Evidence of Evil

Evidence of Evil

A Randa Sorel Mystery

By Jim Ingraham

Smashwords Edition Copyright © 2011 by Jim Ingraham

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Jennifer Phillips, an 18-year-old coed, is with her journalism professor the evening he is murdered in a restaurant parking lot. Jennifer has been seduced by her professor in order to obtain information harmful to her father, a local politician who fears that secrets of his private life, involving perversion and other crimes, may get into the hands of an unscrupulous newspaper writer. Detective Sergeant Randa Sorel, a Florida deputy sheriff, has to fight the political influence of Jennifer’s father in order to solve the murder and rescue Jennifer from a dysfunctional family. In the course of the investigation Randa discovers a love of her own.

Chapter One

Detective Sergeant Randa Sorel of the county sheriff’s department, in ankle-length skirt and dark blouse and jacket, stood just outside the noisy kitchen of Vincenzo’s Neapolitan Gardens Ristorante, breathing fragrances of Italian cooking, smiling reassuringly at Kathleen Hines, the only witness, apparently, who could identify the girl who had been with the victim whose corpse lay face down outside in the parking lot.

Randa had just come in from the Florida heat and was grateful for the cool indoor air.

Kathy, a thin girl with straight blonde hair, blue eyes, and crooked teeth, was nibbling a painted fingernail as she talked. She wasn’t more than eighteen, very nervous, her lips trembling when she took her hand from her mouth. She was about the age of this Jennifer Phillips she had been talking about. Both she and Jennifer were freshmen at Elwell College, although apparently they hadn’t been friends.

It was an argument, Randa said, not a discussion?

She was crying.

And she got up suddenly and walked out?

Ran out…when she saw me.

Why would seeing you…?

Because Burnside…he doesn’t just take girls to dinner.

Maybe in this case…

No. I know he’s dead and everything and you’re not supposed to say bad things. But he was a jerk. I thought Jen had a better opinion of herself. Isn’t her father some kind of a bigshot? Webster Phillips? I seen him on TV.

Jennifer is Webster Phillips’s daughter? That was an unwelcome jolt.

He’s on the city council or something?

Used to be. Now he’s a county commissioner.

This past week stories of scandal involving Webster Phillips had dominated the local news. Obviously if the girl was Webster Phillips’s daughter, there’d be a big fuss downtown. Every politician in the city would be wondering how to exploit it.

Fat chance I have now of handing this case off to Skip Morrow, Randa thought. (She had just sent Skip to the college, hoping to locate Jennifer Phillips.) Randa could picture the sheriff leaning back in his squeaking chair, denying any request she might make to turn this over to one of her deputies. The mayor will be delighted that someone ‘of your acumen’ will be handling things, he would say, amusing himself with the expression Mayor Hack had used while listing her qualifications for promotion to sergeant. Sometimes she wished she had muffed a few more questions on the exam.

The thin blonde prep chef said she had seen no one else in the restaurant paying attention to the couple.

Other than Professor Burnside, does Jennifer…? Is there any particular boy…?

A boyfriend? I don’t know. She’s kind of mousy, you know.

Keeps to herself?

Worse than that. Hardly talks to people.

That the kind of girl Dr. Burnside liked?

Kathy gave that a quick laugh. Who else would want him? Like I said, he was a jerk.

Randa handed Kathy her card and said the usual things about getting in touch. Outside under lights, a crowd behind a yellow ribbon watched forensic techs stooping over evidence, dragging tape measures, snapping cameras. Randa looked around for Skip Morrow. He apparently hadn’t come back.

She gave a few minutes to the body on the asphalt—Caucasian male thirty-two years old according to his driver’s license, what looked like a class ring on the little finger of his left hand, a dent in his earlobe probably from piercing. Not bad-looking.

A good deal of information about him had been found in the wallet taken off the body and in an Infiniti parked at the rear of the lot. Looking at the car, Randa indulged a few idle observations: the Infiniti was more expensive than cars usually owned by assistant professors of English. And parking it in the dark away from other cars could mean he hadn’t wanted anyone to know he was in the restaurant or hadn’t wanted to get the car scratched or hadn’t wanted it seen in the company of Ford Escorts and Chevy S-10’s—not that many of those got parked at Vincenzo’s Neapolitan Gardens. Maybe he wanted to get it boosted. That he might have planned to have a little action back there was another possibility.

