She nods to him.
“A finger or a . . . something like that. Whatever was . . . around. Whatever we . . . could find.”
“This is . . . difficult . . . to talk . . . about,” Sam says. “You’re . . . doin’ so . . . good, Caden.”
“Mama’s proud of you, buddy,” Marybeth says. “You’re really helping the police with their investigation. Makes you a good citizen and a hero.”
The fact that at her age Mariah was the sexually assertive one and had already had her sexuality awakened somehow makes me wonder if she was the victim of child molestation. And if so, by whom? I know it doesn’t necessarily mean that, but it could.
“Did she say who else had done that to her before?” I ask.
He shakes his head.
“Is that why she was running away?” I ask.
He shrugs. “Think to get away from . . . Brett and his mom, maybe. She . . . she wanted me to go with her, but . . .” he shakes his head. “I couldn’t. Couldn’t leave . . . my family.”
“Where was she running to?”
He shrugs. “Don’t know. Just away. Back home to get her things and then . . . I don’t know. She said we could stay with some of her friends or somebody. Maybe her grandparents—think she really wanted to meet them. Or Miss Nadine. She said she’d take us in. ”
“We?”
“Me and her.”
“I thought you weren’t going?”
“I wasn’t. I didn’t. She just wanted me to.”
255
“Well?” Reggie says.
Sam and I are in her office.
It’s just the three of us. Arnie and Keisha are in Atlanta working surveillance with GBI on Trace, Ashley, and Irvin. Jessica is going over the DNA results and will have a report for us soon.
It’s later that afternoon. Sam is tired and I need to get her home soon, but she insisted we meet with Reggie first.
Reggie watched the interview video while I took Sam to lunch.
“He . . . seemed to be . . . tellin’ . . . the . . . truth,” Sam says.
I nod. “I agree.”
“Me too,” Reggie says.
“I . . . found it a . . . little . . . odd,” Sam says, “how . . . cooperative his . . . mother . . . was.”
“I did too,” I say. “We’re living in a post-forensics and investigative techniques world. She’d have to know Caden was a suspect. Is she that naive or is it something else?”
“That’s . . . what . . . I won . . .der . . . ed,” Sam says.
“Just seemed like a good citizen, eager to help to me,” Reggie says.
“Maybe so,” I say. “But you’d at least think she’d have a lawyer.”
Sam nods.
“Before I forget,” Reggie says. “Got a call from GBI. Still haven’t gotten anywhere with the drive-by but they’re fairly certain Little Swag or operatives acting on his behalf are responsible.”
I nod.
“Means I’m tellin’ you there’s nothin’ to tell you, but . . . just thought I’d tell you.”
I nod. “Thank you.”
“Okay,” she says. “Back to . . . So we thinkin’ maybe Mariah was a victim of molestation?”
“It’s . . . possible,” Sam says. “Sometimes . . . kids . . . are more . . . sexual . . . earlier than . . . average and . . . it’s not . . . the result . . . of molestation.”
“We need to talk to her pediatrician,” Reggie says, making herself a note on the pad on her desk. “If she had been molested and it’s related to her murder . . . it’d most likely be Trace or Irvin, right?”
I nod.
“Or Brett,” Sam says.
Reggie shakes her head. “Crime’s too sophisticated for a ten-year-old boy.”
“Hate . . . to . . . sound . . . like . . . certain members . . . of the . . . Boulder . . . po . . . lice . . . de . . . part . . . ment, but . . . Brett commits . . . the . . . crime . . . and Ash . . . ley covers . . it . . . up.”
Reggie nods. “Now that’s possible. I can buy that. Still think it’s more likely Trace or Irvin, but . . . this scenario is at least possible.”
A tap on Reggie’s open door and Jessica appears.
“We’ve got him,” she says.
“Who?” Reggie asks.
Jessica comes the rest of the way into the office, standing near where Sam and I are sitting across from Reggie’s desk.
