Seeds of Evidence (9781426770838)

by White, Linda J.

  David forced his eyes open. “Who did this?” he asked as he pressed his hand over the wound.

  The man couldn’t talk.

  “Did you know him?”

  The man shook his head. Then he moved his hand, and his gesture sent a deep chill through David. The killer had a scar bisecting his face. Kit’s scar-faced man? Hector Lopez?

  “Hispanic?” David asked.

  The man nodded and then his eyes fluttered.

  “Oh, Jesus!” David cried out. The man’s eyes opened and he reached out a hand. David gripped it. “You stay with me, man, help’s coming,” and he held on, pressing one hand on the man’s wound and praying out loud, until lights and sirens pierced the darkness and medics appeared at his side.

  The phone ringing jarred Kit out of the book she was reading. “David?”

  But it wasn’t him. “We’ve got a dead man on the side of 13. Looks like a trucker—shot,” Roger Lee said. “Want to go?”

  She sat straight up. “Yes!”

  He gave her the location and she called Chris. “Meet me at the car when you’re ready.”

  David, where was David? She pulled on clothes while dialing his cell phone number. “C’mon, c’mon …” she said. When he didn’t answer, her mind began racing with fear.

  The lights from the emergency vehicles created a surreal atmosphere at the crime scene. David shoved his hands into his jeans pockets, fighting to keep from slipping into death’s dark despair.

  “So you just came upon the victim?” the trooper was asking.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Mind if we go through your vehicle?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “What were you carrying?”

  “Tomatoes. It’s empty now.” That night, David had forgotten his gun. He’d been mad at himself earlier. Now, he was grateful for that omission.

  Kit pulled up to the scene, her heart in her throat. Chris pulled up right behind her. A white box truck stood parked on the shoulder. Oh, God! It had C&R’s logo!

  But then she saw him. David was standing on the side of the road, next to a cop, his hands jammed in his pockets, his face drawn. “We don’t know him,” she cautioned Chris, who nodded his agreement.

  Flashing their credentials, they made their way past the cops standing around looking curiously detached, to the body on the ground. “Who’s the vic?” Chris asked a trooper.

  “We don’t know. Wallet’s gone. Guy over there spotted him.” He gestured toward David.

  Kit walked over to the body, which the medics had covered with a sheet. The air felt sticky hot and the crushed weeds smelled sweet, like cut hay. Locusts buzzed all around. Later, she would remember the sound of them, and the smell of the grass, and the oppressive humidity.

  Dropping to one knee, Kit gingerly lifted the sheet to look at the victim’s face. As she did, her heart stopped. She inhaled sharply. “Oh, God!” she said, “I know this man.”

  The shock of seeing Connie Jester’s husband, Bob, dead on the side of the road, made Kit’s head spin. “I know him,” she said, standing up. The sound of her own voice seemed strange, distant, like it belonged to someone else. The ground seemed to move under her feet. The trooper put a hand on her elbow to steady her.

  “Are you OK? Who is he?”

  “He’s from Chincoteague. Bob Stewart. He’s a trucker. Dear God!” Kit put her hand to her face. Regaining control, she looked at the officer. “Who’s in charge?” The man nodded toward the trooper standing near David. That’s when she noticed David’s eyes were fixed on her.

  She walked toward them, fighting to regain composure. “His name is Bob Stewart. He’s from Chincoteague. His wife, Connie Jester, is a friend of mine.” The words spilled out.

  David’s eyes widened.

  “Wonder where his truck is?” The trooper took a deep breath. “OK. You want to come with us to notify her?”

  David’s chest tightened. Connie’s husband! The dead man was Connie’s husband?

  “So you were just driving and saw him?” Chris questioned David as if he didn’t know him.

  “Yes, sir. I saw something out of the corner of my eye that struck me as odd. I couldn’t just go on. I turned around up there,” David motioned up the road, “and came back at it. Then I saw it was a hand. And so I stopped.”

  “There’s nothing in his truck,” a trooper said, coming over to them. “He’s clean.”