It interested Randa that Jennifer hadn’t been seen near the car or among the people near the body, suggesting that she hadn’t been waiting for Burnside to come out. Maybe she didn’t know he had been shot. It was too early for speculation but it wasn’t unthinkable that Jennifer had left Burnside’s table, not because she had been seen by Kathy Hines but because she was an accomplice. If Burnside was the relentless womanizer Kathy Hines believed him to have been, what more effective way to discourage his attentions than with a boyfriend who had a gun?

Although Randa had been out of college for more than fifteen years, she vividly remembered instructors who had seated pretty girls in the front rows and delivered lectures to their chests. How many of them had taken students to bed, she had no idea.

Not there, Skip said, lowering the yellow ribbon he had just ducked under, brushing a shock of snarly brown hair from his eyes. But I got this, and he handed Randa a card on which was written the address and phone number of Jennifer’s mother. It’s what Security had as her permanent address. Kids in her dorm said she’d moved out a week ago. Monday, they said.

Moved out where?

They didn’t know. She came in and filled a duffle bag and left. Never said anything. They said she wasn’t at all clubby. Kind of a loner, I guess.

They see the car she went off in?

I don’t think so. But she’s got a red Mustang, they said. I didn’t see it on the lot.

Tag number?

I’ll get it.

She had to grab his arm to keep him from running off—an eager rookie. Later, she said. Right now I want you to question those witnesses, pointing at people on benches in a lighted garden near the front of the restaurant. See if anyone saw the shooter leave the scene. If someone heard footsteps, were the strides long or short, soft soles or hard soles? Man or woman? Make sure they check the alley over there, pointing past the dumpster. That would have been the most direct route of escape. Still clutching his sleeve, she said, Stay as long as the techs stay. I’m going to the mother’s house.

She watched him stride across the parking lot, a tall Clint Eastwood-looking tomato farmer from just down the highway in Bonita. She liked him mainly because he enjoyed his work and never argued. He was married and had a three-year-old daughter, a bright little girl with stunning black hair who looked exactly like her mother, a strikingly beautiful Latina from San Juan named Danielle.

After talking a few minutes with the forensic techs, learning there was no visible exit wound from the single bullet that had entered the body, she okayed the removal and ordered the Infiniti brought to the holding shed after it was checked for prints. She wanted to know whether Jennifer Phillips had been a passenger. The girl’s disappearance suggested she might have come to the restaurant in a separate car. Conceivably she provided the killer’s means of escape.

It took Randa about a half hour to get to Calusa River just south of the Westminster Yacht Club. It was a small old village of big houses, narrow roads, spacious lawns under ancient shade trees. It had long been abandoned by the millionaire snowbirds who had wintered here since the turn of the century and was now occupied largely by their less affluent admirers who were mainly transplanted Republicans from the upper Midwest—the Lincoln Towncar crowd, mostly middle-aged or elderly. Randa couldn’t remember ever having seen a basketball hoop in Calusa River or a swing under any of the trees. Not even for grandchildren.

She pulled into the Phillips’s driveway looking at a roofline and the reaching branches of a live oak silhouetted against a cloudy haze of night sky. Three downstairs windows were lighted. There was the smell of honeysuckle in the damp night air. Twice while she walked over wet grass she heard the lonely moaning of a dove. She had thought doves moaned only in daylight. But maybe they got lonely at night.

She knew the feeling.

She knew little about the Phillipses. She knew they were divorced. She knew that Harriet Phillips had been a high-school teacher in Ohio. Beyond that she knew only that Webster Phillips was a lawyer and part owner of a real-estate business. As to the scandal the media had recently been playing with, she knew only that it had something to do with allegations that Webster had used undue, if not unlawful, influence upon the Board of Adjustments to get a zoning variance for a builder named Paoli Fronzi. Randa hadn’t given the story much attention: she tried to stay clear of local politics.

