The detective asked, “Here’s what I need to know. What connection was there between Cheryl Smith and your cousin Albert Gordon?”
A deep naughty laugh came out of the phone. “Not the type of connection you’re looking for. Albert was a straight-up guy. But he was her lawyer.”
Joshua gasped. “Her lawyer? But she was never arrested for Angie’s murder. She was long gone when Angie’s body was found.”
“I’m talking about before that—back when Angie first disappeared,” Tad explained. “The summer that Angie disappeared—I think it was 1978—Cheryl was at the top of the suspect list.”
“But she had an alibi,” Cameron said.
“Right,” Tad said. “But her alibi was her derelict friends, so no one bought it. Anyway, there wasn’t enough to arrest her. Angie was gone so there was no evidence. There were no witnesses. Suddenly, days after Angie’s gone missing, Cheryl’s making plans to move to Hollywood and leave the area. The prosecutor in Beaver County didn’t want her going anywhere, so he tried to get an injunction to make her stay. That was where Albert came in. He defended Cheryl at the hearing, and the judge said with no real evidence to connect Cheryl to Angie’s disappearance; they couldn’t prevent her from leaving the area. Days later, Cheryl’s gone, and just like the prosecutor predicted, she disappeared off the grid.”
Joshua concluded, “When Angie’s body turned up in 1984, Cheryl Smith was nowhere to be found.”
Tad asked, “Why would she come back here . . . of all places?”
Cameron said, “If we find the answer to that, then we’ll find the answer to how she ended up in that cellar.”
“Albert had nothing more to do with Cheryl after she left town,” Tad said. “He lost more than one friend for defending her at that hearing.”
Cameron bit her tongue to keep from voicing that as a possible motive for Albert killing Cheryl Smith. The passion in Tad’s tone warned of an argument that she didn’t want to fight with Joshua on the scene.
Announcing that he had a patient waiting for him, Tad disconnected their conversation.
Joshua tapped the button to turn off the phone with the handle of his spoon before finishing off the last of the sundae. “Any other leads?”
“I found this when I went through her clothes.” She handed him a sheet of paper. “I made a copy for you.”
Joshua studied the image of both sides of a business card.
“I found it in the back pocket of Cheryl’s jeans,” she explained. “The lab was able to augment it enough to read the writing on the back.”
The printing on the front of the card was simple. It read: Davenport Winery. On the next line it read: Brianne Davenport, Owner. In the corner, it read “Direct Line” and had the phone number.
“Brianne Davenport was good friends with Angie.” Joshua read the cursive writing on the back of the card. It read Ned and had another phone number.
“I checked out the phone number,” she told him. “It’s disconnected now, but back in the summer of 1985, it belonged to Ned Carter’s car phone.”
“Brianne’s husband.” He set down his spoon to concentrate on the report. “I remember he used to deal drugs back in the day—very small time—mainly to his friends, which is why he was so popular.”
“Cheryl had to have gotten that heroin from someone,” Cameron said. “She didn’t crawl into that freezer in Albert’s cellar on her own. Somebody hid her body there—Maybe to make a statement about him defending her.”
Joshua studied the picture of the lady. “She used to be very pretty. Too bad she screwed it up.”
“Yes, she was very pretty,” she said. “Best looks money can buy.”
Cameron turned her attention to waffle dish. She broke it apart with her spoon to eat. Joshua wasn’t a fan of the waffle dish. The rest was hers and hers alone.
Joshua was still studying the pictures. “Any indications of sexual assault?”
“No tears in her clothes or wounding in the pelvic area,” she said. “There was some seminal fluid. So she did have sex shortly before her death. They got enough to get his DNA.” She shook her spoon at him. “Lucky thing for us.”
“Us?” he asked.
“Angie Sullivan’s body was found in Chester, WV,” she said. “Your turf. That makes her murder your case. Don’t you want to tag along with me, just in case I uncover something that could solve her murder?” She batted her eye lashes at him. “I promise you’ll have a good time.”
