Eighth Witness

by Kathi Daley

“True. This afternoon will be fine. If we aren’t meeting with Rick, do you want to go get some breakfast? For some reason I’m starving.”

  “Breakfast sounds good. Let’s head to Gertie’s,” Jack suggested. “Chances are she knows as much about what is going on with the island’s newest murder investigation as Rick does.”

  “She does seem to have a knack for being in the know,” I agreed.

  Of course, we should have anticipated that we wouldn’t be the only islanders with the idea of heading to Gertie’s for news on the latest murder. The counter was lined with locals, including Mayor Betty Sue Bell, looking for the latest update. Jack and I grabbed the last two stools at the end of the counter, ordered coffee and the breakfast special, and settled in to catch up with the news circulating through the gossip hotline.

  “My sister told me that her neighbor told her that the woman who found the body was so traumatized that she ended up in the hospital,” a woman wearing a green jacket announced to everyone. “You know, she had been working for Mr. Carlton for almost four years. A person can get close to someone after four years, especially because she was there with him when his wife dumped him and left town with her trainer at the gym.”

  “Is that why he was selling his house?” a woman in a red sweater asked.

  The woman in the green jacket nodded. “It was. My sister told me that her neighbor told her that the man was devastated when his wife left him. Apparently, her leaving came from out of nowhere. Poor thing. I really can’t blame him one bit for wanting to start over elsewhere.”

  “I’ve always wanted to get a look inside that house,” I said, jumping right in. “I heard there was going to be an open house, but I must have missed it.”

  “The open house was last Saturday,” Betty Sue informed me. “I heard there were several offers generated from it. I even heard that one of the offers was for all cash, and they wanted to close right away. I’m pretty sure I heard that Mr. Carlton was going to take the offer, so I imagine if he hadn’t died he’d most likely be busy packing right now.”

  “Which may be why he came home early,” I said as I realized the sense in that. “I heard he wasn’t expected until this coming weekend.”

  “I heard that as well,” the woman in the red sweater said. “But if he did sell and the buyer wanted a quick close, I could see why he might cut his trip short to get started. The house is a big un. I have no doubt that it would take quite an effort to get the place packed up.”

  “If he planned to come home early it seems odd that he didn’t tell his housekeeper to expect him early,” Jack added.

  “True enough,” Betty Sue agreed. “Of course, for the man to have been shot, doesn’t that seem to indicate that someone knew he’d come home early?”

  “Does anyone know exactly when he was shot?” I asked.

  “My cousin works in the county morgue and she told me that she heard that he was shot sometime Wednesday night,” a woman named Susan, who I’d met a few times at various local events, answered. “The body was found in the late afternoon on Thursday. He had to have been dead for a while.”

  “Seems odd that a man can get shot to death and no one heard anything,” Red Sweater said.

  “Guess the killer might have used a silencer, like on TV,” Susan answered.

  “My brother lives just down the street from where the murder occurred, and he said that folks in the neighborhood are saying that the murder happened in the middle of the night, when everyone was sleeping,” Green Jacket said. “It’s been cold and rainy all week. Makes sense that folks would have their windows closed.”

  “I heard that Mr. Carlton was just getting home when he was shot. Why would he be just getting home in the middle of the night?” Susan asked.

  “I guess he might have driven straight through from wherever he was,” Gertie said, delivering Jack and my breakfast and joining the conversation for the first time since we’d arrived.

  “I suppose that could be,” Susan acknowledged.

  I continued to listen to the theories as they moved up and down the counter, though I took a moment now and then to process my thoughts as well. If the man I now knew as Mr. Carlton had sold his house and planned to come home the weekend following the open house, that could account for the fact that the burglary, assuming that was even what had happened, had occurred so soon after the open house. In the cases we’d looked at that had corresponded with the open houses Gina had been involved in, the burglaries occurred weeks afterward. Of course, the modus operandi could have changed completely when the guy with the dark truck had to find a new partner to replace Gina… assuming we weren’t just barking up the wrong tree altogether.

