Beauty to Die For and Other Mystery Shorts (3 page)

“Did your printer explode?” Tad asked.

Seeing Tad and Jan wearing jackets, Cameron glanced out the window to see that during the time they had been piecing everything together, the sun had gone down and storm clouds had rolled in.

Jan said, “We were going out to dinner and wanted to know if you two wanted to come along.”

“We ate,” Joshua said, “but thanks.”

“Maybe you’d like to share your special sundae at Cricksters,” Jan offered.

“What is this?” Tad asked about the scattered papers.

Joshua picked up one page of the report and waved it over his head. “He didn’t do it.”

“Do you mean Billy?”

Anger seeped into Joshua’s tone. “He didn’t kill Rachel Burke. Gina has been right all along.”

Tad slumped onto the arm of the sofa. “Do you mean all these years that everyone has thought she couldn’t accept that her son was a monster? That everyone thought she was delusional saying that he was the victim of a conspiracy –”

“—and murdered?” Jan squeezed in on the sofa between Admiral’s butt and the sofa’s arm. “People have been telling her all these years that she had to accept it.”

“Someone framed her son, her only son, and killed him, and they got away with it.” Joshua clinched his jaws. “And I’m going to find out who was behind this cover up before she passes away.”

“
We’re
going to,” Cameron corrected him.

“Josh … Cameron,” Tad said, “Gina slipped into a coma last night. She can pass at any time.”

“She’s not dead yet,” Joshua said. “She has to die in peace with the world knowing that Billy didn’t do it.”

Jan asked, “How do you know he was innocent?”

Joshua gestured at the fan of papers that scattered the floor. “It’s all right here.”

“Exhibit A.” Cameron held out a sheet of paper to her husband, which he snatched to show Tad.

“Billy Robb had no carbon on his hands,” Joshua told him. “He didn’t fire a gun. So he didn’t shoot himself in the head.” He handed the report over to Tad.

Jan read the report over her husband’s shoulder.

“Then we have the matter of Robb’s clothes.” He grabbed another sheet of paper to add to the previous one in the doctor’s hand.

Jan asked, “What about them?”

“They weren’t his,” Cameron said. “All the witnesses who knew Billy Robb said he was a goth. Yet, he was found wearing a purple shirt and blue jeans.”

Joshua tapped his finger on a section of the report that she was referring to. “Goths don’t wear purple.”

Tad pointed out. “Maybe he decided to quit being a goth.”

“If we can find these clothes in evidence” Cameron said, “I think forensics will be able to determine if Billy was wearing those clothes or not.”

“According to these forensics reports,” Joshua said, “the clothes that Robb was wearing when he was killed—”

“The non-gothic clothes,” Cameron interjected.

“—the clothes that had Rachel Burke’s blood and tissue all over them, they were expensive and tailor-made. The pants didn’t fit him. The top button wasn’t even fastened.”

“What about the murder weapon?” Jan asked. “The scissors from the salon? Wasn’t that found in his room?”

Joshua said, “It had Robb’s fingerprints on it, but those could have been planted. That doesn’t prove he did it.” He gestured at the report scattered before them. “This proves he didn’t. His fingerprints weren’t found in the salon. Nowhere in any of these reports does it have one bit of evidence proving that Billy Robb was even at the crime scene.”

“If Billy didn’t do it,” Cameron said, “and there is no evidence to place him in that salon at the time of the murder, then someone else killed Rachel Burke and that someone killed Billy to frame him.”

Jan asked, “Could it have been a government conspiracy like Gina always said?”

Cameron’s mind was still working. “Whoever it was had enough power to get the state police to cover it up. Rachel Burke had some rich and powerful friends.”

“Rachel Burke was killed the week after Labor Day weekend,” Tad recalled. “I remember the news saying that she had a big swanky Labor Day party, a fundraiser for Senator Linda Pryor, the day before she was killed. The media made a big deal about all the big names in sports and politics that was there.”

Joshua gathered together more pages from the scattered report. “Which brings me to Rachel Burke’s autopsy report. It was never mentioned in the media that she had consensual sexual relations shortly before she was killed. Yet, she wasn’t married or raped.”

Taking the reports, Tad asked, “Did the police get a DNA profile from the semen?”

“No match in the system,” Cameron said, “according to the forensics report. And nowhere in this case file is there any mention of them ever identifying who she was with.”

“Based on that,” Joshua said. “Rachel Burke had sex with a man. Something went wrong and he killed her. Billy Robb, who had a long history with the police in the area, had a beef with the victim and our killer knew that. That made him an excellent patsy for our unidentified lover boy to frame him for killing the beauty queen.”

“She had a broken arm,” Tad said.

“What did you say?” Cameron asked.

“Broken arm.” Tad held up the report as if she could read it from across the room. “The ME mentions it in Rachel Burke’s autopsy.”

“Defensive wound,” Cameron said with a shrug.

“I don’t think so,” Tad said. “He says right here that it was at least a day old at the time of her death. A hairline fracture from her elbow down to her wrist. Must have been painful, but I have had patients, thinking that it was a bad sprain or pulled muscle, come to me only to discover that their arm was broken.”

Joshua knelt over the papers on the floor. “Well, with Gina Robb in a coma, we don’t have time to sit here speculating about who could have done it. The best way for us to get answers to our questions is to talk to someone who was there.”

“Who?” Jan asked.

Joshua said, “Rachel had a twin sister.”

Cameron was spoiled. Since living in Chester after marrying Joshua, she had grown accustomed to country driving. As soon as she entered the Pittsburgh city limits, she felt her shoulders tense when she went on alert. In her cruiser, she felt like she was driving a tank into combat while waiting for some wayward motorist texting their BFF to plow into her.

