by Bush, Nancy
“Start with the ex-husband,” Gretchen said, her nasal tones more pronounced in the morning.
“Estranged husband.” September wanted to talk to Sheila Dempsey’s parents as well, but she didn’t think Gretchen was wrong about Dempsey. The guy had given the deputy next to nothing, according to the report.
“Sounds like as good a plan as any. We need to kick-start this investigation before the feds learn about it and swoop in and take it away from us.”
“I wish Wes were back,” September said, thinking aloud. “He met Sheila once, or maybe twice, at The Barn Door. The bar with the mechanical bull.”
“I know—the seventy-two-ounce steak place. Eat it all and you get it for free. Weasel tell you he tried that once?”
Wes “Weasel” Pelligree was another detective with the Laurelton PD. He was African-American and had that lean, cowboy look that September found appealing. He’d gotten wounded helping Auggie on the Zuma case and had taken a bullet to the abdomen. Luckily, he was going to be fine, but he was still recuperating after surgery and in the care of his longtime girlfriend, Kayleen. No word on when he’d be back.
“He said he puked it up in the alley behind the place,” September remembered with a smile. “But he said Sheila was cheering him on while he was eating it. A couple weeks later she was gone.”
Gretchen nodded and looked at the bulletin board. Before Decatur’s and Tripp’s bodies had turned up, Wes had kept Sheila’s picture on his desk, a reminder. Now all three victims’ photos were on the board with pertinent data about each crime listed beneath them. Everything else was in the file.
“All three of them frequented bars,” September pointed out.
“Who doesn’t?” Gretchen stood up and stretched. “I mean, yeah, some people have problems with alcohol and all that, but these three women . . . that doesn’t seem to be relevant with them. They were looking for a good time. Even Glenda, she just liked to dance.”
“I was thinking that . . . maybe he picked Glenda after I talked about Frank Navarone in that interview with Pauline Kirby.”
Gretchen frowned. “You think you influenced him?”
“She was killed that night. My interview ran at ten, and Auggie and I were called to her apartment the next morning. The neighbor saw the open door.”
“Huh.” Gretchen thought that over, then asked, “What’s Sheila Dempsey’s husband’s name?”
September looked down at the notes. “Greg Dempsey. Sheila’s parents live in Portland. Diane and Rick Schenk.”
“Let’s start with hubby. I like the idea of a face-to-face. Get something going. It’s been like a morgue around here.”
George showed up, yawning as he settled his bulk into his desk chair. “You guys are sure early.”
“No, George. You’re late. Again,” Gretchen said.
“Shut up, Sandler,” he said without heat.
“Get yourself some coffee and try to be nice.”
He gazed at her blandly. “Like you are?”
Gretchen’s mouth turned up at the corners briefly.
The Dempsey home was a modular house in a park of many such homes. Most of them were trimmed and tidy, but Greg Dempsey’s was rampant with dandelions, the lawn brittle and bleached tan, the asphalt drive cracking at the edges and one big chunk of it had fallen and tipped into the yard. The front gutter had a big ding in it, as if struck by a rock, and when September rang the bell the plastic covering fell into her hand, exposing hanging wires. She knocked loudly twice instead.
“Think he’s mourning his wife’s death or just your average slob?” Gretchen asked.
“Guess we’re gonna find out,” September said as she heard heavy footsteps just before the door swung inward.
Greg Dempsey was somewhere in his mid-thirties with lanky, dirty-blond hair and that super-thin, fragile look of someone who’d been sick a long time or an inveterate junkie. He eyed them speculatively as both September and Gretchen introduced themselves and pulled out their identification.
“More cops? I thought I was done with you guys.” He swung the door wide and walked back inside.
September started to step inside, but Gretchen held out an arm and called, “May we come inside, Mr. Dempsey.”
“Sure. Whatever.”
“You never know,” Gretchen said in an aside to September. “You find something in the house, try to arrest the guy. His lawyer says in court that you weren’t invited in. Unlawful search and all that. Besides, it’s polite.”
