James 516: A London Carter Novel (London Carter Mystery Series)

by BJ Bourg

  “That’s the first thing he taught her to do—and she was good…damn good! She was out-shooting grown snipers on the sheriff’s department team by the time she was twelve.” Larry shook his head. “That little Liz was something to see. I been on a number of hunts with Kenny and her. I seen that girl drop an elk with one shot from eight hundred meters, seen her drop a four-hundred-pound black bear that was charging directly at her, seen her blow the eye out of a coyote at four hundred meters.” Larry nodded fondly, as though he were seeing it through his mind’s eye. “You name it, that girl could do it with a gun. Kenny was some proud of his little sniper. It nearly killed him when she moved away.”

  “Moved? Where’d she move to?” I asked.

  “I’m not real sure. She got married for five minutes to some guy she met up around Sevierville. They didn’t stay married long. She divorced him and moved away. She’d come back to visit every now and again, but things just weren’t the same for Ken with her gone. It was like she took his soul with her when she left.”

  “Who’d she marry?” Sally asked. “What’s the guy’s name?”

  Larry shook his head. “I never did hear his name called.”

  “Any idea where she moved?” she asked.

  “Nope. I just know she moved away and it killed old Ken.”

  We all stood silent for a few minutes—me trying to think of what to ask next, Larry going back to work on supper and Sally scratching Cletus’ head. Finally, I thought to ask if Liz ever talked about the night her father and baby brother were killed.

  “Not to me,” Larry said, “but she did say something to Ken about it. Ken wouldn’t bring it up much because it made him sour and he didn’t want to dig up old wounds for Liz. But when he’d get to drinking, he’d sometimes talk about it if we were alone. One night when he was hitting the moonshine extra hard—it was after Liz had moved on—he told me that he knew his brother was set up. Said he could prove it.”

  “Did he say how he could prove it?” I asked.

  “The law down there said they bought drugs from Lenny and Michelle the day before the raid, but”—Larry shook his head—“Liz was home and she said they didn’t get no visitors…none. She also said her dad didn’t own no guns. In fact, when Ken tried to give him one at Christmas a few years before he was killed, Lenny went off about how a man with a family shouldn’t keep guns around the house. Too dangerous, he said. Ken believed every man should own a gun and teach his family how to use it—you never know when they might need it—but Lenny, he was a different breed. Thought every situation could be talked out. He sure didn’t have a chance to do any talking that night.”

  “Did he ever tell anyone what Liz told him? Did he report it to the authorities in Magnolia or to the FBI?” I asked.

  “Ken knew how the law worked. Liz was a little girl and her word wouldn’t stand up against a bunch of cops. Nope, after all his attempts to get justice failed, he just settled into teaching her to let go of the bitterness and get on with her life. Taught her that those that do wrong get theirs in the end—that the Man upstairs settles all scores sooner or later. It was a lesson that took a long time to take root.”

  Larry shook his head. “That little girl was some bitter. Ken would’ve had an easier time breaking a wild mustang with that attention disorder all them youngsters claim to have nowadays. I always said she would grow up and become FBI and go after them bastards, but I don’t really know what became of her.”

  I jotted some notes from Larry’s statement and then turned to Sally. “Can you think of anything else?”

  “Yeah—two things,” she said. “First, what’s Liz’s real name and—second—whatever happened to Michelle James?”

  “Liz’s name was Elizabeth…Elizabeth James. As for Michelle”—Larry shook his head—“she committed suicide in the mental hospital. It was a bunch of years ago, when Liz was still a little girl. That really hit Liz hard—set her back a bit—but Ken stuck at it and got her head back on straight. He always had a way of making things better for her and helping her through things. Of course, now that he’s gone…”

  “Have you seen her since Kenny died?” Sally asked.

  “She was at his funeral, and I meant to talk to her, but didn’t get the chance. Ken was kind of popular and the funeral was a big deal—newspapers, TV crews, cops from all over the country—and with all that crowd, I lost track of her. One minute she was there and I started making my way through the crowd. By the time I got through, she was gone.”

  “Would you have a picture of her?” I asked.

  “Never did own no camera—never had a need for it. Now Ken, he had pictures of her all over his house. He’d buy some of those throw-away cameras and would stand in line at the pharmacy for hours waiting for them pictures.” Larry grinned, a stream of tobacco juice leaking from his lower lip. “Liz would fuss when they had company over because Ken had hung those pictures everywhere. He had pictures of her at the shooting range, swimming in the river, hunting and just kicking around the mountain. Liz would bitch something awful about them pictures. She wasn’t one for attention, that girl.”

  “What was Liz wearing on the day of the funeral?” Sally wanted to know.

  I stared sideways at her, wondering what was on her mind.

  Larry shrugged. “What everybody wears at funerals—black.”

  “What did she look like when you last saw her—color and length of her hair, height, eye color—as best you can remember?”

