by BJ Bourg
After calling off his dogs, Virgil apologized for his appearance and led us up the steps and into his house. “Make yourselves at home while I put on some clothes.” He turned and hollered, “Skylar! We’ve got company…they’re detectives.”
Virgil left Dawn and I alone in the foyer and hurried up a flight of stairs. I shrugged and sauntered through the opening and we found ourselves standing in a modest living room. I was surprised by how simple the interior of the home was, given the elaborate setup on the outside.
“Hello, detectives,” called a feminine voice from the opposite side of the living room. “I’m Skylar Brunner. Virgil will be down in a minute. Can I get you something to drink while waiting?”
Skylar was a few inches shorter than Dawn, but a little heavier. She carried herself well and her straight dirty blonde hair was pulled into a neat bun.
I turned down the drink and told Skylar who we were.
“Are you here about Debbie Brister?” Her face was laced with concern and her gray eyes were moist.
“Did you know Debbie?” I asked, allowing her to assume we were there for Debbie.
“No, but I mailed an invoice to her husband, Gerard, for services Virgil provided, so I figured that’s why y’all wanted to talk to—”
“Hey, everyone,” Virgil said, interrupting Skylar, “let’s take the party to my office.”
Skylar frowned, wondering if she’d said too much, and stood on her tiptoes to give Virgil a quick kiss on the cheek as he led the way out the door. The pack of German shepherds jumped to attention, but Virgil uttered a voice command and they plopped down wherever they happened to be standing. They didn’t pay any more attention to us.
“You’ve got a nice place here,” I said as we descended the steps and followed a concrete sidewalk toward one of the outbuildings. “You must have some wealthy clients.”
Virgil laughed. “Not even close. I inherited the house from my dad and he inherited it from my grandpa. Had this property not already been bought and paid for, Skylar and I would be living on a small lot with a wooden picket fence—and a short one, at that. Hell, you should’ve seen our shitty apartment in New Orleans when we were first starting out.”
“What’d your dad do for a living?” I asked.
“He ran a successful cabinet business.” Virgil frowned when he stopped to open the door to his office. “Dad wanted me to go into the family business and take over when he died, but it wasn’t in my blood.”
I stepped back so Dawn could enter first and then I followed her inside. Virgil flipped a light switch on and took his seat behind a large metal desk. Dawn sat across from him, but I stopped and read the heading on a news article pinned to the wall behind Virgil’s chair.
The caption, which was dated fifteen years earlier, read, “Off-duty detective intervenes in armed robbery, stabbed.” There was a faded photo of a man lying on the ground and several people huddled around him. One person, who appeared to be a homeless man, was holding pressure on a bloody wound, and there was a young lady standing nearby chewing on her fingernails. I scanned over the article. Apparently, Virgil had saved a homeless man from being robbed, but had been stabbed in the process. It seemed that the homeless man had gone from victim to hero himself.
“As this homeless man’s hero lay dying,” the article read, “the homeless man sprang into action and became a hero himself, saving the off-duty detective’s life…”
CHAPTER 37
“You were a cop,” I said to Virgil as I took my seat beside Dawn.
Virgil glanced over his shoulder and grunted. “That was a lifetime ago.”
I studied this man with the thick moustache. His hair was normally slicked-back and shiny, but tonight it was dull and unruly and, from this distance, I could see some gray on his upper lip.
“What happened?” I asked. “Why aren’t you a cop anymore?”
“I didn’t recover fast enough, that’s what happened.” He sighed. “I was off-duty at the time of the injury, so it wasn’t covered by Workman’s Comp. When I ran out of vacation time and sick leave, they terminated me.”
I’d heard of that kind of thing happening before, so I wasn’t surprised.
“They told me I could reapply for my job once the doctors cleared me for duty, but I was done.” Virgil smirked. “You know, after firing me, the city had the nerve to invite me to their awards banquet to honor me for disrupting the armed robbery. Needless to say, I didn’t show up to receive the bullshit award and I told the chief what he could do with it.”
After he finished his story, I turned to the subject at hand. While we were here to talk about Kathleen, Skylar had confirmed a connection between him and Debbie, so that’s the angle I pursued first.
“Your wife mentioned Gerard Brister was a client. What kind of investigative work did he request?”
“I figured you’d want to discuss my clients and, as a former cop, I’m going to respect your every request.” He paused and stared into my eyes first and then Dawn’s, as though trying to determine if he could trust us. “However, I have to ask that you keep everything we discuss confidential. I know you might need to use some of the information to build your case, but please be discreet and only use what’s absolutely necessary.”
I assured him we would and again asked why Gerard had hired him.
“Well, unfortunately, the majority of my clients suspect their spouses of cheating, and Gerard Brister was one of those clients.”
“We all know he had good reason to suspect her,” I said. “One of our deputies took a statement from her lover earlier today.”
Virgil nodded. “I began following her two months ago and I was able to document eight meetings between her and Kim Berry.”
“How’d you document the meetings?”
“Photographs, mostly.”
“Were you following her early this morning when she went missing?”
