Dead Center (The Still Waters Suspense Series Book 2)

by Dawn Lee McKenna

  “What’s up?” he asked as he hurried to the desk.

  “Check this out,” Evan said excitedly. “We have a commonality. All three of them!”

  Goff came around the desk to stand next to Evan and look at Bellamy’s file. “What?”

  “Look,” Evan pointed with his finger. “The Bellamys just moved here, right? He got his Gulf County license December 6th.”

  “Okay,” Goff said as Evan shoved Bellamy’s file aside to expose Vicaro’s.

  “Tina Vicaro lost her wallet, remember? Look. She replaced it January 14th.” He shoved that file aside. “Look at Overstreet. He renewed his license on the 17th.”

  Evan looked over at Goff, smiling. He felt a relief that was so similar to joy as to be almost indistinguishable.

  “Well, damn,” Goff said quietly. “If we got a rampaging killer on our hands, only makes sense he hangs out at the DMV.”

  “Bet you a hundred he works there. Maybe he was the one that handled all three.”

  “I won’t have a hundred till Wednesday,” Goff said, “and I ain’t that stupid.”

  “We need to find out who took care of each of the three victims,” Evan said.

  “Well, you’re in luck,” Goff said. “My cousin Audrey’s the supervisor.”

  Evan grinned at him. “I knew having you around would pay off eventually.”

  Goff nodded, pulling a stick of gum out of his shirt pocket. “Well, it was never gonna be about the sex, that’s for sure.”

  Evan looked at his watch. It was sneaking up on five. “What time do they close?”

  “Five-thirty.”

  “Come on.” Evan stalked around his desk, Goff on his heels. “Call her up. Tell her we need her to stay late and wait for us. I want to know when the last employee is out of there.”

  Vi looked up as they hurried past her desk and frowned over her bifocals at them.

  They walked briskly down the carpeted hall toward the front of the building. Goff spoke quickly into his phone behind him, accompanied by the percussion of his gun belt.

  Evan pushed open the glass door to the Sheriff’s Office. Goff stopped just before the door to finish his conversation, as Evan walked over to the top of the front steps. Goff came out a moment later and came to stand next to Evan.

  “She’s good to go. She says everybody’s in a hurry to leave once the clock strikes. Place should be clear by quarter-till at the latest.”

  The two men stood there, Evan with his hands on his hips, Goff rubbing two fingers over his mustache.

  “Maybe we should just mosey across the parking lot, go in there, and ask him to reveal himself,” Evan said, as they stared at the front entrance of the courthouse, which also housed the DMV, less than a hundred yards away.

  NINETEEN

  EVAN LOITERED IN THE reception area of the SO for the next thirty-five minutes, staring out the big, plate-glass window that looked out onto the parking lot in front of the courthouse. They’d sent Crenshaw over to the round concrete table beneath a palm near the courthouse entrance. It wasn’t unusual for an officer to hang out there on his lunch break, and Crenshaw was able to take pictures on his phone of every male that left the building after five o’clock. He also noted car makes and, when possible, license numbers.

  Even though Evan knew they had no way of knowing the difference between a lawyer, a DMV clerk and a guy with jury duty, Evan wanted the pictures. He had this horrible fear that their guy would get the heebie-jeebies that very day and take off and that once they’d identified him, all they would have was an employee file containing a fake plate number and a false address.

  Finally, at twenty before six, Goff’s cousin called and told them everyone had left the office. Evan grabbed Goff, and they walked over to the courthouse, releasing Crenshaw from his post as they headed for the front door. The security guard started to tell them everybody was closed, but Evan told him they were meeting someone and, after the requisite security check, they made their way to the DMV.

  When they got to the door, a glass door tinted faintly green, Evan saw a short, slim woman in her fifties, with black curly hair and big round glasses leaning against the front counter, watching them.

  “That’s Audrey,” Goff said unnecessarily as she hurried to let them in.

