Fact or Fiction - A Sam Prichard Mystery (Sam Prichard, Mystery, Thriller, Suspense, Private Investigator Book 13)

by David Archer

  The sheriff’s office was located in the Criminal Justice Center on East Main Street, and Sam pulled in and parked in front of the building. As he climbed out, he reached under the seat and retrieved the trash bag that contained the hat and tucked it under his arm. When he got inside, a receptionist greeted him and directed him to the actual sheriff’s office, just off the lobby.

  The dispatcher, a young woman, smiled as he entered. “Hi there,” she said. “I’m Jill McCann. How can I help you today?”

  Sam showed her his ID. “My name is Sam Prichard, and I’m a private investigator looking into a case that happened here in Franklin County about eight years ago. It was the murder of an elderly woman named Millie Cameron, and I’m wondering if any of the deputies who were involved might be available. Their names were Johnny Moore and Bob Fry.”

  “Oh, goodness,” she said. “I remember that. They said her son did it, right?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Sam said. “The trouble is that there are a number of people who don’t believe he’s guilty, and from what I’ve seen so far, there were avenues of the investigation that were never followed. From what I understand, there was only one witness, but his testimony was discounted, and I may have actually stumbled across some potential physical evidence that lends credibility to his statement at the time.”

  “Oh, my. Well, Johnny Moore is our chief detective, now, but Bob Fry passed away about a year ago. Johnny is off today, but let me see if I can get hold of him for you.” She turned away and picked up a telephone, then dialed a number quickly from memory. Apparently it was answered on the first ring, because she smiled into the phone. “Hey, Johnny, this is Jill,” she said. “I got a private investigator here who’s got some questions about a case you worked on eight years ago. It was the murderer of that old lady in Thompsonville—Millie Cameron, do you remember that? Okay, yeah, but this man says he may have come across some evidence that he thinks might change the situation. Could you come in and talk with him? Okay, great, I’ll tell him. Bye-bye.” She hung up the phone and turned back to Sam. “If you’d like to have a seat, he’ll be here in about five minutes. He just lives a couple blocks away, and he said he was already heading out the door, anyway.”

  “Thank you,” Sam said. There was a row of chairs against the wall opposite the reception desk, and Sam took a seat.

  Detective Moore showed up right on time and came directly to Sam. “You’re the private eye?”

  Sam showed his ID to the detective and rose to his feet. “Yes, sir, Sam Prichard. I’ve been asked to look into the case against Ross Cameron, and I wanted to discuss it with you a bit.”

  Moore nodded and motioned for Sam to follow him. “Come on back to my office,” he said. “We can talk there.”

  “I appreciate it,” Sam said. He followed the detective past the reception desk and into a hallway, where they turned into the second door on the left.

  Moore motioned Sam into a chair in front of his desk, then sank into the one behind it. “I remember this case very well,” he said. “I was actually the arresting officer. Jill said something about new evidence?” He looked pointedly at the trash bag that Sam had placed in his lap.

  “Well, I’m not certain whether it’s new evidence or not. I met with Ross the day before yesterday and asked him to tell me everything he could remember about what happened that day. He said that he was walking in the woods and came home to find his mother dead, in the condition you saw when you arrived. However, he also told me that he had seen someone else in the woods that day. He saw them in the morning, as he was walking around, and then again shortly before he got home. When he saw the person the second time, he said they seemed to be in a rush, and he observed them throwing a hat onto the ground as they hurried through the woods. He was curious and went to look at the hat, and described it as a black hat with a feather.”

  Moore frowned. “He never said anything like that to any of us,” he said. “And as far as I know, no hat was ever found anywhere around there.”

  Sam nodded. “Well, today I spoke with Jason Garrity, who claimed he saw somebody leaving the house that afternoon. He also told me that the person he saw seemed to be wearing a black hat, but he couldn’t remember a feather.”

  Detective Moore made a scoffing sound. “There you go again. I talked to Garrity that day, and Detective Weimer spoke to him a couple of times afterward. I remember him saying he saw somebody leaving the backyard of the house, but he never mentioned any hat.”

