SLEEPING DOGS (Animal Instincts Book 6)

by Chloe Kendrick

  Mr. Frias’ house was located on Starr Street, and I was guessing from the address and what I’d been told that it was in one of the grittier areas there. I pulled up in front of the house, whose grass was almost taller than my own. The garage door was open, and everyone could see a kaleidoscope of projects. There were paths between the stacks of materials and half-built machinery in the garage. I remembered what Gwen had said about how Belinda had kept a job for the steady income. This is what happened when that income went away.

  It didn’t bode well for him as a murder suspect. He had lost his security and now he had to live like this. Whatever motive he’d once had was now gone and he was left in a rundown part of the city. Poverty had risen drastically in Toledo, and visiting places like this didn’t let you forget that.

  I knocked on the door, assuming that he was at home given that the garage door was open. After a few seconds, a man came to the door. He wore a pair of jeans with numerous holes and smudges on them along with a t-shirt that had once been white.

  A Pit Bull stood behind him. The dog didn’t growl, but I knew their reputation. I was a bit tense, but as I watched the dog, I saw all the signs that said this was just a pet and not a vicious killer. The stance was off for attack, and the attitude was anything but aggressive.

  “What?” the man said, stroking the dog’s head absent-mindedly as he waited for my response.

  “I was hoping to ask you a few questions about your wife’s death.” I thought that an upfront approach would work best. Mr. Frias was likely busy and wouldn’t relish the chance to walk through memory lane with me. So I came to the point with my first sentence.

  “Are you the police?” he said. I could see him scrutinize my appearance, but my look was anything but official. My hair was buzzed, my jeans were worn, and I had an older jacket on. I was more likely to fit in here than at the police station.

  “No, actually I’m looking into my sister’s disappearance, and I think your wife’s murder might be related to it.” I explained the situation. Everyone who had lived in Toledo for over 10 years had heard of the Susan Fitzpatrick case. I rarely introduced myself as such, because I’d grown to hate the questions and looks, but now I was trying to get information out of a man who had no reason to tell me anything. By trying to give us something in common, the loss of a loved one and the media circus that followed, I hoped to get him to talk about the murder.

  He nodded. “I remember that case like it was yesterday. Normally, I’d throw your ass out of here, but I understand. You’re a kindred spirit as it were. Come on in.” He stood back and motioned for me to enter. I walked in and waited for him in what could loosely be called a living room. The area had thread-bare carpeting and two wooden chairs.

  “I don’t entertain much,” he said as he took one of the chairs. The dog came over and sniffed me while I tried to get comfortable in the other chair. He licked my hand a few times, but quickly lost interest and went over to his owner.

  “I understand. I don’t either.” I thought back to my own home though, which had matching furniture and plush carpet. I had kept up the appearance of normality in my own life, even though I’d tried to maintain a low profile. In many respects, being overtly normal is the best way to be invisible. We see so many split-levels with two cars and a few toys out in front of the house that we neglect to pay any attention to the people who live there.

  “So what do you want to know? Why would you think that these two things are related?”

  I gave him a brief outline that my sister had begun to look for tickets out of Toledo the day following the murder, and I felt that it was likely that she’d seen the murder take place. He listened carefully, but he didn’t speak. He just nodded and continued to pet the dog. He didn’t seem to be overly upset about his wife’s death, but it was hard to gauge what a normal reaction was for grief after more than a dozen years had passed. If he’d been more upset, I think I would have been more suspicious. He’d apparently moved on, even if the move had been down the socio-economic scale.

  “So I am looking into the murder in hopes of finding out what she might have seen and how that might be related to the murder.” I paused and waited for him to respond.

  Finally, he spoke. “I’d love to be able to help you. I know that Belinda would have liked that as well. She was big on helping people. But I just don’t know anything about it. She went to work like it was any other day, and she never came home.”

  “The family found the body? It wasn’t time for her to come home?” I’d actually made up a list of questions for the husband while I’d been walking the dog. I wanted to be prepared in case he was hostile, and I only had a few minutes to ask questions.

  “Yeah. I only went and picked her up at the end of the day. Quitting time for her on that day was usually 6pm, but that night, she’d called and asked if I could pick her up an hour later. She said she was running behind, something about a mess from the first house she cleaned that day.”

  I checked my notes. “The Wagners? That was her first house, I think.”

  He shrugged. “I didn’t bother with the names. I only knew the addresses. They were the family who lived next to the Gillespies. Nice house, big place.” I wondered if he was thinking of their home in comparison to where he lived now. It would have made him pensive.

  “You met them?” I asked, not sure how a cleaning lady worked. I have never had the funds to hire any help. I don’t think that she would have approved of the way I kept house anyway.

  “Yeah, a few times, when I picked her up at the end of the day. Typically she did their house last, after the Gillespies’ house.”

  “Did you ever talk to them?” I was curious to see what he might know about other clients. I hoped that he could provide me with any information on other clients that Belinda Frias might have had. It was odd that she’d switched her routine that day. I wondered if it had been a coincidence or if there had been an overt reason to change her schedule.

