Heroes In Uniform (266 page)

“She says she only told the officer that she’d seen a red truck. She told him she couldn’t tell him anything more about it. Didn’t see a plate, the driver, how new or old it was. Nothing. But get this, boss. She says it was Sam Denton who put the idea in the officer’s head that it was Ken Statler. They were all standing outside the front of the house. By that time, everyone in town that could get up to Charlie’s place was standing at the bottom of the driveway where the police had the area blocked off. She went over to tell the officer what she saw, and Sam and Charlie were standing there next to her. She remembers it was Sam who said, ‘that would’ve been Ken Statler’s truck’ as though he knew Ken had been there. She said the officer wrote it down and that was that.”

John didn’t answer right away. He was too busy cursing under his breath at the officer who didn’t follow up, didn’t confirm one way or the other whose truck was outside the house that day. And there had never been any confirmation of an alibi for Ken Statler. He’d simply disappeared so no one had a chance to find out where he’d been that day.

“Thanks, Danny. Come on back. We’ll go see Marcy again if we come up with anything else.”

As John stared through the window of his cruiser, he could only think one thing. Sam Denton seemed to be circling around a lot of the details of this mystery. He had supposedly been with Charlie moments before Charlie discovered Caroline’s body. The police report stated the two had met in Charlie’s living room to exchange some papers and then Sam had left. Charlie went in the office and found Caroline. If it was really Sam’s truck in the driveway, not Ken Statler’s, could Sam have been there earlier in the day and Charlie didn’t know it?

John’s mind scrolled back over the details of the day Caroline was killed. He pulled the statement Charlie had made out of his memory and went back over the facts. Charlie said he had arrived to meet with Sam. He’d said Sam was waiting for him when he arrived. They reviewed some papers in the living room, then Sam left before Charlie found Caroline. Sam Denton’s fingerprints were found in Charlie’s office, but they had been on the list of prints that were expected to be found in there, along with Charlie, Caroline, and Charlie’s cleaning woman’s.

John thought back to all of the other facts in his head that were connected to Sam Denton. When Katelyn was attacked last week, John had asked all the guys working on the build-out at her studio if they’d seen anyone around the day of her attack, or in the days leading up to it, who shouldn’t have been there. Sam gave a vague description of a car. Dark sedan that was a little beat up. The kind of car you might see in about a hundred or more driveways around here. Oddly, no one else had seen the car. Only Sam.

John felt sick to his stomach as he wondered if the answer to this mystery had been right under their noses, so damn close to home all these years. The biggest problem he’d have would be finding an actual answer to his questions. He definitely didn’t have enough for a warrant. If he brought Sam in to question him, he’d tip him off that he was suspicious and any evidence that may exist in this twenty-four-year-old mystery would be destroyed, if it hadn’t been already.

John forgot about lunch as he pulled out of the parking spot and headed toward the hospital. He hoped like hell he’d find Alan awake and cognizant today of all days.

* * *

A nurse smiled at John as he entered Alan’s hospital room. “He’s a little worn out today, I’m afraid,” she said as she let herself out with a sympathetic look at Alan, who lay sleeping in the bed.

John winced. He knew Alan’s condition was getting worse, but he wasn’t ready to face that reality yet. He pulled a chair up next to the bed and leaned over his mentor.

“Alan, I need to talk to you. Are you awake, Alan?” John asked gently. He hated to wake him, but the time for getting answers seemed to be slipping away from him before his eyes. Right along with his friend’s life.

“Hummph,” grunted Alan, opening one eye. He didn’t say anything else, but John hoped he was awake enough to answer him.

“Alan, I need you to think back. Did Sam Denton have a key to Charlie Hanford’s place back in eighty-nine? Would he have had access to the house?”

He didn’t get an answer from Alan—instead the answer came from the other side of the room.

“Why do you want to know that?” asked Charlie from the doorway. John could tell Charlie was trying to act casual about the question, but he sensed an edge beneath the man’s relaxed facade.

