“She a good kid?”
“Bethie? Yeah. She’s real bright and kind of hyper – you know, talks a mile a minute. He’s doing a good job with her.”
While T.J. talked with Eric Bounds, Sam took Tripp Rocker.
They had planned their approach on the flight down.
Sam was joined in the interview room by a dark-haired, stocky detective who introduced herself as Lt. Maria Luisa Lopez.
Rocker looked sick and weary.
“They cut out on us,” he said when Sam asked him about Brittanie and Michelle. “If that’s why you’re down here, I can’t help you much. They just took off. I already gave one of the cops Tiffanie’s home number. “
“Tell me what happened with the girls,” Sam said. “Why’d they leave?”
“Damned if I know. Everything was fine. We stopped here ‘cause we were all tired and we didn’t know if we’d find a place in Daytona once we got there, so we were going to wait until morning to go on down there.”
“This was Tuesday night?” Sam asked.
“Whatever day we left Merchantsville. Anyway, Eric and me, we wanted to sleep late in the morning, but Michelle and Brittanie, you know how women are, they were like bouncing off the ceiling wanting to leave. “
“All four of you were in the same motel room?” Lt. Lopez asked sorrowfully.
“Yeah,” Rocker said. “Saving some money.”
Lt. Lopez sighed and shook her head. She seemed to be playing mom cop to Sam’s dad cop.
“Go ahead with what happened,” Sam cut in.
“So Brittanie says she’s going to find an ATM,” Rocker says, “and she goes and comes back all bent out of shape because it wouldn’t give her enough money, and that means she’s got to call Daddy. Hey, can I get a Tylenol or something? I’m getting a headache.”
Lt. Lopez nodded sympathetically and tiptoed out.
“Anyway, she finally gets up the nerve to call her Daddy, and then she’s all Yes, Sir, Yes, Sir and she goes outside to talk to him, and next thing I know, she gets Michelle to go out to the car with her, and I fell back to sleep and Eric woke me up and said the girls hadn’t come back and we had to clear out by eleven.”
Lt. Lopez had come back in with aspirin and a glass of water.
.”You weren’t worried about the girls?” She asked mournfully. “Did you ever think they might have been abducted or something?”
Rocker looked at Sam.
“It’s a good question,” Sam said. “Were you worried?”
“Hell, no, I wasn’t worried. Not about them. I was worried about me and Eric,” Rocker stopped to swallow four aspirin with a long drink of water, and then continued. “They just dumped all of our stuff out of the car, right on the pavement, and took off. She’s daddy’s girl and her daddy told her to come home and she went home, and talked Michelle into going with her. Plain and simple.”
“Anyway,” he added, looking toward Lt. Lopez, “They sure weren’t worried about us. If Eric’s stepbrother over in Orange Park hadn’t had that van to lend us, I guess we would have been walking. Anyway, that was the end of the Daytona plan, so we just hung around Jacksonville Beach.”
“The girls are okay,” Sam said to Lt. Lopez.
Rocker seemed only mildly curious.
“Where are they? Back home?”
Sam nodded.
“See, I told you,” Rocker said. “They’re all right, and I hope you know Brittanie’s 19. There wasn’t anything wrong with us being in that motel. Is that what this is all about? Old man Flammonde sent you down here?”
“No it’s not about Brittanie,” Sam said, “I was just curious about why the girls went home. I’ve just got some questions I need to ask you about that last day you were in Merchantsville.”
He nodded to Lopez who pushed the record button on a tape recorder.
“Mr. Rocker,” she said sadly,” I know they may have done this when you were picked up last night, but let’s do it again just to be sure you understand your rights.”
Her motherly tones, combined with the words of the Miranda warning seemed to have an impact. Tripp Rocker sat up a little straighter. He looked a little confused. He was clearly getting uneasy, but he said he didn’t need a lawyer.
“What for? For a DUI? For staying in a motel with a 19 year old grown woman? What?”
