Her Final Prayer: A totally gripping and heart-stopping crime thriller (Detective Clara Jefferies Book 2)

by Kathryn Casey

  “Max—” she started.

  “No pressure. I promise. But if this isn’t going to work out…” He knew she was skittish. He understood that he couldn’t push her. She hadn’t explained what she’d been through, but Max sensed that her marriage had been traumatic, and that something truly bad must have happened to convince her to leave her family and her home. But he’d been hurt, too. He’d lost Miriam, nearly lost Brooke. And as much as he wanted to be with Clara, he couldn’t endure that kind of pain ever again. Last time, it had sent him reeling to the bottle, cost him his job and nearly his sanity. If that happened again, he wondered if he could survive it. “You don’t have to answer me now. Just think about it.”

  For a moment, Clara was quiet. Then she asked, “Where’s the cabin?”

  At least she hadn’t said no. “Outside Salt Lake. He’s always offering it to me as a getaway, and I decided to say yes, this time. Mountain views. The cottage is cozy. A stone fireplace. There’s a stream nearby. It may be too cold for trout fishing, but we can go hiking.”

  She glanced over at him and gave him the hint of a smile. Max wondered what he’d do if she said no. He felt an overwhelming relief when she said, “I’ll think about it. Okay?”

  “Good. Yes. Okay,” he said. “We can—”

  Before Max could finish his sentence, Kellie’s voice on the radio filled the Suburban: “Chief, you there?”

  “Yup. Chief Deputy Anderson is with me,” Clara answered. “What have you got for us? Have any more lab results come in?”

  “No, not yet.”

  “What is it then?” Clara asked.

  “Conroy needs you over at Myles Thompkins’ place,” Kellie said.

  “Is this good news? Did Thompkins turn up?”

  “Conroy didn’t say. He just said he needs you ASAP,” she explained.

  Instead of turning off the highway toward Alber, Clara flipped on the siren and lights and headed in the direction of the mountains. They might finally have a break in the case, and Max heard relief in Clara’s voice, optimism that had evaporated in the ICU room with Jacob, when she said to Kellie: “Tell Conroy we’re on our way.”

  Thirty

  The sun sets early in November in the mountains, and it was low in the sky when Max and I arrived at the cabin. We found Conroy with Thompkins’ neighbor, Scotty, near the barn. Both men had their arms folded across their chests, and they were jabbering away as if they had a lot to discuss. The dogs barking in the background, we walked up and Conroy, who never seemed to waste a single word, said: “Homer is back.”

  “Homer?” I repeated.

  “Thompkins’ horse.”

  “But no sign of his owner?” I said, simply to verify.

  “No,” Conroy confirmed.

  Inside the barn, the penned-up dogs kicked up the noise level, while Homer nonchalantly munched on a pile of hay. He looked just as Scotty had described him: a big-shouldered bay with black points. It wasn’t hard to believe that he measured a full sixteen hands. Homer had a colorful blanket on his back topped by a thick strap that ended in stirrups and a worn saddle.

  “When did he arrive?” I asked.

  “Not sure, but I found him here about half an hour ago. Gave Officer Conroy a call to let him know,” Scotty said. The guy looked clearer than at our last meeting. Maybe he’d sworn off the pot for a day. “I came over to feed the dogs, and I found Homer nosing around in his empty oat sack. Hungry, I guess, so I fed him.”

  I wondered how to handle this. I hadn’t had any experience searching a horse. I suggested, “Max, let’s get some gloves on and take that saddle off, check out the pockets and the blanket.”

  “Instead of that, let’s get the CSI folks out here,” Max said. “No telling what secrets this horse might reveal. There could be prints on the saddle that might help.”

  I considered balking, not wanting to waste any time, but Max made sense. While he put in the call to Lieutenant Mueller and the CSI unit, I clicked on my radio. “Kellie, tell Stef to come out here ASAP. I want her in on this.”

  “Will do, Chief,” she said.

