The J D Bragg Mystery Series Box Set

by Ron Fisher

  “How do you know who I’m sleeping with?” I asked.

  “We’re the FBI, Mr. Bragg,” he said, and almost grinned. “You don’t want to piss us off.”

  “Well, when you put it that way, I promise not tell a soul. But in return, when you’re ready to make it public, I’m the first reporter you call.”

  “I can live with that,” he said.

  “So, what is it with this mask?”

  “We have a witness,” he said. “From two murders ago. She saw the killer leaving the victim’s apartment, and he was wearing the very mask you described, a cowboy hat, and a long coat down to his ankles.”

  I looked at Agent Smith, my mouth probably open, trying to shape what he’d just said into some semblance of understanding.

  “We’ve been keeping this from the press. You can buy these masks on the internet, and the last thing we need is a copycat.”

  “Mother, Mary of God,” I said. Can Teddy Crane be a serial killer? I leaned back in my seat, and said, “I’m blown away. I’ve thought some pretty bad things about him, but never this.”

  I had another thought. “Was the murdered girl from the killing in Greenville working Wilson Kroll’s party?” I asked.

  “According to a couple of her friends that we talked to, she could have been. They said they worked a party somewhere in North Greenville County Friday night and had just gotten back. Then they all lawyered up, and aren’t saying anything else. Maybe it was this Smoke character we were just discussing who hired their lawyers.”

  “Well, if the murders stop now, that should be proof that Teddy was your man,” I said. “But I still can’t believe it. Well, I can,” but it’s a shock.”

  Smith glared at me. “I don’t want to wait for that. I want proof now. I want to find that mask, or a hammer with blood on it. We know he takes pieces of their jewelry as souvenirs, I want to find it. He turned to one of the County detectives and said, “Bring our forensic people in to do a fine-tooth search of Crane’s house. Your guys can help, but they need to take orders from mine.”

  “Fine by me,” the Detective said. ‘You know what you’re looking for, we don’t.”

  “Smith nodded at the FBI woman, and she grabbed her phone and left the room again. I guessed she was calling in the forensic team.

  Mosely Smith looked at me as if he were trying to think of other questions to ask or things to say. He was excited about the unfolding investigation. Then he said, “I guess you can go, for now, Mr. Bragg, “but stay available.”

  As I stood up to leave, I said, “Can I call you tomorrow to see what you’ve found at Teddy’s house. Obviously, I want to keep up with the investigation.”

  He fished out one of his cards and handed it to me. I gave him one of mine.

  “I’ll tell you what I can,” he said.

  I nodded, and left for Kelly’s and hopefully, to a less insane world.

  CHAPTER-FORTY-FIVE

  On the drive to Kelly’s, I thought about calling Alvin to tell him what had happened to Teddy and Natasha, but it was after midnight, and I figured they were all asleep—if sleep was possible after the news about Jamal. I’d call him first thing in the morning.

  Kelly was waiting for me at her front door before I even got to it. We stood in the doorway for the longest time, just holding each other and not speaking. I took her in, and we sat on her sofa as I told her about Teddy and Natasha. There was nothing to say that could explain or lessen the horrific tragedy of the day’s events and the pain we both felt. Kelly was almost too shocked to cry.

  We talked more about Jamal Johnson’s murder, too, and the incredible unfairness of it. But we said nothing about Natasha climbing into my bed, Kelly’s anger at her, or anything else derogatory about her. All of that was so irrelevant now as to be disrespectful. Whatever she had done, was just Natasha being Natasha and we would both miss her.

  Kelly didn’t know Teddy, and we didn’t talk about him much until I broke my promise to Agent Smith and told her about the witness, the mask, and the clothes—the shocking clues that pointed to Teddy Crane as the Carolina Stalker serial killer. I knew it would eat her up to have to sit on a such a blockbuster scoop, but I also knew she would do it. She said my word was her word and she would keep it.

  I hadn’t eaten since breakfast, and while we continued to talk, I grabbed some leftover pasta from the fridge, and I ate it with a glass of wine.

