Walk a Crooked Line (Jo Larsen Book 2)

by Susan McBride

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Jo sent Hank back downtown with the tobacco spit in an evidence baggie. He had instructions to hand off to Emma Slater, who already had Kelly Amster’s underwear to analyze for blood and semen. Her gut told her there was something incriminating, or Kelly wouldn’t have saved them. And now they’d have Jason Raine’s DNA for comparison.

  She wondered if Trey was running scared. Or was he feeling his oats after his power play last night? Did he think she’d lay off him after that? Didn’t he realize he’d only made her want to go after him and his boys that much harder?

  Hank had asked if she wanted him back at the station after the drop, and she’d told him to go on home. The commute to downtown Dallas and back would suck up a good couple of hours. It was nearing quitting time for the masses, too, which meant nobody’d be moving anywhere too quickly on any of the city’s roadways.

  Once her partner had gone, Jo got straight to work. She started with a property records search for Collin County, tracking down the acreage owned by Jason Raine’s parents. Sure enough, she found it, right off the Farm to Market Road, FM 455, on the eastern edge of Celina, just as he’d said.

  When she Googled the address, she got a beautiful bird’s-eye view of a good-sized home sitting a fair piece off the road, near a big pond. There was a large shed or barn with a fenced paddock, though she didn’t see any signs of cattle or horses. Trees and brush covered much of the undeveloped land, and Jo figured from Jason’s comments to Hank that much of it was used for hunting.

  She tried zooming in on an area that looked like a blackened circle within a ring of stones. It was centered inside the paddock, which appeared to cover a good quarter of an acre. Was it the site of the bonfire Jason had talked about, the one he, Trey, and the boys lit up a night or two before a game, beating their chests in order to get their blood pumping?

  She sat back in her chair and stared at the screen, trying to reconcile the public persona of Trey Eldon versus what she’d learned of him last night. Was he just a mixed-up young man who’d lost his mother too soon, or was he a spoiled rich kid who thought he could do whatever he wanted without consequences?

  “Detective?” a voice said almost tentatively, and Jo looked up.

  It was Bridget, holding a laptop that wasn’t Kelly Amster’s. She’d taken off her knitted hat with the peace sign patch, and her tangled, dark hair resembled a rat’s nest. There was a strain around her eyes that Jo hadn’t seen before.

  “Can I show you something?” she asked, but there was nothing in her face to make Jo figure it was anything but bad news. In fact, she appeared almost ill.

  “You okay?”

  “I don’t know.” Bridget shrugged as she moved Jo’s keyboard, then opened the laptop to set it on Jo’s desk. “I found a couple of the Posse’s Facebook posts archived that hadn’t been restricted. There’s one photo and a video put up by Dan Trent. I doubt he realized he’d had the privacy settings off, so they could be viewed by friends, not just the four members of the Posse. The video is from last fall. The photo’s only a few days old.”

  She tapped a couple of keys and then stepped back, arms wrapped around her belly.

  Jo leaned in, not sure what she was seeing at first. “It’s pretty dark,” she remarked, hardly able to discern much beside what looked like dashboard lights. “Where are they?”

  “Just keep watching.”

  She heard plenty before she saw anything worth a lick—lots of cursing and laughing, the noise of a beefed-up engine and Hank Williams Jr., wailing about all his rowdy friends comin’ over tonight, enough to nearly drown out the voices altogether. “This is how we do it, y’all,” someone hollered, and it sounded an awful lot like Jason Raine’s West Texas drawl. “Gotta break a few things to get pumped for a game!”

  With the near absence of light and grainy quality, it took a few seconds before she knew exactly what she was looking at. Whoever held the phone was recording from the back seat of a vehicle as it bumped down a dark road without headlamps. The camera jostled, and Jo made out a shadowy figure behind the driver, and then the bobbing head of the shotgun passenger.

  “Here it comes . . . here it comes,” someone whooped, and then the camera panned to the windshield as the headlights abruptly flipped on.

  Jo spotted the mouth of a driveway with a mailbox dead ahead on the right. She watched a hand raise a baseball bat, moving it aside as a window rolled down.

