5
“Proof,” Chester said, “is tough to come by in a case like this.”
Amelia and I sat side by side, each absorbing Chester’s words like gospel. He had a magnetism about him that was hard to ignore. It wasn’t his looks, or even the tone of his voice. I think it had more to do with the confidence with which he spoke, the certainty that what he was saying was the absolute truth.
“The police believe Christine Danvers dead. They have a witness claiming he saw Joe with the body and a shovel, but the witness is suspect at best. What else do they have?”
He looked at us, though I knew he wasn’t expecting an answer.
“A missing woman,” he said, smacking the top of his desk. “That’s it.”
“But Joe fled town,” I said. “You can’t ignore that.”
Chester pointed at me, as if I was making a good point in his favor. “He did leave town. I, for one, believe that to be a mistake on his part, but it was understandable. He was being hounded by the people of Grey Falls, watched by the police. He was being labeled a murderer. His wife was gone, presumed dead. Let me ask you, Mrs. Denton, would you not also want to get away?”
I didn’t have to think about it for long. “I suppose I would.”
“And that’s what Joe did. He left town to get away from the constant pressure building up around him. He hid, changed his name so that no one could find him.”
“But he came back,” Amelia said.
“That he did.” Chester looked to Amelia as he might a prized student. “He came back because he knew Christine was still out there. He came back because he thought it was the only way he could find her again. He hoped no one involved in the old case would recognize him, but I did. And it seems someone else must have.”
I truly wanted to believe what Chester was saying, but it was hard. So far, all he’d given me was his belief with nothing to back it up. “What makes you think Christine is still alive?” I asked. “Do you have any sort of proof?”
Chester’s face fell at my question. “Unfortunately, no. I have a lack of proof when it comes to the popular belief of Joe’s guilt. I have doubts that a man like Joe would have killed his wife for any reason. I have the fact that there is no hard evidence of him hurting her, or that she was harmed at all.” He leaned forward, met my eye. “And I have rumors.”
“Rumors?” There was a healthy dose of skepticism in my voice.
“I know it’s not much,” he allowed. “But sometimes rumors do pan out.”
“Sometimes it’s all you have to go on,” Amelia said.
I knew that all too well, just as I knew that often, rumors could lead you down the wrong path and obscure the truth.
“What kind of rumors have you heard?” I asked.
“That while Joe was looking for his missing wife, Christine was, in turn, looking for him.”
I raised my eyebrows at that. “Did she tell you that?”
Chester laughed. “How easy would my job be if she had? No, I have nothing so grand as a letter from her. But when you spend as much time on a case as I have, you hear a lot of things. A lot of it is bunk. But sometimes, there’s something that stands out, especially when you hear it from more than one source.”
“Yet, you haven’t been able to confirm anything?”
“Sadly, no. But, if nothing else, I hope Joe’s death will somehow draw out the truth.”
Amelia and I left a short time later. I wasn’t completely convinced of Joe’s innocence, but I did feel better about the whole mess. If he didn’t kill his wife, and she was still out there somewhere, then perhaps there’d be some form of justice for him.
“What do you think?” Amelia asked on the way home.
“I think we need to be careful,” I said. “If Chester’s wrong, we could be defending a guilty man.”
“He’s not.” The confidence in her voice didn’t surprise me. Chester had made a pretty good argument, despite his lack of proof.
Amelia dropped me off at the house and immediately took off again. I wondered if she was heading back to Chester Chudzinski’s office to look into Joe’s case some more. My chest tightened at the thought—I didn’t want my daughter to put herself in harm’s way—but there was nothing I could do about it. She was an adult, able to make her own choices.
Still, it was hard. They never stopped being your children, no matter how old they got.
Manny had yet to return with the van, and Ben was still out doing whatever he was doing, which left me to my own devices. I headed inside, checked on Sheamus and Wheels, and then grabbed the keys to Manny’s car. There might have been a murder, and I had a cat to find a home for, but I still had shopping to do.
I tried not to think about Joseph and Christine Danvers as I made my way through the grocery, but it was hard. I kept coming back to what Chester had said about Christine possibly being alive, and wondered if there was any chance he was right after all these years. Did she know about his death? Could she have come back to town and killed her husband herself? If so, why?
I simply didn’t know enough about their relationship to form any concrete hypotheses. Could I really trust Chester’s view, considering he worked for Joe? That had to create a bias.
“It’ll be two hundred dollars and forty-five cents, ma’am.” I startled back to the present and shoved my card into the reader. The clerk was giving me a worried look, as if he’d told me my total more than once.
