04.Die.My.Love.2007 (21 page)

At about that same time in Houston, the phone rang at Doug McCann’s town house, in the Memorial area, just west of the city. “Do you know who I am?” a woman asked.

“No,” McCann admitted.

“Well, it’s Piper. I’m looking for my sister.”

This had been an unusual weekend for McCann, the head of a Houston oil and gas manufacturing company. He and Tina had met about a year earlier on Match.com, dated briefly but then broken it off. Yet just the day before, Tina had called McCann, suggesting they get together for dinner.

He’d agreed, and Tina ended up staying overnight at his town house. Doug knew about Mac, but Tina had told them they were just friends.

“Tina just left here,” he told Piper. “She’s on her way to work.”

“I was trying to see if you two want to go out to dinner to night,” Piper said.

“Well, sure, if we can work it out,” Doug said.

“How did you like that red dress Tina wore last night?”

Piper asked. “Some say it looks better on me.”

Doug didn’t answer.

“Do you think I sound like Tina?” she asked.

“Maybe,” he said.

158 / Kathryn Casey

“Some people say we sound alike,” she said before she hung up.

At eleven o’clock that morning, Stem’s phone rang on the scene.

“I’ve got the first results back on Piper Rountree’s cell phone from Sprint,” Williamson said. “They can’t say where she is today yet, they’re working on that, but yesterday someone made calls on that cell phone that bounced off towers in Richmond.”

“Well, isn’t that interesting,” said Stem. “Keep me posted.”

“Will do,” Williamson said.

When he hung up the telephone with Williamson, Stem thought about what that piece of information meant. Rountree’s phone was in Virginia, but that didn’t necessarily mean that she was. He decided it was time to make a second call, and minutes later he was talking to Houston Police Department Lieutenant Rick Maxey, in charge of the homicide department that Saturday. Stem explained the situation, that Rountree was—as the ex- spouse always is—someone they were interested in, and he asked Maxey to try to locate her. “Assuming she doesn’t know, we need to fill her in and tell her we have her kids,” said Stem. “We’d, of course, like to verify if she is in Houston, so we can rule her out as a suspect.”

In Houston, Investigator Breck McDaniel and his partner, Sergeant David Ferguson, were the next up for a case, and Maxey responded by immediately assigning them to help out the Henrico P.D. McDaniel, a husky, jowly investigator with short brown hair, and Ferguson, in his mid-fi fties and a twenty-nine-year veteran of the force, pulled up Piper’s information on the computer. They found a driver’s license with her photo, blew it up, and printed it off in black-and-white, along with information on the state car registration DIE, MY LOVE / 159

for her black Jeep Liberty and her address in Kingwood.

After getting her phone number from information, they left the Houston P.D.’s downtown headquarters and drove out on I-59, through the maze of skyscrapers, north toward Kingwood. Once they arrived, they rang the bell and knocked.

No one answered. They called the telephone and heard it ringing inside, but no one picked it up. McDaniel looked in the garage window and found it empty.

At 12:49, before they left Piper’s house, the investigators did one more thing: McDaniel called Piper’s cell phone. No one answered, but he left a message, asking her to call Coby Kelley with the Henrico P.D.

Back in Virginia, Loni had heard about Fred’s murder while watching her children play soccer that morning. When she showed up at the Jablin house, she was screaming and nearly hysterical. Chuck Hanna pulled her to the side and coaxed her back into her car, telling her the children were safe and there wasn’t anything she could do to help. “Was Ms. Rountree in Virginia this weekend?” he asked.

“No, I don’t believe so,” Loni said. “I haven’t talked with her.”

“She didn’t stay with you this weekend?” he prodded.

“No,” Loni replied. “I haven’t spoken with Piper in a month or more, and I don’t think she was even in town.”

“If you hear from Piper Rountree, tell her we need to talk to her,” Hanna said, before Loni drove away.

By then, Cindy Williamson was again on the telephone with Captain Stem. “We’ve got more information from Sprint,” she said. “The phone was used here this morning, just after 4:30 a.m., and it bounced off a tower on Cox and Broad Streets, about five miles from the Jablin house.”

“Looks like Rountree was here,” Stem told his offi cers.

“We need to find out where she stayed last night and how 160 / Kathryn Casey

she’s traveling, if she had a gun. We’ve got a lot of questions to answer.”

