Then she e-mailed Jill Burns with the photos of Dan Trent and Scott Gray, asking if she’d ever had contact with either of them, or if they’d ever interacted with her German shepherd, since the high school students lived in her neighborhood next to the dog park.
Finally, she checked her e-mails, finding the examination report on Duke from Dr. Hooks as well as the photo and video that Bridget had forwarded.
She opened up the latter immediately, going over the photo with the department’s enhancement software, refining the resolution and magnifying the image, spotting what looked like class rings visible on the fingers of several Posse members. Even with their faces half-covered, Jo knew who they were.
But was it enough to convince a judge to issue a subpoena for the boys’ phones and for their laptops so they could look for evidence tying the Posse to Kelly Amster’s alleged assault?
Jo wasn’t so sure.
She needed more. So she kept looking.
She used the same software to run the video, trying to make the resolution less grainy, the audio less garbled. She fiddled with it until it wasn’t worth it to tweak anymore, and then she watched it again at least a dozen times until her eyes blurred.
The voice was Jason Raine’s. She felt sure of that much. Otherwise, she could find little to identify the vehicle or anyone in it. There was nothing hanging from the rearview mirror: no rosary, no fuzzy dice, no pine tree–shaped air freshener. She couldn’t make out any faces or any features or clothing that pinpointed the passengers. The fact that the video was posted by Dan Trent to the Posse’s group page was hardly evidence enough to implicate the boys.
Jo backed up her files and rubbed tired eyes.
Time to go.
I’m on my way, she texted Adam. Be home in ten.
Then she grabbed her gear and took off.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Wednesday
Jo awoke in the dark, lying still for a minute, her heart racing.
She’d heard something, a distinctive ping, enough of a noise to interrupt her less than restful sleep.
Up on her elbow, she saw the light from her phone on the night table, just beyond Adam’s chest. The pinging noise certainly hadn’t disturbed him. He was snoring like a fiend. Carefully, she untangled herself from his long limbs, an arm and a leg tossed across her sometime in the night. She shimmied from beneath the covers and slowly inched her way to the end of the bed to avoid climbing over him.
When she got to her phone, she had a text. It was from Bridget.
Check your e-mail, it read. I found something.
Jo didn’t want to stay in the room and risk waking Adam. She tiptoed out and toward the small second bedroom that served as her office. She stumbled over Ernie in the dark, his black hue making him invisible. As she caught herself, she cursed under her breath, moving cautiously through the hallway as Ernie twined around her ankles.
“You’re gonna make me break my neck someday,” she hissed, but he just purred.
She slid into her chair and booted up her computer, preferring to pull up whatever message Bridget had sent on her laptop screen rather than the small screen on her phone.
“Lie down, baby,” she whispered to the cat as she settled herself at her desk, and Ernie wormed his way onto her lap.
Jo let him stay there, dangling across her thighs and rumbling like an engine on idle as she got online and quickly found an e-mail with attachments. It was 2:30 a.m. by her computer’s clock. The time stamp showed the e-mail had been sent at 2:20 a.m. Did Bridget ever sleep?
She opened the message and read, thinking all the while that if the captain didn’t get the city to hire his niece full-time, he was crazy.
I might not be able to crack the encryption on the notes to your vic from Trey Eldon. But Kelly must have gotten wise to the fact that the program re-encrypted the e-mails once she closed them out. These screenshots were hidden in with her math homework. I’m looking for others. I’ll let you know if I find any more.
—B
Jo downloaded the attached files, which didn’t take long. There were only two JPEGs with shots of the brief e-mails from Trey Eldon’s Stang12 address. But as she read, her heart raced all over again.
This first was dated a mere day after the party:
No one made you drink. No one made you pass out. He was drunk, too. You should NOT have worn a dress that tight. What was he supposed to think? It’s your word against ours. Do NOT mess with us. Let it drop, or your life will be OVER.
