Nothing To Sniff At (Animal Instincts Book 5) (5 page)

“So where do we go from here?” I asked after a long pause. “What should I do?”

She looked over her notes again. “The first thing we do is wait. There should be an autopsy done today if it’s not done already. That should tell us more about the body, when it was put in the car and we’ll also learn about the car the body was found in. We might even get a name for the vic.”

“And after that?” I looked at her, and her silver eyes met mine.

“I need more data before we proceed in any direction. So just wait.”

I nodded.

Waiting was definitely not what I do best. I took the dogs for a long walk to tire both animals and me. We came back to an empty answering machine. I put on a pot of coffee to take the edge off the cold outside.

I still had the phone log from my sister’s phone to deal with. I opted to call the bus station and see what they had to say. I got a lot of run around. The records I sought were on file and in the computer system, but they wanted a court order to release the records.

I pointed out that an underage girl had gone missing, that they’d sold a ticket to an unaccompanied minor, and might have aided in the commission of a crime. I told them that the FBI was involved, which was the truth since interstate flight had been suspected. By the time I got done threatening them with litigation, they agreed to look up the records and call me back.

So I was stuck with waiting some more. I still wasn’t sure what I would do with the information from the bus company. If Susan had left by herself, then likely she’d wanted to leave and not be found. Did I really have the right to bother her after all these years? I wasn’t sure. However, I argued that knowing where she was did not constitute bothering her. Having her address was not an imposition on her life.

Since I knew that my mother had to know all of this through Sergeant Siever, I wondered what her decision had been. Had she opted to leave things as they were, or had she talked to Susan while leaving me in the dark about her whereabouts? I wasn’t sure what the answer to that question would do to our relationship.

The news came on at 5pm, and I sat between the two dogs waiting for stories about Port Clinton. None came. News turned to weather and then sports, but nothing on a dead guy in a Corolla. I turned on the desktop and did several searches for information on the body in the car, but I didn’t find any there either. I knew that I hadn’t imagined the body or the wave of nausea that had come over me. So what was going on with the body? Was the press being shut out, or had they chosen not to report the results of the autopsy?

After the 11pm news, there was still no discussion of what the police had learned about the dead man in the trunk. I wasn’t sure what to do about the situation. I took a long shower and went to bed.

The next morning the
Toledo Blade
had a story on the corpse in the trunk. I felt the relief wash across my body as I read that the man had been shot elsewhere and put in the car after death. The coroner stated the man had been dead for nearly four days. That meant he’d been killed prior to my contact with Officer Brate. I’d had no chance to go up to police station before my first meeting with him. I had no reason to be involved until Brate had brought Barkley to my house.

He’d not been able to find an identification of the man through fingerprints, so DNA would have to be tested, which would take much longer to process. They ran a likeness of the dead man, but the face was generic enough that it could have been anyone. I wondered if anyone would be able to recognize that face.

I called Sheila Green, but she wasn’t available. I left a message on her voicemail that I seemed to be in the clear as far as the murder went. I took the dogs on another long walk, and they probably both wondered what was going on.

The phone was ringing when I got back to the house. I picked it up on the fourth and final ring. “Hello,” I answered cheerfully.

“Griff, it’s Sheila. I wanted to let you know what’s going on. They’re currently looking for the actual crime scene. Since they know he was moved to the car from somewhere else, they are looking for that somewhere else as we speak.”

“Do you remember what I said regarding Barkley and the place I found him? Has anyone checked that out yet?” I thought of the curtain-less windows and the empty look of the place. It would be easy to kill someone undetected when the home was vacant.

“I have no idea, but I’ll give the Port Clinton people a heads up on that.” She paused for a second. “Were you ever inside that house?”

“No,” I replied. “I was at the back fence and I looked in the front windows, but I was never inside the place. Why?”

“If I’m telling them where the murder occurred, they’ll likely want to know how you knew about this place. Guilty knowledge because you actually committed the crime is one way of thinking about it. So if you were in the house and your prints or DNA is there, it would look bad.”

“I understand, but I never went into the house. It’s all good.”

She promised to tell the officers about the house. Given that it was in Onyx and not in Port Clinton, I had no idea if someone from the TPD would check it out or if they could get jurisdiction to continue their own investigation. I’d have to ask about that later.

The phone rang again, and I picked it up without checking the caller id. It was a risky move, given that three quarters of my calls were the equivalent of junk mail.

“Hey, it’s Brate. I can’t talk long, so just listen. The house you located for Barkley is being looked at. Someone called in that perhaps this could be the location of the killing. A TPD cop, I think. Anyway, if the police ask you anything about it, what are you going to say?”

I honestly hadn’t thought of my testimony. In my feelings of relief that I would be exonerated of any part in the murder, I had given no thought to how this evidence would affect others. Brate had asked me to find a dog that he hadn’t reported as missing. At best, he’d get a slap on the wrist, but he could be fired for improperly losing police property.

“I’m – not sure,” I replied honestly.

“Look, at this point, I need you to come clean. Just tell them what happened. Tell them everything you know. I’m a little worried that this is going to blow up in my face.” I thought back to Sheila’s comments about police corruption and thought of Brate. It would be terrible for him to get caught up in a high profile case like this. The thought of a slap on the wrist must have seemed like the lesser of two evils in the matter.

“Will that be necessary?” I asked. If they found the house, I wasn’t sure how I’d play into this at all.

“If the house turns out to be the crime scene, they’re going to find out you were there, and then, yeah, there will be questions about it. You’ll be called in to explain how you knew about this place. Given that you talked to the breeder, it’s only a matter of time before they’ll put it all together.”

