A Reunion to Die For (A Joshua Thornton Mystery)

by Lauren Carr

  Curt pointed out, “We haven’t really looked at Margo as a suspect in Gail’s murder. Seth immediately focused on you, and then Karl surfaced.”

  “I don’t think Karl did it. As much as I hate to admit it, I believe him that he found her dead when he went in after I left.”

  “But then that would leave you as our prime suspect.”

  “Jan found the front door unlocked and open when she went there three days later. I made a point of locking the door and Karl said that that was why he went around the house and came in the back door. It was dark. He was unfamiliar with the house. Imagine him stumbling around outside looking for a way in. That can take time.”

  Curt saw where he was leading. “Enough time for someone already in the house to smother a drunken woman.”

  “Then the killer simply hid in the dark and waited for Karl to go out the back door before escaping out the front.” Joshua concluded, “Knowing that Randy had a lot to lose and money to pay to keep up appearances, Karl lied about killing her, threatened to implicate him if he was caught, and requested cash for his silence.”

  The prosecutor turned his head to where the women were studying them through the living-room window. He thought they should leave, but knew that it bothered them more the longer they hung around. “Can you see that woman, already being a suspect for killing Tricia, plus having a scene in public threatening Gail, taking the chance to go into her house and killing her herself?” Aware of being watched, Joshua shook his head slightly. “She’s too smart and loves money too much to take a chance like that. She’s more likely to sic her lawyer on her.”

  “Unless Gail had something so bad on her that she couldn’t take the chance of losing a lawsuit and having Gail reveal it anyway,” Curt said with a shake of his own head. “Don’t give Margo more credit than she’s due. She may be smart, but she’s not that smart. I heard through the grapevine that she paid Herb Duncan twenty-five thousand dollars for his dump. Had you seen his place? He and Blanche lived in a secondhand trailer on a one-acre lot in Birch Hollow. I wouldn’t have given him twenty-five cents for it, but Margo paid him twenty-five thousand dollars. I heard that they are moving into a brand-new three-bedroom, two-and-a-half bath in Connor Estates.”

  “Herb Duncan?” Joshua recalled seeing him drive past his house. “Didn’t he just buy a new truck?”

  “Yeah, he did. He’s real young, about twenty-two or so. When I was his age, I was living in a Marine barrack.”

  Joshua’s mind was churning with possibilities.

  Seeing the wheels spinning in his head, Curt leaned toward him. “What are you thinking?”

  Joshua muttered more to himself than the sheriff, “She could know something that the rest of us don’t know. Like that a big highway development is interested in the property, or maybe even a mall or professional development is looking at the place. Even so, it would be more prudent to offer to buy the property for its worth or even less.”

  Curt nodded his head in agreement.

  Joshua was studying the women peering out at them while he recalled Tad’s question upon seeing Herb’s new truck, “What has Herb Duncan gotten himself into?”

  “He got himself a job working for Margo’s construction company. She hired him as foreman.”

  “Foreman? Wasn’t Rex Rollins a foreman?”

  “Until he got fired.”

  “Exactly when did she hire Herb?”

  “A few weeks ago.” Curt grinned as it occurred to him, “It was the same week I heard about her offering him all that for his trailer and lot. A lot of people were surprised because there were at least two other guys, with seniority, who were certain they were going to get the job.” He started the engine. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

  “I’m thinking I’m going to have to get me a warrant,” Joshua’s accent slipped from that of the sophisticated lawyer, “for Margo’s financial records.”

  Saturday morning was Sylvia’s regular day for cleaning lawyer Tori Brody’s condo. She would arrive at nine in the morning and finish before noon. It did not take a lot of time for her to clean the loft apartment.

  Her first clue that something might be wrong was bloody handprints in the elevator. She shuddered while imagining what had caused so much blood. She would ask Miss Brody if she knew what happened.

  Miss Brody was unable to answer the question.

