A Reunion to Die For (A Joshua Thornton Mystery) (5 page)

“You have no authority here,” she objected.

“One phone call to your police and I can have you taken into custody. Citizen’s arrest.”

“For what?”

Tad tapped her glass. “Underage drinking. You can talk to me here, or in the police station while we’re waiting for your parents.”

“Her ID says she’s twenty-one, man,” the bartender interjected.

Tad stood up. His attitude was sufficient to intimidate the man behind the bar.

“It’s okay, Mitch.” She turned to the doctor and scoffed at his threat of arrest. “My parents don’t care. They’re home getting drunk themselves.”

“Then you can sit in a cell until they sober up enough to come pick you up.” He pulled her alongside him toward the exit.

She yanked him back before jumping back up onto the stool. “What do you want to know?”

“Your name for one.”

“Nicki. Nicki Samuels.”

“How long had you known Grace?”

“I met her this summer. We met at the swimming pool at the resort in Newell. Her parents never let her do anything. So I invited her to come along with me to the clubs. She sneaked out after her parents were asleep, and I’d pick her up.”

“And do what?”

“Hit the clubs. Play with the guys. Her parents didn’t even let her date. We had a good time until she decided to go get herself pregnant.”

“She got herself pregnant? Did anybody ever tell you girls that it takes two to get pregnant?”

“The dummy thought that Billy would marry her if she got knocked up.”

“Billy who?”

“Billy Unger.”

“How did Billy take the news that he was going to be a daddy?”

Nicki giggled. “He went ballistic, of course. He wanted her to get rid of it, but she wasn’t about to do that.”

“And so someone got rid of both her and the baby,” Tad pointed out.

“He didn’t kill her.”

“What makes you so certain?”

“He was going to run away. He told me Saturday night. He’s been working on something that is going to have a big payoff, and then he’ll have enough money to take off where no one will ever find him.”

“Did you tell Grace that her boyfriend was going to leave her high and dry?”

“It was none of my business. The little idiot thought the two of them were going to elope.” Her sneer told him that she really didn’t give a damn about the predicament the girl she had led into the nightlife was going to be left in.

“Who else would want to kill your friend?” Tad used the term “friend” loosely.

Nicki shrugged, and then took another gulp of her drink.

“She said I was a bitch.” Heather Connor was explaining the reason for her fight with Grace to county prosecutor Joshua Thornton. She was the millennium version of her mother.

The former Margo Sweeney had graduated from high school with him.

The daughter of the bank vice president and a county commissioner, who were both active in the PTA, Margo managed to get herself onto the varsity cheerleading squad. Whereas the stereotype of cheerleaders used to be perky, pretty girls who aspire to make their high school experience the best it can be before studying husbandry in college, Margo’s major field of study was causing trouble.

She was not as athletic or as pretty as the rest of the girls on the squad. She wore heavy cosmetics and dyed her hair bright red. To be kind, her figure was voluptuous. She dressed to accentuate her large breasts that she let fly during her cheers, much to the amusement of the adolescent boys.

Joshua disliked her cruel sense of humor. The butts of her jokes were those less fortunate than she. When he intervened, she would turn on him to make him the object of her ridicule. By their senior year, Margo split his inner circle into two camps: his, who believed in being kind to their fellow students; and hers, who got their kicks by cutting down those they considered beneath them.

Joshua looked across the conference table in the courthouse interview room at Margo Sweeney, now Connor. With her polished, metropolitan lawyer perched at her side to defend her daughter, she smirked at him.

Her figure had ballooned to fat. Her breasts, which seemed to grow along with the rest of her figure, were encased in a bright dress with a plunging neckline. She still dyed her hair red and wore a hat like something you would see on the Queen of England.

Her real estate and development business was one of the biggest employers in the valley. For her daughter’s interview with the county prosecuting attorney, Margo displayed her wealth like a king showing a rival country his weaponry. She wore jewels on every body part upon which they could be displayed.

In contrast to her client’s brilliant appearance, her lawyer, Christine Watson, dressed in a black suit and was devoid of jeweled ornaments. She wore her short black hair slicked back.