  “All right,” the other trooper replied. “You have any more questions?” he asked Chris.

  “Not tonight. Just be sure we can contact him.”

  The trooper nodded. “Guess that’s all, sir. You OK to drive?”

  David responded positively, but as he climbed back in his truck, his hands and knees were shaking.

  It took David thirty minutes to return the truck to the C&R Enterprises property and pick up his Jeep. Then he didn’t know where to go or what to do. But he knew he could not go back to that motel room. He’d feel like a caged animal. He drove by the offsite, and then Kit’s motel. Her car wasn’t at either place. Didn’t the trooper ask her if she’d go with him to notify Connie? Why was everything so blurry in his head?

  Lacking a better plan, he drove to Chincoteague. When he got there, he turned his SUV toward Chicken City Road. He knew where Connie lived—he’d picked up paint at her house once. But he’d never met her husband, didn’t know what he looked like, until tonight. And tonight, he’d watched him die.

  Kit had seen death before. She’d even been on a notification team one time, when a coworker had died of a heart attack at the office. She’d gone with the boss to inform the widow.

  But this was different.

  Connie’s house looked dark except for a small lamp in the living room window, no doubt intended to welcome Bob home, and the side porch light.

  Kit felt a physical ache in her chest as she and the trooper walked up to the front door. Connie’s expression as she opened it indicated instant recognition—and horror.

  “What’s happened? What’s happened?” she said.

  The trooper held his hat in his hand. “Ma’am, we have some bad news.” The next half hour felt surreal. Connie seemed in shock. She kept crying over and over, “Bob, oh, Bob! Not Bob! Oh, please, not Bob!” Her grief filled the house, a keening wail that plucked the heart like a harp. “He’s gone! My Bob is gone!”

  Professional or not, Kit cried. She cried for Connie. She cried for Bob. She cried for all the pain and grief that death had caused.

  The trooper left. Kit stayed. She held Connie in her arms. Helped her call the children. Phoned Connie’s minister and a neighbor. And prayed … prayed more than she had in years, because she knew no one but God could touch a grief that raw.

  There were four or five cars parked outside Connie’s house. David scanned the cluster of vehicles. Then he saw it: the Crown Vic Kit had been driving.

  He felt foolish, but he wanted to be near her, wanted more than anything to hold her in his arms, as if somehow that would diffuse the feelings that were raging inside. It was impossible, he knew.

  At least he could be close. He parked down the street. Turned off his engine and just watched as a few people arrived. As the front door opened and the warmth of the light inside spilled into the night. As the door closed again and the house encircled the mourners inside.

  Outside in his car, the dark night enveloped David. He shivered in his aloneness, his stomach a knot of emotion. He looked up through the windshield, into the night. The stars he could see moved across toward the west. He sagged back in his seat, closed his eyes, trying to make sense of it all, trying to understand, trying to let go of what he had seen, and the memories it had stirred.

  He couldn’t. Finally, he turned to the One who had set the stars on their courses and made the Heavens resound with his thunder. And acknowledging the ache in his chest, he let the tears fall. Hours later, David drove back to the Main Street house, sat on the porch, and watched the dawn arrive. His cell phone rang.


  “I didn’t wake you, did I?” Kit asked.

  His heart jumped at her voice. “No.”

  “Look, can we meet? You and Chris and I?”

  “Where?”

  “I’m on Chincoteague.”

  “Me, too.”

  “You are? OK, how about your place, in an hour?”

  “Fine,” he said. His palms were sweaty when he hung up the phone.

  Connie’s last words haunted Kit: “God’s hand is in this, honey, I know it. He’s in control. Somehow, he’s going to get me through. But honey, life is shorter than you think. Don’t give up the fight for joy.”

  The fight for joy. Right, Kit thought. How could Connie even think about joy in the face of Bob’s murder? Where’s the justice in that? Much less joy! Good grief. What was Connie thinking?

  Oh, God, she breathed as she inserted the key in the ignition of the bureau’s Crown Vic, there’s so much I don’t know. None of this makes sense. I’d like to believe that you’re in control. But God! Why Bob? Of all the truckers … why Bob?

