Eyewitness 4: A Gripping Mystery Suspense Thriller

by Marc Timms

  She told him about Henry’s car, and he began with a photo of that car. Then they discussed the differences between that car and the one that had carried the shooter. Within twenty minutes or so, he was able to pin down the car.

  He gave her a huge grin as he stood up. “This has been very helpful,” he said, trying not to laugh.

  “I don’t see what’s so funny about the fact that someone tried to shoot me.” Johanna could feel her skin bristle, as she sat there. She knew her face had turned a bright red, and she could feel the flush in her cheeks.

  “That’s not why I’m laughing,” he said, trying to get his humor under control. “It’s just that Dempsey has this very same car. Are you sure that you weren’t influenced by seeing his car?”

  She understood the laughter now, but she still was not amused. She’d experienced too much over the past few weeks. Johanna wanted life to settle down so that she could enjoy it again. “I’ve never seen his car, here or anywhere else.”

  “He takes care of that thing like it's his child. I’m surprised he doesn’t have photos of it on his desk.” The officer opened the door. “We’ll run this through the DMV, but without a license plate, it’s going to be difficult to identify the car. Our best bet would be to see if any of the suspects have a car like this, work from the people and not the cars.”

  “Unless the car is rented,” Johanna said. “I’m using a rental car at the moment, and it provides a certain amount of anonymity to driving.”

  “Yeah, your car hit that guy: the one in the murder case,” the officer said. “Thanks for the tip. We’ll look into that.”

  He walked her back to Dempsey’s office and parked her in a plastic chair outside his office. She waited while he was on the phone. She couldn’t tell who he was talking to, but twice he rattled off an address, one that she was not familiar with. Finally, he clicked off the phone and walked out to see her.

  “Thanks for coming in. I appreciate it. Did the officer say anything about the results?”

  Johanna owned up to it immediately. No use in letting him learn it from somewhere else. “It’s your car, the one I picked. He thought I was imagining things or confusing the two cars.”

  He nodded. “That happens, but I don’t think that happened here. Besides, I have an alibi,” he said with a grin. “Go home and try to forget about it. I’m sure this will all be worked out soon.”

  Johanna was only halfway home when she realized that something was wrong. A car that had been following her on the highway cut off a car that had slid in between that car and her own rented vehicle.

  Remembering the chase back to town from the park, Johanna put her foot on the gas and sped up slightly. It sped up as well. She could still see the car; the windows were tinted.

  She made a decisive choice. Johanna cut over three lanes and got off on the ramp. She felt sure that she’d lost the other car, but looking in her mirror while waiting at the light, she saw that it had done the same thing.

  The speed could be forgiven, but the last-second decision was more than a coincidence. This car was following her.

  Her first thought was that the police had put a tail on her, but she doubted that they would have gone to that trouble. The car could have met her at home. There was no reason to follow her closely unless they were expecting something to happen.

  She flashed back to the last chase, where she’d sped through the city, trying to shake the car that had hit hers repeatedly. She’d held on and outsmarted them, but it had been tough.

  Now the light changed, and she sped up. She swerved between a few cars and took a shortcut via a side street. The other car followed her through this trail. Now that she was confident that he was following her, Johanna needed to lose the car. She had places to go to solve this case. Plus, she wanted to revisit Penny and make sure that she was okay.

  The car sped up again and now was only a few inches behind her. She braced herself as the car smacked into the rental car, lurching her forward. Johanna sped up again, trying to outrace the other car.

  She wasn’t sure where to go. Her own apartment was too far, and she had no desire to lead them to her own home. She needed a safe place and fast.

  Johanna recalled the words that Dempsey had said while he was on his phone. She shouted them at her phone, and the automatic voice told her that she was only five minutes away. That would have to do. She followed the voice's directions and kept her foot pressed nearly to the floor, trying to outpace the other car.

  At one light, he had been behind her, and Johanna kept her eyes focused on the other car, ensuring that the car didn’t hit her—or worse yet, that the driver would exit the car and come for her. She had nearly put the thoughts of the man in the park behind her. Getting shot at had done that to her.

  Her GPS said she had three minutes until she arrived at the address she pulled from her memory. If she could hold on that long, there might be people associated with the police waiting and ready for anything.

  She thought about calling the police, but alone in the car, Johanna had to keep her eyes on the road as well as on the car behind her. She had no extra focus to put on a phone call, even if she just shouted 911.

  When the light changed, she hit the gas and hurried along the street in front of her. The car behind her took longer to get moving, and she put a few feet between her and the people following her. She felt her muscles relax for a minute, but she gave herself a lecture. Johanna had no time to relax yet. There would be time for that later, hopefully.

  She took a sharp turn to the right and then to the left, following her GPS instructions. Given that she wasn’t familiar with this area of town, she would be lost if the directions were inaccurate. She’d be lost and would have to slow down to not get caught on a dead-end street. She would have to drive back towards the other car, facing them and giving them time to fire on her if that’s what they wanted. The vehicle could also turn ninety degrees and block the road, leaving her trapped with nowhere to run.

