Bright and early at seven on Tuesday morning, Alex and I stood outside on the front porch of Gavin O’Malley’s upscale home in Columbia, about an hour southeast from Sunset Ridge. Unlike the wrap-around porches on the Victorian homes in our town or even my modest porch that spanned the entire front of my very average size house, O’Malley’s home had merely a small covered area right in front of the door, despite the fact that his home was at least twice the size of mine.
Painted light grey with black shutters, the stately Colonial stood proudly on a sizable lot that also included a circular driveway, a yard big enough for children to play in, and a two car garage. Around the neighborhood, tall trees towered over the homes creating a canopy of leaves that let in just the right amount of sunshine. I had to admit I liked this place.
When no one answered after the first knock, I nudged Alex’s arm and said, “This is a nice neighborhood. Don’t you think? Very safe feeling.”
He smiled and knocked again on the front door. “Except for the possibility that the man who lives here killed a jeweler in cold blood. Other than that, yeah, it’s pretty nice.”
I rolled my eyes at his insistence on always being a cop. “You couldn’t just comment on the trees or how cool it is that there are no mailboxes in front of any of the houses? I like that idea of having to go down the road to collect the mail. I bet it gives everyone a chance to get to know one another.”
“I bet it’s a pain when it’s winter and the last thing you want to do is walk all the way down the road to get your mail,” he said, countering my approval for the way the area had been set up.
That he had a point didn’t change my mind about how lovely and bucolic the neighborhood was, faraway mailboxes and all.
Changing the subject back to the reason we stood there on that porch, I looked up at the bedroom windows on the second floor and saw no one moving around. “I don’t think anyone’s home, Alex. Maybe they’ve all left for the day?”
His eyebrows shot up in that way they did when he doubted what he’d just heard. “It’s seven in the morning. I saw a swing set in the back as we drove up. Are you telling me kids have left before seven am to go to school?”
“In some areas, kids are on the bus for nearly an hour to get to school,” I said, remembering a report I’d seen on TV a while back about rural children having to travel long distances to reach their schools.
“Really?”
“Most of those areas are in farmlands, though,” I admitted, poking a hole in my initial claim.
A noise like a crashing sound inside the house alerted us that someone was in there, so Alex knocked on the door once more and reached for his gun as he called out, “Mr. O’Malley? It’s the police. Please open the door.”
Just seconds later, the front door slowly opened and a man who looked almost exactly like Bruno Carter stood in front of us in a black silk bathrobe. He looked groggy, like he’d just rolled out of bed, but even disheveled, there was no mistaking how much he looked like Eliza Morrow’s driver.
Alex held up his badge and said through the screen, “Mr. O’Malley, my name is Alex Montero and this is Poppy McGuire. We’re from Sunset Ridge. We’d like to speak to you.”
Gavin O’Malley shook his head as if to clear his mind and then scrubbed the last remnants of sleep from his face. “Now? You want to speak to me now? I don’t even know where Sunset Ridge is. Are you sure you have the right person?”
“We’re investigating the death of Samuel Morrow. We’d like to talk to you about your son and his mother.”
As soon as the words left Alex’s mouth, Gavin’s eyes filled with a look of recognition. He may have been still sleepy, but that got his attention.
“Okay. Give me a minute to put some clothes on, okay?” he said before walking up the staircase in the center of the home and disappearing from sight.
When he was out of earshot, I turned to Alex and said, “Oh, my God! Did you see how similar he looks to Bruno? He’s the spitting image, just about twenty years older than him. There’s no way that guy could avoid admitting he was the father. Wow!”
“I have to admit they do look a lot alike. So much alike, I’d guess, that someone might confuse the father for the son and vice versa,” Alex said quietly as he took out his notebook from his shirt pocket.
“Are you thinking that Sterling mistook the father for the son all those times he watched Eliza with Bruno?” I asked, my brain whirling at the concept of such a thing happening.
“I’m not ruling anything out. Either should you.”
Alex’s subtle dig about my propensity to jump to conclusions registered loud and clear. Nodding, I smiled at him. “I know. Don’t get ahead of myself. I got it. You may not think I pay attention to how you do this, but I do.”
“I didn’t say that, Poppy. I just meant…”
Alex let his sentence remain unfinished, so I completed it for him. “You just meant that I shouldn’t jump to conclusions, even though that’s one of my more charming habits. Don’t worry. I won’t.”
