A Reunion to Die For (A Joshua Thornton Mystery) (4 page)

Joshua shook his head.

Offended by the shake of his head, Seth snapped, “What’s wrong with you? Whoever killed her got close enough to press a gun against her chest. That means it was someone she knew, someone she trusted—like trusted enough to let him get her pregnant.”

“Don’t waste your time on the football team. Murphy got closer to our killer than anyone. The perp was slightly built. That doesn’t sound like a football player.”

“It’s my job to investigate this murder and catch the guy who did this,” Seth reminded him. “It’s your job to not screw up my collar and prosecute the son of a bitch!” He asked Tad, “What is he even doing here?”

“I invited him,” the medical examiner answered. “If this guy was a football player, based on Murphy’s description, he’d be mincemeat after fifteen minutes on the field.”

Joshua told them, “According to everyone who knew the victim, Grace did not date anyone she went to school with.”

“Did they know about this tattoo?” Seth lifted the blanket to reveal the eagle as if his memory needed to be refreshed. “Who is to say that she wasn’t dating someone at the school? Our killer had to have access to the murder scene. You claim that she had no freedom to come and go. Who is she going to date and let get her pregnant except someone she had access to, and who does she have the best access to except a boy who goes to Oak Glen?”

Joshua argued, “I know teenagers. I have four. If a teenager wants freedom, she’ll take it. Clearly, Grace managed to escape from her parents to create a secret life for herself. This life was so secret that she was drinking without anyone in her immediate circle of friends knowing.” He chuckled. “We are talking about a very careful girl here.”

“If she was so careful, how did she get pregnant and how did she get herself killed?” Seth cracked.

“She didn’t reveal her other side to the girls on the squad because she was afraid one of them would rat her out. I don’t think she dated anyone from school because her parents could find out. She kept that life outside of Oak Glen’s environment because it was less likely for word to get back home.” He shook his finger at him. “You’re going to find this guy someplace other than her school.”

Seth’s flushed face warned them that his fury was rising.

Tad crossed to his desk and returned with a notepad on which he scribbled a name and phone number. “Start with the tattoo.” He tore off a sheet of paper and handed it to the detective. “There’s only one guy in the valley who does this type of work. Tell him I sent you.”

Seth was right. Joshua’s job was to prosecute the case after the detective brought the killer to him. Reminded of this, he told himself that he had to sit back and let Seth do his job. But, there was nothing that said that he couldn’t talk to his kids’ friends himself in his role as a parent.

Since his daughter Tracy was running for the cheerleader spot left vacant by Grace’s death, the squad invited themselves to her home to teach her the cheers to help her win at the tryouts. The twins and their friends who got wind of the girls coming over gathered in the family room to play with their drums and guitars. Donny was playing games on his computer while Sarah loitered in the kitchen. The thirteen-year-old girl seemed to be searching for ways to annoy her sister.

Joshua had no idea how many people were at his home. The first batch of pizzas he ordered for the girls disappeared to the family room with Admiral in hot pursuit. There was not even one slice left, and he suspected that the dog was successful in begging more than one slice for himself based on the tomato sauce in his whiskers. Joshua had to order a second batch.

Grace’s pregnancy was kept secret. Anyone who proved to have knowledge of that information would give himself away as knowing about her secret life. It was Tracy who unknowingly revealed that the dead girl might have known about her pregnancy. She was picking at the cheese on a pizza pie while stirring a pitcher of lemonade when she told her father about how annoyed the captain of the squad was with Grace. “She said she didn’t want to be on the top of the pyramid anymore.” Tracy fought the smile at the corner of her lips. “If I make the squad, Madison is going to put me at the top.”

“Things are really working out for you, huh, Trace,” Sarah noted with a wicked grin while taking a slice of pizza with everything on it. When a mushroom dropped off the pile of toppings to the floor, Admiral almost knocked her off her stool diving for the morsel. He snorted with disappointment when he discovered that it was not his favorite.

