Killer in the Band

by Lauren Carr

  J.J. turned back to her. “Notice what?”

  “How you changed the subject just now,” she said. “For the sake of family harmony, we need to work out our differences. When I married your father, I said ‘till death do us part.’ That means that I’m not going anywhere. Somehow, someway, you need to learn to get along with me. I’m willing to meet you halfway. Just tell me what I need to do to get there.”

  J.J. uttered a deep sigh. “There’s nothing you can do.” He slammed the bedroom door behind him.

  “I thought you hated shoveling horse manure.” Joshua was unable to contain the grin that was working its way to his lips when he went into the barn and found Donny leaning against the railing of the indoor arena—and keeping a close eye on Poppy, who was working with Comanche. The teenage boy was practically drooling. He had suspected that his younger son had had an ulterior motive when he’d offered to give Izzy a ride out to the farm.

  Next to him, Izzy was gazing with admiration at the experienced horse trainer. The giant rooster, Charley, was perched on the railing next to her.

  They seemed like an odd match, the petite, slender redhead dressed in form-fitting riding pants and boots and the skittish palomino mare. If Comanche had wanted to, she could have run the trainer down and squashed her as though she were a bug. But she didn’t want to. Joshua noticed that the horse was actually calm with Poppy, just as all of the animals seemed to be. The horse was also becoming calmer around Izzy.

  “I’m studying animal attraction,” Donny said to his father with a wicked grin.

  “I thought you were staring at her tight behind,” Izzy said.

  “Her freckles are really cute, too.”

  Seeing Poppy cast a glance in their direction, Joshua said, “That will be enough of that. Donny, if you’re not going to help Poppy out by doing any actual work, I suggest that you leave.”

  With a grumble, Donny waved good-bye to the trainer and left.

  Poppy continued to look over at Joshua, who was leaning against the arena’s top rail, and then she finally stopped the lunging exercises and reeled the mare in. As she spoke softly to the tired horse, she stroked her face, and then she called Izzy in to cool the mare down and to lead her out to the pasture.

  “Why aren’t you exercising her in the outdoor arena?” Joshua asked, curious about why she wasn’t taking advantage of the beautiful, sunny day. He held the gate open for her as she left the arena.

  “Kind of warm, and there’s no shade up there.” She shot a look over her shoulder at him. “With the air conditioning here in the barn, the horses don’t get overheated.”

  “I guess that’s why Noah decided to live up in the hayloft,” Joshua said. “Barn has heat in the winter and air conditioning in the summer.”

  “Probably.” She draped her arms over the top rail and kept a close eye on Izzy, who was chattering away to Comanche as she walked her.

  “And since you sympathized with Noah and his situation, you let him,” Joshua said, watching Poppy for her reaction.

  The two of them eyed each other.

  “If I had been letting Noah live in the barn, I wouldn’t have told y’all that someone was sleeping up in that loft.”

  “You told us that there was someone there before you knew who it was and why he was sleeping up there,” Joshua said. “But I think the next day, you figured it out yourself. You realized he was a young kid with no one. His background is similar to yours. So you kept your mouth shut and even asked if he could come down here to work with you.” He held up his hand. “And that’s okay with me. You have a big heart. I can see that. I admire it. But if you know something else that you aren’t telling us, you need to come clean.”

  “Is this about Noah calling in sick?”

  “The day after Clyde Brady accused him of killing his wife.”

  “Noah has a stomach bug.”

  Joshua shook his head. “Don’t lie to me, Poppy. Right now I respect you. When people lie to me, I lose respect for them.”

  Her emerald eyes flashed. “I’m not lying!”

  “I just talked to Tom,” he said. “When he got up this morning, Noah was gone.”

  Poppy’s mouth dropped open.

  “The kid has taken off,” Joshua said. “Now, I do believe that he called you. But I’m thinking he asked you to help him run away.”

  Poppy turned her attention to the girl and the horse in the arena. “May…Maybe Noah is trying to buy some time.”

