by A. E. Howe
“I appreciate that, and if you had nothing to do with this man’s death, I will do everything in my power to make sure you walk away from this unharmed.” I was completely sincere. I hoped he could tell that.
“I’ve had trouble with my anger in the past. Long time ago, before I met Anna.” He looked toward the kitchen. “She changed me.” He blushed. “And then there was Cara.”
“Why were you at the site where he was hanged?” I asked.
He took out his phone and pulled up his recent calls. He held it out to me, showing me a number. I took his phone and pulled mine out, taking a picture of the information displayed on his phone while he talked.
“I got a phone call from that number early this morning. A man’s voice said that he needed to talk to me about Timberlane. I started to complain about the time, but he said it was urgent, a matter of life and death. I said okay, and he told me where to go. Cara was up and I asked her if she knew how to get to this place. She said sure and gave me the directions.”
“And that led you to the site of the hanging?”
“That was where I saw…” His voice trailed off, his face haunted by the memory.
“Tell me what you saw. What happened?”
“I drove my truck down the dirt road a bit, then stopped and got out. That’s when I saw Timberlane hanging from the tree. I ran over there, but it was clear he was dead. I pulled my phone out and was going to call 911, but then I decided I wanted talk to Cara and Anna first. I had just pulled onto the main road when a sheriff’s car passed me. I watched in my rearview mirror and saw them turn down the same dirt road I’d just come out of. I knew what that meant.”
“What?” If he had this all figured out, he was ahead of me.
“I was being set up. Someone wanted me to be caught with the body.”
Chapter Three
I believed almost everything he said and, if he was telling the truth, I was pretty sure his conclusion was right. However, his nemesis had done a pretty damn good job of making a solid case against him. It would be law enforcement malpractice not to take him in for questioning. But I wasn’t going to do it. I had no clue what I was going to do, but I knew I wasn’t going to haul Henry in right then.
“Of course you don’t have an alibi for the time of the murder because the call lured you out while the murder took place. You realize how bad this looks?” I asked him.
“It looks that bad because someone intended it to look bad,” he said with conviction.
“What will I find if I run your name?”
He sighed heavily. “Nothing for the last thirty years.”
“And before then?” I pressed.
“Between the ages of eighteen and twenty I worked as a merchant seaman. I have several charges stemming from bar fights and other… incidents.”
“Incidents?”
He was blushing again. “I got in a couple fights over women, mostly.” His voice was so low I almost had to ask him to repeat it. “I pled guilty to two of the four charges. The others were dropped. I spent a total of six months in jail.” He stopped talking and looked down at the floor. “What’s going to happen now?” he asked, head still down.
I was trying to think of what path I needed to take to ensure that I did my duty and, at the same time, protected Henry as best as I could. “That’s what I’m trying to figure out. Why don’t you ask Cara and Anna to join us? Whatever happens, it’s going to involve everyone.”
He got up slowly and left the room. In a moment all three came back. Cara came to my side and put her arm on mine. It was utterly depressing under the circumstances.
“Larry?” Cara asked.
“This doesn’t look good,” I told her. “But I’m going to figure it out.” For encouragement, I added, “We aren’t in this alone, either. My dad can be a bit of a horse’s ass sometimes, but he’s a good man. He’ll trust me.” I hoped this last part was true. As close as we were, we didn’t always see eye to eye.
“But what now?” Cara asked.
“For right now, I just want your dad to stay here. Don’t talk to anyone else. I’m going to run the number on the call you got this morning. Maybe we’ll get lucky.” There were gloomy faces all around. No one believed that the person who went to all this trouble would be so stupid as to use a phone that could be traced back to them. But checking it was something positive that I could do.
“I want you,” I pointed at Henry, “to write down everything you remember about all your contacts with Doug. Everything. Who knows what’s important and what isn’t.”
“Why is someone doing these crazy things?” Anna asked in a disillusioned voice. She seemed so naïve for a person of her age.
“I can only see two motivations: to kill Doug and to frame Henry. Which one was the primary objective, I don’t know. It’s reasonable to think that killing Doug was the main purpose because it seems worse to think that someone would kill a person just so they could frame a third party for the murder. Somehow it seems less callous if they planned on killing Doug and then figured it would be best to frame Henry while they were at it. The bottom line is that it’s way too early to know anything. You might want to add to your writing assignment anyone who might hold a grudge against you.”
Henry looked genuinely perplexed.
Anna spoke for him. “He gets in some heated arguments, but he always makes amends.” She took his arm and hugged it.
“She’s taught me to let things go. I apologize and make it right if I fight with someone. I do it sooner than later too.”
“But not with Doug?”
“Not with Doug. If you had seen him touching—”
I put my hand up to stop him. “I get it. Just write down everything you can. Don’t hesitate to call me if you remember something else or anything happens. I’ll be in touch.”
Cara walked outside with me. At the car we stopped and just looked at each other. I was trying to find the right thing to say, but she spoke first.
“Thank you. Dad is pretty upset and confused. Honestly, I am too. Who would do this to him?”