“Okay.”
The living room smelled like sour beer, which wasn’t a surprise given the cans that were tossed into every corner and spilled off a table onto the matted carpet. Dempsey was sprawled on a couch, staring at a television that had been muted. “What do you want to know now?” he asked.
“We’re heading up the investigation of possibly three women, maybe more, who’ve been killed in essentially the same manner,” Gretchen said. “Your wife is the first that we know of. We were hoping you could just fill in a few things for us.”
“Me and Sheila were done,” he volunteered. “Kaput. She’d moved on. Kicked me out of the place and started screwing every guy she could find. I moved back here after she . . . died.”
September had a picture of Sheila living at the house and thought it had probably been a lot nicer then. “Do you know if she was seeing anyone in particular?” she asked diffidently.
“Jake Westerly, the miserable fuck.”
Jake Westerly!
September hid her intake of breath behind a short cough. She’d just been thinking about him. But Jake . . . linked to this investigation . . . it couldn’t be. The idea made her so uncomfortable that it took an effort to snap herself back to the present.
“You know that she was seeing Westerly for certain?” Gretchen was asking skeptically. “You didn’t mention it before.”
“You mean to that deputy who told me my wife had been murdered?” Dempsey sneered. “He was more interested in me and my whereabouts than listening to anything I had to say, so I just shut up. Fuck ’em.”
“But you’ve thought it over now . . .” Gretchen prodded.
“Sheila knew Westerly from way back. She cut his hair and they were . . . friends,” he said with a twist of his lips.
September remembered, then, that Sheila had worked as a part-time hairdresser. Deputy Dalton had reported that Sheila had no particular client list and had only worked at the salon a short time. He hadn’t followed up, apparently, so maybe he did put the blame for Sheila’s death at her husband’s feet.
But Jake Westerly!
September suddenly recalled the slide of his hands across her skin, the heat of his mouth, the shock and thrill of intimacy. She felt slightly dizzy. Almost ill. She’d had a few other relationships since Jake, but they’d never had that same, throat-grabbing power. Now she clenched her teeth together until her jaw ached and tried to stay in the moment.
Gretchen asked Dempsey more questions about Sheila: who else she was friends with, how she spent her extra time, did she have any enemies that he knew of. Dempsey didn’t have much else in the way of real information. Kept circling around to the fact that “she couldn’t keep her legs together” after they’d split up, and that she had a real thing for the cowboy type.
September kept silent throughout. Jake Westerly had been a three-sport athlete in high school, tough and strong, but from her recollection, not a thing about him read “cowboy.” At least not then. She wondered now if he hung around The Barn Door . . . his family had lived in the Laurelton area back in the day, and his father, Nigel Westerly, had worked as a foreman/overseer at The Willows when her father first invested in the winery, commuting the forty minutes each way every day. Nigel had been first on the scene of September’s mother’s accident as Kathryn had been driving away from the winery. He’d tried to save her, but she was gone before the ambulance arrived. Braden, in his grief, had half-blamed Nigel for not saving his wife, and even September, dealing with her own
loss, had lashed out at Jake’s father. But Nigel was as torn up as anyone. He’d liked Kathryn. She’d been nice to him, he’d said, over and over, like a litany. Treated him like an equal. It didn’t stop Braden from firing him, though maybe it was a blessing in disguise because Nigel purchased a small vineyard nearby and began cultivating his own Pinot Noir grapes.
But September hadn’t known any of that when she was a girl. She’d only known that her mother was gone, and then her sister, and that she’d wanted something special her senior year and she’d done her damnedest to make Jake Westerly notice her . . . and had succeeded.
She forcibly shut her mind down to those events, concentrating instead on the fact that, when they’d hooked up, Jake had mentioned the accident that had taken her mother’s life, saying Kathryn’s death had really hit his father hard. His words made September feel even smaller and meaner that she already had for the rash accusations she’d hurled when she was eleven. She’d been just a kid, sure, but the way she’d transferred her pain to Nigel—going so far as to tell him it was his fault, and she hated him!—was like a splinter under her skin to this day, one that still had the power to hurt at unexpected moments. Nigel’s dismissal from The Willows by Braden was another attack on an innocent man.
