by BJ Bourg
She hesitated for a long moment. Finally, she nodded in resignation. “I guess so.”
“I can’t imagine why you would be coy with me.” I resisted the urge to fold my arms across my chest, opting instead to keep my hand close to my pistol. I didn’t know if her boyfriend killed Chad, but I had to act as though he did and that he was lurking around. “Is there something you want to tell me?”
“No.” She fiddled with the front of her robe. “I’ve told you all I know.”
“It seems there’s something you want to tell me,” I said slowly. “You appear to have a guilty conscience.”
Wanda didn’t immediately say anything, so I just stood there quietly, allowing the silence to grow loud. She didn’t take the bait.
“What about your boyfriend, Danny?” I finally asked, breaking the silence between us. “Where was he Saturday night?”
The question caught her by surprise. She stammered for a few seconds, but quickly recovered. “He was with me.”
“When?”
“Saturday.”
“What time on Saturday?”
“Um, well, he came over on Friday afternoon and stayed here for the weekend.” She shifted her feet. “He usually stays here when Alice visits her dad. He left on Sunday.”
“What did y’all do?” I asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Beginning with Friday when he arrived and leading up to when he left on Sunday, can you tell me in detail everything y’all did?”
Grunting, she began listing everything they had done from the moment Danny arrived at her house. She made sure to go into great detail when she recounted the sexual activities that had taken place, and I knew she was either trying to annoy me or trying to convince me that he had really been with her.
While the devil is always in the details and the details she provided were convincing, I knew better than to believe them automatically. If Wanda was a good liar, she wouldn’t make up a bunch of falsehoods about this weekend. Instead, she would simply recount all of her activities from a different weekend, so that she could relay the tiniest of details and make it seem convincing.
When she was done, I shifted my feet and asked about something I’d learned from Tiffany. “I understand Danny also stays here when Alice is home and I know that upset Chad quite a bit. So much so, that he was thinking about hiring an attorney to take you to court.”
Wanda scowled. “Who told you that?”
“It doesn’t matter who told me. What matters is that Chad didn’t like your boyfriend hanging around Alice.” I paused and studied Wanda, arching an eyebrow as I did so. “How’d your boyfriend feel about Chad getting a lawyer and threatening to take you to court?”
“Look, detective, I hope you don’t think Danny had anything to do with what happened to Chad. Danny loves Alice. He would never do anything to hurt her.”
“Well, that’s interesting, because it was pretty miraculous how Alice escaped injury during all of the shooting down at the campsite. It was as though she had an angel watching out for her—or the shooter intentionally missed.”
I paused again and fixed Wanda with curious eyes. I knew the silence and the accusations would be too much for her. She finally spoke.
“Detective Wolf, you have to believe me. There was no animosity between Danny and Chad. Sure, Chad didn’t like Danny, but Danny didn’t have a problem with Chad.” She licked her lips. “He doesn’t even have a gun.”
“How do you know he doesn’t have a gun?” I asked.
“He told me he’s not allowed around guns.” As soon as she said it, I could tell she wished she hadn’t.
“So, he’s a felon.” I said it more as a statement than a question, but Wanda nodded. I then asked if she knew of what he had been convicted.
“He never really told me.”
I nodded, glanced around. I hadn’t detected any movement from inside the house while we had been talking, but that didn’t mean Danny wasn’t out here somewhere, lurking around.
“Isn’t Danny kind of young for you?” I asked after a moment.
“Of course not.” Wanda actually stood straighter and smirked, pushing her breasts out farther. “He’s only eleven years younger than me. I think that’s why Chad hated him.”
Wanda was in her early forties, so that would put Danny in his late twenties or early thirties. I needed his last name.
“Could it be that Chad didn’t like him being around Alice because he was a felon?” I asked.
“I guess that’s possible—”
“Where can I find him?” I asked, interrupting her. “I need to ask him some questions.”