Smirking at her, Joshua slid the report to the side and reached across the table for her hand. “If the killer placed that freezer in Albert’s basement to make a point, then why did they try to destroy it by blowing up half the countryside?”
“That’s something we’re going to have to find out.” She picked up the report and put it back into the manila folder. “Do you want to go on a road trip with me?”
“To where?”
“Down memory lane.”
“Is Irving going with us?” Joshua asked.
Seeing the look in his eye, she hesitated before replying, “Are you willing to accept the pay back if we leave him behind at your place?”
Joshua sat up straight. “I’m a man. I can take it.”
“That’s what you always say.”
Detective Harry Shannon wasn’t what Cameron was expecting. She found the retired state police detective tinkering under a 1972 Charger. His wife had directed Cameron and Joshua around to the garage located behind their white ranch-style home in the suburbs of Raccoon Township, Pennsylvania. Inside the garage, they found a dismantled red and white muscle car with a man’s legs sticking out from underneath it.
“Detective Shannon?” Cameron bent over to call underneath the car while Joshua admired its leather interior.
“Not anymore, lady.”
She held out her badge under the car for the man to see. “I’m Detective Cameron Gates from the Pennsylvania State Police. Homicide. I left a message with your wife earlier about Angelina Sullivan’s murder.” She gestured at the pair of feet on the other side of the car. “This is Joshua Thornton, a prosecutor from Hancock County—”
“This ain’t his jurisdiction.”
“Her body was found in the Ohio River along the banks of Chester, West Virginia,” Joshua called down to him. “It’s believed she was killed in Chester, which makes it my jurisdiction.”
The dolly slid out from under the car to reveal a muscular, bald man with a white goatee and mustache. Small wire-rimmed glasses were perched on his nose. “What’s this about?”
“We found Cheryl Smith,” Cameron said. “Your prime suspect.”
“You found Cheryl Smith? Are you sure?”
“We’re sure,” Cameron said.
“I’ll be damned.” The retired detective wiped his hands on a rag he had resting on his stomach. He climbed to his feet. He looked from one of them to the other and back again while scratching his head. “Where is she?”
Joshua asked him, “Did you hear about the explosion in Hookstown a couple of weeks ago?”
“No one was hurt in that.”
“A dead body was found in a freezer in the basement of that house, which happened to have been the home of Albert Gordon, Smith’s lawyer,” she said. “The victim was identified as Cheryl Smith—the same Cheryl Smith wanted for questioning in Angelina Sullivan’s murder.”
Pacing the garage, Harry rubbed his goatee while repeating, “I’ll be damned. I’ll be damned.”
Cameron and Joshua exchanged glances. She stepped into the path of his pacing to rip him from his thoughts. “In order for us to determine if Cheryl Smith’s murder was connected to Angie Sullivan’s murder, we need to know about what you remember from your investigation of her disappearance.”
“I’m retired.” Harry said.
“You were the first lead investigator in the case,” Joshua said. “You were there at the beginning. That makes this case your baby.”
“Don’t tell me that baby doesn’t wake you up at night,” she added. “Disappearance of a young girl in her prime. Years later, she’s found dumped in the river.”
A slow grin crossed his tanned face. “Follow me.”
He led them through the house’s back door into a country kitchen where his wife was baking cookies from scratch. He offered them both seats at the table, in the middle of which he had a case file tied together with a string.
“Angie Sullivan was only eighteen years old,” Harry told them. “She had graduated from South Side High school in Hookstown a couple of weeks before she disappeared, June 3, 1978.”
“1978?” Cameron stared at the picture resting on top of the police reports in the case file. It was Angie Sullivan’s senior class picture. With her long silky, strawberry-blond hair and blue eyes, she looked like every mother’s ideal for a daughter. Wholesome and sweet.
Too sweet to die so young.
