Barnwell arrived at headquarters the following morning to find Detective Sutton lurking outside Jeffrey’s office. She introduced herself to the digital forensics investigator, who was nothing like she had pictured him. Instead of a small, bookish man, she found a behemoth, easily six feet four and with a statement of net girth that strained his belt. “You found something?” she said.
“Yeah, but let me wait for Lyle. I only want to go through this once.”
She walked the three doors to her office and fidgeted while she waited. Ten minutes later, Jeffrey showed up. “Sorry I’m late.”
“We were both early,” she replied. They crowded around Jeffrey’s desk as Sutton pulled documents out of a folder, panting with the effort. “I rarely make the rounds in person,” he said, chuckling at his impending joke, “but this patient requires surgery. Have you heard of a website called Neighborhood?”
Both shook their heads. “It’s a social media site for communities. People post notices about missing dogs and cats, traffic hazards, and the like. Sometimes it gets more personal. On January 25th, a woman with the handle of ‘SharonE’ wrote this message.” He handed Jeffrey a printed copy, which Barnwell read over his shoulder.
Does anyone have experience with a company called BJW Investments? I bought into a real estate program they offer. Now they’re saying I have to send more money to pay taxes on the properties they’ve purchased. I’m new to this and grateful for any advice.
“That’s a new one,” Barnwell said. “Walker kept changing the offer. First it was self-driving vehicles, then bitcoins, then real estate.”
“The woman gets a bunch of responses warning her it sounds like a scam, but sprinkled among them are two messages,” Sutton said. “The first is from someone named Annette H. The site requires you to post under your real name, but a lot of women just use the initial of their surname.”
He handed over a sheet of paper containing several responses, one of which he’d highlighted in yellow.
I know this company and the person behind it. Send me a private message.
“On the next page, you’ll notice a third party, Moira Buller, marked it with a heart,” Sutton continued. “The three women exchanged private messages over the following twenty-four hours, culminating in this from Annette.”
We need to meet in person. Let’s get together for breakfast tomorrow at First Watch in Settler’s Ridge. How does 7:30 sound?
“Great work,” Jeffrey said. “Anything on Thorson’s phone yet?”
“We’re going through it now, but so far, we haven’t found a thing.”
Jeffrey and Barnwell exchanged glances. This was what both now expected. He thanked Sutton, who lumbered off. “So now we have them together,” he said.
“Is it time to question Annette?” Barnwell asked.
“It is, but here’s our strategy.”
* * *
They entered B&M Construction Company on the Washington Pike at ten and asked for Annette Henley. The man at the front desk swiveled in his chair and said to the woman behind him, “It’s for you.”
“Yeah?” she said as she approached them. Barnwell put the woman somewhere in her forties with green eyes in a long oval face and shoulder-length chestnut hair that fell in curls around her neck. She was husky, with stocky hips and big-chested. Lydia couldn’t help noticing she walked with her feet splayed and her fists clenched, as though she were ready for a fight.
The detectives flashed their IDs. She showed no reaction. “We’re investigating a series of frauds,” Barnwell said. “Your name has come up as a likely victim. We’d like to ask you a few questions.”
“Okay,” she said, drawing the word out.
Barnwell asked for some place they could speak in private. “Or we can do this at headquarters. “
“We have a conference room,” she said. “Charts all over the place, but I can clean it up. How long will this take?”
“An hour, maybe,” Jeffrey said. “The sooner we begin, the sooner we’ll finish.”
She clamped her thin lips shut and puffed out her breath. “Okay,” she repeated, seeming to accept the inevitable. “Nick, tell Mort I’m using the conference room. I need to help these people.”
The man at the desk said, “Sure.”
His eyes follow them as Annette led them into the conference room. She picked up piles of what appeared to be building plans and stacked them at one end of the table, then took a seat at the head. Barnwell and Jeffrey sat across from each other. As agreed, Barnwell initiated the interview. “Last fall, you issued a check for $10,000 to a firm called BJW Investments.”
Annette nodded vigorously, her lips drawn tight as though clamped in a vise. She stuck a stick of gum in her mouth and began chewing like a recovering nicotine addict, which Barnwell decided she probably was. “What was it for?” she asked.
The woman smirked as though she was a fool. “Investment,” she said.
“In?”
“Have you ever heard of a REIT?”
“Real Estate Investment Trust,” Barnwell said. “It’s like a mutual fund that owns commercial properties.”
“Well, that’s what it was.”
“Was?” Barnwell said.
Henley rested her right elbow on the arm of the chair and rested her weight on it, but kept her hands wrapped around her. “If you’re talking to me, you know it went bust. Or disappeared. Whatever.”
“You’re saying it was a scam?”