  We went to bed eventually and made desperate love. I fell asleep holding her close, feeling her tears on my shoulder. All night long, tormented dreams brought a jumble of disturbing questions that circled in my semi-consciousness and never reached a conclusion. But none of them were about Jamal or Natasha or Teddy’s murders—or even Teddy as the Carolina Stalker. They were all about Kelly and me. Did I decidedly want Kelly to be with me forever, or was I just afraid of what my life would be like if I lost her? I realized, even in my sleep, that this was the question of greatest importance in my life. And one I had to answer, asleep or awake.

  Monday morning I awoke before Kelly, got up and dressed, made a pot of coffee, and grabbed the Greenville newspaper off her doorstep.

  The headline across the top of the front page of the paper announced, “Murder in the Dark Corner,” in bold type. The story about Teddy and Natasha was on one side, Jamal, on the other. I poured a cup of coffee and sat down at the kitchen table to read them.

  There wasn’t a lot of details in either story other than the bare bones facts and short backgrounds of the victims. There wasn’t anything there I didn’t already know. Thankfully, there was no mention of Alvin or me in either story. The cops appeared to be keeping everything close to the vest, which suited me just fine. I didn’t want or need the press. There was no mention of the Carolina Stalker. Smith was keeping that under wraps, too.

  While Kelly was in the shower, I called Alvin. He was in Taylor’s room at the medical facility in Greenville.

  “I was about to call you,” Alvin said. “Natasha and Teddy? Damn, J.D..”

  “You heard,” I said.

  “Well, yeah. It’s all over the news.”

  “I found them,” I said.

  “Damn,” he said again. “I didn’t see that part. What the hell were you doing there?”

  “I wanted to see if the news about Jamal would put a crack in Teddy’s façade.”

  “Why didn’t you ask me to go with you?” Alvin asked.

  “I said I wanted to put a crack in his façade, not his skull.”

  “Then it's a damn good thing you didn’t get there earlier, as Natasha did.”

  “You got that right,” I said.

  “They said somebody shot Teddy ‘execution style,’ but don’t name no suspects or reasons why. What’s your take?”

  “Wilson Kroll or Eddie Smoke, pick one,” I said. “Teddy had too much on both of them, and they all know this whole thing is about to blow up. I think Natasha went to see Teddy at the absolute worst time she could, and walked into the middle of it.”

  “Damn,” Alvin said for the third time. “You think we caused this?” he said, his voice taking on a hushed tone, probably to hide what he was saying from Mrs. Johnson and Taylor.

  “Perhaps we sped it up a bit, but Teddy was bound to end up with something bad happening to him. But Natasha getting caught up in it . . .”

  “That’s the motherfucker,” Alvin said, completing my thought.

  “How are Mrs. Johnson and Taylor doing?” I asked.

  “They want to talk you.”

  I heard the shuffling of the phone and Millie Johnson came on the line.

  “I want to thank you for finding my boy,” she said, her voice filled with sorrow. I could feel her pain over the telephone.

  I didn’t know what to say; I was my most awkward self at moments like this. Every tragedy in my life was like the one Mrs. Johnson was experiencing. Someone died before their time, without explanation, or answers. Why them? Why now? Why, God? With me, it was my parents’ death when I was jus
t a kid; years later, my grandfather’s senseless murder. If there were words for times like this, I didn’t know them.

  “When you outlive your child,” Millie Johnson said, “it’s like living in hell while you're here on this earth. And that's where I am. I’m sunk as deep as Lucifer's pit as I sit here thinking about my Jamal. I already knew in my heart something bad happened to him, but it don’t make it easier to find out for sure.”

  “Is there anything I can do for you, Mrs. Johnson?” I asked.

  “Find out who did this to my baby.”

  “Mrs. Johnson, with Teddy Crane dead, we may never know for sure. Maybe the police will find out one day.”

  “The police the one’s told me Jamal run away. What they gonna’ tell me now?”

  She probably had a right to mistrust the police, based on their efforts so far, but they could still do things that I couldn’t.

