Photograph, page 12
But instead of having been asleep for a few minutes, it was already morning, with sunlight streaming through the motel window. I guess that’s progress if I made it through the night and my vision didn’t leave me screaming.
I showered, then drove a mile south on the highway to a little breakfast café called the Happy Egg. I ordered myself a glazed old-fashioned doughnut and a cup of coffee, and then I found a table by the window and waited for Detective Chuck Kimble to arrive. We’d said eight o’clock, and at seven forty-five, a green Pontiac pulled into the parking lot right outside my window.
The man who got out had cop written all over him. He was about five feet ten, still in pretty good shape for a man who was probably in his late forties or early fifties. He had a shaved head, the classic technique of bald men everywhere who don’t want people thinking they’re bald. Wavy wrinkles ran across his forehead, and he had black-and-gray stubble that hadn’t been cut back in a couple of days. Call it nine-o’clock shadow, rather than five. He had squinty, intense blue eyes and a thin line for a mouth that didn’t look accustomed to smiling. His clothes fit snugly on his frame, white shirt with a tie knotted firmly at his collar, chocolate-brown slacks, dusty tan loafers. His badge was slung over his belt.
Three words came to mind. Hard. Suspicious. Thorough.
Kimble came into the restaurant, and I waved at him. He nodded at me, but I saw no warmth on his face as he approached. I already had the feeling that this was not going to be one of those cop–private detective relationships where we shared all of our innermost secrets and painted each other’s toenails.
“You’re Shannon Wells?” he said, sitting down across from me. The café waitress obviously knew him and had a mug of coffee ready to put in front of him the instant his ass hit the chair.
“I am. Detective Kimble, I presume?”
“That’s right.” His voice was a deep, throaty rumble. He eased back in the chair and drank his hot coffee with the confidence of someone who was on his home turf. “Did you fly into O’Hare?”
“No, actually, I drove.”
His dark eyebrows arched. “That’s a long way.”
“I had a stop to make.”
“Hmm.” He expressed no interest in my detour, which matched my lack of interest in telling him that I’d been looking into the murder of a woman who might have been me in a prior life.
“Anyway, thanks for reaching out to me,” I went on. “How did you spot my post on the cold case forum?”
Kimble shrugged. “I didn’t. I got a call from Phil Potter. He’s a retired detective from the sheriff’s department. The West case was Phil’s before it shifted to my desk when he left the force ten years ago. Phil spends a lot of time digging into cold cases around Michigan. He haunts the true crime blogs. When he saw your post, he made the connection to the West case, and he called me.”
“Do you think Phil would be willing to talk to me?” I asked.
“Talk to a pretty young woman? Yeah, Phil will be all over that.” Kimble’s lips finally crept upward in something like a smile, but it didn’t last long. “However, let’s be clear about something. This is my case, Shannon. It may be cold, but as far as I’m concerned, it’s as active as it was on the day we found Dawn West’s body. I appreciate you taking an interest in it, and I’m never going to complain about an extra set of eyes. But I expect you to respect the ground rules, okay?”
“Absolutely.”
“You find anything, you tell me pronto, got it? I don’t need an out-of-state PI crossing ethical lines.”
“I have no intention of doing that,” I assured him.
“Good. Because if someone calls me to complain about you, I’m going to ask you to turn your car around and head home to Florida.”
“Understood.”
Kimble seemed satisfied. With our deal in place, he rubbed the stubble on his chin and studied me closely, as if taking my measure. Most older cops did that when they met me. I looked young. I was young—despite what Rina thought. But I also didn’t back down from a challenge, and I got the feeling that Kimble could see that determination in my eyes. He might be a small-town detective, but he had a street savviness about him.
“The Florida angle is intriguing,” he went on. “Tell me what you’ve found.”
