The J D Bragg Mystery Series Box Set

by Ron Fisher

  Bagwell took a breath and paused before going on. “Having said all that, don’t get me wrong. I will do everything humanly possible to find and arrest the man who attacked Ms. Mayfield, whoever it is. All I’m asking you is to at least keep this quiet until we’ve had a chance to check out this Hound-dog fellow. This can’t get out before we can determine whether he’s definitely a suspect or not. I don’t want to create a shitstorm—pardon me, ladies—by wrongly casting suspicion on an innocent Dixie Demon.”

  “Innocent Dixie Demon,” I repeated. “That’s probably an oxymoron, but I’ll agree. But you need to be damn sure this guy is innocent beyond any shadow of a doubt.”

  I wondered, who else would have done it? I would let Sheriff Bagwell and the Clemson Police Department do their jobs, but Bagwell didn’t know me well if he thought I’d stop looking into it myself. If it wasn’t Hound-dog who attacked Kelly, then there had to be a clue somewhere to reveal who did. And if the cops couldn’t find it, I would not rest until I did.

  With that conversation seemingly over, Bagwell turned his attention back to the reason he came. Kelly’s recent phone records.

  “These are for both her home and her cell phone,” he said, spreading them out on the kitchen table. “I’ve looked them over, but I didn’t find anything meaningful, at least to me. Maybe you two will spot something I missed.”

  Eloise and I stood examining the print-outs. They revealed the numbers called, as well as date and duration of the call. Not surprisingly, my number frequently appeared. Most of the numbers had names with them, but a few didn’t, and none of the ones that didn’t were familiar to either Eloise or me. We told Bagwell that, and he already had someone in his office tracking those down. He’d pass them along for us to look at as soon as he could.

  The first call that got my attention was to Doctor Michael Stefans last Monday morning, before Kelly’s visit to him that afternoon. That would be unheard of in Atlanta, I thought. It usually took me a week to get in to see my Doctor. Maybe living in small towns did have its advantages.

  Another name from last Monday caught my eye. Kelly had called an April Cheney, a local number, and I’d never heard of her. Neither had Eloise. The interesting thing was, Kelly had called this person a total of five times over four days. The first call she made was after she returned from the appointment with Doctor Stefans. The second, later that evening, and the third call early Tuesday morning. The last two, the mornings of Wednesday and Thursday. Both Monday calls were brief, probably unsuccessful, or at least only long enough to get a voicemail recording. However, the one made at 9:33 a.m. in the morning on Tuesday lasted for almost thirty minutes, and the two over the next two days lasted even longer. So, when Kelly finally reached this woman, they had long conversations. If this April Cheney was a new friend, Kelly hadn’t mentioned her to either me or Eloise. I made a note of the name and number.

  Outside of those, neither Eloise nor I saw anything else suspicious or curious. I grabbed my phone and dialed the number for April Cheney. I got a voicemail greeting that said, “This is April—not the month, silly—but my name. You know what to do after the beep.” She had a very young voice with a definite up-country South Carolina accent.

  Beyond my curiosity over April Cheney, and Kelly’s visit to Dr. Stefans, I didn’t see anything in the phone records to knock Hound-dog off the top spot for Kelly’s suspected attacker. I told Bagwell that, and he agreed.

  Bagwell gathered up the phone records, telling us that when his men tracked down the identities of the unnamed callers, he’d pass that along too. His first order of business was to get Chief Watson to pay a visit to the Dixie Demons and find out the real name of Hound-dog, so they could run a check on the man’s criminal records.

  Bagwell said, “If he’s our guy, it probably won’t be the first time he’s done something like this.”

  After Bagwell left, Eloise and Mackenzie said they would visit Kelly later in the afternoon. I decided to go now, but first, I had another stop to make.

  #

  I used my copy of Kelly’s house key and went inside. The crime-scene people had left a mess with dark smudges of fingerprint dust everywhere, and there was still dried blood on the kitchen floor. There was no police tape, which I took to mean they were finished with their investigation here. I made a mental note to call in a cleaning service before Kelly came home. Some of Doctor Mathis’s optimistic nature at the hospital must have rubbed off on me. Believing she would return home at all was a step forward for me.