“The DNA results,” she says, holding up a sheaf of papers. “There are only two findings that are really relevant. Everything else is just what you’d expect.”
“Well, let’s hear it.”
“The ropes used on Mariah,” she says. They only have Ashley’s and Trace’s DNA on them. No one else’s.”
Reggie nods. “That’s—”
“Mariah’s, of course, but I mean they were on her, so figured you knew that.”
“They did it,” Reggie says. “We follow the evidence and that’s what the evidence says.”
“Evidence says he did it,” Jessica says. “I mean, sure she could’ve been involved or helped him cover it up, but . . . he definitely did it.”
“What makes you say that?” Reggie asks. “What else did they find?”
“The stains that looked like dried semen on Mariah’s bedsheets, well it was. It was Trace’s semen. Trace left traces of himself in his own daughter’s bed.”
“No wonder he quit cooperating,” Reggie says. “Fired Merrill and isn’t willing to come back for another interview. He did it. We have enough for a warrant now. We’re gonna actually be able to clear this thing. Maybe the surveillance will turn up additional evidence, but we have enough to make an arrest now.”
We nod.
“And . . . it fits . . . with the other . . . evidence . . . you . . . have,” Sam says.
“Fuck yeah,” Reggie says. “We’re gonna get a child molester and murderer off the street. That feels good. Damn good.”
Sam is about to say something else, but Reggie’s phone rings and she snatches it up.
While she’s listening, she points at me, nods, though she has an alarmed expression on her face, and mouths Go home. Now.
I jump up as she returns the receiver to its cradle.
“Chris made bail,” she says. “I don’t know how, but . . . we’ll take care of things here and figure out what to do about him, but for now . . . go be with your family.”
256
I have an eventful drive home. At least mentally.
The twenty miles or so between the sheriff’s department in Port St. Joe and our home in Wewa is, like most of the rural highways in North Florida, straight, flat, and largely empty, which gives me plenty of time to think.
After telling Anna what’s going on and making sure she and Daniel are both armed, I turn my mind to the most pressing questions of the moment, as Sam sleeps in the passenger seat beside me.
Who would’ve posted bail for Chris and why? If he has not friends or family, no resources of his own, how would he get someone to do it for him? Was it someone who he knows too much about, someone concerned he’d use evidence on them to cut a deal? If not, what other motive could there be?
And then it hits me.
I know who it is and why—or think I do, and if I do, if I’m right, then it can be only one of two possible motives, and I don’t know which one is frightening.
I call Merrill, tell him what’s going on, and ask him to go see if he can persuade the bail bondsman into revealing who posted Chris’s bail—something I’m reasonably confident not only because Merrill does skip traces for him but because of how persuasive Merrill can be.
With that underway, I turn my attention to what Caden said during our interview with him, what it means, the fact that Trace’s DNA was found in Mariah’s bed, and I begin to see how the murder of Mariah might have taken place and what the various evidence we’ve uncovered could mean in terms of confirming and proving it.
When I get home, I hug and hold my girls and then help them pack.
“Who’s wants
to go on a little vacation?” I say.
“And stay in a hotel?” Johanna asks.
“Yes.”
“So we’ll still be in the same room with you and Anna?”
“Yes.”
“And we can jump on the bed?”
“Absolutely,” I say. “That’s what hotel beds are for.”
“I do. I do.”
“We’ll see if Papa Jack and Verna and Uncle Merrill can go too.”
“Yay. And Za too?”
“Sure.”
“How about Sam and Daniel?”
“I’ll ask them, but I think Sam may not quite be ready for this much fun and excitement yet.”
After booking three random hotel rooms in Mexico Beach under Verna’s previous name and paying with her credit card that still has that name on it, and getting Anna and the girls settled into our room and Dad and Verna in their adjoining one, Merrill and I get back on Highway 98 and head west to put my theory to the test.
“If we been lookin’ all this time and she right here in our backyard . . .” Merrill says.
