A Reunion to Die For (A Joshua Thornton Mystery) (19 page)

All was silent in the elevator as Joshua pushed the scene out of his mind and transformed himself into the Oak Glen High School valedictorian who had fulfilled the promise in his senior year of being most likely to succeed.

With his hand on the small of her back, he stepped into the lounge on the second floor like a dealmaker with his trophy on his arm. Randy was sitting in an armchair next to the roaring fireplace. Hoss and Karl were playing a game of blackjack at a game table. The three men had started on a bottle of scotch.

“Josh! I was beginning to think you wimped out on us!” Randy rolled a cigar between his fingertips.

“I never walk out when I’m winning.” Joshua escorted Hank to the loveseat across from Randy. He observed the game of blackjack. They were playing for money, and Karl was losing.

“And you never lose.” Randy pointed out with a hint of envy while he poured a glass for his classmate and handed it to him.

“No one wins all the time.” Joshua pulled over a footstool to prop his foot on. He wanted to be close so he could observe Randy. “If you win all the time, then you don’t know what it is like to lose; and if you don’t know what it is like to lose, then there is no fun in winning.”

“When have you ever lost anything?”

“You had Tricia.”

“Tricia wasn’t that great.”

“I guess that’s why you cheated on her with Margo.”

“Who is now a fat cow.”

“I’m talking about back then.”

“That’s history.”

“Isn’t that why we’re here?” Joshua gestured towards the room above them, which was in the process of cleanup after the party. “To recall the days back when we were free of responsibility. Sex and drugs and rock and roll!”

“You didn’t do drugs,” Karl reminded him from the game table. He cursed when, once again, he lost a hand.

Joshua could see that Hoss was cheating with a selection of choice cards under his thigh. Karl was too drunk to see it. “Let’s go back to Tricia,” he said.

Randy chuckled, “I thought you were here to find out who killed Gail, and I read in the papers that that was you. You two have been tearing up the sheets for the last twenty years behind your wife’s back.”

“My lawyer cleared me of that.”

Randy made a low sound in his throat when Joshua indicated that Hank was his lawyer. “Some guys have all the luck.”

Uncomfortable with his gaze, Hank covered her legs with the skirt of her gown.

When Joshua asked him about Gail, Randy answered, “I was in Columbus.”

“But Karl was here.”

The sound of his name caused him to look up from his cards.

Randy suggested to the prosecutor, “Then talk to Karl.”

“I hadn’t seen her since we were kids,” Karl blurted out.

“Then why were you calling her?” Joshua asked him.

“I was giving her dirt on Margo. She thought Margo killed Trish.”

“But she didn’t. You were her alibi. So—” He turned to Randy. “Someone else had to kill Trish.”

“Trish killed herself. She wasn’t wrapped too tight. When she lost me, she lost it.”

“The evidence says otherwise. It says that she was murdered.” Joshua also added, “I was there. She dumped you and you went chasing after her.”

“And I got her back.”

“Come on. This is Josh you’re talking to. She dumped you!”

Randy said in a threatening voice, “No one ever dumped me.”

“Rand, I was in the little theater when she ended it. So were all our friends. Everyone heard her say that you weren’t worth the hassle.”

“Trish loved me, and I loved her. I would never have hurt her.”

“If you loved her so damn much, then why were you doing it with Margo? Don’t tell me because of her winning personality.”

“Because Margo would do it with anyone. Hell! She married Karl, of all people!” Randy added with a chuckle, “Josh, you were the only member of the football team she didn’t sleep with.”

“There’s another achievement I can put on my resume,” Joshua said. “Why did you fool around with Margo when you had Tricia?”

Randy rolled his eyes. “Because Trish refused to give it up.”

“So you wanted them to fight over you. You were dating a bitch like Margo to get Trish jealous so that she would sleep with you to keep you.” Joshua let his disapproval slip out. “That’s the oldest trick in the book.”

“It’s the oldest trick for a reason. It works.”

