“Could be,” Mueller said. “Or Carl could have dragged his toe for a couple of inches. How can you tell?”
Doc ambled over and put his hands on his hips. “You think?”
“Yeah, I do,” Mueller said. “We’ll take a cast and photograph that, but I’m not sure it really tells us anything.”
“I see what you’re saying. It’s not very deep,” Doc agreed, adjusting his glasses. “I sometimes don’t raise my foot as I should and scuff it. Of course, at my age…”
“Gentlemen, we need to focus and figure out what happened here,” I said, stating the obvious. The question we were attempting to answer was the same one we’d just put to bed on Myles Thompkins’ drowning that morning. “We need to know if this really is a suicide, or if we’ve got another homicide.”
The problem was that while we’d found a hand-printed note hanging on another tree, one just twenty feet or so away, the scene suggested a lynching. Not that we could find any signs of a struggle. The inside of his trailer didn’t look disturbed. We couldn’t find any evidence of anyone else having been in the area. On one level it didn’t seem out of the question that Carl walked out to the tree with the rope and did himself in.
“We think he killed himself because?” I asked. “What’s his motive?”
“He knew we were closing in on him. Mullins told him,” Max replied. “Maybe Carl figured his time was up, and he wanted to make amends. So, he wrote the note.”
“Sure. Could be. But explain that.” I pointed at the corpse still hanging from the tree. His skin a ghostly pale, Carl’s jaw was clenched, and his head lolled to the right at an unnatural angle. A thick foam encircled his mouth, along with blood. I guessed the latter might have happened when he bit down on his protruding tongue. Doc had climbed on a ladder and taken a look, and Carl’s open eyes were speckled with petechial hemorrhages, tiny blood vessels that are a sign of asphyxiation.
The hard thing to explain was that Carl’s wrists were bound with rope.
“It doesn’t scream suicide, does it?” Lieutenant Mueller said. “But sometimes things have more than one explanation. Could he have done that to himself?”
We all looked at Doc, who shrugged. “Well, it’s not unheard of. There have been cases like this in the literature,” he said. “Suicides where the victim wanted to make sure he didn’t back out, so he tied himself up before he jumped.”
We all stared at the body, wondering.
“Will you be able to tell during the autopsy?” I asked. “Is there usually telltale evidence of some kind?”
“Not sure. I’ve never had anything like this before,” Doc admitted. “But I’ll look into it.”
I thought about that, wondered who else might be able to help. “Listen, I know this guy in Texas who is an expert in knots and bindings,” I said. “How about we take photos of those ropes on his wrists, get some good ones of the knots and the position of the rope. Maybe he’ll have some insight.”
“It’s worth a shot,” Mueller said.
While the others worked on the photos, I walked over to the tree. Someone had pounded a roofing nail into the piece of paper to keep it from falling. For what wasn’t the first time, I gave it a read. All it said was: TELL JACOB I’M SORRY
Thirty-Six
While the others helped Doc lower Carl’s body out of the tree, I circled back to the trailer with the CSI unit’s IT expert, a guy named Randy Nader, a scrawny fellow who had the long, straight hair of his Navajo mother and the aquiline profile of his Armenian father. Once he had the computer on, Nader played around for a while, tried out a few common passwords to unlock it. Nothing worked. Then he picked up the keyboard and looked underneath it. Nothing there. No cheat notes with the code.
“Try Laurel,” I suggested.
He did, and it didn’t work. “Any more ideas?” Nader asked.
“Hmm. Not sure,” I said. I looked around the trailer, didn’t see anything that spurred any thoughts. I pulled up Carl’s info on my phone through the state website. We tried his driver’s license number without luck. His birthdate didn’t work either. I opened his NCIC profile on the national database and looked at his arrest on the bar fight. I gave Nader the name of the guy Carl beat up, and that did nothing. It turned out that the last four digits of Carl’s social security number did the trick, and we were on.
“What are we looking for?” Nader asked, as he loaded a program that examined the hard drive.
“Anything associated with any of the victims,” I said, then recited their names slowly while Nader keyed them in. “And in particular anything that includes the name Myles Thompkins.”
