Act of Betrayal

by Shirley Kennett

  Even though the folders were greatly streamlined, it looked like a big job. It was time to call in reinforcements. PJ dialed Dave Whitmore’s number. He was already in the office too, and picked up on the first ring.

  “What are your plans this morning, Dave?”

  “I thought I’d go on over to Schultz’s neighborhood later on and do more interviews. If his car was stolen from right out in front of his house, somebody should have seen it.”

  PJ thought about the flash of reflected light across the street from Schultz’s house when she had been there. “No one’s said anything?”

  “They were all at work or asleep or walking around with their eyes closed, something like that. Neighbors see more than we’d like to think they do, but getting them to open up about it can be tough.”

  “You don’t think he did it, the hit-and-run.”

  “Who, Schultz? Nah.”

  He sounded so certain. She wished she could get a transplant of his confidence.

  “How do you know for sure?” PJ asked.

  There was a pause. She could picture him holding the phone, frowning, his brows creased in deep thought.

  “I just know, that’s all. He wouldn’t have run if he’d done it. Schultz would face up to it, no matter how bad it was.”

  Then why is he gone? She didn’t voice her concerns to Dave. And she didn’t mention the potential Mrs. Dollins to him, either.

  PJ wanted help, and she had turned to Dave. He was more approachable than Anita, who always seemed aware of the gulf between cops and civilians, and which side of that gulf each of them was on. PJ thought Dave would go along with what she was about to ask. She cleared her throat.

  “I’ve got an idea I’d like you to help me check out,” she said. “Is Anita there?”

  “I haven’t seen her yet this morning. I can leave her a message and come on over to your office.”

  “No, that’s all right,” she said quickly. “It’s you I want to talk to. Are you willing to help out on something that I’d prefer to keep just between the two of us for now?”

  “Sure,” he answered immediately. “Just say the word.”

  She didn’t know whether to be pleased that he agreed so easily or worried that he would do and had done the same for others, namely Schultz.

  “I’ve got an idea I’d like to bounce off you, then,” PJ said. “See you in a few minutes.”

  Dave appeared soon afterward, bringing a small sack of homemade cinnamon rolls. He tore open the bag and offered PJ a choice.

  “These all look so good. Did your friend make them?”

  “She’s into that kind of stuff. I think she started these last night. Put them in the refrigerator to rise overnight. Does that sound right?”

  PJ shrugged. She had made yeast rolls once in her life, and the results hadn’t encouraged repeat attempts.

  “Um, could be,” she said.

  “All I know is when I woke up this morning the place smelled great.”

  “Marry her.”

  Dave laughed. “Maybe I will, at that. If she’ll have me.”

  He glanced at the stacks of folders on her desk, then looked at PJ expectantly. She explained her connection theory, including Schultz’s phone call during which he said he was being framed. Excitement grew in Dave’s face.

  “Sounds like there might be something to it,” he said when she finished. “What do you want me to do?”

  “I don’t want Wall to know about this yet,” PJ said. “Not until there’s something to show for it. And I did promise Schultz three days. He’s got until tomorrow.”

  “My lips are sealed. Except when it comes to cinnamon rolls,” he said, taking the last roll.

  It wasn’t until several hours later, when the smell of the cinnamon rolls had long since dissipated and PJ was beginning to think about taking a lunch break, that she found something that clicked.

  “I think I’ve got something,” she said. Dave looked up. His elbow had been resting on her desk, and his cheek on his hand. He might have been asleep. She knew no one on the team had gotten much sleep since Rick’s body had been discovered.

  “Yeah?”

  “Jeremiah Ramsey, executed for murdering his sister Eleanor. Get this, Dave—he was put to death one year ago July twenty-ninth,” she said.

  “That fells in the range for Rick’s time of death.”

  “One year later.”

  “Revenge on the anniversary of the death. Like placing flowers on the grave, only a lot worse.”

  “There’s a list of family members in here somewhere…” PJ flipped the pages in the folder. “Here. Father, Elijah Ramsey. Mother, Libby. One surviving sister, Darla.”

  “No girlfriend?”

  “Nope. Not in this folder, anyway. Might have been a more recent development, after the trial. Are you thinking Ginger Miller is Jeremiah’s girlfriend?”

  Dave nodded. His eyes held a light she hadn’t seen before, the hard glint of a hungry fox in the dead of winter that’s just scented a rabbit. She hadn’t thought of Dave as a predator, but prolonged exposure to him in Schultz’s absence was changing her mind.

  “Let’s not get carried away,” she said. “This looks like a connection, but it could also be coincidence.”

  “Party pooper.”

  PJ smiled as she checked farther into the family information. Dave was coming through loud and clear. Schultz obviously had a dampening effect on Dave.

  “At the time of the trial, Jeremiah’s dad was a janitor at an elementary school,” PJ said. “Mom ran a day care center. Darla worked in a children’s clothing store.” PJ twirled a pencil between her fingers. “Seems like everybody wants to be around kids, doesn’t it?”

  “Why does that sound bad when you say it?”

  “Because I’m a shrink,” PJ said. Her mood had shifted. She felt she was onto something.