“That’s not funny, Sarah,” Joshua chastised her while pushing Admiral down from where he placed his front paws onto the counter to see if the boxes contained anything except mushrooms. His snout claimed that they did.

“People have killed for less.”

Fear came to Tracy’s eyes. “You don’t think the police are going to suspect me if I get on the squad, do you?”

“Don’t you have homework to do?” Joshua snapped at Sarah while he sorted the pizza boxes to divide up between the cheese, vegetable, and supreme.

“No.” Sarah studied a slice of green pepper as if she were deciding if she should eat it or give it to Admiral whom she knew did not like peppers. “Everyone has been moving so quickly about replacing Grace. It’s tacky, if you ask me.” She held the piece of pepper up over her head and then dropped it into her mouth.

“No one is asking you. It’s the sponsor who’s rushing the tryouts to replace her.” Tracy placed the pitchers of lemonade in the refrigerator. “Football season is really gearing up and the squad is short one cheerleader.” She gestured towards Joshua. “I asked Dad if he thought it would be in poor taste for me to try out. He told me to go ahead.”

The doorbell rang. Tracy rushed off to greet her friends. Sarah ducked out of the kitchen to her bedroom with another slice of pizza.

Joshua did not notice her thievery. He was thinking about Grace’s request not to be at the top of the pyramid. If she was afraid of falling, then she didn’t want to lose the baby, which told him that she knew she was pregnant and wanted to keep it. He helped himself to a glass of lemonade.

Tracy escorted the band of giggling girls into the kitchen. There were ten in all. Trying to be casual about casting her eyes about the room and out into the backyard, Madison, the captain of the squad, asked if Murphy was home. Before anyone could answer, the boys rushed in from downstairs. With shouts and squeals, the party began.

In a flash, Joshua recalled parties he had hosted in the same kitchen decades ago. He remembered one that was not so happy—the day he and his friends learned of another cheerleader’s death. Somehow, he was not sure how, at the end of that day, everyone ended up at the home he shared with his grandmother. The house was quiet. They spoke in soft whispers, as if speaking in a normal tone would wake their dead friend.

Joshua was amazed by how unbroken these young people seemed to be about Grace’s death. Twenty years earlier, the squad did not replace Tricia out of respect for her memory. Grace wasn’t buried yet and they were already replacing her, most likely with his daughter.

After the pizza was consumed, the young people spilled out into the backyard for a football game with Murphy and J.J. as team captains. The game was well under way when Connie, a cheerleader who Murphy had noted was in his social studies class, took a break when Joshua and Donny came out onto the porch steps. The father and son were eating ice-cream sundaes.

Joshua had observed that Connie was different from the other girls on the squad. She was pretty without all the trappings of cosmetics. While her friends were diving for the pizza, she stood back to observe the goings on in the kitchen before taking her slice after the mob had cleared. Uncomfortably, Joshua noticed that often her eyes landed on him. He suspected that he was being sized up.

A few minutes into the football game, Connie took a break to sit on the steps to pet Admiral. It did not take her long to initiate a conversation about Grace’s murder. The dog shook his head at her touch on his ears. She had interrupted his staring match with the ice cream.

Ignoring Admiral’s order for a bite, Joshua responded coyly to her question about the investigation’s status. “We’re still looking for suspects. Do you recall Grace having any disagreements with anyone?”

“There was that fight she got into in the locker room with Heather Connor last week.”

Madison came up onto the porch to help herself to another glass of lemonade. “Oh, yes. That’s right. I forgot about that.” She was gently patting her sweaty face with a hand towel so as not to smear her mascara.

“One of your friends gets blown away, and you forgot about the fight she got into the week before?” Joshua asked.

The rest of the girls came up to get refreshments. The boys had taken over the backyard. J.J. proved to be a bigger match in leading his team than Murphy’s players had thought.

“It was not an actual fight,” Madison said. “It was more of a shoving match. It was nothing serious.”

“I’d say having Heather Connor gunning for me would be serious,” Tracy muttered.

