February's Regrets (Larry Macklin Mysteries Book 4)

by A. E. Howe

  Nowhere does time move more slowly than in a hospital. After what seemed like an eternity, word came that they had stabilized Tonya, but that she’d sustained a massive blow to the back of her head and was in a coma. The doctors wanted to do an MRI and half a dozen other tests that had strange acronyms before they would feel confident that they completely understood her condition and could give a prognosis.

  At three o’clock we finally received some good news. The doctors thought it was unlikely that Tonya had been sexually interfered with. I could see the relief on Shantel’s face.

  “Now we just have to pray for her to come back to us,” Shantel said.

  “Do you want me to drive you home?” I asked her.

  “I can’t go.”

  “You can’t sleep in the ICU, and you won’t get any rest in the waiting room. Why don’t I take you to a motel?”

  She smiled for the first time in hours. “I’ve got a place in the morgue,” she said.

  I had no idea what to say to that. My mind was too tired for riddles.

  “A friend works downstairs and told me I can borrow the couch in her office.”

  “If you’re sure.”

  She hugged me. “Thank you.”

  “I’m glad we found her.”

  Chapter Eight

  My phone woke me up after a few hours’ sleep. I didn’t get it the first time, but it started ringing again almost immediately. “I Shot the Sheriff”—my new ringtone for Dad.

  “Morning.”

  “It’s almost noon.”

  “Almost.”

  “I heard you created a pile of work for us.” His tone was flat. “You’re quite the hero.” His voice was still deadpan.

  “Too early.”

  “I’m kidding. Not about the hero part. The Democrat’s online headline says ‘Deputy Rescues Kidnapped Girl.’ They even spelled your name right. I can just hope that a few of the less educated voters get mixed up and think it was me.”

  He was obviously in a good mood. I could never decide whether he was easier to deal with when he was his normal grumpy self or when he was in a good mood. I think I preferred grumpy.

  “The crime scene techs are out scouring Emery’s place. Pete’s in charge, obviously. And, unlike you, he didn’t sleep in. I’ll authorize the hours if you want to work on it too.”

  I took a minute to think about it. Was I going to get sucked back into the department? Maybe. But I really did want to work the case. “Yeah, I want to.”

  “Done,” he said, hanging up.

  I crawled out of bed, cleaned up quickly, fed Ivy even quicker and was back at ol’ Ray’s by one-thirty. Both of our crime scene vans were parked out front and Pete was napping in his car.

  “Morning,” I said, tapping on Pete’s window. He’d apparently heard me walk up because he didn’t move except to open one eye.

  “You need better moccasins if you’re going to sneak up on me.”

  “And if you’re trying to hide, you need to figure out how to keep the windows from fogging up,” I pointed out.

  He rolled his window down. “I got up early. After you kept me out late on a very exciting date. Get in.”

  I had to move the flotsam and jetsam of a dozen carryout meals in order to find the passenger seat.

  “They should be finishing up soon,” Pete said, nodding at the house.

  “Dad put me on the case.”

  “Must be nice to have friends in high places,” he responded, sounding more like my old nemesis Matt Greene than like my old partner.

  “Okay, we have got to clear the air.”

  “Clear away,” he said soberly.

  “You’re pissed at me for resigning.”

  “Bingo.”

  “Why? This is not what I was meant to be. And I think last month proved it. I arrested a DEA agent and almost got my dad killed.”

  “Bullshit! You made a couple mistakes. Yes, we deal with high-risk situations and when we make a mistake, the consequences can be serious. Fine. But we’re human and we’re going to make mistakes. You just have to accept that. You’re damned good at this,” he said, waving his arms toward the vans. “As good as I am.”

  “No, I’m not. You want to be a deputy and you’re good at it. I don’t want to be in a job where a mistake can cost someone their life.”

  He jabbed his finger at me. “Exactly. You’re being a coward. Someone else is going to have your job, and that someone is going to be a human being, just like you, which means they’re going to make mistakes, just like you would. You aren’t stopping the mistakes from happening, you’re just shielding yourself from criticism.

