Real Murder (Lovers in Crime Mystery Book 2) Page 15

  Tad agreed. “Usually when you see that much overkill, it’s someone who was furious about something—someone the victim is familiar with.”

  “Someone she made angry,” Joshua said, “like by bleeding them dry.”

  “Dolly said something very cryptic when she gave these albums to me,” Cameron said. “Something about how maybe she could be forgiven if she made things right before she died … ” She paused to remember Dolly’s exact words, but her memory failed.

  “Doesn’t surprise me.” Tad scooped up Irving from where he was rubbing against his leg. Displeased about being picked up when he didn’t want to be, Irving squirmed out of his hands, jumped over the arm of the chair, and scurried out of the room. “I found out who she was seeing at the hospital last month. It was Dr. Meyers. She had been having health issues. Dr. Meyers diagnosed it as cancer and tried to send her to an oncologist in Pittsburgh. She refused to go, and he never saw or heard from her again.”

  “At her age, she probably didn’t think it was worth the heartache,” Cameron said.

  “Probably not,” Tad agreed. “Based on her autopsy, she was much too far advanced. She would have been dead in four months.”

  “So that explains the call record.” Curt came back into the room to overhear. “Dolly made those calls to the hospital to find out she was dying. Then, the next call that was out of ordinary for her calling pattern was to that dance joint down the river.”

  “If I knew I was dying, I would put my affairs in order,” Joshua said, “not call a dance place.”

  “She did get her affairs in order,” Curt said. “She had that will made up in the last month.”

  “Who did she call at the bar?” Joshua asked.

  “The call was made to the main number listed in the directory,” Curt said. “But I’ve got a suspicion about who she could have talked to. The owner’s name is Larry Van Patton. Guess where he worked up until nineteen seventy-six.”

  “Dolly’s?” Cameron asked.

  Curt placed one finger on his nose and pointed another in her direction. “Dolly’s closed up a few weeks after Ava Tucker’s murder. Then Larry bought his own bar in Weirton. The question of the day is why did Dolly call her old bartender when she found out she was dying?”

  “To put pressure on him,” Joshua suggested. “Maybe he’s a blackmail victim.”

  Curt shrugged his shoulders. “Background check says Larry had a boatload of cash to buy that bar.”

  “Maybe Dolly lent him the money to start his own business,” Tad suggested. “Maybe the money that Dolly was collecting every month was payoff on loans that she had made while Dolly’s was in operation—not blackmail.”

  “It’s more fun to think Dolly bought Larry the bar as payment for a hit,” Donny said.

  “Speaking of paid hits,” Curt said with a grin. “Forensics got a match in the federal database, CODIS, for the DNA they got off the hair that Irving ripped from our suspect’s head. Anthony Tanner.”

  Sitting up straight in his seat, Tad exchanged glances with Joshua.

  “Do you know him?” Cameron asked them.

  “He got put away back in the nineties for second- degree murder,” Tad said. “He beat a woman to death in New Cumberland. The thing is, the police were convinced that the victim’s husband paid him to do it. There were all kinds of rumors to support it. But there was no clear evidence and Tanner refused to turn. He was offered manslaughter if he testified. He took second-degree murder and got fifteen years. The victim’s husband took the life insurance and went out west. Someone told me that he was found dead in a seedy motel—in equally suspicious circumstances.”

  “Tanner was released six years ago,” Curt said.

  “Maybe he’s back in business,” Tad said.

  “Where was Tanner when Mike disappeared?” Joshua asked.

  “I checked already,” Curt said. “Tanner was already doing time. He went to jail in ninety three. I put a BOLO out on him.”

  “If he’s smart, he’s laying low, if not out of the area,” Cameron said. “Were his prints on the knife?”

  “No usable prints on the knife,” Curt said. “Killer most likely wore gloves.”

  “What about the medallion and the hair that Dolly had clutched in her hand?” Cameron asked.

  “No hit in CODIS on the DNA for the hair, which they say came from a woman. “

  “Woman?” Joshua asked. “But I only saw one perp in the house.”

