Buried Secrets Can Be Murder: Charlie Parker Mysteries, Book #14 (The Charlie Parker Mysteries) (19 page)

I groused over that for a minute, jamming a filter into the coffee maker and spilling a scoopful of the grounds. When the machine finished brewing I poured cups for each of us and carried them upstairs.

I had gathered all the materials from Chet’s place and brought them with me, so I spent a few minutes placing them in boxes that could be shipped to Seattle if the police requested them. It felt as if I was giving up; it seemed there were still so many unanswered questions. Besides, the police already had all these reports and photos; Chet’s files were merely duplicates, other than his handwritten notes. I slipped the photos out of their brown envelope again and spread them on my desk.

Meanwhile, I reminded myself that the two children weren’t the only victims. We still didn’t know who’d run Chet off the highway. I couldn’t let go of the feeling that it had something to do with the Donovan case.

I set the photos aside again and pulled out Chet’s little spiral notebooks, intending to start with his most recent one and work my way backward to see what he might have learned in his final hours.

Since the New Mexico police were treating this as a simple hit-and-run car crash, they weren’t likely looking into Chet’s investigation or putting it together that the killer wasn’t just a random stranger. I’d tried to tell them, but they’d given the notebooks to me anyway. I didn’t feel a bit badly about checking this out on my own.

Chapter 20

Pacing sometimes helps one think. I was intently doing both—pacing and thinking—when I spotted Ron standing in my doorway.

“You didn’t hear your intercom?” he asked.

I came to an abrupt stop and brought myself back to the present. “I guess not.”

“Boyd Donovan is on the phone. He wants to talk to you.” His face told me what the news would be.

I took a deep breath and picked up the receiver.

His voice sounded fairly steady. “Did Ron tell you?”

“Boyd, I’m so sorry.”

“I’m—I’m almost glad. No, not really. But at least it’s an answer. They tested the DNA. They’re mine.”

“Both were there?”

“Yeah. Deni and Ethan. Two sets of little bone—” A huge sob escaped.

“Boyd, you don’t have to go into this. It’s too painful.”

“No, I need to . . . I think it helps a little to talk about it.” He blew out a breath. “They won’t let me see the . . . uh, the remains. It’s just skeletons. But there was a scrap of blanket they were buried in. I recognized it.”

“So that ties the burial to Tali. It would have to, unless she claimed that the stranger somehow got hold of it.”

“That’s the thing. In the original testimony she said that Deni had taken her favorite blanket outside when the kids went out to play. Later, it was gone. So she covered her bases on that.” His voice got stronger as he talked about specific facts.

“Do the police know how . . .”

“How it happened? Not yet. Or they aren’t saying. That’s why I’m telling you all this. I told the police that you were working with Chet. I want Tali found. I want them to reopen the case.”

My tiny nagging feeling that Boyd might have harmed his ex-wife vanished.

“I don’t know if they can do that.” I explained a little about what Chet told me about double jeopardy.

“I’ll file a civil suit,” he said. “In a New York minute I’d do that.”

“But you need evidence.”

“Exactly.”

“The police will work the case. I’m sure they’ll find what you need.”

“To a degree. But it won’t be the same because they aren’t taking it to a prosecutor. I’ll need everything I can get, Charlie. Maybe you can put together whatever Chet had found, give it to them, tell them what you know.”

His voice grew higher, tinged with desperation. Police departments weren’t known for wanting to share case information with civilians, especially murder cases, but I would try. Cunningham seemed a reasonable man. At least he would take whatever evidence we could put together and give it a fair appraisal. I assured Boyd Donovan that I would do my best.

“Woo, rough, huh,” Ron said when I walked into the kitchen to heat water for tea.

“I can’t even imagine.”

He plucked a donut from the days-old box and stuffed it into his mouth. I knew he was thinking about his own boys. As nasty as things had gotten between him and Bernadette when their marriage ended, at least the kids had been safe. Neither parent would ever neglect or harm them. I patted Ron on the shoulder and carried my tea upstairs.

Before I got back to the specifics of deciphering Chet’s notes I decided to call Cunningham in Seattle. I figured Boyd Donovan would have told him the same thing he told me, that he still wanted our help in locating Tali, but it would be good PR to speak to the detective myself.