“Only it didn’t work that time.”

“What makes you think it didn’t?”

“Because Tricia dumped you, and don’t tell me she didn’t.”

“That scene in the little theater was what you saw. What you didn’t see was what happened afterwards.”

This was what Joshua was waiting for. What happened after they left the little theater? He concealed his anticipation behind a façade of disbelief. “Are you going to tell me that you two kissed and made up?”

“Yeah. Sure, she said I wasn’t worth the trouble and went outside, but she was still in love with me. I gave her a little sweet talk and promised my devotion and before you knew it—” His smile was cocky. “I have no doubt that if she had lived, homecoming would have been the night. I was getting a room at the Econo Lodge for the occasion.”

Even though Cindy had told him that Tricia had led Randy to believe that they had made up by agreeing to go to the homecoming, the prosecutor pretended he didn’t believe him. “Judging by the way she dropped you, I think that was all in your mind.”

“Screw you, Josh!”

“Hey,” he put up his hands in defeat. “I’m just telling you the way it looked to me.”

“Who gives a shit how it looked to you?”

“A jury.”

The two words told Randy the reason for his presence at the reunion. For their old friend, it was not a social gathering. It was an impromptu interrogation. Joshua warned him, “You should care how I perceive things.”

“Should I call my lawyer?”

“Are you talking about the one defending you against two rape indictments?”

The gloves were off.

The hatred that had grown out of envy during the years that Randy pretended to be friends with a boy who was always one step ahead of him in life boiled to the surface.

“Gail’s book could not have come at a worse time,” Joshua said. “If she told the world what happened that night of the Valentine’s Day dance, then it might reach the ears of the jury and you would be a dead man.”

“My lawyer was handling it. We were going to sue her.”

“You put her in my van.”

“She was drunk out of her gourd!”

“You convinced her that it was me!”

“If she was so convinced it was you, what was she doing writing that it was me?”

“Because she found the son she had put up for adoption and saw you!” Joshua said. “That’s right, Randy! You’re a Daddy, and your son is the spittin’ image of you! Gail saw him and started remembering what happened that night. It drove her into having a nervous breakdown. She was going to tell the world what you did to her, which would have revealed to everyone that you are nothing more than a common rapist, and that scared the hell out of you!”

“My lawyer was not going to let that happen.”

“There is no way your lawyer could have stopped her from writing the truth about what happened to her. She told Tricia’s mother that she had a theory she was working on about Tricia’s murder. Gail’s research shows that she was investigating you and the host of sexual assault charges that have been filed against you throughout the years. You were her chief suspect, not Margo.”

“I did not kill either of them!”

“Where were you when Trish died?”

Randy shook his head. “I was with Hoss!”

A blank look crossed Hoss’s face before he nodded in agreement. “Yeah, we were together at his place, playing pool.”

“And we were both in Columbus when Gail was killed and you can’t prove otherwise.”

Joshua said with sarcasm, “And you had nothing to do with her murder.”

“That’s right.”

“Then why did you pay Karl five thousand dollars?”

Randy snorted. “It was a loan to an old friend.”

“Who happened to be at Gail’s house the night she was killed,” Joshua said. It was a bluff in order to study their reaction.

“I was not there.” Karl suddenly forgot about the card game he was playing.

“Suppose I said that evidence suggests otherwise?”

Karl was breathing hard. “You were the one who killed her! I saw you. I saw you take her in and I saw you leave and when I went in she was dead!”

Stunned by his admission that he’d been at Gail’s house, Joshua forgot about the suspect he had come to the reunion to question and turned to face Karl, who was pointing a finger of accusation in his direction.

Randy grinned. “Looks like you’re on the wrong side of this interrogation now, Thornton.”

Joshua asked Karl, “How did you get into her house? I locked the door on the way out.”

“The patio doors were open.” He went on, “I just wanted to talk to her about her book. She said that she remembered what we did to her in your van and she was going to write about it and say that we killed Trish because she was going to accuse Randy of raping her—which was a lie! I’d be kicked off the fire squad if she said that. Margo would use it to take my visitation away from Heather.”

