04.Die.My.Love.2007 (22 page)

Meanwhile, that afternoon, Charles Tooke had been at home in his apartment on Lake Conroe, north of Houston, unaware of the drama unfolding in Richmond and Houston involving his friend Piper. At 3:21 that afternoon, his computer popped up an e-mail from Piper’s e-mail address: “I have a brief question for you.”

Three minutes later, Charles, chuckling, e-mailed back:

“I’m a boxer shorts. Not briefs.”

He waited, but she didn’t reply.

Then, a little more than an hour later, at 4:27 p.m., just as McDaniel and Ferguson were arriving at the airport gate, Tooke received a voice mail from Piper on his cell telephone. “I’ve got a question for you. Oops, my kids are on the other line,” then the phone went dead. Charles tried to call her back. She didn’t answer. He left a message, but she didn’t respond.

Once inside the airport lobby, McDaniel and Ferguson flashed their badges, hooked up with the uniformed offi cers assigned to assist them, and headed toward the gate where the Southwest flight in question was scheduled to arrive in minutes. As they rushed to the gate, McDaniel called Stem in Virginia again, looking for more direction. Under Texas law, he’d confirmed, he could stop the woman and fi ngerprint her, to determine who she was. Did they want anything else? Stem called back minutes later. By then he’d talked to Kizer, and they’d agreed that they wanted Tina or Piper traveling as Tina intercepted and detained long enough to confirm her identity.

Once the gates opened, passengers poured out of the 166 / Kathryn Casey

airplane, eighty in all, and McDaniel and the other offi cers worked the crowd, looking for the faces of the women in the blown- up driver’s license photos. They searched, staring into eyes, looking for anyone who avoided their gaze and acted suspicious. As the passengers fanned out into the airport, one officer ran to check the bathrooms, while McDaniel and Ferguson continued the search at the gate. Still, no one looking like Tina or Piper Rountree disembarked.

Once the stream of passengers stopped, the two offi cers entered the airplane, checking the inside, looking for her hiding behind a seat or in the bathroom. It was empty.

They discussed impounding the airplane to give the Houston P.D.’s crime scene experts time to search it for evidence. Perhaps they’d find DNA from a hair left onboard.

But with Southwest’s policy of no assigned seating, they had no idea where the woman traveling on the Tina Rountree ticket sat. In the end, they decided against it, knowing that it would cost a fortune to process an entire commercial airplane.

Back in the terminal, at the gate, McDaniel cornered an agent who checked the rec ords and discovered that the woman they were after had checked baggage. With that, the two offi -

cers ran to the baggage area, only to find the conveyor belt empty and the area deserted.

“That’s it,” McDaniel said. “We missed her.”

“We missed her,” McDaniel’s boss, Lieutenant Rick Maxey, told Captain Stem when he called that afternoon. The Houston P.D. did, however, have another piece of evidence. Before they left the airport, they’d stayed while the baggage clerk went through the tags. They had the tag reading Tina Rountree, showing that a woman using that identifi cation had checked a bag on the flight. Maxey had the ticket in a plastic evidence bag, so it could be fi ngerprinted. Mean-DIE, MY LOVE / 167

while, Breck McDaniel was on the way to Tina Rountree’s house, to see if she could be found there, while Maxey and Ferguson were driving back out to Kingwood to again check Piper Rountree’s house.

Grateful for all they’d done, Stem thanked Maxey for the update, but he hung up the telephone disappointed. Now they’d have a difficult time proving who traveled on the ticket. At the very least, someday a defense attorney would have wiggle room to inject reasonable doubt into a trial, by claiming they didn’t know who the woman on the airplane had been.

“Heck,” Stem said. “Now that’s what I call a bad break.”

When Stem called Kizer at home to tell him the bad news, the prosecutor paused for just a minute, then said, “I bet she’s wearing a disguise.”

“Could be,” Stem said. “What I do know is we need to get someone to Houston quick to follow this up.” When Stem hung up with Kizer, he dialed his boss’s phone number, the Henrico County Chief of Police Henry Stanley. “I need your credit card,” he told him. “We need an officer on the fi rst flight out to Houston in the morning.”

Stanley didn’t hesitate, rattling off his credit card number to Stem.

