State of Life: A Mystery Thriller Novel (Virgil Jones Book 12)

by Thomas Scott

  “Ain’t no law against that.”

  “Actually, there are quite a few laws against that, depending on what you’re doing at the time. But we’ll have that talk later. Right now I only have one question for you, and the answer you give me better be the truth.”

  “What?”

  “Where is Kelly Price?”

  “Who?” Dodge said.

  Murton turned to Henderson and said, “Ed, you might want to wait outside for a few minutes.”

  “Murt…”

  “I’m just looking out for you,” Murton said. “You know…the election and all.”

  Henderson looked at nothing for a beat, then gave Murton a simple nod and walked out. Once he was gone, Murton turned his attention back to Dodge and said, “I lied before…about only asking once. So let’s try again. Where is Kelly Price?”

  “I don’t know no Kelly Price, and that’s the truth. I need some medical attention, man. I think your partner busted my nose.”

  Murton slapped Dodge in the face so hard he fell from the sofa. “We’ve got video footage of you tossing her purse into a dumpster behind the liquor store, asshole. We know it was her purse because her phone was still inside.”

  Rosencrantz walked back into the room. “Hey, look what I found.” He held a woman’s wallet out. He looked at Dodge, shook his head, and said, “Randy, Randy, Randy. If you don’t know who Kelly Price is, how is it that you’ve got her wallet? It was sitting right on top of your nightstand.” He opened the wallet, and Price’s driver’s license was right there, tucked behind a plastic insert. “There’s no money in here, so I guess that means you already spent it. I try really hard not to judge others, but it’s not looking too good for you right now, Randy. My partner here has a way of getting people to talk. It’s usually not pretty, so I’d start to get on board with the program, if you know what I mean.”

  Dodge managed to get himself back on the sofa. “Okay, look. I gots my problems, and everyone knows all about it. Here’s what happened: I found the purse, and I don’t deny it. I took the money from the wallet because I needed it. What I didn’t need was a purse or a phone, so I tossed those.”

  “Why’d you keep the wallet, Randy?” Murton said.

  Dodge visibly swallowed. “The only reason I kept the wallet was because I was going to try to use her debit card, but then I seen on the news that the Price girl was missing. I didn’t know what to do. Knew if I went to the cops they’d think I done it, but I didn’t.”

  Murton smoothed an imaginary wrinkle from his shirt, looked at Dodge, and said, “So let me see if I’ve got this right. A teenage girl goes missing, and by your own account, you know about the situation. Then, you happen across some of her personal belongings and instead of notifying the proper authorities, you take the wallet, ditch the purse and phone, all so you can grab a six-pack. Want to know what we call that, Randy? We call that tampering with evidence. Evidence that could help us find this young woman.”

  “You got it backward, man. I didn’t know the girl was missing until after I found her stuff. I didn’t know it was evidence. I just thought, finders keepers. I needed a drink, is all.”

  Murton got right in his face. “What do you think Kelly Price needs right now?”

  “I want a lawyer,” Dodge said.

  “That might be the smartest thing you’ve said yet,” Rosencrantz said. “Here’s why: In about an hour or so, the county’s crime scene people and a few deputies are going to come out here and tear this place apart…right down to the goddamned sticks that are somehow still holding it together. If they find one single shred of evidence that Kelly Price has ever been here or in your vehicle…a single hair, a drop of blood, a fingerprint, anything, you’ll be facing charges that’ll make a night in the drunk tank seem like an all-inclusive stay at a vacation resort.”

  “Lawyer.”

  Murton and Rosencrantz looked at each other, then they each grabbed one of Dodge’s arms and hauled him outside to where Henderson was waiting by his squad car.

  “He wants a lawyer,” Murton said.

  Henderson put Dodge in the back of his squad, then pulled Murton and Rosencrantz aside. “He do it?”

  Murton shook his head. “Probably not. He looked genuinely confused. You can charge him with tampering with evidence, and just to make sure, I’d get your crime scene people out here and do a proper search, but I think he’s probably telling the truth.”

