A Reunion to Die For (A Joshua Thornton Mystery) (3 page)

“What happened?” Joshua asked again.

“We were finishing up practice. The cheerleaders were done and they were in the stands with Tracy and J.J. Suddenly we heard this shot from behind the shed, and I saw him running for the fence.”

“Him?”

“I have no idea if it was a man or woman. They were wearing this big black trench coat—”

“Trench coat?” Joshua’s thoughts raced to another high school shooting that involved youths dressed in black trench coats.

“Yeah.” Murphy added, “But I don’t think it was anyone I know from here. It was way too big for him and he was no taller than Sarah. He wore this black bandanna and wrap-around sunglasses that, like, took up his whole face.” He sucked in his breath and fought to keep the shudder out of his voice, “And he had the biggest gun I ever saw in my life.”

“You saw the murder weapon?”

Murphy nodded and pointed out across the track field to the chain-link fence that marked off the school property. A deputy was taking a picture of something that had become stuck on the fence.

“I chased him across the field and over the fence and into the woods. When I was just about to tackle him, he turned around and pointed it right into my face.”

“What were you thinking?” Joshua roared.

“That I could catch him.”

“He had just killed someone, and you didn’t think he’d do the same to you?”

Murphy stood at his full height. His shoulder pads made him appear bulkier than he truly was. “Dad, I did exactly what you would have done.”

Joshua reminded him, “He had a gun. He killed Grace. Like he would think twice about shooting you? I thought you had better sense that that, Murphy.”

“I do have sense!”

“Then use it!” Joshua sucked in his breath as if he were trying to pull back the words he had uttered. His son was right. He would have done exactly the same thing. How he sometimes hated the genes he had passed on to his children.

Murphy pressed his lips together while he watched his father grimace in what he concluded was anger at him for his foolish behavior.

“Was Grace going to meet anyone after school?” Joshua asked.

“I don’t know. That’s something that maybe one of the girls knew, or maybe not. She didn’t really mix a lot. Her closest friend seemed to be Tracy, and she wasn’t allowed to get that close to her.”

Joshua recalled the Saturday afternoon he had spent having tea with Grace’s mother, who had yet to learn of her daughter’s death. They resumed the walk around the outside of the yellow-plastic-taped fence while Murphy reported what little he knew about the victim. “Grace was not allowed to date until she was eighteen. She had to fight tooth and nail to get her folks to allow her to be on the cheerleading squad. Her mother escorted her to every game and chaperoned her when we went out after the games. Most of the time Grace didn’t go with us because she was so embarrassed about her mom tagging along.”

“Bummer.” Joshua didn’t have the energy to keep such a tight rein on his children.

Sheriff Curt Sawyer had ducked under the tape and was coming down the steps to join them on the running track. His gold badge stood out against his black uniform on his broad chest. Not wanting to discuss the particulars of the murder in front of his son and a witness, Joshua suggested that Murphy wait for him at the van while he gathered the details from the sheriff.

Curt waited for the teenager to be out of earshot before he reported, “Doc says she’s been dead for less than an hour, which we already knew.”

They strolled along the fence in the direction of the shed. Curt handed Joshua a pair of evidence gloves, which he put on to prevent contaminating the scene.

“Single gunshot wound to the chest. Looks like a contact wound. No sign of a struggle.” The sheriff speculated, “I think the killer caught her by surprise.”

“Why are you telling me this? I’m just a guy whose kids happened to be on the scene.”

Curt stopped and stuck his thumbs inside his thick belt and glanced in the direction of the shed. “I’d just like for you to take a look at the scene and tell me what you think.”

“But—”

“Don’t tell me you’re not curious.”

“Of course, I am. Why do you want me to look at it? My job is to prosecute the guy after your investigator catches him.”

“If you were cooking a gourmet meal and Emeril happened to be around the corner, wouldn’t you want him to take a taste and tell you what he thought?”

“Come on, Curt. You know that I can’t cook.” Joshua ducked under the yellow tape and around the corner of the shed to the open door. The deputies and forensics officers had gathered outside the building to confer with each other. He noticed several pairs of eyes following Seth, who was scribbling on his notepad.

“What do we have here?” Joshua tried to decipher the detective’s notes from over his shoulder.

Seth flipped the notebook shut. “Looks like a jilted admirer decided to take out the object of his affection.”