  She unlocked it for them and held it open. “Hey, Ruben,” she said as they walked in. “Sheriff.”

  “Evan,” he said in response. “Thank you for waiting for us.”

  “Sure thing,” she answered, closing and locking the door. “I was just gonna go do some target shooting later,” she said.

  Evan looked over at Goff. “Are you a whole family of gun cranks?”

  Goff had been a sniper in the Army, and once told Evan he could shoot the stink off a squirrel fart from two-hundred yards. His wife was known to carry a 50cal Desert Eagle, though Evan couldn’t imagine her stick arms holding the thing steady.

  “Some people fish, some people watch TV, we shoot,” Goff said. “Famous for it. Ain’t nobody in my family ever been broken into.”

  They were following Audrey down a short hallway. At the end of it was an office with the light on and the door open.

  “Sheriff, Ruben says you need to know about one of my employees?” Audrey asked.

  “Well, it’s not quite that direct,” Evan said. “We don’t know which employee yet.”

  “How can I help?”

  She led them into the office. There was one orange vinyl chair in front of her desk, and another by the door. Evan sat in the former, while Goff dragged the latter over.

  “We have three people who have been here at the DMV in the last month and a half,” Evan said as she sat down behind her desk. “They all got new or renewed licenses. We need to find out who took care of them. Is that tracked by terminal or by employee?”

  “By employee,” she answered. “They don’t always work at the same computer, so it’s tracked by employee number.”

  “Okay. Can we pull these licenses and see who printed them or issued them or whatever?”

  “Sure. I can do that from right here,” she said. “Do you have the license numbers?”

  Evan pulled a slip of paper out of his shirt pocket, on which he’d had Vi note the last names and license numbers. He handed it to her.

  She took it, glanced at it quickly, then started tapping away on her keyboard. After a moment, she sat forward a bit to peer at the screen. “Okay, this first one, Overstreet. Employee number four-one-six. That’s Enid Franklin.” She looked over at Evan, a little sternly. “She’s a good friend of mine.”

  “That’s okay, we’re not looking for a female.”

  Mollified, she turned back to her computer and started typing again. “Vicaro. That was five-oh-nine. Larry Winters.” She looked up at Evan, who scribbled the name down in his notebook.

  She looked at the last name on the notepaper, then slowly looked back up at Evan. “Wait a minute,” she said quietly. “These are those people that were killed.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She looked at Goff.

  “What about the last one?” Goff asked her.

  She looked it up. “Bellamy’s license was issued by employee three-five-seven.” She looked up at Evan. “Sam Kovacs.”

  Evan wrote it down, then sat there tapping his pen on the notebook. “We were really thinking the same person served all three,” he said.

  “No.”

  “Okay, but they were all here,” Evan said. “Even in a town this size, that’s too much coincidence. You have video cameras out there, right?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Does it show on there what time each license was issued?”

  “Yes, the entries are all time-stamped.”

  “How far back do you keep your video?” Evan asked her, praying for an answer he liked.

  “Oh, way back. It’s all digital, and it’s all backed up, oh, I think eighteen months. I don’t handle that, that’s all from the state security office.”
>
  “Okay,” Evan said, daring to feel excited again. “Can you get us the footage from say, an hour before to an hour after each visit?”

  Her face fell. “I’m sorry, I don’t know how I would do that. Each file is automatically saved by date, but I don’t have any software for editing it or anything. All I can do is download each zip file to a jump drive for you.”

  “That’s okay, don’t worry. That’ll be great, thank you,” Evan said. “I need one other thing, to help us narrow down what we’re looking for on all this video.”

  “Sure.”

  “How many employees do you have, counting everybody? Receptionist, clerks, security guard, whomever.”

  “Just fourteen,” she said. “As DMVs go, we’re not real big.”

  “Can you find out which employees worked all three of those days?”

  “Sure, but it’s probably going to be most of them.”

  “That’s okay, too,” Evan reassured her. “Eliminating anyone at this point will save us time, and we really need to save as much as possible.”

