LM 04 February's Regrets by A.E. Howe

Author:A.E. Howe [Howe, A.E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mystery
Published: 2016-09-26T04:00:00+00:00

We all were pretty much done-in by the time we got back to the restaurant. True to his word, Winston had a couple of strawberry pies waiting for us, made with fruit fresh from Plant City. We agreed to eat pie first and compare notes later.

With both pies and about a gallon of coffee gone, we all leaned forward and swapped notes. All of us had talked with people who’d seen suspicious cars, trucks or vans that they wanted us to look into. Only a handful sounded promising and had enough information to be useful.

“You’re going to love this,” Susan said. “Mohammed Attica gave me a very detailed description of a truck he saw driving through the neighborhood.”

“Oh, lord,” Julio groaned.

Mohammed was a self-proclaimed community leader. Though he tended to bring a lot of bluster and drama in his wake, he truly did care about the people in his community and, every once in a blue moon, came up with a tip that was really important. Of course, he had also filed half a dozen civil suits against various county agencies, including one against the sheriff’s office that Dad still hadn’t forgiven him for, even though the suit had been dismissed. Dad had wasted a week of work digging up a bunch of evidence and providing it to the county attorney.

“What did he see?” Despite his reputation, I wasn’t passing up anyone’s help.

“A black Ford pickup. He called it a redneck truck. The guy driving it was white and wore a ball cap. He saw it parked about a block from his house. He thought that was on Friday and then he’s pretty sure he saw the same truck Saturday evening. Maybe around eight, he said. No tag. Maybe he could pick the guy out of a lineup, but he had no idea how tall or how much the guy weighed since he only saw him in the truck. When pressed, he said the guy probably wasn’t obese or super skinny.”

There were possibilities there. Maybe the guy was cruising for victims, or he was a construction worker who’d been paid on Friday and was looking for drugs, or he was just a stalky ex-boyfriend. But it was information that might come in handy and Pete wrote it all down.

We moved on to Julio, who had information on a van parked by the side of the road down from the Sweet Spot, possibly on Saturday. The woman who saw it thought it was funny because it was a utility van, but didn’t have any signage on it. She also found it odd that the windows were partly rolled down, but no one was in it.

“Like she says, no one leaves their van unlocked around there,” Julio said, giving Pete a piece of paper with the woman’s information. “She thought someone was in the van. Maybe hiding.”

Almost everyone else reported sightings that were too vague or would only be useful if we already had a suspect. A lot of witness testimony falls into the latter category.

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