Beauty to Die For and Other Mystery Shorts Read online

  Instead of launching into the details of her sister’s disappearance, she asked him, “What kind of case are you working on that Charley’s name came up?”

  Cameron and Joshua exchanged glances before turning back to the doctor.

  “Murder,” he finally answered.

  “Why kind of murder?” Her counter question was quick.

  “I can’t really go into the details.”

  “Charley disappeared in New York.”

  Cameron said, “We suspect we found a witness who may know something about Charley’s disappearance. But before we can pursue it, we need more details about how she disappeared.”

  “What witness?”

  “We can’t say. It’s an active investigation.” Cameron concluded it wasn’t really a lie. Even though the Rachel Burke case was closed, Cameron’s unofficial investigation was active.

  This seemed to satisfy Dr. Sam Halston.

  “Charley had gone to Syracuse with some friends for the football game. It was October in 1996. Pittsburgh won. They all went out clubbing in Syracuse to celebrate after the game. Charley didn’t come home. No one has seen her ever since.”

  Now it was time to connect some dots. “Who were her friends?” Joshua sat on the edge of the sofa to wait for her answer, which came quickly.

  “Her best friends. Susan Burke. Susan’s sister Rachel, and Linda Rogers. It’s now Pryor, Senator Pryor.”

  Cameron grasped his arm. This is it! This is the Charley they were fighting about in the recording.

  Sam said, “Charley never should have gone out with them.”

  “Why do you say that?” Joshua sat so much closer that he threatened to fall off the sofa onto his rump on the floor.

  “Charley had problems.” She gestured at the office and the clinic. “She’s why I’m here today.” She stared at one of the pictures she had of her sister on the desk. “Charley was what most people nowadays would call a drama queen. She was emotional, but it was more than that. Her highs where higher than other girls and her lows were lower. Back then, no one had any idea that she had a serious problem.”

  “Charley was bi-polar,” Cameron said.

  Sam nodded. “Not knowing what her problem was, with no one to help her other than to offer a shoulder for her to cry on and asking her to calm down when she was manic, she tried self-medicating as best she could. By that I mean drinking or taking pills or smoking pot. A lot of times, she was out of control, like she was that night in Syracuse.”

  “What happened in Syracuse?” Joshua asked. “Who told you what happened?”

  “Susan Burke,” Sam said. “They were best friends. Charley was studying theater and communications. She had interviewed Ronald Pryor on her radio show here on campus and they started having a fling. Susan had warned her that it was a mistake. He was dating Linda. They were serious, as serious as you can be when you’re cheating on your fiancée. He was going to marry Linda. They were going to be a power couple. But Charley bought all the lies about him loving her. Then, here, the four of them went up to Syracuse together and after the game they went out clubbing.”

  Cameron asked, “She rode up to Syracuse with the girlfriend of the guy she was sleeping with? I can imagine that ride.”

  “Charley wasn’t wrapped too tight before she started drinking on that trip.”

  “When did it all come apart?”

  “At their third club after the game. According to Susan, Ronald was paying attention to Linda. Charley was drunk, plus she was in one of her manic moods. She started a fight with Ronald for not telling Linda about them. the bartender threw them out. Rachel and Susan dragged her out of the club and put her in the car to take her home. Next thing Susan says she knew, Linda was in the car, too, and they were fighting in the back seat while Rachel was trying to drive back to the motel. Then, Charley was climbing over the front seat to grab the wheel out of Rachel’s hands away. They almost crashed. Rachel hit the brakes and Charley got out –where they could not remember—and refused to get back in the car. It was close to one o’clock in the morning and they were in downtown Syracuse. Linda ordered Rachel to leave her there. Rachel drove away—leaving Charley there on the street.”

  “I don’t believe it,” Joshua breathed in disbelief. “They left her there.”