The screen filled, line after line of documents and photos. Nader flipped through, loading one after another. There were images of Jacob Johansson and his family, some posed, others candid shots, and some that resembled those in the album of Laurel, like they were taken with a telephoto lens from a distance, in secret. While Anna, her children and Jacob were in many, the majority seemed to be of Laurel.
Half an hour into the search, Nader opened a file dated the previous Saturday, two days before the murders, and images of Laurel and Myles together at the river popped up on the screen. In some, Laurel appeared despondent, holding her infant son and sitting on the rock, looking as if she were crying. Myles stood above her, his arms folded as if angry, closed off to her, glaring. “That’s the argument Naomi caught the tail end of,” I murmured.
“What?” Nader asked, but I brushed him off.
“Keep scrolling through those,” I said, and he did. Carl photographed them as they embraced, Laurel’s head on Myles’s shoulder. They walked to their cars, and Carl shot a photo of Naomi getting out of the van with little Kyle. Then Naomi staring down the dirt road at Myles and Laurel. The final photo was of Laurel holding Jeremy, not in his car seat, as she drove away.
Just like Mother Naomi described it, I thought. Then I said to Nader, “What we’re really looking for is a text file, a suicide note. It would have Myles’s name and was probably written very recently.”
Nader continued scrolling, then clicked on a short file. The suicide note popped up. I didn’t have the original with me, but I saw no differences from the one we’d found in the saddle pocket. It seemed evident that Carl was Thompkins’ killer.
“When and at what time was this note written?” I asked.
Nader opened the file info: it had been created Monday, the day of the murders at the ranch. I looked at the time: 02:11:59 AM.
I pulled a notebook out of my bag, the one where I’d jotted down Doc’s timeline. Around midnight, Laurel was murdered. According to what we’d uncovered on the computer, two hours or so later, Carl wrote a suicide note for Myles. Just past three, someone texted Scotty on Myles’s phone and asked him to feed the dogs and watch over his place. Four hours later, Anna, Benjamin, and Sybille were all murdered, and someone slashed Jacob’s throat. The timeline seemed to fit.
“Thanks,” I said. “Make sure you log all of it into evidence, the entire hard drive, and look through it, see if anything else is connected to the Johanssons or Myles Thompkins. And take the printer, so we can be sure that the note was printed on it.”
“Will do,” Nader said.
I left Nader working and followed the path through the woods to rejoin the others. It seemed that the case was falling into place, but loose ends kept circling through my mind. I felt unsettled, ill at ease, not at all the way I’d come to expect as a case wound to a close. Usually, I’d have a sense that all was becoming right with the world. That wasn’t happening this time. Why not?
Walking farther on, I thought about Jeremy. Was it time to pull the guard off? That brought to mind Sybille and Benjamin, their still bodies on the cold ground. I couldn’t let that happen to Jeremy. I still wasn’t sure I’d kept my promise to him.
Not yet, I decided. The guard stays until I have it all figured out.
I reached the Day of the Dead tree—the vultures were back, perched on tree limbs around t
he clearing, I assumed waiting for an opening. A racket above, and I saw one soar over me and swoop down. It flew off, its muscular wings rustling the air. As I lowered my eyes, I focused on one of the ornaments dangling from the tree, a brightly painted skull, mouth wide open, as if it were laughing at something uproariously funny.
At the tree’s base, the men had Carl’s body laid out in the bag. They were all standing around, looking down at the dead man, murmuring. Max had a sour look on his face, like he wanted to shake the deceased awake. “What’s wrong?” I asked.
“We were just saying that we all feel cheated,” Max said.
“Cheated?” I echoed.
“Madder than a wet hen,” Doc said. “It’s just not fair.”
“Because he’s not here to answer questions?” I wondered if that could be what bothered me, why it didn’t feel final. For a moment, I thought maybe. But then, that didn’t sit right either. There was something else.
“Well… yeah, that too. We’d like to know the details,” Max swallowed hard, and I could see anger in his eyes. “But mostly it’s that this stiff is responsible for a lot of carnage, those two dead little kids, the two women. And now we can’t tell him what garbage he is. We’ll never be able to throw him in a jail cell.”
