Cul de Sac, page 6
“Do you recall her having a lot of enemies in high school?”
“There were plenty of people that were jealous of her. But I think hate might be a strong word. People like me, if I’m being honest, were very jealous of her. She was beautiful and had the attention of all of the guys. But it was mostly jealousy, you know? She was that unattainable girl…the girl all the dudes wanted and all the girls wanted to be. You know the type? So while there were plenty of people that surely didn’t like her, I think it would be a stretch to call those people enemies.”
“So when you spoke with her at the reunion, was it cordial or sort of forced?” Chloe asked.
“It was a very friendly conversation. She had come into Dollar General a few days before to get some sort of weed killer for her flower beds. We chatted a bit then and when I saw her at the reunion, I was just being polite—asked her how her flowers were doing. It got us on a tangent about some stupid project we’d had to do for biology in high school.”
“Even though she was polite to you on occasion after high school, do you know if there were any people she was not polite to?”
“Oh, I’m sure there are several. One person that instantly comes to mind is the woman that used to work as a nanny for the Hilyards.”
“What’s the story there?”
“Well, years ago, Lauren was working as a hairdresser in the better part of town. And Jerry had the same job he has now—some sort of marketing or copywriting job for the only ad firm here in Barnes Point. So there were a lot of late hours. This was years ago, when Victoria still needed a babysitter and wasn’t old enough to watch Carter herself. They hired a nanny and from the way the story goes, it didn’t last very long. Some sort of altercation took place between Lauren and the nanny. There are about a hundred versions of the story floating around town but the way I understand it, Lauren ended up slapping this woman and pushing her off of the front porch, screaming at her. There was some talk of the nanny pressing charges but it never came to anything.”
“If that story is true, does it jive with how you remember Lauren in high school?” Moulton asked.
“Maybe not to that extreme, but yes…it reminded me a lot of the Lauren I knew back then. If the whole story is true.”
“Can you think of any other stories like that since after graduation?” Chloe asked.
Brandie thought about it for a moment and then shook her head. “No. That’s the only one that sticks out.”
“Do you happen to have a name for that nanny?” she asked.
“Yvonne Dixon. She’s still here in town. Lives right up the street in one of the Gladstone Apartments, in fact.”
“Are you close with her?” Chloe asked.
“No. But on this side of town, you tend to start to know where everyone lives. I’m pretty sure she’d be open to talking to you. And I don’t know what it is…but it always seems that babysitters and nannies always have the best gossip. The most truthful gossip…if there’s such a thing.”
During the course of her brief career, Chloe knew that this did tend to be the case. She assumed it was especially true in a smaller community like this. Having a nanny who once worked for the Hilyards as a potential lead made the case feel like it had some wheels to it—like they might wrap this thing before barely even got started.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Chloe did her best to keep her feelings in check, but being an active agent was still so new to her that it made her want to break out into a grin whenever she had the chance to flash her ID and badge. She found herself doing just that as she and Moulton spoke with the owner/landlord of the Gladstone Apartments complex.
“FBI?” the owner asked, genuinely shocked. “What on earth do you need to speak with Ms. Dixon for?” He was an aging man, pushing sixty, hiding his stark white hair beneath a John Deere hat.
“We’re not at liberty to say,” Chloe said. “Although, for your peace of mind, I can assure you it’s not in regards to anything she’s done.”
“It’s about that Lauren Hilyard murder, isn’t it?” the owner asked.
“I’m sorry sir, we really can’t say,” Moulton echoed.
“Can we please just get her apartment number and contact information?” Chloe asked.
The owner nodded and went to a tattered filing cabinet behind his desk. He flipped through a few papers and brought one back over to them. It had her apartment number listed, as well as her phone number and last known residence before becoming a resident of Gladstone Apartments.
Chloe snapped a picture of the document with her phone and nodded her thanks to the owner.
“Do you know if she’s currently working anywhere?” Chloe asked.
“Working as a babysitter for some family out on the other side of town in one of those subdivisions.”
“Farmington Acres?” Moulton asked.
“Nah, some other one. I don’t know the names of all of them. But if you’re looking to talk to her, I’m pretty sure she’s home. I saw her car out there in the parking lot when I came back inside from cleaning out the gutters about half an hour ago.”
“Thank you very much,” Chloe said.
She and Moulton stepped back outside, Chloe looking to the picture she had snapped. “Apartment number seven,” she said.
The apartment complex was two stories, each story holding eight apartments. It was the type of apartment building where the stairs were all outside and the entire place looked like one big house rather than an apartment building. They followed the order of the numbers on the door and found number seven at the very bottom corner of the first floor.
Moulton knocked on the door and they heard an immediate, “One second,” called out from inside.
Yvonne Dixon answered the door about twenty seconds later. She was sweating a bit and the apartment behind her smelled like Lysol or Mop and Glo, or some similar cleaning product. She gave them a skeptical look, not opening the door all the way.
“Can I help you?”
Again, Chloe was delighted to flash her badge and ID. “We were hoping you might have some time to speak with us about your history with Lauren Hilyard.”
