Unintended Witness

by D. L. Wood

  Refusing to give up, Chloe scrolled back several more months, to around the time Amanda had said she and her boyfriend had started dating. But still, Chloe found no photos that might suggest any kind of romantic relationship. There was one group photo, however, with half a dozen women and two guys, all having dinner and margaritas at a Mexican restaurant. It looked like a birthday celebration, based on the gargantuan black and silver-spangled sombrero propped on the head of the woman on the end. Wondering whether one of the men had become more than a friend, Chloe scrolled over their faces. Both had been tagged.

  Chloe clicked the tag on the first one, and the Facebook page of ‘Justin Perry’ opened. He looked to be in his late thirties, and had a scholarly look about him, complete with glasses and a goatee covering a slight chin. Although his site was mostly private, he did share some posts and photos with the public. Chloe scrolled back just a few weeks and gasped as the timeline revealed several photos of Amanda and him together. From the looks of it they had definitely dated. For whatever reason, he apparently had not felt the need to delete them after their break-up. This was the guy.

  Would it be possible to approach him directly?

  Chloe leaned back in her chair, pulling her warm mug to her chest. Going straight to the source would have its advantages. They could skip convincing Amanda to cooperate. Then again, he might be even more skittish than she was. What if confronting him scared him off? Maybe they needed Amanda to grease the wheels first and convince him to meet with them. Fortunately, it wasn’t her decision to make. Holt could field that one after she handed him all the information.

  “So, Mr. Perry, let’s see if we can give Holt an address to go with the name.” Hunching over the computer again, she searched his name for matches in Franklin. Several people-finder sites that provided information about individuals returned hits on the name. She clicked on the first such site and waited for the results to appear.

  The first possibility was listed simply as “Justin Perry,” but he was only nineteen.

  “Too young for Amanda’s Mr. Perry,” Chloe noted, and continued scrolling. The next entry was “Justin K. Perry,” but at seventy-two he couldn’t be a match either. She continued clicking on each name in succession, but none of them were the Justin Perry she was looking for. After the last listing for various forms of ‘Justin Perry,’ the site began suggesting similar names as possibly being relevant to her search. She sifted through the “Justin” and “Perry” permutations before finding one halfway down the list for a Justin P. Roberts, thirty-seven years old. The age sounded about right. Maybe ‘P’ stood for Perry.

  She opened another window and searched Justin P. Roberts, Franklin, Tennessee. The top hit was for a licensed therapist with an office in downtown Franklin. She clicked on the link.

  A black and white professional photo of the same man listed as Justin Perry on Facebook filled up one quarter of her screen as the website for Justin P. Roberts, licensed therapist, opened. It was definitely him. He must have used his middle name as a last name on Facebook in order to keep the page somewhat private. It made sense, given that he was a therapist. He wouldn’t want clients stumbling onto his personal page too easily.

  Her nerves firing, she clicked back to the people-finder site and ordered a full report on him for $1.95. When the report finally generated, it gave his latest address as 239 Breakstone Way, Franklin, Tennessee. According to Google Maps it was only fifteen minutes away.

  “Nicely done,” she told herself, already thinking about how satisfying it would be to tell Holt she had not only found Amanda, but also her mystery man.

  Out of curiosity she returned to Justin’s Facebook page to get a better sense of the man, and maybe gain some insight as to how they could best approach him. She noticed that the latest post was from just that morning—a photo of him standing in front of what was, presumably, his home. He stood beside a Lexus sedan, his arms in the air, giving the thumbs up. The caption read, “T minus one hour. Beach bound—Destin here I come!” She squinted at the photo. The time of the post was just twenty minutes earlier.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” Chloe groaned. This guy looked like he was about to leave for the beach any minute and Holt was stuck in court all morning. They were going to miss him.

  Unless she did something about it.

