Cold Case Cover-Up

by Virginia Vaughan

  The judge was gone, having been escorted out by the constables during the commotion, and the courtroom had nearly cleared of people. Quinn spotted several deputies and local police officers outside the door doing their best to keep those remaining in the building calm and orderly with little success. He turned to look at the mayor. Pete McKinnon, a local EMT who’d been in the courtroom, had already hurried over and started working on him while Meredith Jessup stood, blood covering her white pantsuit as she held her husband’s hand and fussed at Pete to hurry.

  “How is he?” Quinn asked Pete.

  “Looks like a GSW to the right shoulder. I don’t see any more wounds, but this one is bleeding badly. He needs to get to the hospital.”

  “I’m fine,” Mayor Jessup stated, but even his insistence sounded weak. He was breathing heavily and sweating with pain. “I’m sure someone else needs help worse than me.”

  Meredith Jessup reprimanded him harshly, her fear flowing over into her words. “Hush, Calvin. You’ve been shot. You need to get to the hospital. You’re too important to let something happen to you.”

  Quinn looked around. No one else seemed to be hit. “It looks like you were the only victim,” he stated. He pulled out his cell phone and called for an ambulance, only to discover that one was already on its way because someone else had called in the shots fired.

  Quinn had counted four shots. If only one had hit the mayor, what had happened to the remaining three? He scanned the room, quickly finding a trio of bullet holes on the far wall with the bullets still lodged inside. Good, recovering the shells would make identifying the weapon used easier. But Quinn doubted that was going to be necessary.

  “What is it?” Dana asked, coming up behind him. “What’s wrong?”

  He pointed out the trio of bullet holes. “Look how close together they are. That’s not random. Whoever fired these shots knew what he was doing.”

  She glanced back at where the mayor was sitting and where she had been at the time of the shots. “It’s not even a direct line from where the mayor was. So these were fired but weren’t meant to hit anyone, only scare them.”

  “Or clear the room,” Quinn stated. “More than that, whoever made these shots was an expert marksman.”

  She turned to look at Mayor Jessup, who was now being loaded onto a gurney by the EMTs. “So he was the target. I thought it was me. But why shoot the mayor?”

  Quinn wasn’t convinced Jessup had been the target. The angle where he had been sitting was in the direct line of sight from Dana, although it seemed someone trained well enough to make these shots wouldn’t have missed and hit the mayor, but even snipers were human and targets often made a little move that changed the situation. Again, he was struck with the blinding anger of realizing she could have been killed today.

  * * *

  Quinn met up with his father and found the sniper’s nest where they believed the shots had been made from. He shared his concerns about the shooter being a marksman. “No way Reed Jessup made those shots,” he said. “We’re looking for someone with either military or law-enforcement training. Someone with sniper experience.”

  “Who do we know in town that could have made those shots?” his dad asked.

  “There aren’t many,” Rich conceded. “Tim Langley works SWAT with the West Bend police force as a sniper. He’s had special training through the state academy. Bruce Davis had sniper training in the US Marines Corps. There are maybe a handful of others in neighboring towns.”

  John Dawson sighed. “Bruce Davis lost his job at the denim factory six months ago. His wife works at the school with your mother. According to her, they’re deep in debt and about to lose their house.”

  “Any reason he would blame the mayor for that?” Quinn asked.

  Rich shrugged. “He raised taxes on the plant, which forced them to downsize.”

  “Wait a minute,” John stated. “Are we saying we don’t believe this had anything to do with Dana and the Renfield murders?”

  Quinn shook his head. “No, the timing is too coincidental and I still think Dana was the target. Jessup was sitting behind her. If the shooter missed her, he would have hit the mayor. I think if we look into Bruce Davis’s financials he’s probably recently experienced a payoff. My guess is it’s from the same person who is paying off Reed Jessup.”

  John nodded and turned to Rich and Quinn. “Go find Bruce Davis and bring him in for questioning. I’ll run his financials. I’m tired of this game. I’m ready for answers.”

  Quinn nodded, but stopped to speak to his dad before he left. “Will you take Dana back to the station with you? I don’t want to leave her alone.”

  “Sure. We’ll be waiting.” He put his hand on Quinn’s shoulder and looked at them both. “Be careful.”

  “We will,” Rich assured him.

  Quinn walked back to the courthouse, where his brother’s cruiser was still parked. Dana was waiting inside the courthouse for him, flanked by two armed deputies for her protection. She quickly ran outside to meet him as he approached the building.

  “We have a lead on someone we believe might have been involved in this shooting. I’m going with Rich to bring him in. My father will take you back to the sheriff’s office and keep you safe.”

  She nodded, but he sensed her fear beneath the surface. They would both feel better if he stayed with her, but like his dad, he was ready to end this game. He wanted to confront Bruce Davis before anything else happened. To end this once and for all, and possibly, set his sights on a life, a future with Dana.