He didn’t phrase it like a question. I didn’t like giving up information without a promise of getting something in return, but you know—flies, honey, etc. So I gave him the full rundown on my research into the deaths of Bruce Falline and Faith Selby, and I took him all the way to the present, including my conversation with Wayne Donalds at the motel the previous night. That connected the book Millennium Memories to the town of Devil Creek.
Then, as I had with the motel owner, I grabbed my phone and found the photograph of Faith Selby.
“This is Faith,” I told Kimble. “She’s the one who took the photograph at the motel. She was murdered in St. Augustine last month. Does she look familiar? Like maybe she showed up somewhere in Phil Potter’s files about the case?”
The detective took a glasses case from his shirt pocket and unfolded reading glasses that he positioned at the end of his nose. He studied the picture on my phone without any expression, then handed my phone back.
“No, she’s not in our police file. I also don’t recognize the name Faith Selby.”
“Yeah, I’m pretty sure she changed names when she came to Florida. If she was in Devil Creek, she was living as someone else back then. I imagine she changed her looks, too, if she wanted to stay off the radar. Probably a new hair color, maybe even some plastic surgery.”
“I’ve been through that cold case file a thousand times,” Kimble pointed out. “Even if she changed her looks, I’m sure I’d recognize her. This woman’s not in it, old or young.”
I frowned. “And yet she was in town that day. Faith took this photograph on the same night as Dawn West’s murder. We know that because of Vince Marmaide and his truck. So either the killer saw her take the picture, or he was in the uncropped version, or both. Either way, he knew enough to go looking for Faith.”
“It doesn’t mean she lived in Devil Creek,” Kimble said. “She could have been a tourist.”
“True. She might have been an out-of-towner staying at the motel. If so, she probably checked in under her real name. Whatever it was back then.”
“Maybe so,” Kimble acknowledged.
“The motel owner said the police took his registration records.”
“Sure. Phil got them. They’re in our files.”
“Can I see them?”
Kimble’s sharp eyes studied me again. “Like I said, Shannon, I don’t mind an extra set of eyes, particularly on a cold case like this one. But I’m not inclined to let nonpolice outsiders—who don’t even live in my town—start pawing through our official records.”
I wasn’t surprised. Most Florida cops would have said the same thing. But hey, it was worth a shot. “Well, I assume Phil Potter talked to everyone who was staying at the motel.”
“He did, but that was a dry hole. Nobody saw anything.”
“Except Wayne Donalds said some of the guests bolted before the police had a chance to lock things down.”
“A handful, yes,” Kimble agreed. “We found most of them through credit card records, but some paid cash. Probably people having affairs. It’s that kind of motel. Even so, we used names on the register, and eventually we tracked down almost all of them. I was just a beat cop back then, but I can remember going around the state, talking to people who’d been staying at the motel that night. This murder was a big deal in Devil Creek. Phil had all hands on deck to help with the investigation. But we came up empty. Dawn got shot in the middle of the night when everybody was asleep. So we didn’t find any witnesses.”
I wondered if that was true.
If I’d seen a murder and thought my life was in danger, I’d probably tell the police I’d been asleep in my bed, not taking my little girl out to get a can of Coke at three in the morning. Somebody knew something, but if it was Faith, she wasn’t around to answer any questions.
“What can you tell me about Dawn West?” I asked.
“She was sixteen years old. Quiet, shy, smart. A loner. There were no red flags about her. A straight-arrow kid. Not like her brother, Gordon.”
“What was up with her brother?”
“Gordon was two years older. He’d been arrested a few times, tagged for assault once. He was working at a car wash, and he got into it with a customer who accused Gordon of dealing drugs to his kid.”
“That sounds interesting,” I said. “Could there have been a connection between Gordon’s troubles and what happened to Dawn?”
“Yeah, that was the first angle Phil considered,” Kimble replied. “Anytime you catch a whiff of drugs in the family, you start asking questions. But it went nowhere. Gordon himself had a solid alibi—he was in a band, and they had a gig in Detroit. The club had him on camera at one in the morning. Phil grilled the kid when he was back in town, but he couldn’t find any connection between Gordon and what happened to his sister.”