  “You might remember that I once made a mistake that almost cost Matt his life. I was stuffing my fat face while a fellow officer was being shot at not half a mile away. A report was made, a reprimand was given. And you know what I did? I sucked it up and took the humiliation. I could have run off to some other county or police department. I had to work with Matt for years, taking all his insults and nasty looks. And you know what the worst part of it was? In my heart, I knew his anger was justified.” He stopped, breathless from his tirade.

  “So I’m a coward. What’s that to you?”

  “You’re my friend. If someone is going to make a mistake and possibly get me killed, I want it to be a friend.” Pete mumbled the last part, as though embarrassed to admit it.

  His words stung a bit, but I was glad we were finally talking about it. “I’m sorry that I didn’t talk to you before I resigned. What do they say in AA? One day at a time? For now, for this case, let’s just pretend that everything is back to normal,” I said, putting out my hand. After a moment, Pete took it and shook.

  “I guess I can do that,” Pete said, looking out his window. “So what the heck do you think went on in there?”

  “I don’t know,” I said honestly. I told him about Ray groping Tonya at the Sweet Spot.

  “Sexually assaulting,” he corrected me.

  “Right. By the bartender’s account, she left first. Ray might have found her outside when he left and… what? Lured her back to his house? That seems unlikely after what went on inside the bar. Honestly, I think he would’ve had a hard time luring her even if he hadn’t just assaulted her. He’s not a very charming individual.”

  “So he hit her and then dragged her back to his house? Sober, he’d have a hard time doing that. Drunk, it’s even less likely. And he hasn’t been sober in decades,” Pete speculated.

  “Maybe she was walking past his house, needed help with something and decided to knock on the door?”

  “Possibly, but you said she left before him. And we found her phone in Ray’s house, and it’s working. If she needed help, she could have called one of her friends.”

  “Yeah, Jarvis would walk across molten glass to help that girl,” I said.

  “What aren’t we seeing?” Pete asked.

  “Why was Ray keeping her locked up?”

  “Maybe he just liked to look at her. Weirdos do weird things, that’s why we call them weirdos,” Pete said.

  “Thank you for that deep insight into deviant sexual behavior,” I said, enjoying being on good terms with Pete again.

  “Maybe we’ll just have to wait until one or both of them are conscious.”

  “Even when they wake up, it’s going to be iffy whether we get the real story. He’ll probably lie to us and, with Tonya’s head injuries, she’s unlikely to recall the time around the incident,” I despaired.

  “I’m going to ask Dr. Darzi to look at her head wound. Maybe he can give us some idea of what caused it.”

  “Good idea. Damn. I just realized that we need to do a search of the area between the Sweet Spot and Ray’s house for evidence.”

  “Should have thought of that.” Pete opened his door and lifted his bulk out.

  I was close behind him. We made a quick stop at the house to let the techs know we’d be adding to their workload. Marcus was there and asked about Tonya and Shantel. His wife, Est
her, Shantel’s best friend, had gone to the hospital that morning, but he hadn’t heard anything from her. We told him what little we knew, then he went back to dusting for prints, looking lost without Shantel beside him.

  Pete and I started walking from the house to the Sweet Spot, trying to decide how large an area the techs should cover when they finished with the house. We kept our eyes open as we walked, hoping for the once-in-a-blue-moon chance of finding a piece of obvious evidence.

  “There wasn’t much blood,” Pete said to himself as much as to me.

  “Maybe he used a piece of concrete or a stick.”

  The neighborhood was poor and there was a lot of trash along the street. Bottles and cigarette packages, mostly, effluvium from the Sweet Spot’s customers. There was also a disturbing amount of condom wrappers, used condoms and the small plastic jewelry bags, about an inch square, used to distribute drugs. It would make anyone shudder to think what went on in this neighborhood.