“Of course not.” Virgil appeared slightly offended. “She wouldn’t have gone missing if I would’ve been following her.”
“You said you documented the case mostly with photographs—what other methods of documentation did you use?”
“With Mr. Brister’s permission, I installed a tracker on his wife’s car.”
“Please tell me you forgot the tracker on her car.”
He frowned. “I retrieved it last week after I concluded the investigation.”
I cursed silently. That would’ve been too good to be true, but I’d take any break I could get. I’d once solved a murder case by knocking on the wrong door, and I didn’t complain one bit about it.
When I asked to see the photographs from the case, Virgil said he didn’t have any, but he’d give me what he did have. He stood and walked to the far end of the room. After pulling out a key that hung from a rope around his neck, he opened the door to a closet where a giant fireproof safe was located. He entered the access code by rotating the dial back and forth and then pulled the heavy door opened. When he returned to his desk, he placed a thin file folder in front of us.
“This is my report detailing the surveillance. The cliff notes version: she’d sneak out at night, drive to Kim Berry’s house, hide her car in his garage, and then leave about an hour or two later.”
“Did you photograph any physical interaction between the two of them?”
“I caught them making out near the entrance a few times and once in the garage right before she backed her car out.”
“What’d you do with the photographs, and why don’t you have them anymore?”
“Adultery is a very private and embarrassing event,” Virgil explained. “I mean, I’ve made my own share of mistakes—trust me, those days ended the night I got stabbed—and I know how hurtful it can be to the one you love, especially if it’s made public. So, my policy is to destroy any photograph that could potentially cast an individual in an embarrassing light.”
I cocked my head to the side. “Do you at least show the evidence to your client before you destr
oy them? I mean, how are they supposed to use it in divorce court?”
“I do better than show them.” Virgil explained that his policy was to print one copy of all the photographs and present that copy to the client in a sealed envelope. “The photographs I took of Debbie Brister were hand-delivered to Gerard last week, along with a copy of my report, and he was informed that the originals were destroyed. Nowadays, with accounts being hacked and compromising photographs being put up on the ‘web, it’s too risky to keep digital copies floating around. Before I take on a new case, the client is aware that I don’t keep copies of video footage or photographs, so if it gets out into the public somehow, it’s totally on them.”
As I sat there pondering this information and wondering what it meant to the case, Dawn tilted her notebook so I could see a message she’d scribbled for me.
Having had the flow of many interviews disrupted by a question from a fellow detective, Dawn and I had a habit of keeping our mouths shut while the other was conducting an interview. We usually reserved our questions or comments for the end of the interview, but she wanted me to ask him who else knew about Debbie’s infidelity, and she wanted to know the same thing about Kathleen. Her note read, “If he’s so secretive, that narrows the suspect pool to him and the husbands—unless we can prove Nehemiah knew the women were ‘sinners’.”
I nodded idly, as realization slowly poured over me. Virgil Brunner was the only common denominator between both women. As Dawn pointed out, if he hadn’t told anyone else about the women’s affairs, it left him as the one person who knew they were so-called “sinners”.
I turned my attention back to Virgil, who had noticed our silent exchange. The skin around his eyes tightened. If it came down to me having to interrogate him, I knew I’d have to approach him with logic and direct evidence, rather than trickery. Games wouldn’t work on him, because he had probably played all of them himself when he was a detective.
CHAPTER 38
I held my hand out to Dawn and she gave me the surveillance photo of Virgil at Dark Sands Casino. “My partner was just reminding me to ask about Kathleen Bertrand.”
Virgil studied the picture I handed him. “I had to track her all the way to Mississippi,” he said, “but after that, it was easy to catch her messing around. I guess she figured crossing the state line made her invisible, because she acted like that guy was her husband. She hung all over him…they made out at the poker machines…he was always grabbing her ass. It was quite a spectacle.”
“Did you ever identify him?” I asked.
“No. I tried striking up a conversation with him, but he didn’t care to talk to me. My boobs weren’t big enough and my skirt wasn’t short enough.” Virgil slid the photo in my direction. “When I first heard about Kathleen, I thought Joey killed her. I saw you two sitting in church last night and I wanted to talk to you, but I didn’t want to violate my confidentiality agreement with my client.” He threw his hands up. “If you come to question me, I have no choice but to cooperate with an investigation, but I felt I’d be stepping over the line if I approached you without real evidence.”
I grunted. “Could you tell we were cops?”
“Not her”—Virgil shot his thumb in Dawn’s direction—“but you’ve got it written all over you.”
Dawn jabbed my arm playfully. “I told you!”
I gave a fake laugh, and then asked Virgil why he suspected Joey of killing his wife.
“A few days after I send him the packet confirming his wife is cheating, she’s found dead and a note’s attached to her body declaring her a sinner,” he said. “It made perfect sense to me, except I can’t imagine him being so evil. Hell, I saw a lot as a detective, but I can’t imagine anyone doing this to a woman. It’s one thing to kill your spouse in a fit of jealous rage, but to crucify her…” He shook his head. “That’s one sick bastard.”
