In a Split Second

by Timothy Glass

  “While the items don’t mean Hopper is guilty,” Kate said, “when Connor and I returned to talk to Mr. Hopper about what we had found, he lawyered up.”

  “Did he state that the items were missing?” Beth asked.

  “Yes. Before he wanted his attorney, we asked for any documentation about when his office had canceled the code on the lost keycard and when it had issued a new keycard to him.”

  Beth looked over the board once again, then returned to her notes.

  “I keep wondering if there could have been a lovers’ triangle,” Kate said.

  “Anything is possible,” Beth said. She quickly changed the subject. “Did you two run an MO crosscheck?”

  “We did. Nothing came back as a match within a two-hundred-mile radius,” Kate answered.

  Beth noted this on her tablet. “Did you get anything back from his attorney as to when the keycard was canceled and a new one issued for Mr. ... ah …” Beth searched on her tablet and started pulling her file back out of her briefcase.

  “Hopper,” Kate offered.

  Upon hearing this, Beth returned the file to her briefcase.

  “From the records his attorney provided, the card from his work was reissued a week before the murder,” Connor said, stroking Sundae’s long ears.

  “Is it possible that the records had been changed?” Beth asked.

  “We thought about that, too, Connor replied. “Brad could have changed them or had someone change them for him. It’s on a simple paper log – no date or time stamp to validate anything.”“Who’s the other person of interest?” Beth pointed toward Jeff Gilbert’s photo.

  Connor answered. “He was Ellie’s boyfriend after Brad Hopper and right before she became involved with Bud Hampton. Ellie acted like it was nothing more than casual. In fact, she dropped any communication with the guy after she met Bud. That was over a year ago.”

  “We requested a search warrant for Brad’s house. Maybe we’ll glean something from that.” Kate held up a piece paper, looking it over.

  Beth adjusted her seating as if she was uncomfortable in such a cheaply constructed chair. The lack of adequate padding in the seat and the chair’s wobbly legs probably had something to do with that. Beth tucked the tablet back in her briefcase and stood, straightening her skirt.

  “I’ll try to work up something for you both by the end of the week.” Beth handed Kate her business card. “It was nice meeting you, Kate.” Beth shook her hand.

  Connor and Sundae walked Beth to the door. The phone rang as Beth stepped into the elevator and the door closed. Connor and Sundae walked back to his desk as Kate hung up the phone.

  “That was the DA’s office. We have our warrant for Brad’s house.”

  Chapter 11

  The two CI techs always reminded Kate of a comedy team rather than detectives who specialized in crime investigations. Chris was tall and thin and had a ruggedly handsome look. While he always wore slacks, a dress shirt, and a tie, Kate always thought he would look better wearing a flannel shirt and jeans, like the guy on the paper towels she always bought at the grocery store. Chris had a dry sense of humor. Joe, on the other hand, was a smaller, more muscular man who had what Kate’s mom would have called “bedroom eyes.” Joe had an odd sense of humor. The two of them could easily have done some moonlighting at the local comedy club.

  “So, where’s your partner and his four-legged, tail-wagging friend today?” Joe asked.

  “They’re meeting with the ADA this morning.”

  “That’s okay. We’d rather talk to you. You’re much prettier than he is and you don’t have four paws like the little sniffer.”

  Kate blushed and laughed. “What? You aren’t smitten by Ms. Sundae?”

  Both Chris and Joe laughed.

  “We were in the neighborhood and thought you might want to know we ‘precinct maids’ did the dusting and cleaning on the Hampton crime scene,” Joe said. “We didn’t find anything out of place on the carpet. Just your standard dust that matched the outside the home, strands of hair that matched the three people living there. However, when Chris vacuumed the rug, we found something you’ll want to know about: fibers in the carpet.”

  “Aren’t fibers what carpet is made of?” Kate asked.

  “Yes. However, these weren’t carpet fibers,” Chris said.

  “It took us some time to find out what exactly they were, but the fibers are consistent with shoe condoms,” Joe said with a smile.

