The shit is going to hit the fan. Gwen’s words nagged at him all the way home. What had Walter told Gwen?
TWENTY-TWO
Sonya was already at the office when Matt arrived at 7:30 the next morning. The crime scene photos were laid out on her desk.
It had been her idea to come in early and go over the file again. “We must have missed something,” she had said the night before when Matt told her about Gwen’s comment to Violet Bailey.
Matt had his doubts. He and Sonya had been through the file so many times that they knew it by heart. But they owed it to Ray to go through it again. Learning how to do a flip turn would have to wait.
Sonya tapped on the photo of the black sedan in the garage. “Let’s start with what we know. At three o’clock Derek Costello sees Walter drive the replacement car from the limo company into the garage.”
“He had to get out of the car to open the garage door,” Matt said. “He wouldn’t have done that if he knew he was going to be leaving in a few minutes. He would have parked in the driveway and gone in through the front door.”
“I agree. Walter comes into the kitchen from the garage, opens a beer, sits down at the kitchen table and starts reading the newspaper.” She pointed at the photo showing the Sunday Sentinel on the kitchen table beside the bottle of beer and the chauffeur’s hat. “At 3:07 he calls Dan Burke, who tells him the mayor doesn’t need him. At 3:13 he calls Gwen, who gets off the phone and tells Violet that the shit is going to hit the fan. He must have seen something between the time he got to the house and the time he called Gwen. But what?”
“Maybe it was something in the newspaper,” Matt suggested. He peered at the photo, but he could only make out the headline: Snowden Woman Killed in Hit-and-Run. Police Looking for Black Sedan. “Are the Sentinel’s back issues online?”
Sonya navigated to the newspaper’s website and found the issue from the day of the murders. “Check this out,” she said. Midway down the front page was a photo of the Chief—far younger than the old man they’d met—in a restaurant booth with an attractive young blonde. The headline of the story read Chief Promises Help for Single Mothers. “Doug Cunningham said the Chief was playing around. Makes you wonder what kind of help he was offering her.”
“Probably the same type of help he offered my mom,” Matt said. He told Sonya what his dad had told him.
“Gross.” She clicked on the link to page two.
Matt glanced at the Sentinel headline again. Snowden Woman Killed in Hit-and-Run. Police Looking for Black Sedan.
A black sedan.
“Go back to the front page again,” he said. “The article about the hit-and-run.”
A West Side woman has died following a hit- and-run early this morning on Amsterdam Avenue. Anita Sonnenberg, 52, was rushed to hospital by ambulance but was pronounced dead on arrival. An eyewitness said the victim was crossing the street when she was struck by a late-model black sedan that fled the scene without stopping. The witness did not see the driver but said a young female was sitting in the passenger seat. Anyone with information is asked to call Snowden Police at 806-9317.
“Holy shit,” Matt said.
“I don’t get it,” Sonya said.
“The Chief’s car was a black sedan. The day after the hit- and-run, Walter took it in for repairs. And we know the Chief liked to fool around. The young woman in the car could have been one of his girlfriends.”
“You think the Chief was driving? Are you insane?”
“Something happened to the car, or Walter wouldn’t have had to take it in,” Matt pointed out. “And remember how the Chief tried to stop us from investigating Ray’s case with that bullshit about us misusing Justice Project resources? What if Walter read the article and figured out that the Chief was responsible for the hit-and-run? Then he calls Gwen and tells her. That would explain the shit’s going to hit the fan comment.”
“Are you saying the Chief killed Walter?”
“He couldn’t let anyone know about the hit-and-run. He would have gone to jail.”
“How did the Chief find out that Walter knew about it?”
“Walter told him. That’s where he went when he left the house at 3:15. To see the Chief.”
“Wouldn’t he have gone to the police?”
“Not without speaking to the Chief first.”
“But Walter wasn’t killed at Lawson House,” Sonya pointed out. “He was killed in his own house.”