“Like I said, you already know that or you wouldn’t be here.”
“Who sold it to you?” Barnwell asked.
“Man named Fitzhugh. Mike Fitzhugh.”
“How did you come to know him?”
“I met him in a bar. Stupid me, right?” Neither detective replied, both staring at her in a practiced maneuver. In the ensuing silence, Annette said. “Young guy, but slick. He gave me a line about being new in town and starting his own firm. We got to chatting. He was quite a talker, that one. He was buying the drinks, and my tongue started wobbling. I told him too much, and he spotted an easy mark.”
“So he talked you into investing in this deal. Then what?” she said.
“Then nothing. He sent me some paperwork. It looked official. I didn’t hear from him for a while. I got suspicious and started asking questions. He didn’t respond. I kept calling, and his phone went to voicemail. Then the number was disconnected. That’s the last I heard from him. I haven’t seen him since. I hope you get the son of a bitch.”
Jeffrey, who’d been silent during this conversation, slid a photograph toward her. “Do you recognize this man?”
She glanced at it, not touching it. “Could be,” she said. “Looks a bit like him, but I can’t be sure.”
“He goes by several names,” he said, “but his real name was Brad Walker.” He emphasized the past tense, but Henley didn’t bite.
“Would you like to know what’s happened to him?” he asked.
“Sure. You got him?”
“He’s dead,” Jeffrey said. “Murdered.”
“Oh,” she said, shaking her head and drawing it out. “I can’t say I’m surprised. If he’s done this to others, I mean.”
She looked from one to the other. “That it? Are we through here?”
“Do you know a woman named Sharon Easterling?” he asked.
She blinked twice, her brash confidence taking a break. “No,” she said, looking off to one side. “Can’t say I have.”
“That’s odd,” he said, “because the two of you were spotted having breakfast in Settler’s Ridge back on January 27th. You and another woman. You remember that?”
“No. You’ve confused me with someone else,” she said. “I don’t go out for breakfast.”
“How about Moira Buller? Know anyone by that name?”
She seemed to search her memory, then shook her head. “Sorry,” she said.
“Annette,” Barnwell said, giving her the x-ray eye treatment, “We have you on the Neighborhood site responding to a question Sharon posted about BJW Investments. You suggested taking the conversation private. Moira Buller joined it. The three of you decided to meet at First Watch. Now do you remember?”
She stared back at Barnwell, allowed herself a slight smile, and cocked her head. “So what if I did? He asked her for more money. For taxes, he said.” She snorted. “We tried to keep her from digging in deeper. There’s nothing wrong with that.”
“Then why deny meeting her?”
She gave the slightest of shrugs, but still kept her arms braced around her breasts. “I didn’t want to involve anyone else.”
“Who?” Barnwell said. “Moira? She’d identified herself as another victim. You say she was also trying to help. Why protect her?” When Annette didn’t respond, she said, “Or was it Sharon? She was still being swindled. You lied to us to protect her? From what? This makes no sense.”
“If she wants to talk to you, she will. It’s not my business to involve other people.”
“Only, she can’t speak with us,” she said. “She’s also been murdered.”
Annette twisted her face in pain and pretended to dab her eyes. “I am truly sorry to hear that. She seemed like a nice person. A little nervous, but who wouldn’t be if some creep had taken your life savings?”
“The two of you spoke eight times by phone. She called you six times, you called her twice.”
“Uh-huh. She kept asking me questions. What should she do? I told her to talk to the police and not take his calls. I tried to be nice, but if I couldn’t help myself, how could I help her?”
“Have you ever been to her house?”
“I don’t even know where she lives. Lived.” Her cockiness having returned, she said, “I’ve told you all I know. I need to get back to work now.”
The detectives kept questioning her, but she evaded them. She claimed she’d had no further involvement with the man she knew as Mike Fitzhugh and had met Sharon Easterling only once.
“She’s smarter than she looks,” Jeffrey said as they returned to their cruiser.
“How is a smart person supposed to look?” she shot back. Then she conceded the point. “Yeah, she kept her hands to herself and didn’t touch Walker’s photo. She gave us nothing, particularly not her fingerprints.”
* * *
Moira Buller sat in an interview room fuming. Two uniformed officers had barged into the health club, asked for her, and in full view of the clients and her fellow staff members, ordered her to come with them. Sitting alone in the windowless room, she glanced at her phone, wondering why she couldn’t get a signal. She knew only that they’d brought her here. They hadn’t given her a reason, though she thought she knew. She couldn’t know how much they’d discovered. As the officers drove her to headquarters, Moira was also unaware Annette Henley had just been questioned at her work.
