Deception with Murder (A Rilynne Evans Mystery Book Two) Read online

  “They were married just after Shane graduated from the academy. I actually met Jane even before I worked with him the first time,” he said. “She would come in every few weeks or so with some kind of baked goods for the station. She makes the best cranberry orange muffins.”

  Rilynne spent the remainder of their drive with her eyes on the buildings moving past them. Despite having been in Addison Valley for four months, she was still impressed by its small town charm. She often found herself getting lost at the sight of the rustic buildings and friendly citizens. Had she not seen it all first hand, she would have though such places were not real, just inventions of storytellers. She had never actually seen a place before where people would wave kindly at passing cars, or stop while walking down the sidewalk just to talk to people.

  She was almost completely lost in thought by the time the car stopped.

  The Villarreal’s house was a cozy little cottage tucked between two large live oak trees. It was obvious that a lot of work had gone into maintaining not only the exterior of the home itself, but also the yard surrounding it. Passing through the gate, they stepped onto a cobblestone path that weaved between a beautiful coy pond and the strategically placed flowerbeds.

  The house itself was surrounded by a large deck that appeared to be wrapped all the way around. In addition to a pair of rocking chairs and a small table, it was decorated by numerous lawn ornaments and potted plants.

  Matthews had just pulled his hand down after pressing the bell when the bright red front door swung open, revealing a slender woman dressed in a simple black dress. Her golden hair was pulled up in a tight bun, leaving her tear-covered face exposed.

  “It’s good to see you, Jane.” Matthews reached out and embraced her.

  “Please,” she said after they drew apart. “Come in, Todd.” She nodded kindly to Rilynne as she closed the door behind them and motioned to an inviting sitting room just off of the entryway.

  Matthews lowered himself down on the camelback sofa, followed by Rilynne. “I’m so sorry about Shane. Is there anything that Katy and I can do for you?”

  “Thank you, Todd,” she replied, wiping a single tear from her cheek. “Do you have any news about what happened?”

  “We’re looking into it and are going to do everything we can to find the person responsible for this. This is my partner, Rilynne Evans,” he said gently. “We needed to ask you a few questions if you’re up to it.” Her nod was barely visible. “Good. Can you think of anyone who would have wanted to do this to Shane.”

  “No,” she said softly. “Everyone loved Shane. He was always thinking of others before himself. He had even gotten involved in a mentoring program for troubled boys before he took his undercover assignment.”

  Matthews jotted down a few notes. “Did Shane tell you anything about the case that he was working?”

  “Only that he was getting close. He said it wouldn’t be more than a couple weeks and we would be together again.” Tears were now rolling freely down her cheeks.

  “How often did you see each other?” Rilynne jumped in.

  “At the beginning of his assignment we would see each other a couple times a week when we could arrange it. Lately it had been closer to once every week or two.”

  “And where would you meet?” asked Rilynne.

  “Sometimes he would come to the house, but we mainly met at motels,” she explained. “He thought it would be safer that way.”

  Jane seemed almost numb, as if she were not actually part of the conversation. While she was obviously upset, it seemed as if it were not real to her. Rilynne knew the feeling all too well.

  “We’ll need to see all of the records that Shane kept here,” Matthews said, rising from his seat. “Can you tell us where they would be?”

  “Um, yeah,” she said as she walked toward the door. “They’re probably all in the attic. It’s this way.” She led them up the stairs to a door at the far end of the hall. “He kept everything up there,” she said as she pulled the door open, revealing a dark flight of stairs. “If you don’t mind, I’ll wait down here.”

  The attic was almost like a maze. It was clear that anything that did not have a place in the put-together rooms below was thrown in there. In the back corner, they found a desk surrounded by towers of boxes. “This must be where Shane worked while he was at home,” Matthews said, hauling one of the boxes to the floor and pulling the lid off.

  “There are hundreds of files in these,” Rilynne said while sifting through another one. “It looks like he kept a file on every call he was sent out on.”

  Some of the files dated back to his first year out of the academy. He had copies of every report that he had ever written, and even every traffic citation he had issued. “It’s going to take days to go through all of these by ourselves,” Rilynne said after making it just a few files into her first box. “We should have these all taken back to the station so we can get everyone working on them.”

  “Good idea,” he said, pulling out his phone. “I’ll call in for a van. You start looking for his journal. He might have hid it up here for safe keeping.”

  She nodded as he stood and walked back out of the room.

  Rilynne went through every drawer in his desk, and had just started on the trunk next to it when Matthews walked back in. “Jane will be sending Jerkins and Skinner up when they get here. No sign of the journal?”

  “No,” she said, still sifting through the trunk. “It isn’t in his desk, or in here.” She closed the lid and stood up. “There are a lot of places in here it could be, though.”

  “Well, let’s start around the desk and work our way out. It’s probably safe to say that it isn’t anywhere that has a thick layer of dust on it.” He ran his finger across the top of a particularly dusty box tucked into the corner.