  “If he wanted to buy time, wouldn’t it have made more sense for him to tell Tom that he was sick and to then take off after Tom left for work?”

  Poppy’s face hardened with determination as she regrouped. “How am I supposed to know what that kid was thinking?” She scrambled up over the railing and dropped down into the arena. “I know animals—not people. To tell you the truth, Mr. Thornton, I don’t even like people.”

  “What do you mean, he left?” Cameron said into her cell phone.

  J.J. heard Cameron’s swearing despite the earbuds he was wearing. Karrie had e-mailed the digital versions of her interviews with Wendy to them that morning. J.J. had decided to listen to them while eating breakfast, which gave him a good excuse to avoid talking to Cameron, who he sensed wanted to continue their discussion about their relationship.

  Uncomfortable with the possibility that Cameron’s outburst might attract attention, J.J. looked around at the tables of hotel guests taking advantage of the free continental breakfast. To his relief, no one else seemed to notice.

  “He shot out my cruiser’s windshield,” Cameron said to the county prosecutor’s assistant, who had called to deliver the bad news. “He shot at a cop, and he’s just going to walk away? What idiot judge set bail for that nut?”

  Trying to be discreet, J.J. shushed her, but Cameron wasn’t having it. “He paid how much? Where would a low-life blood-sucking twerp like him get that much money?”

  Giving up on listening to the recording, J.J. pulled the earbuds from his ears and got up to refill his coffee mug. Maybe she’ll be done by the time I get back.

  “Okay, can you try to have some uniforms keep an eye on Silas Starling until I get back?” With a heavy sigh of disgust, she thanked the prosecutor’s assistant before hanging up, dropping the phone onto the table, and rubbing her forehead with her hands.

  “Did she know where that low-life blood-sucking twerp got the money to make bail?” J.J. asked her as he slipped back into his chair.

  “No. And I haven’t looked into his financials yet.”

  “I have,” he said. “Silas Starling inherited Wendy’s estate. Now, Vendetta was not exactly Elvis Presley, but she was quite a cult celebrity in the gothic-punk scene. Her music—”

  “Which Silas Starling wrote,” Cameron said.

  “Still sells. While Vendetta recorded the songs and publicly took credit for them, Silas Starling kept the rights to them. Between the royalties for her music, her image, and her music videos, all of which he owns, he does pretty well. He’s not a millionaire, but he’s comfortable.” With a grin, he stuck his coffee stirrer between his teeth.

  “And if Vendetta had left him for Karrie, he would have lost most of that.” A slow grin crossed her face.

  “Which means that Silas Starling had a financial motive as well as a romantic motive for killing Vendetta.” J.J. shook the stirrer in her direction. “Think about this: If Wendy, a.k.a. Vendetta, had not mysteriously disappeared, she probably would have continued to sing and to make gothic music videos, grown old like all rock stars, and eventually faded into the sunset. She would’ve started performing in underground roadhouses or wherever it is that has-been goth singers perform. But because Vendetta, at the height of her success, mysteriously disappeared into the night the way she did, she became a legend. Sort of a gothic version of Elvis Presley. Is Vendetta really dead, or is she alive?”

 
; With a laugh, Cameron joined in the joke. “Did she decide to just walk away from her life, or was she killed by a vampire? Does she now live among the walking dead?”

  “You’re mixing two myths,” J.J. said. “When a vampire kills you, you become a vampire, not a zombie.”

  “No, I’m not. Vampires are the walking dead.”

  “No, vampires are the undead,” J.J. said. “They’re immortal. The walking dead are zombies.”

  “Whatever,” Cameron said with a wave of her hand. “What difference does it make?”

  “It makes a lot of difference to the vampires and the zombies.”

  “Next thing you’re going to tell me is that zombies are real.” Cameron got up to refill her coffee cup. She continued the conversation from the service counter as she poured and mixed her coffee. “So Silas Starling made a lot of money by making Vendetta disappear the way she did.”

  “So he had both emotional and financial motives.” Sitting back in his seat, J.J. chewed on the plastic stirrer.