  The house held the familiar aroma of her. I could never remember the name of the perfume she wore—ever the inconsiderate male—but I knew it by smell. Memories of being there with her flooded my mind as I looked through her things, hoping to find something Bagwell and his officers may have missed. I’d come on the off chance that she’d made notes somewhere of whatever she’d been working on, and the sheriff’s deputies had overlooked them, not knowing what they were or that they would be important to anyone. I looked through the desk files in the spare bedroom she used as her office, and in the nightstand in the master bedroom, and I didn’t find anything. I even went through the pockets of her clothes in the closet, finding nothing there either.

  I sat down in a chair in the living room, and my thoughts filled with memories of Kelly and me there: us watching TV on the sofa and fooling around like a couple of love-struck teenagers. The many times that kind of activity led to something far more adult. The sounds she made making love. The tenderness of her touch and the heart-race of my touching her.

  These visions should have made me feel good, but they didn’t. They made me violently angry. Angry at the latest memory of her, lying unconscious in a hospital bed with her lovely face bloody and bruised. Angry at the scent of her now—the antiseptic odor of a hospital.

  I found myself wanting desperately to see the person responsible get what he deserved, if by not meted out by the justice system—then by me.

  For the first time in my life, I wanted to kill someone.

  CHAPTER TEN

  I made the thirty-mile drive from Kelly’s house to her hospital room in record time. I sat and watched her, hoping against hope that she would suddenly open her beautiful brown eyes and smile that heartbreaking smile of hers. But she didn’t.

  I sat there long enough for Doctor Mathis to make his rounds and tell me that Kelly was still stable and there was no change, although she looked a little better. Her bruises were lightening in color, and the swelling in her face and eye was slowly going down.

  But even if she was looking better, I found myself having to work harder to stay positive about her condition. Doctor Mathis said the average time of an induced coma was from a couple of days to about a week, and there was no intention to try to bring her out today.

  I went out in the hallway and called Eloise, telling her she didn’t need to come today. Nothing had changed with Kelly’s condition, and I probably wouldn’t stay too late myself. I could tell she felt guilty not coming, so I made an argument about something we both knew. Spending so much time with Kelly with her in a coma wasn’t helping anything, and might even be hurting. We were in the Doctor and nurses’ way, and potentially keeping Kelly from getting the complete rest she needed. Sitting with her was more for our benefit than Kelly’s. It made us feel like we were doing something helpful when we weren’t. Eloise understood and said she would stay home today.

  I couldn’t take my own advice. I would continue to visit Kelly every day. Even if I spent most of the time just sitting in the waiting room and out of the medical staff’s way. If there were only the remotest possibility that Kelly felt my presence near her and it could comfort her, then I would be there every day until she was well again.

  I went back into Kelly’s room, squeezed her hand again, then went out and sat in the waiting room. I’d brought in the back issues of the Clarion and began looking through them. In the issue dated two weeks ago, an editorial Kelly wrote caught my attention. A local woman had died f
rom an opioid overdose, and Kelly had stepped up on her soapbox to editorialize about the exploding opioid epidemic in America, and how it had made its way into Pickens County. Her point was that no city or community, large or small, was safe.

  She talked about May Burgess, the deceased woman, a young divorcee whose life had been cut short because of it. She quoted the woman’s mother, a Kate Cheney, who said her daughter innocently started out on prescription pain pills for a back injury and ended up a full-blown addict and buying drugs off the street.

  Cheney, I thought, sitting up straighter in my chair. May Burgess’s maiden name would be Cheney. April and May Cheney. Too much coincidence not to be sisters. Was Kelly calling April Cheney about her dead sister?

  I looked back at what I’d copied from Kelly’s phone records. The dates on Kelly’s calls to April Cheney were the week after the editorial appeared in the Clarion. And so was her visit to Doctor Michael Stefans. Was he the doctor who prescribed the pills that got April Cheney’s sister hooked?

