Count on Me (Petal, Georgia)

by Lauren Dane

  Shane answered and she forced herself to focus. “I have the connection between Vernon Hicks and my mother.”

  He rushed over to the Lassiters to take their statements and take the datebook to enter into evidence.

  Mindy came back in at some point but their grandfather had made her be quiet.

  “Okay, so before I call in my favors to get warrants for Hicks, run it through with me,” Shane said to Caroline. “We have a murder. We have a suspect who was seen washing blood off the night of the murder, and there’s a connection between that man and the murder victim.”

  “And we have a suspect who has a history of violence. A man who has done time for manslaughter and assault. He has a history of stalking and hurting women. The murder bore really personal hallmarks. The kind a man Hicks might be. Angry at women. Obsessive. He’s got major anger problems.”

  “I need some more, here, Caroline. What’s his motive?”

  “I know. Damn it. Okay. He did time in the system in several places. Did he submit DNA on any of them? We could get it to the lab to see if it’s a match. You’d have a physical tie to the scene.”

  “That’s a good idea. There’s a backlog but this is exigent. You’re being threatened. He’s tried to kill you. He took photos of you and the victim from your apartment. My concern is that he’s now stalking you, Caroline. We found evidence of a little sniper’s blind in a tree. The one the rifle appears to have been fired from.”

  Royal cursed under his breath and took her hand.

  “Well isn’t that comforting? Okay so he’s obviously stalking me. But, you don’t know that Hicks has any connection to me at all. You absolutely do need to arrest him, don’t get me wrong. But you need to run this by the prosecutor to see what he thinks. Order the DNA if it’s in the system. But if you arrest him without enough and you have to let him go before he gets charged, he might bolt. He’s changed his name multiple times, he’s moved around a lot, creating new identities.”

  “Okay, defense attorney, knock holes in it,” Shane said.

  “This is all totally circumstantial. So Vernon Hicks knew Bianca Mendoza when she was murdered. That’s not a crime. A nearly ninety-year-old woman who remembers blood from sixteen years ago? There’s no evidence she came forward at all with this information. You have nothing to tie Hicks to that murder but acquaintance.”

  She blew out a breath and realized her sister was crying, her head on their grandfather’s shoulder. He looked absolutely wrecked as he stared at her. She tore her attention from however much they hated her for this and got back into the right headspace.

  “Maybe your father would have better advice. You have probable cause to arrest, but arrest him on a stalking charge. I’m being stalked and threatened. He’s a stalker and threatener with a history of being locked up for violence and obsessive harassment of women. The current victim is the daughter of a murder victim Vernon Hicks is also a person of interest in. If you arrest him for that, you have him in while you serve the search warrant. He seems the type to trophy collect. Some of my mother’s hair was taken. The pictures from my house. He’s a collector. If he really did do it and he hasn’t had to dump it when he ran or went inside, proof should be there.”

  “And while he’s in interrogation and we’re in his house, he’ll go crazy imagining us going through his stuff. Touching his trophies can probably use that fear to get him talking if he doesn’t lawyer up.”

  Caroline snorted. “He’s a career criminal. He’s going to lawyer up ten minutes after you get him in a room. If you don’t find anything at his house, you’re screwed. You’ll have to let him go.” She continued to pace as she thought. “So assuming that doesn’t happen, we have ten minutes. All right. We’ve both dealt with his type before. He thinks he’s way smarter than he is. He’s got a hair trigger. Poor control means if you hit the right buttons in interrogation you can get enough to make a dent on holding him before he realizes he’s screwed up and asks for a lawyer. Especially if you find something at his apartment.”

  “All right. I’m calling now. I’ll have to run this all by the prosecutor and then a judge to get those warrants. I’d like to hit him as soon as we can. We’ll need to coordinate with Porter on this obviously. I’ll let you know when I can.” Shane hugged Caroline. “It’s nearly over.”