  Larry struggled through a description and as Sally wrote down the particulars, I reached down to check my phone that was vibrating. It was Bethany.

  “Hey, did you all leave yet?” she asked.

  I walked toward the loaner car. “Not yet. We’re talking to an old friend of Kenny James.”

  “Who?”

  “Some mountain man named Larry Durham.”

  “Larry Durham? Did he tell you anything?”

  “Did he ever! I think we’re looking for a female sniper—Lenny James’ daughter.”

  “I think your Larry Durham has been drinking too much moonshine,” Bethany said. “Lenny James didn’t have a daughter. He only had a baby boy and his baby was killed in the raid. Gina and all have already combed every newspaper they could find on the case and they even found his obituary, but there’s no mention of a daughter.”

  “Yeah, this little girl has been a well-kept secret. She’s the key to everything. When we find her, we’ll find the killer.”

  There was a long pause from the other end. “Are you saying the killer—the sniper—is Lenny James’ daughter? That she’s killing everyone involved in the raid?”

  “At this point, she’s our best bet.”

  “Does this girl have a name?”

  “Elizabeth James.”

  “Elizabeth?” Bethany echoed.

  “Yep.”

  “Hold up a second…” Moments later, the sound of fingers pattering against a keyboard came through the phone. Bethany finally spoke again. “I’m running her name and there seems to be a few of them, but none from Tennessee. There’s one from Anchorage, Alaska, one from Chicago, Illinois and one from Denver, Colorado. I doubt if any of these are our girl. Maybe this Durham fellow is shooting you a line of shit.”

  “Where are you?” I asked.

  “Home…why?”

  “How’re you checking the database from home?”

  “It’s a web-based program. I can check it from anywhere that has an Internet connection.”

  “A what?”

  “Never mind that. Do you have any more information that’ll help get us closer to this girl?”

  “Larry did say she moved away and got married, so she could be going by a different last name, but I still think we need to check these women out. Get officers from each of their hometowns to visit them and see what they’re up to. If any of them are out of town, we need to find out where she’s supposed to be and what she’s supposed to be doing and try to verify that information. The real Elizab
eth James is here somewhere…creeping around in these mountains.”

  “I’ll call Gina or Melvin and have one of them get right on it,” Bethany said. “By the way, when are you coming back?”

  “We’re about done here, so we should be leaving soon.”

  “Good…I miss you.”

  Sally walked up and motioned to the car, and I followed. “I miss you, too,” I murmured, hoping Sally hadn’t heard. I flipped my phone shut and slipped into the driver’s seat. “Ready to head home?”

  “We have one stop to make first,” Sally said.

  “Where’s that?”

  “The local newspaper. Larry remembered that Elizabeth James got the flag from the funeral and he said a number of photographers were shooting during the presentation.”

  “No shit! Great idea.”

  Sally had made a phone call and got the directions from Detective Plump. Within the hour we were going into the office of the Gatlinburg Gazette and we were shown to the desk of the reporter who’d covered the funeral.

  “That was a couple of weeks ago,” Courtney Hackenburg said, sliding her chair back and turning to rummage through a stack of articles. She finally found the one she was looking for and handed it over. “Here it is.”

  I unfolded the paper and scanned the front page, with Sally leaning close. There was a picture of the flag-covered casket with rows upon rows of uniformed officers in the background. A few other photographs depicted the color guard, officers crying and the sheriff giving his speech. The story ended at the bottom of the page and directed me to page five. I flipped through the pages and found more pictures from the highly publicized funeral.

  “This guy was popular,” I commented.

  Courtney nodded. “He was very well-respected around here. Cops from everywhere attended the funeral. The governor even—”

  “Holy shit!” My stomach suddenly went sour and I felt an intense urge to vomit.

  “What is it?” Sally asked, craning her neck to see over my shoulder.

  I dropped the paper to the desk. My head swam, knees felt unsteady. The room began to swirl. “Jesus…Christ,” I muttered through numb lips.

  Sally stared down at the picture that had stopped my clock in its tracks and she gasped violently. There in the picture, receiving the United States flag from the casket of Kenny James, was Elizabeth James…known to us as Bethany Riggs!

  CHAPTER 40

  I rushed out onto the sidewalk and vomited against a nearby lamppost. Several tourists swore out loud and made wide circles around me as I stood slumped over, gasping for breath.

  “Amateur,” one of them scolded.

  “Learn how to handle your sauce,” another chided.

  I jerked my shirt up and wiped my face. My mind raced. How had I been so blind? What in the hell had I been thinking? What was I going to do? Bethany’s voice…her smile…her soft lips…her naked body in bed beside me…all of those images strobed through my mind, making me dizzy. I felt a hand on my shoulder.

  “Are you okay?”

  I looked up. It was Sally. I straightened, fought to keep from swaying, and nodded. “I’ll be okay. It just…it just surprised me is all.”

  “I know she meant a lot to you,” Sally said in a soft voice. “I’m really sorry.”

