Chasing The Dead (An Alex Stone Thriller)

by Joel Goldman

  He started on the east side of I-29, working his way west, limiting himself to the places that would have been open that late in the evening, like the Hooters, Boston Market, and Starbucks. There was nothing on their videos.

  There were more places to check on the west side of I-29, and the going was slow. Some managers refused to allow him to see their videos without a warrant and without authorization from someone higher up in the company food chain. Others confessed that their video cameras didn’t work. And still others told him that they recorded over their videos so that they had only the most recent twenty-four hours.

  It was late afternoon when Rossi got to the motels. The manager on duty at the first one cited company policy requiring a subpoena or court order before allowing anyone to look at their security videos. Rossi told him that he’d be back the next day with a subpoena and warned him not to let anything happen to the video.

  The manager at the second motel, an overweight, middle-aged man named Milton with a comb-over and beer breath, was more helpful, taking Rossi to his office and pulling up the video from the night of the murder. After watching for ten minutes, Rossi turned to the manager.

  “Why are we only seeing three sides of the motel? What about the west side?”

  Milton shrugged. “No cameras on that side.”

  “Why not?”

  “Can’t afford ’em.”

  “Then why did I see cameras on the west side when I drove through the parking lot?”

  Milton stuttered. “Uh, uh . . . what I meant to say is that we got cameras but they don’t work.”

  “Let me ask you a question, Milton. Suppose I get a search warrant and bring the department’s video crew up to take a look at those cameras. You suppose they’d work then?”

  Milton paled. “Well . . . I don’t know . . .”

  “Oh, Milton. I think we both know.”

  “I could get in a lot of trouble.”

  “More trouble than with a search warrant? More trouble than you being charged with obstructing justice?”

  “If I tell you, can we keep it just between the two of us?”

  “I’ll do the best I can to help you out, but one way or the other, I’m going to find out, and when I do, you’ll be a lot better off if I can tell the prosecutor that you were very cooperative.”

  Milton swallowed. “Okay. The rooms on the west side are private.”

  “Aren’t all the rooms private?”

  “Not like these. They’re more like apartments, really. Paid up a year in advance.”

  Rossi nodded, getting the picture. “For men who are cheating on their wives and don’t want to check in at the front desk and tell you if they need one key or two.”

  “Yeah, like that.”

  “Show me the names of the men renting those rooms.”

  Milton shook his head. “I . . . I . . .”

  “We’ve been down this road, Milton. Show me the names or get ready for turning this place into a cop convention with twenty-four/seven media coverage.”

  “Okay, okay. I get it.”

  He pulled up a spreadsheet with names and room numbers. Rossi dropped one of his business cards on the manager’s desk.

  “E-mail the list to me.”

  Rossi waited for the e-mail to pop up on his phone and forwarded it to Wheeler, telling him to call immediately.

  “A Detective Wheeler is going to be here in the next hour with a search warrant for this computer. If you alter or delete this file, if you do anything at all to it, if you so much as sneeze on the screen, you’ll go to jail for obstruction of justice. Are we clear?”

  Milton’s eyes fluttered and his jowls quivered. “We had a deal! No search warrant if I gave you what you wanted.”

  “I told you I’d do my best, and that’s as good as it gets.”

  Rossi’s phone rang. It was Wheeler. He took the call as he walked to his car.

  “Why are working on your day off?”

  “My bowling league doesn’t start until seven.”

  “What’s on the file you sent me?”

  Rossi explained, Wheeler whistling when he finished. “Get a search warrant and get up here. I want the computer and I want to know who was using those rooms on the west side the night Robin Norris was killed. Let’s find out if someone saw Robin or Ted Norris’s car.”

  “On it. By the way, we can cross the daughter off our list unless all the kids were in on it. They were all at home the night Robin was killed.”

  “I don’t mind the list getting shorter as long as we end up with the right person still on it.” Rossi’s phone beeped with a waiting call. “Gotta go. I’ve got another call.”

