by BJ Bourg
In town, we had canvassed the neighborhoods of each attack at least three times, but no one could tell us anything. We’d searched high and low for the green Thunderbird and Chloe had plastered it across all media outlets in the area, but it seemed to have disappeared. The town had gone back to normal as the story faded to black and people went about their busy lives, but the police department hadn’t gone back to normal—and we wouldn’t as long as a killer was on the loose. While I knew there was more to do and the case needed my attention, I had other things on my mind at the moment.
I placed a hand over Chloe’s curvy hip and ran it up her smooth skin until I reached her breasts. She groaned and leaned closer into me. “Want to be late this morning?” she asked.
I nodded and we both slipped out of bed and raced to the bathroom. We stood naked in front of the sink, loading our toothbrushes and eyeing each other with naughty intentions. After we were done brushing our teeth, Chloe pushed her perky breasts against my torso and pulled my mouth down to hers, kissing me aggressively. I grabbed her buttocks with both of my hands and lifted her off the ground, carrying her back to bed. We had just plopped onto it when my cell phone began ringing. I ignored it and we continued kissing and exploring each others’ bodies with our hands. My phone finally stopped ringing, but a second later it beeped to indicate I’d received a text message. As I began to wonder if something was wrong, it beeped a second and third time, and then started ringing again. “Leave us alone!” I yelled, and we both began laughing.
“You’d better get it,” Chloe said. “It might be another dead body.”
My mood suddenly fell. “I sure hope not!” I rolled to a sitting position and snatched my phone from the nightstand. I saw that the missed calls had been from Melvin. I checked the text messages. The first two were from Melvin:
Chief, where r u. can u please call
Hey, Chief, I need you to call me asap please
The third was from Susan and I could read her excitement in the message:
Clint, wake the hell up! We know who the killer is!
“They know who it is!” I said, jumping to my feet and scrambling to find some clothes. I hadn’t ironed a fresh pair of uniform pants, so I grabbed the pair I’d thrown in the hamper the night before.
Chloe leapt out of bed herself, pulling on her panties, and slipping into her bra. “Who is it? The killer—what’s his name?”
“I don’t know yet.”
She stopped in mid-motion—one breast hanging over the cup of her bra—and eyed me with suspicion. “You don’t know, or you don’t want to say?”
That stung, but I knew I deserved it. I finished buttoning my uniform pants and walk over to her. I cupped her face in my hands and looked into her eyes. “I’m sorry for lying about my booze problem, but I meant it when I said I’d never lie to you again.” I kissed her until her tense shoulders relaxed and then I pulled back to look into her eyes again. “I don’t know who it is yet, and that’s the truth. But when I do know, I won’t be able to tell you.”
She scowled. “Okay, I guess this is Chief Wolf speaking, which means you’d better get your hands off of me before my boyfriend, Clint, gets home.”
CHAPTER 33
I had rushed out the door without tucking in my uniform shirt or tying my boots, but I didn’t care, and Lindsey didn’t seem to notice when I walked into the office. She knew what I was looking for and pointed to the interview room, which also served as a conference room. Susan and Melvin were bent over a stack of documents and they both looked up when I entered. Susan looked down at my boots and then at my shirt, and shook her head. “Who dressed you?”
“I don’t even know if I remembered to put my socks on.” I then checked my holster to make sure my pistol was there. “What do we have?”
Melvin explained that the crime lab had faxed over the results of the DNA tests and it showed they’d gotten a CODIS (Combined DNA Index System) hit, where the DNA from the three arrows and the cigarette butt we’d recovered from our crime scenes was matched to an offender who had already been entered into the system.
“Who’s the suspect?” I asked, eager to find out who’d been hunting down the citizens of our small town. Once I had a name, I could track him down and put my hands on him.
Melvin handed me the crime lab report and I scanned it, searching for the culprit’s name. I finally found it. “Gregg Daniels,” I read out loud. I looked from Susan to Melvin, whose expressions were as blank as mine felt. “Who the hell is Gregg Daniels?”
