by Libby Howard
Reaching the end of the line, I sent a few friend requests to a few likely prospects, then looked up the profiles of the tagged women in the lake trip. Not wanting to fall into the black hole of non-friend messages, I noted their birthdates and the city where they lived, then headed to the state case search database.
I found that one had a wage garnishment. From there, I kept digging until I found a number that hopefully was still current and a place of business. Leaving messages on both, I set it all aside and called it an early day. It was Halloween. I had pumpkins to light, candy to set out, and Kentucky short ribs to make with Madison.
I got home by four, let Taco out for some free time, and did a quick bit of Halloween decorating with some old stuff I’d found in a tub in the attic. As I stabbed rubber hands into the dirt and hung plastic spiders from the porch ceiling, I remembered the first few years after Eli and I had bought this house.
I’d made decent money at the paper, and although he was raking it in as a surgeon, he still had some frighteningly large student loan debt to pay off. We both had car payments, although they were modest. This house had been our biggest splurge, our gamble that our finances would only improve and we’d be able to do all the repairs and enhancements that we’d dreamed of when the realtor had first shown us through the house. And of course, then we were still hoping to fill all these bedrooms with children.
The children never came, but we’d paid off Eli’s student loans with some frugal budgeting, and as his income increased, we’d begun to make this house our dream home. But even those first years when money was tight, we’d celebrated Halloween with these very decorations I was putting out now, making sure we had plenty of candy for the kids that came by.
Eli always overbought on candy. And he’d never gone for the cheap stuff, either. For weeks afterward, we’d had dishes of mini chocolate bars all over our house. I’d done my fair share to put a dent in the extra candy, but it was Eli who really loved the chocolate. After a few weeks he’d step on the scale, express his horror at the weight gain, then haul the three pounds of candy still left over into the hospital for the staff to eat. He’d usually come home that night laughing that it had all been eaten within three hours. No one likes chocolate like doctors, nurses, and hospital staff, he’d joked.
Judge Beck pulled in with the kids at quarter to five. They both raced inside—Henry to throw on a makeshift costume for what might be his last year of going door-to-door for candy, Madison to get started on her short ribs. The girl had been cooking for a while now, so I gave her some space, deciding that this was a simple enough recipe that she didn’t need me hovering over her. After I finished putting up the decorations, I put the mini chocolates into a bowl and headed into the kitchen to check on my budding chef.
Madison was spooning the barbeque sauce over the short ribs, ready to put them in the oven. “Thirty minutes, put the salad in a bowl, and we’ll be ready,” she announced.
“Then you go sit on the front porch and hand out candy while I clean up some of these dishes,” I told her. “I’ll pull everything out of the oven when it’s ready and make the salad. You go have some fun, and if you want to throw on a sheet and go trick-or-treating with Henry, go ahead.”
She leaned over and surprised me with a quick kiss on my cheek, then ran as the doorbell rang. I got to work on the pots and pans, popping up front every now and then to catch a glimpse of the early trick-or-treaters.
I’d just pulled the short ribs out of the oven when my phone buzzed. I hit the speaker button and started putting the salad into a bowl.
“Kay Carrera.” I’d expected one of those automated calls, a recording offering me a refinance of my non-existent student loans, or alerting me of a great deal on replacement windows. I didn’t expect it to be Mary Allen’s lake-trip friend returning my call.
“I’m Stacy Washington. You called me about Mary?” The woman barely took a breath before launching into a speech. “I can’t believe…when I read in the paper that they’d found her body, that she’d been murdered…. I hadn’t heard from her in months, but after David died, I just assumed she left to go live with her parents for a while. Now I feel like a terrible friend. She was dead and in that grave, and I didn’t do more than send her a few texts? I never even bothered to find out if she was okay or anything. Oh, God, I can’t believe she’s dead.”
“You went on a lake trip with her last fall, right?”
“Pfft. Yeah. Me, Mary, Leslie, and Eileen. Mary had just broken up with that slime bag Richard. Richard the Dick Hodges. We were celebrating. Best damned decision she ever made, well, except for getting clean, that is. We made more margaritas than a tequila bar on Cinco de Mayo. Swam. Grilled. Got one mother of a sunburn. Mary swore off men. Said she was going to become a nun and help other addicts. I’m sure that was the tequila talking, but she didn’t take that loser back, and that’s all that mattered.”
“What did you think about David?”
She hesitated. “He was a nice guy. He treated Mary right, and I could tell she really loved him. When he proposed to her, gave her that ring, I think it was the happiest day of her life. But…”
I had girlfriends. I completely understood. “He hadn’t been clean for very long.”
“He hadn’t been clean at all when Mary met him. And less than a month back from rehab and he’s proposing? I don’t wanna say he was the wrong guy or anything, but I wished she’d taken things slower, made sure he was solid in his recovery before jumping in with both feet, you know?”
“Were you worried Mary would start using again? That he’d falter and take her down with him?”
“Oh Lord, no. Mary was solid. Although after David died, I did wonder if she’d start up again. His death hit her hard. He was the only man for her, as far as she believed.”