  Caroline smiled. “Thanks, Shane.”

  They walked him out and she went back in to grab her purse. She hugged Shep. “It’s gonna be okay. Call me if you need me.”

  Shep looked between Caroline and Royal. “I hate this.”

  “If I’m right, this will be the beginning of the end of this whole thing.”

  “No not that. Though yeah, that’s bad too. I mean the family. I mean the way this has gone down and you’ve been dumped on.”

  She hugged him again. “It was worth it. And I have you back in my life. You gotta take your victories where you can.”

  She turned her back on her grandparents, and Royal escorted her out.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  “Are you all right?” Royal asked her as he helped her into the car.

  “Not really, no.”

  “You mad that I punched Garrett?”

  “Nope. He needed punching. Thank you for punching him.”

  “I’m sorry your grandparents are horrible people and your sister is a useless whiner.”

  That made her laugh.

  She reached out and he took her hand.

  “I can’t think about it right now. Okay? I can’t think about it or talk about it. Warrants being argued over. They could say no. If they do, he can bring him in to talk. But a career criminal knows his rights, trust me on that, so even if they bring him in, he’ll talk but he won’t tell them anything. And then he knows we’re on to him. We lose our edge. He can run.”

  “Do you want to keep not talking about it? Like how it doesn’t matter because you have literally shed blood for this. This is going to happen. I can feel it. You have put so much into this. Years and years of your life. If anyone has the will and the persistence to make something like this happen successfully, you do.”

  He took her home and they had sweaty sex and she pushed all the stuff she needed to deal with really far away because she just couldn’t do it that night.

  He slept, and she got herself snuggled into him and closed her eyes.

  And when she woke up again, it was to the sound of her phone ringing. A bleary look at the phone told her it was four in the morning. She grabbed it quickly; the ID told her it was Petal PD.

  “Caroline Mendoza.”

  Royal turned one of the bedside lamps on.

  “I just got back from Porter. I desperately need to sleep but before I do that, I wanted to call to let you know what happened. Hicks is in custody. For first-degree murder.”

  “What?”

  “It took a few hours to get the warrants, but we got them and my friend in Porter served them with me. Hicks opened the door bitching about being woken up, and then he saw it was us and he ran for it. We chased him six blocks and took him down. We took him back to his place, and we walked inside where some of Porter PD were executing the search warrant. Anyway, there was enough there that we tossed him in the back of a cruiser and down to the station for processing. We charged him on stalking and got him in a room and my God. He just opened his mouth and started talking. First about you and then about your mother. He confessed. Without any prompting on our part.”

  “I don’t… What the hell is going on? He confessed to killing my mother?”

  “Caroline, I have seen a lot tonight, and I know you’re eager to know all the details, but I want to come out there to you and tell you everything face to face. I want to shower, sleep for a few hours and then hug my wife and son. Can I come out to the ranch at ten?”

  “Yes, yes. Come on out then. Thank you.” She put her phone down and turned to Royal. “They arrested Hicks on the stalking charge, but they also charged him with first-degree murder. Shane says he confessed af
ter whatever they found in his apartment but wouldn’t say what it was. Now I’m freaked and imagining things like heads in aquariums or zombies on leashes. He didn’t tell me the whole story but he’s going to sleep a few hours, he just got back. And then he’s coming out here at ten so I’ll let Shep know when it’s a more appropriate time to call a seventeen-year-old.”

  “Come back to bed. Rest for a bit.”

  She cuddled with him a while but couldn’t go back to sleep. He couldn’t either so he headed out to work. She’d work from home until Shane came by.

  Before she got started though, she made all the calls she needed to make and ended up spending an hour on the phone with her uncle.

  She didn’t have as much time to work before she had to stop and get ready for Shane to come over, but it was worth it. She’d missed her uncle more than she’d thought she did. Hearing his voice made her smile, and after she’d briefed him about the situation with Hicks, she ended up spending far more time telling him about Royal and her growing feelings for him.