Yvonne frowned slightly as she glanced back and forth between the agents. “I heard about that,” she said. “It’s…well, it’s sad.”
“We understand you used to work for her,” Chloe said.
“Yeah, I did.” She paused a moment, apparently seeing where this trail was going to eventually lead. She opened her door up and waved them inside. “Come on in. But excuse the mess. You caught me in the middle of cleaning.”
They walked inside and Chloe found that while the apartment itself was small and rather dingy, Yvonne kept it tidy and clean.
“The landlord told us that you have a job out on the other side of town,” Moulton said. “Did you have the day off?”
“No. I work for the Nelson family. The father is usually on the road, traveling for business. The mother works a dispatch position for the sheriff’s department in town. She has some odd hours, usually forcing me to wake up around four in the morning. But it gives me the afternoons off; she’s usually off of work by three or so.”
“How long have you worked for this family?” Chloe asked.
“A little over three years.”
“Well, according to the story around town, things didn’t particularly end well with you and Lauren Hilyard.”
“That’s putting it mildly,” Yvonne said. “I’m sure there are many versions of the story floating around town, but here’s what really happened. Carter, their son, was five at the time. He was preschool age and Lauren had me going through this really simple and quick tutorial sort of thing to help prepare him for kindergarten. She much preferred that over sending him to one of the preschools in town. The kid was bright as all get out and whenever he did exceptionally well, I’d give him a Blow Pop as a reward—a reward, mind you, that Lauren approved of.
“Well, this one day…I still don’t know how it happened, but Carter got the gum from the Blow Pop in his hair. And he didn’t bother telling me. He was playing in his room then comes down and tells me it’s been there for like fifteen minutes. I did my best to get it out with some weird methods I found online—dish soap, peanut butter, all that. But nothing worked. I tried calling Lauren but she never answered her phone. So I made a judgment call and I cut it out. It didn’t butcher his hair or anything, but it was noticeable. When Lauren got home and saw it, she went right the hell off. She had lost her temper with me several times before, but this was bad. This was nuclear.”
“We heard she slapped you,” Moulton said.
“Yeah, she did. She asked me to step out on the porch to talk. I assumed it was so her kids wouldn’t hear us arguing. The moment I stepped out there, she started screaming at me. The moment I tried to get a word in, she slapped me. Busted my lip and took me by such surprise that I damn near fell down her porch steps.”
“I assume she fired you that day?” Chloe asked.
“That’s just the thing. When I didn’t show up the following day, she called to see where I was…like she fully expected me to come in. It was like she was pretending nothing had happened. She eventually apologized for slapping me. But of course, I never went back to work for her.”
“Did you speak to her at all after that? Like maybe whenever you might have happened to pass by one another in town?”
“No. It was always just dead silence. Jerry did try to approach me one day in the grocery store to make amends but I told him I wasn’t interested.”
“Do you remember what she was like in high school?” Moulton asked.
“I didn’t go to school around here. I moved to Barnes Point for a guy. A guy that ended up beating on me and moving away. But then I was sort of stuck…”
“How are you typically treated by the little groups of women around town?” Chloe asked. “I know this place can be a bit clique-y.”
“I’m never mistreated, but it’s clear that if you haven’t always been part of the group, you aren’t welcome in.”
“So it’s safe to say that you have an unbiased opinion of the friend groups around here?”
“I suppose so. I will say that most of the women around here come off as being stuck up. Like they’re better than you. Which is dumb. Because if they were all that, why the hell did they stick around a place like Barnes Point after high school or college?”
“Well, given your rather neutral position on the town and its people,” Chloe said, “can you tell us of anyone else you think might have been rubbed the wrong way by Lauren Hilyard?”
“As a matter of fact, yes. Just last week, I heard that she had fired the guy they had coming in to rework her flower beds.”
“Did things get out of hand?” Moulton asked.
“From the way I hear it, it did. A little screaming match and everything. It wasn’t until later that I found out the guy she had hired was sort of a creep. And I think that’s why Lauren fired him.”
“What do you mean?”
“The guy is a Hispanic dude that doesn’t live around here, but used to do a lot of work for the wealthier families. A jack-of-all-trades sort of guy. Landscaping, light carpentry, that sort of thing. Then word got out that he got caught peeking into windows and…um, well, pleasuring himself while he peeked.”
“Do you have a name for this guy?”
“Sorry, no. But he drives a blue truck with one of those ladder and utility racks on the back. The sticker on the side of the truck says First Choice Handyman.”
“How reliable would you say this story is?” Chloe asked.
“Pretty reliable. I heard it from a woman that lives a few houses down from the Hilyards. She works at the bank and those ladies are always gossiping. She said she and her husband were out for a walk when Lauren had her little shouting match with him.”
“Thank you very much for your time,” Chloe said.
“Sure,” Yvonne said. “But…there are people talking. Saying that Lauren’s death is related to some sort of political stuff. Is that true?”
“It’s really just too early to say,” Chloe said. “But hopefully the information you just gave us can help us find out.”
