Читать книгу Trail of Blood - Wanda Evans - Страница 11
ОглавлениеDetective Tal English, a tall, amiable native of Lubbock whose slow, deliberate speech, mild blue eyes and deferential attitude contrasted sharply with a quick mind and intuitive reasoning, was twenty-seven years old and had been a detective assigned to the Crimes Against Persons Department for about a year. That department is divided into two divisions, robbery and sex crimes, but the investigators in each division work on other crimes against persons as well. English was assigned to the robbery detail, partnered with a veteran LPD detective, Corporal George White.
English didn’t even know that Scott Dunn had been reported missing when he reported to work on the Tuesday after Memorial Day. He parked his car in the City of Lubbock lot across the street from the square beige and brown building that housed the Lubbock police department, as well as the city’s Municipal Court and Lubbock Power, Light and Water and covered the entire block between Texas Avenue and Avenue J. English walked just down the hall from his minuscule office, grabbed a cup of coffee from the department coffee pot and had just sat down at his desk, when his telephone rang.
He picked up the phone to hear Jim Dunn, wanting to know what the police had done about finding his son, Scott, over the weekend. English admitted that he didn’t know what Jim was talking about. “The missing persons report has not yet made it to my desk.” Jim gave the detective the same information he had given Brazell on Friday night—how unlikely it would be for his son to go off for this length of time and not tell anyone where he was. According to Dunn, Scott’s boss had fired him. Dunn also told English what Scott’s roommate Leisha Hamilton had said about someone breaking into Scott’s apartment the day after he turned up missing.
English tried to reassure the anxious father that, most likely, Scott was all right and would eventually show up on his own. “We get tons of missing persons reports all the time and very seldom does anything pan out on them, especially on young kids like that,” he told Jim. “They usually show up—in 99 percent of these missing persons incidents, victims waltz back from an unannounced vacation or an extended weekend with a new attraction—or some other explainable circumstance.”
Jim informed English, “Scott has been gone too long for the extended weekend scenario and the timing is entirely wrong for the vacation theory.” Jim also emphasized to English that Scott would never, ever have gone off for such a long period of time without his yellow Camaro.
The detective reassured Jim that he would look into the case as soon as he got the report from the records division. In the meantime, although he didn’t tell the distraught father, English had another missing persons case that he considered more urgent. The other case also involved a young man, a ministerial student who had been reported missing by his family. He was a model student and a respected member of his church and school community. The prior week, he had gone to his bank and pushed a note under the teller’s window, asking for all of his money, both checking and savings accounts, amounting to several thousand dollars in cash. No one had seen him since that day. None of the man’s family members or acquaintances knew of any reason why he would need so much money. English had to face the possibility that the young man had been kidnapped and forced to withdraw his money. If that were the case, the concern became, how long would the man stay alive after he gave up his money? The search for the ministerial student, who appeared to be in more imminent danger than Scott Dunn did, took priority in Tal English’s mind.
English got to work diligently, with his superiors at LPD and the student’s family breathing down his neck, trying to find the missing boy. English had no qualms about working so hard on this case instead of the Scott Dunn matter, because Scott’s case looked like the normal missing persons case where the young man would turn up in a couple of days. By the end of the day, English had not found the other missing person, however, and he went home feeling discouraged and worried.
The next morning, he walked into his office to start the search for the missing student again. Once again, as it had on the previous day, the phone rang. Jim Dunn once again was on the telephone, wanting a progress report on the investigation into Scott’s disappearance. Since he had done nothing so far, to find Scott Dunn, English had nothing to report, but something about Jim Dunn’s persistence got his attention. When the conversation ended, he immediately called the number Jim had given him for Leisha Hamilton.
Leisha answered the telephone and English identified himself. He told her he was investigating the disappearance of Scott Dunn. Sounding more angry than worried, Leisha told the detective she thought Scott had gone off with another woman. She said other girls were always calling Scott, but the calls had stopped since he left. Then Leisha informed English that she thought someone was breaking into her apartment when she went out.
“Why do you think that?” English asked her.
“The day after Scott left, I came home from work and somebody had kicked in the back door. I made a police report. Haven’t you seen the report?” she asked.
Not having seen the report, English did not know anything about this.
Since that time, Leisha told the detective, she had noticed several things inside her apartment had been moved—placemats, chairs and other small things. So she felt that somebody could have been in the house.
