Witness Read online

  I heard during the funeral service that his step-daughter lit into him and told him to his face he’d killed her mother. What kind of man murders a woman with a young daughter?

  Now, that had been the sticking point; her mother’s reference to the step-daughter. Her mother, a huge believer in women’s intuition, said that the little girl probably sensed things or knew things that nobody else did, and if this child said he’d killed her mother, then he probably had, the bastard.

  But her mother had never really cared for him in the first place.

  From their first date, when he’d brought Josie by her mom’s place to drop off a quilt mom wanted, her mother had taken her to one side and warned her.

  Josie, what’s it say about a man who steps out with another woman behind his wife’s back?

  Mom, they’re having marital problems.

  Sure, they are.

  Oh, Mom, come on. Everyone knows it. From what I hear, she’s seeing someone too.

  Huh.

  Really, Mom.

  Sure, as sunshine, once you get him to be your man, he’ll do the same thing to you.

  No, he won’t, Mom, he says I’m special.

  Oh, sure, you may think you’re special, but you ain’t any more special than the next gal he steps out with once he gets you into his bed.

  Well, her mother kept up with the litany of offenses, and after a time, some of what her mother said started sinking in.

  It didn’t help when Josie said, Gee, Mom. I snuck out behind Reggie’s back when we were getting divorced, but Mom countered with Yes, but you two knew you were breaking up. This woman doesn’t know her husband’s seeing you behind her back. Doesn’t that worry you just a bit, Josie? That he’s married to one person and seeing another on the sly?

  Well, yes, it did bother her; it did bother her, a whole heck of a lot, as a matter of fact, and more than she cared to admit to her mother.

  And, little by little, over the following days, her mother worked on her until she’d nearly reached the point she was ready to break up with Randy.

  All she needed was the right excuse.

  He killed his last wife. What makes you think he’ll spare you?

  Well, because Josie had something on him.

  But he had something on her, as well.

  As if he’d heard her thoughts, he grunted. “Things are getting tricky out at Houser’s Farm.”

  “Yes, yes, they are, Randy,” she said evenly.

  Her mother knew nothing about the sex trafficking ring, and if she ever found out, she’d probably wring both their necks, hers first, and Randy’s next, for that kind of shit would bring about both their downfall if news ever got out about their extracurricular activities.

  “We need to rethink the way we’re doing things.”

  “I know,” she said mournfully.

  “We can’t keep bringing them through there. Folks are starting to talk.”

  “That’s not good.” She considered. “That coming from Mike?”

  Mike Mathers, the head of security at the warehouse.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “Isn’t there some farmer out there in one of the more remote counties, who we could pay to let us do the exchanges in his cornfield or something?”

  “I guess that’s one idea.”

  “Well, what are you thinking?”

  “I know it ain’t a great option, but we could do the transfers at the Casino.”

  “Sweet Christ, Randy, did you take leave of your senses?”

  “We’d do it around back, at the loading dock. Nobody’ll notice.”

  “Everybody will notice,” she said with heat. “Are you stupid, or what?”

  At the sudden look of rage in his eyes, she reared her head back, not really surprised, and wondering at the same time why’d she say that? Why did she deliberately provoke him? Did she want him to ram her face into a wall? She was going about it the right way if she did.

  “Sorry, Randy.”

  “S’okay.”

  But he still looked angry.

  “Anyway,” he said, trying to pick up the thread of their conversation. “I’m thinking of the Casino.”

  “I think we oughta look elsewhere,” she said, her voice trailing off.

  He regarded her evenly. “I didn’t kill my wife.”

  “It don’t matter no more whether you did or not. She’s dead and gone, and we got other problems to deal with.”

  “We’ll do one last exchange at the Casino,” he said, “but after that, we gotta move it somewhere else.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  “You okay with that?”

  “I’m gonna have to be, ain’t I?”

  He looked at her, saw the flint in her eyes, and looked away.

  I’m still in love with you, but that’s the only thing right now keeping me from kicking your ass to the curb. You better not mess with me.

  As if he’d heard her, he said, “I hear you loud and clear, Josie.”

  “About time,” she said, and she flashed him a brief, wintry smile.

  He’s hiding something from me, I know it.

  And the old man who’d keeled over on his front lawn? What was up with that? Randy knew something . . . something he was holding back from her, she didn’t know what it was, but she also knew something else.

  Whatever it was, she sure as hell didn’t wanna hear it.

  An hour later.

  Ginny Wittenberg clutched her mother’s left hand in the pouring rain as Grandpa’s casket got lowered into the ground; Evie held Mommy’s right hand, crying softly. Mommy stood there, her head bowed. Aunt Kathy stood to one side, looking teary.

  She’d gone and told Grandpa her secret, and now Grandpa was dead.

  She saw the bad man kill her grandpa.

  And he’d kill her and her mother and her sister and even her Aunt Kathy, if she said or did anything.

  Better not to say a word.

  24

  Monday, April 1, 9:00 a.m.

