by LS Sygnet
“So he likes to play rock star for your fans.”
Madden snorted, “You could say that. He’s got this delusion that he can snatch any woman right out from under me, and honestly, the kind of girl he likes isn’t one that’s gonna make a blip on my radar.”
“He told me he favors blondes.”
“True enough, but I bet he hit on you anyway. Fulk goes for anything with a pussy.” Madden’s eyes darted toward the floor. “Sorry, I didn’t mean that to sound as crude as it did.”
“Are you familiar with why he was dishonorably discharged from the Marines?” I lowered my voice and threw in enough hesitation to parlay the question into something that sounded like I was taking him into deep confidence.
“The personality disorder bullshit? Yeah, I heard that was the official party line,” Madden said, “but if you ask me, there was something deeper than that involved. After watching him for at least fifteen years, I’d lay odds that it had something to do with gay bashing.”
“He’s had problems with that while working for you?”
Madden nodded. “He gets really hot under the collar when he sees same sex couples on the floor. I got no problem with it. Live and let live and all that. But Fulk gets a little nuts over it.”
“And has he been physically aggressive toward anyone like that while he’s worked for you?”
“No way. I won’t tolerate any abuse of the fans. If it weren’t for our fans we would be nowhere. I’ve made that very clear to everybody. You don’t have to love the fans. You don’t have to socialize with them. But you will respect that they’re the ones who got us where we are today and behave accordingly.”
“If I asked you to look at a photograph of the woman found dead backstage last night, would you tell me if you’ve ever seen her before?”
He grinned. “Depends. Would you have dinner with me?”
“Now?”
“If your pal from OSI doesn’t plan to let us leave town until he solves this murder, I suspect we could have a couple of nights to choose from for dinner. What do you say, Helen? Will you go out with me?”
A cacophony of warnings sounded in my head, none of which felt very accurate according to my gut instincts. Madden had more than his fair share of bravado, true, but wasn’t that part and parcel of this wealth and fame thing? He didn’t strike me as the ultimate sinner that Underwood insinuated. In fact, tonight, he seemed very different than he had upon our first introduction.
“We’ll see,” I said without closing the door or committing to a date. “I’ve got her picture on my phone. Care to take a look?”
“For you, anything.”
I opened the phone and showed him the photograph.
Madden’s face turned ash gray. “Shit!” he rasped.
“Scott, do you know her?”
“That’s my nephew Kyle!”
I gripped Madden’s arm and led him down a deserted hallway. “Talk to me.”
His hands shook. “Oh my God. I – it was Kyle?”
“Yes,” I said, “but nobody knows that the murder victim wasn’t really a woman. Only the murderer and those of use who were present at the medical examiner’s office this morning know the truth, Scott. Tell me the last time you saw Kyle.”
“Years ago, at least a couple. I think it was the last time we played Darkwater Bay.”
“So when Kyle was about seventeen?”
He nodded. “His father and I had a falling out a couple of years before that.”
“Because Kyle was transgendered?”
Wide hazel eyes impaled me. “Have you told Theo and Marion yet?”
“They’re out of town,” I said. “Their names are Goddard. How…?”
“I picked Madden when I started the band. Let’s just say that my family didn’t always approve of my lifestyle. It’s ironic, because Theo accepted everything about how Kyle lived his life, but my ways were too goddamned wild to suit his tastes.”
Bitterness and resentment bubbled around his words.
“I take it that Theo is an older sibling?”
“Yeah,” Madden rasped. “He’s about ten months older than me, but you’d think he was a decade the way he acts. He’s gonna go ape shit when he hears that Kyle is dead.”
“Can I ask why his son’s sexual identity caused a rift between the two of you, or am I correct to assume that it merely deepened one that already existed?”
“You’re really sharp, Helen. The rift as you call it, was there from the day I was born. Theo always hated me. He was the good kid. Straight A student, never got into a lick of trouble, always exceeded everyone’s expectations.”
“And you got all the attention.”
“Me and our younger brother Rham. Don’t get me wrong. Kyle is… was a sweet kid. But I thought that Theo ought to discourage him from being so brazenly out there with being a girl.”
“Because…?”
“Isn’t it obvious? He hit on the wrong dude and ended up dead!”
“Can you think of anyone in your entourage who would react that way to the advances from a beautiful young girl that was really a boy?”
“I can’t believe you really asked me that,” Madden growled, “after I just explicitly told you that Underwood hates gays.”
“I figured you’d say that. I don’t suppose you’d be able to tell me if you saw Fulk yesterday around noon?”
“Noon?”
I nodded.
“Shit. Nothing’s ever easy, is it? We were all together at noon yesterday. We were talking the logistics of this two date set with the techs.”
“When did the meeting start and end?”
“Eleven. We finished by about one-thirty.” Madden gripped my hand. “I just gave the son of a bitch an alibi, didn’t I?”
“I’m afraid so,” I said. “At least for the time being. Mr. Madden, would you be willing to talk to Johnny Orion and tell him what you just told me – officially, on the record?”
