Chapter Twenty-Seven
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
S am called the number for Zeke’s mother.
She answered on the third ring.
“Mrs. Bellamy, this is Lieutenant Sam Holland with the DC Metro Police.”
Silence.
“Hello?”
“Is this the first lady? Oh my God!”
“I told you who I am in this context. I’m trying to reach your son Zeke, and he’s not answering his phone. Is he home?”
“No, he isn’t. I just got home myself, so I’m not sure where he is.”
“Do you know where he was earlier today?”
“He was at school earlier and then baseball practice. Why?”
“We’re trying to reach him and Zoe, and both their phones are going straight to voice mail. Is his car gone?”
“Yes.”
“Is Zoe’s car at your house?”
“No, it’s not.”
“Are you able to track him?”
“Goodness no. He’d never go for that.”
Who’s in charge? Sam had to bite her tongue so she wouldn’t actually ask the question. “What’s the plate number for his car?”
“Why do you want to know that?”
Sam rolled her eyes at Freddie. “Because we’re looking for him and Zoe. Please give me the information, or I’ll send an officer there to get it.” They could get the info on their own, but getting it from his parents would save time and paperwork.
“I… Um… Hold on for a second.”
Sam took a deep breath and let it out while she waited for the woman to return.
“It’s a black Mustang that we bought for him two years ago. It’s registered in Virginia.” She recited the plate number, which Freddie wrote down.
“Have you ever heard Zeke talk about anything to do with Zoe’s mother?”
“Only that she was difficult and gave Zoe a hard time about everything. Once, he thanked me for not being like her.”
“If you hear from him, I’d like you to have him call me at this number. Tell him it’s urgent.”
“Is he in trouble?”
“I’m not sure.”
“What does that mean?”
“Just what I said. Have him call me.”
“I… I will. What should I do in the meantime?”
“Figure out where your son is. That’d help.”
“Oh… Okay. I will. I’ll do that.”
“Thank you.” Sam slapped the phone closed. “ ‘Is this the first lady?’ For fuck’s sake. A cop is calling you right after your son’s girlfriend’s pain-in-the-ass mother was murdered, and that’s your first question?”
“If I didn’t work with you every day, it might be.”
“You’d never act a fool like that.”
“I might.”
“Don’t you dare! I’ve raised you better than that.”
“Whatever you say. What’s next? ”
Sam thought about that for a second. “We need to put out a BOLO for the car Zoe is driving, as well as Zeke’s And get the plates out to Flock,” she said of the company that monitored license plate cameras. Doing that would make it more official that they were considered suspects, but they’d hit a wall in trying to locate them. She led the way back into the interrogation room, where Frank was on the phone asking when he might hear back from whomever he had called.
“I need someone immediately. I’m at the police station now, and she’s going after my kids. This is an emergency.”
Maybe you shouldn’t have fired Dunning, Sam wanted to say in her best smug tone.
Frank muttered a curse as he ended the call.
“I’d ask how the lawyer shopping is going, but apparently not well.”
“People don’t understand the word ‘emergency’ these days.”
“They understand the saying ‘your lack of planning isn’t my emergency.’”
“How could I have planned to need a defense attorney?”
Sam shrugged. “Seems to me that you had one of the better ones before you ran him off.”
“One of the better ones wouldn’t allow you to abuse the family of a murder victim.”
“He’s an officer of the court. He’s not going to risk his license or reputation for you. He was giving you his best advice to cooperate with us so you could be done with this. Your lack of cooperation is a huge red flag, which he could see as well as we can.”
“We are cooperating! What more do you want from us?”
“I want to know where your daughters are.”
“I told you I don’t know!”
“Are you willing to continue this conversation without having an attorney present?”
He was obviously torn.
“We can charge you with obstruction and make you comfortable downstairs until your new attorney arrives. It’s up to you.”
“Downstairs?”
“The city jail is in the basement.”
“Yeah, hard pass on that.”
“Are you waiving your right to an attorney in this matter?”
“For now. Yes.”
“Please let the record show that Mr. Frank Myerson has waived his right to legal representation in the homicide case of his wife, Elaine Myerson.”
“Let the record show that I did not kill my wife.”
“As their only living parent, shouldn’t you know where your minor children are?”
“They’re not babies! I don’t have to know where they are every second of every day.”
“Elaine would be so disappointed in you.”
His eyes flashed with barely concealed rage. “Don’t you speak of her as if you knew her.”
“I know her pretty well after the last few days, and it seems to me that she knew exactly where her kids were at all times.”
“That was our biggest problem! She never gave them an ounce of independence or freedom.”
“Is that why they decided to kill her?”
“They did not kill her!”
