Linda Crowder - Jake and Emma 02 - Main Street Murder (8 page)

Whoever the taller man was, it seemed he had a habit of not wanting to be seen.

10

Emma’s first few sessions with Cheri were not productive from Detective Joyner’s point of view, but Emma was satisfied with the progress they were making.  She explained to Joyner that navigating the transition from friend to therapist could be tricky but that once Cheri was able to relax and trust Emma as her counselor, they would be able to begin the harder work of exploring the missing memories.

Joyner, who was accustomed to the methodical pace of good police work, accepted Emma’s assurances and began working to identify the two men.  He’d submitted the shorter man’s photo to the state crime lab, which would run it through their facial recognition database.  If the state failed to make a match, they would send it to the FBI to be run through their national database but that could take months.

Joyner checked with business owners along the parade route to see if any of them had security cameras that might have caught the two men.  Only two stores had cameras and both had been directed inside to watch for shoplifters. 

He’d shown each manager the shorter man’s picture and a picture of the two men together.  He’d hoped that even though their faces were not visible someone might remember seeing them at the parade.  He issued copies of the pictures to patrol officers in every city in the county along with a countywide “be on the look-out” order.

That done, Joyner went back to the parade footage and turned his attention to the bystanders who had been close enough that morning that they might have noticed the two men.  A local parade attracts a predominantly local crowd and Joyner had been on the Casper PD long enough to recognize a good number of faces in the crowd. 

He made a print of the crowd shot and made a list of the people he recognized, putting an “X” on those faces in the picture.  As he learned more names, he checked those faces off the picture and in this way ensured he had found and spoken to everyone who would have been in a position to overhear the two men’s conversation. 

Joyner got a list from Cheri of all the Casper Welcome members who had walked in the parade and questioned them as well.  Since their attention had been on the crowd, he hoped one of them might have noticed the two men.

It was slow going but in his experience it was this kind of steady, unglamorous footwork that usually solved cases.  Unfortunately, the results were discouraging.  A few people remembered noticing the two men but no one could give him a meaningful description.  None remembered hearing anything unusual in the men’s conversation immediately prior.

The only glimmer of a lead came when he’d shown the photo of the men in the crowd to Kristy Castle.  She hadn’t reacted to the shorter man’s photo but when she looked at the two together, Joyner thought he saw the shadow of recognition pass across her face.  Then it was gone and she handed the photo back to him.

“Are you sure you don’t know these men?” he had asked her, studying her reaction.

Kristy had shaken her head.  “The taller one reminded me of someone I used to know, that’s all” she had explained. “It startled me.”

Joyner had handed the picture back to her and asked her to look more carefully.  “You know Mrs. Rand thought they might be talking about you,” he had reminded her.  “Are you absolutely sure you don’t know him?”

Kristy had given the picture back again after a cursory look.  “I’m sure.  Absolutely sure.”  Joyner had watched with interest while a muscle at the corner of Kristy’s eye started to tic.

“Is there something you aren’t telling me, Ms. Castle?” he’d asked, his voice taking on a sterner tone.

Her mouth had opened to speak, then shut and she shook her head.  He’d asked the name of the person she’d thought the man resembled but she’d refused to tell him.  “It isn’t him,” she’d explained.  “The man I was thinking of is dead.”

Joyner returned to his office disappointed but thoughtful.  The focus of the crowd had been the parade.  The men had enjoyed every expectation that their conversation would be lost in the general noise and chaos of the day.  It had been their bad luck to have caught Emma’s attention.

While he’d assumed the taller man had been shielding his face from the security cameras, Ms. Castle’s reaction to his picture gave Joyner another idea.  Perhaps he had been shielding his face from her, not the camera.  She claimed the man she’d known was dead, but was he?  Clearly, Joyner needed to learn more about Kristy Castle’s history prior to her move to Wyoming.

He unlocked a drawer in his desk and unhooked his holster from his belt.  Placing the holster and his service revolver in the drawer, he slid it closed and turned the key.  Dropping the key in his pocket, Joyner picked up the coffee cup he had left half-empty that morning and headed down the hall to the break room.

He poured out the stale coffee and rinsed the mug, drying it with a paper towel.  Picking a bottled water from the department fridge, he returned to his office.  He set the empty cup and his water bottle on the desk and took off his suit jacket, hanging it from the back of his chair. 

He was musing the wisdom of the City fathers keeping energy costs low by keeping the building air conditioning set at 78 degrees when he was startled by a quick knock on the door.  He looked up to see Arty Thomes, the department technical investigator. 

Joyner waved the young man into the office.  “You look like a man with good news,” he observed.

Thomes smiled.  “I got a hit on that picture you sent to the state for ID.”

“Seriously?” Joyner offered Thomes a chair.  He had two older chairs, brown, “h” shaped, and barely cushioned.  Thomes looked dubiously at the chair and sat gently at the edge of it, ready to spring up if it should collapse.

“I was going through the records on the rodeo patrons when it occurred to me that if these two were at the parade, maybe they’d be at the Solstice too.”  Joyner agreed that was reasonable and Thomes continued.

“I had already pulled all the driver’s license records for the crowd and of course, driver’s licenses have pictures so I started going through them, manually comparing pictures,” Thomes held out a file triumphantly, “And there he is!”