“The Chief couldn’t kill him at Lawson House. What would he do with the body? He must have persuaded Walter to take him back to his house. The limo’s windows are tinted, so nobody would have seen that the Chief was in the car. They go into the kitchen from the garage. The Chief kills Walter, but before he can leave, Gwen comes home, so he has to kill her too. Then he fakes the burglary so the police will think a robber did it.”
“Wait a minute,” Sonya said. “Just because Walter took the car in for repairs doesn’t mean it was in an accident. For all we know, the car could have been keyed by an angry husband.”
Matt chuckled. He looked at the photo of the black sedan. The limo company’s name was on the license plate. Snowden Limousine Service. He reached for his phone.
“Put it on speaker,” Sonya said.
“Snowden Limousine Service. Andy Evelyn speaking,” a teenage voice squeaked.
“Hey, Andy. It’s Matt.”
“I hope you’re not going to hit me up for something else for the auction. My dad chewed me out for giving you the car and driver.”
“It’s not about that.”
Matt and Sonya waited impatiently while Andy dug out the paperwork.
“What was the problem with the car?” Matt asked when Andy was back on the phone.
“I don’t know. All it says on the invoice is Repairs. $1,965.”
“Is there any way of finding out what they did?”
“The body shop would have had a work order, but I don’t know if they would have kept it all this time.”
Matt and Sonya exchanged a hopeful look. A body shop. That’s where Walter would have taken the car if it had been in an accident. “What’s the name of the place?” Matt asked.
“Bob’s Auto Body on Crawford. We don’t use them anymore. The new owner’s a real bitch.”
“He would never say that about a man,” Sonya said after Andy hung up. “A man who’s tough is just tough. But when a woman’s tough, she’s a bitch.”
Matt nodded. He wasn’t going to touch that one with a ten-foot pole.
TWENTY-THREE
“I didn’t know there were so many bad drivers in Snowden,” Matt joked when they got to Bob’s Body Shop at the end of the day. Cars were raised on hoists in each of the three bays, tended to by workers in greasy overalls, and another six cars with varying degrees of damage were parked in front.
A woman behind a cluttered desk in a small office was on the phone, the name Madge stitched on her shirt.
“We can’t look at your car until Friday morning,” Madge barked into the phone. “Bring it in then.” She tossed her phone on the desk and looked up at Matt and Sonya.
“We’re with the Justice Project,” Matt told her. “We’re looking for some information about one of our cases.”
“Do I look like I have time to go on a scavenger hunt?”
“I can see you’re really busy,” Matt said, flashing a smile. “But it’s really important.”
“I know who you are. You’re that football player.”
“Guilty.” This is going to be easy, he thought.
“My ex-husband played football. It was all he ever talked about. Biggest jackass I ever met. Now get lost.” The phone rang. Madge picked it up. “Bob’s Auto Body. Just a minute.” She put the phone down and walked out to the garage. Sonya nudged Matt and pointed to a shelf above the window that held dusty binders labeled by year.
“When’s the Camry going to be ready?” Madge yelled.
“Not today,” a voice shouted back.
/> “Why are you still here?” she said to Matt and Sonya when she returned. She picked up the phone. “Call back tomorrow.”
Sonya moved to the far side of Madge’s desk. “I don’t feel so good,” she said. She covered her mouth and leaned over the desk as if she was going to throw up.
Madge picked up the wastepaper basket and held it out in front of Sonya, her back to Matt. “Use this,” she ordered.
Matt quickly grabbed the binder they needed and shoved it into his backpack. He rushed to Sonya’s side. “Are you okay?” he asked.
“False alarm,” Sonya said, straightening up. “Mom said the first three months are the worst.” Madge looked at her openmouthed. “We should go,” Sonya said to Matt. “I need to lie down.”
Matt put his arm around her shoulder and helped her out the door. “I told you to use a condom,” Sonya said angrily, in a voice loud enough for Madge to hear.