  “Shoe condoms?” Kate asked, a puzzled look on her face.

  “Joe, be nice to the lady,” Chris said. “What Joe’s talking about is those covers you put on shoes. You know, so you don’t bring dirt into the house. Servicemen wear them on their shoes when they come to work on your cable or something like that.”

  “We all wear those at a crime scene,” Kate said.

  “Not this brand, we don’t. These are the type you buy at a big-box home improvement store. The fibers are much thinner and are blue, not white like what we wear,” Joe said.

  “So you think the killer wore shoe covers?”

  “Can’t say for sure the killer wore them,” Chris said. “What I am saying, Kate, is that I found them from the bedroom to the kitchen. I also picked them up in the den by that black backpack that was on the floor.”

  Kate remembered that this was the path Ellie stated the killer had taken from the bedroom to the kitchen. The backpack was found in the den. It didn’t belong to anyone living in the house.

  “Whoever this SOB is, he sure put a lot of thought into this before he pulled the trigger that night,” Chris said.

  Connor and Kate wore white cotton gloves as they searched Brad Hopper’s home office. Sundae busied herself by sniffing around. She abruptly stopped in front of the printer stand, then sat and howled, signaling to Connor that she had found something.

  “What the…?” Connor looked at Sundae. He gave his release command and lifted the lid on the ink jet printer. When that rendered nothing, he looked around the printer stand.

  “Find anything?” asked Kate.

  “No, nothing,” Connor said. “Guess she’s off her game today.” Connor looked once more, then walked away. Sundae quickly took her place in front of the printer stand once again, sat, and howled. Connor shook his head and once again gave the command for Sundae to be released. This time, Sundae started pawing at the printer’s bottom shelf. In doing so, she knocked over a foot-square fabric storage basket containing typical office paraphernalia. Ballpoint pens, a red plastic ruler, an extra ink cartridge, a box of highlighters, and dry erase markers littered the floor. Connor bent down to pick up the contents Sundae had knocked out of the basket. As he did, he caught something in his line of sight. A pile of papers had been shoved behind the dusty outline of where the basket had once sat. Connor leaned in and pulled out the rumpled stack of papers.

  “Is this what you wanted us to see, girl?”

  Connor stood and looked over the stack of papers in his hands. Kate approached and stood beside him. Connor stopped, pulled two items from the pile, and studied them. The paper in his left hand was a bright orange flier with a photo of a handgun on its left side. Large block letters advertised a gun show. In his right hand, Connor grasped an admission ticket for the gun show, which had been held months before the murder. Red ink stamped on the ticket indicated that someone had, in fact, attended the show. “For a man who isn’t a gun enthusiast, it’s funny that he attended a gun show.”

  Connor transferred each of the items into a separate evidence bag, then took out his pen and wrote down the date, time, and location of its collection. On the line asking for the name of the person had collected the evidence, he wrote his name. Then Connor started putting the pen back into his shirt pocket.

  “Don’t put that away so quickly.” Kate held up a yellow and white box with a label that said “shoe covers”. “The box is supposed to have ten, but two are missing. One for each foot. Maybe these will match the fibers that Joe and Chris found
in the carpet,” Kate said, handing them to Connor. “Why on earth would Brad Hopper need shoe covers in his line of work? Every time we see him, he’s in a suit and tie.”

  “To kill someone,” Connor replied.

  Chapter 12

  Several days later, the lab report came back. The fibers from the carpet did indeed match the eight remaining shoe covers in the box. Connor carefully looked over the report.

  Three days after the report on the shoe covers had come in from the lab, Brad Hopper and his attorney sat at one side of the interview table. Kate, Connor, and Sundae sat at the other side. Connor purposely allowed Sundae to enter the interview room. He wanted to see how she would respond to Mr. Hopper. Connor noted that when they had entered the room, Sundae had run to Mr. Hopper’s side, sniffed around briefly, then returned to sit down between him and Kate. ‘Odd behavior,’ Connor thought, considering Sundae’s lack of interest in the suspect.

