Chapter Twenty-Four
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
D r. Colleen Barker’s office was in Woodley Park, about two miles from Freddie and Elin’s apartment. When Freddie called her, she said to come now because she was on a two-hour break.
She had short red hair, green eyes and pale skin that looked like it would burn like crazy in the sun. She wore a dark green tunic with black leggings and invited them into a warm, cozy space with plush chairs, a sofa and a coffee table that made it look like a random living room rather than a psychiatrist’s office.
After gesturing for Sam and Freddie to have a seat on the sofa, she sat in a deep purple chair and crossed her legs.
There was something so soothing about the office and the woman who worked there that made Sam want to settle in and share her troubles with the good doctor.
“Did Frank sign the release allowing us to speak with you?”
“He did, and let me say… I was so very sorry—and truly shocked—to hear about Elaine’s murder. Are you getting any closer to figuring out who did it?”
“We’re making some progress. We’ve heard a lot about the difficulties she was having with her daughters. ”
“Yes,” Colleen said. “Elaine was having an awful time handling the usual rites of passage with her girls as they approach adulthood. We spent a lot of time working on that. As you can imagine, her sister’s violent death cast a long shadow over her life and made her afraid of history repeating itself, especially since her sister’s killer was never found.”
Sam took notes and made an asterisk next to the part about her sister’s killer still being at large. “Everything in me is thinking Elaine’s murder involved her kids in some way.”
Colleen shook her head. “I can’t see that. I’ve met her girls. We had some group therapy sessions with the whole family, and the girls loved Elaine very much. They just hated her rigidity when it came to rules and safety.”
“Did they hate the rigidity enough to want to eliminate the person who was causing so much grief for them?”
“I didn’t know them as well as I knew Elaine, but I can’t see either of them being involved in something like that.”
“Zoe indicated that the therapy wasn’t productive.”
“No, it wasn’t. Elaine refused to budge on the things the girls identified as important to them, such as being able to walk home from school or friends’ houses or riding in cars driven by peers. These were hard limits for Elaine, and we tried to find a compromise, but she wasn’t having it.”
“What role did Frank play in these discussions?”
“He mostly stayed on the sidelines. The dispute was between Elaine and the girls.”
“Both girls?”
“Primarily Zoe because she was older, but as Jada matured, things were heating up with her, too. In addition, Jada had a visceral dislike of the constant fighting and begged her entire family to make it stop.”
“How did her parents react to that request?”
“They both wept. I think they very much wanted peace in their family, but with Elaine dead set on protecting her daughters from anything that could harm them, they were at a stalemate.”
Sam had an itchy feeling working its way down her backbone, and the tingling intensified any time Jada’s name was mentioned. How was it even possible to suspect her when she’d been in West Virginia and Maryland the day her mother was murdered?
“Sam?”
Freddie’s voice dragged her out of her thoughts.
“I’m sorry.”
“Did you have more questions?” Colleen asked.
“Was there anything else happening in Elaine’s life that might have led to murder?”
“Not that I can think of. She had the usual stressors of work and kids and juggling all the responsibility, but she wasn’t experiencing conflict with anyone else, at least not that she told me.”
“What did she say about friends?”
“She had friends, but preferred to keep to herself and spend her free time with her family.”
“In your experience, was that unusual?”
“Not as unusual as you’d might expect. More and more, I’m hearing from women who prefer to have smaller friend groups due to the drama and bickering that can come with larger groups.”
“I get that,” Freddie said. “My wife has distanced herself from some high-maintenance friends lately.”
“Everyone is busy,” Colleen said. “People want to be with friends who build them up, not bring them down.”
“That’s my wife’s feeling as well.”
“Trina Gauthier, Jada’s friend Ali’s mother, told us about a falling-out she and her husband had with Frank and Elaine.”
Colleen nodded. “When they told them Jada wanted to live with them. Elaine was very upset about that and how the Gauthiers handled it. She felt they should’ve said no and shut it down right away.”
“Did you agree with that?”
“Not really. I could see it from Jada’s point of view, but Elaine was resolute in her anger over it.”
“Can you think of anything else that might be relevant?”
“I’ve gone through all my notes since I got the news, and there was nothing that stands out to me that would lead to murder.”
“Thank you for taking the time to do that review and to meet with us.”
“I really hope you find the person who did this to Elaine. Despite how it might seem to you after hearing about the difficulties with the girls, she was a sweet lady who had a difficult life. She didn’t deserve this.”
“No, she didn’t.”
Sam left her card, with the usual request to call if anything else came to mind that might help. “What do you think?” she asked Freddie when they were back outside.
“I want to look closer at the daughters. The situation inside their house was combustible for years. I can’t see how it doesn’t involve them in some way.”
“I agree, but how? They both have airtight alibis, the phone data and witnesses put them where they said they were, and there was nothing unusual in the financial reports.”
“We pulled them for the parents, not the daughters.”
Sam looked at him. “No, we didn’t.”
“We never pull financials for minors.”
“Maybe we should in this case.”