Joshua had come up against Christine before in the short time he had been county prosecutor. She was a humorless professional who considered any show of femininity a revelation of weakness to be penetrated by the male enemy. He didn’t know if Watson was married. She lacked so many of the qualities associated with feminine behavior that he found himself wondering if she was a lesbian.

Joshua studied Heather after she explained away her beef with Grace by claiming she had been upset to learn that the blue-eyed blonde had said an unkind word about her. “So you burst into the girls’ locker room and tried to beat her up for telling someone that she thought you were a bitch?”

She wiggled her head from side to side. It was a gesture her peers adopted to use as a sign of strength, much in the way dogs let the hair on their back stand up on end right before a fight. “I wanted to talk to her about it. There’s no law against talking.”

Heather had her mother’s cocky smile. She also used the same hair coloring. She wore her thick hair down to her waist in loose waves. Like Margo in high school, Heather wore heavy makeup and showed off her large breasts. She also displayed tattoos on each arm and one around her neck that resembled barbed wire.

Like mother, like daughter.

“There is a law against murder,” he reminded the girl.

Sneering, she turned to her lawyer to return fire at their enemy.

“Josh,” Christine said, “it was nothing more than a catfight. No one was hurt. The coach didn’t even write it up.”

“She started a fight because she heard from someone—” He turned to Heather and asked, “Who told you that Grace said you were a bitch?”

She answered with an exaggerated shrug, “I don’t remember.”

“It was upsetting enough to you that you got into a fight with Grace for having said it, but you don’t remember the name of the person who told you she had said it?”

“If she had called me a bitch to my face I would have respected her for it.”

He doubted it.

“Are we done here?” Heather asked her mother. It was an order for them to go. “There are other things I’d rather be doing.”

“Yes, we are.” After ordering her lawyer to end the interview, Margo stood up.

“No, we’re not,” Joshua objected.

“Yes, we are.” She ushered her daughter to the door.

“Are you charging my client with anything?” Christine slapped her notepad shut and stood up. She tucked her pen in the inside breast pocket of her suit jacket.

“Obstruction of justice if she doesn’t tell me where she was when Grace Henderson was killed.”

Heather paused at the door. She rolled her eyes when she answered, “Let’s see. Where was I Monday between four-thirty and five o’clock? Oh, yeah, I remember. I was fucking my boyfriend.”

Without giving Joshua a name or place or phone number, Heather went out the door. Even with the sophistication he had developed in his travels around the world with all types of people, he was still shocked by her mother’s lack of shock at her teenage daughter’s announcement that she was having sex while one of her schoolmates was being killed.

“I guess that means Heather has an alibi and you have nothing.” Margo snickered on her way out the door.

“Nice seeing you, Josh,” Christine quipped while she moved toward the door to follow her clients.

“Wait a minute.”

At the door, she turned to him. “Margo is right. You don’t have anything against her daughter.”

“Not yet.” He draped a leg across the corner of the conference table. “My question is why are you defending Rex Rollins?”

“What’s it to you?”

“Your clients are usually of a higher caliber than he is. He’s been in court almost as much as I have and he always gets a public defender because he’s broke, and right now he’s unemployed.”

“But he still has the right to the best defense possible.”

“The best defense he can afford. Who’s paying his bill?”

“That’s none of your business.”

Chapter Five

The next day, Joshua groaned when he and Seth Cavanaugh arrived at the Henderson home to find Gail Reynolds’s sports car parked in the driveway. The detective and county prosecutor had arrived to search once again Grace’s bedroom to look for evidence that would further connect her to Billy Unger and tell them where they might find their suspect.

The artist to whom Tad led the investigator had put the eagle on Grace’s rear end and confirmed Nicki’s statement about Billy and Grace’s relationship. According to the tattooist, Billy brought her in and paid cash for the artwork. The artist thought her fake driver’s license was real. Otherwise, he swore, he would never have broken the law by giving a minor a tattoo.

With two witnesses to claim Billy was her boyfriend, the authorities could assume he was the baby’s father, and that made him their prime suspect. Joshua obtained a warrant to bring him in for questioning.

