December's Secrets (Larry Macklin Mysteries Book 2)

by A. E. Howe

  “Does your son use the name Doug Timberlane sometimes?”

  The question got more of the silent treatment.

  “Ms. Page, where do you live?”

  “Orlando.”

  “Is anyone with you?”

  “Oh, my God. No! Tell me he’s okay. Please.” She began to cry.

  “Ms. Page, we found the body of a man. The license in his wallet identified him as Doug Timberlane.”

  She was just wailing now. There was no point in going on. I told her that I would call back in an hour and hung up.

  “Apparently this might not be Doug Timberlane,” I said to Shantel. She pulled the dead man’s wallet out of the evidence case and we took it apart, dusting the cards and money carefully.

  “That answers one question,” I said, holding up his license. While it was inside the plastic sleeve it looked real enough to fool me, but without the plastic to obscure the flaws, it was obviously a fake.

  There was one card in an interior pocket bearing the name David Tyler. “I think we have a winner. Mom thought it was David calling, and the truck in the driveway was registered to a David Tyler.”

  Pete and his crew came up with a plastic bin of bagged items that they’d found scattered over an acre around the murder scene. Most of it—cigarette butts, old potato chip bags and odds and ends of clothing—would prove useless. But there was one interesting item—a pay-as-you-go cell phone. If we could find out who purchased it and where, we just might find our killer.

  Chapter Two

  We finished up and headed back to the office. I ran a check on both names and came up with a long list of priors for David Tyler, stretching back to his eighteenth birthday. I was sure that if his juvie record was unsealed we’d find they went back further.

  Looking at the arrest photos for David, I felt confident he was our victim. Though with his record for aggravated assault, sexual battery, sexual assault, lewd behavior, burglary, etc., etc., it was hard to think of him as a victim. He’d spent the majority of his life victimizing others. But you couldn’t let the fact that the murdered guy was an asshole affect how hard you hunted for his killer.

  I sighed and called his mother again. Bad guys have mothers too.

  “Yes?” she answered, sounding bone-weary.

  “I’m sorry, Ms. Page. We’ve looked into the identity of the victim and his real name was David Tyler.”

  She started to cry, but choked it back. “David is my son.”

  “You live in Orlando?”

  “Sanford, actually.” Close enough. “What… what happened to him?” she asked, sounding like she wasn’t really sure she wanted to know.

  “He was murdered.” I didn’t want to flood her with all of the horrible details too soon, but she seemed to have found her resolve.

  “How was he killed? Have you caught the man who did it?”

  “He was hung. And, no, we’re just starting our investigation.”

  “Hung?” She almost laughed, clearly on the edge of hysteria. “I imagined him getting stabbed or shot. The sort of people he called friends… Some of the things he did…” Her voice trailed off. After a moment she asked, “How do I… My son, I want to bury him. How…?”

  “We still need to do an autopsy, and we need someone to make a positive identification.”

  She thought about this for a moment. “I can be there in the morning.” Her voice was shaking.

  “Do you have someone who can come with you?” I was worried for her. No one should drive in the state that she was in.

  “I have to check, but I think my daughter can drive me.” I gave her information on places they could stay and which hospital he was at. Adams County is too small to have its own hospital so we use one in Tallahassee. I told her to call me when they were ready and I’d meet them there.

  Thinking about the hospital, I looked at my watch and tried to decide if Dr. Darzi had had a chance to do a preliminary exam of the body. What the hell. I dialed his number.

  After the usual greetings he said, “Very interesting case.” He sounded excited. I took this as a bad sign. I really wanted everything to be cut and dried.

  “How so?” I asked.

  “He wasn’t hung once, but at least five times.”

  “What?” I wasn’t liking this at all.

  “The rope left at least five distinct marks on his neck. As though he hung from the rope, then was raised off it, then left to hang again and again.”

  “Really.” I didn’t know what to say. My mind was trying to come up with a scenario for the evidence.

  “Two of the indentations are very deep. Which one killed him will have to wait for the complete autopsy.”

  “You sound pretty excited by this. You don’t get out much, do you?” I asked good-naturedly.

  “What can I say? I get tired of looking at accidents, gunshots and stabbings. This is unique.”

  “You’d like that, wouldn’t you? Get your name in the Lancet.”

  “Not that interesting.” He laughed, but I don’t think he got my JAWS reference.

  “So maybe someone had the rope around his neck and dragged him over to the tree before they got it over the branch and pulled him up?”

  He thought about that for a moment. “No, I don’t think that would account for it. If he’d been struggling while they dragged him to the tree, I would expect the rope marks to be all the way around his neck as he twisted and turned. The rope marks are all on the front of his neck as though he was raised and lowered over and over. You might see this on someone who was standing on their toes, trying not to suffocate. They might rise up for a short period of time, then become exhausted. Let go. Begin to strangle and rise up on their toes again.”

  “I see. What if someone lifted them up and dropped them? Lifted them and dropped them?” I was thinking of the big guy that Tyler’s neighbor had described.

  “That would explain it.”