“Does Gordon still live in Devil Creek?” I asked.
“As far as I know, yeah.”
“What about Dawn’s parents?”
“Her dad died a few years ago, but her mom’s still around. She’s on the school board.”
“You’ve talked to her?”
“Lots of times. But by the time the case landed on my desk, the murder was fifteen years old, and Phil hadn’t touched the file in ages. I didn’t have much to tell her, and she didn’t have anything to add to what they told Phil back then. I pull the notes out every year and try to think of an angle that Phil missed, but so far, I haven’t come up with anything.”
I finished my doughnut as I thought about what Kimble had told me. It didn’t really matter what Dawn’s family had told the police over the years. That was where I needed to start. “Family first” is the rule for a reason. Usually, that’s the hidey-hole for a victim’s secrets.
“Did Phil have a theory?” I asked.
Kimble shrugged. “He thought a stranger did it.”
I tried not to roll my eyes. In small towns, it was always a stranger. Nobody ever believed it was one of their own.
“How did that work?”
“Phil figured Dawn was hiking along the north–south highway. Some guy picked her up and took her behind the motel to assault her. Dawn realized what the guy had in mind and tried to run. The guy had a gun and shot her. Then he took off.”
I knew better than anyone the reality of stranger danger, but in this case, the explanation was full of holes.
“Did anyone at the motel hear a car engine?” I asked. “Somebody screeching away from the scene?”
“No.”
“This was like three in the morning, right? What was Dawn doing on the highway in the middle of the night? Why did she leave home? I mean, for a stranger to pick her up, she had to be going somewhere.”
“Agreed,” Kimble said.
“Doesn’t it seem more likely that she was meeting someone? Like maybe at the motel?”
“Could be.”
“But Phil never found a guest who would admit it?”
“No.”
“Did Dawn have a boyfriend?”
“Not according to her parents,” Kimble said.
“A teenage girl? Like they’d know.”
“Fair point.”
“Tell me something, Detective. That’s Phil’s theory of the case. A stranger did it. What’s your theory? Because I don’t think you buy that idea any more than I do, and this case has been on your desk for years.”
Kimble gave in to the obvious. “I think it was somebody who knew her.”
“Like who?”
“I don’t have a clue about that,” he replied. “I wish I did. After Phil’s investigation hit a brick wall, we had no suspects. If Dawn was keeping secrets, she held them pretty close.”
FOURTEEN
The library in Angola told me a lot about the murder of Jenny Curtis, including the home invasions that led up to it. So I thought maybe the library in Devil Creek could tell me more about the murder of Dawn West. After I left Detective Kimble, I found the town’s Berrien County library branch in a small redbrick building across from the fire station, surrounded by the flapping flags and neat green lawns of the area’s municipal facilities.
The town wasn’t big enough for its own newspaper. Instead, I asked for the archives of The Herald-Palladium, the daily that covered all of southwest Michigan. Before I went back twenty-six years to the time of Dawn’s murder, I first went back a couple of months to the June editions. It didn’t take me long to find the article Wayne Donalds had described, which highlighted the photograph of his motel that appeared in Millennium Memories.
The reporter who wrote the story had interviewed Bruce Falline about the book, but Falline declined to provide any details about who had taken the photograph. The contributors to the book, he said, were intended to be anonymous. But it was clear from the quotes in the article that Falline knew who the photographer was. That one fact had set a violent string of events in motion.
The timeline was inescapable.
In June, the article about the photograph hits The Herald-Palladium.
July 4, Bruce Falline gets killed.
July 7, Faith Selby gets killed.
Why?
The answer, whatever it might be, had its roots in the year 1999. I switched from hard copies to microfilm and went back twenty-six years to the August 8 edition of the newspaper. Dawn West had been murdered in the early-morning hours of August 7, so I figured the story would be in the headlines by the following day. It was. Like Jenny Curtis’s murder in Angola, this was big local news.