“Connor,” he asked. “Is that Connor as in the Connor Estate, as in the same neighborhood where the killer had escaped after the shooting?”

“The very same,” Connie answered before asking her friends, “What was the fight about anyway?”

“I have no idea.” Madison told Joshua, “It was over as soon as it started. It was so minor that the coach didn’t even write it up. She told Heather that she would give her detention if she caused any more trouble with anyone on the squad.”

“Who is this Heather?” he wanted to know.

His daughter answered, “Her mother’s big in real estate. She builds and sells all these housing developments. She’s real rich.”

The kids had taken over the family room after the football game. Joshua had put Admiral on a leash and had dragged him away from the chips and dips and salsa spilled around the basement to walk down Rock Springs Boulevard to Church Alley to knock on Tad’s door. He wanted to ask his cousin about Heather Connor.

The blue Mustang outside could have belonged to one of the other residents whose homes backed up to the alley. It was only after Tad, dressed in his bathrobe, invited them inside and put the kettle on the stove that Joshua discovered he had company.

“Oh, geez, I’m late!” he heard a shriek from the back of the one-bedroom apartment.

A woman with her red hair cut in a pixie-type style rushed into the kitchen doorway. She was stuffing her panty hose into her purse with one hand while slipping her black pumps onto her feet at the end of her legs that seemed to go on forever. She was gorgeous.

“Tad MacMillan, you are awful! Why is it that every time I come over here you make me forget about the time?”

He chuckled at her while he reached for mugs from the cupboard in which to pour the tea.

Playfully, she slapped his arm. When he turned to her, she pecked him on the lips. He retaliated by pulling her close and kissing her full on the mouth.

“Until next time, darling,” she whispered. “You know my number.”

She was not flustered when she noticed that someone was in the room to witness the farewell to what had to be an intimate encounter shortly before. Her blouse was still untucked when she waved good-bye to them on her way out the door.

“If you had told me you had a date—” Joshua sat at the kitchen table. Admiral plopped down in the middle of the floor with an eye on the door in preparation to leave if Tad’s dog appeared. Though Dog was a fraction of his size, the young canine exhausted him.

“She was a friend who just stopped in to say hello,” Tad explained.

“A friend? What kind of friend?”

“A very good friend.” His naughty grin matched Joshua’s.

While waiting for the water in the kettle to boil, Joshua told him, “None of the kids know about Grace’s pregnancy.”

“Maybe she didn’t know.” Tad placed a mug in front of his guest. “She was no more than six weeks along.”

“No, she knew. Tracy said that she requested to be taken off the top of the human pyramid.”

“She didn’t want to fall and lose the baby.” Tad pushed his tea bag down into the cup and squeezed the herbs inside together. “I wonder if her boyfriend drove a white Pontiac Firebird.”

“A white Firebird?”

“Or it could have been tan. Or it could have been a Camaro.” Tad smiled. “Deputy Hockenberry told me that on a house-to-house search of the development behind the school, he found a girl who saw someone in a black trench coat take off in a white or tan Firebird or Camaro. Cavanaugh took credit for finding the witness. What a jerk.”

“But she doesn’t know if it was white or tan or a Camaro or a Firebird,” Joshua said. “That witness doesn’t sound credible enough to use in court.”

“No, she doesn’t.” Tad shook his head sadly. “It’s such a shame about Grace. Sweet kid like that. Who would want to kill her?”

“Who is Heather Connor?”

“Second generation of trouble, that’s who.”

“Who?”

“She’s Margo Connor’s daughter and every bit as arrogant as her mother.”

“Who’s Margo Connor?”

“You know Margo Connor.”

“Remind me.” Joshua was getting perturbed by his teasing.

“I’m sure you’ll remember her by her maiden name.”

“Which is—”

“Sweeney.”

“Damn!”

Chapter Four

Jan had spent the morning hanging around the courthouse hoping to catch Joshua so she could suggest that they have lunch together. Her intention was two-fold. While spending time with him, she might be able to get information about Grace Henderson’s murder that a journalist less intimate with the county prosecuting attorney would be unable to discover. She also hoped to make him forget about their argument.

