But Not Forsaken: A Clint Wolf Novel (Clint Wolf Mystery Series Book 3)

by BJ Bourg

  [Long pause]

  Megyn: I…I mean, how could you know that? I read that they had his DNA and they found the knife at his house.

  Chloe: According to the police report, a burglar alarm went off at her house exactly seven minutes after eleven. If you’re positive he was here at ten-fourteen and he stayed here until two, then there’s no way he committed the crime.

  [Long pause]

  Chloe: It’s okay, don’t cry. Look, you told me on the phone that Jolene once mentioned to Lance that her husband was having an affair. When I confronted Mr. Hedd about that he got really angry, so I think there’s some truth to it. I need a name.

  [Door slams]

  Chloe: Hey, what are you doing here? Wait—what’s going on? What are you doing? No!!!

  ——

  I jerked in my skin as gunfire and screams blasted through the speakers.

  CHAPTER 38

  I leaned forward and dropped my head to my hands, listening to Chloe and Megyn scream for their lives as gunshot after gunshot was fired—at least five of them. There was a crashing sound and, due to the muffled amplification, I knew the device had recorded Chloe hitting the floor. I squeezed my eyes shut and fought back the tears as I listened to Chloe gasping for air in a struggle for her life.

  Susan leapt from her seat and shut off the recording. “Jesus Christ, Mallory! Couldn’t you have vetted this recording before playing it for him?”

  I heard Mallory stammering for words and felt Susan’s hand on my shoulder, but it all seemed like a dream. After a long moment, I lifted my head and tried to collect my thoughts.

  “Do you need a minute?” Susan asked.

  I thought about walking out, but I knew the best thing for me to do was get busy on the case. As long as I was being productive and working toward finding her killer, I knew I’d be okay. “No, there’s too much work to be done.”

  “I’m so sorry, Clint,” Mallory said. “I just thought you should be the first to hear it. I had no idea—”

  “It’s okay. We need to hear it—all of it.” I nodded. “You can put it back on.”

  Frowning, Mallory clicked the play button and we all sat there listening as Chloe put up a gallant fight for her life. It was difficult to listen to, but I needed to know every detail of what happened to her. I had failed to be there to save her, so the least I could do was bring her killer to justice.

  Just as Chloe took her last breath, footsteps pounded the floor and faded away from the recording device. I heard a woman’s voice pleading with someone to help her, and then I jumped again as another gunshot sounded.

  Footsteps moved toward Chloe and then faded away again, seemingly moving in a different direction. A door slammed shut and everything grew quiet. We all looked at each other. “Is that it?” I asked.

  Mallory shrugged and pointed at the time indicator. “There’s still ninety minutes on the recording.”

  We continued listening and finally heard the door slam again. The footsteps echoed across the wooden floor and grew loud as they walked past Chloe’s body. The killer walked around for a while, but we weren’t sure what he was doing. We heard a dinging sound at one point and I knew he was removing the money from the register. A few minutes later it sounded like he grabbed Chloe and began dragging her across the floor. Her body plopped to the wooden floor and we heard the door slam again. A car started somewhere in the distance and then drove nearer. It stopped and a car door slammed. The sounds we heard next indicated he had dragged Chloe across the porch and hoisted her body into the trunk of her car. The trunk then slammed shut and the only other sound we heard was rumbling from a short car ride. After the engine was killed and the door slammed shut, there was no other sound for about thirty minutes.

  Finally, someone entered the car again and cranked the engine, taking Chloe’s body for a ride. Somewhere along the way, the memory card on the recording device filled up and the audio file shut off.

  Things were starting to come together inside my head, and I didn’t like the picture that was forming. “I received a text message from Chloe Wednesday evening at about six o’clock saying she was in an interview. It had to be the interview with Megyn, but Megyn had been dead between eight and twelve hours when we found her, and that old man we talked to Thursday said the bar was closed at five.”

