It Takes Two to Strangle (14 page)

Damon played along. “Arlington, Virginia, just outside of Washington, D.C.”

“That’s an awfully long ways away,” mused the sheriff. “I think I can spare a few minutes to find out why you came to see me.”

He led Damon through the door, past Carla who began to peck determinatively at her keyboard, and into his modest office. He went to retrieve mugs of police-house coffee from down the hall.

Moments later, the sheriff handed Damon a cup of java and sat behind a desk that was too large for the room.

“Sorry the coffee looks like mud,” Anbani said. He waited a beat and said with a chuckle, “It was ground just a minute ago.”

Damon laughed.

“So, now that you’ve made it past my crack security team,” the sheriff said, “what can I do for you?”

Damon regaled him with the events of the past week, including what he had passed along to Gerry. He left out any suggestion of the information funneled in the other direction. Just because the sheriff may have broken nonsensical protocol in speaking to him, that didn’t mean he would condone a detective sharing case information with a private citizen.

Finally, Damon came to the bombshell unloaded on him by Randy Wadecraft the night before. “Randy said that about fifteen years ago, there were rumors going around Battle Park High School up near Uniontown that Lirim Jovanovic was taking pictures of pre-teen girls and selling them.”

The sheriff had waited patiently and impassively throughout Damon’s account. He now raised his palms to his eyes and wiped them in an outward direction. “Lirim Jovanovic is dead?” were the first words out of his expressionless mouth.

“Yes, strangled last Wednesday night,” Damon replied, unsure whether the conversation was over or not.

After a pause, the sheriff pronounced, “That’s fine by me.” He took a small sip of coffee. “I think those rumors are true, Mr. Lassard, but I suspect there’s no way to prove it now. It’s something that’s bothered me greatly for years.”

“If you suspected it, why didn’t you do anything about it?” Damon asked, then immediately regretted his candor.

But Ravi Anbani just smiled. “I wish I could have. Back then, I was still a volunteer reserve. The sheriff was Jonathan Greely. The way I remember it is that several local men came into the office over the course of about a week. And every one of them had a similar story. Lirim Jovanovic had approached them about buying photos of a little girl. I mean he just flat out came up to these guys, told them he had illicit pictures and asked whether they wanted to buy any. Most of the men had children of their own, so naturally they came to us. At least some of them did. Who knows if any took Jovanovic up on his offer.”

“I can’t believe he could be so brazen,” Damon said.

“Me neither, though he didn’t come out and show the men the photos. Every person who came to the office said Lirim wasn’t willing to show them what he had until they gave him cash.”

“Couldn’t Sheriff Greely have just put someone undercover to buy a picture?”

“Mr. Lassard, I’m going to be frank with you,” Anbani said. “I don’t think Sheriff Greely ever did a damn thing about it. Not for real anyway.” He sighed. “After the first few of these reports came in, Greely gathered the deputies and volunteers and told us that he’d be looking into the matter personally. The allegations were of grave consequence, he said, and anyone who had a complaint should be directed to him. He’d personally handle the questioning of Lirim Jovanovic and all of the men who came forward. I should have known right then something was amiss. It felt wrong but I was just too green to realize why.” He laid his hands on the desk. “In retrospect, I realize the tip-off should have been that Greely almost never took cases on himself. He was far too insouciant for that. I was new to the field so I try not to kick myself over it, but I do. Sometimes, in the early morning hours, I still wake up with guilt eating away at my insides.”

“But shouldn’t the deputies have known?” Damon asked.

“Of course they should have.” Anbani banged his fist against the mahogany desktop. “Idiots. Though I don’t suspect any of them did anything nefarious. They wouldn’t have been smart enough to cover it up.”

Damon glanced behind him toward the cracked open door. He could hear people milling about the office.

“Don’t worry, they’re all gone now. Either let go or finally left of their own accord when I was elected sheriff. They knew the gravy train days had come to an end. And I didn’t succeed Greely directly. Sheriff in this county is an elected position, and there’s a two-term limit. There were two other sheriffs between the time Greely was in office and now.”

