Chapter 8
Steve and I dropped the laptop and pistol off at the station with James in Tech.
James had tried to run a trace on Keegan Sloan’s phone using the number, but we came up empty—the phone was either off or possibly destroyed.
James said he would get what he could from the computer and give us a ring if there was anything of interest. The pistol went to our forensics lab.
While we didn’t plan to get anything from the weapon, it had become common procedure when executing search warrants to remove any firearms. Everything that needed to be returned to the Sloans at the completion of our investigation would be.
After a quick check-in with Garcia, who was just leaving the supermarket scene, Steve and I split up and went our ways—Steve to Keegan Sloan’s workplace to ask more questions, and I went to Ally VanHaren’s apartment, since I’d located the address.
I pulled up to the visitors parking section outside the gates of Ally VanHaren’s apartment complex around two o’clock.
While I had her phone number, I wouldn’t be giving her a heads-up that I was coming to question her about her boyfriend.
I left the car and went to the small guard shack at the gate.
A woman who looked about sixty sat inside the shack with a man of about equal age.
I walked up to the window where the woman was already waiting for me.
“Help you out?” she asked.
I flashed my badge. “I just need to have a chat with one of the tenants in here.”
“Um, okay,” she said. “Who are you looking for?”
“Someone who doesn’t live here,” I said.
She shot me a confused look.
“I’m looking for the boyfriend of a tenant that lives here. I have the apartment number. It should just be a knock, a couple of quick questions, and I’ll be on my way.”
“Mind if I see those credentials again?” she asked.
I obliged but wasn’t about to give her Ally VanHaren’s name, as I didn’t need the security woman possibly giving Ms. VanHaren a heads-up before I was at her door.
After a few additional questions to verify that I was law enforcement, Security sent me through the gate on foot.
I passed three or four buildings that each held about a dozen apartments, then I found the one that Ally VanHaren lived in, and around the back of that building was the apartment number that I sought.
I reached out, hit the bell, and waited.
It wasn’t more than a couple of seconds before the door opened inward.
A thin blonde in her early twenties stood in the doorway wearing pajamas.
“Hi,” she said. It sounded like a question.
“Are you Ally VanHaren?” I asked.
“I am. Can I help you with something?”
“I’m looking for Keegan Sloan. I believe he’s your boyfriend.”
“Was my boyfriend.”
“Was?” I asked.
“I broke up with him. I don’t know. But either way, he isn’t here. He doesn’t live here. Who are you?” She spit out the sentences rapid-fire as if the name of her boyfriend, or ex-boyfriend, immediately made her angry.
“Sorry. I’m Lieutenant Nash Harrington with the Miami-Dade Police Department.” I showed her my credentials but left out the homicide designation, as it had a tendency to blow up an interview before it started.
“Did he do something?” she asked.
“I’m not sure. I’m just trying to locate him. When was the last time you spoke with him?”
“Saturday,” she said.
“Is that when you broke up with him?” I asked.
“I broke up with him last Thursday when he confessed to cheating on me. So I kicked him out and haven’t seen him since. He’s a dick.”
“Okay,” I said. “Any text message exchanges after the breakup?”
“He messaged me about a million times. Tried calling me too. I sent him a couple messages back and when I talked to him Saturday, I told him to leave me the hell alone. I think he finally got the point, because he stopped messaging me last night and hasn’t messaged me at all today.
He’s probably at work. Or out screwing around.
Being an asshole somewhere.” Her nostrils flared.
She twisted her hair into a ponytail and secured it with a black band that had been slipped around her wrist. “Sorry I can’t help you. ”
“Any idea where he would go if he wasn’t at work or at his home?” I asked. “A friend’s place he may be at or something?”
“Why are you looking for him?” she asked.
I debated telling her, but we needed some answers, and her current frigidness toward her boyfriend, or ex-boyfriend, wasn’t going to help.
I figured if I told her the same thing we’d told Keegan’s mother, there was a chance I would get more cooperation.
I asked if I could come in to talk, and while she seemed annoyed by my presence, she invited me in and pointed me toward a small dining room table.
I slid out a chair and sat while she did the same opposite me and crossed her arms over her chest.
“Well?” she asked. “What did he do?”
“I’m going to tell you what we know, which isn’t much.”
“Okay,” she said.
“Keegan’s vehicle was used in a homicide this morning.”