  “Sort of wish he wasn’t,” Henderson said.

  Murton nodded, and said, “Me too.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Becky finally got the tracking information from Kelly Price’s phone out of the Verizon system and sent it to Murton and Rosencrantz. With that done, she dug into the Marion County Sheriff’s Office records and began looking for the index of cases during the time Virgil’s father, Mason, had been the sheriff. As she suspected, most of the files hadn’t yet been digitized, and as a point of fact, she thought they probably never would be. But Virgil had been correct…the index itself was digitized, and after an hour or so, she was able to cull the indexed closed cases from the open and unsolved files. She printed the list, then walked it over to Virgil’s office.

  “It’s quite a list,” Becky said after she handed the pages to Virgil. “I wouldn’t think there’d be so many.”

  Virgil picked up the sheets of paper—five pages in all—and gave them a quick scan. “Well, it’s a big department, and as sheriff at the time, my dad would be listed on each case. But, I think we can narrow it down. Do you have this on a spreadsheet?”

  “Yeah. Why?”

  Virgil took out a pen from his desk drawer, and said, “Come around here and look at something.”

  Becky walked behind the desk and looked over Virgil’s shoulder. “What is it?”

  Virgil ran his finger down the list on the first page, then stopped at one of the case file’s index numbers. “See this one? It ends with the letters MCPD.”

  “Yeah, I noticed that all of the index numbers have some sort of letters at the end. I thought MCPD meant Marion County Police Department.”

  Virgil looked at Becky and gave her a kind, sad smile. “No, it means Missing Child Presumed Dead. Those are the case files I’m going to want to look through. Can you separate those out for me?”

  Becky took the pages back and told him she would. “It’ll only take about ten minutes.”

  “That’s fine, Becks. Let me know when you’ve got it and I’ll head over to the Marion County Sheriff’s Office and start going through their archives.”

  Murton and Rosencrantz were looking at the tracking data from Kelly Price’s phone. Becky had sent both the raw data and a map overlay to make the information easier to interpret.

  “How do you want to handle this?” Rosencrantz asked.

  Murton had the map pulled up on his iPad, looking at the various markers that showed where Price’s phone had been on the day she went missing. “We know she left her dental appointment at 8:15. Her class wasn’t scheduled to start until 9:45. According to this map, it looks like she stopped at McDonald’s…the one right between Highway 44 and East Michigan Road. Let’s head over there and see what we can see.”

  The traffic was light, and five minutes later they were at McDonald’s. They walked inside and spoke with the manager, an overweight woman with fly-away hair, and tiny teeth. When she smiled at them, her gums looked like they needed to be trimmed back. “How may I help you, detectives?”

  Murton showed the manager the picture of Kelly Price. “Have you seen this young woman?”

  “Yes, I have.”

  “When?” Rosencrantz said.

  “This morning.”

  Murton and Rosencrantz looked at each other, then back at the manager. “You’re saying she was in here this morning?” Murton said.

  The manager shook her head and turned a few different shades of red. “No, I’m sorry. I misspoke. I saw her picture on the morning news. She’s the one that’s missing, right?”
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  Rosencrantz nodded. “Yes ma’am. Let me rephrase the question my partner just asked. When was the last time you saw Ms. Price?”

  “I’ve never actually seen her in here,” the manager said. “But that doesn’t mean she hasn’t been here. Most of my interaction is with the employees in the back. I don’t deal with the customers that often unless there’s some sort of problem.” Then she seemed to revise her own statement by saying, “Now that I think about it, I guess I have more interaction with the customers than I’d like. But anyway, I’ve never seen her. At least not that I recall.”

  “We’d like to take a look at your security footage from the day she went missing…both inside the restaurant and the drive-thru.”

  “Not a problem,” the manager said. “Come around the counter. The system is in my office. And watch your step. The floor gets a little slick back here.”