Hoss quipped, “It isn’t like you get to see her now.”

Joshua stepped towards Karl. “You went inside after I left. You found her passed out. So you took the pillow and you smothered her.”

Karl backed out of his seat to get away from him. “No, she was dead already when I found her. I tried waking her up and she wouldn’t. So I turned on the light and that was when I saw that she was dead.” He repeated, “She was already dead and the only one I saw go in and come out was you.” Once again, he pointed a finger, trembling with anxiety, at his former friend. “You killed her!”

Randy told Joshua, “Looks like we have a standoff. Both you and Karl were there that night. One of you killed Gail. Since you’ve been cleared, then I guess Karl is it.”

“It’s not a standoff,” Joshua insisted.

Karl snatched a knife used to slice limes from the bar and grabbed Hank. He held the blade up against her throat.

“Don’t anybody move or I’ll slit her throat!”

Joshua told Randy, “Now this is what you call a standoff.”

Chapter Fifteen

“Put down the knife, Karl.”

Karl shook his head at Joshua. “No way. I’m not going to sit here and let you put me away for something you did!” He had his arm wrapped around Hank’s shoulders while pressing the blade of the paring knife to her throat.

She waited for a sign from Joshua to make her move.

As soon as Joshua was distracted by Karl’s desperate act of taking Hank hostage, Randy and Hoss ran down the stairs and out into the parking lot where Stan and his team of investigators took them into custody for questioning about the murders of Gail Reynolds and Tricia Wheeler.

“I didn’t kill Gail,” Joshua said.

“Well, I certainly didn’t!” Karl yelled as if by raising his voice to the highest volume he could convince everyone within hearing distance that he was telling the truth.

“Karl, listen to me,” Joshua said in a gentle tone while reaching under his coat for the gun he concealed in a belt holster behind his back. “We can talk about this.”

“Like anybody is going to believe me over you! Randy is going to tell them that I told him I killed her!”

“Why did you tell him that you did it if you didn’t?” Hank asked in order to take his attention and eyes from Joshua.

“For the money.” Karl guided her in the direction of the door. “He was the one with everything to lose if that book came out. He told me to scare her into not writing it. When I found her dead, I figured that if I told him that I killed her for him that he would help me out.”

“And keep you quiet,” she concluded.

Joshua had his gun in his grip. In hopes of not having to use it, he kept it tucked behind his back. “While you were outside waiting for me to leave, did you see or hear anything?”

“No!” Karl judged the distance between them and the door. “You were the only one there.”

Joshua stepped closer to them. “And you went in through the back door?”

“Because the front door was locked.”

“I locked it. When you left, what door did you go out?”

“The same way I came in. The patio door.” Karl pressed the blade against her neck. “Get away from me, man!”

Hank’s eyes told Joshua they were running out of time.

“Karl, don’t make us have to stop you. I’m telling you to put the knife down.”

Karl snarled, “I’ll put it down. I’ll put it down right—”

Before Karl could finish his threat she lifted her leg and dug her high heel into his shin and brought it down to his foot. At the same time, she pulled his arm away from her throat while plunging her elbow into his ribs.

Before he could recover to go after her with the knife, she dove for the gun in her handbag on the loveseat.

“Bitch! Damn bitch!” Seeing that his hostage was gone, Karl lunged for Joshua but came face to face with the barrel of his Berretta.

“Don’t make me use this, Karl.”

“I guess we can file this case as closed,” Stan announced the conclusion of the Gail Reynolds murder case.

“I’m not so sure about that,” Joshua countered.

He and Hank had given their statements to the state police, who took over Karl’s hostage situation, which was determined to be part of their investigation.

“Why not?” Hank asked. “You saw what happened here. Karl killed Gail to stop her from writing about the gang rape that was going to ruin all of their lives and reputations. Then he got Randy, who had the most to lose, to pay him for his silence.”

