Free Kill For Me by M. William Phelps Page A

anything; they just wanted to talk. Feel the guy out. See what he had to say for himself, and weigh his reaction to the visit itself.
    Body language and eye movement don’t lie.
    Lynch was one of those “methodical investigators” every good detective squad has on the force, said one colleague. He could be tenacious and pigheaded, but in a way that moved the case forward and didn’t upset anyone. Lynch stood six feet tall, a little over two hundred pounds, and had a clean-shaven look.
    “Not thin, not heavy,” Lynch’s boss, Paul Andrews, later said. “He is a good family man. He has two daughters,” Paul added. “Lynch is a dedicated father who makes his family his focus. We have worked many cases together and have a connection between us, with mutual trust and respect for each other as persons and investigators. My first weekend as supervisor, we had a homicide by beating and stomping. Lynch and I interviewed a key witness, the suspect’s extremely intoxicated and beaten wife, at the hospital. Through the interview we learned about each other as investigators and our styles, and we had very similar thought patterns.” As far as the Sandee Rozzo homicide went, Paul said that Lynch was “instrumental in working with Ski and giving him pointers on the investigation and subsequent documentation of each step.”
    As Ski and Lynch drove to the club, Ski thought about the case. He wasn’t 100 percent sold on the notion that Humphrey was their killer.
    “I didn’t want to have tunnel vision,” Ski said later. Which is important, maybe more so in a case such as this one, when everything seemed to point in one direction. “Just as I had given Mr. Ponicall the chance to dispel any alarm from me and cooperate, and to see what information he had to offer—basically, I was heading over there to do the same thing with Mr. Humphrey.”
    The goal in talking to Humphrey now was to get an alibi. Humphrey had good reason to want Sandee Rozzo dead, so the PPPD needed to hear from him regarding what he was doing on the night near the time she was murdered.
    The Brandon Athletic Club was your typical cookie-cutter gym in a strip mall, offering all the latest and greatest gadgets for losing weight and weight training. Humphrey had been a personal trainer at the Brandon location for some time. He seemed pretty popular with the ladies at the club—that much Ski and Lynch knew from speaking to several of Sandee’s friends. What was also clear was that Humphrey had a con man’s blood running through his veins; he knew how to get people to do what he wanted. It was more of a skill he had developed, rather than an inherent trait he’d had his entire life. But even more than that, Humphrey had a way of working himself into the lives of those females he trained and getting them to focus on him more than their own lives.
    Svengali all the way.
    “I’d say it developed over—when you’re seeing somebody several days a week, talking a lot,” said Tobe White, a forty-one-year-old woman Humphrey had been training at the club since March. “I’d say probably over a few months, we became better and better friends.”
    “Friends” was maybe how Tobe White viewed the relationship. But as the PPPD slowly began to learn, Humphrey rarely allowed anyone into his life that he couldn’t use or manipulate in some capacity. Humphrey definitely needed something out of Tobe—it was the only reason he had taken the relationship from the gym floor to the outside.
    Walking in, Ski and Lynch asked the owner of the franchise if Humphrey was working.
    “Tracey’s here,” the guy said. “Sure.”
    “We need to speak with him.”
    The owner provided a space for the impromptu conversation, one of those soft rooms.
    Lynch and Ski introduced themselves. Humphrey, all smiles, stuck out his hand. He was sweaty and out of breath, a towel wrapped around his neck like a boxer after a fight. He seemed surprised by the visit, but not shocked.
    “I