The article included Dawn West’s name and the fact that she was going to be a junior at Devil Creek High School. It also mentioned the names of her parents, Gretchen and James. The reporter noted that the Thunder Mountain Motel, where the murder occurred, was a hot spot for 911 calls and a known hangout for drug sales and underage drinking. Wayne Donalds and his wife definitely would not have been pleased.
Detective Phil Potter of the Berrien County Sheriff’s Department was already speculating in the newspaper that the most likely explanation for the murder was Dawn West coming upon a violent stranger at the motel or on the highway. As to why Dawn was out there to begin with, the implication came through pretty clearly that Phil thought Dawn was looking to buy drugs. That theory flew in the face of what Detective Kimble had told me, which was that Dawn was a straight arrow and her brother was the one with the drug problems. But this was barely a day after the murder, when the fog of confusion was at its thickest.
Apparently, that fog had never cleared.
Why were you out there, Dawn?
I kept reading about the murder. Nothing else jumped out at me until the very last paragraph. Then I saw something that made me stop and reread it several times.
When questioned about the recent triple homicide in Devil Creek, Detective Potter said their investigation so far showed no connection between the death of Dawn West and the murders of the Daugherty family in July.
“It’s on our radar screen, but as far as we can tell, the timing is completely coincidental,” Potter said.
Completely coincidental.
Maybe I would have believed that if the shooting of Dawn West had happened in a vacuum, but a quarter century later, two other people were dead. That suggested a continuing cover-up of something big.
A triple murder sounded big.
I kept going backward day by day through the archives. County newspapers typically aren’t where you go for hard-hitting journalism. It’s weekend festivals and high school sports games and new coffee shops and sewer tax rates and the selection of Miss Blossomtime 1999. If there was anything about crime, it was usually drunk driving or a tourist arrested for public nudity on the beach.
But nine days before Dawn’s murder, I saw one of the largest headlines I’ve ever seen in a local newspaper.
PROSECUTOR AND FAMILY SLAUGHTERED
Nine days. That took my breath away.
When I read the details, I learned that Berrien County attorney Gregory Daugherty had been found in the foyer of his house, dead of two shotgun blasts to his chest. His wife had taken two more rounds, and her body had been found in the kitchen pantry. Their teenage son, Zeke, had been gunned down on the stairs as he descended from his third-floor bedroom.
Three people dead. An entire family murdered.
I examined the accompanying photo of the family’s Devil Creek mansion. It was a sprawling rich man’s estate hidden behind an iron gate. The article included the address, and when I checked the maps on my phone, I saw that the Daugherty home was located in the upscale neighborhood I’d toured when I first got to town. I compared that location to the address of Dawn West’s parents and saw that the two houses were miles away from each other. So Phil Potter was right that there was no obvious connection between Dawn’s family and the Daughertys.
But this was a small town. The elite and the not-so-elite had to rub shoulders from time to time.
The reporter who wrote the Daugherty article—the same reporter who wrote about Dawn West’s death nine days later—referenced Gregory Daugherty’s hard-hitting crusade to put away the leaders of a Chicago-based gang that had brought an epidemic of drugs to the quiet lakeside county.
The prosecution hadn’t gone well.
Although police declined to speculate about a motive in the brutal killings, the murder of Gregory Daugherty and his family comes only months after two key witnesses in a gang-related criminal investigation died under suspicious circumstances. Those deaths forced the county attorney to drop charges in a case that Daugherty had hoped would be the first big blow against Chicago crime bosses.
I shifted my research and went forward in time. The same reporter, a man named Terry Blaine, had done a handful of follow-up pieces about the Daugherty murders over the next year, but as far as I could tell, the police investigation quickly turned cold. No one was arrested. The case, like Dawn’s murder, went unsolved.
