A Reunion to Die For (A Joshua Thornton Mystery) Page 6

  “Who is Heather Connor?”

  “Second generation of trouble, that’s who.”

  “Who?”

  “She’s Margo Connor’s daughter and every bit as arrogant as her mother.”

  “Who’s Margo Connor?”

  “You know Margo Connor.”

  “Remind me.” Joshua was getting perturbed by his teasing.

  “I’m sure you’ll remember her by her maiden name.”

  “Which is—”

  “Sweeney.”

  “Damn!”

  Chapter Four

  Jan had spent the morning hanging around the courthouse hoping to catch Joshua so she could suggest that they have lunch together. Her intention was two-fold. While spending time with him, she might be able to get information about Grace Henderson’s murder that a journalist less intimate with the county prosecuting attorney would be unable to discover. She also hoped to make him forget about their argument.

  She failed. He was having a luncheon meeting at his desk with one of his part-time prosecutors. So, she decided to try for the man on the front line, Lieutenant Seth Cavanaugh.

  “What do you want?” was his greeting when Jan popped her head around the partition marking off his cubicle that was to serve as his office.

  “I’m working on the Henderson case for The Glendale Vindicator. Do you know—?”

  He snorted. “A jilted boyfriend. Who else?”

  “But I heard that she didn’t date.”

  “Clearly she did.”

  Deciding it would be harder for him to dismiss her if she sat down next to his desk, Jan pulled up a chair. “Can you tell me who your suspects are?”

  Seth looked both ways before answering in a whisper, “She had a split personality. By day, she was the virginal cheerleader, by night, she was—”

  “Josh, did we have a one o’clock meeting?” Curt Sawyer’s voice boomed from the other side of the partition.

  Joshua did not see Jan when he went into the sheriff’s office. “Curt, you have a calendar. Why don’t you use it?” He shut the door.

  Seth rose from his seat. “I don’t have time for you right now.” He ushered her out of his cubicle.

  Jan gave up and drove through a burger place on her way back to the newspaper. Her failure felt complete when she sat down at her desk outside owner/editor Ernie Gaston’s office and saw Gail Reynolds meeting with her boss. They were laughing while she recounted a story from her life as a globe-trotting journalist.

  Jan forced herself to turn away from the scene and laid out her burger, fries, and milkshake in preparation to begin writing about a pre-trial motion in magistrate court for Rex Rollins, who was charged with violating a restraining order and trespassing. It wasn’t a big story, but it was enough to get her name on a byline in the paper. She had written the lead to her story when Ernie’s office door opened and he led Gail to her desk.

  “Jan, look at who has come in for a visit.” Ernie gestured with a wave of his hand in Gail’s direction. “Jan Martin covers the Hancock County courthouse . . . Jan, you know Gail. It’s like old times. Remember back at Oak Glen when I was the editor of the paper and you two were my top reporters?” The year after he graduated from high school, his protégé had beaten out Jan to take over his position as editor.

  “Yes, I remember.” Jan squinted and flexed her cheek muscles to force her face into a smile.

  Ignoring the tension that filled the air between the two women, Ernie continued, “Gail is researching the death of a local girl who died twenty years ago.”

  “Tricia Wheeler,” Jan said to him. “I know. She was shot. The sheriff ruled it a suicide.”

  “I told Gail that we would do everything we can to help. Can you take her to the morgue to get her what we have on Wheeler?”

  Jan fought to conceal her displeasure by forcing herself to sound cheerful. “Sure.” It sounded like a squeak. Grabbing her milkshake, she ushered Gail toward the stairs leading to the basement of The Glendale Vindicator, where they stored their old issues of the paper.

  Gail said, “I heard you sold the drugstore.”

  “That’s right. I’m writing full time now. I cover the courthouse, Josh’s beat.”

  “I remember my first reporting job, at this little television station in Pennsylvania while I was going to school.” She sighed. “I look back and realize that things were so much easier and less stressful then. People expect less of you when no one notices your work.”

  Jan stopped, her hand on the doorknob leading into the dusty file room. She told herself not to say anything.

  “You are really lucky, Jan. Staying here in this small town with no one depending on you to be the best all the time.”

  “I know why you’re doing this.” Jan whirled around. “I know why you’re here.”

  Gail smiled. “Everyone knows why I’m here. I’ve made it no secret.”

  “It’s also no secret that the network didn’t renew your contract.”

  Her smile dropped.

  Aware that she finally had the upper hand, Jan continued, “I saw you on the news, playing all emotional and suddenly having to come here to uncover the truth about your good friend’s murder. But I know the truth. I was there.”

  An edge of fear crept into Gail’s tone. “What do you mean?”

  “Come on! You and Tricia may have taken a few classes together, but you were not friends!”

  “We were friends.”

  “No!” Jan elaborated, “She hung out with the cheerleaders and the jocks. She and her friends were at the top of the social hierarchy. The student government and the school paper were below them. That was where you and I belonged. We were one step above the science geeks. The student government and school paper committee interacted with the jocks, but we were never really in that circle.” She concluded, “You weren’t friends with Trish.”

