Chapter 3
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As soon as Zev left—and it had taken a little bit more pushing to get him to go—Doreen sat down in her living room and just let some of the information flow through her brain. Could there be a connection between the murder of a decade ago and this current one?
Of course.
Was it likely? After all, the murders were ten years apart.
Probably not.
And the fact that the family was in Alberta when the mother had been murdered was an interesting twist. It didn’t necessarily have anything to do with the niece, but, if she was on Mack’s suspect list, then Doreen wanted to know.
Now that didn’t mean Mack would tell her, but some things needed to be shared.
So she picked up her phone and called him.
Mack answered, but he was a little distracted. “I don’t have any information for you,” he warned.
“I might have a little bit for you though.”
“What do you mean?”
“I just had a very strange visitor at my front door.”
“Oh?” he replied, wariness sliding into his tone.
Then she explained about the visit.
“We’re looking at his niece,” he confirmed in exasperation. “Yet it’s not as if we’ve made any decisions, and we sure haven’t arrested anybody. It’s so typical. People go off half-cocked, and they jump to the worst conclusion.”
“I did tell him that he may want to get a licensed PI, and I directed him to Corey in town,” she shared.
“Yes, but you also heard cold case, and now you’re all over it.”
She hesitated. “I heard cold case, and obviously we don’t have any way to know whether it’s connected to this one or not,” she clarified, “but the fact that Zev even showed up here …”
“Why are people jumping all over this?”
“Because they’re scared,” she offered. “It’s his family, and they’ve already been through the grinder with the police over the mother’s death some ten years earlier—but it was in Alberta.”
“I understand. I get it,” he said, with a groan. Then in a calmer tone, he added, “I just wish they wouldn’t keep bringing you into it.”
“I don’t think we can stop that, particularly at this stage. However, I do wonder about the mother’s case.”
“Of course you do because it’s a cold case,” he stated, with a note of humor.
“Therefore, I’ll ask if you could pull the files.”
“Even though it’s an Alberta case?” he asked.
“Yes.”
When she hesitated, Mack was all over her. “What are you thinking?”
“I don’t know, but the family moved here ten years ago, after that murder. Already a lot of their relatives were here, so they joined them after the ugliness of Jillian’s mother Katie’s murder.”
“So, everybody who had some connection or involvement in that ten-year-old case moved here?” he noted. “That’s just great. And now they’re all in the midst of a second murder.”
“That’s one of the reasons I thought you needed to know about this. Plus, I’ll need you to clarify just what’s going on with Katie’s murder case and who, if any, were considered suspects back then.”
“Oh, gee, let me guess. You want me to find that out too.”
“I would think that, in the course of your investigation into this current case, you would want to know about that previous murder, and you would check it out anyway.”
“Obviously I would want to know,” he muttered. “So, fine. I’ll do that much but no guarantees.”
“Of course not,” she said in a gentle tone.
After a moment of silence, Mack sighed. “Sorry I’ve been a bit of a bear. And how are you?”
“I’m okay,” she muttered. “A little bit out of sorts.”
“And you’re thinking this case might pull you out of the doldrums?” he asked, humor threading through his tone. “Just a juicy little murder, even if it isn’t in your own backyard?”
“I haven’t dealt with anything quite so far away,” she noted, “and I can see how that could be an issue but maybe not. It is a curiosity.”
“It is—a curiosity that could impact what I’m doing as well.”
“Exactly, so, in the spirit of cooperation—”
“In the spirit of you getting information you want, you mean,” he pointed out wryly. “Yeah, you told me.”
“Yes, but isn’t it interesting that Zev came to see me in the first place?”
“That seems to be more of the norm now,” Mack muttered.
“It would be great if people would just tell the cops what they knew and wanted, so we didn’t have to go through all these shenanigans.
But it doesn’t seem as if criminals have gotten any more honest or ethical in the years that I’ve been on the force. ”
She laughed. “No, I don’t think so,” she conceded. “Not only that, I suspect they may be worse. They’ve gotten smarter and have a lot more ways to hide their crimes, and they can do everything more quickly.”
“I know,” he agreed. “And, on that note, I’ll get back to you. The captain’s calling.” And, with that, he ended the call.
Doreen sat back and looked at the names Zev had given her, then quickly settled down in front of her laptop and started an internet search.
Just as she was about to go through the pages and pages of results, she had a thought and checked Solomon’s files.
She had all the shortened digital summaries in her phone but also had hard-copy printouts in a binder.
She put on some coffee and then sat down with her phone to see if any of Solomon’s unsolved cases dealt with this Burgon family.
Nothing came up on Katie’s murder, but the Burgon family was mentioned as potential eyewitnesses on another matter, with some questions for them.
This seemed totally unrelated to the Burgon family’s two murder cases.
Still, she pulled the physical file and reviewed it in full.
Not much was here, yet she found a direct link to the family on yet another of Solomon’s files.
“Another case? A third case?” she muttered to herself, as she looked down at her summary notes regarding a possible suicide or an actual murder of yet another Burgon family member.
“Why would this same family be involved in all these murder cases?” She pulled the Burgon file, which had a few notes of dodgy business practices, but no reference material to back it up.
However, a single handwritten note stated Alberta connection.
She sat back, stared at it, took a picture of it, then sent it to Mack. She didn’t know what was going on here, but there was an Alberta connection between one or two of Solomon’s unsolved cold cases and now a current case.
When Mack phoned her a little later, he asked, “What is that from?”
“Solomon’s files,” she shared.
“Oh boy,” he muttered.
“Yeah, I know,” she replied, “and I don’t really understand what it means. There’s not much information, but that note about a connection to an Alberta case caught my eye.”
“I phoned Red Deer to get the details on the mother’s murder and talked to one of the officers put on the case.
He told me how the mother was home alone, the family off bowling for some teenager’s birthday party or something that Jillian had been invited to.
When they came home, Katie was dead. She’d been killed in her own house. ”
“Sexual assault?”
“No,” he confirmed.
“Thank heavens for that.” Then another ugly thought hit Doreen. “Did the daughter find her?”
“I think the uncle may have been there with Jillian, but I don’t know for sure. The information in the database is minimal, so I’ve asked for a hard copy of the file.”
“How long will that take? And I bet it’s incomplete too.”
He gave a bark of laughter. “That’s just the facts of life. When we want more, we get less, and, when we want less, we get more. I’ve got to run.”
And, with that, he was gone again.