Murder with a Twist

by Allyson K. Abbott

  “There is an ex-husband,” Mitch said. “A guy named Jamie Cooper. We found out he worked as a car salesman over in Brookfield up until a month ago. Apparently he got fired for showing up drunk to work. His boss gave us an address out in Glendale, an apartment he thought Cooper was staying at, but the roommate there, Jason, said he hasn’t seen Cooper for the past week. Jason said Cooper went on a bit of a bender after getting fired, couldn’t come up with his overdue rent money, and then disappeared. So far we haven’t been able to find him. He wasn’t scheduled to work today and he isn’t at home. The roommate figured he’d found someone else to mooch off of for a while.”

  “Any idea who the new mooch victim might be?” Carter asked.

  “Not sure,” Mitch said. “The roommate told us Cooper had recently started talking about a girl he met named Valeria Barnes, but he doesn’t know if the two are now living together or not.”

  Sam said, “Have you talked to this girl yet? It’s not uncommon for a girlfriend to be jealous of the ex-wife and her connection to the ex because of their kid.”

  “We haven’t been able to find her, ” Mitch said. “There is no one with that name listed in the phone directories, the utility rosters, or with DMV. So either the name is one she made up, or she’s someone who lives totally off the radar, which in this day and age is unlikely unless she’s a homeless person. Based on the description of her that we got from the roommate, who only saw her once from a distance when she was outside waiting for Jamie, she is clean, well groomed, and nicely dressed. So I doubt she’s homeless.”

  “So no one has seen the ex-husband or his girlfriend for a week,” Carter summarized. “They sound like potential suspects to me.”

  “Yeah,” Mitch said. “Until we can find them and question him, those two are at the top of our list.”

  “But why would they kill the mother and take the kid?” Sam asked. “What’s the motive? Did the father want custody bad enough to do something like this?”

  Steve and Mitch both shrugged. “Don’t know,” Mitch said, clearly the more talkative of the two cops. “We haven’t had much time to work up a profile on the guy yet.”

  Cora shared what she’d discovered earlier from the public area of the Circuit Court Access site. “The divorce between Belinda and Jamie wasn’t a pleasant one,” she told the group. “They fought pretty bitterly over the kid and in the end Belinda got sole custody because of some allegations about a drinking problem and some abuse in Jamie’s past.”

  Sam, still in his psychologist mode, pushed his idea a little further. “Were there any signs that whoever killed her knew her? Was her face covered up? Was she stabbed in places that might suggest the killer had issues with her?”

  I watched both Steve and Mitch closely as they fielded this one, knowing that they likely knew, as did I, about the attempted strangulation. But they were good. Their expressions gave nothing away. Once again it was Mitch who provided an answer. “Most of the wounds were on her torso and she was stabbed from behind.”

  “Stabbed in the back?” Holly said with a grimace. “That might be a message.”

  I knew that was unlikely based on what Duncan had told me, but it was something I didn’t share. When the killer had tried to strangle Belinda, he or she had come at her from behind with the panty hose. But Belinda had fought hard enough to make the stranglehold ineffective, forcing the killer to grab a pair of scissors and stab her instead. From the way it appeared, stabbing her in the back had been more a matter of desperation than any sort of diabolical message. The weapon of choice was one other tidbit of information that the cops were holding back for now, to weed out the crazies who might try to confess to the crime merely for attention. As it stood now, the media had said that Belinda Cooper was stabbed to death, and the presumption on the part of the public was that a knife was used.

  Still searching for motives, Sam asked, “Is there any family money involved? Might someone have kidnapped the kid for ransom?”

  “But why kill the mother if that’s the case?” Holly posed. “Why not just take the kid? I mean, who’s going to pay the ransom if the parent is dead?”

  Carter said, “Maybe killing the mother is the kidnapper’s way of telling the rest of the family that the perpetrators are deadly serious,” Carter said. “It sends the message that they aren’t fooling around. Meet their demands or else . . .”