“I could be wrong.”
“Not according to Keller you ain’t.”
Keller Branch is the bail bondsman who bonded out Chris and according to his records the person who put up the money for it was Nancy Drury.
Nancy Drury is an alias for Randa Raffield. She’s not in some non-extradition country sippin’ on sex on the beaches. She’s right here.
And I think she’s at her dad’s.
It would explain why he keeps calling me to check in, to find out what I know or if I have a lead on where she is. He hasn’t been looking for her, he’s been trying to protect her. It would also explain how she was able to vanish so completely and how she would have been able to handle Daniel—both of which she would have needed help with.
And now we’re racing over to Seaside to see if I’m right.
“Even if I’m right about her putting up the bail money,” I say, “I could be wrong about her being with her dad.”
“We’a soon find out,” Merrill says.
“She’s my daughter, John,” Jerry Raffield says. “I had to help her, had to take her in and . . . I was just so glad to have her back in my life. I . . . I thought she was dead for so long . . . to get her back was like having a child come back from the dead. Who wouldn’t want that?”
I understand what he’s saying and why he would do it—something I wouldn’t have nearly as well before I had Johanna.
Thinking of Johanna reminds me of Chris holding his gun to her precious little head and fills me with a deep red rage that makes me want to kill him.
The fire of my rage is extinguished by my overwhelming desire to be with her, to have her in my arms, to be there protecting her than over here chasing down Jerry’s daughter.
“This whole time,” he adds, “I—you’ll appreciate this—the entire time she’s been here with me I keep thinking of the parable of the prodigal son and what the father said, ‘My son who was dead is alive again.’”
I nod. “I get it. I do. But we still have to take her in. Is she here?”
He shakes his head. “She’s not back yet.”
“From?”
“Over your way,” he says. “I tried to get her not to go, but . . . I can’t get her to do or not do anything she doesn’t want to. I begged her.”
“She went to hire Keller Branch to post bail for Chris Taunton,” I say.
He nods. “I gathered it was something like that.”
“What else was she going to do?” I ask. “She should’ve been back quite a while ago.”
“I don’t want to think about it,” he says, “but . . . I’m afraid she might be planning to do something to him. You’ve got to stop her. Please. She’d be doing it for you, for what she feels like she owes you. She’d see it as settling her account with you. Please stop her. Protect her from herself. Please.”
After having the Walton County Sheriff’s Department take Jerry into custody, I feel sad and guilty.
Jerry had lost Randa and it devastated him, but then he got her back. Now he is losing her again—and not just her, but a big part of his life as well.
Now Merrill and I are racing back toward Wewa to try to stop Randa from killing Chris.
The irony is not lost on us.
“I can drive slower,” Merrill says. “You could not call Reggie about sending a deputy over to check on him. Just seems surreal to be tryin’ to save the bastard who had a gun to Johanna’s head yesterday. And tried to have you killed not so long ago.”
“It is,” I say. “Surreal. But . . . don’t look at it as saving him so much as catching her. Just finishing what we set out to do.”
“But we can still do that after she puts one in Chris’s brainpan.”
“I know,” I say. “But . . . I can’t just let her kill him.”
“Only way that makes any sense is if you want him for yourself—or your best friend and Johanna’s godfather.”
I smile. “Sorry.”
He laughs and shakes his head. “How many times you wanted his sorry ass dead just in the past twenty-four hours?”
“Too many to count,” I say.
“But when an opportunity arises for that very thing to happen your ass is workin’ to stop it.”
“Yeah.”
“Don’t ever change, babe,” he says. “Don’t ever fuckin’ change.”
I call Reggie and explain the situation to her and ask her to have a deputy check on Chris and stay with him until we get there.
When I’m off the phone, Merrill says, “Let me ask you somethin’. You feel bad for having Jerry arrested, don’t you?”
I nod. “I do. Whatta you want me to say? I’m sorry, but I do. Guy got his daughter back from the dead.”
