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Neither Joy nor Amanda believed David had gone off on an adventure, at least not of his volition. It was all too convenient. First, the guy disappeared, then an email mysteriously appeared complete with his resignation and an explanation of his vanishing act.
“Come on, Chief Doolan, doesn’t this make you just a little suspicious?” Joy said.
Lumpy Doolan felt like he was on another quick trip to nowhere. He’d been down this road before with these two reporters. Joy and Amanda had been sure one of St. Isidore High School’s most beloved teachers was a serial killer. Doolan had given them one of his oldest detectives, who’d died for his trouble, and they had come up with nothing but a basement that might or might not have been a BDSM dungeon of death.
Joy and Amanda followed that up with a three-part shock series of articles about the Suicide Forest and all of the women who had wound up swinging from the trees for the past three decades or more. And then the crap they stirred up came tumbling downhill right into Chief Doolan’s lap.
Now they expect me to get into bed with them again; Doolan thought and stewed at the sight of the two reporters on the other side of his desk.
“And what do we have to go on besides your suspicions?” Doolan said. “I mean is this going to be anything but shaking up a hornet’s nest like you did last time? I got stung in the ass plenty over that fiasco.”
“Fiasco?” an outraged Amanda yelled as she rose from her wooden chair in front of the Chief’s desk.
“The only reason your investigation flopped was that you pulled back. The Chamber of Commerce started quaking in their boots about the Suicide Forest and what it would do to the town if there was a serial killer loose.”
“Hold it right there, young lady,” Doolan said as he pointed a fat index finger Amanda’s way.
Joy put a hand on her ace reporter’s wrist and not so gently led her back to her chair. The last thing they needed to do was to piss off Doolan again. It was bad enough they had to remind him of the shit storm that rained on his parade the last time they had all gotten together.
“Oh, no,” Amanda said, refusing to sit down even though Joy’s grip on her wrist was tightening.
“Oh, no, nobody wanted to admit a serial killer was targeting young girls, women and even some boys and men. Oh no, it was so much easier to make believe that all of these people, especially the teenage girls, had been killing themselves.”
“You need to sit down,” Doolan said as he rose from his chair, a troubling sign, and Joy knew it. Any time Doolan got his 300-plus pounds of muscle encased in fat moving there was going to be a conflict. The man did not waste energy.
“Okay hold on, everyone,” Joy said as she rose to the rescue of her young protege.
“Chief, nobody is saying you or anyone in your department shirked their duty or anything like that. But what we are saying is whatever happened in the Tim Sheldon investigation is history. This is new. Let’s move forward.”
Doolan would have loved to have tossed these women out of his office. Hell, he’d like to have thrown them out his sixth-floor window. But the Shapiro family that had been publishing the St. Isidore Chronicle for years had too much weight in this town. If there was one thing Doolan had grown adept at over his past thirty years in office, it was dodging storms that rained down hail shaped like turds.
“Okay, granted this is new. But where is the evidence that anything is wrong here? The guy, this David what’s-his-name, sent an email explaining he was resigning and going off on some weird quest. He’s a millennial for Christ’s sake. That’s what they do.”
“He was in love with Mary Eileen.”
“And you think she killed him.”
“Could have, that’s all I am saying, Chief Doolan,” Amanda said.
“And if there is a ‘could have killed’ in this case, why not help us investigate?” Joy said.
“Why would she kill him?”
“They were divorced,” Joy said.
“So, what? Lots of people get divorced. Most of them don’t wind up dead. Hell, if more marriages split up quicker the murder rate would probably be a lot lower.”
“Everybody in town knows David was refusing to leave Mary Eileen’s apartment,” said Amanda.
“And he got killed for that? Because he was, I don’t know, what? Eating her food?”
“She was having an affair with Hans Mueller,” said Joy. “They are still together.”
“Again, ‘so what?’” Doolan said. “Half of the people in this town are sleeping with the other half.”
“They don’t all have guns,” said Amanda.
“Mary Eileen Sullivan has a gun?” Doolan asked.
“And she is trained to shoot to kill,” said Amanda.
Doolan eased back in his tilt chair, looking at the suspended ceiling. Amanda held her breath. Joy counted the seconds clicking by on the wall clock.
Chief Doolan leaned forward as slowly as any large, powerful man would who knows he doesn’t need to move quickly for a couple of female reporters.
“Ladies, think about this from my point of view, the point of view of a professional,” Doolan said in his most condescending, authoritarian voice.
“You have a motive; I will give you that. I can believe that Mary Eileen might have wanted David what’s-his-name dead. Okay. Means? You say she knew how to shoot and had a gun. Granted. So there’s motive and means. Opportunity? Well, yeah. They lived together, whether they wanted it or not.”
“That’s just what I have been saying since Day One,” Amanda said raising her fist in victory as she jumped out of her chair.
“But what we are still missing something,” the Chief said in a stage whisper building tension and easing Amanda off her victorious cloud-nine.
Amanda and Joy were on the edges of their chairs.
“We don’t have a body,” Doolan roared. “Bring me a body, and we have a murder. But don’t get me a body and as far as I am concerned, nobody got killed.”
Amanda and Joy shrunk in their chairs.
“Now ladies, that’s the door,” Doolan said, pointing over their heads.
“Please don’t let it hit you where the Lord split you.”
As soon as Joy and Amanda left, Doolan reached for his buzzing smartphone. State Police Commander Jack Hart was calling.