She had lived in South Florida only about ten years. Seven years of her childhood had been spent on Zamelek, the fashionable end of the island called Gezirah on the Nile in Cairo. She could remember little of that. Her father had been a consulting engineer, an outspoken Frenchman openly opposed to the terrorist antics of religious fundamentalists and had been murdered by the same group that had assassinated Anwar Sadat. She and her mother, who was English, had been taken to London by her mother’s brother, who had brought them to Rhode Island where she spent all of her teenage years. When her mother died, she waited out her senior year at Brown University, then came south, never having learned to enjoy the ice on Thayer Street or frozen fingers and the frosty sight of her own puffing breath. She loved the heat and the humidity. She secretly enjoyed the comforting warmth of sweat on her body.

She pressed a white button near the door and looked through a curtained sidelight down a long hallway illuminated at its far end by a lighted open doorway.

A thin man in slippers and robe came hesitantly into the hallway, paused as though listening to instructions, then walked slowly toward her. As he edged the gauze curtain aside to peer out, Randa held up her badge. His eyes widened. He turned and hurried back down the hall and disappeared through the lighted doorway.

Randa waited more than a minute, then again pressed the button. After a few seconds, the thin man came into the hall and got rudely bumped aside by a woman in a scarlet robe and white stockinged feet who strode with strong purpose down the hall.

Before she had fully yanked the door open, the woman yelled, Well, it’s about time, dismissing Randa’s badge with impatient scorn. I know who you are. Come in, come in before the bugs get in.

An impatient, self-important, rude woman, Randa told herself as she stepped into a hallway that smelled of rotting floorboards and dust. Her gaze briefly cruised over framed lithographs on plastered walls and damask-cushioned chairs she imagined no one ever sat on. Everything looked old—the pictures, the carpet, the varnished furniture, a brass chandelier dangling over the distant doorway. Even the woman seemed a relic of a bygone affluence. It was like having stepped into an old movie starring an aging Bette Davis.

But why did you come here? It’s not happening here! she said, jeweled hands clenched into fists, eyes wide with annoyance.

Because she was shorter than Randa and possibly did not enjoy raising her eyes to another woman, she stepped back, jostling the thin man, who looked as though he wanted an apology. He was in his late twenties. He had thick, dark brows and thinning dark hair. He was slightly taller than Randa.

You are Mrs. Phillips? Randa said.

The woman hadn’t come to the door to answer questions. She had come to make demands. In a strident voice, she said, It’s about Hugh Burnside and my daughter, isn’t it?

It’s about...yes, yes it is.

I explained where they were, Mrs. Phillips said. Why aren’t you over there? That’s where he’s doing it.

Obviously she didn’t know about the shooting. Instead of telling her, Randa elected, at least for a moment, to use the opening provided by the woman’s ignorance.

You filed a complaint?

Isn’t that why you’re here?

No, Randa said. The man was staring intently at her mouth, his body turned partly aside, watching her from the edge of his vision as though slightly afraid.

Randa could hear muted voices from the end of the hall, television voices. Hadn’t it been on television?

When did you file the complaint? Randa asked.

I filed it on Monday and again on Tuesday and again yesterday. And the bristling eyes said, If you were doing your job, you’d know that.

I’m not here about a complaint, Mrs. Phillips.

Randa wondered: Where’s the hostility coming from? She thinks I’m here in response to a complaint and apparently thinks I should have been here three days ago. But that shouldn’t cause this degree of rancor. Then she remembered that Webster Phillips had walked out on her. He’s a public servant; I’m a public servant. Maybe she hates us all.

Randa said, What I came to tell you…it’s not very pleasant news. She waited a few seconds, then said, Professor Hugh Burnside has been murdered. He was shot outside a restaurant in North Summerlin. Your daughter wasn’t hurt, but she was with him, and I’m….

The woman’s mouth gaped open in astonishment. As though to steady herself, she grasped the man’s sleeve and stared in disbelief at Randa. Clearly she hadn’t known. The man’s face turned pale as chalk, but he did not reflect the same degree of surprise, which didn’t necessarily mean anything, although it was interesting. Everybody has his own way of processing information.

Burnside…? the woman said, focusing hard on Randa’s eyes. She was no longer imperious or demanding. The news had humbled her. Something almost babyishly naïve had come into her expression, as though the woman inside had risen to the surface. Clearly she had run into something she couldn’t dominate. He’s dead?