  “What are you getting at?” Susan asked.

  “The killer must’ve had Chloe’s cell phone and was using it to keep me at bay.” I turned to Mallory. “Do we know what time she made the recording?”

  “The date and time stamp showed Wednesday at quarter to five in the evening.”

  Every text message I’d received after that point was from the killer. I grew nauseous at the thought of communicating with the person who murdered Chloe. But who could it be? And why were both women killed?

  I rubbed my chin. “The killer took Chloe’s body away from the bar and cleaned up the scene.”

  Susan nodded her agreement. “Those two bullet holes in the wall weren’t misses at all—those were the two bullet holes that went right through Chloe’s body.”

  “The coroner recovered one bullet from Chloe,” Mallory said. “If you give me the bullets y’all cut from the wall and the ones y’all recovered from Megyn’s body, I’ll have the lab compare them to the bullet from Chloe. If they match, we can prove they were killed by the same person.”

  “That won’t happen,” I said. “The evidence from Megyn’s murder was secured in our evidence lockers at the police department.”

  “And it all went up in flames!” Mallory cursed. “Did y’all recover any other evidence from the scene?”

  “We got some fingerprints—most of which were smudges—and we swabbed for DNA,” Susan said. “But everything’s gone.”

  “Any spent shell casings?”

  “Nope—the killer picked them up.”

  “Megyn was shot three times,” I said. “Twice from some distance and once point-blank in the head. Chloe was shot three times and from some distance. Six shots total from at least three different shooting positions, but not a single shell casing was recovered.” I shook my head. “I understand why the killer would take the shell casings, but why move Chloe’s body from the scene and clean up the blood? That doesn’t make sense.”

  “Maybe Chloe is like one of those shell casings,” Susan offered. “Her body might offer a clue as to who the killer is.”

  “Or,” Mallory said softly, “they didn’t want you finding Chloe because then you wouldn’t be on a case—you’d be on a mission.”

  I considered both of their points. “This new revelation could be a coincidence, and the Parker brothers could still be responsible for her death.”

  “Think about it, Clint,” Susan said. “Right before the shooting started, Chloe said, what are you doing here? That means she knew her killer.”

  My mind began to race. If she knew her killer, that might mean I knew her killer. “We need to run a search warrant on her phone,” I said. “We need to trace her steps in the hours leading up to the shooting—find out who she spoke to and where she went.”

  “Already done,” Mallory said. “Follow me.”

  CHAPTER 39

  Mallory led us to a large conference room in the detective bureau and slammed the door shut. She ran her fingers through her long brown hair and pointed to a large map on the wall. “The red push-pins represent pings from Chloe’s phone on Wednesday,” she explained. “The time she was at each location is written on the little pink tabs.”

  I studied the map and recognized most of the locations, but not all of them. When I asked about them, Mallory handed me a document she had prepared. “This details the times and corresponding locations for you,” she explained. “As you know, we can’t pinpoint her exact location from the phone records, but we’re pretty sure we’ll be able to verify all of it when we start doing interviews. We know she did stop at the sheriff’s office that morning, so that location has already been verified.”

  �
�She stopped here?” I read through the list, running my finger across each time and location:

  ——

  7:30 a.m. – The Rushing residence

  7:45 a.m. – At news station

  8:13 a.m. – Still at news station

  9:46 a.m. – Sheriff’s Office

  10:31 a.m. – Between Sheriff’s Office and news station

  10:40 a.m. – At news station

  4:37 p.m. – Bayou View Pub

  6:00 p.m. – At news station

  10:26 p.m. – At news station

  ——

  “Why’d she stop here?” I asked.

  “She stopped in our records division to pick up a copy of the Lance Duggart investigative report and then she stopped in CID to speak with Doug.”

  “Why Doug?” I asked.

  Mallory shrugged. “I guess she saw that he was the lead detective on the case initially.”

  “Did he speak with her?” I wanted to know.