John matched the relaxation with a measured sigh as he stood and turned toward Charlie. He didn’t want Charlie to feel any need to mention this to Sam.

“I’m just trying to grasp for anything and everything I can to add to the file before, well…you know,” he said with a nod toward Alan. “There’s virtually no evidence on the case, and one of the things I can’t find in the notes is a list of who would have had access to the crime scene. It should have been pretty standard to have that list in the file with an apparent robbery, but it isn’t there.”

Charlie shrugged as he walked into the room. “A lot of people have access to my place. I never thought I’d have to worry about it in this town, you know?”

John nodded, and Charlie went on. “Sam had a key. My housekeeper had one. Still does. Let’s see… The lawn guy had a key to the garage, and from there he could get into the main part of the house. I never locked that door. Caroline had a key, of course, so she could come in to do the books.”

“Did Ken Statler have a key?” John asked.

Charlie frowned. “No. No, he didn’t, but wasn’t the back door broken? I always thought the intruder got in that way.”

John didn’t answer him. He’d been looking at the pictures of the damage to the back door for years, and he’d always wondered if that was really the way the murderer had gotten in. The more he looked at the damage, the more he wondered if that hadn’t been set up to look like the entry point when it wasn’t. There were no unexpected fingerprints on it, nor had it been wiped clean as parts of the office had. It simply had a broken pane of glass. But, he wasn’t about to share that theory with Charlie.

“Yeah, you’re right. Like I said, I’m just trying to fill out the file as much as I can before Alan goes.” He shrugged and stepped toward the door with a shake of his head that he hoped conveyed the message “forget I asked” to Charlie. “It’s nothing.”

He could feel Charlie’s eyes on him as he walked out. Any theory pointing the finger at Sam Denton, a man everyone here considered one of their own, a native born and raised in Evers, wasn’t going to win John any popularity points. Luckily for him, he put his popularity, and even the issue of winning enough votes for re-election, below finding a killer on his list of priorities. He didn’t care whose panties he put in a twist to catch this killer. He’d give the whole damned town wedgies if it meant finding out who killed Caroline before Katelyn was hurt and before Alan passed away.

“John!”

John spun to see Charlie standing behind him, his hands fisted in his pockets, head hanging. The older man raised his head to look at him and John wasn’t sure he’d ever seen Charlie Hanford look so unsure of himself. So hesitant.

“Yeah?” John asked, prompting Charlie.

Charlie shook his head. “I just . . .” Charlie glanced over his shoulder toward the door to Alan’s room. “Have we been living among a killer all these years? Were we wrong about Ken Statler? Because if we were, if we’ve all been living with Caroline’s killer all this time, it would kill him, John.”

John nodded once before turning to walk away. Alan would be dying no matter what. And John honestly didn’t know the answer to Charlie’s question, but he had to think that knowing the truth was always a good thing. He had to believe that justice was always the right thing.

Everlasting: Chapter Fourteen

If anyone had asked John to predict the following day’s events, he never in a million years would have come up with this one. He shook his head as he followed Danny through the construction site that would someday be a set of apartment buildings outside of Evers. It was thirty minutes outside of town, but still within John’s county. They stepped over rebar and abandoned tools to the elevator shaft that held Sam Denton’s body. Workers had discovered it at the bottom of the shaft early that morning and had called it in to Berta. It had been far too late to save Sam.

“Charlie’s on his way out. He was over in Canton Falls at a project but he said he’d leave right away when I talked to him earlier. Should be here soon,” Danny said over his shoulder, then stopped and hung back as though he didn’t want to view the body again.

John didn’t blame him. This was the worst part of their job. John took the extra few steps to the shaft without Danny and peered in. Two sides were concrete, the other two were made up of metal joists and framework that left the cavity in the middle open for John to see. From the angle of Sam’s neck, it was clear he hadn’t stood a chance. He had likely died on impact. His arms and legs had suffered compound fractures, the bone in one leg protruding angrily from torn pants.