  Thinking over the possibilities, Cameron stirred her coffee as she returned to their table. “Suppose Silas was a visionary.”

  “A what?”

  “Bear with me,” she said. “I know that Silas didn’t plan everything, but let’s think about this. Silas Starling did not have star power, but he wrote songs. Not mainstream songs but deep, dark stuff. He met Wendy, who was suffering from depression and was gothic before it was cool. Silas saw that this lovely goth could sing and that she would be the perfect person to sing his songs, and he envisioned hearts and dollar signs. But”—she held up the stirrer as though it were a torch—“Dylan broke up the disturbing pair by taking Wendy away with him. Silas hunted them down and latched onto Wendy, who he saw as his golden goose and who was getting in on the ground floor of the gothic music scene. And when Dylan threatened to break them up again—” She stopped when she saw that J.J. was slowly shaking his head. “What’s wrong? You agreed earlier that Silas had more than an emotional stake in Wendy’s career.”

  “I don’t think Silas killed Dylan.”

  “He must have.”

  “Now you listen.” J.J. slid his tablet across the table in her direction. “According to Wendy’s account of what happened the last time she saw Dylan, she had dinner at the cheap motel diner with Dylan and Silas. The place was having a Fourth of July special: apple pie à la mode. They ordered dessert, and then Dylan got up and said that he was going to gas up the van. He invited Silas to go with him—”

  “Probably to give him his walking papers in private.”

  “Probably,” J.J. said. “Which is why Silas declined the invitation, I think. Dylan left, and they never saw him again.” He leaned across the table. “He didn’t even come back for his pie. That’s when I think the murder occurred.”

  “Why didn’t they call the police to report Dylan missing?” Cameron’s eyes were wide with disbelief. “Think about it. Why order dessert if you don’t plan on coming back to eat it? If you and one of your sisters were having dinner in a diner and you left before dessert to go gas up the car and never came back—even after ordering pie—wouldn’t Tracy or Sarah assume that something had happened to you instead of assuming that you had abandoned her?”

  “Tracy or Sarah? Yes,” J.J. said. “But they aren’t Wendy Matthews, and we don’t know what kind of conversations Wendy and Dylan and Silas had during dinner before Dylan left and never came back.”

  “Maybe this girl was used to people walking out on her.”

  “Which made her ripe for Silas Starling,” J.J. said. “According to what Wendy says in this interview, Silas told her that Dylan wasn’t going to take her to Hollywood with him and tried to get her to leave as soon as Dylan was out of sight.”

  “Which proves that Silas knew that Dylan wasn’t coming back,” Cameron said. “That tells me that he killed Dylan or—”

  “Silas never left Wendy’s side,” J.J. said. “At least that’s the impression I get from the recording.” He tapped his tablet. “She says in this interview that Silas stayed there with her, waiting for Dylan to return to eat his dessert so that they could leave for Hollywood. They watched the van leave the parking lot and cross the street to the gas station—”

  “Does that seem odd to you?”

  “Very odd,” J.J. said. “Now, if the reason that Dylan suddenly decided to leave the restaurant was to ditch Silas without Wendy knowing about it, why did he leave after Silas refused to go with him?”

  “Silas put him in a difficult position by refusing to go with him,” Cameron said.

  “So Dylan had to leave, at which point he encountered his killer.”

  “Could Silas have excused himself to go to the men’s room and then snuck out the back door, run to the gas station, and killed Dylan?” Cameron asked. “If he did that, he would’ve known that Dylan wasn’t coming back for Wendy.”

  J.J. shrugged his shoulders. “Going to the restroom is such a small, common thing that Wendy wouldn’t have suspected anything.”

  “That’s the problem with this case. No one knew that a murder was being or had been committed. The band thought that Dylan was on his way across the country. Wendy thought that her brother had abandoned her like everyone else had and left her vulnerable to a creepy, disturbed nut.”

  “So no one was paying attention,” J.J. said. “Now that so much time has passed, we’ll be lucky if we can ever solve this case.”

