Evil Secrets Trilogy Boxed Set

by Vickie McKeehan

  True, most of what he had to share was pure speculation, developed by people with no formal police or investigative training. But the group of people, led by his friend, Jake Boston, had come up with an impressive timeline of sorts that showed a solid set of facts connecting their prime suspects, Jessica Boyd and Alana Stevens, to the Parker murders. He had to hand it to them it wasn’t a bad first attempt at trying to solve a forty-year-old cold case.

  As he walked into the substation, he thought about all the work he’d done for Jake Boston and Reese Brennan over the years. The two always managed to find him the most interesting cases. Throw in the fact that for two years he’d been trying to solve Claire Boston’s murder, a murder still unsolved and heading quickly toward its own dusty, cold case box, he wasn’t all that happy.

  But just recently, Jake had asked him to take another look. He’d always felt bad about not being able to find Claire’s killer. Maybe now after letting it sit for two years, he could start with a fresh pair of eyes.

  But over the course of the last few weeks, it wasn’t Claire’s murder that had occupied most of his waking thoughts. The Parker murders had intrigued him enough to sit down with Kit Griffin and listen while she described the double murder of an old couple―in detail from a dream.

  Well, they didn’t call it La-La-Land for nothing, he supposed. The bizarre dream was only one reason his boss Reese had serious doubts and remained skeptical about the whole thing. From the beginning, Reese didn’t buy all the guesswork because really, that’s all it had been. Add in the fact that up to now, Jordan didn’t even know for sure how exactly the couple had died other than what the newspaper article Jake had dug up at the library had told them. Both of the Parkers had suffered gunshot wounds and stab wounds.

  Hopefully this meeting would put an end to all the speculation.

  After going over the timelines, Jordan had become convinced that the motive for the murders had definitely been the money and the land itself. And no one could dispute the fact that the bloodsucking lawyers at BBG&G and Alana had benefited the most by the couple’s deaths.

  The timeline laid out all the specifics and more, including the fact that the moment the lawyers at BBG&G became aware that the Parkers’ only son had gone missing in Vietnam, they’d filed a codicil to the couple’s will making Jessica the sole trustee.

  Reese had come up with that tidbit in old probate files.

  Jordan intended to make sure he took full advantage of the meeting with Ron Blake. It was his job to make sure the cold case detective understood all the details pointing to his two prime suspects. As he walked up to the front desk, Jordan decided it would be a major victory if he could convince the detective that Alana Stevens and Jessica Boyd had at least a vested interest in the old couple’s death.

  A uniformed deputy escorted Jordan into a small ten by ten-foot interview room where he waited for Blake to make an appearance. After about ten minutes, Jordan’s gung-ho resolve only grew stronger. Finally, the door flew open and a middle-aged man with brown hair walked in, eyed him carefully over a pair of reading glasses before offering his hand. “I’m Blake. So you’re the guy with the insane idea he has something that might solve a forty year old murder.”

  “With that attitude, we may have a problem.”

  “Don’t mind me I’m a natural cynic. Let’s cut to the chase. Show me what you got.”

  Jordan opened his briefcase and took out a thick file folder, leafed through a stack of papers. Quickly, before he lost the guy, he went through the timeline showing the detective exactly how Jessica and Alana had the most to gain from the Parkers’ deaths.

  But it wasn’t until he flipped open the briefcase again and took out the .357 the group had found in a mobile safe tucked away in Alana’s attic that Blake sat up and took notice. Jordan placed the heavy weapon down on the table, watched as the detective eyed it with interest.

  “I guess there’s no point in playing hard to get. Let’s take a walk,” Blake offered as they left the interview room to head down a hallway into a much larger room, where a lone, beat-up, dusty brown box already sat on a conference table. “After your phone call I took the liberty of pulling this out of the Evidence Room, on the off-chance you actually brought me something.”

  Jordan stared at the carton. After forty years it had come down to a cardboard box. They stood around the table as he watched Blake dig through the carton, pulling out several pieces of paper.