  “A few times. Just casual stuff. I saw them a couple of years ago, and they came up and talked to me. They offered their sympathy, but it seemed a little late for that. They could have come to the funeral if they cared so much. They still lived at the same address, which seemed odd, since I’d moved and the Gillespies had moved too. They were still at the same house.”

  “Okay, so the Wagners then. Did she say what had happen at their place? Any details about why she was running late?”

  “Eh, maybe, but honesty if she did, I didn’t pay attention. I was working on my own project, and I just jotted down the time I needed to get her, so I wouldn’t forget. The police took that paper when they started questioning me. So many times, I would only half hear her. I feel bad about that now.”

  “What project were you working on? Do you remember?” I wanted to keep him talking and I thought that perhaps some talk about himself would help.

  “Yeah, that I remember. I’d come up with a computer app. I was testing it at the time. It was great. However, by the time that the police had interviewed me twenty times and all of that, I lost the momentum on the project. I never got back to it.” He put a hand to his face and rested his palm over his brow, as if the mere thought of this gave him great pain. These projects didn’t look like any version of app development. They looked metal, real with hard materials that wouldn’t bend. I wondered if he’d changed his projects after his wife’s death.

  “So she was running late. The police said that the Gillespies found the body at 7pm. You weren’t already there to pick her up?” I was trying to play with the timetable to make this work out.

  “I was late too. There was some traffic, and it took me an extra 15 minutes to get there. So I pulled in around 7:15. When I arrived, the police had already been called. I had to wait in my car until they talked to me. They warned me that I didn’t want to see the body, and I knew that I didn’t. I loved that woman, but blood makes me pass out. I’d have been no help to anyone if I was face down on the floor.”

&nbs
p; I remembered the photos I’d seen and the blood splatter all over the room. My guess is that whoever had killed her had been drenched in it. His arrival in time for the police wouldn’t have mattered if Susan had seen him at the crime scene. She would have seen him nearly an hour earlier. That was plenty of time for him to drive home, work some more, and then go back at 7pm.

  “Are your projects yours alone, or do you work with other people?” I asked, trying to skirt the issue of an alibi.

  “I don’t have an alibi, if that’s what you’re asking. I work alone. I always have. The police tried to find someone who could put me at our house that evening, but they couldn’t. So I have no alibi except for my word.”

  “But you didn’t do it, right?” I’d heard this from so many people and Sheila had told me stories where people had sworn their innocence while carrying the murder weapon that the question was just to get him talking.

  “Look at where I ended up. I’m living in one of the worst parts of town in a dump with my dog. I had a nice house and a nice life. Even I knew that I had it good. Why would I give that up?”

  “Do your projects sell?” I wanted to know more about what he did and how he paid any bills. Maybe he’d made some money and decided to be rid of his wife, but I couldn’t see what he’d replaced her with. Few women would want to live in this manner.

  “Yeah, sometimes. It’s just that they don’t pay often enough or exactly when you finish. Everything has a waiting period before you get paid. The bill collectors don’t want to hear that you have the money in your accounts receivable, but you can’t get others to pay you so that you can pay them. There’s a certain irony in that.”

  I nodded. “Thanks. Did you know the Gillespies’ dog?”

  The man laughed. “You jump around more than anyone I ever met. Yeah, I knew the dog. Name was Rex, or Rexy or something like that. Nice dog.”

  “Did it ever bark at you?” I was still trying to get to the bottom of that idea. Gwen had shot it down, but I wanted to hear more from other witnesses before I crossed it off the list.

  “Not that I remember. It was pretty laid back. He never gave Belinda any trouble that I knew of, and she would sometimes let herself into the house and work. A lot of times the entire family would be out of the house. She actually liked it better that way.” He petted his own dog who was now laying with its legs up in the air and getting belly rubs. He knew what laid back was.

  I got up to leave, and he followed me to the door. “For what it’s worth, and I know it’s not much, I always thought that the Gillespies had something to do with it. They were way too nervous afterwards, and then they up and leave the country. Seems very odd indeed.”

  I nodded and headed back to my car. I’d gotten about as much from him as I hoped I could. He didn’t have an alibi, but he didn’t have a motive either. All in all, not much help.

  Sheila was waiting for me when I got home again. She looked much better than she had when I’d seen her last. She was wearing a pants suit, which meant that she was either going to or coming from work. She wore nothing but pants suits for her role as detective. I wasn’t sure if someone had told her that it looked professional, but I imagined that she had an entire closet of these things at home. I didn’t know what home looked like, because as of yet, I had never seen the inside of her place, at least not with her in it. My only entrance had been when she’d been attacked, and at that point, I’d been more interested in finding the missing police report than looking around to learn more about her wardrobe. That would have to wait for another time.

  She greeted me with a hug and a smile. “How goes the investigation?” she asked.