  When the door was unlocked, Sylvia assumed that her employer was home. She had only to take a few steps through the door when she saw that her morning was not going to be taken up with cleaning.

  She found her boss, dressed in a black negligee, seated in the chair inside the door with a bullet hole in her chest.

  Chapter Seventeen

  “Tori was killed between eleven and midnight last night,” Tad reported to Joshua. He was in the process of the cursory on-scene exam before having her body removed to the morgue for the autopsy.

  “J.J. and I were playing chess about that time.”

  “You don’t have to tell me you didn’t do this,” the sheriff assured him. “Everyone knows that she was chasing you and you didn’t give her a tumble.” With a grin, he asked, “Why are all these women running after you anyway?”

  “I have no idea. If I were a woman, a single father with five kids would be the last thing I would want.” Joshua gestured towards the hallway outside the condo where he saw crime-scene investigators scraping blood from the wall. “I saw blood in the elevator and hall. Was she shot here?”

  Tad showed him the hole in her chest. “Judging from this wound, I doubt if she could have made it anywhere after being shot. I can’t say for certain until I open her up, but I think she was killed instantly. It looks like the bullet hit her square in the heart.” He shone his penlight on the black negligee.

  Joshua knelt next to the chair to look at her. Even in death, sprawled on the chair, Tori seemed strangely sensuous.

  Tad peeled the negligee from the wound. In doing so, he revealed her breasts.

  “It wasn’t a contact wound,” the prosecutor noticed about the bullet wound. It was a hole, pure and simple, with no blackened speckling that came from the barrel of the gun. “She was shot from a distance, at least a few feet.”

  “But look at all the blood on the negligee.” Tad made a circular motion with his latex-gloved hands.

  Joshua saw the blood pattern on the front of the lacy material. It was almost not noticeable on the black garment.

  While he examined the hole in her breast, the medical examiner concluded, “I don’t think that’s her blood.”

  “Must belong to whoever spread it all over the hallway and elevator.”

  Curt Sawyer completed his search of the condo. “No murder weapon on the scene. Whoever splattered their blood on Brody, the hall, and the elevator must have taken the gun with them.”

  “Here’s another question.” Joshua asked. “With all that blood, are we looking for the killer, or another victim . . . or both?”

  “Hello, Jan.”

  Jan slammed her front door in Ernie Gaston’s face.

  He knocked again. “Jan, please, can we talk?”

  This was what she had been waiting for her whole life. Someone was begging her for forgiveness after trampling on her.

  “No.”

  She waited and hoped that he would knock again.

  He did.

  Then came the words she was waiting for. “I’m sorry. I need you. You are the only journalist Josh Thornton will talk to. Our whole newspaper is stonewalled when it comes to Hancock County news at the courthouse. I never realized how many political connections he has. None of them will talk to anyone from our paper.”

  She called through the door between them, “What about that article about Josh, making him look like a womanizing psychopath?”

  �
�That was Seth Cavanaugh’s fault. He misled me.”

  She threw open the door. “And you didn’t check and double-check the information he gave you?”

  “Well—”

  Jan grew angry with her realization, “You wanted it to be true! You wanted Josh to get railroaded into jail!” Involuntarily, her finger came up to point at the man who had been her boss. “You’re jealous of Josh!”

  “No!”

  “Yes! Back in school, you were the school editor. Gail was your protégé because—”

  “I saw that she had talent.”

  “Is that what you call it? Only, as it turns out, she had the hots for Josh.” Her question came as an accusation, “What happened? Did you tell her how you felt about her and she told you to take a hike—after all the help you gave her to become editor—and then get my scholarship! Where were you the night Gail was killed? Were you sharing a bottle of wine with her?”

  Ernie puffed out his chest. “Do you know who you are talking to?”

  Jan was smug. “Yes, I know who you are, and I know who I am. I’m the news editor at The Review and the only journalist Josh Thornton will talk to.”

