by Claire Booth
‘And you knew who you were picking up? Who was coming for the evening?’
Matt straightened suddenly and pivoted toward Hank.
‘Was Hailee Fitch really in the car?’
‘Yes, she was,’ Hank said. Matt shook his head.
‘I don’t know why she was there. That doesn’t make any sense.’
She wasn’t a friend of anyone else, and she was, well, not someone who got included in things. Under prodding from Hank, he admitted it was because of her sister. ‘My parents said flat out that I wasn’t to have anything to do with her.’
‘So who would have asked her?’ Hank asked.
‘It would’ve had to have been Johnny. It was his thing, his invite.’
Hank thought for a minute. ‘Explain that to me. Did everyone kind of decide to get together that night, or did he pick people?’
Matt pushed the hair off his face.
‘He picked people. I never really thought of it that way, but I guess that’s what he did. I didn’t really even know for sure who was going to be there Saturday night.’
‘Did the rest of the kids in the car … make sense?’ Hank said. ‘Or did anyone else stick out like Hailee?’
‘Nah,’ he said. ‘Everyone else made sense, I guess. It was kinda a – what’s that word, eclectic? – group. I didn’t know if any of them really hung out together. And I only really knew Johnny. Oh, and Alex Danzig’s in my chem class. Otherwise …’ He shrugged.
‘How well did you know Johnny?’
The hair fell over his eyes again as he refocused on the ground.
‘I been thinking about that,’ he said. ‘Ever since I heard yesterday about the crash. My mom asked, too.’
He didn’t know much. Johnny told him at the beginning of the year that he’d moved here from Kentucky. Matt didn’t know where he lived, but it couldn’t be too far away, because he did know Johnny walked to school. He’d offered him a ride home a couple of times, but Johnny always turned him down. He didn’t know what Johnny’s parents did. In fact, the guy had never mentioned his parents at all, now that Matt thought about it.
The dew tracks were fading from the field. Second period students were trickling out from the locker rooms. Hank asked why Matt thought people wanted to hang out with Johnny Gall in the first place.
‘Johnny was new and cool. He just seemed like he had it all under control. Totally smooth. Like everything was no big thing, you know?’ Matt paused. ‘Everybody tries to act that way, right? But you can tell we’re all just a bunch of posers. He really was that way. Like he wanted to be here and it was all cool and easy.’
EIGHTEEN
Sheila banged on the little house’s front door again. She knew someone was in there – she’d heard water running. Finally the door slammed open and a worn-down woman in a bathrobe stood glaring at her.
‘What the hell do you want?’
Sheila, today in full uniform, identified herself and asked for Kyle Hatwick, the on-site foreman on the theater development.
‘It is eight in the damn morning. Come back later.’
Sheila stopped the door as it started to swing closed.
‘No, ma’am. That is not how this works. I came by yesterday afternoon to speak with him, and there was no one home. Even though he told me he’d be here.’
A hint of worry started in her eyes. ‘We went out.’
‘OK,’ Sheila said in as bland a manner as possible. ‘But this is an urgent matter, and I need to talk to him right now.’
‘He do somethin’?’
Sheila, remembering Hatwick’s suspicious answer about the job being done, decided to be noncommittal.
‘Right now, I need to show him some photos. See if he recognizes anybody. So get him out of bed.’
The battle between irritation and apprehension played out on her face. Fear of the law won. The woman sighed and disappeared into the little house. Five minutes and a lot of yelling later, Kyle Hatwick appeared. He leaned against the doorjamb and scratched at his bare chest.
‘You the one called yesterday?’
‘Yes.’ She didn’t expect an apology for getting stood up yesterday, and as usual, her expectations were met.
‘So, what you want again?’
‘I need to show you a few photos and see if you recognize them.’
Hatwick shrugged, then turned around and yelled for some coffee. From the back of the house, Sheila heard the woman tell him to get it himself and stick it somewhere impolite. She fought back a smile as Hatwick scowled and grabbed the picture she was holding out.
‘Nope, never seen him before.’