  “Okay.”

  “You can also skip your female employees unless one of them is at least six feet tall,” Evan added.

  “No, I know for a fact that Emily’s the tallest woman here, and she’s only five-seven,” Audrey answered.

  “Okay.”

  “We have…” Audrey looked up at the ceiling a moment. “We have six male employees.”

  “Okay, that helps,” Evan said. “Six is better than fourteen.”

  A few minutes later, accessing her payroll software, Audrey had their answer. “All six of them worked all three of those days.”

  Evan sighed. “One was the answer I was hoping for.”

  “There aren’t that many government jobs in town,” she said. “You got one, you hang onto it by not missing work.”

  “Okay, can I get a printout or something with those six employees’ names?”

  She chewed at the corner of her lip. “Can I get in trouble for giving you that without a warrant?”

  “No, I don’t think so. I could hang out here tomorrow morning and get that information just by looking at the nameplates on their stations.”

  “That’s true,” she said. “I’m wondering, though, if I can get in trouble for the video.”

  Evan thought about that a moment. “You know what? Even if we get this guy, saying he’s one of your employees, even if we get him, the video isn’t going to be a big point in court. We’re not going to be using it to try to convict him, we’re just using it to figure out how we need to get the evidence that will convict him.”

  She looked at Evan, then at Goff, then back at Evan. “That sounds like crap to me,” she said.

  “It might be,” Evan told her.

  She thought for just a few more seconds. “Well, if the higher-ups get wind of it and they want to write me up, they can. I’ve got almost twenty years here with a clean record.”

  “Just tell ’em you’ll go on the news talking about how the state cares more about not looking bad than they do about protecting the public,” Goff said. “That oughta do it.”

  She blew out a breath. “I don’t think they’re gonna know, anyhow,” she said. “Just never mind.”

  A few minutes later, she had downloaded the zip files of the appropriate days’ videos onto a jump drive and handed Evan a printout containing the names of the six employees. Evan knew enough to know he couldn’t ask for socials or other personal data, but he didn’t think some anecdotal information would be out of line.

  “What can you tell me about each of these guys? What do they do here, that kind of thing.”

  “Well, let’s see. Mike Westmoreland is a clerk. He’s about to retire. Next week, actually.”

  “How old is he?” Evan asked as he took notes.

  “Almost seventy. He couldn’t afford to leave any sooner. They need his wife’s social security, too, and she just turned sixty-five.”

  “Okay,” Evan said.

  “Peter Bullock is very nice, he and his boyfriend or whatever just finished a big fundraiser for the animal shelter, and he’s always talking about some little dog they’ve adopted.” She looked at the list upside down. “Scott Waller is a good employee, very quiet. He’s the photographer, usually, unless we’re backed up, then everybody takes their own pictures and he has to man a terminal. Sam Kovacs is an ass.”

  “How so?”

  “He’s just a jerk,” she said, shrugging. “Not too many people like him. He’s okay with the customers, but he’s always bragging about one thing or another with the rest of us.”

  “What’s he do here?”

  “He’s a clerk. Dane Little is a nice guy, he’s a clerk, too. His son’s been giving him a lot of heartache, poor guy.” She looked at Evan knowingly. “Drugs.”

  Evan noted it.

  “Who else?” She looked at the list again. “Oh, John Crawford. He’s the security guard. He’s okay. I don’t really know him well. He was just hired right before Christmas. We had to replace the last guy, Norman Lewis. He got caught posting pictures of his inappropriate parts on Craigslist,” she said with a grin. “In uniform, ’cause he was a moron, I guess.”

  Evan thought that was interesting. Apparently, Goff did, too, because he was smiling at the wall behind Audrey.

  “Okay, Audrey, thank you,” Evan said. “I can’t think of anything else you can help us with at the moment, so we’ll let you go home.” She stood up, and they stood with her. “I will ask you not to mention this to anyone, though. No one here, none of your friends…you understand, I’m sure.”