“We’ve been through that,” Matt said, pretending to be just as angry. “Matt Junior needs a sibling.”
They were howling with laughter by the time they got to Sonya’s car.
“Your friend at the limo company was right,” Sonya said. “That woman is a bitch.”
Matt opened the binder. It didn’t take long to find the work order he was looking for. Lincoln Continental. License: THE CHIEF. Replace hood and front bumper.
“Oh my god,” Sonya said. They stared at each other wordlessly. Then Sonya called Jesse and left him a message to call her back.
“It could be a coincidence,” Matt suggested.
Sonya gave him a look that said she didn’t believe that any more than he did. “That was really smart, the way you figured out that the Chief’s car was involved in the hit-and-run.”
“Not bad for a Neanderthal who needs to take off his shoes and socks to count past ten,” Matt joked.
“That really pissed you off, didn’t it?”
“Not as much as our showing up barefoot did you.”
“That was cute. I’ll give you that. Was that your idea?”
Matt nodded. “Did you actually think your petition would change anything?”
“No. Not in Snowden, where even God wears the green-and-gold.”
“So why did you do it? You don’t even play sports.”
“Because it was the right thing to do. Why shouldn’t women athletes get the same support men do?”
Sonya dropped Matt off in front of his apartment. “I’ll call you as soon as I hear from Jesse.”
An envelope from Eastern State was in the mailbox. Matt opened it when he got into the apartment. Inside was a letter congratulating him on being accepted into the school, along with the course curriculum.
Congratulations! What a joke. If you could walk and chew gum at the same time, you were pretty much guaranteed acceptance to Eastern State. He thumbed through the course curriculum, but nothing registered with him. He was too busy trying to process what he and Sonya had discovered.
Had the Chief really killed Walter and Gwen? He and Sonya had been so sure of it, but here in his living room, in the hard light of day, it seemed preposterous. He went over the facts again and again, and each time he reached the same conclusion. The Chief was guilty. It gave Matt goose bumps to think that Ray’s nightmare was coming to an end, that he would soon be walking out of prison a free man.
He stared at his phone, commanding it to ring. An hour passed before it obeyed.
“What did Jesse say?” he asked Sonya anxiously.
“Do you have your computer?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“Go to the Sentinel’s website and find the paper from the day of the murder.”
“Got it,” he said, when it was up on his screen.
“Read the last paragraph of the article, about the mayor’s meeting in the restaurant with the blonde.”
Matt read it out loud. “‘I intend to work with City Council to make sure single mothers get the help they deserve,’ the Chief said in an interview at Snowden Airport Saturday afternoon, minutes before he boarded a plane to Chicago to attend a charity dinner.”
Minutes before he boarded a plane. It took a moment for Matt to grasp the implication. The Chief had been in Chicago at the time of the hit-and-run. He had nothing to do with the murders.
Matt and Sonya were back at square one.
TWENTY-FOUR
Matt had just come through the door to the office when Anthony texted him.
On my way to the airport. See you at graduation tomorrow.
Matt texted a reply. CU then.
“Do you want to go to Cooley Park after work?” Sonya asked after Matt got himself a coffee. “It won’t take long. We only have four houses left to visit,” she added in a tone of voice that made it clear she didn’t hold out much hope that anything would come of it.
Matt was inclined to agree. In the two weeks following the fiasco with the Chief, he and Sonya had devoted every free moment to following up with the people on their list. Only one person they contacted, Leon Patterson, whose mother, Lenore, was Jolene’s good friend, had any information about the case, but he didn’t tell them anything they didn’t already know. Leon sent an email from Brazil saying that he had seen Ray come out the back gate of the Richardsons’ house on the afternoon of the murders and head down the alley toward Delaney Heights.
That left only seven names on the list: the four in Cooley Park and three that Ralph Chadwick, the Justice Project’s investigator, was looking for because Matt and Sonya had been unable to track them down.
