A Reunion to Die For (A Joshua Thornton Mystery) (7 page)

It was two o’clock in the morning before the pretty young barmaid locked up the State Line Lounge. Rita was ready to go home. She hated closing the bar. She was always conscious of anyone who might be lurking around to rape her before shooting her brains out as she had seen numerous times in recent movies at the mall. Hugging her purse under her arm with her hand on the handgun her father had given her for protection, she slammed the back door shut and locked it.

Rita saw the old beat-up truck sitting alone by the garbage bin at the corner of the parking lot. It looked like there was a man inside.

She took out her gun and hurriedly got into her car. After her doors were locked, she studied the truck and its occupant.

He made no move for her.

Why was he sitting there at two in the morning? Maybe he was in trouble. He seemed to be passed out. It was not uncommon in the bar business for a drunken patron to fall asleep in his car.

It was hard to tell because the windows were dirty. From where she sat, it looked like mud splattered across the windshield.

Rita remained in the safety of her car and took a look inside the truck on her way out of the parking lot.

She could see that the side window was shattered. That did not concern her. Her customers’ vehicles were often beaten up.

The reddish-brown splatters across the windshield caught her curiosity. She had thought it was mud, but it was too red to be mud.

Clutching her gun, Rita opened her door and stood, with one foot in her car, to peer through the window into the cab.

It took her a minute to ascertain if she was seeing what she thought she was looking at. Her mouth opened in horror, but the shock constricted her throat so that the scream could not escape. When it managed to work its way past her beating heart and the lump in her throat, she could be heard at the service station on the other side of the Pennsylvania border.

Chapter Six

Dr. Tad MacMillan took off his motorcycle helmet, ran his fingers through his hair, and yawned. He climbed off his Harley-Davidson and took his medical examiner’s bag from the travel compartment. Suppressing a second yawn, he put on a pair of evidence gloves from the bag.

State forensics officers and county sheriff’s deputies had already descended onto the State Line Lounge parking lot and roped it off. Lights had been erected to aid in seeing the crime scene. Police were labeling and photographing the smallest evidence. The morgue attendants were waiting for Tad to do his thing so that they could take the body to the morgue.

He was the last one to arrive.

Lieutenant Seth Cavanaugh stepped away from his car where he was talking to one of the deputies and crossed over to the medical examiner, who was checking to make sure he had film in his camera. “Sorry to interrupt your date.” His tone was sarcastic.

“Where’s the body?” Tad hung the camera around his neck.

Seth led him over to the truck and gestured for him to take a look inside.

“Who is it?” The doctor set his medical bag down.

“Rex Rollins.”

Tad sucked in his breath and looked through the shattered window.

The top of Rex’s head was splattered across the back of the passenger seat and side and front window. His mouth hung open. What was left of his head rested against the headrest and was tilted towards his right shoulder. His unseeing eyes looked up to the roof of the truck as if he were looking to the heavens for help.

Tad snapped picture after picture while he reported what he saw. “Looks like two shots.” He glanced at the shattered window. “Came through the driver’s side window. Hit him square between the eyes. That one took off the top of his head and exited out. Betcha you’ll find the slug in here somewhere. Big caliber. A forty-five at least.” He turned the head to examine what was left of the back. “Second shot was in the mouth. He was already dead. We have overkill here.”

He noticed the gun on the floor of truck where it had landed between Rex’s feet. “Did you see the gun here?”

Seth followed the invisible line from the end of Tad’s finger to the floor of the truck where the revolver rested. It was concealed under the cover of darkness. “Yeah, I saw it,” he lied.

Tad felt the body with his palm flat on the bloody corpse. It was cooling down fast in the chilly night air. “Been dead approximately two hours. Bar had to be open when it happened.”

“Yeah. The barmaid who found him said the music was up and people talking. You know how bars are on weekends.”

“No one saw or heard anything.” Tad spied a pretty blonde-haired woman sitting in the backseat of a patrol car. She was sipping coffee from a convenience store across the street. “Is she the one who found the body?”

“Yep,” Seth chuckled. “Scared the hell out of her.”

The medical examiner gestured to the attendants waiting nearby. “He’s ready to go.”

“When will I get the report?”

“After I’m done with the autopsy.” Tad put his camera back in the case and zipped it shut.

“This time around make it only one copy for the sheriff’s department. Thornton doesn’t need to be in on this until I’m ready to make the arrest.”

“Give it a rest, Cavanaugh.” He ducked under the yellow police tape more to end the conversation than to greet the woman in the back of the patrol car. “Hi, Rita.”

Startled, the barmaid splashed her coffee on her white button-down shirt. Tad apologized and handed her a tissue from inside his medical bag. “I didn’t know you were working here at the State Line.”

“Not anymore.” She stepped out of the back of the car. “I’m quitting. It was bad enough serving drinks to a bunch of drunks always looking down my blouse and telling wild lies, but this—” She pointed at the truck a few feet away and shuddered.