  “I get it,” she said. “Look, I hope you guys find out nobody here did something that awful.”

  “So do we,” Evan said. It was a lie. He hoped down to his shoes that someone there was their guy. It was all they had.

  TWENTY

  AT JUST AFTER FIVE-THIRTY the next morning, Evan went for his first run in almost two weeks, a long time for him. He’d debated skipping it that morning, too, given that there was going to be a lot of information to go through when he got to work, but he needed his head clear for that precise reason and decided it was worth the half hour.

  There was a small park next to the marina, connected by a path, that Evan usually used for his runs. The Cape San Blas lighthouse was there, and there was an excellent trail. Between getting to the park and jogging its perimeter, he got enough of a run to get his systems flowing, but not so much that he was exhausted when he finished.

  When he got back to the boat, he took a quick shower, put on his last clean suit, made a second cup of coffee, and whisked up some eggs. He was in the middle of cooking them when his cell rang. Picking it up off the counter, he saw that it was Goff.

  “Hey,” he answered, holding the phone with his head.

  “What are you doing?” Goff asked.

  “Scrambling the cat’s eggs,” Evan answered without thinking.

  There was a moment of silence.

  “Well, when you’re done with that curious task, get on in here,” Goff said. “Trigg left our videos for us.”

  “Awesome,” Evan said. “I’ll be there in ten.”

  He disconnected the call. When they’d gone back to the office the night before, he’d pressed Trigg into service locating the time stamps they were looking for, then copying clips that contained everything from half an hour before each license was issued to half an hour after. She’d griped, since she was planning on leaving early, but Evan knew she wasn’t that annoyed. She was as much of a workaholic as he was.

  He’d been there himself until almost seven, assigning a couple night shift guys the tasks of running background checks on each of the male employees and printing out their driver’s licenses.

  Evan turned off the gas burner and removed the small skillet from the heat. When he turned around, Plutes was sitting on the teak ledge over the sink. Evan grabbed his stainless-steel bowl out of the dish drainer and scooped the eggs into it. By the time he put the bo
wl down on the lobster placemat by the dinette, Plutes was right beside him.

  “It’s hot,” Evan said, straightening. Plutes went to it, anyway, grabbed a bite, and immediately dropped it onto the placemat.

  “I don’t understand,” Evan told him. “You just heard me tell you it was hot.”

  When Evan got to the SO, he could feel the energy in the air. There wasn’t a lot of noise or motion, there weren’t six simultaneous conversations going on about the case, but the expectation of results, of being able to end this thing soon, could be felt like static electricity.

  In the bullpen, he found Crenshaw and Meyers each viewing separate video files. Crenshaw had the one for Bellamy’s visit to the DMV, and Meyers the one for Vicaro’s.

  “How’s it going, guys?” he asked them as he walked in.

  “You know what?” Meyers asked. “The only thing worse than going to the DMV is watching everybody else go to the DMV.”

  “I imagine,” Evan said. “Anything yet?”

  “Tina Vicaro’s still waiting in line here,” answered Meyers. “So far, she’s talked to the security guard, the new one, not Lewis the Lefty.”

  Crenshaw pointed at his screen. “Bellamy’s at the counter now. He was waited on by Sam Kovacs.”

  “That’s the guy that’s supposed to be a jerk, right?”

  “Yeah, and he is. I went to high school with him,” Crenshaw said. “I wouldn’t figure him for our guy, though. Couldn’t say why, just my thought.”

  “He talk to anybody else while he’s there?”

  “So far, just the lady that was in line in front of him, older African-American lady with a service dog. Looked like they were talking about the dog.”

  “Okay,” Evan said. He looked at the wall beside them. Six photocopies of driver’s licenses were pinned to a corkboard that had previously held outdated missing persons flyers and notices from HR. “These our male employees?”

  Crenshaw looked up. “Yeah. Peters said the background reports are on your desk.”

  “Thanks,” Evan said. “Seen Goff?”