“Today’s not good,” Matt said. “I’m seeing Emma. How’s Saturday?”
“That works.”
Matt sat down at his desk. A feeling of sadness washed over him. In two days Emma would be leaving for California to start her job with the theater company. She would be working there until school started in September. Who knew when they would see each other again?
“I know it doesn’t seem like it now,” Sonya said, “but you’ll meet somebody else.”
“It won’t be the same.”
“You know this song?” Sonya began singing, her voice intense. “I’ll always love you. I’ll always love you. I’ll always love you.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “Until I find somebody new.”
Matt laughed. “That’s not very romantic.”
“All I’m saying is, I don’t believe people have a soul mate—that there’s only one person in the world who we’re meant to be with. What if that person lives in another country, somewhere you’ll never go to? You’d never meet each other. There are lots of people you can fall in love with.”
Matt couldn’t argue with the logic, but it didn’t make Emma’s going away any easier to take.
Emma was already in the café when Matt arrived. She was seated at the back, her head in a book. He stood and watched her for a moment. Her face was tanned a deep bronze from her time in the country.
She’s so beautiful, Matt thought. He remembered the first time they had had sex. They had been at her parents’ place at the lake. They’d been going out for a year by then. They’d talked before about having sex, but Emma had always said she wasn’t ready. “I can wait,” he had told her. “I don’t want you to do anything you don’t want to do.”
They’d been fooling around on the deck. Emma’s mother and father had taken her kid brother, Jake, aka the “little shit,” to the fair in Midland. All of a sudden Emma sat up, stared into his eyes and then took him by the hand and led him into her bedroom. He had driven back to town later that afternoon. He had been so excited about finally doing it that he’d run a red light and almost gotten into a car accident.
Emma looked up from her book as he swayed toward her. They hugged. She smelled like flowers, a familiar smell that triggered a jumble of feelings, of desire and of loss.
“Did you have fun at the lake?” he asked.
“The water was freezing, my parents argued the whole time, and the little shit was a little shit.”
“Sorry I wasn’t
there,” Matt said. He was only half joking.
“How have you been?”
“It’s been tough. I’m not going to lie.”
Emma covered his hands with hers. For a moment he imagined that she was going to tell him she had decided to stay in Snowden after all. Get a grip, dude.
“Let’s get out of here,” she said.
They left the café and walked to the river. Matt’s spirits sank with every awkward step. In the month since he’d shed the crutches, he had learned to accept the looks that came his way without feeling like he was a member of a lesser species. But as he walked beside Emma, he was painfully aware of his ludicrous gait. They were Beauty and the Beast come to life.
They sat down on a bench facing the river. Canoeists paddled by, some drifting downstream, others working against the current.
“The hardest thing is knowing that it’s never going to end, that I’m going to be like this for the rest of my life,” Matt said. “It’s my first thought when I wake up, and it’s my last thought before I fall asleep. It just never freaking ends.”
Emma put her hand on his cheek. That was all it took to open the floodgates. She held him in her arms as he sobbed. “Let it out,” she whispered.
He surrendered to the feelings he had kept bottled up inside for so long, his tears releasing his sadness and pain and grief in a way that words never could.
He cried until he was all cried out. He felt spent, depleted, as if he had just gone through a grueling workout. But he also felt lighter, as if he’d shed all the emotional baggage he had been carrying for so long. The black cloud that had hovered over him had lifted. At least for now. It could only have happened with Emma. Even though they were no longer together, he still felt closer to her than to anybody else in the world.
“I am going to miss you,” he said. “I’m happy for you, but I’m really going to miss you.”
“I’m going to miss you too. But I’m only going to be a phone call away.”
“Until those Hollywood producers see you. Then it’ll be Matt who?”
Emma laughed. “Matt Barnes?” she said in a puzzled voice. She shook her head. “Doesn’t ring a bell.”
The Justice Project Page 9