I wheeled the groceries to Manny’s car, knowing I had likely forgotten a few important items in my haze. I packed everything away—rebagging the bread and other squishables that were bagged with sharp, heavy objects as I did—and then climbed into the driver’s seat.
It took only a few seconds for me to realize I was being followed once again.
The sedan pulled out of a space a few cars down in the same aisle where I’d parked. In fact, I’d walked right by it when I’d taken my groceries to the car, but hadn’t noticed it in the sea of vehicles.
The car stayed back, but always in sight as I pulled out of the lot, and onto the main drag.
“Christine?” I wondered aloud. If she truly was alive and had come back to kill her husband, who did she think I was? A mistress? A witness of some kind?
My first instinct was to drive straight to the police station and tell Cavanaugh about my tail. Of course, I doubted the driver would follow me all the way to the station. Even if I called ahead, it was likely they’d vanish in traffic before I got anywhere close to where Cavanaugh would be.
I didn’t want my stalker to vanish; not entirely. If the driver was the killer, or perhaps if they knew who killed Joe, I needed to talk to them. Or, at least, the police did.
One thing was for sure; I wasn’t about to lead my tail home again. Once was enough.
Jacking up the cold air so my ice cream would stand a chance, I turned away from downtown Grey Falls, and headed for a series of roads off the beaten path that I was familiar with. Here, there was more than one dead end road, but enough people around so I didn’t have to worry about my safety.
The brown sedan followed from a distance, but follow it did. I drove with one eye on the road, the other on my rearview mirror. If the sedan were to break off, I wanted to know exactly where it did, and then, perhaps, I could turn the tables on my pursuer and follow them instead.
The car was still behind me as I turned onto a bumpy, pothole-ridden street. It forced me to slow more than I liked, and I feared the sedan might decide to cruise on past, but after a few long seconds, it turned slowly onto the road.
“Got ya,” I muttered, weaving around the worst of the craters in the road. It looked like a meteor shower had struck, but no matter how many times the city tried to repair the road, it ended up looking like this after only a few months. Farm equipment tended to do that.
I continued on for five more minutes, and then made another turn onto a dead-end street. The sign had been knocked over years ago and no one had bothered to right it again. I was counting on my stalker not to know the area well enough to realize what I was doing.
Sure enough, after a few moments, the sedan pulled onto the road, though I noted they weren’t following me as quickly as before. Nerves? Or had they had enough of the wild-goose chase?
Either way, this was it. If I waited much longer, I feared they’d give up the chase and I’d miss my chance.
The cul-de-sac was just up ahead. As I sped up and made the turn quickly, I could feel the tires on the driver’s side want to lift from the road. I was facing the sedan a second later, hoping the driver wouldn’t realize what was happening until it was too late.
Brake lights flared. The sedan came to an abrupt halt, just past a driveway that led to a house that looked to have been left abandoned.
I slammed on the gas and shot forward, heart pounding in my ears. My eyes were locked on the sedan. The driver was sitting bolt upright, but the sun was reflecting off the windshield, making it hard to see them clearly.
The sedan started backing up, so I pressed the gas clear to the floor.
“No you don’t,” I muttered. My entire body was tense, and I feared that if I pressed it too much, Manny’s car would stall. It was already shaking more than it should.
The sedan backed into the driveway, and stopped. I assumed the driver planned on gunning it and speeding away before I could get close.
Unfortunately for him, it was too late.
A dark, wide-eyed face stared back at me from the driver’s seat as I shot past. But instead of a female face, like I expected, I saw the short hair and the well-trimmed beard of a man who couldn’t be far into his thirties.
And then I was past. I hit my brakes and jammed the car into reverse, but I was too slow. The sedan’s tires threw gravel as the driver shot out of the driveway and flew around me. I tried to get my car back into gear and give chase, but by the time I reached the end of the street, the car was gone.
This time, I didn’t hesitate to make for the police station. Now that I had a description of my stalker, I had something to give Detective Cavanaugh.
The Grey Falls police station sat downtown, just across the street from the courthouse. I pulled into the lot and headed for the large plate-glass doors out front. My heart had slowed its rapid hammering, but I still felt jazzed up from the chase. No wonder some people became adrenaline junkies. It was exhilarating, if not terrifying.
I went straight through the metal detectors without setting them off. I had a feeling they didn’t bother turning them on most of the time; it wasn’t like Grey Falls was rife with crime. I made for the front desk and the officer who was sitting there.
“Hello, Officer Mohr,” I said by way of greeting.
“Oh!” The young cop blinked and, for a moment, looked frightened by my appearance. “Hi! Mrs. Dyson, right?”
“Denton, but call me Liz.”