  “So what’s the plan, boss? Jump on this?”

  “I think we should finish the last couple of folders,” she said. “If nothing more promising comes up, we go on this one. I’ll track down the family and find out what they’re up to now—there’s a last known address in here. It’s been about twelve years since the trial, so there’s no telling if this information is still accurate. You can check out whether Jeremiah got a girlfriend while he was in prison.”

  “What kind of girl falls for a guy on death row, anyway?”

  “I know of a case where a woman fell in love with a convicted serial killer awaiting execution. They got married over the telephone.”

  “Different strokes, I guess. But I wouldn’t want to live next door to her.”

  They raced through the last two folders, finding nothing compelling.

  “Okay, the Anniversary Killer it is,” Dave said.

  “I’ve just had another thought,” PJ said. “If revenge by the family is the story here, why stop with the prosecutor and the detective? Aren’t there other obvious targets?”

  Dave’s eyes widened. “The judge,” he said.

  “And the jury,” PJ finished.

  PJ sat across from Lieutenant Howard Wall. His face, which could be described as craggy at best, seemed as lined as the surface of Mars, which had deceived early astronomers into believing an advanced civilization had built canals. New worry lines seemed to pop into being as she talked.

  After some soul-searching, she had gone back on her decision to give Schultz until Friday morning to resolve things on his own. Dave had pressured her not to keep their speculations secret. Truthfully, it hadn’t taken much pressure at all. She felt that lives could be at stake. Her promise to Schultz was important, but it wasn’t going to get in the way of saving lives.

  “So Schultz called you Tuesday?” Wall said.

  “While you and I were having lunch at Subway,” she said. Having decided to figuratively bare her chest, she wasn’t going to keep Schultz’s contact a secret. “The call came on my cell phone while I was in the bathroom.”

  “I thought you looked a li
ttle upset when you came out.”

  “Upset doesn’t quite cover it.”

  “There’s something lacking in our communication,” Wall said. “I want you to think of me as someone you can come to with problems.”

  PJ tried to keep the skeptical look off her face, but apparently didn’t succeed.

  “I know I’ve been hard on you before,” Wall said. She expected him to smile at the understatement, but he didn’t. “Regardless of what you think, I don’t care about procedures or chain of command or that civilian versus cop thing you’re so hung up on.”

  PJ kept her silence. It wasn’t quite the reaction she expected from Wall. He was hitting too close to home.

  “I couldn’t give a crap about department politics, either,” Wall said. “That’s for Wharton and his hangers-on. Now I don’t like getting chewed out by my superiors and I’ve been known to pass it on. But you have to expect that on this job. On any job.”

  “I understand.”

  “No, I don’t think you do, PJ. I think you’re too wrapped up in your own concerns. I don’t care about proving you can work with the big guys. I care about saving lives.”

  PJ began to get defensive. “That’s not fair. I came to you with this because I care about saving lives too,” she said. She felt heat rising in her cheeks.

  “You could have opened up about it on Tuesday. If there’s anything to this, there could have been more resources working on it. I think you kept quiet because you didn’t want to look bad if you were wrong.”

  There it was. Did PJ really care more about her own image in the department than helping Schultz? Or, heaven forbid, than protecting innocent people? No, she decided. She had kept quiet at first because Schultz asked her to do so. And she wasn’t about to explain the complexity of thought and emotion that went into that decision to Wall. She wasn’t ready to closely examine it herself. But when it became clear to her that other people might be in deadly danger, she hadn’t hesitated to come forward. She forced herself to answer calmly and contritely.

  “That wasn’t quite it, sir, but I’ll work on my communication,” she said.

  He held her eyes for a minute, then seemed to decide that was all he was going to get from her. “Good. Now what exactly did Schultz tell you?”

  PJ went through the conversation in the toilet stall, then told him about her visit to Schultz’s house.

  “You’ve got a key?” He sounded displeased.

  “Yes.” She practically dared him to make an issue of it.

  “You didn’t by any chance go there right after Schultz disappeared and remove an answering machine tape, did you?”

  “No.”

  So he knew about the missing tape, which meant he also knew about the bottles under the sink, just as Dave did. Wall ignored the fact that he hadn’t bothered to tell her of those findings earlier. She bit off a smart remark about communication evidently being a one-way street. Stubbornly, she decided to keep her observation about the busybody across the street from Schultz’s house, the person who might be able to clear or further incriminate Schultz, to herself.

  Wall listened intently when she got to the connection she was tentatively fashioning among Rick Schultz’s amateur execution, framing Schultz for the hit-and-run, and Victor Rheinhardt’s brutal knifing. She rushed on before Wall could question the details of how she obtained knowledge of the Ramsey case. PJ didn’t want to get Louie in trouble again if she could avoid it.

  Wall indicated that he was familiar with the Ramsey case, although he had no direct involvement in it.

  “It’s possible the killer won’t rest until everyone responsible for Jeremiah Ramsey’s death has been eliminated,” PJ said. “There’s no telling how far it will go. There could be a chain of deaths. The judge in the case, the jury, the defense attorney for not getting Jeremiah off, even the warden who officially carried out the sentence.”

  “The governor who declined clemency.”