  “I’ll do what I can, Mrs. Johnson. Even if it’s only staying on the cops’ case to make sure they don’t stop trying to prove who did this.”

  She broke down sobbing. Alvin came back on the line. “Taylor wants to talk to you, too.”

  I could hear Taylor’s respirator working in the background when he spoke.

  “You found Jamal . . . like you promised.”

  “I just wish we’d found him alive,” I said.

  “Thank you . . . J.D.. Will you go to . . . Jamal’s funeral for me? Mama’s only . . . got Alvin and . . . she needs all the support . . . she can get. You can go . . . in my place. You always were . . . like one of her boys . . . anyway . . . It’s Thursday . . . at Gowensville . . . Baptist Church.”

  “Of course, I’ll be there, Taylor,” I said.

  Alvin got the phone back. “So what do we do now?” he asked.

  “I guess we wait and see where the cops come out in their investigations with Jamal and Teddy and Natasha. I’ll stay in touch with them. What I learn, you’ll learn.”

  I didn’t tell Alvin the wild news that Agent Mosely Smith was looking at Teddy as the Carolina Stalker serial killer, and it wasn’t because I didn’t trust him. I’d wait until Smith completed his search of Teddy’s house, so I could tell Alvin with more certainty Teddy was a worse guy than even we suspected. I told Alvin I’d see him at Jamal’s funeral and hung up.

  I went through my phone messages. The cops took my phone while they questioned me, and when they gave it back, I didn’t check my calls. I’d missed two: one from Kelly, wondering when I was coming home, and one from Ronnie Dill, saying he’d found Jamal’s journal.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  I called Ronnie on the number attached to his messages and got his father. He bluntly told me that “Ronnie’s at fuckin’ school—or he goddam better be,” and slammed down the phone. What a guy.

  Then I called the office at Ronnie’s high school to see if they would let me talk to him, thinking maybe I could drive over and pick up the journal if he had it with him. An assistant principal told me in no uncertain terms that she could not get Ronnie out of class for any reason other than a family emergency. The lady I was speaking to said she knew Ronnie’s father’s voice, and I was not him. I told her, “And thank God for that,” and hung up.

  I took out Agent Moseley Smith’s card and called him. He must have seen my name on his caller I.D. because he didn’t wait for me to tell him who was calling.

  “You’re not going to be calling me every fifteen minutes, are you?” he said. “We’re still at it, so you’ll have to give us a little time, Mr. Bragg.”

  “You don’t sound happy,” I said.

  It was a moment before he spoke again. “Sorry I barked at you. You’re right; I’m not happy. I’m disappointed. I think I let you get my hopes up. We’ve found no masks, no polo mallets, no two-gallon zip bags, and no keepsake jewelry. The only thing of interest so far are a couple of cowboy hats and two of those long coats, cowboy dusters, you called them. Two different colors, a light one, and a dark one. They’re in the lab with our people who are combing them for blood, or hairs, or anything that can tie Crane to the murdered girls. So far, no luck. We’re checking behind walls now, hoping he had a secret hidey-hole somewhere. Maybe he knows he was seen and threw it all away.”

  “How about his car?”

  “There was nothing in it, either. There are several dents and scrapes on the front end, but they only show paint scrapings from other cars, or walls or whatever. No blood or hair. So far, all we’ve got on him is that he was a terrible driver.”

  I was beginning to feel like “the boy who cried wolf,” but my memory of the masked rider, coattails flying was still vivid. It had to be Teddy. What the guy wore and his physical appearance fit Teddy too well.

  “If there’s nothing else, let me get back to work,” he said. “If anything turns up, I’ll call.”

  With nothing to do until Ronnie Dill got out of school, I followed Kelly into the Clarion. I spent time with Eloise, while Kelly went to work on this week’s edition, which would cover the murders in North Greenville County. She would best the large Greenville daily paper with a more detailed account based on what I could tell her. No one had interviewed me over there, and Kelly would be the only one with a first-hand viewpoint of both events.