  Rilynne was fairly certain that Jane had not ever venture into the attic. Where the rest of the house had been meticulously clean, as well as Jane herself, the attic was dusty and seemed to have no sense of order. It was so full that they had only searched a quarter of the room when Detectives Jerkins and Skinner walked in.

  “These are the boxes that need to be taken in,” Rilynne said, pointing to the stacks surrounding the desk. While Matthews helped them carry the boxes downstairs, Rilynne continued to search for the journal.

  After taking in the overwhelming amount of stuff crammed in the attic, Rilynne sat back in Villarreal’s desk chair and closed her eyes.

  Shane was sitting in his chair, intently looking over the file laid out in front of him. Unlike the man that had been found, his hair was short and his face cleanly shaven. There was the sound of a door shutting through the floor, and his face instantly lit up. He quickly pulled together the file and stuffed it into the file box on the floor before rushing toward the door.

  Rilynne recognized the look he had gotten when he heard his wife walking in. It was pure love. She couldn’t help but think that Jane had been a very lucky woman.

  Villarreal really did seem to keep everything. In one box she even found his sister’s old school books. Judging by the dates on the homework still tucked inside, they were the ones she would have been using around the time she had died. There were also several boxes filled with children’s toys. They were too new to have been his from childhood, so Rilynne assumed he had been collecting them for when he had a child of his own. She wondered to herself if his wife had known they were there.

  By the time the men finished loading all of the boxes and Matthews walked back up to rejoin the search, she had cleared all but the last corner.

  “Was Shane a baseball coach or something?” Rilynne asked as she pulled open a large box filled with bats and helmets. Judging by the size, they would have been too small for him to have used for himself.

  “Now that you mention it, I seem to recall something like that.” She could tell that he was searching his memory. “Yeah, he actually set up a team a few years back for the kids who had parents on the force. The kids r
eally enjoyed it.”

  The more she learned about Shane Villarreal, the more she liked him.

  “I don’t think we’re going to find it here,” Rilynne said, closing the last box. “Besides, this wouldn’t be the most convenient place for him to keep it. He would have been risking his cover every time he came here.”

  “I think you’re right. Maybe Jane will have an idea of where he would have put it,” Matthews said, leading the way back down the stairs.

  They found Jane in the kitchen brewing a pot of tea. “Please sit.” She motioned to the stools at the end of the island. “I’ve just made some tea.”

  Before Rilynne could politely decline, Matthews pulled out the seats and said, “That would be great. Thank you.” After filling the cups she had placed in front of them, she began to sip on her own.

  “Jane,” Matthews said after taking a drink himself. “We were wondering if you had any idea where Shane would have hidden his journal. We hoped it might have information that could lead us to who’s responsible for his death.”

  Jane sat her cup down on the counter. “What journal?” she asked with a puzzled tone.

  “Well, we were told by Collin Clark that he had been keeping a journal that he wrote everything in. It would’ve had information that he’d not yet put in his reports,” Matthews explained.

  Jane looked both confused and concerned. “Do you think that someone could have found his journal and discovered that he was a cop? Is that what got my husband killed?”

  “It is a possibility,” Rilynne said gently. “But we don’t think that was the case. He would have taken great care to hide the journal so no one would be able to find it. But since he said he was getting close to closing the case, it might help us identify the persons who might be involved.”

  Her expression did not change as she shook her head slowly side to side. “I don’t know where he would have hidden it,” she said. “He never mentioned it to me.”

  Rilynne watched Jane as they finished the remainder of their tea in silence. For the first time since their arrival, she was allowing her emotions to show. It seemed almost as if a wave was passing over her, hitting her with everything from anger to confusion at once. When they were done, Matthews and Rilynne thanked Jane for her assistance and saw themselves out.

  “Let’s run by Shane’s apartment before heading back to the station,” Matthew said as he climbed into the car.

  *

  It was really more of a long-term motel room than an apartment. Rilynne stood by the car looking over the rundown building while Matthews went into the office to get a copy of the key. “He’s in 3A,” he said, walking out a few moments later.

  The room was void of any personal touches, which was to be expected for an undercover residence. The only items Villarreal had were a few sets of clothes and some hygiene items.

  “I’ll start in the bathroom,” Matthews said.

  Rilynne waited for him to leave the room before sitting on the corner

  of the bed and closing her eyes. She only had to wait a few seconds before the room appeared again in front of her.

  Shane was lying in bed watching television. He turned it off, throwing the remote down on the colorful comforter, and walked over to the table. Reaching under, he pulled out something that seemed to have been taped to the bottom. It was a worn, maroon notebook.

  She hopped off of the bed and dropped to her knees next to the table. She stuck her head under it, looking at the underside, but the journal was not there. Her heart sank. After a few moments of frustration, she pulled herself up and searched the rest of the room.

  “It isn’t here,” she said a few minutes later when Matthews walked back out. “It looks like something had been taped to the underneath of the table, but he must have moved it.”

  “I’ll have someone stop by to pack up his belongings so they can be returned to Jane,” he said, looking morosely around the room. “We should head back to the office and see if they’ve found anything useful in his records.”

