The Root of Murder Read online

  Seeing that the fight between the two women was over, Cameron and Joshua entered the interrogation room.

  “Do you think that maybe the two of you can trust each other enough to work together?” Joshua asked.

  Madison and Heather’s expressions were filled with an equal mixture of distrust and guilt.

  J.J. pulled out two chairs, set next to each other, from the table. “Something I learned growing up is that with family you have everything. Without it, you have nothing. You two need to work together to get justice for your dad—who, in spite of being a bigamist, did love both of his families.”

  “Sit down,” Cameron said.

  Madison and Heather sat at the table.

  “I didn’t call in the tip,” Madison said.

  “I guess I knew that all along,” Heather said. “I just couldn’t think of who else could have planted that dishtowel.”

  They dared to smile at each other.

  “Madison,” Cameron said, “you told me that you waited for your father to leave Shippingport after work on Friday. What time did he leave?”

  “It was close to six when he left. I had parked in the visitors’ lot at five o’clock and waited for him to leave for like an hour.”

  “I couldn’t follow him because I had that stupid blind date,” Heather said. “One of my co-workers had set it up a couple of weeks ago.”

  “But you have the dance studio, Madison,” Joshua said. “Did you have to contact any students to reschedule lessons?”

  “Luckily, I didn’t have any scheduled,” Madison said. “My studio is still working on getting students.”

  “Did you just close up shop?” Joshua asked. “I mean—”

  “Elizabeth worked the office in case someone walked in for information,” Madison said. “We close at five o’clock on Fridays—unless I have lessons scheduled.”

  “What excuse did you tell Elizabeth for leaving early?” Cameron asked.

  “I just told her I was meeting someone for drinks and left,” Madison said. “She’s my employee. I don’t have to report to her.”

  Cameron noticed Heather roll her eyes in J.J.’s direction. “What was that about, Heather?”

  “What?”

  “You just rolled your eyes like my fourteen-year-old. What was that about?”

  “It has nothing to do with Dad.”

  “Let us decide that,” Joshua said. “Why did you just roll your eyes when Madison mentioned not having to report to Elizabeth? What were you thinking?”

  Heather chewed on her bottom lip. “Truthfully?”

  “No, I want a bold-faced lie,” Cameron replied.

  Heather uttered a sigh. “Elizabeth and my sister became friends after I went to college.” She told J.J., “You were gone by then. Things were rough for Lindsay—having a baby, being married to a loser, being broke all the time. Her real friends had left the area to get jobs and go to college. Turns out Elizabeth got pregnant about the same time and married Aaron. They moved into the trailer in the lot behind Lindsay and Derek. Their babies were the same age. They were both broke and lonely. I guess, at first, it was nice having a friend stop in to keep her company, but after a while…” She turned to Madison. “Lindsay couldn’t get rid of her.”

  “She did kind of force her way into the job at the studio,” Madison said. “I really wasn’t ready to hire anyone yet. I’m still trying to get on my feet.”

  “I’ve always felt like she killed Lindsay.”

  Joshua sat up in his seat. “What do you mean? She killed Lindsay? Wasn’t it an accident?”

  Heather’s usually confident demeanor fell. “Lindsay and I had a fight that night. Luke’s birthday was coming up. I had an opportunity to go to a conference in Colorado. It was a fabulous networking opportunity. I couldn’t pass it up. Lindsay took it personally. To make it worse, she blabbed to Elizabeth about it. The last time I talked to my sister, she’d called me on the phone from Chester Park where she and Elizabeth were drinking and doing Lord knows what.”

  “Lindsay was at Chester Park that night?” Joshua asked.

  Heather rolled her eyes. “That was her and Elizabeth’s favorite hang out spot. They’d get pizza and booze at the drive-thru and then go to the park to eat and drink and do heroin. Lindsay got good and wasted. She called me to cuss me out saying that if I was a real sister I’d be there for Luke’s birthday. I could hear Elizabeth in the background egging her on.”

  “Do you know for a fact that Elizabeth was with her?” Joshua asked.

  “Of course. At one point, Elizabeth grabbed the phone from her said that Lindsay had fired me as her sister. She was now Lindsay’s sister.” She stopped to catch her breath. Her face contorted with emotion. “They disconnected the call before I could say anything.”

  Madison draped her arm across her shoulders.

  “A couple of hours later, my sister was gone,” Heather said in a soft voice.

  Exhausted, Cameron went straight to bed as soon as they had gotten home from Lisbon. Thankfully, Tracy and Hunter had offered to allow Izzy to sleep over at their place since they suspected it would be a late night of interrogations. Joshua had given strict orders that Izzy work on her science project instead of bridal shower stuff. Tracy had promised that she’d make sure Izzy stayed focused.

  Feeling a dire need for ice cream, Joshua went into the kitchen to find Admiral and Irving sitting side by side.

  The animals looked up at him as if to demand an explanation for why Izzy wasn’t there for them to sleep with. Her bed was cold and lonely without her. If they had arms, they would have been folded across their furry chests.

  “She’ll be back tomorrow.”

  Both cocked their heads at identical angles.