As two detectives entered the room, she laid her phone on the table, then slid it into her hip pocket. Her face was devoid of expression as the male detective passed his eyes over her. She was accustomed to that look. She wasn’t beautiful, but with wavy brown hair and blue eyes, she wasn’t bad to look at. Despite being thirty-six, she had a youthful figure, with firm breasts, a toned butt, and attractive legs. She often wore tight-fitting tights and tops to show off her shape. When selecting a personal trainer, old guys always went for her.
“This is Detective Sergeant Lyle Jeffrey,” the woman said as she slid into the seat opposite her. “I’m Detective Lydia Barnwell. We spoke by phone last week. You told me how you met a man you knew as Carl Ferris. Do you remember that conversation?”
“Is that why I’m here? About Carl?” she said.
“Just answer the question. Do you recall speaking to me?”
“Yeah, vaguely.”
“You told me this man Carl came in for a free training session, but that you never saw him again. Do you remember saying that?”
Moira nodded, and Barnwell asked her to repeat it aloud for the recording. “That wasn’t true, was it?”
“I don’t recall ever …” She broke off. Her shoulders tensed. Whatever lie she was about to tell lay frozen on her tongue.
“On October 17th last year, you wrote his firm, BJW Investments, a check for $10,000.”
Some of the tension left her shoulders. “Okay. I didn’t mention that because it’s embarrassing. He was a flimflam artist, and I got taken. You don’t like to admit that sort of thing.”
“Not even to the police? You think we haven’t heard stories like this before? You must have had a better reason for concealing it from me.”
“No, I was just ashamed.” She ran her tongue over her lips and swallowed.
“Are you thirsty?” Barnwell asked. “We can get you a glass of water or a cup of coffee.”
Moira smiled. “Yes. Tea if you have it.” Jeffrey rose to leave the room. Barnwell stated for the recording device she was suspending the interview for a moment. but she continued to look at the suspect, who glanced back and forth at her surroundings like a caged animal looking for a way out. Barnwell knew she welcomed the interruption. It was a chance to collect her thoughts and come up with a plausible story.
Jeffrey returned with a white mug, which he held by the handle, wrapped in a napkin. “It may be hot,” he said, laying the mug before her.
She slid the napkin aside, lifted the mug to her lips, sipped at it, and wrapped her hands around it. “I like it hot,” she said.
“Detective Jeffrey has returned to the room, and we’re resuming the interview,” Barnwell said. “Does the name Sharon Easterling mean anything to you?”
If she was shaken by the turn in the conversation, she concealed it. “Not that I recall.”
“Annette Henley?”
Once again, her body tensed. “I may have heard the name. You meet so many people at the health club.”
“We’ve just spoken to her,” Barnwell said. “It’s why we had you wait a few minutes.”
“All right. I’ve met her.”
“In a restaurant at Settler’s Ridge on January 27th. The two of you had breakfast with Sharon Easterling, who was a victim of the same scam that ensnared you, run by a man you later came to know as Bradley James Walker. BJW.”
“All right. We did. She’d posted online she’d invested money with what was supposed to be an investment firm. The man behind it demanded more, claiming she owed property tax. Annette said to take the conversation private, and I joined in.”
“What happened at that meeting?”
“We told her this real estate thing was a fraud, that she shouldn’t give him any more money, and should go to the cops.”
“Then what?” Barnwell said.
“And then she went away. That’s the last I’ve seen of her. I can’t speak for Annette.”
“Remember,” Jeffrey said, leaning toward her, “we now have her side of the story.”
Moira backed away from him, pushing at the table with both hands. “Whatever she told you is a lie.”
“What part of it?” he said. “What did she lie about?”
She was frightened now, her eyes wide with panic as she turned her head back and forth.
“How do you even know what she told us?” Barnwell said.
An officer knocked at the door. Barnwell rose to answer it. “There’s a man here says he’s an attorney for your witness. Name’s John Gimble.”
“John?” Moira exclaimed. “He’s one of my clients.”
“That’s odd,” Jeffrey says. “He claims you’re his client.”
“He is. I mean, I am. He’s come here to represent me. You have to let him in.”
An older man with a fringe of white hair ringing his scalp and what seemed like pounds of flesh hanging from his face barged into the room. “Gerrie called me and said they’d arrested you.”
“We’re questioning her,” Jeffrey said. “We haven’t filed charges.”
He glared at Jeffrey, then at Barnwell. “I want to speak to my client in private,” he said. “Now.”
Jeffrey ended the interview and left the room with Barnwell in tow, but not before he’d scooped up the mug, shielding it with what was now a tea-stained napkin. He carried it into the break room, emptied what remained of the liquid into a sink, and placed the mug into an evidence bag. Then they waited.
Five minutes passed until Gimble emerged from the interview room. “Are you holding her? I’ve told her not to answer any more questions. Unless you’re filing charges, she’s coming with me.”
