Clint Wolf Mystery Trilogy: Boxed Set

by BJ Bourg

  “Leave your car and jump in with me,” I called to Susan, hitting the unlock button on my keyless remote.

  The southern sky was clear and blue, and the air warm as we sped across town. A recent cold front had reduced the temperature from ninety-five degrees to ninety. Sweat caused my tan polyester uniform shirt to cling to my back, but I wasn’t complaining. Not one to relish cold weather, I welcomed the unseasonal temperatures and embraced it like an old friend. Most of the townspeople made their living hunting, trapping, and trawling, and the weather was taking a huge bite out of their economic pie. While I felt bad for them, I was happy for myself. I was feeling like I landed in a tropical paradise. I’d always told Michele I wanted to live so far south that all four seasons were summer, and she’d agreed. My disdain for winter had come from spending too many wet and freezing mornings huddled over dead bodies on the mean streets of La Mort, which was the third largest city in Louisiana. As for Michele, she just hated being cold.

  I frowned at the thought of my wife. She and Abigail would’ve loved living in Mechant Loup. Michele’s parents had moved here after she graduated and left the nest. She had tried to visit as often as she could, but the trips were always brief, so she never got to appreciate the area. Back then, I would’ve never considered leaving the city to move to some backwoods town with one road in and one road out, but a lot can change in a few years.

  Susan pointed to a street sign that was approaching at breakneck speed. “That’s it!”

  I smashed the brake, turned right onto Lacy Court, and cruised toward the back of the street.

  “It’s after Second Street, the third house from the end, and it’s on the right.” She nodded. “Can’t miss it—it’s the only house with a dead guy in the driveway.”

  The first thing I noticed when we drove up to the scene was the red arrow sticking out of the man’s back. Although we were twenty yards from the body, it was hard to miss. My blood slowed in my veins—whoever killed Betty Ledet had struck again. We had a hunter on our hands, and he was preying on humans. I snatched my phone from the console and dialed the office. I didn’t need every nosy townsperson with a scanner knowing what was going on. Hell, I didn’t know what was going on. Lindsey answered on the first ring. “Run this address through every system and program you have,” I said. “I want to know everything about the people who live here…what they drive, where they work, who their family and friends are—everything. I even want to know if they do it with the lights on.”

  There was a long pause on the other end of the line.

  “I’m joking about the last part,” I said.

  Lindsey laughed. “Okay, I was wondering how I’d find that out.” She cleared her throat. “I already ran the address through the complaints computer. The owners are Isaac and Stella Edwards and I found two calls for service in the last eight years that are associated with them.”

  “What’re they about?”

  “The first one was because someone broke into their shed. That was eight years ago. The other complaint was…oh, wow.” Lindsey paused and I could hear her fingers dancing across the keyboard. “Stella Edwards was hit by a car two weeks ago.”

  That caught my attention. “Here? In town?”

  “No. She was hit a couple miles north of town.” Lindsey paused again, mumbling to herself as she read the report. “Okay, it seems she was jogging with her husband along the highway and a car swerved toward them. She saw the car and pushed Isaac out of the way and it ran smack over her.”

  “Why do we have a complaint on it?” I asked.

  “The sheriff’s office got into a high speed chase with the car and it was heading back toward town, so they asked us to set up a roadblock by the bridge. They blew out the tires with spike strips before the suspect got to the bridge, though, so we didn’t get involved. William was working the night shift at the time.”

  I mulled over the information for a minute, asked, “Do we know who the suspect was?”

  “No, but I can find out.”

  “Thanks.” I shoved my phone in my shirt pocket. There might be a connection between the crash and the murder. But what was the connection between Isaac Edwards and Betty Ledet? I stepped out and followed Susan to the body.

  The second thing I noticed as we got closer was the camera attached to Isaac Edwards’ head. “Is that a GoPro?” I asked.

  Melvin, who had arrived before us and already roped off the scene, wiped sweat from his forehead with the tan sleeve of his uniform shirt. “It sure is, Chief. I think we just got a major break in this case.”