  It had kept her busy, and prevented her from thinking too deeply on anything but putting one foot in front of the other.

  Royal came looking handsome and all cleaned up while she’d been making a fresh pot of coffee, and they’d just poured two cups when there was the sound of a car approaching the house.

  Royal stilled. “We’ll both go to the door.”

  Nodding, she took his hand, and they walked to the front and peeked out before opening up and stepping onto the porch.

  It wasn’t Shane, but Shep who’d approached and parked. The words sending him back to school were on her tongue until her grandfather got out as well.

  Fuck. She didn’t have the reserves to deal with another fight with her grandparents.

  James raised a hand in a wave as they came up the steps to the doorway where Caroline and Royal stood. “I let Shep leave school for this meeting on the promise that I’d get to come along.”

  “Why is that?”

  “You and I have some things to work though. I’m sorry, Caroline. I failed you in a lot of ways, and I don’t know if you can get past it. But I hope so. I’d like you to give me a chance, and I’d also like to come in and hear what Shane Chase has to say.”

  Caroline took a deep breath and stepped from the way, motioning them into the house. “There’s coffee in the kitchen. Shep, show him where it’s at. Shane’s pulling up to the house now.” She waved his way and they all went inside.

  Royal watched her. His usually confident Caroline was nervous. There were chinks in her normally self-assured armor of confidence. He wanted to comfort her, but it was clear she was holding on by her fingernails.

  They all settled around the kitchen table.

  “We served the warrant, like I said.” Shane sipped his coffee. “And he freaking ran. We chased him and brought his butt back to his apartment where they were doing the search. Hicks didn’t want to go back inside, and when we got into the living room, I knew why.”

  “Why do I want to cringe before I even know?”

  “The whole room was papered with pictures of you, Caroline. Newspaper articles you wrote going back as far as your first year in college. And the pictures he took from your apartment were up on the wall too.”

  “There’s your link.”

  Royal’s stomach bottomed out. He leaned a little closer, bumping his thigh to hers.

  “Yes, there’s our link on the stalking, and as we’re all standing there in his living room, he knows it. So we take him back to the station in Porter and, I shit you not, I turn on the recorder, introduce myself and the other officer in the room and he just starts talking. He starts confessing. He’d been obsessed with your mother. In the search they found some of what we think is the hair taken from her at the scene. He had pictures of her too. Polaroids usually shot from what looks like a dumpster at the back of the diner. Stacks of them he had in a box with a locket necklace that had pictures of Enrique and you guys in it.”

  “My mother had a locket. It had their wedding picture and then a tiny department-store picture of me and Mindy holding baby Shep. It was white gold with rose-gold accents. I think it had little diamond chips in it. Nothing flashy.”

  “That’s what we found. Anyway she was nice to him, he said, but she always turned him down. So he waited for your father to make a run to the bank as the diner cleaned up and readied for the next day. Hicks came in when your mother was alone and he killed her. He described the kind of knife. It’s what killed her. He never knew Joyce Marie saw him. But he heard you on the radio, and then he saw you on television because he keeps up on you, what you’re doing, where you’re going. So he listened to that radio show, and it enraged him. And then the television. He knew you had to go and he had plans to kill you. He wrote them down in a notebook and he also told them to us.”

  “Why? Why would he tell you all this? This guy should be savvy. He’s done some time. He should know the drill.”

  “Right? So there I am, I can’t figure that out. I’m poking around, asking him questions trying to figure it out when he tries to make a deal to keep us from putting him back inside. Turns out he’s ripped off a local drug dealer who has a lot of associates doing time. Hicks panicked, and then he lost his control and confessed to try to save himself. He’s seriously scared of this dealer he screwed over. So much he didn’t even make a fuss about moving to Petal. Figured his attorney would fight it just to slow things down. Guess Petal’s lack of drug lords in the cells was a better option than fighting because once he got himself a lawyer, no one said a thing about it.”