  It was from Gardiner Harris, a burly veteran homicide detective who’d worked the Dwayne Reed case with Rossi.

  “Hey, Rossi, I hear it’s your day off.”

  “So they tell me.”

  “Hope I’m not interrupting your golf game.”

  “I had to cancel my tee time when I remembered that I left my driver up your ass. What’s up?”

  “I got a dead body you’re gonna wanna meet.”

  Chapter Fifty-One

  BY THE TIME ROSSI ARRIVED at the Blue Ridge Mobile Home Park, a perimeter marked off with yellow crime scene tape had been established, interviews of neighbors had begun, and an assistant coroner had completed a preliminary examination of the body.

  “You’re going to love this,” Gardiner Harris said when Rossi got out of his car.

  “A dead body on my day off. What’s not to love?”

  “Guess who called it in.”

  “Who?”

  Harris pointed to a uniformed cop standing next to a patrol car. “Hey, Travis!”

  The officer opened the rear car door and Alex Stone stepped out.

  “Fuck me,” Rossi said.

  “She found the body, a woman named Bethany Sutherland. Stone says she’s the sister of Joanie Sutherland, who’s the vic in one of your cases. And she says Joanie Sutherland’s daughter was living in the trailer. Name is Charlotte. Ten years old and autistic. Doesn’t say a word and likes to wander off. I got teams out looking for her, but so far, we got nothing.”

  “I arrested a homeless guy named Jared Bell for raping and murdering Joanie Sutherland. She’s his PD. So what’s the connection to the sister getting killed?”

  “Beats me. Stone says she’ll tell me when she tells you.”

  “What can you tell me about the sister?”

  “White female, thirty-three years old. Killed sometime last night by a blow to the left temple from a sharp, heavy object. CSI is about done inside the trailer. Thought you might want to get a look before we remove the body.”

  “Thanks. I’ll do that first, then talk to Alex.”

  “Alex, huh? You two on a first-name basis these days?”

  “Trying not to be.”

  Alex caught up to Rossi and Harris as they walked to the trailer.

  “Aren’t you supposed to be home taking it easy or something?” Rossi asked her.

  “I tried that. Didn’t work for me.”

  “And finding dead bodies does?”

  “It’s not like I was on a scavenger hunt and that was the next thing on the list.”

  They reached the trailer, Rossi holding his hand up to Alex.

  “Wait out here.”

  “Look, I was here on Monday. Bethany is dead and Charlotte is missing, and even if she weren’t she doesn’t talk. I’m the only one who can tell you if something is missing.”

  “She’s got you there,” Harris said.

  Rossi sighed, shaking his head, and motioned for her to follow them. Alex stayed by the door as Rossi examined Bethany’s body and did a quick tour of the trailer.

  “Okay, Counselor, what’s missing?”

  Alex studied the layout, stopping at the ironing board leaning against the dishwasher. “There was an iron on the floor, but it’s gone.”

  Harris said, “I didn’t see an iron. That fits with what the coroner
told me. Sharp, heavy object. The killer could have clocked her with the pointed end of the iron.”

  “The blow was to her left temple, so the killer was probably facing her, which means he was right-handed and strong enough to swing an iron weighing three or four pounds with enough force to kill her. Anything else missing, Alex?”

  “Check the stack of mail on the counter. There should be five thousand dollars in an envelope underneath Bethany’s bank statement.”

  Harris put on a pair of latex gloves and picked up each piece of mail by the corners.

  “No cash.”

  “Which,” Rossi said, “means Bethany stashed the money somewhere else or this was a robbery gone wrong that has nothing to do with Joanie Sutherland’s murder.”

  “I think you’re wrong,” Alex said.

  Rossi directed her outside. “And now I get to hear you tell me why I’m wrong.”

  “I think Joanie and Bethany were killed by someone they were blackmailing.”

