Chapter 13 #3
I flipped a few pages to make sure of my hunch and winced when I saw the crime-scene photos of Cash’s dad, laying on his side, his left arm underneath him and his right arm bent at the elbow, his hand resting near the bullet wound in his temple.
Cash leaned over to look as well, and I had to remind myself that he’d probably looked at these photos dozens, if not hundreds, of times.
“Someone came up on him. Ambushed him. He didn’t have a chance to draw his weapon,” he said.
I shook my head. “No. He had a chance, Cash. He just didn’t draw because whoever pulled up was someone he trusted.”
“What do you mean, ‘pulled up?’”
“I mean, your dad was shot next to the front passenger seat of his vehicle.”
I paused to point to the photo, which clearly showed Cash’s dad next to his patrol car.
“Someone he recognized must’ve pulled up next to him, and when your dad got out of his car to walk around the hood to greet the killer, he was executed.”
“I’m struggling to see how you can be so sure of that, Maddy.”
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I swiveled the binder toward him. “Your dad was shot slightly off the curb, right?”
“Yeah.”
“So, he wasn’t on the sidewalk, which meant he was in the street by at least a couple of feet.”
“Okay.”
“And see right here?” I said, pointing to the outline of a parking space next to the one where Cash Sr.’s patrol car was parked.
“What am I looking at?”
“Your dad had walked around the hood of his car to then step off the curb into the space between the two vehicles. The way he’s lying and the way his body is facing says that he wasn’t ambushed from behind. The first bullet caused him to jerk backward. The second lifted him off his feet,
throwing him half onto the curb. The third was obviously execution style, when the killer stood over your dad. Whoever it was then took the time to locate the bullet that exited your dad’s skull, then got back into their vehicle and drove away.”
“No. That’s not possible. The killer didn’t drive away.”
“How could you know that?”
“Because there was a witness.”
“A witness to the murder?”
“Almost.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means that Doug Maydole was out walking his dog when he saw my dad’s patrol car pull up and park on the street. He waved, Dad waved back, then Doug turned the corner, walked maybe six hundred meters before he got to the end of the street, and that’s when he heard gunshots.
He hustled back and saw my dad dead in the street. Norris questioned him repeatedly, and the old man swore he didn’t see or hear another car.”
My brow furrowed. I’d been so certain that Cash’s dad had gone around the hood of his own patrol car to greet another car that’d pulled up to park next to him.
The crime-scene photo showed him lying near the passenger-side door of his patrol car.
Why would he go around his hood if his intention was to do anything other than greet the driver of a car that’d pulled up next to him?
“You think it was someone on foot?”
Cash shrugged. “That’s the working theory.”
But I was unconvinced. “Can you show me a map of the street where the witness was?”
Cash pulled out his cell phone and tapped at the map app.
Zeroing in on our location, he pointed to Wanda’s Diner, then moved his finger to the right, indicating an intersecting road across from the diner but farther down to the right.
His finger then traveled the length of that street, which I could already see ended in a cul-de-sac.
He double-tapped the screen at the cul-de-sac.
“Doug got to about right here when he heard the shots.”
“Is Doug someone I can talk to?”
Cash grimaced and shook his head. “The poor guy had early-onset Parkinson’s. He was only in his fifties at the time. He took his life two months after my dad was murdered.”
Something shifted in my mind. I couldn’t readily explain it, except that I felt like Doug Maydole was the key to everything. Which is why I pressed the topic a bit with Cash. “I’m assuming he made an official statement before he died?”
Cash nodded and pointed to the binder. “It’s in there.”
I pulled the binder closer and flipped several pages in, finally landing on a witness statement form with a neatly typed out description of what Doug Maydole had seen and heard that night, and at the bottom of the second page, he’d scribbled his signature.
Or something perhaps slightly resembling his signature.
The scrawl was completely illegible; the letters were riddled with jagged bumps, like they’d been infected with a pox.
No doubt about it, a shaky hand had definitely scribbled a name on the signature line.
Still, there was something that felt like it didn’t add up to me, but I realized that Cash had only the information available to him that was in the binder, so I chose not to continue to push him on it.
“So, you believe your dad’s killer was on foot.”
He nodded. “I do.”
Again, I checked in with the visceral feelings swirling just below my belly button. My gut didn’t buy it. “Okay, walk me through it then. How did the killer know where your dad would stop and park his car?”