  Once Blake located the police report, they both went over the details, line by line. They soon learned that Mary Parker had died from a single gunshot wound to the head while Pete Parker had died from a single gunshot wound to the chest. According to the coroner, both had multiple stab wounds inflicted post mortem, after death.

  Pictures from the crime scene revealed graffiti written on the walls of the couple’s bedroom. Looking at the pictures reminded Jordan about Kit Griffin’s psychic dream. At least that’s what he called it. She had been adamant from the start about the exact words written on the walls. Standing there looking at the photos of the crime scene, he saw that her description had been eerily right on the money. How had she known the exact words written on the walls in the victim’s blood, years before she’d ever been born? He didn’t know anything about psychics or their dreams, but he did know how to read a police report. It confirmed the bullets retrieved from both bodies of the victims were believed to be those from a .357.

  Goose bumps formed on his arms.

  Blake stared at Jordan. “Bingo. That’s significant.” He held up an evidence bag from the box. “We retrieved bullet fragments from the scene. I’ll send the gun off to the lab today. Put a rush on the ballistics.”

  Later, as Jordan walked to his car, he couldn’t help feeling euphoric. Only a cop, or in his case, an ex-cop, knew how truly unusual it was to be able to solve a cold murder case, let alone one that had been sitting dormant for forty years, one that had killed a defenseless elderly couple in their beds.

  He dug out his cell phone to give Reese and Jake an update.

  But at that same moment Reese and Jake were crammed into one of the interrogation rooms at the downtown police station waiting for St. John to make his appearance. Jake sat at a table, drumming his fingers on the wood, nervous, while Reese sat there, the epitome of cool and collected, a fact that slightly pissed Jake off, until he reasoned that it wasn’t Reese’s ass that was on the line here.

  After all, Reese hadn’t been the one to marry a woman like Claire.

  Determined to get out of this mess once and for all, to put it behind him and therefore move on with his life with Kit, Jake stiffened his resolve. He’d be damned if he took anymore crap from Max St. John. For the first time in two years, his chips were all in.

  When the door finally opened and fifty-five-year-old Max St. John strolled in with a smug look on his face, Jake’s resolution quickly turned to resentment, especially when he noticed Max’s hands were empty. He hadn’t brought Claire’s case files after all. That one fact took Jake all the way past pissed.

  “Come here to confess,” Max chided, as he took a seat across from the two men.

  So it was going downhill from the get-go. To hell it would, Jake thought, as he upped the ante. “I came here to find out why you never mentioned you had DNA on file; DNA that would have exonerated me two years ago.”

  Max’s eyes widened a fraction. “Who told you that?”

  Jake’s body vibrated with anger. He stood up. When Reese tried to get him to sit back down, Jake simply batted his arm away. “Two years ago I took a polygraph and passed. I had an alibi for that day. The airline confirmed what time my plane landed at LAX. Witnesses at work told you what time I came through the door that morning and verified that I never left the entire day until eleven-thirty that night. I gave you a DNA sample. I did everything you asked of me. I cooperated fully until the day you told me I was the only suspect that made any sense.

  “Damn it, St. John, I didn’t kill Claire. I found the
body that night, I was in that room, I saw all the furniture turned over, the mess, and the blood all over that bedroom. She fought with someone, Max. You know it and I know it. And it wasn’t me. You have to have DNA from under her fingernails, something that clears me once and for all. And you’re too fucking stubborn to admit it.” Jake’s fist slammed down on the table. “I want some answers from you. After all this time I deserve some goddamned answers.”

  “Where was this kind of emotion two years ago, Boston? I watched you sit there stone-faced, waited for you to get angry, and never saw anything but relief that your wife was dead.”

  Exasperated, Jake ran his hands through his hair. “Okay, you got me. Maybe something inside me might have been relieved. I don’t know. She was sleeping with every man she came into contact with but me. How the hell was I supposed to react to that? You should know, Max. You’re the one who sat me down in a room very much like this one and not so politely told me the facts about every one of her affairs. Let’s see,” he counted on his fingers, “there was her aerobics instructor, her yoga instructor, her personal trainer, her tennis coach. As I recall, you had a list. But you left someone out.”

