Magic City Murder

by C S Davis

  I began the arduous task of standing up after sitting for too long. My body was sore, and my tailbone was asleep. I dusted the snow off of myself and puffed smoke as I walked over to the snowmobile and placed the camera in a bag. As I did, I happened to see the video function on it that I never used. For some reason, it got the gears in my mind turning. I stared at it suddenly remembered the doorbell of the fugitive neighbor across the street from Stephanie and Eve’s house. How many other cameras were there in that area? On any given day, if you live in a city, you are on camera somewhere up to 75 times a day. Billings would be nowhere near that number, but there were bound to be ATM cameras, security cameras, traffic light cameras, something that could have caught someone at or driving to the house the night Stephanie died. My specialty when I was a working agent was interviews. I needed to pull my head out of my ass and look at the whole picture.

  I zipped back to the cabin on the sled and went inside. I shook off as much snow as I could from my coat and pants and kicked my boots. The boots were left on a rubber mat and the coat hung up. There was a missed call from Eve and a text message following up asking if I minded if she came out. I was a little confused on why she thought she needed an invitation, but she might have just been making sure I would be home before making the drive. I said yes come on out and grabbed a sandwich. She arrived an hour later meaning she had already been on her way.

  The young lady who had seemed confident was withdrawn and defeated. She told me of the meeting with the deputy fire marshal who accepted her alibi but was convinced the house had been torched. There had been an accelerate poured through the halls and in the rooms but mostly in the room that had belonged to Stephanie. The gas line had also been kicked off of the stove. It was a half-assed attempt to make it look like an accident.

  Eve had not had time to look for appliances and seemed dejected. I offered my place to her and told her she was welcome to stay there until she found affordable furniture for her apartment. She dismissed the offer saying she would figure something out. There were circles under her eyes

  “Did you sleep at all last night?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “I was nervous about talking to the fire marshal and worked up about the house.”

  I led her into my room and closed the curtains. I pulled off her snow boots and tucked her into bed. “Stay with me for a minute?” she asked.

  I laid down next to her and put an arm around her body. It was not long before both of us had drifted off to sleep. When I woke, the bed was empty, and Eve was in the kitchen looking over the documents we had pulled out of the trash at the clinic.

  Yawning, I asked what she was up to.

  Eve held up a page. “This mail for Becky Rand. She was a friend of Stephanie’s, but I didn’t realize they worked together.”

  “How did you know her?” I asked.

  “They went out on the weekends all the time,” she explained.

  That seemed interesting. “Do you think Becky knew Stephanie well?” I asked.

  Eve shrugged. “I don’t know, but they were close enough that Stephanie referred to as ‘my friend Becky’ never ‘Becky from work.’”

  “She called me after I had been there saying she thought the doctor might be engaged in Medicare/Medicaid fraud but never mentioned a peep about Stephanie. You would think if she was that close to Stephanie, she might have taken more interest in an investigator asking questions about her friend’s death.”

  “So, why didn’t she?” asked Eve.

  It was my turn to shrug. “That’s something we’re going to have to figure out. But I think this patient intake forms have something to do with it. Why would she immediately want to put a spotlight on Dr. Yu? If the doc gets in trouble, Becky could be out of a job.”

  “What do we do now?” asked Eve.

  “Something illegal,” I replied.

  She became uncomfortable. “How illegal?” asked Eve.

  I laughed. “Oh, just breaking and entering. Even if we get thrown in jail, the jail is full.”

  She did not seem to appreciate my humor.

  “What? You’ve never broken into a business?”

  Eve’s eyes narrowed. “Are you asking me because I’m black?”

  I stammered. “No, I uhh--”

  She slapped in me in the shoulder and laughed. “I’m just fucking with you, Locksy.”

  I breathed a sigh of relief and then one of despair if she was going to start calling me “Locksy.”

  Now that Eve had told me Becky the blonde’s last name, I could do a little research on her. It didn’t take long to discover she had several civil judgments against her for outstanding loans she did not seem to want to pay. She had also been married a couple of times. I guessed her credit was shot. Becky had no criminal history but several people she was associated with did, including both of her exes. Burglary, possession of paraphernalia, possession of dangerous drugs. I wondered if she also knew Cliff Dove who had been selling Stephanie Adderall. One of her exes was still incarcerated out at Deer Lodge where the state penitentiary was.

  “Okay, so here’s what we need to do. We need to go up and try to look at the patient files for the patients we have intake forms for. We need to go find Becky’s dealer and confirm that he knows Becky. And we’re going to try to find some cameras in your neighborhood that might have caught the person who set the fire or anyone coming and going the night Stephanie died.”

  Eve’s eyebrows raised. “That’s quite a shopping list.”

  I nodded. “It might be a long evening. You have to go to work?”

  Eve shook her head. “No, I don’t think I’m going to go back there. I think I have enough saved up until I figure something else out.”