“Must’ve arranged a meeting,” Cash said, like he’d had it worked out for years.
“Cell phone records show any unusual numbers?”
“It was the year 2000, Maddy. My dad didn’t even own a cell phone.”
I smirked. “Fine, did landline records show any unusual numbers?”
Cash shook his head. “Norris ran down every incoming call to the sheriff’s office. Only six were for my dad in the days leading up to the time he got shot. Three were from my mom, one was from my granddad, and the other two were from a mechanic’s shop that used to be in business around here.”
“What’d the mechanic want?”
“One of the cruisers needed a new alternator. It had to be specially ordered, and it came in the day my dad got shot. Norris was gonna drop off the cruiser the next day.”
I glanced out at the street. “The shop went out of business?”
“Sort of. It was owned and operated by Red Shoemaker. Red died when the lift of a car he was working on failed, and it dropped the car on top of him.”
I grimaced. “Yikes.”
“No kidding. That was a messy scene. Blood everywhere.”
“You saw it?”
“I did. I was the one who found Red after it happened.”
“You found him?”
Cash offered a grim nod. “The summer after my dad died, I was trying to bring in some extra cash for the family, working for the sheriff’s department. Mostly running errands, getting coffee, filing, that kind of thing.
One of the items on my to-do list that morning was to pick up new windshield wipers for all the cruisers, and that’s when I found Red.”
Cash was staring off into space with a haunted look, no doubt remembering the terrible scene.
“I’m assuming Red had been cleared as a suspect before the accident happened?”
“Yep. He was out to dinner with his wife, Lynn, on the other side of town when my dad was shot.”
“What about your home phone?” I asked. My gut said that Cash Sr. had been set up. The thread to the communication that led him to that parking space at that time on that night was the key to everything.
Cash shook his head. “McQuade went through every call with me and Ma. Most of the calls were for her or me. The rest were from phone solicitors. The week he died, Dad didn’t get a single personal call at home.”
“Was that unusual?”
“Considering how much he hated talking on the phone, not even a little.”
I stared at the countertop and just let my mind go where it wanted to. It was so odd a sensation because there was an almost conscious effort to, I guess, blanking my mind enough to allow an intuitive switch to flip. In a way, it was like a muscle memory that I was actively aware of.
“What’re you thinking?” Cash asked after a minute or two.
I pulled my unseeing gaze from the countertop. “I think your dad was set up. Someone told him to meet them at that spot, at that time, when they could be fairly certain there were no witnesses around, and the killer both arrived and left, in a hurry, by car.”
Cash crossed his arms, wearing a skeptical smirk. “The thing that doesn’t make sense, though, about the killer driving off, other than Maydole swearing there was no other car on the street, is that the direction he would’ve driven in order to get outta town fast would’ve been north.”
“Why is that problematic?”
“Because for two miles up the road, the speed limit is thirty-five, and toward the very end of that stretch, Norris was staking out the speed trap. It’s one of the town’s best moneymakers.”
I smirked. “So, lemme get this straight: Town central ends just up the street at the library, but you guys have made sure to extend a lowered speed limit for two miles up the road?”
Cash shrugged nonchalantly. “Hey, I don’t make the laws, Maddy. I just enforce ’em.”
I shook my head ruefully. “Okay, okay, I guess Evansville’s gotta pay the bills somehow, but getting us back on track, let me guess, Norris didn’t stop anybody for speeding around the time of the murder.”
It was Cash’s turn to shake his head, but his gesture wasn’t rueful. “No, Maddy. Norris didn’t stop or even see a car around the time of the murder. The whole night had been a bust right up until he got the radio call that Dad had been shot.”
“Is there any place to turn off between the edge of town and the speed trap?”
“Nope.”
“Then he must’ve headed south.”
“He couldn’t have.”
“Why not?”
“Because Dad had just come from placing cones and setting up a detour due to a downed tree at the far end of town. There’d been some forty-mile-an-hour wind gusts earlier in the day, and a big elm had toppled over about two hours earlier.
Dad had just finished setting up cones to reroute traffic back north to County Road 62, over to Highway 69, then back down and around the southern end of town for folks who needed to get to their homes on the other side of the tree.”
“Huh,” I said, tapping my finger on my arm. “So, you think the killer was on foot.”
“I do.”
“That means they lived in town, Cash.”
“It does.”
“How many people live in town?”
“About eighteen hundred.”