“We definitely should. I’ll call Cameron and get that moving.”
Frank Myerson vociferously objected to the request to access the girls’ financial records. “That’s outrageous,” he said on a call to Sam after receiving Cameron’s request for permission to access the data, which was required since the girls were minors. “They’re children .”
“We can get a warrant,” Sam told him.
“What in the world could you possibly want with the bank accounts of two teenage girls?”
“We’re trying to rule them out as suspects, Mr. Myerson. I would think you’d have the same goal we do.”
“There’s no need to rule them out of anything! They had nothing to do with this!”
“That’s what we’re trying to prove.”
“If you want that information, you’re going to have to get a warrant. There’s no way I’m betraying my daughters this way.”
“Fine, then that’s what we’ll do.”
The line went dead.
“Did he hang up on you?” Freddie asked as Vernon drove them back to HQ.
“Yep. Call Malone to get a warrant going for all three kids. We may as well include Zeke in the warrant, but we don’t need to notify his parents because he’s a legal adult.”
Freddie made the call and put it on speaker.
“That’s going to be a tough ask,” Malone said. “Judges tend to require a higher burden of proof when minors are involved.”
“You can say that our investigation has yielded extreme tension between Elaine and her daughters,” Sam said. “And not with anyone else.”
“I’ll do what I can, but just know it’s not a certainty.”
“Would it help to have an affidavit of all the reasons we think the daughters could be involved in this murder?”
“Yep.”
“We’ll get on that. Hold off on the request until we get back to the house.”
“Will do.”
“I’ll write it up,” Freddie said after she ended the call .
“I’d like to take a stab at it, and then you can spruce it up, if you don’t mind.”
“Fine by me.” He glanced over at her. “Are we really thinking teenage girls plotted their mother’s murder and then went about their days like nothing of any importance was happening?”
“I don’t want to think that’s possible, but we’ve looked at every other aspect of her life and have found no real trouble anywhere but right in her own home. There’s no sign of forced entry, which means whoever did this had the code to the house. Where would that person have gotten the code except from someone who lived there?”
“Good points. It’s just hard to fathom.”
“It is, but maybe they’d reached a breaking point with her and thought it would make everything easier to have her out of the way.” The statement added to the buzz working its way down her back.
“And you think these two sisters, who had not a nice thing to say to each other, worked together on this?”
“Roll with me… What if the nastiness was part of the plan? ‘If we act like we hate each other, no one will believe we’re capable of doing something like this together.’”
“The hatred was very convincing.”
“There’s probably enough actual hatred to make it easy to act that way. Just because they worked together on this doesn’t mean they’re suddenly BFFs.”
“You’re really digging this angle.”
“It’s the only thing so far that’s given me a buzz.”
“Accusing minors of murder, if that’s where we end up, will be dicey.”
“For sure.”
When they returned to HQ, Sam went directly to the captain’s office and knocked.
“Enter.” Malone sat behind his desk, his attention on a stack of folders in front of him .
“What’s all that?”
“Forensic reports from Stahl’s house. Just some light reading to keep me awake all night.”
“Jeez, better you than me.”
When the captain looked up at her, she saw anguish in his eyes. “It’s still so unbelievable… That he was a serial murderer while showing up here every day and pretending to be one of us.”
“He was never one of us. Not for one day of his entire miserable career.”
“No, he wasn’t.” Malone sighed and made a visible attempt to shake off the horror that would stay with them all forever. “What’s up?”
“As I mentioned on the phone, the Myerson investigation is pointing toward the daughters at this point.”
“What’ve you got on them?”
“At this moment? A ton of animosity between the vic and her daughters, as well as a really big hunch. We’re hoping the financials will show some money moving around that might lead us to the person they hired to take care of their most pressing concern.”
“How old are these girls?”
“Fifteen and seventeen.”
“It’s a bit of a stretch to picture teenage girls arranging their mother’s murder.”
“They were at war with her. Full-blown, bloody war. They couldn’t move without her approval, which they hardly ever got. They’d learned to be sneaky to get around her unyielding rules. I don’t think anything about them is ‘normal teenager’ by any definition of that term.”
“What does the dad say?”
“What you’d expect: ‘They’re children, and it’s obscene to even consider they had anything to do with this.’ But he was kind of punched out of the whole situation with the mom. Both girls pleaded with him to intervene on their behalf, and those pleas went unanswered as far as we could tell.”
“I’d like to get him back here and dig a little deeper into what he knows before we go full-on in that direction.”
Sam didn’t think that would help, but she wasn’t about to question him. “Will do.”
Back in the pit, she asked Freddie to call Frank and ask him to come back in.
“What’s the plan?”
“Malone wants us to talk to him some more and get a feel for whether there’s any there there.”
“Ah… Okay…”
“I agree, but he’s the boss.”
“Making the call.”
“I’ll write up the affidavit for the warrant on the girls’ financials.” Sam went into the office, shut the door and sat before the computer to collect her thoughts. Anything to do with writing or reading was challenging for her due to her dyslexia, but she was determined to put their case, such as it was, on paper to persuade a judge to grant the warrants.
