by B J Bourg
After we got the pleasantries out of the way, I asked if the sheriff’s office had transported Dixie to the detention center yet.
“No. I got a call right when I came on duty saying they would be here around noon,” she explained. “There was some big drug roundup last night in the northern part of the parish and their vans were tied up for hours.”
We made small talk until I arrived at the criminal operations center in Central Chateau. It was a little after nine and I recognized Mallory’s car in the parking lot. I knew she had probably been there for hours.
“Howdy, Clint,” she said when I walked into the detective bureau. She was wearing the same clothes from yesterday, and she wasn’t a bit bashful about it. She indicated my clothes with her head. “You were able to get a shower, I see.”
“Yeah, a few hours ago.” I followed her toward the conference room. “What about you? Didn’t you make it home yet?”
“I meant to stretch out on the sofa in my office for ten minutes before driving home last night, but I dropped dead. I didn’t move until this morning when one of the detectives showed up to work on a report.” She punched her security code into the keypad and pushed the conference room door open. There were pieces of evidence stretching from one side of the long tables to the other. “This is everything we got out of Dennis and Dixie’s house.”
I ambled toward the table and began scanning the items. There were several boxes of shotgun shells, some new and some already broken open. I noticed they were the same brand and type as the shells we’d recovered from the crime scene. There were also packs of zip ties the same color and size as the ones used to bind Carl’s family.
Mallory pointed to two zip ties that had been used and cut. “We’re going to have these processed for DNA. I’m willing to bet they were used on Carl.”
“Where’d you find them?”
“They were in an oyster sack in the garage, along with a bloody knife that I believed was used to kill Nathan Baxter. We found an extra magazine for his pistol in the sack, and there appeared to be dried blood on the barrel of the Colt Model 1911 semi-automatic pistol you took off of his body. I’m thinking it’ll match Jennifer’s DNA.” She walked around to the other side of the table and removed some latex gloves from a box on a wall shelf. After pulling them on, she lifted a photo album and waved me over.
I cocked my head to the side, said, “People still print photos?”
“I guess so.” She flipped through the pages until she found the desired one. “Check this out.”
She tilted the book in my direction and I saw a picture of Dennis squatting next to a giant wild boar. In his hands, he held the same shotgun we’d recovered from the murder scene. I whistled. “This is damning evidence.”
“Against Dennis, but what about Dixie?”
“The DNA on the shotgun will seal her fate.”
She nodded and took me through every item they’d recovered during the search warrant. It was almost noon—the only reason I knew the time was because of my growling stomach—when static suddenly squealed from the radio in my back pocket. A split second later, I heard Beth’s voice hollering over the speaker, calling for me. “Are you on the air? Please answer if you can read me!”
I answered immediately. “Ten-four, go ahead with your traffic.”
“She’s…she’s unresponsive in the jail cell. It’s Dixie Boudreaux—she’s not breathing! She’s dead!”
CHAPTER 50
I raced to the Mechant Loup Police Department as fast as my Tahoe could take me. There was an ambulance, a prison van, Susan’s Tahoe, Melvin’s truck, and two patrol cars parked in front of the raised building when I arrived. I took the large concrete steps three at a time and crashed through the front doors. The lobby door was wide open and I sprinted through it on my way to the crowded hallway. I glanced into the dispatcher’s station on my way past the room and saw Beth sitting pale-faced in front of the radio control panel. I felt bad for her, but I couldn’t do anything to comfort her now.
Everyone moved back and made a path for me to squeeze through, and I found Susan standing just outside of the cell watching two medics as they collected their gear. One of them, a young man who looked twelve, shook his head and frowned. “It’s no use. She’s gone.”
Susan glanced at me and took a heavy breath before explaining. “The two transport deputies came back here and found her like this.”
I brushed past Susan and stared into the cell. Dixie was lying flat on her back where the medics had positioned her to attempt CPR. Her lifeless eyes were partially open and her jaw was lax. A blanket was on the ground next to her, but it wasn’t entangled in her feet as I would’ve expected it to be if the medics had dragged her off the bed.
“In what position was she when y’all arrived?” I asked the medics before they left the corridor.
“She was just like that when we arrived.”
“I moved her to her back,” called Melvin from somewhere behind me. “She was on her left side, lying on the floor near the bars when I got here. One of her arms was protruding through the bars, but she wasn’t moving or breathing.”
“Yeah,” agreed a female transport deputy, “that’s how she was when we approached the cell door.”
I began examining Dixie’s body, looking for evidence of what had brought about her death. There were no obvious signs of trauma, so it didn’t appear she had been beaten to death or had fallen. She had no ligature marks on her neck, so she hadn’t hanged herself. Had she smuggled drugs in and overdosed? I quickly ruled that out, because there was no vomit in the cell.
I scanned the small room where this murderer had taken her last breath. It was pristine. I glanced back down at Dixie’s body and lifted one arm, and then the other. I scowled when I examined her left arm. There was a tiny drop of dried blood inside the crook of her elbow.
