Liar

by Campbell, Jamie

  “I can speak to your boss for you.”

  “I’ve never been involved in an investigation before. You realize I have no idea what I’m doing? I’m probably more of a liability than an asset.”

  Leo shrugged, determined to find a solution for every obstacle she put in the way. “I know what I’m doing, I’ll guide you through it.”

  “Could it be dangerous?”

  “Yes,” he said simply, she knew he was telling the truth and was relieved he didn’t lie about it. “But I will protect you and do everything I can to keep you safe. I have no intention of putting you in harm’s way.”

  Amelia tried so hard to find a good excuse but nothing else was coming to her. A part of her knew she was going to agree to it anyway, but she had to try. It was difficult to say no to the detective, he made it virtually impossible.

  “I guess we’d better get going then,” she sighed, picking up her handbag and turning off her computer. “But you’re going to have to speak with my boss, and I warn you, she’s scary.”

  “Leave it with me.” Leo nodded and took off, leaving Amelia to grin to herself like a schoolgirl.

  * * *

  The Armstrong Inn was not the kind of place Amelia frequented. Besides being dark, sticky, and covered in a layer of grime, it was also full of sweaty and dirty men. As she walked through, she was considerably grateful for the cop at her side. If she was there alone, she thought for sure they would eat her alive.

  As they crossed the floor to the bar area, if felt like every single pair of eyes were on them. The only way Amelia could have felt more uncomfortable would be if she was stark naked. She inched closer to Leo, making sure everybody saw that she was with him. And he carried a gun.

  They took a seat at the bar, Leo looked around keenly for the barman. If anyone remembered seeing Blake Turner, it was going to be the guy that served him. Leo caught his eye and signaled for him.

  “What can I get you?” He was probably no more than twenty-three and wore a complete day’s stubble on his chin. Judging by his slightly red nose, he probably enjoyed too much of the alcohol himself.

  Leo flashed his police badge quickly and returned it to his jacket pocket. It didn’t escape Amelia’s attention that he wasn’t wearing it clipped to his belt anymore. He probably wasn’t meant to be using it at all.

  “Have you seen this man in here?” He held up a photograph of Blake Turner, his mug shot. “He could have been asking around for work?”

  “That’s the guy from the news,” the barkeep nodded as he started putting away grimy glasses. “Yeah, he was in here. He would come in for the lunch rush and then again in the evening too. He never ordered anything, that’s why he stands out. My boss kept telling me to throw him out but I didn’t have the heart.”

  Amelia smiled, knowing he was telling the truth. Perhaps she had been too quick to judge him as an alcoholic vagabond who didn’t shave.

  “Do you know what he was in here for?” Leo asked, already knowing the answer. He needed to test the man’s truthfulness for himself. He had ways of discerning lies too.

  The barman shrugged. “He was always talking to people. He asked if we had any openings here so I figured he was looking for a job.”

  Leo nodded. “Did he ever talk to you about anything besides a job?”

  “No, he didn’t seem like the talkative type.”

  Amelia strained to hear the truth, thinking it sounded like a lie. Yet nothing came. Either the barman was the first person in history that could lie to her, or he was telling the complete truth about Turner.

  “Did he talk with anyone in particular? Maybe some regulars?”

  The barman shook his head. “He spoke with everyone. I got the feeling he was pretty desperate.”

  Leo turned to Amelia. “Do you have any questions?”

  She just had one. “Do you declare all your cash tips in your tax return?”

  Both the men stopped to look at her like she was crazy. She didn’t break her eye contact with the barman. Finally, he answered. “Of course I do.” I never do, she heard.

  Satisfied, she didn’t need to hear anything further. The barman couldn’t lie to her, everything was still right in her world. “That’s all the questions I have.”

  Leo thanked the barman and turned around to face the rest of the pub. He surveyed the patrons. Despite the odd few that were keeping to themselves, the room was full of men in work clothes. High visibility shirts and thick, hardwearing trousers seemed to be the dress code. From the steel-capped boots on their feet to their hair matted down from hard-hats they were prepared for a hard day’s work of manual labor.

  But it wasn’t the workers that Leo was searching for, he was looking for those higher up the ladder. If Turner was looking for work, he would have focused on those with the ability to hire. He needed to find the supervisors amongst them.

  “What are we looking for?” Amelia asked after she had scanned the crowd several times while waiting for him to make a move. They all looked like dirty, and probably smelly, men. If their taste in eateries was anything to go by, they probably weren’t fussed at all by their appearance.

  “I’m trying to get into the mindset of Turner. He came here twice a day for a reason. Who would I target for a job?”

  Amelia turned around and tried to do the same thing. She had only ever had a few jobs and she didn’t have to beg someone to be hired for them. It wouldn’t have been a good experience. She suddenly felt a pang of sympathy for Turner. He wouldn’t have known where his next paycheck was coming from or how they were going to make the house payment. He would have been desperate, so she tried to do the same thing.

  The common trait amongst the men seemed to be that they were all hot and tired but still in good spirits. There also wasn’t one alcoholic drink amongst them. It was good to see the work safety officers were on the ball.

