Shots in the Dark

by Allyson K. Abbott

  “If anyone asks, we can say we’re going to visit someone I know who’s buried there,” Mal said. “What time do you want to do it?”

  “Why don’t we plan to go around noon? That way I can get the bar open and running before we leave.”

  “Noon, it is.”

  I realized then that I had left my own coat at Isabel’s house and would have to wear the one she’d given me for now. I hoped no one would notice that it wasn’t the same coat I’d left in, and when we arrived back at the bar, I headed straight for my office to take it off. With that out of the way, I headed back out front, happy to see that everything appeared to be running smoothly.

  Teddy was behind the bar with Billy, and I made my way over to the two of them, with Mal on my heels.

  “How is my new protégé doing?” I asked, smiling at Teddy.

  “I’m getting the hang of it,” Teddy said.

  “He’s a natural,” Billy said. “We had a couple of guys get into a squabble over a girl a bit ago, and it looked like the two of them were going to go at it. But as soon as Teddy walked over and asked them to leave, they did. One look at him and they were shaking in their boots.”

  “Solid work,” I said to Teddy.

  He shrugged and smiled. “I didn’t have to do much. My size was enough.”

  Billy said, “The Capone Club members were asking when you were going to be back. They apparently have some news on this new case you’re looking into.”

  “Good. I have some news for them, too.”

  “About that,” Teddy said. “I did some asking around on that matter you mentioned to me last night.”

  I nodded, giving him an expectant look, and then he dashed my hopes.

  “No one was aware of Tiffany Gallagher having any affairs of any sort after she and Ben started dating,” he said.

  I frowned with disappointment. “She must have been very secretive and careful, then. Because she had sex with someone other than Ben not long before she was killed.”

  “I did hear an interesting tidbit, though,” Teddy went on. “Some of the folks who knew Tiff in her younger days said she disappeared from school during her senior year. When she came back, she told everyone that she was sent to a boarding school overseas to complete her education. There was a rumor going around that she had gotten pregnant and had gone somewhere to have the kid in secret, but no one knew of anyone who Tiffany was dating at the time.”

  “So there’s no reason to believe the rumor,” I said, not surprised that such juicy gossip was still in the minds of those with nothing better to do.

  “I suppose not,” Teddy said with a shrug, “but the rumor had more footing than some. It hung on for years. And Tiff’s death resurrected it.”

  I had every intention of keeping my promise to Kelly Gallagher, so I said, “It’s an interesting bit of gossip, but given that it happened more than six years ago, I doubt it has any relevance to the current situation. I’ll keep it in mind, though.” I gave Teddy a grateful smile. “Thanks for looking into it. Let me know if you hear anything else.”

  I turned to Billy. “Is Teddy here competent to man the bar for a bit? I’d like to talk to you in private for a few minutes.”

  “He’s good to go,” Billy said.

  I led the way to my office, with Billy and Mal following. Once inside I told Billy what I needed, and we spent a few minutes making up a list.

  “Not a problem,” Billy said when we were done. “I’ll get right on it. It’s very sweet of you to do this.”

  “It’s the least I can do,” I said. “And one more thing.” I handed him a folder. “Have Teddy fill out the employment paperwork in here tonight. He can shove it under my office door once it’s done.”

  “Got it.” Billy took the folder and the list and left the office.

  Mal and I left right behind him and headed upstairs to the Capone Club. The usual group was there: Cora, Frank, Joe, Carter, Sam, Tad, Holly, and Alicia. Tyrese was there, too, along with Nick, both of them looking tired and sipping on cups of coffee. Also present were Stephen McGregor, the high school physics teacher, and Sonja West, the salon owner. And to my surprise, Clay Sanders was there. I hadn’t expected him back until tomorrow.

  “Hey, M and M,” Carter greeted as we entered the room. M and M was the nickname Cora had given to Mal and me, and it had stuck with the group. “Where have you two been?”

  “Out and about,” I said vaguely. Then, to get the spotlight off of us, I said, “I hear you guys have something regarding the Middleton case.”

