Joel Goldman - Chasing The Dead

He sipped his coffee. It had gone cold with all the stirring. The waitress came by to freshen it, but he told her, “No, thanks,” and left. It was his day off. If he went back, Mitch Fowler would tell him there was no money in the budget for overtime and to get lost.

He stood in the parking lot, the day cool and crisp for late September. He clasped his hands together behind his neck, stretching the kinks out of his muscles. A day off. What the hell was he going to do with that? He knew the answer. He’d work the case on his own time.

The neighborhood canvass had been a bust. But a lot of those businesses had their own video surveillance systems that might have captured Robin and her killer. The cops doing the canvass hadn’t checked for that.

I-29 and Barry Road was a major intersection in the northland. There were shopping centers on three corners and two motels on the fourth. Continuing west of the intersection, the direction Robin Norris had chosen, there were a couple of churches, a high school, a park, and several residential neighborhoods, after which development thinned out, turning Barry Road into a little-traveled, unlit country lane by the time it reached the curve five miles farther west where Robin had been killed.

Rossi was confident that his basic premise was correct. While there were many different routes to the intersection, because Robin was unfamiliar with the area, she would have used I-29 to bring her to the junction with Barry Road. She placed her last-second call to Alex at ten fifteen p.m. She could have been anywhere on either side of I-29 prior to that. The timeline he had established for her movements had a gap of seven hours from the time she left the office to the time of the phone call. But the most important part of that period was the fifteen to thirty minutes before she called Alex. Something happened in that time frame to send her racing into the unknown darkness.

He started on the east side of I-29, working his way west, limiting himself to the places that would have been open that late in the evening, like the Hooters, Boston Market, and Starbucks. There was nothing on their videos.

There were more places to check on the west side of I-29, and the going was slow. Some managers refused to allow him to see their videos without a warrant and without authorization from someone higher up in the company food chain. Others confessed that their video cameras didn’t work. And still others told him that they recorded over their videos so that they had only the most recent twenty-four hours.

It was late afternoon when Rossi got to the motels. The manager on duty at the first one cited company policy requiring a subpoena or court order before allowing anyone to look at their security videos. Rossi told him that he’d be back the next day with a subpoena and warned him not to let anything happen to the video.

The manager at the second motel, an overweight, middle-aged man named Milton with a comb-over and beer breath, was more helpful, taking Rossi to his office and pulling up the video from the night of the murder. After watching for ten minutes, Rossi turned to the manager.

“Why are we only seeing three sides of the motel? What about the west side?”

Milton shrugged. “No cameras on that side.”

“Why not?”

“Can’t afford ’em.”

“Then why did I see cameras on the west side when I drove through the parking lot?”

Milton stuttered. “Uh, uh. . what I meant to say is that we got cameras but they don’t work.”

“Let me ask you a question, Milton. Suppose I get a search warrant and bring the department’s video crew up to take a look at those cameras. You suppose they’d work then?”

Milton paled. “Well. . I don’t know. .”

“Oh, Milton. I think we both know.”

“I could get in a lot of trouble.”

“More trouble than with a search warrant? More trouble than you being charged with obstructing justice?”

“If I tell you, can we keep it just between the two of us?”

“I’ll do the best I can to help you out, but one way or the other, I’m going to find out, and when I do, you’ll be a lot better off if I can tell the prosecutor that you were very cooperative.”

Milton swallowed. “Okay. The rooms on the west side are private.”

“Aren’t all the rooms private?”

“Not like these. They’re more like apartments, really. Paid up a year in advance.”

Rossi nodded, getting the picture. “For men who are cheating on their wives and don’t want to check in at the front desk and tell you if they need one key or two.”

“Yeah, like that.”

“Show me the names of the men renting those rooms.”

Milton shook his head. “I. . I. .”

“We’ve been down this road, Milton. Show me the names or get ready for turning this place into a cop convention with twenty-four/seven media coverage.”

“Okay, okay. I get it.”

He pulled up a spreadsheet with names and room numbers. Rossi dropped one of his business cards on the manager’s desk.

“E-mail the list to me.”

Rossi waited for the e-mail to pop up on his phone and forwarded it to Wheeler, telling him to call immediately.

“A Detective Wheeler is going to be here in the next hour with a search warrant for this computer. If you alter or delete this file, if you do anything at all to it, if you so much as sneeze on the screen, you’ll go to jail for obstruction of justice. Are we clear?”

Milton’s eyes fluttered and his jowls quivered. “We had a deal! No search warrant if I gave you what you wanted.”

“I told you I’d do my best, and that’s as good as it gets.”

Rossi’s phone rang. It was Wheeler. He took the call as he walked to his car.

“Why are working on your day off?”

“My bowling league doesn’t start until seven.”

“What’s on the file you sent me?”

Rossi explained, Wheeler whistling when he finished. “Get a search warrant and get up here. I want the computer and I want to know who was using those rooms on the west side the night Robin Norris was killed. Let’s find out if someone saw Robin or Ted Norris’s car.”

“On it. By the way, we can cross the daughter off our list unless all the kids were in on it. They were all at home the night Robin was killed.”

“I don’t mind the list getting shorter as long as we end up with the right person still on it.” Rossi’s phone beeped with a waiting call. “Gotta go. I’ve got another call.”

It was from Gardiner Harris, a burly veteran homicide detective who’d worked the Dwayne Reed case with Rossi.

“Hey, Rossi, I hear it’s your day off.”

“So they tell me.”

“Hope I’m not interrupting your golf game.”

“I had to cancel my tee time when I remembered that I left my driver up your ass. What’s up?”

“I got a dead body you’re gonna wanna meet.”

By the time Rossi arrived at the Blue Ridge Mobile Home Park, a perimeter marked off with yellow crime scene tape had been established, interviews of neighbors had begun, and an assistant coroner had completed a preliminary examination of the body.

“You’re going to love this,” Gardiner Harris said when Rossi got out of his car.

“A dead body on my day off. What’s not to love?”

“Guess who called it in.”

“Who?”

Harris pointed to a uniformed cop standing next to a patrol car. “Hey, Travis!”

The officer opened the rear car door and Alex Stone stepped out.

“Fuck me,” Rossi said.

“She found the body, a woman named Bethany Sutherland. Stone says she’s the sister of Joanie Sutherland, who’s the vic in one of your cases. And she says Joanie Sutherland’s daughter was living in the trailer. Name is Charlotte. Ten years old and autistic. Doesn’t say a word and likes to wander off. I got teams out looking for her, but so far, we got nothing.”