  The sun kept getting lower, the light dimmer. While we waited, we searched the property, trying to figure out what direction the horse had come from. We had given up by the time the forensic trailer pulled in, followed by Stef in her Alber PD squad car. Soon we had eight folks including Mueller and two of his team staring at the horse. Stef and the CSI folks gathered round and whispered, concocting a plan. Mueller was the one who announced: “We’re going to treat Homer like he’s a crime scene, okay?”

  “You bet,” I said.

  Max and I stood back with Conroy and Scotty, while the CSI folks carefully removed Homer’s hardware, his saddle, canteen, all the rest, and laid them out on a table they popped open just outside the barn door. Stef helped the techs bag the blanket and the reins. They inspected the saddle but decided to wait to test it for prints until they got it to the lab.

  “You know, it’s funny,” Scotty commented as we watched.

  “What is?” Max asked.

  “I figured Myles was out hunting. One reason was that I didn’t see his bow and arrows in the barn,” the guy explained. “But they’re not on the horse either.”

  Stef chewed on that a minute and then said, “They’re probably somewhere in the woods. Wherever he was when he got off the horse?”

  “I wonder where that was.” I looked at the horse and wished there was a way to tell. “We need to look through those saddle pockets,” I said to Mueller. “Here, not wait for the lab.”

  “We’d have better control in the lab,” Mueller pointed out. “We don’t want to mess up any latent prints.”

  “You can be careful, but we can’t wait,” I said. “We need to know if there’s anything in there that can help us find him.”

  Mueller sighed but did as I asked. The saddle glowed in the light emanating from the barn’s interior as he used a small tool to pop the pockets open and a hook to search inside. Out came a stash of energy bars and a wallet. We found Myles’s driver’s license with the same photo we’d been showing on TV, those inquisitive blue eyes I remembered, dark hair and a pilgrim beard to match that covered his neck. Mueller closed the wallet and slipped it, as he had the energy bars, into evidence bags to go in for fingerprinting.

  Meanwhile, the rest of us waited while one of the techs continued searching the saddle. At first, nothing, but then she found something in a small inner pocket—an envelope. On the front, someone had typed: LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT

  Inside she found a single sheet of folded paper dated the previous day, Monday, the day of the killings. The tech laid it out on the table and we gathered around. There were three short paragraphs and a typed signature at the bottom. I picked it up in my gloved hands, Max shined his flashlight on it, and I read aloud to the others:

  To whom it may concern:

  Point One: Being of sound mind, I, Myles Thompkins, want my cabin and all I possess liquidated. All funds are to be put into a trust for Jeremy Johansson, the son of Laurel and Jacob Johansson.

  I paused. Before I went on, something immediately bothered me. I looked at the faces of the others. “Does this seem real to you?” I asked them. “Isn’t it odd that it’s typed?”

  “I’d feel better if it were handwritten,” Max said. “Why would Myles type this when he hand-printed all the letters to Laurel?”

  At that, Mueller spoke up. “Also, we didn’t come across this document when our tech guys examined the computer we found in his cabin. If Myles didn’t write this on his computer, where did he write it? All we found on his desktop were old tax returns, financial records, and emails to buyers about the dogs he was selling.”

  “That does seem strange,” I agreed.

  “Is it possible that Myles had a second computer? A laptop?” Max asked.

  “We didn’t find any,” Mueller pointed out. “And no evidence of one, no cords sitting around, laptop cases, anything like that.”

  “Well
, let’s send Myles’s printer in for analysis, see if the characters in this document match the printer,” I suggested. “At least we might be able to figure out if this letter was printed on his equipment.”

  “Good idea,” Mueller said. He looked up, called out to one of his techs and said, “Get the printer boxed and logged in.” The guy nodded and ran off toward the cabin.

  That done, I returned my attention to the paper in my hands. “Okay, well, let’s keep going,” I said, and I started reading the second paragraph to those of us gathered:

  Point Two: I, Myles Thompkins, confess that I murdered Jacob, Laurel, Anna, Benjamin and Sybille Johansson. I did this out of jealousy. I went to the bison ranch to take Laurel away with me, but she refused me. I didn’t mean to kill anyone, but my anger took over. I killed them all. All except Jeremy.

