Six John Jordan Mysteries

by Michael Lister

  “She’s fine,” I said. “She doesn’t know.”

  “I’ve got to be with her,” he said.

  “You can in just a little while,” I said.

  He shook his head. “No,” he said. “Now.”

  “Just help us understand how your wife got in here,” I said, “and what happened to her.”

  “I didn’t do this,” he said. “There’s nothing I can tell you. I swear to God on my daughter’s life. I wouldn’t say that if I had done this. I love Kayla more than anything in this world. I’m going to be with her. If you want to arrest me, then arrest me and get me a lawyer. If not, let me go check on my girl. I know my rights.”

  “Don’t you want to help us figure out who did this to your wife?” Stone asked.

  “Of course I do,” he said, “but I’m not stupid. I know you think it’s me. Hell, I’ve watched enough cop shows to know. Husband’s always the number one suspect.”

  “Because he’s usually the one who did it,” Stone said.

  “Well, not this time,” he insisted. “I told you—give me a lie detector test.”

  “Tell you what,” I said. “Just give us your clothes and the names of the men your wife was seeing, and you can go be with your daughter.”

  Stone looked over at me, eyebrows raised, frown deepened.

  “More like boys,” he said. “Some of them half her age.”

  “Any of them work here at the prison?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “Probably, but I’m not sure. I wasn’t her pimp. I didn’t keep up with who she was sleeping with, but according to some busybodies it was half the town.”

  “We need names,” I said.

  “I don’t have any,” he said, but I knew he was lying. He had heard the same small-town gossip we all had. “You might want to talk to Brother and Sister Clark. She was going to them for help.”

  Roy Clark was the pastor of Eastside Baptist Church in Pottersville. He and his wife Gwendoline lived in the parsonage next to the church out on River Road.

  Stone and I were heading toward it in his state-issued warden’s car. He was driving.

  FDLE had arrived and was processing the crime scene, the D dorm wicker, and Joe Wynn’s uniform.

  “Pete should be here, not me,” I said.

  “The inspector’s happy to be dealing with FDLE,” he said. “He knows he’s not very good at this, and he doesn’t seem to mind you helping. But even if he did, it doesn’t matter. We can’t worry about protocol or hurt feelings. We’ve just got to find out how a civilian got into our institution and got killed.”

  I nodded, and we rode along in silence for a while.

  “You think he did it?” Stone asked.

  I shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “Do you have a feeling either way?”

  I shook my head. “Not really.”

  “What if he runs?”

  “We’ll know he did it,” I said.

  “But—”

  “Pull in the co-op up here and I’ll get Dad to put someone on him.”

  Forgotten Coast Electrical Cooperative consisted of a large redbrick office building in front and an acre filled with light poles, transformers, cable, trucks, a warehouse, and utility sheds in back—all surrounded by a tall chain-link fence.

  Dad was on the side near the large gates where the vandals had broken in. Stone stayed in the car while I got out to talk to him. The two men, each king of his respective kingdom, had often been at odds over the role of the sheriff’s department in criminal investigations inside the prison. They didn’t care for each other, and didn’t seem to care much that I was often the one caught in the middle of their conflict.

  “Your warden doesn’t want to get out and talk shop a while?”

  “What’s going on here?” I asked, attempting to change the subject.

  “What happened to the good ol’ days when kids’ idea of joy-riding was taking their parents’ car around the block?” Dad said.

  I didn’t say anything.

  “They used bolt cutters they stole from Linton’s to get in here and Whitehurst Timber Company,” he said. “Drove some of the trucks around and defaced them with spray-painted stick figures and misspelled obscenities. Why they broke in up here instead of around on the other side, I’ll never know.”

  The large double front gates were well lit and right off the main highway, but the small, single gate on the side was dark and hidden.

  “Nothing scarier than a brilliant mind bent on crime,” I said.

  He smiled.

  “Get this,” he said, “they wiped everything down, but left the Potter Elementary School gym shirt they used.”