  “And we hear you have the same,” Sam said. “How did the interview with Ben Middleton go?”

  “It went well,” I said, settling into an empty seat. Mal grabbed a chair and pulled it up beside me. “Ben Middleton seemed very sincere, and his story about what happened is believable.”

  “Did you ask him if he killed his wife?” Carter said.

  “I did,” I said with a nod. “He denied it, and he seemed to be telling the truth. He did lie to me once, about his and Tiffany’s relationship, but he came clean as soon as I called him on it.”

  “So, I take it we’re a go with the case, then?” Holly said.

  “I think so, assuming all of you agree.”

  There was a series of nods around the room.

  “Good. I have some other stuff to report, but first I want to hear what you guys have,” I said.

  Joe was the first one to speak. “Our friend Clay here got us some pictures of the inside of the Middleton car.”

  I blanched, wondering if the pictures included Tiffany’s dead body, and remembering the horror of the car we’d just finished looking at. Cora must have read my mind.

  “They show the blood evidence, but nothing else,” she said.

  Clay said, “I also brought a copy of the autopsy report on Tiffany.”

  “Anything of interest that we didn’t know already?” I asked.

  “Maybe,” Cora said. “Our new friend Mr. McGregor here may have discovered something.”

  She slid some photos toward me, and I looked at them. They showed the front interior of a car, and there was a large bloodstain on the headrest on the passenger side, as well as a number of smaller spots that looked like blood scattered around the interior. These were circled in green, and the color made me think of the most recent letter.

  Stephen McGregor explained. “If you look at the pattern of the blood in these photos, you can see an obvious void created by the victim’s body. The void implies that she was sitting slightly sideways in the seat, with the right side of her back against the passenger door. The autopsy report says that the bullet entered the victim’s head here.” He pointed to a spot above his right eye. “And it came to rest in the back of her skull, on the left, meaning it crossed the midline.”

  I raised my hand, making him pause. “Ben said the gun fired twice. Where did the second bullet go?”

  “It was embedded in the door on Tiffany’s side of the car,” Clay answered.

  I nodded and signaled for Stephen to continue, which he did.

  “For the bullet to have traveled the way it did, the gun would have had to have been somewhere out in this area.” He held a hand out in front of his face, waving it around in a small area. “Now, let’s assume for a moment that Ben Middleton was alone and he made up the story about the carjacker. Look at this newspaper photo of Middleton during the trial, sitting at the table, pencil in hand. There’s a tablet of paper in front of him, so presumably he was taking notes. Based on this, I think it’s safe to assume that Middleton is right handed.” Stephen got up from his chair and looked at Holly, who was seated nearby. “Holly, would you mind playing Tiffany this time?”

  “Happy to,” she said with a smile.

  She rose from her seat, took the chair Stephen had just vacated, and assumed the position he’d said Tiffany was in. Stephen took her empty chair and set it beside her on her left, about a foot away. He sat facing forward in this chair, while Holly sat in hers with her
head and body turned toward him.

  “Imagine that I’m Ben Middleton,” Stephen said. “I’m right handed, and I’m going to shoot my wife.” He formed his right hand into a mock gun shape and aimed it at Holly’s head. “In order for me to shoot her and have the bullet track the way it did, I’d have to have my hand out in front of me and bent backward.” He demonstrated the position with his hand, which was obviously an awkward one, and then shifted his body. “As you can see, it doesn’t work very well, even if I move in my seat and put my back against the driver’s door.” He dropped his right hand and made the mock gun with his left. “If I was left handed, it would make much more sense,” he said, holding that hand out in front of him and aiming it toward Holly’s head. “The angle might work then.”

  He straightened in his seat. “Now let’s imagine there was a carjacker, and Middleton was struggling with the man, trying to wrestle the gun from him.” He looked over at Carter. “Would you be our carjacker?”

  Carter nodded, got up, and walked over to Stephen’s left side, standing a foot or so away. Then he did the mock gun thing and thrust his hand toward Stephen’s face.