  I paused. I felt stunned. Reading his letters, I’d come to think I knew Myles, that I could see inside his heart. Despite the evidence of the boot’s sole matching the print on the scene, part of me didn’t believe—or didn’t want to believe—that he could have been the murderer. Yet, here it was, typed out for all to see, his confession.

  I mentally clicked through Doc’s timeline that indicated Laurel died six or seven hours before the others. It didn’t seem logical in the context of the confession I held in my gloved hands. How could Myles have gone to the ranch to claim Laurel and been rebuffed, killed her around midnight but then waited all those hours to murder the others? Why would he do that? It made no sense. But then, maybe, I just didn’t want to see it?

  “Does this sound right to you?” I asked Max. “What do you think?”

  Max’s frown stretched tight. “No way to tell for sure, but no… I’m thinking the same thing you probably are, that this scenario doesn’t fit the autopsy evidence.”

  “Not that I can tell,” I said. “Maybe we’re misinterpreting something?”

  Max thought for a minute, then said, “Keep reading. What does he write next?”

  I did as Max requested, and the letter became even more alarming:

  Although I understand that bequeathing him my money and property will not make up for all the harm I have done to Jeremy, all I have taken from him, it is all I have to leave him. I am unable to live with what I have done. I ask God’s forgiveness as I prepare to meet my end in the place where Laurel and I shared our happiest memories.

  And then there was the strange document’s most suspect element—the typed “signature.”

  Mueller took the paper from me and slipped it, along with the envelope, into an evidence folder. “We’ll work on the printer and do fingerprinting and trace evidence,” he suggested. “That might help.”

  “Thanks, sure. Good idea,” I said. I thought about that phrase “as I prepare to meet my end.” I turned to Max. “What are you thinking? What’s he planning to do?”

  “Suicide note,” Max said. “Plain and clear. Every indication.”

  Mueller walked off to take the envelope with the letter to the CSI trailer, and a few of the others returned to examining the horse. I glanced over and saw Stef petting the animal, murmuring to it. We all felt the sadness, I figured. So many lives lost, so much tragedy.

  “He says, ‘where Laurel and I shared our happiest memories,’” I pointed out.

  “Are you thinking what I am?” Max asked.

  I called over to Scotty, who was petting one of the dogs, just to be certain I hadn’t misunderstood. “One more time, where did you say you saw Myles and Laurel together?”

  “Along the river, where the kids go to hide from their parents. The clearing where there’s a big boulder right on the bank,” he said. “Only saw them together there the one time, but, like I said, I saw Laurel off and on sitting next to the water.”

  Max and I exchanged worried glances. “You finish up here,” I said to Mueller. “But don’t head back to your office until you check in with us. We may need you.”

  Thirty-One

  Driving back down the highway west of Alber, I turned off on the dirt road Naomi had taken days earlier. I thought about how she’d seen Laurel and Myles talking, and that she said Laurel seemed upset. Max and I got out of the SUV, and we walked down the dirt path that wound through the woods. Nineteen years earlier, we’d taken this path together. Now gray speckled Max’s hair and the stubble on his dimpled chin. All those years ago, his cheeks were soft and boyish, and I remembered the fluttering of my heart that accompanied our first kiss. I could almost hear my father emerging from the trees and shouting: “Stop!”

  In the growing darkness, our flashlights lit the way as we trudged through the trees. Surrounded by the scents of pine and the river, I felt a stiff chill in the air. I wondered what we’d find. Perhaps Myles Thompkins’ dead body against a tree trunk, a gunshot wound to the head, his gun at his side. From the tone of his note, if it were genuine, that didn’t seem improbable.

  The grass was winter yellow and brown, and dead leaves crunched beneath our feet as we scouted around the riverbank, wandering off in different directions into the forest, looking for Myles. I privately hoped we wouldn’t find him. I thought of the man who wrote the letters, the one who seemed to love Laurel more than he loved himself, who wanted her happiness above his, and I wished that in the midst of so much death, he’d survived. I wished that the confession wasn’t true.