  Kelly was still working on the subject of her opioid editorial. I was sure of it. Perhaps it was just a follow-up opinion piece, but knowing Kelly’s reporter’s nose for hard news, my gut told me she was chasing down something of greater significance. Possibly, the illegal source of opioids in the upstate. The implications of that sent my imagination into over-drive. There would be some people who wouldn’t want her going there. Dangerous people who had a lot to lose if she dug too deeply into their business, and would be willing to do whatever it took to stop her. Including beating her nearly to death.

  Curiosity and suspiciousness were traits that often got me into trouble. They were also the reason for my success as an investigative journalist. Kelly and I both shared these. Had her curiosity caused her to stick her nose someplace that angered some very dangerous people? Like opioid traffickers and dealers?

  Perhaps even the Dixie Demons? Was their interest in Pickens County more than just a good place to hold an annual reunion? Were they responsible for the increased influx of opioids in the area? An intuitive alarm bell went off in my head.

  If Kelly was digging into that subject, she could easily find herself in harm’s way from several possible directions, the Dixie Demons included.

  I’d been having a hard time believing that an over-sexed Dixie Demon would try to kill a woman for just getting snubbed at a bar. That is, unless he was a certifiable psychopath. Add a snoopy reporter to the equation, sniffing around a biker gang’s highly profitable livelihood, and it might be another matter. That might cause someone to commit—what did Bagwell call it—a heinous act?

  So, I had two women to talk to now. April Cheney, Kelly’s recent phone mate, with a sister who had OD’d on opioids; and the little red-headed bartender at the Tiger’s Tail, who, from the way she acted when I showed her Kelly’s picture, knew something she wasn’t telling.

  I stuck around until late afternoon, combing through the past issues of the Clarion, and looking in on Kelly every few minutes. She never moved, and I didn't find anything else in the paper that suggested any different reason for Kelly’s beating. I kissed Kelly on her forehead for the last time and headed to Still Hollow.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The worry alarm on my internal clock woke me up Monday morning. I lay there with Kelly on my mind. I guess I was having a hard time accepting that I had no control over her fate, and the helplessness of it dragged me to the depths of despair when I thought about it too much. The truth was, I just couldn’t share Doctor Mathis’s blind optimism anymore about her recovery, as hard as I tried. The age-old fear of someone I loved dying on me again was paralyzing. I’d been there and done that and didn’t want to do it again. Ever.

  I got up, showered, shaved, got dressed, and was on my second cup of coffee in the kitchen when Eloise came down. Still in her nightgown, robe and slippers, she poured herself a cup from the pot of coffee and sat down at the table with me. I could tell that my sister had a lot on her mind too. She looked like she hadn’t slept well either.

  “What’s up, sis? How are you this morning?”

  It was a moment before she spoke. “I just don’t know what to do.”

  “About what?”

  “The Clarion,” she said and sighed. “I don’t see how we’re going to get this week’s paper out without Kelly. So, I was thinking maybe I ought to call everybody, give them the week off with pay, of course and just cancel this week’s edition. I don’t know if I can handle it without her.”

  “Sure, you can. You’ve already got your front page—it’s Kelly. What’s bigger news than that? And I’ll help.”

  “You’d actually come work at the Clarion?” she said, surprised.

  “Of course, Eloise. At least until we can get this week’s edition out. What kind of publisher would I be, if I didn’t? By then, we should know more about when Kelly will return, and we can plan accordingly.”

  If she returns, I thought, but didn’t say. We’d cross that bridge if we came to it.

  Eloise had raised an eyebrow when I’d referred to myself as the publisher. I’d always been perfectly clear that I’d never take a “hands-on” position with the Clarion. The paper was hers and Kelly’s to run entirely, and I was publisher in name only. That was our bargain from the beginning. But Eloise was never pleased with it. She’d wanted me there, which was what our grandfather wanted. He’d dreamed of me one day taking over from him. In a way, I would, but not exactly as he’d planned.