  “Detectives, this better be good. You’ve disrupted my client’s work several times now! No DNA of his was found at the crime scene, plus he has an alibi for the time of the murder,” Attorney Ted Kent said sternly, scowling.

  Connor and Kate ignored the attorney’s theatrics.

  “Mr. Hopper, do you use shoe covers for anything at work or home?” Connor asked.

  “Shoe what?” Brad looked confused as to what they were.

  Kate got up, left the room, and quickly returned with a pair of white shoe covers that she had removed from a package in her desk. She tossed them across the table for Brad to examine.

  “Detectives, where are you going with this line of questioning?”

  “No, I don’t use anything like this at work or home,” Brad said.

  “Are you saying you never saw a shoe cover before?” Kate asked.

  “I’ve seen service people wear them. Wasn’t sure what they were called,” Brad responded.

  “Can you explain how a box of shoe covers was recovered from your home office?”

  “You don’t have to answer that,” Brad’s attorney, Ted Kent, blurted out.

  “I have no idea … I never saw them before,” Brad said.

  “For God’s sake, that’s it! We’re done here, detectives,” the attorney said, standing. “Unless you’re arresting my client, we’ll see ourselves out of here.”

  Brad stood, his face pale white as he followed his attorney to the door.

  “Oh, one last thing,” Connor said before opening the door. “Did you or your fiancée happen to attend the gun show last August in Lakewood?” He held up a photocopy of the gun show flier.

  Brad turned toward the two detectives. “I….”

  His attorney interrupted before Brad could finish.

  “No, I’ll answer this,” Brad said. “I told you, I don’t like guns. I purchased one many years ago and sold the stupid thing. I don’t like them, nor do I have a need for them. So I would have no desire to attend an event like this.” With that, the attorney ushered his client out of the room before Brad could say another word.

  Connor looked over at Kate and then at Sundae lying on the floor between them.

  “Sundae wasn’t the least bit interested in him. Did you notice?”

  “I noticed.” Kate looked at her watch. “We better get a move on if you still want to go to Hampton’s funeral. The Presbyterian church is all the way over on the west side of town.

  A closed wooden casket sat on the altar as the minister spoke of Bud Hampton’s life and how from the time he was a young boy he had given to and helped others. Connor and Kate stood at the back of the church. While others were there to mourn the loss of Bud Hampton, Connor and Kate were there to observe the actions of the people in attendance. They saw Mr. and Mrs. Hampton in the front row along with Ellie and her daughter, Kim. Two rows back, they thought they saw Kim’s father, Sam Peters.

  The service lasted just under an hour. Then six pallbearers carried the casket from the church and placed it into a black hearse. At the graveside service, Mrs. Hampton’s sobbing could be heard over the minister’s voice. After the short service, people shook hands and departed. Connor and Kate were walking back to their car when Mr. Hampton approached them.

  “I’ll call you tomorrow. It may be nothing, but I remembered something Bud told us.”

  Chapter 13

  Connor and Kate immersed themselves in the Hampton case. They pored over the phone records for Ellie and Brad as well as for the victim, Bud Hampton. If Kate’s theory of a lover’s triangle was correct, there were no calls or text messages to prove it.

  “They could have used a burner phone to communicate,” Kate suggested.

  Connor rubbed his hand through the two-day-old stubble on his face. “Maybe, but…” He stopped mid-sentence as the elevator chimed and three mailroom workers dollied plastic mail tubs toward them.

  “What the…?” Kate said.

  “Let me guess. The newspapers and TV reports have brought out all the crazies in the world,” Connor said, shaking his head in disgust.

  “Where do you want all this?” the mailroom employee asked Kate with a wink and a smile.

  Connor pointed to the side of his desk. The tubs were stacked two high in three rows. The empty dollies rattled across the floor as the mailroom employees returned to the elevator.

  Connor carefully clipped together the phone records and stuffed them into a file marked “Bud Hampton”. The file bore a red “active” sticker on its front. Connor then lifted the first tub of mail and carried it over to an empty five-foot by eight-foot white folding table in the corner of the room. The day-shift employees began crowding around the elevator door, leaving for the day.