  “Really? You know you don’t have to make any life changes because you’ve been hanging around an old man the past couple of weeks.” I said.

  “Oh, stop,” she said. “Don’t give yourself so much credit. But I have been kind of looking at my own life since Stephanie’s gone and I think I need to make some changes. This is just one of those changes.”

  I smiled and nodded.

  The sun was setting when we got to Billings, so I first went to the neighborhood where Eve’s house used to be. We drove down her street slowly, seeing if anyone else had a doorbell camera or security cameras. There did not seem to be anyone in the vicinity who could have caught anything happening at her house.

  We then went down the street behind her house and did not see cameras there either. I did happen to see a gas station a block over so just for the hell of it I drove over. The gas station had video cameras on the main building pointed towards the gas pumps. One of the cameras was in a position that it just might have been able to catch something if the quality of the camera was good enough. With my luck it would be a place where the cameras had not worked in the past three years.

  Eve and I went inside and asked to speak to the manager. There was a portly assistant manager named Phil working who insisted he could not look at the video because of the store’s policy. Eve burst into tears and explained how all of her worldly possessions had been lost in a fire and she desperately needed his help. Phil had a comb over and glasses and seemed to get reeled in by Eve hook, line, and sinker. We had not planned her little performance and she was doing such a great job I started feeling bad for her all over again. Phil showed us to the back office.

  “Now, I’m not sure how far back this DVR goes, but we can check,” said Phil.

  He worked the computer and it was obvious he had no idea what he was doing.

  “Here, can I help?” asked Eve.

  “Um, sure,” said Phil. However, before the word “sure” had left his lips, Eve already had one hand on the mouse and the other on his keyboard. She clicked around with a tech savviness only known to millennials and a few moments later had the right date and time frame up when her house was burned. The video was high definition, but it was still difficult to make out much that was happening at her house because of the
distance. One thing was for certain, a tall male who seemed dark complected had ran out the house and sped off in what seemed to be a red late model Toyota RAV4. Eve pleaded with Phil to burn a copy of the video to a disc, putting her hand on his as she did.

  He smiled. “Of course, anything to help.”

  “Just for the hell of it,” I said, “let’s go back a couple of weeks.”

  Phil looked confused, but Eve was already searching through the video. The DVR did not record that far back. One week seemed to be as much as we would get.

  We thanked Phil. I shook his hand; Eve gave him a big hug and kiss on the cheek. I think she made his year.

  When we got back in the Jeep, I told Eve she had done a great job with her acting.

  “I wasn’t acting,” she said.

  I immediately regretted complimenting her. I looked over to her and noticed her giving me a look out of the side of her eyes with a wry grin. My regret faded.

  The next stop was to find Cliff Dove. He was fairly easy to find. His truck was still parked in front of his parents’ house in the Heights.

  I decided it was best if Eve stay in the vehicle for this one. I knocked on the door with my reinforced gloves. Someone who I gathered to be his mother came to the door. She was a fairly normal looking woman about my age, with short brown hair starting to gray.

  “Yes?” she asked.

  I flashed my badge and credentials and did not say who I was or that I was a private investigator, just that I needed a minute with her son Cliff.

  She did what I expected her to and was immediately compliant. A moment later Cliff appeared, his nose was taped up and his eye black. “Oh, no,” he murmured.

  “Step outside for a minute, this will be easy,” I said.

  Cliff looked around cautiously then to his mother who nodded and pushed him outside. He had his hands in a hoodie for warmth and kept his distance from me. His mother shut the door but kept an eye on us from the nearest window.

  “Becky Rand,” I said.

  Cliff’s eyes darted around in confusion and he raised his shoulders up and down. “Who?”

  “You sold Adderall to Stephanie York. You sell anything to her friend Becky Rand? Blonde lady in her 30s, average build?”

  Cliff shook his head. “I don’t sell anything but my prescription. I don’t have anything else and there was only like a handful of people who were buying those.”

  “No blow, no meth, no H?”

  Cliff furrowed his brow. “Naw, man I don’t mess around with that shit.”

  “Well, that’s very white of you,” I said.

  “What’s that mean?”

  I sighed. “Forget it. Did you know anyone else Stephanie hung around with?”

  Cliff shook his head. “No, I just knew her for a class we had last year. She was having a tough time, so I offered to help her out, you know? With the pills.”

  “Well, that was awfully nice of you.”

  Cliff nodded in agreement. “Yeah, you know. Just helping folks out.”

  I nodded and as I did, grabbed the lapels of my coat, revealing the gloves with reinforced knuckles. “Don’t be so helpful,” I said.

  Cliff kept nodding and was probably still nodding as I turned and walked down the driveway to the Jeep.

  “How did it go?” asked Eve.

  I shook my head. “It was a shot in the dark. I keep going back to the phone call I had with Stephanie where she thought she was going crazy and thought maybe she was taking something other than Adderall.”