Dawn and I exchanged glances. Joey had lied to us. But why? And why hadn’t he let us search his home? Was it that he didn’t want us to suspect him of murdering Kathleen, or was it because he did murder her?
I turned back to Virgil and placed my hands flat on the table. “I’ll be honest with you, Virgil…you’re the only common denominator between Kathleen and Debbie. As of right now, we’re not positive Debbie is a victim of the crucifier, but things aren’t looking good for her.”
“What are you saying?” Virgil looked me directly in the eyes. “Do you think I did this?”
“Did you?”
“No, I didn’t.”
Our eyes remained locked and he didn’t waver. He appeared to be telling the truth, but he was a former detective and he knew the game, so I had to treat his reactions as suspect.
“Knowing what you know, do you still think Joey did it?” I asked.
“Initially, my money would’ve been on him, but I don’t know anymore.”
“What about Gerard? Do you think he’s capable of killing Debbie?”
“Absolutely not.” Virgil shook his head for emphasis. “He’s a very religious man. When he first came to me, he was crying hysterically, saying how guilty he felt for thinking his wife was cheating on him.”
I drummed my pen on the desk. There was still the possibility that Gerard hurt Debbie, but not in the same manner as Kathleen. The two incidents could be totally unrelated, so I decided to remain focused on Kathleen at the moment.
“Other than you and Joey, who else knew that Kathleen was having the affair?”
“No one—unless Joey told someone.”
“What about your wife?”
He shook his head. “No one.”
“Do you have any other investigators working for you?”
“I have one employee—his name’s Keenan Tipton—but he’s not an investigator. I conduct all the investigations myself.”
“What does Keenan do?”
“He runs errands for me, he’ll pick up groceries for Skylar, he tends to the dogs, and he does odd jobs around the house. That’s about it. He doesn’t know anything about my cases.”
“How can you be so sure?” I pressed, wanting him to prove to me that he was the only one who knew. If he did prove it, he would help narrow the suspect pool down to himself, Joey and Gerard—unless we could prove Nehemiah knew something.
“I handle my photographs like evidence, because that’s exactly what they are,” he explained. “Once I take them, I come back to the office and lock them in the safe. I’m the only one with the key to the wooden cabinet and no one knows the combination to my safe. Once the investigation is complete, I print one copy of the photographs and one copy of my report. I place the report and photographs in a large envelope that I immediately seal. I put evidence tape across the seal and affix my signature and date across the tape. I then burn the SD card that holds the photographs in the fire pit out back and the envelope is hand-delivered to the client. The original copy of my report is locked in the safe, and I destroy my records by fire every three years.”
“Are you sure your wife doesn’t know the results of your investigations?” I asked. “Don’t you ever talk to her about the cases?”
“I don’t talk to her or anyone about my cases. Look…” He leaned forward and rested his forearms on the desk. “Can you imagine how long my business would last in a small community like this if word got out that I gossiped about my cases? I’d have no choice but to start making cabinets, because no one would ever trust me to investigate their cases again.”
He was absolutely correct, and I believed him when he said he didn’t tell anyone, not even his wife. I was beginning to wonder if he was involved. He seemed like a straight shooter and I liked him, but that didn’t mean he was clean. I just couldn’t imagine what his motivation would be for killing his client’s cheating spouses.
Unless…
CHAPTER 39
“Would you be willing to show me your bank records and let us have a look around your property?”
“Sure,” he said smoothly, “but why do you want to
see my bank records?”
“I’d like to see how much Joey and Gerard paid you for your services.”
A corner of Virgil’s mouth curled up into a grin, and his expression seemed to be one of respect. “I like it.”
“Like what?”
“You think my clients paid me to find out their wives were having affairs, and then paid me to kill them in the most humiliating and torturous way possible.” He nodded his appreciation. “That’s clever, but it didn’t happen. I don’t have the stomach for that sort of thing.”
“Do you mind proving it by showing your records?”
“Anything to help,” he said, firing up his computer. While he accessed his bank accounts, he explained that he required a retainer of $500 and billed at a rate of $150 per hour. He said he offered a discount for the members of his church. “It’s the Christian rate.”
Just then, an ear-piercing train horn blared from somewhere nearby. It was so loud the walls seemed to shake. I glanced at the clock on the wall. “Is that the Maque Trax train?”
Virgil nodded. “It passes every night at ten and it blows the shit out of the horn. It was always waking me up as a kid. When Skylar and I moved back here, we didn’t even bother going to bed until after the damn thing went by.”
“Our team’s conducted a lot of anti-terrorism exercises on that train,” I said, standing with Dawn and moving around the desk to look over Virgil’s shoulder.
“I thought I saw y’all over by the station a few times,” Virgil said, scrolling through his business account. “I also saw some SWAT trucks out at the airport. It’s good that your team prepares like it does. You can never be too careful.”
I just nodded. As Dawn and I watched him pull up month after month of records, I began wondering if Joey had killed Kathleen and then collaborated with Gerard to kill Debbie.
“Is it possible Joey and Gerard got together and spoke about their wives cheating?”