The second, a week after:
You don’t have proof, so don’t lie. The blue dress is SMOKE. You have NOTHING. You know about my posse? Leave JR alone. Shut your trap. Or we’ll take you to Celina.
She read them several times each, enough so that the words and their intent sunk in. When she’d finished, she realized she was holding her breath.
With a whoosh, she exhaled, her pulse thumping like Secretariat on steroids. All the scenarios she and Hank had played out about what had happened at Trey’s party weren’t mere conjecture anymore, not after this.
It’s true, she told herself, thinking these two short e-mails confirmed so much.
Cassie hadn’t been lying. Kelly had been raped that night, and Trey was blaming her for it. Maybe he hadn’t been the perpetrator of the assault, but he was pointing a finger at “JR,” which very well could be Jason Raine. Regardless, Trey had threatened Kelly, had told her to keep quiet or else she’d end up going “to Celina,” surely a reference to the roundup. Kelly must have known that they were killing animals on Jason’s country property. Could it be that she’d seen the very same picture Jo had seen, or one equally unnerving?
It had doubtless been enough to scare the crap out of her.
If only Kelly had come forward. If only she’d filed a police report about the assault and the threats. The teenager might still be alive. At least, she would have had support. She could have helped stop the roundups, too.
Why, Kelly? she wondered. Why didn’t you stay and fight?
Jo sighed.
She knew why all too well. She’d been there. She understood how small Kelly must have felt in the end, how completely powerless and insignificant. One skinny girl against Trey’s physically intimidating crew. What did Kelly have, after all? Not much in comparison. Trey’s daddy would have no trouble hiring the best lawyers in Texas. Even if they charged him for being complicit in Kelly’s rape, Jo had no doubt he’d walk.
Yeah, Kelly had been screwed from the get-go.
Ernie mewed softly in protest as she dumped him from her lap and drew her knees up to her chest, hugging them tightly. She didn’t remember making a sound, but she must have, or else how would Adam have known to come in and put his arms around her?
“You’re shaking,” he said, his mouth near her temple, his breath ruffling her hair. “What’s going on? Talk to me, Jo.”
She hadn’t shown him the video or the photograph from Facebook. She hadn’t told him much about anything she’d learned today. When she’d gotten home, she’d been so tired and hungry. He’d fixed her a sandwich with leftover chicken, some Gouda, and tomatoes, and she’d gobbled it up. Then all she’d wanted to do was get into sweatpants and a big T-shirt and curl up on the sofa with Adam and Ernie. The TV had been tuned to a show about Saturn, and Jo had sat back, staring at the amazing photographs of rings made of dust and ice, but all she had thought about was the underpants Kelly had so carefully bagged and hidden, and the awful photograph of the Posse with bandanas tied around their faces like outlaws from an old B movie, dead dogs at their feet.
She swallowed hard, turning in the chair and opening herself up to him. He sat on the floor at her feet as she talked, his hands on her knees. She showed him the video and the photo Bridget had dug up, and she read him the e-mails that Trey Eldon had sent to Kelly. She wondered aloud if the boys weren’t responsible for the nasty remarks on Kelly’s social media, too, particularly the one telling her to go back to who she was or jump.
When she was done, she braced herself, waiting for him to say something to undermine her confidence, to subvert the story she’d come to believe was real.
“You’re makin’ things up, Jo Anna, and I don’t believe a word of it. If you don’t watch yourself, I’ll wash your foul mouth out with soap,” Mama had told her once when she was so little, when she had finally screwed up the courage to confess that something bad was going on beneath her own roof. “Do you hate him so much you want to paint him with tar? And after all he does to take care of you? You should be thankin’ him for putting food in your mouth and clothes on your back. That’s what you should be doing.”
But Adam didn’t go there.
He didn’t tell her she was crazy, that she was jumping to conclusions. That she was a foul-mouthed liar.
“I want to help,” he said quite staunchly, drawing away so he could look in her eyes. “What can I do?”
She almost said, “Nothing,” but realized that she could use his trained eyes.