  “My first instinct,” Stephen said, “would be to push the hand holding the gun or the gunman’s arm away from my face.” He did so, wrapping one hand around Carter’s mock gun and grabbing Carter’s wrist with the other. Then he pushed Carter’s arm while Carter tried to bring the gun back toward Stephen’s face. The two men struggled for several seconds, their arms waving about.

  “As you can see,” Stephen said, “this places the gun in roughly the same area it would have been in had Middleton been left handed. The carjacker would have been trying to aim the gun toward the back of the car, hoping to hit Ben. From this position, it would be easy for a bullet to track the way it did. Even if we consider a scenario where Middleton got out of the car with the window down and then leaned in to shoot Tiffany, the angles don’t make sense if he’s right handed.”

  Stephen relaxed his arms then and said thanks to Carter. Carter dropped his arms and went back to his seat. Stephen looked over at me with a smile. “So you see, the scenario that fits best with the evidence is exactly the one that Ben Middleton claimed.”

  “Unless Ben Middleton is ambidextrous,” I said.

  “Possible,” Sam said, “but unlikely. Only one in one hundred people is truly ambidextrous, and the majority of them favor one hand over the other. Most often that’s the right hand, a product of living in a right-handed world. And as we saw in the picture, Middleton writes with his right hand.”

  “So there was a third person there,” I said.

  Stephen nodded. “The physics suggest so, yes.”

  “Except there’s a big fly in our ointment,” Sam said with an apologetic smile. “Just because Ben didn’t fire the bullet that killed Tiffany, it doesn’t mean he didn’t hire someone else to do it. And if that was the case, he was essentially telling the truth when he said he didn’t kill her.”

  Mal leaned forward in his chair, frowning. “If he hired someone, there would be a money trail somewhere. Was there any mention during the trial of any unusual financial transactions?”

  Clay shook his head. “They briefly covered the financials, because the prosecution was convinced money was behind Ben’s motive. Tiffany had money in an account that Ben had no access to, and if there were any unusual transactions in that account, it wasn’t mentioned. Ben’s money all went into a joint account that both he and Tiffany were authorized to use. Occasionally, Tiffany would augment that account from her own funds, but everything that came out of that account was tracked and allocated to legitimate expenditures. The prosecution claimed that having his wife control the purse strings was what pushed Ben over the edge.”

  “Did Tiffany have sole discretion over her personal account?” I asked.

  Clay shrugged. “I don’t know. Why?”

  “Just wondering if her parents had any control over what she spent.”

  Sam, not one to give in easily, said, “Just because there isn’t any evidence that a shooter was paid doesn’t mean one wasn’t hired. Maybe Ben told whoever it was that they’d have to wait for the payment until things blew over and he got access to some of Tiff’s money or the life insurance proceeds. Clearly, he wouldn’t have been able to get at any of it, given how quickly he was arrested, but what’s the shooter going to do? Complain that he wasn’t paid for a murder? He wouldn’t have much recourse.”

  Much as I hated to admit it, Sam had a point. But as I tried to visualize how it might have happened this way, the image kept falling into pieces like in a jigsaw puzzle where none of the edges matched up. “There are too many things that don’t make sense,” I said. “If Tiffany was the intended victim, why wouldn’t the shooter go to her side of the car? Why risk reaching in and shooting her from the driver’s side?”

  “Maybe that’s how Ben planned it, so that the carjacker story would hold up,” Sam suggested.

  “But if he’s that clever in his planning,” I said, “why would he be stupid enough to buy the gun himself?”

  There were lots of frowns and quizzical expressions in the room as everyone contemplated this question. No one came up with an answer.

  “And the other thing that bothers me about this,” I went on, “is why Tiffany didn’t try to get out of the car and run. Why would she just sit there and not even shy away from it all? I asked Ben that question, and he said she had a history of panic attacks, but I would still think that having someone shove a gun in your face or your husband’s face would make you want to get out of the way. And judging from the position she was in, in the car, she was shying away from something on the driver’s side.”

