The Root of Murder Page 15

  “Is it any wonder that the safe house happens to be the crime scene?” J.J. asked.

  “Digital forensics is examining the phones to see if they can trace those calls to see if they came from the same caller,” Cameron said. “If we’re lucky, the caller didn’t use a burner phone. At the very least, we can locate the general area from where the calls were made. Also, Kathleen said John told her that the caller claimed to know his ‘dirty little secret.’”

  “A disgruntled former employee would have the motive and opportunity to learn about Davis’s double life if she followed him from the plant to Calcutta where he’d switch from one life to the other,” J.J. said.

  “Especially if she lived directly behind the apartment complex,” Cameron said. “I tracked down Bea Miller today. She rents a trailer in a park within walking distance of Davis’s apartment.”

  “And you said she’s mentally unstable,” Tracy said. “Maybe, this Bea Miller went in and committed the murder after the fight the witness overheard.”

  “But my gut tells me it’s not Bea Miller,” Cameron said. “She’s obviously paranoid. She’d seen Davis around—at the gas station and store. She assumed he was stalking her. I don’t think she had any idea that he had an apartment across the road from where she was living.”

  “Paranoia would give her motive to kill Davis if she believes he’s out to get her,” J.J. said.

  “He gets a restraining order against her and then stalks her to provoke her into reacting so that he can have her arrested,” Joshua said. “At least, that’s how it looks to her. So she kills him in what she views as self-defense.”

  “My gut is saying she didn’t do it,” Cameron said.

  “She has motive and she has means,” J.J. said. “Does she have an alibi?”

  “I couldn’t get that far in the interview,” Cameron said while taking her vibrating cell phone from her pocket. “Did I mention that she’s paranoid?” She put the phone to her ear. “Lieutenant Gates here.”

  Across the kitchen, Tracy was shaking her head. “It can’t be Heather and Maddie. It can’t be.”

  “You should have seen Heather this afternoon,” J.J. said. “She can be pretty aggressive.”

  “Yeah,” Hunter said. “Remember when she punched J.J. in the face and gave him that black eye?”

  “He wouldn’t have gotten that black eye if Maddie hadn’t ducked.” Tracy dumped the pasta into the strainer.

  “Dancers can be wickedly fast on their feet,” J.J. said.

  Cameron stuffed her phone into her pocket. “Well, it looks like we just got a break in the case. An anonymous tip. A witness saw Heather Davis and her SUV in the apartment complex at the time of the murder, and it was used to dump his body at the Newhart farm.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  On the outskirts of Chester, Locust Hill Road led up a hill and through the valley to Route 8 on the other side of the county. Once out of town, Locust Hill split at a fork in the road. The left branch offered a steady incline through the valley. The right branch dropped down and around a sharp hairpin curve before snaking through the countryside. The inner portion of the curve was home to a steep hundred-foot drop-off into a ravine.

  The next morning, Joshua arrived to find that Hunter had set up flares at the beginning of Washington School Road and on the other side of the curve. He parked his SUV behind the police cruiser, as far off the road as possible.

  Dressed in his uniform, Hunter had opened the rear of his cruiser to make a workspace. He had spread out reports and photographs of the accident. Leaning against the open compartment, the deputy studied the results from an accident reconstruction program on his laptop.

  “I guess I got you curious.” Joshua sauntered over.

  “Tracy says you’re a bad influence on me.” Hunter tapped the laptop’s keyboard. “I’ve entered all of the data that I could find.” He gestured at the pictures of the skid marks on the road. “These are really helpful. Sawyer did a good job with taking everything down—most importantly, the measurements.” He nodded at the laptop. “I’m not as brilliant as you may think.”

  “I won’t tell Tracy that,” Joshua said with a grin.

  “This program that I use takes the data and creates a visual reconstruction of the accident. That way we get a visual of how the accident happened. Granted, there’s still some things that we need good old fashion gumshoe work to find out—”

  “Like what was happening inside the car.”

  “But, we can still see how it happened.” Hunter took a stack of the accident photos and led him around the curve and halfway up the hill toward where the road split. He handed the pictures off to Joshua.

  “This is where it started.” Hunter pointed to the gravel on the shoulder of the road. “You can see in that picture where there’s a skid mark along the edge of the pavement and the gravel has tire marks in it. Sawyer was swift enough to notice it. That’s where the car first went off the road.”

  “The car swerved to the right, but the driver corrected it before going down the hill.” Joshua referred to the pictures and the accident report. “But there’s no brake marks until the car hits the bottom of the hill and the curve.”

  “The driver overcorrected.” Hunter led him back down the hill and across the road to the outer rim of the curve. “The tire marks and metal and damage to the car paint a pretty clear picture when you get down here. I’d say the driver was going fifty miles an hour when the car crossed the center before hitting the brakes. The car was on the opposite shoulder before the driver was able to make the turn. At that point, the driver had to have panicked. He or she turned too sharp and the car shot across to the other shoulder on the inside of the curve.”

  “Which drops off into the gully.” Joshua pointed to the drop-off while crossing the road.

  “The driver spun the wheel again to avoid going into the ravine,” Hunter said. “Suddenly, the car was spinning in the other direction. The passenger door opened and Lindsay went flying.”

