by Marc Timms
Johanna’s phone rang, and she answered it without checking the number. “Hello?”
She didn’t recognize the voice, though she’d heard it often. “Johanna, this is Detective Dempsey. We’ve found your car, and we need you to come down to the police station immediately. Do you have a ride, or should we come and pick you up?”
“Pick me up?” Johanna asked, not liking the sound of that. “Is the car totaled or something?”
“I’d rather talk about that here, if you don’t mind? When can you be down here?”
Johanna named a time and hung up the phone.
“What was that?” Marnie asked.
“I’m not sure, but stay near your phone. I didn’t like the sound of it.”
Chapter 4
When Johanna pulled into the parking lot, Detective Dempsey was standing by the door, smoking a cigarette. She tried to ignore the look on his face as she approached. He was pensive and had an almost disgusted expression, as if the cigarette didn’t agree with him.
He approached her as she got out of the car, and he led her to a small industrial-looking room. He indicated a chair on one side of the table. Johanna sat down and waited for him to say something. She had a bad feeling
“So do I get to see my car?” she asked. “Isn’t that why I came down here?’
“Where were you at 10:00 a.m. this morning?” Dempsey asked. He sat down opposite her and put his elbows on the table.
Johanna realized what was happening. She was being questioned about something that had happened with her car. Had someone been killed in the car, like the other deaths she’d witnessed? The thought of that made her sick.
“I was at Jessica’s lawyer’s office—or what’s left of it. Did you know that it burned down last night or this morning?” Johanna hated to give the man information, considering how he was treating her at the moment. Still, she saw that she had few other choices. She wanted to get out of here as quickly as she could. Johanna needed to be upfront so that her alibi could be cleared. “Marnie drove me. So I don’t think you can suggest I was anywhere else.”
“What do you mean burned down?” he asked, suddenly more interested in other subjects than her questionable guilt regarding the car.
Johanna explained why they’d gone to the lawyer’s office and what they learned while at the site. The pencil was flying over the notebook pages as she spoke. When she’d finished, he looked up at her.
“I’m going to have to talk to the lawyer, but you’ll be free to go after that.”
She narrowed her eyes and looked at him. “Why after that?” she asked.
“I have to do my job,” he said, standing up to leave.
“Haven’t I been doing it for you?” Johanna asked, but he left without a response.
Three hours later, Dempsey returned to the room. His mouth was turned down, and his eyes looked tired. She wondered what had been going on during the time she’d been sitting here, none too patiently. Johanna also suspected that she’d been under surveillance during this time. Still, she frankly had no idea how to act innocent. She had provided Dempsey with an alibi of where she’d been. Indeed, that should be enough for him.
“You’re free to go,” he said without sitting down.
“That’s it? I need to ask you a few questions before I go.” Johanna felt peeved that the wait seemed to have been fruitless on her part.
“I had to run through your alibi and check a few other things out about the lawyer and the arson before I could let you go. That’s the way we operate here.”
“I actually wanted to know if my car was okay to drive or if I needed to call a service.” Johanna was far too pragmatic, or maybe she’d seen too many crime dramas, to know that her car would be impounded until the culprit was caught and the case solved. There was a chance that her car was evidence in some manner, and they likely would not want her going through the carwash, erasing the clues.
“You won’t be driving the car anytime soon,” he said dully.
“So it’s evidence?”
“It’s totaled,” Dempsey said.
“Now, you need to explain. What happened?” Johanna asked, though she had a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach; she had a good idea of what had happened. She recalled the car chase she’d experienced the day before. Someone wanted her dead and wanted the case closed.
“Your car was taken to commit a hit-and-run this morning. The victim landed on the hood twice and broke your windshield. He’s in the hospital now.”
“Will he be okay?” Johanna shuddered at the thought of her poor car and the man who bounced off it multiple times. How fast had the driver been going?
“He might be. Like I said, he’s in the hospital. I’m only telling you this because I’ve seen you with the person who was struck.”
Johanna tried to run through a list of people Detective Dempsey might have seen her with, but none of them were apparent to her. Then she realized. “Thomas,” she stated, as a fact.
“He was struck this morning by your car. The perp abandoned the car, left him on the road, and fled. We’re presuming he stole another car in the area to make his getaway, but we don’t know that for a fact.”
“Is he alive?” Johanna asked now. She was distressed to hear this. They hadn’t been more than friends at this point, but she definitely could have seen herself falling for him in the future. He had brooding good looks and a funny, easy-to-handle personality. Now he was in the hospital and might not make it.
“Yeah, he’s alive. He made it through surgery, and they are hopeful for a recovery, but he did have some substantial injuries.”
“What hospital? And I’m free to go, right?” Johanna could hear her own voice grow higher pitched and more rushed. She was surprised that the news had hit her so hard.
“Christ Hospital, and yes, you are,” he said, still showing that forlorn expression on his face.
Johanna found the room with no trouble. The woman at the information desk had assumed that she was the man's romantic interest and let her through without issue. Johanna wondered what the woman would have said if Johanna announced that her car was responsible for his afflictions.
