Cruelest Month (21 page)

39

Ray propped the sauna door open with a board
he pulled from a pile of old lumber haphazardly stacked at the side of the building. They peered into the gloomy interior at the chalk outline Sue had made around the body before the EMTs had bagged it and carried it away.

“So he was sprawled toward the door?” said Ray.

Sue switched on a large LED lantern and placed it inside the doorframe. “Yes,” she responded. “Maybe he realized that he was in trouble and had to get out of here?”

“I don’t think so. Drunk, hyperthermic. But who knows?” said Ray.

“So what if his lady love came back last night with the intent to do him in. She brings a gift of booze, gets him totally smashed, maybe puts something extra in his drinks, lures him to the sauna with, well, you know, an array of enticements, and bakes him for a couple of hours. It’s not quite the Hansel and Gretel scenario, but it would work.”

“What’s her motive? She had her stuff back. And she would have to know she’d be the first person we’d want to talk to.”

“How many times have you told me that most of our bad guys and gals don’t hang out at Mensa brunches?” quipped Sue. “Give me a few minutes to shoot the interior.”

Ray stood outside, watching Sue. Then the door caught his attention. He inspected the lower half first, searching the soft, rough sawn cedar for marks left by the nails of a desperate man. “Is it okay if I close this for a minute?” he asked.

“Go ahead,” came the response.

He pulled away the prop and swung the door shut. It was casually constructed of six wide vertical boards held together by two horizontals, one at the top and one at the bottom. Ray ran his hand below the uppermost board where he found an indentation on the surface of the door. Propping the door open again, he looked at the path of widely placed pieces of cracked stone that ran from the house to the sauna. About three feet from the door there was a deep indentation in the earth to the side of a large stone. He began to search the exterior of the sauna. Along the back wall was a jumble of scrap materials—metal and wood. Ray took particular interest in a rusty steel rod—three inches in diameter and six feet in length—on top of the pile.

“I’ve got something to show you,” he said as Sue emerged from the interior. After showing her the mark in the door and the indentation in the ground, he walked her behind the sauna. “Can you pull any prints off that?”

Sue inspected the rod carefully. “Pitted, rusty surface like this, I don’t think so.”

“Okay, then help me. Let’s see if this fits.”

They carried the heavy rod to the front of the sauna, sliding the shaft under the crosspiece on the door and bracing it against the boulder in the ground. “Perfect fit. Now let’s see if it would have prevented Moarse from pushing his way out.” Ray pulled the brace away from the door. “Go in and see if you can move the door. I’ll tell you when to start pushing.”

“No way,” said Sue, a minute later, emerging from the building. “I couldn’t budge it.”

“This sort of changes things,” observed Ray. He kicked at the rod. “Do you think that little redhead could carry this?”

“What does it weigh?”

“Rough guess, 120, 130 pounds. Could you carry it? I suspect you’re much more fit than….”

Sue squatted, wrapped her hands around the metal, and lifted it a foot. “With difficulty,” she admitted. “It would have been hard for me to move it here and get it in place. Getting it back would have been even harder. We’re looking at a homicide rather than an accidental death, aren’t we? And that 911 call suggests….”

“I’m not ready to even speculate on that yet,” said Ray. He turned around and glanced around at the house, the garage, their own two vehicles. “So now this whole place is a crime scene. Do you want to start in the house or the garage?”

“The house,” answered Sue quickly. “I’ll be able to see what’s changed since the last time I was in there.”

An hour later they emerged, Sue holding the door as Ray gingerly carried a Macintosh computer in gloved hands. Sue, holding the keyboard and mouse in a clear plastic bag, opened the back of her Jeep and made room for the machine and its appliances between the cases containing her investigative equipment.

“That’s an unexpected find,” said Ray.

“He didn’t have the computer more than a few weeks, but it was already starting to disappear in the clutter. Any open space in that dump of a house would be like a vacuum. Looks like he made room on that table to look at the contents of the hard drive, then didn’t use it again. I shudder to think how long a thorough search of that place will take.”

“Let’s look in the garage. Then we’ll go back to the office and develop a plan for the next steps.”