At two-thirty that afternoon, Henrico police had tracked down a number for Michael Jablin in northern Virginia. When they put a call through and told them what had happened, he was at first quiet, apparently stunned. Then he said, “Have you considered my brother’s ex-wife as a suspect?”

When he hung up the telephone, Michael couldn’t believe his brother was dead. Hoping it was all a bizarre mistake, he dialed Fred’s cell phone number and listened to it ring. But no one answered.

By then Chuck Hanna was ringing the doorbell at Steve Byrum’s town house, in the Sussex Woods section of Richmond, just down Gayton Road from Kingsley. Byrum was upstairs watching football on television with his son when the doorbell rang, and came downstairs reluctantly when he saw men in suits, wondering if there were missionaries at the door wanting to convert him. When one of the offi cers at the door fl ashed his badge and asked about Piper Rountree, Byrum didn’t look happy. “She’s been calling me the last couple of days, but I haven’t been answering,” Byrum said.

“I’m pretty upset with her over the last time she was here.

Why are you looking for her? What’s happened?”

“Have you seen her this weekend?” Hanna asked. “Did she stay with you?”

“No,” Byrum insisted. “Tell me what’s happened.”

Hanna left without explaining.

At the mall, where her son was in a karate exhibit, Fred’s girlfriend, Charlene, talked with yet another investigator.

The news had shaken her badly. She and Fred had begun e-mailing in June, after meeting on the Internet website Match.com, she said. The last time she saw him was for lunch the previous Wednesday, and they’d talked on the tele-DIE, MY LOVE / 161

phone a little after ten just the eve ning before, as they often did before going to bed. She told the officer that there’d been some back and forth between Piper and Fred recently about whether he was willing to let the children go to Texas to attend Piper’s sister Jean’s wedding over Thanksgiving. “He decided he’d let them go,” Charlene said. “But he’d been e-mailing Piper about money again lately, looking for the child support she owed him.”

Meanwhile, back at the Jablin house on Hearthglow, now known as the murder scene, Captain Stem was getting yet another call from Cindy Williamson. More Sprint rec ords were being faxed in. These were even more enticing. Calls had been made off Piper’s cell phone early that morning that showed it had traveled southeast on Interstate 64, leaving Henrico and cutting through the heart of Richmond. At one point it crossed the James River, a favorite place for local criminals to dispose of weapons and evidence. But there was more. “We know that around noon the phone was used in Norfolk,” Williamson said. “Then—this is interesting—

an hour and a half later, it was in Baltimore.”

“Oh, yeah. We’ve got a good lead now,” Stem crowed.

Kelley, Stem, Russell, Hanna, and the others discussed the possibilities. It was apparent that the person on the telephone hadn’t driven the 240 miles from Norfolk to Baltimore in such a short time. “She’s traveling by air,” Stem said. Getting on the telephone, he called headquarters and asked for an investigator to drive to the Norfolk airport to try to fi nd out if anyone there remembered seeing Piper. With Homeland Security in force after 9/11, Stem figured she must be traveling with her own identification. “We need to track down a ticket for a Piper Rountree or a Piper Jablin.”

Minutes later Williamson called again. “I just got a fax from Houston,” she said. “They’re saying there’s not just a Piper but a Tina Rountree. Maybe your offi cer should check the airline rec ords for that name, too.”

162 / Kathryn Casey

* * *

At three that afternoon Chuck Hanna and another offi cer drove to Loni’s house, built on a ravine just fi ve minutes from Hearthglow. Loni had married, and she and her husband, Bill Gosnell, an attorney, were renting the frame house while they built a new one. Again Hanna asked Loni if she’d heard from Piper. Had her friend stayed with her that weekend? “No,”

Loni answered to both questions. Hanna left unconvinced.

Soon after he did, Loni picked up the telephone and punched in Piper’s cell phone number. No one answered. Throughout that day she dialed the same number over and over again.

Each time, she was diverted to voice mail. Piper wasn’t answering.

“Call me, Peeps,” Loni said. “It’s important.”

Around that same time, Kelley was also calling Piper’s cell phone and leaving a message. His was more forceful:

“Ms. Rountree, this is Investigator Coby Kelley with the Henrico Police Department. We need to talk to you. Please call me at . . .”