Yvonne seemed pleased with this, giving them the faintest of smiles as they walked toward the door. She opened it for them and saw them out, giving them a wave as they got into the car.
“First Choice Handyman,” Moulton said as he typed it into his phone. He found the number on Google and called it right away. “Let’s find out if he was doing anything more that working the flower beds when he was at the Hilyards’ residence.”
CHAPTER NINE
When calling First Choice Handyman, Moulton was met with a voice message. The recorded message told him that business hours were from eight to five and that if he left a message, someone would call him back soon. Moulton did not leave a message. Instead, he went back to the Google search results and found out more about the business. It was owned by a man named Oscar Alvarez. The business had several reviews on Google and Yelp. The ones that specifically mentioned the man’s level of work were all great. But many of them seemed to be bemoaning the fact that he had been caught masturbating while looking through windows. One even suggested that Oscar Alverez peddled child pornography.
“Damn, the internet can be a mean place,” he said. “I wonder how soon we can get this guy’s records from the bureau.”
“I think we’d be better off just heading to the local police department to see what they have.”
“And that’s why you’re considered the lead on this case,” Moulton said with a smile.
They located the Barnes Point police station thirteen minutes later. It was located at the end of a rather long Main Street stretch that seemed to be situated right in the zone that separated the wealthier side of town from the other side of the tracks.
When they walked inside, the woman at the reception desk gave them a smile. Chloe wondered if Ms. Nelson—the mother of the family that Yvonne Dixon currently worked for—had been sitting there earlier in the day.
“Can I help you?” the woman asked.
“We’re the FBI agents that were sent out to look into Lauren Hilyard’s murder,” Chloe said. “We were hoping to get some information about a man that we believe might be a suspect.”
“Oh, you’ll want to speak with Sheriff Jenkins,” she said. “And boy, will he be glad to speak with you. I’ll buzz him and let him know you’re here. But go ahead and go on back. He’s the last door on the left at the end of the hall.”
They walked beyond the counter and through a door that the receptionist buzzed them through. They found the sheriff’s office at the end of the hall, the door already open.
“Sheriff Jenkins?” Chloe asked.
The middle-aged man behind the desk looked up from a stack of papers he had been sorting through. Behind him, a map of the state was on the wall, marked up and labeled with various Post-its.
“Yeah?” he asked. But he seemed to understand who they were within another second or two…perhaps by the way they were dressed. “You with the bureau?”
“We are,” Chloe said. They both showed their identification and introduced themselves. At once, Jenkins seemed relieved.
“Well, I don’t have much on the Hilyard case,” he said. “But what I do have, you’re welcome to.”
“We actually think we might have a lead,” Chloe said. “We were wondering what you might be able to tell us about a guy named Oscar Alverez.”
“Ah hell,” Jenkins said, reclining back in his chair, looking as if it was the first bit of rest he had gotten all day. “How’d his name come up?”
“We spoke with a few people and discovered that Lauren Hilyard fired Alvarez last week, the day before the high school reunion.”
Jenkins shook his head slowly. “See…I hadn’t heard that yet. I’ve talked with everyone I could think of that was close to that family and didn’t hear that a single time. I didn’t even know they had hired Alvarez for anything.”
“From what we gathered, he was leveling out the ground for the flower beds. There was apparently some huge fight, seen by one of the Hilyards’ neighbors and then passed around the town grapevine.”
“Well, that I can believe.” He rolled his chair over to a filing cabinet and thumbed through some of the documents. Chloe wasn’t sure why, but she always felt a certain charm whenever she watched someone use a filing cabinet. It was something reliable, something tangible and not encoded on some network or electronic filing system.
“Oscar Alvarez,” Jenkins said, pulling out a folder and sliding it over to them. Moulton picked the folder up but didn’t look through it yet. He seemed to be perfectly happy listening to Jenkins as he gave a play-by-play. “He was arrested for lewd conduct two years ago while building a back porch for the Harper family. According to Mrs. Harper, she saw him fondling himself one time but figured maybe he was…well, adjusting or scratching. But then she caught him trying to peer through her bedroom window while she was changing, again fondling himself. Forgive me for being so crude, but he left some…evidence behind, right there on the side of the house.”
“Did he do time for that?”
“Three days here in the cell and a three-thousand-dollar fine. He stayed away from Barnes Point for a while after that. He came in here about eight months ago, spoke to me directly, and swore that he was a changed man. Said he wanted me to be the first to know because he was going to try to drum up more business here in Barnes Point. I told him good luck because no one would hire him again based on what everyone knew of him. To my surprise, a few did hire him. Small stuff, mostly. He’s cheaper than the well-known handymen and construction companies around here and, if I’m being honest, he does much better work.”
“Where does he live?” Moulton asked.
“The town of Winston, about ten miles south of here. Lives in a double-wide off the road a bit.”
“Has there been any more trouble with him?”
“No. Nothing serious. Sure, stories still circulate, but there’s nothing to them. As far as I was concerned, he was true to his word: he was a different, improved man.”
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