  FORTY-SIX

  Holt checked his phone again, just to make sure it was in silent mode. The federal courthouse may have relaxed its rules about bringing cell phones inside, but it had a zero-tolerance policy on noise from them. He had been witness to more than one attorney getting dressed down in open court and slapped with a fine. Justice Janice Nixon, United States District Court Judge for the Middle District of Tennessee, was no different. If anything, she was considered more unforgiving than most. Consequently, the triple check of the phone.

  The large open room was packed with attorneys waiting for their turn on the motion docket. The scent of stale coffee punctuated the air along with pockets of nose-hair-singeing aftershave worn by several of the more senior lawyers. A steady rumble of hushed whispering issued from the gallery, a droning background for whatever arguments were being made before the bench at any given time. Unfortunately, Holt’s case was at the bottom of the docket, which meant he would be lucky to get called before lunch.

  Holt represented the plaintiff in a lawsuit filed against her employer, claiming the company had intentionally failed to promote her because she was a woman. It wasn’t the typical kind of case he handled, but he had caught it because the plaintiff’s husband was a friend of his. After depositions, the company had filed the present motion for summary judgment, seeking to have the case dismissed. Holt had promised to call his client once he had a better idea of when the case would be called, hoping to spare her unnecessary hours on the gallery’s hard wooden benches. Reconciling himself to a long wait, he pulled his cell out again to see if Chloe had texted him. She hadn’t, but there was a text from Pax.

  Call me ASAP.

  Slipping out the back of the courtroom, Holt found a somewhat private corner in the marbled hallway and called Pax.

  “Hey, man. It’s me. What’s up?”

  “You know that corpse? The one from the Donner site?”

  “Yeah,” Holt answered impatiently.

  “Well, they got the DNA back on it.”

  Holt’s gut hummed. “And?”

  “And I need to know if you’re planning on buying my breakfast tomorrow.”

  “If this is good, I’ll buy it for a week. Spill.”

  “Dude’s name was Joe Bellamy. He’s not from here. Hails from New Jersey. Or New York. Can’t remember.”

  “You can’t remember?”

  “Yeah, whatever. They were sayin’ a lot.”

  “Okay. Fine. What else?”

  “The word ‘mob’ was mentioned.”

  Holt turned towards the wall, angling for more privacy. “As in, the mob mob?” he said, his words hushed.

  “As in, like, the Sopranos, yeah.”

  “What mob? From where?”

  “That’s all they said.”

  “Did they happen to say anything about how Bellamy’s body ended up in a waste drum on Donner’s property?”

  “Nope. But, they did say it looked like it had been in there a couple weeks. And, turns out, they found a bullet in the drum. They figure it fell out when the body decomposed. Acid did a pretty good number on the guy’s—”

  “But nothing else? Nothing that points to who did it?”

  “Nope. Sorry. At least, nothing they mentioned.”

  “Did Sims come up?”

  “Nope.”

  “Okay. Thanks. Keep me posted.”

  “Uh-huh. I’ll be expecting that breakfast.”

  “Yeah,” Holt said, tapping to end the call. He shoved the cell phone in his pocket and strode back into the courtroom, wondering how far he would have to dig into Donner’s affairs before finding a tie to Bellamy and whether, if he pulled on it, he would f
ind Elise Banyon and Vettner-Drake at the other end.

  FORTY-SEVEN

  The directions Chloe had pulled off the internet indicated that Justin Roberts’s house was only fifteen minutes from Reese’s place. But it seemed to take forever to get there as Chloe turned off Highway 96 West and continued down a series of winding country lanes leading, it felt like, to the middle of nowhere.

  It was a beautiful nowhere, though, with brisk cerulean skies crowning open fields of snowy popcorn-like cotton begging for harvest. Chloe’s Civic floated over the winding roadway, golden thickets on both sides towering over her car like sentinels, the tips of their branches stretching towards each other as if playing a game of London Bridge, creating an autumnal tunnel. It almost hurt to drive through it without stopping to photograph the brilliant fall display.

