Already Taken (Laura Frost FBI)

CHAPTER EIGHT

Laura strode into the Sheriff’s office after a brief knock on the door; she’d seen through the glass that he wasn’t alone, but that was the point. The middle-aged woman who worked on the desk at the front door had already informed her that Mrs. Bluton had just arrived from her trip out of town.

“Ah, Agent Frost,” Sheriff Ramsgate said. He had a slight look of relief about him. He cast an eye toward Mrs. Bluton before looking back at her, and Laura noticed that the woman was actively crying into a tissue. “Maria, these are the FBI agents I was telling you about. They’re in charge of the case now, and they’re going to make sure your Jamie gets the justice he deserves.”

Laura sucked in a breath. She wished people wouldn’t make promises like that—and especially not on her behalf. She’d do her best, but nothing was ever guaranteed.

“Mrs. Bluton, we’re very sorry for your loss,” Laura said. “I wonder if now is a good time to talk to you a little about your husband, see if we can’t get to the bottom of this?”

She sat down in one of the chairs at the Sheriff’s desk, turning and angling it toward Mrs. Bluton first, having no intention of taking no for an answer. Agent Moore hovered in the doorway for a moment, seeing that there was nowhere else to sit. Laura caught her eye and then shot a glance toward a low filing cabinet at the side of the room. Agent Moore took the hint with a grateful expression and perched on the edge of it, holding her hands together in her lap as though she was waiting for the grown-ups to talk.

“Yes, I suppose I can.” Maria Bluton sniffed, raising her head from the tissue. She was wearing mascara which had streaked in ugly black lines down her face, giving her a look as though she had been saved from drowning. Together with her travel-rumpled clothes and messy hairstyle—thrown back into a bun as if she had paid little thought to it—she painted a clear picture of a woman in the throes of grief.

Not that that necessarily meant she had nothing to do with her husband’s death. Laura knew enough to be cautious in these circumstances.

“I’m sorry to have to ask this, but was there anyone you can think of who might have wanted to harm your husband for any reason?” she asked, for a kick-off.

“No!” Maria burst out, shaking her head wildly. “No, Jamie got along with everyone. Everyone we knew, which wasn’t a whole lot of people. We’ve had to keep our heads down. There’s been so much to do at the farm over the past few years. He knew some people here from when he was younger, but a lot of the kids he went to school with have grown up and moved away. I don’t know why anyone would have any reason to hurt him—to want him d—” She cut herself off on the last word, a choking sob filling her mouth instead.

“Alright,” Laura said with feeling, trying to reassure the woman as best as she could. “That’s great. You’re doing great. Did you talk with your husband at all while you were away?”

“Of course,” Maria said. “We were texting all the time, and I called him every night.”

“Did he at all seem different to you? Was he worried about anything or did he notice anything suspicious?”

“No,” Maria said, wiping her eyes only to smear the mascara more badly across her face. “Everything was fine. I don’t know why someone would do this. We didn’t even have anything worth stealing, except the equipment!”

Laura glanced up at the Sheriff. “Was anything taken?”

“We don’t believe anyone entered the farmhouse,” he said. “We’ll have to ask you to take a look at the machinery, Maria, but it looked to us as though everything was where it should be.”

“I just don’t understand,” Maria went on. “Jamie never hurt anyone. Why would someone want him gone? Why would they want to leave my kids without a father?”

The mention of children made Laura wince. They hadn’t gone into the details of the family enough, but she did remember Ike saying earlier that James Bluton was a family man. Laura figured that Mrs. Bluton must have left the children with her family, rather than bringing them to the scene of their father’s death.

“How old are your children?” Laura asked.

“One is five years old, the other is six,” Maria said. “We were visiting my family and their father’s.”

“Their father’s?” Laura asked, picking up on the strange phrasing. Not Jamie’s or my husband’s.

“The children are mine, not Jamie’s,” Maria said. “I got into a relationship with a… a bad man. I got out of it and Jamie, he kind of rescued me when I was on my own. Took on the kids and looked after them like they were his blood. He was… he was everything we needed.” Her eyes were misty again, fresh fat tears sliding down her face when she blinked her lashes.

“Where is the children’s father?” Laura asked, seeing the suspect immediately. “Did he know you were living here with Jamie?”

Maria shook her head. “He died two years ago,” she said. “Bar fight. Now I’m all those kids have.”

“That must suck, having to raise them as a single mom,” Agent Moore spoke up unexpectedly. Looking at her, Laura saw she was shaking her head in sympathy. “I’m so sorry.”

There was a pause in the room, a beat. No one spoke. Maria was looking at Agent Moore with a kind of horror for a moment, and the Sheriff even looked somewhat angry. Laura cleared her throat. She needed to get the interview back on track, rather than letting it be derailed by the interruption. The whole flow was off now, but she could get it back.

“Did you take part in any local parent groups or community meetups?” Laura asked, deciding to proceed as though Agent Moore hadn’t even said anything.

“No, not really,” Maria said, sniffling. “I didn’t have time to go with the boys. And there wasn’t much of it going on around here, anyway. Everyone already knows each other, so why have set times and places to meet up? It’s been a bit isolating, to be honest.”

She suddenly burst into a fresh peal of tears. Laura could easily imagine why. Agent Moore had just reminded her that she was going to have to do it all on her own now. The farm, the children, everything. More likely, she would have to sell. There was no way a single woman with small children could manage that all on her own, and it sounded as though there was no one else left on James’s side. She’d verify that later with the Sheriff, just in case she felt she needed to talk to anyone else.

“And James, was he part of any groups? Perhaps a farming community?”