  “I’ll be fine,” he assured her, then kissed her long and hard as she clung to him before he broke it off. It was harder than he’d expected walking away from her, and he was sure this was how his teammates felt every time they left their loved ones to do the job.

  He stopped at Rich’s cruiser and readied himself for the upcoming confrontation by slipping on a protective vest and choosing a weapon. He was armed and ready for a physical confrontation, but as they got into the car and Rich started the engine, his words brought Quinn back to the emotional battle brewing inside of him.

  “You have to tell her.”

  He stared out the window at the woman who had become so important to him in so little time and knew his brother was right. “I know.” It was time to take a risk and pray his heart could handle the fallout.

  * * *

  Rich didn’t bother with the siren as he pulled onto the land that belonged to Bruce Davis and his family.

  “Keep your weapons low but ready,” he advised Quinn, as if this was his first time. Rich often forgot Quinn had seen more battles than he had during his time with Delta and the SOA.

  He parked and they quickly got out.

  “We should have brought backup,” Quinn stated, but Rich shook his head.

  “I don’t want to spook him.” He knocked on the door, but they heard no movement from inside.

  “Both cars are here,” Quinn noted. He knew Bruce had a wife and family, so where were they?

  They headed for the barn, moving cautiously and scanning for movement. Rich called out to Bruce, but again they heard nothing.

  Quinn pushed open the barn door, raised his gun and scanned the area. He stopped and felt his heart drop when he spotted Bruce Davis hanging from a rope by a rafter. He was dead of an apparent suicide.

  * * *

  Dana tried to push back the feeling of disappointment when Quinn and his brother returned with news of Bruce Davis’s death. It seemed they were blocked at every turn. Sheriff Dawson had already confirmed a large payout in the Davises’ bank account and they were looking in to who had transferred that money into his account. Right now, they were operating on the assumption that whoever was pulling Reed Jessup’s strings had also paid Bruce Davis to shoot Dana at the courthouse.

  “What about Missy and the kids?” Clara asked when she le
arned about Bruce Davis’s suicide.

  Sheriff Dawson had found them, too. “He sent them to her mother’s yesterday. They had no idea what he was planning to do.”

  “How awful for her,” Clara stated.

  Dana wanted to agree. She wanted to feel sorry for Missy Davis, but her husband had accepted money to try to kill her and sympathy was coming harder and harder for her. And they still didn’t know who had paid off Bruce Davis.

  Dana leaned into Quinn for comfort. She was growing so weary of this and ready for it to be over, but she was thankful he was still with her, supporting her.

  “Maybe we should go back to the house and decompress for a while,” he suggested and she was thankful for the offer. It was just what she wanted.

  “That sounds good to me.”

  They went back to Quinn’s house and settled into a comfortable silence. She focused on her work, searching online for other cold cases that might make good episodes for her show. Mason emailed her about the investigation in West Bend, asking about airing the case, but she nixed that idea. This investigation wasn’t about ratings or programming. This was for her.

  The longer she remained in West Bend, the more she began to wonder what it would have been like to have been raised here. If the murder hadn’t happened, she would have lived in this town. She would have gone to school at West Bend High and possibly even met a teenaged Quinn during that time. She wondered if they would have liked each other. Would there have been the same attraction that she felt for him now, and would his protective nature have manifested itself then as well?

  But Bill Mackey had ruined all that when he’d abandoned her.

  She shook her head, pushing away such daydreams. This was her life and there was no sense in wondering about what might have been. It was what it was. And if she was going to focus on what-ifs, she could always start with her adoptive mom.

  “What’s that face for?” Quinn asked, sitting down beside her on the couch.

  She tried to wave away his concern. “Nothing.”

  “No, tell me. What were you thinking about?”

  She looked at him and smiled. She liked pretending they might have dated back in high school. “Actually, I was thinking about my mother, my adoptive mother.”

  “What was she like?”

  “Driven. Ambitious. Distant.” Dana sighed. She didn’t often talk about her life. “My mother worked all the time. After my father passed away, she threw herself into her career as prosecutor. She was good at it, too. She had one of the highest conviction rates in the state and she had her eye on becoming district attorney one day. Instead, she got cancer and died.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I didn’t even know I had been adopted until I found all that information when I was cleaning out her things. At first, I wondered why on earth she adopted me because she didn’t seem to want to be a mother, but then I remembered the times before my dad died. I remember us being a family. I guess a part of her died when he did.”

  “How old were you when he passed away?”

  “I was eleven. He went riding on his motorcycle one afternoon and never came home. The police pronounced it an accident and said he likely lost control and hit a tree.”

  “That sounds like a lonely way to grow up, Dana.”

  “It was.” Loneliness had become her way of life ever since that day. She’d tried to fill that emptiness with others, relationships with men like Jason, and her career, but she’d never escaped that feeling of being abandoned. She hadn’t understood it fully until she’d put the pieces together and realized her abandonment issues actually went much further back than she knew. Back to being a frightened one-year-old who’d been abandoned by a man who should have protected her.

  He reached over and took her hand. “You’re not alone anymore, Dana. You have me.”