  “I can stay and do this,” Connor offered.

  “What, and let you have all the fun reading these crazy notes by yourself?” Kate smiled and tilted her head.

  Connor and Kate grabbed white cotton gloves from their desk drawer and then pushed their chairs toward the table.

  “How do you want to handle this?” Kate asked.

  “Put the crazies in one stack here.” Connor pointed to the left side of the table. “And the tips in another, over here.” He pointed to the far right side.

  They began opening the letters. After they’d gone through the first tub of mail, the stack of crazies far outnumbered the possible tips. Connor lifted the second tub and dumped the letters onto the table. He and Kate continued sorting the letters into piles.

  “So, the ADA still doesn’t feel we have enough on Brad Hopper to arrest him?” Kate asked.

  Connor ripped open another letter and read it. “No. The fact that his coat and IDs were found close to the crime scene isn’t enough.”

  He opened another letter, read it, and added it to the pile marked for the crazies.

  “As for the gun show flier and ticket, we’re waiting for the show’s records as to which guns the vendors had sold. It was a small show, so it didn’t have any security cameras. Once we have a list of what was sold, if we find a match, we’ll ask for the records.”

  “Did Mr. Hampton ever call you with what he wanted to talk to us about?” Kate asked.

  “No. If we don’t hear from him by tomorrow, I’ll give him a call. I know it was really hard on both of them yesterday,” Connor said. “Hey, you hungry? It’s past six. We could order some food to be delivered.”

  “What do you want? I’ll order it.”

  “You pick,” Connor said as he opened another letter.

  Kate removed her white gloves and ordered a large pepperoni pizza with a side of garlic bread for delivery.

  Two more tubs of mail and forty minutes later, the elevator chimed. The aroma of freshly baked pizza and garlic bread wafted through the third floor, awakening Sundae. She stood and shook her head, causing the badge that hung from her neck to jingle.

  Connor took off his gloves and tossed them onto the table. Removing a pink ceramic bowl from his desk, he measured out a portion of kibble. Connor kept a small bag of dog food in his bottom desk drawer for
nights such as this. After he fed Sundae, he refilled her water bowl with fresh water.

  “Boy, has she got you wrapped around her paws.” Kate laughed.

  Kate opened the pizza box, took two paper plates and napkins, and served up two large slices on each plate. She handed one to Connor. Sundae finished her kibble and looked up at Connor with her big brown eyes, begging for some pizza. When that didn’t work, Sundae went over to Kate’s side.

  “You know, I think that reporter, Candy Martin, really likes you. She called and has been asking a lot of questions that don’t involve the Hampton case at all,” Kate said.

  Connor finished a slice of pizza before he answered. “I’m tired of the head games. I’m just not interested in dating or getting involved.”

  Kate found herself wondering what Connor’s ex-wife had been like. They had broken up long before she and Connor had become a team. Kate knew that Connor had worn his wedding ring on a chain around his neck for quite some time afterward. She had seen it once when a perp had been resisting arrest and the chain had dangled loosely outside of Connor’s shirt collar. Suddenly, the silence embarrassed her.

  “Oh, by the way, did you know she gave the killer a nickname in the newspapers? She calls him the Moonless Killer,” Kate said.

  Connor shook his head. “I hate when journalists give them names. Just brings out the copycats and fuels the real killer.” He wiped pizza sauce from the edge of his mouth. “What about you? You’re a beautiful woman. Why is it you’re not dating?”

  Kate felt her face flush at Connor’s compliment. “I guess I don’t like the head games, either. He cheated on me. I guess I should have figured that out myself. Suddenly, the intimacy came to a halt. Three months later, I found out it was because he was sleeping with his younger girlfriend. He was being faithful, alright … just not to me, his own wife.”

  Sundae walked back toward Connor. Suddenly she stopped and howled at one of the last tubs of mail sitting next to his desk. “I know what you’re up to, you little beggar. I get up and you’ll be on my chair eating my dinner,” Connor said as he continued eating his last slice of pizza.