Chasing The Dead (An Alex Stone Thriller) (29 page)

He waved her off. “You were just doing your job, and in a way, I’m flattered that anyone might think that someone as boring as I am could be caught up in something so dramatic. Thank you for helping me hold up my end of the dinner table conversation tonight when Sonia asks me about my day.”

**

Alex returned home, worn-out. She poured herself into her easy chair in the den and took a nap. After lunch she stayed at the kitchen table, using her laptop to catch up on her e-mail. Late in the afternoon, Grace Canfield called her.

“Where’ve you been all day?”

Alex didn’t want Grace worrying and asking too many questions.

“Home with a cold.”

“Drink plenty of liquids.”

“I promise.”

“I got Joanie’s records from Fresh Start.”

“Let me guess. The Steele Family Foundation paid for her treatment.”

“If you knew that, why did you run my butt around to get these records?”

Alex laughed. “I just found out this morning,” she said, filling Grace in on her conversation with Judge Steele.

“So you were well enough to go see the judge but too sick to tell me what he said so I wouldn’t spend my day hollering at some poor medical records clerk at Fresh Start?”

“Sorry, but we needed the records anyway to confirm what the judge said.”

“Those records may be more important than that. Didn’t you say that Charlotte was Bethany Sutherland’s daughter?”

“That’s what Bethany told me.”

“Well, according to these records, Joanie told the doctors at Fresh Start that she was Charlotte’s mother.”

“Really? Did she say who the father was?”

“Said she didn’t know, which I can believe, given her chosen occupation. Anyway, I checked the city’s birth records and Joanie is listed as the mother on Charlotte’s birth certificate. The father isn’t listed. She was born at Truman Medical Center. I’m going to subpoena the hospital’s records to see if there’s anything in them about the father and who paid the bill.”

“Lean on them like you did with Fresh Start. I wonder why Bethany told me that Charlotte was her daughter.”

“Probably because she’s the one that was raising her.”

“Okay, but here’s something else that doesn’t make sense. Bethany also told me that she didn’t know who paid for Joanie’s treatment at Fresh Start. Since Judge Steele’s foundation paid for it, Joanie would have had to jump through who knows how many hoops to get that free ride. There’s no way Bethany couldn’t have known about that.”

“And then there’s the money, the five thousand dollars. Where’s Bethany or Joanie gonna get that kind of money? Maybe it’s all tied together. Maybe they were blackmailing the judge and he was using his foundation to pay her off. We’d have to subpoena the foundation’s records to trace the five grand.”

“Yeah, and you can bet Steele would fight that subpoena to the death, and without more proof, Judge West will quash it.” Alex looked at her watch. “Bethany has to be at work in about an hour. If I leave now, I can catch her and get some answers.”

“I thought you were sick.”

“Not that sick. Get that subpoena over to Truman and ask Bonnie to help you cut through the red tape.”

**

Alex was relieved when she saw Bethany’s Impala parked in front of her trailer. She climbed the single step to the open door. The lights were off, strands of daylight leaking through the lowered blinds on the trailer’s windows, casting shadows and stirring dust mites. The television was playing in the background, Meredith Vieira asking
Who wants to be a millionaire?
Bethany was slumped over the dinette table as if she was dozing. Alex called to her.

“Bethany.”

When she didn’t wake up, Alex rapped on the side of the trailer.

“Bethany!”

Then Alex caught the rank, sickly-sweet scent of decomposing flesh and knew that Bethany was dead. She stepped inside. Charlotte wasn’t there. Back outside, she flung open the door to the storage shed. Not finding her, she ran around the trailer, shouting.

“Charlotte! Where are you?”

Chapter Fifty

WEDNESDAY MORNING, ROSSI AND Kalena Greene sat in front of the computer on Rossi’s desk playing the airport security video over and over, using freeze-frame and slow motion to break the action down. Kalena drained her cup of coffee and pushed away from the screen.

“This is hopeless,” she said. “If you and I can’t identify Norris in the video, there’s no way a jury can.”

