Chapter 28
I’d just gotten off the phone with Skip, and it didn’t sound like he was having any luck contacting the next of kin for John Russell.
Skip said that he’d called the number on Mr. Russell’s health insurance card and gotten the name and number for a Leah Russell.
The number listed had an out-of-state area code—Colorado, to be exact—but when he tried the number, his call went straight to voicemail.
I got the phone number from Skip and punched it into my desk phone.
Again, the call went straight to an automated robotic voicemail.
I left a message with my name and number, ended the call, then tried it again from my cell phone.
Again, I reached the voicemail. I hung up and sent a text with my information to the number.
“Damn.” I tapped on my desk.
I had the man’s address, which was only about a five-minute drive from the office. I left my desk and went to have another quick chat with Halloway.
I gave his open office door a tap as I stood in the doorway. Halloway sat at his desk with his phone held to his ear with his shoulder. He pulled his phone away, tapped the screen, and set the phone down.
“I was just trying to call the major,” Halloway said. “I’ll try him back in a minute. What’s up?”
“I’m going to run out to this guy’s house,” I said.
“Whose house?” Halloway asked.
“The last victim. Skip didn’t have any luck with contacting next of kin.
I didn’t either. It’s an out-of-state number that went straight to voicemail.
I left a message and sent a text, but this guy’s house is only a couple minutes away.
I figured I’d run over there quick and see what I can find out. ”
“All right,” Halloway said. “Let me know what you get. If we have any developments here, I’ll message you right away.”
I left the office and drove to John Russell’s neighborhood, passing my own in the process.
Russell’s home was in the Doral Lakes subdivision, just about a mile, maybe a mile and a half, north of my own.
It wasn’t lost on me that the place where John Russell lived, where his body was dumped, and the storage facility were located in about a five-mile radius.
Either our suspect was very much local, or he had a specific hunting ground for one reason or another.
After I made a left into the subdivision then another left on the first street, my navigation said that Mr. Russell’s home would be up the street on my right.
I wove my way back to the address, passing a mix of small single-family properties and townhomes.
Russell’s house approached on my right, and I parked at the curb out front of the small ranch with a single-car garage.
No vehicles were in the driveway, and the outdoor lights that bookended the garage door were on in the daylight.
I left the Explorer and walked to the front door, watching the ground for any signs of blood with each step, but I saw nothing.
The same nothing was also present at the front door.
I pressed the bell, heard it chime inside, and waited.
Nobody came. There were no windows in the front door and none to its sides.
I stepped back from the door and had a look at the house.
Some shrubs and overgrown landscaping ran along the front, and the only window I saw was a large bay window with a shade pulled down, completely blocking any view inside.
When I walked up to the house, I’d noticed a wooden fence stemming from both sides of the home, blocking me from any view into the side windows or otherwise.
I returned to the front door and gave it a couple of hard knocks, but again, nobody came.
I got the time from my watch. If I needed to, I could possibly still get a search warrant and get inside before the workday was out.
Opting to check in with the neighbors first, I headed to the home immediately east and rang the bell. An older woman, in her later seventies or early eighties, answered the door while holding a poodle in her arms. The dog wiggled in her grasp, looking as if he was about to jump down.
“Can I help you?” she asked.
“Ma’am,” I said. “I’m Lieutenant Nash Harrington with the Miami-Dade Police Department. I actually have some questions about your neighbor here.” I jabbed a thumb in the direction of John Russell’s home.
“John?” she asked.
“Correct,” I said. “Does anyone else live there?”
“No, it’s just John.”
“Do you remember the last time that you saw him?” I asked.
“Oh. It’s probably been a week or so. I was kind of hoping that he was going to mow my lawn this week, but I haven’t seen him around. Is something wrong?”
“Unfortunately, I can’t really get into that,” I said. “Would you happen to have his phone number? Or know if he has any family in the area?”
She squinted at me like she was trying to read the situation. The woman set her dog down, and it immediately sniffed my ankles before standing on two legs and putting its front ones up on my knee.
“Hey, buddy.” I reached down, let the dog sniff the back of my hand, then gave it a little scratch beneath the chin. The dog spun around my feet, lay down, and showed me his belly.
“All right, you ham, get in the house.” The woman shooed the pup into the house, stepped out onto her front stoop beside me, and closed her front door. She crossed her arms over her chest and continued to give me the look of judgment.
“Well, you passed the Stanley test.”
“Stanley test?” I asked.
“My dog. He’s a good judge of character.”
“Ah,” I said. “I’ve got a pup named Lucky. My best friend in the world. Well, aside from my wife,” I added.
“Good catch,” she said. “So, what is going on with John?”
I couldn’t tell her that he’d been killed—that he was a victim of a homicide. We hadn’t contacted anyone in his family, and we owed that family the courtesy of being the first to know.
“I’m sorry, ma’am. At this point, we can’t divulge anything regarding the nature of the investigation.”
She was silent.
“I’m trying to help,” I added.
