A Reunion to Die For (A Joshua Thornton Mystery)

by Lauren Carr

  “What about Rex Rollins?” Joshua reminded her of the reason he was there. “Was he having trouble with anyone before the fire last night?”

  Bella frowned that he had interrupted what she considered a great story. “Rex was the worst: always drunk; never had a job; never paid his rent. I heard that he got himself killed. How did it happen?”

  “I’m afraid we can’t discuss the particulars of the case.”

  “Do you know who did it?”

  “We’re working on that. Did he ever have any guests visiting him here at the boardinghouse? Phone calls?”

  “No,” she answered quickly. “Do you know why he got himself killed?”

  “Once we know that, we’ll know who killed him.” He offered her another question, “What did he do most of the time?”

  “He spent all of his time up in his room working on that damn computer he got.”

  “Rex had a computer?”

  “Yeah, he brought it home a little more than a week ago.” Bella snorted. “He was typing away on it day and night ever since he got out of the hospital. I’ll bet he was surfing around on those porno Web sites they talk about. I was about to call the sheriff to have him come bust him for pornography but I guess now it doesn’t matter.” Her lips wrinkled together to resemble a bird’s beak.

  “Well,” Joshua said while backing up toward the house, “thank you for all your information, Mrs. Polk.”

  “Is there a reward for catching his murderer?” she asked.

  “Not that I’m aware of.”

  “Suppose someone gave you something that could help you catch ’em?”

  He stopped his backward retreat. “Like what?”

  “What are you looking for?” she squinted at him. “What are you going in my house to find?”

  “Evidence to find out who killed Rex and torched your house.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. We’ll know it when we see it. Do you have any suggestions of what we should look for, Mrs. Polk?”

  “No,” she responded quickly. “Who is going to pay for fixing my house?”

  “Well, your insurance—” he started to answer, but she interrupted him.

  “Bunch of crooks.” She launched into a speech about the unscrupulous nature of insurance companies. She had canceled the homeowners insurance thirty years earlier after they refused to pay for damage to her roof after a storm.

  As Bella advanced during her speech, Joshua backed away until he was able to escape inside the smoky building.

  The would-be author’s room was a black hole. It was still smoldering and hissing from the meeting of fire and water. Rex did not have much in the way of possessions for them to observe, and what he did have was destroyed.

  The detective was searching through the closet of torched clothes when Joshua found him.

  “Tad talked to a barmaid last night who said that Rex Rollins was bragging to everyone that he wrote a tell-all book about a woman getting away with murder,” Joshua told him.

  Seth scoffed, “Give me a break. She told me that he was inebriated when he came in and inebriated when he left. I’m putting my money on a second drunk with a hot temper who Rollins owed money to.”

  “I can see where you would come to that conclusion.” The lawyer poked through what was left of a table that had served as Rex’s computer desk. “Except that the landlady told me that he had come home with a computer a week ago and has been working on it ever since.” He bent over and rested his hands on his knees. It was a cheap table that had enough room for the computer and not much else.

  “If that drunk wrote a book,” Seth continued, “then anyone who knew him would know that the odds of him ever getting it published were equal to winning the lottery.” He peered over the lawyer’s shoulder at the table that had collapsed under the weight of the melted monitor resting on top.

  Joshua poked with his pen through the things on the desk.

  “Come on, Thornton. If he had walked into your office and told you he knew something about a killing, would you take him seriously?”

  After stabbing through the charred equipment, he responded, “Tell me, Cavanaugh, since you became a cop have you ever had a saint for a witness?”

  Seth admitted he hadn’t.

  “It’s a fact that ninety percent of the time witnesses are from the dregs of society. They aren’t necessarily credible, and they do have something to hide. That’s why lawyers like to destroy their credibility in front of the jury—because they can. Everyone has something he or she wants to hide, whether it be an illicit affair or cheating on taxes. When a defense attorney digs up dirt on my witnesses, I ask the jury to consider what sins they have committed for lawyers to use as stones to throw at them if they ever become a witness. When jurors think about that, they usually get back on track.”

  “What are you looking for?” Seth gestured towards the desk.

  Joshua stood up. “What is wrong with this picture?”

  The melted monitor had slipped over onto its side. The keyboard swung off the desk by its cord. The printer was barely recognizable where it rested on the floor. Cords with nothing to connect to hung from the monitor and the power outlet.

  “Where’s his hard drive?” Joshua asked the detective.

  Chapter Seven

  “What could your client possibly have to offer us in exchange for a lesser sentence?” Joshua asked Tori Brody.

  “Matt Landers’s killer.”

  He sat up straight in his seat at the table in the conference room on the fourth floor of the courthouse. The courtrooms were two floors below them. A brick wall separated them from the prisoners housed on the same floor.

  It was Monday morning and Billy Unger was scheduled to be arraigned for attempted armed robbery at ten o’clock.