  “Here’s a piece of information that will interest you,” the sheriff slung a leg across the corner of Joshua’s desk in his study and crossed his arms. “The slug they took out of Tori Brody came from the same gun that killed Grace Henderson and Matthew Landers.” He held the case file for Tori Brody’s murder in his hand.

  “No kidding,” Joshua gasped at the news. “Billy Unger. She was his lawyer.”

  “And his fingerprints are all over her condo. We also found articles of his clothing there. She’s been hiding him.”

  “Then why did he kill her?”

  “Maybe she came to her senses and wanted him to turn himself in. I don’t know.” The sheriff shrugged. “It was Unger’s bloody handprints in the elevator. There were also partial fingerprints on the call button in the hallway and the button for the ground floor in the elevator. Those weren’t his. No ID on whose, though. Tad was right about the blood splatters on the front of her negligee. That blood wasn’t hers. And the slug he took out of her heart, it had two blood types on it. One was hers, the other wasn’t. It matches the blood in the hall and elevator.”

  “Then, the bullet went through someone else before it hit her,” Joshua concluded.

  “And it went in at a downward angle,” Tad announced from where he leaned in the doorway. He had stolen yet another apple from the Thornton refrigerator.

  “A downward angle? Do you mean to say that she was sitting in the chair and the killer was standing over her?” The sheriff twisted his body to confer with Tad who plopped down on the sofa and put his feet up on the coffee table.

  “The bullet went in at a twenty-five-degree angle and hit her aorta.” He illustrated with his hand the angle at which the shot was fired. “She also had sex with a man whose blood type was B positive—real recently, like right before she was killed.”

  The sheriff said, “The same blood type found in the elevator and on the front of her nightgown.”

  Joshua asked Tad, “What was Billy Unger’s blood type?”

  “B positive. You don’t think she was sleeping with her client, do you?” Tad reflected on the possibility of Tori making such a foolish decision.

  Joshua answered, “Evidence suggests she was hiding him from the police.”

  Tad admitted, “Unger was one good-looking young man . . . to young girls. I guess Tori fell for his charm.”

  “Until we determine who killed her, there will be people, based on Ernie’s article, who will assume I did it and covered it up.” Joshua grabbed the case file from Curt’s hand and leafed through the reports. “Now, Billy Unger was at the crime scene. Walt Manners says he gave the gun he used to kill the Landers boy to Billy to get rid of. I don’t think Billy did what he was told to do. That gun was used to kill Tori and Grace. Unger is the common denominator in both murders. Find him.”

  “What’s wrong with this picture?” Sheriff Sawyer observed the inside of Billy Unger’s car, which had been found behind some bushes on the banks of the Ohio River, downstream from New Cumberland. The car and Unger’s body had been discovered by two fishermen looking for a secluded place to fish.

  From the driver’s side, Tad examined Billy Unger’s body while the sheriff and Joshua observed the dried puddle of blood in the passenger seat. “Entrance and exit wound,” he told them. “The bullet went clean through. I’m betting that it is the same one I dug out of Tori.”

  “He was sitting here.” Joshua pointed to the blood in the seat and the streaks that went from the pool to his final resting place on the other side of the car. “He was dragged over to the driver’s side.”

  “How long has he been dead, Doc?” the sheriff asked.

  “Decomposition has already started,” the medical examiner said. “If you want my guess for now, . . . I’d say three days.”

  “Tori was killed three days ago,” Joshua reminded them.

  “I’d say he was there when she was shot. The wound looks like it’s at a downward angle.”

  “Tori got it in the chest,” the sheriff said. “She was sitting in the chair when she was hit.”

  “If Billy was standing in front of where she was sitting—” Joshua worked out the scene in his mind. “Suppose the killer was standing over Tori and he stepped in front of the gun and took the bullet.”

  Tad said, “The bullet went through him and got her in the chest.”