“She’s not under arrest,” Jeffrey said, adding a pointed, “yet.”
“Then we’re leaving.” He returned to the room, said something to her, and the two of them emerged, heading toward the entrance.
* * *
“Should we have let her go?” Barnwell asked.
“We had no choice. We have no physical evidence linking either of them to the house or to Walker’s vehicle. But this may change things.” He hoisted the evidence bag and called for a police cruiser to transport it to the crime lab.
“I hoped we could break her,” he said as he filled in the form that would accompany the bag, “but someone at her work was smart enough to call a lawyer. By this afternoon, we may have enough evidence to seek warrants for both of them.”
“And meanwhile, they get to compare stories.”
“Yes,” he agreed. “It can’t be helped.” The officer appeared. Jeffrey printed and signed the form, sending him on his way.
They settled in to discuss how they would question the pair when Ross Sutton appeared in the doorway. “Sorry to disturb you two, but you’ll want to hear this. We now have records for all the cell phones found in Walker’s car. He used a different one for each victim and made no other calls with them. That way, when a phone rang, he knew who was calling.”
Sutton snorted as he said, “He even wrote their initials on the back with a Sharpie. Thorough bastard, that one. He also had an old iPhone that he used for everything else. That struck me as odd, since we seized his phone at the time of his arrest. Where did he get this one?”
“Where, indeed?” Jeffrey said.
Turning to Barnwell, he said. “Every phone has a unique identifier, an IMEI. It stands for International Mobile Equipment Identity.”
Barnwell knew this, but wasn’t about to slow Sutton down. She was willing to endure his mansplaining as long as it led somewhere.
“Someone had used a sharp tool to scratch out the identifier on the back of the phone. He didn’t seem to realize you can get it by putting in a six-digit series. We did.” He paused, and Barnwell sensed he was about it drop a bombshell. “This phone is registered to Benjamin Thorson.”
“What?” Jeffrey shouted. His mouth hung open as he turned to Barnwell.
“It doesn’t have a SIM card. It ran only on Wi-Fi. Walker set up a Google voice number for it, just as he did for his burner phones.”
“So he didn’t have to register it through a cellular service,” she finished for him.
“Oh,” Sutton said, recognizing Barnwell was familiar with the process. “To anticipate your next question, we found no record Walker called his brother on this phone, nor did he receive one.”
“What about Thorson’s phone records?” Jeffrey asked.
“I’m getting to that. He made most of his calls to his wife, the TSA, the distribution center where he now works, and a pizza place. He and his brother were in regular communication until more than a year ago, but then nothing.”
This tallied with what Thorson had told him about breaking contact after Walker refused to repay the loan. “How about the three women, Easterling, Henley, and Buller?” Jeffrey asked.
“Nothing. If he contacted them, he didn’t use his phone. We also checked the websites he visited. Most were for job-hunting purposes and ordering pizza and Chinese food. He had a language app and was trying to pick up some Spanish.”
“Maybe so he could communicate with people going through the security line,” Barnwell suggested.
“There’s nothing suspicious about his search activity. Nothing like where do I dispose of a body?” He allowed himself a small laugh, which shook his entire body. “And no sign he was trying to trace anyone’s location.”
They thanked him, faced each other, but said nothing for several seconds. Barnwell broke the silence, placing both hands on her hips as she rocked in the chair, staring at the ceiling as though reading from its tiles. “Ben told us he had no further contact with his brother after his arrest. He implied they hadn’t spoken in some time. So, how did Walker get the phone?”
“The simplest explanation is he lied to us.”
“We need to ask,” she said, “because if he did, we should take a step back.”
* * *
As she related the conversation to Jeffrey, he said, “The library confirms his story. He signed in to use a computer at 1:15, stayed for nearly an hour and a half, and checked out at 2:40. The trip to Old Mill takes twenty minutes at that hour.”
“So he’s in the clear,” she said.
“As far as Sharon’s death is concerned.”
Was he still holding out the possibility Ben had killed his brother? Lydia didn’t ask.
Carnegie Distribution Center was a sprawling, three-story structure that looked like a huge white brick left in an open field. Trucks lumbered into the facility, making their way around the back of the building to the loading docks. Barnwell parked in front. They entered through a pair of glass doors that seemed shoved into place as an afterthought.
A uniformed guard sat behind a glass pane thick enough to be bulletproof, reminding Barnwell that this center transported cargo to and from aircraft. She asked him to summon Thorson. “What’s the nature of your business?” he demanded.
“Police business,” she said and flashed her badge. Jeffrey did the same.
He frowned, reached for a phone, then suspended his hand in the air. “Is he in some sort of trouble?”