  On Sunday, Tori had called Joshua at home and asked that they meet with her client at nine o’clock to work out a deal. Billy offering up Matthew Landers’s killer was not what he expected.

  Matthew was the college boy killed with the same gun used to kill Grace. The police withheld the information that the gun was used in both killings. Now it seemed that secret would pay off since Billy was offering himself as a witness to Landers’s murder to protect his own butt. By doing so, he was connecting the dots between the two murders: himself.

  “My client witnessed the murder,” Tori told Joshua. “He’ll testify against Lander’s killer in exchange for immunity on the burglary.”

  “You are aware that he’ll be admitting that he had a part in the murder?”

  “He was a juvenile at the time.”

  “So now, according to precedent, he can be tried as an adult for murder, which took place during a felony. How could he have witnessed the murder if he wasn’t taking part in the burglary?”

  “But you can’t get Landers’s killer without my client. If you could, you would have before now.”

  “Do you really think I’m going to let him walk away from all of this?”

  “Listen to what he has to say.” Tori turned in her seat to her client.

  “Walt killed him,” Billy announced.

  Joshua showed no reaction. He waited for him to go on.

  When her client didn’t offer any more information, Tori prodded him, “You have to give him all the details.”

  Billy sighed, rolled his eyes, and sat forward to tell his story. “Walt and my brother, Bobby, knew each other since they were little kids. Well, Walt comes up with this bright idea that they break in these big old houses in Weirton, and they told me to be their lookout. That was all I did.” He paused for a sign from Joshua that he believed that he had had nothing else to do with the break-ins.

  He offered Billy none. “Go on. I’m listening.”

  “So one night, they were cleaning o
ut this house up on top of the hill, and I see this truck pull into the driveway. So’s I get on my radio and I tell them to get out. That was what they were supposed to do.”

  “But they didn’t.”

  “It turns out there was like four computers in this place and all this really bitchin’ stuff, and Walt didn’t want to walk away from it. We didn’t even know that he had a piece on him. He waits for the kid to come in and he wastes him.”

  “How did he waste him?”

  Billy hesitated.

  “Weren’t you there?” Joshua asked. “Then I can’t offer you any deal. For all we know you’re lying, and it was you who killed him.”

  That was enough to make him respond. “I went inside when they hadn’t come out.” He laughed. “The kid was scared shitless.”

  Joshua contained his distaste over Billy’s amusement at the boy’s terror in the face of death.

  “Walt was knocking him around. He told him he wanted his watch. The kid gave it to him and said that he wouldn’t say anything if we took what we wanted and left. Then, Walt tried to grab this gold cross that the kid was wearing around his neck, and he tried to stop him. Walt punched him in the face and blood squirted out everywhere. Then, he made the kid get down on his knees. He was crying like a baby. He was saying this prayer, and Walt put the gun to the back of his head and blew him away.”

  The room was silent while the defense attorney and her client waited for his verdict.

  After pushing away the image of one of his own children experiencing Matt Landers’s fear when he felt the barrel of the gun pressed against the back of his head before it was discharged, Joshua broke the silence. “What happened to the gun?”

  “Walt got rid of it.”

  “Did he give it to Bobby?”

  Billy shook his head. “Bobby got himself blown away about a month after that.”

  “During another burglary,” Joshua noted. “You have to tell me what happened to the gun, Billy.”

  Tori prodded him. “You have to tell him.”

  “I don’t know,” the young man insisted.

  Joshua shook his head at his denial. “One of the factors that we take into consideration when making a deal is the honesty of the defendant.”

  “I’m telling you the truth. I don’t know.”

  “No, you’re not. Where is it now?”

  Billy shrugged. “Ask Walt.”

  Joshua stood up. “Okay.”

  “Have we got a deal?” Tori asked.

  “No.”

  “He gave you Manners.”

  “He told me a story with no proof to back it up. I’ll go ask Walt, and I can tell you right now what he’ll say. Your client did it. Then he’ll want a deal in exchange for his testimony. It will be your client’s word against his. Now, you tell me, Counselor, who should I give the deal to?”

  “What more do you want?”

  “The murder weapon.”

  She turned to Billy, who glared at her. “Give us a minute.”

  Joshua welcomed the excuse to leave the room. During the statement, Deputy Hockenberry, who was watching through the two-way glass, went to retrieve the case file for the Landers murder so they could compare his statement to the facts.

  Hockenberry was studying it when the prosecutor stepped through the door. “That kid was there.” He went on to report, “It was never released to the public that four computers were stolen from the Landers’. A watch and gold cross his dead mother had given him were taken. The victim was beaten up and had a broken nose. That was never released to the public, either.”

  “So he was there. But did Unger witness or commit the murder?” While referring to the autopsy report in the file, Joshua studied Billy, who was in discussion with his lawyer on the other side of the two-way mirror. “The victim was six feet tall and weighed a hundred and ninety pounds.”