“What’s the plate number on the car Zoe is driving?”
His face went blank for a second. “The plate number?”
“Yes, the number on the license plate.”
“I… I don’t know that off the top of my head.”
“What make, model and year is it?”
“It’s a silver BMW SUV. I think it’s two years old.”
“Registered in the District?”
“Yes.”
“Detective Cruz, can you please get the plate number and put out a BOLO alert to all local departments?”
“Yep. ”
“What’s a BOLO alert?” Frank said as Freddie left the room.
“Be on the lookout.”
“For what?”
“For the car and the people in it.”
“Is this what you do when your investigation is going nowhere fast? You focus on the family of the victim?”
“In many homicide cases, someone close to the victim is directly involved.”
“Not this time.”
“So you say, but you can’t tell me where your daughters are after they took thousands of dollars out of their bank accounts and checked out to be in specific places that it seems they never intended to go.”
“Weren’t you a teenager once, Lieutenant? Did you ever sneak around?”
“Of course I did, but if my mother had been murdered, I wouldn’t have fallen off the grid. I would’ve stayed close to home and spent time with my family.”
“That’s you. Not everyone reacts the same way to trauma. My kids wanted their friends.”
“Mr. Myerson, your kids lied to you. Is that the first time they’ve done that?”
He hesitated, only for a second, but long enough to answer the question without saying a word.
“So it happens a lot, does it?”
“You have to understand. It was the only way they could do anything with Elaine tracking their every move.”
“How did they pull off lies if she was watching them?”
He seemed to be deciding whether to tell the truth or not.
“I feel that I need to warn you that you’re perilously close to being charged with obstruction, sir.”
He sighed deeply. “They have other phones that Elaine didn’t know about.”
“ What. The. Fuck? ”
“I’m sorry! I know I should’ve told you before now. ”
“Do you think?”
Sam pushed her notebook and pen across the table. “Write down the numbers.”
Frank pulled out his phone and scrolled through his contacts to find the numbers, which he then wrote down.
Sam took the page from the notebook and went to the door, calling for Freddie.
He came around the corner.
“The girls had other phones that Elaine didn’t know about.”
“Holy crap.”
She handed the page to him. “Let’s get warrants moving for these numbers and see if their location, or locations, can be determined.”
“I’ll run this right up to Archie.”
“Tell him it’s 911.”
“Yep.”
Sam went back in the room. “Call Zoe on this number.”
Frank eyed her with trepidation. “I’m not sure I should do that.”
“I’m very sure you should, unless you’re looking to spend the rest of your natural life in prison.”
“I didn’t kill my wife. How can you pin that on me?”
“You’ve obstructed the investigation into her murder by withholding relevant information. That’s a slam-dunk conviction that comes with years in prison.”
Nothing was ever a slam dunk, but he didn’t need to know that.
“Call your daughter and put it on speaker.”
He placed the call and set the phone on the table.
Zoe’s voice mail picked up with the same message that was on her other phone.
“Try Jada.”
Same thing. Straight to voice mail.
“So they’ve shut off all their phones and gone off the grid. Why would they do that if they have nothing to hide? ”
“Maybe they got scared because you seem to be looking only at them for this.”
“Or maybe you told them to shut off their phones, get in the car, go as far away as they could get and don’t come back.”
“I did not!”
“Did you know they wanted Elaine dead?”
“ Elaine knew they wanted her dead, but that doesn’t mean they did it.”
“No one else in her life wanted her dead. According to you and the girls, no one else had access to your house. There was no sign of forced entry. Elaine was killed coming out of the shower, which means she most likely didn’t admit the person who killed her.” Sam leaned in closer to him. “Who else could it be?”
“I don’t know! Someone could’ve gotten in somehow and killed her.”
“For what reason? You said nothing was missing, right?”
“At first glance. Who knows if they took things that belonged to her? I don’t know every piece of her jewelry. She inherited some valuable things from her mother. Maybe they were after those.”
“How would they know she had them?”
“Isn’t it your job to answer these questions?”
“Yes, it is, and usually the family members of murder victims are helpful because they want answers, too. For instance, they don’t wait days to tell me their daughters have second cell phones that their mother didn’t know about. They come clean with details like that the first time we ask so we won’t waste valuable time chasing our tails.”
“I should’ve told you that. I’m sorry that I didn’t.”
“Why didn’t you?”
He took a second, seeming to collect his thoughts. “My first thought was protecting Elaine.”
“From what?”
“From the whole world finding out that the three people closest to her lied to her about everything. I hope you can try to understand… She was intractable when it came to guarding the safety of her loved ones. Her brother wouldn’t tell you that he put distance between them because he couldn’t handle having to report in to her every day and flatly refused to let her track his phone. She was obsessed , Lieutenant.”