“Angie disappeared hours after being in a fight with Cheryl Smith, and Cheryl’s last words to her were that she wasn’t through with her yet. The prosecutor tried to keep her in the area, but her scumbag lawyer got the judge to say she could go.”
“That scumbag was my cousin,” Joshua said.
Harry apologized. “But you have to understand where I’m coming from.”
“I understand,” Joshua said. “But with no direct evidence to prove she had anything to do with Angie’s disappearance—”
“She was threatening the victim only hours before her disappearance.”
“That’s circumstantial,” the lawyer argued. “Truth is you had nothing, and you can’t indefinitely confine a suspect to a town without any real evidence to prove they had anything to do with it. It’s been over forty years since Angie Sullivan disappeared and the case is still open. What was Cheryl Smith supposed to do? Put her whole life on hold until you find enough evidence to either arrest her or clear her? That’s unfair persecution without—”
Not wanting to waste their time in a debate about law and order, Cameron interjected, “The fact is that after going off to Hollywood to make it big in porn, your prime suspect came back here and ended up dead in a freezer.”
“Porn star?” Harry asked.
Joshua said, “Cheryl Smith ended up going to Hollywood, changing her name, and becoming a star in porn movies.”
“Sounds like Cheryl Smith,” the retired detective said.
Cameron said, “According to the ME’s report, she had breast implants and a nose job. Between that and her name change, she was able to keep off the radar in this investigation.”
Harry’s wife didn’t have to offer twice when she set a plate of warm chocolate chip cookies in the center of the table for them to eat.
“You’re right,” Harry grumbled to Joshua. “We had nothing. Cheryl had a dozen witnesses saying that they were drinking and partying at the First Street Chester Bridge overlook until way into the middle of the night. She even had a boy saying that they were having intercourse in the back of his van.”
She asked, “First Street? In Chester?”
Joshua spoke around a bite of a cookie. “The police are chasing kids out of there all the time. They’ve torn apart the monument and destroyed it with graffiti.”
She was doubtful. “I imagine all of these witnesses that vouched for Cheryl were boy scouts.”
“You know how it is,” Harry told her. “Since we couldn’t disprove their alibis, and with no evidence that anything had happened to Angie, we couldn’t keep her. The prosecutor tried, but Gordon fought for them to let her go. Less than two weeks after Angie Sullivan disappeared, Cheryl Smith was gone. The case went cold until the drought in 1984 made the water level in the river drop to show her car off the yacht club pier.”
“Which happened to be less than a mile downstream from where Cheryl Smith and her friends were partying,” Joshua said.
Harry nodded his head vigorously. “By then, Cheryl Smith was nowhere to be found.”
“Did her friends give her up after the body turned up?” Cameron asked.
“Nope,” the retired detective answered. “That’s the benefit of time in cold cases. Loyalties have a way of dissolving over the course of years. After Angie’s body was found, several of Cheryl’s friends did admit that they were all so high and drunk that most of them passed out during the night.” With a frown, he shook his head. “But not the Romeo that she was with. That hard ass refused to give her up.”
“What were Cheryl and Angie fighting over?” Joshua asked him.
“Cheryl got it in her head that Angie was fooling around with her ex-boyfriend Ned Carter.”
“Ned?” Cameron asked.
“He married her best friend Brianne Davenport about a year after Angie disappeared,” Harry said.
“Was Angie having an affair with him?”
“According to him, no,” Harry said.
“Don’t you find it significant that Ned and Brianne were so quick to get married after their friend’s disappearance?” Joshua asked.
“Why?” Harry replied. “The beef was between Cheryl and Angie.”
“Over Ned, who married Brianne,” Joshua pointed out.
Cameron picked up Joshua’s train of thought. “Ned was stepping out with Brianne. But, knowing what a hothead Cheryl was, he protected Brianne by leading Cheryl to believe Angie was the other woman. If Angie found out she was being made a scapegoat, she could have confronted Ned and Brianne.”
“Do you happen to remember the cause of Angie’s death?” Joshua asked Harry.