“How did Richard feel about the breakup?”
She snorted. “He got mad. Then he cried and begged her to come back. Then he got mad again. It went on for a few weeks, but he finally gave up or found another girlfriend.”
“Do you think he was the sort of man who might have approached Mary after David’s funeral and try to get back together with her? Someone who might be angry enough at her refusal to kill her?”
“Richard? Hardly. He was all bluster. The moment Mary stood up for herself, he folded into a blubbering begging mess of need. He’s a dick, but he’s not a killer. And for all his begging and crying, he’s got too much pride to try to get Mary back after she’d moved on.”
“But she told the people at her recovery group that she and David were keeping the engagement under wraps because of her ex. That doesn’t sound like Richard was over her. That sounds like a crazy stalker ex who might resort to murder if he couldn’t get his way.”
She laughed. “That wasn’t Mary’s crazy ex, it was David’s.”
My mouth dropped open. “David’s?”
“Yeah, I didn’t get all the details. I’m not sure Mary even knew all the details. David had some ex-girlfriend that refused to let it go. I got the idea she’d been hounding him for a long time. Like years, long time.”
Why hadn’t DeLanie mentioned that? “Do you know when they’d dated? If it had been a recent breakup?”
Stacy made a frustrated noise. “From what Mary told me, the two of them had been off and on again for, like, the last decade. So no wonder the woman thought David was going to come back to her again. He always seemed to. It was another reason I didn’t think he was the best match for Mary. But she loved him, and she was absolutely positive he was done with the ex once and for all. She said David just needed a few months for the ex to cool off and all would be okay. Richard hadn’t been an issue, so Mary was convinced David’s ex would be the same.”
But then he died. And then she was murdered. Although I wasn’t completely willing to give up on Mary’s ex as a murderer, David’s ex was now at the top of my list.
“Do you know what her name was? This former girlfriend of David’s?”
“Mary never said. Maybe one of his family or friends know? I’m sorry. I wish I could be of more help.”
“Can I call you if I have any more questions?” I asked her.
“Yes, please do.”
Stacy hung up. I grabbed the platter of short ribs in one hand and the bowl of salad in the other and headed into the dining room. Tonight was all about family and celebrating the spooky holiday, but tomorrow morning first thing, I was going to need to ask DeLanie a few more questions about her son and possible past girlfriends.
Chapter 19
“David dated a lot,” DeLanie told me. “He wasn’t a player or anything, but he kept things casual enough that he didn’t introduce any of them to me.”
“But he didn’t introduce Mary to you either, and he was planning on marrying her, so it’s not a stretch to think he would have an on-again, off-again relationship with someone and not tell you?”
“I figured a lot of his girlfriends were users and he didn’t want me to know about them. As far as I know, his girlfriends only lasted for a few months. He was probably single more than he was with someone.”
“Did he ever mention one that he felt was a problem? One that wouldn’t take a breakup as a permanent thing?”
DeLanie thought for a moment then slowly shook her head. “No. I know there was a girl in high school that he was friends with. She went to the same college as he did. I got the impression from him that she had a bit of a crush on him. I think they may have gone out here and there, but I don’t think it was anything serious. That’s the only thing I can think of that would have been remotely considered on-again, off-again.”
It was such a setback that David hadn’t been on any social media. It made it hard to even find pictures of him through tagging. But as DeLanie talked, an idea came to me.
“Did David have a cell phone? Do you have it and know his password?”
She nodded. “Yes, I have a box of his things in my room over here. I never could get rid of them, but didn’t even want to put them away. It just seemed like he was near as long as I kept his things around.” She went over to a box and went through it, pulling out a phone and handing it to me. “I don’t know where the charger is. David always used the same password for everything—1215. It was my birthday.” Her voice broke on the last sentence.
Returning to the office, I found a charger in J.T.’s desk drawer that worked, plugged in David’s phone, and sat down to find Richard Hodges. I quickly discovered that Richard had no criminal record, had a rather spotty credit history, and a job at Dickerson Construction that he’d held for the last five years. He had a Ford F-150 with alarmingly high payments. He had a little rancher he’d bought over in Milford three years ago.
And he had a wife.
I frowned at the screen. Richard Hodges had gotten married in April to a Leesa Vasquez. Well, Richard certainly hadn’t wasted any time. He’d gone from angry and begging Mary to not leave him to married to another woman in six months. Although to be fair, Mary had found love just as quickly after her and Richard’s relationship had ended.
Richard’s social media was fairly bare-bones, but his profile pic was a wedding one. His new wife had wedding and honeymoon pictures splashed all over multiple sites. I still might have thought there was something that might have tied him to Mary’s murder—blackmail or revenge, or old feelings of love and anger dredged up by a death and a marriage. The only thing that made me cross Richard’s name off my list was the timing. His wedding was three days before David’s funeral, and according to the pictures all over his wife’s accounts, he and Leesa were in Aruba during Mary’s murder. Nothing says alibi like eighteen hundred miles of distance.