Sue followed him along the gravel drive, weeds encroaching on the uneven surface. Struggling a bit with the heavy garage door on an overhead track, Ray pushed it open.

“Plates are three years out of date,” said Sue, slipping sideways through the debris.

“Why bother keeping up to date if you don’t have an operator’s permit?”

“There’s that. Too bad the people who write the laws are clueless about the folks that break them.” She bent and looked at the right rear tire. “I bet these bald Eagles match my plaster casts.” She paused for a moment. “One more thing to process. We’ve got the computer and the probable vehicle. Too bad we’re a day late and a perp short.”

“Great wit for someone who’s sleep deprived. Now if you could only tell me about the phantom cell?”

“I think we’re just looking at the top of the proverbial iceberg. This case gets more and more complicated.”

“I wonder if you can find any residue of burned skin on that sauna stove?”

“I don’t know how to do that,” Sue said thoughtfully. “I’ll need to make some phone calls and send some emails.”

40

Ray read Sally Rood the boilerplate
from a laminated card. Then he identified himself and Rood, and gave the date, time, and location of the interview. He glanced up at one of the two ceiling cameras as he finished, then settled his gaze on Rood.

“Thank you for coming in,” he said.

“Like I had a choice,” she responded. “So there’s this cop at my hotel room at seven in the morning. I’m sure my new boyfriend is sitting there now, wondering what kind of woman he got mixed up with.”

Rood’s face was flushed, her body tense. To Ray, she smelled of soap and shampoo, cigarettes and coffee.

“The SOB wasn’t even going to give me a chance to shower.” She crossed her arms fiercely over her chest. “What’s this all about anyway? Is Jim claiming I stole something on my way out? Your deputy was with me the whole time.” She made a face. “That asshole doesn’t have anything worth taking, and if he did, fat chance you could find it in that dump.”

“Jim Moarse was found dead in his sauna this morning.” Ray let the words sink in.

Rood stared blankly, her defensive stance drooping. She clenched her arms again. “Jim and that damn sauna,” she sneered. “When he was really drunk, he liked to climb in there, said the heat was ‘purifying,’ that he never had a hangover the next day.” She laughed, but her fingers were making white marks on her arms. “He liked to drag me in there with him, but he couldn’t keep his hands off me. I don’t like being pawed. It was one of the things we argued about, one of the many things.” She relaxed slightly and lifted her chin. “So I’m sorry he’s dead, but what does it have to do with me?”

Ray slid his notebook into a more central position. “I need some general information,” he said. “Where were you last night?”

“I sure as hell wasn’t with him, if that’s what you’re asking. You followed me down 22 almost to town yesterday. And that’s where I was. I didn’t come back up here to God’s country.”

“What were you doing?”

“I was hanging out with a friend.”

“Where?”

“In town.”

“Doing what?”

“What people do when they hang out.” She lifted her hair off her neck with one manicured hand and laughed at him.

Ray kept his gaze steady. “Can you be a bit more specific?”

“Like are you trying to establish if I have an alibi? Is that it? Okay, I’ll play the game. I met someone in town. We had lunch, walked around. We got a room at the Park Place, had dinner there, and late in the evening we had drinks in the bar up at the top. Get a copy of my hotel bill; it’s all there. And the city cop that was pounding on the door of our room before dawn will tell you…I guess he figured out that I was there because my car was in the parking lot.”

“The room was registered in your name?”

“Yeah, my name, credit card, my plate number.”

“Does your friend have a name?”

“I don’t want him involved. Like, he’s getting a divorce, and him being with me would just make things worse.”

“That shouldn’t happen. His name is?”

Rood narrowed her eyes, staring him down. “Okay, it’s Dan Ellis. He’s a lawyer from downstate. Wyandotte.”

“After you left Moarse, did you go back there again?”

“No.”

“Did you contact him again by phone, text, e-mail?”

“No.”

“Tell me more about your relationship with Moarse?”