  The next morning, feeling emboldened, and wondering if there might be anything else she could bring to Dr. Chase’s attention to get him to change his mind on Miranda Randalls’s cause of death, Kathryn walked to the evidence room, wrote out the number, and handed the slip of paper over to the girl behind the desk. The girl opened the door. “You know where the boxes are stored?” she asked.

  “I sure do,” Kathryn said. “I can find them.”

  As she walked down the hallway, a pin-prickling of tension rimmed her eyes and she sensed the short hairs on the back of her neck prickling up; someone was watching her. She whirled around, half-expecting to see someone standing in one of the nearby corridors of files, peeking at her from between the shelves, but all she saw was the electronic eye in the ceiling.

  She shivered back her apprehension and walked on, deeper into the evidence room.

  At last, she reached the place where the ten evidence boxes had been stacked, but she did a double-take when she got there, for the shelf was empty, completely bare.

  “Wait a minute,” she said. She checked her notes. Yes, she was in the correct aisle, the proper row. She back-tracked a little, walked back, checked the notes, verified it to her satisfaction.

  Yes, she was in the proper place.

  So where were the boxes?

  Checking to see if perhaps they hadn’t been moved to another shelf, she checked the other shelves, in other bays, but did not see the ten evidence boxes.

  Who took them? Who removed them?

  And where were they now?

  A few minutes later.

  Kathryn walked back to the front desk

  “Find what you wanted?” the girl asked.

  “No, as a matter of fact, I didn’t.”

  The girl looked up. “Oh, yeah?”

  “Did someone come in and move them?”

  The girl turned to her computer and tapped some keys, clicked on a few things, then stared at the screen for a few minutes, her brow contracted. “Ok
ay, that’s weird,” she said at last.

  “What is it?”

  “They got transferred back to the Shelbyville Police Department, but you can’t tell from just looking at the record. There’s a notation deep inside the index, that says what happened to them, but it wasn’t immediately apparent. I had to really search.”

  “Hm,” Kathryn mused.

  “That’s odd,” the girl said. “And I’m sorry you had to walk all the way to the back to find that out.”

  “No worries.”

  Why did the evidence boxes get taken here in the first place, and then moved all the way back? If there was a trial—a very big if at this point—the defense lawyer would have a field day tearing the officers apart from, first, the conflict of interest of the Rowan County Sheriff’s Office having anything to do with the boxes, and second, with the corruption of the chain of command so essential in chain of custody exchanges of evidence. Why’d they do that? Bring the boxes here in the first place, and then drag them all the way back to the Shelbyville PD.

  It didn’t make one a bit of sense.

  What the heck was going on?

  25

  Sunday, March 31, 2:00 a.m.

  Ginny awoke to the sound of Grandpa’s land-line ringing, all the way downstairs from the living room, and from the satellite phone located on a small table on the upstairs landing. As she lifted her head and saw the clock, two in the morning, a sick dread filled her in the stomach. She buried her head under a pillow as her mother got out of bed, hurried to the telephone table in the upstairs landing hallway, picked up the receiver, and said, “Hello?”

  Silence as her mother listened.

  Then, “Oh no, oh no, oh no,” and Mommy started crying, and Ginny knew all she needed to know. Grandpa had died.

  The bad man had won again.

  26

  Saturday, March 30, 1:00 a.m.

  Ginny awoke with a start as a cold rush of air blew across her face. Frightened, she bolted out of bed and looked around her in the inky darkness but saw nothing. Phantoms and ghosts hovered around in the edges and corners of her mind. A cold sweat broke out across her brow and she shivered. In her dream, a goblin had been chasing after her, and she’d been afraid to turn around and face the goblin, but as she ran away from the goblin, she tripped on a tree root and fell and the goblin blew over her and when she lifted her head, she saw the goblin’s face.

  The bad man.

  The man at the funeral parlor.

  The man that Brittany had yelled at.

  Officer Friendly, who’d stalked her in the girls’ bathroom.

  He’d killed Mrs. Randalls, and Ginny had done nothing to save her.

  She had to do something, and now.

  She walked to the bedroom door and opened it a crack. Why didn’t her mother come home and make her get out of bed? A strange dissonance, a sense of something wrong, struck her heart, then she remembered. Mommy was out of town with some of her women friends; they were going to French Lick, Indiana, for a weekend of pampering and spas and beauty treatments. That’s why Mommy didn’t get her out of bed and make her come downstairs for dinner, but if that was the case, then why didn’t Grandpa get her up? Something didn’t make sense.

  She opened her bedroom door and walked out onto the landing and stood at the top of the staircase for a long moment, then walked into Evie’s bedroom. Her baby sister was fast asleep. Grandpa picked up Evie from school, fed her dinner, then put her to bed? Why didn’t Grandpa get her up? What was wrong here? But as she gazed down at the sleeping face of her sister, a measure of peace filled her heart. Evie was here and well and fast asleep, and at some point, in the evening, Grandpa must’ve walked into Ginny’s bedroom, checked on her, seen her sleeping, and walked out of her bedroom as silently as he’d entered.

  Okay, so things were fine. Grandpa just did things differently than Mommy did. He either didn’t bother making dinner, or he bought take-out for himself and Evie on the way home from school.