  At eighteen, Billy had a build that lacked the bulk that comes with adulthood. He was still physically developing into a man. His flat stomach, which he displayed by wearing his orange overalls unzipped to his navel to show off his eagle tattoo, had muscle definition that the lawyer had given up on achieving in his own physical training.

  “I wonder if at fourteen—his age at the time of the murder—if Billy could have taken on Matthew Landers.”

  Walt Manners was a brute. Over six feet tall, with two hundred and forty pounds of muscle that he used to intimidate anyone who challenged him, the criminal could easily have terrorized and killed the victim the way Billy described.

  Joshua rubbed his tired eyes. “But we need more than the testimony of a juvenile delinquent turned adult offender—and possible killer—to make a murder charge against Manners stick. We also need that gun to connect Billy to Grace’s murder.”

  Deputy Hockenberry agreed. “That’s why he won’t cough it up.”

  Joshua stepped back into the conference room. He could tell that Tori, who had yet to develop a poker face, had something to offer. “Has your client remembered what happened to the murder weapon?”

  “Walt got rid of the gun,” she told him. “But my client does have proof that he killed the Landers boy.”

  “What?”

  She turned fully to her client. She placed her arm across the back of his chair and gestured for him to tell the prosecutor his proof.

  “Walt wears a gold cross around his neck.” Billy chuckled. “He ain’t no Jesus freak. He says it’s a souvenir. Ask him what it’s a souvenir of.”

  His information checked out. Two members of the gang, who were up on the same charges, admitted that Walt Manners had bragged to them about killing Matthew Landers and that he had taken the cross off the victim before shooting him in the back of the head. They were willing to testify against their leader in exchange for a deal.

  Joshua Thornton postponed the arraignment in order to adjust his charges.

  “Number one,” Phyllis Rollins shook her index finger at her visitors, “it’s laughable that Rex thought he could write a book. Number two, if I knew he was writing a book about me, I could not possibly care less.”

  Tad looked at Joshua, who, he was surprised to notice, was not paying attention to their suspect, but observing the beams in the cathedral ceiling of the Rollins’ log-cabin home.

  Phyllis was dry-eyed during the interview about her husband’s murder.

  Doug, who sat on the sofa next to his sister, gazed at Tad with wide eyes. The doctor wondered if he understood the meaning of the news that they had delivered.

  “Then you don’t know what Rex was talking about when he said he wrote a book about the wicked witch of Chester?” Tad asked.

  She scoffed. “I have no doubt that he was talking about me. Big whoop. Like I care if he wrote a book about me?”

  “This is a nice house,” Joshua interjected.

  Tad started. It was not like his cousin to change the subject during an interview with a suspect. Joshua was like a dog with a bone when it came to murder. Maybe exhaustion had caught up with him.

  “How many square feet is it?”

  She answered, “Twenty-eight hundred. Double that if you count the finished basement.”

  “You must do better business at the café than I thought.”

  Phyllis Rollins was the owner and cook at the Rollins Corner Café, a diner, gas station, and market located on the country crossroad one hill before the Pennsylvania state line. Doug waited tables and cleaned up. The restaurant, which was frequented by truck drivers and other blue-collar workers in search of hot meals, was busy the first half of the day. After lunch, business would slow down to a crawl until she locked the door at eight o’clock.

  Rollins also made a lot of business from the bean grinder Phyllis bought from a coffee house going out of business. After deciding that Chester’s residents wer
en’t the type to read deep literature over café lattes, she nixed the idea of turning her business into a coffee house. But she kept the grinder. Rollins Corner Café was the only local place to buy fresh ground coffee in assorted flavors.

  Joshua lowered his eyes from the beams and returned to the reason for their visit. “Where were you Friday night?”

  “Here with Doug.”

  Joshua regarded her brother.

  To look at the two men, it was hard to believe they had graduated the same year. Doug Barlow was a wisp of a man. Worry lines etched deep into his face made him appear years older than his former classmate.

  While Joshua studied the man whom he had expected to become a scientist or scholar, Doug’s unfocused eyes, hidden behind thick glasses, were drawn to his face.

  “How are you doing, Doug?” Joshua’s question was sincere.

  He responded with a nervous smile. “Okay.”

  “I heard that you work at the diner with your sister?”

  “Yeah, I wait on the customers and grind the coffee, and she even lets me cook sometimes.”

  “That’s good. I guess that’s one of the perks of—”

  “Any other questions?” Phyllis inquired sharply.

  “No.” Joshua stood up and gestured to Tad for them to leave. “Thank you very much.”

  The Corvette raced around the curves of the country road through Birch Hollow while Tad voiced his confusion over Joshua’s lack of conviction while interviewing the victim’s widow. “What was that all about? You gave up back there.”