  “Pity.”

  Shane sighed. “So there you go. He confessed. On tape. There’s so much evidence in his apartment I had nightmares. He definitely needs to be off the streets. We have his journals, which he stashed in a friend’s garage with all his boxes of trophies, while he did time. There are other victims. I’m sure of it. The state folks are already looking at it, and since he’s moved around across several states, the federal people are too. Your father, Enrique Mendoza, did not kill your mother, Bianca Mendoza. Please count on my help when you go through the process to clear him posthumously. I’m deeply sorry that shoddy investigation by a racist incompetent let the man who killed walk free, and an innocent man spent thirteen years in prison on death row. I’m sorry Petal PD had any part of it.”

  “You helped solve it. You can’t own what the other guy did, as people tell me so often. You made it right because your department has the integrity his lacked. Thank you.”

  “The prosecutor will call you about interviewing you and getting evidence from you. He’s interested in seeing your files that you put together.”

  She got up and brought him out a huge three-ring binder and then a smaller one. “I have them copied in bulk.”

  They walked Shane to the door and he drove away.

  Shep sat at the table, his hands clasped tightly. “You did it.”

  “I’m not even sure how to put it all into words.” She smiled at Shep and he got up to hug her. “But I’m glad you were here to hear it with me.”

  Shep sat again as uncertainty rose from where her grandfather sat.

  “I had a lot of help. So much help. There’s still a ways to go though, so it’s best to brace yourself for a long process. But I’m hopeful and I’m going to allow myself that hope. And now people can see Dad didn’t do it.”

  She turned to her grandfather. Royal stood close enough that the heat of him blanketed her back as she faced one of her demons. “He’s innocent.”

  James cocked his head. “It appears that way.”

  “He’s innocent,” she repeated. Because it was important. If they ever were to get to a place where she could work things out with her grandparents, they needed to admit it.

  Her grandfather understood and took a deep breath. “Yes. He’s innocent. I misjudged you and your father. Now that we’ve got all this proof, your grandmother will come around. Mindy too. We really had no idea you’d
been threatened and harmed to that degree. If we’d have known…”

  “You did know. You knew someone shot at me and you never called to check on me. Not once. You knew my apartment had been broken into. You knew my car had been vandalized. And you never called. Now that you know the truth and it’s been proven by another person, you want to just what? Pretend none of that happened? She slapped me. And she threatened me to never see my brother and sister again. It was bad enough you threw me out, thank goodness for the Mendozas. Because they finished raising me. They dealt with my grief and pain, and they sent me off to college and law school. They came to my graduations too. For a long time I pretended it didn’t matter. I pretended that I could make this better if I was just more of this or less of that. But it never worked, and it won’t because I can’t be anything but what I am. And I don’t even want to. So I accept your apology from earlier. But I don’t know how I’m going to be taking any new steps back toward you all.”

  “That’s fair. She was wrong to have hurt you. Wrong to have threatened you. She and I had a very bitter disagreement once I found out. We love you. All three of you. We did what we thought was best but we messed up. People make mistakes.”

  “I love you too. But I need some time and some space away from you and Abigail. I’m sorry your daughter died. You didn’t deserve that.” Caroline hugged him.

  “Thank you for finding her killer,” he whispered before kissing her cheek and leaving with Shep.

  Shep came back inside. He hugged Caroline tight. He was so lost, her baby brother.

  She hugged him back. “It’s okay. He’s behind bars. At last. He’ll pay, Shep. He’ll pay for what he’s done to our family.”

  “I can’t quite believe it. I want us all to meet. You, me and Mindy. She needs to think this through. Especially now. We need to stick together. All three of us for Mom and Dad. She needs her letters.”

  “What if we misjudge, and she destroys them or tells Grandma about them? My heart breaks to imagine how she’ll feel later when she realizes she was wrong.”