“Karl said he didn’t do it.”

Stan scoffed. “Of course. He’s not going to confess to the county prosecutor.”

Joshua shook his head in hopes of shaking everything into place. “He said that he left her house through the open patio doors because I locked the front door.”

“So?” she asked.

“When Jan Martin came by three days later, the front door was unlocked and open. Who unlocked it and left it open?”

“Karl Connor,” Stan answered. “That’s what I’m telling the jury.” He turned away to go home and back to bed, but stopped when he remembered something. “Oh, we got a trace on that e-mail that Sally Powell got that threatened to tell her husband about her affair.”

“Who sent it?”

“Margo Connor.”

“Karl’s ex-wife,” Hank observed.

Stan acknowledged the family connection between the source behind framing Joshua and the man he had arrested for murder. “She claims she didn’t send it. Her lawyer says that anyone in her office who had access to her computer could have sent it from her e-mail account while she was away from her desk.”

Hank suggested, “Maybe she doesn’t want her daughter to suffer the humiliation of having her father arrested for murder. Frame Joshua to keep suspicion off Karl.”

“And get the man prosecuting her daughter off the case,” Joshua surmised.

Mabel Barkely-Fine was on her way back to Columbus, Ohio, to hire a lawyer, but not the kind her husband needed. Fed up with the controversy he had brought to their lives, she was looking for the best divorce lawyer money could buy.

Seeing the end of life as he knew it, Randy was angry by the time Joshua stepped into the Hancock County jail’s conference room to finish the discussion they had started in the lounge at Mountaineer Resort. His suit jacket and tie were gone. With the few strands of his thin hair messed up, and his stomach hanging over the waistband of his pants, he held little resemblance to the high school Romeo Joshua had known long ago.

“Get out, Josh!” he ordered him. “My lawyer is going to move to have you taken off this case. You’re prejudiced against me.”

“If you mean that I have a personal dislike for rapists, yes.” He sat down across from him.

“I never raped Trish.”                          

“But you raped Gail.”

“She wanted it. She couldn’t get enough of me.”

“She wanted me, not you—”

“The story of my life,” Randy muttered.

“What are you talking about?”

“Do you know what it is like to make love to a woman and have her call you by someone else’s name?”

Joshua caught his breath while recalling the night before. He found himself wondering once again if Hank heard him whisper Valerie’s name into her ear.

Randy’s voice interrupted his thoughts. “All you had to do was give Trish the sign and I would have been history.” He scoffed, “You had no idea, did you? She was in love with you.”

Joshua felt a hole in the pit of his stomach. “Is that why you killed her?”

“I told you already. I did not kill her. Gail was off her rocker, saying that I killed Trish because she was going to accuse me of raping her.”

“Maybe that wasn’t your reason for killing her,” Joshua agreed with him. “Maybe you killed her because she had the gall to dump you in front of all your friends for cheating on her.”

“She took me back! You saw me chase after her. I followed her out of the theater and out the side door, and begged her forgiveness, and she took me back.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Josh! We used to be friends. You have to believe me.”

Joshua leaned across to challenge him. “Make me believe you.”

Randy thought, and then smiled. “Ask Doug Barlow. He saw the whole thing.”

“Doug Barlow?”

“He followed Trish outside, too. He was going on and on to her about how much he loved her. I told him to get lost. He tried to be gallant and told me that she didn’t want to talk to me. Then, the little twerp threw a punch at me. So I decked him. Then she told him to leave us alone because we had to talk. But he wouldn’t leave. He went over to the door and listened in on the whole thing. After we made up, he started crying like a girl and ran off.”

Finished with his tale, Randy sighed. “Ask Hoss if you don’t believe me.”

“Hoss will say anything to protect you.”