“Of course I would! Christ, when Theo finds out that Kyle is… shit. We’ll cooperate in any way you want, you have my word.”
I started wondering if Kyle, aka Kylie, was the deep dark family secret that Underwood insinuated was the bit of information that Madden would do anything to keep hidden. Suddenly, the straightforward hate crime seemed a little murkier than it had a few hours ago.
Chapter 14
I sucked in a deep breath and felt the need to utter a silent prayer to the universe that Johnny would let me speak without going ballistic that I spent any time alone talking to Underwood and Madden. Please let the information I unearthed override his insane jealousy.
Crevan held one arm out over the elevator door and waited for my snail’s pace to cross the threshold. “Calm down, Helen. You act like you’re facing the gallows.”
“It would be helpful if I could get you to promise not to tell him anything that’s gonna make him go ballistic.”
“Oh, like this upcoming dinner date you made with a notorious womanizer?”
“I highly doubt that will happen now that Madden knows it was his nephew who was murdered yesterday. And for the record, I never agreed to have dinner with him, Crevan.”
“We’ll see I guess. And for the record, you never turned Madden down either.”
The elevator chimed at the penthouse level of La Pierre Tower. Johnny was waiting in the vestibule. His eyes raked over me suspiciously.
“Oh for God’s sake!” I yanked the collar of my blouse away from my neck. “I wasn’t even mauled. Happy now?”
The corners of his lips twitched, in humor I hoped, but something in my gut told me he was not amused, nor was he amenable to trusting my word alone.
“Honest, Johnny. Nobody was inappropriate,” Crevan said. “Helen learned something important when she talked to Madden tonight.”
“What?” he spoke directly to me.
I conveyed the substance of my conversation with our locally grown rock star, as well as what Underwood had hinted about some deep dark secre
t Madden was hiding from the world and his belief that he would go to great lengths to keep it a secret.
“Including murder?” Johnny asked.
“He seemed genuinely shocked when I showed him the photograph of his nephew.”
“Right,” Johnny muttered. “Then again, if he’s play acting, he’d appear surprised enough.”
“I can’t imagine that his nephew would engage in sexual activity with a family member, Johnny. And with Underwood’s history, he’s looking more like the prime suspect than anybody else. We already know he lied about performing the sound check on Scott’s equipment before the concert. He said he found the speaker in working order at three in the afternoon, but Maya put the time of death around noon.”
“Tell him the rest,” Crevan said.
“What else?”
“Well,” teeth clamped down on my lower lip, “Madden sort of supplied an alibi for all of the band members and techs,” I said. “They had some sort of meeting from eleven to about one-thirty Sunday afternoon.”
“Have we verified that with other witnesses?”
“Yeah, unfortunately, everyone we talked to Sunday night before they had time to get their stories straight gave the same timeline for Sunday that Madden did tonight. Of course at the time, we were focusing on an entirely different window for when the murder was committed which made Underwood appear less ironclad with his alibi. We haven’t been able to track down these girls he allegedly met.”
“What did their full day look like, Crevan?” I asked.
“The trucks rolled into Darkwater around seven in the morning. Roadies unloaded the trucks and did the basic setup which was finished in time for the morning to early afternoon powwow. Nobody has a clear memory of Underwood doing his sound check, or not doing it for that matter.”
“Scott said that he’s pretty infamous for neglecting to do his job,” I said.
“What else did Scott have to say, detective?”
“Johnny –”
“How many suspects do you routinely call by their first names?” he growled.
“Oh, I don’t know. I seem to remember calling you Johnny an awful lot when you were a suspect.”
His eyes widened. “A suspect of what?”
“Never mind,” Crevan intervened quickly before things got out of control. “The point is, we have everybody but the drivers alibied for the time of death.”
“I suppose we’re considering Winslow’s determination infallible.”
“Is she fair game because she’s my friend, or because she tells you what the evidence bears out instead of what you want it to say?”
“Helen, that wasn’t fair,” Crevan said. “And Johnny, if Maya says the time of death was between noon and two, that’s when it was.”
“What I keep coming back to is the hemophilia,” I said. “Kyle Goddard didn’t have enough clotting factor in his blood on a good day. If somebody had an encounter with him, realized he was male and not female, stabbed him and left the screwdriver in his body, I wonder what sort of things could’ve impacted the scenario we uncovered.”
“Where are you going on this one, Doc?”
I shook my head. “I’m not sure. I need to talk to Maya.”
“Because you have doubts about her infallible time of death now?” Johnny asked.
I ignored the sarcasm – for the moment, at least. “Somebody with access to the band’s equipment is involved in this murder somehow. We’ve already ruled out those with backstage access. None of them were around until well after the time of death.”
“Right,” Johnny said. “So then the time of death has to be wrong?”
“I’m just trying to imagine what sort of circumstances might slow decomposition while at the same time preventing heat loss.”
“You think Goddard died before noon?”
“I’m not sure,” I said. “That’s why I need to talk to Maya. If the time of death was later than noon, then the body temp dropped faster than anticipated. If he died before noon, something maintained his body temp longer than anticipated. Crevan, what do we know about how this equipment is stored during transportation?”