I glanced out into the corridor, where Melvin was standing alone watching me. He wore faded jeans and an old T-shirt, and his pistol was tucked into the front of his pants.
I held up the arm to reveal the tiny drop of blood, and asked him what he thought it could mean.
“Beats me,” he said. “Is there anything in the cell that she might’ve used to stab herself?”
“No, but she certainly didn’t bleed to death—unless she only had one drop of blood inside her body.” I straightened and glanced up at the video surveillance cameras in the corridor. There were two of them, but they only covered the corridor and would do no good. Due to privacy issues, we didn’t film inside the cells because the toilets were exposed in the cells. I nodded in Melvin’s direction. “What do you know?”
“I showed up to clean the boat,” he said. “While I was getting the keys, I heard the transport deputies yelling for help and I came running. I found her here on the floor. She was unresponsive.”
I sighed and asked him to keep an eye on the body while I retrieved my crime scene kit. The transport deputies were standing in the dispatcher’s station with Amy and Susan when I walked by. I was about to enter the lobby when I heard a knock at the door. I opened it and saw a man standing there wearing a red aluminum backpack sprayer. There was a logo on his left shirt pocket that told me he was from a local pest control company.
“You’ve come at a bad time,” I said, “but I’ll let you speak with the chief about rescheduling. Wait here.” I stuck my head in the dispatcher’s station and told Susan the pest control man was here. “I told him you might want to reschedule—”
“What?” Beth asked, twisting around in her chair. “He already came this morning. He was early.”
My head jerked around and my eyes found Susan’s. She was looking directly at me. Realization hit me like a wrecking ball. “Beth, what time did the pest control man come?”
“Um, it was around ten, I’d say. He said he had a cancellation in his schedule so he was early.”
I shot a finger toward the bank of cameras in the corner of the room. “Sue, pull up the footage from earlier!”
/>
I stood close to Susan and watched over her shoulder as she worked the controls and pulled up the cameras in the corridor outside of the cells. We watched in stunned silence as a man appeared in the camera and walked along the wall opposite the cell, working the pump on a potato sprayer as he did so.
“He…he said he was going into the kitchen,” Beth said, stammering as she watched with us. “He lied to me!”
The man—who wore navy blue slacks, a light blue shirt with a logo on the breast pocket, and a baseball cap pulled low—crossed to the wall on which the doors to cells were located and made his way toward where I imagined Dixie lay sleeping on a cot. He stopped in front of Dixie’s cell and stared inside. As he stood there, he lifted his hand, and the keys to the cell dangled from his fingers. It was then that I saw he was wearing gloves.
The man must’ve said something, because I saw part of Dixie’s nose appear through the bars. It looked like they were talking. A few seconds later, Dixie reached for the keys.
“What in God’s name is he doing?” Susan asked. “And who is he?”
I didn’t answer. I simply stared as I watched. Just as Dixie was about to wrap her fingers around the large key ring, the man grabbed her wrist and jerked her arm through the cell toward him. He spun around and pinned her exposed arm under his armpit. He grabbed the wand attached to the potato sprayer and lifted the end toward the crook of her elbow. I gasped when I saw a clear syringe attached to the tip of the wand. The plunger on the syringe was gone, but I knew he wouldn’t need it.
The face of one of the transport deputies scrunched up. “What’s he doing?”
“He’s going to shoot enough air into her veins to kill a grizzly bear,” I predicted, watching as he shoved the needle into her vein. He then depressed the trigger on the wand and turned to face Dixie. I couldn’t see the expression on her face through the bars, but, almost immediately, her arm slipped from the man’s grasp and slid downward, coming to rest on the floor and sticking through the bars. The man stood staring for a full minute, then slowly backed away, returned the keys to the hook, and slithered out the corridor. Once he left the area, we could no longer see him, but we guessed he walked straight out the door.
“I…I’m so sorry,” Beth said. “I should’ve escorted him around the building. I…it’s all my fault—”
“Stop,” I said. “You’re lucky he didn’t kill you, too.”
“What’re we going to do?” Susan asked.
As I pondered the question, some things started to fall into place inside my head, and I knew there was only one person it could be—Chuck Duval. He was here when the fax came in from the crime lab and he had taken page four. He knew before I did that the DNA on the shotgun was that of a female, and he knew that female had to be Dixie. He had left the building around the time I went into the interview room, and must’ve shoved the pages under the fax machine where we would find it later. He wanted us to think it had been there the whole time so no one would suspect him. This gave him motive.
Chuck had heard Lindsey tell Susan the pest control man would be coming to the police department around noon. He’d probably spent all night making up a uniform that looked like a pest control technician, and he knew all he’d have to do was show up a little early and say he was here to take care of the ant problem in the kitchen, which was just down the hall from the jail cells. He had spent a lot of time in our facility and was very familiar with the layout of the place. This provided the opportunity he needed.
He had no doubt snatched a syringe from his deceased wife’s insulin stash, but he’d been a detective long enough to know the small syringe wouldn’t hold enough air to cause a fatal air embolism, so he attached it to a potato sprayer, providing him the means to carry out a covert murder.