“That’s really not necessary, Detective Wolf. He doesn’t know anything.” Wanda’s demeanor changed. She began wringing her hands. “He definitely had nothing to do with this. I swear to you, he knows nothing.”
“How can you swear to that?”
“Because he was with me all weekend.”
“You told me yourself that everyone loved Chad,” I said slowly. “According to everything we’ve learned so far, Danny is the only person who might be at odds with Chad. I need to talk to him.”
Wanda stood there fidgeting, not saying a word.
“Hey, by the way,” I began, snapping my fingers in the air, “what’s his last name again?”
I saw the worry lines on Wanda’s face relax a little and I knew she wasn’t about to tell me anything. She figured if I didn’t know his last name, she was in the clear. I opened my mouth to press her when a shrill scream pierced the night air like a mountain lion in a still forest.
CHAPTER 27
I pushed by Wanda, who had lost all color in her face, and rushed into her house. My gun had instinctively appeared in my hand and I allowed it to lead the way as the sound of the scream guided me through the house. I turned a corner and came into a living room. That’s where I found Alice. She was writhing on the floor near the sofa. Her arms were covering her face and she was screaming like she was locked in a nightmare.
Realizing the young girl was having a bad dream relating to her father’s murder, I quickly holstered my pistol and rushed to her side.
“Wanda, get in here!” I hollered over my shoulder. I then turned to Alice and said, “It’s okay, Alice, you’re having a bad dream. You’re safe. I’m here.”
“Dad? Is that you?” Alice’s eyes flew open and she stared with her mouth agape, searching my face with her probing eyes. It only took a second for her to realize she had awakened from one nightmare only to find herself in another one, but this one was very much real. She let out a guttural moan and sank onto the floor, bawling.
My heart was breaking. I didn’t know how long I could stand to look at her. Finally, when it was all I could take, Wanda appeared at my side and took Alice in her arms.
I stood and backed away, my eyes smarting. I watched as Wanda rocked Alice in her arms and tried to calm her down. I caught movement from the corner of my eye and turned to see Amy standing there, a puzzled expression on her face. I walked over and explained what had just happened.
“She won’t tell you where to find her boyfriend?” Amy asked, her chest heaving.
“Nope. She won’t even tell me his name.”
Without saying a word, she marched to where Wanda was crouching and grabbed the woman roughly by the shoulder. Wanda let out a startled gasp and twisted around to look up at Amy.
“Look at your daughter,” Amy said roughly, pointing down at Alice, who was still crying uncontrollably. “There’s a good chance your boyfriend did this to her. How dare you protect him! What kind of a monster are you?”
Wanda’s face twisted in pain and tears streamed down her cheeks. “He didn’t have anything to do—”
“The next thing out of your mouth had better be his name and address,” Amy snarled. “If you really love your daughter, you’ll tell us where to find him. If he’s innocent like you say, then we’ll clear him quickly and move on, but the more you stall, the harder it’ll be fo
r us to solve this case.”
“His name is Danny Kiger,” Wanda finally said, the words stumbling from her mouth like a drunken boat hand. “He lives down the street in the blue house.”
“He lives down your street?” Amy asked, a bit surprised.
Wanda nodded. “I met him one day when I was jogging. I…we’ve been having an affair since last year. I really don’t think he had anything to do with Chad’s murder, but that’s who he is and where he lives.”
Amy let go of Wanda and headed for the door with me on her heels. I glanced over my shoulder once and saw Wanda trying unsuccessfully to console Alice.
Once we had jumped into my Tahoe, I explained what had happened with Alice’s nightmare. Amy frowned.
“That poor girl will never be right,” she said sadly. “She’ll be traumatized for the rest of her life.”
“Do you think therapy will help?” I asked as I backed out of the driveway and headed toward the front of the street.
“Nope.” Amy shook her head for emphasis. “Nothing will be able to erase the horrors of that incident from her mind. It was like a war zone out there, and she won’t be able to escape the sights, the sounds, and the smells from that night.”
