SLEEPING DOGS (Animal Instincts Book 6) (2 page)

The family consisted of the mother and father along with a boy and a girl. The girl looked like she was nearly Susan’s age, but I didn’t remember any Gillespies in her class at school. The boy was older than her, which meant I would not have known him at all. None of them had motives so even the chance of hiring a killer were slim.

Frias had apparently been working at the time of the killing. There was no sign of forced entry, which meant either that the killer had a key or more likely, the killer had been admitted by Frias. That meant someone with either a connection to the family or to the maid, which left a fairly wide playfield of suspects to consider.

The police seemingly tracked down the suspects as best they could. Many of them were ruled out for alibis. I printed out the articles that detailed the actions of several family friends and acquaintances of Frias. Given that more than a decade had passed, I doubted that some of these people would be able to recall what they’d been doing at the time of the murder. Unless I would be able to break these alibis, I would end up in exactly the same place as the police.

The major sticking point had been motive. Frias was middle-aged, attractive, but not stunning, and married. She had no children and few close relatives. There had been an uncle, who received money under the terms of her will. There was a cousin who had been given some cash under an insurance policy. However, nothing indicated that either of these people needed the money enough to kill a family member for it. The husband had received the little that was remaining. I wondered why.

The police went farther afield, but even in tracing her movements for several days, Frias had gone to church, cleaned the homes of seven different families and gone home to eat and sleep. There were no signs that she was involved in anything illegal, no blackmail and no illicit affairs. Her life was dull, the way many people’s are. However, most people do not end up dead.

Frias had no police records and from one reporter’s article had never even had a traffic ticket. There were no known beefs with neighbors or friends. She was described as amiable and moral. I know from talking to Sheila that prosecutors are not required to show motive, but that it always makes the case more solid when they do. This case would have had to go to court without a motive.

However, the case had never gone to court. The police investigation had not turned up sufficient evidence to charge anyone. The investigation had petered out several months after the crime. The newspapers went on to other crimes and killers, including my sister’s disappearance two weeks after the Frias murder. The uproar toned down after a while, and later still people forgot about the case.  By five years ago, it had been relegated to the “once-a-year on the anniversary of the crime” reporting beat.

So why had I settled on the Frias case as a possible situation involving my sister, Susan? First, the crime had taken place two weeks before she left, and the day before she’d begun making phone calls to the bus station to learn about fares to other cities and the schedules. The time proximity was telling. It wasn’t proof, but it was certainly a major coincidence in the cosmos if the two were not related. The two biggest crimes in the last 20 years in Toledo had happened less than two weeks apart.

I’d originally forgotten how close the two events had been in time. When Susan left, I’d become so engrossed in her life and my life that I’d forgotten about the Frias case. It was only when I started looking at events around the time of Susan’s disappearance that I rediscovered how close the events had occurred.

The second reason was that the crime had taken place less than two miles from our house, the house where my mother still lived. Even though neither Susan nor I were old enough to drive at the time, two miles was at the outside limit of what we could have traveled by bike. Given the time, it was more likely that a parent would have driven us that far, but my mind reeled at the thought that my parents had known of the disappearance and lied about it for so many years. While I highly suspected that my mother knew more than she was telling, I didn’t think that she could have pulled off the manipulation of lying about the crime so early on. Her grief was too real and raw to be engineered.

By the time I finished eating and feeding the dogs, it was nearly 10pm. I began to worry about Sheila and wondered what could have happened to her. I dialed her number and waited for an answer.

On the fifth ring, a man picked up. “Yes?”

I felt ice in my veins. No one else should have had access to her phone, which she sometimes used for work. “Sheila?” I asked, thinking that my voice didn’t sound like me.

“Obviously not. What business do you have with her?” the man asked. He was very preemptive, and I guessed that he was probably police. The tone and manner would fit. However, it still did not fit what I knew of Sheila and her habits.

“I’m dating her. Why are you answering her phone?” Two could be demanding, and I knew that I would end up answering his questions so he should answer mine.

“There’s been a break-in,” the voice said.

“At her house? When? Is she okay?” My heart pounded in my chest. In just a few hours after beginning to look at the Frias case, Sheila had been attacked, and likely injured, from an unknown intruder at her home. The similarity was too much to bear.

“She’s getting checked out by the EMTs right now,” the voice said. “I have some questions for you though.”

I didn’t bother to respond. I clicked off and stuffed the phone in my pocket. In less than 20 minutes, I was at her house and looking at the kaleidoscope of flashing lights around her home. There were, by my count, six police cars, a fire truck and the EMT unit. I got out of the car and headed to the EMTs first. Sheila was in the back of the vehicle, resting on a gurney.

“Griff, what the hell are you doing here?” She started to sit up, but the EMT put a restraining arm across her. The left side of her head was bandaged, and blood had seeped through the gauze in a few places. I knew that head wounds bled a lot, but the effect was scary. I couldn’t spot any other injuries on her, but head injuries were bad enough. All of this was made more horrendous by the fact that she’d likely been injured in the course of helping me solve the mystery of my sister’s disappearance.

“Sir, are you family?” he asked.

“We’re dating,” I said with more authority than I felt. We’d gone out a few times, kissed a few more, but we’d never really defined the details of our relationship. So putting a label on it was more than I probably should have done, but given my stress, I didn’t care. I found a sister and nearly lost a romantic relationship in the span of a few hours.

“What happened?” I asked her as I moved closer. The EMT made no moves to throw me out, so I waited for her to respond.