  They followed the manager to the back of the building—she was right…the floor was slippery—and entered her office. “I hope you’ll excuse the mess. Hardly anyone ever sees this part of the building except me and my assistants. Well, that and corporate when they come in for an inspection. We always know when that’s happening though, so we’ve got time to clean up and—”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Rosencrantz said. “If we could just see the footage, please.” He handed her a slip of paper with the specific date and time that matched the information Becky had given them.

  The manager gave Rosencrantz a dry look and said, “I was just making conversation.” Then without saying anything else, she brought up the camera that showed the drive-thru.

  Ten seconds later, Murton said, “Freeze that. Right there.” He looked at Rosencrantz and said, “There’s our girl.” The camera had caught a perfect shot of Kelly Price with a smile on her face as she handed her debit card to the cashier.

  “Can you send us a picture of that?” Rosencrantz said.

  “I’m afraid our system isn’t set up that way,” the manager said. “You could take a picture of the screen though.”

  Murton took out his phone and snapped a picture of Price, then asked the manager to let the footage roll. Two seconds later he again said, “Freeze that please.” He took another picture of the back of Price’s car, a late-model, red Nissan Ultima. He looked at the manager and said, “Thank you. You’ve been a big help.”

  The manager showed them her big gums and said, “Always happy to help law enforcement. Would either of you care for something to eat?”

  “No, thank you,” Rosencrantz said. “We just ate.”

  When they walked outside, Rosencrantz looked at Murton and said, “I don’t think I’ll ever eat at a McDonald’s again. How does a place like that get past the health inspectors?”

  Murton shrugged. “The fries are pretty good.”

  “Yeah, especially the ones with that ‘just off the floor seasoning.’”

  They were walking toward Murton’s squad car when Rosencrantz grabbed him by the arm, pointed, and said, “Is it my imagination, or are we two of the luckiest bastards on the planet?”

  Murton looked where Rosencrantz was pointing and saw a Big Lots store that essentially shared the same parking lot with McDonald’s. Sitting at the edge of the lot was a red Nissan Ultima. They jogged over, staying a few feet away from the car. “Let’s not touch anything,” Murton said. “We might be able to get prints.”

  “Do the plates match?” Rosencrantz said.

  Murton checked his phone. “Yeah, it’s her car all right.” Then he called Sheriff Henderson. “Ed, it’s Murt. We’ve found Price’s car at the Big Lots store next to McDonald’s. Get your crime scene people headed this way.”

  Henderson said he would, and when Murton was finished with the call, Rosencrantz said, “You know what happened? She went through the drive-thru, then parked over here to eat. She might have even gone inside the department store.”

  “Hang tight, Rosie. I’m going to run back over and get my squad. I want to check the iPad again.”

  Murton went to his car and drove back over to where Rosencrantz stood, about ten feet away from Price’s car. When he brought the map and tracking data back up, he noticed that Price’s phone hadn’t moved from where her car was currently parked for about ten minutes. Then it made an almost straight track to the liquor store where they’d been previously.

  “This is clearly where she was taken,” Murton said. He looked at the exterior of the Big Lots store and saw cameras mounted on both front corners. “I’m going to wait here for Ed and his crime scene techs. Run inside and see if those cameras caught anything, will you?”

  Rosencrantz said he would, then added, “Pretty far away, man.”

  “Yeah, but it’s their lot, so I’m hoping we’ll get lucky.”

  And they almost did.

  With his list in hand, Virgil drove over to the Marion County Sheriff’s Office. He parked in the back and locked his gun in the truck before approaching the building. Once there, he pulled out his badge, pushed the intercom button, then looked up at the camera mounted above the door. When the door buzzed, he stepped inside and walked over to the interior door, and repeated the process again. This time a voice came through the intercom. “That you, Jonesy?”

  Virgil knew most, but not all of the Marion County deputies, mostly from his time at the bar. But he couldn’t tell who was speaking to him through the intercom. “In the flesh.”