  He said that the samples had already been sent off for toxicology. We’d get a preliminary report in a couple days and the full results in a couple weeks. He’d perform a full autopsy this afternoon. You could tell he was looking forward to it. I thanked him and disconnected.

  As strange as the case was getting, I was grateful that everything might be pointing to one suspect. The big guy. Now all I had to do was find him.

  My phone rang. When I saw who it was, my heart jumped. Cara hadn’t called me since she’d told me she wasn’t comfortable dating a deputy.

  “Hey,” I said, trying to strike the right tone, somewhere between excited and cool.

  “Larry, I need your help. Can you come over to my place?” She sounded very serious. It was clear from her tone that we weren’t talking about helping to move a piece of furniture or something equally banal.

  “Of course. What’s wrong?”

  “I’d rather explain it to you in person.”

  “I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”

  I had to keep myself from running out of the office, but honestly, everything else was forgotten. We’d only had two dates, but I was enamored with Cara Laursen. She was beautiful, petite and red-haired, a couple years younger than me. But it was much more than her looks. There was a depth to her that I hadn’t seen in other women I’d dated. I felt an indefinable connection when I looked into her eyes. It had hit me hard when she told me that my job bothered her.

  Oddly, being a deputy had never been important to me. I’d become one for complicated reasons. After my mother died, my dad went into a deep depression. I’d suggested that he run for sheriff. My mom had always joked that he should, since he’d spent his whole career with the department. It seemed like a way to pay tribute to her and to get him out of his depression. He’d agreed on the condition that I become a deputy. And reluctantly, out of love for my father, here I was.

  Cara knew that the ties between my father and me were strong and she didn’t want to damage them, which just made me respect and care about her more. So for the past few weeks I’d force
d myself to give her space, hoping that she felt something for me that would make her reconsider. My pulse quickened as I drove to her duplex.

  I restrained myself from running up to her door. It opened as soon as I got within knocking distance. Cara stood in the doorway and it was the first time I’d seen her that she didn’t have even a hint of a smile on her face. Alvin, her Pug, ran out and sniffed my ankles as I followed Cara inside.

  I almost drew my Glock from its holster when I saw the huge man dominating the small living room. I may not be a great investigator, but even I recognized the large, blond-haired man with a ponytail. I’d found my murder suspect. He looked like a middle-aged Viking, but without the shield or the dragon boat.

  I looked from Cara to the man and back. Just then, an older version of Cara walked in from the kitchen. My disorientation must have been clear from my expression. Cara stepped up quickly.

  “Larry, this is my father, Henry, and my mother, Anna.”

  I didn’t know whether to shake the huge hand Henry offered or try to cuff him. I settled on shaking his hand as Cara’s mother came toward me with outstretched arms. I’m not really a hugger, but she wasn’t going to give me an option. I took the hug and gave a little back.

  After the greetings we all stood looking at each other. No one seemed to know what to say. Finally Cara offered an explanation.

  “My father has a problem.” She looked at him. “Dad?”

  He sighed. “I saw a dead man this morning,” he said without elaborating.

  “Look, I’ve already talked to a neighbor of the dead man who described someone much like yourself arguing with the victim at his house yesterday.” I tried for Cara’s sake not to sound too accusatory. I was at a loss how to approach this. Anyone else and I’d have already asked them to come down to the sheriff’s office to be interviewed, but… it was Cara’s dad.

  “Yes, that’s true. His name was Doug Timberlane. He used to work for us.”

  That was it? Henry was clearly one of the strong and silent types. I almost blurted out that his name wasn’t Doug Timberlane. I had to keep forcing myself to treat Henry as I would any suspect and not give out information that could hurt the investigation.

  “Can we sit down?” I looked at Cara. “And I’d like to talk to your father alone.”

  I saw trust in her eyes and I hoped she could see the same in mine. She turned to her mother. “Mom, why don’t we go make something for lunch?”

  “Great! We can put out some tabbouleh and hummus and warm up the…” Anna said excitedly as she followed her daughter into the kitchen.

  The Viking and I sat across from each other in the living room. His face and hands were weathered from years of working outside. His eyes had a hard, intelligent gaze that was focused on me. This was not the way I wanted to meet Cara’s parents.

  “Okay. Could you start at the beginning? And give me as much detail as you can.” I added the last part hoping to get less laconic statements from him.

  He looked up at the ceiling for a moment, apparently deciding where to begin. Or maybe he was trying to figure out how to give more than one sentence answers. “I’m sure Cara’s told you about the co-op her mother and I live in down in Gainesville. Well, Doug came to us about five months ago. The co-op has a few trailers for rent. He stayed in one next to another fellow he knew. No one had a problem with him and, about two weeks into his stay, he asked me if we had any work he could do. Most of the folks who live at the co-op help out as a give-a-little/get-a-little deal. But we have a couple positions where we offer a wage. He could handle a backhoe and was mechanically minded, one of our positions was open, so we hired him.”

  “You hired him or someone else hired him?”

  “We have a board, but I’m the manager and they pretty much follow my lead on hiring. I gave him a thumbs up and they agreed.”

  “Did you check references?”

