20
Nothing went as planned.
Brady called Gabe at three that afternoon. He had Velma packed and headed toward Carrington, but there was no way she would be able to come to the sheriff’s office. She was weak and fragile. She’d almost fallen twice on the walk to the car.
Instead of taking her to the sheriff’s office, Brady went straight to Leigh and Ryan’s house.
Leigh had explained the situation to the hospitalists working with Liz, and it took a few hours to figure out how to legally get Liz out of the hospital and to the Weston-Parker home without violating any laws. Not that anyone involved would press charges, but they needed to be sure they had all their paperwork correct in the case of an audit.
Someone figured something out. They explained it to Gabe, but after a few seconds, all he heard was “blah, paperwork, blah.”
The result was that Velma Brown was welcomed into the care of Leigh at four thirty that afternoon. Leigh got Velma’s signature on the forms they needed for Liz and handed them to Ryan, who took them back to the hospital. While Ryan handled the paperwork, Leigh tucked Velma into a cozy spot, fed her some homemade chicken soup, and insisted she sleep.
Liz was released from the hospital around seven that night and taken straight to the Parkers’.
Anissa and Gabe watched the reunion between mother and daughter from the deck. Liz was so forgiving and so worried about her mom. That girl was a gem.
But she’d been sick. And Velma still was.
They called it an early night and no one could blame them. The truth was that everyone involved was relieved to have this part of the process over.
Tonight had been easy enough.
Tomorrow night would be very different.
After another night on Anissa’s sofa, Gabe volunteered to swing through the Chick-fil-A drive-through and grab biscuits for everyone, the security guards included. “I’ll meet you at the storage unit at eight.”
He wasn’t sure if Anissa had given up arguing with him about driving or if she just really wanted that chicken biscuit.
“What girl could resist a guy who brings Chick-fil-A?” Anissa called to him through her open window as she pulled out of her driveway, the security guards close on her tail.
But eight turned into eight thirty when someone who was allergic to bee stings was stung in the middle of the drive-through line. Everything stopped for fifteen minutes while the EpiPen was administered, the ambulance was called, and the minivan was moved out of the line and into a parking space.
With bags full of biscuits and minis, Gabe pulled into the storage facility parking lot and chose a spot between Anissa’s car and the forensics van.
Two deputies were flanked by two Campbell guards. They stood on either side of an open roll-up door at the end of a long row of storage units. “Yo!” he called down the hall. No response.
“Yo!” he hollered again as he got closer. “I come bearing gifts.”
This time Dante met him ten feet from the door and held up a hand. “Hold up, bro.”
What was going on? “Where’s Anissa?”
“She’s inside. She’s fine. Well, she isn’t fine. But . . . prepare yourself. Okay?”
Gabe handed Dante the bags and ran to the door.
Nothing could have prepared him.
Pictures of Anissa covered every square inch of the unit, including the ceiling. Newspaper articles highlighting her cases. Pictures of Carly. Pictures of a three-year-old Jillian. Pictures of Anissa’s family in Yap.
Most of the pictures were a few years old.
But not all of them.
He spotted pictures of him and Anissa on a run. When had that been taken? Maybe April?
Pictures of him eating tacos with Anissa outside a food truck. That had been in May. Cinco de Mayo.
His gaze finally landed on the real, very much alive Anissa. She was in gloves, booties, and a hairnet, walking around the ten-by-ten space. She made the circuit and stopped when she saw him at the door. Confusion. Fear. Misery. All raced across her features. “Why would Ronald Talbot have these pictures of me? I don’t understand any of this.”
He didn’t either.
Three hours later, Anissa still had no idea what was going on.
The cursory evidence in the storage unit indicated that Ronald Talbot had known Carly and held a grudge against Anissa for what happened to her.
There were copies of the documents that had been sent to Paisley Wilson. Exact duplicates. No way a different person was responsible.
Journal entries documented Anissa’s friends, her favorite restaurants, her work schedule, her church, her gym, even her preferred grocery store.
