by L A Dobbs
"We understand that," Sam said. "We’re working to get it solved as quickly as we can. Where are they staying? I could go talk to them. They might know something that could be helpful."
"I put them up at the Covered Bridge over on Route 11," Dupont said. "I want all hands on this. There’s extra in the budget from the salary of Richardson. I strongly suggest you bring your part-time man up to full time and speed up the timeline of this case."
Sam glanced over at Kevin’s desk. Unlike Sam’s and Jo’s messy desks, it was stacked neatly with papers, pencils, and a notebook. Kevin wasn’t much of a go-getter, though he was an adequate cop. Sam didn’t know if increasing his hours would help, but maybe they could have him work on the smaller local calls, freeing them up for more investigative work. "I’ll do that."
Dupont gave a curt nod. He glowered at Sam and Jo then shot a parting look at Lucy on his way out.
"Sheesh. The guy acts like we’re just lollygagging around, not trying to solve the case. Doesn’t he know we want to solve it as much as anyone?" Jo asked.
"He just likes to be a pain in the ass. Where is Kevin, by the way?"
Jo handed him the digital camera. "He signed out. Said he was afraid he’d already worked too many hours. Pictures of the area where we found Lynn’s clothes are in the camera."
"Okay, I guess I’ll talk to him tomorrow about moving to full time."
Jo glanced at Tyler’s desk. "Temporarily or for good?"
Sam sighed. "I guess we should offer him the position for good. I mean, it’s only right. He’s been here over a year now, and it would be the right thing to promote him."
Sam was all about doing the right thing, but for some reason, the hollow feeling in his chest told him he didn’t really want Kevin as a replacement for Tyler.
"Yeah, I guess so." The tone of resignation in Jo’s voice told him she was as enthusiastic about bringing Kevin to full time as he was.
"In the meantime, I say we waste no time in finding out what the deal is with these suspects. Seems like Noah and Amber both might’ve had a reason to want Lynn out of the way. I say we question all the campers separately and see if we can find out what really happened the night Lynn Palmer was murdered."
Chapter Fourteen
Jo was eager to see how the campers reacted to their visit. In her experience, the deeper you delved in an investigation, the more nervous people got, and the more nervous they got, the more apt they were to slip up. She shoved her yellow smiley mug under the coffee machine’s spout and grabbed the little red K-Cup with the extra-caffeinated grounds. She could use the extra caffeine to keep her brain sharp so she’d be able to notice any telltale signs that their suspects were lying.
She balanced the warm mug in her hands from the passenger seat of the Tahoe as Sam drove them to the campsite.
They usually drove together like this when there wasn’t much going on. They did a lot of their collaborating in the car on the way to talk to suspects or visit crime scenes. Somehow, the scenery of the mountains and the absence of traffic on the backcountry roads had a way of helping Jo think better.
"Thing is, they’ve already had over twenty-four hours to get their stories straight and try to cover their tracks," Sam said.
"I know. That’s a bummer. But killers always make mistakes. If one of these kids killed her, they’re bound to reveal themselves." Jo sipped the coffee. "But I don’t think we should let on that we think one of them might have done it. We need to act friendly and see if we can get her cell phone. Once they realize we’re treating them as suspects, they won’t be so eager to comply with us."
"I want to check out the murder site again and the place where we found her clothes. Now that we know it’s a murder, I need to look closer. You’re right about not tipping them off to our suspicions. I’m going to make it seem like Jesse is our main suspect. I don’t think he did it. Doesn’t make sense for him. He has no motive unless it was a fit of anger because she rejected him when he came on to her. Jesse doesn’t seem the fit-of-anger type. He didn’t get that mad when I came to his work to interrogate him," Sam said.
Jo agreed. "We’ve never had any calls about him fighting. He’s more the sneaky breaking-in-and-selling-weed type."
"I still want to double-check what he told me, though. I would think one of them would’ve noticed that Lynn was still alive when Jesse left… if what he told me is the truth."
