Real Murder (Lovers in Crime Mystery Book 2) (5 page)

“I should have gone with him,” Joshua said into his  brandy before taking the first sip. “We were friends. I remember when we were six years old. We built a raft, handmade, out of plywood. Since we were too young to use a hammer and nails, we tied it together with baling twine. Then we took it down to the river. That thing actually floated—until we were in the middle of the river. Then it started to sink. Luckily, some people heard us screaming for help. The police and fire department and everyone in town came out to rescue us.”

Joshua tore his eyes from where he was staring into the fire he had built in the study’s fireplace to look over at Irving, who was perched with his front paws tucked under his black body in the wing-backed chair across from him. His emerald eyes bore into Joshua like an accusation.

“I let him down, Irving.” Joshua sat forward in his seat with his elbows on his knees. He looked down into the brown liquor in the snifter he held in his hand. “But I was in the navy. I was on my way to Naples. I couldn’t not go. I had orders to be there.”

Meow.

“His murder wasn’t my fault. Who’s to say that if I had gone with him that we both wouldn’t have been murdered—that both of our bodies wouldn’t have been in that cruiser? Or maybe his murder had nothing to do with the case he was working on.”

“If it wasn’t your fault, why are you kicking yourself over it … whatever it is?”

Joshua jerked his head around to look over at Irving, who was still eyeing him.

“You forgot about my milk and cookies.” Cameron came in from where she was leaning in the doorway to slip her hand over the top of the chair to his shoulder.

“Sorry.”

“How many of those have you had?”

“This is my first,” he answered.

“Do you always bare your soul to Irving in the middle of the night?”

“Only when I need to talk to someone with the power to make me feel really guilty about something that wasn’t my fault.”

“Oh.” She slipped into his lap. “Sounds like Tad is through with his autopsy on Mike’s body.”

“No.” Joshua peered up into her eyes. “I don’t need the results of any autopsy. My gut has been screaming ever since they brought that cruiser up from the bottom of the lake. His gun wasn’t in his holster. Someone killed him, Cam.”

“Maybe when his car went into the lake, he took out his gun to shoot out the window, but drowned before he could do that?” She wrapped her arms around his shoulders and leaned her head against his.

“I’m not buying it.” He turned to look at her. Their noses collided.

“His murder isn’t your fault,” she said. “It’s the fault of whoever killed him.”

“I should have asked him about the case he was working on,” Joshua said. “I was so focused on my own life, my  family, my moving, and my career, that I blew him off, Cam. If I hadn’t, then maybe—”

“Maybe,”
she said. “Maybe not.”

Even Irving was sitting up on the edge of his seat.

Joshua sighed. “Hunter stopped by.”

“You predicted that he would,” she said. “Did he have any enlightening information?”

“Seems the Gardner family had a black sheep.”

She rested her head on his shoulder. “What kind of black sheep?”

“A prostitute.”

“Interesting,” she said. “Was she murdered?”

“Hunter doesn’t know,” Joshua said. “Seems no one in the family will talk to him about it. He’s only heard rumors. One  of those rumors was that this black sheep was really Mike’s mother.”

“You mean like a secret adoption?”

“It’s not unheard of,” Joshua said. “I’m sure Tad would know about it if there were any truth to it.” He wrapped his arms around her. “Do you still want that milk and those cookies?” He waited for her to reply.

She didn’t.

She had fallen asleep.

Chapter Five

Cameron couldn’t believe it when she woke up to   discover that Joshua hadn’t set the alarm. When she saw the sun shining into their bedroom from the veranda, she screamed and threw the covers over Irving in her dash for the shower. Seeing the bruise across her forehead and the scrape on her cheek, she tossed aside the idea of heavy makeup and opted only for mascara before running down the stairs and outside and jumping off the porch to find her car missing.

Then she remembered that it was still at the station. Joshua had driven her home from the hospital the day before.

Guess that means I get to drive the Vette!

As much as he claimed he loved her, Joshua had yet to let her drive his black classic 1964 Corvette. He didn’t even drive it in the winter months. Grabbing the keys from his desk drawer, she went to the garage tucked into the back corner of the property and opened the door.

When she threw back the tarp that covered up Joshua’s baby, an evil giggle escaped from her lips. It was with a sense of exhilaration that she opened the driver’s door and slipped in behind the steering wheel. To her surprise, she found an envelope addressed to “My Love” taped to it. It was written in Joshua’s brisk and precise handwriting. Her exhilaration was replaced with guilt.

He isn’t even here. How does he know?

She opened the envelope and took out the card. The   message was brief:

Go back to bed, darling. I’ll be home for lunch.

Love, Josh

She tossed the note aside onto the passenger seat.

You’re not the boss of me, Joshua Thornton!

She turned the key in the ignition. Nothing happened. Silence.

Ha ha ha. Think you can stop me by disconnecting the   distributor cap, huh? I’ll show you.

She got out of the car and with a sense of triumph threw open the rear compartment to find the distributor cap   attached. Instead, there was an empty hole in the area   reserved for the battery.
No, Joshua didn’t put a stop to her with something that could be easily fixed by hooking up the caps. He had removed the whole car battery.