  “Hard to believe that we can be walking through this crap and look up and see yards with children’s toys,” I said, voicing my frustration.

  “It’s not like we haven’t tried shutting the place down,” Pete said as his eyes scanned the ground, looking for anything that might have been related to Tonya’s assault.

  I was grateful for the weather, dry with a clear blue sky and cool air. Luckily it hadn’t rained since Tonya disappeared, so if we could find a weapon, there was a good chance there would still be DNA on it.

  We found a few items, but nothing that was clearly related to Tonya. We marked the area off with crime scene tape until the techs could take another look. Then I headed to the hospital in Tallahassee. The thirty-five-minute drive gave me an opportunity to try and make sense of everything, but by the time I arrived I still had nothing.

  I found Shantel in the ICU waiting area with other friends and family, including Jarvis. I took her down to the cafeteria for coffee and finally told her about Ray’s public groping of Tonya. She cried some more.

  “I just feel like I’ve let her down since she finished high school. I thought maybe I’d watched over her too close when she was a teenager. When she graduated, I thought she’d made it. Wouldn’t need me as much.”

  “You can’t regret the past.”

  Shantel looked up and gave me a little smile. “Look who’s talking.”

  “You know I did that on purpose.” I smiled back.

  “I got to pray. I know that. I can’t let my own self-pity cloud my judgment. I’ve got to get my head on straight and see Tonya through this. The doctor says that she’s going to be in a coma for a few more days, maybe longer. They think she’d come out of it if they let her, but they want to keep her there until the swelling in her head goes down. Doctors talk a lot. I think that’s to keep you from realizing how little they know.”

  “At least it wasn’t the Hacker,” I said, remembering Shantel’s earlier anxiety. She looked up at me.

  “Funny, I’d already forgotten about that. And yesterday it was my biggest fear.”

  “Did the report you saw actually mention the Hacker?”

  “By name. It listed a dozen points of comparison and at least four were ones that hadn’t been made public,” Shantel said.

  I thought that talking about the Hacker would be a good way to distract Shantel, even just for a few minutes.

  “They only had the one case, right? When was the body found?”

  “Almost a month ago. Near the county line.”

  “Was she from Adams County?”

  “Yeah, north side near the trailer park.”

  “Where Tonya’s friend Jenny’s boyfriend lives.”

  “And where Tonya was last known to be. Until you traced her to the Sweet Spot.”

  “That idiot Jenny could have saved us some time there. It felt like forever before she mentioned that important detail.”

  “In her airhead way, she thought she was helping Tonya. When I was Tonya’s age, I’d have been royally pissed at any friend of mine that ratted me out to my family.” Shantel gave a little laugh. “Jenny did call and ask about Tonya. She almost apologized.”

  “Funny thing is, I can’t stop thinking about the Hacker. What’s Dad going to do if he is back?”

  “Could he really be back? I mean, after all this time?”

  “Wouldn’t be the first time that a serial killer went dormant only to come back and kill again. There are people who think that the Zodiac Killer and the Unabomber are one in the same. A psychopath can fool you. They can learn to mimic human emotion. Blend in. The BTK Killer stopped for fourteen years.”

  “Now you’re just giving me the creeps.” She shuddered.

  “We can hope that the Leon County Sheriff’s Office is over-reacting. I just wish I could warn my dad. All the trouble between us came from me holding information back from him, and now I’m doing it again.”

  “I’d say I’m sorry for dragging you into this, but the fact is, I’m glad. I told you, our department needs you. You’re a great investigator.”

  I waived my hand dismissively. “Pete would have already been on top of it if they weren’t short-handed. Speaking of which, Pete’s asked Dr. Darzi to look at Tonya’s wounds from a forensic perspective.” I wanted to give Shantel a heads-up about that.

  “You think he can help pin this on that drunken monster?”

  “Pete thought he might give us some insight into what weapon we’re looking for and what type of attack she was subjected to.”