  “We will,” Cameron said. “Because one person was paying attention: the killer.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  “You missed our exit,” J.J. said.

  “Recalculating route.”

  J.J.’s voice was somehow even less emotional than the GPS lady’s voice was she chastised Cameron for speeding past the exit for the Poconos

  “Damn!” Cameron said to them. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I did,” he said. “We both did.”

  “Turn right in seven miles,” the GPS lady said to Cameron, who sensed that she had wanted to add “you dummy” to the instruction.

  “Sorry,” Cameron said to them. “I was thinking about Wendy Matthews.”

  “That’s not your case,” J.J. said.

  “Technically, no. But in a way, it is. The body found at Dixmont hasn’t been positively identified as Dylan Matthews. He was identified based on only the computer-generated image of what the corpse would’ve looked like in life. But if we find and positively identify Wendy’s body, we can do a DNA comparison and prove that the body found at Dixmont was her brother’s.”

  “Without a positive ID, the defense could claim that the body is not Dylan’s, and the killer could walk away,” J.J. said.

  “Exactly,” Cameron said. “I’m thinking about this whole obsession that Silas has—or had—with Wendy. I mean, after Dylan became her legal guardian and moved her out of the area, Silas actually hunted them down. He possibly killed Dylan to keep him from separating the two of them. Then, when it looked like she was going to leave him, he killed her.”

  “In some cases, a person will kill someone he loves rather than let her leave him—I’ve heard of that before,” J.J. said.

  “But do those people dump the people they love someplace?”

  “Don’t miss our exit!” J.J. yelled at the same time that the GPS lady ordered Cameron to turn right.

  Pulling the steering wheel to the right, Cameron made such an abrupt turn off of the freeway that the cruiser fishtailed up the incline and to the stop sign.

  J.J. clutched the dashboard and regained his composure. “I assume that Dad always insists on driving when he’s riding in the car with you.”

  “I’d bet that Silas has Wendy’s body nearby,” Cameron said. “That he buried her someplace close—or maybe on his property—so that he could visit.”

  “But you can’t get a search warrant t
o look for it,” J.J. said. “Wendy’s disappearance is not your case, and you can’t even prove that Wendy Matthews is dead—”

  “She’s been legally declared dead.”

  “Still, you have no proof that she was murdered, let alone evidence that her body is in or around Silas’ home. All you have is speculation.”

  Cameron eased her foot down onto the accelerator, and they continued on their way to the Poconos. “Dixmont Hospital had a cemetery with approximately thirteen hundred bodies buried in it. It’s still there—right over the hill from Silas Starling’s place. It’s not his property. That cemetery belongs to the state, which means that we don’t need a warrant to search it.”

  “Finding one specific body among thirteen hundred will be like finding a needle in a haystack.”

  “I didn’t say finding it would be easy.”

  Dr. Malcolm Geller, formerly known as Keith Black, was the chief of staff at a substance-abuse rehabilitation center tucked away in the mountain resort area of Pennsylvania known as the Poconos.

  The residential substance-abuse rehabilitation center had all of the amenities that a peaceful, serene, luxurious, resort would have had.

  “If I had come here to dry out, I would have kept on drinking just to have an excuse to come back,” Cameron said after turning her cruiser up the long, winding tree-lined drive that led to the main building of the complex.

  As Cameron drove around in search of visitors’ parking, J.J. took out his cell phone and called Suellen only to connect with her voice mail. “Hey, hon, it’s me. I was wondering whether you were still feeling nauseous. We’re about to go in to interview Keith Black. The interview should take an hour. Call me when you get this message, okay? Love you.”

  With a look of concern, he hung up. Aware that Cameron was watching him, he said, “I have a bad feeling about this.”

  “She’s going to be fine.” With a forced reassuring smile, she unsnapped her seat belt and threw open the door.

  “No, she’s not,” J.J. said. “She’s dying. That’s not fine.” He threw open the door, slid out of his seat, and slammed it shut.