moment to sift through them, then, settling on one, he began to read. “According to the report submitted by the detective, Andy claimed not to have seen Gina since work earlier that day.”
“From what I remember Alex saying about Andy’s testimony at the trial, they were a committed couple on the verge of marriage,” I said. “It was Friday night. I wonder why they didn’t have plans.”
“I guess one or the other might have had something else going on that evening,” Clara said.
“I suppose it would be easy to find that out,” I said. “Rick may already know the answer.”
“Okay, so if she wasn’t with Ryan or Marvin and she wasn’t with Andy, who else might she have gone to see?” Clara asked.
“We know that Tina and Valerie were her best friends,” I said. “Well, at least according to Tina, the three women were best friends. I suppose if she was upset after her fight with Ryan and Andy wasn’t available for some reason, she might have gone to see one of these two women. I have spoken to Tina several times, and nothing she has said has led me to believe that she had seen or spoken to Gina on the night she died. But what about Valerie? Has anyone from this group talked to her?”
Everyone said that they hadn’t.
“Then I think a conversation with her might be a good move,” I said.
We all agreed. I offered to speak to her, but Alex said he would take care of it. Brit offered to go with him and he took her up on it. More and more, I was thinking that whatever was going on between the two of them was getting interesting. They had always been friends, but I wouldn’t say they were particularly close. In fact, they tended to bicker more than anything else. And in the beginning of this investigation, bickering was what I had witnessed, although it was Brit who had taken the hard stance and Alex who had shown deep emotion, which seemed to be a one-eighty, in my opinion. But during the past week of sleuthing, I had seen them with their heads together on more than one occasion. I guess at some point they must have found a common ground.
“Okay, other than finding out why Andy and Gina were not together on the night she left her home and then was murdered and talking to Valerie, what else do we need to follow up on?” I asked.
“I’ve been thinking about the red fibers under the cuffs of Gina’s sweater,” Jack said. “She had on a black sweater on the night Ryan saw her and later found her missing from her house. It seemed odd that the red fibers would be on the underside of her cuffs, but then it occurred to me that maybe her hands had been bound by something with red fibers and the cuffs of the sweater fell over the top of the bindings.”
“I thought she was bound with duct tape,” I said.
“I checked the police report, and it said that her feet were bound with duct tape but her hands were free. It occurred to me that her hands had been bound, but that the killer had either removed the bindings before dumping her in the marsh or, if her hands were bound with something like rope, the creatures who live in the marsh could have chewed through it.”
“I guess we can check to see if the fibers that were found were rope,” Alex said. “The summary I saw didn’t specify, other than to say they had not been matched to anything.”
“Were you ever able to obtain a personal item for me?” Clara asked.
“Not yet,” Alex answered.
“I suppose her parents must have taken possession of her personal belongings,” Clara said.
“Probably,” Alex agreed. “Given what I know of the couple, though, I am not inclined to think that they would be willing to help us.”
The others agreed with this at once.
“I’ll find out if Gina had a second car, talk to Valerie about her recollections of the night Gina most likely died, and see if I can find out where Andy was that night,” Alex summarized. “Is there anything else I should plan to follow up on tomorrow?”
“The red fibers,” I said. “Talk to Rick to see if you can find out if they might have come from a rope. Not that knowing one way or the other will tell us who killed Gina, but it is an open end that could lead to something else.”
“Okay,” Alex said. “We’ll plan to meet up again in a week unless we get a real break between now and then. If anyone stumbles across anything that might be even remotely relevant, please call or text me.”
Everyone agreed that they would and the meeting broke up.
“Are you picking up on anything at all?” I asked Clara. She had asked for a personal item, which Alex had been unable to get, but she did at times get readings even without one.
“I didn’t want to say anything to Alex because all I really have is a hunch, but I think the missing car is the key.”
“The red sports car?”
Clara nodded. “Find the car and find the killer.”
Chapter 13
Tuesday, January 15
Kizzy and I were doing the formatting for the weekly paper when Alex walked in through the front door of the Gull Island News. Jack was out interviewing neighbors of Malcolm Carlton to add some detail to the article he had written, so it was just the two of us in the office this afternoon. Alex crossed the room and sat down on a stool.
“You look like a man with news to share,” I said.
“I am. I have, in fact, had a very busy morning.”
I sat back and gave him my full attention. “Okay. What do you know?”