“Check the school records. Hoss was pissed after that because Doug was his chemistry partner. You remember how lousy his grades were. They had a lab test that afternoon, and the twerp wasn’t there to help him. Doug didn’t show up for the next two days. The attendance records will confirm that. Hoss was as mad as hell. Don’t you remember? He almost got tossed off the team because he flunked that test. You ended up tutoring him.”

Joshua wasn’t listening while Randy went on asserting that if he checked the school records he would find that Doug Barlow had left school that afternoon after seeing him make up with Tricia. As much as he did not want to believe Randy, he could not deny recalling Doug following her out of the little theater. If he had been in love with Tricia, then it was possible that he chose that time to proclaim it.

“So, Mr. Prosecutor,” Randy concluded with a sneer. “Do you believe me or am I under arrest?”

“I believe you,” Joshua muttered, “and you are under arrest.”

“For what? You can’t arrest me for raping Gail. The statute on that ran out a long time ago.”

It was the prosecutor’s turn to scoff. “Karl told you that he killed Gail and you did nothing but cut him a check. That is accessory after the fact. You’re under arrest, Randy.”

“You look like you’re going somewhere.” Joshua observed the backpack in Hank’s car. She was waiting for him on the front porch when he and his children got home from the Sunday church service. Nineteen hours earlier, she was dressed in a stunning gown when he escorted her to the reunion.

The one piece of information Joshua considered lucky to have gathered from the reunion was that Doug Barlow had witnessed Tricia and Randy making up. Joshua doubted if Doug would be able to give them more details about that day. However, he did think Phyllis, if she chose to be cooperative, might be able to enlighten him about what her brother had told her about Randy and Tricia’s discussion after the fight.

“I have to get back to Pearl,” Hank explained when he asked about her backpack in the back of the rental car. “I think you can handle yourself from here on out.”

“I thought you would maybe hang around for a few more days. You said you had vacation time to use or lose.”

She kissed him on the cheek. “I have work that won’t wait.” She descended the steps to the driveway. “It was great seeing you again. Love you.” She got into the car and drove off.

Aware of the five pairs of eyes watching him from various windows in the house, Joshua stood up straight, swallowed, and scratched his head.

As her car disappeared down the hill on Fifth Street, he heard the roar of Tad’s Harley. It came into sight as Hank’s rental faded from view. The motorcycle turned onto Rock Springs Boulevard and pulled into the cobblestone drive.

Joshua was surprised to see that it was Jan who rode on the back of Tad’s bike with her arms wrapped around his waist.

Hopeful for a ride on the motorcycle, Donny, still dressed in his church clothes, came running out onto the porch with the pretence of saying hello.

“Where was Hank going?” Tad asked after cutting off the engine.

“Back to Hawaii. She couldn’t stay any longer. She has cases that won’t wait.” Even coming from his own mouth, Joshua thought the excuse was not the whole truth.

When Tad started to dismount from his bike, Donny jogged down the steps to greet him with a hopeful grin.

“Do you want to go for a ride?”

After his father consented, the boy put on the helmet Jan had been wearing and went off down the road with his cousin.

Shaking out her hair that had been matted from the helmet, Jan followed Joshua to his study. “How was the reunion?”

“You didn’t miss much.”

“I didn’t think so,” she replied. “Tad took me to the Ponderosa for dinner.”

Joshua was startled to hear this. He turned to see that her cheeks were glowing. “I guess you had a good time.”

Her grin said that she did. “Did Randy kill Trish?”

He answered with a shrug and a shake of his head at the same time. “His profile doesn’t fit with the murder.” He plopped down in the chair behind his desk.

“Who did kill her?”

The slam of the front door relieved Joshua of the burden of answering. Tad found him sitting behind his desk with his head in his hands studying Tricia’s case file.

“What have you got there?” Tad pulled the top sheet from the folder. He let Jan read it over his shoulder.

It was a copy of a letter from the former county prosecutor, dated fifteen years ago, to Dorothy Wheeler in regard to a missing class ring. It stated that the county was not responsible for the theft. However, to settle the matter, they would reimburse her the cost of the ring in the amount of one hundred and fifty dollars. The letter noted that a check was enclosed.