Tad held her coffee cup in order to free her hands to mop the spill on her bosom. “Can’t say your mother didn’t warn you. She didn’t want you working in places like this. That’s why she broke her back to get money to send you to school.”

“I know.” Rita sighed. “Mom is always right.”

“What happened?”

“What does it look like? Someone blew away a drunk.” She dug through her purse.

“Was Rex one of your customers tonight?” he asked.

“Yeah, he was already smashed when he came in.”

“What time was that?”

“About midnight.” She took a pack of cigarettes with a lighter tucked inside the wrapper from her purse. “I’ve seen him since I first started working here. He was always shooting his mouth off about how important he was. Then, Margo Connor fired him and he didn’t show up as much. Some of her crew hangs out here and I guess he was embarrassed. I don’t know.” With trembling fingers, she stuck the tip of a cigarette between her lips.

“But he came back tonight.” Tad lit her cigarette. “Did he talk to anyone?”

“Just me.” She took a drag from the cigarette and blew the smoke out of the corner of her mouth. “Lucky me. Nut.”

“Why do you say he was a nut?”

She shook her head with a laugh. “He said that he had just finished writing a book—like I didn’t know that he was a loser. Everyone in Chester knows Rex Rollins. If brains were dynamite, he didn’t have enough powder to blow his nose, and he’s telling me loud enough for everyone to hear that he was the next Ernest Hemingway.” She scoffed. “Give me a break. He didn’t even leave me a tip.”

“I guess everyone had a good laugh when he said that he had written a book,” Tad smiled.

“Yeah.” She flicked the ashes from her cigarette to the ground and pawed at them with the toe of her athletic shoe.

“Did he tell you what his book was about?”

“He said it was about the wicked witch of Chester.”

Tad squinted. “The wicked witch of Chester? Did he say if it was fiction or—”

“He said it was a true story about this wicked witch who got away with murder. Then he laughed and said that he was the only one who knew her secret.”

“How did the customers in the bar react when he said that?”

“Everyone laughed at him.”

Tad felt sympathy for the dead man who spent most of his life being the butt of jokes. “Who all was in the bar tonight while he was there?”

“Only the guys who worked construction for Margo Connor. They were all playing pool when Rex came in and started talking about how famous he was going to be. You should have heard him.” Rita paused to visualize the inside of the bar while sucking on the end of her cigarette. She flicked another ash to the gravel in the parking lot and pawed it into the gravel. “Herb Duncan was sitting at the end of the bar. He isn’t one of Margo’s crew, but he’s a regular. He came in right after Rex did. I remember because I served him a Coors Light after I waited on Rex. He paid for it with a twenty-dollar bill and gave me a five-dollar tip. He usually has me put his drinks on his tab, which he paid up tonight. By the way, Rex was three months behind on his tab. I guess the boss is going to have to eat that, which will put him in a foul mood.”

“Did Herb hear about Rex’s book?”

“Everyone who was there tonight heard about it. Rex was not exactly keeping it a secret. Herb had himself a good laugh right along with everyone else. He said that Rex was going to get himself killed.” She quickly explained, “Because he was so drunk.” She dropped the last of her cigarette to the ground and stubbed it out with her toe. “Can I go home now?”

Tad looked around for a deputy to inquire if they needed any more information from her. “Did anyone leave the bar right after Rex?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. I was in the back getting a case of Miller when he left.”

The attendants were carrying Rex’s body, encased in a black body bag, to the van for transport to Tad’s lab.

At the sight of the body bag, Rita grasped his forearm and shuddered. “Do you have any idea who did this?”

“No, but from what you tell me, I guess the first suspect we need to question is the wicked witch of Chester.”

“Haven’t you read the newspapers or seen the news?” Sheriff Raymond Stains did not try to contain his disgust with the call made to his home in Parkersburg, West Virginia, on a Saturday morning. He was still in his bathrobe and had not yet finished his first cup of coffee. If Joshua had called fifteen minutes earlier he would have roused him out of bed. “The Quincy murder was the biggest crime that Parkersburg has suffered since I’ve been sheriff. Seth Cavanaugh had the intuition and know-how to find the evidence to nail the killers.”

“I know about the Quincy case. What did Cavanaugh do before that? How good was he before he appeared on Larry King?” Joshua heard silence from the other end of the phone.

“Why do you want to know?” the sheriff finally asked.

“You didn’t even know who he was until that case came along.”

Sheriff Stains responded with a lecture about how he could not possibly take the time to get to know every one of his deputies. Seth Cavanaugh had to be exceptional or he never would have had the know-how to put together how the Quincy brothers had killed their parents for their inheritance and hidden the evidence. This was the mark of a superior detective.

