Voice Mail Murder by Patricia Rockwell Read Free Book Online Page A

clerk remembers and won’t say or truly doesn’t remember a thing about the woman, I don’t know. All we know is a woman paid for that room two days ago, but when the coach’s body was discovered yesterday morning by a very surprised cleaning lady, said woman was nowhere to be found. And unfortunately, the Shady Lane Motel has no security cameras so we have no video of anyone entering or leaving the room.”
    “Detective, that’s all well and good,” continued Pamela, sitting forward at her desk, hands on her knees, “but I don’t see how it affects me. It seems that this unknown woman is probably your killer and your job is to find her. What can I possibly do to assist you?”
    “I’ll tell you, Dr. Barnes,” he said, reaching into the pocket of his overcoat and bringing out a cell phone. “Whoever this mystery woman is, no one seems to know. No one on the staff or faculty was aware that the coach was sleeping with someone—and, believe me, his wife and daughters were not aware of it. That was not a pleasant interrogation.”
    “I can imagine.”
    “We seem to be at square one,” he continued, palming the little phone and looking at its small screen, “except for this.” He held the phone out to her.
    “A cell phone?”
    “The coach’s cell phone. We found it under the bed in the motel room, next to his body. The only prints on it were his. There are a number of voice mail messages for him that he hadn’t yet deleted—going back to January it seems, according to our techs. Seems he didn’t delete his messages very often—if at all. Not a very wise thing to do if you’re having an affair.”
    “No, I would think not.”
    “Anyway,” continued Shoop, “our techs have gone over the messages thoroughly, attempting to identify the speakers. There are seven messages—all short, all apparently from women.”
    “More than one?”
    “Yes. They all seem to be calling the Coach to verify or change an appointment—probably an afternoon motel appointment, if you get my drift.”
    “Yes, I get it,” she sighed.
    “We’ve gone over all of the messages and we can’t identify any of the speakers. None of them appear to be family or close colleagues. All of the messages were apparently sent from disposable cell phones that are no longer in service. In fact, when we examined the Coach’s car left at the murder scene, we found a box of new disposable phones in his trunk,” he said. “Unfortunately, we’ve come up empty-handed.”
    “So how do I fit in?” she asked, anticipating where this line of reasoning was leading.
    “We’d like you to listen to the recordings,” he suggested, reaching into his other large overcoat pocket and retrieving a CD case. “I’ve made a copy of them for you.” He handed her the CD case. “Maybe you can listen to the voices and tell us something about these women that we don’t know. “
    “That you don’t know?”
    “You know,” he said, shrugging, “anything about them. Starting with how many women there are. We have seven messages, but we aren’t sure that there are seven different women. There might be just one woman who has left seven messages—or there might be seven women each leaving one message—or any variation in between. We don’t know for sure. We figured you could tell us that—and more—with all of your acoustic expertise.” He smiled at her. He was schmoozing her—and it wasn’t something he did well—or often, so he wasn’t very good at it.
    “Oh, Shoop!” she lamented, stretching her arms over her head. “I can’t believe you’ve dragged me into another murder investigation.”
    “You won’t be involved, Dr. Barnes,” he said with a grimace. “We’d simply appreciate any authoritative input you can give us about the women who are speaking on this recording. Right now, these women are our best leads as to the Coach’s killer—maybe one of them is the killer. We don’t know, but we need to find out who they are—and