  She drove toward the Main Street house, her stomach churning, questions fluttering like butterflies through her mind. What would Connie do without Bob? Who killed him? How was David? Why did he have to go through this again?

  Kit jogged up the front porch steps at her grandmother’s old house. David invited her in without meeting her eyes. Her heart grew tender the minute she saw him. She wanted to ask him how he was doing after this latest encounter with death. What was he thinking? What was he feeling?

  There was no time for any of that. Chris arrived seconds later, dressed, Kit thought, like a stockbroker—or an undertaker—in his black suit and fresh white shirt. He looked like it was the middle of the day, not 8:00 a.m. after a late night. “I brought breakfast,” he said, setting a box of doughnuts and cartons of yogurt down on the coffee table.

  David had brewed coffee. Kit and Chris filled their mugs and returned to the living room where David waited. “I know who did it,” he said, running his hand through his hair. Energy emanated from him like an electrical field.

  “Who?” the others said in unison.

  David met Kit’s eyes. “The cops asked me if Bob had said anything. I said ‘no’ and that was true. But when I asked him if he knew who shot him he motioned with his hand, like this.” David traced a horizontal line across his right cheek. “I think that means a scar. I think … I think Hector Lopez shot him.”

  Kit’s eyes widened. “Why? Why would he?”

  “For his truck. I’ve been thinking about this all night. The cops have the one from the scene of the trooper shooting, you know? Now Lopez needs a replacement. So he follows one, or he pretends to be broken down on the side of the road and signals one to pull over. Bob was goodhearted, right? So he stops, and Lopez shoots him. Now he has the truck he needs.”

  Kit sagged back on the couch.

  “Good theory,” Chris said.

  “It’s more than a theory.”

  “But C&R has loads of trucks!” Kit protested.

  David shook his head. “This is something extracurricular that Hector is doing. Something beyond what he’s doing for C&R. Didn’t you say the owner seemed straight up?”

  “Yes, but …”

  “But nothing. He needs a truck for his illegal activity … we think for trafficking people. Or running drugs. Now he has one. Or at least, the parts for one. He might run it through the chop shop.”

  “What do we do now?” Kit asked. “We need proof he killed Bob.”

  “Maybe something will show up on the forensics,” Chris suggested.

  Kit grimaced.

  “I’ll get it out of Lopez. You wire me up. I’ll get him to implicate himself,” David said.

  “No, David …”

  Chris interrupted. “Yes, it’s time.”

  Kit’s head felt tight with tension. “What? No!” But the two men kept talking, batting around ideas for a recording device David could wear. Through her mind flashed the look on Connie Jester’s face, her devastation at the loss of Bob, and her sobs. She thought about death and grief and loss and the inevitable separation all that caused.

  If David wore a wire it would put him at even greater risk than he was in now. Because if Hector Lopez found out …

  She zoned back in when she heard the word “iPod.”

  “They’ve seen me with mine many times,” David was saying. “I think that would work.”

  “All right, I’ll take care of it.”

  “Wait. I think we should see if we can get wiretap authorization without that,” Kit said again.

  “No. Lopez has been talking with me about making a bigger run,” David said. His words jabbed at an invisible foe. “Twice, maybe three times the money. What’s he talking about? Drugs? People? Who knows? Now he’s got a truck. It’s time to move.”

  Chris interjected. “He’s right. I’ll go talk to the tech. I may have to get Quantico involved if modifying an iPod is beyond his capability, and that could take some time.”

  Kit’s face flushed. She was losing control of the conversation. “Maybe they can’t even do it.”

  “So let them tell me it can’t be done.”

  “It’s an unnecessary risk!”

  “It’s going to be fine,” David said, with finality.

  “I’ll go get started now,” Chris left.

  21

  KIT TURNED TO DAVID TO PROTEST AGAIN. THEN HER CELL PHONE RANG. She looked at the caller ID and felt a rush of surprise. She put the phone to her ear. “Ben!” she said, responding to the voice of her friend from D.C. “How are you?” She saw David’s eyes shift away from her. Then he left the room, headed for the kitchen.