Joshua looked inside the darkened shed stocked with equipment used to maintain the school grounds. The teenaged girl was sprawled in a spread eagle position on the dirt floor.

While putting his equipment back into his medical examiners bag, Tad gestured for the attendants to wait for the county prosecutor to take a look before they removed her to the morgue across the river.

“Your son told one of the deputies that he touched the body,” Seth told Joshua. There was a critical note in his tone.

Tad interjected, “J.J. said that he was checking to see if the victim was okay when he realized that she had been shot. It was dark in here, and he didn’t see the blood until he had put his hand in it.”

The investigator added, “He also mentioned that the victim’s skirt was pulled up. He pulled it down because he didn’t want everyone to see her that way. That indicates an attempt at sexual assault.”

“Her fingernails are clean, no skin under them, no evidence of a struggle,” Tad showed Joshua her hands covered in paper evidence bags sealed with rubber bands, as if he could see them through the paper. “There’s no physical sign of sexual assault, bruising on the thighs or anywhere else. The skirt probably flew up when she hit the ground.”

Seth’s glare in the medical examiner’s direction was interrupted when Joshua stepped between them to examine the girl on the ground. He knelt next to the body. Her dead eyes peered up at him. They were wide as if she still had something to fear.

Here was a girl he had met in life. Pretty. Sweet. The type of girl fathers imagined their sons taking to the prom. She was still dressed in her blue-and-gold cheerleading uniform that the squad had worn for their yearbook pictures that day. While the outfit had the same color and trim as when he was in school, it had been updated to be more form fitting and the skirt shortened for a sexier edge.

She could have been Tracy. He could only imagine the unbearable pain her parents were going to suffer when Sheriff Sawyer and the parish priest rang their doorbell to tell them that their daughter would not be coming home.

Joshua swallowed, closed his eyes, and transformed himself into the professional he was. When he turned his head away to regain his composure while distancing himself from the victim, he saw a blue athletic bag and purse set on the floor by the door. “Is that her gym bag?”

Curt picked up the purse and did a brief examination of the contents while Joshua studied her lifeless form. “What was she doing in here?” He peered around the shed used to house a lawn tractor, clippers, shovels, fertilizer, and other equipment.

“The cheerleaders were having practice right outside here,” Seth answered. “After they finished, the rest of the girls went over to watch the football team. They thought she was with them until they heard the shot.”

“So someone stopped her on her way to the practice field, or she met someone here,” Tad observed.

“A loser who wanted to date a cheerleader,” the detective theorized, “She said no and he couldn’t take the rejection.”

Joshua suggested, “Anyone could have lured her over here for a chat or whatever. A secluded building with no windows.”

“Perfect place for a teenage girl and boy to have some fun,” said Seth.

The prosecutor asked, “If they were having so much fun, why’d he shoot her?”

Curt removed a Polaroid picture from one of the pocket sections of the purse and held it out to Joshua, who stepped out of the shed to take it. He studied the blurry image. The photograph was of two girls, one blonde and one redhead. The blonde was Grace, but she did not look anything like the all-American cheerleader he knew. She was sexy. Her makeup was heavy. The hue of the other girl’s hair was more orange than red. Both girls grinned broadly at the camera while hugging a bare-chested man, who had his arms around them. In the background was a bar with a portion of a sign that read: Half-.

“Does that girl look familiar to you?” Seth grabbed the purse from the sheriff to examine it.

“Nope.” Joshua traded the picture for a driver’s license the sheriff had removed from the wallet. At first, it looked like any other West Virginia driver’s license. When he saw the lawman’s knowing smile, Joshua took a second look. The sixteen-year-old victim’s birth date had to be 1988, at the earliest. However, on this identification it stated that she was born in 1982, which made her over twenty-one, the legal age to drink alcohol and buy cigarettes.

“It’s a good ID, too,” Curt observed. “The average Joe wouldn’t spot it.”

Joshua handed the license back to him and strolled around the inside of the shed. “She was meeting someone. The gym bag was set down, not dropped or thrown. She came inside this shed to talk in private to her killer.”

The sheriff reminded him, “The cheerleaders went over to the field to watch football practice. So she was alone with this guy.”

“But the whole team and the squad were right on the other side of this building.”