  Rilynne nodded and followed him quietly back to the car. She closed her eyes as the car started to move and she ran through everything she had learned so far about Villarreal. She concentrated as hard as she could, but could not will herself to see anything but the inside of her eyelids. By the time she gave up and opened her eyes, they were pulling up in front of the station.

  “Let’s stop by the lab and see if they’ve gotten anywhere with the evidence before we head up to the office,” Rilynne said as they stepped through the front doors.

  The lab was one floor above the homicide detective’s office. When they walked through the door, the first thing Rilynne saw was Ben slamming his fist down on his desk.

  “Hey,” she called out. “What did your desk ever do to you?”

  He spun around so fast that he nearly lost his balance. A grin quickly formed on her face as her mind drifted back to when they had first met. It wasn’t until she watched him nearly fall again that she realized he was no longer the clumsy man he had been several months before. “For your information, it happens to be very stubborn. Good to see you, Matthews. What can I do for the two of you?”

  “Have you gotten back any results from the evidence collected?” Rilynne asked, hiding a soft chuckle.

  He motioned them over. “The blood type was the same for all of the samples. I won’t have the DNA results back until tomorrow, but I’m fairly certain it all came from the victim.” Detective Matthews tensed up at Ben referring to Villarreal as ‘victim’ instead of by name, but he did not correct him. “The powder collected from his nose was a chemical match to the cocaine in the vials. We’re running a comparison against the samples we have from all of the drug busts made in the county to see if we can find its source.”

  “What about the skin found under his fingernails?” Matthews asked.

  “I’m running it now.” Ben leaned against his desk. “I’ll let you know as soon as we have the results back.”

  “And the substance found in his hair?” asked Rilynne.

  “I was just about to start on it. The same black substance was found on the left shoulder and back of his shirt. It looks like something had been dripping on him. Hopefully I’ll have an answer for you by the end of the day,” he said. “If not, I’ll have it tomorrow.”

  Rilynne looked around the room and saw only one other tech. “Are you processing it all yourself?” she asked, though she already knew the answer.

  “Yes,” he said swiftly. “Summers is back at the scene seeing if the blood spatter can tell him anything. The rest of it I’ll be doing myself.” His tone didn’t have a ring of frustration, but of determination. Rilynne gave him an understanding smile before walking with Matthews toward the door.

  “I’ll find you when I have something,” Ben called out behind them.

  “I take it he’s not very pleased with the new crime scene investigator that was hired?” Matthews asked when the elevator doors closed.

  “That obvious?” Rilynne chortled.

  “How far have you gotten?” Matthews asked as they walked into the conference room a few minutes later. The twenty-six boxes taken out of Villarreal’s house were being sorted through by the seven detectives sitting in the room.

  Wilcome stood up and looked around. “We’re maybe a third of the way through. So far we haven’t found anything connected to his assignment. We’re making a list of everyone in these who may have held a grudge, and we’ll start looking into all of the possibilities as soon as we’re finished. If his death wasn’t related to his undercover case, the answer may be in here somewhere.”

  Rilynne grabbed a box and took a seat.

  After working her way through half of the box, Rilynne found a report for a home invasion that had taken place two years before. The home, which belonged to a young couple, had been broken into through the back door. Despite the home being empty at the time, the power and the phone lines had been cut. The entire house had been searched, and all jewelry and e
lectronics taken. The husband had stated that a man in his mid twenties had knocked on the door an hour before he and his wife had left for the grocery store trying to sell magazines.

  “Hey,” she said, patting Matthews on the arm to get his attention. “Where’s the list of the homes that had been hit by the ring?”

  “It’s on my desk,” he said, giving her a confused look. “Why do you ask?”

  “Do you mind grabbing it for me?” she asked. “I think I may have something.”

  Matthews walked out of the conference room, and returned a few moments later with a file in his hand. He took his seat and opened it up, placing it in front of Rilynne. She looked at the report in her hand once more, and then thumbed through the pages in the file.

  “Here,” she said pointing to an address and date. “This was one of the first homes that was broken into. Villarreal was the responding officer.”

  “That must have been what got him interested in working the case,” he said while looking over the pages.

  “Wouldn’t it risk his cover if he was involved in the case?” she asked. “What if they had been watching the house after the home invasion and saw the officers respond?”

  He hesitated for a moment, looking over the rest of the report before giving an answer. “The call was almost a full year before his undercover assignment started. And you saw him, with his hair longer and his beard, even half of the officers here wouldn’t have recognized him.” He sat the report back down, rubbing his hands over his face as he mulled it over.

  “Has anyone come across any reports about home invasions?” he called out to the entire room. “Any case where the M.O. matches the assignment that he had been working?” After looking around at all of the shaking heads, he went on. “If any reports pop up that look like they could have been the work of this group, pass them to me.”

  “I’m going to go pull up the complete reports for the breakins on the list prior to him taking the assignment to see if he was noted on any of them,” Rilynne said, pushing her chair back from the table. “That’ll be a little quicker than looking through all of these boxes.”