  With the steadiness that comes with acceptance, Sam said, “Susan told me that she knew Charley had money and expected her to get a cab to take her back to the motel. Only problem is, in her condition, it was doubtable if she could remember where they were staying. As soon as she got back to the motel and Linda was out of the car, Susan turned the car around and went back to find Charley, but she was gone.” She let out a breath that, in spite of the passage of years, contained a whimper. “No one ever saw her again.”

  “Have you ever talked to Senator Pryor about what she thinks happened to Charley?” Cameron asked.

  “She’s made it very clear that she doesn’t ever want to talk to me about it anymore.” Sam added, “Senator Pryor is not the most compassionate of people. She has a six foot wall, complete with guard dogs and motion sensors, built around her heart. No one gets in.”

  “That cold, huh?” Cameron asked.

  Sam nodded her head with a smile. “I used to be angry with her for refusing to help me find Charley. Now, treating students here, I have come to feel sorry for her. She must be a miserable person. As smart as she is, she has to know that she’s married to a dog.”

  “The wife only pretends to be the last to know,” Joshua said. “What about the police in Syracuse? Have they been any help?”

  She paused, “In two-thousand and five, they found a serial killer that was targeting streetwalkers in downtown Syracuse. He would keep them captive in his house for months until he got tired of them and then he would kill them and bury them in his basement. I expected the police to call me to tell me that Charley was one of his victims. When they didn’t call me, I called them. They didn’t think so. Charley disappeared about three years before the first murder this guy confessed to.

  “It’s funny.” She shrugged. “While I was relieved to find out that she didn’t suffer through months of being kept chained up like an animal, I wished it was her so that I would know what had happened. Then it would have been over.” She sucked in a shuddering breath. “Do you know what I mean?”

  “Yeah, I know what you mean,” Joshua said.

  She looked over at him. Now it was the man on the doctor’s sofa that was being asked the question by the doctor. “Do you really think it’s possible to find out after all these years what happened to Charley?”

  He cocked his head at her. “When you set your mind to it, there’s nothing you can’t do. I’ve found that to be true.”

  “That’s better than what most people offer me,” she said.

  “Linda Pryor killed Rachel Burke because guilt was eating at her and she was about to spill the beans about Linda killing Charley Halston,” Cameron said during their long drive down the turnpike to home. “Not only that, but Rachel was having an affair with her husband, which is the same reason Linda killed Charley.”

  “Now all we have to do is prove it,” Joshua said. “We still don’t have a positive ID on the body found in the Allegheny Mountains and I guarantee that no one is going to get anywhere near Senator Pryor without any evidence. Right now, we have none.”

  Cameron was studying the screen on her smart phone. “We will. That’s the beauty of 5Gs. I already sent a message to the Syracuse police to match the dental records they have on file for Charlene Halston to the Jane Doe in the Allegheny Mountains. Nowadays, with computers, they should be able to do the comparison in no time.”

  “Time is running out,” Joshua told her. “Gina Robb’s body is shutting down, but she won’t give a do not resuscitate order until she knows I’ve found out who framed and killed Billy.”

  “Linda Pryor has all kinds of political power,” Cameron said. “She must have known about Billy threatening Rachel after she fired
him.”

  “Do we know that for sure?” Joshua turned to look at her, while keeping one eye on the road. “She didn’t work at the salon. She was on the campaign trail. Remember, this was September 2001. Election was only a couple of months away. Would Linda Pryor have bothered knowing about a little gopher in Rachel Burke’s salon? Why go to the trouble of framing and killing him? Why not just let Rachel Burke’s murder look like a break-in gone wrong?”

  “The circumstantial evidence points to Senator Linda Pryor,” Cameron said. “She has the juice to be able to get her people to cover this up.”

  “I certainly think Senator Pryor is capable of killing Rachel Burke,” Joshua said. “From the recording, Rachel and Susan were deathly afraid of her.”

  Cameron went on to explained, “Susan Burke was there with her sister Rachel and Pryor when Charley Halston disappeared. Pryor says right there in the recording, mention Charley’s name again and she’d end up the same way she did. The next day, Rachel is stabbed to death. The Allegheny National Forest is on the way home from Syracuse. After killing Charley, they threw her body in the trunk of the car and dumped it in the mountains for the bears to finish off. Then, they made up this cock-in-bull story about her disappearing a state away. Everyone is looking for her in New York, when she is really hours away in Pennsylvania.”