“They were alone long enough for her to get shot,” Tad pointed out. “She didn’t put up much of a fight, probably because she didn’t have time. In this shed, if the killer used the element of surprise, he would have had the advantage.”

Seth declared, “We’re looking for a jilted boyfriend.”

“She wasn’t allowed to date,” Joshua told them.

“Just because she wasn’t allowed to date doesn’t mean she didn’t have a boyfriend,” Tad said with a naughty grin.

Chapter Three

The Glendale Vindicator
wasn’t
The Washington Post
. The small, privately owned newspaper operated on a shoestring and paid chicken feed, but Jan Martin didn’t care. As soon as she finished writing about the valley’s story of the decade, Joshua’s solving of a double homicide in their own hometown, she was certain that her first book would be published and that she would be on her way to being a first-class author.

Jan had made a mistake by professing her love to Joshua at what she had thought was the opportune time, one year after the death of his wife. She’d been humiliated by his rejection, even if he was kind about it. At least he still wanted to be friends.

There was hope, she prayed.

Joshua and Tad returned to the Thornton home shortly before her arrival for dinner. She understood when Tracy begged out of dinner to rush to her room and sob. Murphy went upstairs to take a shower in the bathroom in his and J.J.’s attic bedroom. J.J. went to do his homework. He was working towards an academic scholarship and wasn’t going to let dinner and murder stand in the way of his studies. This single-minded dedication, Jan noted, was something he had inherited from his father. Meanwhile, Joshua went to his study to make a couple of phone calls in regard to pending cases.

Sipping a glass of red wine, Jan prepared the Caesar salad and garlic toast for dinner while listening to Tad’s account of the sixteen-year-old girl killed with a single gunshot wound to the chest in the maintenance shed, next to the practice field filled with the football team, the cheerleading squad, and assorted other witnesses.

She reminded Joshua when he came through the swinging kitchen door from the living room, “Tricia Wheeler was wearing her cheerleading uniform when she was found dead with a single shot to the chest.”

“You must have been talking to Gail Reynolds.” Preoccupied with his trauma-filled day, he did not stop to think about the reaction his words would have on her.

A silence fell over the kitchen.

She broke the silence. “Why would I be talking to Gail?”

Tad cringed.

“I have not had a good day.” Joshua sighed. “Gail is in town.”

“Whatever for?” she demanded to know.

Tad told them, “She’s renting the old Marshall place out by the state line.”

“Why would a big, famous network news journalist covering stories all over the world be here?” Jan asked Joshua, “Did she come here to interview you for a book about the Rawlings?”

“She wants to write a book about Tricia Wheeler,” Joshua said.

Glaring at the mention of her childhood rival, Jan slapped Tad’s fingers when he tried to sneak a tomato from her antipasto tray. “Why is she suddenly all interested in Tricia?”

Tad suggested, “Maybe because Tricia was a friend and she wants to find out what happened to make her kill herself.”

“Gail had no friends, only connections,” she said with a sneer. “That’s how she got my scholarship.”

“That was twenty years ago, Jan. Get over it already.” Joshua poured himself a glass of wine. Between the murder, Tori, Gail, and Jan, he concluded that he had earned it.

Jan’s tone continued to be accusing. “You never answered my question. Why is she so interested in Tricia?”

He answered her with an exaggerated shrug. “I don’t know. Tricia killed herself.”

She scoffed. “Do you really think Tricia killed herself?”

Joshua started. He had thought of it in passing before, but never considered that Tricia Wheeler had indeed been murdered.

At dinner, Jan told of her adventure covering a case at the courthouse. The defendant led the police on a high-speed chase—on his lawn tractor. He was driving the tractor because his license had been revoked due to drunk driving.

Joshua and Tad found the case to be minor compared to the cases they had worked on, but Jan, who was in the middle of all the legal action at the courthouse, thought it was thrilling. The children, even if only out of kindness, confirmed that she was on the brink of an exciting career.

As Jan took in the country kitchen, she reminisced about when they were children. Grandmamma Thornton seemed to always be busy cooking something while Jan and Joshua would drink fresh milk from Tad’s family’s dairy farm and eat cookies still warm from the oven.

Built a century earlier by Joshua’s great-grandfather for his bride, the three-story stone manor needed to be brought up to modern standards when Joshua moved his family back home. Since his renovations during that summer, the kitchen was chic with new appliances and furnishings. The wallpaper and wall hangings that Tracy had picked out cast a French country ambiance.