From that point on, the groundwork was laid: Kelley and his partner, Investigator Robin Dorton, a forty-something,

soft- spoken officer with a slight paunch and a disarming, Columbo-like approach to questioning suspects, would fl y to Houston the next morning to follow leads in Texas, including, they hoped, a sit-down with the prime suspect, Piper Rountree. At the same time in Henrico, Williamson would continue to collect phone and bank rec ords, while Hanna followed any Richmond- area leads.

As for the prosecutors, Kizer had made his intentions clear: If Captain Stem and his crew wanted to charge Piper 168 / Kathryn Casey

Rountree, the Henrico P.D. needed more than conjecture and cell phone rec ords; Kizer wanted nothing less than an eyewitness who could place not just Piper Rountree’s cell phone, but the woman herself in the Richmond area at the time of the murder.

In Houston that eve ning at 6:00 p.m., Breck McDaniel arrived at Tina’s house and found Piper Rountree’s Jeep Liberty in the driveway. McDaniel called his boss, Lieutenant Maxey. “What does Virginia want me to do?” he asked.

Maxey said he’d check.

Fifteen minutes later McDaniel still didn’t have an answer from Virginia when Piper walked out the door wearing a tank top and jeans and climbed in her black Jeep, license number X54-JBJ. He followed, as she drove from the house the few blocks to Tina’s clinic, then got out of the car. McDaniel parked his unmarked car a few houses away, then walked toward the clinic. He ducked into the adjacent property’s backyard, where he had a view of the clinic parking lot. The clinic was closed, the lot empty, except for Piper’s Jeep parked next to the trash bin with the car doors open and country music blaring. McDaniel watched but never saw her leave the car or enter the clinic. Inside the clinic, the lights never went on. At seven she pulled out of the driveway, and he ran to his car to follow. He stayed on her tail until she pulled through an amber light and he was cut off by another car. At that point he lost her.

When Breck reached Coby, the Richmond offi cer told him to let it go for the rest of the night. “Piper is a suspect,”

he said. “But I’ll be there tomorrow, early, and we’ll take it from there.”

Around the time Piper was in the clinic lot, she returned Lo-ni’s phone calls. Loni, by then nearly frantic, would later remember blurting the news out, crying, “Fred’s been killed.”

DIE, MY LOVE / 169

Loni waited for a reply, but at first Piper was silent. When she did talk, she said only, “Uh-huh.”

“No, you don’t understand,” Loni said, sobbing. “Fred was shot and killed in the driveway, at the house.”

“Uh-huh,” Piper said again. “So where are my kids?”

Later, Piper’s tone of voice would resonate with Loni. She sounded cold, disinterested, and not surprised.

“So where are my kids? I want my kids,” Piper asked again.

“I don’t know,” Loni said. “The police have them.”

After 7:00 p.m., Coby Kelley received a voice mail on his office phone from Piper Rountree: “Hi. I didn’t catch your name. I talked with Loni, and I’m looking for my kids. I’m at my sister’s.” She then repeated her cell phone number ending in 7878, the same one that had been traced to Richmond just that morning.

In Richmond that Saturday eve

ning, Chuck Hanna was

making the rounds, trying to find out where Piper Rountree had stayed, assuming she, in fact, was the one who had murdered Fred Jablin. By then he knew that at 4:46 that morning, one hour and

forty-five minutes before the murder, someone had checked messages on Piper’s cell phone. The call was initiated a short drive from the Jablin house, bouncing off a tower near Cox Road and Broad Street, an area peppered with small hotels. Patiently, Hanna went from one to the next, showing a copy of the photo of Piper in the red dress they’d taken from her son’s bedroom, and asking the clerk on duty to check the hotel rec ords from the night before, to determine if a Piper or Tina Rountree had registered.

Late that eve ning he pulled up into the parking lot of the Homestead Suites, tucked back off the road, hidden behind a shopping center and a line of trees, not visible from the main street. Inside, Hanna went through that same routine.

170 / Kathryn Casey

This time, however, the clerk checked the rec ords and didn’t shake her head no.

“A Tina Rountree had a reservation here for last night,”

the woman said. “But we have no record of her ever checking in.”

“You sure she wasn’t here?” Hanna asked.

“She never registered,” the clerk insisted. “She didn’t stay here.”

Hanna reluctantly left, moving on to the next hotel.

Back and forth that night, Kelley and Piper traded voice mails. Always, she asked about her children. Finally, at 9:00 p.m., David Ferguson had Piper’s house staked out.