Just then, Gavin O’Malley came walking back down the stairs, now fully dressed in jeans, a navy blue polo shirt, and sneakers. His appearance had a quintessential suburbanite feel to it.
As he opened the screen door, he said, “I hope you don’t mind if we take a little walk around the back. I don’t want to wake my wife and kids. They have off from school today, so we got to sleep in a little this morning and we’re going to take a drive to the state park for a picnic at lunchtime.”
Alex nodded. “Lead the way. We can talk and walk at the same time, Mr. O’Malley.”
I suspected the reason he didn’t want to stand on the front porch and talk to us was because his neighbors might see a policeman at his house. However, the fact that we’d already told him we wanted to speak to him about his illegitimate son Bruno may have also played a big role in the reason he wanted to take us away from the house. I wondered which reason pressed more heavily on him.
The three of us walked around the house and into the backyard lined with a wooded area at the very rear. The trees had the full bloom of leaves, so in no time we’d left behind the eyes of his neighbors and family.
“So what’s this about Eliza and Bruno? I don’t know what she told you, but I’m not her son’s father,” Gavin said flatly in a tone I knew he had to be working to affect.
Alex and I stood looking at him in disbelief. Did he seriously intend on sticking with that claim? No DNA test was necessary to show he was Bruno Carter’s father. All one had to do was look at the two of them. The only difference was Gavin was older and less muscular.
“Mr. O’Malley, the Sunset Ridge police department has no real interest in that, except as how it relates to Samuel Morrow’s murder last Saturday. I will say, though, that you’re going to have a hard time convincing people you’re not Bruno Carter’s father. Genes don’t lie, and he’s wearing yours all over.”
Gavin opened his mouth to protest what Alex said, but even he saw no point in fighting the obvious. Sighing, he hung his head. “Fine. You’re right. I guess there is no point in continuing to uphold the charade. I am the father of her child.”
He looked up at us and continued, “Other than that, though, I have no connection whatsoever to Eliza or Bruno.”
“Have you seen either one of them lately? Say in the past month or so?” Alex asked, his pen ready to jot down Gavin’s answers in his notepad.
“No. Not in the past month. I admit, I have seen her a few times in the past few months. I did. But it wasn’t anything bad like cheating.”
I watched Gavin O’Malley answer Alex’s question and tried to ascertain if he was lying about the cheating on his wife with Eliza. I couldn’t tell for sure, but my gut said he was telling the truth. And what the private eye reported seeing bore that out.
“You mean like that picnic you and Eliza had during that heat wave we had in February?” Alex asked, surprising Gavin.
“How? Who told you?” he said excitedly and then paused before letting out a heavy sigh. “What am I asking for? We were sitting right out in the open by the fountain in Meridian Hill Park, for God’s sake. Yes. That was me, but whoever you found that out from must have told you that it was nothing bad. That’s if they told the truth.”
“Again, Mr. O’Malley, we’re not interested in whether you cheated on your wife or not. What we want to know is what you two were meeting about other than sex,” Alex said as he wrote down in his notes REASON and then a question mark.
Gavin looked around, I suspected to make sure no one could hear what he was about to say, and then whispered, “She found me at the Caston Public Library and told me about Bruno. I told her I wanted nothing to do with that. I was just a kid when that happened. But she came around a few more times, and then he began to come around leaving notes in the books he brought back for her. I ignored them, but when she came up to me at the library at Georgetown, I agreed to talk to her. So we got together a few times and she showed me pictures of him when he was a baby. It was all a mistake, though, because she wanted more and I couldn’t give her more.”
The worry etched into his features as he spoke about Eliza and their son made me think he was afraid of them or what they’d do. I suspected she was the type of woman to threaten to tell a man’s wife about his past, and by the way Gavin was talking, I thought he might be concerned she’d do that too.
Alex looked up from his notes and said, “So you met and told her you didn’t want to be in Bruno’s life. Is that right? Did she want anything else? Did she threaten you with anything from your shared past?”
“Yeah. I told her one day when we were at a coffee shop, and then the next thing I knew she was coming to see me at the library at school telling me Bruno needed my help and I was the only person who could help him. I put her off as long as I could, but she kept coming around. Last Saturday, she sat in the library for over five hours practically terrorizing me at my workplace. I refused to see her and stayed in the storeroom nearly the whole time.”
Curious what Eliza could have been talking about, I asked, “Do you know what Bruno needed from you? What kind of help only you could give him?”
