A Neighbor's Lie

by Blake Pierce

  Still, “A Boy Named Sue” was in her head when she slapped at her nightstand for her phone. As she yanked her phone from its charger, she saw that her clock read 6:05—just twenty-five minutes before she had set her alarm to go off.

  “This is Agent Fine,” she answered.

  “Agent Fine, it’s Assistant Director Garcia. I need you in my office right away. Shoot for within the hour. I’ve got a case I need you and Agent Rhodes on as soon as possible this morning.”

  “Yes, sir,” she said, sitting up. “I’ll be there right away.”

  In the moment, she didn’t care that it was another day with Rhodes. All she cared about was that so far, she was 1-0 as far as cases went and she was eager to improve upon that record.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Chloe arrived in Assistant Director Garcia’s office three minutes later. He was sitting at the small conference table in the back, looking through a few papers. She saw that he had already set out two cups of coffee for them, steaming and black, on either side of the table.

  “Good morning, Agent Fine,” he said as she entered. “Have you seen or spoken with Agent Rhodes?”

  “She was pulling in just as I got on the elevator.”

  Garcia seemed to think about this for a moment, maybe confused as to why she had not simply waited at the elevator if she’d seen Rhodes. She then wondered just how much Johnson had told him about the little power struggle that was at play in their partnership.

  Having finished her own coffee in her car on the way, Chloe sat down in front of one of the cups and sipped from it. She preferred a splash of cream and some sugar but didn’t want to appear high maintenance. Just as she started sipping, Rhodes entered the room. The first thing she did was shoot Chloe a look of annoyance. She then took the seat in front of the other cup of coffee.

  Garcia eyed them both, apparently sensing the tension, but then shrugged. “We’ve got a murder in Landover, Maryland. It’s a case that appeared pretty normal at first. Maryland PD is running it right now but they’ve asked for our help. It’s also worth mentioning that Jacob Ketterman of White House Public Affairs knows the victim. He used to work with her back in the day. He has requested we look into it as well, as a favor. And when it comes from the White House, we try to keep it quiet. That should be simple with this case. It’s a pretty simple homicide from the looks of it. It’s one of the reasons we’re putting new agents on it. It’ll be a good test and there seems to be so pressing time table, although of course we’d like it solved as soon as possible.”

  He then slid two copies of his report over to them. The details were brief and to the point. As Chloe read over them, Garcia recited what he had learned.

  “The victim is thirty-six-year-old Kim Wielding. She was working as a nanny for the Carver family when she was killed. From the best we can tell, someone entered the home and killed her. She was hit in the head twice with something very hard and then strangled. There were two rather nasty blows to the head. It has yet to be determined which of those things killed her. We need the two of you to find out who did it.”

  “Was the murder the sole reason for the killer to visit the home?” Chloe asked.

  “Seems that way. Nothing was reported stolen. The house seemed exactly the way the Carvers last saw it…with the exception of their dead nanny. The address is right there in the files,” Garcia continued. “I just got off the phone with the sheriff in Landover. Both of the Carvers and their three children have been staying at a motel since the murder occurred two days ago. But they’ll be meeting with you at the house this morning to answer any questions. And that’s it, Agents. Get out there and get another win for us. Head down to HR and check out a car between the two of you. You familiar with the process?”

  Chloe was not, but nodded anyway. She assumed Rhodes already knew the ins and outs. Given the way yesterday had gone, Chloe assumed Rhodes knew just about every single piece of information on how the bureau was run.

  Both Chloe and Rhodes got up from the table. Chloe took one last gulp of her coffee before heading out of Garcia’s office. They walked down the hallway toward the elevator without a word shared between them.

  This is going to be a long day if she and I don’t get past this stupid rivalry nonsense, Chloe thought.

  As Chloe pushed the Down arrow, she turned to Rhodes and did her best to not just break the ice—but to obliterate it.

  “Agent Rhodes, let’s just get it out in the open. Do you have a problem with me?”