“No,” she said. “He’s helping us with an investigation.”
That seemed to satisfy him. He let his hand fall to the phone, picked it up, and spoke into it. “Thorson to the front. You have visitors.”
Jeffrey peered around the room, which was devoid of chairs, tables, lamps, and printed material. “As sterile as an operating room,” he said.
They waited four minutes before Thorson appeared. He pushed open a windowless door and stood staring at them. “What now?” he said. “Why are you disturbing me at work?”
Jeffrey fished a plastic bag out of his pocket. “We’re returning your phone.”
His stance relaxed, and he displayed what passed as a smile. “Thanks,” he said, holding out his hand.
“If you have a moment, we have a few last questions.”
“Last?” he said.
“We hope so. Is there somewhere we can go for a few minutes?”
Thorson glanced around the room as though seeing it for the first time, which perhaps was the case. He glanced toward the guard, who seemed to listening. “Okay if we talk outside?” he asked.
Barnwell nodded, and Jeffrey said, “Sure.” It was a rare cloudless day, with the temperature having soared into the low fifties, so Thorson didn’t don a jacket.
“You found nothing on my phone,” he said. It was a statement, not a question. “It’s as I said. I’ve had no contact with my brother in at least a year, other than to see him when we were both working. He always gave me a hello like nothing was wrong. I tried to ignore him.”
Barnwell took a step forward and stared up, her blue eyes boring into him. “Then how did he get hold of your old cell phone?”
“What?” He stepped back as though she’d taken a swing at him.
“When we arrested your brother, we seized his cell phone. But when we found his car, conveniently parked on the airport grounds, we found an iPhone 8 registered to you. Did you give it to him?”
“No,” he said. “It was Cathy’s. When I upgraded her last year, it wasn’t worth anything, so we threw it in a drawer. The idea was to give it to Cindy when she turns ten. By then—” He stopped, lost in thought.
“How did he get his hands on it?” she asked.
“I have no idea,” he said. “None, zero.”
“Could your wife have given it to him?”
“Cathy?” He snickered, his face wreathed in disbelief. “She wouldn’t give him the time of day. No way.”
“What’s your guess then?”
He spread his legs and rested his knuckles on his hips. His voice rose to a shout. “Have I told you my brother is a fucking thief? He must have broken into our apartment when we were out. I’ll ask Cathy if anything else is missing, like money. That piece of shit.”
They spoke for another two minutes, but Thorson could think of no better explanation. “That it?” he said.
Jeffrey was about to answer, but Barnwell put a hand on his arm. “Have you told Cathy about the ‘loan?’”
“Yeah,” he said. He rubbed his hands together and shivered, though whether from the cold or from reliving the conversation, she couldn’t tell. “She was furious. Beside herself. I’ve never seen her so … ‘How could you?’ She kept repeating that.”
“Well…” she began.
“But I’m glad you made me do it,” he continued. “This thing has been hanging over me for nearly two years. We’re going through a rough time right now, but you made me come clean. We’ll work things out.”
They watched him retreat into the building. “Do you believe him?” Barnwell said as she got behind the wheel.
“I don’t know. He seemed genuinely surprised. You?”
“Either he’s telling the truth or all that acting training serves him well.”
They were silent as they headed back toward Pittsburgh. As they approached the Greentree exit, Jeffrey received a call. He listened for a moment, responding in monosyllables. As he disconnected, he turned toward her and said, “We’ve got a match.”
* * *
Annette arrived at headquarters at 2:55 looking defiant, her jaw set and her bearing rigid. She shook off the touch of an officer who guided her down the hallway toward the interview room. By contrast, Moira, accompanied by her attorney, appeared deflated, her shoulders slumped and wearing the look of someone who’s lost a child. The same officer escorted her to the adjoining interview room, but Jeffrey had ordered Annette’s door left ajar, allowing her to spot Moira as she passed.
The warrant that had brought them in on a charge of tampering with a corpse allowed the ACPD to collect their fingerprints and DNA. While the women waited in their respective rooms, the crime lab ran a quick check on Annette’s prints and confirmed those Jeffrey had taken from the mug Moira had cradled earlier in the day. They placed both women at Sharon Easterling’s house, in her garage, and in Brad Walker’s car.
They had not found Sharon’s prints inside Walker’s vehicle. At first, this had surprised Lydia, but she now imagined a sequence of events, which she tucked away to use when the opportunity arose.
They turned first to Moira, allowing Annette to sit alongside her attorney, wondering what she was telling the two detectives. “Ms. Buller,” Jeffrey said, “you’ve been charged with tampering with a corpse. We found your prints in the vehicle used to carry Brad Walker’s body to the bridge over the North Fork. It’s a misdemeanor under Pennsylvania law, but it carries jail time. Do you want to tell us what happened?”