“I spoke to Valerie Goodson. She wasn’t willing to say much, but she did tell me that while Gina had been driving around in a red Corvette, it wasn’t hers. Valerie was sure it belonged to her boyfriend. I then went to speak to Andy Fallon. He told me that he does not now nor did he then own a red Corvette, or any sort of red sports car, for that matter. I checked with a buddy at the DMV who confirmed that the only car currently registered to Fallon
was a black Lincoln and the only car registered to him in 2016 was a black Mercedes.”
“So the Vette wasn’t Fallon’s. I wonder who it belonged to.”
“I wondered the same thing, so I had my buddy do a search of all Corvettes registered to any resident of the island in 2016. Interestingly enough, there were only two. One was registered to a man named Leonard Gibson and the other to a woman named Jolene Colton.”
“Wait. Jolene Colton is the contractor with the black truck. We suspected that she might have been Gina’s accomplice in the burglary ring, but she mustn’t have been because Marvin Newman confessed to being her partner.”
“I had the same thought,” Alex said, “so I made the assumption that, despite the coincidence of Jolene owning both a red Corvette and a large black truck with a shell, Leonard Gibson was the one I was looking for. I’d decided that Gina must have been hooking up with Leonard on the side, which is why she occasionally drove the car, and when her friends saw her with the car, they assumed that the vehicle belonged to Andy, but in reality it belonged to the man she was cheating on Andy with.”
I leaned forward just a bit. “Okay, I’m following, but based on the tone of your voice, I’m going to guess that you checked Leonard out and he was not our guy.”
Alex chuckled. “No, he wasn’t. Leonard Gibson is sixty years old if he’s a day, and he has black carpet.”
“Black carpet?”
“Valerie told me that the car Gina had been driving had black seats but red carpet that, given that the exterior was red, she found gaudy.”
“Red carpet,” I said. “As in red fibers beneath the cuffs of Gina’s black sweater?”
“Exactly.”
“So what happened next?” By this point I was on the edge of my seat. “Did you talk to Jolene?”
“I did.”
“And?”
“And Jolene said that Gina’s car had been on the fritz, so she let Gina borrow her Vette.”
“Which explains why her neighbor saw the Vette parked out in front of Gina’s house, and probably explains how Gina left her house on that Friday night after arguing with Ryan.”
“You would think so, but no. Jolene said that Gina returned her car to her before she left for Hawaii, which happened to be the day preceding Gina’s death. Jolene also said that when she returned from her trip, the car was still in her garage, so she had no reason to believe that it hadn’t been there the entire time she was gone. I asked Jolene if Gina possibly could have kept a key to the car or had a copy made and she admitted that it was very possible. I also asked her if Gina had the code to her home security system, and she admitted that she did. My theory is that Gina borrowed the car again after Jolene had left for Hawaii and parked it in her garage, which is why no one reported seeing it on the night she fought with Ryan and most likely died. After the fight she might have been upset, so she took the car and drove it somewhere.”
I narrowed my gaze. “Okay, then how did the car get back into Jolene’s garage? And if, as I suspect, the red fibers under Gina’s cuffs are from the red carpet in this car, how did she get the fibers on her sweater?”
“I don’t know.” Alex sighed. “I suppose whoever Gina went to see that night might be the one who killed her, and maybe the killer is the one who returned the car to the garage.”
“The killer would have had to have known the car belonged to Jolene. Neither Valerie nor Tina seemed to know.”
“The registration would have had Jolene’s name and address on it, but I agree that the killer would have to have known that Jolene was out of town and that Gina had taken the car without her knowledge. Otherwise, why return the car? Why not just dump it?”
“Maybe Gina told whoever she went to visit that the car belonged to Jolene and that she had borrowed it without her knowledge.”
“That is as good an explanation as any,” Alex said. “Assuming that our theory is correct and Gina even had the car that night. For all we really know, the car was parked in the garage the entire time and Gina really was picked up at her house by her killer.”
“Maybe, but if that is so, where did Gina get the red fibers?”
Alex frowned. “Maybe we should talk to Rick and have him compare the fibers in the car with the ones found on Gina’s body. If they don’t match, trying to figure out whether Gina had the car and who returned it is moot.”
I saved the work I had been doing on the computer. “Let’s go talk to him.”
******
Rick agreed to take a carpet sample from Jolene’s Corvette to have it compared to the fibers found on Gina’s sleeve, but we wouldn’t get the results immediately, so I went back to work and Alex went to have another conversation with Andy. In all the hoopla over trying to figure out who owned what type of car, he’d forgotten to ask him why he and Gina hadn’t been together on that Friday night. I didn’t know whether the answer to that question would turn out to be relevant, but I figured any information we could gather might prove to be valuable.
