He gestured to the rest of the files in the room. “You mind helping us with these?”
Eight
“I feel dirty,” Gretchen joked once they were back in the car. She shifted the letter box that Plummer had given them on her lap. “And not just because I’m sweating. From now on, check with me before you volunteer us for hard labor.”
Josie laughed. “What do you think the age difference is between Plummer and Tammy?”
“It’s gross,” Gretchen answered. “However many years gross comes out to.”
Josie laughed harder and started the car, turning her windshield wipers up as fast as they’d go. Two more patrol cars pulled up, maneuvering around her vehicle to block off the road. The water had been up to their calves by the time they left Plummer’s office. Josie turned her vehicle around, driving away from the flooded area. “Some people say age is just a number,” she teased.
Gretchen shook her head. “To be fair, I was twelve years younger than my husband, but I’m thinking there’s a lot more years than that between Plummer and Tammy.”
They returned to the police station, pushing through the soaking wet throng of reporters still staked out at the back door, and took the file up to their desks. Once they got out of their raincoats and waders and felt sufficiently dry, they spread the paperwork out across Josie’s desk and pored over it. Josie said, “This guy saved a copy of every check Evelyn Bassett ever sent him.”
“That’s a lot of checks,” Gretchen said. “Here we go. This is the tenant before her.”
She pulled out a thin manila file from the box. Josie gathered up the documents from Mrs. Bassett and made room for the new file. Gretchen opened it and began placing various documents side by side. The lease, copies of checks, letters, and what looked like legal documents. Josie picked one up and skimmed over it. The top of it was marked with the Denton City Municipal Court seal. “This is an eviction action,” she said. “Calvin Plummer versus Vera Urban, April 9, 2004.”
Something in the shadows at the back of Josie’s mind fought to burst forth.
Gretchen picked up more documents. “Looks like Vera lived there for about seven years before Plummer filed that. Did it go through?”
Josie flipped through the pages but found no evidence that Vera had actually been evicted. She moved on to the rest of the legal documents until she found a Petition to Withdraw. “They must have worked it out,” Josie said. “Because he withdrew the action June 18, 2004.”
“So what happened?” Gretchen asked.
Josie paged through the copies of Vera’s rent checks, then she went back to Evelyn Bassett’s checks. “There’s a year-long gap here between Vera Urban’s last rent check and Evelyn Bassett’s first one.”
“So the house on Hempstead was vacant for a year?”
“It appears that way. From the eviction proceedings, it looks like Vera hadn’t paid her rent for two months when Plummer filed against her. Then he withdrew the action, but I don’t see that she ever squared up with him or that he ever returned her security deposit,” Josie said.
“Maybe she took off, and he kept the security deposit,” Gretchen suggested.
“We’ll have to ask him. In the meantime, let’s see what we can find out about Vera Urban.”
Gretchen paged through the rest of the stuff in the letter box while Josie pulled up the TLO database. She took a few minutes to search through it. “This is strange,” she said.
Gretchen leaned over her shoulder to look at the screen.
Josie said, “She’s had no property purchases, no utilities, not even a phone for the last sixteen years.”
Gretchen slid her reading glasses on and leaned in closer. Josie moved her chair out of the way a bit to make room for her. “This can’t be right,” Gretchen mumbled.
Josie reached over and clicked through a few more tabs in the database. “She was born in 1962. Here we’ve got high school graduation from Denton West in 1980. No criminal record. A couple of speeding tickets. She was arrested once for a bad check but not charged. Here are utilities at various addresses including Hempstead but that’s it.”
“Pull up her driver’s license,” Gretchen said. “She would have to have kept that up to date.”
Josie looked it up, but the last license on file was sixteen years old as well. A sinking feeling began in her stomach. Gretchen nudged Josie out of the way and went through all the searches and information that Josie had just