Highland County Heroes Collection

Chapter 9

Warren was dragging as he made his way up the stairs to the third floor on Saturday morning. It had been a week since that early morning call out that had resulted in the body of Ms. Tanalynn Snyder and they weren’t much closer to finding who’d killed her than when Detective Howard had called him in on Monday. The three of them, him, Howard and Cooley had talked to more people than he could remember, including Ms. Snyder’s roommate in the dorms, her boss at her work study position and all the frequent contacts in her phone, and no one knew anything about a boyfriend. The roommate said she’d been on several date’s recently, but she didn’t know with whom, she didn’t even know if they’d been with the same person, or how many there might have been, the only thing she had been sure of was that Tanalynn dated men. Not just males, men. She said Tanalynn wouldn’t date them unless they were at least twenty-five and that was just the bare minimum, she preferred her men over thirty. No one else had had as much to say about Ms. Snyder and her dating habits. Warren had to wonder if she’d gotten mixed up with a professor who didn’t want to lose his job over dating a student. But why would he rape her first?

“Come sit down,” Zeke Howard called to him as he rounded the corner to where Howard and Cooley’s desks sat nose to nose so they were facing each other as they sat.

“What is it?” Warren recognized the look on Howard’s face. It’s the one he got when they found something interesting. It might not pan out, but it was something that might.

“Preliminary autopsy report,” Cooley said in his partner’s place.

“Anything helpful?” Warren pulled up a chair and sat down at the end of where the two desks joined, where he’d been sitting for the last week.

“Read it and tell me what you see.” Detective Howard slid a stack of papers his way. He picked them up, leaned back in his seat and started reading.

An hour later he dropped the pages back on the desk and rolled his neck. He was starting to get old if sitting still for an hour made him this stiff.

“Well, what do you think?” Zeke leaned back in his seat and watched Warren, as if this was some kind of test and he wanted to see how Warren would do.

“After this,” he tapped the stack of papers, “it may have been a crime of passion, a moment of rage, then panic and dumping the body. We really need to figure out who she dated in that last,” he paused for a moment as he tried to remember, “six weeks. I take it they took DNA from the fetus?”

“Of course, but we have to have something to compare it to.”

“I’d say first compare it to the rape kit. Second, run it through CODIS.”

“You think this might have been the baby’s father?”

“I think it might. The roommate said she only dated older men. What if whoever she’d been dating was married, or had a job where dating a student would cost him his career? Then, as a theory, say she turns up pregnant, either accidentally or on purpose, doesn’t matter. They do their thing and as they’re lying there in bed afterward, she tells him about the baby. He demands she abort, she refuses.” Warren took a deep breath. “This is all just theory, right? Say he’s so afraid, of something whether it’s his wife finding out or that Ms. Snyder will go to the board at the college, whatever, that when she refuses to abort, he goes into a rage and strangles her. Once she’s dead he has to get rid of the body, where better than a deserted road late at night.”

“Not a bad scenario,” Detective Brian Cooley said with a nod. “Now tell me why you changed your theory.”

“Because this doesn’t back up my original theory.” Warren tapped the report again. “I saw her on the side of the road in the early dawn light with no clothes on and thought beaten and raped. The autopsy said rape is inconclusive, it could be, but it could also be consensual rough s*x. There was skin under her nails, and that will be sent off for DNA testing, but there was no bruising, no signs of restraints, and no defensive wounds. To me, that means she probably knew them, and the s*x was consensual. The rest I pieced together from what others have told us. She liked older men. Was she looking for a sugar daddy? A meal ticket via child support? Maybe she just liked older men, I don’t know. But she did like older men. The older men she was in a position to meet were mostly professors at MNM, where they could lose their jobs for dating a student. Some of them are even married. So there you have both in one,” he finished with a shrug, waiting to see what the two detectives had to say next. They seemed to be waiting on something, but after only a week, Warren couldn’t read them well enough to be able to tell if it was good or bad.

A couple moments later the Captain came out of his office and headed straight for them. Warren eyed the man carefully, not sure what to make of his appearance, he’d only spoken to the man a couple times in the last week.

“Well?” Captain Tolson asked as he came to a stop beside Zeke.

He was a tall man, about 6’3” as far as Warren could tell, and he could see the captain had once been in prime shape, but too many hours behind a desk and not enough at the gym or at some kind of physical labor had given him the beginnings of a beer belly.

“Well what?” Warren couldn’t keep from asking.

The captain ignored him, his attention on Detectives Howard and Cooley.

“I told you,” Howard said, unable to keep a wry smile from lifting one corner of his mouth.

“He came to the same conclusions you did? With the same or similar reasoning?”

“Close,” Cooley said. “He even caught a couple things that took Zeke and I both talking it out to see.”

Captain Tolson’s brows lifted and he watched Warren for a moment with a new interest. “Come see me at lunch, I want to talk to you.”

“Yes, sir.” Warren wasn’t sure what was coming, but some instinct told him this wasn’t an ass chewing he was going in for.

By lunch time, Warren was dragging. He’d been working for then days straight and was in desperate need of a day off or two, but as long as they had strong leads on the case, and no one higher up bitched about the over time, he wasn’t about to let the case go cold so he could spend a day sitting on the couch or fishing on Los Hermanos Lake.

He knocked on Captain Tolson’s open door at straight up noon, a little nervous about being called in to, not his boss’s office but one three steps higher.

“Come on in, son. Close the door and have a seat,” Tolson said as he glanced up from the papers he’d been reading on his desk. He waited while Warren did as he asked, then slipped off the reading glasses that sat low on his nose and stared at Warren a moment. “Do you know why I’ve asked you in here today?”