  “Go for it, bro!” someone cried, and the others joined in a drunken rebel yell.

  She glimpsed the shadowy backside of one of the riders, hanging out of the cab before she heard the distinct thwack of wooden bat against metal. The yelling grew louder as the headlights went dark.

  “Fucking thing went down flat!” someone yelled, then another, “Rock and roll!”

  Then it was over.

  Jo checked the timer. The whole thing had lasted a little less than a minute thirty, yet her heart kept on pounding.

  What the hell was that?

  She didn’t wait for Bridget to step in and replay it, clicking on that button herself.

  Silently, she viewed the video again in its entirety before she fully understood what she was seeing: four people in a moving vehicle, their voices clearly male, one of them swinging a bat and knocking down a mailbox. Where were they? Up in Collin County, in Celina or Weston? Jo didn’t recall any kind of similar vandalism around Plainfield last fall. She would have remembered that.

  “This was posted to the Posse’s closed group?” she asked Bridget, just to be sure.

  “Yes.” The young woman leaned over her again, tapping keys on the laptop. “It probably appeared on their news feed when it went up, which is why I could find it. But they didn’t delete it or change the privacy settings, even though they had to realize friends outside their group viewed it, ’cause it got a couple of dozen likes.”

  Jo had a feeling they didn’t mind at all that others saw it. Maybe that had been their intention, to show their peers that they were infallible. If anyone tried to turn them in, they could deny they were involved. No names were mentioned. There was nothing she’d seen to specifically identify them. Just because Dan Trent posted it didn’t make him guilty of anything criminal. Lots of kids shared videos and photos online of acts much worse than this.

  “You want to see the photo now?” Bridget asked.

  “Does it show more mailbox bashing?”

  “No, it’s way worse. I can’t believe something like this was out there, and no one reported them,” Bridget said, pulling up the image and then getting out of the way.

  When Jo saw the photograph, bile rose to her throat.

  Four figures stood front and center, backlit by the orangey glow of a big honking fire, all with bandanas tied around their heads, hiding half their faces. They either wore hoods or cowboy hats and dark shirts. Baseball bats rested in their arms like babies, and below them, at their feet, lay the carcasses of two dogs, tongues lolling, eyes lifeless.

  Another kick-ass roundup!!! the caption read.

  Roundup? Was that what they called it?

  Jo felt her stomach lurch.

  “Maybe it’s staged,” Bridget whispered. “Maybe they were just going for shock value, and the animals aren’t real.”

  “How about the photo?” Jo asked. “Is it real, I mean?”

  “I don’t see any signs of manipulation of the image.”

  Jo had to look away.

  Was this one of the “rituals” Jason had told Hank he and his posse went through on the nights before a game? Where they lit a bonfire and got “revved up”? Did they take dogs to the Raines’ hundred acres in Celina and then get their inner cavemen on by banging the crap out of the animals with wooden bats? Had they gone from bashing in mailboxes last fall to beating dogs senseless?

  She thought of Jason’s story of his missing mutt and kicked herself for feeling sorry for him. She’d thought he was a victim. Had he killed his own dog?

  Damn.
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  “Is this all you’ve got?” she asked, trying to focus on facts, not on her emotions.

  “Isn’t it enough?”

  When Jo glanced up, Bridget had tears in her eyes.

  “Did they really do that?” she asked. “Did they really murder them?”

  “I don’t know,” Jo told her. But she aimed to find out.

  “Can you make sure to back up everything?” she said, finding it easier to talk shop than address the horror of what she was seeing. “I don’t want to risk losing a file because that gang of juvenile delinquents gets wise and deletes everything or infects our system with some virus.”

  Like they had Kelly’s computer, if that was what had happened. Considering Trey’s dad had a cybersecurity company, Jo figured anything was possible.

  “I backed up everything already,” Bridget said grimly. “I just wish I could do more.”

  “You’re doing plenty,” Jo assured her. “Just keep at it, okay? If you find anything else online, let me know right away. You turn up anything in Kelly’s doc files?”

  “I’m sorting through, like, a year’s worth of homework and textbooks, and I’m still trying to break the ciphertext in the e-mails from Trey Eldon,” she said. “But it’s beyond a long shot that I can decrypt them without a key.”