  “That seat seems kind of tight.” Joshua observed that the driver’s seat was close to the steering wheel. “Looks like the way my car does when I’ve been giving Tracy driving lessons.”

  “No, Billy didn’t drive this car last,” the medical examiner agreed. “Someone was probably trying to get him to the hospital, but he died before they could get him there, so they left him here. On this road, on Friday night with the resort up the river, they wouldn’t have had any trouble hitching out of here.”

  “The killer had his gun,” the sheriff reminded them.

  Joshua said, “Billy got that gun four years ago. It was hot. He was savvy enough to know that if he was found with it, then he himself would be implicated in Landers’s murder.”

  “Wait a minute,” Curt held up his hands. “We have been working on the theory that Unger kept the gun and used it to kill Grace Henderson. That’s why you first suspected him of killing her. Are you now saying that he got rid of it?”

  “With all the heat I put on him, you’d think he’d cough up who he gave it to, but he didn’t.”

  “Loyalty,” Tad suggested. “There are a lot of people sitting in prison right now because they refused to give up a friend to the cops to save themselves.”

  Curt argued, “If Unger didn’t kill Henderson, then why didn’t he give up whoever it was that was wearing his trench coat?”

  Joshua breathed and shook his head. “Like Tad says, maybe loyalty, or fear. He ran with a rough crowd.” He gestured towards Billy’s dead body. “Look at what they do to each other.”

  The sheriff disagreed. “He didn’t mind giving up Manners when it served his purpose.”

  “Maybe he didn’t know,” Tad said. “Maybe the gun was stolen by someone who didn’t know it was hot.”

  “In which case he wouldn’t know who had it.” Joshua cringed. “But Billy is the only common denominator in these murders. The only other common denominator is Heather, but she doesn’t fit the description of the killer leaving the scene after shooting Grace.”

  “There is another!” Tad exclaimed. “Didn’t you say that Karl said the last time he saw Heather was at the mall with a redhead?”

  “Actually he said she had orange hair,” Joshua said. “What about her?”

  “The orange-haired girl in the p
icture. Nicki Samuels. She introduced Grace to Billy. Suppose she knew Heather, too?”

  Curt snapped his fingers. “Josh, didn’t Heather Connor say that she was going to meet a Nicki when we were interviewing Margo at her house?”

  Joshua said, “I think you need to have another talk with this Nicki.”

  Joshua went home, took two aspirin, chased Admiral off the sofa in his study, and lay down. He was overwhelmed and needed to clear his head.

  “Oh, God,” he prayed, “give me a break.” When he heard the door slam, he covered his face with a pillow and tried to pretend he wasn’t there.

  “Dad!” he heard his youngest son yell.

  “I’m in here!” he yelled back, rolled over, and covered his ears with the pillow.

  “Dad!” Donny called again.

  “I’m in the study!” He muttered, “Kids? What was I thinking?” He answered his own question, “I wasn’t thinking. I always get into trouble when I’m not thinking.”

  Donny ran into the room and looked down at his father’s reclining form. “Dad, are you sick?”

  “No, I was taking a nap.” Joshua said. “What do you need?”

  “Money.”

  “Of course. How much and why?”

  “I got a date.”

  Joshua’s head spun around and he looked at his ten-year-old son who stood proudly before him. “You’re only ten.”

  “You were ten when you had your first date.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “You.”

  “Who is she?” Thus began the interrogation. It ended with Joshua permitting his son to take a girl to a school dance and giving him money for dinner at a fast-food restaurant.

  After his interrogation of Donny, Tracy and Murphy came home arguing over Madison. Murphy had asked Connie for a date, and she accepted. For some odd reason that only Tracy understood, Madison blamed her, and Tracy blamed Murphy for putting a kink in her social life. The slamming of doors and harsh words told Joshua that a nap was out of the question. He got up, groaned, rubbed his face with his hands, and went to the kitchen to make a cup of coffee. Caffeine might make him feel better.