  Kit pressed the phone to her ear. “I’m all right. Yes, it was horrible. What a shock.” Kit hesitated. “But how did you know?” She grew silent, listening, and every sentence Ben Heitzler spoke felt like a surgeon’s knife cutting deeper and deeper, lancing some deep boil in her soul, releasing the poison. She felt her head grow tight. A strange mixture of fear and … and what … hope? … churned in her. She sat down on the couch, and pressed her hand to her forehead as she concentrated on her friend’s words. Questions spilled out of her: when? how?

  Then she quietly closed her cell phone.

  She walked out to the kitchen. David stood with his two hands braced on the table, his head down. “Why didn’t you tell me?” she said, softly.

  He straightened up and faced her. “I didn’t want you to think I did it for you.” He rubbed his hands on his pants like they were sweaty.

  “Ben said you spent hours together. Over several days.” Her heart was drumming.

  “That’s what you wanted me to do, right?”

  “Will you tell me about it?” When he didn’t respond, she repeated herself. “Please?”

  “I had a doctor’s appointment in D.C. I still had that piece of paper you gave me, the one with Ben’s name on it. On impulse I called him. Told him you’d given me his number. Told him I had a lot of questions about God and all. He had tickets to a Redskins preseason game and he invited me to go with him.” David looked down and traced an invisible pattern on the kitchen table with his forefinger.

  “And?”

  “It was a great game. ’Skins won, 21-18.”

  Kit waited, blood pounding in her temples.

  “We talked during the game, after the game, in the car, at his house. We were up most of the night, talking about God. What he said made sense to me, Kit. More than sense. It brought everything into focus for me.”

  Her heart grew tight. What was he saying? What had happened?

  David’s eyes were shining. “It’s like this: when you’re working a homicide, you have bits and pieces of information. Solving it is like putting together a puzzle. That’s what Ben did for me. He put together the puzzle.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’ve been pretty churned up inside. Upset that I shot that kid. That seemed to stir up a lot of other stuff: anger tow
ard my stepfather, anger toward my mother.

  “Ben’s a good guy. I started telling him about all this and he just took it all in, you know? I thought he’d be judgmental, but no. He listened. He understood.

  “And then he started talking to me about sin and how we all struggle with it. We hurt other people … other people hurt us. I could see how this sin nature he talked about was real, and it had been driving me.

  “My stepfather,” David tapped his finger on the table, “when he was drunk, he’d beat my mother. The last time he tried to do it, I was seventeen. I nearly killed him.” David looked at Kit, as if gauging her reaction. “The judge gave me a choice: the Navy or juvenile detention. I took the Navy.”

  “I’m so sorry,” she said, a tremor in her voice.

  “I’ve been carrying around hatred for that man all these years. I knew it was wrong, but I didn’t know what to do about it, you know? There, at his house, Ben explained the cross to me. I’d never understood that before. He told me God could forgive me for that hatred, if I confessed it. But do you know what else he said? He nailed it. He told me that, at some point, I needed to not only let go of my anger, but forgive my stepfather. For my own sake, if nothing else.

  “He said he’d read a quote somewhere.” David closed his eyes, trying to make sure the words came out right. “ ‘Unforgiveness is a poison you drink hoping someone else will die.’ ”

  Kit’s stomach tightened.

  “My stepfather was an inadequate man desperately trying to control his world through violence and alcohol. I knew enough to stay away from booze, but anger was controlling me. Ben told me how to stop that cycle of destruction. We prayed. Asked God to take care of it. Told him I’d trust him. And then, it was … it was amazing. It all just fell away.”

  She paced now, agitation rising within her. “It could come back.”

  “Ben told me that it might, but that every time I give it to God, it’ll have less power over me.” David cleared his throat. “I was so tired of being angry! For the first time in my life, I tasted something,” he groped for words, “something pure and peaceful. I want more of it, whatever it is. I’ve talked to Ben at least once a day ever since then. I have a thousand questions. I can keep Ben busy for a long, long time.”