Randa nodded.

Somebody shot him?

Randa nodded.

Mrs. Phillips was still clutching the young man’s sleeve, now looking up at him. Did you hear that, Troy? Burnside is dead.

Randa wouldn’t say there was joy in the voice, but there was a heartiness that came close to it. The young man hadn’t acknowledged her look. He was watching Randa who said, Jennifer….

As though trapped in a reverie, Mrs. Phillips turned her head and stared at Randa, her mouth half open. Jennifer…?

I have to find her, Mrs. Phillips.

You don’t think…?

I just want to find her.

You said she isn’t hurt.

As far as I know. But I haven’t seen her. I take it she’s not here.

No…she wouldn’t— Sadness filmed her eyes and she looked away. She was holding Troy’s sleeve as though clinging to a lifeline. Although Randa wasn’t drawn to the woman, she recognized a sensitivity in her that was endearing. The abandoned brashness was obviously a suit of armor.

Would she have gone to her father? Randa asked.

No. An abrupt response. Then, troubled by it, Mrs. Phillips took a deep breath. I don’t know. Maybe.

He’s home, the man said. I’m quite sure he’s home. He had a thin, timid voice, consistent with his appearance.

Randa said, Troy? You are…? She dug a notebook from a wide pocket of her leather bag and found a pen. Showbiz: she didn’t need notes to remember any of this. Your last name?

Mrs. Phillips moved protectively closer to the man, her shoulder pressed to his chest. Troy Phillips. He’s my former husband’s stepson. He lives here with me.

Why didn’t she let Troy speak for himself?

Not a blood relation to Jennifer? Randa wasn’t sure why she asked, maybe just to get the relationship straight.

His mother was my former husband’s first wife. My husband adopted him and gave him his name. He’s more a brother to Jennifer than a real brother would be. And she tugged fondly on the arm she was holding and gave Troy a quick look of motherly approval. He’s a very good boy, aren’t you, Troy.

The very good boy had to be at least twenty-eight years old.

What’s going on between these two can’t be altogether healthy, Randa told herself, watching Mrs. Phillips gaze into the grim face of the man called Troy like a mother looking at a sleeping baby.

Have both of you been here all evening?

Mrs. Phillips quickly said, Yes. And her fingers tightened on Troy’s sleeve. Giving him a message?

Yes, all evening, Troy said.

It wasn’t unusual these days for a single man his age to be living at home to avoid paying rent, but there was more than that going on here. She warned herself against reading too much into what she was getting only a brief glimpse of. What I see is an aggressively doting stepmother and an apparently dependent stepson. It tells me something about them; it tells me something about the environment Jennifer grew up in.

Randa knew that her own mother in this situation would have immediately gone to the daughter. She would have known where the daughter was and would have been fully confident that the daughter would be glad to see her. Why wasn’t that true here?

This had to be a very difficult night for Jennifer, Randa said. Do you know of a friend she might have gone to?

Not until the words were out did she recognize the cruelty in them. Too late she watched the woman cringe.

At the college, Mrs. Phillips said, an often-visited regret lingering in her eyes. There must be someone at the college. It came out as a kind of pleading with the gods. In spite of herself, having vowed a million times never to get emotionally involved, Randa felt sorry for the woman.

Troy was staring at the floor, his face grim. He apparently had nothing to offer.

Although it was possible they both knew where Jennifer was and were shielding her and would warn her the minute Randa left the house, but Randa didn’t think so. There was a wall between this woman and her daughter. Randa doubted that Mrs. Phillips had any idea where her daughter was.

Searching for an exit line, Randa caught herself almost saying, I just hope she’s not alone somewhere. It would have been a blade to the heart.

If you do contact her, Mrs. Phillips, please have her get in touch with me. It’s very necessary that I talk with her.

She handed the woman her card, said goodnight to both of them, and went out to her car, realizing as she breathed the sweetened night air how suffocating the atmosphere had been inside that house. A lonely woman, a weakling stepson.

Things were very different where Hugh Burnside had lived—at Dolphin Docks in a townhouse on reclaimed swampland south of the city. Although it was nearly midnight when Randa entered the gardened drive, many windows were lighted and young people were laughing and talking near the several pools. As she searched for Section F, she saw, beyond gardens between two-story townhouses, tall masts and railed decks of boats on a canal. Everything was lighted. Laughter and young voices everywhere.