  Joshua nodded his head as it came together in his mind. “After Rachel’s murdered, Angela digs up a report about a Jane Doe found in the mountains based on what she had overheard in the recording.”

  “Being a hair’s breadth from the Senate seat,” Cameron said, “Linda Pryor couldn’t risk Angela ruining everything. When Angela refused to buy Ellicott’s take on what happened, Linda ordered him to make her go away.”

  Joshua’s cell phone vibrated to cut off their conversation. Cameron checked the caller ID. It read Tad. “Hey, Doc,” she called into the speaker phone.

  “Where are you two?” Tad asked.

  “We’re on the Pennsylvania Turnpike,” she answered. “What’s up?”

  “Your house got broken into.”

  On this news, Joshua pulled over. “Was anything taken?”

  Tad’s response was a laugh. “No.”

  “What’s so funny?” Joshua failed to see the humor.

  Tad said, “Well, you know how you complain that Admiral is so lazy that if someone broke in, he would sleep through it? A little while ago, I’m in the kitchen in our house next door, making myself a sandwich, and suddenly, I hear a gunshot and all hell breaks loose. I look outside just in time to see this guy running across your back yard with a skunk cat on top of his head and a one-hundred-and-fifty pound dog attached to his butt! He didn’t even make it to the road before he collapsed. By the time I got there, Admiral had shredded his pants down to his knees and Irving made his head look like it had been run through a food processor.”

  “Is Irving okay?” Cameron gushed. Judging by Tad’s laugh, the skunk cat was fine.

  “Did you call the sheriff?” Joshua asked.

  “Yeah, they got the guy and took him to the hospital. Irving and Admiral refused to get off him until Sheriff Sawyer came.” Tad turned serious. “You’ll never believe who the guy was.”

  “Who?” Joshua was thinking of any number of young men who had been friends of any of his children.

  “A Pennsylvania State cop,” Tad said. “Badge and everything. His driver’s license says his name is Ralph Ellicott. He was carrying a gun, too. I don’t think he was breaking in to steal anything.”

  Cameron jabbed Joshua in the arm. “I was right.”

  “We know about Charley.”

  Susan Burke opened the front door of her home to find Joshua Thornton leaning in the doorway. Wearing her badge and gun, Cameron was directly behind him.

  “We have Ralph Ellicott sitting in a jail cell in Hancock County, West Virginia, after breaking into my home,” Joshua said. “He had a throw away gun on him. I’m thinking someone sent him to shut me and my wife up. Plus, Charley Halston’s body was found in the Allegheny Mountains, not far from where you and your sister and Linda Pryor had driven through on your way home from Syracuse.”

  “We also have a recording where Rachel as much as threatened to tell the truth about Charley,” Cameron added. “Everything is on its way to coming out.”

  “If you don’t want to be taken away from your son and sent to jail for being an accessory,” Joshua said, “now is the time to start talking.”

  Susan regarded them both. “You say you have a recording where Rachel was wanting to tell the truth?”

  Cameron nodded her head. “A journalist had accidentally recorded the fight you and Rachel and Linda had at Rachel’s Labor Day party.”

  “Where Linda confronted Rachel about her affair with her husband,” Joshua clarified.

  “Oh,” Susan said. “I guess it is time for the truth to come out.” She stepped back to invite them inside. “Please sit down.”

  Joshua and Cameron sat on the sofa across from her.