“Made a deal with the devil to do it,” he says. “And the devil is his daughter.”
“She may or may not be the devil, but she is his daughter.”
“Like I said, don’t ever change, babe. Whatever you do, don’t ever change.”
257
The small house is dark and quiet.
I’m set up on the front door in the living room. Merrill is set up on the back door in the kitchen.
We’re in Chris’s tiny, dilapidated rental on Second Street waiting to see if Randa shows.
It’s late. We’ve been waiting a while.
All around us the town has shut down for the night. There is no traffic on Second Street and only the occasional, lone vehicle on Main.
Earlier, Reggie moved Chris to a secure, secret location. Since we arrived, we’ve just been waiting.
Reggie and a deputy are hidden at each end of the street.
I shouldn’t be in here. Neither should Merrill. But I reminded Reggie she owed me for what I had done for her mom. I basically blackmailed her because I had to be here when Randa walked in—and because I knew Merrill needed to be after she stole Daniel right out from underneath him.
Chris’s mostly empty, about-to-collapse little wooden house is a sad reflection of his own implosion. Barren, hollowed out, on borrowed time.
It smells of neglect, of the years-old, baked-in sweat and cigarette smoke of previous tenants, of the mildew of damp, rotting boards, and the hint of a septic system not working properly.
It’s the fringe smell of desperation and decay, and indicates just how far the once hot shot Tallahassee attorney has fallen.
I’m missing my girls so much I’m about to tell Merrill we should call it a night, when I hear the unmissable metallic ticks and scratches of a lock being picked. They’re coming from the back door.
I move across the small living room and position myself against the wall next to the opening to the kitchen.
In another few moments, the lock is picked and the back door creaks open.
And Randa is following the beam of a small penlight into the room.
She’s only taken a few steps inside the kitchen when Merrill steps from behind the antique GE refrige
rator and places the barrel of his gun to the back of her head.
“Drop it,” he says.
“You’re surrounded,” I say.
“Okay,” she says and drops both her light and the murder kit she’s carrying.
I snap on the bare bulb overhead light as Merrill subdues her and zip ties her wrists behind her back.
She smiles when she sees us. “Should’ve known,” she says. “Thought I could be in and out before you even realized I was the one who posted bail.”
I withdraw a pair of latex gloves from my pocket and put them on. Stepping over to where her penlight and small leather bag are, I pick them up.
A quick glance in the bag reveals a small pistol, syringes, and several small vials with no identification on them.
“Seriously,” she says. “No way, y’all’ve already had a hearing to—”
“Merrill was able to obtain the information on his own,” I say.
“I owed you one,” Merrill says from behind her.
“You did at that,” she says. “At least one.”
I place her bag and light on the leaning lemon formica table, take off my gloves, and pull out my phone to call for a deputy to take her into custody.
“Don’t suppose you’d give a girl a head start,” she says. “I was here to do you a favor after all.”
I shake my head and smile at her.
“I’ll tell you who killed Mariah,” she says.
“I already know,” I say.
258
“Mariah’s murder was what a lot of people thought JonBenét’s was,” I say.
Arnie and Keisha are back from Atlanta. They, along with me, Reggie, Jessica, and the district attorney—a middle-aged man named Houston Reynolds—are in Roger Garrett’s rental house one last time.
We’re here at my request. We were supposed to be meeting in Reggie’s office to go over the case against Trace Evers and to coordinate with Dekalb County on his arrest, but I’ve asked them back out here to hear me out during a crime scene walkthrough before we do.
“Many if not most people, especially early on, thought JonBenét’s death was unintentional and that the crime scene was staged, part of an elaborate coverup, but you only have to look at JonBenét’s autopsy report to know that what that poor child suffered through was a horrific, brutal assault and murder. Unlike, Mariah, JonBenét had defensive wounds. She was struggling against her killer, fighting for her life. We see none of that with Mariah.”
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