John looked up through the top of the shaft. Each floor had wood covering the open area leading to the shaft except for one of the openings eight stories up. There were splintered remnants of those wooden barriers hanging off the edge, and John could see what looked like matching pieces lying on the ground around Sam’s body.

He walked back to Danny and looked at the workmen all standing outside the taped off area Danny had set when he arrived on scene ahead of John.

“Anyone know what he was doing here last night?” he asked Danny in a low voice.

“No. I asked them all what time he usually left, and they said it wasn’t unusual for him to stay and work later than the rest of them. He may have been foreman but they said he didn’t have any family to go home to. Sometimes, he’d just putz around a site long after everyone left, not really doing much of anything, they said.” Danny looked down at his notes as he talked.

“And I take it no one was here with him?”

“Nope. Everyone else knocked off at five thirty,” he said.

John had a hard time believing a man with as much experience as Sam Denton would have simply fallen down an elevator shaft. And it struck him as odd that the wood barrier would just give out if Sam hadn’t fallen against it hard. Or been shoved against it by someone else.

He wondered about suicide. If Sam had killed Caroline, would Katelyn’s return have been enough to drive him to kill himself?

But what about the broken wood? If he wanted to kill himself, wouldn’t he step over that wood?

It was possible the wood snapped when Sam tried to step over it, but something seemed off to John. He looked up to see Charlie Hanford rushing toward them from the parking lot. He looked pale and drawn as he came to a stop before them.

“Is it really Sam?” he asked, as though he were still holding out hope that Danny might have been wrong when he called him that morning.

“Charlie,” said John, holding his hands out to stop Charlie’s progress toward the body. “I’m sorry. It looks like it happened sometime last night after everyone left.” The coroner's van pulled up as John spoke. “We’ll know more after the coroner issues her report.”

Charlie stared past John at the spot where Sam lay as the coroner picked her way through the obstacle course leading to the body.

“I should have pulled him off the job,” he said, his voice heavily laden with regret.

“Why do you say that, Charlie?” John asked, studying the man’s body language as he waited for an answer. The hair on John’s neck stood on end, a signal he’d learned to listen to a long time ago. Listening to that signal had saved his life more than once in his line of work. He seemed to get that feeling around Charlie a lot, but he couldn’t pinpoint a reason for the feeling. Maybe he’d just picked up on Katelyn’s hesitation about the man, given her feelings toward her father’s best friend.

Charlie pulled his eyes off the elevator shaft and focused on John. “He was having trouble lately. He’d forget things. I’d find him on a site, disoriented. One night, I came back to a site to pick something up I’d forgotten and he was there. It was midnight, and he was walking around in his boxer shorts. I started talking to him and it was like he thought he was in his own house. He brushed it off, tried to joke about it, told me he’d just had a little too much to drink after everyone went home. The next day he was fine, and I didn’t see any signs of any problems as serious as that again. I...oh hell, I didn’t have the heart to take him off the job. I had him doing less and less. Just supervising things, but not working hands-on with anything.”

“It’s all right, Charlie,” John said, but in his head he was wondering what Charlie thought would happen if he let someone showing signs of dementia work on a construction site. And John had seen Sam working pretty hands-on only last week at Katelyn’s studio. He’d been hanging drywall and installing lights.

It took Danny and John about ten more minutes to console Charlie before John was able to get a minute alone with the coroner and Danny. John and Danny climbed down into the elevator shaft with Dr. Catherine Tanner, the county coroner who was also the medical examiner. The dual role was a blessing for the county. Not such a blessing for Cathy, who was paid one salary for fulfilling both sets of duties. John never understood why she hadn’t put her medical training to use doing something that would have earned her more money, but she seemed to be content staying where she was.

“What can you tell me so far, Cathy?”

She pulled her soiled gloves off, loosening each finger by the tip as she spoke. “Time of death was approximately eight pm to midnight last night. Cause of death is clear. Broken neck. I suspect the trauma to his spinal cord would have been significant enough to cause immediate spinal shock and a very quick death, but I can’t confirm that until I do the autopsy, if you want one.”