  “Maybe there were two,” Cameron said. “The female suspect escaped without you seeing her?”

  “Forensics did get a partial fingerprint off the medallion,” Curt told them, “which matches fingerprints on the cell phone. So we can assume that they belong to the same person. Forensics doesn’t have a hit in the database yet. They’re still running it.”

  Joshua said, “Even so, we do have the name of Anthony Tanner. That’s a very good start. Now all we have to do is locate him.”

  “Well, I do know where one of our suspects can be found,” Curt said. “Larry Van Patton, the sleazy bar owner who Dolly called when she found out she was dying. What do you say we find out what was so important for her to tell him that she reached out to him after all these years.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Late in the evening was the Blue Moon’s busy time, and the sheriff, Joshua, and Cameron headed down Route Eight to Weirton, located on the other side of New Cumberland. The club that featured exotic dancers was owned by Dolly’s former bartender, Larry Van Patton.

  Thinking about the slightly naughty grin that she had seen on Joshua’s face while he was looking over her shoulder at the silver-haired Rachel and Dolly’s comment, “All boys are naughty,” Cameron stared at the back of her husband’s head in the front seat of Sheriff Sawyer’s cruiser.

  “Too bad your breasts aren’t perkier.” Rachel certainly had perky breasts. Joshua isn’t into that type of stuff. If he was, I’d have seen it by now. Nudie magazines. Trolling porno sites on his laptop.

  Then, her thoughts turned to a murder case she had investigated years before. A husband and father of three was found murdered in a park. The murderer ended up being his young male lover who had killed him in a rage because the victim refused to come out of the closet about their relationship. The wife had been married to him for over twenty-five years and they had grown children. She never suspected his real sexual tendency.

  How well does anyone know anyone? I’ve known Joshua for only a year. Maybe …

  “Here we are?” Joshua sang out in an upbeat tone from the front passenger seat. “Wake up, Cam. You look like you’ve fallen asleep back there.”

  As expected, the establishment had no windows. But in keeping with the name of Blue Moon, the club’s exterior, including the door, was painted blue. The parking lot was completely filled with every type of vehicle possible.

  The sheriff parked his cruiser and unsnapped his seatbelt. “Are we ready to go check out some flesh?” Through the rear-view mirror, he flashed Cameron a smile.

  While the sheriff trotted to the main entrance, Joshua opened the cruiser’s rear door for her to climb out.

  “Josh …” she started to ask, and then thought better of it.

  “What?” Joshua squeezed her hand. “What’s wrong?” He took her face in his hands. “You don’t look well. Maybe you’ve been exerting yourself too much. You were in the emergency room with a concussion only the day before yesterday.”

  “Josh,” she asked, “do you think my breasts aren’t perky enough?”

  “Hey, you two,” the sheriff called to them from the door. “You insisted on coming. Are we going in?”

  Joshua gazed into her eyes while replying to him, “We’re coming. Go on in, Curt. We’ll be right with you.”

  With a shrug of his shoulders, Curt yanked open the door and went inside.

  “Wha
t’s this about?” Joshua asked her.

  “You didn’t answer my question about my breasts.”

  “You aren’t thinking about getting surgery, are you?” Joshua said with genuine concern in his tone.

  “No,” she said with a squawk, “but the way you were looking at Rachel’s pic—”

  “Who’s Rachel?”

  “One of Dolly’s girls,” Cameron said. “The one with the leather teddy and perky breasts. You were looking at her—”

  “I was looking at all of those call girls’ pictures trying to find out which one Dolly was blackmailing and who would want to kill her.” He pointed out, “If this had to do with male strippers, then I’d be expecting you to look at pictures of half-naked men, and it wouldn’t bother me in the least.”

  “Even if someone told you that your breasts were less than perky?”

  “Who told you that,” Joshua replied, “and why is someone other than me examining their perk level anyway?”