  The implied result made everyone in the group wince.

  “So how about it, guys?” Sam asked the two cops. “Is there any family money?”

  This time Steve answered. “We don’t know, but it doesn’t look like it. Based on what the cops in Ohio told us, Belinda’s family appears to be average, lower- to middle-class folk. We don’t know about Jamie’s yet, but he can’t be living high on the hog. His employer said he had the lowest sales of anyone on the payroll.”

  “Was the kid’s mother dating or seeing anyone?”

  “Not that we’ve found,” Mitch said. “For all intents and purposes, her life revolved around her job and her kid. We haven’t learned of any outside interests or activities she was involved in, nor does she have any family in the immediate area. Belinda and Davey Cooper pretty much kept to themselves.”

  “Where did she work?” Holly asked.

  “At a day care center over on the west side of town,” Mitch said. “She took her kid to work with her every day, so I’m guessing they weren’t apart much.”

  “Well, they’re apart now,” I said, feeling sad as I recalled the adoring expression on Belinda’s face in the photos. “Forever.”

  Chapter 17

  Duncan returned just before closing, crooked a finger at me, and headed for my office. I excused myself from the others and headed that way. Once we were both inside with the door closed, Duncan said, “The task force on this case will be working all night, but so far all we’ve uncovered are a lot of dead ends. If they don’t find the kid tonight, I’ll need to canvass some of the Coopers’ neighbors first thing in the morning, and I’d like you to come along, if you don’t mind. Give me your take on what they say and how they say it.”

  “You want me to be a human lie detector?”

  He shrugged and grinned. “Pretty much, yeah. I’ve seen you do it and frankly I think you’re more reliable than the machines.”

  I frowned when he said this but it was more of a reflexive reaction than a reflection of actual feelings. To be honest, I kind of enjoyed that aspect of my abilities. When I was younger, I figured out early on that I had the ability to tell when my father was lying to me, and I also figured out that not all lies are bad. Sometimes he would tell me little white lies that were intended to make me feel better and, after exposing them as such, I realized that I hurt his feelings by doing so. I learned that my father’s need to protect me, or at least feel like he was protecting me, was very important to him, so I started letting the white lies go by and pretending I bought into them.

  It didn’t take me long to realize that customers who came into the bar lied all the time. They lied to other customers, they lied to my father and me, they lied to our staff, and at times they lied to themselves, though these last ones were sometimes harder to pick up on. Occasionally, I would meet someone who never seemed to lie at all, and as I got older and savvier about people in general, I realized that these were the truly dangerous people, the sociopathic types who could lie without compunction. It was the guilt, that tiny sense of awkwardness most of us feel when we tell a lie, that allowed me to pick up on it. It’s that underlying awareness that we’re being deceptive, and the associated guilt that goes with it. It’s the same thing that makes our pulse and blood pressure change, or our sweat glands produce a bit more, which is what a conventional lie detector detects. But those subtle little changes also affect the way our voices sound, and while most people aren’t aware of these very minuscule changes, I am—not because I hear them but because I taste or see them.

  Oddly enough, it’s also how I can tell when a customer in the b
ar needs to be cut off. Speech is affected by one’s degree of inebriation just as other bodily functions are, and I can see the change before others become aware of it via the person’s slurred speech or other physical indicators like staggered steps.

  I remember one customer in particular, a man named Rolly, who my father would often have me watch, because when Rolly drank too much, he became nasty and violent, trying to pick fights with other customers. Twice it resulted in disaster: once when Rolly picked a fight with another customer and the end result was Rolly’s arrest and over a thousand dollars’ worth of damage to our bar, and once when Rolly picked a fight with the wrong guy on a bus and ended up in the hospital with a broken arm, a broken nose, and a very bad concussion. Rolly was a pleasant enough soul when he was sober, or when he only had a few drinks under his belt. But there was a line he would sometimes cross and, when he went over it, all hell broke loose. I could tell when he was getting close to that line because Rolly’s voice typically tasted like scrambled eggs to me—bland, boring, and ordinary. But the more Rolly drank, the spicier those eggs would get, as if they were seasoned with pepper, then onions. If he stopped at this point, he was generally okay, but if he continued to drink past the onion stage, his voice began to taste like someone had doused the eggs with Tabasco sauce. My job was to warn my father when Rolly’s voice started tasting spicy so we could cut him off and send him home.