Joshua hung up the phone, sat back in the chair behind his desk in his study, and examined the detective’s resume. Nothing stood out. It was the resume of an average cop. He had been to the state police academy but graduated with an average class ranking. His only exceptional talent was a ninety-eight percentile in marksmanship.

He laid the resume on his desk. Someone had to know what Seth’s pedigree really was.

If it weren’t for the media attention for solving the Quincy murders and the county commissioner’s insistence that he be hired for the position of chief of detectives, Sheriff Sawyer would have promoted Deputy Pete Hockenberry.

Joshua reviewed the list of references on Seth’s application. Sheriff Stains was at the top of the list. Judging by their jobs, he guessed the rest were friends. He also noted that his partner was not on the list. He dug through the personnel folder until he found the name and phone number of Deputy Kenneth Hanson.

The phone rang several times before the deputy sheriff from Parkersburg answered. Joshua introduced himself and explained that he was doing a background check on his former partner. “How would you rate him as an investigator?”

Deputy Ken Hanson responded with a sarcastic laugh. “Did you notice that he did not list me as a reference? That was for a reason.”

“The news reported that he broke the Quincy case.”

“If it weren’t for me, he would have gotten himself shot when he tripped over those shotguns.”

“But—”

“The only reason Seth got all the press he did about his role—if that is even what you want to call it—in solving the Quincy murders was because a local television reporter he was sleeping with bought every story he would spin about his investigative genius.” Kenneth added, “Between her creativity and his pretty blue eyes, he became a star.”

Joshua asked, “Are you saying that you would not recommend him as a detective?”

“Let’s just say he’s not my problem anymore. Now he’s yours. Good luck.”

Perplexed by Hanson’s referral, or lack thereof, Joshua sat back in his desk chair and swiveled in the direction of the window to gaze out at the lawn. The leaves on the hedge were turning brown and falling to reveal the red of a sports car on the other side.

Gail’s car.

He had noticed it parked in the alley behind the house when he woke up that morning. He recognized it from the Henderson home. He checked the time and concluded that it was late enough to call her. When she did not answer, he left her a voice mail.

“Gail. Josh. How are you feeling? Listen, your car is parked behind my place and I can’t find your keys. I assume you have them. Give me a call if you need me to give you a ride to pick it up. My cell number is 304-555-4684.”

“Take your time,” Joshua advised his son.

He almost hoped Murphy wouldn’t recognize Billy in the lineup. Then, he wouldn’t have to put him on the stand during Billy’s trial. Even inexperienced defense attorneys were brutal against eyewitnesses. Tori could have Murphy doubting his own assessment of the weather on the day of the murder by the time she was through.

Murphy studied the group of men on the opposite side of a two-way mirror. They all looked the same to him. Each of the six men was dressed in a black trench coat and wore a black bandanna down over his forehead.

Billy’s glare dared him to pick him out. His gaze gave him away as their chief suspect.

Joshua watched Murphy’s eyes while the teenager studied each of the men lined up on the other side of the mirror. He saw his eyes pause when they hit Billy. “Do you see him?”

“Easy, Mr. Thornton,” Tori chastised the prosecutor from the corner behind them. “You told him to take his time.”

Murphy sucked in a nervous breath. “He was wearing sunglasses.”

Joshua nodded to Deputy Darrel Carter, who was waiting on the other side of their witness. The officer spoke into a mike next to the two-way mirror. “Put on your sunglasses.”

Each of the men put on sunglasses to hide his eyes.

Murphy groaned. Now, they really all looked the same. They could have been a rock group that called themselves “The Trench Coats.”

“Maybe number three,” he finally said.

Joshua’s heart leapt and dropped at once. He had picked out Billy Unger.

Deputy Carter ordered Billy to step forward so the witness could take a closer look at him.

Murphy held his breath. “Maybe not,” he mumbled. “The guy I saw was shorter.”

Tori stepped up behind him. “That doesn’t sound like a positive ID to me.”

Murphy glanced from the defense attorney to his father. “I’m sorry. I could be wrong.”

“You have to be positive,” Joshua told him. “If you think this suspect is too tall, then we can’t charge him for Grace’s murder.”

“We’re through here,” Tori said. “I’m taking my client home.”

“No, you’re not.” The prosecutor chuckled. “We still have him on armed robbery and accessory to attempted abduction. Both charges are felonies, and he’s an adult.”

“But you don’t have him on murder. Your witness can’t positively identify him.”

He told her more for Murphy’s sake than hers, “That’s no big deal. You tell your client not to plan on seeing the light of day in the near future.”

She turned around and walked out with a sense of success. She had saved her first client from a murder rap.

The deputy said into the mike, “Okay, men. We’re through here.” They filed out. Another deputy escorted Billy back to his cell. It was not standard procedure, but Joshua draped his arm around Murphy’s shoulder and gave him a hug.

“I’m sorry, Dad.”