  “He told me that, but he said it was because he didn’t really think about the hat until I mentioned Ross saying he had seen one. However, both of them told me that the person they saw was wearing a yellow shirt. Ross said the pants were brown, while Jason said they were either brown or a dark red. Now, I highly doubt the two of them ever had a chance to compare their stories, so that gives me a pair of closely matching descriptions of the same individual.”

  Detective Moore had been leaning back in his chair, but now he sat forward and put his elbows on his desk. “Okay, you got my attention,” he said. “However, that doesn’t really provide any kind of new evidence, now, does it?”

  Sam held up a finger in the universal gesture that asks someone to wait. “On its own, I would agree with you, though it does at least lend some credibility to Ross’s story. However, before I went to see Jason today, I decided to just go by and take a look at the house where Millie Cameron died. I parked and got out, and was looking through the windows when a woman suddenly started talking to me. She was a short, heavyset woman who called herself Marie, and she asked me if I wanted to go inside. When I said I’d love to see the inside of the house, she handed me a set of keys and told me that she had been asked by Millie’s daughter to keep an eye on the place. I went inside, and…”

  “Did you see the ghost?” Moore asked. “All the locals claim they’ve seen a ghost inside that house, looking out the windows and such.”

  “To be completely honest, I’m not sure,” Sam said. “A couple of strange things did happen while I was in there; one of them was when a cabinet in the kitchen opened on its own, very slowly. I—well, for a moment I thought I saw what looked like a man’s face looking out at me, but when I blinked it was gone. However, before I could go running out the door—and I’ll confess that I almost did—something else inside the cabinet caught my eye.” He picked up the trash bag and laid it on the desk. “This was inside the cabinet. I didn’t want to touch it, so I used an old dish towel to pick it up and put it in that bag.”

  Moore’s eyes narrowed as he gingerly opened the bag and let its contents spill out onto his desk. They widened again when he saw the hat, with what looked like the remains of a decorative feather affixed to it. He stared at it for several seconds, then looked up at Sam.

  “This was inside one of the kitchen cabinets?” he asked.

  Sam nodded. “Yes, and you’re not half as surprised as I was. That was the last thing in the world I expected to find inside that house. Ross had told me that when he saw the hat, it was, as he put it, ‘sticky with blood’ and getting dirt on it. Considering how dark those little mud stains on it are, I have to believe that’s the very hat he saw that day.”

  Moore was using a pencil to move the hat around. “But how in the hell could it have gotten inside the house? I mean, even though we were pretty sure we had the right guy, we still searched through the house as part of our investigation. I can guarantee you that hat wasn’t there then.”

  “It wasn’t there two weeks later, either. Jason Garrity’s mother said she helped Debbie and her husband gather up what they wanted to keep from the house, and said she looked in every cabinet in the kitchen at that time. I have no idea how it could have gotten there, unless there was another witness that we don’t know about who thought it might be needed at some point.”

  “Did you ask that woman who gave you the keys about it?”

  Sam grimaced. “Yeah, about her,” he said. “When I came back out of the house, she was gone. I didn
’t know where to find her, so I asked Jason and his mother about her, and they both told me that there was a woman named Marie who had been watching the house for Debbie, but that she had died and no one ever found the keys.”

  10

  Moore looked up at Sam, and his own eyes got wide. “Are you telling me a ghost gave you the keys to the house?”

  “No,” Sam said, shaking his head. “I’m telling you that a woman who claimed to be Marie and fit her description gave me those keys. I have spent most of my life denying the existence of ghosts, even though I’ve seen some pretty strange things over the years. I’m not quite willing to start admitting I actually believe in them now.” Mentally, Sam crossed his fingers, remembering that he had actually said that he was starting to wonder about Beauregard.