  Everyone’s voice triggers some sort of manifestation for me, but if I focused on them all the time my life would be a chaotic mess of smells, and occasionally images. I learned at a young age to mentally push these extra senses aside, much the same way one might try to ignore an itch they can’t scratch for some reason. But if I choose to focus on them, they become crystal clear to me. And that’s exactly what Duncan wanted me to do.

  “I’m happy to try to help you,” I told him, and then I added a caveat. “But remember, just because someone is lying, it doesn’t mean they’re guilty.”

  “Yes, I know,” Duncan said in the sort of patronizing tone of voice one might use on a stupid child.

  “I’ve spent more time with you today than I have with my bar. If this is the way things are going to be, I’m going to have to set some limits. I can’t spend the majority of my time helping you when I have a business to run, a business I depend upon for my livelihood.”

  “I realize that, and I promise you it won’t be like this all the time. If I’d known that this Cooper thing was going to happen, I never would have involved you in the Dan Thornton case. I did that first one mostly to help you wet your feet, to give you a trial run at it.”

  “And you didn’t really need me,” I said. “You would have figured that one out on your own.”

  “Probably, eventually,” Duncan agreed, albeit reluctantly. “But not as fast as we did. Still, it’s water under the bridge now. I’m sorry the day turned out like it did, but I really do need your help with this latest one. We have to find that little boy, and time is of the essence.”

  I suspected he knew quite well that if he mentioned the missing child in his appeal, it would get to me. And it worked. I sighed and nodded my acquiescence.

  “Thanks,” he said in a tone that made it sound like a mere formality and left me feeling a little taken for granted. “Will you need to get or do anything before we head out in the morning?”

  “My crystal ball, perhaps?” I shot back in a slightly irritated tone.

  “Do you have one?”

  “No, but if I did I’d be tempted to clobber you on the side of the head with it right about now.”

  “Then I’d have to arrest you,” Duncan said, taking a step closer to me. His tone of voice changed dramatically, and its accompanying taste changed as well, shifting from smooth milky chocolate to something darker, spicier, exciting, and different. As he gazed down at me, I saw his pupils dilate.

  “You would do that?”

  “In a heartbeat,” he said.

  “Would you handcuff me?” I asked in a low, sultry voice.

  Duncan sucked in his breath and the corners of his mouth twitched ever so slightly. He closed his eyes and sighed. I couldn’t help but smile because I knew I’d gotten to him.

  When he opened his eyes again, they looked different, softer. I wasn’t sure I liked the change. “Let’s talk about this,” he said. We were back to that smooth milk chocolate.

  “Talk about what? The case? What you want me to do?”

  “No, this,” he said, pointing a finger at first me, then himself. “This thing between the two of us.”

  “There’s a thing between the two of us?” I said in a half-joking voice. “I thought you were just buttering me up to get me to like and open up to you. I took you for someone who flirts with all of your female suspects.”

  “I do,” Duncan said with a wicked grin. “Flirt, that is, but I reserve that other part for the special women in my life.”

  “Women? Plural? Are there any others at the moment?”

  His face darkened and his grin faded. “Only you, at the moment.” Oddly, the chocolate turned bitter.

  I wondered who had been in his life before me. As handsome and outgoing as he was, I imagined he must have had women lining up to date him. “Anyone special in your past?” I asked. “I don’t know much about you. Have you ever been married?”

  “No, but I came very close once.”