  I resisted the urge to immediately rip the headgear off his head. Instead, I directed Melvin and Susan through the process of documenting the scene and searching for evidence. It was a simple scene—a man in extremely short shorts shot through the back with an arrow after checking his mail. Based on the blood around the body, he had been shot with the same type of three-blade mechanical broad-head as Betty. I lifted his shirt and the large wound canal through his body confirmed my suspicions.

  When we’d finished searching and photographing the scene and surrounding area, Melvin recovered the mail while Susan and I took measurements.

  “Hey, Chief,” Melvin called from his knees in the driveway, “Isaac’s going to be late for jury duty in February.”

  I looked up from the body of the elderly man and watched as Melvin carefully placed a jury duty subpoena in an evidence envelope.

  “You think he killed himself to get out of jury duty?” Susan asked.

  I stifled a grin, not wanting any neighbors to see us laughing at a murder scene. Neighbors. I scanned the street. It was empty. “Who called this in, anyway?” I asked.

  “Some kid on a skateboard found him,” Melvin said over his shoulder. “The kid’s mom called.” Melvin had located more mail under the hedges where the wind had blown it. A little thick in the belly, he had to take a deep breath and hold it as he bent to retrieve the envelopes. When he straightened, he exhaled and wiped more sweat from his face. “That boy was scared stupid. Said he had just waved to the man a minute earlier and told him good morning, and when he saw him again he was dead on the ground. I asked him if he saw or heard anything suspicious, but he said everything was quiet.”

  Melvin went inside to search the house next, while Susan and I finished measuring the position of the victim’s body in relation to the surrounding area. Based on our recreation of the scene, it appeared the arrow had been fired from across the street. I walked to the edge of the road and surveyed the area. A ditch separated an empty lot from the street. The lot stretched for about two hundred feet from the ditch and was lined with trees on the backside. One lone tree was situated near the middle of the lot. The leaves were still thick and hung low to the ground. I nodded. That was the spot.

  When Melvin came outside and announced there was nothing of evidentiary value inside the house, I said, “Can you call your canine buddy—Seth, right?—and see if he can pick up a track from that tree? It’s got to be where the killer fired the arrow.”

  Melvin, who was always eager to please, nodded his head. “I’m on it!” He turned and walked up the street to make the call.

  Susan had finished what she was doing and joined me near the body. I pointed to the GoPro camera. “You ready to see what’s on that thing?”

  Nodding, she squatted beside the body and eased the camera from the man’s head with her gloved hands. We then walked to my Tahoe and she removed the mini SD card from the GoPro. Digging her laptop from one of her bags, she shoved the mini into an adaptor and plugged it into her computer. Within seconds, she’d pulled up the video files from the GoPro.

  We watched as Isaac walked up the driveway—the camera bobbing up and down with each step—and to Lacy Court. He faced toward the back of the street and then his pale and wrinkly legs suddenly came into view as he bent to stretch. When he straightened, it appeared he nodded to himself and then broke into a nice jog toward the back of the street. His pace was steady and bris
k—not at all what I would’ve expected from someone his age. He didn’t slow down until he reached the end of the concrete road, where he turned around and headed toward the front of the street.

  “Rewind it to the end of the street and pause it there,” I told Susan. When she did, I studied the picture, which was crisp and detailed. Where the concrete ended, a dirt road began and extended for what looked to be a mile, or so, until it reached a line of trees. On either side of the dirt road were deep ditches separating the road from fields of rich grass that were bordered by thick lines of trees and shrubbery. A barbed-wire fence stretched from a locked gate to the tree lines on either side. They were littered with No Trespassing signs and other signs warning that violators would be prosecuted to the fullest. There were a few good hiding spots from which an archer could launch an attack, so I wondered why the killer hadn’t shot Isaac when he reached the back of the street. It was possible the killer staged in that area and stalked Isaac from there, so I covered every inch of the screen, searching for the tiniest hint of a human’s presence. There was none. I sighed, motioned for Susan to continue the film.