  “I know what you mean,” Moore said. “I don’t believe in them, either, but there have been a few pretty strange things that have happened in my life, too.” He looked back down at the hat. “As for this, I’m not sure what to make of it. If we had found it back then, if Ross had told us about it, it might have made a difference. I’m really not sure about that. Now, though, when we can’t even be a hundred percent certain that it’s the same hat…”

  “I understand, but I think it should be processed, anyway. Most hats end up with hair from the wearer stuck inside them. There’s at least a chance that DNA could be recovered on that hat. I have a short list of possible suspects, and if it would match any of them…”

  “Suspects?” Moore asked, his eyes meeting Sam’s again. “Then I take it you honestly believe Ross Cameron is innocent?”

  “I do,” Sam said. “Ross is autistic. I know a bit about autistic people from my days as a policeman, when I had to deal with them every now and then. One thing I learned is that they don’t seem to have a lot of imagination. Generally speaking, they are just about incapable of lying. They react to the world precisely as they see it, and one of the most common traits of the autistic is an inability to either recognize or utilize deception. For example, Ross says Weimer told him that if he would admit to killing his mother, he could go home. While the thought of being dishonest by admitting to the crime displeased him, he accepted Weimer’s statement as fact. Since saying he did it meant he could go home, and he wanted to go home, then he was willing to say he did it even though he did not. If Ross tells me he saw someone in the woods behind the house, and that that person was wearing and discarded a hat that matches this one, then I am essentially certain he’s telling me the truth as he knows it.”

  Moore stared at him for a moment. “I’m gonna tell you something I’ve never said to anyone else,” he said slowly. “There have been many times since that day when I have felt that everything just went too easy, if you know what I mean. I’ll grant you, my first reaction when I saw Mrs. Cameron was to grab the person who was closest and say he did it, and it wasn’t until months later that I began to really wonder if he did. I think it was my sister’s kid who made me think about it. I mean, he knew Ross because he used to take his motorbike to the garage he worked at, and Ross would always figure out the problem and fix it pretty quickly. He told me one day that he and his friends didn’t believe Ross was guilty, because even when they would tease him and taunt him when they were younger, Ross never got mad.” He rubbed at his nose for a moment, as if it were itching. “The beating that killed Mrs. Cameron looked to me like something done in anger. It looked like somebody had let out an awful lot of rage on that poor old woman, and if a bunch of kids torturing a man they thought of as retarded wasn’t enough to make him lose his temper, then I can’t imagine what could be.”

  “But you never wanted to look deeper into it? You never took any action to try to find out what the truth might be?”

  Moore licked his lips. “Yeah, I did,” he said. “I actually tried to reopen the case about a year afterward, but I was told to let it go. Since I didn’t have any kind of new evidence, nobody wanted to work with me on it.” He pointed at the hat lying on his desk. “I don’t know if this is going to be enough, to be honest with you, but I’m definitely going to give it a try.”

  “What about Weimer?” Sam asked. “Is he going to object?”

  Moore made a grimace of his own. “I don’t think he’s going to be any problem. Ray Weimer is the chief of police here in Benton, now. He ran for sheriff a couple years ago, but he lost the election, so he took the job when it came open about a year back. I won’t say he and I are close, but we get along okay.”

  “I’m glad to hear that,” Sam said. “Frankly, I don’t feel he did his job very well on this case, but I’d just as soon not have him offering any resistance. Ross’s been sitting in a prison long enough, and I’m actually starting to have some hope that we might get him out of there one day soon.”

  “I’m not sure I’d go that far just yet,” Moore said. “Now, tell me about this short list of suspects. Who are you thinking of?”

  “Well, Jason Garrity said he thought the person he saw leaving the house was a woman, and he gave a pretty logical argument for why he thought so, based on the way the person walked. Millie Cameron had a sister named Judith, couple years older than herself, and it just so happens that Donald Cameron, Millie’s husband, had originally been engaged to the sister. He left her and married Millie after they had a little affair, and Millie ended up pregnant. Ross was born sometime after they left Tennessee together.”

  Moore cocked his head to the left and looked at Sam with a slight grin. “So you’re thinking the sister might have had motive? Sixty years or so seemed like a long time to wait for revenge, don’t you think?”