“Is anything missing? Do you think it could have been a burglar?” English asked.
“Yes,” she told him, “several items are missing.” On the first day, when she discovered Scott was gone, a waterbed mattress liner, some towels, sheets, a thermal blanket, a comforter and three pillows were also missing. All the bedding had been laid out as kind of a pallet where Scott slept in the bedroom. A laundry basket full of Scott’s clothes also was gone. She told English she assumed Scott had taken these things with him.
Then, on the second day, when the door had been kicked in, tools and spare parts needed to work on the Scott’s remote control boat were gone. Also missing were a gas can for the boat and an empty clothes basket. In addition, Leisha Hamilton said, Scott’s wallet was gone, but the jeans he had worn last were left behind, along with his car keys.
“We lived with Max Gianoli, over on Fortieth Street, when we first came to Lubbock,” Leisha also told English. “Max and Scott moved here in January and I came in February. Then, when Max’s wife moved to Lubbock, Scott and I moved into this apartment.” Their move had been recent, “so we haven’t much bedroom furniture.” Max had given her the keys to the old apartment, Leisha said, and she was supposed to have turned them in to the manager, but she hadn’t done so. Now, the keys were missing. “I guess Scott might have taken the keys and gone over there,” she mused.
Something about Leisha’s comments didn’t sound quite right, English felt. He decided to check the situation out a little further. He drove to the apartment on Fortieth Street and pounded on the door, but no one responded. A check with the manager elicited the information that the locks already had been changed. The manager hadn’t seen any sign of Scott Dunn since he and Leisha Hamilton had moved. It was time, English realized, that he paid a visit to Max Gianoli, Scott Dunn’s employer.
Before the detective got a chance to go to ProSound Electronics, however, the Las Vegas, Nevada, Police Department called and said the missing student English had been looking for had turned up there, safe, but without the money he had brought with him. Ironically, the missing person case that on the surface appeared to be the more suspicious turned out to be okay. Meanwhile the case of Scott Dunn, which had looked innocuous, was proving to be more dangerous.
With the problem of the missing ministerial student solved, English turned his full attention to the disappearance of Scott Dunn. A visit to Max Gianoli still topped English’s to-do list. During the short drive, English found himself hoping Gianoli would tell him Dunn had taken a few days off and would be back soon. At ProSound, English introduced himself to a fit, dark-haired man in his forties, half expecting an angry outburst from Gianoli, based on what the man had said to Jim Dunn about firing Scott. English was surprised that Gianoli now seemed genuinely puzzled at Scott’s disappearance. He appeared to have had second thoughts on the matter.
Gianoli said it was not at all like Scott to leave so abruptly, especially not with a big Crank It Up competition coming up. He pointed out a row of statuettes that lined a shelf behind the counter. “Scott won those. He’s the best. Scott can look at a wire and know where it goes. Everybody else practically has to draw a diagram showing where each wire goes. Not Scott. He can just look at the speaker and do it.”
Gianoli also told English that Scott was great for his business. In fact, Scott, good-looking and articulate about his knowledge of electronics, had done a television infomercial to promote the opening of the store. Gianoli confirmed what Jim Dunn had told English, that it was totally unlike Scott to go off without his tools, his car and his prized remote-control boat. “When it comes to his stuff—he likes his stuff and he’s not going to leave that for anybody.”
English questioned two other employees at the store and got the same assessment. Scott was a great installer, a good friend, a grand guy to party with, Pat Taylor told him. Taylor insisted that Scott would not stay away for any length of time without calling and letting them know where he was.
The other installer, Mike Roberts, said the same thing. Roberts insisted that Scott would not go away and leave his tools, which were still there in the shop area of the store. In fact, Roberts currently was using them, because, he said, Scott owed him some money. Since Scott was not around to pay him back, Roberts had appropriated the tools. Roberts said he and Scott had gotten to be pretty close friends. They liked to hang around together in their free time and they were interested in many of the same things. Scott’s remote-controlled boat was a favorite of both of them. The Lubbock area doesn’t boast many lakes and most of them are of the small, playa variety, but they were big enough to put Scott’s boat in. Mike had gone with Scott several times to put the boat in the water.