Jan concluded her memories of their childhood by laying her hand on top of Joshua’s. Fearful of encouraging her feelings, he jerked his hand away.

Her cheeks flushed.

At the other end of the table, Tad lightened the awkward moment by suggesting they all take their dessert of ice-cream sundaes downstairs to the family room in the basement. This gave each one of the children permission to scatter throughout the house to pursue his or her interests.

The family room was cluttered with a hodgepodge of books, jackets and sweaters, and various childish paraphernalia. The adults ate their sundaes and made small talk about what the children were doing in school. As the evening wore on, Joshua suggested that they turn on the evening news to see what would be reported about Grace Henderson. Her murder made the news at the top of the hour, after a lead-in about a feature later in the hour on a local celebrity’s return to the valley: Gail Reynolds.

“I don’t believe it!” Jan sputtered.

“I want to see this,” Tad announced.

“Are you kidding?” How dare he betray her by being interested in her rival?

“I want to see what all the excitement is about.”

Gail and the reporter sat on the balcony of what appeared to be a restaurant overlooking the Pittsburgh skyline. “What now?” The interviewer questioned what had brought the local celebrity back to her hometown.

“Well,” she demurred, “I’m a self-confessed workaholic. So a vacation is out of the question while I’m on sabbatical from the network. I’m researching my next book.”

“What will that be about?”

“I’m investigating the murder of a very good friend of mine.”

Jan scoffed, “You’re kidding.”

“Whose murder is that?” the reporter asked.

“Tricia Wheeler.” Gail’s voice held a hint of emotion. “She was one of my best friends in school. Her death, at such a young age, before she even had a chance to really live, was a defining moment in my life. Everyone knew that she would never commit suicide, but we were all so young, and when the sheriff declared it was suicide, like a bunch of sheep, my friends and I asked no questions. But now, things are different. I am no longer afraid to question authority. It is my right—no, my duty—as Tricia’s friend to uncover the truth.” Her face twisted in a show of emotion.

All was quiet on the screen, as if to punctuate the strength of her announcement.

“Good grief!” Tad muttered.                  

Gail was smiling with reserve at the camera as the show’s jingle signaled the end of the program.

“How much do you want to bet that Gail has a publisher and she hasn’t even written her book yet?” Jan asked.

“Jealousy doesn’t look good on you,” Joshua replied.

“Jealousy? What do you mean I’m jealous?”                                 

“Come on! Gail is everything you’ve always wanted to be! She’s a respected writer. She’s traveled all over the world! The only thing she doesn’t have is a husband and kids!”

“And I’m a nobody, huh?”

Tad sat quietly in his beanbag chair off in the corner of the room to watch the fight. Dinner and a show! he thought.

Accustomed to the noise of family arguments, Admiral rested under the coffee table while waiting for everyone to leave so he could climb back up on the sofa. After getting a treat of leftover lasagna sauce on his pellets, he thought the day was perfect.

“I didn’t say you were a nobody,” Joshua defended himself. “Admit it! Gail’s coming back here with her feature on the local news when you can’t find a publisher for your unfinished book is bugging you.”

“Like you care!”

“I do care,” he countered. “It just isn’t the way you want me to care.” He growled, “Why can’t you grow up?”

“Why can’t you stop being a chicken?”

Joshua looked to Tad for help. As confused as Joshua, Tad looked back at his cousin with no answer to his question. All the doctor could offer was a shrug of his shoulders.

“What do you mean I’m chicken?”

“You’ve never even given me a chance. You’ve slept with Beth. You married Valerie. But you’ve known me since we were taking baths together at two years old, and you refuse to give me a shot. Did it ever occur to you that it’s because you were afraid of falling in love with me?”

Joshua told her in a soft voice, “I don’t want to ruin our very good friendship by becoming lovers.” He tried to stop her, but she was already running up the stairs.

She was backing her car out of the driveway when Tad grabbed the door handle and asked for a ride. Since he lived only two blocks away, Jan knew that he wanted to continue the conversation. After she responded to his request with a grunt, he jumped into the passenger seat for the ride down the hill to Church Alley, the back street that ran behind his doctor’s office.