  “Just make sure they have to take art and spelling at boot camp.”

  “Whatta you got?” he asked. “Why you slumming with the warden?”

  I told him.

  “You think Wynn’s gonna run?” he asked.

  I shrugged. “Can you put someone on him without him knowing?”

  He nodded. “I’ll call you if he runs.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “Sure,” he said, “just tell the warden he owes me.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “I’ll be sure to do that.”

  I got back in the car, and we continued toward the Clarks’.

  “What’d he say?” Stone asked.

  “That since it was you, he’d do it,” I said.

  His perpetual frowned deepened again.

  “He’ll call us if Joe runs,” I said.

  “You think they can handle it?” he asked. “Looked like that vandalism was taxing them.”

  “Dad’s a good sheriff,” I said, “and he’s got a decent department.”

  He didn’t comment, and we rode the rest of the way without speaking.

  Gwendoline Clark was a large woman with enormous breasts and a slightly masculine manner. She dressed in loose clothes meant to help conceal her bulk, but their formlessness gave her a shapeless appearance that had the opposite effect.

  “Hey Warden, Chaplain,” she said when she opened the door. “Come on in.”

  She knew both of us from various prison events and the annual volunteer banquet.

  Ushering us into a living room and offering us coffee, Gwen acted as if she were genuinely glad we had dropped in unannounced. This gift of hospitality made her popular among her husband’s parishioners, who felt their preacher and his family were as much theirs as the home they lived in.

  It’s how most congregations feel, and one of the reasons I wasn’t suited for pastoral ministry and why Susan had chafed at being a pastor’s wife when we were together in Atlanta and serving a large church.

  Of course, I was fairly certain the Clarks were happy to have the little parsonage. The church paid Roy so little that even without a mortgage, Gwen had to clean businesses in town at night to keep them just slightly north of the poverty line.

  “Roy’s over at the church,” she said. “Let me give him a call. He can be right over.”

  “Thank you,” Stone said.

  She called Roy, then poured coffee for all of us, bringing it into the living room on a coffee-and-cream-ringed serving tray.

  “Ma’am, we’re here to talk to you and your husband about Melanie Wynn,” Stone said when she sat down across from us in a faded recliner that bore the indentation of her generous backside.

  We were on a soiled and stiff sofa.

  “Poor girl,” she said. “She’s doing better, I think, but she’s had a rough spell. Just sort of lost. Roy meets with her far more than I do, but I doubt there’s much he can tell you—confidentiality and all.”

  In another moment, Roy arrived and we all stood to greet him.

  Unlike his short, round wife, Roy Clark was tall and narrow, his stomach seeming concave beneath his flat chest. When they were standing beside each other, the physical oddness of their pairing was accentuated, and I wondered, as I always did with such unusual couples, what sex was like for them.

  “They’re he
re about Melanie Wynn,” Gwen said when we were all seated.

  “Is she okay?” he asked.

  He was sitting in a high-back chair on the other side of the room from his wife’s. The chair, which clashed both in style and pattern with the other furniture in the room, seemed overdressed and out of place.

  “Is something wrong with Joe?” he asked. “Kent said he’s been having a very difficult time.”

  Kent Clark, aka ManSuper, the Wynn’s youngest and very much closeted gay son, was part of our K-9 unit and on the pistol team.

  “We understand you’ve been counseling her,” Stone said.

  Roy nodded.

  “We need to know who she’s been seeing,” Stone said. “We understand it might be quite a number of young men.”

  “I’m sorry, Warden,” Roy said, “but I can’t talk about anything Melanie’s discussed with me—though I can assure you it hasn’t been that.”

  “Confidentiality is not an issue,” I said. “Melanie’s been murdered.”

  “Murdered?” he said in shock.

  “Oh, my dear sweet Jesus,” Gwen said. “That poor girl. Any idea who did it?”

  “That’s what we’re trying to find out,” Stone said.

  “I don’t understand,” Roy said.

  “I know it’s a shock.”