Stacy was right. It wasn’t Richard. And unlike Detective Norris, I refused to believe that a terminally ill Ford had shot his son’s fiancée and elicited help in disposing of her body. No, I was leaning toward the ex-girlfriend.
Who no one seemed to know about.
I eyed the stack of skip traces. Then I turned back to my computer and found the Locust Point High School yearbook from twelve years ago. There was David, handsome as ever and looking even more like a young Ford in these pictures. I downloaded a list of the graduating class, then, wanting to start by casting a broader net, I downloaded the list of the following year’s graduates as well. DeLanie said this girl had gone to high school and college with David, but she might have been a year younger.
David had gone to State. I didn’t have time to go through all the hoops of getting the college to send me their enrollee records for the four years David was there, so I fired up a handy little bit of software that J.T. had purchased when he began to take on skip trace clients. We paid a fee each time we used it, but for those hard-to-find people, this software was invaluable. I set the parameters, then let the software crawl through social media and search engine data, doing in a few hours what would have taken me weeks to do manually.
Then I turned to David’s cell phone, hoping his mother had been right about his password. It turned out I didn’t even need the password. David’s phone fired right up, showing me a picture of him and Mary, cheek to cheek. Her hand was on his chest, a diamond engagement ring front and center on her left-hand ring finger.
They looked so happy, and for a moment, tears stung my eyes. They didn’t deserve this. They should have been married, had kids, grown old together. It wasn’t just Mary’s murder that upset me either, it was David’s life being cut short by his addiction. All the photo albums, discussions with his family, what I’d pieced together off the internet…. David had not been a troubled child, destined for this sort of end. He’d been happy, active. He’d played sports in school, gotten good grades. His mother had worked two jobs, but between her and Ford, he’d grown up right. He’d done well in college, graduated with a business degree and an entry-level job in marketing with a local tech firm. There he’d gotten regular pay increases, and a promotion. I was certain he’d attended the occasional party, had joined his friends for happy hours, possibly drank too much at a weekend barbeque, but nothing in his youth or young adult life foreshadowed a drug addiction or his overdose death.
Had he started abusing prescription drugs after needing them for something so common as back pain or a root canal? Had the emergency room given him opioids after that car accident six years ago, and he found himself unable to give them up? Had that addiction quickly slid into the cheaper heroin? An addiction even rehab and the love of a woman in recovery couldn’t break? It seemed such a heartbreakingly common story. I’d grown up thinking addiction was a crisis of the poor, but the last few decades had seen those claws grabbing hold of middle-class America. No one’s child, sister, uncle, or spouse was immune, it seemed.
“Oh, David,” I murmured as I scrolled through the texts on his phone. “If only you hadn’t died. If only someone had gotten to you in time, been there to help you.”
But he had died. And Mary had been murdered the afternoon of his funeral. And all I could do to help them now was find Mary’s killer and see justice served.
The texts were an interesting mix of work-related communications, a few regarding recovery group meeting recommendations from a man who I assumed was David’s sponsor. There were some from Ford. One from his mother back in January asking him to pick up milk on his way home. Most were from Mary, and I felt a bit guilty as I delved into their personal conversations.
They started in December, right before David had gone to rehab this last time. At first, they were warm and encouraging, but obviously texts between strangers—Mary reassuring David that he could do this, that she and the group would be there for him when he got home, to catch him if he felt himself falling. There was a gap in the messages where I assumed David had been in rehab and unable to use his phone. When they started up again, the change in tone was rapid and marked. The two quickly fell in love, David touching in his honesty about his struggles and Mary his rock. They discussed more than a shared addiction, they talked about family, work, what food they
liked to eat, an early morning snow, a squirrel at the bird feeder. Between the long message threads and pictures, I felt I actually knew these two people.
The words of affection and love grew more frequent. And with them was concern over someone they both called CW. She’d called David again—five times in one evening. She’d showed up at his house, at work. He’d thought she might have broken into his apartment a few times. Mary wanted to confront her, but David didn’t want his fiancée to become a target. He told her to be careful, that he’d take care of it, that CW had assumed they were getting back together once David got back from rehab, that he blamed himself, thinking he might have said things while he was under the influence that had led this CW to believe they had a future together.
Mary wasn’t so charitable. She urged David to call the police, told him she didn’t like this sneaking around. Never once did she chastise David for having possibly led this woman on. She did, however, express concern that the stress of dealing with this ex might jeopardize David’s recovery. The texts ended on that note the day David had died. The final three messages were from Mary, asking how something had gone, then frantically urging him to call her. I felt ill looking at them, knowing what had happened, imagining Mary’s grief.
Had Mary confronted this CW and accused her of driving David to use again? Had this ex been so unstable and fixated on David that maybe she killed the rival for his affection out of anger and grief? Reading these texts, I had more than a strong suspicion that this unknown woman was the murderer.
CW. I looked at my crawler software that was still chugging along, then went through the high school records, searching for a woman with the initials CW. There was nothing in David’s graduating class, but in the one the year after, there had been a Cindy Weiss.