  Finally, she turned onto the street whose name Dempsey had shouted. Johanna was disappointed. This was a plain, suburban street. No one would be armed and ready to help her when she found the house. Maybe this was the home of a girlfriend or wife? Johanna couldn’t even attempt a guess now.

  The other car had slowed as well. They were in no hurry. She would not be able to find assistance, and the other vehicle could complete their plans. She shuddered to think of what these people might want to do to her for her own investigations.

  She discovered the house near the next intersection, a newer home, all angles and cubes. Not what she’d expected in this neighborhood, but oh well. She slowed down even further, and Johanna noticed the curtains in the front window move away ever so slightly from the center and then fall back into place.

  She decided to take a chance. Johanna whipped the car into the driveway and slammed the car into park.

  The other car just stopped on the road. Johanna had confused them with her most recent tactics. Whatever these people had expected, no one had suspected that she would park in the driveway of a particular house. She doubted that the people inside the house were any more certain of what she was doing than the people in the car.

  Her moment of surprise didn’t last long. The other car parked right in the middle of the street, and the door opened. She immediately recognized Ryan Donley, the man who had shot at her and Marnie when they rescued Penny from her abduction. The other person was a stranger. Had she been wrong about so much in this case that she didn’t recognize the other person?

  Donley went for his pocket. Johanna walked quickly to the front door, but the door opened before she got there.

  Two men came out of the house with guns drawn. One was clearly an officer dressed in his uniform. The other was Thomas.

  Chapter 5

  “The police have been hiding you here?” Johanna asked. Thomas pushed her away for a second. His other hand had a gun trained on the men who had stepped from the car.

  T
he officer shouted. “Drop the gun. Put your hands on your head and stay still.” He used one hand to pull cuffs from his belt while still holding the gun trained on the men.

  Johanna decided to walk inside the house until this scenario had played out. She didn’t want to witness a possible gun battle, and she also wanted to see the accommodations where they’d put Thomas. She recalled that she and Marnie had found indications that Thomas was a fraud in the last house they'd visited. She wondered what clues would be here.

  However, before she could pick up the first photo from an end table, Dempsey arrived. He looked inside the house and said, “I need you to come here.” His tone was flat, and Johanna couldn’t tell if he was angry or concerned.

  When she came back outside, the two men from the other car were cuffed and in the back of two police cruisers. She assumed that they were not supposed to be able to talk to each other.

  “You knew Thomas was here? How?” he said, as they approached the officer and Thomas.

  “I didn’t,” she said honestly. “I heard you shouting this address to someone while I was waiting with you. I needed a safe place since this car has been following me since I left the police station. At first, I thought they were police, but then I recognized Donley. There was no way I was going back to my place, so I asked my GPS to find this house. I’m glad I did.”

  “So Thomas didn’t give you this address?” Dempsey said. “You haven’t talked to him since we took him into protective custody?”

  “Sorry, no, it came from my memory. I was just glad this address was close.”

  The officer looked like he might laugh at the turn of events, and Thomas lifted an eyebrow of appreciation for her quick skills in saving herself. However, he didn’t say anything.

  The two cruisers pulled away with the men in them. Johanna felt a deep sense of relief that Donley was under lock and key. With the hired gun and Arthur in jail, she wondered who else would be the next to be arrested.

  Even as she pondered this, Johanna knew that at least one more person would be involved in this matter. Arthur was the conman who would help come up with the plot. Donley would be the muscle to implement the plan. That left one more person who would be the brains behind the operation—the person who would benefit from the awkward will that had been left. She couldn’t imagine who that would be.

  Johanna would rather not imagine who that would be, as she looked at Thomas, and wondered what his involvement in the matter was. He’d made peace with the devil that was Arthur to make this happen. He’d arranged a deal with Carolyn to make sure she wouldn’t give him away. How far would he go to get this money, when in fact, all he had to do was announce his identity. Johanna thought it evident that someone knew his true identity and wanted to kill him for it.

  She followed her train of thought as she casually followed Thomas and Dempsey into the house. Now she could look at the photos while thinking about the identity of the killer. She carefully lifted up the first frame.

  Dempsey yelled at her to stop, but it was too late. She’d already looked at the photo, which depicted Thomas and Dempsey, with one arm around the shoulders of the other, facing the camera. They were both smiling, and while she could quickly identify both of them, the photo was at least five years old.

  Johanna put the photo down and started to back away toward the front door. These two knew each other, and both of them had neglected to mention that. They’d had their arm around each other, so it was a close relationship too. She worried about herself, more now than she had in the car with killers chasing her.

  “You’re not really afraid of us, are you?” Dempsey said, with a laugh.

  “Johanna, I can explain,” Thomas said.

  The offer to rationalize the photo only made her panic more.

  “He’s my cousin,” Thomas said, continuing. “Your Detective Dempsey is my cousin Thomas.”

  She stopped walking. She still might be in trouble in this strange house, but they had intrigued her with the last statement.

  “What? Dempsey is Thomas, and you are—?” she asked.

  “Well, according to our mutual friend here, he told me that you’d already figured out who I was.”

  “Then you’re admitting it?” Johanna asked, feeling more puzzled now.