  “He did. He said she asked about some missing witness—we now know it was Megyn Sanders—but he had no clue what she was talking about.” Mallory looked over her shoulder to make sure the door was still closed. “I wasn’t here back then, but they say there was some bad blood between Reginald and Doug over the case. Doug wasn’t making enough headway, so the sheriff brought Reginald in to take over.”

  “Apparently a good move,” Susan said, “because Reginald solved it.”

  The stitches above my left eye were starting to itch, so I rubbed the cut as I thought things over. I needed to know everything I could about the case. If I could find out what Chloe found out, maybe that would point me in the right direction. I finally asked Mallory if I could see the file. With a nod of her head, she disappeared out the door and returned about ten minutes later with a large binder that was labeled, Jolene Hedd Murder Book.

  I pushed the binder aside and continued running down the list of times. I stopped when I reached the six o’clock hour and stabbed the paper with my finger. “Chloe texted me at six to say she was in an interview.”

  “That’s impossible,” Mallory said. “She was already dead.”

  “Precisely.” I pointed to the location on the document. “Someone from the news station used her phone to text me.”

  Susan sucked in her breath. “You’re right. And they were still using it at ten twenty-six that night.”

  “That was a text from her phone to tell me she had just arrived at her dad’s house and she would call me in the morning.” I turned to the binder. “There’s something in here that made someone at the news station want to kill her, and I need to find out what that reason could be.”

  “Find the motive, find the killer,” Susan said, echoing my words from long ago.

  “While you get acquainted with the murder file,” Mallory offered, “Susan and I can head out to interview Chloe’s intern. We need to verify the times on the phone records and find out if she had any appointments scheduled—either on this case or on something else.” She handed me a list of telephone numbers. “These are the numbers that communicated with Chloe on that day. We haven’t identified any of them yet—other than yours—but we’ll get on it right away. Do you recognize any of them?”

  “Once I put a number in my phone, I never look at it again.” I frowned. “I don’t even know Chloe’s number. I just press her name every time I want to call or text her.”

  Before they walked out, Susan handed me her phone in case something came up. She told me to call Mallory’s phone if I needed her. She grinned. “It’s under her name, so you won’t have to remember the number.”

  I nodded and dropped to the chair in front of the murder book. When I was alone in the room, I ran my hands across the top of the binder, aware that Chloe had touched this same object just three days earlier. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine her sitting there…tried to imagine what would be going through her head. When nothing came to me, I sighed and opened the binder.

  I turned to the photographs first and found a picture of Jolene Hedd’s lifeless body. She was lying on her back on the floor in the master bedroom of her house. Her clothes had been ripped from her body and she was completely nude, except for the straps of her black bra clinging to her shoulders. She had been stabbed in the neck and there was blood on her body and on the blue carpet around her. It was a horrific scene.

  I flipped though the report, searching for information on Lance Duggart. Why had this successful bar owner killed the woman with whom he’d been having an affair? And why rape her if he was having consensual sex with her on a regular basis?

  Susan’s phone began ringing and I glanced at the number. I didn’t recognize it, but I answered it anyway. It was Reginald.

  “Clint, I’ve been calling your phone all morning.”

  “Oh, yeah, it got lost in the fire at the police department. What’s up?”

  “I need to talk to you right away,” he said. “We were all thinking Simon Parker and his brothers murdered Chloe, but the audio recording Mallory recovered changes everything. I strongly suspect her murder is linked to the Lance Duggart case.”

  I remembered hearing that Reginald had solved the case when no one else could, and realized he probably knew more about it than anyone else. I told him I was at the sheriff’s office and he said he’d be right over.

  CHAPTER 40

  3:47 p.m.

  Ali Bridges’ Apartment

  Susan sat at the small kitchen table holding Ali Bridges’ hand. Ali was crying hysterically and shaking uncontrollably. Mallory walked over with a tissue and sat on the other side of her. After she’d calmed down a little, Ali took the tissue and wiped her face. She finally nodded. “I’m…I can talk a little. It’s just so…so hard, you know? Chloe wasn’t just my boss, she was my friend. She was such a nice person.”