Rood crossed her legs, opened her purse, and closed it again. “God, I wish you could smoke in here. Anyway, there’s not much to tell. I met Jim the summer I was waitressing. He was sort of a fun guy and a big tipper. In the fall I was looking for a new place to stay. I’d been sharing an apartment with three other girls, and that wasn’t going so well. Jim offered me a room, no strings attached.” She uncrossed her legs, re-crossed them. “I know what you’re thinking,” she said, looking directly at Ray. “At first things were okay, fun, but that didn’t last too long. I figured out pretty quick that he had money trouble and was going down fast. Of course, the worse things got, the more he drank.”

“What was his occupation?”

Rood snorted. “Like half the men I’ve met up here, he said he was a builder.” She shrugged. “And I guess that was true, or at least it had been once. Jim talked about this formula he had. He’d buy lots cheap at tax sales and build inexpensive homes—bi-levels, half story down and a half story up. He told me that he and his crew, a couple of guys, could throw one of those together in a few weeks, and he cleared about 20 grand on each building. Then, boo hoo, the housing market fell apart, and his bank cut off his credit line. By the time I moved in, he was running out of money. And all the so-called friends he’d screwed along the way wanted their money. They were pissed. People were always coming by, calling, sending letters.”

“Did he ever mention Al Capone or buried treasure?”

“Are you kidding?” She laughed. “Pretty funny. He could have used a little buried treasure. He was desperate.”

“Can you give me any names of friends?”

“Who knows? Like I said, what friends he might of had were super pissed. The two of us ended up completely isolated out there. He didn’t have money to take me anyplace, and he refused to drive that stupid old Jeep of his anywhere—except in the middle of the night. That’s a lot of fun. He acted like I was his chauffeur or something.”

“So there were no other friends?”

“Not really. Well, there was one guy that came on the scene about the time I was thinking of leaving, a Ricky something, an old friend from somewhere. Jim was pretty excited to hook up with him again, said the guy was rich and knew all the angles.”

“Can you tell me about this man?”

“Not really. I only saw him, let me think, twice. The first time he arrived with a lot of food and booze. The food came from some good place in TC, not your usual carryout. The two of them got pretty smashed, and then went off to take a sauna. Jim wanted me to join them, but I wasn’t going to have any of that.”

“And the second time?”

“Pretty much like the first, but at some point, Jim told me to get lost for a while. They had to talk business. I did, I went to the movies. The guy was gone when I got back. Jim said they were working on some big deal, that things were going to get better.”

“Did he give you any details?”

“No, and by that time I just couldn’t stand him anymore. I didn’t care. He might have been up that minute, but he’d be down the next. Since I’d moved in, he was more and more depressed. I’ve heard stories, but I’ve never seen someone so determined to drink themselves to death before.”

“So you lived with him from…?”

“Sometime in October till the second or third week of February.”

“Can you describe this Ricky fellow?”

“About your height and size, early 40s. He seemed pretty fit, especially compared to Jim. Wore those nylon running suits like ghetto kids. Used too much perfume. Something sort of foreign about him. But it wasn’t how he talked. You know, just something different. Not from here. He gave me the creeps.” She crossed her arms again over her chest and took a deep breath. “A woman knows a lot about a man by the way he looks at her,” she said. “That’s one of the first things you learn waitressing. Ricky looked me over like a piece of meat, something he’d use and toss away like an empty cigarette pack. I’m sure if we had ever been alone together, he would of hit on me instantly.”

“What kind of vehicle did Ricky drive?”

“Something big, expensive.”

“Color, make, model?”

“I don’t know. I only saw it at night and not even close. I think it was light colored, maybe gray or silver, a Mercedes or Cadillac, an SUV.”

“Do you remember anything about a plate number or state?”

“Are you kidding?”

“And you’re sure you don’t have a last name?”

“I’m pretty sure he never used it.”

Ray took some time scanning the notes he’d made. Rood sat perfectly still for the first time during the interview. “I think that’s it for now,” he said, finally. “But I want your cell number in case I need to talk with you again. And here’s my card. Please call if you remember anything that you think might be helpful. Are you planning to stay in the area?”

“Yeah, I am as a matter of fact. I’ve got a job lined up at the casino. Start next weekend.” Her tone softened, “I’m sorry for Jim,” she said. “Really. As men go, he wasn’t a bad sort. I just caught him crashing and burning. And I needed to get away. I didn’t sign on to be part of the wreckage.”