“My client will make no statement at this time,” the attorney, John Gimble, said.
“But that’s not your worst problem,” Jeffrey continued. “We’ll be charging you with false imprisonment, because we also found your prints in the house where you held Walker. That too is a misdemeanor, but it’s more serious.”
“No comment,” Gimble said.
“The most serious issue you face is your role in two murders, that of Brad Walker and later the staged suicide of Sharon Easterling. We have ample evidence both deaths were planned. Mr. Gimble, would you explain to your client the penalty for premeditated murder in the commonwealth?”
“We have no comment.”
“That’s fine. I expect your cohort, Ms. Henley, will be more forthcoming.”
“My client knows no such person.”
“She’s already admitted they met with Sharon Easterling.” Jeffrey rose to his feet and leaned past the attorney, addressing Moira. “We have your phone records. You two chatted back and forth throughout this activity. That argument won’t wash.”
They left the room and spent a moment watching the monitor in an adjoining room as the two conversed, Moira waving her arms as she spoke and tearing tissues out of her pocket to wipe tears from her face. Gimble patted her arm, trying to calm her. “She’ll cave first,” Jeffrey said.
Lydia didn’t argue. He had more experience with interrogations, but Moira, in her opinion, had the sharper of the two lawyers and could hold out the longest.
They entered the second interrogation room, meeting Annette’s scowl with bland faces. Barnwell introduced them to Rita St. Germaine, a general practitioner with limited criminal experience.
Whereas Jeffrey had started with the least serious charge and built up, she began at the top. “We’re investigating the murders of Brad Walker and Sharon Easterling. You were present in the house where Walker was held. We can place you in his car, which the three of you used to carry his corpse to the Old Mill Bridge. So far, we’ve only charged you with that crime, but we’ll soon add more.”
She stopped and waited for Annette to react. When she merely returned her gaze, she said, “How did the three of you capture Walker? Did you bring him to Sharon’s or lure him there?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Annette, we have you at the scene. Your prints are all over Sharon’s house, in her garage, on the trunk of Walker’s car. You wiped your prints down the chair and toilet in the basement, but it’s harder to destroy DNA. We can put you at the scene of both murders.”
Barnwell paused and stared at her for a moment. “So I’m not asking you to confess. We can prove you did it, so how you play this is up to you. I’m interested in how it happened. He showed up on his own, didn’t he? He’d been after Sharon for more money. You told her to call him and come collect it. When he did so, what happened? How did you go about it?”
“I’m not telling you nothing.” She reached for a stick of gum, unwrapped it, but reconsidered with it halfway to her mouth.
“All right, fine,” she said. “We’ll stick with Moira’s version.” With that, she ended the recording, closed her notebook, and rose from the table, Jeffrey following her. They watched the interaction between the two women on the monitor for a moment. The attorney seemed to plead with her, but Annette sat with her arms folded, looking straight ahead.
“She’s a tough nut,” Jeffrey said.
“Maybe, but when she cracks, she’ll leave shells all over the floor.”
The other monitor showed a calmer Moira. She and Gimble stared straight ahead, neither speaking to the other. “Time to shake things up,” Jeffrey said.
They returned to the room wearing masks of triumph. “Your friend Annette’s been a bit more forthcoming,” Barnwell said.
Gimble smiled. “I’ve been telling Ms. Buller how the game is played. How you go from one room to the other, suggesting one is accusing the other of such-and-so, so that this one will tell you something to make the other talk.”
“You drove Walker’s car the night of February 6th,” Barnwell continued. “You’d never intended to leave his body beneath the bridge. It was too close to Sharon’s house.” Now Lydia was flying by dead reckoning, but she’d pieced together enough of what must have happened to be certain of her destination. “You hadn’t intended to pull his body from the car. You were going to abandon it with him in it. But the snowstorm hit, and you, at the wheel, were afraid to go on.”
She saw a small flicker of reaction as she spoke the last few words and realized it was not Moira who’d insisted they change plans. She could use that against Annette, but to Moira, she said, “At least, that’s how she tells it. Do you want to correct me?”
“My client has nothing to say,” Gimble said. His sneer told her he was enjoying himself, seeing through everything she was trying to do. But Moira might not be convinced, so Lydia changed subjects, posing questions only she would know, such as when Walker had first spoken to her about investing with him.
“No comment,” the attorney said.
“She can tell us that,” Barnwell said. “She’s already admitted he swindled her. We have his bank records. I just want to know how he operated.”
“We don’t stipulate that. She might have loaned him the money.”
“She didn’t,” Barnwell said. “We’ll let you sit for a while and think about it.”
“What now?” Jeffrey said as they switched their attention from one monitor to the other.