I sank into a chair. I didn’t know if I should be mad at Chuck or impressed. One thing was certain, I didn’t have a single shred of evidence to prove my theory, and I knew I wouldn’t find anything once I processed the scene. If I interviewed him and he refused to confess, this case would remain unsolved. I didn’t want to arrest him, but I also didn’t want an unsolved homicide on my record. I began to wonder which of the two was more important to me.
CHAPTER 51
Two weeks later…
“Do you think he’ll show up?” Susan asked idly, staring up Washington Avenue. It was a beautiful Saturday and the street was crowded with pedestrians, tents, and boiling pots. It was our annual crawfish boil-off, where teams came from all over the south to put their skills and seasoning blends up against the best boilers in the state, and there appeared to be a record turnout.
“I don’t know.” I was holding Grace’s hand and scanning the faces in the crowd. I saw Melvin standing near a table across the street. He was plucking one crawfish at a time from a plastic tray and devouring them as fast as he could peel them. He looked different wearing cargo shorts and a T-shirt. He looked up at one point—I guess he could feel my eyes on him—and smiled. I smiled back and continued scanning the crowd. It was right around then that I saw him. “Susan, take Gracie. I see him.”
Susan quickly picked up our daughter and hurried away as I began pushing my way through the crowd. I could feel the heat generating from boiling pots as I ducked around some of the cooking tents and made my way behind them to avoid the crowd. The smell of the crab boil was thick in the air and my stomach growled. I hadn’t eaten all day and I was starving, but I’d wanted to wait to see if he would show up before getting my hands full of crawfish.
When I reached the tent that had a banner for Sheriff Turner, I slipped back out onto the sidewalk and came face to face with the man. We both stopped and just stood there staring at each other. After a long moment, he said, “Good afternoon, Clint.”
“Chuck.” I stuck out a hand and he gripped it tightly. I had to raise my voice to be heard above the music blaring from speakers down the street and the hundreds of people who were laughing and talking loudly all around us. “I didn’t think you’d come.”
He took a casual glance up and down the street. After taking a deep breath, he said, “I never pass up a chance to eat crawfish.”
“I’ve been leaving messages for you.”
“So I’ve noticed. You practically filled up the inbox on my voicemail.”
“I don’t know if you’ve heard or not, but Dixie Boudreaux was murdered while in my custody.”
“I’m sorry to hear it happened while she was in your custody, but it needed to happen. We both know she wouldn’t have gotten a just sentence otherwise.”
I studied the man. He looked gaunt and there was no spark in his eyes, but that was to be expected considering all he’d gone through and what he’d done. It was an unnatural thing for a man with high morals to murder a woman, regardless of how much she deserved it, and I could tell it was taking a toll on him.
“Would you like to talk about it?” I asked.
“There’s nothing to talk about.”
I frowned. I’d had a perfect record as a homicide detective, and I’d been very proud of that fact. Not because I cared about a record, but because I cared for the victims and their families. To have an unsolved murder case on file would mean I’d failed a victim and his or her family, and that was unacceptable. However, in this case, I wasn’t so sure anymore.
“Dixie had a family,” I said slowly. “They deserve justice for their loved one.”
“And I hope they get it.” Chuck rubbed his face and sighed heavily. “Although I’ve rarely stepped foot in a church over the past forty or so years, I’m a devout Catholic. I say the rosary every night before bed. My dad made us do it when we were kids and I guess it stuck with me.”
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
“It’s the only reason I’m still here.”
I pondered that for a minute before it hit me. “Suicide is against your religion.”
“If I ever want to see my children again, I have to wait for God to take me.” He stared off for a lon
g moment at the fire shooting from a nearby burner. I didn’t know if he even noticed the blue flame. Finally, he snapped out of it and turned his blank gaze back in my direction. “And if you want answers to your questions, you’ll have to wait until He takes me.”
I cocked my head to the side. “How’s that?”
“Trust me…when I’m gone, you’ll get your answers.”
“I already have my answers,” I said coolly. “I know you killed Dixie. I just can’t prove it.”
He shrugged and turned away. After he’d taken a few steps, he called over his shoulder, “When I’m gone, you’ll be able to prove it.”
“How?” Chuck either didn’t hear me or he was simply ignoring me, but he walked under a tent and grabbed a tray of crawfish. Without looking back, he walked toward the far end of the street, and eventually disappeared amongst the crowd.
I had gone over every inch of the corridor, reviewed tape from every surveillance system along Washington Avenue, and interviewed every person who worked or lived along the avenue. I turned up exactly nothing. I even applied for a search warrant for Chuck’s house in La Mort, but the duty judge had refused to sign it, citing my lack of probable cause as the reason.
I suddenly noticed Susan standing beside me. “I don’t guess he confessed to you, or he’d be in handcuffs.”
“No, he didn’t, and I didn’t expect him to.” I put an arm around Susan’s waist and glanced down at Grace, who was hugging her leg. A warm breeze was blowing my hair. It felt good against my face. “I guess this’ll be my first unsolved murder case.”
“Yeah, and let’s hope it’s the last.”