The pain in her voice made me want to reach out and hug her, but I was afraid it would just add another layer of emotions that she didn’t need right now.
“Cara, I swear to you that I will do everything in my power to get your family through this.”
She stepped in and wrapped her arms around me. Women are often braver than men. I hugged her firmly, trying to give her some measure of security and hope. “I’ll call you soon,” I said, and she gave me a small smile.
Pete called as I was pulling out of Cara’s driveway. He’d found the owner of the trailer that Tyler was renting. Turned out it was owned by Justin Thompson, the father of my new and strange confidential informant. Not that I was going to say anything bad about Eddie. Just the month before, my CI had given my dad information that had saved my life.
I told Pete I wanted to drive by the crime scene and that I’d meet him and Thompson at the trailer in an hour.
Crime scene tape was stretched across the dirt road to discourage gawkers. I parked, grabbed a measuring tape and walked down the road to the site of the hanging. The ground was sandy and covered in oak leaves, so we hadn’t been able to get any tire tracks. Now I knew that if we had, they probably would have matched Henry’s truck.
Walking over to the tree where Tyler had been strung up, I could see the marks on the branch where the rope had scarred the bark. I got down on my hands and knees and felt the ground, moving slowly and carefully toward the spot that was directly under the marks. Eventually, I found what I was looking for—depressions in the dirt, round and about two inches in diameter. There were four of them. They had been partially covered by leaves, but they could still be felt. Taking out my tape, I measured the distance between the impressions.
I was pretty sure now how the murder had taken place. I figured that the killer had forced Tyler to climb up on a stool or a chair, probably at gunpoint. Once Tyler was standing on the stool, the ki
ller threw the rope over the tree branch, made it taut around Tyler’s neck, and tied it off. The murderer then removed the stool and replaced it several times, making David Tyler dangle and then regain his purchase, until he finally removed it and let Tyler die.
Why would he remove and replace the stool? Just to torture Tyler? Then a more intriguing thought occurred to me. Maybe he was interrogating Tyler. Asking questions and torturing him when he didn’t get the answers he wanted. Knowing that Tyler was a criminal, maybe he had stolen something of the killer’s. Could it be drug related?
But none of that answered the question of why the killer wanted to involve Henry. Just to throw us off the scent? That seemed a little far-fetched. How did the killer even know about Henry? Maybe he was watching Tyler’s house, saw Henry get in a fight with him, and came up with the plan to frame him on the fly. But then how would he get Henry’s phone number? Probably from Tyler while he was torturing him.
My theory made a lot of sense. I turned it around in my head, trying to find a flaw in my logic. It seemed like the simplest explanation. If Occam’s razor held true, that should be the solution. Hey, I’m getting better at this, I thought. Now all I had to do was find the killer and Henry would be off the hook.
Twenty minutes later I pulled into the driveway of the trailer. Pete was already there. I looked over and saw the old man sitting on his porch next door. I waved, but he didn’t wave back. Probably asleep. The day had warmed up to the point that it was perfect napping weather. I thought about checking to see if he was alive and figured that was silly.
“Thompson should be here shortly. Said it would take him a little while to go home and get the key,” Pete said without looking up from his phone. I nodded and left him leaning against his car while I walked around the trailer again. How much could Thompson be charging for this dump? I wondered.
I heard a car park at the curb. With Tyler’s, Pete’s and mine, there wasn’t room for another vehicle in the driveway. I saw a lean man of average height get out of a newish SUV. He was wearing jeans and cowboy boots, but it looked more like a costume than a working man’s outfit.
“Justin Thompson,” he said without putting out his hand.
“I’m Deputy Macklin and this is Deputy Henley,” I said.
Thompson squinted at us as though he was trying to decide if we were worthy of committing to memory. “You’re the sheriff’s son,” he said, giving me a double dose of his squinty eyes.
“That’s right.” I stared back at him. My CI had told me how this man had treated him when he discovered that Eddie was a cross-dresser, which could be summed up as mean and nasty. I had no doubt that Eddie was telling the truth. Justin Thompson looked like a man that could strangle babies for fun.
“I knew he was a little shit when I rented it to him,” Thompson said, digging a set of tagged keys out of his jacket pocket. “But what are you going to do? I ran a credit check on him and it came back clean.”
David got a lot of mileage out of that fake ID, I thought. Pete and I put on gloves. I took the key from Thompson and opened the door.
Inside, the house smelled of stale beer and cigarette smoke. Thompson went around opening blinds and turning on lights. “Shit, it’ll take a week to get this place clean,” he said, looking at the mess that Tyler had left him.
Thompson watched us go through the living/dining/kitchen area of the trailer. There was trash, lots and lots of trash. Beer cans and bottles, pizza boxes and bags from every fast food place in the county. We found his keys, which reinforced the idea that he hadn’t left on his own. Was David abducted from inside the trailer or had he met the murderer at the door and been ordered into a car? Looking around, there was no way to tell if there had been a struggle. But the killer had to have been here, which made this a crime scene.
“We need to let our crime scene techs go over the trailer,” I told Thompson.