  Rossi rolled his eyes. “Is that what this is about? You’re trying to use the sister’s murder to get your client off? Give me a break.”

  He turned away. Alex grabbed his arm.

  “Hey! Hear me out. There’s no way Joanie or Bethany could come up with that much cash.”

  “So you’re saying Joanie got her hooks into a john with more money than sense and raised her rates in return for not telling his wife.”

  “It was about sex in the beginning, but it turned into something more.”

  “More than sex?” Harris asked. “What’s more than sex?”

  “A child,” Alex said.

  “Charlotte?” Rossi asked.

  “Yeah. A wife might forgive her husband for going to a prostitute, but having a child with the prostitute is a lot harder to forgive and a lot more expensive if you throw in child support and treatment for autism. We find Charlotte’s father, we might find who killed Joanie and Bethany.”

  Rossi looked back inside the trailer and then at Alex. “Okay. It’s possible.”

  “You got any candidates for this father of the year?” Harris asked.

  Alex hesitated, taking a deep breath. “It has to be someone with money or power or both, someone with more to lose than the average john.”

  Rossi said, “That makes for a long list. Can you shorten it up?”

  “I tried to but I struck out.”

  “Who?” Rossi asked.

  “Anthony Steele.”

  “The judge? Christ! You’ve got to be kidding. What possible connection does he have to either one of them?”

  “Joanie’s first arrest was in Clay County for shoplifting. Steele was the judge and he put her in diversion before she even had an attorney. Fast-forward to five years ago and Joanie is a hooker with a drug problem and Steele pays for her to go to Fresh Start for rehab.”

  Rossi raised an eyebrow. “Out of his own pocket?”

  “No. His family has a foundation, the Steele Family Foundation. They paid for it.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Steele told me. When I saw him at Robin’s memorial yesterday I said that his name had come up when I reviewed Joanie’s arrest record. He said he didn’t remember her but he gave me a Voldemort look when I mentioned her name.”

  “A Voldemort look?”

  “Yeah, Voldemort is the bad guy in the Harry Potter books. He’s so scary that just saying his name out loud will ruin your day, and Steele acted like I ruined his. And then he calls me this morning and says he remembered Joanie and would I come to his chambers so he can tell me all about her.”

  “And I’m guessing that instead of thanking him for taking the time to help you out, you accused him of murdering Joanie?”

  Alex shrugged. “It sort of came up.”

  “How’d he take that?”

  “He laughed it off, said I was just doing my job and he thanked me for giving him something to talk about at dinner.”

  “I’ll bet,” Rossi said, dipping his chin for a moment, his eyes narrowed in concentration. “Wait a second. Back up. What did you say the name of the foundation was?”

  “The Steele Family Foundation, why?”

  Rossi opened his phone and pulled up the spreadsheet Milton had e-mailed him, scrolling down until he found the entry that read SFF.

  “Motherfucker.”

  “What?”

  “Tell me about your conversation with Judge Steele in his chambers and don’t leave anything out.”

  Alex grimaced, suddenly woozy, her wounds throbbing. She grabbed a patio chair and eased herself into it.

  “You should have stayed in bed. You okay?”

  “Peachy. Let me think for a minute.” She took a breath. “Okay, I walked into his chambers, we said hello, he told me I looked like shit and I said I threw my back out. He said he’d been there because of how much his wife makes him work out. He was dressed down, khakis, no socks, that kind of thing. I asked him if the court had adopted a casual dress code and he said he could always put on his robe and that if I’d been there an hour earlier I’d have caught him in his workout clothes. His gear was in a bag on the floor—”

  Rossi interrupted. “The bag. Tell me about the bag.”

  Alex furrowed her brow. “I don’t know. It was a bag, you know, some kind of duffel.”

  Rossi pulled up the airport video on his phone, freezing it on a close-up of the duffel bag. “Did it look like this?”

  Alex took the phone, playing with the image, making it larger, then smaller. “Who’s that in the video?”