  Isaac maintained his impressive pace toward the front of the street. He passed dozens of houses, most of them sprinkled with Halloween decorations. Every yard was manicured, every tree and bush trimmed to perfection. Nearly every driveway had at least one car—most had multiple—but no one was outside except for one man toward the beginning of the street. He could be seen opening the door to a white SUV and stepping out. He was too far from the camera for me to make a proper identification, but the house and four cars in the driveway would make him easy to find.

  When Isaac reached Main Street, he turned and made his way back down Lacy Court, turning once more at the end of the street. Not wanting to miss anything, we watched every minute of his hour-long jog and were nearing the end of the video when a sandy-haired kid on an oversized skateboard popped into view. His hair was bushy and he appeared dirty and he was scooting away from Isaac. “Is that the kid, Melvin?” I asked when the boy turned and whisked toward Isaac.

  Melvin, who was waiting for his buddy from the sheriff’s office to show up with a K-9, walked over and confirmed it was the kid. “That’s the little shit. He looks like he’s up to no good.”

  “Yeah,” Susan agreed. “If he hasn’t been arrested yet, he will be.”

  “Maybe seeing this dead body will scare him straight,” I said, shooting my thumb toward Isaac Edwards.

  “Maybe he’s the killer,” Susan countered.

  I glanced down at the indicator bar at the bottom of the video player. We were nearing the end of the footage. “If someone doesn’t pop up soon and shoot this man with an arrow, I’m going to start thinking it was the kid.”

  Susan and I leaned closer to the computer screen—our mouths open with anticipation—as we watched Isaac draw to within a hundred yards of his house. He suddenly broke out into a sprint, as though he were trying to finish strong, and didn’t slow down until he reached his driveway. He walked back and forth in front of his house a few times and then his arm came into the camera’s view, appearing to wipe sweat from his head. He shouted, “Not bad for an old man,” and then—

  “What the hell?” Susan blurted.

  CHAPTER 18

  “You’ve got to be shitting me!” Susan said.

  “We should’ve known it was too good to be true.” I sighed, staring at the blank computer screen. Isaac Edwards had turned the camera off moments before his murder. Had he known what was about to happen, would he have left it running? A car approached behind us and we turned to see a sheriff’s office cruiser with a large “K-9” emblem on both front doors approaching the scene. It stopped a few feet behind my Tahoe, and Seth stepped out.

  Seth was a young fellow with a shaved head and he was dressed in dark blue BDUs. I remembered him from a year earlier when he and his runt of a German shepherd named Coco had helped us recover a dead body from Bayou Tail. He’d told us that Coco was strictly a cadaver dog, so I wasn’t surprised when he opened the back door and a large black and tan German shepherd bounded out.

  Seth put him on a long leash and made his way to where we had moved to the side of the road. He shook each of our hands and greeted us like it had only been a few weeks since we’d last spoken. He nodded to his canine companion. “This monster’s name is Buddy, and he’s as mean as he looks.”

  Melvin nodded his head up and down. “I can vouch for that! I wore the bite suit a few times when Seth was first training him and he nearly ripped my arm off.”

  I didn’t argue and I didn’t want to find out how mean he was. I pointed to the tree. “We’re thinking the killer fired from that vantage point,” I said. “No one has gone near the tree, so everything’s still fresh.”

  Seth nodded his approval and turned to Melvin. “You gonna cover us?”

  Melvin looked at me and I gave him a “thumbs up”. He grinned and followed at a safe distance behind Seth as Buddy began working side to side, his nose buried in the grass. When they reached the tree, Buddy sniffed around, but didn’t alert on anything. Seth began directing him in linear sweeps across the property and Buddy finally alerted on a spot in the grass directly across from the victim’s body. They then set off toward the tree line, hot on the trail.

  Susan and I waited at the scene until a coroner’s investigator arrived to transport Isaac Edwards’ body to the morgue. While Susan got the information from the investigator, I stepped away and, although it was Saturday, made a call to the district attorney’s office. The answering machine picked up telling me they were closed for the weekend. Next, I called Reginald Hoffman’s cell phone. It rang to voicemail and I left yet another message for him. I was becoming increasingly frustrated with him, and I was sure he’d be able to hear it in my tone of voice. I swiped my finger across the screen to shut down my phone and watched Susan jotting information in her notebook. She had saved my life on more than one occasion in our short time working together and I was not going to let her go down for doing her job.