"Even if one of them did, they might lie if they are trying to point the finger away from them and toward Jesse."
"Playing along like we think it’s Jesse will set them off guard and give us a chance to observe them before they realize what we’re up to." Sam pulled into the campground, and the Tahoe bumped down the rutted path to the site. "It’s late afternoon. I figure we’ll start cutting them from the herd and getting down to business first thing tomorrow. Make it look like we’re just asking them in for official statements."
They pulled up to the site. Jo set her mug in the cup holder. The base was a little too wide, but she’d found she could balance it at an angle on the top indentation and the mug wouldn’t tip over. Usually.
Sam frowned at the precariously balanced cup, then his eyes moved to her navy-blue short-sleeved button-up shirt. "You have some jelly on your shirt."
Jo looked down to see a shiny red blob just below the white, gold, and light-blue police patch. "Darn it." She swiped at the blob, but it only smudged it in deeper.
Sam had already gotten out and was standing in the middle of the campsite. The campers surrounded him, their faces full of curiosity. Jo stood back and studied them. Was one of them a murderer? If so, she couldn’t tell which one.
"Did you catch him?" a teary-eyed Tara was asking. She was holding a newer-model expensive backpack that Jo knew was supposed to be very lightweight. These folks really took their camping seriously.
"Not quite yet. We think she was killed over there." Sam nodded toward the area where they found the clothing. It was cordoned off with yellow crime scene tape strung between the pine trees. "And I want to take a better look to see if there’s any evidence."
"What kind of evidence?" Joshua asked, his eyes drifting over to the area.
"Signs of a struggle, blood. If we had a big forensics team, they’d be combing the area, but we gotta work with what we have."
"What about that local guy?" Noah asked. "Did you bring him in?"
"We’ve had him in for questioning. In fact, I was wondering if you guys could verify something he told me." Sam started toward the area, and the crowd followed. Jo admired the way he was handling it. Totally nonconfrontational, as if he were taking them into his confidence as though they were allies in the investigation.
Sam slipped under the yellow tape and started to walk slowly around the area, his eyes fixed on the ground. The others stayed back behind the tape, probably conditioned to act that way after viewing a billion crime shows on TV.
"Jesse." Sam stopped his pacing and looked back at the crowd. "That’s the guy from town who was here partying with you." Sam walked to the place where they’d found the pile of clothing. Sam had marked it with a birch stick the other day, and Kevin had come back and put a yellow police marker on the spot.
Sam crouched down, pushing leaves aside. The campers watched him quietly while they waited for him to continue.
"Anyway, Jesse said he was only here for an hour. Said Lynn was alive when he left." Sam stood up and looked at them again. "I was wondering if anyone here could verify that. Does anyone remember talking to Lynn after Jesse left?"
The campers exchanged looks. Jo watch them carefully. Most of them had blank faces as if they were trying to remember. Sam continued his search, making his way down to the beach, which was about twenty feet from the area where they’d found the clothes.
Jo slipped under the crime scene tape but stayed close to the campers. She made a show of sweeping the ground for clues while also keeping one eye on the campers.
"I don’t think he was here. Lyn
n disappeared, and I don’t remember seeing him after that." Tara raised her voice so Sam could hear. She looked at Josh. "Do you?"
"I don’t know. We were all kind of drunk," Josh said. "I thought Lynn was in her tent."
Sam made his way back from the beach and slipped under the yellow crime scene tape, joining the campers on the campsite side. "Speaking of that, we didn’t find her cell phone or a purse in her tent. Did she have them?"
Julie shook her head. "Not a purse. No sense in taking a purse camping. But she had a cell phone. Even though we’re taking a few days off, we still need to be in contact with the people back at the office. We all brought our phones." As if to illustrate, she undid the flap on the side pocket of her khaki cargo pants and pulled out her phone.
Sam paced around the site. He inspected the picnic table and various chairs around the campsite. He didn’t find a cell phone.