“Okay,” Sam interrupted. “Now let me tell you to start with that we’ve got an interview just like this one going on with your friend Eric, and the detective talking to him is going to be asking him pretty much the same questions.”
He let that sink in.
“Are you going to tell me what this is about?”
“No, I’m going to ask you some questions, and I need some answers. Let’s start with that last morning you were in Merchantsville.
“Okay,” Rocker said with an exasperated sigh. “Whatever.”
“Now just to save time,” Sam said, “We know that you and Eric were in the residential area of Merchantsville, with clipboards, on foot, late Tuesday morning.
“That’s right,” Rocker said. “Mr. Hilliard told us when we first got there that would be all right to go from door to door. Is that what this is all about? I mean if there’s a fine or something, we can come back by and pay it.”
“You were in the area of Williams Street and then you were on Hilliard Court,” Sam said, “Is that right?”
“I don’t know the street names.”
“Okay, let’s start at the beginning,” Sam said. “Where’d you park?”
“I remember that,” Rocker said. “Right by the water tank so we’d remember where the car was.”
“And where’d you go from there. Just tell me everything you remember doing.”
“We hit about three houses and nobody answered the door, and then we got to this house where there was this real old lady with gray hair out in the yard and she signed the petition. I’m not sure she was, you know, all right in the head. She was out there in a bathrobe and these big pink bedroom slippers that looked like bears or something, and it was like she thought we were from her church. Why? Did she say we bothered her or something? Because we didn’t.”
“How about letting me ask the questions for now?” Sam said. He could have told Rocker that Willie Mae Witherford didn’t even remember that they had come by, but he was more interested in assessing Rocker’s honesty.
“Okay, okay,” Rocker said, sounding injured. “Well, okay. I’ll keep on going. This one house we went to, this lady was peeking out from the curtains, and then about five minutes later here comes this cop car real slow. Didn’t stop but just looked at us. You know you got some kind of weird town, don’t you?”
“Let’s stay on track,” Sam said.
“Then we started just looking for houses that had cars in the driveway,” Rocker said, “and we got down to where the conservatory building is, on that brick street, you know.”
“Right,” Sam said. “Hilliard Court.”
“I guess. Anyway, there’s this three-story house there that has a doctor’s office on the side. You know which one I mean?”
Sam nodded.
“Well, somebody was just pulling out of the parking lot, so we figured it was open, and we went in the office, and the receptionist in there signed the petition.”
“Was there anybody in the office except her?”
“No. And that girl will remember us if you ask her. She’s the real pretty blonde that works in there. She was real friendly, and she told us how she didn’t care anything about that old building, and she wanted the shopping center.”
“Anything else?” Sam asked idly.
“Well, yeah. Eric told her about how we didn’t know what a big deal the whole thing was when we got down here and how we were run out of that grocery store parking lot, and she had heard all about that. She told us not to bother stopping at the next house, because the old lady who got us run off lived there. I mean in that big mansion. So we thanked her for that, and we left.”
<
br /> “Thanked her for what?”
“For telling us about the old lady living next door,” Rocker said, “That’s all we’d need, to have her yelling and screaming again and somebody calling the.. you know.”
“Sheriff?” Sam asked with a grin.
“Well, yeah,” Rocker said and managed a grin of his own. “I mean it was a good thing she told us or we’d have gone there next.”
“Okay,” Sam asked, “What time do you think it was by then?”
“I don’t know, maybe like 11:30, I don’t know.”
“Which way did you go then?”
“Well we went past that house, the mansion, you know, and then we cut across to that lot where the old building is took a look at it just to see what all the fuss was about and.” he paused, thinking, frowning a little.
It struck Sam that Rocker was making a decision to leave out something.
“I could sort of see why they wouldn’t want it torn down, to tell you the truth,” Rocker finally said. “And then we went up another little short street on the other, and went to one house that had a car in the driveway, but either nobody was home or they weren’t coming to the door. You really want to know all this stuff?”
Sam nodded.