“A what!” She balked. She uncrossed her arms and slapped her palms on the table. “He may be a cheating bastard, but he sure as hell didn’t kill someone.”
“The suspect was using Keegan’s vehicle,” I said.
“But the witness descriptions we have, and video evidence that we recovered, point to someone older and shorter than Keegan. Also with a different hair color. The witnesses put the man in his forties, of average height and build. Further complicating things is that we can’t locate Keegan.
He didn’t show to work today. He hasn’t been home, and his mother hasn’t seen him.
And now you are telling me that you haven’t talked to him in a couple days. ”
Ms. VanHaren was silent.
“Anything that you can offer that may help?” I asked. “Any idea where he could be?”
She grabbed her forehead and dug her fingers into her eyes as she shook her head. “I need a second to think. Like, I can’t even process this.”
I gave her a moment, but she still didn’t speak.
“Do you have any clue where he could be?” I asked again. “Did he mention going out of town or anything?”
She squinted, hard. “No. He didn’t mention anything like that. If he’s not at work, here, or home, I don’t really know where he could be. Or how anyone could have his car.”
“Any close friends that he could possibly be staying with? Someone that he would let borrow his car?”
“His best friend Nick, maybe? I mean, he could be staying with him. But I don’t know why he’d use his car. And it’s not like Nick would use Keegan’s car to go kill someone.”
“Last name on this Nick?” I asked.
“Thomas,” she said.
“He wouldn’t happen to be older, would he?”
She shook her head. “No. He is, like, the same age as Keegan.”
I wrote the name down as someone to touch base with.
With the little I’d gotten out of his mother and the little I was getting from the ex-girlfriend, I was leaning heavily toward believing that something had happened to Keegan, and whatever happened to him was more than likely at the hands of our shooter driving his car that morning.
Putting those things together along with everything else made me think we very well could have another homicide on our hands.
“Has Keegan mentioned being in any kind of trouble or anything weird lately? Problems with people or something like that?”
Her face scrunched up as if in thought. “No.”
“He wasn’t into anything bad? Drugs or owing people money or anything?”
“No, nothing like that.” She let out a hard breath and shook her head again. “I had a feeling something was wrong this morning.”
“Because?” I asked.
“I don’t know. He’d been going on and on about changing and being sorry and it was just a drunk mistake and all that.
A million messages begging me to take him back.
I mean, I told him we were done. To leave me alone.
And then the messages and calls just stopped last night.
Not one more. And none today. I mean, I told him to leave me alone, so I thought maybe that’s what he was actually doing.
But the thought did cross my mind that maybe he hurt himself or… I don’t know…”
Her body language suggested she was wrestling with her emotions. I’d seen it before—the breakdown was coming. I hoped to get a few more questions answered before it came.
“Do you think that was something in his nature?” I asked. “That he could or would hurt himself?”
“No, but I don’t know,” she said. “It was just a weird feeling.”
“Could you maybe check your phone and see what time exactly his last message came in?”
She tapped the screen of her phone then slid it across the table to me.
I glanced at it, seeing that the last message came in around ten o’clock the night before.
I scrolled the screen of her phone up and saw the flood of messages he’d sent her.
What she was telling me appeared truthful.
And while we would need a copy of the text exchanges, I imagined that we’d be able to get it from Keegan’s phone records when we got the transcripts from his carrier.
As predicted, the tears began to flow. Through choppy breaths, long pauses, tissues, and nose blowing, Ms. VanHaren continued to talk, yet none of it was putting me any closer to something resembling a lead.
I asked about the woman Keegan had cheated with, yet Ms. VanHaren didn’t know who the girl was.
Apparently, VanHaren had found a condom wrapper in a pair of his pants that she’d washed.
She confronted him about it, and he’d confessed to being unfaithful.
I asked if she or Keegan knew someone named Robert Mehen, our supermarket victim.
She claimed she’d never heard the name before and had never heard Keegan mention anyone named Robert, or Rob, or anything similar.
She did mention that a week or so before, Keegan had gotten into some traffic incident with a guy on a motorcycle.
Apparently, Keegan accidentally cut the guy off, and after some verbal thrashing, the motorcyclist broke the passenger-side mirror off Keegan’s car.
While it accounted for the damage to the Honda, a story about a traffic altercation days before with a random guy on a motorcycle didn’t give me much to run with.