  She stared into his face and wanted so badly to believe him, but she’d been burned too many times. Her heart cried out to her to be careful and not risk the pain of abandonment again. At least being alone meant no one could hurt you.

  He pulled at her hand and locked eyes with her. “I mean it, Dana. I won’t leave you.” His green eyes were clear and free of hesitation. He really meant it, but she’d seen others mean it, too, until something happened that changed their minds.

  He saw her hesitation and pulled her into his arms. “I’ll have to prove it to you then. I was raised to be a man of my word.”

  Raised by the first person to abandon her.

  She couldn’t blame him for things his grandfather had done, but by his own admission, his grandfather had played a big part in making him the man he was. How could she trust her heart again after it had already been so broken and battered?

  His phone rang and he pulled it out. “It’s my dad.” He pushed the speaker button on his phone. “Hey, Dad, what’s up?”

  “I just received a phone call from Colette Williams. Judge Henry signed the exhumation order on Alicia only. He’ll sign the one for Rene if it turns out our suspicions are true and Alicia’s grave is empty. We’ve got a crew heading to the cemetery right now. They’ll take the casket to the coroner’s office. Why don’t you two meet us there?”

  “We’ll be there.” Quinn hung up and turned to her, excitement written on his face.

  Apprehension was all Dana felt. She should have been happy. This was the news she’d been waiting for and now that it was finally happening she felt sick instead. It was likely only nerves, but as Quinn got up and grabbed his keys, all she wanted to do was sit on this couch and forget that call had ever happened.

  He kneeled beside her, his beautiful eyes glistening. He stroked her cheek, obviously sensing her hesitation. “This is what you’ve waited for. Let’s go put this issue to rest once and for all.”

  She nodded and grabbed her purse and her phone. She couldn’t allow nerves to get the better of her now. She was finally going to know the truth about whether or not Alicia Renfield died that night thirty years ago. She was finally going to know for certain who she was.

  * * *

  The waiting was the hardest part. Waiting for them to dig up the casket then haul it back to the coroner’s office. Waiting for him to document and dictate and follow procedures line by line. It was frustrating to have the answer sitting right in front of him on a metal examination table in the laboratory and not be able to hurry along the reveal.

  Quinn stayed beside Dana just as he’d promised her he would, but she seemed oddly calm given the circumstances. He chalked it up to nerves. Her entire life was about to change one way or another. Either she’d discover she’d been wrong about everything, or else she’d discover she’d been right and her life wasn’t what she thought it was.

  His life would change, too, if that casket was empty, because then he would finally know for sure that his grandfather had done something unimaginable by faking a little girl’s death.

  His father waved him and Dana into the room as they finished cutting open the seals on the tiny coffin. It broke his heart to see how small it was. A tiny coffin for a one-year-old. He’d known about this case all his life, but it had never hit home to him as it did at this moment.

  The medical examiner ordered the seals removed and the latches opened.

  He held his breath as his father lifted the lid. Dana reached for his hand and squeezed it. This was the moment she would know the truth one way or another. He looked at her and felt the anxiousness flowing off her.

  “Well?” he demanded. Why were they keeping them in such suspense? “What do you see?”

  The sheriff pushed the lid all the way open to reveal a satin interior, pink and delicate. But the coffin wasn’t empty. His dad reached inside and pulled out one of several large stones lying where the body should have been.

  “How could this have happened?” Quinn demanded. He couldn’t say what he’d been expecting, but i
t hadn’t been this. Part of him had believed Dana’s story, but the other part hadn’t been able to wrap his brain around the idea that his grandfather had faked the death of a child and left her abandoned sixty miles away.

  His father turned to the coroner. “I’ll speak with the prosecutor. Based on this new information, I believe she’ll be able to persuade the judge to grant an exhumation order for Rene as well. They’ll want to have the autopsy redone and its possible they may be able to obtain DNA.” He spoke the last part to Dana as if that consolation should make up for what had been done to her.

  All eyes in the room, including Quinn’s, turned to look at Dana as the realization seemed to hit them all at the same time. They’d all bought into a thirty-year-old lie. Alicia Renfield hadn’t died in the fire after all, as everyone believed. His grandfather and a handful of others had lied about her death. It was true. It was all true.

  And someone had gone to great lengths to keep that truth from coming to light. Now their next step was to find out who...and why.

  EIGHT

  Mayor Jessup greeted Dana as she walked into his office. Quinn had insisted on bringing her and she was glad to have his support. She’d asked him to remain in the mayor’s waiting room, but now she wished she’d brought him inside with her. She was surprised to find they weren’t meeting alone. Two other people, one man and one woman, both dressed in suits, were also present and sitting beside the massive desk in the center of the room. She couldn’t say what she had been expecting, but definitely something more personal now that everyone knew Alicia hadn’t died the night of the fire. After all, Mayor Jessup had expressed an interest in speaking with her again if it turned out she was his daughter, and that was now an even greater possibility.