Cameron was still cursing him when her cell phone   vibrated on her utility belt. Seeing his name in the caller ID, she answered, “You …” and then she sputtered out three nasty names at once.

“I see you discovered that I brought my car battery to work with me,” Joshua said with an evil tone in his laugh.

“How am I supposed to get to work?”

“You aren’t supposed to get to work,” he replied. “Do you remember yesterday? Your lieutenant said you’re on sick leave for two weeks. You aren’t cleared to work until the doctor   approves you. So go back to bed.”

She slammed down the rear compartment to the Vette.   “I hate lying around doing nothing.”

“Be gentle with my car,” he ordered. “Do something to keep yourself occupied. Take Irving for a walk. Cook lunch for when I come home.”

The memory of their conversation in front of the fireplace in the middle of the night came to her mind. She had forgotten all about Joshua drinking a brandy before the fire while telling her about—
Damn! Mike—what was his name? The deputy who had landed in the lake.

“Did you call Tad yet about the black sheep hooker?” she asked.

“No,” he replied. “I’m in court today. I’m hoping to talk to him this afternoon.”

“Didn’t you say that friend of yours—what was his name?”

“Mike Gardner,” he said.

“He was adopted …” The memory came back.

“We don’t know that for sure,” Joshua said. “This is why you need to take some time off. Your brain is still quaking inside your skull.”

“Who came over last night?” she asked. “Why didn’t you bring me my cookies and milk?”

“You know where they are,” he said. “If you want milk and cookies …”

“I hate this,” she said. “I’m calling Tad to find out about Mike’s autopsy, and you can’t stop me.”

Joshua laughed. “If looking into Mike Gardner’s murder will keep you home and happy and quiet, then go for it, baby.”

By the time she hiked up from the garage to go through the back door into the country kitchen, Cameron’s head felt like it was going to explode. The pain was so bad that she broke down and took one of the pain pills prescribed by the emergency room doctor. With Irving and Admiral following    at her heels, she went into the study to plop down at Joshua’s desk.

Catching her image in the mirror that hung on the wall above the sofa, she started and moved in closer. Is that me? Her forehead was puffy and black and blue. The welt across her cheek had swollen up to her eye so that it was almost shut. She dabbed at her tender wounds.

People are going to think Josh is a wife beater.
Thinking of her own reputation of being a woman in control, she reconsidered with a smile.
They should see the other guy who’s in jail where he belongs.

Pleased with the satisfaction of her arrest the day before, Cameron dismissed the brutal image in the mirror. Calling her bruises and black eye badges of honor, she plopped down behind Joshua’s desk and switched on her laptop.

With some effort, she remembered the name of the   missing, and assumed dead, deputy. Michael Gardner.

Maybe this whole concussion thing is worse than I thought.

Using her official log in, Cameron made her way to the police records for the missing persons report for the case file in the database.

Michael Gardner disappeared while on duty on Friday, September 13, 1996.

Friday the thirteenth? I guess it was an unlucky day for him.

When he had failed to make his regular report into the station at two o’clock, his fellow officers went out looking for him. According to the case file, the last person to see Gardner alive was Joshua Thornton and the server at Allison’s Restaurant on Carolina Avenue in downtown Chester, where Gardner had gone to pick up his lunch for takeout.

The report indicated that nine months after Gardner had gone missing, Joshua Thornton had contacted the sheriff’s   department to report that Gardner had told him that he was going out to Tomlinson Run Park to meet an informant about a case he was working on involving the murder of a prostitute, which was news to his fellow deputies and the sheriff at the time. The sheriff’s department had no record of what case the deputy could have been investigating, and at no point in their investigation into his disappearance had there been any witness who indicated that Mike Gardner was working on a criminal case during his own time.

A search of the park did not turn up anything.

Guess they didn’t drag the lake.

In the same case file was the report that the sheriff had provided the county court on June 11, 2001, which restated basically the same information. The sheriff had no clues and no suspects. Everyone loved Michael Gardner, and they   believed he wouldn’t simply take off. There were no transactions on his credits cards or any type of activity to indicate that he was alive.

On June 17, 2001, Michael Gardner was declared dead.

A front-page article appeared in
The Review
, for which Jan Martin MacMillan was the editor. The article included a picture of Mike Gardner in his police portrait. Ruggedly handsome would be the right description. Red curly hair and blue eyes. A broad chin and shoulders. Cameron was struck with how much he resembled Hunter.

That must be why I thought Hunter looked familiar last night. … No, it can’t be. I hadn’t seen any pictures of Mike Gardner until now. But Hunter looked …
With a sigh, she pushed the idea from her mind.
Hunter and Mike must just look like someone I used to know. But who? It’s going to bug   me until I can put my finger on it. Who else do they remind me of?
Her head pounding, Cameron gently rubbed her bruised forehead.
You’re losing it, Cam.

Squinting against her headache, she continued to read the various statements in the online file.