Warren resisted the urge to cross one knee over the other or fold his arms in front of himself. Both would be seen as defensive postures and he didn’t want the captain to think he was hiding anything. He wasn’t but he was uncertain enough about why he was here to make him want to fidget.

“I assume it’s got something to do with the Snyder case.”

“Yes and no. More no than yes.” Tolson leaned back in his chair and wove his fingers together over his stomach. “Your report as first officer on the scene caught the detective’s eye. You know that. They were impressed with your work, not just the report, but the work you’ve done with them and came to me.” He fell silent for the space of several breaths.

Warren didn’t know what to say so he stayed quiet, waiting.

“Because of their recommendation, I took a look at your file.” He picked up a folder off the desk and flipped it open before glancing back at Warren. “After three years on vice, anyone would need a break, especially after the kind of cases you worked for them. I spoke with your CO from APD. He had nothing but great things to say.” He flipped through a couple pages then let them fall back into place. “What I don’t get is why you left there to come be a patrol officer here. They could have transferred you out of vice, let you work something else. In fact, your CO said they tried to get you to do that, but you insisted on quitting and coming down here. He didn’t seem to know why.”

Warren had kept his reasons for making the move to himself, yes, burn out was part of it but Nancy needing help was a bigger part. He’d just told everyone in Albuquerque he was making the move for personal reasons and let it go at that. Some had pushed, but he’d refused to tell them about his brother-in-law. He’d been afraid some asshole reporter would hear about it then Thomas’s death would be in the news again. That would only have hurt Nancy more.

“Are you asking why I left Albuquerque, sir?”

“I’d like to know, if you’ll tell me.”

Warren stayed quiet a few seconds as he considered it. “I’ll tell you, but only if you agree my answer stays in this room, just between the two of us.”

Tolson frowned. “Assuming it’s not something I need to report, something that could endanger someone, you have my word.”

Warren watched him a moment, gauging the truth of his words before he spoke again. “Nancy Fisher is my sister.”

The captain frowned. “The name is familiar, but I’m not placing it right away, help me out.”

“She’s Thomas Fisher’s widow.”

“Ah. Part of that team KIA last year from Ft. Watterson.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Why didn’t you just tell your captain that then?”

“Because there was still a media circus around the whole thing then. I didn’t want to add to it. It would only make things harder for my sister and she was barely hanging on. She had lost her partner and been left with four small kids to raise on her own. She was lost in a way few people would understand. She’s better now, but I’d still like to keep it quiet.”

“Why didn’t you try for something more than patrolman here? You took a significant pay cut when you started here, but you have enough experience and good reviews you could have come in a little higher. We can’t compete with Albuquerque for wages, but you could have done better than you did.”

“Patrolman worked for what I needed then. The mostly set hours, and pretty low stress were just what I needed. It let me recover from vice and gave me the time I needed to give Nancy the help she needed.”

“You talk like you don’t need that time anymore.”

“Nancy’s doing pretty well now. She still has days that aren’t so good, but they’re becoming fewer and farther in between.”

“Good, that’s good.” The captain looked down at the folder in his hand, then back up at Warren. “What about you? Are you ready for something more than patrol or do you want to stay there?”

“Actually, I was just thinking about that this morning, sir. Considering whether or not I should put in for something different either once we get the Snyder case taken care of or I’m sent back to the first floor.”

“Good, good.” Tolson closed the folder and tossed it back on the desktop as he leaned back again and watched Warren. “I know this isn’t the way things are normally done, but if you’re amenable, I’d like to put your name in for the next detective opening. We’ve actually got a couple now, but they’ve not filled them yet. I think with your record,” he nodded toward the file, “and your skills, you’d be an asset to the team.”

Warren blinked several times as he tried to hide his surprise. This had been the last thing he’d been expecting. He hadn’t known why he’d been called in to the captain’s office, but to be offered a recommendation for a promotion he’d barely decided to apply for hadn’t even crossed his mind.

“Thank you, sir. I would really appreciate the recommendation.” He didn’t know what else to say. This would never have happened in Albuquerque, but then, almost no one ever quit and started over in a place like that. And if they did there were too many others to shine, they were easily overlooked. Yeah, he’d made the move to be here for his sister, but now that she didn’t need him as much, he hadn’t even considered going back. He liked Blackjack and all of Highland county. It might qualify as a small city, but it really had much more of a small town attitude. He liked going to the grocery store and running into people he knew. Having the checker at the Circle K ask how Nancy was doing. It made him feel like the whole town was family, not just his sister, and he liked it. He understood why she’d wanted to stay and raise the kids here, and after spending a year in Blackjack, he agreed. This was an amazing place for them to grow up. “Is there anything else?”

“Only that I think you’re on the right track with the Snyder case. It will take several weeks for the DNA results to come back, but I want you to double check all her contacts, get warrants for her phone company and for the social media sites she has the apps for on her phone, they should be able to turn over anything sent or received by the device. And make sure tech takes a look at the phone. They should be able to figure out if there were any apps deleted recently. Be sure to get warrants for those too.” Tolson shook his head. “I suspect you may be on to something with the professor or married man angle. And these days there are too many ways for messages and pictures to be sent from one to another and then disappear, or supposedly disappear. We need to make the key to this case unvanish.”

“Yes, sir. I’ll get right on that.”

Tolson nodded.

Warren knew he’d been dismissed so he stood and left the door open the way he’d found it as he went to the desks where he’d been working with Howard and Cooley. Neither was there at the moment, so he went to Cooley’s seat and started the paperwork he’d need to get the warrants.