“How were the interviews?” I asked Jack when he got back to the office.
“They went well.” He sat down on a stool and scratched Kizzy’s head as he spoke. “I was lucky today and managed to chat with people who were willing to tell me what they knew in the hope of seeing their names in the newspaper.”
“The whole situation really is tragic. The guy’s wife leaves him, so he decides to sell his house and move on with his life, only to be shot before he ever has the chance to get started with that new life. From what others have told me, Carlton was a very nice guy.”
“That’s what the neighbors said as well. If he had shown up at his home an hour earlier or an hour later, he would most likely still be alive. Did Tim drop off the ad copy he wants to use for this week’s grocery specials?”
“He did. I don’t know why he doesn’t just email it in like everyone else.”
“Tim is set in his ways. He has always dropped off his ad copy and I am sure he will until he retires, which, based on his age, won’t be too far into the future.”
“Alex was by earlier,” I said, and then filled Jack in on what we now knew.
“It sounds like a Corvette with red carpet could be a real lead.” Jack frowned. “And the fact that both a black truck and a red Corvette were seen at Gina’s house in the months prior to her death seem significant as well, but didn’t we decide the truck belonged to her burglary partner?”
I shrugged. “I assumed it did. The neighbor did say that someone in a black truck came by late at night, and we know that’s when the burglaries occurred.” I frowned. “Although I never did ask Rick if the man he arrested had a black truck. I’ll try to remember to do it the next time I talk to him.”
Jack got up and crossed the room. He poured himself a cup of coffee, then walked over to his computer. He turned it on and waited for it to boot up. He picked up a pile of messages and began to sort through them. “I think I am going to plan to come in early tomorrow just in case our part-time guy flakes again. I had a talk with him and he swore he’d be here, but I will admit to having my doubts.”
“I thought you were going to replace him.”
Jack looked up. “I have some feelers out, but finding someone who is willing to work so few hours won’t be easy.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “Me too. I guess if he doesn’t show, one of us can deliver the newspapers. At least it isn’t supposed to rain tomorrow.”
“I don’t know. There is a cloud bank in the distance. So far, it is hanging out at sea, but you never know. I was thinking…”
“Hang on,” I interrupted. “It’s George.” I answered my phone. “Hey, George. How did your interview with Toby Wells go?”
“Very well indeed. He was bright and articulate despite his age, and he very clearly identified Colin Prattle, one of the three men who came upon Jeremiah standing over the body of Celeste Willoby as the man who actually stabbed her.”
I frowned. “How did it happen?”
“Toby
said that he saw a man in a black suit, who he later identified as Prattle based on his conversation with the detective, arguing with Mrs. Willoby. The conversation grew quite intense, which is what captured Toby’s attention in the first place. He had been fishing down at the dock a bit, but when he heard the arguing he couldn’t help but take a peek. He told me he approached the pair who were arguing, being careful to stay out of sight. As he watched, Mrs. Willoby started to walk away, but Prattle grabbed her arm and stabbed her in the gut and then, after she fell onto the wooden planking where they were standing, walked away from the dock toward the street. Toby said he was frozen in fear, not knowing what to do. He was considering whether to run to find help when Jeremiah came along, saw the woman, and tried to help her. Toby said he could tell by the look of horror on Jeremiah’s fact that it was too late. Toby said he thought about approaching Jeremiah and telling him what he had seen when the three men came around the corner and, upon seeing Jeremiah bending over the body, gave chase.”
“And Toby tried to tell that to the police officer who showed up? That he had seen Prattle stab the woman?”
“No,” George admitted. “Keep in mind, Toby was just a kid and scared to death. When he saw that the killer was with the other two men who showed up, he hid behind a stack of old crates. He was still hiding when the first officer arrived and he did not think the officer saw him. He said he knew in his heart he should do something, but Jeremiah had gotten away, and he was scared to talk to the cop with the killer standing right there. Later, however, when a man in a suit came back to take a second look at the crime scene, he was there fishing again and he told the man what he’d seen. The man he spoke to showed him a bunch of photos and he was able to identify Prattle. The detective spoke to Prattle, who, of course, denied his involvement. Toby said he tried to make things right, but no one believed him. He was a poor child and the killer was a wealthy man. It was his word against the killers, and the detective chose to believe the rich businessman.”