  They stared at each other until Reese started to speak, but Max simply waved him away with his hand. “There was a list, a fairly long one.”

  “Did you name everyone on that list, Max? Or did you leave someone out?”

  “What are you getting at?”

  “Go get the file. I want to see the list.”

  Max got up and went to the door but before he turned the knob, he wanted to know, “You looking for someone in particular, Boston?”

  “Yeah.”

  Five minutes later, Max was back in the room. It wasn’t a file folder he carried, but rather a moving-size box. And he wasn’t alone. Dan Holloway, his partner, joined them at the table. Max pulled the top off the box, pulled out a stack of papers, and started thumbing through the sheets until he found what he was looking for. “Now, you want to tell me whose name’s on this list that I didn’t mention?”

  “Connor Boyd.”

  “Oh, come on, Boston. Man, you and the Griffin woman must have one major personal vendetta against this particular family. No wonder they kidnapped Kit and tried to get back at you. Connor Boyd? You must be crazy.”

  “Check it out. I believe Connor and Claire were having an affair. I missed it two years ago because I concentrated on the list you put in my head. But there had to be neighbors who saw him come and go at the house—more than once. If you interview those neighbors again, show them a picture of the man, one of them might remember seeing him come to the house the day she died. Maybe they might remember how often he came to the house. Of course, I’m not stupid. I know that only proves they were having an affair. But then there’s the DNA evidence, a ton of which must include blood and semen samples. It wasn’t my DNA you found there, Max, but that of the man who killed Claire.”

  Dan Holloway stared at Jake in disbelief. “Let me make sure I understand this. After everything that’s happened to Kit at the hands of Collin Boyd, after he kidnapped her, you want us to reopen your wife’s case, start digging around, go talk to your neighbors in Westlake Village, get them to ID Connor Boyd as the man Claire was seeing, and then go after him?”

  “Actually,” Jake said, as he jerked a piece of paper out of Reese’s hand. “We have someone who has already done the legwork for you guys. He’s already talked to the neighbors, showed Connor’s picture around.

  “It just so happens, the names on that paper are several of the neighbors who remembered him and identified him from the photo Jordan Donovan showed them. It seems Connor Boyd was someone who visited my house on a frequent basis. A few estimated the guy in that picture came and went from my house as long as a year before she died.”

  Jake handed the piece of paper off to Max, let him study it. “All you guys need to do is present him with that fact that he was having an affair with Claire, gauge his reaction, and then ask him where he was the morning she died. Ask him to submit to a DNA test.”

  Max shook his head. “That’s all we have to do, huh? Look, Boston, you have the bucks to spend any way you choose, but…”

  Jake interrupted him. “And that just chaps your butt, doesn’t it, Max? I don’t give a rat’s ass about your petty vendetta against me. All I’m asking is for you to do what the taxpayers pay you to do, what you should have done two years ago. Find Claire’s killer.”

  “It isn’t quite that easy, Boston. I respect the fact that you came here today. I’ll even tell you this much, the DNA we have on file did not match yours.” He gave him a rueful look. “Okay, I owe you one. But so often in these cases, trust me, it’s the husband.”

  Reese stood up, lawyer taking over in place of a supportive friend. “So officially he’s no longer a suspect.”

  Max looked irked for about two seconds. Then glad to have this chance to clear the air, he admitted, “You’re right. We have semen samples. Plenty. And your wife had blood and skin under her fingernails. She put up a helluva fight. There’s plenty of DNA to go around. We swabbed every person on that list I gave you. There were no matches. I didn’t know about the affair with Boyd. If and I emphasize if, the affair ever happened.” He pointed to Reese. “You of all people should know that I can’t just go knocking on Connor Boyd’s door and say, ‘hey there, how about you open up your mouth and I’ll swab it for DNA?’ I have no official cause to do that.”