She put her fingers on the keys and began to type, having learned to just let the thoughts and words flow and not worry if they were correct until the story was on the page. Freddie would check her work for any mistakes.
This past Sunday, Elaine Myerson was found dead in the bathroom that adjoined her bedroom in her home on Webster Street Northwest in the Crestwood neighborhood. The medical examiner has determined that she died as the result of a single blow to the back of her head, we believe from a baseball bat that was recovered by CSU from a dumpster six blocks from the home. The bat, which had blood and hair stuck to it, is being processed by the lab. We have fully investigated Mrs. Myerson’s life, spoken to her husband, daughters, brother, coworkers, therapist and neighbors. Throughout our investigation, we learned of significant strife …
“Is ‘strife’ the right word to describe what was going on in that house?” she asked herself. “Not really.”
…we discovered that Elaine was essentially at war with her daughters, Zoe, 17, and Jada, 15. To give some context, when Elaine was twenty, her sister Sarah, age 17, was abducted in the family’s Manassas neighborhood while she was walking home from a friend’s house. Sarah’s naked body was found six weeks later. The autopsy showed she had been sexually assaulted while held captive and had died recently. The killer was never found, but the case remains open, with the original detective still actively pursuing new information. Needless to say, the trauma of this incident stayed with Elaine. We were told that she wasn’t sure she wanted children because she feared being overprotective to the point of absurdity. However, her husband, Frank, very much wanted children, so they had two daughters. As the girls matured toward young adulthood, Elaine resisted their desire to be independent, to have jobs, boyfriends, ride in cars with peers, etc. By all accounts, the situation in their home had escalated to “warfare,” especially since Zoe now had a boyfriend. At the time of the murder, Mr. Myerson was at an all-day work event. His alibi has been confirmed. Zoe was at the Arlington home of her boyfriend, Zeke Bellamy, and their phones confirm their locations at the Bellamy house for the entire afternoon.
Like a bolt of lightning from above, an idea hit her that had Sam standing and heading for the door. “Freddie.”
When he stood to see what she needed, she tipped her head to bring him into the office.
“What’s up? Do you need help with the narrative?”
“No, but something just occurred to me that I should’ve thought of before now.”
“What’s that?”
“What if Zoe and Zeke left their phones at Zeke’s house and went to Zoe’s to deal with her mother?”
“I suppose that’s possible, but would kids think of doing that?”
“Go ask Archie to look at the history on their phones and see if there was an unusual lack of activity. Also see if there are any true-crime fans among the three of them.”
“On it.”
Every cell in Sam’s body buzzed as this theory took hold. It had to have been the daughters. No one else would’ve wanted Elaine dead. If the surviving family members were to be believed, no one else had access to the house. No one else was at “war” with Elaine. No one else was motivated to do whatever it took to get the person causing them nonstop grief out of the way.
Sam was seated at her desk when Freddie came to the door. “Frank said the girls took the car to visit friends, so he doesn’t have a ride. I told him I’d send Patrol to pick him up. He wasn’t thrilled about that, but I let him know it wasn’t optional.”
“Good job. So the girls are out and about?” Sam asked herself where she would’ve been shortly after her mother was murdered. It would depend on when in her lifetime it happened, but she probably wouldn’t have been out with friends right after, even if it had occurred during their long estrangement.
“He said Zoe was taking Jada to Ali’s before she went to see Zeke.”
“Is it weird to you that they’re already going out?”
“I don’t know. I mean, there’s only so much they can say and do with their dad and aunt. Maybe they need the support of their friends.”
“Does that mean you’re not fully on board with them being involved?”
“Despite the buzz I was getting before, I honestly don’t know what to think. I’m keeping an open mind.”
“I’ll have this ready for you in a few minutes.”
“Okay.”
Turning back to her computer, she changed the last line to accommodate the possibility that only the phones were at the Bellamy house. Zoe was at the Arlington home of her boyfriend, Zeke Bellamy, and data shows their phones remained at the Bellamy house for the entire afternoon.
Sam picked up the desk phone and dialed Archie’s extension.
“Hey,” he said.
“I’m wondering where we are with camera activity near the Myerson home.”
“There was nothing useful.”
“Do you have a contact with Arlington IT?”
“Yep. What do you need?”
Sam gave him Zeke Bellamy’s address. “Can you find out if they have anything from Sunday near their house?”
“What’re we looking for?”
“Male and female teenager leaving the house together at any point from two o’clock on, and anything from the surrounding area.”
“That’s a big chunk of time. Might take a minute to go through all that.”
“We can send someone over to help if they need it.”
“I’ll make the offer.”
“Cruz is on his way up with a couple of other things.”
“He just walked in.”
“How’s your girlfriend?”
“Eh, not sure. Haven’t talked to her.”
“Keep me posted?”
“I will if there’s anything to report. Might be a dead end.”
“I hope it works out the way you want it to. Thanks for the help.”
“Sure thing.”