When she entered the room, Johanna was glad that Detective Dempsey had prepared her for Thomas’s medical status. Part of his face was wrapped with gauze, and she thought she detected a small bloodstain on the hospital gown. Johanna chose not to look too closely. She really didn’t want to know.
She took a seat in the room, but there were no signs of movement on the bed. Thomas must have had a hard collision with the car. She looked around the room and found no signs of his condition.
Johanna saw the chart hanging from the wall just outside the door. She walked briskly to the station and opened it.
Nothing jumped out at her. The list of injuries was long, but little else was noted. The surgery was to relieve pressure in the brain and the addition of pins in Thomas’s left arm. She flipped through the pages, but there was nothing about next of kin or contact information. She wondered why he’d not been carrying any such information.
Johanna wondered if the details had been listed in his phone, which was likely crushed in the accident.
She pulled out her own phone and dialed the number for Lilly, Jessica’s neighbor. Lilly picked up the phone, and Johanna could hear the sounds of Penny barking in the background. “How are you, dear?” the woman asked.
Johanna briefly went through the situation and asked for the niece’s contact information. “Her name is Henry, short for Henrietta, which she hated.” Lilly rattled off a phone number that Johanna now stored in her phone.
She had just hung up when a nurse entered the room. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t aware that there was anyone here with Thomas. What’s your relationship to him?”
Johanna decided to go with the assumption made by the information desk clerk. “I’m dating him. I can’t believe that we were just having breakfast yesterday, and now this happened.”
The nurse nodded. “It apparently happened
so quickly. I haven’t heard if they’ve found the person who did this.”
“They haven’t,” Johanna said truthfully. “It’s an open case.”
“I hate to ask this because I know that you’ve got to be in shock, but we don’t have any information on Thomas Pogue. I don’t have a next of kin, should we need it for any information. We don’t have any insurance information either or identification to obtain all of that. You know, social security number, date of birth, things like that.”
“I’ll talk to the family today,” Johanna said, again speaking the truth. “I’ll get back to you with all of that information.”
When the nurse left, Johanna dialed the number she’d been given. The phone rang and went to voicemail. Johanna shrugged since so many people let unknown numbers go to voicemail. She left a short message and asked Henry to call her back.
Within two minutes, Johanna received a call. “Hello,” she said cautiously, not knowing what type of response she’d be getting.
“Hello, I’m baffled here. Up until a certain point, your message made perfect sense and then you went off the rail.” The woman's voice was young, with just a touch of an accent that she couldn’t place.
“Let’s start at the beginning then,” Johanna said. “I got your name and number from Lilly, who is watching your late aunt’s dog.”
“Yes, that’s fine. Penny is staying with Lilly until we get things worked out. I didn’t want the poor little thing to be uprooted too much at once. That wasn’t the part that bothered me,” Henry continued. “It was the rest.”
Johanna took a deep breath and started. “Your cousin, Thomas, was struck by a hit-and-run driver, and is in the hospital.” Johanna had left the part out where her car was stolen and used as a weapon against this woman’s family.
“I don’t have a cousin Thomas,” Henry said. [NLS1]The tone of her voice had grown cold with this statement, professional, and devoid of emotion.
Johanna didn’t know what to say at first. She had never thought that Thomas was not one of Jessica’s relatives. He had presented himself well and talked about the family. Now she was being told that he wasn’t a part of this clan. That admission would put him at the top of the police’s list of suspicious people involved in this murder.
She thought about what to say for a minute and then began. “I believe you, but this man presented himself as your cousin. Is there a way for you to come to the hospital and see if you can identify him? He said something about being a cousin of yours, but he called her Aunt Jessica. Does that ring a bell?”
“Several people might fall into that category.”
“Look, I get that this is out of the blue. I can give you Detective Dempsey’s phone number. He’s involved in this case, and he could explain what they know. Then both of you could meet here and see what’s going on.” Johanna’s voice had a slightly plaintive tone in it.
The guy had been good-looking and exciting, but she hadn’t fallen for him. It would take a long while for that to happen—she wasn’t sure if she had a long time at this juncture.
“I have his number already,” Henry replied.
That’s right, Johanna thought. Dempsey had been the one to find Jessica’s body. He would have talked to the family to see what their motives were. She wondered what Henry’s motives were—besides the money—and if either will had been in her favor.
“Can you call him and get back to me?” Johanna asked. “I know this is totally off the wall, but the hospital needs a medical history . . .”
“And insurance information,” Henry said. “I’ll call you back.”
A little more than five minutes passed before her phone rang again. “Both Dempsey and I will be there in under an hour.” With that, Henry hung up.
Dempsey arrived first. He didn’t have much to say. Johanna thought that he should least thank her for all the work she’d done. All of today’s clues, from the lawyer and the missing will to the identity of Thomas, had come from her. His contribution had been to let her stew in an interview room for three hours.
Henry showed up about five minutes later, still earlier than the hour she promised. She was a striking woman in her mid-forties, Johanna guessed, with short silver hair and bright eyes that seemed to hint at everything she knew.