Sam was incredibly observant, and Jo figured he was taking mental notes of everything around the campsite. But it didn’t take someone with Sam’s skills to see there was no cell phone lying around.
"So where is it?" Jo asked as she slipped back under the yellow tape.
More blank looks were exchanged. Finally, Julie said, "Maybe it was in the woods near her clothes?"
Sam shook his head. "I just looked all around there, and I didn’t come up with it. Have any of you found an extra cell phone?"
They shook their heads.
"Maybe that local guy from town took it for some reason," Amber suggested, looking to Noah for approval.
"Why would he do that?" Sam asked.
Her pretty forehead creased. "Well, I don’t know, but it’s missing."
"And none of you remember seeing Lynn alive after he left? When did he leave? I mean, it doesn’t make sense that he’d kill her and then come back to the party, right? So he must’ve left after he killed her. If he did kill her."
More silence.
Then Noah said, "We weren’t exactly looking at our watches every minute. We were having a party."
"What time did she die?" Tara asked.
Jo had been waiting for this. They purposely hadn’t let out the time of death. They preferred to keep that close to the vest so the killer wouldn’t have time to invent an alibi. But since it had been at 2:30 in the morning, she didn’t know how useful that would be in this case. Most would claim they were in their tents sleeping.
"What time did your party end?" Sam asked as the phone in his pocket chirped. He pulled it out and glanced at the screen. "Gotta take this."
He stepped away, and Jo continued the questioning.
"Did anyone notice the time?" Jo asked.
Josh shrugged. "Like Noah said, we were partying, not clock watching."
"Wait a minute. We were at the bar till one. Then we came back here…" Julie’s face was scrunched up as if she were trying to recall the sequence of events. "That guy, Jesse, followed us. He sold us… I mean we had a few drinks, and then we all started making our way to bed. We were going hiking the next day. Couldn’t have been more than an hour after one."
"And Jesse was still there when you went to bed?" Jo asked.
Julie twisted her lips together. "I don’t remember. Does anyone remember?"
Nobody did. Or if they did, they weren’t saying.
Sam snapped the phone shut and came back to the group. "Okay. We have another call. Maybe you folks need a little time to think. I’d like you all to come to the station tomorrow so we can get official statements." At their looks of concern, he held up his hands. "Just standard procedure. We want to get to the bottom of this as much as you do. Officer Deckard has your phone numbers from the other day, and we’ll be calling to let you know what time we want to talk to you. In the meantime, could you please look for Lynn’s phone? It’s important."
They promised to look, and Sam and Jo got into the Tahoe.
Jo picked up her mug. The coffee was lukewarm now, but lukewarm was better than nothing. She was curious as to why Sam wasn’t taking them in right away. Maybe he figured if he gave the killer enough rope, they’d hang themselves. "You giving them some time to think things over, or to get their story straight?"
"Neither. We have business. Being shorthanded really does put a crimp in the investigation."
"We got another call?"
Sam held up his phone. "Several. We got a cat up a tree on Cross Street, a fender bender on the corner of Owings and Main, and an altercation over at the Laundromat. The interrogations will have to wait until tomorrow. Maybe by then we’ll be able to rule out one of our suspects."
"Really? Which one?"
"Jesse. He said he stopped for gas on the way home that night, and I have Ernie looking for the receipt. According to the campers, and Jesse’s own account, he got there after the bar closed at one and left shortly after. That’s a small time frame, and not too many people would have been stopping at the gas station that early in the morning. If Jesse paid with a credit card, all the better. We know Lynn was killed between two-thirty and three. Maybe the receipt will prove Jesse couldn’t have done it."
Jo looked out the window. "I think we already know he didn’t do it. We just need to figure out who did."
"Yep. Getting her phone would help. Do you think she could have dropped it in the woods? Maybe we should start a grid search."