Susan shrugged. “I have no idea. I’ve never heard of him before. Neither has Melvin.”
“Did y’all run him in the system?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Melvin said, handing me a criminal history report complete with his prison mug shot. “It seems he got out of prison a few months ago.”
Melvin was right. Gregg Daniels had been released from the state penitentiary on July 27, after serving twenty-one years of a twenty-five-year sentence. He’d been arrested a dozen times before the long stint in prison, and it took me a few seconds to sift through all of his previous arrests before finding the charge that landed him in prison for most of his adult life—aggravated rape. A sick feeling formed in the pit of my stomach as a thought occurred to me. “If he’s killing jurors for putting him behind bars,” I said slowly, “it’s only a matter of time before he gets to the victim.” I turned to Susan. “Call Isabel and give her his name. Ask her to find his case file and send us the names of everyone involved in the case—from jurors to witnesses to victims to law enforcement.”
Next, I asked Melvin to run a name inquiry and get every address ever listed to Gregg Daniels, as well as any vehicles registered in his name.
I went into my office and called Sheriff Buck Turner. When he answered, I told him we had identified the suspect through DNA evidence and, based on the newspaper clipping from Chloe’s grandfather, we believed the incident occurred in his jurisdiction and Reginald Hoffman had assisted in some way. “Can you have one of your people try to locate the old file? I need to know as much as I can about the case and everyone involved.”
“Sure,” Turner said. “That won’t be a problem.”
“And Sheriff…”
“Please, Clint, call me Buck.”
“Buck…everyone who worked this case is a target.” I let that information sink in before continuing. “Gregg Daniels spent the last twenty-one years seething in prison, but he’s out now—and he’s pissed off.”
“I’ll put my people on high alert.”
Once we’d said our goodbyes, I found the number for the state prison and dialed it. I needed to know all I could about Gregg Daniels. He was ruthless and unpredictable, and I needed to stop him as soon as possible—before someone else found themselves on the wrong end of a three-blade mechanical broad-head.
After pressing too many buttons and not getting a live person on the line, I finally started pressing “0” repeatedly until an automated message finally told me to hold on for an operator. When she came on, she transferred me to a Lieutenant who transferred me to a secretary who asked me to hold for the warden. Ten minutes later a heavy voice answered in a thick north Louisianan accent. “This is Warden Grant. What can I do for you?”
I introduced myself to him and explained everything I knew about the case. “We’re in the process of trying to track down Gregg Daniels’ whereabouts, and I was wondering if you might be able to help us out.”
“Hold on a minute.” There was a long pause and I could hear fingers snapping against a keyboard. It was painfully obvious he had a hard time navigating the keys, but it wasn’t long before he spoke again. “Go ahead and send me a written request on your department’s letterhead and I’ll see what I can find out.”
I pulled the phone from my ear and stared at it, telling myself to count to ten before opening my mouth again. I put the phone back to my ear. “Warden, this is an emergency. For starters, I need to know who picked him up when he was released, I need a li
st of every person who visited him over the past twenty-one years, and I need to know who he called while he was there—and I need to know this in a hurry, before someone else dies. His current address would also be most helpful.”
“Then I suspect you’ll get that written request to me in a hurry.”
I started to object, but the line went dead. I thought about calling back, but decided against it. It would only be a waste of time anyway. On a yellow sticky note, I jotted the list of things I needed from the prison and the fax number, and then brought it to Lindsey. I explained what I needed and stepped into Susan’s office. She was on the phone, but waved for me to sit across from her.
“I’m on hold,” she explained. “Isabel’s got someone looking through their old computer system. She said Reginald thinks he might remember the case now, but he wasn’t the lead detective. He said a female detective was primary—a Mary Cox—but she was killed in a crash a few years ago during a high speed chase. I actually remember when it—” She threw up a hand and turned her attention back to the call. “Yeah, I’m here. Right…okay…sure, thanks.”
