“Same with my guy. Said he saw a guy with a leaf on his forehead.”
“Mine said she saw three white males packing stuff in the truck.”
“So we were off on the time,” I said. “Erin Smith didn’t pack up her house after she left the courthouse. She had someone do it when she was in jail overnight.”
“She knew she was going to be arrested that day.”
“Everything was staged. From the moment we first pulled into her driveway and she fainted on us, she’s had this thing planned from the very beginning.”
“So all we need to do is find out where the truck took her things and we’ll know where she went.”
“Not going to happen. She’s been playing with us from the beginning. This whole thing has been a façade. Nine times out of ten the furniture was rented. The neighbor told me they weren’t living here that long. And remember what she told us when I asked her if there’s anyone we can call to be with her? She said that it was just her and Jack. They were here alone. Jack’s mother lives in a retirement home up north. It was just the two of them. They moved around a lot.”
“So if the furniture’s rented, why bother moving it?”
“Part of the show. My guess is we’ll find the truck abandoned somewhere with the trailer filled with furniture.”
“So where does that leave us then?”
“Good question.”
And I’m afraid I don’t know the answer.
Twenty-two
I quickly got word out to the neighboring states around D.C. to look out for an orange and white U-Haul truck, large enough to move an entire house of furniture. By now, Erin Smith would have a twenty-two hour jump on us and could be anywhere within a day’s driving distance, which left a lot of ground to cover.
I sat at my desk, disappointed with how I handled the investigation. I should have picked up on the clues earlier. Part of being a good detective is relying on your instincts. But Erin Smith played the situation perfectly. She showed genuine remorse when she found out that Jack was missing. Then she looked deflated when I told her that we found his body. She did everything a grieving wife would do when finding out their spouse was murdered.
But she made two big mistakes. She left footprints next to Jack’s body and she lied to me. Two mistakes that got her busted. Let’s hope she’ll make more.
Twenty-three
Special Agent Jayden Davis of the FBI pulled in front of Chase Bank in a black unmarked Crown Victoria. It was just past nine in the morning when she arrived. Police and federal agents were spread in front of the bank. Yellow police tape stopped people from turning into the parking lot. Flashing red and blue light emitted from the cop cars.
Agent Davis walked through a crowd of federal agents as she made her way through the bank. Word of the murder hit the airways about an hour ago. A lonely female had been shot in the head. Her body was sprawled in an open vault. She had been found by the assistant branch manager. Money from the vault was missing.
When she got to the vault, she saw Special Agent Fletcher Johnson kneeling over the dead woman’s body. Fletcher Johnson was a bull of a man standing five-eleven and weighing close to two hundred and twenty pounds. If he were ten years younger, he’d be a perfect fit as a fullback for an NFL team.
“Fletcher.”
Fletcher Johnson looked up. “Jayden.”
“Do we know who she is yet?”
“Stacey Windfield. She was the branch manager.”
“Security footage?”
“Gone. Presumably whoever she came with took it with them.”
Agent Davis knelt down and looked at Stacey Windfield. She was wearing sweatpants and a T-shirt. Her hair was frizzy, almost as if she’d gotten out of bed and didn’t comb her hair. She looked at her hands and didn’t see any broken nails, so she probably didn’t struggle with whoever killed her. No physical lacerations on her skin from what she could see. But it was apparent that what killed her was the bullet that went through her right eye.
She looked around the safe and could see empty spaces where money had once been sitting. Lying next to Stacey’s body were four bricks of money wrapped in rubber bands. Agent Davis had gloves on so she picked up the bricks and flipped through the individual bills.
“They knew these were the fakes,” she said. She put the bricks back down. “Estimation on time of death?”
“Few hours. Rigor Mortis is just setting in.”
Agent Davis looked at her watch. It was 9:10 a.m. A few hours meant that Stacey Windfield could have been killed anytime between four and six in the morning.
Was she a co-conspirator? Or was she here out of her will?
Another agent called her name from behind. “Agent Davis? The assistant branch manager is ready to see you.”
Sitting in an office walled with glass, a dark-haired, petite woman with glasses nervously sat in a chair in front of a brown wooden desk. Agent Davis smiled when she walked in, partly to ease her tension and partly to be polite.
“Ms. Patty Stonewall?”
“Yes.”
“I’m Agent Jayden Davis from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. You were the one to find Ms. Windfield?”
“Yes.” Tears started falling down her face.
Agent Davis saw a tissue box on the desk. She reached over and grabbed a tissue and handed it to Patty Stonewall.
“Can you walk me through what happened when you arrived at work?”
She took a deep breath before speaking. “Usually Stacey’s the first one here. When I pulled up and didn’t see her car I assumed she must be running late. I know she usually goes to the gym before work.” She took another deep breath. “I went to unlock the front door and noticed that it was already unlocked which it shouldn’t have been. I then went to turn off the silent alarm, but saw that it was already turned off so I thought that maybe she was here. I looked across the room to her office and saw that it was empty.” She pointed across the room to Stacey’s office. “Then I went to the back and saw that the vault was open and that’s when I found her.” She dipped her head and started crying.