  Kelly would stop every so often, and come to quiz me about some detail regarding the crime scenes, the state of the victims, and so on. I’d told her my suspicions of who I thought did it, but she couldn’t (and wouldn’t print) guesses. She, like me, would have to rely on police work to reveal that. Perhaps with my new connections with the FBI and Greenville County Sheriff’s department, I could soon deliver her another “scoop,” not to mention an ending for my own “horse country” story, which I had yet to write. I told her she couldn’t use my name and to refer to me as either a reliable witness, or just “a witness.” She was good at what she did, and I didn’t try to read over her shoulder or tell her how to write it, nor would she let me if I’d tried.

  Later, Kelly, Eloise, and I had lunch at a restaurant in the nearby town of Easley which served Cajun food, including fried alligator bites, which I’d had in Florida once, but was very drunk at the time, and remembered little about it. The waitress told me it tasted like chicken. I had the chicken and told her it tasted like alligator. She didn’t think I was funny.

  Finally, it was time to head for the Dark Corner and Ronnie Dill’s house. I wanted to get there in time to catch him as he got off the school bus if that proved to be his transportation home, and I guessed it was.

  I parked the Jeep on the shoulder down the road from his house, not wanting to risk running into his father. A half-hour later a yellow school bus came down the road and stopped in front of Ronnie’s house. I got out of the Jeep and stood at the front fender. When I saw Ronnie get off, I gave him my best ballpark whistle. He saw me, glanced in the direction of his house, and came hurrying over to me.

  “So you found it?” I said.

  “Yes I did,” he said. He pulled the backpack from his shoulders and took out a small hard-bound book with a blue cover, and handed it to me.

  “I ain’t read it,” he said, as if that’s what was expected of him.

  “You heard about Jamal?” I asked.

  He stared at the ground between his feet and looked like he was about to cry. “They announced it this morning at home room. They’re going to close the school Wednesday, in memory of him. And anybody wants to go to his funeral on Thursday, can.”

  “I’m sorry Ronnie,” I said. “I know what good friends you guys were.”

  He looked up at me. “I’ll never have another friend as good as him.”

  I didn’t say anything. Perhaps he was right, but I hoped not. Ronnie was a good kid, and with a daddy like his, he at least deserved a few good friends.

  I opened Jamal’s journal and looked at it. It was filled almost cover to cover with cursive writing in a neat hand, but with a lot of abbreviations and acronyms.

  “Where’d you find it?” I asked.

&n
bsp; “In our old secret hiding place,” he said. “A place Jamal and me used to keep secret stuff when we were kids. I hadn’t thought about it in years. It’s an old hollow tree out behind Jamal’s house—a big old poplar. The book was wrapped in a plastic garbage bag and stuck down among a bunch of acorns squirrels had stored there, and some matchbook cars I found a long time ago in a ditch by a house down the road.” His eyes stared into the distance as he recalled the memories.

  “I ain’t seen them cars since we were nine years old,” he said. “Jamal wanted me to take them back, saying they belonged to some other kid, not us. He wouldn’t even play with them. I put them in our hidey-hole and never did get around to taking them back.”

  “Well, you’ve done a good deed here, Ronnie. Maybe it will help us discover who killed Jamal.”

  “I’d like that,” he said, “but I’d like it better if he was still alive.”

  “Me, too,” I said and suddenly had a thought. “Do you have any ambition about going to college?”

  “Ain’t no way I can go to college,” the kid said. “We can’t afford it.”

  ‘How are your grades?” I asked.

  “Not too bad. Specially math and science. Why?”

  “I’ll tell you what,” I said, thinking about the college fund Natasha had set up for Jamal Johnson. “If you’ll bear down at school, hit the books and get your grades up as high as you can, maybe we can do something about that.”

  I assumed that Natasha’s parents would take charge of that trust now, and might not be opposed to helping this kid, who needed all the help he could get. Jamal and Mrs. Johnson would approve, I thought. I told him about it. “Don’t get your hopes up just yet,” I said, “but I’ll speak to them about it.”

  “For real?” he said, and again looked like he was about to cry.

  “I’ll do what I can if you will too. Deal?”