“Then Brittanie called me on my cell phone and said to come on back out to the Waffle House by the motel because Mr. Hilliard was on his way to give her the money, and she sounded really pissed, because they had to get out of the motel room by 11 and they were stuck in the Waffle House all that time waiting for us, and they hadn’t wanted us to go anyway.”
“Why not?”
“Because they were saying that it was all a big waste of time and we weren’t going to get any more signatures. So we went back the way we came and then we drove back out to I-75 and Mr. Hilliard got there and gave us about twice as much money as we expected. And we left for Florida. Period. That’s it.”
“Did you see Miss Mae-Lula Hilliard that morning?”
“Who’s that?”
“The one you had the argument with at the grocery store. The short one with white hair who was doing most of the talking.”
“No, sir. I only saw her that one time at the grocery store. Why?”
“You didn’t go up to her house, ring the doorbell, knock or anything?”
“Is that the house next to the one where the blonde was?”
“Yes.”
“I said not. We knew she lived there, I mean, we didn’t know her name but we knew she lived there. “
“Let’s go back to the girl a minute. The blonde. Did she give you her address or her phone number?”
“No,” Rocker said. “She mighta put it on the petition, but we gave those to Mr. Hilliard.”
Sam sat and thought a while.
“Did you see her again after she signed the petition?”
“Yeah,” Rocker said, “When we went back past the office. She came out the door right then and threw this cat down the steps.
“Did you say cat?”
“That’s right,” Rocker said, smiling a little at the memory. “I mean the door flies open and out comes the blonde and she just throws this cat out, and then she sees us and sort of waves and we wave back and then she goes back inside.”
“What’d the cat look like?” Sam asked.
Lt. Lopez gave Sam a sad and questioning look.
“Do you remember what the cat looked like?” Sam persisted.
“It was just a plain cat. Like spotted or something.” Rocker was sounding impatient.
“Do you know how to run a dishwasher?”
“What?”
“Do you know how to run a dishwasher? Did you have one at home growing up? You ever loaded one and started it?”
Lt. Lopez gave Sam a perplexed and doleful stare. She seemed to be changing sides.
“Yes, we had one,” Rocker said, looking baffled. “Of course we had a dishwasher.”
“Was it the built-in kind or the kind that you have to hook up?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Rocker groaned “What do you mean hook it up? How do you hook up a dishwasher? What’s all this with the cat and the dishwasher?”
Lt. Lopez reached over and patted Rocker’s hand.
“Calm down,” she said. “You’re doing fine. Just stay calm.”
“I am trying my damndest to answer all his questions,” Rocker said to her, “but this isn’t even making sense.”
Sam’s cell phone rang.
“I can save you some time on the Borders case,” T.J. said, “They didn’t do it. Rocker got a speeding ticket Tuesday night around 11:30, right here in Jacksonville. As for the other murder, I don’t think Eric has a clue that anybody’s even dead in Merchantsville. He did tell me one interesting thing though. There’s some kind of derelict living in the conservatory. “
“Thanks,” Sam said, and then he turned back to Rocker.
“Okay, we’re going to wrap this up,” he said. “What time did you and Eric get back to the Waffle House?”
“It was after 12 sometime,” Rocker said. “We went by MacDonald’s and got some burgers on the way out there.
“Did you get there before Mr. Hilliard got there?”
“Yep. Yes, Sir.”
“Now, do you remember that I told you Eric was going to be asked for pretty much the same information? I’m hoping that’s the way it’s going to be when we compare notes. Have you got anything you want to add before we finish?”
Rocker stared at Sam gloomily and then let out a big sigh.
“Okay,” he said. “Two things.”
Sam waited.
“First, you asked me if we saw anybody else around that neighborhood, and I said we didn’t but there’s this bad looking old homeless guy living in that conservatory building, and as sure as I don’t tell you it’ll turn out Eric did. This old guy signed the petition. We saw him coming out of one of the windows in the back, and he wanted a couple of dollars, so we gave it to him, and then he was talking this crazy preacher talk one minute and talking ordinary the next, and he just about begged us not to tell anybody he was staying in there, and we said we wouldn’t. He was kinda crazy acting but he wasn’t hurting anything.”