“But she was still married to you,” Gretchen questioned Dempsey, unable to keep from inflecting disbelief into her words.
“I didn’t see her much,” he muttered. “Stayed with her parents some . . . or at friends, whoever they were. That other policeman asked me all this, y’know.”
Gretchen finished wringing Greg Dempsey dry of any useful information, and she and September headed back outside to the department issue Jeep. Gretchen swung into the driver’s seat and September climbed into the passenger’s.
“What a shithead,” Gretchen observed as they drove away. “His wife gets strangled, carved up, and raped and all he can do is talk about what a bitch in heat she was.”
September nodded.
“Weasel knew Sheila from The Barn Door. He ever meet this guy?”
“Called him a narcissist,” September said. “We should talk to him about Dempsey. I know he checked on Dempsey’s whereabouts during the time Emmy Decatur was killed and basically cleared him.”
Gretchen snorted. “Yeah, what was that again?”
“Dempsey has the graveyard shift at a convenience store off Vick Road. The one in the strip mall. I think it’s a 7-Eleven. He was there. Cameras on him all night.”
She made a growling sound and said, “Maybe he switched the tapes.”
“He’s a bastard,” September said, “but I don’t think he’s good for it. He didn’t react when you introduced me just now. I was standing right there, but he barely noticed me. He didn’t send my artwork to me.”
“If it’s all connected.”
“You and Auggie . . . you think I’m reaching?”
Gretchen made a face. “Nope. I just wish assholes like Dempsey were wiped off the planet. All right, what’s next? This Jake Westerly?”
September said carefully, “Let’s go see the Schenks, Sheila’s parents.”
She made a grunt of acceptance. “I’m going to call this deputy—Dalton—and see what he thinks about Dempsey. I don’t blame him for wanting to pin the thing on him, but he sure dropped the ball.”
“D’Annibal basically squeezed it away from county.”
“Only after Emmy Decatur’s body was found,” Gretchen reminded her. “Sounds like Dawson was just sitting around on his ass like George does instead of getting anything done.”
“Is that the tack you’re going to take?”
Gretchen turned to September, a little surprised. “You want to get warm and fuzzy on a homicide case?”
“No.”
“I know you don’t like my style. And you know what? I don’t fucking care.”
“Why don’t you let me talk to him?” September suggested.
“Think you can do better?”
“Probably not,” she hedged. She didn’t want to get on Gretchen’s bad side, but good God, Sandler could be a downright bully sometimes.
“Fine, you take Dalton. After you talk to him, let’s go to The Barn Door, see if anybody knows this Westerly. Dempsey said Sheila liked cowboys and The Barn Door’s got that going in spades.”
Uncomfortable, September nevertheless kept her mouth shut. She would call Dalton and see if he had anything else to add to the investigation.
The Schenks lived in Portland on the east side of the Willamette River, and when Gretchen and September had explained what they wanted, Sheila’s parents were more than happy to talk to them—maybe anyone—about their daughter. They waxed nostalgic on her days playing elementary and high school soccer. “She always wanted to be a cowgirl, though,” her mother had said. “You just don’t know how hard she tried to get us to buy her a horse. I always said, ‘We live in the city, honey,’ but she didn’t care.”
“We moved from Laurelton to Portland when she was a sixth grader,” Mr. Schenk explained.
From the file, September knew that Sheila was about her same age. “What grade school?” she asked, her thoughts on Jake.
“Twin Oaks.”
September exchanged a look with Gretchen. Glenda Tripp had worked at Twin Oaks and Sheila had attended elementary school there. Gretchen then asked the Schenks about Sheila’s relationship with her estranged husband, and that was when the Schenks shut down as if someone had hit the GAME OVER button. It was clear they didn’t much like Greg Dempsey, but when questioned about it, they kept trying to shift the conversation to happier days with Sheila. They finally admitted that Sheila and Greg just didn’t get along, but that’s all they would say.