“So do you think Sheriff Greely covered for Lirim?” Damon asked focused on Anbani’s masculine face.

“I do, Mr. Lassard. I can’t prove it, but I do. The thing is, Greely was clever. He may have been lazy, but he knew how to get things done when they needed to be done. After he told us that he was running the investigation solo, he was out of the office for almost two weeks, interviewing witnesses and questioning Jovanovic. I’m pretty sure Greely even got a search warrant for his house and the carnival trailers and other equipment that were at a nearby storage facility.”

“He didn’t find anything?”

“That’s what he said. But just because Greely said he came up empty doesn’t mean it’s true.”

“And no girl ever came forward,” Damon said.

“I don’t think so. Not even Greely would have been able to cover that up. He told the prosecutor he had nothing but unsubstantiated accounts. And from my years of experience now, I know stories that aren’t backed by concrete evidence are worthless to a prosecutor. The defense counsel would just argue that a group of men had a bone to pick with the defendant and they colluded to spread a nasty rumor.”

“Why would Sheriff Greely have covered for him?”

“I’ve asked myself that many times. The truth is I suspect he was a customer. It’s possible that Jovanovic had some dirt on the sheriff, or paid him off, but I think the sheriff got word that he was selling the pictures and wanted a set of his own. This all happened just before the Internet became common.”

“So the deviants couldn’t sit in the privacy of their basements downloading the filth,” Damon said following the sheriff’s line of thinking. “They had to have a physical channel of distribution.”

“Exactly. And they don’t sell magazines featuring pre-teens off the shelf.”

“Did any of the men who reported being approached by Lirim raise a fuss after the sheriff called off the investigation?”

“I don’t recall any particular protests. I suppose when the sheriff searched Jovanovic’s property and said he didn’t find anything, the locals assumed Jovanovic was just trying to get a rise out of them. Which was not Lirim’s nature at all. From what I knew of the man, he rarely spoke to anyone in town. I don’t think he had any friends here, even though he lived most of his life on that property in Cheat Lake. I think his parents came from Croatia or Albania when he was a boy.”

Damon sipped coffee from his bright yellow mug. It was lukewarm. “Are his parents still there?”

“They both passed. Lirim had been living there with them when he married Tabitha and she moved in. The four of them lived in the house together for a few years. It’s a pretty large property—about an acre and a half. But then Lirim’s father died of prostate cancer and shortly after that his mother went to live in one of the assisted living facilities here in town. She died five or six years ago.”

“Do you know whether Tabby knew about Sheriff Greely’s investigation?” Damon asked.

“I imagine she did, though I never raised it with her or heard her speak about it with anyone—not that she was much of a talker, either.”

Damon wondered whether Tabby had known. Not only of the rumors but also of the truth. And had a teenage Clara heard the rumors about her father? Or been a subject?

“And you didn’t reopen the case when you became sheriff,” Damon said boldly.

Anbani’s face soured briefly then mellowed. “I didn’t. The problem is there hasn’t been a complaint in fifteen years. No judge would ever sign a search warrant.”

“Too bad,” Damon said, getting ready to take his leave. But then he recalled his other line of questions. “Sorry to take up so much of your time, Sheriff, but I wanted to ask you about something else, too.”

The sheriff asked him to “stay put” for a minute and disappeared from the office. With the door opened wide, Damon could hear voices coming from down the hall, in the direction of the room where Ravi Anbani had retrieved their coffees a half hour earlier. Damon picked up the yellow mug from his lap. It was dripping with cold condensate. He looked down and stared in dismay at a wet spot the size of an orange near the zipper of his khaki shorts. Damon lurched for a tissue from a box on Anbani’s desk. Panicked wiping made the spot double in size.

He heard Anbani’s footsteps approaching the office. Damon untucked his polo shirt and quickly stretched it over his knees.