Having lived through my own piece of hell, I knew her to be correct. Sure, Alice might get to a point in her life where the pain would dull enough for her to function on a day-to-day basis, but she’d never be able to escape the nightmare.
CHAPTER 28
After contacting the sheriff’s office’s SWAT team and waiting until their snipers could set up on the home of Danny Kiger, Amy and I made our way stealthily across the front lawn. We didn’t have the legal authority to go onto his property and surround the house, so the best we could do was walk up and knock on the door. It presented some risks to be sure, but law enforcement was a risky profession.
I wasn’t familiar with the snipers who had been deployed on this operation, so I could only hope they had our backs. The one sniper in whom I had the utmost trust and confidence was my friend, London Carter, from the neighboring Parish of Magnolia. But last I checked, he hadn’t hired on with Chateau.
“Do you think Wanda called and warned him?” Amy whispered when we had reached the steps of the small wood-framed house.
“I sure hope not.” I moved to the right side of the broken concrete steps and Amy moved to the left. There was no light bulb in the globe above us, so we were cloaked in darkness. After giving Amy a quick nod, I rapped loudly on the door.
There was instant movement from inside, as though we’d startled someone. Footsteps pounded heavily on the raised wooden floor. I was tense, expecting anything—well, almost anything. I wasn’t expecting a young man who was five-foot-nothing to answer the door. He peered through the screen, squinting out into the darkness.
“Wanda? Is that you?”
“No, it’s Clint.”
“Clint?” The man’s face scrunched up. “I don’t know nobody named Clint. You’d better get your ass out of my yard before I come out there and—”
“And what?” I asked, stepping into the glow that shone from the kitchen light behind him. I could clearly see that he was unarmed and he could clearly see me now, but I kept my badge and pistol side turned away from him. “What in the hell do you think you could do?”
He gulped audibly and slunk back a little. “Man, look, I don’t want any trouble. I don’t know why you’re here, but I’m sure you’ve got me confused with someone else.”
It was then that I angled my gun side slightly forward and allowed the light to reflect off of my gold badge. “Are you Danny Kiger?” I asked.
He gulped again. “Yeah, and I swear I didn’t do it.”
“Do what?”
“I didn’t kill Chad Pierce.”
I studied the young man for a long moment. I didn’t even bother asking if Wanda had called him, because I was sure she hadn’t. Word about the murder of Chad Pierce had spread far and wide on the wings of Jenny Billiot’s murder, and if Danny’s I.Q. was anywhere above twenty, he knew that, as the victim’s lover, he would be the prime suspect.
“And I’m just supposed to believe you?” I asked, wanting to gauge his response.
“Well, I can prove it.” Danny ran a finger through his greasy and unkempt hair. “I’ve got a witness to where I was at.”
“Would that be Wanda Pierce?”
“Yep. I was with her all weekend. I waited until Chad left with Alice and then I walked to Wanda’s house. That was Friday afternoon. We stayed at the house all weekend and I went back home Sunday at around noon, just in case Chad might come back early.”
“What did y’all do during that time?” I asked.
“What do you mean?”
“I want you to recount every little detail of everything you did while you were at Wanda’s house this past weekend. If you clipped your toenails in her living room, I want to know about it. If you ate Life cereal for the first time, you’d better not leave it out. If you want to convince me you didn’t kill Chad Pierce, you’ll tell me all of it.”
Taking a deep breath, the straggly young man began to recount every detail of his visit with Wanda, and his accounting matched Wanda’s version almost verbatim. I scowled, wondering if Wanda had coached him on what to say. While it was possible she had called him and told him everything she had told me, it seemed highly unlikely. While it was also a possibility that they might have preemptively decided to recount their activities from a different weekend if they were ever questioned by the police, it also seemed unlikely.
