by A. E. Howe
“What’s happened?” she asked, holding the door open for us to come in. She was wearing a blue robe and kept smoothing her hair as though she wished that she could brush it. “Is Jeffrey all right?”
“I’m sorry,” Pete said quietly.
“Oh, my God. What?” She looked like she was going to collapse, so I put my hand on her arm and eased her down onto a wingback chair.
“Mrs. Ayers, I’m sorry, but your son is dead,” I said, not wanting to drag it out. She knew something horrible had happened so what good would it do to delay the inevitable?
“How?” she asked.
I didn’t want to tell her, but I didn’t seem to be able to stop myself. “One of our deputies shot him.”
“What? Why? Why did you kill my son?” She was pounding her fists on the arms of the chair so hard that it rocked back and forth. I knew that she really wanted to be hitting us.
Pete seemed at a loss. “Our deputy reported that your son was assaulting a woman and, when he ordered him to stop, your son turned and charged. The deputy had to defend himself.”
“Lies!” she screamed. “All of those lies you told about him. He never hurt anyone!” She stopped pounding the chair and brought her hands up in front of her.
I knew what was going to happen a nanosecond before she flew out of the chair and started flailing at me.
I just curled up and let her thump me with her fists. Pete tried to get in between us and deflect some of the blows.
“Please stop now,” Pete said. “I’m investigating the shooting. If your son’s death wasn’t justified, I promise we’ll set the record straight.”
Mrs. Ayers landed a few more blows, but her strength was fading. Finally she dropped back into the chair and began to sob.
“Is there someone you could call?” I asked gently.
“I have to tell Wayne,” she said and then began crying again. I vaguely remembered that Jeffrey Ayers had a brother.
“Is that your other son?”
“Yes,” she said, trying to control her sobbing. “He didn’t do it. Jeffrey, he was here the night that girl was attacked. I know that.”
During an interview regarding one of the rapes, she had told us that she’d heard Ayers come home and hadn’t heard him go out again. But she had also admitted it was possible she could have fallen asleep and not heard him go back out.
“Where is he?” she asked. Tears still rolled down her face, but her breathing was coming under control.
“We have to take his body to the… hospital for an autopsy. We want the truth as much as you do,” Pete told her.
“I can’t think. Go. I don’t want you all here.”
“Do you want us to call your son?” I asked.
“No, just get out. I’ll call him. Go. You’ve done enough!” she shouted. We quietly made our escape.
Chapter Two
I could have used a cup of coffee, but in Calhoun everything shut down after one in the morning. It was the county seat, but had only ten thousand residents. There were a lot of great things about small town life, but 24/7 service wasn’t one of them.
Back at the crime scene we set to work helping to gather evidence or, more accurately, collecting a lot of trash that would probably prove unconnected. After two hours, Pete finally found the bullet that had passed through Ayers’s body. He bagged it up for its trip to the state’s crime lab. The Florida Department of Law Enforcement would be providing assistance on this case as they did for most major crimes in small counties.
Major Sam Parks arrived at the scene when we were nearly done. He was in charge of most of the administrative divisions within the department, including budget and human services, and he would be heading up the internal review of the shooting. Parks was a humorless curmudgeon, but was respected by the rank and file for his forty years of service. He had an accountant’s nose for errors and was meticulous to a fault. I’d heard Dad bemoan Parks’s imminent retirement on more than one occasion. Dad never had to worry about the budget or trouble with the department’s certification while Parks was running things.
“Everything in hand?” Parks asked Pete.
“At first glance it looks clean. But we’ll know more after the forensics come back.”
“Yep. Keep me informed,” Parks mumbled. “I’m sending Nichols home. Told him he’d be on paid leave until the final report. Be safe.” He turned and strode back to his car.
“That man was old when I joined the department,” Pete said, shaking his head.
Pete had had his own run-in with Parks several years ago when he failed to respond to a shooting while on break. He didn’t technically do anything wrong and was let off with a couple days’ suspension and a note in his file. It was hard on Pete and he beat himself up over it for a long time. I’d heard him say once that he should have been terminated over the incident. It didn’t help that Matt Greene, a patrol deputy at the time, had been the one who was being shot at. He certainly hadn’t forgiven Pete and definitely believed he should have been fired. It had been difficult working in the same office with the two of them, and had been made all that much worse in the last month since I’d discovered that Matt might be corrupt.
With the news crews finally gone, Dad was leaning against his truck, watching as everyone finished up at the scene. I walked over to him and his eyes met mine. His were lacking the normal spark of self confidence I was used to.
“Son.”
I didn’t know what to say and just shook my head.
“You don’t have to say it. Everything looks like it went down the way Nichols claims.”
“There’s a lot more work to be done. You know that. And you had good reason for letting Ayers go.”
“Yeah, I thought so. But it doesn’t look good now.”
The first rape had occurred just before Christmas. Pete was the lead. A week later there was another attack and Matt picked it up. Three days later, when the third woman was assaulted, we’d known there was a serial rapist at work.