  “Yes, it is, but that’s not what I meant,” Roy said. “Why are you two here about it? I would think the only possible connection would be Joe. Is he a suspect? Are you trying to clear him?”

  “It’s complicated,” Stone said, “but we are trying to help Joe. He’s the one who sent us to you.”

  “That poor man,” Gwen said. “He really loves Mel so much.”

  “Confidentiality’s not an issue,” I repeated. “Joe sent us to see you. Please tell us who she was involved with.”

  He hesitated, then nodded to himself slowly.

  “The only person I know for sure was Judy Williams’s son, Sean,” he said.

  I nodded. Sean Williams was a correctional officer. His mother, Judy, was one of Melanie’s fellow teachers at PES. They had been close friends until recently, when suddenly they weren’t, and no one seemed to know why. It was little wonder. Sean was barely twenty and Melanie was just a few years younger than Judy.

  “That one nearly split our church in two,” Gwen said. “Judy and her family stopped coming and took a lot of their friends with them after Roy preached a sermon on not judging one another and defended poor Melanie, who was working so hard to get her life back together.”

  “Judy just can’t forgive Melanie,” Roy said. “And now she hates me and our church.”

  “Roy just told her what the Bible says,” Gwen said. “Warned her about the path of hate she was headed down.”

  “Surely she didn’t do anything to Melanie,” Roy said.

  “She couldn’t have,” Gwen said. “She was angry, but she’s no murderer.”

  I was surprised when Sean opened his door so quickly. I had assumed he’d be asleep. I was even more surprised when it wasn’t Sean opening the door, but his mother, Judy. I had expected her to be at the school.

  “John,” she said. She quickly cut her eyes over toward Stone and then back to me. “Come in.”

  We did.

  Sean and his mother lived in a large two-story brick home with enormous white columns in the front and a swimming pool in the back. Inside the immaculate house were tile floors, art-covered walls, and exquisite furniture—too nice for a single mom who made her daily bread as an underpaid Florida school teacher. It had come from life insurance money Judy had collected when her husband Tony drowned after capsizing his boat in the Chipola River. Sean had a trust coming his way, too, but not until he turned twenty-five.

  If the abuse Sean took for still living at home with his mom bothered him, he didn’t show it. His indulged life was too good, and he loved spending all the money he made on motorcycles, trucks, video games, boats, and beer. Though his mother was refined and sophisticated, Sean had succumbed to his surroundings and become a redneck.

  “I’m surprised to find you home,” I said.

  “Just didn’t feel like going in today,” she said. “Tell you the truth, the older I get, the more I feel that way, and the more I go with the feeling and just take a personal day.”

  “Good for you,” I said, though I was thinking how suspicious it was given the circumstances.

  “Mrs. Williams, this is our warden, Edward Stone,” I said.

  I couldn’t call her by her first name, and it wasn’t just that I was raised in the South, but the fact that she had been my teacher in elementary school.

  They shook hands.

  “It’s nice to meet you,” she said. “I’ve heard good things about you from Sean.”

  She led us into the kitchen.

  “Would either of you like some coffee?”

  Neither of us would and we told her so.

  “Have a seat,” she said, motioning to the stools next to the counter. “I’d be worried when the warden and chaplain show up at my door if I didn’t know Sean was safe and sound up in his room.”

  Judy Williams was trim for a middle-aged woman, except for her bottom, with white skin that appeared to be thin. Her shoulder-length hair had a red tint to it, and even in casual clothes you could tell she had money.

  “We need to talk to him,” Stone said. “I’m going to have to ask you to wake him up.”

  “He just went to sleep,” she said. “He hasn’t been home from work more than a few hours. Can’t this wait?”

  “I’m afraid it can’t,” he said.

  She sighed, hesitating. “Okay.”

  “Before you get him up,” I said, “perhaps we could talk to you for a few minutes.”

  “Do I need my lawyer?”

  “Why would you ask that?” I said.

  “I was just kidding,” she said. “Do I? You’re starting to make me worry.”