She failed. He was having a luncheon meeting at his desk with one of his part-time prosecutors. So, she decided to try for the man on the front line, Lieutenant Seth Cavanaugh.

“What do you want?” was his greeting when Jan popped her head around the partition marking off his cubicle that was to serve as his office.

“I’m working on the Henderson case for The Glendale Vindicator. Do you know—?”

He snorted. “A jilted boyfriend. Who else?”

“But I heard that she didn’t date.”

“Clearly she did.”

Deciding it would be harder for him to dismiss her if she sat down next to his desk, Jan pulled up a chair. “Can you tell me who your suspects are?”

Seth looked both ways before answering in a whisper, “She had a split personality. By day, she was the virginal cheerleader, by night, she was—”

“Josh, did we have a one o’clock meeting?” Curt Sawyer’s voice boomed from the other side of the partition.

Joshua did not see Jan when he went into the sheriff’s office. “Curt, you have a calendar. Why don’t you use it?” He shut the door.

Seth rose from his seat. “I don’t have time for you right now.” He ushered her out of his cubicle.

Jan gave up and drove through a burger place on her way back to the newspaper. Her failure felt complete when she sat down at her desk outside owner/editor Ernie Gaston’s office and saw Gail Reynolds meeting with her boss. They were laughing while she recounted a story from her life as a globe-trotting journalist.

Jan forced herself to turn away from the scene and laid out her burger, fries, and milkshake in preparation to begin writing about a pre-trial motion in magistrate court for Rex Rollins, who was charged with violating a restraining order and trespassing. It wasn’t a big story, but it was enough to get her name on a byline in the paper. She had written the lead to her story when Ernie’s office door opened and he led Gail to her desk.

“Jan, look at who has come in for a visit.” Ernie gestured with a wave of his hand in Gail’s direction. “Jan Martin covers the Hancock County courthouse . . . Jan, you know Gail. It’s like old times. Remember back at Oak Glen when I was the editor of the paper and you two were my top reporters?” The year after he graduated from high school, his protégé had beaten out Jan to take over his position as editor.

“Yes, I remember.” Jan squinted and flexed her cheek muscles to force her face into a smile.

Ignoring the tension that filled the air between the two women, Ernie continued, “Gail is researching the death of a local girl who died twenty years ago.”

“Tricia Wheeler,” Jan said to him. “I know. She was shot. The sheriff ruled it a suicide.”

“I told Gail that we would do everything we can to help. Can you take her to the morgue to get her what we have on Wheeler?”

Jan fought to conceal her displeasure by forcing herself to sound cheerful. “Sure.” It sounded like a squeak. Grabbing her milkshake, she ushered Gail toward the stairs leading to the basement of The Glendale Vindicator, where they stored their old issues of the paper.

Gail said, “I heard you sold the drugstore.”

“That’s right. I’m writing full time now. I cover the courthouse, Josh’s beat.”

“I remember my first reporting job, at this little television station in Pennsylvania while I was going to school.” She sighed. “I look back and realize that things were so much easier and less stressful then. People expect less of you when no one notices your work.”

Jan stopped, her hand on the doorknob leading into the dusty file room. She told herself not to say anything.

“You are really lucky, Jan. Staying here in this small town with no one depending on you to be the best all the time.”

“I know why you’re doing this.” Jan whirled around. “I know why you’re here.”

Gail smiled. “Everyone knows why I’m here. I’ve made it no secret.”

“It’s also no secret that the network didn’t renew your contract.”

Her smile dropped.

Aware that she finally had the upper hand, Jan continued, “I saw you on the news, playing all emotional and suddenly having to come here to uncover the truth about your good friend’s murder. But I know the truth. I was there.”

An edge of fear crept into Gail’s tone. “What do you mean?”

“Come on! You and Tricia may have taken a few classes together, but you were not friends!”

“We were friends.”