“How long will it take? I’d like to clean it out and get it rented again as soon as possible.”
“We don’t intend on dragging our feet. They’ll come out tomorrow, and if we don’t find any blood or obvious trace evidence, you should be able to get back inside in a couple of days.”
Thompson looked like he was considering this. I wanted to tell him this was not optional and if he wanted me to make it longer, I could, but I didn’t want to start a fight with the man.
“Yeah, okay,” he allowed.
The sun was going down as we finished. I looked at my watch. It was five-thirty. Ivy was going to wonder where I was. Not that she’d gone out this morning. She’d sniffed the cold air and decided that staying inside, cuddled up in warm blankets, was where a tabby cat should be on a frosty winter morning.
I considered going by Dad’s house, but I was exhausted and didn’t want to have to decide whether to tell him about Henry or keep it from him. Being sheriff meant that he had higher priorities than protecting the feelings of my would-be girlfriend.
So I went straight home and fed Ivy. She always seemed grateful that I’d rescued her from the parking lot of the sheriff’s office. She’d been living off scraps given to her by burly deputies who would have been embarrassed if anyone had seen them calling “kitty, kitty” to her.
After a hot bath and an hour with social media, I called it a night. I always slept well in my trailer in the woods. It had been part of the twenty acres when I bought the land five years ago. I had a place picked out to build a house if I ever managed to save up the money, but for now, I’d still rather live in a trailer in the woods than a mansion in the city.
Chapter Four
Rain was pounding on the roof when I got up in the morning. The Internet said that a front was moving through and we’d have falling temperatures by evening and a hard freeze tomorrow.
“Looks like another day inside for you, little girl,” I told Ivy. She took it well as she kneaded a blanket on the couch and prepared to sleep the day away.
I remembered that Tammy Page was going to be in town today. Why did it always rain when I had to meet a family at the morgue? As if things weren’t depressing enough.
I got to the office and went through the reports on my desk. There were three new ones from the night before. I looked over at Pete’s desk. There were only two sitting there. He wasn’t in yet. His morning routine called for a huge breakfast at Winston’s Grill. No one said a word to him about coming in late because, the truth was, he got a ton of useful information gabbing with the locals every morning. We’d all benefited from gossip he had heard while slurping down pancakes and bacon. Police work comes in many forms.
Now I wistfully fantasized about dropping one of my cases onto his pile. But Lt. Johnson had already assigned them electronically. No chance I’d get away with it.
Two of my new cases were domestic assaults. I had a hard time with domestics. I always wanted to slug the abuser and shake the victim and ask them why they put up with it. Of course, relationships are complex and some people are more emotionally able to deal with life than others. And, yes, I’d had a psychology course that talked about codependence and the power dynamics in abusive relationships. But I still had a hard time understanding it at a gut level.
The new cases were both first-time reports at those addresses and both involved people under thirty. Maybe I could talk to the victims and get them to understand that they would be doing the abuser a favor by pressing charges. If the abuser got help now, maybe they could find new ways of dealing with their emotions that would change their lives. Or not. This was one of the reasons I had a hard time fully committing to being a law enforcement officer; most of the time it felt like I was just beating my head against the wall.
The other case was a hit and run. Damage to a car parked on the street. The rub was that someone had been sitting in the car and ended up with a broken nose when the other car rear-ended them. They got a brief look at the car, but couldn’t give much of a description. The officer had called the crime scene techs out and they’d gotten some transfer pai
nt samples off of the damaged car and pictures of skid marks. I’d have to do a little work on this one.
I’d finished going through my emails when my phone rang. It was Tammy Page. I told her where to meet me at the hospital in Tallahassee and said I’d be there within the hour.
It was still raining as I got out of my car and walked up to the front entrance of the hospital. I only had to wait a few minutes when I saw a short, stout woman walking across the parking lot with her head held up, looking straight ahead and not seeming to notice the rain pounding down. A younger version of the woman walked beside her, head down and guiding her mother around the puddles. Once they were under shelter, the daughter tried wiping some of the rain off of her mother.
I introduced myself.
“I’m Alice and this is my mother, Tammy.”
Tammy Page stared straight at me. “I want to see him. Alice doesn’t think I should, but I do.”
Alice sighed dramatically. “Mother, why put yourself through more pain for that boy?”
Her mother looked at her reproachfully and the younger woman rolled her eyes in defeat.
“Well, let’s get on with it then,” Alice said to me.
I led them through the corridors and down the elevator to the morgue. I’d called ahead to make sure that the body was ready and presented as compassionately as possible. Tammy would have nothing to do with the viewing room and insisted on going in to stand next to her son. She touched his cheek, ignoring the purple color and puffed up features.
I took them to sign the necessary papers, then we retreated to a small room near the hospital security office so I could ask them a few questions. I’d thought about talking to mother and daughter separately, but I wanted to see how they interacted and how they each reacted to the other’s opinions and thoughts about Tyler’s murder.
“I know he was in trouble a lot. Was there a particular reason that he’d chosen to live under an alias at this time?”
