Lethal Invitation by Randall Dale

Lethal Invitation by Randall Dale

Author:Randall Dale
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2020-03-19T04:00:00+00:00


Both detectives sat motionless on one side of the table as John Fillmore was led into the interrogation room, ducking to make sure he didn’t bump his head on the door. His hands were cuffed at his back and with his longish hair frizzled in disarray and eyes puffy and squinted, he looked as though he’d just woken up. One of the uniformed officers pointed to a chair. John looked at him with one eye closed and the other open only a sliver. He grunted as he sat, then coughed and hawked. He looked around for somewhere to spit, but seeing nothing, he swallowed loudly in the confines of the bare-walled room.

“Whatever it is, it wasn’t me.” He cocked his head, squinting at the detectives.

Demetrius pushed the button on the recorder, then nodded at his partner.

The younger man sat straighter in his chair. “Where were you two nights ago?”

Fillmore studied the recorder on the table. As he looked at it, both detectives’ eyes were also drawn there. A tiny red light blinked every second.

The man glanced up with a squint, looking first to Demetrius, then to Dan. He blinked his eyes, squeezing them tight for a second before resuming the squinting. He yawned wide and shook his head before answering.

“Working. You can check the tapes again.”

Demetrius laid his big hands on the table. A phone call to the gas station while they were waiting had confirmed Fillmore had worked all that night. The coroner indicated the time of death from between nine and midnight, so as with the Smallwood murder, the disheveled man in front of them couldn’t have pulled the trigger. He nodded again at his partner.

“We’ll do that for sure. Did you work all night?”

“From eight till four.”

Dan nodded then looked at the senior detective. Both men had expected the answer. Demetrius took his turn. He stood and fished an empty nine-millimeter shell casing from his pocket. It had been fired from his own gun through the pillow at the gun range only a few days earlier. He placed it, spent primer down and hole up, on the table.

“Do you know what that is?”

Fillmore grunted and shrugged. “An empty casing.”

“A nine-millimeter. We found one just like it at a murder scene from two nights ago.”

“So?”

“So, the prints on the casing are yours.”

Stretch sat up quickly, all tiredness apparently gone from his body. He looked at the detectives with wide eyes.”

“I told you before, I didn’t kill nobody.”

“Then how do you reconcile the fact that two spent casings on two separate nights are found at the scenes of two separate murders, and both casings have your fingerprints?”

The man looked around the room while licking his lips nervously. His eyes darted from one detective to the other. He finally focused on Demetrius.

He paused and swallowed one more time. “You’ve read my file?”

“Yes.”

“And you know I did time?”

“Yes.”

“And I’m out on parole and can’t own a gun?”

“Yes.”

Stretch hesitated, his right eye began to twitch. “I did own a gun, a nine-millimeter Glock, but I sold it a month or so ago ’cause I was out of a job and needed the money.



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