“She reacted when I suggested she’d chickened out during the storm.”
“So it was Annette,” he said.
“Yes. Annette and Moira drove Walker’s car. Sharon was following them in hers, because—” She broke off for a moment. “Where are the reports on their calls to each other?”
They went into Jeffrey’s office and compared the records from the three phones. Then they returned to the room where Annette waited, now openly fidgeting. “Sorry it’s taking so long,” Jeffrey said. “We can only interview one of you at a time.”
Annette didn’t move her head, but her eyes darted from one detective to the other. She’d ended her debate over whether to put the gum in her mouth, and the sound of her chomping was, for a moment, the only sound in the room. “We’ve hadn’t been able to figure out why you left Walker’s body so close to Sharon’s house, but Moira enlightened us. You never intended to ditch the body. You were going to leave the car at the airport and cover the corpse with the blue tarp.”
Annette’s eyes shifted again. She clasped her hands and massaged her fingers as Barnwell took up the narrative, her mouth punishing the chewing gum. “Moira’s driving. You’re in the passenger seat. Sharon’s following you in her car because she’s going to bring you back after you ditch Walker’s vehicle. And …”
“And it starts to snow,” Jeffrey chimed in.
“Boy, did it ever,” Barnwell said with a laugh. “You remember I had to dig my car out the morning of February 7th? I finally gave up. You had to send a four-wheel for me.”
The detectives hammed it up for a moment. “No wonder Sharon got scared,” Jeffrey said. “She couldn’t drive in the snow.”
“So she called you,” Barnwell said, as though remembering Annette was in the room. “She couldn’t go further, but she didn’t want to the body back at her house.”
“You argued with her, but in the end,” Jeffrey said, “you pulled across the road and decided what to do with the body.”
Annette said nothing for a moment, and Barnwell feared their gambit had failed. “That was a mistake,” she said, looking at the woman. “If you’d just continued on, we might never have tied you to these murders.”
“It was Moira,” she said. “I told them to go on. I pleaded with her to take the wheel of Sharon’s car, but she wouldn’t. Meanwhile, the snow kept getting worse. I was worried we’d all be trapped there.”
“So you dumped the body,” Barnwell said.
“Yeah.” She doubled over, her head nearly hitting the table. “But I didn’t kill him. Moira did.”
“How did she do it?”
“I don’t know. Sharon left him alone. She was supposed to call one of us whenever she had to leave. I couldn’t come out there that day, and she couldn’t reach Moira, so she left him. She said it was only for an hour, but it must have been longer, because his body was cool by the time I got there. Sharon said she found him that way.”
“Where did Moira come in?”
Annette sighed like wind whistling through the last leaves of autumn. “We thought he’d died of natural causes. At least that’s what we told each other. But when was it? Ten days ago? Word came out he’d been poisoned? I knew I hadn’t done it. Moira claimed she hadn’t. So we focused on Sharon. She also denied it, but she was the one coming unglued, calling us while we were working, crying and moaning. She was leaving a cell phone trail. I kept telling her to stop, but that just made things worse.”
“Moira?” Barnwell said in her softest voice.
“I drove out to Sharon’s house to calm her down. Had to leave work to do it. They don’t like it when you take off. I’ve never missed a day.” She seemed to think about it. “Sharon was lying on her bed, comatose. I found an empty pill bottle on her nightstand and a suicide note accusing both of us of killing Mike—Walker, I mean. The note claimed we were setting her up. ‘They tried to kill me by pinning his murder on me,’ she said, ‘so I’ve left this earth. Let whoever finds this bring them to justice.’ Something like that, anyway. She was still breathing. I worked to revive her. Once I had her sitting up, I called Moira to tell her what had happened. I was so angry with her.”
“With Sharon?”
“With Moira. If Sharon denied poisoning him, it meant she’d done it.”
Only Annette’s heavy breathing broke the silence, to which she now added choking sobs. “By the time she got there, Sharon had slipped back into a coma. I showed Moira the note. She tore it up, denied she’d had anything to do with it. She accused me of killing Walker, when all I’d done was to go along with her scheme to get our money back.”
She wrapped her arms around her torso and rocked back and forth as though cold. Her voice grew quiet as she recalled the events. “He kept insisting he’d gambled it all away, but Moira didn’t believe it. I tried reasoning with her. ‘It’s gone,’ I said. She wouldn’t listen.”
“Annette, who killed Sharon?”
“Moira. Didn’t I just say that? I don’t know what I’ve said.” She shook her head in confusion. “She said, ‘We need to finish this. She started it. Let’s let her have her way.’ I argued with her, but she paid no attention. The woman’s stubborn. She said if we let her live, she’d find another way to implicate us. ‘I didn’t kill him. You say you didn’t. That leaves Sharon. This whole thing is her doing, and she wants us to pay the price. We can’t let that happen.’”