  Gail’s lack of a reaction told Jan that she was on the right track. “Of course, for you to come to town and say that you were investigating the death of someone you didn’t give a damn about wouldn’t make for very good press, and without that, you can’t get another network job. Now, why, I wonder, can’t you get another network job without publishing another book? Did I read something on some Web site about a hospital visit? Could it have something to do with drugs?”

  “Tricia Wheeler was murdered.”

  “I don’t doubt that. And I believe her case does need to be reopened. But I don’t like you using her murder for your own ambitions. That’s the difference between you and me.”

  Gail’s eyes narrowed. “If you don’t open that door and get me everything this paper has on Tricia, I am going to go tell your boss some very unpleasant things about you and you’re going to be looking for a new job.”

  “Mary, have you seen my pen?” Joshua called out of his office to his administrative assistant.

  She glanced around her desk and responded with a no.

  He once again rummaged through the drawers of his desk in his search of the blue-and-gold pen that Jan had given him. Unable to find it, he slammed the last drawer shut and looked at the empty holder at the front of the desk.

  With a hand on her hip, Mary questioned him from the doorway of his office, “When was the last time you saw it?” Her voice held a tone that reminded him of his grandmother when he asked her to help him find things. Grandmamma Thornton would consent to aid in the search, but not without a lecture about putting his things away.

  “A couple of days ago,” he answered.

  Mary proceeded to remove folders from his IN box to see if the pen had slipped under the files.

  “I know I didn’t take it home. I’ve been keeping it here in the office in the holder where it belongs.” He groaned when the ringing phone interrupted the search. “This is Jos
hua Thornton.”

  Without any greeting, Seth Cavanaugh launched into the reason for his call, “We got a break in the Henderson murder. The lab got a match on the slug that the medical examiner took out of the girl.”

  “The gun was used in a previous crime?” He sat back in his seat to let Mary reach in front of him to open the center top drawer of his desk to search for the pen.

  “Yeah,” Seth answered. “It was a four-year-old murder case in Weirton. The victim was Matthew Landers, an eighteen-year-old college kid, killed execution-style. He walked in on his father’s house being robbed. There was a string of break-ins in the area at the time.”

  “But the burglaries stopped.” Joshua shook his head when she held up an old blue pen to ask if that was it.

  “After the thieves broke into the wrong house. The owner blew one of the guys away with a shotgun. Justifiable homicide. The guy who got blown away was Bobby Unger. They didn’t find the murder weapon of the Landers boy so they could never officially connect the burglaries to his murder, but all the circumstantial stuff was there. Now, the guy who shot Unger says there were two of them and the second one got away. He said it was a boy, but he was unable to identify him because it was dark. Unger had a little brother named Billy. He was fourteen at the time.”

  Joshua added four years to fourteen to arrive at Billy’s current age. He leaned back in his chair. “Just the right age to get a sixteen-year-old girl pregnant. Do you have any way of connecting Billy Unger to Grace?”

  “Nope.”

  “That gun could have been in a hundred different hands since that kid was killed. Has Unger been in any trouble since then?”

  “He turned eighteen this past summer. So his record is officially clean. However, my sources in Steubenville tell me that he has a juvie record as long as your arm.”

  Joshua ordered, “Get Heather Connor in here as soon as possible. The kids say that she’s a party girl and, from what I have learned, Steubenville is the place to party. Maybe she can connect Billy to Grace.”

  With a shake of her head and a shrug of her shoulders, Mary left the office, defeated in her search for the pen.

  Joshua had sat up in his chair and was about to hang up the phone when the investigator added in a by-the-way tone, “Interesting thing that Connor’s name has come up in this case.”

  “Why?” Joshua leaned back again in his chair.

  “You know Rollins was arraigned in the magistrate’s court today on those charges of violating the restraining order?”

  “Yes. Foster is working that case.” Joshua would hand off his smaller cases in the magistrate’s court to one of his two part-time lawyers, who, like Tori Brody, were just getting started.

  “Did Foster tell you that when Rollins came into court he had a Pittsburgh lawyer there to defend him? Christine Watson. She’s supposed to be big.”

  “I know her. She doesn’t usually defend clients of his . . . uh . . .” Joshua looked for the right word. “. . . caliber?”

  “She’s pleading him innocent and requested a jury trial. He’s out on bail.”

  “A jury trial?” Joshua did not expect Rex Rollins to put up such a defense. He was certain he would plead no contest. “Watson doesn’t come cheap. What rich relative did he kill off?”

  “That’s why I said this was so interesting,” Seth chuckled. “The deputy who was keeping an eye on Rollins after we arrested him says that he called Margo Connor from the hospital the night before he was released. Watson was waiting for him at the jail. I did a little digging this afternoon and guess what former employer has Watson on retainer?”

  “Margo Connor. Maiden name Sweeney.”

  “What have you got on the Grace Henderson murder?”