“It’s loaded in the back of trucks. Nothing special as far as I know.”
“So they don’t temperature control for the equipment?”
“Not that I’m aware.”
“The ambient temperature right now would cool a body faster than normal. Our humidity would make decomposition occur at a faster rate. If this victim didn’t die around noon, you’d expect a dramatic enough physical finding to indicate an accurate time,” I said.
“Call Winslow and get her take on this,” Johnny said.
“It’s very late.”
“And I was under the impression that she knows you well enough to understand that you’re going to call whenever you need answers,” Johnny said. “Which is it going to be, detective?”
I shot a glare and pulled out my phone.
“Winslow. Please tell me you don’t have another dead body.”
“It’s Helen.”
“Oh, well in that case, this had better be about dead bodies. If you’re calling to vent –”
“All of our suspects have unbreakable alibis for the time of death on Kyle Goddard. Are you certain that the time of death was earlier, around noon?”
I heard the joint in her jaw pop, and she mumbled around it. “Unless Goddard was stored in a very warm, very dry area until the body could be disposed, no, I’m certain that the time of death was accurate.”
“How warm and dry?”
“More than 12 hours had passed from the time of death to when I checked the liver temperature, Helen, based on the temperature and the anticipated loss of heat. His body was cold. We would anticipate finding warmer temperatures up to eight hours postmortem.”
“So if the time of death was later than noon, but the body was exposed to colder temperatures, would that account for inaccuracies in time of death based on temperature? We already know that livor mortis could be affected by the hemophilia, right?”
“I suppose it’s possible, but if that’s the case, aren’t you opening your suspect pool to a much larger sample, and shouldn’t someone have seen this poor kid slumped over that speaker box bleeding the blood pooled in his guts inside?”
“Yes,” I started pacing. “Unless…”
“Unless what?”
“I think we need a forensics team back over at the amphitheater. Nothing has been packed away.”
“Where you goin’ with this, Helen?”
“The trucks,” I said. “What if our victim was killed in one of the trailers where the equipment was stored? I already know that Fulk Underwood has a longstanding reputation of doing his job poorly and at the last minute. If the killer knew that, it would’ve been an ideal location for a clandestine meeting.”
“Plus, the killer could’ve let the vic bleed out right there in the trailer without anyone noticing.”
“So what are we suggesting?” I asked. “That whoever killed Kyle Goddard might not be the same person that hid his body in the trunk where it was found?”
“Or that the killer had time to transfer the body and move the equipment into the amphitheater where it would be discovered later.”
“That makes a leap that the killer wanted him to be found, Maya.”
“In equipment that Underwood was responsible for checking.”
I noticed Johnny and Crevan’s expressions growing impatient with the half of the conversation they could hear. “I’ll let Orion know and he can use whichever forensic team he wants scouring for more evidence. As far as I know, we still haven’t got a murder weapon. We might find it along the way.”
“Just out of curiosity, do we know what the ambient temperature in Darkwater was Sunday afternoon?”
“Less than 40 degrees,” I said. “We had freezing rain in the afternoon.”
“That could certainly cool the body enough to screw with my time of death estimate. You do realize that time of de
ath is a best guess window scenario, Helen.”
“Of course. I’m not saying that you didn’t make the right call based on the information we had at the time. All of this makes me very curious though. Someone went to great lengths to implicate Mr. Underwood in all of this.”
“Well, it sounds like the guy has a very long line of enemies lined up around the corner and down the block, possibly from sea to shining sea.”
“Yeah,” I said, one of whom was with me when the crime was discovered and who couldn’t point a finger at Underwood fast enough. “Thanks for the help, Maya. I’ll be in touch.”
“At a decent hour please. Ken and I are old. We need our sleep, you know.”
“Guess that means I should vote for the state instead of Darkwater’s forensic team.”
“I would love you eternally if you did.”
Johnny had his phone poised, ready to dial when I clicked off the call. “So we’re searching the transport vehicles to see if that’s where the actual murder took place?”
I nodded. “There’s no way, with a later time of death, that Goddard could’ve been killed out in the open at the amphitheater without someone being a witness, Johnny. Plus, considering the evidence Maya found of sexual activity, it stands to reason that this meeting was clandestine.”
He called OSI.
Crevan jerked his head in the direction of Johnny’s office. I followed.
“Are you guys gonna talk this other thing out one of these days?”
“I tried to talk to him earlier tonight, Crevan. For some reason, he’s angry with me. I can’t help but believe that there’s more to this anger than my absence at the hospital when he woke up.”
“Please don’t start blaming Tony again.”
I hadn’t even started thinking about the things Briscoe might’ve said to incite Johnny’s extreme distrust of me. No, my mind went immediately to the law that Johnny had severely bent in order to save me from further scrutiny from the FBI. Was he remembering more than he was willing to admit?
“Talking about me behind my back?” The low rumble assaulted my left ear.
“Crevan is worried that we’re not trying to resolve the problems between us,” I said. “I told him that we tried to talk through some of it earlier.”