Roberts told English he had gone by to see Scott at about midnight on Wednesday and stayed for an hour, talking about work, how to get ready for the Crank It Up contest. Scott had not been at work since Monday and Roberts had been installing the stereos in the company van for the competition. Scott promised to come to work the next day. Since Scott’s yellow Camaro was parked at ProSound Electronics, Roberts said he would come by the next morning and drive Scott to work. At about 8:45 Thursday morning, Roberts said, he had knocked on Scott’s door, but had received no answer. He had tried for fifteen minutes to get a response, but had gotten none. At nine o’clock he left. The only unusual thing he had noticed was that the north window of Scott’s bedroom was closed. Normally it was opened wide enough to allow an electric cord to go through it. Scott used the cord to jumpstart his car. Also, Roberts said, he had noticed that Tim Smith’s car was parked in the lot next to Scott’s apartment. He thought that was unusual, since Smith lived several buildings away.
Gianoli, Roberts and Taylor also insisted that Scott would not have gone away for this long and left his cars behind. Not the Scott they knew.
Driving away from ProSound Electronics, English didn’t know what to think. In spite of what Scott Dunn’s father and his friends thought, English still felt that maybe, for some reason as yet unknown, Scott had just taken off, but English could not be as sure as he had been earlier.
The following morning, English found a message on his voice mail at the office. Leisha Hamilton had called and said she was planning to go out of town for a couple of days the following week. He wondered why she would take the trouble to call. He had not suggested to her that she stay in the city or that she keep him informed of her whereabouts. Puzzled, he tucked the note into the new folder labeled Dunn, Scott that he had started.
His partner, Corporal George White, came into the small office they shared. White, attractive and older than English by at least a dozen years, was not quite as tall as his young partner’s six-feet-plus and had graying dark hair. English told White about the Dunn case. For a while, they kicked a few ideas around. Then, since there were other pressing cases to work, they moved on. Nevertheless, a nagging suspicion about the Dunn case, heightened by Jim Dunn’s repeated calls every day, began to develop.
About four o’clock on Friday afternoon the telephone rang. It was Jim Dunn again. Taking a deep breath, hating what he had to say, English admitted to the worried father that he knew no more about his son’s disappearance than he had when they had talked twenty-four hours earlier. He gave Jim a detailed account of everything he had done that week to locate Scott.
“I’m sorry I don’t have any good news,” he told Jim.
Jim had news for the detective and it was not good, either. He told English that Max Gianoli had called both him and Scott’s mother. The information Gianoli had given him made Jim even more certain that something bad had happened to his son.
Max Gianoli had told Jim that Leisha had come into the shop on the Monday after Scott left and that she was really acting weird. She was hysterical and crying—shaking, Gianoli said. She had taken Scott’s car. Gianoli had not threatened to have it towed, as she had reported to Jim, and Gianoli had wondered why she had not just left it on the parking lot if she was so sure Scott was going to come back at any moment. She had told Gianoli that she wanted Scott to have to face her when he came back. The only way to make sure he did that was to keep possession of the things he loved the most—his car and his boat.
Then, Leisha had calmed down enough to tell him that she was afraid of some guy named Tim. She had been dating Tim and she said she thought Tim had done something to Scott. Gianoli said that all the time she was talking, she was looking over her shoulder, as if expecting Tim to come into the store.
According to Gianoli, Leisha said Tim had been following her and was leaving threatening notes on her door. She could not get him to leave her alone. She said she was afraid to go home. Finally, she left the store; Gianoli said he was relieved to see her go.
Promising Jim Dunn that he would follow up on this information immediately, English concluded the call and turned to George White. “I think we need to pay a call on Leisha Hamilton.”
White, who had not heard the full phone conversation, nodded. “Maybe we should call and see if she’s at home.”
English turned back to the phone and dialed Leisha Hamilton’s number. The woman answered immediately. English told her he was following up some leads regarding Scott Dunn. She agreed to talk to him, launching into the story about Tim Smith that English had just heard from Jim Dunn. Tim had been coming into the restaurant where she worked, just sitting and watching her work her entire eight-hour shift. And he had been leaving notes on her car and on her apartment door. No matter what she said to him, he would not leave her alone.
“Oh, there’s something else,” she added. It seemed that her father, who lived three hours away, had visited on May 28 and she had cleaned up the house. When she vacuumed the living room floor, she moved the couch and discovered that a large piece of carpeting had been cut out, leaving the bare carpet padding.
English’s chest felt tight. He tried to free it by taking a deep breath. Why would someone remove a piece of carpet? He couldn’t think of one reason for such an act that didn’t mean trouble for Scott Dunn. Something was wrong here. “Leisha, my partner and I would like to come and take a look at the apartment. All right?”