Cunningham sounded distracted when I got him on the line. I basically reiterated what Boyd had said to me, then told him about the final pages in Chet’s notebook.

“Even though the accident is being treated by the police here as a hit-and-run,” I said, “I can’t help but think that it could be related to this case.”

He asked a couple of sharp questions and then said, “I’ll let you know. We’re swamped here today. I’ve got forensics working on the remains of the two kids. There’s visible evidence of trauma. The daughter had a broken neck, which is probably going to turn out to be her cause of death, and there’s a broken arm and some ribs, older injuries. I trust that you won’t say any of this to Mr. Donovan. We want a full report, not speculation, before we release any information.”

“Are you saying he could be a suspect? That either he
or
Tali could have abused the kids?”

“Someone did. We take these things a step at a time.”

“Boyd mentioned a blanket that was found in the grave.”

“Yes. He identified it, along with some scraps of clothing. The little girl wore a pink top and jeans. Her brother had on a white sports-logo sweatshirt and dark pants over his diaper.” He paused to listen to someone else in the room. “I’ve got a call. Like I said, I’ll contact you if we need anything.”

I reported to Ron. “It wasn’t quite the brush-off, but near enough,” I told him. “All he wanted from us at the moment was a copy of the pages from Chet’s notebooks.”

“About all we can do, I guess.” He pointed at his computer screen. “I just got us a new client. Flagg Corporation. They won a big bid of some kind and now all their employees have to pass background checks. Forty-three to start with, eventually around three hundred once we get the files from all their other branches. That’ll keep me busy for awhile.”

I was so glad he phrased it that way. Background checks, to me, are deadly dull work. He could have them all. Truthfully, I’d rather do tax returns.

“I’ll leave you to it,” I said cheerfully.

I gathered the small spiral notebooks and took them downstairs to the copier, where I spent twenty minutes or more lining them up and getting images of the pages. Then I created a cover sheet and faxed the whole stack to the attention of Detective Cunningham.

Meandering back to my office I felt a little bit at loose ends. Clearly, the Seattle police didn’t want us mucking about in their case; I understood that. But I had all this data on hand, everything Chet Flowers had left behind.

The one aspect I could check into was Chet’s fatal crash. The Seattle police had bigger concerns right now and the New Mexico police were brushing it off as a drunk driver incident. If they could catch the driver who hit Chet’s rental car, they would surely prosecute. But I’d gotten no indication from Ramirez that they would track this guy to the ends of the earth.

I did an online search for any news of the wreck. The Santa Fe paper had a two-paragraph story simply stating that a crash had resulted in one fatality south of the city. It didn’t give Chet’s name or even say that the victim was from out of state. If this was a simple case of DWI, as Ramirez believed, the driver himself wasn’t going to come forward in a rush of conscience. As far as he knew he’d just lightly tapped another vehicle. He didn’t know that the guy inside it had died, and even if he’d caught the miniscule article in the paper he would be full of justification as to why he didn’t think it was the same car, or some such thing. I didn’t hold much hope for Chet’s killer ever being caught via the regular channels. Which was why I was determined to keep looking into it myself.

While Ron clicked away at his keyboard, digging up background information on folks who thought their jobs were secure, I went back to Chet’s notes, from the first day he’d contacted us. As I read about the meetings with Boyd Donovan in San Diego, then on to our interview with Anna Vine in Belen, I began to get a glimpse into his shorthand system.

He always spelled out a person’s name in full when he first met them; after that, references to that person usually used only their initials. So, my guess that SS and DS were Scout Stiles and her husband was correct. I found a place earlier in the investigation where their names had come up. BF and RF had to be Babe and Roxanne. Looked as if Tali’s whole family were under Chet’s microscope.

His final page contained: RF unfriendly, says nothing. BF sullen when ??

I took that to mean he’d gone to Santa Fe and tried talking to Roxanne and Babe Friezel. Since the accident had happened as Chet was southbound out of Santa Fe, it made sense that he’d driven up there that afternoon, maybe had to wait for Roxanne to get home from work, tried asking some questions but didn’t get anywhere.