“Well?”
“She found an entry in the system, but it only has the disposition of the case. She’s got someone going to their storage facility and she’ll call as soon as they have the file in hand.”
Susan and I sat in her office for fifteen minutes, talking about the case and bitching about the upcoming hearing. We finally stepped into the patrol section to see what Melvin was up to. We found him seated at his desk, which was next to Lindsey’s work station, with Lindsey looking over his shoulder. “Is that him?” Lindsey asked, staring at the computer monitor. “He looks scary!”
Susan and I walked to stand behind Melvin. He had accessed Daniels’ mugshot from the last time he was arrested and it was quite a picture. Daniels’ eyes were so wide the brown of his irises were completely surrounded by a sea of white. His scruffy face and brown hair sticking straight up added to the insane look in his eyes. The zipper on his sweat jacket was low, revealing a series of scratches and claw marks on his neck and upper chest.
“His victim fought hard, it seems,” Susan said in a low, stern voice. “I’d like to get my hands on him.”
Melvin grunted. “Yeah, but you wouldn’t scratch him—you’d punch him so hard his grandma would get a nosebleed.”
“Who’s his grandma?” Lindsey wanted to know.
“How should I know?” Melvin asked.
“You just said Susan would—”
“It was a joke, Lindsey,” Melvin said with a smirk. “You know what those are, don’t you?”
Lindsey socked him playfully in the shoulder and turned away. “See if I deliver anymore messages from your wife.”
“Are any vehicles registered to him?” I asked.
Melvin shook his head. “None—not even back when he was a free man, but I did find his brothers.” He handed me a printout that listed Daniels’ relatives. He had two brothers—Farrell and Howard—but all of the addresses listed to them were at least five years old.
“Nothing current?” Susan asked.
“Nope. Not a thing.” Melvin searched for more results and then whistled. “Farrell had a green Thunderbird registered to him, but the registration has been expired for two years.”
“You mean he’s driving around killing people in a car that has an expired tag?” Susan asked incredulously. “He’d better not let Amy catch him.”
We all laughed and sat around while Melvin ran query after query, trying to locate anything that would tell us where Daniels had taken up residency. It was nearly an hour later when Susan’s cell phone rang. She glanced at the screen and nodded, put it to her ear. She spoke back and forth with Isabel and then waved for Lindsey to bring her a notepad. With pen in hand, she told Isabel to read off the list of jurors from Gregg Daniels’ case. I couldn’t see what she was writing, but counted thirteen lines. Susan frowned, causing her dimple to dig deeper into her cheek. “Wait, is that it?” she asked, then said, “Okay, thank you.” She hung up the phone and handed me the list. “They’re not on here.”
“What?” I read over the names of the twelve jurors and the one alternate, and then read over them again, but slower. None of them were our victims.
CHAPTER 34
“So, you think these will help me sleep?” I asked Doctor Leslie Garner, holding up the orange bottle of pink capsules she’d recommended.
“You could start to see improvement within five days, but it usually takes one to two weeks.” She wrote some notes in my chart and flipped it shut. “Okay, that should do it for today. Come back and see me if you have any problems at all.”
I thanked her and stopped to pay the deductible before heading home. It was four o’clock when I arrived home and stepped out the Tahoe. Chloe was already there and I found her fussing over the living room. She dropped what she was doing and ran to greet me, beating Achilles by half a step. When she finally let go of my neck, she stared sideways at the pill bottle in my hand. “What are those?”
“I’ve decided to try something new. Susan suggested I go to a doctor and see about getting some—”
“So, when Susan tells you to go to a doctor, you go”—Chloe folded her arms across her chest—“but when I tell you to go, you make all kinds of excuses and refuse to get some help.”