I sighed, knowing I might have to accept the fact that they were telling the truth. I glanced in Amy’s direction, gave a one-shoulder shrug in case she had anything to ask.
“How long have you been messing around with Wanda?” she asked, her voice carrying loudly in the night air.
It was clear that Danny hadn’t seen Amy standing in the shadows, because he jerked in his skin when he heard her voice. He squinted, trying to see through the screen in that direction.
“You scared the shit out of me,” he said, and then turned back toward me. “I didn’t know anyone else was with you. What’d she say?”
“How long have you been screwing Wanda?” Amy asked again, stepping into Danny’s line of sight.
“Um, it’s been a while.”
“Before she and Chad split up?”
“Yeah.” He nodded in confirmation. “I feel bad about that, but I’m kind of confined to my neighborhood and the pickings are slim around here.”
“Is that so?” Amy folded her arms across her breasts. “You were only settling for Wanda Pierce? Like, you really think you could’ve gotten better than her?”
“I mean, I used to be pretty smooth with the ladies and they like my bike.” Danny twisted his face into what was probably supposed to be a seductive glance, but it looked more like he was having a brain hemorrhage. “What’s up, baby?”
“You call me baby again and I’ll drag you out of your house by the throat,” Amy said firmly. “Now, why are you confined to the neighborhood? What crimes have you committed?”
“I got drunk and totaled my motorcycle. I lost my license and the insurance dropped me.”
“What else?” Amy pressed. “You can’t carry a gun, so what felony did you commit?”
“I…um…I broke into a house while the family was home. I thought the place was empty. The man tried to stop me. He tackled me and was trying to beat me up, so I had to defend myself, you know? I only fought him so I could get away, but they got me with a crime of violence.” He shook his head. “It’s not right. This is still America. I have the right to defend myself.”
“You break into someone’s home and think you can claim self-defense?” Amy asked in exasperation. “That man could’ve justifiably killed you in his home.”
“Really?” Danny was dumbfounded—and more dumb than founded.
“Yep.”
“I didn’t know that.” He grunted. “I guess I won’t do that a
gain.”
Amy pointed past Danny, toward the interior of the house. “Do you mind if we search your house?”
“Why?” He was suddenly defensive. “What are you looking for?”
“You say you didn’t kill Chad Pierce and you’re a convicted felon, so you shouldn’t be in possession of any semi-automatic rifles or 5.56 ammunition, right?”
Danny pushed open the screen door and stepped back. Waving an arm, he invited us in. “You can search all you want, but you won’t find any guns or ammunition in here.”
He was too eager to let us in. I knew we wouldn’t find anything. As I followed Amy and Danny around, my mind was far from this little, messy blue house. Our best lead had just fizzled up and died. If Chad hadn’t been killed by his estranged wife’s boyfriend, then who had done it? And why? Who else had a motive to kill him? Was there more to Chad Pierce than we knew? Or had this been a random act of violence?
The last thought gave me a shudder. Random murders were much harder to solve than targeted ones. I’d always said that if I could figure out the motive for the killing, I could identify the suspect. But what if there was no motive? What if our suspect was simply a depraved person who came upon Chad’s campsite and decided to mow him and Alice down for no good reason? What if that same person used Chad’s disabled vehicle to lure his next victim? And what if that same person was out there right now, trying to set another trap for an innocent person?
“Let’s go,” I said to Amy before we had reached the last room in Danny’s house. “We’re wasting time now. He didn’t do it.”
“That’s what I tried to tell you when you first got here,” Danny said, pushing out his tiny chest.
“Sorry for the bother,” I muttered as we made our exit.
CHAPTER 29
It was nine o’clock at night when Amy and I pulled into a department store parking lot down the road from Danny Kiger’s house. Sheriff Turner, Susan, Mallory, and a group of SWAT officers were waiting for us. I had called Susan and Mallory on a three-way and told them about the new developments—or lack thereof.