  I was even more anxious to speak to Rick, and while I was getting bits and pieces from the conversation at Gertie’s, everyone seemed to be talking at once, so I settled in to eat my breakfast while I just listened. Other than the fact that there had indeed been an open house at Carlton’s house this past Saturday, after which he received a very attractive full-cash offer requiring him to pack up and move out right away and had been killed in the middle of the night on Wednesday, I wasn’t sure we were picking up any relevant or important clues. That is, until Green Jacket made a comment about the neighbors witnessing what was going on, which, in my mind, blew the case wide open.

  ******

  Rick texted us shortly after noon, letting us know he was back in the office and we were free to come by whenever we liked.

  “So what do we know?” I asked Rick as soon as Jack and I were seated.

  “It appears Malcolm Carlton arrived home between eleven p.m. and one a.m. on Wednesday night/Thursday morning. He entered through the front door, and from the position in which his body was found, the keys that were on the floor, and the fact that he still wore his heavy jacket, he was shot and killed shortly after entering. I am operating under the assumption that the killer was already on the premises, and before you say anything, yes, it has occurred to me that Mr. Carlton could have interrupted a home burglary.”

  “I guess you already know about the open house on Saturday,” I said.

  “I do. And while the house is being sold by a real estate company other than the one Gina worked for, and the MO is slightly different given the short timeline, I do suspect that if an interrupted burglary is what occurred, we very well might be looking at the same burglar Gina was teaming up with, assuming that she actually was teaming up with a burglar, which at this point is mere speculation.”

  “According to local gossip, Carlton found a buyer for his house as a result of the open house and the offer was all cash for a quick close,” I informed Rick. “That could explain the accelerated timeline on the part of the burglar, assuming, again, that a burglary was involved. Have you found evidence to support the theory?”

  “Nothing had been obviously disturbed, and Mr. Carlton is dead, so we can’t ask him if anything is missing. I have spoken to his ex-wife, who has agreed to come to the island to take a look around. She will arrive tomorrow. In the meantime, I am keeping an open mind. I spoke to several of the neighbors this morning and none admit to having seen or heard anything unusual on the night Carlton was shot.”

  “We were in Gertie’s this morning and a woman wearing a green jacket whose name I don’t know was saying that her brother lived a few doors down from Carlton. When she asked him if he had seen anything unusual on the night of the murder, he replied that he hadn’t seen anything because a big black truck with a shell that was parked in front of his house was blocking his view of Carlton’s residence.”

  Rick’s brows rose. “A black truck. Now that sounds promising.”

  “That’s what I thought. You can ask Gertie if she knows the woman’s name, and she can connect you with her brother,” I suggested.

  “I will. Thank you for the lead. Did your little gossip session net any other relevant data?”

  “Between the woman with the cousin who works for the morgue and the woman whose sister knows the housekeepe
r, we knew pretty much everything you told us, but not much more.” I looked at Jack. “Do you remember anything else that seemed relevant?”

  “There was that thing about the dog.”

  I frowned. “Dog? I must have zoned out. I don’t remember hearing anything about a dog.”

  “The woman in the red sweater shared that she’d heard from some other friend that the woman who lives directly behind Carlton’s house called in a noise complaint on the night he was shot; her next-door neighbor’s dog wouldn’t stop barking. The 9-1-1 dispatcher didn’t consider a barking dog an emergency and told her as much. The operator suggested that the woman ask the neighbor to quiet the dog. The neighbor tried to do as suggested, but no one was home. The neighbor went home, turned on her television to mask the noise the dog was making, and tried to go back to sleep.”

  “Did the dog normally bark?” Rick asked.

  “That’s the thing,” Jack replied. “According to the woman in the red sweater, her friend told her that the dog was left alone whenever the neighbor worked the late shift, but he had a doggy door into the house and had never disturbed her in the past. Of course, all this is hearsay, so I recommend that you talk with the woman directly.”