  She flew over a rise and felt her stomach drop as if on a rollercoaster. She was going much too fast. But her fear of missing a departing Justin Roberts outweighed her fear of a speeding ticket. So she pressed down harder on the gas and zoomed on.

  Her GPS dropped her in front of Roberts’s stone-trimmed, French Country style home just seventeen minutes after rocketing away from Reese’s house. She exhaled a heavy sigh of relief. Roberts’s Lexus was still in the driveway.

  Chloe slammed the car door behind her then jogged up the flagstone walk, wasting no time in banging hard on the plank cedar front door. When Roberts yanked it opened suddenly, she had to catch herself to avoid knocking him right in the face.

  “Oh, hey, sorry,” she apologized, stepping back. Tall and lanky, his pale eyes regarded her with curiosity from behind steel-rimmed glasses. The goatee from his earlier online photos had been shaved off.

  “Can I help you?” he asked, standing in the doorway with one arm raised above him, holding the door open just about a foot or so.

  “I really, really hope so,” Chloe answered, then dove into her story.

  * * * * *

  “Geez, Amanda…” Justin Roberts groaned, his voice trailing off as he rubbed his face in obvious frustration. He leaned against his porch railing, trying to process what Chloe had just told him. She leaned against the post opposite him and waited.

  “She never should have said anything about that conversation. It didn’t mean anything. I was just—” He cut himself off, huffing loudly as he searched for what he wanted to say. “It didn’t mean anything. She shouldn’t have come to you. She’s just mad because I threw that glass.”

  “For what it’s worth, she made it pretty clear that she really didn’t want to say anything. But I think she realized that in a situation like this, if she could shed light on a murder investigation, it was too important to stay quiet.”

  “It doesn’t shed any light on anything. I was just rambling. I’d had one too many and I shot off at the mouth.”

  “Amanda disagreed. She thought it sounded like you might know someone with a reason to hurt Donner.”

  His eyes pierced hers from behind the lenses of his glasses. “She’s letting her imagination get the better of her.”

  Chloe squared her shoulders, refusing to back down. “Did she imagine you saying that you wouldn’t put it past your ex-girlfriend to murder Donner?”

  Roberts straightened, his nostrils flaring. “I didn’t say that exactly. I was mad, okay? At the woman I’d been dating. Things between us ended terribly. There was a lot of animosity. When I said what I said to Amanda, I was just letting off steam.”

  “But—”

  “No,” he barked, interrupting her and waving her off. “You know what? I’m sorry, but I don’t have to do this. I was on my way out of town and now,” he checked his watch, “you’re holding me up. I think it’s time for you to leave. I don’t have anything to say.”

  “We’ll just talk to Amanda again.”

  “Well, then it’ll be her word against mine.”

  He turned towards the front door, but Chloe caught his arm. He looked down at her grip on the sleeve of his button-down shirt, then flashed his gaze up, his nostrils flaring.

  “I get it, Mr. Roberts, I do,” she said. “And I’m really sorry for how this happened, I…it wasn’t how I wanted to handle it. But I didn’t have a choice.” He shook her hand off, but stayed put. “This is too important to just forget about. So, you can either talk to me now, or, if you won’t then we’ll have to expand our investigation and share what little we know with the police and come at it that way. And then this becomes a whole other kind of frustrating. A very public, very official kind of frustrating.”

  In truth, Chloe had no idea what kind of leverage they had to hold over Justin Roberts’s head. For all she knew, her ultimatum had absolutely no teeth. But she was willing to bet that, given his reluctance to talk, just the idea of getting the police involved would escalate things far beyond what Justin Roberts was willing to risk.

  The twinge of panic that flittered across Roberts’s features told her she was right. “You can’t go to the police with this.” His face had started to flush and his hands tightened into white-knuckled fists. She had struck a nerve.

  “We don’t want to do that, Mr. Roberts. Not unless we have to.”

  “What do you want me to say?”

  “We want to know the name of your ex-girlfriend and why you thought she might be mad enough to get rid of Phillip Donner.”