“You said before that you understood why she was obsessed, after the way her sister was murdered.”
“I did, but understanding doesn’t make it easy to live under that kind of regime. If I was ten minutes later than planned getting home, she’d grill me about where I’d been. If an open house ran late, she’d start texting, fearing that some rando had killed me in the house. It was all day, every day. I used to wonder sometimes how she held on to her job with all the time she spent spying on us.”
“Were you faithful to your wife, Mr. Myerson?”
His expression hardened. “Yes, I was.”
“Always?”
“Yes. I told you. I loved her.”
“Even when she was spying on you all the time?”
“She did that because she was concerned about my safety. Not because she didn’t trust me. I never gave her any reason not to trust me.”
“I think you gave her a very good reason not to trust you—she just didn’t know that you betrayed her by providing her children with secret phones so they could defy her.”
“You don’t understand how it was.”
“To me, it seems like life with Elaine was torturous for you and your daughters.”
“It could be. At times. Other times, it was wonderful. She went all out for birthdays, holidays, anniversaries. She was an amazing cook who loved nothing more than having all four of us at the table for dinner after a long day. She loved gardening and reading and binge-watching her favorite shows. There was a lot more to her than the traumatized sister of a murder victim.”
“That murder was never solved. Do you think Elaine feared the murderer might come for someone else she loved?”
“I don’t think she was lying awake at night, worrying about that particular scenario, but of course it was a possibility as long as the person who killed her sister remained at large.”
“Try calling your daughters again.”
He tried both numbers and got voice mail for both. “They’re supposed to answer those phones. That’s the deal we made when I agreed to get them.”
“What else did you negotiate with them on the side?”
“Sometimes I would put their phones where they were supposed to be so that when Elaine tracked them, she wouldn’t panic about where they were.”
“That’s diabolical.”
“We did what we had to, Lieutenant. It was a very difficult situation, and we were full of empathy for the cause of it, but that didn’t make it easy to live with.”
“What was your plan if Elaine found out about the second phones and the planting of the ones she knew about?”
“How was she going to find out? Only the three of us knew, and we weren’t going to tell her.”
“What if, say, Jada was supposed to be at Ali’s and Elaine went there, but Jada wasn’t there?”
“Thankfully, that never happened, but we were careful. We made sure to mostly tell her the truth. Like, for example, if Zoe was going somewhere in a friend’s car, we would tell Elaine that she was at the friend’s house and would be home at whatever time. The plan worked well, and it gave us all some breathing room. The fighting was less intense than it had been before.”
“How long ago did you get the second phones?”
“Two months or so. Zoe came to me with the idea and begged me for help. I agreed to it only if they both promised to always tell me where they really were—and always answer those phones if I called. Today is the first time they haven’t done that.”
“Tell me the truth. Do you think it’s possible they harmed your wife?”
“No way. They couldn’t have.”
“Look at it from my point of view for a second. Remember all the things I’ve mentioned about no forced entry and no sign that Elaine let someone in and then went to take a shower. Why would she do that? Recall how Zoe’s main cell phone was at Zeke’s house all afternoon, but if we dig deeper, will we find that they weren’t there at all? If we seize his car, will we see movement during the hours in question on Sunday? If it was them, we’ll prove it eventually.”
His eyes filled with tears. “These last few years… It’s been a lot. There were times when I wanted to kill all of them. I remember thinking this is the kind of shit that causes people to snap and kill their whole family and then themselves. But it never once occurred to me to actually do that, and I can’t imagine for the life of me those two girls planning something like this. I just can’t.”
“What about Zeke?”
“What about him?”
“Could he have planned it for them?”
“I… I don’t know him well enough to say that.”
“Was he frustrated by the restrictions placed on Zoe by her mother?”
“Everyone who knows Zoe was frustrated by it. She’s lost friends over it. I mean, who wants to be friends with someone who isn’t allowed to do anything?”
“One thing keeps nagging at me.”
“What?”
“Elaine must’ve known that Zoe was at Zeke’s on Sunday afternoon. Zoe told me herself that her mother would freak out if she knew they were having sex, and yet, Elaine had nothing to say about her being there alone with him for six hours?”
“She didn’t know they were alone. Zoe told Elaine that his parents and sisters would be home.”
“And Elaine wouldn’t have checked that to be sure?”
“She was trying to be more trusting of her.”
Sam felt for Elaine, who’d been deceived by her family, but she also had empathy for Frank and the girls, who’d struggled to live under Elaine’s unreasonable rules. Her empathy ended when it came to murder, however. If the girls had killed their mother, or arranged to have someone else do it, Sam would make sure they paid for their crime.