  I rolled my eyes. “First things first,” I said as I kissed her. My lips grazed hers, and I slipped my arms around her. I felt a bit more proprietary about her since she’d been attacked. I knew that she took it with a grain of salt. It was part of her job, but I had never even dated anyone before, so this was all new.

  She pulled away after a minute. “Don’t get all mushy on me, Griff. I need you to stay focused on what’s important. You need to get this matter wrapped up. I’d like to see all of this behind you.”

  I thought that she was important. However, I didn’t seem to get that feeling from her. Not for the first time since we’d started dating, I wished that I had someone to talk to about women. In my teen years, when most people learn about these things, my sister had disappeared. No one had stopped to discuss dating or crushes or first kisses. We’d talked about BOLOs, the FBI and possible sex offenders in the area. I’d grown up with a police investigation, so it really made sense that I could look into a murder or a missing person case.

  Instead of dating and kissing and wondering about girls during school, I’d preferred to stay by myself. I’d been set adrift into adulthood with no idea what I was doing.

  If I knew someone that I could have talked to about this, I would have. I thought about calling my brother in Denver, but I wondered what he’d think of me for not understanding what were probably perfectly obvious clues to a relationship.

  For a second, I thought about calling Susan with this matter. Letting her have a first row seat for what she’d done to her family and to me, specifically. I wondered how she would react to that. If the first call was any indication, it would probably end with another hang up.

  So I was stuck with trying to figure out things on my own. It wasn’t easy, given that I was this close to the relationship, but it was all I had to work with.

  “So what’s important?” I asked. “I’ve found Susan. I’m trying to get her home – without much luck. So I really can focus on some other things at the moment.”

  She grunted. “There’s still quite a bit to sort out. I located the autopsy report for Belinda Frias. I can understand why it might have been pulled.”

  She handed me a sheaf of papers. Sheila was not the type to tell me things outright. She usually just created the circumstances to allow me to determine the truth on my own. The autopsy report would be another example of this. I read through the pages twice and then looked at her. “Belinda Frias was pregnant?”

  “Five will get you ten that it wasn’t the husband’s either.” Sheila looked grim. I knew that part of this was just her demeanor. She was always ready to suspect the husband of murder or a lover impregnating a woman. She was more cynical about the world than I could ever be.

  “So we have a motive, finally.” I thought about who the lover could be. If the man had been married, then he’d likely not want to have to tell his wife that he’d knocked up the maid. That would be the end of the marriage. I hadn’t talked to any married men so far about the crime. The Gillespie son was single, or at the very least he hadn’t indicated he was married. Besides he would have been in his late teens at the time of the murder.

  Perhaps Mr. Gillespie would have been interested in the maid. I couldn’t get past the alibi at this point, but I’d seen them altered before. Also the neighbor next door, Frias’ client from earlier the day of the murder, had been married. These two men were by far the best bets for a possible killer, given this motive if the baby truly didn’t belong to the husband.

  “Anything else in there worth reading?” I asked. I still wasn’t sure how this fell in with Susan’s disappearance, but it felt good to finally have a reason for the murder. Of course, I tempered my excitement by reminding myself that the police had obtained all of this information, and nothing had come of it.

  “Not much. No DNA under the fingernails. No signs of defensive wounds. So it’s likely that she knew the killer and didn’t think of him or her as a threat until it was too late. Just more evidence that this was not a random crime. Someone who knew her killed her.”

  I nodded. “What about the missing interviews? Any luck in finding those?” I wondered what had been said to the investigators that someone had yanked from the files. How many secrets were involved in this case?

  Sheila sat down on the sofa. She was known for making herself at home, but I co
uld tell that some of this case from the injuries she’d received. She looked tired, and there were bags under her eyes. “No interviews. They’re gone for good, or at least more gone than I can find. I’ve written down the names of the people who were interviewed, so you can question them if you can find them.”

  “So what next?” I asked.

  “This is your case, Griff. You are in charge. I’m behind at work from being off with a concussion, and they’re asking me all sorts of questions about the attack. Plus I think the brass might be getting wind of the fact that I’m not working on the cases I should be working on. So I need to cool it for a while. I like my job, and I don’t want to jeopardize it.”

  I nodded. I understood. This really was my case and my journey of understanding myself and my family. While Sheila might be able to add some guidance, I was the person who had to follow through on it. I had thought back to the first months of looking into Susan’s disappearance, where I’d actually let the police file on her disappearance sit on my dining room table for months before opening it. Now I had no problem in taking the investigation where it needed to go next.

  So I outlined what I was going to do next. I wanted to talk to the neighbors, the Wagners, who had also hired Frias. He was married, so perhaps he had the motive to get rid of a pregnant boyfriend. Then I was going to try to talk to my mother without Siever around. I thought that perhaps I could get more out of her alone than with her police protection. Following that, it would be the follow-up interviews with the two missing records from the police report.

  Sheila nodded, but didn’t speak. I could still feel the tiredness emanating from her.

  “I think we make a pretty good team,” I said with a grin.