  Rhodes smirked and took a moment to think about her answer. “No,” she said finally. “I don’t have a problem with you, Agent Fine. But I am a bit hesitant to work with someone that was placed into ViCAP at the very last minute. It makes me wonder if someone is doing you favors—favors that are unfair to other agents that busted their asses to be part of this program.”

  “Not that it’s any of your business, but I was asked to join this program. I was perfectly content to stay my course with the Evidence Response Team.”

  Rhodes shrugged as the elevator doors opened up. “I’m not so sure the ERT would have been so thrilled with how you muddled that footprint yesterday.”

  To that, Chloe remained silent. She could keep having this little war of words with Rhodes, but it would do nothing but make the working relationship even worse than it already was. If she was going to bring it to a stop, she was simply going to have to prove herself to Rhodes.

  Besides, she had screwed up yesterday. And the only way to fix that was to prove herself with this new case.

  ***

  When Rhodes elected to drive without any sort of conversation about it, Chloe let it ride. It wasn’t worth getting upset about. On the way to Landover, Chloe started to wonder if something had happened at some point during Rhodes’s path to get to where she was—something that caused her to be bossy and to overcompensate. She had plenty of time to ponder this during the half-hour drive to Landover because Rhodes was still not making any real effort to talk.

  They arrived at the Carver residence at 8:05. It was a gorgeous house in a well-to-do neighborhood, the type where all of the lawns were perfectly edged to show the perfect lines of the sidewalks. There was a newer minivan in the driveway, parked in front of the garage. Rhodes pulled in behind it and killed the engine. She then looked over to Chloe and asked: “We good?”

  “I don’t think so, but that doesn’t matter. Let’s just focus on the case.”

  “That’s what I meant,” Rhodes spat as she opened the door and got out.

  Chloe joined her and as they did, a man and a woman got out of the minivan—the Carvers, Chloe presumed. A quick round of introduction reveled that these were indeed the Carvers, Bill and Sandra. Bill looked like the type who never really got much sleep but thrived off of it. Sandra was rather pretty, the type of woman who probably didn’t have to put much effort into it. But she also looked tired, especially as she looked toward the house.

  “I understand you’ve been staying in a motel?” Chloe asked.

  “Yes,” Sandra said. “When it happened, Bill was away on business. The cops were coming in and out of the house and there was…well, there was just so much blood. So I picked the kids up from school, took them to dinner, and then took them to a motel. I told them what had happened and it just seemed morbid to come back right away.”

  “I got back home yesterday morning,” Bill said. “Around noon or so yesterday, the police gave us the okay to get back into the house. But the kids and Sandra were just too creeped out by it.”

  “That might be for the best,” Rhodes said. “We’d like to get a look at the scene, if that’s okay.”

  “Yes, the sheriff told us you were coming,” Sandra said. “He instructed us to tell you that there’s a file with all of their information on the kitchen counter.”

  “Before we head inside,” Chloe said, “I was wondering if you’d like to tell us a bit about Kim?”

  “She was so kind-hearted,” Sandra said.

  “And grea
t with the kids,” Bill said. As he said it, there was a waver in his voice. It was as if the full weight of what had happened was only now starting to catch up with him.

  “Do you know if she had any bad blood with anyone?” Chloe asked

  “Not that we know of,” Sandra said. “We’ve been asking ourselves that for the past two days. It just…it makes absolutely no sense.”

  “Any failed relationships?” Rhodes asked. “Maybe an estranged ex-boyfriend or something?”

  “She has an ex, sure,” Bill said. “But she rarely mentioned him.”

  “But she did mention him?” Chloe asked.

  Something akin to understanding flashed in Sandra’s eyes. “You know, she did say how it was something she had to escape. And I don’t think it was a joke. I mean…she never really talked about him.”

  “Do you have a name?” Rhodes asked.

  “No,” Sandra said. She then looked to Bill for the answer but he only shook his head.