“What about having some video geek enhance it?”

Kalena shrugged. “We can try that, but your twenty-four-hour hold on Norris expired two hours ago. We’ve got to charge him or let him go.”

“So charge him. We know his car was used, and his alibi is for shit.”

“So is our case if we can’t put him in the car. You got a warrant to search his apartment last night and you didn’t find the duffel bag or anything else to link him to the murder. And your canvass of around Barry Road and I-29 didn’t turn up anything.”

“There’s still his daughter Kim. She may have been in on it with him. If Norris thinks we can prove that, he’ll confess if we agree to treat her as a juvenile.”

“What do you have on her?”

“Wheeler talked to Sonia Steele, who was Robin’s best friend. According to Sonia, mother and daughter have fought for years.”

“Fought about what?”

“Whatever moms and teenage daughters fight about, which I guess for them was everything. Things got worse in the last six months or so. Kim started staying out all night and Robin was afraid she’d graduated from smoking dope to using meth. And a few weeks ago, Kim was expelled from school when she was caught with a box cutter in her purse.”

“How did Kim explain the box cutter?”

“She said she was going to use it to cut a bitch.”

“Damn, that white girl went ghetto in a hurry.”

“Not hard when you take the meth express. Sonia said that Robin was trying to get Kim into an alternative high school but that Kim refused to go.”

“Have you gotten into Kim’s computer and phone yet?”

“Wheeler is getting a search warrant for the computer and is going to serve the phone company with a subpoena today.”

“What about the hidden car keys? Any luck with that?”

“The one for the Camry was right where it was supposed to be, but there were no prints. Not even partials, smudges, or swirls. And nothing on the metal box it was kept in.”

“So,” Kalena said, “the killer wiped the key and the box clean, which supports Norris’s story. If he’d been behind the wheel, he’d have used his own key.”

“Unless he used the spare and wiped it clean to make it look like someone stole his car.”

“Which is a theory in search of proof. I hate to say it, but you’ve got to let him go. Whoever did this did a pretty good job of hiding his tracks, but you’ll find him.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“Aren’t you sure?”

“You know that I am.”

Kalena grinned. “Then, that’s good enough for me.”

Rossi gave instructions for Norris to be released and headed to the City Diner at Third and Grand, taking a window booth at the back, ordering coffee and telling the waitress to keep his cup full. He needed the caffeine to weed out the cobwebs from the night before and figure out what to do next.

He’d let Bonnie Long get to him, taking it out on a bottle of scotch he’d meant to save for a better occasion. He was halfway through the bottle before he decided he didn’t give a rat’s ass about the lawsuit. The lawyers for the department and the city would tie the case up in knots that would take years to untangle. When he finished the bottle he fell asleep, waking in the middle of the night and looking out the window, seeing the women and children from Bonnie’s patio standing outside, staring at him, then waking a second time, realizing the first time had been a dream.

He’d killed four men in the twenty years he’d been a cop. The department’s shrink had to clear him before letting him return to duty after each shooting, which meant giving him tests to find out how fucked-up he was, never telling him he was too fucked-up to go back. He figured they knew he was lying when he told them the nightmares never lasted more than a week or two and that his drinking wasn’t a problem but looked the other way because they needed a guy like him who wasn’t afraid to put a bad guy down. Their unspoken deal had worked for both sides for a long time.

Stirring his coffee, he chided himself for letting Bonnie Long knock him on his ass. She’d called him out, and for the first time in a long time he had to admit that there wasn’t as much of a difference between him and Alex Stone as he wanted—needed—to believe. They’d both worked the system.

Bonnie had proved tougher than he’d expected. Instead of getting scared and folding, she’d gotten angry and fought back. Walking through their house, seeing their family portrait and the home they’d created, he understood why. And if he had any doubts, seeing them together in the hospital took care of that. Their life together was worth fighting for, and he was no longer certain he had the stomach to take it away from them.

He sipped his coffee. It had gone cold with all the stirring. The waitress came by to freshen it, but he told her, “No, thanks,” and left. It was his day off. If he went back, Mitch Fowler would tell him there was no money in the budget for overtime and to get lost.