  “He gave me a couple and was upfront about what they were going to tell me. I checked them and, sure enough, they said he worked hard when he was there but had a problem being on time and sometimes he didn’t show up at all.”

  “That didn’t bother you?”

  “Not really. We pay for the time a person works. If he wants to work two hours one day and ten the next, that’s fine. We’ve had folks with reliability issues in the past, but we work with them. Hell, just about all of us are odd ducks. That’s kind of the point of our co-op, for folks who don’t conform to society’s way of doing things.” Henry raised his hand to stop me. “Don’t think we’re stupid. I Googled his name and checked it against the sex offenders list. We’ve had some problems like that before.”

  I had to bite my tongue not to tell him where he went wrong. You aren’t going to get the goods if you’re checking up on the guy’s alias.

  “Everything was fine at first. He worked hard. Fixed up a bush hog we were having problems with and dug up and repaired a section of septic lines. Everyone was happy.”

  “But…”

  “We started to get complaints about how he treated some of the women. I talked to him about it and he said he was lonely and hadn’t had a girlfriend in a while. I laid down the law to him. He took it well and apologized, saying it wouldn’t happen again. And, like I said, I’m not stupid. I didn’t just take his word for it that he’d behave. I took some time away from my work to check up on him. Sometimes letting him know I was checking and sometimes doing it as covertly as I could.” He stopped and his lips pressed tight. I could tell he didn’t want to go on.

  “Something happened?”

  “A couple of months ago, I stopped in and saw him working on a water line. We talked for a moment, then I told him I had to go make a supply run and asked him if he needed anything. He said he could use another can of PVC glue. No problem. I left, waited fifteen minutes, then came back. I had a ready-made reason. I was going to ask him which of the several different types of PVC glue he preferred.

  “When I came around the building—it was one of the units we rent out—I heard a scuffle. What I saw scared the crap out of me. He was holding a young girl, Ellie, by her upper arm, tugging on her. She was fighting him and, just as I came into view, he pulled back his other hand to slap her. He saw me and let go of her, then started to run.”

  “What’d you do?”

  “I caught him.”

  “And?”

  “Took him by the throat and told him I’d strangle him with my bare hands if I ever saw him again. When I dropped him, he took off running. An hour later I checked his trailer. The guy next door said Timberlane had packed his bags and took off. Good riddance, I thought.”

  That was all well and good but… “So how did you end up here yesterday arguing with him?”

  “I guess after a week or so he got his nerve back and started texting me and one or two of the board members whose numbers he had. He wanted his last two weeks pay that he’d earned. At first I just told him to go screw himself, but some of the board members thought we’d be better off if we gave him the money. Well, I finally agreed. When I found out he was living up here, I decided I’d bring him the check instead of sending it.”

  “Why’d you do that?”

  Henry got quiet again. “Two reasons. One, I wanted to give him another warning and, two, well, honestly, I didn’t like him living in the same area as Cara. I thought if he knew I knew where he lived, he might decide to move on. I never got the idea he was too attached to any one spot, if you know what I mean.”

  “You just wanted to warn him? You didn’t think that roughing him up a little might help to move him along?”

  “I never intended to harm him.”

  “Never intended, but did you?”

  “No.”

  “Okay, so why didn’t you call the Alachua County Sheriff’s Office? He’d assaulted a young girl. You could have had him arrested.”

  “I screwed up.” He held his hands up as if surrendering. “It is a cardinal rule at the co-op that, within reason, we keep our
business to ourselves. Our members have some different ideas about pot and other herbs that don’t strictly conform to the law. And some of the folks at our place have had some bad experiences with law enforcement. But I’m not making excuses. I made the wrong decision.”

  Anna came in carrying a plate of pita bread and a bowl of hummus. Cara was right behind her, trying to keep her from interrupting, but it was clear that Anna was a bit of a loose cannon.

  “Can I get you two something to drink?” she asked.

  “Mom, they want to be left alone to talk for a while.”

  “Won’t hurt them any to have some food and drink.”

  Why fight it? “Water would be nice.”

  “Tea, Anna,” Henry told her in a gentle voice.

  “Be right back.” She turned and hurried off. Cara looked at me and shrugged her shoulders as if to say, I can’t control her.

  Henry and I waited for our drinks before going on. Finally Cara managed to herd her mother back out of the room.

  “Yesterday. You went out to his place with a check?” I asked.

  “Yes. He came out of the house like he was going to give me shit.”

  “He pissed you off?”

  “I couldn’t believe his nerve. I threw his check on the ground and told him that I’d kill him if I ever heard that he touched another girl.”

  I had a suspect. He was admitting to a motive. He clearly had the strength to do it, and I was afraid he had the opportunity. But how do you arrest the father of the girl you want to date? “That’s all you did, threaten him?”

  “Yes. I made a move toward him and he slunk back into the house. So I left.”

  “If he hadn’t retreated?”

  Henry looked down at his big hands. I looked at them too. They were huge, callused and could easily be used as weapons. “I would have beat him up. I’m glad he went back inside. I’m not proud that I wanted to hurt him.” He looked in my eyes, searching for something. “I’m being honest with you because Cara said I could trust you.”