  “I think he was threatening her,” Jo remarked, as her gaze lingered on the dark image of the masked posse with their battered victims. Had Kelly seen this photo or others like it, enough to be convinced that Trey and his pals would harm her if she didn’t toe the line?

  “I’ll forward the AV and JPEG files to you, Detective,” Bridget said, reaching for her laptop. “But I need to get this back to my desk.”

  “Yeah, okay,” Jo told her, then looked at the clock and realized what time it was. “No, wait, it’s not okay. You should go home. There’s a very real thing called burnout in this business.”

  Bridget shut the laptop and picked it up, hugging it against her. “I want to get these guys. Anyone who can do . . . that to poor defenseless creatures shouldn’t be walking the streets.” Her eyes welled behind her glasses. “Besides, call me crazy, but I’d rather work than go to bars, like everyone else my age. This is what I do for kicks.”

  “I get it.” Jo smiled gently, understanding all too well. “Go dig up more dirt on these bastards. ‘Do or do not, there is no try,’ right?”

  Bridget almost smiled.

  “Between you and me and Hank, we’ll nail them for something.”

  “Good,” Bridget said, nodding. Then she headed off.

  Jo picked up the phone and dialed Hank.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  “You checking up on me, partner?” Hank said as soon as he’d picked up. “Have no fear, that ugly plug of spit is with Emma. By the way, she says to tell you she’ll try to have something preliminary tomorrow. We won’t get DNA back, not on the saliva or Kelly’s underwear, but we’ll find out if there’s semen on the pants. That’ll be something, at least.”

  “Something is always better than nothing,” she told him. “Where are you?”

  “I’m in the car, heading home. You’re not still at the station?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You need to git.”

  “I will, in a bit,” Jo said, but first, she wanted to fill him in on what she’d just seen, explain where her mind was going with everything. When she finished, his silence was more telling than words. Hank was rarely ever lacking in smart-ass retorts.

  Jo stole the moment to string the facts and assumptions and hearsay together.

  “So Kelly decides she wants to be popular, and she knows just the guy to help her out. She contacts Trey Eldon and threatens to expose his family’s dirty laundry if he doesn’t give her a leg up. He buys her clothes. He invites her to his party, this fifteen-year-old kid who’s dying for attention. She gets drunk and passes out, and he takes her upstairs and rapes her, or one of his friends does, or maybe they all do.”

  Because that was the world they lived in, wasn’t it? Just do it. Don’t stop and think of the consequences. Satisfy the itch and the urge. Forget about kindness or compassion, or whether the act you’re committing is lethal or unlawful or just plain wrong.

  “They take her home, dump her on the lawn, and don’t realize she’s got semen in her underwear and on her blue dress. She starts to fall apart, spilling some of the beans to Cassie. Until Trey starts threatening her, and she realizes she’s got evidence. She tells him she has proof of the assault on her blue party dress, except Trey uses the keys she left behind to get into her house, trashing her room to find it. He thinks he’s in the clear, but Kelly lets him know that he’s not.”

  Hank remained so quiet that Jo was afraid she’d dropped the connection. She asked, “You still there?”

  “Yeah,” he muttered. “I’m here.”

  She went on. “Kelly’s got a backup plan. She has her unwashed panties. But Trey’s feeling safe, and he’s suddenly not so willing to help her out anymore. He thinks his e-mail threats will shut her up. Maybe he even shares a JPEG like the one I just saw, proving to her that his posse means business. Kelly’s got someone online calling her a whore, Cassie’s burned her friendship bracelet, and her mom’s taking care of other people’s sick babies. Kelly can’t take the pressure and decides to kill herself. Think of her suicide note,” Jo reminded him. “‘I love you, but it hurts too much to stay.’ She feels like she’s in this alone, and it breaks her.”

  “Damn, Larsen.” Hank sighed a heavy sigh, which was as good as him saying, By George, I think you’ve got it.

  She envisioned him running a hand over his bald spot, rubbing the stubble at his jaw, and feeling as helpless as she did.