  “Pete’s good, but you and Pete together are better. Just think about it,” she said, standing up. “I’ve got to get back up to the ICU.”

  “Let me know how Tonya’s doing.”

  “I will. You keep me up on the investigation.”

  I gave her a thumbs up and, on that note, decided I’d better check in on our suspect. I went back upstairs to the cardiac wing, where it took me the better part of an hour to find someone who knew something.

  “It isn’t unusual for a patient who’s suffered a severe cardiac event to go into a coma. This patient has a number of risk factors that make his recovery problematic,” the doctor explained.

  “What’s the bottom line?”

  “I doubt he’ll regain consciousness in less than a couple of days. And any neurologic prognosis that I give you in the first seventy-two hours is going to be unreliable. There’s your bottom line. Come back in a couple of days,” he said and walked away.

  I called Pete and gave him an update.

  “I’ve officially released Ray Emery from custody,” he told me.

  “What?” I asked, louder than I intended.

  “Just until we see how his medical situation shakes out. Your dad told me to do it. It’s not like Ray’s going to hop a plane for South America. And your dad said the department couldn’t afford to be liable for his hospital bills,” Pete explained. “And I’ve tracked down the bartender from the Sweet Spot. We’re going to pick him up for questioning, if you want to meet us back at the office.”

  “Roger that.” I was looking forward to talking with the bartender when I had the home court advantage.

  Chapter Nine

  I got to the office before Pete and the bartender. It was awkward not having a desk to go to and not really wanting to talk to anyone, though Dill Kirby, the old desk sergeant, did congratulate me on finding Tonya and thwarting a kidnapping.

  While I was pacing around the hall in front of the interview room, a woman walked in. She looked familiar. She was well dressed and carried a small notebook. She smiled at me and I realized who it was—Officer Darlene Marks of the Calhoun Police Department.

  “Officer Marks. What are you doing here?”

  “Ex-deputy Macklin, I could ask you the same question. Rumor has it you quit,” she kidded me.

  “The news of my resignation has been somewhat exaggerated. I’m still a reserve deputy. Actually, I’m waiting to interview a witness. What about you?” I wasn’t going to let her get away with changing t
he subject.

  “I’m here for an interview too. For your job. Or maybe Matt’s,” she answered, smiling at my reaction.

  “Pete mentioned they might hire an investigator from outside the department. That’s a surprise.”

  “I guess with so many of you quitting, being killed or getting arrested all in the same month, the sheriff had to look outside the department,” Darl, as she liked to be called, shot back. It was all good-natured banter, though there was a slight edge to it. Darl had a way of getting under my skin.

  “Good luck.”

  “It’s not about luck.” She winked at me and headed for my father’s office. A couple minutes later I heard a huge bark come from that direction. Dad loved to have Mauser, his two-year-old, one-hundred-and-ninety-pound Great Dane, sit in on interviews. The rumor around the station was that Mauser actually approved all hires and promotions. After an interview, everyone always asked if you got a paws up or a paws down.

  Pete showed up a few minutes later with a very unhappy-looking bartender in tow.

  “I knew you were trouble,” he said to me before we even sat down.

  Pete introduced him. “This is one Thomas Jackson, AKA Topman, twenty-eight-years old and an employee of the Sweet Spot for the past eight months. He has several convictions on his record, though so far just misdemeanors for possession. Mr. Jackson, you realize that if you get a felony you won’t be able to be a bartender?”

  “It’s not like it’s my career or anything,” he said, looking down at the table.

  “No, I would imagine your actual career involves breaking the law on a regular basis. We may get back to that. Right now we’re interested in events that took place at the Sweet Spot on Saturday night.”

  “I don’t know anything about it.”

  “First of all, we didn’t tell you what event and, second, you’ve already let on that you saw this sexual assault take place,” I told him.

  His head jerked up. “I don’t know about any sexual assault. What the hell are you talking about?”

  “You told me that you saw ol’ Ray grope Tonya Williams at the Sweet Spot on Saturday night.”