“No!” Jan elaborated, “She hung out with the cheerleaders and the jocks. She and her friends were at the top of the social hierarchy. The student government and the school paper were below them. That was where you and I belonged. We were one step above the science geeks. The student government and school paper committee interacted with the jocks, but we were never really in that circle.” She concluded, “You weren’t friends with Trish.”

Gail’s lack of a reaction told Jan that she was on the right track. “Of course, for you to come to town and say that you were investigating the death of someone you didn’t give a damn about wouldn’t make for very good press, and without that, you can’t get another network job. Now, why, I wonder, can’t you get another network job without publishing another book? Did I read something on some Web site about a hospital visit? Could it have something to do with drugs?”

“Tricia Wheeler was murdered.”

“I don’t doubt that. And I believe her case does need to be reopened. But I don’t like you using her murder for your own ambitions. That’s the difference between you and me.”

Gail’s eyes narrowed. “If you don’t open that door and get me everything this paper has on Tricia, I am going to go tell your boss some very unpleasant things about you and you’re going to be looking for a new job.”

“Mary, have you seen my pen?” Joshua called out of his office to his administrative assistant.

She glanced around her desk and responded with a no.

He once again rummaged through the drawers of his desk in his search of the blue-and-gold pen that Jan had given him. Unable to find it, he slammed the last drawer shut and looked at the empty holder at the front of the desk.

With a hand on her hip, Mary questioned him from the doorway of his office, “When was the last time you saw it?” Her voice held a tone that reminded him of his grandmother when he asked her to help him find things. Grandmamma Thornton would consent to aid in the search, but not without a lecture about putting his things away.

“A couple of days ago,” he answered.

Mary proceeded to remove folders from his IN box to see if the pen had slipped under the files.

“I know I didn’t take it home. I’ve been keeping it here in the office in the holder where it belongs.” He groaned when the ringing phone interrupted the search. “This is Joshua Thornton.”

Without any greeting, Seth Cavanaugh launched into the reason for his call, “We got a break in the Henderson murder. The lab got a match on the slug that the medical examiner took out of the girl.”

“The gun was used in a previous crime?” He sat back in his seat to let Mary reach in front of him to open the center top drawer of his desk to search for the pen.

“Yeah,” Seth answered. “It was a four-year-old murder case in Weirton. The victim was Matthew Landers, an eighteen-year-old college kid, killed execution-style. He walked in on his father’s house being robbed. There was a string of break-ins in the area at the time.”

“But the burglaries stopped.” Joshua shook his head when she held up an old blue pen to ask if that was it.

“After the thieves broke into the wrong house. The owner blew one of the guys away with a shotgun. Justifiable homicide. The guy who got blown away was Bobby Unger. They didn’t find the murder weapon of the Landers boy so they could never officially connect the burglaries to his murder, but all the circumstantial stuff was there. Now, the guy who shot Unger says there were two of them and the second one got away. He said it was a boy, but he was unable to identify him because it was dark. Unger had a little brother named Billy. He was fourteen at the time.”

Joshua added four years to fourteen to arrive at Billy’s current age. He leaned back in his chair. “Just the right age to get a sixteen-year-old girl pregnant. Do you have any way of connecting Billy Unger to Grace?”

“Nope.”

“That gun could have been in a hundred different hands since that kid was killed. Has Unger been in any trouble since then?”

“He turned eighteen this past summer. So his record is officially clean. However, my sources in Steubenville tell me that he has a juvie record as long as your arm.”

Joshua ordered, “Get Heather Connor in here as soon as possible. The kids say that she’s a party girl and, from what I have learned, Steubenville is the place to party. Maybe she can connect Billy to Grace.”

With a shake of her head and a shrug of her shoulders, Mary left the office, defeated in her search for the pen.

Joshua had sat up in his chair and was about to hang up the phone when the investigator added in a by-the-way tone, “Interesting thing that Connor’s name has come up in this case.”

“Why?” Joshua leaned back again in his chair.