  Whatever. It didn’t matter.

  But something did matter.

  She tiptoed out of her sister’s bedroom and closed the door and crept down the stairs.

  She found Grandpa exactly where she knew he’d be, seated at the dining room table, his hands wrapped around a mug of hot tea. She walked up to him and sat down beside him.

  “I was a little worried when you weren’t at school today, when I went to pick up you girls.”

  “I know,” she said, her cheeks flaring with shame at the memory. “I was embarrassed.”

  “About what, honey?”

  “I peed all over myself in class.”

  “Oh, sweetie, that’s too bad. I’m sorry.”

  “I put my clothes in the washing machine and took a shower.”

  “Well, you’re a good girl, and I’m not surprised you cleaned up after yourself,” he said gently, “but what was it that got you so upset you went and peed in your pants, honey?”

  “I had an accident.”

  “I see.”

  She snuffled.

  “Sweetie,” he said gently, “what’s troubling you?”

  “Grandpa,” she said. “There’s something I need to tell you.”

  Six hours later.

  He knew it, he just knew it. Hank Wittenberg had been harboring a feeling of unease for the longest time now, ever since that poor neighbor lady turned up dead, the morning Ginny abandoned her newspaper route. He just knew Ginny had seen something, and it’d frightened the poor kid half to death, and right now, although he knew he felt justified in his instinct, it bothered and worried him to realize just how dangerous a thing it was that Ginny had witnessed.

  And now that he knew, he had to do something about it.

  Damn, he wished Melanie hadn’t decided to embark on a weekend away with her girlfriends, but he and Ginny were going to pop on down to the Randalls’s home, talk to Mr. Randalls, and let him know where things stood.

  It was the decent thing to do.

  “Come on, sweetheart,” he called out to Ginny. “Let’s get going.”

  “Okay, Grandpa,” she said.

  He turned to little Evie. “Honey, your sissy and I are going on a real quick errand, and we’ll be back in a jiffy, so you stay right where you are and don’t go anywhere, all right?”

  “All right, Grandpa,” Evie said. She was parked in front of the television on a Saturday morning, watching cartoons. She wasn’t going anywhere.

  “Okay, then,” he said. “Let’s do this.” He locked the house, walked Ginny out to his car, put her in the front passenger seat, backed out of the driveway, pointed the nose of the car north and drove up the street to the Randalls’ residence.

  “Grandpa?” she asked.

  “What is it, honey?”

  “Why aren’t we going to the police?”

  “We will, honey, but I just want to talk to Mr. Randalls first, see what his side of this is.”

  She stared at him, her blue eyes wide open and bright with terror.

  “Grandpa, I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  “I understand, honey, but I just want to feel the man out, see if he can explain himself. There may be a perfectly logical explanation for what happened.”

  “Okay.”

  He reached over and patted her on the leg. “Don’t worry, sweetheart, I’ll keep you safe. Nothing’s gonna happen to you with Grandpa here.”

  “Okay.”

  “And here we are,” he said, pulling up to the curb of the Randalls’s residence. He killed the engine and sat there a moment, listening to the engine tick quiet.

  He wanted answers and he was gonna get them.

  He got out of the driver’s side of the car and stepped up onto the curb, and then the sidewalk, and then he walked into the front yard.

  The passenger-side door opened behind him. “Grandpa, what are you doing?”

  “Just want to look at something,” he said, thrusting his hands on his hips. “Get back in the car, Ginny. Close
the door.”

  She obeyed and he surveyed the scene. Yes, he could see exactly how Ginny had witnessed the murder. The dining room was right there, and the curtains were drawn back. If this man had been hoisting his wife up to hang her, he would’ve been clearly visible through the plate-glass window.

  Ah, if only he’d winkled this information out of his granddaughter earlier, but it was still time for him to take her to the police to make a statement.

  A few hours later.

  Randy rolled out of bed that morning at the unprecedented hour of nine o’clock, and awoke, for the first in a long, long time, refreshed. He wandered downstairs, fixed himself a pot of coffee and wandered around the house, musing over what chores he wanted to tackle on this nice Saturday. He topped up the coffee and walked into the dining room to get a feel for the space—a moving van had arrived last week and the workers had hauled everything out of the room, the dining table, the matching buffet, the enormous mirror—and wondering if he wouldn’t be happier if he just turned this room into his home office, when he saw something out of the corner of his eye.

  He ducked behind the curtain and peeked out. Some old man was standing in the fucking yard, walking around, his hands on his fists, acting like he owned the fucking place.

  Christ Almighty, these assholes act like they’ve got every right in the world to trespass on my property and feast their eyeballs on whatever there is to see.

  Rage filled his heart and he blinked back the overpowering desire to put his hands around the man’s throat and squeeze . . .

  Ever since Miranda’s death, and all the excitement that followed, a regular stream of visitors had tramped all over his front yard, and he resented it mightily.

  What the hell did these assholes want?

  The old man surveyed the front yard as if he were planning a remodeling project.

  Get the fuck off my property, old man.

  It singed his ass, it singed his ass something fierce, the way these assholes acted like they owned the fucking place—