I tried to reconstruct the exact chronology of events. The scene would have to have been close enough to Zig’s Place that Chris and his killer could walk to the stranded vehicle together. I had seen streetlights on most of the major thoroughfares in town, but off the beaten path I suspected they were few and far between. Once the two of them reached the woman’s vehicle, Chris would have knelt beside it to examine the tire with his killer standing directly behind him. But if it was dark that night—really dark—wouldn’t Chris have needed some kind of illumination to see what he was doing? And suddenly a picture of the scene formed in my brain. Chris was next to the vehicle on his knees As for the woman? She was standing slightly to one side with a flashlight in her hand—maybe one of those high-powered Maglites that cops carry on patrol, something powerful enough to provide plenty of illumination in the darkness but heavy enough to function as a weapon as well.
I took a breath. Yes, this was all conjecture on my part, but I had the sensation that I was finally getting somewhere. So what would have happened next? With Chris sprawled on the edge of the road, either dead or unconscious, Shelley would have needed to move him away from the scene in a hell of a hurry.
I thought about the bathrobe-clad woman I’d encountered earlier at the house on Diamond Ridge Road. She had been five-eight, about the same height as Twinkle Winkleman. Unlike Twink, however, Shelley Adams was not particularly muscular and probably weighed somewhere around a hundred thirty-five. From Bill Farmdale’s description, it was safe to assume Chris had been six-two and weighed in at somewhere around a hundred forty pounds. The math didn’t add up, if you will. There was no way someone like Shelley alone would be strong enough to lift something that weighed more than she did. Was it possible she’d had an accomplice? After a moment’s thought, I dismissed that idea. If she had done this in order to lay hands on that ten grand, she wouldn’t have wanted to share her spoils with a partner in crime.
Once more I closed my eyes and envisioned my mental crime scene, again with the snow falling all around and with Chris lying dead or dying on the side of the road. Desperate to get him out of sight, his killer would need to move him. The problem is, human bodies— especially newly dead human bodies—aren’t easy to maneuver. For one thing they’re ungainly. Before rigor sets in, arms and legs tend to flop around in an unpredictable fashion. It’s hard to get a firm grip. Not only that, if there’s blood involved, they can be slick and slip out of your grasp.
The killer’s best bet for getting away would have been to load the victim into a vehicle, but what kind? It was snowing that night. An all-wheel-drive sedan of some kind? Nope. Lifting the victim up and over the lip of the trunk opening would have been difficult, and dragging him into the backseat would have left behind a bloody mess. What about an SUV? With adrenaline coursing through her body, someone Shelley’s size might have been able to climb in and drag him into the luggage compartment, especially if she’d been able to lift him partway up onto something else—a toolbox maybe—so she didn’t have to pull him the whole way from the ground to the SUV all at once.
I made a note to see if we could find out what kinds of vehicles Shelley and Jack Loveday had owned back in 2006.
Now what? I asked myself. Where does our killer go once she departs the scene of the crime?
Leaving the body in the back of the SUV would be too risky. What if someone looked in through the windows and saw it? It made sense that she’d want to ditch the corpse at the earliest opportunity. I opened my iPad and Googled the distance from Homer to Eklutna Lake, where I discovered that the estimated driving time was four hours and forty minutes, about the same amount of time it would take to drive between Anchorage and Homer. But it would doubtless take much longer on a night with ten inches of new-fallen snow on the ground. It didn’t seem likely that she would have embarked on that kind of perilous journey alone in the middle of a stormy night alone and with a dead body rolling around in the back of her vehicle.
If Shelley had spent an hour or so wrestling with a bloody body, she certainly wasn’t afraid of getting her hands dirty—and her clothing, too. She would have been a blood-soaked mess. It made sense that she’d have driven home, but if the tire was really flat, how was that possible? So maybe Shelley had come prepared for just such a contingency. If she was an airplane pilot, she’d have some mechanical ability. Maybe she’d let the air out of the tire herself and then brought along a cigarette-lighter-powered compressor to refill it. I was pretty sure Twink had just such a device among the equipment stowed in the Travelall’s rooftop luggage rack. Once Shelley reinflated the tire, she most likely drove home, parked her vehicle in her garage out of sight of prying eyes, and cleaned herself up. That way she could ditch her filthy clothing and wait for better weather in which to dispose of the body.
Had Jack Loveday been at home to greet Shelley late that night when she showed up after murdering Chris? I doubted it, and with him dead there was no way to ask. Since no alarm had been sounded in the wake of Chris’s sudden disappearance, his killer was gifted with the luxury of time. Shelley would have been able to get rid of the body and Chris’s personal effects at her leisure, eventually abandoning the corpse in the middle of nowhere for the bears to find. She’d also had ample opportunity to clean up the vehicle she’d used to first entrap Chris and later to transport his body.
At this point, a dozen years down the road, Shelley was resting on her laurels, convinced that she’d committed the perfect murder. Unfortunately for her, there was a fly in her ointment—yours truly.
If Shelley Hollander Loveday Adams had murdered Sue Danielson’s son, I was determined that she pay for it—come hell or high water.
Chapter 22
I spent the next hour or so going through the material Todd had sent along during the course of the day. While looking into Roger Adams’s life and times, Todd had researched details about his second marriage, to Shelley Hollander Loveday, which had occurred in July of 2009, a bare two months after the death of Roger’s first wife in May of that same year.
The dossier included details concerning the death of Jack Loveday, starting with the crash of his aircraft in early November of 2008 and his subsequent suicide in February of 2009. With my new focus on the possibility that Shelley might be a cold-blooded killer, that seemed like two too many deaths in her proximity in far too short a time for them to be dismissed as mere coincidence, so I studied with avid interest the details Todd had provided.
After the plane crash that resulted in the loss of both his legs, Jack Loveday had been hospitalized for three weeks before being transferred to a rehab facility in Anchorage for an additional three weeks. Following his release from there, he’d been sent home to Homer to for his stumps to heal completely so he could be fitted with his prosthetics. A fitting appointment for those had been scheduled two months down the road, but Jack died before that day arrived.