  “Out the passenger side door?”

  Hunter handed Joshua the medical examiner’s report. “You had to have seen this already. Lindsay had gotten run over.”

  “Tad said the car had rolled over her. It wasn’t the wheels that crushed her, but the car itself.”

  “Did you see the gas cap on her back?”

  Puzzled, Joshua flipped through the medical examiner pictures. Unable to see what Hunter was talking about, he handed the stack to the deputy who took out a picture that Tad had taken during the autopsy. Among the bruises and broken bones, there was a circular bruise in an outline on Lindsay’s shoulder blade.

  “The gas cap on this car was on the passenger side,” Hunter said, “which means the car rolled over her from that side over the top to the driver’s side.” He pointed to the steep hill on the inside of the curve in the road. “That means she was thrown from the passenger side of the car.”

  Hunter took the pictures of the totaled car rammed up against a thick tree at the bottom of the ravine. “This car rolled down rear first. The driver spun around to avoid going down the gully front ways. However, at that point, the car had so much momentum, and he spun it around so fast—”

  “The driver ended up doing a donut.”

  “Between the speed that the car was traveling when it hit the curve, and angle of the road, we had a perfect storm,” Hunter said. “The car rolled sideways over Lindsay. Then, the rear tires went onto the shoulder and down the ravine. The car then went down the ravine end over end.”

  “How positive are you that someone else was driving?” Joshua asked.

  Hunter dug a picture from the bottom of the pile and showed it to Joshua. It was a picture of a skid mark. To Joshua, it looked almost like a half moon.

  “After Lindsay had been thrown out, after she had been rolled over, the driver turned out of the skid with their f
oot on the gas. He or she was still fighting to keep from going down the hill. Lindsay was already outside the vehicle when that happened.”

  “What happened to the driver?” Joshua asked. “How is it possible that someone was in this accident and walked away?”

  “If they were drunk or high enough, they may have been so relaxed that they didn’t get hurt.” Hunter pointed at the gully. “That’s a long hill. Maybe they bailed out when the rear wheels started going over—before the car started rolling end over end.”

  “And walked away,” Joshua said, “leaving Lindsay lying in the middle of the road like roadkill.”

  “Bishop Moore got what he had comin’ to him.” Brenda Bayles glared up at Cameron from her motorized wheelchair.

  The detective reconsidered her decision to step into the managers office, out of the cold, to wait for Ross Bayles to return from a maintenance job in one of the apartments. Something told her that the freezing temperatures outside were warmer than the bitter woman inside.

  Brenda was clad in a housedress with an afghan wrapped around her to keep her warm. She wore slippers on her feet. Her swollen legs, marked with varicose veins, were bare. She tapped an open pack of cigarettes to extract one while eyeing Cameron, who watched through the window for Ross Bayles’s arrival.

  “What did Bishop Moore do to deserve being murdered?” Cameron regarded her out of the corner of her eye.

  The old woman lit her cigarette and took a long drag on it. She blew smoke out of the corner of her mouth. “Bishop was a selfish bastard. Using his good looks and charm to suck the living daylights out of women. Then, after he’d sucked them dry, he’d throw them away like yesterday’s garbage and start on a fresh piece of ass.” She pointed out the window. “I saw his last two victims coming out that night.”

  Cameron peered up at the breezeway where John Davis’s apartment was located. While the window provided a clear view of the walkway from the parking lot, one couldn’t see the apartment itself—especially from the lower angle of a wheelchair. “You saw them? There were two of them?”

  “Couldn’t miss them,” Brenda said. “One was hysterical.”

  “Can you describe them?”

  “A blonde and a brunette. Pretty. Of course. Bishop wouldn’t be caught with an ugly woman. Young enough to be his daughters.”

  “What time was that?”

  Brenda shrugged her shoulders. “About ten minutes before eight. I remember the time because I’d run out of cigarettes and sent Ross out to get more. I was waiting for him to come back. He took forever.”

  “You were watching the clock because you were afraid of going into nicotine withdrawal.”

  “I love my cigs.” Brenda took another long drag on her cigarette. “I’ve been smoking since I was a little girl. They give me pleasure—what little I have in this life.”

  “You saw the two women leaving at ten minutes to eight,” Cameron said while peering out the window. “They were young and pretty. They were hysterical.”

  “One was hysterical. You’re not listening. The blonde was freaking out and her friend was consoling her.”

  Cameron squatted and looked out the window—trying to envision what Brenda could have seen. From the wheelchair, she could not have been able to tell which apartment the two women had been visiting. “Are you certain they were coming from Bishop Moore’s apartment?”

  “I heard them before I saw them,” Brenda said. “They were yelling awful things at him. I opened the door to see where the fight was and saw them leaving his apartment.”

  Cameron opened the door. As Brenda had said, upon stepping outside, there was a view of Bishop Moore’s apartment door, which was still blocked off with yellow crime scene tape. Yet, the view was only clear enough to see the edge of door, not into the apartment.