  An hour later, Max and I stood in the dark with our flashlights not far from where we did the day of our kiss, alongside the big boulder where Scotty had seen Laurel alone, singing.

  “So, neither one of us found a single sign that he’s been here,” Max said. “The note’s a lie?”

  “Could be,” I said. “But maybe not. Maybe they had another favorite place?”

  A wave of anxiety flooded through me, and I felt unsettled. Raw. Being there with Max brought back too many memories. I looked over at him, so close I could have reached out and touched him. I considered my years in Dallas, how I’d spent a decade alone trying to restart my life, training to be the best cop, never letting anyone close, all the while keeping the world at arm’s length. Being home these few months, I’d realized how much I missed my family, how much I’d grieved for the connection I once had with Max. He was offering to rekindle what we had. Was I too scared to accept it, in case it got taken away again?

  I needed to be alone for just a moment, to collect my thoughts.

  Wandering off, I again walked the bank, watching the river lap against the land. Something scurried by in the woods, and I shined my flashlight on a gray wolf fleeing, eager to get away from me. I stopped and looked back. When I did, I saw Max’s silhouette illuminated by moonlight. He was sitting on the rock, looking out over the water. His profile achingly familiar, I thought about all I’d never told him, about the bad turn my life had taken in Alber, why I fled, and about how during those long years we’d been apart, he came to mind often. In the quiet moments, I’d wondered where he was and if he was happy.

  As I began pacing yet again, those thoughts from the past left me. Instead, I caught flashes of images from the murder scene the day before, the bodies of the women and the two precious children; my heart ached so that I thought I might scream.

  Pulling myself together, I turned to eye the shoreline, the water, the river’s rocky bottom visible along the bank. I searched the woods around me. In my flashlight’s glow, I saw something just ahead of me, a black shape on the ground. Part of it had caught the light. I rustled over, crunching the leaves beneath my boots. When Scotty mentioned that Myles hunted deer with a bow and arrow, I’d pictured a high-tech fiberglass device, probably finished in camo print. But the one that lay in the woods was old-fashioned, made from wood polished to a fine dark sheen. Beside it lay three arrows, broken in half. I bent down and took a closer look at the craftsmanship, so fine, the feathers skillfully anchored in hand-cut notches.

  Not far from where I stood, I noticed grooves in the mud leading to the river. A fallen branch lay across them.

  “Max,
come here!” I shouted.

  Not asking why, he rushed toward me.

  “The bow and arrows are over there,” I said, pointing into the woods. “And look over here. These marks look like someone either slid into the water or was dragged in.”

  “You think?” he asked, then he looked up and my eyes followed his flashlight’s beam. Where the branch had broken or been ripped off the tree, the cut looked relatively fresh. “I’ll call Mueller.”

  It took less than half an hour for Mueller to reach us, and by then he’d made calls of his own. One went out to a local guy with a boat who volunteered to do water searches for the sheriff’s department, another to a trained recovery diver.

  “You think he went in right about here?” Mueller asked, looking at the branch a couple of his guys were logging into evidence under the glare of the team’s portable lights. It would be examined for fingerprints, although the rough bark made it unlikely that we’d find any.

  “Well, it could be,” I said. “We’re thinking maybe he slipped on mud along the bank, and instinctively gripped the branch and tore it off while getting in the river. Or, if it wasn’t his idea to get into the water, he might have grabbed the branch when someone forced him in.”

  “Knowing where he might have gone in gives us a place to start,” Mueller said.

  Not long after, the guy with the boat showed up. We helped him unload the trailer, and then we pulled the drag bar he’d brought with him off his pickup’s roof. A triangle, five feet wide at the base, it had evenly spaced treble hooks hanging from chains.

  “Any idea how deep the river is here?” the boat’s owner asked.

  Mueller and Max considered that, and they figured around twenty feet. “Maybe some deeper. There are rapids about a mile down, but the current’s pretty calm here,” Max said. “If he’s here, we think he’s been in the water for at least twenty-four hours, most likely longer. Do we need to move downriver and look?”