  “You mean you were engaged?”

  “Closer than that, I’d say.” That comment had me confused and it must have shown. “I was left at the altar.”

  “Oh, no,” I said, genuinely shocked. “That must have been awful.”

  “It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever gone through. It’s the main reason I moved here, so I could get a new start in a new place with no memories.”

  I found this news disturbing. If he was still recovering from a broken heart, I wasn’t sure he was ready for any sort of long-term relationship with me. Then again, it was still early in our relationship and I needed to take things slow as much as he did. “If you need more time, maybe we should slow things down,” I said.

  “No, I’m good with where things are now.”

  I smiled, enjoying the closeness we shared, the heat I could feel radiating off his body. We weren’t touching, but the electricity hovering in what little space existed between us felt like enough to light the entire city. “Now I understand why it took you so long to make a move,” I told him. “You really did have me wondering there for a while.”

  “I didn’t want to trespass on someone else’s territory.”

  I had no idea what he meant by that and it was obvious from the confused look I gave him. “What are you talking about? Whose territory?”

  “Zach’s, of course.”

  “Zach? I haven’t seen him in six weeks. We broke up back when you were investigating Ginny’s murder.”

  “I didn’t know that. You never said anything. Neither did anyone else.”

  I gaped at him in disbelief. “Seriously? You are a detective, aren’t you? You didn’t notice that Zach hasn’t been around here for weeks, and that I haven’t mentioned him at all? If you were curious, why didn’t you just ask me, or anyone else for that matter?”

  Duncan shrugged. “Just because I didn’t see Zach here didn’t mean you weren’t seeing him elsewhere. To be honest, I thought the reason you didn’t mention him around me was because you thought it would be awkward. And I did ask someone else. I asked the Signoriello brothers, Debra, and Billy. They all shrugged and said they had no idea.”

  I smiled at that. “My employees and the customers who know me best are careful to protect me, because they know I tend to be a bit rabid on the subject of my privacy. They’re my extended family; they look out for me. So until you make your intentions known, I don’t think any of them will tell you much. Even then, I suspect they’ll be pretty tight-lipped.”

  “I suppose it’s nice that you have that with them,” Duncan said, “though it certainly is a pain for me. I
’m glad most of my suspects aren’t as tight-lipped as your group of extended family, because if they were, I’d never solve a single case, even with your help.” He paused and sighed, his breath gently rustling my hair. “And that brings me to my other concern.”

  The seriousness in both his tone and his expression caused me to take an involuntary step back, widening the space between us. “You have a concern?” I said, hating the faint tremble I heard in my voice and hoping he didn’t pick up on it. I’ve always considered myself a strong woman and I hate looking or feeling vulnerable. It’s one of the reasons I haven’t had many romantic relationships so far in my life, and why the ones I have had were often limited. Opening myself up to someone else in that way doesn’t come easily for me.

  “It’s more of a professional concern,” Duncan said, and I breathed a hair easier. “I don’t want my relationship with you to color your interpretation of things. Sometimes I jump to conclusions, and while I’m often right, sometimes I’m wrong. I don’t want my assumptions or area of focus to interfere with your perceptions in any way, whether conscious or subconscious. Because, I believe in what you do, but I also believe that your interpretation of things can be subjective at times.”

  “Of course they’re subjective,” I said. “They’re my experiences, my interpretations. No one else could possibly understand them, and sometimes I think people have trouble even comprehending what happens to me. I thought that by using Cora to log my reactions, we were taking steps toward objectifying things more.”

  “That’s true, we are,” Duncan admitted. “And so far your reactions have proven to be reliably repeatable for the most part, something I was skeptical about in the beginning. But I’m worried that you might want to please me, or try to give me the answers I want to hear, rather than what you’re actually thinking, or feeling, or experiencing. How can I know that any feelings you have for me won’t color the reactions you’ll have down the road, the ones we haven’t recorded?”