Jo took another lukewarm sip. The coffee had turned bitter, and she forced it down her throat. She didn’t think they were going to find the phone in the woods. "I think a search would be a waste. My guess is someone took it. I think there’s something on that phone the killer doesn’t want us to see."
Chapter Fifteen
Jo and Sam flipped a coin for the calls. She’d lost and had spent forty-five minutes at the Laundromat, settling an argument between Lola Ehrsam and Judith Crawford because Lola had taken Judith’s clothes out of the dryer prematurely. Lola claimed it wasn’t so, Judith hadn’t put enough quarters in for a full cycle, and the machine was sitting there useless. Jo settled the dispute by buying both the women coffee and making Lola promise to fold Judith’s clothes once they ran through the full cycle.
When she was done, Sam had rescued the cat from the tree and smoothed over things at the fender-bender scene. The day was done, so they both headed home.
After making a pit stop at one of the stores near the Laundromat, Jo drove the police car to her small cottage in the woods. They often took the cars home if they’d been out late. Her own car, a Volkswagen, sat in the lot in town. She liked the Crown Vic better.
She took a cardboard box carefully out of the trunk. On the porch, she balanced the box on her hip and dipped her index finger into the planter full of purple pansies that sat on the porch railing. It was still cold for annuals, but pansies liked the cold. The dirt inside the box was cool and damp.
The wooden screen door of the cottage was thick with layers of chipped paint and squeaked when she pulled it open. The front door had almost as much paint, but the lock was new and shiny, and she put her key in and pushed the door open.
Inside, the cottage was small but cheery. Once a seasonal camp, it had been converted to year-round and had been painted in light colors. Jo had furnished it with comfortable overstuffed furniture from thrift stores and yard sales. It was all chipped, worn paint, large floral and striped prints, and muted colors. She supposed the decorating magazines would have referred to it as cottage chic, but she’d just cobbled together the best value for her budget.
She passed through the living room, the wide pine floorboards creaking as she made her way to the kitchen, which had been remodeled extensively. The ceiling rose up in a peak, and the old wooden cabinets had been painted a sunny shade of yellow. They stretched all the way to the ceiling—too high for Jo to store anything on the top shelf without getting on a step stool even though she was five foot seven.
Jo put the box on the butcher-block countertop. She carefully pulled out the small round goldfish bowl and set it on the counter. She leaned over so her
face was at counter height and peered in at the fish. Its orange-gold fins flapped as it turned to face her. She wondered what she looked like from his perspective. Probably just a gigantic distorted face like when you looked in a fun-house mirror.
She took the jar of flake food out of the box and pinched one tiny flake between her index finger and thumb. She dropped it on the surface of the water. The fish zoomed up and devoured it, practically jumping out of the bowl to do so. He must have been hungry.
She contemplated putting another flake in, but Irving down at the pet store had warned her about overfeeding the fish. Too much food produced too much waste and could turn the water toxic. He’d also suggested a small tank with a filter. Fish bowls apparently weren’t the best environment for keeping fish in. She’d consider that later—best to see how this worked out first.
She sat at the old farmer’s table to admire her new companion. She thought about Lucy with her bright eyes and wagging tail. Reese had taken her back to the shelter. Jo hoped the dog would find a loving family. Maybe someday she could graduate from a goldfish to something with four legs.
When she’d come to White Rock four years ago, she hadn’t expected to be there very long. It had seemed smarter to rent. That way she could pick up and leave once she’d finished her business. She’d told Sam in the interview that she needed a change of pace—someplace more rural. That was only half true. He didn’t need to know the real reason she was here. But as time had marched on, she’d come to love the job and love working with Sam. The real reason had faded into the background.
She’d never imagined she’d want to put down roots, but she’d come to love her cottage. It was small, but perfect for just one person. Her favorite part was the setting. It was secluded, set by itself in the woods, surrounded by pine trees and wildlife. To the east she had a view of the mountains, and there was a bubbling creek out back. It had the comfortable, secure feeling of home.