  “We don’t know yet. Just focus on the bag. Does it look like the one you saw in Steele’s chambers?”

  Alex played with the image some more, wrinkling her nose. “Could be. What’s that word on the bag? This image is too fuzzy for me to make it out.”

  “Solutioneering, all lowercase.”

  Alex nodded. “Yeah. There was something printed on his bag. That could have been it.”

  Rossi’s face lit up, his eyes dancing. “How well did you know Robin Norris?”

  “Like I told you before. We were good friends but in a professional way. I didn’t know much about her private life.”

  “What about her and Judge Steele? Was there anything going on between them?”

  “Not that I knew . . . Wait, let me show you something. Meg Adler packed up Robin’s personal stuff from her office and I offered to drop it off at Robin’s house. It’s in my car. I’ll get it.”

  Alex started to get up, but Rossi put his hand out.

  “Keys.”

  He brought her the box from her car, putting it at her feet.

  “Show me.”

  She retrieved the framed photograph of Robin and Judge Steele, handing it to Rossi.

  “That was taken at the state bar convention earlier this year. The judge presented Robin with a service award. Later that night, I saw them having a drink, and they looked so cozy that I kidded Robin about it the next morning. She told me I was being ridiculous because he was married and she was close friends with both the judge and his wife.”

  “Hmm. But she kept a picture of the two of them in her office.” Rossi turned the frame over, raising the clips holding the photograph in place, sliding it out, and turning it over. “I think she was a little closer to him than she was to his wife.”

  He handed the photograph to Alex. There was an inscription on the back. This will have to do until the next time we can be alone.

  “Is that Robin’s handwriting?” Rossi asked.

  Alex shook her head. “No. It must be Judge Steele’s. Wow. Who’s that in the video?”

  “Robin Norris’s killer.”

  Rossi opened his phone and called Wheeler.

  “Did you find out who was using the rooms on the west side of the motel?”

  “Yeah,” Wheeler said. “Only one room was occupied. It belongs to someone with the initials SFF, but your buddy Milton swears on his life that he doesn’t know who that is.”

  “I do. M
eet me at the court of appeals.”

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  ALEX STAYED IN THE PATIO CHAIR while Bethany’s body was bagged and carried out of the trailer. The wooziness she’d felt had passed. Harris approached her.

  “You okay to drive yourself home? I can have an officer take you and another one drive your car.”

  “Thanks, but I think I can handle it.”

  “Okay, then. We’re pretty much wrapped up here.”

  “What about Charlotte?”

  “We’re combing the area. If she’s on her own, she’s probably fairly close by. If the killer took her, it’s anybody’s guess. We don’t have much to go on.”

  “I guess Rossi thinks Judge Steele killed Robin.”

  “Yeah, lover’s quarrel and all of that. They’ll have him in custody before you get home.”

  She shook her head. “The whole thing is unbelievable. Robin and Judge Steele. How could he do it? How could he kill her?”

  “C’mon, Counselor. You spend enough years doing what you and I do and there’s nothing we can’t believe. Look on the bright side. You may not have found the killer you’re looking for, but because of you, Rossi got his guy.”

  “Swell.”

  Alex took her time going to her car, slow steps less painful than rapid ones. If Rossi was right about Judge Steele, then the judge must have also tried to kill her. But if he had, why invite her to his chambers the next morning? She slid into the driver’s seat, grunting at a flash of pain, and sent Rossi a text, asking him to let her know when he arrested Judge Steele.

  As upset as she was about Robin and Judge Steele, she was more worried about Charlotte, ten years old and alone in the world. Had she been home when Bethany was killed and somehow escaped? Was the killer hunting for her because she was a witness? Or had she been out wandering only to discover Bethany’s body when she came home, leaving again because she was afraid and didn’t know what else to do? And if she was on her own, where would she go? Alex could think of only one place: Liberty Park.