  “I will,” Rick repeated. “I interviewed neighbors on either side of Carlton’s house, as well as directly across the street, but I hadn’t yet gotten around to neighbors farther removed from a direct line of sight of his property.”

  “It seems that a lot of the questions that we all have can probably be answered by the Realtor who held the open house on Saturday,” I said. “That is, if our theory about he or she being involved is true.”

  “I called the realty office and was told the Realtor handling the house, Barbara Kent, called in sick both yesterday and today. I spoke with another agent in the office, who said that she received a phone call on Wednesday morning not long after she arrived at work and left a few minutes later. No one had seen her since. I went by her home, but she didn’t answer the door. I’m working on a warrant to enter the house without her presence or permission, but I don’t have it yet.”

  “Do you think she is in danger?” I asked.

  Rick shrugged. “If she is working with the burglar, probably not. Right now, our theory as to why Gina was killed is because she may have decided she wanted out of the robbery scheme after she realized that she had a meal ticket with her boss and boyfriend.”

  “So the new partner, again if we’re right about things, may just be in hiding,” Jack said.

  “Perhaps. I played up the danger element to the judge because I hoped that would help me get the court order. I guess we’ll see how that works out.”

  I sat back in my chair to let everything run through my mind. I was sorry that a man had died, but I realized that his death could lead us to the information we needed to prove Ryan’s innocence. “What about prints? Were prints found at the scene?”

  “A lot of them. They are being processed. In addition to all the people who attended the open house and may have touched things, I spoke to one neighbor who told me that after Carlton’s wife left him, he began throwing big parties on the weekends. What that means for us is that there must be a ton of prints to sort through. I’m not sure we will get anywhere going that route, and so far, other than a few fibers that could have come from anywhere, we haven’t come across any physical evidence that seems promising.”

  “Was the murder weapon recovered?” Jack asked.

  “No, it wasn’t.”

  “It was raining on Wednesday. Did the crime lab guys look for footprints in the mud? If the dog who lives behind the house was barking, maybe whoever was in the house came in through the back,” I said.

  Rick frowned. “I would assume that the guys from the county would have looked at prints in the mud, but I don’t specifically remember hearing about them. I’ll check. Of course, it was raining pretty hard. Even if there had been prints, they might have been washed away.”

  I supposed that was true. “If the burglars did come in through the back and didn’t walk on the sidewalk from the street to the house, their shoes would have had mud on them,” I pointed out. “When Jack and I were at the house on Thursday, I specifically remember thinking that the yard was muddy and that the only clear path to the house from the street was up the walk.”

  “If the burglars had a key and the alarm code, they may have just walked up the front path.”

  “Not if the security cameras were turned on.”

  Rick paused. “They weren’t on. I asked about video, hoping the murder was captured. The last thing recorded was the agent coming into the house for the open house on Saturday.”

  “So she must have turned the cameras off and never turned them back on,” I said. “That actually makes sense if she wanted to snoop around without being seen.”

  “Wouldn’t the homeowner realize the cameras were off?” Jack asked. “Most people have the video feed hooked into their laptops or some other device.”

  “He may have known the cameras were off. I’m not sure how we can know,” Rick said.

  Chapter 10

  When Jack and I got home for the evening, we decided to take Kizzy out for a walk on the beach. As we headed up the walkway toward our cabin, we ran into Meg, who was on her way to George’s place from the parking area. We stopped to chat for a minute and then continued on. By the time we had reached our own oceanfront home, George had texted to inform me that he had made paella and we were welcome to come over and have some. He had heard back from his friend who was looking into Jeremiah’s case, so we cleaned up a bit and went over there.

  “This paella is wonderful,” I said to George after we had been served generous portions of a delicious mixture of seafood, sausage, vegetables, and rice.