She wore jeans and a silk blouse that presented her well. Johanna hoped she could look that confident and put-together in two decades.
“You’re Johanna?” the woman asked. She stuck out a hand and shook Johanna’s hand in a firm grasp. This was a woman not to be trifled with.
“And this is my unidentified cousin?” Henry asked, pointing to the bed. At this angle, only bandages and a sheet covering his body were visible. No one could see much of him from here.
Henry assessed the situation and moved around the equipment that was all over the room. She even took and moved a piece of the bandage, which Johanna wasn’t sure was sanitary. However, Dempsey didn’t stop her.
She nodded finally and said, “If I’m not mistaken, this is my cousin Arthur’s son, Thomas. He said that he was close with Jessica?”
Johanna went over what she’d been told; that Thomas was a relative who referred to the older woman as Aunt Jessica, even though he’d been more nebulous on the exact relationship. She didn’t mention that Thomas had told her his parents had passed away. And here, he had a very live father. Thomas seemed to have some issues with the truth and integrity. That might have been why Thomas lied, but at the same time, in this murder case, all the facts counted.
“There’s a grain of truth in there somewhere, but he’s not close to Jessica. I’m going with what I can recognize— the resemblance to his father. I wonder why he’s here.”
“He’s not from around here?” Dempsey asked, finally putting in a word.
“Arthur lives on the East Coast. He was in Boston, but he often moves to stay in front of the creditors. I suspect that Thomas is much the same. So I’m not sure where they live.”
“Do you have a contact number for Arthur? The hospital is wanting to call the next of kin and talk to them about his treatment—”
And insurance,” Henry inserted again. “I know how these places are. Thomas’s next of kin isn’t his father. That would be his wife.”
Johanna sat down in the chair as if she’d been struck.
Chapter 5
Married?” Dempsey asked. Johanna almost detected a smirk on his face, as he spoke to Henry.
“Yes, I was invited to the wedding. Thomas invited the entire family—and I mean entire. It was just a ploy to get gifts, but most of the family went. That was about eight years ago. I didn’t go. It was easier to just buy the gift and stay home.”
Henry looked at him again, assessing his face as she spoke. “I’m almost certain this has to be him. If he’s here, he has an angle, and I’m sure that it’s the estate.”
Johanna took a deep breath. Just because she’d been duped, she couldn’t stop looking into this. She was too involved in the matter to back out because some guy had lied to her.
She looked at Dempsey with a stern expression on her face. “Is it possible that Thomas manufactured this incident himself? Stole the car and let it hit him?”
Dempsey seemed to ponder the question, while Henry seemed somewhat taken aback. She looked at the man again as if she could see what drove him.
“He’d need an accomplice to implement that,” Dempsey said. “The car actually seemed to have been driven, and someone put it into park after the accident. Thomas couldn’t have done that himself. So someone else was involved.”
“The wife?” Johanna asked. She looked at Henry. “Do you have a name or a phone number so that we can contact her?”
Henry shook her head. “It’s been too long ago now. I’m sure that I would have thrown the invitation out after I purchased the gift. So I’m no help at all. You might ask Lilly if she knows the name, or perhaps you can ask her to look around my aunt’s house and see if she kept the invitation. She was much more of a pa
ckrat than I am.”
Johanna looked at the woman. Dempsey had not made any notes based on that statement, and she wondered if Henry’s comments had been directed toward her. She would definitely follow up with Lilly on the matter.
“How many relatives do you have? I mean, ones who might think they have a claim on the estate, like Thomas did.”
Henry sighed. “I haven’t thought of this in ages. A long time ago, perhaps about the same time that Thomas married, my aunt drew up a will. I know that I was mentioned in it. She told me. However, she did not tell me anything about who else might have been included. It could be all of them or none of them.”
“If you had to guess?” Dempsey added. Now his notebook was out. Given that the lawyer’s office had been destroyed, someone might not have been happy with their slice of the pie.
“Me, Arthur, Thomas, my aunt Nedra, and her son, Jackson. Nedra might have had another child, but I don’t really know. I haven’t seen these people in ages.”
Johanna nodded. She had family that she’d never met, cousins whose names were not familiar, relatives who might have passed away since the last time she’d inquired after them. Following the death of her own parents, she had lost track of her other family members. They had come to the funerals and counted that as their only responsibility.
“That’s about all the questions I have for you,” Dempsey said. Johanna was a bit annoyed, as most of the questions had been hers. “We have your number in case we have any more issues to resolve.”
Henry left the room without any comment.
“You didn’t ask about insurance,” Dempsey said, with somewhat of a grin.
“I doubt that if she doesn’t recall the man’s wife, she isn’t conversant with his insurance plans.” Johanna wanted to leave, go home, and forget all of this. But someone had taken her car, used it to hit a suspect, and she’d witnessed two women being murdered. Johanna was in this matter, whether she liked it or not. For the record, she did not.
“Need a ride home?” he asked.
“Let me check,” she replied, offering him a small smile. “There should be a rental outside waiting for me.”