He stood in the parking lot, the day cool and crisp for late September. He clasped his hands together behind his neck, stretching the kinks out of his muscles. A day off. What the hell was he going to do with that? He knew the answer. He’d work the case on his own time.

The neighborhood canvass had been a bust. But a lot of those businesses had their own video surveillance systems that might have captured Robin and her killer. The cops doing the canvass hadn’t checked for that.

I-29 and Barry Road was a major intersection in the northland. There were shopping centers on three corners and two motels on the fourth. Continuing west of the intersection, the direction Robin Norris had chosen, there were a couple of churches, a high school, a park, and several residential neighborhoods, after which development thinned out, turning Barry Road into a little-traveled, unlit country lane by the time it reached the curve five miles farther west where Robin had been killed.

Rossi was confident that his basic premise was correct. While there were many different routes to the intersection, because Robin was unfamiliar with the area, she would have used I-29 to bring her to the junction with Barry Road. She placed her last-second call to Alex at ten fifteen p.m. She could have been anywhere on either side of I-29 prior to that. The timeline he had established for her movements had a gap of seven hours from the time she left the office to the time of the phone call. But the most important part of that period was the fifteen to thirty minutes before she called Alex. Something happened in that time frame to send her racing into the unknown darkness.

He started on the east side of I-29, working his way west, limiting himself to the places that would have been open that late in the evening, like the Hooters, Boston Market, and Starbucks. There was nothing on their videos.

There were more places to check on the west side of I-29, and the going was slow. Some managers refused to allow him to see their videos without a warrant and without authorization from someone higher up in the company food chain. Others confessed that their video cameras didn’t work. And still others told him that they recorded over their videos so that they had only the most recent twenty-four hours.

It was late afternoon when Rossi got to the motels. The manager on duty at the first one cited company policy requiring a subpoena or court order before allowing anyone to look at their security videos. Rossi told him that he’d be back the next day with a subpoena and warned him not to let anything happen to the video.

The manager at the second motel, an overweight, middle-aged man named Milton with a comb-over and beer breath, was more helpful, taking Rossi to his office and pulling up the video from the night of the murder. After watching for ten minutes, Rossi turned to the manager.

“Why are we only seeing three sides of the motel? What about the west side?”

Milton shrugged. “No cameras on that side.”

“Why not?”

“Can’t afford ’em.”

“Then why did I see cameras on the west side when I drove through the parking lot?”

Milton stuttered. “Uh, uh . . . what I meant to say is that we got cameras but they don’t work.”

“Let me ask you a question, Milton. Suppose I get a search warrant and bring the department’s video crew up to take a look at those cameras. You suppose they’d work then?”

Milton paled. “Well . . . I don’t know . . .”

“Oh, Milton. I think we both know.”

“I could get in a lot of trouble.”

“More trouble than with a search warrant? More trouble than you being charged with obstructing justice?”

“If I tell you, can we keep it just between the two of us?”

“I’ll do the best I can to help you out, but one way or the other, I’m going to find out, and when I do, you’ll be a lot better off if I can tell the prosecutor that you were very cooperative.”

Milton swallowed. “Okay. The rooms on the west side are private.”

“Aren’t all the rooms private?”

“Not like these. They’re more like apartments, really. Paid up a year in advance.”

Rossi nodded, getting the picture. “For men who are cheating on their wives and don’t want to check in at the front desk and tell you if they need one key or two.”

“Yeah, like that.”

“Show me the names of the men renting those rooms.”

Milton shook his head. “I . . . I . . .”

“We’ve been down this road, Milton. Show me the names or get ready for turning this place into a cop convention with twenty-four/seven media coverage.”

“Okay, okay. I get it.”

He pulled up a spreadsheet with names and room numbers. Rossi dropped one of his business cards on the manager’s desk.

“E-mail the list to me.”

Rossi waited for the e-mail to pop up on his phone and forwarded it to Wheeler, telling him to call immediately.