“Sure. Whatever you want.”
“We’re on our way,” he said, nodding to White. The two grabbed their jackets from the rack and left the office, shrugging into them as they walked. They drove to the Regency Apartments, an older unit that covered about half a block. Its front was a mosaic of narrow windows, aqua-colored doors flush with the building and faded light blue siding. A small, fenced pool was next to Leisha’s unit. Number 4 was the northernmost apartment on the west-facing building. The small apartment was of the mass-produced variety popular in the sixties, with a low roof and two small windows flanking the blue wooden door.
English parked in a small area adjacent to Apartment B4, walked quickly up the short sidewalk and knocked on the door. The good-looking woman who opened the door was tall, slim and dark-haired. They stepped into a small, sparsely furnished living room. The couch sat immediately to their right, on the west wall of the tiny room. English walked across the room and, looking back at the couch, saw a tan oblong of padding underneath it, where a large chunk of the gray and green pile carpet had been removed. The thought crossed his mind that she would not have had to move the couch to see the cut-out in the carpeting. Across from the couch was a portable television on a stand and a portable stereo. A chair that matched the couch was the only other furniture in the living room. To the left was a small kitchenette, separated from the living room by a breakfast bar. The two men moved the couch and measured the area, roughly three feet by five feet, which had been cut out. A pretty big hunk of carpet, English thought.
Then his eyes opened wider. Directly in front of the stereo, the carpet was stained pink in a large, irregular pattern.
“What’s this?” White asked.
Leisha shrugged. “That was here when we moved in. I have no idea what it is. Kool-Aid, maybe?”
“Why do you think you never noticed before that the carpet had been cut?” English asked.
She shook her head. “I’ve been sleeping on the couch ever since Scott left. I’ve had sheets hanging over it, so I never noticed it.”
George White nodded amiably. “Mind if I look around the rest of the apartment?”
Leisha shrugged again and White went into the north bedroom. English glanced cursorily around the small kitchen.
“Tal! Come look at this!” White called from the bedroom.
Hearing the urgency in his partner’s voice, English hurried into the other room. He stopped just inside the doorway and stared. The room was empty. Not a stick of furniture. A few boxes, half-filled with clothes and miscellaneous items, were scattered about the floor. George White was holding the edge of a brown afghan that was spread neatly in one corner and staring at the carpet below it. English’s eyes followed White’s. A half-moon shaped piece of clean carpet, about three feet long and two feet wide, had been patched into the existing carpet in the room. Along the ragged edges of the patch, where the original carpet had been cut, were large brown splotches.
Leisha had said this was the room where she and Dunn slept on the floor. White gave the patched area a closer look, then reached down and pulled at the edge of the clean carpet. The smaller piece of carpet came loose. White peeled back a small portion of it. It was stuck to the padding with duct tape that was crusted with a large amount of a dried ruby substance. Blood?
English, his heart pounding, exchanged a meaningful look with White. Then English turned around and looked through the bedroom door to where Leisha sat on the couch, watching television as if oblivious to their presence.
“Leisha,” English called.
She appeared in the doorway.
“What is this?” English asked.
She shook her head. “I don’t know. Maybe some mud or something Scott tracked in.”
“How long has it been here?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t used this room since Scott left.”
“You didn’t put the afghan on the floor? You never moved the afghan or looked under it?” English persisted.
“No. I told you. I’ve been sleeping on the couch.”
“Let’s call the ID boys over here,” White said and headed for the telephone.
While English and White were waiting for an officer from LPD’s Identification Section, they examined the room in minute detail. A closer look at the bedroom wall revealed a collage of whitish smears, lighter than the surrounding wall, as if someone had tried to wash the wall and had done a poor job of it. The smears were markedly evident along the baseboard in that area, but English’s eyes followed the smears higher up the wall, where he could see red-brown specks. “Blood?” he suggested to White.
“Leisha, do you know what this is?” White asked.
Leisha walked up to the wall and looked at a brown fleck just above her eye level. “It looks like blood,” she said. “And look, there’s a hair in it.”
She volunteered that she had not noticed the spot before. She pointed to the afghan. “This is where Scott was sleeping the last time I saw him.” Her voice was as cool and as calm as if she had been telling them what she had eaten for lunch.
English stared at the woman, scrutinizing her.