She asked him if he’d take a look at Duke’s X-rays, and he didn’t balk. He didn’t say he had no time to study the radiographs of a dead dog. He told her that if she could get him the films from Dr. Hooks, he’d look them over. That if Duke hadn’t already been cremated, he’d autopsy the pup himself.
“Anything else?” he said, and Jo started to shake her head.
Then she changed her mind again. “Yeah,” she told him. “Believe in me.”
“I do,” he said. “I do.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
She was up before dawn and back at the office before her shift began. She even traded in her usual bottle of Coke for a cup of bad coffee, though she hardly needed the caffeine. By 8:00 a.m., she’d gone through her voice mails and e-mails, and she’d gotten hold of Karen Rossfeld, the sole detective in the Celina Police Department, who confirmed Jo’s suspicions about the mailbox vandalism taking place up north, not in Plainfield.
“We started getting calls about damaged mailboxes a year ago. We even tried strategically setting up a few cameras on the weekends, but we didn’t get squat.”
No, Jo thought, because the Posse went on their rampages during the week, before their Thursday- or Friday-night football games, not after.
“It went on for about ten weeks, then stopped altogether in November. Not sure if the cold made them quit, or if it was all the hard work we’ve been doing to cut down on underage drinking and DUIs,” Rossfeld told her. “I’m sorry, though, that we never caught ’em.”
Ten weeks, huh? Jo estimated that was the entirety of high school football season, which would fit the Posse’s MO, too. No wonder the vandalism had stopped in November. They’d played—and won—the state championship game by Thanksgiving. No reason to knock out mailboxes and get pumped up when there wasn’t anything to get pumped up for.
“We had them pegged as kids from the area,” Rossfeld went on. “I guess, whoever it was, they grew up.”
“I think they grew up, all right,” Jo agreed. They’d morphed into eighteen-year-olds with a hard-on for bigger and more vicious things. “Have y’all had any reports of missing dogs lately? Probably older dogs, big ones, not the kind you can stick in a purse.”
Rossfeld hesitated. “Funny that you’re asking, ’cause we’ve had two that stand out recently. We got a call about a boxer that vanished from its backyard two days ago.”
“Have you found it?”
“No, not a trace.”
Jo swallowed. “What’s the other? You said two stood out.”
“Yeah, the other’s from about three weeks back. A woman from your neck of the woods came into the station, crying her eyes out and wanting someone to blame for her Labrador that’d gone missing and turned up on the side of FM 455, presumably hit by a moving vehicle.”
Jo knew exactly what she was talking about. The dog that had disappeared from Plainfield and ended up dead in Celina, the black Lab that Dr. Hooks had mentioned reading about in a sidebar in the paper. Like Duke, he’d been battered and left for dead.
“. . . a boxer that vanished from its backyard two days ago . . .”
A few days ago, Jason Raine was in Celina.
Isn’t that what he’d told Hank?
The black Lab from three weeks ago fit in with the first week of school, the first big game. There were probably other dogs they didn’t know about—the ones in the photograph—that must have come between then and Duke. The timeline seemed a little jumbled, like the Posse hadn’t figured out their rhythm yet, or maybe Jason liked to practice his murderous swing between bonfires. Maybe he didn’t want to wait between games.
“I think I might know something about the dogs,” she said, and the Celina detective was all ears.
Jo told her what she suspected about the gang of four, how she figured they’d gone from bashing property with baseball bats to bludgeoning stolen dogs. “My partner and I believe they’re using the Raines’ property in east Celina for their roundups, as they call them. Which is why I got in touch. We want to catch them at it, if we can. Maybe you can help us.”
“I hope you’re wrong,” Rossfeld said, “but if those boys got horns holding up their halos, we don’t want ’em running wild any more than you do. Let me talk to my LT and the chief, and I’ll get back to you ASAP.”
Jo thanked her. Before she’d even hung up, she e-mailed the JPEG and AV files so the detective would have ammunition to show her higher-ups. Jo was hoping it would work with Captain Morris, too. She planned to catch him when he got in, so she could finish telling him about the incident with Trey Eldon. Except now she’d add more to it.