She took back the driver’s license photo of Johnny Gall and took out the other picture. Hatwick started laughing.
‘That’s Euford’s little bitch.’
Wait, what?
‘What the hell’s wrong with him? He looks like, dead, or something.’
‘He is,’ Sheila said. ‘Deceased. He was murdered Saturday night.’
‘Damn. Really?’ He turned toward the back of the house again. ‘We’re in the middle of a Law and Order episode, baby. Get out here.’
The woman, now dressed in a T-shirt and leggings, slouched into the little living room. Hatwick stuck the photo in her face. ‘See?’
‘Whoa.’ She squinted at it. ‘You know him?’
‘Yeah, let’s get back to that,’ Sheila said, her mind spinning. ‘What do you mean, “Euford’s little bitch”?’
‘He was always with Euford, when he came to the theater. Gettin’ him water, findin’ him a chair, wipin’ his ass.’ Hatwick chuckled. ‘Well, you know what I mean. So we started calling him that.’
‘Do you know his actual name?’ Please, please, please.
Hatwick thought on it.
‘Rick, maybe?’ Another shrug. ‘I don’t know. I never talked to him. I tried to stay out of Euford’s way, man. The guy was an asshole. I’m lucky he was mostly interested in the stage, so it was mostly the lighting guys he was botherin’.’
‘You ever see what kind of car this “Maybe Rick” drove?’
‘I think he always came with Euford. And that was in an old Caddy. Kinda an off-white thing, big as a boat. He’d park right in the truck zone, get in everybody’s way. Like I said, he was a real pain in the ass.’
‘And you don’t remember anything about where he’s staying? A rented house? A hotel? Anything?’
‘Lady, I see now why this is important and all, but I got no idea. He’d come and he’d go, and we were all glad to see the back of him.’
She waited on the doorstep while he searched for a list of workers on the Country Song job. He finally found a tattered roster in his pickup. Sheila took it and started down the front walk as the woman came to the door with a steaming cup of coffee. She leaned lazily against the doorjamb, shot her husband/boyfriend/whatever a taunting look and took a long drink. He grumbled at her and stomped back toward the house. Sheila shook her head and headed toward her squad car.
‘Wait!’
She turned back. Hatwick jabbed a finger at his significant other and grinned.
‘Coffee. He’d show up most days with a big ol’ coffee. From that new place near downtown. With the fancy blue-and-gold to-go cups. Does that help?’
It did. Sheila said so and pointed her cruiser back toward Branson and the new Donorae’s Gourmet Coffee on Main Street.
The Chief wasn’t answering his phone. Sam glared at it. He wanted to tell somebody. He was almost positive the Kentucky birth certificate was a forgery. The clerk of the county where Johnny Gall was supposedly born had emailed him a full color scan of what theirs looked like. The spacing in between boxes was slightly different and the seal was set a little bit to the right. Just to be sure, he scanned Gall’s and sent it to the lady. His phone rang two minutes later.
‘You’re right, sir. It’s a forgery.’
Sam pumped his fist.
‘It’s a good one. Some of my folks might not have even caught it. It’s
just the seal in the corner, really. And one other thing.’
The paperwork said the birth occurred at Southern Regional Medical Center. But seventeen years ago, it was called County Hospital and Clinic, the clerk said, so that’s what should be on the birth certificate. And she knew for sure because that’s where her fifteen-year-old daughter was born, and that was what her certificate said. They didn’t change the name until six years ago.
At this, Sam stood up and did a few celebratory dance moves. The lady couldn’t tell him whether the forged embossing was any good because Sam had only the black-and-white copy, but that didn’t dampen his jubilation any. It didn’t matter. It was a verified forgery. He hung up and dashed off a text to the Chief and Sheila. Then he sat back down and started thinking.
The next thing on his list was the car from the IMAX parking lot. He headed out.
‘We’ve been open six weeks now.’
The owner smoothed her royal blue apron and shifted in the small space. They were in the storeroom, wedged between boxes of very aromatic coffee beans. The woman hadn’t wanted customers to see that she was being interviewed by a cop, and this was the only private space in the building. Sheila was pretty sure she was getting a caffeine-contact high. She tried to concentrate.