She rested on the gurney with her eyes closed, but she spoke after a minute. “I came home after stopping at work regarding our errand.” She was vague, so I was being told to talk in less than plain terms. “I came home, got something to eat, and before I knew what hit me, I was attacked by an intruder and knocked out. When I came to, I called for help.”

“Are you okay?” I felt panicky at the sight of her laying there, head bandaged and eyes closed.

“I’ll be fine. They’re insisting that I go down to the hospital and get checked out. I bet I have a concussion, but that will be it.”

“You were lucky,” the EMT said flatly.

“Luck had nothing to do with it. The guy didn’t want to kill me. He could have done so easily when I was out.” I knew that she couldn’t be too damaged, because she sounded like the same Sheila I’d known for over a year.

“So what can I do to help?” I felt marginally better knowing that she hadn’t lost her pragmatic view on life. It gave me hope that she’d be okay.

“I left something in the house that I’ll need later. If you could, go in the house when the cops are getting ready to leave and get it.” She handed me her house keys after taking them from her pocket. “You won’t have any trouble finding it. It’s still there. I looked.”

So she’d gotten the file, hid it, and then checked the hiding spot when she woke up. I wondered if the police would have found it and wondered what she was doing with the Frias file. That would have made an interesting investigation, given the similarities, but she seemed to think that they wouldn’t find it – and that I would.

The EMT shooed me out of the ambulance and closed the doors. I watched as it drove off into the night, lights flashing and horns blaring. The fire truck had long gone too. There was only a single police car here now, and I walked up to the patio and went into the house. The two men were talking to each other, but they were done with the scene.

I’d never been in Sheila’s house before. The effect was odd. We’d gone out to restaurants and had dinner at my place, but never in the course of a year had she invited me back here. If it hadn’t been for the intruder, I wondered when I would have been allowed to see her home. I had often speculated that she hid diamonds here or had a family of seven children that she didn’t want me to meet.

Instead, the house was refreshingly normal. It hadn’t been decorated too formally. There were pieces of furniture in each room, the things you would expect. However, none of them look like sets or even particularly well matched. The pieces had been picked for comfort or whatever reason without care for color and style. I thought much of the house could have matched my own decorating style, which perhaps was a reason we got along so well.

I was barely inside the front door, but I’d already taken in so much about Sheila and her personality from the décor and the surroundings. Maybe she was just afraid of being this vulnerable in front of me. Given that I observe and deduce for a living, she may have thought that I would know too much about her if I visited here.

“What are you doing here?” the one asked me, hand on his holstered gun.

The other one put a hand on the first’s shoulder. “That’s the boyfriend. She’s on her way to the hospital. You can catch her there.” He turned away from me and started talking to the other officer again.

I held up the keychain. “She asked me to pick up a few things. She figures she’ll be there overnight, and you know how women are,” I said with a shrug. Actually, I really didn’t have an idea of how women were, but it sounded good.

I headed off to her bedroom, where I found a small bag under the bed. The room was ridiculously tidy and almost girly. Not what I would have expected from Sheila. The comforter and bed skirt were older, but still in good repair, and I wondered for a moment if they had some special meaning for her, which is why they hadn’t been replaced. However, my mind was spinning too fast for me to give it the thought it deserved.

I haphazardly stuffed a few items into the bag. I wondered how Sheila would feel about me pawing through her things. It was in the name of a good cause, so I found a set of pajamas as well and then went out to the kitchen.

The kitchen was modern, more like what I’d expected from Sheila. The appliances were all stainless steel, and the floor was a black and white tile. There were no signs of any personal items out here, so I doubted that what I wanted was in the kitchen.

The problem was that I had no idea what I was looking for. She had said that I would know it when I saw it. The two cops were out there. I looked around, got a glass from the cupboard and filled it with the water dispenser in the refrigerator door. That gave me a few moments to look around and see if any place looked like a likely hiding spot for a police report, but nothing stuck out at me.

I walked into the living room. A few things had been knocked over in the attacker’s search for papers here. However, nothing looked permanently damaged. The dog crate was turned on to its side and the pillow cushions had been dislodged.

Maybe it was because I had already suffered through a tough day, but it took me a minute to realize that Sheila didn’t have a dog. The crate, which would be familiar to me, was the clue I was looking for. I put the cushions back on the sofa, watching the two policemen in the other room. They were not interested in me at all as they continued their conversation.

I walked to the crate and righted it. The crate was a larger one, with a big door in the front and a removable pan underneath the floor. I slid the pan out far enough to see the folder. I shifted to block the view of the crate. I set the bag down next to me. I readjusted the crate, put the newspapers back on the floor of the crate, and then slid the file into the bag.

I got up to leave, knowing that the attacker would likely visit the house again to see if he could find the file. Now that Sheila was gone and the police would not guard the house all night, he or she could take their time and locate the file. It would have been easy to accomplish if I hadn’t been there to get it first. I didn’t want to be here, and I especially wasn’t keen on people mentioning that I’d spent a lot of time here looking for files.

I paused to say good-bye to the officers. The younger man took a step towards me. “We’re going to need to see the contents of the bag. You can’t leave here with anything that might be evidence in a crime.” He held out a hand, and I paused, wondering what to do. I wanted to see that file desperately, and did not want to spend time answering questions about why I had the notes from the Frias case.

The older cop knocked the other’s arm out of the way. “Are you crazy? Green would have your dick whacked off if she found out that you were pawing through her undies.” He looked at me. “Sorry, no offense.”