I understood but didn’t comment. My mind was elsewhere. It seemed odd that with so much death surrounding me, so much pain, when I took a deep breath, I caught the scent of fresh pine from the trees and the mountain breeze. Life held such contradictions. People died, and the next morning others woke and started a new day. Carl Shipley’s dead body lay at our feet, and it wasn’t enough. We wanted him to suffer. We still ached for revenge.
I bent down and helped Doc zip up the body bag, shutting Carl away in the darkness in which he’d lived his life. At that moment, my message alert pinged, and I opened it and saw a text from my friend in Dallas, the expert in bindings and knots:
If other evidence supports suicide, hand bindings don’t disprove it. The angle of the knots and the way the rope is wrapped isn’t inconsistent with having been done by the victim. It is entirely possible that he did this to himself, and this is far from unheard of in a self-hanging.
I handed Max my phone, and he read it, too. “What did you find on Carl’s computer?” he asked.
“The suicide note,” I said. “Nader is logging everything in to take it to the lab to get a better look, but it appears that Carl wrote the note. We have more photos of Laurel and Myles, too. Many taken that Saturday before the murders, of the two of them together at the river.”
“Everything fits then?” Max asked.
I showed him the timeline in my notebook, starting at midnight and ending around 8:05 a.m. when Naomi arrived at the ranch and found the bodies. “Well,” Max said. “It does all appear to match the evidence. So, Carl murdered Laurel, then killed Myles and staged it to look like a suicide. He then returned to the ranch, and when the family got up at seven, he slit his best friend’s throat and shot Anna and the children.”
I frowned and shook my head, then semi-agreed. “I guess.”
“Clara, it looks like this is over. Carl’s our guy, and he’s dead. No chance he’ll hurt anyone ever again,” Max asked. “What bothers you?”
“Some of this doesn’t make sense to me. I don’t understand why he murdered Anna and the children, or attacked Jacob,” I said. “If Laurel’s upstairs, her throat slashed, and the rest of the family’s asleep. Why didn’t Carl just make Myles look like the killer and go on with his life? What did he gain by killing the others?”
We stood silent as Max thought that through. “Maybe Carl blamed them all? Maybe he was jealous of Jacob, too, and he couldn’t kill him without killing Anna and the children?” he speculated. “But the sticking point here is that Carl’s dead. We can’t ask him. Maybe we’ll never know for sure why he did any of it other than that he was obsessed with Laurel.”
“I don’t like not knowing,” I said.
“Me either,” he agreed. “But sometimes cases don’t end up with every question answered.”
Max was right, of course. Sometimes we never did uncover all the circumstances, the blow-by-blow details that laid out the intricacies of human behavior. We liked to think that we could analyze others, figure out what drove them, know for certain why things happened. But people were often mysteries, especially those like Carl whose brains weren’t wired the way the rest of ours were. To do what he did, he had no empathy.
“We need to get to the hospital,” I said. “We have to explain all of this to the Johanssons before the town rumor mill delivers the news.”
When we got off the elevator, none of the family was in the hallway. I’d grown so accustomed to seeing Michael and Reba there that I wondered what was wrong. Instead, as we walked toward Jacob’s room the curtains were pulled back and we saw him with his parents. The machines were gone. He was dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, and they were packing a bag. Mother Naomi stood just inside the doorway, grinning so wide I wondered if it would make her cheeks sore.
“Clara, you’re here just on time for the good news,” Michael said when I walked in. “You too, Max. Jacob is released. Going home.”
“So soon?” I asked.
“No solid food for a while,” Reba said. “Lots of liquids, ice cream and malted milks, but he swallows like a champ. The doctors said he’ll do as well at home as here.”
“And the house is ready for him,” Naomi said. “Ready for him to move back home with his son.”
“That is good news,” Max said.
I smiled at Jacob, and he tried to reciprocate, but it came off as more of a grimace, so the healing wasn’t quite miraculous. The bandages covering the wound on the front of his throat moved up and down as he swallowed.
“Jacob, do you remember any more about what happened at the ranch last Sunday and Monday?” I asked.