  “One of them was telling him that he was going to pay for what he’d done,” Brenda said. “I heard the door slam shut. The blonde was shrieking like her guts were being ripped out. She said she didn’t know how she was going to tell her mother.” She giggled. “I’ll bet he got her pregnant. The brunette hugged her and said that she’d take care of everything. I guess that means she knows a good doctor to give her an abortion. They had their arms around each other when they walked down to the parking lot. They got into a purple SUV and left. I told Ross about what had happened when he finally decided to come home.” She shook her finger at Cameron. “About time someone taught that man a good lesson.”

  “Would you recognize those two women if you saw them again?”

  Brenda stubbed out her cigarette. “Fraid not. My eyesight ain’t what it used to be.” She did a u-turn with her wheelchair and went into the living room to resume watching a talk show hosted by a psychiatrist talking about the risks of hatred to our health.

  Cameron saw Ross Bayles racing toward the office across the complex grounds in an ATV with a cart hooked behind it. As he drew near, the roar of the ATV’s engine sounded like a lawnmower on its last legs.

  “Detective Gates?” Ross blurted out upon seeing her waiting for him. He took his tool chest out of the cart and carried it inside. “I hope you weren’t waiting long.” He dropped the tool chest onto the table and stepped into the living room doorway.

  Cameron followed him.

  Brenda Bayles had wheeled her chair to the lift recliner. She pushed herself up out of the chair and shuffled to turn herself around—positioning herself in front of the seat. Then, she dropped her great weight down into it. She landed with such force that the recliner was propelled into the corner. Ross went behind the chair to shove it out from the wall to allow room for it to recline.

  Brenda seemed oblivious of her husband’s presence while she lit another cigarette and hit buttons on a remote to lift the footrest and drop the back into position. She didn’t acknowledge him until he turned to join Cameron in the kitchen. “Ross, get me a beer.”

  Ross grabbed a can from the fridge and hurried into the living room. Upon returning, he told Cameron in a low voice, “I know you have a job to do, but, if possible, can you not come to the office when I’m not here? As you can see, my wife has some serious issues.”

  “I understand,” Cameron said. “She seems to have had very strong feelings about Bishop Moore.”

  “She didn’t know him.”

  “She knew him well enough to hate him. She knew which apartment was—”

  “Only because a ton of cops were here the other night searching it.”

  “Does Brenda ever talk to the tenants?”

  “Only when she absolutely has to,” he said. “She’s not a well woman. She’s been dealing with addictions her entire adult life. It’s done something to her brain. The only exposure she had with Moore was maybe when he came into the office to pay his rent at the first of the month. Otherwise, she’d have no reason to even know who he was.”

  Staring at him, Cameron considered his excuse. Beads of sweat formed on his upper lip and forehead. “None of these cameras in this apartment complex work?”

  “Not a one.”

  “It’d be worth the investment to get them fixed,” Cameron said. “Once word gets out that they don’t work, the crime rate will go through the roof.”

  “I can only do so much with what the owners give me to work with,” he grumbled.

  “Where were you Friday night?”

  “I rarely saw the guy.” Ross flapped one of his arms. “I told that other detective and a uniformed officer and—”

  “Now you’re going to tell me,” Cameron said. “I want to hear it in your own words.”

  “I got off work at five o’clock and cooked dinner. I was cleaning up afterwards and just getting ready to sit back and have a beer when Brenda discovered she was out of cigarettes. She blew her top and I knew that if I didn’t go get another box that there’d be hell to pay. So I got in the van and went to the store to get
a box.”

  “What time was that?”

  “It was seven o’clock.” He shrugged his shoulders. “I got back around eight-thirty.”

  “It took you ninety minutes to go buy a carton of cigarettes? The convenience store is around the corner.”

  Ross shot a glance in the direction of the living room.

  Cameron lowered her voice. “Did you stop in on a friend while you were out?”

  His mouth curled up. “You see what I have to put up with.”

  She sighed. “I’m not judging you. I’m just trying to find out what happened.”

  “I barely knew the guy.”

  “I need to ask everyone,” Cameron said. “Where did you go?”

  “She lives in the building around back. Building D. Apartment Three-B. Third floor. I parked in the lot in front of her building and went up to see her after I got the cigs. I came back here at eight-thirty.”

  “And your wife didn’t suspect anything?”

  “I told her that I ran into a friend.” He shrugged his shoulders. “It isn’t like she cares any.”

  “Did you see anyone around the Moore apartment when you got back?”

  “Nothing,” he said in a firm tone. “Everything was quiet. His friends’ car and truck were here. I figured he was on a layover or whatever it was. Didn’t know anything was up until the cops started asking questions on Monday.”

  “Why did your wife hate Bishop Moore?” Cameron asked.

  “She didn’t know Bishop Moore,” he said with a growl.

  “Maybe she didn’t know him, but she certainly hated him. Why is that?”

  Ross glanced over his shoulder into the living room.

  “Kill the bastard!” Brenda yelled at a woman being counseled by the talk show host about her serial cheating husband. “The only good cheat is a dead one!” With a cackle, she took a drink from her can of beer. “Slash that pretty boy’s face. That’ll teach him a lesson.” She took a long drag on her cigarette.

  “Can’t you see? My wife is not a well woman.”