“You formed the task force as soon as you realized the cases were related. There are a hell of a lot of departments that wouldn’t have put it together that fast,” I tried to reassure him.
“And I put myself in charge of the task force. I’m thinking that might have been a mistake.” It was tough listening to him second-guess his decisions.
“You did it because you cared. I don’t think it was a mistake. A case like that needs resources and a high profile. Those were the reasons you put yourself at the head of the investigation. And when the next two rapes happened, we were at the scenes fast and with a lot of manpower.”
“But what did I miss?”
“I don’t think we missed anything.”
“If Ayers was our rapist then we must have missed something,” he said angrily.
“We questioned him because he knew the first and third victims. But it’s a small county; everyone knows everyone,” I said.
“But we arrested him because his car matched the description of a car seen shortly after one of the attacks. Plus, he had a bruise on his face that the last victim said she could have given him.” Dad wasn’t going to let this go.
“And you released him because an ATM machine’s CCTV image taken two hours before the attack showed that he already had the bruise, corroborating his story that he hit himself in the jaw with a piece of lumber.”
“If only one of the women had seen him.”
“But they didn’t. Our mistake might have been arresting him too soon.”
“Why couldn’t we have found some trace evidence?”
“Because the rapist was very careful. Which brings us to that last bit of evidence we found after we arrested him.”
“Don’t remind me,” Dad grimaced.
None of the victims’ medical exams or rape kits recovered any pubic hair. After we arrested Ayers, a physical exam revealed that he shaved his pubic region. Everything seemed to fit.
“Damn it! I should have continued to hold him even wit
hout the bruise being evidence.”
“You know the State Attorney wouldn’t have brought charges without something more than his circumstantial lack of pubic hair. Ayers even had an alibi for one of the rapes.”
“It was his mother,” Dad reminded me dismissively.
“But once you threw out the bruise the alibi looked a lot stronger.”
“Five rapes altogether and now a murder. Six women whose lives have been damaged or destroyed. And their families…”
“Dad, stop this. You made the right decisions. Remember my first year with the department, when I was chasing that stolen car? He hit another car and kept going and I stayed with him. I remember feeling so good when I finally ran him off the road and cuffed him. But then I found out that the woman in the car he’d hit lost her leg and almost died.
“Remember what you told me when I was giving myself a hard time for not stopping and helping her? You said that decisions, no matter how well thought out, always have a chance of being wrong. But that you can’t let that destroy your ability to do your job. Well, I’m throwing that back at you. Go home. Mauser’s probably losing sleep wondering where you are.”
That made him smile a little. Mauser was Dad’s one-hundred-and-ninety-pound, black-and-white monstrosity of a dog. Theoretically he was a Great Dane, but my money was on Angus bull.
“Fat chance,” Dad snorted as he climbed into his truck. He gave me a small wave as he drove off.
“He’s going to be under a hell of a lot of pressure,” Pete said, walking up behind me.
Chapter Three
I woke up the next morning with Ivy rubbing her head against my face. Since I’d rescued her from a life on the streets, the little tabby cat had taken charge of my schedule when I was at home. She frowned upon sleeping in late, regardless of the lack of sleep the night before. I got up and fed her breakfast before opening my iPad and checking out the morning news.
The Tallahassee Democrat had a front page story on the shooting. Not a surprise. “Sheriff Ted Macklin Takes Responsibility for Releasing Rapist” was the headline. Not great, but it could have been worse. For the most part, the story wasn’t too damning. The local TV station websites each had a video of the interview with Dad. Overall the local news outlets were pretty friendly to law enforcement. They needed good relationships to ensure regular news feeds from the different law enforcement departments. And local news ratings were all about the blood. “If it bleeds, it leads” was gospel.
By eight o’clock I was in my car for the quick five-mile ride to town. One of the great things about living and working in a rural county was no morning traffic. Especially this morning. The first twenty-four hours after catching a major case are critical. Even though we had a pat explanation for all the bodies in this case, we couldn’t take anything for granted. We couldn’t delay starting the paperwork and setting the hounds onto any hot trails.
I knew that Pete wouldn’t be at the office yet. His morning routine called for him to be at Winston’s Grill for their breakfast specials. I decided to meet him there. Normally not my thing, but I wanted to hear what folks were saying. I took the last space in the back of the lot. Winston’s made more money between seven and ten in the morning than they did the rest of the day. Pete’s car was parked in his usual spot under a sweetgum tree that was leafless in the middle of January.
Someone who didn’t know any better would think that Pete took a lot of liberties spending the first couple hours of each day at a restaurant eating breakfast and chatting with the locals, but the truth was that he learned more talking to the regulars at Winston’s than most of our deputies could learn in a week going door to door or making cold calls. The old timers and blue-collar folks who ate breakfast there were the very ones who kept a sharp eye on what was going on in the county. Once they were full of Winston’s jumbo pancakes or bacon scramble special, they’d lean back and talk about everything—which couples were stepping out on each other, whose son had wrecked his car for the third time or who was down on their luck. And Pete was always there to hear them.