“So you helped hang her?”
She looked away and wiped her hands on her bluejeans as though were Pontius Pilate. “I helped, but Moira did it.”
* * *
At ten that night. Lydia and Calvin sat at the dining table, two empty pizza boxes between them. Calvin maneuvered the last two dozen pieces of the jigsaw puzzle in the puzzle’s vanishing hole. Lydia sat rotating her wineglass as she spooned out the day’s events.
“We kept hammering at Moira. We’d question her for twenty minutes, go away for ten, then come back with some new piece of information as though Annette had just revealed something else.” She paused, smiling to herself. “By that point, she’d admitted everything and was on her way to Second Avenue, but Moira didn’t know that.”
Calvin laid another two pieces in place and looked up to show he was listening.
“When we revealed we had her fingerprints on the beam and the ladder, she finally admitted to hanging Sharon. You should have heard the self-justification. ‘She was going to do it anyway. She’d try to overdose, and it hadn’t worked. It wasn’t murder. We just helped her do what she wanted.’ It was nauseating to hear her describe it so casually.”
She paused and poured herself another glass of wine, something she rarely did. “I asked her why they’d removed his clothing. Do you know what she said? ‘Have you ever tried to dress a stiff?’”
“So he was already naked?” Mayfield asked.
“Yeah, after he’d peed all over himself, they took his clothes and tied him to the commode. He sat like that for hours each day.”
She paused, seemed to look past him, and bit her lip. “But?” he said as he pressed another piece into the disappearing gap. He’d become accustomed to her moods. He knew there was more.
“Moira adamantly denies poisoning Walker. She insists Sharon did it, but Sharon’s suicide note blamed the two of them. Annette insists she didn’t do it. We know from her manager she didn’t leave her work until late in the afternoon. The phone records show Sharon had already called her.”
“So who killed Walker?” he said.
“I don’t know. They both deny knowing Thorson. Annette says she was unaware he had a brother. It would have been easy for one of them to point the finger at him. Neither did.” She tossed her curls in frustration. “Jeffrey wants the DA to charge both of them and let the two sort it out in court.”
“But that’s not good enough for you,” he said.
“It is not.” She rose and poured the rest of her glass into the sink, then returned to pick up the empty pizza boxes.
While Calvin continued to work on the puzzle, she took out her notebook, edited a few entries, and added more.
1/18, Walker arrested
1/19, Preliminary arraignment; released; transfers funds for attorney; now broke
1/2, Formal arraignment, Walker noshow
1/25, Sharon writes on Neighborhood
1/26, Women meet for breakfast, begin texting and calling
1/29, they lure Walker to Sharon’s house
2/5, Sharon returns home and finds Walker dead
2/6, The three leave Walker’s body beneath bridge
3/3, They leave Walker’s car at airport
3/20, Cindy Thorson discovers body
3/25, Sharon is murdered
“A piece is missing,” Calvin said.
“I know,” she said, staring at the timeline. “Something we don’t yet know.”
Mayfield smiled. “That’s not what I meant. There’s a piece missing.” He scooted his chair back and poked his head beneath the table. “Not here.”
Lydia went into the back room and lifted Howie off his bed. She passed through the kitchen, tossed a few scraps of paper into the garbage, and returned to the table, holding the errant piece of cardboard. He reached for it, but she played Miss Liberty, holding it aloft like a torch.
“Who’s that officer from Crafton you used to golf with?”
“Joe Ransombe. Joey,” he said. “Are you keeping that?”
She lowered her arm and dropped the piece into his hand. “But you no longer play with him. Why?”
He snapped the piece into place. “Voila,” he said and returned his attention to her. “Why do you ask?”
“Play along with me for a moment. This is important. Back when we were at Boyleston, you two used to go off together once a week. Last summer, you stopped and joined up with three cops from Carnegie. You guys now play whenever the weather permits. What happened to Joey? Why did you drop him?”
“I didn’t drop him. He quit. He didn’t play well, always slicing the ball into the trees or dropping it into a pond. We were playing so slow we were holding other—”
“Would you say he couldn’t play?”
He shook his head in puzzlement. Where was this conversation going? “No, he just doesn’t play well. I tried to get him lessons, but—”
“Calvin, would you ever say, ‘He can’t play?’”
“I wouldn’t put it that way.”
“What if the golf club barred him?” she persisted. “What if every course for a hundred miles said they wouldn’t even allow him on the practice green?”
“That would be brutal,” he said. “But yeah, I’d have to say he can’t play. Satisfied?”
She tossed her head and looked off at a horizon only she could picture. “Very.”