  “Did Kim ever stay here?” Rhodes asked.

  “Yes. If Bill and I ever went on little mini-vacations, she’d stay. We have a guest bedroom that we always joked was Kim’s. She’d also sometimes just stay overnight on days where the kids had really been struggling with homework or school stuff.”

  “Which bedroom is that?” Rhodes asked.

  “Upstairs, first one on the left,” Bill said.

  “Would you mind just hanging out for a while in case we need to speak with you after we have a look around inside?” Chloe asked.

  “We don’t have to come in, do we?” Sandra asked.

  “No,” Rhodes said. “You’re welcome to just stay out here.”

  Sandra seemed relieved at this. But she still looked at the house as if she were expecting an axe murderer to come barreling out of the front door at any moment.

  Both of the Carvers remained in the driveway while Chloe and Rhodes headed for the porch. It was a wraparound porch, complete with a porch swing and two rockers. Chloe opened the front door and they stepped inside.

  The local and State PD had done the cleanup, according to Garcia’s reports. And from what Chloe could tell, they’d done a great job of it. Of course, it would have been much easier to get a read on the scene if the evidence was still there—including any blood that had been spilled. Whoever had tasked the bureau with taking on this case apparently had no clue as to how forensics or evidence collection was carried out.

  Chloe saw a folder sitting on the kitchen counter—the report and files from the sheriff, she supposed. She walked across the foyer and through the living room to retrieve it. She opened it up, flipping through the basic report and skipping to the crime scene photos. She walked back to the front door to show Rhodes and they both studied the five pictures, comparing it to the now immaculately cleaned scene.

  In the pictures, there was blood on the foyer floor, right up to the doorframe. The body of Kim Wielding lay sprawled on the floor, her left foot no more than six inches from the front door. In the second picture, it was very evident that she had been struck in the face with a blunt instrument. Her nose had been partially caved in and the lower half of her face was nothing more than a sheet of blood.

  “Safe bet she was answering the door,” Rhodes said.

  “Which means she knew the person,” Chloe added. “Or that she had been expecting someone.”

  Rhodes took the pictures from the folder, not necessarily snatching them away, but not being polite about it either. “This pisses me off.”

  “What does?” Chloe asked.

  “This case. A single murder in an upscale neighborhood. With a cleaned murder scene and no direct help from local PD, what the hell can we do?”

  “I say we skip the scene. I mean, we have the pictures. That’s enough. What would we learn if the body and the blood were still here?”

  “Plenty. We’d also have the chance to search for our own evidence.”

  Chloe didn’t press the issue any further. Truth be told, the entire situation irritated her as well. But there was no sense in dwelling on it.

  “I’m heading to the upstairs bedroom,” Chloe said. She figured if there was no crime scene to give them answers, they’d have to look elsewhere. And if there was an ex-boyfriend in the picture, it seemed that any place she lived might have some clues.

  She headed upstairs while Rhodes remained downstairs, studying the living area. Chloe entered the room Sandra Carver had mentioned and found it very tidy. A small desk sat against the far wall. A single bedside table sat between the doorframe and a queen-sized bed, adorned with a lamp and a Nicholas Sparks paperback.

  She checked the closet and found only a few changes of clothes and spare linens. There was also a small backpack, the kind worn around the chest as a satchel of sorts. She checked it and found lipstick, lip balm, six dollars, and a library card.

  Chloe sighed as she took a final look around the room. There was nothing of note here; anything worth finding had apparently already been picked up by the local PD. There was likely to be a bit of paperwork to claim any evidence from the PD in her future.

  She headed back downstairs, where Rhodes was hunkered down on the floor, closely inspecting the area where Kim had been killed. She glanced up to Chloe, still irritated, and said: “We’re going to have to pay a visit to the State PD. The report here says they took a laptop that was sitting on the kitchen bar. A Lenovo with a lock screen blocking access. I’d like to know if they found anything on it.”