  While they waited in silence, Susan brought her hands up to her face. Tears came to her eyes. Finally, she spoke, “Charley was my best friend. She was wacky. Fun, and different from everyone else. She also believed everyone was like her. Since she would never lie, then she didn’t think other people would either. Ronald Pryor had seduced her into an affair, when he had no intention of leaving Linda. But he told her he loved her and she believed him, even when everyone told her what a fool she was. We all went up to Syracuse, New York, for a big football game, and Charley confronted Ronald in a club to tell Linda that he loved her. Linda attacked her. A fight broke out and we all got tossed out of the club. We were in the car trying to get back to the hotel and Rachel was trying to drive, when Charley went nuts because Linda was tearing her hair out in the back seat of the car. Rachel pulled over because she was going to wreck. The fight spilled out into the street, and—It was over.” She paused to wipe the tears from her eyes. “Linda bashed in Charley’s skull with a brick she found on the side of the road.”

  They were lost in their thoughts watching her.

  “Everything after that was like in a fog,” she said in a soft voice. “We were just standing over Charley looking at her lying with her head in a pool of blood on the sidewalk while Linda was snapping orders at us to wrap up her body—fast—put her in the trunk of the car and for us to get out of there. The next morning, Linda called the police to say that our friend was missing. They never even offered to look in the trunk of our car. The next day, on the way home, we went to the Allegheny Forest to dump her body on the way home.”

  She stopped talking to suck in a deep breath. Her eyes were glazing over.

  “When I found Rachel’s body, I knew. I just knew it was Linda,” Susan said. “When she wants something ...”

  “My client wants it on record that she is here voluntarily,” her lawyer tapped his finger on the table top in front of Cameron as she stepped inside.

  “We are as anxious to get this misunderstanding cleared up as the media,” Senator Linda Pryor smoothed the front of her red suit and peered at her reflection in the two-way mirror. The years had not been kind to her. Her firm serious expression had frozen to give her a gaunt, unpleasant appearance.

  “Ralph Ellicott is telling us that your client gave him orders to kill my husband and me for asking too many questions about Rachel Burke’s murder,” Cameron began.

  “That’s a lie,” the Senator said. “I told him to end your investigation. I didn’t tell him to kill anyone.”

  “Did he contact you about my visit with him?” Cameron said. “The one where I asked him about the lack of physical evidence placing Billy Robb on the scene of Rachel Burke’s murder. Yet, we have two witnesses who said you were fighting with Rachel Burke just one day before her murder.”

  “Your witnesses are mistaken,” Linda said. “I had no reason to kill Rachel.”

  “I’d call sleeping with your husband and threatening to go to the police to te
ll them about you committing murder a big motive,” Cameron countered.

  “Your witnesses are full of it,” Linda tapped her finger on the table. “One, I never killed anyone, anywhere, anytime. Two, Rachel was not sleeping with my husband, therefore I didn’t get into any fight with her about sleeping with my husband.”

  “Not according—”

  “Susan was sleeping with my husband,” Linda said. “And yes, I did get into her face about it the day before Rachel was killed. That slut and my pig of a husband embarrassed the hell out of me. They went running off on a bike ride and Susan comes back with her arm all banged up and they tried to tell me this lie about her falling off the bike. If Ronald is going to be sneaking around with my being Senator, the least he could do is become a better liar.” Uttering a sigh of disgust, Linda crossed one leg over the other and rolled her eyes.

  Cameron gazed at her while trying to piece together what the senator had said. She could sense Joshua doing the same in the observation room behind her. Finally, she found her voice to asked, “Susan messed up her arm.”

  “Yes,” Linda said with a note of annoyance. “Sprained it or something. Somehow while they were going at it like a couple of horny rabbits—”

  “Susan, not Rachel?”

  “Yes, it was Susan that Ronald was sleeping with … at that time!” Linda said. “He did have a fling with Rachel off and on all through college. I think he was even in love with her for a while.” With a smirk, she announced, “But my family had more power and money. I’m not stupid. I know that’s why he stays around. All I ask of him is that he be discreet.”

  “Was Rachel sleeping with Ronald at that time?” Cameron asked.

  Linda shrugged. “You have to ask him.”

  Cameron slammed her folder shut. She started to get up to leave, but stopped to ask, “Who killed Charley Halston?”

  Linda gazed at her. Her eyes narrowed. “My temper is infamous.”