  “That’s one I hadn’t thought of,” PJ said.

  “Who do you think the killer is?”

  “I don’t have any idea at this point. Likely suspects are members of Jeremiah’s family, a lover if he had one, or even someone who got to know him in prison who feels the execution was unjustified.”

  “Like a guard who worked on death row,” Wall said.

  “Or a counselor of some kind. Here’s a thought: instead of the defense attorney being a target, the attorney or someone in his office could be the killer, trying to wipe out a blot on his record, or a perceived injustice,” PJ said.

  “Then that could apply to any of the possible targets. Maybe a member of the jury feels he was talked into a guilty verdict and is trying to atone.”

  PJ shook her head in dismay. The list of possible suspects was growing faster than the estimate on her last car repair job.

  Wall locked her in his gaze. His eyes gave away nothing, but she knew he was considering where to go next and what her role was to be.

  “I want you to stay with the family,” he said. “Go do your shrink stuff on the Ramseys. I’ll get a task force looking into others who had to do with the case. We’re not dropping our other lines of investigation, though.”

  By that he meant he wasn’t going to entirely stop considering Schultz as the perpetrator in Caroline Bussman’s death. PJ nodded. “I’ll get right on it,” she said.

  Nineteen

  BACK IN HER OFFICE, PJ closed the door to shut out the hallway noise. It sounded as if there was a party going on in the men’s room directly across from her office, complete with whoops and hollers. The closed door blunted the noise, but didn’t shut it off entirely.

  Her desk lamp illuminated the center of her small windowless space, but left shadows at the edge. That made the work area seem even smaller than the converted utility room that it was. It was a good thing she wasn’t claustrophobic.

  Dave, Anita, and others were going to start contacting people who had been involved with the Ramsey trial, people who might be in danger. No doubt they’d be setting up protective watches for those people, at least the more prominently involved ones. Being on a jury had a sort of anonymity about it, whereas others such as the judge stuck out as individuals. There was another benefit from watching the movements of those involved—the killer might be among them.

  She balled her hands into fists and rubbed her eyes. When the surveillance started, would the killings stop? That would be beneficial—no more deaths—but it would also mean that the killer had been alerted to the fact that the police were closing in.

  It was her job to talk with the family members, who were unlikely to be targets themselves. So, although her work was vital and could lead to the identification of the killer, it didn’t have the same ring of urgency as protecting those in danger. To prepare, she had to do two things: locate as many family members as possible, and learn more about the case itself so that she could talk knowledgeably about it. She had learned from past experience that if she wasn’t thoroughly prepared, she might as well have a sign on her forehead reading “loves to be manipulated.”

  After looking in the case file for the last known addresses of Libby and Elijah Ramsey and their older daughter Darla, she dialed the phone numbers listed. One of them resulted in an automated message that said the number didn’t exist and urged PJ to check her directory for the valid number. The other phone number got her a recorded message from a health clinic that offered confidential testing for sexually transmitted diseases. PJ was told that her call was important, and to please call back during office hours Monday through Wednesday.

  Opening the phone book, she found over a hundred and fifty listings for Ramseys. None were for the exact names she was looking for, but she called a few promising ones that were listed under the right initials. No luck. It was frustrating, but not unexpected, that after more than a dozen years the Ramseys might be hard to find. It was quite possible none of them even lived in the St. Louis area anymore. Bad memories.

  She dialed t
he number from the case file for one of the Wee Belong Together day care centers that Libby Ramsey had operated. To her surprise, someone answered.

  “Mrs. Ramsey, please,” PJ said, slipping into her concerned mother’s voice.

  “There’s a name I haven’t heard in a long while. She hasn’t been around for years,” said a woman’s warm voice. “Years. Did you know Libby?”

  “I’m trying to locate her. We’ve lost touch.”

  “Oh, I’m not surprised. After that dreadful business with her daughter… Who did you say you were?”

  “I’m a friend of hers. Actually an old client. My son used to attend Wee Belong.”

  “Well, it’s run by Mrs. Wellsing now. If you’re calling about the center, I’ll let you talk to her.”

  “No, wait. All I need to know is where I can reach Mrs. Ramsey. It’s important. I’m a friend of hers, and I have some news for her. Good news, for a change.”

  PJ discovered that casual lying for a good cause came easily to her. Perhaps she was cut out for investigative work, after all, in spite of the way Schultz sometimes taunted her about only being suited for consumer studies.

  Abruptly she felt the phantom pressure of his lips on hers.

  “Oh, well… I guess it wouldn’t do any harm,” the woman said. “It’s not like she went into hiding, the poor thing. She moved to Jefferson City. I don’t know her phone number.”

  “That’s okay. Thanks.” PJ hung up hurriedly.

  Having gotten one nibble, PJ dropped the search for the other family members and concentrated on Libby. She figured that if she could locate Mom, chances were good that Mom could tell her where the rest of the family was. In her family, that would certainly be the case.

  The phone company information line yielded no listings for Elizabeth Karen Ramsey in Jefferson City. A half hour later, after a lesson from a bored rookie on desk duty, PJ got an address from the Department of Revenue’s license bureau. Libby had a driver’s license.