  Joshua gave them each a treat and patted them on the head to send on their way. In the refrigerator, he discovered a pan of brownies—a little goodie left by Tracy when she had picked up Izzy.

  “What a woman,” he mused.

  He placed two brownies on the bottom of a big bowl, topped them with two scoops of ice cream, hot fudge, whipped cream, and two cherries. With a wicked grin, he took his concoction upstairs to present to his bride.

  Cameron was already undressed and in bed. With the comforter pulled up to her shoulders, she lay on her back with her fingers laced behind her head. Deep in thought, she stared up at the ceiling. He recognized the far-away look in her eyes.

  Playful, he bent over at the waist and followed her line of sight to the ceiling. “What are you looking at?”

  “My case.”

  “And what do you see?”

  “I see ice cream.” She sprung upright and held out her hands. In doing so, the comforter fell to reveal her naked bosom.

  “I see your girls.”

  “Wanna trade?”

  He handed the treat to her. “I don’t think those will look as good on me.” He proceeded to undress. “What are you in such deep thought about?”

  “Why did John Davis go back to his apartment in Calcutta?” she asked around a mouthful of ice cream and a brain freeze. “Madison and Heather had been keeping tabs on him and figured out his routine. Knowing that he would be returning to the Davis family on Friday, Madison followed him from the Whitaker house in the morning. He went to Calcutta where he switched from the downhome trucker who did woodworking—”

  “Woodworking?” Joshua tossed his clothes in the hamper.

  “You should see his workshop.” She let out a moan of pleasure upon discovering the brownies on the bottom. “You do love me.”

  He slipped into bed next to her. “Don’t thank me. Thank Tracy. She left them for us.”

  She spoon-fed him a taste of ice cream coated with hot fudge and a bite of brownie. While he enjoyed it, she said, “Madison says he does beautiful woodwork.”

  “I’ve never known John to
do anything with his hands. He doesn’t even mow his own lawn.”

  “I’m beginning to suspect John Davis and Shawn Whitaker were two sides of the same man,” Cameron said.

  “Do you mean like a split personality?”

  “I wouldn’t go so far as to call it a mental illness,” Cameron said. “I get the sense that Kathleen is a very controlling person.”

  “I couldn’t live with her.”

  “People like Kathleen are usually the way they are because they have to be,” she said. “They’re the adults in the room. Every room needs an adult—someone to keep things in order—otherwise you have chaos. But sometimes, when you control someone too much, you can end up stifling who they really are.”

  “Like a corporate vice president who has a secret love for woodworking,” Joshua said.

  “Would Kathleen have let John set up a workshop in their garage?” She handed the bowl, with a generous share of ice cream left, back to him.

  “The John Davis I knew may have assumed Kathleen would have considered it pedestrian and disapproved.” He dug into the last of the brownies.

  “Would he have even asked?”

  “Maybe he was afraid of disappointing her by revealing that side of him,” Joshua said. “He told Madison and Heather that he loved both of his wives. I think he was telling them the truth. In all the years that I knew them, I never saw any clue that John did not adore Kathleen.”

  “But there was this side of him that he feared she would not approve of,” Cameron said.

  “A side that loved working with his hands and driving a manly truck. That side fell in love with Sherry Whitaker.”

  “Is there a secret side that you’re afraid to show me?” she asked.

  Looking at her out of the corner of his eye, he set the bowl on the night table.

  “I know, your smartass side. I know that side all too well.” Seeing a small mound of ice cream left, she reached across him to pick up the bowl and finish off the treat. “To get back to my point. On Friday morning, Shawn Whitaker turned into John Davis. Suit and tie. Audi. Cell phone. He went to Shippingport and worked all day. About six o’clock, he left the office. Madison followed him to the apartment in Calcutta.” She tapped his chin with the bottom of the spoon. “He had his clothes, phone, and Audi—everything he needed to be John Davis. Why didn’t he go straight to Chester? Why go back to Calcutta?”

  “Good question. Maybe he forgot something. Maybe he picked up the wrong phone.”

  “I think he went to pay someone off,” she said. “He had that ten-thousand-dollars in cash, which he had withdrawn that afternoon. Madison told me she saw a thick brown envelope on the counter when they had confronted him. He’d folded it up and put it in his jacket pocket. He had no brown envelope on him when we found his body. Sometime between eight o’clock, when the daughters left the apartment, and midnight when Davis’s body was found, someone took that money and killed him.”

  “Who?”

  “Whoever it is knew about Davis’s double life.” Cameron put the empty bowl on her nightstand. “It was a woman and she’d called him on both phones. He called her Bea.”

  “Bea Miller?”

  “I think Bea Miller is too paranoid to go anywhere near him.”

  “We both know of murders committed by paranoids who have been so deluded that they think they’re killing in self-defense.”

  “I think Bea Miller is too paranoid to leave her house, but I could be wrong.” She wrapped her arms around him and rested her head on his chest. “She wouldn’t be asking Davis for money anyway. Money would be of no interest to her.”

  Joshua reached up and turned off the light on his nightstand. “Maybe the old woman smoking up a chimney saw who went in after Madison and Heather had left.”