‘I need to know if you remember two people coming in for coffee,’ Sheila said. She held up her phone, where she’d pulled up a Wikipedia photo of Euford Gunner. ‘He might have been wearing a cowboy hat.’
The owner, a plump little white woman named Vicki, laughed.
‘Half our customers wear cowboy hats. We offer an early morning special. To draw in the cast members before the breakfast shows. The coffee they serve during some of those things is awful. So the performers come here first. They get a special discount. I can set you up with one, if you like?’
Sheila politely declined. Vicki kept talking.
‘That’s why I picked this location. We’re right on the edge of downtown, so we draw the tourist shopping traffic. And that also puts us right at the east end of the Strip, so we get that traffic, too. It’s been going great.’
Sheila directed her attention back to the photo. The lanky Euford smiled in a 1980s-era photo. ‘He’d be a lot older than this.’
Vicki considered it. ‘Maybe? I can’t say for sure. Looks like a lot of folks.’
Sheila put away her phone and pulled the next picture out of her notebook.
‘Oh, my. He doesn’t look good.’
Sheila agreed. ‘We’re trying to identify him. It’s very important.’
‘Is he dead?’
‘Yes.’
Vicki’s already big eyes got huge. She bunched the bottom of the apron in her fists and leaned forward.
‘I think so. There was a younger guy, not in costume, who’d come in most mornings for the last couple of weeks. It could be him.’
OK. Maybe she was getting somewhere. She asked to see credit card receipts. Hopefully there would be a ‘Maybe Rick’ in there somewhere.
‘Wouldn’t you rather see the app?’
Sheila’s eyebrows shot up. ‘You mean like Starbucks? Where you buy it through the app?’
‘We don’t say that word around here,’ Vicki whispered. ‘But yeah, exactly like that. It tracks your purchases and you earn rewards. Hang on …’
She sprang up from the Arabica bean box she’d been sitting on and darted out of the room. She was back in seconds with a laptop. A couple of questions and flurry of keystrokes later, she had a list.
‘OK – male, eighteen to twenty-five, purchasing at least a large. I come up with six people.’
She turned the computer around to show Sheila. There was no one named Rick. She frowned.
‘What if the person ordered two coffees most of the time?’ she asked.
Vicki tapped away. There were two. Gavin P. O’Connell and Andrew T. Bennett, according to the credit card information submitted to the app. One of them could be her guy, but they also very well might not be. Sheila sighed, and asked for a print out with their names as well as the other four and their info. Then she had Vicki do a name search for Euford Gunner, just in case his go-fer was using the boss’s credit card. No luck.
Vicki disappeared and returned with the print out and a large coffee.
‘I insist,’ she said, pressing the to-go cup into Sheila’s hands. ‘It seems like you’ve got a long day ahead of you. I’d love it if this helps you get through it.’
Sheila smiled weakly. She’d love it, too, but a name – not caffeine – was the only thing that would solve her problems.
NINETEEN
Hank was exhausted. His shoulders were wet with the tears of teenage girls who didn’t know anything about Johnny Gall or what their friends had been doing with him. One sixteen-year-old had collapsed right in front of him when she heard about Lauren Blenkinship. He’d had to carry her to the nurse’s office.
He swiped at his eyes and stared out the windshield of his squad car. He’d been here at the high school for hours and didn’t know much more than when he’d arrived. He should keep at it, but he just couldn’t. Each face he saw was another tightening turn of the vise around his heart. He leaned his head on the steering wheel and tried to breathe.
He finally started the cruiser and put it in gear. He needed to look into Alex Danzig’s real mother – and her car. He needed to find out what the hell Emily Fitch was up to. Each of those women was closely linked with a crash victim. And either one might have somebody out to get her. Alex or Hailee could’ve been targeted in order to get back at their not exactly wholesome relative. And there was still the mystery of Johnny Gall. Not to mention the murder victim. One of these would pan out, would be the explanation for all of this. It had to be. The alternative – that it had simply been a car accident due to lousy teenage driving and even lousier traffic patrolling – was too awful to contemplate.