“You know Rollins was arraigned in the magistrate’s court today on those charges of violating the restraining order?”

“Yes. Foster is working that case.” Joshua would hand off his smaller cases in the magistrate’s court to one of his two part-time lawyers, who, like Tori Brody, were just getting started.

“Did Foster tell you that when Rollins came into court he had a Pittsburgh lawyer there to defend him? Christine Watson. She’s supposed to be big.”

“I know her. She doesn’t usually defend clients of his . . . uh . . .” Joshua looked for the right word. “. . . caliber?”

“She’s pleading him innocent and requested a jury trial. He’s out on bail.”

“A jury trial?” Joshua did not expect Rex Rollins to put up such a defense. He was certain he would plead no contest. “Watson doesn’t come cheap. What rich relative did he kill off?”

“That’s why I said this was so interesting,” Seth chuckled. “The deputy who was keeping an eye on Rollins after we arrested him says that he called Margo Connor from the hospital the night before he was released. Watson was waiting for him at the jail. I did a little digging this afternoon and guess what former employer has Watson on retainer?”

“Margo Connor. Maiden name Sweeney.”

“What have you got on the Grace Henderson murder?”

Jan bristled. Gail was poring over all the clippings on Tricia Wheeler that the reporter had printed from the microfiche in the file room. She had perused the clippings herself while she printed them. Now, when Jan thought that she had spent as much time with her as she could take, Gail once again intruded into her territory.

“Sorry,” she responded politely, but firmly, “That’s my story.” She assumed that the seasoned professional would understand that reporters, as a rule, did not give away their stories.

“Wasn’t she a cheerleader?”

Jan laughed. “Those murders are not connected.”

“They were both Oak Glen cheerleaders, shot once through the chest, after school, in their uniforms.”

“Twenty years apart?”

Again, Gail was condescending. “That’s the difference between you and me, Jan. I know a story when I see it. That is why I am here.” She indicated her perfect ensemble. “And you are there.” She wiped a smudge of dust from her colleague’s cheap blouse.

Jan emptied the melted remnants of her milkshake onto Gail’s silk blouse.

When a sweet thing like Grace Henderson gets killed in a quiet small town, the public gets nervous.

The father of a teenaged daughter away at her first year of college, Tad was so sickened to have to conduct an autopsy on Grace that he felt compelled to find out who killed the girl who had no reason for being on his examination table. That was why he had changed from his doctor’s robes and dressed down into jeans and a polo shirt to go to Steubenville to seek out the orange-haired girl posing with Grace for the picture found in her purse. Steubenville, Ohio, was out of his jurisdiction. Murder investigations were not in his job description, but Tad believed that rules were made to be broken.

It was at the third bar frequented by young people that he spotted her. He guessed that he was on the right trail when he saw the name and logo of the establishment: Half-Moon. They matched the partial name and logo in the picture. He recognized the bartender as the bare-chested man hugging the two girls. In the late afternoon, the piece of beefcake was working his regular job of tending bar.

Since it was a school day, most of the regular patrons were home living their public lives. That didn’t seem to have any significance for the girl with orange hair, who sat alone with her vodka and orange juice at the bar.

“Hello,” Tad took a spot on the stool next to her. He gestured to the bartender for a root beer.

The girl looked over the attractive older man and decided that he might be worth her while. “I’ve never seen you here before.”

“First time.”

“Ah, so you’re a virgin?” she quipped.

“Not exactly.”

As she took another sip of her drink, he observed a ring she wore on her right hand. The stone that resembled a ruby surrounded by rhinestones looked oversized. Has to be a fake, he thought, like the orange hair.

He sipped his soda. “I’m from Chester.”

“Really?”

“I think we might both know someone.”

“I don’t know anyone from Chester.”

“How about the late Grace Henderson?” He waited for her reaction.

It was slow to come. She asked defiantly, “Who are you?”

“Medical examiner.” He showed her his badge. “Did you know that your friend was dead?” When she tried to slide off her stool away from him, he grabbed her arm and pulled her back.