  “It was just a stupid comment! It was nothing. I didn’t mean it.”

  Chloe shook her head. “It was enough to scare Amanda into seeking us out, so she could tell us about it. From what she said, it sounded like Donner was trying to blackmail this woman into doing something. If you’re worried about her finding out that you helped us, we can do our best to keep her from knowing it came from you. We can—”

  “No,” he seethed, stiff determination in his voice. “I can’t. Don’t you understand? I can’t.”

  His last words held more than anger. There was desperation in them. Whatever was going on, he was terrified of being forced to disclose it.

  “Then we don’t have a choice. We’ll have to start talking to everyone you know. Trying to find out on our own who you’ve been dating who might have a connection to Donner. Your friends, family, your co-workers—”

  “What? No!” He rubbed his face in his hands. “You can’t do that. You just can’t.” His eyes pleaded with her. “It will ruin my career.” He was rigid and pale, his lips clenched together.

  What is he so scared of? she thought, her mind churning to come up with a set of circumstances that would put a therapist’s career at risk, when it hit her.

  Who was strictly off-limits for a therapist when it came to dating?

  Chloe eyed him cautiously. “She wasn’t a client, was she, Mr. Roberts?”

  The chilly silence that met her guess confirmed that she was right.

  “So the reason you can’t talk about it is because the woman you were dating was someone you were counseling?” His head dropped a few inches, and he closed his eyes in remorse.

  Chloe sighed, her shoulders sagging. This complicated matters. There was no way he was going to talk to her. Not unless it was better than the alternative.

  “Okay. Just think through this with me. If you talk to me now, if you give me her name, explain what was going on, then maybe we can minimize the impact on you. I know there are rules about client confidentiality, but there are exceptions, aren’t there, when a crime is involved? If you talk to us, we can keep you out of it as much as possible—I mean, I can’t promise the relationship won’t come out, but there’s less chance of exposure than if we go rummaging around in your life—”

  “No, it’s not like that.” He cut her off, his repudiation a sharp bark. “The problem—the issue she had with Donner—it wasn’t something I learned about while counseling her. This isn’t a client confidentiality problem. It was…a different kind of situation.”

  “Okay, what kind of situation?” Chloe pressed.

  Justin’s stature deflated even more, and he looked away fo
r a moment, out over the yard, to the field across the street where white fences corralled a meadow of ash-black cows. He scratched his chin, maybe absentmindedly reaching for the goatee that was no longer there. His shoulders seemed to cave a little more in surrender.

  “You realize that the board might have my license over this—dating a client?” He heaved a sigh. “What I tell you, I’m only telling you because I think it’ll be worse if I don’t. It’ll be bad if I do, but…” He shook his head, letting the thought go unfinished. “Of all the ways I thought this might come back to bite me—this wasn’t even on the list.”

  Chloe waited silently for him to continue.

  “If this is going to come out, I don’t want to get dragged through some investigation and I sure don’t want it to look like I’m not cooperating. It’s bad enough without that.”

  “Okay, so talk to me. What was this…situation…that your ex-girlfriend had?”

  He snorted, as if she had said something funny. “That’s just it. I am the situation.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means that she wasn’t just a client. She’s a married client.”

  Chloe’s eyebrows shot up. “Oh.”

  “Yeah. Exactly.”

  “And you were their marriage counselor?”

  “What? No!” he denied quickly, almost sounding insulted by the insinuation. “Just hers. But the licensing board still won’t like it.”

  Chloe ignored the comment and charged on. “So why would you having an affair with this woman create a situation for her with Donner?”

  “Because Donner threatened to use the fact of our affair against her if she didn’t cooperate with him. Said he would ruin her reputation, her career—not to mention her family.”

  “Cooperate? Cooperate how?”

  “Don’t know. She didn’t say. Just told me to stay far away from her. Acted like I’d been blabbing about our relationship—which was ridiculous because it would’ve hurt me as much as her.”