The problem was that no one knew where to find him, and time was running out. Sheriff Sawyer had heard a rumor from an informant on the street that Billy had something—most likely illegal—going down, after which he was planning to leave the area.

“Nice wheels,” Seth Cavanaugh paused to admire the red sports car in the Henderson driveway.

Joshua pressed the doorbell on the front door. Martha Henderson was wiping her eyes with a tissue when she opened it. He took a deep breath and expressed sympathy for her loss before asking if they could speak to her. As he stepped inside, he gestured for Seth to leave the driveway where he was studying the leather interior of Gail’s car.

The living room looked like something out of a home decorator’s magazine. The fireplace mantel was loaded with photographs of their daughter.

Gail sat in the chair across from the middle-aged couple who had lost their only child. Holding out a micro cassette recorder to capture every word that was uttered, she contorted her face into an expression of sympathy.

Sam Henderson told the prosecutor and detective, “She says that Grace’s murder has the same MO as this other cheerleader, and that her murderer might be a serial killer. Is that true?”

“Excuse me.” Joshua whirled around and ordered Seth to take over the interview. He then grabbed Gail by the arm and yanked her across the room and outside. “What the hell do you think you are doing?” He demanded to know when they were out of earshot.

“Your job, as always,” was her answer.

“No. My job is to prosecute Grace’s murderer. All you’re doing is sensationalizing her murder for one of your books and upsetting these people with some wild theory.”

“It’s not a wild theory! Did you know that Tricia and Grace were related?” She elaborated, “Their mothers are cousins. That makes our victims second cousins.”

He was incensed. “Gail! This is a small town. If you look far enough into anyone’s genealogy you are going to find that we are all related in some way or another. Hell! A genetics expert could probably make a case for this valley being inbred. Now go home!”

“Josh, look at the MO! Both of them were cheerleaders. They were both wearing their uniforms when they were killed. They were both shot in the chest.”

“You forgot that they were both blondes!” he added with a laugh. “Get a grip!” He ticked off on his fingers. “Two different guns. Tricia was killed at home. Grace was killed at the school. The gun was left at Tricia’s crime scene. The gun was not left at Grace’s.”

“You said Tricia’s crime scene. Are you admitting that she was murdered?”

“When I have time, I will look over the case file. I’m not saying I will reopen the case, but I will look.”

“Want to make a bet on who solves the case first?”

“I don’t consider murder to be a game.”

“It’s just an innocent bet between friends,” she added, “or lovers.”

“Go home and stay out of this investigation!” He opened her car door and ordered her inside.

She refused to move. “You can’t tell me what to do, Joshua Thornton.”

“Let me remind you that I am the prosecutor, and if you interfere any further with this investigation, then I will have you arrested for obstruction of justice.”

With a scoff, she climbed into the car and turned on the engine. She raced at least ten miles over the speed limit down the street, rolled through the stop sign, and then turned left to make her way to Route 8.

“Damn fool is going to get herself killed,” Joshua muttered to himself before he became aware that he was being watched. He scanned the windows of the houses around him until he spotted the two faces peering out at him from the second-story double window on the opposite side of the Henderson’s driveway.

The one face belonged to a woman with dark hair cut to her bare shoulders. She did not appear to be wearing anything more than a black brassiere over her overly endowed breasts. He could only guess at what she was wearing below the window frame. The man appeared bald. His fleshy chest was bare. Aware that they had been spied, he pulled the woman back from the window and closed the blinds.

Before he dismissed the incident, Joshua paused to take in the van in the driveway next door. It was a red van with the gold lettering “Tender Lawn” scrawled on the side.

“Hmm,” he hummed.

“What is all this that I’m hearing about you reopening that case of that other cheerleader who died a while back?” Seth wrote the name in his notebook to hunt down the case file and evidence that Joshua had requested he send to the prosecutor’s office. “And why is Gail Reynolds so interested in her? I doubt if any of the physical evidence is still around. The case was closed as a suicide. After so long, the department cleans house and gets rid of the evidence from closed cases.”

“But there has to be something in our files,” Joshua replied.