  When Susan was done and the coroner’s investigator had driven away, we pulled down the crime scene tape and headed toward the front of the street. I stopped when we reached the house with the white SUV, and stepped out. Susan walked around the Tahoe and we strode up the driveway together. “How are you and Chloe getting along?” she wanted to know.

  “We’re getting along great.” I was tempted to ask about the day she showed up at my house, but decided against it.

  “You’ve been with her—what?—a little over a year now?”

  I nodded and knocked on the door to the house. Susan stepped to the right and I stepped to the left. Within seconds, the storm door was sucked inward as the main door opened. A man stood there in gray slacks and a light blue dress shirt. He frowned. “Can I help you?”

  I explained that we were working a death case involving a jogger in the neighborhood. “Did you notice anything suspicious or out of the ordinary this morning?”

  “A jogger?” The man scratched his head, ruffling his thinning white hair. “Are you talking about Isaac? I saw him running this morning. Did something happen to him? I always said that poor bastard would have a heart attack running around like he does. He’s too old for that shit. ”

  “I can’t release the identity of the victim at this moment,” I explained, “but if you saw anything out of the ordinary—anything at all—it might help us answer some questions.”

  The man was thoughtful. “I left for the store early this morning. The neighborhood was quiet when I left. Other than Isaac and some hunter, there was no one else in the area.”

  I felt my ears perk up. “A hunter?”

  The man nodded. “His car was parked off of Main Street, just south of Lacy Court.”

  “How do you know he was a hunter?” Susan asked.

  “He was wearing an orange hunting cap.”

  “Did he have a weapon?” I asked.

  “I didn’t see one, but that doesn’t
mean he didn’t have one. When I pulled out of the street, he had just stepped out of the driver’s door and walked around to the trunk of his car. He was still leaning in the trunk when I drove away.”

  “Have you ever seen him before?” I asked.

  “No. I mean, I don’t think so.”

  I frowned. “Would you recognize him if you saw him again?”

  “I didn’t get a look at his face, but I did see what kind of car he was driving.” The man looked up toward the ceiling of his carport, as though trying to recapture the image. “It was a faded green Thunderbird. Old—at least fifteen years or better—and the paint was chipped in places. It definitely stood out.”

  “You said you didn’t see his face,” Susan began. “Are you sure it was a man?”

  “Hmm…” The man rubbed his face. “You know, come to think of it, I don’t know if it was a man or woman. I guess I just assumed it was a man because he was wearing a hunting cap.”

  “Did you assume anything else?” Susan wanted to know.

  “No, I did not,” the man said curtly.

  “How tall was this person?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “I couldn’t tell. He was leaning into the back of the trunk mostly.”

  “What about the build?” I pressed. “Thin? Heavy? Medium?”

  “That was hard to tell, too. He was wearing some bulky clothes, like camouflage, and he probably looked bigger around than he really was.” The man nodded his head. “Yeah, I remember thinking it was odd he’d be wearing all that bulky clothes in this heat.”

  Despite our probing questions, the man was unable to remember more than he’d already provided, so we left our cards and asked him to call if he remembered anything.

  Next, we headed to Chateau General Hospital, which was twenty minutes north of town. Well, everything was north of town. To the south, there was nothing but acres and acres of marshland separating the town from the Gulf of Mexico. As for me, I was starting to buy into the hype. I never dreamed of working or living in a dead-end town like Mechant Loup, but it was growing on me faster than weeds in the summer. It was peaceful here…and slow. I’d grown accustomed to the pace of small town Louisiana and didn’t think I could ever go back to the rat race of the big city. What killed me most was the idea that Michele and Abigail would’ve loved this place. Why didn’t we move here when they were alive? I frowned and tried to change the subject in my mind. “Focus on your work,” I thought to myself.