My hand flew to my mouth, and I stopped it before the latex made contact. Younger versions of Penny stared back at me from the wall.
The dead man behind me had to be her abusive husband.
So many thoughts avalanched through my brain that it was almost a minute before I could sort them out.
“Elise?” my voice felt small to my ears, like I’d whispered rather than speaking in a normal tone. But I must have spoken normally because Elise joined me. “I think I might have found a connection between Vilsack and your victim. His wife and one of The Sunburnt Arms employees attend the same PTSD support group.”
“You think his wife did this to him?” Elise asked.
“She couldn’t have. She was at the support group meeting when the neighbor called 911.”
But maybe the group encouraged its members to confront the people who’d harmed them. It seemed like a stupid policy if they did, but for all I knew, confronting their attacker for those who’d been victimized was a step in gaining closure. If it was, I certainly wasn’t doing it. One was dead, and for the others, I’d have to travel all over the country. My emotional stability was much better served by never seeing any of them again.
Elise peered at the photos on the wall like they might have a clue hidden inside. “If you don’t think she killed him, then it’s a loose connection. You’ve been here long enough to know that everyone in this area is connected to everyone else somehow.”
True enough. “I was thinking more that, in twelve-step groups, one of the steps is making amends with the people you’ve hurt. A support group where the members are victims rather than abusers or addicts might have something similar where they need to confront their abuser. Penny might have told off her husband in such a way that guilt overcame him. It could have even been by email since it sounded like he was hounding her and she didn’t feel safe. Becky might have tried to talk to Vilsack and then had to defend herself from him? Or perhaps he’d mocked her and she lost it?”
Elise’s mouth formed a small O. “You think Vilsack…?”
I nodded. Elise was smart. I didn’t have to spell it out for her to figure out that I suspected Bruce Vilsack of raping Becky. It would fit with what his roommate said about him being a bit of a player.
Elise glanced back at where Mark and my mom had made way for the stretcher and crew who’d transport the body back to Cavanaugh Funeral Home. Mark could conduct a full autopsy there. “As soon as I can get away from here, I’ll run Becky’s name through the system and see if anything pops.”
“We might have to do legwork on this one instead. It sounds like Chief Wilson might have covered up any reports made.”
Elise rolled her eyes. “Given everything else he apparently covered up, I wouldn’t be surprised. I’ll check anyway.”
Mark left with the body, and my mom joined Elise and me.
My mom held her hands awkwardly away from her body, as if she wasn’t sure where to put them so as not to contaminate the scene or get anything untoward on herself. She probably wasn’t sure. My parents came in long after a crime scene was released and cleaned. The closest they came to it all was examining photos and reports.
That made my mom’s reaction to it all that much more impressive. I’d seen a few dead bodies up close, and describing me as squeamish was still an understatement. My mom had gone straight for the body as if she’d worked in a morgue only yesterday.
She moved her hands as if she wanted to plant them on her hips in her trademarked gesture, then lowered them to her sides again, still keeping them out enough to prevent them from brushing her thighs. “This wasn’t a suicide.”
12
Elise’s throat worked like she’d swallowed her tongue. “What do you mean it wasn’t a suicide? He left a note.”
Her reaction made it clear that calling us in had been a failsafe for her. She’d believed it was a suicide, but because it was a former police officer, she’d wanted to be able to show that she’d done her due diligence.
My mom motioned for us to follow her back to the chair. With the body gone, all I had to avoid looking at was the blood stain on the floor. A crime scene tech hovered nearby, clearly waiting for my mom’s permission before tagging and bagging the rest of the evidence.
My mom pointed with her foot to the pen and paper lying on the floor. “Left side.” She stuck her pointer finger out toward where I knew the blood stain and gun lay. “Right side.”
It felt a bit like when my mom worked with clerking law students. She’d give them enough to see what their conclusion should be if they were paying attention, but she wouldn’t give them the answer. They needed to learn to see the pieces and put them together themselves.
I hadn’t realized until now that she also worked that way with peers. Maybe to see if they’d come to the same conclusion she had, thereby verifying her deduction. Which meant that I might have misinterpreted when she used to do the same to me. I always assumed it was because she felt I wasn’t competent enough to come to the right conclusion on my own.
I was pretty sure what the evidence said to me now was the same as what it said to her. Not only did we share genetics, but she’d trained me. The real question was whether Elise would agree. She didn’t come with the same bias I had of seeing the evidence through my mom’s lens.
“If he wrote the note with his left hand,” Elise said, “he wouldn’t have shot himself with his right. He would have used his dominant hand for both.”
My mom smiled, but I couldn’t join in. If this wasn’t a suicide, that destroyed my theory about members of the group confronting their attackers and the murder-suicide being a consequence of that. And it meant the two murders might not even be connected.
We needed to figure out if Vilsack had been Becky’s rapist.
Since Chief McTavish was still out sick, we took over his office. It gave us room to work together. Elise used McTavish’s computer to start running Becky’s name through the system. I settled in with Mark’s autopsy report on Vilsack, and my mom—who seemed like the best choice because no one dared cross her—went with Scherwin to look up the past cases Penny’s husband had been a part of in the hope that we could find a different suspect for his potential murder there. Scherwin had returned from talking to Vilsack’s family and roommate with the news that, as far as they knew, he hadn’t known Penny’s husband.
Mark’s autopsy report didn’t say much that I hadn’t known already. He’d been killed with a heavy, rounded object. The results from the lab confirmed the blood on the bat matched, so that was our murder weapon.
He’d lain in one spot for a while before eventually being moved out to Susan and Jurgen Schmitkes’ land. Why whoever killed him left him there so long was a question we still needed to answer. If I’d been forced to guess, it was likely because a guest or someone else was out in the hallway or downstairs at the time and they couldn’t move him then without being spotted.
Mark had listed time of death as 6:03 pm. That seemed awfully specific given how long post-death they’d discovered the body. With a long gap, the best a medical examiner could do was estimate a range.
I pulled out my phone. How did you determine TOD on Vilsack?
“Becky was raped,” Elise said, “but not by Vilsack.”
I fumbled my phone and grabbed it just before it smashed into the desk.
Elise spun the monitor around.
On the screen was a newspaper article rather than a police report. In more detail than I needed, it described how Rebecca Holmes was grabbed by a man she didn’t know while walking home from a late-night college class. When he cut her face for the pleasure of hearing her cry out, she realized he planned to kill her after raping her. She watched for a chance to escape. She got one when he relieved himself post act. Police were able to charge her attacker based on her testimony and DNA evidence, since he was in the system for a B&E.
Not only was the man not Bruce Vilsack, but the attack didn’t even happen in Fair Haven. It’d happened when Becky was away at school. It did explain a couple of things though, like why she refused to work the night shift and why she’d dropped out of school to come home and work two jobs in Fair Haven. She probably thought it was safer here.
