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.