She was relieved when she finally found the bistro where Police Captain Ralph Ellicott was known to frequent lunch on a side street near PNC stadium. After putting fifty cents in the meter, she pasted a smile on her lips and stepped inside the restaurant.

In her black slacks and leather jacket, the police detective, with her tousled brown hair, looked out of place in the restaurant that catered to those known and wanting to be known in the political arena. Cameron could tell without looking at the price list that this was out of her range.

Why didn’t I ask Josh to take this and I take the sister of the victim?

She spotted Ralph Ellicott in a corner booth. If it weren’t for his expensive suit with a blood red tie and a gold watch that caught off the light shining down on it from over their table, the police captain would have looked like the squirt Cameron’s friends had said he was. He was short, skinny, with thin hair that was as pale as his face with its weak jaw and beady eyes.

He reminded Cameron of a lizard.

She hated him before even meeting him.
You need to stop that, Cam.

She passed by a table filled with a party of women dressed in brightly colored suits and pumps. Spotting the detective’s gun holstered on her hip, they paused in drinking their margaritas to watch Cameron make her way to the corner booth.

“Captain Ellicott?” Cameron asked.

The state police captain jerked from where he was in conversation with a young man with light brown hair dressed in a gray suit with a blue tie. An expression of annoyance crossed his face.

Cameron offered her hand, which he ignored. “Detective Cameron Gates.” She flashed him her badge which she wore clipped to her belt next to her gun. “I’m from the state police barracks in Beaver district. Could I have a moment of your time?”

“The Beaver District?” After looking the female detective up and down, a smirk crossed his face. “You’re a little out of your way, detective.”

Even though he didn’t offer, Cameron slipped into the booth to sit on the very edge of the cushion. The couple of men on her side were gentlemen enough to squeeze over to give her some room, but not much. “I’ve been going over some of the old cases from our district to prepare them for archiving,” she lied, “and found one of yours. The Rachel Burke murder.”

“Oh, I remember that case well,” Ralph Ellicott said with a wide smile, the first one he flashed since Cameron approached their table. He took a sip of his drink, which Cameron could tell was a scotch—double. After uttering a gasp of satisfaction, he added, “That case made my career.”

“Even though there was no physical evidence to connect Billy Robb to the murder scene,” Cameron said.

The smile dropped from Ralph Ellicott’s face.

The other men at the table inched away from her as if the tension that dropped down onto the party was contagious. They all feared falling victim to the fallout that was surely to come.

In contrast, the young man in the gray suit sitting next to Captain Ellicott stared straight across the table at her. The corner of his lip curled.

“What do you want, detective?” Ellicott demanded. “Why are you here?”

“Before this case can be permanently closed and archived, I want to know if there’s any possibility of a mistake.”

“Mistake?” the police captain shouted.

The men to her right squirmed. With no way out of the booth, they were trapped to witness the scene that was unfolding.

“Let’s face it,” Cameron said, “based on the lack of physical evidence putting Billy Robb at the murder scene, if he had lived to stand trial, he would have gotten off, and most likely you wouldn’t be sitting here wearing the captain’s badge. So, my question, before I archive this case, is to you: Who did you not question in the murder of Rachel Burke?”

“Billy Robb committed suicide because he knew I was closing in on him?”

“Actually, the evidence says he didn’t shoot himself in the head,” Cameron said. “According to the forensics report that I uncovered in my investigation, the real one, there was no carbon on his hands. How do you shoot yourself in the head without getting carbon on your hand? Billy Robb was murdered and framed for Rachel Burke’s murder. Whoever did it had the forensics report that was put in the official case file altered to read like he did do it. The only thing I don’t know is if you were in on it and got rewarded with being put on the fast track to where you are now, or if you’re fool enough to have been duped along with everyone else.”

Ellicott stood up as far as he could while trapped in the corner of his booth. “Get out of here!”

Out on the street, Cameron looked up from where she was opening her car door when she saw the man in the gray suit. He glanced over his shoulder before going around the front of her SUV to step up to her. With his back to his friends in the restaurant, a wide grin crossed his face. “You have a lot of guts, lady.” He clasped her on the shoulder on his way past. Feeling his hand make contact with her hip, she thought he was trying to grope her, which made her jump back.

He continued on his way around the cruiser to the sidewalk and on down the street.

She felt her hip where his hand had seemed to grab her. Inside her jacket pocket, she felt a stiff piece of paper—a business card.

She took it out to read the front:

Victor Sinclair

Public Relations Officer

Pennsylvania State Police

On the back, written in handwriting:
For Info RE Burke, Call 412-555-8356. Say Vic sent you!!!

Joshua hated the driving around the Mall at Robinson Town Centre near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He could never determine which way he was supposed to go in the multitude of access roadways around the shopping center. To add to his frustration, he seemed to almost always park near the entrance at the opposite end of the mall from where he wanted to go.

For some reason that was foreign to him, his kids loved the place. They would go early and spend the day hanging out with their friends. At the end of the day, they would come home with shopping bags full of goodies and his credit cards maxed out.

That was another reason Joshua hated the place.

He was there for one reason and one reason only: to meet Susan Burke, Rachel’s twin sister.

According to the witness statements Gina Robb had managed to uncover during her investigation, Susan and her twin were inseparable. They were the best of friends. Even though they were identical, they were easy to tell apart. Rachel was the beautiful and outgoing sister, while Susan was shy and more serious.

As the father of twins himself, Joshua found that his two older sons, Murphy and Joshua Junior (J.J.) had developed such distinct personalities that they were no longer identical. Murphy, a recent graduate of the Naval Academy and now serving at the Pentagon, wore his hair short. He was fun loving and outgoing, which showed in every way. Meanwhile, J.J. was more reserved. A student in law school, he wore his hair longer, to the top of his collar like his father.