An hour later, September and Sandler were heading back to the station when Gretchen took a detour into Taco Bell. “I can’t face the vending machine today,” she said, “and I don’t have time for lunch.”
“Tacos are fine with me,” September said as they walked inside.
“That mighta been a huge waste of time with the parents,” Gretchen said after they’d ordered, received their tray, and walked back to a table.
“Except for the part about Twin Oaks.”
“Yeah . . .” Gretchen frowned. “I wonder how Glenda Tripp got her job there,” she said as she bit into her taco.
“She didn’t go to elementary school at Twin Oaks,” September said, dragging from her memory information from Glenda’s file. “She went somewhere in Portland.”
“I remember that, too. . . .” She shook her head. “Could be coincidence.”
“Could it?”
“We gotta be careful about making connections when there aren’t any. Sheila Dempsey attended school at Twin Oaks until sixth grade, but she doesn’t appear to have had anything to do with the school since. Glenda Tripp was looking for a job, and found one at Twin Oaks.”
“Or . . . there’s something the two women share that’s centered around Twin Oaks,” September said.
Sandler grimaced. “Okay. We should check the current staff. See if any of them were there when Sheila attended and knew Glenda.”
“Okay.” September’s mind was already traveling back to the Jake Westerly angle, trying to figure out the best way to handle it. She didn’t believe he had anything to do with Sheila Dempsey’s death, but he did know Sheila, and he knew September, and well . . . she wanted to talk to him before Sandler or anyone else did.
They finished eating, tossed their trash into a bin, slipped the tray in its slot on the counter atop the garbage receptacle and headed back to the Jeep.
“I’ll check on the staff at Twin Oaks,” Gretchen said as they wheeled into the department lot. “And I’m gonna do some more background checking on that prick Dempsey.”
“I’ll call Deputy Dalton, and then see what I can find on Jake Westerly,” September said casually.
“Have George look into it. All he ever does is sit like a stone in front of his computer. Give him something to do.”
> “Yeah . . .” September said, though she had no intention of doing so at all.
“If Dalton tries to do a little two-step, we might have to meet this deputy face-to-face and discover his level of incompetence firsthand.”
“Dempsey didn’t tell him about Westerly or much of anything else,” September reminded her.
“Dalton didn’t do shit,” Gretchen retorted. Then, “Maybe it is better if you talk to him.”
Ya think? September wisely kept that to herself as well.
As soon as she got back to the station she put in a call to the deputy, who wasn’t in at the moment, so September was invited to leave a message. She told Dalton’s voice mail who she was and that she was following up on Sheila Dempsey’s homicide. After leaving her cell number, she hung up.
Next, she checked for Jake Westerly through her own computer and came up with an address not all that far from her apartment complex, and a number that, by the exchange, was clearly his cell.
Should she call him? Stop by? She didn’t even know what the hell he was doing any longer, and wondered if she should revive her Facebook account and see if she could find him that way. She’d deactivated the account, which she only sporadically looked at anyway, after she’d received the artwork.
The artwork . . . Jake Westerly. He’d been a classmate of hers in second grade and pretty much every grade since. But there were a lot of kids who’d gone all the way through elementary school and high school with September. Jake was just the one who’d made the biggest impression on her. She, Auggie, and May had been enrolled in public school after their father had gotten in a furious wrangle with the administration of the exclusive private school that March and July had attended. According to family legend, Braden had bellowed that they were a bunch of arrogant hypocrites with too much power for their paltry little lives, or something like that. So, September had gone kindergarten through sixth grade to Sunset Elementary, then moved on to Sunset Junior High, and finally Valley Sunset High. Jake Westerly had done the same.
Sheila Schenk Dempsey had attended Twin Oaks, but the family had moved and September had never known her, though they were the exact same age. But Sheila had been Jake’s hairdresser, so it was possible that Jake Westerly had known her before her parents moved from Laurelton to Portland. Could be random. Gretchen was right about making too many connections, too soon.