  Jan bristled. Gail was poring over all the clippings on Tricia Wheeler that the reporter had printed from the microfiche in the file room. She had perused the clippings herself while she printed them. Now, when Jan thought that she had spent as much time with her as she could take, Gail once again intruded into her territory.

  “Sorry,” she responded politely, but firmly, “That’s my story.” She assumed that the seasoned professional would understand that reporters, as a rule, did not give away their stories.

  “Wasn’t she a cheerleader?”

  Jan laughed. “Those murders are not connected.”

  “They were both Oak Glen cheerleaders, shot once through the chest, after school, in their uniforms.”

  “Twenty years apart?”

  Again, Gail was condescending. “That’s the difference between you and me, Jan. I know a story when I see it. That is why I am here.” She indicated her perfect ensemble. “And you are there.” She wiped a smudge of dust from her colleague’s cheap blouse.

  Jan emptied the melted remnants of her milkshake onto Gail’s silk blouse.

  When a sweet thing like Grace Henderson gets killed in a quiet small town, the public gets nervous.

  The father of a teenaged daughter away at her first year of college, Tad was so sickened to have to conduct an autopsy on Grace that he felt compelled to find out who killed the girl who had no reason for being on his examination table. That was why he had changed from his doctor’s robes and dressed down into jeans and a polo shirt to go to Steubenville to seek out the orange-haired girl posing with Grace for the picture found in her purse. Steubenville, Ohio, was out of his jurisdiction. Murder investigations were not in his job description, but Tad believed that rules were made to be broken.

  It was at the third bar frequented by young people that he spotted her. He guessed that he was on the right trail when he saw the name and logo of the establishment: Half-Moon. They matched the partial name and logo in the picture. He recognized the bartender as the bare-chested man hugging the two girls. In the late afternoon, the piece of beefcake was working his regular job of tending bar.

  Since it was a school day, most of the regular patrons were home living their public lives. That didn’t seem to have any significance for the girl with orange hair, who sat alone with her vodka and orange juice at the bar.

  “Hello,” Tad took a spot on the stool next to her. He gestured to the bartender for a root beer.

  The girl looked over the attractive older man and decided that he might be worth her while. “I’ve never seen you here before.”

  “First time.”

  “Ah, so you’re a virgin?” she quipped.

  “Not exactly.”

  As she took another sip of her drink, he observed a ring she wore on her right hand. The stone that resembled a ruby surrounded by rhinestones looked oversized. Has to be a fake, he thought, like the orange hair.

  He sipped his soda. “I’m from Chester.”

  “Really?”

  “I think we might both know someone.”

  “I don’t know anyone from Chester.”

  “How about the late Grace Henderson?” He waited for her reaction.

  It was slow to come. She asked defiantly, “Who are you?”

  “Medical examiner.” He showed her his badge. “Did you know that your friend was dead?” When she tried to slide off her stool away from him, he grabbed her arm and pulled her back.

  “You have no authority here,” she objected.

  “One phone call to your police and I can have you taken into custody. Citizen’s arrest.”

  “For what?”

  Tad tapped her glass. “Underage drinking. You can talk to me here, or in the police station while we’re waiting for your parents.”

  “Her ID says she’s twenty-one, man,” the bartender interjected.

  Tad stood up. His attitude was sufficient to intimidate the man behind the bar.

  “It’s okay, Mitch.” She turned to the doctor and scoffed at his threat of arrest. “My parents don’t care. They’re hom
e getting drunk themselves.”

  “Then you can sit in a cell until they sober up enough to come pick you up.” He pulled her alongside him toward the exit.

  She yanked him back before jumping back up onto the stool. “What do you want to know?”

  “Your name for one.”

  “Nicki. Nicki Samuels.”

  “How long had you known Grace?”

  “I met her this summer. We met at the swimming pool at the resort in Newell. Her parents never let her do anything. So I invited her to come along with me to the clubs. She sneaked out after her parents were asleep, and I’d pick her up.”

  “And do what?”

  “Hit the clubs. Play with the guys. Her parents didn’t even let her date. We had a good time until she decided to go get herself pregnant.”

  “She got herself pregnant? Did anybody ever tell you girls that it takes two to get pregnant?”

  “The dummy thought that Billy would marry her if she got knocked up.”

  “Billy who?”

  “Billy Unger.”

  “How did Billy take the news that he was going to be a daddy?”

  Nicki giggled. “He went ballistic, of course. He wanted her to get rid of it, but she wasn’t about to do that.”

  “And so someone got rid of both her and the baby,” Tad pointed out.

  “He didn’t kill her.”

  “What makes you so certain?”

  “He was going to run away. He told me Saturday night. He’s been working on something that is going to have a big payoff, and then he’ll have enough money to take off where no one will ever find him.”

  “Did you tell Grace that her boyfriend was going to leave her high and dry?”

  “It was none of my business. The little idiot thought the two of them were going to elope.” Her sneer told him that she really didn’t give a damn about the predicament the girl she had led into the nightlife was going to be left in.