Jenny Danzig didn’t live at the shabby apartment address listed on her driver’s license. The man there sent him across town to a ramshackle frame house – which was less than a mile from the park near the Anderson place. No one was home. Hank walked slowly back down the front path and stopped at the bare patch of yard that was obviously used as a parking space. The tire tracks looked the right size for a sedan. And an oil patch stained the dirt. He half-heartedly snapped a picture and then walked to the house across the street. A four-year-old answered the door. He knew this because the boy told him so.
‘Is your mom here?’
The kid darted away and returned with an astounded woman in her early twenties.
‘Tommy, how did you get the door open? Oh, my God.’
She grabbed her son by the shoulders and stared fearfully at Hank. He held up his hands and then pointed at the badge on his chest. She relaxed slightly.
‘I’m just trying to find out some information about your neighbor across the street,’ he said. ‘Do you know anything about who lives there?’
It was a rental and people came and went, the mom said. Some lady had moved in a few months ago. Never introduced herself. She was older, maybe in her late forties. Had a blonde die-job that was growing out. She came and went, but not regular. Most on the street were working folks, and had set schedules. That lady didn’t seem to.
Hank asked whether the woman had a vehicle.
‘Yeah. A little brown sedan. It’s usually parked right over there in the dirt.’
‘When was the last time you saw her?’ Hank asked.
The mother took the towel off her shoulder and twisted it absentmindedly as she thought. Her son had wiggled out of her grasp and disappeared back into the house.
‘It must have been Friday,’ she said. ‘Because then it was the weekend and Pete was home – that’s my husband – and I didn’t see her at all then. But she must have been around, because the car was there.’
‘And when did the car leave?’
She thought for a moment. ‘It wasn’t there when we went to church yesterday morning. So I guess I don’
t know when she left in it exactly, but that’s when I noticed it wasn’t parked over there.’
Hank nodded. Tommy had reappeared and was looking at Hank’s holstered gun with a gleam in his eye. The kid made his rambunctious Benny seem like a saint. Hank squatted down to his level and pinned him with a stare. He turned white as Hank gave him the stern version of his never-touch-a-gun lecture. He finished, solemnly shook Tommy’s hand and stood up. The mom mouthed ‘thank you’ as Tommy cautiously backed down the hallway and disappeared again.
Hank dug out a card and wrote his cell number on the back.
‘If you see her come home, please call me immediately. She’s not in any trouble, I just really need to talk to her.’ He started to turn away but stopped. ‘And, if I could – you’ve got a smart little guy there. He’s going to figure out any kind of latch he can reach, I’ll bet. I’d recommend something you can install way up high. A chain lock, or even better, one of those hinge flip lock things. They’re harder to undo. That’s what I’ve got at home.’
In the back, a baby started to cry and Tommy shouted for her. She sighed. ‘You have kids?’
‘Oh, yeah. Five and three. They take a lot out of you, don’t they?’
A smile lit up her tired face. ‘Thanks for that. Sometimes just somebody else knowing how hard it is means a lot.’ She held up his card. ‘If I see her, I’ll call.’
‘Try putting Tommy on “surveillance duty.” Tell him he needs to be nice and quiet and still, and watch out the window. It might work.’
She was laughing as she shut the door. The sound lightened the pain in his chest for a moment. He took one deep breath before it closed in again and trudged, head bowed, to his car.
‘Do we even know if she’s heard about the crash?’ Sheila said.
Hank shrugged at her. They sat in his office at the Branson substation. She’d opened the window to try and freshen the stale air, and the bent aluminum blinds rattled in the breeze. They didn’t use the small space much. The main sheriff’s department facility in the county seat of Forsyth was fully equipped. Here there were only a couple of computers, a small lobby, a closet-sized interview room and the office they were sitting in. Sheila loved it. There weren’t a dozen people asking questions or wanting her help. She could get work done in peace.