  “It’s a recipe I have been working on for a while,” George answered. “My mother used to make the recipe with chicken rather than seafood, which was also delicious, but after I moved to Gull Island I began to experiment with seafood. Initially, I used just shrimp and lobster to replace the chicken, but eventually I settled on a combination of shrimp, lobster, clams, corn, peas, and Andouille sausage.”

  “Well, it is absolutely wonderful.” I took another bite and sighed with contentment.

  “Jill told me that you had news about our first story on the pioneers of Gull Island,” Jack said.

  George nodded. “I heard back from my friend, who copied and sent me a transcript of the Groverson trial and the police report that was generated when Celeste Willoby’s body was found. I didn’t have time to do much more than glance at them, but I thought we could go over them together after dinner. I will say that one thing I noticed was that the transcript of the trail was short. Much too short for such a serious crime, in my view. If I had to guess, the law enforcement personnel involved had already made up their minds that Groverson was guilty and the trial was just a technicality.”

  “But he did have a jury trial?” I asked.

  “He did. But again, it seemed, based on a cursory glance at the document that the minds of pretty much everyone involved was already set on a conviction.”

  “I suppose that just because he saved a bunch of people from a burning boat doesn’t mean he wasn’t guilty of killing that woman on the dock,” Jack said. “It would be better for our story if he was innocent, and I think that clearing his name would provide closure for his daughter, but if I am honest, I have to admit I won’t be surprised if, when all is said and done, we determine that the verdict handed down all those years ago wasn’t the correct one.”

  “I’m afraid that these sorts of second looks often do end up that way,” George agreed.

  After we finished eating, Meg and I tackled the dishes while George and Jack took Kizzy for a quick walk. By the time they returned, the kitchen was spotless and we settled around George’s dining table with the information his friend had sent.

  “It looks like the police report was summarized by someone at some point,” Jack said as he sca
nned through one document. “According to this, on April 5, 1941, three men, who were identified by name, were walking along the boardwalk near the old cannery up north when they came across a man standing over a woman’s body. The men approached and tried to detain the large male, who appeared to be in his late twenties, but he managed to get away. The woman, who had been stabbed fatally in the chest, was later identified as Celeste Willoby, the wife of Harvey Willoby, the owner of the cannery where Jeremiah Groverson had worked until he was recently fired. One of the three men, Davis Jagger, recognized Jeremiah, and a warrant for his arrest was issued. Jeremiah seemed to have disappeared and wasn’t seen again until more than three years later, when a man fitting his description was credited with saving more than sixty men, women, and children from a burning boat just off the shore of Gull Island. The detective assigned to Celeste Willoby’s case followed up and Jeremiah was brought back north, arrested, and tried for killing Mrs. Willoby. After a short trial lasting barely two days, Jeremiah was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. He died less than a year later.”

  “We pretty much knew all that,” I said. “Does the summary provide any new information?”

  “There are some notes that might have been penned by whoever provided the summary,” Jack said.

  “And do we know who wrote it and when?” Meg asked.

  “A man named Farley Moon signed and dated the summary November 10, 1946.”

  “So, after Jeremiah had already died in prison,” Meg said.

  “It appears so,” Jack confirmed.

  “And the notes?” George asked. “Do they provide any new clues that might lead us down a path other than the one that was followed seventy years ago?”

  “Moon seemed to have scoured the original police report and found the investigation inadequate. According to his notes, after Davis Jagger made an official statement confirming that he saw a man standing over the recently deceased body of Celeste Willoby, and that the man, Jeremiah Groverson, was a disgruntled ex-employee of Mrs. Willoby’s husband, the detective in charge didn’t appear to have looked any further and focused all his attention on tracking Jeremiah down. Moon also noted that there was a witness to what occurred who stated that it was not Jeremiah but a man dressed in a dark-colored suit who killed Celeste Willoby, but the witness’s statement was determined to be unreliable because he happened to be a ten-year-old boy.”