Anbani returned and sat behind his desk. He eyed Damon curiously, then noticed the yellow mug sweating on the corner of his desk.

“I wanted to ask you about Tabby’s car wreck,” Damon stammered.

 
“I can’t help you much there unfortunately,” the sheriff grumbled. “You’ll need to speak with my deputy, Jasper Horton. I was in India when it happened. My wife’s cousin was getting married and we used it as an excuse to take a three week trip to the subcontinent. It was my first real vacation since I was elected sheriff.”

“Deputy Horton didn’t consider it anything other than a hit-and-run?” Damon asked.

Ravi Anbani’s eyes narrowed and he gave Damon a penetrating look. “Jasper didn’t. And I read the reports when I returned. I didn’t see anything to suggest otherwise. But reading a report is never the same as being there. Is there something you know to the contrary, Mr. Lassard?” Damon felt the other man’s intensity searing across the desk and was thankful not to be a suspect on the other end of the sheriff’s questioning.

“Tabby’s brother Toma seemed skeptical that it was an accident. He didn’t mention anything concrete to back up his belief. It may have just been a gut feeling, but it piqued my interest.”

Anbani picked up a black corded telephone from his desk and punched a single digit on the system’s base. The receptionist’s voice came over speakerphone. “Yes Sheriff?”

“Carla, can you find the file on a Tabitha Jovanovic and ask Jasper to bring it to me?” He spelled Jovanovic. “But first, please bring me today’s newspaper.”

The receptionist entered and handed Anbani a thick Dominion Post. The sheriff pulled off the top two sections and handed them to Damon. “I thought you might want to know what kind of spills we get to clean up around here,” Anbani said with a wink as an embarrassed but grateful Damon placed the paper on his lap and unwound his shirt from his knees.

The sheriff shifted gears. “How much about Lirim’s past do the Arlington police know?”

Damon admitted that he hadn’t yet told them about the child pornography rumors he heard the previous evening. “I wanted to speak with you first to verify the veracity of the rumors before sending the detectives down a wrong path.”

The sheriff didn’t opine on the wisdom of that decision but rather requested the names and phone numbers of the detectives on the case, which Damon provided.

A moment later, a young man close in age to Damon knocked at Anbani’s open door. Jasper Horton was tall and thin with a shock of wavy blond hair. He handed the sheriff a thin folder.

“Jasper, Mr. Lassard and I want to walk through this car accident,” the sheriff said holding up the file folder.

Jasper Horton didn’t question Damon’s interest in the matter. He scratched the underside of his chin, which was dotted with stubble. “That was almost a year and a half ago. In December, I believe. Woman in her mid- to late-fifties. Dark green car, though I can’t remember the make offhand. It should be in the file.”

“Forest green Cavalier,” Anbani said peering down at the open file folder.

“That’s right,” replied Horton. “An older model. The woman hadn’t been wearing her seat belt so even though the airbag deployed, it wasn’t much help. In fact, the airbag probably killed her.”

Damon gave the deputy an inquisitive look.

“You don’t want to hit an airbag while it’s still inflating,” Horton said. “You want the bag to be in the deflation stage, through the airbag’s vents, by the time the driver makes impact. A deflating bag will cushion the head and neck. If it’s still inflating on impact, it’s like hitting your head against a brick wall.” The deputy straightened his posture. “It can crush your spine right along the back of your neck. That’s why a seat belt is so important. Without one, your head is much more likely to smash up against the airbag while it’s inflating rather than deflating. And that woman Tabitha’s spine looked like a row of knocked over dominoes under her skin.”

Sheriff Anbani looked up from the file folder. “Enough physics lessons, Horton. Impressive, though.”

The deputy tried to suppress a smile. The young man clearly had aspirations.

The sheriff asked, “Do you know whether Tabby Jovanovic usually wore her seat belt?”

Horton was caught off guard and looked at the floor. “I don’t,” he mumbled. “I didn’t think to ask about that.”