English continued to track the brown specks up the wall. He could see droplets on the ceiling, too. Blood spatter? With a chill in his chest, English began to feel that something bad had happened in this room.
ID Officer Gaylon Lewis arrived and began taking photographs. White showed him the bare place in the living room where the piece of carpet had been removed and Lewis photographed that area. In the bedroom, White had replaced the corner of carpet he had pulled away from the wall so that Lewis could photograph the patch in place. Then, White pulled up the half-circle of carpet again, revealing padding underneath that bore dark stains. Duct tape had been taped to the underside of the existing carpet and to the half-circle. This was a fairly neat job and undoubtedly took some time to do. Pictures were taken of the underside of the patch of carpet and of the padding underneath. Lewis collected the duct tape for processing for latent fingerprints. Then the carpet padding and sections of stained carpet were cut out for testing. The detectives noted that the area that was cut from under the couch would have been large enough to cover this semicircular area. There was a large smear of what looked like dried blood between the carpet nailing strip and the wall. A section of the nailing strip was taken up and several scrapings from the wall collected. One area near the upper center of the semicircle had another brown spot that looked a lot like dried blood on the cement.
This was the spot, Leisha had told Tal, where Scott Dunn’s head rested when he was in bed.
Carefully, Lewis cut away portions of the Sheetrock containing the dark droplets scattered over the walls, put them in bags and sealed them. The ID Section protocol dictated that everything that might have evidential importance be collected, carefully placed in boxes and bags, sealed and labeled, signed by the officers present, ready to be delivered to the appropriate departments. In this case, everything except the duct tape would be taken to the Texas Department of Public Safety crime lab. The Lubbock Police Department had its own facility for examining fingerprints, but it had no forensic laboratory where other crime scene evidence, such as bloodstains, could be tested. The DPS had a crime laboratory in Lubbock, a few blocks from the police building. Evidence usually was sent there for testing. In some cases, the local lab forwarded evidence on to the State DPS Lab in Austin or to the FBI lab.
Lewis would take the duct tape back to the police department’s ID office and check it for fingerprints. Any other evidence he could obtain, such as fibers or hairs, would be turned over to the DPS lab.
While the ID officer was gathering the items, a woman came to the door and introduced herself as the apartment manager, Gail Rose. When English explained what they were doing, she nodded. “I thought something peculiar was going on, with Leisha driving Scott’s car all the time. It’s none of my business, of course, but Scott was always out there working on his car, which was parked right next to their apartment. Then suddenly, she’s driving it and it’s all torn up and I didn’t see Scott anymore. I thought they might have had a fight or something.”
English nodded. “I noticed the car. You say it’s torn apart?”
“Let me show you,” Gail offered.
He followed her outside to where the yellow Camaro was parked perpendicular to the building, in an area that contained spaces for about six cars. Looking inside, English understood what Gail meant. The back seat had been removed, the passenger seat was tilted a little to one side and the dashboard was missing. Unattached wires were protruding through the firewall. He remembered that Jim Dunn had told him Scott was transferring the motor and parts from this car to another Camaro with a better body. Apparently the work had already begun. He was surprised the car was operable.
Back inside the apartment, English showed Gail the stains in the living room and in the bedroom. She looked stunned. “That carpet was not stained or patched when Scott and Leisha moved in,” she said firmly.
In the meantime, White had called the DPS crime lab and talked with Jim Thomas, a chemist and the supervising criminalist at the lab, which analyzed crime scene evidence in a ninety-county area. Evidence received at this laboratory covered a variety of substances: blood evidence for DNA and serological examination, hair and fibers, glass, shoe prints, tire tracks, controlled substances and various types of trace evidence that might be involved in a criminal investigation.
Although Thomas was the lab supervisor, he also was involved in analyzing certain types of evidence and giving testimony about his analyses. On occasion the chemist responded when an officer requested assistance in the collection of evidence at crime scenes.
White apologized for asking Thomas to stay late on a Friday afternoon and asked if he would stand by to look at samples the detective wanted to bring him. Thomas agreed. White called his LPD supervisor, Sergeant Randy McGuire, and asked him to come to the apartment. When McGuire arrived, English told Leisha, “We really need to ask you to come with us to the department. We’ll need to talk more.” Leisha agreed. McGuire and English drove Leisha downtown to the police department for further questioning.