“Describe him for me.”
“Skinny white guy,” Rocker said. “Missing some teeth. Gray hair, but I don’t think he was all that old ‘cause he climbed out that window pretty good. He just had that homeless look. Stunk. Smelled like whiskey.”
“What was the other thing?”
“Eric pulled up a sign in front of that old lady’s house, the mansion, and threw it in the road. Now are you going to put us in jail for that, or what?”
“No,” Sam said. “No, I’m not going to put you in jail for anything.”
A half hour later, following Sam’s call, Taneesha and Bub Williston were at the old Hilliard Conservatory site, trying to talk the homeless man out of the basement of the building so that they didn’t have to go in after him. Taneesha had caught him once in the glare of her flashlight, but now he was hiding.
“We’re not gon’ hurt you, man,” Bub called through the space where the whole window frame had just rotted out. It had been boarded up, but had been pulled loose, boards and all, and was leaning across the open space, partially hidden by an overgrown azalea.
“We just need for you to get out of there. We’ll get you something to eat and a place to stay,” Taneesha called. “If you don’t come on out, we’re coming in,” and we don’t want to be chasing you around and putting you in cuffs. We just want you to come on out by yourself.
“Whatcha like to eat?” Bub asked.
“Soup,” a voice came back. “Chicken soup with rice and lotsa soda crackers. And I ain’t goin’ to Central State, ‘cause ain’t nothin’ but crazy people there. I wanta go to the Salvation. They know me up there in Macon.
“I gotta ask my boss about that,” Taneesha said, “but he’s a good guy. If you’re not in any more trouble than trespassing, he’ll get y
ou up there.”
“Okay, Lemme finish my whiskey,” the voice came back.
Taneesha used her flashlight again and this time she located him, sitting on the floor, with a bottle in his hand.
She glanced down at her watch.
“I’ve got a half hour before Bethie gets out of school,” she said to Bub. “Can you handle this once he comes out? Just take him over to the jail. I’ll call ahead from my car.”
“It’s not gonna take you any half hour to get to the elementary school,” Bub said.
I didn’t say it was. It’s just that one of us has to go get the man’s chicken soup and saltines, and I can do it on the way. “
Chapter 14
IT WAS JUST AFTER 4 P.M. when Hunter came to the sheriff’s office to see Taneesha and met Bethany Bailey for the first time. Taneesha looked harried.
Sam Bailey’s daughter was seven or eight, Hunter thought. She was a wispy little girl with long straight blond hair, and glasses that seemed to magnify her blue eyes.
“Bethie,” Taneesha said, “This is Miss Hunter. Miss Hunter this is Bethie. She’s staying with us until her daddy gets back from Jacksonville.”
“Or until my Gramma gets back from Atlanta,” Bethie said. “My Uncle Jack is driving her down here, because her car is broke again, and they just had a new baby, named Hannah Marie Bailey…” she stopped for breath and continued, “and my Aunt Marianne is still is the hospital, so Uncle Jack had to get Sissy and Jason from their school and they’re probably on their way now, but I think Daddy may get here first because he’s in Mr. Bubba’s airplane. “
Hunter smiled at Bethie and turned to Taneesha.
“I brought you the chip,” she said. “
Bethie tugged at Hunter’s sleeve.
You’re the lady who’s got the kittens, aren’t you?”
Hunter smiled, “Yes I am. How did you know that?”
“Miss ‘Neesha told me your cat had kittens,” Bethie said, “and I’m going to tell my daddy, because I want a kitten. See, my mom is allergic to cats and puppies and everything, but now she lives in Nashville and Daddy promised me like a hundred times that I could get a kitten when it was kitten season and now it must be kitten season. What color are they?
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