“No, that’s not it. She told me the same thing you did and I told her I didn’t need to see a damn shrink. That’s when she said all I had to do was see a general practitioner and say I was having problems sleeping. So, I did.” I looked up at Chloe. “I thought you’d be happy about it.”
“I’m sorry.” Her face softened and she hugged me again. “I am happy. This is a huge step and I know you’re doing it for me.”
“I am. I don’t have a problem with vodka at all.” I tossed the bottle of pills on the table and went in my room to change. “Want some grilled burgers?” I called over my shoulder.
“Sounds yummy.”
As I changed into jeans and a T-shirt, I considered whether I should tell Chloe about the latest on the case. We’d run all of the names Isabel had given us, but we couldn’t come up with a connection to Isaac Edwards, Betty Ledet, or Chloe’s grandfather. Being that her grandfather was involved now, I would simply be updating a victim’s family member, and not divulging information to the media.
I could tell Chloe recognized the conflicted look on my face as we began making the patties together, because she said, “Just say it. You know you will eventually, so just get it over with.”
She was right, I knew. I made her promise to keep it to herself and then told her what we’d learned.
She stopped what she was doing and stood there lost in thought, her hands covered in ground beef. After a few moments, she finally said, “So, this Gregg Daniels is responsible for the killings and for desecrating my grandfather, but none of the victims served on the jury that convicted him?”
“Yep, you’ve been paying attention.”
“Then why’d he pick them?”
I didn’t have a good answer, so I didn’t say anything. One thing was for certain—I needed to find Gregg Daniels before he killed again. Chloe started to ask another question, but my phone began ringing.
“Achilles, get the phone!” I ordered. “My hands are dirty.”
Instead of picking up the phone, Achilles just cocked his head to the side and perked his ears straight up, as though trying to figure out what I’d said. I laughed and washed my hands off, getting to the phone just as it stopped ringing. It was the office. Groaning under my breath, I called back and Amy answered on the first ring. “Chief, I’m sorry to bother you, but we need you to come out.”
“What is it?”
Amy explained how William had staked out Cig’s Gas Station and finally caught the suspicious subject who had been asking about me. William had him bent over the hood of his cruiser handcuffed, and he wanted me to interrogate him. When I asked why he’d handcuffed the man, Amy said the stranger t
old William he had a message for me—and it was about my dead wife and kid.
My curiosity fully aroused, I said in a hurried voice, “Okay, I’ll be there in a few minutes.”
Chloe sensed something was amiss and gave an understanding nod. “It’s okay. I’ll finish these up and keep them warm until you get home.”
I kissed her and grabbed my pistol before heading out the door.
CHAPTER 35
Isabel Compton tossed back a lock of wet blonde hair and wiped sweat from her sticky forehead with a rag. “What if we destroyed the file?” she asked Reginald Hoffman, who only sighed and sank to a seat on a file box that was smashed and busted open on one end.
Reginald had come to her earlier in the day waving a newspaper article in the air like a madman and saying he knew how to solve the Arrow Slayings (as they had been dubbed by the media). While the picture Chief Clint Wolf showed them didn’t ring any bells for Reginald, he figured his mom would recognize it, and he was right. He often complained about her saving every issue of every newspaper that ever had his picture or name in it, but he wasn’t complaining that day. Isabel thought it was adorable how Mrs. Hoffman followed her son’s career, and she loved the woman—well, not because she followed Reginald’s career, but mostly because she brought fresh eggs and vegetables to the office on a regular basis. Come to think of it, Isabel couldn’t remember the last time she’d eaten a store-bought egg, thanks to her.
As it turned out, the photographer from the newspaper hadn’t been taking a picture of the jury in the background—he had been shooting Reginald. According to the article, Reginald was the defendant in a civil case where a suspect was claiming he used excessive force during an arrest. It had been a bench trial (meaning a judge heard the case, rather than a jury) and he had ruled in Reginald’s favor. The article quoted Reginald as saying, quite simply, “The truth prevailed today.”