White hurried to the DPS crime laboratory and waited while Thomas conducted a preliminary test for blood on a portion of the wooden carpet-tack strip, used as a nailing strip, that White had pried from the wall in Scott Dunn’s bedroom. The method Thomas used was a presumptive test with Tetraethyl Benzedrine. Thomas’ test revealed that blood was present on the wooden strip. There was one big question that had to be answered before the detectives proceeded. “Is it human blood?” White asked Thomas.
“I can’t tell you right now,” Thomas said. “The test to determine if this is human blood will take a while, but I’ll call you when we run more tests.”
White nodded. “I’ll be at the office. Call when you know something.”
Tal English and Leisha Hamilton were waiting in English’s office when White returned. At 6:48 PM Friday, June 7, English read Hamilton her rights. She said she understood them.
Despite the unanswered question of whether it was human blood, White informed Leisha that the samples that had been found in the apartment were, indeed, blood. He asked her to let the police secure the apartment until a more complete examination of the premises could be done. Leisha nodded, gave White the key to the apartment and signed a consent to search it.
At that point, White called ID Sergeant Tomas Esparza, supervisor of the Identification Department, who had gone home for the day. White asked him to come back to the police department. When Esparza arrived, English explained the situation to him. Esparza said, “I’ll get with the DPS lab technicians and ID Officer Lewis and perform a complete examination of the apartment.”
English and White continued with their interrogation of Leisha Hamilton. Almost word for word, Leisha recited the same story of Scott Dunn’s disappearance that she had told earlier to English. She claimed not to have seen the stained area of the carpet and did not have any explanation about the carpet that was cut from under the couch.
She said that when she came home on May 16 and Scott was not there, an afghan that was kept in the bedroom was spread out on the floor where Scott had been sleeping that morning. The bedding was missing. Leisha said she thought Scott had moved out, taking the missing items with him.
“Was he always so orderly?” English asked.
Leisha said it was not like Scott to be neat and spreading the afghan out so carefully was not typical of something he would do. She was not curious enough, however, to look under the afghan to see if there was a reason why it had been spread out.
Leisha also said she did not really believe Scott would leave any of his property behind, because he was too greedy. At that point she again gave detectives a detailed list of items she said were missing from the apartment: a blue laundry basket containing seven pairs of jeans; seven T-shirts, black, with ProSound printed on them in pink; ten pairs of socks and eight to ten pairs of underwear. Also, she said, the bedclothes, consisting of a solid blue king-size flat sheet, a blue-gray comforter, a light blue thermal blanket, three pillows—two were standard size and one was smaller—the small one had a blue-gray pillowcase; one pair of gray western boots, size twelve; one pair of Reebok air pumps, white, blue and orange in color; a second pair of tennis shoes, white with black trim; three towels with white and yellow stripes running lengthwise; one brown towel with a design in the middle.
Scott’s brown leather wallet, containing about eight dollars, also was missing, she said.
Talking about her relationship with Tim Smith, Leisha said that she had gone out with him a few times and then tried to get rid of him, but he would not leave her alone. He had followed her several times when she went out with Scott. She said Scott and Tim did not like each other. Then, on being asked where Tim Smith lived, Leisha admitted, “In the same apartment complex where I live.”
Although the investigators were still awaiting proof that the blood they had taken from the apartment was human, they asked Leisha, “Would be willing to stay somewhere else for a day or two, so that Esparza and an expert from the DPS can conduct Lumalight and Luminol testing on the bloodstains in the apartment?” She agreed. They also told her they wanted her to come back to the Police Department the next day, Saturday, and give a formal statement about what she knew.
Once again, she agreed, saying she could find another place to stay that night. “Can someone take me back to the apartment and let me get clothes and makeup?” White and English took her home; Sergeant Esparza followed them. After Leisha had gotten what she needed and left, the three investigators walked around the outside of the apartment, noting a chain link fence around the tiny back yard, which only consisted of a small patio.
Esparza shook his head. “Anyone, especially if it’s in the wee hours of the morning, dark of night, when there’s nobody else around, could walk out the front door of that apartment lugging a body, walk past this small fenced section and not be seen.”
English nodded. “And the parking area is so close. Someone could have had a car parked here and it wouldn’t be one yard from the front door.”
“Yeah,” White grunted. English glanced at his partner. Whatever was on White’s mind, he wasn’t talking. English said nothing more. He now felt there was a good chance that Scott Dunn had been brutally attacked in this apartment.