Jacob dropped his head and shook it ever so slightly as he gave me a half-hearted thumbs down.
Michael, who moments earlier had been smiling at his son, teared up. He walked over and wrapped his arms around Jacob, who stood at least half a foot taller. At the same time, Reba rubbed Jacob’s arm. “We’ve explained to Jacob everything we know,” she said. “He doesn’t remember what happened, but he knows about Anna and the children, about Laurel’s death.”
“We’re sorry, Jacob,” I said. “Very sorry about your family.”
A slight nod, and tears filled Jacob’s eyes.
“Did you make any more progress on the case?” Michael asked, and at that, Max suggested they sit down and listen while we explained.
We went over it all, not in detail but the big picture. It didn’t take long before Reba jumped back up. “Not Carl!” she shouted. “Not after all we did for that boy, raising him like a son. It’s not possible that he’d do this to hurt us. Jacob treated him like a brother.”
But as we laid out more of what we’d uncovered, slowly they came to agree that it had to be Carl. All the evidence pointed to him. Everyone but Reba, who couldn’t seem to make that jump, appeared to accept it.
The room dissolved into a mixture of tears and cries, shouts of anger and pain. Michael tried to calm his wife as he asked us more questions, Reba in the background swearing that the only one responsible for her family’s horrific tragedy had to be Myles Thompkins and that we’d failed the family by not focusing on him.
Jacob remained quiet, until he grabbed a pen and paper off the bed tray and wrote: CARL WAS MY FRIEND
I then told him about Carl’s suicide note, and that he’d asked us to tell Jacob that he was sorry.
Jacob dropped his head, and Naomi slipped between the older Johanssons to put her arms around him. She whispered in Jacob’s ear, and he closed his eyes, as if to shut out the world.
As Max and I left the hospital, I phoned Mullins. It went right to voicemail, so I got in touch with dispatch. “I just hung up with Detective Mullins. He’s on his way here to talk to you,” Kellie said. “He knows about C
arl Shipley. The detective sounded kind of relieved.”
I dropped Max off on my way. Only a handful of protesters congregated on the sidewalk outside the station, and they seemed less dedicated, not bothering to shout at me. When I walked in the back door, Mullins was sitting at his desk. He had his head propped up on his fist, and he looked like he’d been to war. Maybe he had. I approached him, and he stood, and tears flushed his eyes as he threw his arms around me. “Thank you, Chief,” he said. “I am sorry that I kept interfering. I knew you two would solve the case, but Laurel was my little girl, and I worried that…”
Overwhelmed, he couldn’t seem to form the next words.
“Let’s go in my office,” I whispered.
Mullins never asked me what had happened when we arrived at Carl Shipley’s trailer, what we saw. He seemed to know about the hanging and the note, probably from someone at Max’s office or mine. It appeared that he had closed that chapter; the angry father of a murder victim role was gone. Now, for the first time, he gave himself permission to grieve.
“Chief, let me tell you about my girl,” he whispered, his voice breaking with the deepest of pains. “From the beginning, Laurel was special…” The rest of the day dissolved in memories.
Thirty-Seven
My sleepless nights endured. I lay in bed well past midnight, my mind roiling. By four, I was again awake, the lights out in my room, staring into the darkness, troubled. Everyone else considered the case over, but I couldn’t get there. Was I being compulsive, hanging on when it was time to put it to rest? Maybe Mother Naomi’s assessment of me was right; perhaps I simply didn’t understand when to let things be.
An hour after sunrise, I walked through Alber’s cemetery. The headstones at the front were obelisks and flat panels so worn by the decades, some more than a century, that the names were barely legible. A scattered dozen or more were sanded off by the winds and rains until whoever lay below would remain anonymous for eternity. With time to spare before the funerals began, I lingered at the graves of my sister Sadie and one of my four mothers, Constance, who’d passed away years earlier. In an area where clusters of Jefferies were laid, I was surrounded by family history: great-grandparents, aunts, uncles, a few cousins, many of whom I’d never known.
Her Final Prayer: A totally gripping and heart-stopping crime thriller (Detective Clara Jefferies Book 2) Page 26