Unlike the watering holes Joshua used to frequent with his colleagues in the big cities before his return to home, Dora’s was not furnished in oak and trimmed with antique brass. The locally owned establishment featured down-home comfort with tables in need of polishing and wood floors that needed another coat of varnish. The patrons would yell greetings across the lounge to each other, and the favorite drink was cold beer or Jim Beam, rather than martinis and cognac.

In Washington, the clientele, accustomed to diligent service, would have abandoned Dora’s years before. Joshua was unsure why the place remained the hangout for New Cumberland’s courthouse crowd, what with the uncivil attitude of the head waitress, Wanda, a bleached blonde in her twenties.

The two men had taken a corner booth from which they could observe the comings and goings of their colleagues.

“What do you want?” Wanda stood before them with a hand on her wide hip. Her expression was not unlike that of a mother who caught her children making a mess after she had cleaned the house.

“Draft,” Seth said.

Joshua ordered a beer while he studied the menu of appetizers scrawled on a chalkboard hanging over the bar. “Can I have the chips with guacamole instead of salsa?”

Her hand flew from where it was perched to point a finger between his eyes. “No, you can’t.” Before he could find the words to argue, she was on her way back to the kitchen to get the beer and tortilla chips with salsa, not guacamole.

After she delivered their order, Joshua recalled his youth, something that had become a daily occurrence. “Tricia was supposed to graduate with me.”

“She was a blonde cheerleader and was wearing her uniform at the time she was killed.” Seth raised his eyebrows. “Interesting,” he muttered when the same theory that Gail submitted to the Hendersons crossed his mind.

“Chuck Delaney was the sheriff at the time. He wasn’t exactly on the straight and narrow.” Joshua sighed. “I never thought of it before now. The police said it was suicide, so I figured they knew something I didn’t. That’s why I want to see the case file.”

“There had to be some grounds to rule it a suicide.”

“Because Tricia and her boyfriend broke up the day she died.” Joshua shook his head. “Knowing what I know now, I don’t think so.”

“You mean because of Grace Henderson?” Seth scoffed. “Nah! Reynolds is off her rocker. Unger blew Henderson away because he didn’t want to deal with a kid.”

Joshua swallowed and chewed his lip. He was not comfortable with how quickly Seth had concluded the case against Billy Unger before speaking to the suspect. “There’s no connection between these two girls and their deaths. In the matter of Tricia committing suicide, statistically, women commit suicide with pills—”

“Not a hundred percent.”

“Tricia looked good and she knew it. If she were to kill herself, she wouldn’t do it by putting a big hole in her chest.” Joshua sat forward while he thought of more arguments. “Plus, she displayed no suicidal tendencies, especially the day she died. I was there when she broke it off with her boyfriend—”

Joshua took a sip of his beer while he recalled that last time he saw Tricia Wheeler.

It was the beginning of his last year of high school. Joshua and his friends had gathered together in an auditorium called “the little theater” located around the corner from the cafeteria to socialize during their lunch hour. The students took up two camps in the seats with the center aisle acting as the dividing line between them. Those who were not socially elite would sit on his side of the auditorium where they were safe from Margo and her friends on the other side of the aisle.

The final split of the class of 1985’s upper crust resulted from a civil war waged on the varsity cheerleading squad.

Cheerleading captain Tricia Wheeler and football team captain Randy Fine had been dating since the junior prom. With their good looks and popularity, they became one of the royal couples, second only to Joshua and Beth.

With the start of the new school year, Randy began cheating on his steady girlfriend with Margo Sweeney. When Margo declared her intention to break the couple up, the cheerleading squad split down the middle.

The battle spilled onto the football field during the game between Oak Glen and Weirton. Quarterback Joshua Thornton was so wrapped up in trying to pull the team from where it lagged behind by three points that he didn’t notice the mutiny on the cheerleading squad along the sidelines.

Captain Tricia would call a cheer and start to lead her squad, only to have her rival call another and lead her cohorts in it. The result was one half of the varsity cheerleaders performing one cheer, while the other half would be chanting another.