  “Well, I can’t disagree, but I’ve met the woman. There’s an awful lot of hate there, and she actually seemed to know that Millie was dead even though she claimed to have no contact with her.”

  Moore nodded. “Okay, that’s one. Who else?”

  “I’ve learned that Millie and her husband had a third child, another girl,” Sam said. “According to Mrs. Garrity, Lynette was caught in an affair with her father, Bill Parkinson. Parkinson was a much older man and was apparently arrested for statutory rape, but not long after that, Lynette disappeared. Charges against Parkinson were dropped, and it was speculated that Lynette was sent away because she was pregnant. She never came back, though, and a few months later, Parkinson also disappeared. Jason has speculated that Lynette may have held a grudge against her mother, especially if she was forced to have an abortion or give up a child she wanted to keep, and I can say that there could be some validity to that. Lynette would probably be in her mid to late fifties now, so that would put her in late forties or very early fifties at the time of the murder.”

  “I found out about Lynette back when Mrs. Cameron was killed,” Moore said, “but Dan Anderson—he was sheriff at the time—said that Lynette died around thirty years ago. I don’t know how he knew that, but he seemed pretty sure.”

  Sam’s eyes widened slightly in surprise, but he went on. “Then that could leave Parkinson himself, but he would probably have been pretty elderly by then. He’s also a man, and I tend to believe Jason is probably right in his belief that the person he saw leaving the scene was a woman. We still haven’t got any kind of evidence that says that person was the killer, of course, other than the circumstantial evidence of being in the woods behind the house both before and after the crime.”

  “You’re assuming that Parkinson, when he took off, went to be with Lynette? Have you got anything concrete that makes you believe that, or is it a wild guess?”

  “Again, just circumstantial evidence. I was told that after Lynette disappeared and Parkinson’s charges were dropped, he and Lynette’s parents became close. Now, the Camerons were from down in the South, where it wasn’t uncommon for girls as young as thirteen or fourteen to get married back then. It’s possible they were fully aware of the relationship, whether they approved or not, and if Lynette really was pregnant, then they might have been working out some sort of arrangement for him to eventuall
y go to be with her and his child. That’s the only reason I can think of for the parents of the girl to befriend the man who was sexually abusing their daughter.”

  “Well, you do have a point,” Moore said, “and I have no idea whatever happened to Parkinson. I’ll run him through the computers, see if I can track him down. Who else is on your list?”

  “Well, this is sort of off-the-wall,” Sam said, “but Mrs. Garrity. When she told me that her father was the one who was caught with Lynette, there was an awful lot of anger showing through her eyes. If she blamed Lynette for taking her daddy away, it’s possible that anger boiled over at some point and she lashed out at the only connection she had to the object of her rage.”

  “Despite the fact that we weren’t the most competent investigators back then,” Moore said with a slight grin, “I actually did canvass the area and check the alibis of just about everyone in that little town. Royce Garrity was in the hospital here in Benton the day Mrs. Cameron was killed, having a hysterectomy. I don’t think she would’ve been in any shape to beat someone to death that afternoon after having major surgery in the morning.”

  Sam nodded and grinned sheepishly. “I’m kind of relieved to hear that, because I actually like Jason. That kid has a natural gift for detection. He says he’s applied at every law enforcement agency around here and been rejected, but I think he would be an asset. You really ought to sit down and talk with him about this case, get him to open up to you. You’ll be surprised at just how intelligent he really is.”

  Moore burst out laughing. “Surprised? I wouldn’t be a bit surprised,” he said. “That little cracker used to run us all ragged. I personally picked him up on half a dozen different burglaries, and I’m dead certain he did some of them, but he always managed to wangle his way out of it. There was always an alibi, or some bit of evidence that he could cast enough doubt on to keep the prosecutor from pursuing the charges. I don’t know about you, but I think the best criminals know how to think like the best investigators. Got to, in order to make sure your butt doesn’t end up in a sling. In Garrity’s case, I think he didn’t want it to end up as some big guy’s cuddle toy in prison.”