Again, she said nothing. The woman stood there for a moment then told me to hold on. She walked into her house and came back a moment later with a business card.
“This is his phone number. The business card is unrelated, just something I used to write his phone number on. He doesn’t have any family in the area. He works for some electric company doing power lines. I’m not sure of the company name, though.”
I took the card from her and had a quick look at the phone number. “Thank you for this,” I said. I snapped a quick photo of the business card and handed it back to her.
“Do you happen to have any cameras outside here?” I asked.
She shook her head. “No. Never had any reason to.”
“Okay,” I said. “You haven’t seen anything strange going on over here in the last week or so, have you? People hanging around that shouldn’t be. Strange cars. Anything like that?”
I got another headshake.
“No. I haven’t seen anything except neighbors,” she said.
I figured that I’d gotten about as much as I was going to get from the woman, and before she started pressing again on what had happened to her neighbor, I thanked her for her time and started for the home across the street to see what, if anything, they knew.
As I walked across the street, I fired off a text to Wade with the photo that I’d taken of John Russell’s phone number, with the request to run it and see if we could find a location.
With his phone not found on his body, a location on it could break open the whole investigation.
When I reached the front door of the house across the street from the older woman, I dropped my phone into my pocket and reached out to hit the doorbell.
I waited, but nobody came even after a second ring of the bell.
I turned around and left the house, thinking I would try a couple of more neighbors before heading to the station.
As I walked down the driveway, my phone buzzed.
I slid it out, expecting to see an incoming call from Wade, but it was Colt calling.
“What’s up, Colt?”
“We have something from the letter,” he said. “I’m not sure what we can do with what we’ve got, but it’s something.”
I turned toward the Explorer instead of the neighboring house. “What did you get?”
“We know where the letters came from. I mean, the individual letters. I know where they were clipped from. Well, kind of.”
I wasn’t following. “Try that again,” I said as I pulled the cruiser’s door open and hopped inside.
“The letters themselves were clipped from some kind of publication from Alton’s Furniture.”
Alton’s Furniture was a big nationwide chain. The fact that there was one within a stone’s throw of Newman’s Fine Furniture, where we’d found John Russell’s body, registered in my head right away. There was a chance we had a connection.
“How did you find that out?” I asked.
“Do you remember that light I was shining through the envelope when the letter was still inside?”
“Sure,” I said.
“Well, I put it to the letter itself, hoping that I would be able to see the back sides of the individually clipped letters.”
“And you could,” I said.
“Kind of. I mean, common sense would say that if the letters were cut from a magazine or something like that, there would also be something on the back. Because magazines like that are printed double-sided.”
“I’m pretty sure I know how magazines work,” I said with just enough sarcasm to let him know that I was eager for him to get to the point.
“Yeah, yeah. Anyway, I could make out some text on the backs of a few letters using the light. So I called Wade in, thinking that maybe we could get some images of what I was looking at, and he could use one of his fancy computer programs to enhance the text. Long story short, we recognized that a couple of the letters on the front, which he’d used to craft his letter, were the same color, the same font, and the same size.
Like they’d been clipped from the same page.
Those letters all had text on the back. We ran images of that text through Wade’s computer program and found the text said ‘Connerton,’ ‘love,’ and the price of sixteen ninety-nine, ninety-nine.
So I searched the words and price and found a Connerton love seat for four ninety-nine but the full Connerton living room set for sixteen ninety-nine, ninety-nine available at Alton’s Furniture. ”
“Hmm.” I tried to put together what that could tell us.
“We’ve got a killer that used something from one furniture store and a body found at a different furniture store,” Colt said. “I just don’t see that being a coincidence. Plus, I know that there is one right there across the street from where the body was found. It has to be connected, right?”
“It would be a hell of a coincidence if it wasn’t,” I said.
“I’ll cruise over to the Alton’s Furniture across from where we found the body.
I have a couple photos of the letter this guy made on my phone.
I’ll see if I can find anything at the store that looks like it matches the letters.
Maybe I’ll talk to a manager or something while I’m there.
Sniff around a little and see if anything pops up. ”
“All right,” Colt said.
“Did you get anything else from that letter?” I asked.
“That was literally the first thing that I tried. And it kind of spiraled a bit. I haven’t even tried to get any prints from it yet. I’m about to get back on it, though.”
“Okay. Appreciate the call, and good work. Let me know if and when you get something else.”
“For sure,” Colt said.
“Did you tell Halloway?” I asked.
“I called his office, but he didn’t pick up. So I just left a message on his voicemail.”
“Got it,” I said. “Talk soon.”
“Yep.”
I ended the call and saw a notification of a text from Wade. I clicked on the message. Wade said that he would try to track the phone right away and would let me know what he got.
I was thankful that I’d at least gotten a phone number for John Russell out of my trip to his neighborhood.
When I returned with a warrant to go into his house, I would resume my door knocking at the neighboring homes.
But until then, and with the new furniture store lead, it was time to go.
I fired the motor to go and see what, if anything, I could get from Alton’s Furniture.