“I’ve heard of cops and ambulance people who would take stuff off dead people,” Jan said.

“Didn’t we all see Trish take back her class ring from Randy that day?” Joshua recalled.

The original letter stapled to the copy signed by the prosecutor was from Dorothy. The letter read that it had come to her attention that her daughter had taken her class ring back from her ex-boyfriend on the day of her death, but she did not find it among any of her effects. If it was taken into evidence with her clothes and other items, she wanted it back for sentimental reasons. When she had checked with the sheriff, she was told that no class ring was found, nor was it logged in. Suspecting that it had been stolen, she wanted to be paid for the cost of it, or she was going to go to the media.

“Josh, have you looked at the crime scene pictures yet?” Tad asked.

Jan said, “Tad and I decided that someone moved her body after she had died.”

Joshua braced himself to look at the photographs of Tricia. The father could imagine the horror Dorothy had experienced when she came home to find her only child dead.

Tricia looked like she was taking a nap; that position should have told the previous sheriff that she had not committed suicide. Dressed in her cheerleading uniform with her blue-and-gold pleated skirt and turtleneck sweater with a gold trim “OG” on her chest, she was laid out in state. Her head rested on a pillow and her feet were up off the floor. Her hands were folded across her chest.

It was a picture of peace.

According to the medical examiner’s report, death was instantaneous.

Joshua took out his magnifying glass to study the bullet hole through the O on her chest.

“What are you looking at?” Jan bent over the desk to see what he was examining.

When the phone rang, she knocked it off the hook.

“Here.” Joshua handed them the picture and the magnifying glass with one hand while he answered the phone with the other. “Hello, Mrs. Wheeler. How are you today?”

“I’ll be fantastic if you can tell me who killed my daughter,” she said with a pleasant, yet serious, tone in her voice.

“I’m making headway.” He turned around in his chair and directed his attention to the woman on the other end of the phone. “I don’t have any or enough evidence to make an arrest, but I am closer than Sheriff Delaney was, that’s for sure.” He took out his notepad. “Tell me about the ring.”

“What ring?” As soon as she asked, Dorothy remembered. “Oh, her class ring. Yes. Trish had given it to Randy Fine when they started going steady. When she died, I thought he had it. Then, years later, I ran into Cindy Patterson, now Rodgers. She told me that Trish took her ring back on the day she died. So I figured the police had it and, since they weren’t doing anything with it, I wanted it back. But they couldn’t find it. One of the deputies confided to me that a couple of years after Trish died, one of the hospital attendants who worked in the morgue had been caught stealing and was fired, and he was working at the time she was brought in. So I got them to pay me for it.”

While it sounded like a good explanation of what happened to her ring, Joshua made a mental note not to forget about it. He couldn’t dismiss that the killer might have taken it as a souvenir.

After assuring Dorothy Wheeler once again that he was making headway in finding her daughter’s killer, he hung up the phone with a sigh of physical and emotional exhaustion.

Seeing that they had no other information to exchange, Jan announced that she had a lot of work to do. She hesitated for Tad to follow or offer to give her a ride down the street to her house only to have him plop down in the chair. Concluding that they had man-talk to discuss, she went home.

“How was your date with Hank?” Tad asked once he heard Jan shut the door in the front foyer.

“I’m not meant to date women.”

Tad shot him a wicked grin. “Who are you meant to date?”

Joshua was not amused by his humor.

“Want to talk about it?”

Joshua shook his head. “I need some time off, away from all this.” He indicated the stacks of files on his desk. “I came back home so the kids and I could have a more stable life. But the minute I get elected county prosecutor, my love life is called into question and we have a killing spree with an idiot for a detective. Sarah is barely passing English. I haven’t been to one scout meeting with Donny. Murphy is taking him. I missed the last parent-teacher conference. I forgot about it. I don’t do things like that.” He concluded by announcing, “I wish I had never run for this job.”