At the University of Richmond, many of the calls had already been made to Fred Jablin’s students, to tell them of their professor’s death. “We thought at first maybe it was a heart attack,” says one student. “But then we knew about the divorce, and a lot of us wondered how he’d died. No one would tell us.” A meeting was scheduled at the school for Sunday morning, with the faculty and chaplain. More information, they were told, would be forthcoming.

When Captain Stem’s phone rang about 3:30 p.m., it was the officer he’d dispatched to the airport. “I didn’t find a record for a Piper Rountree, but a Tina Rountree flew out of Norfolk on Southwest Airlines flight 247 at 12:30 p.m., changed planes in Baltimore, and is right now on Southwest Flight 2609 that DIE, MY LOVE / 163

left at two-ten, on her way to Houston, and scheduled to arrive at four-thirty central time,” the officer told her.

First Stem called Kizer to tell him of the break in the case. Someone, a woman, was traveling back to Houston.

Stem wanted to have the Houston P.D. get a warrant for her arrest and to hold her, to confiscate her bags and search them for evidence. “Wade, we know she was here in Virginia at the time of the murder,” he said. “And if she has evidence on her, she could destroy it.”

As much as Stem argued, Kizer wouldn’t budge. “All we have at this point are some cell phone rec ords. We don’t have enough to do that,” he said. “Let’s just send someone to the airport to see if they can verify who is getting off that plane, Tina Rountree or Piper Rountree, then seize her bags and hold them until we can get a warrant.” Kizer and Stem went way back together, to a time when they’d both worked Burglary, and they’d had this type of disagreement often. As a police officer, Stem often wanted the suspect taken in and charges processed before Kizer felt he had enough for an indictment. He knew he’d have to try a case in a courtroom before a judge, where
how
evidence was obtained could become a paramount issue.

Reluctantly, Stem agreed. As soon as he hung up with Kizer, he called Houston and asked to have officers sent to the airport with photos of Piper and Tina Rountree, to identify the sister traveling as she got off the airplane, seize her luggage, and hold it until they had a warrant.

At Henrico P.D. headquarters, Cindy Williamson was following yet another paper trail: the information from Southwest Airlines that showed Tina Rountree had charged the airline ticket on a Wells Fargo debit card. Once she had that detail, she picked up the telephone and called the bank’s credit card division. The supervisor on duty, however, refused to cooperate without a subpoena signed by a judge.

164 / Kathryn Casey

When Williamson told Kizer, he stopped what he was doing to draw up the paperwork.

Meanwhile in Kingsley, Ana, the Jablin children’s nanny throughout most of the tumultuous divorce, left the Boyds’

house with Investigator Berger, after comforting the children, to go to the house on Hearthglow to claim enough of their clothing to get them through the coming days. On the scene, the nanny told Kelley about her run-ins with Tina Rountree, how explosive the woman could be. Crying and upset over Fred’s murder, she choked out the words as she described Piper as unstable.

In Houston, Breck McDaniel and David Ferguson, six-foot, his brown hair balding, with a soft Louisiana drawl, had been getting off work for the day when the call came in that the Henrico police needed someone to meet a Southwest Airlines flight from Baltimore at Houston’s Hobby Airport, the airline’s hub, just south of downtown. Armed with grainy driver’s license photos of Piper and Tina, they left for the airport. McDaniel, a self-described “computer nerd,” called ahead and arranged to have three uniformed offi cers waiting for them at Security. On the way there, McDaniel and Ferguson discussed options, wondering how to detain the woman once they found her. If it were Piper fl ying under Tina’s name, was it a federal crime to fl y under an assumed name? If so, maybe they’d have a reason, one that would hold up in court, to take her into custody.

That afternoon in Houston, Tina Rountree called Doug McCann, the man she’d spent the previous night with, and asked if she could come to his house to take a nap. It seemed an odd request, but Doug didn’t question it. “Sure,” he said.

She arrived a short time later and went upstairs, to the third-floor bedroom, and lay down. After Tina left, Doug noticed a message on his cell phone. When he checked it, it was Piper’s DIE, MY LOVE / 165

voice. She sounded upset, and she said she was at Tina’s house, locked out, that she’d left her cell phone inside.

“I’m looking for a key,” Piper said.

Doug picked up the telephone and called Tina. “Piper’s looking for you,” he told her.