Joyner took the file and opened it to see a driver’s license photo of a slightly younger version of the shorter man.  He looked up at Thomes.  “When we put the list together of the people who attended the rodeo, did we keep it the names in order?”

“You mean, now that we know who he is, can we check the list to see who he was there with?”  Joyner nodded.  Thomes shook his head.  “Yeah, that would have been nice, but no.”

Joyner sighed.  It would have been too much to ask.  It had been a wild scene that night, with the crowd pressing to leave and every officer he could call into the Rodeo grounds madly taking down names, barely keeping the crowd under control.

“But I had another thought,” continued Thomes.  “There were 18 men whose driver’s license information didn’t match what the state had on file.  Beyond that, there were 7 men who said they didn’t have their ID with them and whose phone numbers turned out to be bogus.”

Joyner frowned for a moment then his face broke into a smile as he realized where Thomes was headed.  “That gives us a good place to start looking for the other man .”

“Exactly!” said Thomes. Since he knows enough to hide his face from the camera, it’s a good bet he would have thought ahead to either have a fake ID or claim he didn’t have ID when he left the scene.”

He handed Joyner a two-page printout.  “This is great work,” Joyner congratulated him.  “How long would it take to pull a list of all the women who gave us inaccurate contact information?”

The younger man smiled again and handed Joyner a two-page printout.  There were 26 names on it.  “A man going in and out of the ladies room at the Solstice would have attracted a lot of attention so it occurred to me they might have a female accomplice.”

“You have got to get yourself some patrol duty,” said Joyner.  “You’d be a heck of a detective if you had the street hours you need to qualify for the promotion.”

Thomes laughed and turned to leave.  “I don’t like dealing with drunks,” he called over his shoulder as he headed back to his computer.

Cheri
leaned back in her favorite armchair, a glass of sweet tea on the side table and her cat Jonas curled in her lap, asleep.  Her eyes focused unseeingly on the ceiling fan, softly circulating the cool early morning air, as she recounted the events leading up to her attack.

“Kristy and I were standing in the line for the ladies room,” she said, her voice quiet.  Katie Sommers, policewoman on duty this morning, sat unobtrusively in the far corner of the room behind Cheri.  A digital recorder sat on the coffee table between Cheri and where Emma sat on the comfortable couch.

Cheri’s home reflected her personality.  Tastefully decorated, yet with a subtle energy and eclectic touches that kept it from being too predictable.  Emma had suggested holding their sessions at Cheri’s home to support her convalescence and Cheri had readily agreed.  This convenience for Cheri also kept Emma from having to create a never ending string of errands to send Kristy on whenever Cheri had an appointment in order to keep her word to Detective Joyner.

Cheri laughed to herself as she described how Kristy had threatened to storm the men’s room when the line had moved too slowly.  Her narration continued as the two women had finally made it into the restroom and had separated, Kristy entering a stall first and Cheri taking the next one that became available.

Cheri’s voice hesitated and Emma waited.  This was as far as Cheri had been able to remember during their last session.  Each time the women met, Cheri was able to go a little bit further but Emma knew that as they neared the traumatic roadblock, the pieces of memory would stop until Cheri’s mind was ready to release it all. 

Once Cheri reached the limit of her memory before the event, they would try approaching the event from the other side of the trauma, where Cheri currently had no memory until she woke up in the hospital.  Emma had spoken with Dr. Gibbs and he felt it was possible that Cheri had been conscious for a short time after the attack, before Kristy had discovered her.

“I was straightening my clothes,” continued Cheri, and Emma found herself holding her breath.  “I heard Kristy out at the sinks.  She called out that she was going to go get a drink and she’d meet me back at the seats.”

Cheri stopped again.  “I don’t remember if I answered her,” she said, frowning.  There was a quiet ‘meow’ from Jonas as he rubbed his head against Cheri’s hand.  She began to pet him reflexively.  “I think I must have.  I heard her leave.”

She took a deep breath and blew out the air forcefully in frustration.  “At least I think so.  I just don’t know, Emma.”  Cheri pushed a protesting Jonas to the floor and got out of her chair.  She winced as the sudden movement pulled at her sore abdominal muscles where her wound continued to heal.

“It’s so aggravating,” she said.  Cheri walked to the mantle over the fireplace and restlessly straightened the knick-knacks she found there.  Turning suddenly to face Emma, she asked her, “Why can’t I remember?”

Emma, always calmest when her clients were agitated, answered with a soothing tone.  “You are remembering more every time you try, Cheri.  When you’re ready, you’ll remember what happened.”

“Pah!” said Cheri, turning from Emma and walking to the window.  Cheri’s home was along the North Platte River, which wound through Casper as it had in the days of the early pioneers who’d followed the river on their way to the promised land of the Oregon Territory. 

A large bank of windows overlooked the back patio, which in turn overlooked the river.  It was slow and shallow in places this time of year, the rush of the spring run-off long subsided.  Cheri watched while a group of three teenagers on float tubes drifted by, their laughter distant through windows closed to hold in the air conditioning.

Detective Joyner had tried to persuade her to move out of her home and into temporary quarters in one of the hotels on the east side.  “Look at that river access,” he’d growled, standing at this same window with her the morning after her release from the hospital.

“Anyone could float down the river and come up the bank right to the back door.”  He’d gestured to the trees that sheltered her yard, offering her cool afternoons and privacy from nearby neighbors.  “Nobody would even see them.”