Agent Davis took notes.
“How much does the bank normally keep in the vaults overnight?”
“We normally only leave twenty thousand in the vault overnight.”
Agent Davis nodded and wrote down notes. She knew that banks generally don’t keep a lot of money in their vaults, and that Hollywood movies fantasize vaults stacked with millions and millions of dollars. But something was different about this robbery.
“Was there more money in the vault last night than normally?”
Patty nodded, “Yes. On Monday nights we usually keep five hundred thousand dollars in the vault.”
“Why is that?”
“Because the construction company, Powell Construction, gets paid that day and most of the workers come over during lunch to cash their checks. So we have to make sure we have enough cash on hand to cover their checks.”
Agent Davis nodded and thought that the thieves more than likely knew this too.
“What can you tell me about Stacey? What was she like?”
“Stacey was full of life. She was the light of the office. She always had a smile on her face. Never harmed or talked bad about anyone. She was just a really good person.”
“Was she married or have a boyfriend?”
“No, neither.”
“Family?”
“Yeah, her parents live in Pennsylvania and a sister here in Northern Virginia.”
An alarm went off in Agent Davis’ head. If Stacey wasn’t a willing participant in this robbery, there was a way she could be persuaded to participate.
“Do you know her sister’s name?”
“Kim.”
“Okay, thanks Ms. Stonewall. If I need to follow-up, I’ll give you a call.” As she made her way through the office door, she turned around. “And sorry for your loss.”
Patty Stonewall nodded and started crying again.
As she turned
the corner she saw Fletcher Johnson walking towards her.
“Anything?” Fletcher asked.
“Yeah, we need to identify the victim’s sister and find out where she lives. And fast.”
“Why, what’s going on?”
“There may be another homicide.”
Twenty-four
Kimberly Windfield’s body was found by the Fairfax County P.D. lying on her bed, sprawled as if she had just fallen on her back and let her arms fling to the side. She was wearing pajamas and there were tear stains on her face. A bullet hole was in the center of her forehead which caused blood to spray onto her bed, ceiling and back wall.
Resting in her hand was a cell phone. Agent Jayden Davis took the phone from her hand and looked for the last number received. She saw that it was from Stacey Windfield with her picture next to her name. The phone call came in at 3:37 and lasted for seventeen seconds.
Odd time to call a sibling, Agent Davis thought. Unless she was forced to.
Kimberly Windfield lived on the ground floor of a garden style apartment building in Fairfax, Virginia. Each building had twelve units, and Kimberly’s apartment was the first unit on the left. Agent Davis’ specialty wasn’t in homicides, but she spent eight years as a beat cop in Chicago before joining the Bureau, so she’d seen her share of break-ins. From what she could tell, it didn’t appear that whoever killed Kimberly Winfield forced themselves into the apartment. The lock on the front didn’t appear tampered with. The windows in the apartment were locked and intact. So was it someone she knew?
She spoke with the detective in charge of the investigation and asked that she be briefed on any information that came in. Until it can be proven that the murders were related, the investigation would be under the jurisdiction of Fairfax P.D. and not the FBI. Maybe it was just bad luck that two sisters got killed on the same morning. Doubtful, Agent Davis thought. Especially when one of the sisters worked for a bank that was just robbed of five hundred thousand dollars.
Twenty-five
At 10:30 a.m., I got a call from the Virginia State Police that a twenty-six-foot U-Haul truck had been found on the side road of Route 301 in King George County, Virginia. The truck was about four miles from the Governor Harry W. Nice Memorial Bridge, which crosses the Potomac River and connects Maryland and Virginia. It’s an alternative route that many drivers in Maryland take when traveling south so as to avoid the congestion of I-95. It’s essentially a back road that cuts through the countryside of Maryland and Virginia, and at night it’s as dark as they come.
The State Trooper told me that when they found the truck, they looked at the video footage from the bridge and saw that the truck crossed the bridge at 2:37 a.m. the previous morning. Driving another four miles would have put the truck at a stop around 2:42. I asked the trooper if they checked if there was furniture in the back. He said yes. He gave me the license plate and VIN number and said they traced the vehicle to the U-Haul store on Capital Street in D.C.
Route 301 is a long road. I’ve driven it many times. Once in Virginia, it breaks off at various spots and either leads to Virginia Beach or the Interstate 95 near Richmond where there’s much less congestion. Once on I-95, skies the limit. You could go anywhere. I was a little frustrated, but not at all surprised that the U-Haul truck was abandoned. After a some digging, I found out a little about Erin Smith’s past. Before she married Jack, her maiden name was Riley. Erin May Riley was her previous name. Born to Christopher and May Riley in March of 1975. That would make her thirty-eight years old. She was originally from Delaware and moved to Pennsylvania after graduating from the University of Delaware. She met Jack a year after moving to Pennsylvania and the two married a couple of years later.