After parking her Cherokee near a black olive tree and quietly opening the front gate into a small courtyard, Randa stood outside a kitchen slider and watched a girl at a dining room table leafing through pages of a spiral notebook. Randa watched her for nearly a minute before she pressed the white button that activated a chime that gave off the opening sounds of Boola boola.

The girl looked up in alarm. She closed the notebook, glanced frantically around the room, then hurried to a bookcase and pushed the notebook inside behind a row of books. She stood in the center of the room with her hand on her chest, taking deep breaths. She glanced at the bookcase, then came slowly toward the little vestibule off the kitchen.

Without opening the door, she called, Who is it?"

It’s the police, Jennifer. Open the door.

It was a good ten seconds before the knob turned and the frightened face of Jennifer Phillips peered out.

Chapter Two

You are Jennifer Phillips? Randa said, putting her leather ID folder back into her handbag, smiling, noticing red splotches high on the girl’s otherwise pallid cheeks. She was about Randa’s height, maybe five eight, a little plump. She had pale brown hair, evidently a natural color. No makeup. She was in jeans and a blouse, a girl you’d have no trouble casting as a farmer’s daughter. Her plain but not unpleasant face was loaded with apprehension that tugged the corners of her mouth down and denied youthful expression to her eyes.

Why don’t we go in and sit down, Randa said, hoping to appear friendly, hoping the girl wouldn’t think her manner patronizing.

Having investigated robberies here in Dolphin Docks, she knew the layout: kitchen, dining/living room downstairs, two bedrooms, two baths upstairs. This one was outfitted like a graduate student’s apartment—pop art posters on the walls, a plastic pipe table and chairs under a fat globe in the dining section, two bamboo-framed futons in the far section angled around a large, raw-wood seaman’s chest, a glass wall draped with vertical blinds separating the room from a screened lanai. Outside the lanai was a garden with paths leading out to a broad boat canal.

Above a TV cabinet on the wall facing the futons was a large framed portrait of a young man in a director’s chair, an ankle over a knee, brown loafers, chinos, a brown jacket with elbow patches. Behind him were palm trees and blue water and a distant island.

It was quiet inside. The only disturbing element was an odor of cigarette smoke. Randa had noticed a pack of Marlboros on the kitchen counter. Rightly or wrongly, she believed that kids who smoked were having trouble growing up. She caught herself looking for signs of this in Jennifer.

Is that Dr. Burnside? Randa asked, pointing at the portrait, lowering herself onto the futon facing the painting. Jennifer was standing at the foot of the stairs that led up to the bedrooms. She had one foot on the first step and was holding onto the polished oak banister with both hands, perched there like a squirrel at the foot of a tree undecided whether to run up or to stay and indulge her curiosity.

Randa said, Please come over here and sit down. We have a lot to talk about. I know where you were, Jennifer. I have to find out what happened.

Jennifer shot a nervous glance at the bookcase where she had hidden the notebook. Randa pretended not to notice. She leaned back into the cushions and folded her hands in her lap and smiled. With kids this age it sometimes helped to play a coaxing, friendly Aunt Randa.

You know that Dr. Burnside was shot?

Jennifer nodded.

You know that he’s dead?

Jennifer nodded.

Did you see who shot him? Have any idea who shot him?

Jennifer shook her head. After a long hesitation she let go of the banister and slid her buttocks across the bamboo arm and dropped onto the futon facing Randa. She clasped a knee in entwined fingers and slowly rocked backward and forward, her gaze fixed on a little box on the seaman’s chest. Just something to look at, Randa imagined.

Were you near him when he was shot?

Jennifer looked up. I was down by his car. The voice was stronger than Randa had expected, suggesting that this girl was something more than the mousy nobody Kathy Hines had portrayed. There was a lot of intelligence behind those eyes.

You saw it happen?

I saw a flash. I didn’t know what it was.

Where did the flash come from?

Behind the restaurant.

Did you see anything besides the flash…I mean, maybe someone running?

No. It was dark.

How far was that from where you were standing?

"I don’t know. The length of a basketball court,