He waited for her to pull the car up to the steps leading to his apartment over his medical office before offering his advice with an observation. “Josh does care about you . . . so do I.”

She coughed.

He continued in spite of her refusal to look at him. “Maybe he doesn’t care about you the way you want him to, but he cares. You are lucky to have a friend like him. I know I am. If it weren’t for him, I’d be dead.”

She stared at the dashboard of her car to hold back the tears fighting their way to her eyes. She was damned if she was going to let him see her cry and report it to Joshua.

Tad knew the tears were on their way. “Listen, Jan, I have lived more than you ever will, and I have been around the block a dozen times more than you have ever been, and there is something that I learned that I think you should know.”

“What?” she snapped.

“Bed partners come and go. Friends, good friends, are forever. You can’t get a better friend than Josh Thornton.” He added softly, “He is your friend, no matter what happens. Don’t spoil it by trying to sleep with him.”

Tad didn’t wait for her argument. He got out of the car and went up to his apartment.

“What’s wrong with this picture?” Dr. Tad MacMillan asked Joshua Thornton and Lieutenant Seth Cavanaugh.

The three men studied Grace Henderson’s naked back. In death, the girl lay with no dignity on her stomach on the cold steel table in the morgue in East Liverpool City Hospital’s basement. Every crevice and orifice of her body had been probed and studied in hopes of finding evidence to identify her killer.

There are no secrets in death.

Unable not to compare her to his own teenaged daughters, Joshua thought, She shouldn’t be here. She should be spending her father’s paycheck at the mall.

It was easy to see what Tad was talking about when he asked them what was wrong with her. Etched into the once pink flesh of the cheerleader who had been teased for the puritan boundaries set by her parents was an eagle with its wings spread out across her buttocks. The bird’s head rose up above the top of the crack in her buttocks. Its body ran down along either side of her cheeks for the tail feathers to spread out where her legs parted.

The artwork took up her entire rear end.

“It’s a tattoo,” Tad told the speechless men. “I see a lot of them in my line of work. This is a good-quality one. It’s quite expensive to get this type of artwork done.”

Joshua noted what was obvious to him from his personal association with the victim. “This girl didn’t even baby-sit. Where’d she get the money for this?”

“Her folks?” Seth guessed.

“No,” the prosecutor disagreed, “they would never have agreed to a tattoo, especially on the butt. A couple of weeks before she was killed, she came over to our house to see Tracy. Her mother and I had to chaperone. Our house, mid-afternoon on a Saturday to bake cookies with another girl. We are talking about a very strict family here.” He took her earlobe into his hand. “She didn’t even pierce her ears.”

“Her parents can see her ears,” Tad said. “What are the odds that they are going to be checking out her butt?”

“So we have a girl who’s got a secret life,” Joshua concluded.

“Oh, yeah.” The medical examiner referred to the report he pinned on a clipboard. “She was shot once through the heart. It was a contact wound. The gun was pressed against her chest when the shot was fired. She was killed instantly. The slug was a thirty-eight caliber. I sent it to the state lab for analysis. They’ll call you with the results.”

The detective nodded his approval.

“She had a blood alcohol level of point-zero-three. The forensics people found vodka in the water bottle in her gym bag.”

“She drank?” Joshua was surprised by the revelations about the girl whom he considered to be one of his daughters’ friends.

Tad covered her with a sterile white sheet to show only the back of her head. “From what I saw of her liver, she had been drinking regularly, recently, even heavily, but she had not been drinking over the course of the long term.”

“What about drugs?” Seth wondered.

“None in her system at the time of her death, nor did she smoke. Her lungs were pink and healthy.”

“What about sexual assault?” Seth reminded them, “She was found with her skirt up.”

“Nope,” was Tad’s answer. “There is no evidence of sexual assault whatsoever, but she was pregnant.”

“She was pregnant!” Joshua exclaimed.

“At least four weeks.”

“She didn’t even date.”

“It isn’t dating that gets you pregnant,” Tad responded matter-of-factly.

“Maybe she was raped.”

“She was no shrinking violet. She had consensual sex less than twenty-four hours before her death.”

Seth concluded in a firm tone, “It’s this girl’s secret life that got her killed. She got herself a secret boyfriend, got herself pregnant, and the boyfriend decided to do away with her and the baby.” He stepped towards the door to leave. “I’ll start interrogating the football team.”