  “Need to secure your weapon?” the voice said.

  “Nope. Already locked it up in my truck.”

  The interior door buzzed, and Virgil pulled it open and walked into the booking area of the jail. When he saw the deputy, he smiled and said, “Haven’t seen you in the bar lately, Jim.”

  Jim, the deputy, laughed at him. “That’s because you’re hardly ever there anymore. I, on the other hand, am in there so often Delroy is talking about making me a partner.”

  Virgil laughed right back. “Good luck with that. We don’t need a fifth.”

  “I’ll tell you what you do need if you’re interested.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A financing plan. I’m about to go broke if I don’t quit eating and drinking there all the time. Can’t get the wife to cook for me anymore now that she’s had a taste of Robert’s cuisine. A guy like me ought to get a frequent eater’s discount. Maybe you should have one of them punch cards or something.”

  Virgil put a serious look on his face and said, “Wish we could. But the margins are so thin in that business, we’d be busted.”

  “Nice try, Slick. I’ve seen the way you’re packing them in.” Then with absolutely no segue at all: “What’s up?”

  “Need to take a look in the archives. Got a list of cold ones I want to examine. Might need to sign some of it out, depending.”

  “You remember how to get down there?”

  “By heart,” Virgil said, as he turned to walk away.

  “Speaking of hearts, I still miss your old man. For a lot of us old-timers, it hasn’t been the same since he died.”

  Hasn’t been the same for me either, in ways you can’t imagine, Virgil thought. He turned back to Jim, and said, “I’ll catch you on the way out, huh?”

  Sheriff Henderson’s crew began working the car. Murton helped the sheriff set up some crime scene tape to keep the area clear. As they were finishing, Rosencrantz walked out of the store, his phone in hand. “You guys are going to want to see this.”

  “What have you got?” Murton said.

  “Almost everything we need,” Rosencrantz said. Then to the sheriff: “It’s your call, of course, but you can go ahead and break off the search of Dodge’s residence. It looks like his story is going to hold up.”

  “Show us,” Murton said.

  Rosencrantz brought the video up on his phone. It was slightly grainy and distant, but it clearly showed what happened. They all watched as Kelly Price pulled away from the drive-thru, then parked right where they’d located her vehicle. She sat in her car for about ten minu
tes—presumably eating—the video wasn’t that good. But it was good enough to show her get out and walk toward the Big Lots’ entrance. As soon as she was inside, a dark-colored panel van with a sliding door on the side parked next to her car. The door opened from the inside and a male figure crawled out backward, keeping his upper body inside the van. To a casual observer, he might have been searching for something in the van, or even changing a child’s diaper. He was parked so close to Price’s car, she wouldn’t be able to open her own door without the man moving out of her way.

  And that’s exactly what happened. Five minutes later Price walked up to her vehicle, and she must have said something to the man because he climbed back into his van to make room. As soon as Price turned to unlock her door and get in her car, the man grabbed her by her hair with one hand, wrapped the elbow of his other arm around her throat, and yanked her inside the van. The move was so violent, Price dropped her purse and shopping bag, and they both slid about halfway underneath her own vehicle. The van’s door slid shut, it rocked on its springs for a few seconds, then a few seconds after that it slowly drove out of the lot.

  “The cameras are too far away,” Rosencrantz said. “They didn’t get a clear shot of the van’s plates…not that it matters. You can tell they’re covered in mud.”

  “With this black and white footage, we can’t even tell what color the van is,” Henderson said.

  “We might be able to narrow it down, though,” Murton said. “Becky has a program that can compare the shades of gray and give us some possibilities.”

  “How does that work?” Henderson said.

  Murton looked around. “Have your crime scene people take high-res photos of Price’s car, the McDonald’s building, and all the car’s in their lot. Once she has those, she can start to do a comparison model of all the various colors against the different shades of gray. That van looks like either a Chevy or GMC. A dealer will be able to tell us what year it is, and what colors were offered that year.”