  At the long table closest to the bar sat just under a dozen men. They were eating burgers and fries, washing the meal down with soda. They were talking animatedly around the table but there was one man in particular that caught her attention. He sat in the middle of the table and was just that bit more restrained than the others. He was the boss.

  “That guy, over there.” Amelia pointed to him. “I think he’s a supervisor.”

  “I was thinking the same thing,” Leo agreed.

  They slid off the barstools and headed directly for the table. Leo flashed his badge quickly to get the men’s attention. A quiet hush came over them.

  The guy in the middle spoke first. “Can I help you, officer?”

  Leo held up Turner’s mug shot. “Have any of you seen this man? His name is Blake Turner and he usually hung out here at lunchtime and in the evenings.”

  He moved the picture around so everyone at the table could get a look. To their credit, they did have a good study and not just a brief glance.

  “He was probably looking for a job,” Leo continued when he was faced with nothing but silence.

  The middle guy nodded. “I hired him once.”

  “Mind if we have a word then?”

  The man got to his feet and followed them to a more private booth. They took a seat across from him.

  “Your name, sir?” Leo asked, taking out his notebook from his pocket. He waited with his pen poised.

  “Matt Tann.”

  “Thank you. What can you tell me about him?”

  “Like I said, I hired him for a job.” Matt spoke plainly, his hands resting on the table openly in front of him. “He worked for me for a day and I had to let him go.”

  “Why?” Leo thought one day wasn’t exactly enough time to know someone’s work ethic. But when workers were a dime a dozen, he guessed you didn’t need to know much.

  “I gave him the job of cleaning the work site. All he had to do was pick up the rubbish and sweep. The guy couldn’t even do that. I found him sitting down on the job when it was only half done.”

  “Did he offer an explanation?”

&nbs
p; “Said he would finish everything. But that would have taken all night and I had to lock up at six. I paid him for a few hours and told him to get out. I have a boss to answer to as well, you know?” Matt shrugged.

  So far, Amelia had heard the truth but she didn’t know for how long. It was time to ask some trickier questions. “Did he talk about anything besides work?”

  “He kept to himself.” The truth.

  “Do you know if anyone else hired him?”

  “I’ve seen him speaking with a few of the guys.” Matt nodded. “I warned them against it but some people like to see things with their own eyes.”

  Amelia tried to think of anything else that might help but she couldn’t. It seemed like Matt Tann really didn’t have much to do with Turner except for their one transaction.

  Leo leaned forward, making eye contact with the man. “Turner has confessed to a murder. Did he give you any indication that he might be capable of such a crime?”

  Matt’s eyes opened in surprise. “No, not at all. He struggled to clean up the site and even that left him puffing. If he killed someone, it must have been by poisoning them. He wasn’t strong enough for anything else.”

  “What about a child?” Amelia asked.

  “He killed a child?” As the realization was setting in, she could read it in Matt’s face. “He killed that little boy? The one from the news? I have a son his age.”

  “Could he have killed a child?” Amelia repeated, not letting him dodge the question. Dodging was almost as bad as outright lying.

  “I guess anything is possible,” Matt said. “I suppose you don’t know what people are capable of.”

  Amelia shared a quick look with Leo, silently telling him she was satisfied with his answers. She hadn’t heard any lies and the guy seemed to be genuine. He didn’t have any great insight into Blake Turner.

  They let Matt go after he pointed out a few of the others in the pub that he knew Turner had spoken with. They spent the next hour speaking with them in turn.

  Besides the few small lies that betrayed the men’s own egos rather than anything about their confessor, nothing they said revealed anything of use. Each story was starting to sound very similar. They would hire Turner and then have to turn around and fire him again shortly after. He had quite the reputation as a lazy worker and was soon blacklisted from every construction site in the area.

  Leo and Amelia slumped back into the car, glad they had covered so much ground in such a short period of time. According to the barman, it was usually the same crowd that showed up after work too. Except by then there would definitely be alcohol involved – and lots of it. At least they wouldn’t have to come back for the second round.

  CHAPTER 5

  Amelia stared at the board in front of her, examining every inch of the detail. She had only ever seen murder boards on television before, she half suspected they were a prop invented by cop shows. She wasn’t expecting to see one at Detective Michaels’s house.

  “I hope it’s okay.” Leo handed her a cup of coffee. “Feel free to tell me if it’s not.”

  “I’m sure it will be fine, thank you.” She took a sip carefully. Besides being piping hot, it was adequate. “So this is all the information you have on Jordan’s murder?”

  “Everything. I managed to copy the file before I left the station.” He took a seat on the lounge in front of the board, watching her study the information. She seemed to be taking it all in, carefully looking at each of the facts and photographs he had stuck onto the whiteboard.

  There wasn’t much Leo hadn’t already committed to memory about the five year old’s case but everything was fresh to her. From the crime scene photographs to the original persons of interest, there was a lot of information gathered.

  Yet none of it led them to Blake Turner. There were no eye witness reports, no secret tip-offs, no DNA or circumstantial evidence that gave him away. He had popped up out of nowhere to declare his guilt. If he was the real killer, then it was unlikely they would have ever caught him.