  “We want to talk to you about Melanie Wynn,” I said.

  “Oh,” she said.

  “We understand you two had a falling out recently.”

  She laughed. “Something like that,” she said. “But I really don’t want to talk about it.”

  “We really need you to,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “Melanie’s been murdered.”

  She smiled.

  “That pleases you?”

  “I just wondered as recently as yesterday if what she’s been doing would catch up with her.”

  “What’s she been doing?” I asked.

  “Poppin’ pills and sleepin’ with any and everything that moves,” she said. “You can only do that for so long until someone gets so hurt or jealous or betrayed that they strike back.”

  “Any idea who might have gotten to that point?”

  She shrugged. “Could be anybody in town,” she said. “I’m serious. She was with somebody new every night. She went from this neurotic little overweight schoolteacher to trashy, indiscriminating nymphomaniac overnight. The transformation was stunning. I don’t know that she had ever been in a bar before her surgery, but after, it was every night—sleeping with guys in their cars in the parking lot, going back in, drinking some more, picking up another guy, going to his car—over and over again.”

  “Is that what she did with Sean?” I asked.

  She didn’t smile this time. After hesitating, taking in a breath and letting it out, she nodded. “He thought they had a future, but after one time in the backseat of his car in the parking lot of the Sports Oasis, she wouldn’t have anything to do with him. Wouldn’t even talk to him, would be with other guys in front of him. She gave him more than one STD. And Roy’s gonna get up in his pulpit and defend her. I walked out and won’t go back. I don’t hate him. He means well, but I loathe her. I’m sorry she’s dead. I didn’t kill her, and neither did Sean, but it shouldn’t be surprising that somebody had enough of her shit and just snapped.”

  “I can understand that,” I said, “somebo
dy snapping like that. It’d be—”

  “Don’t try to work me, John,” she said. “I didn’t kill her and I don’t know who did. I’m just being honest with you. Sean didn’t do it and I didn’t do it. It’s why I’m willing to talk with you, but if I need to call my lawyer I can.”

  “No need for that,” I said. “We’re just trying to get some information. More background than anything else. If we can talk to Sean for a few minutes, we’ll leave you alone.”

  “I’ll go get him,” she said.

  When she was gone, Stone said, “What the hell are you doing? It’s obvious they did it—her or her son—and you’re treating them like innocent friends.”

  “We’re asking questions because that’s all we can do,” I said. “We can’t make an arrest. We have no authority. Unless someone confesses, a case has to be built, and it’ll be a combination of interviews and witness statements, and most important of all, physical evidence.”

  He thought about it.

  “Just for fun, though,” I said, “tell me how she did it. Did she dress up in a CO uniform, too, sneak into the institution with her good buddy Melanie, somehow get into the rec yard, choke the life out of her, then somehow get out of the institution?”

  “Well, maybe not her, but her son,” he said. “Melanie sneaks in to have sex with him and he kills her—or she’s there to meet someone else or a group, maybe even of inmates, he sees her, snaps, and kills her.”

  “She was killed inside the institution?” Sean asked.

  We turned to see him standing behind us in the opposite door of the kitchen than the one his mom had exited by. He had most likely not been asleep, but listening to everything we said.

  I nodded. “Any idea what she was doing there?”

  “Probably what the warden said—meeting somebody or a bunch of somebodies,” he said. “Fuckin’ new people in a new and dangerous place. Sounds just like the twisted shit she would go for.”

  Sean had blond hair and green eyes. He was muscular and he held himself like he knew it—holding his abs in and his chest out, and his arms out a little from his sides.

  “She ever done it before?” I asked.

  He walked into the room and stood across the counter from us.

  “She was always doin’ shit like that,” he said. “She fucked the president of the bank in his office when the bank was full of people. She fucked a couple of the high school students in the locker room after school. Hell, she used to blow men in the bathroom at church with their wives and children just a few rooms away in Sunday school. You’ve never seen a more sick, twisted bitch.”