  Susan frowned. “I know this is hard. I’m sorry we had to bother you with this, but it’s important we know everything Chloe did on Wednesday.”

  Ali took a deep breath and exhaled. Her brown eyes were bloodshot and her long hair was tucked into a rough bun. “Okay, I’m ready.”

  “What time did she get to work Wednesday?” Susan asked.

  “I’m not sure. I got there at eight and she was already there.”

  Susan jotted down the information. “What time did she leave and where did she go?”

  Ali was thoughtful. “She left not long after I got there. Maybe nine o’clock? Earlier in the week she had asked me to look up old articles involving the district attorney and a man named Isaiah Wilson. I found a bunch of articles about the DA, but only one about that man.”

  Susan caught her breath at the mention of her father. Mallory glanced at her, but Susan nodded to let her know she was okay to continue questioning Ali.

  “Did you find any connections?” Susan asked.

  “No, not really. The article about the man named Isaiah was just mentioning how he had died during a boxing match.” Ali dabbed at her eyes with the tissue. “It was a good write-up. It talked about all the things he had done as a boxer. Now, Chloe was real interested in the picture from his funeral, because she said one of the ladies in the picture was the DA’s wife.”

  Susan pursed her lips. She knew the article well—a copy of it was folded neatly in a box of keepsakes back home—but she hadn’t realized Jolene Hedd was in the picture. “Did you know why Chloe thought to look into this Lance Duggart case? What did that have to do with Isaiah Wilson?”

  “Well, Chloe thought it odd that the district attorney’s wife was pictured at Isaiah Wilson’s funeral and then six months later she was raped and killed.”

  “Did she think there was a connection?”

  Ali shrugged. “I don’t really know, but she did ask me to call the sheriff’s office to see if they had a report on the case. It took a while and they transferred me a half dozen times before I finally spoke with a lady who was able to help me.” Ali explained to Susan that the clerk had to dig around for a while, but she finally found
the box containing the case file. “She called me first thing Wednesday morning and told me she would make a copy for Chloe, but it would cost fifteen cents per page. Chloe didn’t care about the cost—she just wanted to get her hands on that file.”

  “Is that where she went when she left the office Wednesday morning?” Susan asked.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  When Susan asked what time Chloe returned to work, Ali tucked a lock of hair behind her ear and said, “It was sometime in the afternoon. Two o’clock maybe?”

  Susan glanced at the timeline Mallory had created. “Are you sure about that? Her phone records show she was at the news station at ten-forty.”

  Ali nodded. “I’m positive. She called me about ten-thirty to tell me she had left the sheriff’s office and was heading to the district attorney’s office to speak with Bill Hedd. Afterward, she was planning to have lunch with her boyfriend—”

  “Wait, what?” Susan asked, looking from Mallory to Ali. “Clint was in Tennessee.”

  “No, not Clint,” Ali said. “It was some new guy. Chloe said she broke up with Clint.”

  Susan sank into the chair. “Are you sure?”

  Ali nodded and continued. “I don’t know what time she got to the DA’s office or left, but she came into the station around two o’clock. I’m not sure what time she met her boyfriend for lunch, but they probably ate somewhere in town. That’s what they usually do.”

  “What was this boyfriend’s name?” Susan asked.

  Ali shrugged. “I don’t remember her ever saying his name and I’ve never seen him.”

  Fighting to stay focused, Susan glanced at her notes and then back up at Ali. “Is it possible Chloe came back to the news station earlier than two o’clock and you didn’t see her?”

  Ali nodded. “She usually leaves her car parked here when she goes to court or the district attorney’s office, because it’s only a block down the street. Besides, there’s never any place to park over there, so she probably just parked here and walked over.”