  “Where do we go from here?” he asked, something she’d done a little thinking about herself.

  “We’ve got to be careful. I don’t want to tip them off. I don’t want them to think we know as much as we do until we’ve got enough to arrest their sorry asses.”

  “They’ve got a game on Thursday night instead of Friday this week,” Hank said. “They’re playing McKinney. It’s a big rivalry.”

  “Tomorrow’s Wednesday,” Jo remarked.

  “You figure they already had a roundup?”

  Jo thought of Duke and wondered if he’d been part of a warm-up.

  “There was blood on that blanket in the back of Jason Raine’s pickup truck . . .”

  “His folks are gone,” Jo jumped in. “He’s got no one checking up on him. Why the hell not?”

  “He mentioned a full moon tomorrow night,” Hank reminded her. “If I were hung up on rituals, I’d want a full moon to do it right.”

  “Okay,” Jo said, trying to calm her racing heart. “I don’t want to jump the gun, in case we’re wrong. We’ll have to wait and see if Jason and the Posse pack up for Celina tomorrow after practice.”

  “It’ll be a light workout,” Hank told her. “I’ll bet they still do it like they did in my day: helmet only, no pads, game jerseys, shorts, and cleats. They’ll walk through the plays and get a down-and-dirty pep talk from the coach, but that’s about it.”

  “So they’ll be done early?”

  “Yeah. Early enough to head up north and still get home before too late, so they’ll get their forty winks.”

  Jo took a deep breath, expecting to feel the rush she usually felt when pieces of a puzzle started coming together.

  But it wasn’t there.

  Instead, she felt indescribably sad.

  “What’s wrong with them?” she asked Hank, desperate for some explanation. “What could possibly make them so vicious? They have everything—”

  “No, they don’t,” Hank cut her off. “They don’t have everything, Jo, and you know it. Money can buy you a lot of things, but it can’t buy you a soul.”

  “No.”

  “They’re narcissistic clowns who’ve had too much handed to them,” he said, sounding tired and angry. “Affluenza, they call it. You read the papers lately? We
breed ’em in this country like gerbils. Commit a crime? Well, boys will be boys, ain’t that right? Give ’em a slap on the wrist, and send ’em back home to Mama.”

  If Jo hadn’t already felt sick to her stomach, that was enough to do it. “You’re scaring the crap out of me.”

  “It scares the crap out of me, too,” he said. “It’s a bad world for raising kids. We used to have a sense of direction, and now we’re operating without a compass and no one seems to give a damn.”

  “You’re preaching to the choir, Hank.”

  “I know,” he said. “I know.”

  “Go home to your wife and kids,” Jo told him. “If I need you, I’ll call.”

  “I got a CD full of Barney songs my girls left in here, and I just might put it in. The more I hear about this case, the more I appreciate that sappy purple dinosaur.”

  “Barney?” Jo grinned. “You are in dire straits.”

  “Nothing a hug from my girls won’t cure.”

  “Hug them for me, too,” she said.

  “How ’bout you take your own advice? Hang up, Larsen, and go on home to your boyfriend, but please don’t hug him for me. I mean, I like him and all, but that’d be overkill.”

  Jo laughed. “Will do.”

  But when she got off the phone, she didn’t go anywhere. She put her head down and kept working. A half hour later, her phone pinged.

  Adam had sent her a text: Heading to condo. You home?

  Not yet, Jo replied. Eat without me.

  Everything okay?

  Just burning the midnight oil. ILY.

  Ditto.

  Much as she wanted to see Adam, she had a few things to tackle on her to-do list before she closed up shop for the day.

  First, she put in a call to the criminal investigator at the Celina Police Department, leaving a message for her when she wasn’t there. She asked about mailbox vandalism dating back to last fall. She also wanted to know if the department had a report filed by Jason Raine regarding his missing dog, Shale, or any other report that involved him or his parents’ property.

  Next, she e-mailed Hank’s buddy Fred at Animal Services, sending him DMV photos of the Posse. She did the same to several other area dog rescue groups. She couldn’t help wondering if Trey or any one of his crew had adopted pups, particularly in the days prior to the last two Mustang football games.