  The thought made Leo nervous. If they did have the right guy in custody then he could have easily gotten away with it. Just like the real murderer would if he didn’t follow his instincts.

  Amelia finished her studying and took a seat on the lounge next to him. “So you want to walk me through all this? Photos and dot points can only tell me so much.”

  “Gladly.” Leo smiled. He stood up, and pointed to the photos as if he was a teacher, he walked her through every detail since they had received the phone call about a body being found.

  The call had come in during the early hours of the morning at 4:27 a.m. The pharmacy who owned the dumpster where the body was discarded called it in. They were near the hospital so they were open nearly twenty-four hours a day. When they were putting out the garbage for the week, they made the grim discovery. Jordan White was found face up, lying amongst the trash bags.

  No cop liked going to a fresh murder scene, and when the deceased was a child, it made it almost unbearable. Career beat police who had seen more than people should, could be reduced to a vomiting mess at the sight of a child victim. Five year old Jordan’s discovery was no different.

  Every discovery of an infant corpse was automatically treated as suspicious. Leo was called in immediately along with his partner, Detective Frank Dupree.

  The medical examiner was already on the scene by the time they got there. She couldn’t commit to any details but did admit it looked like Jordan had been suffocated. There was no way to tell for sure until she got him back to the morgue.

  It took her three days to confirm her preliminary finding. Someone had suffocated Jordan, cutting off his airway. Besides his fatal injury, there was nothing else to indicate any trauma.

  Discussions with the child’s family brought up no clues. They said Jordan had spent the day playing with the neighborhood children. They always played in the front yards with one parent or another keeping an eye on them. They didn’t even realize he was missing until it was too late. They reported his absence at dusk and spent two days looking for him.

  Night after night they appeared on the news to beg and plead for the safe return of their child. Volunteers and the emergency services covered every park and waterbed in a twenty mile radius. They questioned everyone in the neighborhood, including the children, and no-one saw or heard anything. Jordan White had just vanished into thin air.

  Every relative, neighbor, family friend, and co-worker were systematically cleared by the police. Alibis were checked and confirmed, opportunity and motive considered. It seemed like the White family were just the same as every other family in the city. There was no reason for their son to go missing.

  The usual motives for kidnapping a child were considered: money, pedophilia, revenge. They never received a ransom demand so money was ruled out. The parents were squeaky clean so they ruled out revenge. That only left a sexually motivated kidnapping which was the hardest one to solve as it meant anyone could have taken the child. A random person driving past may have caught a glimpse of Jordan and decided they wanted what they saw.

  When the medical examiner reported her findings, she confirmed there was no sexual interference, meaning they were back at square one for a motive.

  The case had gone cold quickly after the discovery of the body. They combed through the dumpster for clues but there was nothing besides the bags of trash. They kept it all in evidence just in case but they were confident that it didn’t hold any secrets.

  Nobody liked a cold case, and when the victim was a child, the pressure was on the detectives to find the killer. They needed to bring some closure to the family and the public wanted someone they could burn at the stake for their crime. Every day the pressure grew but they couldn’t catch that lucky break.

  Not until Blake Turner walked through their doors. He came in voluntarily, calmly telling the receptionist he wanted to confess to a crime. She stuck him in an interview room and he was forced to wait until Detectives Mich
aels and Dupree were free to speak with him. When he opened his mouth, they were momentarily stunned with disbelief.

  That astonishment quickly turned into relief as they took his statement. Commissioner Pace was eager to release the news to the press so he called the conference as soon as the ink was dry on the confession statement.

  It was only after the dust had settled did the doubts sink into Leo’s mind. He went over the confession with a fine-toothed comb and matched it back to every detail they had uncovered. While so much of it fell into place, there were still glaringly obvious loopholes.

  One of those differences was Turner’s reason for being near the pharmacy. It was across town from the White residence and he couldn’t explain why he had been in either of the areas. He lived in the opposite direction to them both and could never give a clear excuse. Opportunity played a big part in the case and he just wasn’t fitting in with the facts.

  Nobody had listened to Leo so his qualms were drowned out by the triumphant cheers of the others. All that had changed when Amelia walked into the station. He saw her as a glimmer of hope, praying others would see the light too.

  Leo finished his story with his suspension. In an otherwise stellar career, he didn’t relish the punishment. It would mar his record for the rest of his life and it made him angry. Not only did he want justice for Jordan now, he needed vindication too.

  “So we need to find the real killer before it’s too late,” Leo concluded. “We have two weeks before I have to resume my duties.”

  “Does it normally take you two weeks to solve a murder?” Amelia asked, wondering if their timeframe was reasonable. On television they usually solved a crime in a few days, two weeks seemed ample in comparison.

  Leo laughed. “Two weeks is nothing. Sometimes a case can remain open for months, if it’s even solved at all.”

  That was disheartening. As Amelia was about to say as much, the sound of running paws sounded on the floor as a large golden Labrador bounded into the room and made a beeline for her.