He winced. “Right, right. Liz.” Officer Mohr’s face reddened. I kind of felt bad for him. He’d made a mistake or two during a recent investigation and it appeared as if it had earned him permanent front desk duty. He now had a nameplate sitting atop the desk, which hadn’t been there before. The poor guy looked miserable.
Of course, his mistake nearly caused my son to be charged with murder, so I wasn’t entirely sympathetic.
“What can I do for you, Liz?” he asked. “I hope there’s nothing wrong.”
“Not really.” I glanced at the room behind him. Other cops were at work, but I didn’t recognize any of them. “Do you know if Detective Cavanaugh is in? I have some information for him.”
Mohr paled at Cavanaugh’s name. “I . . . I’m not sure. Let me check.” He rose, and nearly tripped over his own two feet as he scurried off somewhere into the back of the station.
I wandered away from the desk, to the red plastic chairs set against the wall. No one was currently sitting in them, and I decided I didn’t want to change that. I had bad memories of this place, and those chairs. The last time I was here, I’d hoped it would be, well, the last.
Yet, here I was. I really didn’t want to make this a habit.
“You wanted to see me, Mrs. Denton?” Cavanaugh approached, alone. Officer Mohr was back at his desk, head down, furiously scribbling away at something. With the way he kept glancing up at us, I had a feeling he was only pretending to work, just so Cavanaugh wouldn’t have something to yell at him about.
“Yes, Detective.” Unsure what the proper protocol might be, I reached out a hand. Cavanaugh shook it with a bemused expression. “I’ve learned a few things about Joseph Danvers’s murder. Or the investigation, anyway.”
I fully expected Cavanaugh to chide me for poking my nose into police business, but he merely nodded at me to go on.
I quickly told him about my conversation with Chester Chudzinski, and how he believed Christine Danvers might still be alive. As I spoke, Cavanaugh’s expression didn’t change an iota. He listened attentively, almost passively, though I knew he was cataloging my every word.
“There’s a chance Christine killed her husband,” I said. “That is, if Chester is right about her.”
“I’m aware of Mr. Chudzinski’s beliefs,” Cavanaugh said. “His name appeared more than once in the case files.”
“So, do you think it’s possible?”
He shrugged. “Anything is possible, I suppose. But”—he raised a finger before I could speak—“don’t read too much into it. His findings were dismissed because he was unable to present the officers on the case with any workable evidence. I don’t believe that has changed, has it?”
“Well, no. But what if he is right?”
“I understand why you’re interested,” Cavanaugh said. “But you need to be careful here. There are people who have worked this thing since it started. Just because they haven’t been able to close the case, doesn’t mean they have given up on finding out what really happened.”
“Like Chester.” It came out almost defiant.
Cavanaugh gave me a single nod, conceding the point. “Trust me, we have this covered. Now, was there anything else?”
I felt kind of silly since he’d so easily dismissed Chester’s findings, but I wasn’t about to hold anything back from him.
“That car I told you about followed me again.”
Cavanaugh’s entire demeanor changed. He stood up straighter, his eyes going razor sharp. “Did you catch a plate this time?”
“No.” I mentally cursed myself for not doing so. I’d been so intent on the driver, it had completely slipped my mind. I, obviously, would never make a good detective. “But I did get a look at the driver’s face.”
“Did you recognize them?”
I shook my head. “All I can say is that it was a black man, maybe in his thirties. It happened so fast, I’m not totally sure.” I gave him a quick description, making sure to note how well-groomed he seemed.
Cavanaugh pulled out a notebook while I talked and took notes. “Was there anything else about him that stood out?” he asked. “Did he look angry? Threatening?”
“He looked kind of scared, actually.” Whether it was because he realized I’d gotten a look at him, or for some other reason, I didn’t know. “He took off as soon as he had the chance. Now that I’ve seen his face, I wonder if I’ll ever see him again.”
Cavanaugh frowned at that and reread his notes before tucking the notebook away. “I want you to be careful, Mrs. Denton. You don’t know what this man wants, or what his connection to the deceased might be.”
“If there’s one at all.”
He gave me a flat look that had me blushing in embarrassment. Of course, there was a connection. “If you see him again, don’t try to interact with him, don’t try to get another look. Find somewhere safe and call me.”
“I will.”
“I’ll send someone right away.” He paused, and then, “In fact, I’ll have someone periodically drive by your place to make sure your sedan driver doesn’t try to make a move against you.”
“That won’t be necessary,” I said.
“But I’ll do it anyway. Please, Mrs. Denton, this is a delicate situation. I don’t want you to get hurt. If you or your family hear or see anything that sets you on edge, don’t hesitate to call. I don’t want to scare you, but with a murder on our hands, whatever happens next, could be a matter of life or death.”