  “I’m Johanna’s son, yes.” Thomas gave her a smile that she was unable to interpret. Was he embarrassed and blushing, or thrilled at the thought of the money and enthused at what he’d done?

  “Why are you both pretending to be someone else?” Johanna asked. The fact that his pretense included the police worried her.

  “Geez, we’re not the killer.” Detective Dempsey looked personally aggrieved by what he read in her face. “I changed my name from Tremblay to Dempsey years ago. My father was and is rather well-known to the local police. I would never get ahead in that organization by being tied to him. I needed a new start: one that didn’t include the rest of my family. So I changed my name legally about four or five years ago. Nothing to do with murder, just a need to put some distance between the rest of the family and me.”

  Thomas gave her a smile. “And I used that name when I came to town. I had another name. Jessica gave me up for adoption when I was a baby, but I wasn’t adopted. I was in the foster system until I was eighteen.”

  Johanna felt a pang of sorry for him. She knew that the foster system didn’t give their wards much stability or family life.

  “So I still had the name she gave me when I was born. Jessica would have known me immediately by that name, and the other relatives might have known me as well. They would naturally assume that I had come to town for my slice of the inheritance. They were already angry that Penny was getting a share of the money, and look what they did with her.”

  “So you think that someone found out that you were in town and tried to kill you?”

  He nodded. “Everyone has denied it, as I’ve been asking them about it. None of them admitted to knowing that Jessica had a baby out of wedlock. Still, I have documentation, including my birth certificate.”

  “In today’s world, anyone could look up your birth certificate online,” Johanna pointed out.

  “Except no one did. You didn’t even think of it. Jessica was a little old lady who lived alone. Everyone just took her story at face value. She was widowed and childless.” Thomas looked frustrated as he said this. Had he wanted to be found out, or was he just annoyed that no one had thought to look for him in all the intervening years.

  “So then, who could possibly have found out?” Johanna asked.

  Detective Dempsey cleared his throat. “Deanna almost had to have heard something. She’s been a part of the family for more than forty years. So she’s old enough to have heard the stories. That means her kids could have heard the stories as well.”

  “And what about you?” Johanna asked Dempsey. “Had you heard the stories?”

  “If I did, I don’t remember,” he said. “Arthur told so many stories that I gave up listening. He might have said something about it, but I couldn’t recall.”

  “But according to the will, only their children would get money—along with Penny. Arthur and Deanna would get nothing.”

  Johanna looked at Dempsey again. “Do the police know who you are?”

  He laughed. “Yes, as soon as that first murder was discovered, the one based on your call, I knew that Jessica was involved, and that meant I had to come clean with my superiors. I still kept looking into the matter, but all of my work was reviewed by higher-level officers, and I was always accompanied by another officer as well.”

  Johanna thought back to the first murder she’d witnessed, the man who had killed the mysterious woman in the car. She’d spent the night deep in the woods of the park, hiding from him. Tracing the car left in the lot led the police to Jessica’s home and the discovery of her corpse in a locked room.

  As she’d grown more involved in this case, the other attacks and murders had seemed to fade into the background. That killer had
not made a move in recent days, not since chasing her across town.

  Johanna still wasn’t entirely clear on which crimes belonged to each case. Still, at the moment, it appeared that Carolyn’s death, the attacks on Thomas and her, and the dognapping were all related to Jessica’s murder.

  Of course, that case was hampered by the lack of explanation of how one of the cousins had entered the house and secured the dead woman in a locked room with no explicable entrance or exit.

  Johanna had an idea that once she learned the method by which the killer used, she would know the killer’s identity and motive for the murder. That might be complicated because so many suspects had the same reason—the desire for money and lots of it.

  “So what now?” she asked. Of the remaining loose ends and clues, Johanna didn’t know which one to follow.

  “I don’t know about you, but we’re having a pizza now,” Detective Dempsey said. “That’s what you heard me shouting about. The person on the other end of the phone couldn’t understand the street name.

  She looked at Thomas. “So you’re staying here?” she asked, still not understanding the situation entirely.

  “Just for a few more days, I think. The danger has reduced dramatically, thanks to you for your work today,” Thomas replied. “With Arthur and Donley behind bars, the immediate threat to me is over. So I could probably stay in a hotel or Airbnb.”

  Dempsey spoke up. “I don’t mind having you here,” he said. “You’re about the only family member who I can stand,” he added, with a chuckle.

  “So what happened with you and Arthur?” Johanna asked. “What caused the final break?”

  Dempsey sighed. “He would go to any lengths to get what he wanted. You would be shocked at the things I learned that he had done. This was when he was in his prime. Now he’s slowing down. He’s happier now to get directions from someone else and follow them. Back in the day, he would come up with these wild schemes and try them out. A few times he went to jail, but never for the length of time that he should have. They have always suspended sentences since he had a kid or time off for good behavior. So he just grew worse and worse. He wanted to get in on a security company, so he threatened this group of children, so their parents would sign up for service. It was horrendous what he did and said. I’m not getting into details, but it made me leave. I was nineteen then, and that’s when I decided that I didn’t have to be that person or live that type of life.”