  “But what about your job with SportsWord?” Eloise asked.

  “Given the situation, they won’t mind me taking a few days off.”

  This seemed to relieve some of her anxiety, and she reached over and squeezed my hand. “Then I’d better get dressed and go to the office. Why don’t you go check on Kelly? She’ll be wondering where you are. You can come into the paper when you’re ready. I’ll gather the troops and find out how much work we need to do.”

  #

  I took my sister’s advice and went to the hospital. Kelly’s condition hadn’t changed. If she was wondering where I was, as Eloise said—or wondering anything—I couldn’t tell.

  As for the Clarion, which occupied my thoughts the entire drive over, even if Kelly recovered tomorrow, I suspected she would miss quite a few more editions of the paper before she was able to work. And that was my optimistic view, which I was trying so hard to adapt. Being realistic, if she recovered at all, it was also possible that due to the severity of her injuries, she might not be able to function well for some time.

  I left her room and found a quiet corner to do something I had to do. I called my boss, Joe Dennis, the publisher of SportsWord magazine back in Atlanta. Joe used to be the editor there and was responsible for hiring me. The publisher at the time was a spineless bureaucrat who cared more about budgets than news and ended up firing me. He was fired later himself, and Joe became the new publisher, and hired me back.

  Joe and I were friends, and we worked well together. He let me choose my own stories, regardless of the sport, and I never let him down. Circulation was healthy, especially since we’d added the digital version, and I was building a name for myself as an investigative journalist that you didn’t want on your tail if you were someone with something to hide.

  Right now, I was going to let Joe Dennis down. I needed more than just a few days off, I needed a leave of absence until Kelly was back on her feet and functioning at a hundred percent capacity at the Clarion. What I wouldn’t tell him was that I was also determined to stay until the animal who did this to Kelly was caught and punished.

  Joe knew Kelly. He and his wife, Ann, had invited us for dinner at their house several times, and Kelly had charmed them both, becoming friends.

  Joe picked up his phone on the third ring.

  “It’s J.D.,” I said.

  “Hey, I was just thinking of you. Wondering where you were.”

  “I’m in South Carolina, Joe.” I told him about Kelly’s assault and her condition.

>   When he got past telling me how sorry he was, how tragic this was, and how I should stay positive, I told him the main reason I called.

  “I need to take a leave of absence Joe.”

  “I understand, J.D., take some days off, but I’ll bet you she’ll be up and around in no time. She’s a strong woman.”

  “I need more than a few days, Joe.”

  It was a moment before he spoke. “I’m not sure I can do without you for too long, J.D., I don’t mean to be insensitive, I understand your problem, but just being honest, I need to keep this place afloat, too. You’re the best I got.”

  “I’ll understand if you need to fire me, but I’ve got to do this.”

  “Let’s don’t go talking about firing or quitting and stuff like that. I’ll try to make do with freelancers until you’re back, which I’m hoping is soon. But J.D.? I can’t continue to pay you while you’re gone. Soon as you use up your vacation days, I’ll have to cut you off and use your salary for the freelancers.”

  “I understand, Joe. I do plan to come back eventually, if you’ll have me. If there’s no job there, then I’ll understand that too. You’re a good boss and a good friend, and I’m sorry about this. This is just something I have to do.”

  “Hey, you didn’t cause this. Do what you’ve got to do. Ann and I will keep you and Kelly in our prayers, and you’ll see, she’ll get over this soon. God wouldn’t do this to her.”

  I didn’t remember Joe ever being much of a religious man, but I’d take well wishes and prayers wherever I could get them.

  “Thanks, Joe,” I said. “I’ll keep you posted.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  I was sitting in Kelly’s room, my stomach telling me it was nearing lunchtime. All I’d had for breakfast was a couple of cups of coffee at Still Hollow before I left. My cell rang and I went out into the hall to take the call.

  “Have you eaten yet?” Eloise asked.