  The conversation was getting out of hand. Cameron gazed up at him while he peered down at her with concern filling his face. “Do you think I’m pretty?”

  “You’re the prettiest woman I know,” he replied quickly. “Why are you even asking me that?”

  “Even if my breasts are less than perky?”

  “Cameron.” He took her face into his hands and pressed his forehead against hers. “Every one of those women in those albums was in her early twenties. I’d be lying if I told you that your forty-year-old breasts are just as perky as theirs. But I can also tell you that when I look at you, any part of you, my whole body instantly becomes very perky. Looking at you, even thinking about you when you aren’t around, every part of my body perks up.” He kissed her on the lips. As they parted, he brushed his lips across her cheek and pulled her in close to whisper into her ear. “Most especially my heart—and that’s a whole lot more stimulating than perky breasts.”

  Wrapping her arms around him, she leaned her head against his shoulder. She could feel his heart beating. He held her close. She breathed in his musky scent. The urban sounds of the busy rusty downtown noise dissolved into the background while she took in the warmth of his arms.

  “Are we good?” His voice sounded miles away.

  “Uh-huh,” she sighed.

  “Curt is waiting inside for us.” He took her hand. “Let’s go.”

  “No.” She pulled him back when he started to lead the way inside. “I’m not going in.” She brought his hand to her lips. “You go without me.” She kissed his knuckles and then his wedding band on his ring finger. “I trust you.”

  “I know you trust me.”

  “Then we have nothing to worry about,” she said. “Go. I’ll wait here.”

  He hesitated.

  “Go before I change my mind.”

  As he backed away, he held onto her hand even as the distance between them grew until their fingers slid away. “Wait for me,” he said.

  “I’ll wait for you right here until you come back,” she said.

  “Behave yourself,” he ordered in a half-serious tone.

  Inside the Blue Moon Club, Joshua paused at the door to allow his eyes to adjust to the dim lighting. He also had to allow time for his ears to adjust to the pounding, eardrum-blasting music that came from all corners.

  There were three mini-stages with poles from the stage floor to the ceiling. Tables surrounded the stages where young women dressed in little more than a thong bikini erotically danced around the poles for patrons. The lounge was packed with drooling men being served by scantily clad women.

  If I ever caught one of my children—

  “Thornton!” Sheriff Sawyer yelled above the music.

  Joshua found the sheriff waving to him from a table in the far corner. Tearing his eyes from the women at the poles, Joshua elbowed his way across the lounge to join Sheriff Sawyer and a tall, slim elderly man with long thin grey hair tied back into a ponytail that fell down to the middle of his back. His face was dominated by a giant nose under which he wore a bushy gray mustache.

  “Larry Van Patton,” Sheriff Sawyer introduced him before ordering the bar owner, “Tell Thornton what you just told me.”

  “Yeah,” the elderly man said in a nasal voice, “Dolly Houseman called me. She was returning my call.”

  “You called her?” Joshua asked. “When? Have you kept in touch all these years?”

  “Not really,” Larry said. “I mean, we were friends.” He gestured at the bar. “She gave me the money to start up this bar on account that she felt guilty about my losing my job after she closed Dolly’s. She gave it to me. No loan. So I had no beef with her. That’s why I called her—to warn her.”

  “About what?” Joshua said.

  “Some guy came in here looking for someone to do a whack job for a friend of his,” Larry said. “Every once in a great while, guys will come in wanting to hire someone to do something illegal. I usually look the other way. But the more this dude talked about the target—an old woman who lived alone, so it was an easy job, a woman who used to own a private club with women—I realized that the target was Dolly. So I called and left a message for her to call me. So she called and I warned her. End of story.”

  “What about this guy that was in here?” Joshua asked. “What did you tell him?”

  “Nothing,” Larry said. “I told him I knew no one and sent him on his way. I didn’t get the name of the person he was looking to have this done for.”

  “Can you give us his description?” Curt asked.

  “Better than that,” Larry said with a chuckle. “I can tell you his name. I’d seen him before when I worked at Dolly’s. I guess he didn’t remember me, but I recognized him all right.”

