Free To Love and to Kill by M. William Phelps Page A

child.”
    Buie had noticed a bump. One doesn’t ask a woman if she’s packing, however—just in case, she’s not!
    â€œHow long are you now?”
    â€œEight months,” Emilia said. This posed a problem, Emilia explained.
    For Buie and Spivey, this was now a major development. The stakes had suddenly changed.
    â€œSo you’ve seen what’s been going on with Josh and Heather?” Buie wanted to know, asking for a bit of insight into the relationship from a third party.
    â€œYeah,” Emilia said. “Back in January, Heather claimed Josh pulled a shotgun on her—the gun belonged to my father. He went to jail.”
    Buie and Spivey were well aware of Josh’s time in jail on that charge. They had gone back and listened to several recordings of Josh making phone calls from jail during that same time in January until he got out, just before Heather went missing. Those tapes, and whom Josh was speaking to, told an interesting tale all on their own.
    â€œWhen he got out of jail, did you two get back together?”
    â€œWe tried to work things out,” Emilia said. “It was very rocky, though.”
    â€œHow’d you and Heather get along?”
    â€œWe weren’t necessarily friendly, so we pretty much maintained our distance. We never fought or anything like that, though.”
    This was untrue, both detectives knew.
    The impression Emilia gave was that she and Heather stayed away from each other. When they followed that rule, things were okay between them. When they didn’t, well, they argued like junior high school girls in the hallway between classes, fighting over a boy.
    â€œWhen was the last time you saw Heather?”
    â€œOh, geez, probably like January tenth, a few days after Josh got hit with that gun charge. I babysat their kids while Heather worked.”
    â€œYou watched their kids?”
    â€œYeah . . . when she got home that night, we argued because of her calling the cops on Josh and him going to jail.”
    Emilia went on to say that Josh never threatened Heather with a gun. He took the weapon so he could clean it. That charge was bogus. It was Heather and her new boyfriend making it up to get Josh out of the picture for a while.
    â€œDid you put your hands on Heather?” Buie asked.
    â€œNo way—she would have had me in jail!”
    â€œDid you fight with her, like grab her hair or anything?”
    â€œNo! When we got into it, I chose to leave. I didn’t have a problem with Heather. I didn’t,” Emilia claimed. It sounded sincere.
    They took a break. Emilia was tired. She was feeling the day, the week, the month. She was going to be giving birth to Josh’s child in a matter of weeks. His wife was missing. Josh was sitting in jail on a fraud charge. Emilia felt helpless and unable to do anything. Her life seemed to be once again spiraling downward, and there was no way she could find to stop it.
    Near 10:00 P.M. on March 18, after a break, Emilia sat down with Spivey and Buie for a second time. She said she wanted to clear something up and then be taken back home so she could rest.
    â€œSure,” Spivey said.
    â€œI did grab Heather once. It was two or three nights before Josh went to jail. But I made sure not to have any contact with her after that. I stayed away from her.”
    They talked about a few inconsequential pieces of information and then Buie got a patrol car to bring Emilia back to her mother’s house in Boardman.
    As she left, Spivey and Buie stood, watching Emilia Carr walk out of the building. They looked at each other. Both investigators knew that they’d be speaking to Emilia again. She definitely knew more. That much was clear in the way she answered questions and her body language.

CHAPTER 18
    JOSH FULGHAM SPENT the evening of March 18, 2009, in the local Ocala jail. Detective Donald Buie, not much convinced by the answers Emilia had given them, called Emilia just