Mike had never actually been on the force long enough to make enemies, nor did he have enough experience in investigation to be a threat. No wonder he asked for Joshua’s help.

Cameron went onto the Internet to do a search of Michael Gardner’s name and a further background check, only to find the background of the average boy next-door. He was born in the hospital in East Liverpool, Ohio—the same one where Joshua had been born. She noted that their birthdates were one week apart.

Suddenly remembering that Hunter had mentioned adoption, Cameron tried to dig further for the names of the parents on Gardner’s birth records and found nothing. Striking out, she looked in the search engine for anything, but only came up with the marriage announcement for Belle Gardner, widow of Michael Gardner, to Royce Fontaine. The announcement said that the couple met while both were working at Remington Pharmaceuticals in Pittsburgh, where Belle was an office manager and Royce was a vice president in charge of research.

With a sigh that came from intense thought and exhaustion, Cameron got up from the desk and moved over to the sofa to stretch out with the laptop perched on her bent knees. Welcoming the move that made his mistress more accessible, Irving perched behind her head on the arm of the sofa.

Cameron went on to dig deeper into cold case murders in the surrounding area of Hancock County that involved possible prostitutes that Mike Gardner could have been investigating.

Irving’s purr bounced in the back of her head and then to the front. She felt like it was bouncing off the back of her eyeballs. She closed her eyes and felt herself drifting off to sleep on the melody of her cat’s purr.

With broad shoulders and curly red hair, he was a ruggedly handsome man.

While Cameron studied the picture, his mother was recounting the same story that she had been telling every detective who had inherited the case over the last forty years. “My son did not commit suicide.”

Cameron put down the photograph and looked at the police report from 1966. There wasn’t much. Douglas O’Reilly was a student at West Point. He had graduated from high school the year before and was on summer break when his car was found in Raccoon Creek. At first, it had been assumed that he had missed a turn and driven off the road, rolling end over end down the steep, rocky embankment before landing upside down in the lake. However, investigation showed that there were no skid marks. They also discovered that his sixteen-year-old girlfriend, Ava Tucker, had broken the news to him that very day that she was pregnant.

The unwanted pregnancy would kill his academic career at West Point. He would be expected to quit school and marry her. He chose instead to take his own life. The investigators closed the case as a suicide.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. O’Reilly,” Cameron said.

“Can’t you at least take another look at it?” the elderly woman asked with tears filling her eyes.

Her heart breaking, Cameron tried to think of something, anything, to give the old woman some comfort.

Ring!

Cameron grabbed her phone and yelled into it. “I’m asleep!”

In one movement, Irving flew over the coffee table and out of the room.

“Sorry, Cam,” Jan Martin-MacMillan responded. “I   didn’t mean to wake you. Josh asked me to check in on you   to see how you were feeling.”

Cameron sat up on the sofa. “I’ve been better. Hey, has Tad finished the autopsy on Michael Gardner?”

“Josh will find that out before I do.”

“Men!”

“Tell me about it,” Jan replied. “He did tell me off the record that the dental records were a match. It is Mike.”

Cameron was now fully awake. “You knew Mike.”

“Grew up with him just like Josh,” Jan said. “We all grew up here within a few blocks of each other.”

“Did you hear anything about him being adopted?”

Jan was silent.

“Are you still there?” Cameron asked.

“I don’t know how much truth there is to it,” Jan said. “You know how small towns are. There’s always speculation and rumors, especially when something like this happens—or when something like Mike disappearing on duty happens.”

“What did you hear?”

“Mike’s aunt was Ava Tucker.”

Ava Tucker! My dream! Or was it a dream? No, memory. There was an old woman—back when I was first promoted to homicide and—

“Cameron, are you okay?” Jan Martin was calling to her through the phone line. “Are you still there?”

Blinking, Cameron rubbed her aching head. “What did you say, Jan? Something about Ava Tucker.”

“Well, we were all little kids—Mike, Josh, and me,” Jan said. “I do remember her though. She had quite a reputation. I heard that a man actually killed himself because she had broken his heart. Gorgeous. I used to look at her with her perfect figure and she wore the shortest mini-skirts and high heels. Red hair. She reminded me of Ann Margaret. She dropped out of high school. Never graduated. Went away. Then, she came back into town, and I do remember hearing rumors that she was Mike’s birth mother—but I never saw or heard anything that proved it.”

“What happened to Ava Tucker?” Cameron asked.

“I …” Jan’s voice trailed off. “I don’t really know. I can search through the archives at the newspaper to find out. Why? Do you think it’s a clue?”

“Maybe,” Cameron replied.

Before she could hang up, Jan stopped her. “I almost forgot why I was calling,” she said. “Want to go to lunch?”

“Is there ice cream involved?”

“Yes, Cricksters,” Jan said. “Every other Monday, the ladies in our neighborhood get together for lunch. Some stay-at-home mothers and a few elderly ladies who don’t get out much. There’s about a dozen of us. Since none of them had a chance to meet you, and Josh asked me to keep an eye on you, I thought I’d invite you to come along. I’ll drive.”

“Buy me ice cream and I’ll follow you anywhere.”