But first, she called Dr. Hooks, requesting the X-ray films for Duke.
“Where do you want them?” the vet asked. “I can send the films electronically anywhere you need me to.”
Jo gave her Adam’s e-mail, and she promised to forward the films right away.
Next, she followed up with Jill Burns, asking if she’d looked over the photos e-mailed the day before.
As Jo had hoped, she recognized one of the faces.
“I didn’t get his last name, just his first—Scott. He approached me at the dog park a couple of weeks back,” she said. “He asked if he could pet Tucker, and he stayed to play with Tuck for a while, tossing him a ball, that kind of thing. He told me he lived near the park, but that’s all I know.”
“Did you ever see him again?”
“No,” Jill again replied. “But I didn’t expect to. My schedule’s pretty crazy, and Tuck goes to a doggy day care . . . went to doggy day care.” She got a catch in her voice. “You can’t think that he took Tucker? Why would he do that?”
“I don’t know,” Jo admitted, “but I aim to find out.”
She touched base with the animal shelters she’d e-mailed the night before, checking to see if they recalled any of the faces or names of Trey Eldon’s crew, particularly in relation to recent dog adoptions. Ultimately, she struck out, though she’d pretty much expected it. Legitimate shelters asked for ID, required paperwork, and usually had a waiting period for prospective owners. They also chipped the animals. Jo couldn’t imagine any of the Posse wanting that kind of provenance. They were more likely to respond to posts on Craigslist or newspaper classifieds, where dogs were being given away, no strings attached. No worries of presenting a valid driver’s license or an animal being microchipped and leading the authorities back to them.
But stealing dogs from backyards seemed equally risky, if not more so when thief and owner lived in the same neighborhood. Maybe that was a part of the thrill, Jo decided, tempting fate, seeing how far they could go without getting caught.
And, so far, they’d gotten away with plenty.
If Kelly hadn’t jumped from the tower to her death, if Jo and Hank hadn’t started asking questions, the Posse’s exploits could have gone on and on, possibly until they disbanded or went off to college, leaving a trail of anguished victims in their wake.
When Hank arrived at the station, J
o was on the phone with Emma Slater at the county crime lab. He opened his mouth to start yakking, but she raised a finger to hold him off.
“I haven’t gotten far with your evidence, sorry,” Emma immediately began to apologize. “I did find a trace amount of semen in the underwear. There’s blood as well that matches your vic’s type.”
“So it’s a good bet someone had intercourse with Kelly the night of the party.”
“Yes, but I won’t even try to pinpoint a timeline,” Emma said. “I’ll leave that up to you. The specimens did have some degradation from being zipped up in that plastic baggie, but I managed to get viable samples. We’re kind of backlogged here, as you know.”
She paused, and Jo felt a lump form in her throat.
“So if you need DNA faster than a few weeks . . .”
“I do,” Jo told her. “I need it yesterday.”
“I could send it to a private lab we’re using, as long as your department agrees to pay for it. We outsource to them on occasion, and I’ll get the results as soon as they’re available. I can try to put a rush on it.”
Jo didn’t hesitate. “Yes, please. Whatever it takes.”
But as she said it, she winced, imagining Cap’s less than enthusiastic reaction. He’d give her a lecture and question how she thought he was going to get the city to pony up for an expensive test that may or may not prove Kelly Amster had sex with a high school boy a few weeks before she died. It wasn’t like a DNA match would indisputably prove rape when the victim wasn’t alive to give her side of the story.
“Do it,” Jo reiterated.
“Okay, if you’re sure,” Emma said. “I’ll take care of it right now.”
“Thanks.”
When Jo hung up, Hank was standing alongside her desk, hip braced on the edge, and arms crossed, patiently waiting.
“What’s going on?” he asked. “We about to catch us some bad guys, hoss?”
Walk a Crooked Line (Jo Larsen Book 2) Page 20