  “Who was he?” Joshua asked.

  “A cop—now the biggest of the big cops.” Larry smirked. “Hank MacRae, head of the state police from down in Charleston.”

  Joshua’s eyes met with Sheriff Sawyer’s. After blinking away the shock, he asked, “Why would Colonel MacRae want to hit an old retired madam?”

  Larry laughed. “Because he’s Congresswoman Rachel Hilliard’s lapdog. I have no doubt that she wanted Dolly hit—and that she had it done, too. Just because I sent MacRae on his way doesn’t mean that he didn’t find someone to do the job. That’s why I warned Dolly.”

  “What was Dolly’s reaction when you told her?”

  “She said for Rachel to bring it on,” Larry laughed. “That’s Dolly for you.”

  “Why would a big influential Congresswoman hire a hitman to knock off a retired madam?” Sheriff Sawyer asked Larry at the same time that Joshua grabbed his arm.

  “Rachel!” Joshua gasped out. “The hooker with the leather teddy. I thought she looked familiar.”

  Larry was nodding his head. “That was our Rachel. She was into black leather and handcuffs and whips and that type of stuff. Her husband had no idea that he had married a prostitute, and Rachel paid Dolly heavily to keep it a secret after she left the club to become a congressman’s wife, which she used as a stepping stone for launching her own political career after her hubby’s sudden death.”

  “Why kill Dolly now?” the sheriff asked.

  “Because the congresswoman has her eyes on the governor’s mansion. MacRae didn’t say anything about any of that. But after he left, knowing how tight he and Rachel were back in the day, I did some digging on the Internet and found that Rachel’s been making noises that sound like she wanted to run. The way the media is, she’d be a fool to not be afraid of one of those vultures getting their hands on Dolly and uncovering what she really is. So she’s tying up loose ends.”

  “With murder?” the sheriff asked.

  The door flew open and a couple of customers came running in. “Call the police! There’s some psycho with a gun out in the parking lot!”

  The sound of gunshots
from outside added its own beat to the music in the club.

  Alone in the parking lot, Cameron felt empowered by Joshua’s words of love for her. Suddenly, she felt silly for her insecurity. Were my breasts ever perky?

  She went back to Curt’s cruiser to lean against the fender while waiting. I was never one of those girly girls anyway, and Josh knew that from the start. What’s wrong with me? What’s gotten into me? Must have been the bump on my head that led to that marital moment.

  The slam of a car door directly behind her startled her out of her thoughts. She turned around in time to see a slender middle-aged man wearing baggy dark pants and a long dark jacket over a t-shirt crossing the parking lot in her direction. His dark hair was in stark contrast to his pale complexion, which served to make the deep scratches on both sides of his face stand out—scratches like those from a cat—a big one—maybe one that resembles a skunk.

  He saw her at the same time that she saw him.

  Cameron assumed that it was the look on her face that scared him. Rather, it was the Hancock County sheriff’s cruiser that she was leaning against. “Anthony? Anthony Tanner?”

  Immediately, he turned and ran back through the lot the same way that he had come—darting and dodging around the parked cars.

  “Stop! Police!” Yanking her gun from where she wore it in her hip holster, Cameron gave chase.

  While Anthony rounded a corner at the end of a row of parked cars, she took a shortcut by jumping up onto a trunk of a Cadillac and rolling over to drop down onto the ground and cut him off. When he rounded the corner, he found her crouching on the ground with her gun aimed at him. “Stop or I’ll shoot!”

  Anthony answered by whipping his arm out from behind his back and firing two shots from the gun he had torn out of his jacket pocket during his attempted escape. Cameron ducked and returned fire. She heard patrons in the parking lot scream and run in every direction.

  One young dancer dressed in a form fitting, low cut dress made the bad decision to dart directly in front of Anthony Tanner, who reached out and grabbed her. Pressing his gun against her head, he yelled at Cameron, “I’ll shoot her. I swear!”