Their coach, the pep squad, and the fans in the stands watched the battle in confusion. The sponsor was furious. Before the first quarter of the game was over, the cheerleaders were ordered off the field and replaced with the junior varsity and freshman squads. Suspended for the fiasco, they were ordered to sit in their uniforms on the sidelines while the junior varsity and freshman cheerleaders led the pep club for the next game, which was scheduled for the next week.

Tricia Wheeler died four days before that game took place.

The last time he saw her, Joshua was the only male sitting with girlfriend Beth and her friend in the back of the little theater in the midst of girlish talk and laughter.

They were chatting away about the goings on at a party that the three of them had gone to on Saturday night. An unspoken element of that night was that Randy had begged out. He claimed that something had come up. As had become her custom, Tricia went to the party with Joshua and Beth. Not one of them had the nerve to voice it, but they all knew that Randy had gone out with Margo.

When there was a break in the conversation as the three friends ate their lunches, Joshua became aware of Margo’s voice across the aisle. “. . . Randy and I were groping around in the dark looking for my panties. We were laughing so hard that I thought I was going to bust my gut.”

The hurt in Tricia’s eyes was unmistakable.

He raised his voice an octave to drown Margo out. “Hey, Tad is giving a party this Friday. How about if the three of us go after the game?”

Margo answered, “Randy’s parents are going away. We’re going to spend the whole weekend together.”

“Shut up!” Beth whirled around in her seat to order the girl seated across the aisle from them to cease her taunting. Joshua motioned for her to be quiet, but Margo had already picked up the gauntlet.

“Make me.”

Tricia challenged her for the first time since the war was declared. “Just because you’re a slut, doesn’t mean you have to advertise it. Some of us have higher standards.”

“Keep saying it, and maybe you’ll convince yourself that it was your choice to give Randy up, instead of the other way around.”

Tricia turned her back to her.

Margo resumed picking away. “He told me that it is like making a choice between a diamond and a lump of coal.”

Tricia’s jaws worked while she ground her teeth.

Encouraged by her allies, Margo continued, “You do know the difference between a diamond and coal, don’t you? A diamond is exciting while all coal does is lie there.”

“Margo, eat your lunch!” Joshua ordered.

“Eat shit!” she snapped back. “You guys act like you’re so high and mighty. Then, you get your noses out of joint because the rest of us are having fun with each other.” She stepped up to the aisle but didn’t cross it. To do so would be to go into enemy territory.

Tricia faced Joshua, who sat with an arm around her shoulders. She kept her eyes focused to the wall behind him.

“That’s why Randy has been spending so much time with me,” Margo taunted her. “I’m woman enough to know how to have fun, and you don’t even know how to play the game, let alone where the bases are.”

He stood up to his full height. “Margo, go back to your side of the theater before I put you there.”

She ignored the warning. “Randy and I have both gone around all the bases. As a matter of fact, he’s hit a home run every single time.” She giggled. “You’re still in the little league, while I’m playing the majors.”

“As the whole team will testify,” Tricia shot over her shoulder.

“At least I’m not alone on the bench. That is where you’ll remain for the whole season with all the rest of the old maids.”

Tricia whirled around and delivered a slap across Margo’s face with the speed and intensity of a whip. She retaliated with a slap that only clipped the tip of her rival’s nose before Tricia pulled her to the floor by her hair. Before Joshua could jump in to stop them, the two girls were screaming and writhing like cats tearing at each other with their claws.

Randy Fine, the center of the triangle, appeared from where Joshua did not know.

Tricia was on top of Margo when Joshua picked her up by the waist and yanked her back to their side of the auditorium. Randy lifted Margo up off the floor with both arms around her waist. Her breasts looked like two water balloons spilling over his arms while he held her back. Both girls strained and kicked to grab at her opponent.

Randy attempted to alleviate the tension with laughter. “What’s going on here?”

Tricia snarled at him. “Oh, Randy, please! Like you don’t know.” She freed herself from Joshua’s hold and smoothed her cheerleading uniform that she had worn for yearbook pictures that day—the same one she would die in.

“Ladies, please! There’s enough of me to go around!”

Margo expressed amusement along with him. She had scored a big success by making the reserved Tricia lose it in front of all their friends.

“Go to hell, Randy!”