He nodded when he saw me coming toward his table in the back corner of the dining room. Two old farmers sitting with him looked up at me. Their expressions went dark as they got up, nodded curtly and went back to their table.
“I didn’t mean to spoil anyone’s appetite,” I told Pete.
He waved me to one of the chairs that the men had vacated as he finished chewing and swallowing a big bite of sausage biscuit. “They aren’t feeling very kindly toward your dad this morning.” He gestured in the direction of people reading papers and eating breakfast before checking his phone, which was sitting on the table. Pete was addicted to texting with his wife and daughters.
“We can’t do much about that. Best we can do is tie this all up as quickly as possible.”
Mary, the owners’ daughter, came over with an order pad. “Can I get you something?” she asked me.
“Just a coffee to go.”
“Good thing that’s all. If you want more you’ll have to get here before this big moose gets his order in.” She smiled at Pete, who just nodded as he cut up his pancakes.
“I’m going to make sure the investigation’s done right,” he said to me after Mary left.
“Absolutely. You know that’s what I meant.”
“I do, actually. Have I ever told you how glad I am to be working for your dad? There’s more than one corrupt sheriff out there.”
“I know. Unfortunately, an honest mistake could turn this election against him.”
As though summoned by the mention of the election, Dad’s opponent came walking thorough the door. Chief Charles Maxwell had been in charge of the small force that made up Calhoun’s police department for a dozen years. In November he had announced that he was going to challenge Dad in the upcoming election for sheriff. I hated to admit it, but Maxwell had a chance. There were less than thirty thousand residents in Adams County and Calhoun was by far the largest of the county’s three communities, so almost everyone knew Maxwell. He had a good reputation for keeping a handle on crime in the city, even though we at the sheriff’s department did most of the heavy lifting. We had more than three times as many officers as the city, so when there was a real crime we usually did the work. But people don’t always understand how things are done, and Maxwell was always quick to step in and be there for the perp walk in front of the cameras.
Maxwell took off his sunglasses and looked around the diner. He had one of his toadies with him, who went to the opposite corner of the room and grabbed a table for them. I thought Maxwell would ignore us as he usually did, but apparently he was in the mood to show his ass. He made eye contact with me and, after a ten-second staring contest, headed over to our table. I felt a kick under the table from Pete, who knew my opinion of the blowhard chief.
“Well, mornin’ boys,” Maxwell said, using his best good ol’ boy voice. It was particularly irritating because it was all a big put-on. Maxwell came from Orlando. He’d been on the force down there for about ten years before moving north with his wife, who had gotten a job at Florida State University as an assistant law professor.
He also enjoyed playing up the fact that he was close to six and a half feet tall. He leaned over and looked at us like we were kids in a lunch room. “Guess your dad barfed on the buffet table with this one. I wouldn’t have let a rapist loose.” This last was said loud enough for the whole restaurant to hear.
“Of course you never could have caught one in the first place,” I said, equally loudly and earning a few snickers from our fellow diners.
Maxwell’s face turned red as he leaned down close to me and said menacingly, “Your dad better get his act together. I want a little bit of a challenge this fall.” Then he turned and walked away to sit with his toady in the corner.
“Ass,” I said under my breath.
“You did good,” Pete said as Mary brought my coffee. I thanked her and got up.
“I’m heading for the office. It sh
ould be quieter there.” I dropped a five-dollar bill on the table and left Pete to finish his breakfast.
Before driving out of the parking lot I sent a text to my girlfriend, Cara Laursen. She worked as a vet tech for Dr. Barnhill, but I couldn’t remember what her hours were today. Almost immediately my phone rang.
“Hey! I’ve got an hour before I have to be at work,” she said perkily.
“Guess you haven’t heard.”
“What?”
I filled her in on the events of the previous night, and their possible political implications.
“Damn. Is there anything I can do?”
“See me tonight?”
“You got it.”
At the sheriff’s department I parked next to Matt’s car, remembering the night last month that I’d spent staring at its rear tires. Of course I hadn’t known it was his car at the time. I was hiding in the woods near the local industrial park, staking out a drug deal that was going down and trying to identify a possible dirty cop who was aiding the drug dealers. Or so my new confidential informant, Eddie, had suggested. The car had pulled in close to the spot where I was lying on the ground with my binoculars. I had guessed that it must be the crooked cop, keeping watch over the drug deal, but, alone and without backup, I couldn’t make a move. Hampered by the dark, I tried to remember as many details of the car as I could. I was eventually able to identify it as Matt’s.
When I finally shared my suspicions with Dad, we came up with a plan. It involved having an outside IT guy install a tracking device on Matt’s department-issued laptop. Hopefully he’d keep it in his car most of the time, which would allow us to compare his movements with known drug dealers and their hangouts. We would have preferred to put a tracking device directly on his car, but since he was using his personal car for business it was a grey area as to whether we would need a warrant to do it. We didn’t have anywhere near enough evidence for that. And Dad wanted to make damn sure that anything we got from the tracker could be used in court.