Was there some medical problem that only his father could help with?
Gavin shook his head. “No, and I didn’t want to know. I never wanted her to keep the baby to begin with. I didn’t want to parent a child with her. She knew that when she told me all those years ago that she was pregnant.”
Alex continued to write down what Gavin said, so I asked another question. “I get that you were young, but why did you say you didn’t want to be a parent with her?”
My partner stopped writing and lifted his head, clearly interested in his answer to that question too. I understood not wanting a child when he was in his early twenties, but why not especially with Eliza?
We waited for him to give us his answer as I wondered was it her age? Or something else?
He winced like admitting what he had to say hurt in some way and then finally answered, “This is going to sound all wrong, but here it is. Eliza has always been manipulative. Well, at least with me she has. I was twenty-two, which was still young, but I knew I had no business being with a fifteen year old. She had a way of making me do things I didn’t really want to do and then making me think it was my idea in the first place. I may have been stupid to be with her, but I knew what would happen if I stayed with her. So I broke it off and a few months later she told me she was pregnant. I didn’t want to believe it was mine, but as you can see with Bruno, there’s no doubt.”
Alex and I looked at one another and then he asked, “Did she ever say anything about her marriage to Samuel Morrow? Did she say he knew that Bruno was her son and not just the man who drove her everywhere?”
Gavin frowned. “That poor guy. I can only imagine what he went through. I’m not surprised she went for a guy that much older than her. I mean, it’s her type, but he had money, and that’s all she ever wanted growing up. Money. I think that’s why she was looking for a boyfriend so much older than she was at fifteen. She wanted to move up in the world. Not that she was dirt poor or anything because she wasn’t. But she wasn’t wealthy like a lot of the girls she saw at Georgetown, and she wanted to be like them.”
The three of us stood there surrounded by trees and said nothing for a long moment until Alex asked the question that had to be asked. “Did she want money enough to kill for it?”
Gavin O’Malley remained silent, as if he needed to think about the question, and then answered, “I honestly don’t know. Maybe she got tired of being married to Morrow and decided to kill him or have Bruno do it for her. I’ll tell you this. She might not be capable of murder, but he might be. I have to go now. My wife and kids are going to be awake soon. I’ve told you all I know.”
He hurried away into the house through the back door, slamming it shut in a sign I couldn’t help but think was more about putting the past with Eliza and Bruno behind him than his talk with Alex and me.
“Well, that was interesting, don’t you think?” I said as we walked to the squad car.
“I think that man is terrified of both Eliza and Bruno. I find that interesting,” Alex said with a smirk.
“He should be. He thought he could leave both of them in the past like some meaningless choice he made about his shoes one year. He fathered a child, but he takes no responsibility whatsoever. That makes him a bad guy in my mind,” I said as we reached the car.
Gavin O’Malley disgusted me. He was a coward who ran away from his child.
“But not our murderer,” Alex said, leaning over the roof of the car.
“You don’t have to remind me we aren’t very far in this case. Everywhere we turn, it’s all Eliza and Bruno, yet the two of them have airtight alibis.”
Nodding, Alex tapped on the car’s roof. “Well, if we can’t poke holes in those alibis, then we need to start looking somewhere else for our killer. I want to go through that list of people Sterling gave us the other day. Maybe we missed someone.”
As we got into the car, it was my turn to remind him of the fact that he’d checked that list twice already. “So the third time is going to be the charm? I don’t think you missed anything. Everyone on that list either has an alibi or couldn’t have done the crime by virtue of being on another continent.”
“Then we need to figure out what we’re missing.”
Alex started the car and began to drive back down the cul-de-sac toward the main road into Columbia as I thought about everything we’d learned about this case. So far, we had Eliza and Bruno who looked like they may have had a motive to kill Samuel but couldn’t have done it because they weren’t anywhere near the jewelry store when it happened. We have a number of people Samuel had the private eye check out to dig dirt up on, but none of them could have done it either. What else was there?
Then it dawned on me. We hadn’t found out how Jared could have known about the fact that my ring was the only item taken from the store.
“What about my ex? He seems to have known about my ring being stolen, even though the police didn’t make it public. He knows something about the case he shouldn’t, so maybe we should check him out?”
Alex turned to look at me and smiled. “I was thinking the same thing. Let’s head back to town and see what good old Jared knows about Samuel Morrow’s murder.”