On the page before that one, he’d noted: SS screamed at me, DS says leave her alone. S will never give up Tali. In this city. Seems
signif
.

Okay, so right before going to Santa Fe to see Babe and Roxanne, he had talked to Scout and Dave Stiles? But I was completely at a loss for what the other notes about the city meant and some significant thing the Stiles’s had said to him.

Oh, Chet, if only we could have had one more conversation.

A wild hair of an idea started to grow. This is not always a good thing. I’ve been known to get into trouble over such things. But I had to know.

Before I could talk myself out of it, I’d muttered to Ron that I was going out for awhile. I gassed up the Jeep at the nearest station and got on I-25 heading north.

The police do not have a suspect in the hit-and-run,
I said to myself in justification.
The witness didn’t get a plate number and they have nowhere to look. They’re waiting for either a confession or the hope that some auto body shop will report to them if the damaged vehicle comes in. All the driver needs to do is keep the car hidden away for a few weeks until every shop forgets it’s on the list. I, at least, have some idea where to look.
I was willing to bet pretty heavily that someone in either the Stiles or Freizel homes drove a dark blue car.

All of this rolled through my mind as I left Albuquerque behind and motored northward. The trick, I realized, would be to break in—something I’ve had a little experience with—and to get back out without being caught. If I found what I was looking for, the police could handle the rest of it.

The Freizel family were doing their best to cover for their little sister and to keep her out of sight. I didn’t for one minute believe that none of them knew where Tali was at this moment. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out that she’d moved in with one of them. Which got me thinking . . . I just might need to check out their homes as well as their garages.

I swatted at the little angel sitting on my shoulder who told me what Drake would say if he had any inkling about what I was considering. I already knew that my strictly law-abiding husband would tell me to phone my tip to the police and let them handle it.

I guess that could be one way to go.

But I was already halfway to Santa Fe and it would be a wasted trip if I didn’t at least try to find out what else Roxanne might be hiding in order to protect her daughter. If one of this clan felt it necessary to get rid of Chet, then there surely was more evidence to be found. But why wouldn’t they have destroyed said evidence years ago, I argued with myself.

I went back and forth this way for another twenty minutes until I had reached Roxanne and Babe’s neighborhood. I cruised past the house, which appeared unoccupied. Even though I had discarded the idea of reactivating my freelance writer role—I didn’t plan for this to be a face-to-face encounter—I thought it best not to give neighbors reason to report that I had returned.

I parked one street over and grabbed a notebook that might help me pass as a survey taker, a college student or maybe a charity volunteer. It really didn’t matter as long as I appeared to be walking the residential street with some purpose other than breaking into a house.

Now that the holidays were behind us, it seemed that most people were required back at their jobs. Only two houses on this street had cars in the driveways. Gone were the lights at kitchen windows and sparkling Christmas trees in living rooms. For good measure, in case curious eyes were peering out, I stopped in front of a house, consulted the blank pages in my notebook then stepped up to the front door and rang the bell. When no one answered I walked around to the side and stood in front of their electric meter. While my pen was scratching notes on the page my eyes were scoping out the view past the back yard.

The Freizel place was visible directly behind this one. The houses on either side of where I stood had no windows facing me, so the only one where someone might catch me in the act was the place directly across the street. A momentary nervous flutter went through my stomach but I reminded myself that when you’re doing something you shouldn’t be, act confident. I squared my shoulders and let myself into the back yard through a side gate. Within a second I’d tucked myself neatly out of view of the street.

From behind a big blue spruce I watched the Freizel place for a good three minutes. Not a movement anywhere.

Come on, Charlie, just get on with it!

I used to listen to that little inner voice a lot more than I do now. Getting cautious with age, I suppose. But this time I listened. I tucked the useless notebook into my purse, slung the strap across my body, and made a dash for the block wall that separated the two properties. I hiked myself over it, and was standing behind the blank back wall of the Freizel’s garage before any nosy neighbor could blink.

Loosely, the plan was to get into the garage, find the damaged vehicle and snap a photo of both the bashed front headlamp and the license plate. This could then be sent to the police and ta-da I would have Chet’s killer cornered. The hitch in the plan was that when I peered through the window in the side door to that garage, it was empty. No vehicle at all—blue or otherwise.