She wasn’t home. That was when Kelley reached Piper on her cell phone.

“This is Piper Rountree,” she said calmly.

A friend, Piper said, had told her Fred was dead and the kids were being held somewhere by the police.

“I’m sorry you had to learn on the phone like that . . . your kids are fine,” Kelley assured her.

“Well, where are they?”

“That’s what I want to talk to you about,” Kelley said.

“Loni told me Fred was shot . . . what happened?”

Not wanting to give away too many details, Kelley explained in broad strokes, then asked about their divorce.

Fred, Piper said, was physically abusive. “It has not been amicable,” she told him. The last time she’d been in Virginia, she told him, was the camping trip. “Can you just tell me where the kids are? . . . I need to come get my kids . . . They’re my kids. I have custody of the kids.”

“Do you happen to have a copy of that order?” Kelley asked. “I’m just trying to get information on what problems

[Fred] might have been having . . . can we talk about that?”

“. . . but how that affects the kids, I can’t say,” Piper answered. No matter what Kelley asked, there was only one DIE, MY LOVE / 171

thing Piper Rountree wanted to discuss—getting her children.

Then Kelley asked her a question that could help locate her on Friday, if she had been the one who talked with Paxton on Friday afternoon. “I called him yesterday,” she confirmed. “I need my kids . . . I’m their mother . . . They’re my kids. I have custody.”

Now Kelley had her admission on tape, that she’d been the one who’d talked with Paxton. “You understand my situation . . .” Kelley said, indicating that Fred had made ac-commodations for the children that might prevent them from being immediately turned over to her, including a will that stated he wanted them to be with his brother, Michael.

“I am the mother,” Piper said, furious. Then after considering what she’d just heard, she said, “Well, he may have.

He’s also expressed that my sister, Tina . . .”

“Okay, I was not aware of that,” Kelley said. “Is there somewhere where I might be able to speak with her?”

With Kelley’s request to talk to Tina, Piper’s cell phone went dead. He called back, but Piper’s voice mail picked up, and Kelley left a message.

After he hung up, Kelley called the number he had for Tina. She answered, listened to him, then said she was on her way to have a drink with Piper and she’d ask her to call him. Reluctantly, Kelley hung up the telephone. There was nothing more he could do until morning when he landed in Houston. Fifteen hours after he’d arrived on Hearthglow Lane, Coby Kelley was finished for the night.

Much of what had happened that day didn’t make sense to Doug McCann. There were Piper’s phone calls, and Tina’s coming to his house for a nap. He hadn’t asked, but he’d wondered how Tina had finished work and driven to Clear Lake to a baby shower as she’d said she was going to, in the rain, and returned so quickly. From four-thirty to six-thirty 172 / Kathryn Casey

or so she was asleep in his upstairs bedroom. She didn’t seem upset, just tired. He’d expected that he, Tina, Piper, and Jerry would be going out to dinner. After all, that was what Piper had mentioned in the morning, but through the eve ning, his phone didn’t ring. No plans were made. By eight-thirty he was getting hungry. He called Tina, but she sounded busy and said she’d have to call him back. When she finally called, she said, “Something serious has come up. I can’t talk about it now.”

In Baton Rouge, just after eleven, Jerry Walters’s phone rang. He’d had a rough couple of days. Bertha, his beloved bloodhound, had surgery on Friday and he’d visited her at the vet’s office on Saturday. The dog wasn’t doing well.

When he answered the telephone, it was Piper, and she said,

“Fred is dead.”

Fred, she said, had been murdered in the driveway.

“Can you come to Houston to be with me?” she asked.

Jerry felt unsure. “Let me see what I can do,” he said.

It was after midnight when the telephone rang at Doug McCann’s town house. She’d sounded upset earlier, but now Tina was upbeat. “Can I ask a favor?” she asked.

“Sure,” he said.

“Is it okay if my sister comes to your place with me to-night?”

When he agreed, saying Piper could sleep on the downstairs couch, Tina said they’d be there soon. Still, it was nearly 2:00 a.m. when Tina and Piper arrived. Doug heard them come in, and then Tina walked up the stairs to the bedroom. “I’ll tell you about it tomorrow,” she whispered as she climbed into bed. “I don’t want to talk about it to night.”

Doug and Tina lay there briefly, in silence, before Piper walked into the room and lay on top of the blanket and between them at the foot of the bed.