  Several seconds of silence followed, and then Joe said, “Maybe she was drugged.”

  There were some tentative nods among the group, and then Mal said, “Or maybe we’re looking at this all wrong. Consider this scenario. There’s evidence that Tiffany was having an affair. Maybe the intended victim was Ben all along, and Tiffany was the mastermind. Maybe she wanted to get rid of him and didn’t want to risk a nasty divorce, where she might have to share some of her money. Maybe the plan was for Ben to get out of the car when the carjacker demanded it and then get shot in the road. Then the carjacker could get into the car and drive off with Tiffany. Later she could say he took her at gunpoint and let her go at some point. In fact, if it was planned right, she could lay low some place and hide before going for help, giving the shooter a decent amount of time to get far away, ditch the car for a different one, and head for a hidey-hole and some future rendezvous.”

  It was an interesting theory, and when I flashed back on the dark, morbid nature of Tiffany’s paintings, it wasn’t hard to imagine her doing something like that.

  Frank shook his head and said, “I don’t see how this could have been a planned thing by either party. In order for a planned scenario to work, assuming it happened the way Middleton said and some guy flagged them down, the planner would have needed a way to communicate with the shooter.”

  “Cell phone?” Holly suggested.

  “According to Ben Middleton, there was no cell service where they were,” I said.

  “That’s true,” Clay said. “It was discussed at the trial, and again the prosecution twisted it around, saying that Ben planned it that way to make sure no one could come to Tiffany’s aid.”

  “Except Middleton admitted that he drove into town earlier that day, and there was cell service available there,” Mal pointed out. “He could have called someone then.”

  I frowned at this. “But he said they were planning to stay at the house at that point, so how would he have known they’d be on the road, headed home, later that day?”

  “We’re assuming Ben Middleton’s version of the events is true,” Mal offered. “Maybe it wasn’t Tiffany who insisted they head home. Maybe it was Ben.”

  “I don’t think so,” I told the group. “I had a strong sense that Middleton was telling us the truth, an
d Tiffany’s mother verified the fact that her daughter sometimes had episodes where she would get moody, withdrawn, and spooked. That fits with what Ben described.”

  “You talked to Tiffany’s mother?” Frank said.

  “I did. Clay was good enough to arrange a visit to their house earlier today, and I met the rest of the family, as well. But the only one I discussed the case with was Tiffany’s mother, Kelly. She made it clear that Tiffany was a troubled young woman long before she met Middleton. And according to Middleton, Tiffany had been acting distant and withdrawn for months. She started sleeping in the guest room, she dropped the volunteer work she was doing at the animal shelter, and she didn’t go out much.”

  “Maybe that was because she was having an affair,” Holly suggested.

  “Perhaps,” I said, thinking. “Maybe we should try to talk to some of the folks at the animal shelter and see if Tiffany ever mentioned anything along those lines.”

  Sonja West perked up at that. “As luck would have it, a woman who volunteers at that same shelter is a regular client of mine. I know she worked with Tiffany, because she talked about her all the time back when the murder first happened. She comes in every other Monday for a mani-pedi, and she’s scheduled to come in tomorrow morning. I’ll talk to her and see what she knows.”

  “That would be great,” I said, once again amazed by and grateful for the diversity of this group. “One other thing I learned from Ben Middleton is that his father-in-law hired a private eye to dig up some info on him and tail him for several weeks.” I looked over at Tyrese and Nick, both of whom had remained silent, listening. “Tyrese, Nick, any chance you guys would know who this was? Ben said he was quite distinctive looking—six-six, with a ruddy, pockmarked complexion and a large beaky nose.”

  “Doesn’t ring a bell with me,” Tyrese said. He grabbed a napkin, took a pen from his pocket, and scribbled down some notes.

  Nick, his brow furrowed, said, “It sounds vaguely familiar to me, but I can’t pull it out at the moment. Give me some time to think on it, and I’ll ask around among some of the other guys, too.”