  “We need to find out if the police located her car, too. If she was killed here, that meant she likely had her car here. So where the hell is it?”

  “I looked for that information in the report,” Rhodes said, nodding back over to the file on the kitchen counter. “It says her car wasn’t here when they arrived on the scene.”

  “We got the license plate number?”

  “Yeah. It’s all in there.”

  As Chloe came to the bottom of the stairs, Sandra Carver came rushing through the front door. She held something in her hands, holding it out toward them in a way that reminded Chloe of that scene from The Lion King.

  “I just remembered this,” she said, excited and maybe a little embarrassed.

  It was clearly an iPad, but why it had Sandra so excited remained to be seen.

  “It’s Kim’s iPad,” Sandra explained. “Madeline would use it a lot to do these interactive games for school. Bill and I have our own tablet, but Madeline thought she was something special because Kim let her use hers. It’s been in our van for the last two days, tucked into the little pocket behind the passenger seat.”

  Chloe took it and pressed the Power button. She was presented with a lock screen. Apparently, she’d used up all of her luck with such things yesterday with the Snapchat video.

  “You said your daughter used it,” Chloe said. “So I assume you know the passcode?”

  “Yes! It’s five-three-oh-nine.”

  Chloe typed in the code and the iPad unlocked. She was greeted to a home screen filled with the smiling faces of three children—the Carver kids, she assumed.

  There weren’t many icons on the home screen—just Spotify, Facebook, Instagram, and the built-in Apple apps like Messaging, Calendar, and FaceTime. She ignored all of the social media apps for now and tapped the Messages icon. There weren’t many threads, and one of them was between Kim and Sandra Carver.

  “Find anything?” Bill asked.

  “I don’t know yet,” Chloe said as she started opening threads involving any male name. She was hoping to stumble across threads from the ex-boyfriend. She sat down at the bar, looking through all of them. Within a minute or so, she thought she had found what she’d been looking for.

  “I think I might have found the ex,” Chloe said, showing Rhodes the iPad.

  Rhodes came over, her expression making it clear that she doubted the authenticity of Chloe’s claim. But Chloe felt that she had stumbled upon something—potentially their first true led into the murder of Kim Wieldin
g.

  The text thread that Chloe had found consisted of a few broken conversations, scattered out over the course of several days.

  The most recent, from five days ago, was quite telling. And Chloe knew that by the time Rhodes reached the end of it, she’d be just as certain as Chloe was. The thread was between Kim and a man named Mike, and it was not pretty.

  You babysitting again?

  It’s not babysitting. I’m a nanny. This is my job.

  Want to take a break and come see me?

  You know I’m not going to do that. Stop asking. Stop bothering me.

  No need to be a bitch. I’m not gonna wait around for you, you know.

  Good. Don’t wait.

  Fuck you.

  Beneath that conversation were a few attempts by Mike to start a conversation. But Kim had apparently never responded. The next actual conversation between them occurred a little over two weeks ago. Again, it was Mike who had initiated the conversation.

  Why’d you stop calling?

  Because I have nothing to say to you.

  I know you’re still upset. I’m sorry. I said it like 100 times already. I was dumb and frustrated and things got out of hand.

  All true. Especially the dumb part.

  Give me another chance. Please.

  No. You were a mistake. I wish I’d never met you.

  Seems pretty fucking harsh.

  It does. But the truth hurts. Please stop contacting me.

  You want that?

  No. But I NEED it. Please stop. Leave me alone.

  You know you miss me.

  The conversation stopped there, and there were no more messages. It made Chloe think that at some point, Kim really had managed to break away from Mike. Maybe she had temporarily blocked him or simply deleted all of the messages between them. She wondered why Kim hadn’t deleted the thread, especially if she knew one of the Carver kids was using it.

  Maybe for evidence if it ever got out of hand, Chloe thought.

  Chloe knew that if it came down to it, they could have the bureau get a warrant to uncover the deleted messages, but she didn’t think it would come to that.