At first blush, it appeared that Ronald Talbot had been a stalker—the photographs and obsession with Anissa’s activities—but he didn’t seem to have had any desire to obtain any truly personal information. No favorite books or movies or music. No favorite foods or brand of tennis shoe.
No. This data collection only made sense if his purpose had been to try to figure out the best way to kill her.
Anissa slid down the wall in the hallway outside the storage unit. She pulled her ponytail out from the hairnet and peeled the latex gloves from her hands.
The entire facility was shut down for the rest of the day. The sheriff personally stopped in—a very abnormal event. The captain spent an hour generally annoying everyone but then gave them free rein to do whatever they needed to do to figure out who had created this bizarre shrine to Anissa. If Ronald Talbot was the guilty party, then he was no longer a threat, but no stone was to be left unturned. No witness left unquestioned. No possibility left unexplored.
Forensics determined that prints were nonexistent. Nary a hair or a fiber was uncovered.
The management of the facility fell all over themselves to help, but they didn’t have a clue. The security tapes—such as they were—were placed in Sabrina’s hands when she stopped by to see the unit for herself.
Sabrina spent the vast majority of her time working in her lab with her computer as her weapon of choice, but once in a while she liked to see the scene of the crime for herself. She said it gave her a different perspective on the person she was trying to make sense of through their computer files. She arrived an hour after Gabe did, Adam at her side. Sabrina studied the room for fifteen minutes without saying anything. No one interrupted her. When she came back into the hallway, she wore a frustrated expression and needed only three words to explain what she’d seen. “This is—bizarre.” Sabrina’s nontechy pronouncement somehow made Anissa feel better.
Bizarre was the only word for it.
The autopsy of Ronald Talbot was bizarre too. He’d died of a gunshot wound that blew off half his face. Dr. Oliver had postulated two scenarios. One was that he’d tied weights to his ankles and shot himself on the edge of the dock, knowing he would fall into the water and the weights would pull him and the gun to the bottom.
At least for a while.
A lot of people didn’t realize how much buoyancy a dead body developed when putrefaction set in. The weight needed to drown someone wasn’t nearly enough to keep them from bobbing to the surface within a week.
Why he would do this and why he would do it this way remained a mystery. Dr. Oliver’s other scenario was that someone else shot him, used the weights to submerge the body, and then tossed the gun in after him.
The security footage from the neighbor with the great cameras would be quite useful, except for the footage obtained during the thunderstorm, when the visibility went to almost zero.
No one in the neighborhood remembered hearing a gunshot in the middle of the night, but a well-timed shot that coincided with a rumble of thunder wouldn’t have registered in anyone’s memory.
They were missing something. She knew it. Gabe knew it. Dante knew it. Dr. Oliver knew it.
Even Mr. Cook knew it.
“Ron didn’t do this, Anissa.” Mr. Cook had arrived in a pickup truck two hours in. How he’d found out, she had no idea. Although it wouldn’t have surprised her if her so-called security guards had been reporting everything back to Charles Campbell. And Charles Campbell wouldn’t have hesitated to tell Mr. Cook.
“I know you want to believe the best about him,” she said. “But the evidence, weird as it is, points to him.”
“I don’t believe it. Not for a second.” Mr. Cook crossed his arms, his mouth set in a firm line. “You’re in danger because the person who did this is not in the morgue.” He looked at Gabe. “Don’t you let her out of your sight.”
“Yes, sir.” Gabe’s response had the weight of a solemn vow.
They’d found it a bit faster than he’d expected, but that just meant he’d be getting his hands around Anissa’s throat sooner than he’d dared to hope.
He’d chosen this particular unit because the security cameras had been damaged in the storm last week. When they’d called in for a repair, he’d jumped at the chance to fix them . . . and to ensure there was no footage showing him hauling everything in. It had taken him the better part of forty-eight hours, but it had the look of a place that had been curated over several months.
It wouldn’t hold up to detailed scrutiny and that was okay. He didn’t need them to think Ronald Talbot was the killer for long.
Just for long enough.