“And then Hank went back to Hawaii. What is that all about?”

“I screwed up royally.” Joshua shook his head in his hands. “She comes flying out here like a knight on a white horse. I didn’t ask her to come. Did you hear me ask her to come?”

“I didn’t even know about her.”

“She comes out here and tells me that she broke it off with her fiancé. We decide—I thought we decided—to give it a shot, and then the next thing I know I called her Valerie while in the middle of a kiss. She couldn’t get back to Pearl fast enough after that.”

“You called her Valerie?” Tad whistled. “That was a big mistake.”

“Her name just came out of my mouth. I thought I stopped in time—”

“Did she say anything about the ring?”

Joshua started. “What ring?”

“Maybe the wedding ring turned her off, too?” Tad’s eyes were on the ring on Joshua’s left hand.

Joshua looked down at his fingers.

The gold band fit as perfectly as the day Valerie had slipped it onto his finger. Over the years it had become scratched and the shine had faded. He saw his late bride’s image forever captured on her wedding day in the crystal frame beyond his hand on the corner of his desk.

“You know, Josh,” Tad explained while scratching the side of his head, “the whole one-year-of-mourning thing is custom. It’s not a rule. The period of mourning isn’t the same for everyone. I remember when Dad died. Mom had been married to him for twenty-one years. She loved that man. But, four months later, she was out there dating and she hasn’t stopped since. I have to beat them away from her with a stick.”

Comparing his beautiful, socially active aunt enjoying a life of retirement in Florida to her amorous son, Joshua noted, “Like mother like son, huh?”

“But then, I have a patient in her fifties. Her husband died twenty-seven years ago. They were married for four years. She has never been out with anyone else. She still wears her wedding ring. She is still in mourning.” He concluded, “Everyone is different. There’s nothing wrong with you if you aren’t ready to move on to someone else.”

The two men sat in silence.

When it appeared as if his cousin had become lost in his thoughts, Tad rose. “I guess I should be going home.”

Joshua fingered the gold band. “That patient you were telling me about? The one who is still mourning her husband after twenty-seven years? Is she happy?”

Tad paused to think about the woman, who lived a life of solitude. Her home had not changed one iota since the day her husband died. “In her own way. She’s alone and she likes it that way.”

“I don’t want to be alone.”

“That’s good. I’d think it’d be impossible to be alone with five kids.”

After Tad left, Joshua, determined to push Hank and Valerie from his mind, picked up the phone and dialed Doug Barlow’s phone number. As he expected, Phyllis answered the phone.

“What do you want to talk to him about?” she startled him by asking when he asked to speak to her brother.

“We are investigating Tricia Wheeler’s death and believe he might have some information about it.”

“He doesn’t,” she snapped back.

He grimaced. Phyllis Barlow Rollins did have a way of making the simplest things difficult. “Can I ask him that?”

“No, you can ask our lawyer. Her name is Tori Brody.”

He cringed. Tori was the last woman he wanted to talk to.

He advised her in the polite tone of a well-informed friend, “Phyllis, I have to tell you that when somebody ‘lawyers up,’ as we call it in my line of work, that makes them look guilty of something. Right now, I only want to ask Doug a couple of questions about what he might have seen the day Tricia died.”

Her tone was terse. “That was a long time ago. My brother is not well. If you try to interrogate him, there is no telling what damage it would do. Besides, we told Sheriff Delaney all we knew about Tricia back when she shot herself, which is nothing.”

“Then let Doug tell me himself he knows nothing.”

“Call our lawyer.”

Joshua took off his gloves. “Phyllis, I’m going to talk to your brother, whether I have to go through your lawyer or not.”

“Over my dead body.”

“We can get a court order to have your brother brought in against his, and your, will, and interrogated before a judge, if need be. Now, if you are really worried about his well-being, how do you think that will affect him?” He expected her to respond to his threat by making an appointment to bring Doug in to see him.

“Go to hell, Josh.”

Click!