I nodded. Secrets weren’t ever really private if more than one person knew about it. The number who knew about Barkley’s disappearance now stood at five plus whoever had taken him in the first place. Those odds were too great to feel that this could be kept secret.

We hung up, agreeing to talk again soon. I wasn’t sure that his fears were warranted, but I did want to understand what he wanted me to do in this situation, especially if the circumstances were as dour as Sheila led me to believe.

I’d no sooner hung up than the phone rang again. This time I checked the caller id. It was the bus station. I thought about just letting the call go to the answering machine, but I took a deep breath and answered.

“Is this Mr. Fitzpatrick?” a female voice asked.

“Yes, speaking.” My voice didn’t sound like me. The words were tremulous, and I was about an octave higher than normal. What if they had information on Susan?

“We have the information that you requested about the bus tickets for Susan Fitzpatrick.” She listed the dates and times of Susan’s purchase and the trip she’d arranged. The tickets had been purchased three days before her disappearance and the bus left the evening of her disappearance. She’d had no intention of going to the movies. The woman even confirmed that Susan had been on the bus when it left for Seattle.

I remembered to thank her. I hung up the phone, not knowing what to do. Susan had been alive. She had left Toledo and gone about as far as she could from Ohio, ending up in Seattle of all places. I wasn’t sure how to take the news. If I had so little trouble finding this information, then why hadn’t the police found it? They had manpower and resources that were exponentially larger than me, and yet I had found my sister’s destination in a matter of a few hours of applied time. How could this be? Sergeant Siever looked like an incompetent if he’d been on this case for more than a decade. I’d solved this in a matter of hours.

In my surprise and anger, I had no idea if she’d traveled alone or with someone. She’d been supposedly dating a boy from her school at the time of her disappearance, but now I had to wonder if that was true. So many other things had been lies. I knew that I wouldn’t get any more information out of the bus company, even if I had an idea of where the other person would have sat in relationship to her. I’d have to see a full seating chart for the bus to see if I recognized any names.

I thought of my dad who had drunk himself into a stupor after her disappearance. What would have happened if he’d known Susan was just living in another state? Would he still have drank that much or would he have merely gone to see her on holidays?

The fog around my brain lifted in the heat of anger that I suddenly felt. Damn her. Damn her and what she’d done to my family. In her own desire to escape, she’d left four other people trapped in the bonds of their own making. She’d left every member of the family with a burden that had taken a special toll on each of us.  My mother might have continued her life without feeling trapped in her own house. I wondered again if my mother knew more about this than she let on. Had she talked to Sergeant Siever because they both knew more than they pretended?

I had to wonder what I would have been if I had not been trying to duck away from any sign or notion that I was not supposed to be visible to the public. I wondered how my future might have been. Would I have been married, had kids, been something more than a guy who pretended to talk to animals. I wasn’t sure, but I suspected that the answer to all of those questions was yes.

I wanted to look her up in the phonebook and call her immediately, but I suppressed the emotion to do so. Hers had been a well-thought out disappearance, and my response needed just as much thinking to it. I wouldn’t get anywhere if I merely called and made accusations, if I could even find a number for her.

To answer the last problem, I googled her. While there were hundreds of stories on Susan, along with more recent pieces that speculated on her fate that seemed to come around at the same time every year, I found nothing that indicated where she was. Even when I narrowed the search down to Seattle, I found nothing. Of course, she could have arranged for another bus trip once she got there, and I’d have no idea where to find her.

I wasn’t sure if she’d had a social security number, but I knew one place that I could find out. Sheila had given me a copy of the police report on the disappearance some months ago, a decision that my mother had strongly protested. All of her personal information would be in that file.

I had put the manila folder away so that I wouldn’t be reminded of her disappearance on a regular basis. Out of sight, out of mind, or so I wanted to believe. I still thought of her most every day, so it was mostly a vain hope.  It hadn’t been entirely effective, but now I grabbed at it and ran my finger across the pages. She had indeed received a social security number.

I went back to the computer, typed it in, and was quickly rewarded with a series of websites that appeared to offer information on this particular social security number. I wondered how legit these sites were; I thought that this was probably one step shy of identity theft. I didn’t care. I was so close to the truth that I could taste it.

I picked the one that was the least shady looking, at least to my untrained eye and gave them my credit card information. In less than thirty seconds, I had a name and address for the person with this social security number. I knew that these numbers were reused by the Social Security Administration after a certain amount of time went by, but since Susan didn’t have an estate, so to speak, my mother had never gone through the process of declaring her dead. She had said that she believed that Susan was still alive somewhere, and she didn’t want society to think of her as dead.

However, I didn’t think that this would be the case here. The search brought up a late 20-something woman named Susan.

After seeing that information in print, I took the dogs for another long walk. I had printed the pages in triplicate. One for me, one for the police, and one for my mother. At some point, I would deliver the information to the police, if nothing else to close the files on the case. Susan was now an adult, who had apparently left of her own volition. There was no crime that I could see except perhaps whatever statute had been violated by running away. There was no longer any reason to keep this police case open.

What baffled me was that once I’d decided to look into the matter, I’d come up with a solution in a matter of hours. I had a hard time believing that Sergeant Siever could not have done the same. Certainly, the police had the same websites available to them. Even now, he could have easily spent the $20 to find out what had happened to that social security number. I doubted that I was that much superior to him in my investigative skills.

My mother had thrown a huge fit when she’d learned that I had a copy of the police report. Now I understood why. The report had shown me that Susan had left her possessions here and gave me the information I needed to track her down. My mother had to know what was in the report, given her reaction. I was baffled on what she’d hoped to accomplish by hiding this from the family. Secrets had a way of coming to the surface at some point.