  Reese countered, “Hypothetically, if we could get you a DNA sample would you compare it, use it? Would you send it to the lab?”

  Max lowered his voice. “This conversation never happened, got that?”

  Reese nodded. “Of course not. We were never here.”

  “If we were having this conversation, we’re talking about a sample from Connor Boyd, right?”

  Jake nodded. “That’s the plan.”

  “Okay, if you could manage it, and I don’t know how you could, I’d send the sample to the lab just like I would anyone else’s you brought me, if for no other reason than to shut this one up.” Max gave Jake a brief glare and then smiled. “But if you tell anyone that, I’ll deny it all the way to retirement.”

  Fifteen minutes later, they’d left the building and were standing outside in the parking lot. Jake turned to Reese and asked, “How do you think it went?”

  “Good on two fronts. First, we found out your DNA doesn’t match anything they have, which we already knew. And second, we got them to say they’d compare a DNA sample if we got one. I’d say that’s a win-win.”

  As he opened the door of his car, Jake took out his cell phone. “I need to call Kit, let her know how great it went.”

  CHAPTER 18 Book 2

  On the Sea Warrior Dylan woke to sunlight dripping down through the skylight above the bed. A glance at his watch told him he’d slept until almost ten o’clock. For him to do that, he must have been wiped. He crawled out of bed, stopping to listen for any signs of life outside his door in case the others had been just as exhausted and were still sacked out. But all he heard was the water lapping at the sides of the boat and the sounds of the harbor slowly coming alive around him.

  As quietly as he could, he made his way into the adjoining head and turned on the shower.

  Fifteen minutes later, fully dressed and ready for the grueling task of unloading their gear into the dinghy and hauling everything up to the house, Dylan walked out of his cabin surprised to find the salon deserted.

  As he absently counted how many trips he would have to make to get everything to shore, he slowly opened the door of Baylee’s stateroom only to find the bed made, the place neat and tidy but empty. At a complete loss, an uneasy feeling started to creep up his spine. It was then he began to look around the boat for all the gear they’d brought with them and discovered it already gone.

  How had two women with a baby unloaded all that crap into a dinghy? How had they motored to shore without him hearing their every move? And had they hauled t
he stuff all the way up the hill to the house on their own while he slept like the dead?

  His stomach rumbled. He peered into the galley, sniffing the air. For the first time, he noticed the fresh fruit and cinnamon rolls on the counter, smelled the hot coffee already brewed in the pot.

  It was then he spotted the note taped to the front of the refrigerator door. Ripping it off, he learned that Baylee had taken the dinghy, was already at the house, and would come back to pick him up at ten o’clock. An arrow at the bottom of the note told him to turn it over.

  He read: We let our captain sleep late.

  Underneath the simple line she’d drawn a huge red heart. For some inexplicable reason, the red heart moved him like nothing had in years. He walked over and poured himself a cup of coffee, reached for the sugar, loaded it up, and brought it back to the little bar area. He sat down, picked up a sweet roll, and shook his head in appreciation. Baylee was so unlike any of the women he’d dated. Most L.A. women wouldn’t go near pastry if you paid them for fear they might gain an extra ounce if they so much as inhaled sugar.

  But not Baylee.

  His beautiful Baylee. She cooked and ate real food. Thinking about her like that had him smiling into his coffee. God bless her, he thought, as he took another tasty bite. Just as he put the last crumb in his mouth, he heard a woman’s voice yell out, “Ahoy matey, permission to come aboard.”

  He headed topside, grinning like a fool. When he got to the deck, he peered over the side of the railing. Looking down into the water next to the boat, he saw Baylee, sitting in the dinghy, bobbing up and down on the water. She’d left her hair loose and the wind lifted it wildly in the breeze. Dressed in a sleeveless red cropped shirt and khaki shorts, she looked tan and happy. A wild thought ran through his head that the woman looked good enough to eat for breakfast. His mouth watered.