Maria shook her head again. “There are events all year long, but in the past couple of years we never really managed to get to them. After we moved here, we were too busy. Then things died down a little but it was harvest season and Jamie needed every spare moment I had. After that I got pregnant again and I couldn’t drink—which is the main point of all those events anyway. I, um. I had a miscarriage last year.” A shadow passed over her face—most likely the realization that there would never be another baby now.

Laura nodded sympathetically, but inside, she didn’t like what she was hearing. All of this was adding up to the victim having no reason to fear violence from any sector. If there was no one who was angry with him, then there was no one who had the motive to attack him so viciously and deliberately end his life. She was beginning to think that maybe the victim had been hiding something, even from his wife. If this was a personally directed attack, it was the only thing that made sense.

They needed to connect the two victims, find out what they had in common and why it would have made them a target.

“Do you or your husband know Janae Michaels?” Laura asked, naming the second victim. “Even if you’ve only seen each other around town, anything like that?”

“No,” Maria said, shaking her head slowly. She looked at the Sheriff questioningly, then back at Laura. “Who is that?” She had stopped, a break in her tears, no doubt because she was now wondering who this woman was who seemed in some way to be connected to her husband’s death.

“Are you aware of any link, Sheriff?” Laura asked, instead of answering the grieving widow’s question.

“I’m not,” Sheriff Ramsgate said, his tone reserved. It was clear that he didn’t want to give away any details of the case that he had not yet been cleared to.

“Alright,” Laura said, standing up. “We’ll leave you there, Mrs. Bluton. Thank you so much for everything you’ve told us. If you do think of something suspicious, or you come across something that you think might be related to what happened, don’t hesitate to get back in touch with us or the Sheriff.”

“You can call me anytime,” Agent Moore said, jumping forward with a business card outstretched in her hand. She practically dove in front of Laura to make sure that she offered it to the woman, and Laura let her. It was always tedious, having to field calls from grieving family members when they really had nothing extra to add. Laura suspected that this was going to be the case with Mrs. Bluton, and that the only calls they might really expect would be chasing up and asking if they had solved the case yet. Agent Moore could deal with those if she was so eager to.

That done, Laura nodded at the Sheriff and again at Mrs. Bluton. “We really are sorry for your loss,” she said, as a parting comment, before leading Agent Moore out of the room.

She didn’t know where she was heading, and she couldn’t exactly ask the Sheriff. She didn’t want to stop him from giving his condolences to the woman, who was after all part of the local community that he served. They would just find somewhere and pitch up, and if they had to move later, so be it.

Using her knowledge of Sheriff’s stations and precincts from across the country, Laura moved down the hall in what she suspected might be the right direction. Sure enough, after the Sheriff’s office she found a door leading into a more open area, a kind of bullpen, if very small. There were only three desks, one of which was occupied for the time being. The deputy there was a rail-thin man who looked even older than the Sheriff was, his hands typing slowly away at a computer that might well have been older than Laura herself.

“Are these desks in use?” Laura asked, pointing to the two workstations that seemed unoccupied.

The old deputy looked up. “Not at the moment,” he said.

That was good enough. Laura was fairly sure that he was being overly sarcastic—since the lack of people sitting at them made it very obvious that they were not in use at the moment—but it was a good excuse for later if they did turn out to be sitting in an inconvenient spot. She chose a desk at random, gesturing toward the seat next to it that would no doubt normally be reserved for criminals and taking the desk chair for herself.

Once Agent Moore was seated, Laura pulled out the file she’d brought with her—the briefing notes, folded in two in order to fit in the inner pocket of her jacket. She smoothed them out and leafed through the pages. “We need to do a bit of research and see if we can connect these two,” she said. “There must be something they have in common. Hopefully, something easy to spot.”

“How can we check that?” Agent Moore asked.

Laura experimentally moved the mouse attached to the computer they were sitting at. The screen activated onto the desktop, which she was fairly sure constituted some kind of regulatory breach if not the law. It shouldn’t have been possible for just anyone to access it. Still, not waiting for IT support was convenient in this case.

“You start with these,” Laura said, tapping the briefing documents against the table and then handing them over. “They have the basic stats pulled from county records—name, age, place and date of birth, height, and so on. Just look for anything that matches. I’m going to do a little bit of search engine magic and see if I can’t dig anything up.”

It was an easy enough process. She started by searching “James Bluton” and “Janae Michaels” together, then changing the name to Jamie just in case. Nothing came up at all. Searching the names separately brought up social media pages and a couple of mentions in local papers—one for a farming-related story and one for a school sports team from about ten years ago.

Nothing related at all.

“I can’t see anything that matches up,” Agent Moore said, putting the files aside with a sigh.

“Nothing here either,” Laura confirmed. “What did you find out about Janae Michaels?”

“Just that she was twenty-five years old, she was also a local but lived in town rather than out on a farm, and she worked from home for a tech startup on their customer support line.” Agent Moore shrugged, rubbing at one of her eyes. “There’s not much else to tell. She was attacked in her own backyard, but it only had a low fence that would have been easy to climb over. No DNA evidence recovered at the scene.”

Laura nodded. She knew as much from reading the briefing documents previously, but it was aways good to have a refresher. “Then there’s no link between them,” she said, swiveling her chair thoughtfully. Of course, she knew that wasn’t the end of the story. It couldn’t be. They had missed something.

There had to be some kind of link.

They just had to figure out how to find it.

“Right,” Laura said decisively. “If there’s nothing that comes up at surface level, then we just have to look deeper.”

“How are we going to do that?” Agent Moore asked.

Laura cracked her knuckles. “Get your phone,” she said. “We’ve got some calls to make.”