  Cameron sat up and turned on the light on her nightstand. “What did you say?”

  “The old woman smoking up a chimney in twenty degrees. Didn’t you hear that part of the fight between Madison and Heather this evening?”

  “How did I miss that? It had to be Brenda Bayles. She saw them leave the apartment. I got her statement today. She was waiting for Ross to come back after sending him to get cigarettes. She told me that she was watching for him because she was on the verge of nicotine withdrawal.”

  He sat up on his elbows. “Are you sure she was out of cigarettes? Maybe she was just low.”

  “Ross told me that it was an emergency because she went to get a cigarette and had none.”

  They stared at each other with realization.

  Joshua broke the stunned silence. “If she was out of cigarettes, how could she have been smoking up a chimney while watching Madison and Heather leave Davis’s apartment?”

  “B! Brenda Bayles!” Cameron frowned. “She wasn’t waiting for her husband to come back with cigarettes. She’d sent Ross out so that she could go pick up her extortion money.”

  “As apartment manager, they have keys to all of the apartments,” he said. “She’s sitting there in that wheelchair all day watching people come and go. She had to notice that Davis was coming in an Audi and leaving in a truck. She noticed the change in his clothes and styles. She got nosy and searched his apartment. She figured out that he was a bigamist and saw a big payday.”

  “She blackmailed Davis,” she said. “He went back to Calcutta to pay her off, but when Heather and Madison confronted him, he saw that it was out there anyway. Would you have paid the extortion money then?”

  “No way.”

  “Brenda must have lost it when he refused to pay up and stabbed him to death.”

  “In that wheelchair?” Joshua shook his head. “Her husband must have been in on it. Do you even know if he actually did go out to get cigarettes?”

  “She can get out of that chair,” Cameron said. “I saw her. I’m willing to bet if she was mad enough, she could have flown out of it to stab Davis if she wasn’t getting her payoff. Then, Ross went in to clean up and dump the body. That has to be it. They killed him.”

  Chapter Twenty

  The next morning, Cameron decided to finish her first pot of coffee before nagging Tony about the whereabouts of Brenda Bayles’s background check. She was preparing the second pot when she felt like she was being watched. Hand on her weapon, she turned around to see two pairs of eyes filled with angst.

  “I fed you two.”

  Admiral’s eyes flicked in the direction of the biscuit jar. Irving uttered a low growl in his throat.

  With a sigh, Cameron punched the button on the coffeemaker to set the pot brewing and reached for the biscuit and the cat treat jars. After handing them out, Admiral and Irving remained in their spots—still gazing up at her.

  “I’m sorry. Did I forget to sprinkle them with the extra special love spice that Izzy uses?”

  With another growl, Irving stood up, turned around, hitched his tail up at her, and walked away. Admiral, however, was willing to give her another chance to get it right. She tossed a second biscuit in his direction.

  She found Tony in her phone’s contacts, pressed the button to call him, and focused on willing the coffeemaker to brew faster.

  The speaker uttered the sound of the phone ringing when Irving scurried out the back door as J.J. opened it. Holding the door open, he jerked his chin at the wrap-around porch. “Dad was supposed to leave his floor sander for me.”

  “Hey, Gates,” Tony said from the other end of the call. “I assume you’re wanting to hear what I found out from Brenda Bayles’s background check.”

  “Where’s Dad?” J.J. asked her in a low voice.

  “He’s got a meeting this morning,” Cameron said hurriedly. “Tony, what did you find out about Bayles?”

  “Oh, she’s a real piece of work,” Tony said. “I’ll start with the highlights.”

  “He said he’d leave it out here for me to pick up.” J.J.
went back out onto the porch.

  Tony continued, “She’d spent seven years in prison for second-degree murder. That was forty years ago. I found that under her maiden name of Jarvis.”

  “Bingo!” Cameron felt like jumping up and down. With a sense of satisfaction, she poured a fresh cup of coffee.

  J.J. returned and went into the pantry to search there.

  Tony went on. “She and her boyfriend shot and killed a clerk while robbing a convenience store in Canfield.”

  J.J. stepped out of the pantry to listen.

  “He was sixteen. She was eighteen,” Tony said. “He said she’d pulled the trigger. She claimed it was him. Since he was a juvie, authorities took his side. He testified against her and got two years in juvie detention. She got seven years in prison.”

  “This was in Canfield?” J.J. asked.

  “That’s where the robbery happened,” Tony said. “She and Ross Bayles moved here from Youngstown four months ago.”

  “Davis started getting the phone calls from someone he called ‘Bea’ four months ago,” Cameron said. “Since he had been harassed by Bea Miller, he may have assumed the calls were from her. Or, Brenda could have given him her first initial. Whatever it may be, the time period between when the Bayles moved here and the phone calls started is a match.”

  “Brenda has been arrested numerous times for DUI,” Tony said. “She’s also had a few arrests for bar fights. A few years ago, she got into a car accident. This time, her husband was driving. She broke her back in three places. I read one statement that said she didn’t do the physical therapy. That’s why she’s in a wheelchair.”

  “I saw her get out of that wheelchair,” Cameron said.