She was physically fit. And so was Jack. They both liked the outdoors. They liked hiking, swimming, surfing, running and biking. Pretty much anything that had to do with outdoor activities. They were a couple that liked to be on the go. Didn’t stay in one place very long. So where would Erin feel most comfortable on the run? Or better yet, where would she want us to think she was most comfortable?
The U-Haul was abandoned about sixty miles south of D.C. Another vehicle picked them up and took them somewhere else. One of the neighbors said she saw three people loading the truck with furniture. Add Erin Smith to the mix and there’s four people. Add Jack’s colleague and then there’s five. So potentially there’s five people together in one car heading south. Or north. Or west. Or there’s three people in one car and two in another heading in opposite directions. Or heading in the same direction but just broken up.
I thought some more and scratched off the north. Familiarity would be an obvious assumption that she’d travel north. She’s from Delaware and lived in Pennsylvania for a few years. She’s a smart women and she’d know we’d be looking for her in the north. She’d know we’d be watching her parent’s house. She’d know that we’d find out who her friends were and have their houses staked out too. So she wasn’t heading north.
That leaves south and west. So where was she going? The problem with heading south is that eventually you run into the water. Including Virginia, there’s five southern states along the eastern coast. And if she headed a little inland, there’s another five states she could travel. But if she headed west, she’d have more than three thousand miles of hiding space. A lot of land to get lost in. A lot of land to hide. A lot of land for us to search. But maybe that was the point.
I sat back in my chair and closed my eyes. I thought about the times when I was in Erin Smith’s house. As an investigator, my eyes are always searching, even when I’m not cognizant of it. There was something in the house. Something that stood out that normally wouldn’t. Something that the casual eye would gloss over and not give a second thought. What could it be? I concentrated. I imagined that I was standing in the living room. My mind’s eye brought everything back as if I’d just been there. I looked round the room. I didn’t see what I wanted. So I walked through the hallway and into the kitchen. I saw everything. The rented furniture that was meant to appear as if it’d been there for years. Then finally I saw it. There was one thing that stood out of place in the kitchen that normally wouldn’t in any other house in America.
I quickly dialed the State Trooper in Virginia and asked him to look for something for me. If it wasn’t there, I knew exactly where Erin Smith was heading.
Twenty-six
It took the State Trooper a little over an hour to get back to me. He named off various objects in the back of the truck. He and a few other troopers cleaned the back of the truck out top to bottom. I was somewhat pleased they hadn’t found what I was looking for. I thanked him for their diligent effort. He probably wasn’t happy that I asked him to search the back of a U-Haul truck stuffed with furniture, but in the interest of justice, he did so without complaining.
I hung up the phone with a slight smirk on my face. I knew where Erin Smith had gone. She wasn’t smarter than us after all. But then Pat came to my desk and changed my perception of intelligence.
“We just got a hit on Erin Smith’s bank card. She just used it at an ATM machine ten minutes ago.”
“Really? Where?” I thought that I knew the answer.
“North Carolina, near the Outer Banks.”
“North Carolina?”
“Yeah, you sound surprised.”
“I am.”
“Fits what we’ve been talking about. She’s heading south. Were you thinking something else?”
I thought a moment before answering. All previous signs suggested that Erin Smith was heading south. And the timing was right. She had an eight hour jump on us. Depending on their driving speed, they had time to get to the Outer Banks. But I also trusted my gut.
“I had a hunch that she was in Maryland.”
“Maryland? Why?”
As I was about to explain it, I realized how silly it sounded.
“There was a picture in her house.”
Pat nodded. “Okay. Lots of houses have pi
ctures in them.”
“But this was different.” I changed positions in my seat. “We know that the furniture in her house was rented.”
Pat nodded. “Yeah, I confirmed with one of the local furniture rentals.”
“It was made to appear that they’d been settled in the house for years. But when you look closer, everything from the furniture to the pictures on the wall belonged to a company.”
Pat continued nodding, probably wondering where I was going with this.
“Everything except for a small picture that was strategically placed on the wall next to the refrigerator.”
“Okay. Sorry, Jacob, but I’m not following.”
“The picture was of Erin and Jack on a small sailboat in the Annapolis harbor. I knew it was Annapolis because I recognized the ice cream shop that was in the background. Some of the best ice cream you’ve ever tasted in Maryland.”
“And that’s important because?”
“Because it’s the only personal picture of them in the whole house. Think about it. Let’s take your house for example. You probably have pictures of family scattered around.”
“I do.”
“So do I. So do most people in America. But not the Smith’s. Everything in their house belonged to someone else except for that picture. I talked to a State Trooper in Virginia and asked them to look through the truck for me. The picture wasn’t there. She took it with her.”
“Okay, so she took a picture with her that had some kind of sentimental value. How does that lead to Maryland?”
“If you were on the run and had access to a boat that no one knew about, where would you take your chances?”
A light seemed to click in Pat’s eyes. “The water.”
“So would I. Last place we’d be looking for her.”
“But she just accessed her bank card from the Outer Banks. No way she could have got there that fast if she was in a boat.”
Behind the Closed Door: A Detective Series of Crime and Suspense Thrillers (The Jacob Hayden Series Book 2) Page 6
