Page 7 of Shadow of Justice
The three of us stood in Sam’s office. Hayden Simmons was with one of the female deputies in a conference room down the hall. Sam scowled as he looked out the window.
Gus poked his head out into the hallway. “Jaffee? It’s ready. Take this straight to Saul’s courtroom. Don’t talk to anybody. Don’t make any other stops. Come straight back here when you’ve got it signed.”
“You got it, Ritter.” Nick Jaffee Chaney was one of Gus’s favorite deputies. He knew the severity of the situation and we all trusted he could keep his mouth shut. Even so, Sam waited until Jaffee left and disappeared down the hall before shutting his office door so we could talk in relative privacy.
Gus took a quick call on his cell while I joined Sam at the window.
“Got it,” Gus said. “Thanks. As soon as I get word back from the judge, we’ll be down there. Don’t let anybody touch anything. Don’t look at anything. How’s the girl? Good. Keep her there.”
He clicked off the call and walked over to Sam’s office couch, and sat down hard. He leaned over, assuming a crash position. I knew how he felt.
“What do you remember about this guy, Simmons?” Sam asked.
“Nothing,” Gus said, shaking his head. “Or next to nothing. The name doesn’t ring any bells but I interviewed a lot of Ellie Luke’s friends and classmates during that time frame.”
“What do you remember about the case in general?” I asked.
Gus looked up. If it were possible, I watched my friend age about ten years in the span of those few seconds. He rubbed a hand across his face.
“It was one of the bad ones,” he said. “Not like there could ever be anything good about something like that. But this kid? Ellie Luke? From everything I learned, she didn’t have a single enemy. She was smart. Pretty. Putting herself through nursing school by working as a home health aide for dementia patients. She was as close to an angel as a kid like that could get. Good family. Good grades. Nobody said a bad word about her. She just dropped off the face of the earth one morning.”
“Her niece said her grandma reported her missing after she didn’t come home from a shift with one of her home health patients.”
“That was it,” Gus said. “We found her car abandoned on the side of Chalmers Road facing east like she was heading toward her house. The back right tire was flat. It had been slashed. The theory was somebody grabbed her when she pulled over.”
“You think the tire was slashed on purpose? She didn’t roll over a piece of glass or something?”
Gus shook his head. “It looked like a clean cut. We didn’t find anything embedded in it. I don’t know if that’d hold up in court as definitive that it was deliberate. But that sure was my gut at the time.”
“You think that somebody stalked her,” I said. “Knew she was going to have to pull over.”
“Chalmers was a dirt road at the time. There were probably eight houses on it back then. Only local traffic and barely any at that. It’s built up now. They put that subdivision back there. Hell, the woods where we found Ellie is a park now.”
“You think somebody planned it all out,” I said. “Somebody who knew her schedule. When the best time to nab her would be.”
“It didn’t feel random, no. We had the whole county out looking for her. Volunteers came in from Lucas County. Fulton County. Everywhere. We dragged the river. It went on for weeks. That girl was one of the first homicides I took after I made detective.”
“You never had any solid leads?” I asked.
Gus’s face darkened. “I didn’t say that. That’s what makes no sense, Mara. I thought I knew who did it.”
“What do you mean?”
“I said Ellie was well liked by almost everybody. But a picture started to emerge. There was a cousin of her mother’s. Kid named Dane Fischer. He was maybe three or four years older than Ellie. Troubled kid. Drug problem. His own mother kicked him out and he went to stay with Ellie’s family for a summer. This was a couple of years before her murder. Ellie’s mom was doing Fischer’s mom a favor. The two of them were first cousins. At least I think that’s how it went. Anyway, a few weeks after Fischer moved in, Ellie caught him stealing from her parents. Cash out of her dad’s wallet. A gold watch. Ellie had a ring that belonged to a great-grandmother or something. A ruby. He stole that too. That’s how she caught him. She came home from cheerleading practice or something early and found him in her room rummaging through her things. She told her parents. There was a big fight. Ellie’s dad kicked Fischer out. But he didn’t call the cops. Ellie did that herself when her parents refused.”
“Fischer knew that?” Sam asked.
“Yeah. He came back to the house high and threatened to beat the crap out of Ellie’s dad. It was a mess. They didn’t want to talk about it. Her parents thought it was in the past. Then Ellie went missing. It took some doing getting this story out of them.”
“You interviewed Fischer?” I asked.
“Hell, yes. His story was full of holes. He lied about his alibi. Said he was at some bar. Only it didn’t check out. The bar he claimed to be at was closed that day. Then he lied again and said he was home all night. Only his roommate at the time wouldn’t back up his story. Said he hadn’t seen him for a couple of days. Then, Fischer failed a poly.”
“Was there any physical evidence tying him to Ellie’s murder?”
Gus shook his head. “That’s the thing. Ellie’s body didn’t turn up for months. There wasn’t much there. Bones. Some tissue. Hair. Cause of death wasn’t even completely conclusive. Her skull was caved in but there was no way to know if that happened post mortem or not. It’s just a working theory. The most plausible thing. Couldn’t even tell you whether there’d been a sexual assault. But she was posed.”
“What do you mean posed?” I asked.