  Starting the Jeep, we drove away from the Dove residence

  “She was also taking the pills for her anxiety. Do you think together they messed with her?” asked Eve.

  I explained, “I don’t know if just those two would have been enough of an interaction to cause that unless she had maybe an allergic reaction that isn’t typical of either one of those drugs.”

  So far, the evening had not been a total loss. We had video of the person who had torched her house who I strongly suspected to be Raymond Freeman who had been previously catfished by Stephanie.

  We drove to the clinic and parked in the back. It had been closed for a few hours and there was no activity around the building and the neighborhood streets were fairly quiet. The clinic was a small standalone building in a residential area, so I was not too worried about getting caught.

  I told Eve to stay in the Jeep, but she refused. I gave her the list of names of patients so she could help me locate the files. She had a smartphone so she could help take pictures of the documents as well. That would be the quickest way to get in and out with the info we needed.

  I grabbed a battery-operated reciprocating saw with a metal cutting blade on it and approached the door. Sliding the blade between the door and the door frame, I turned on the saw and cut through the deadbolt like butter. Whoever got to the clinic first in the morning would know someone had broken in, but they would be very confused with nothing turned up missing.

  “What about an alarm?” whispered Eve. “Or cameras?”

  I whispered back, “No, I was here before and didn’t see any.”

  We made our way through the darkened hallways to a room near the front desk I assumed would have the patient files. It was where it should be so I set Eve up there with the list and the files and told her to snap pictures of all the intake forms she could before I came back to get her. She immediately went to work finding files. She had been wearing gloves and took one off to work her phone and take the pictures. I warned her not to touch anything with that hand. She nodded her understanding.

  My heart was racing as I went to Dr. Yu’s office. It was fairly certain there was not an alarm, but we were definitely on the wrong side of the law and that made me very wary. I was more concerned for Eve than myself. I had joked about the jail being full, but she still did not need a felony on her record. Then again, did anyone need that?

  I turned Dr. Yu’s office light on and went through her drawers. I tried to access her computer, but it was password protected. There was not enough time to do any technical stuff to it and I did not have the know how to pull that off anyway. Some people are savvy enough to image hard drives and examine the data on them, but even that takes time.

  There was nothing interesting in the drawers. I went through the cabinets and found some stock bottles of medication with a lot of names I couldn’t pronounce. They were all stock bottles, so I sorted through the ones with a C stamped on them with Roman numerals. Those were the controlled drugs that would be more likely to be abused. I snapped a few pictures of some that said diazepam, modafinil, hydrocodone, and ketamine. I didn’t have a clue what any of that shit was used for except the hydrocodone. I knew that was basically Vicodin and used for pain.

  I briefly looked around the two exam rooms and didn’t see much of anything that looked interesting. Most of the tables and equipment actually looked rather dusty. I went back to the records room where Eve was coming out of.

  “Got it all?” I asked.

  She nodded. I grabbed her by the hand on motioned for us to leave. We went back the way we came and shut the back door behind us. There was not a flurry of flashing lights waiting for us, so I took that to be a good sign. We hopped in the Jeep and calmly drove off.

  It was a long drive back to the lake. The evening had worn us both out and I was struggling to keep my eyes open. Eve seemed lost in her thoughts as she stared out the window. She finally broke the silence.

  “It was Raymond wasn’t it?” she asked.

  I knew she was talking about the person we saw in the video who had left her house before it went up in flames. I nodded and said, “Yeah, I’m pretty sure it is.”

  She was immediately offended by the idea. “Why would he do that? Was he pissed at me about something? All I did was try to warn him to stay away from Stephanie.”

  “I don’t think he was pissed at you; I think he was returning to the crime scene because he was worried about what someone might find if they looked a lit
tle harder,” I explained.

  Several minutes went by before Eve said anything else. “Do you think he did it?” she asked.

  “Set the fire?”

  Eve shook her head. “No, do you think he killed my sister?”

  I gave her a glance because it was the first time she seemed to come around to the idea that her sister had possibly been murdered.

  “I don’t know,” I replied. It was about as honest an answer I could have given at that time. “Let me ask you something, if you thought your sister had committed suicide, why have you been going along with me on all this?”

  Eve shrugged and smiled. She looked towards me and said, “Because I like you. That and you seem very good at what you do and there’s kind of a question in the back of my mind that keeps tugging at me and asking, ‘what if I’m wrong?’”

  I smiled and nodded. Everyone has that little voice but not everyone is willing to listen.

  Chapter 11

  The next morning, I went through the data we had gathered the night before. Eve had emailed the pictures to me, so I brought them up on my laptop and went through the patient intake forms. I was scrolling through when she appeared with a cup of coffee, wearing a t-shirt and panties. She put an arm around me and kissed my cheek as she placed the coffee in front of me.

  “Thank you,” I said with a smile.