  I took a deep, cleansing breath and exhaled. My shock started to fade and I began to seethe. I’d told my deepest, darkest secret to Bethany Riggs—Elizabeth James. She had lied to me…used me. She’d cold-bloodedly murdered three police officers. Kenneth Lewis had taken his own life, Wesley Guidry had been killed and I had been forced to kill Captain Theriot. A lot of lives had been lost and others ruined—all as a result of her actions. And all this time I had been sweet on her.

  “She means nothing to me,” I said.

  “Just like that?” Sally asked doubtfully.

  “Just like that.” I spat on the ground for emphasis. “After all, if she’d meant so much to me, last night would’ve never happened.” I walked away and left Sally standing there trying to digest what I’d said. Before I made it to the parking lot where our car was parked, my phone rang. I glanced down, then hurriedly waved Sally over. “It’s Bethany’s cell!”

  Sally’s eyes shifted to the rooftops across the road from us and then up and down the crowded streets. “You think she’s watching us? You think she knows that we know?”

  I glanced at my watch. “We were shot at nine hours ago. She could be almost back in Magnolia by now.”

  Sally pursed her lips as my phone continued to ring. “Aren’t you going to answer it? If you don’t, she might get suspicious.”

  I flipped it open, trying to sound casual. “Hey, Bethany, what’s up?”

  “Nothing much. I was able to track down all three women named Elizabeth James. Officers from all three jurisdictions went right out to the houses when I told them what was going on here. All of the women were home, they all have families and none of them have any criminal record of any type. It looks like that name is a dead end.”

  “Yeah, here, too,” I said. “We haven’t found anything worth pursuing. In fact, we’re on our way back. This whole trip was a huge waste of time.”

  “What about the ambush? Do they have any leads?”

  “Nothing. They scoured the mountainside, but they didn’t even find a trace of the shooter. He must’ve been long gone before we even made the call.”

  “Oh, by the way, I called Debra from accounting and asked her to pull up the online call logs for all sheriff’s office phones within the last twenty-four hours. I told her it was a confidential IA matter, like you said, and it worked like a charm. She e-mailed them to me, and I was able to check the call logs from my home computer. I went through—”

  “You can do all that from home?”

  “I can do it from my laptop in my car if I wanted to.”

  “Your car?” I blurted, then silently cursed myself.

  “Yeah, why’s that so hard to believe?”

  “No reason,” I said quickly. “Anyway, what did you find out?”

  “There were no calls to or from anyone living in Tennessee.”

  “Nothing at all?”

  “Nothing at all.”

  Of course there weren’t, I thought, because you’re the shooter! There was a long pause and I finally said, “Well, let me go so we can get out of here.”

  “London…”

  “Yeah?”

  “Will I get to see you when you get back?”

  “It’ll be early in the morning when I roll back into Magnolia. Probably around two o’clock. Maybe we can get together tomorrow afternoon?”

  “Hell, no!” Bethany said. “That’ll be too long. Why don’t I just meet you at your place at around twoish?”

  My mind raced, trying to think of the right course of action. Yesterday I would’ve jumped at the chance of having Bethany spend the night—or morning—with me. Yesterday I couldn’t wait to see her again. But today… Well, today things had changed. Sensing I was taking entirely too long to respond, I blurted, “Why don’t I call you as I’m rolling into Magnolia? And then you can meet me at my house. It should be no later than two, two-thirty.”

  “That sounds great, but I have to warn you…you won’t be getting much sleep until around four or five. I’ve been lying in that hospital for two days dreaming about our next time together.”

  “What about your neck? Won’t that be a problem? I mean, doesn’t it have to heal up first?” I tried to sound concerned.

  “London Carter, are you trying to make excuses? Is there something I need to know?”

  “No…no…not at all,” I stammered. “I just don’t want to hurt you. I don’t want to hurt your neck.”

  Bethany laughed. “I’m kidding. No, the doctors said that was nothing. They were more concerned with whether or not I had any internal injuries from the bullets impacting the vest, but I got the all clear from them.”

  “Very funny,” I said, relieved she hadn’t suspected I was on to her
. “I’ll see you in the morning then.” I flipped the phone shut, then turned to Sally. “What the hell am I going to do?”

  “I think you need to call Sheriff Burke right away and tell him what we know.”

  “No way,” I said, shaking my head. “He’ll have her killed. I might be mad at her, but I don’t want her to die. I mean, part of me understands why she’s doing this—if it is her who’s doing it.”

  Sally studied my face. “I think we’ve moved beyond the what-if-it’s-her phase. I think we should be concentrating on what to do next, and that shouldn’t include doing nothing.”

  “I’m not saying we do nothing. I’m just saying we handle it ourselves—take her in alive—see if she confesses. She’s the missing puzzle to what happened twenty years ago. Like Larry said, she can tell us if there ever was a drug deal in the first place. If she talks, we’ll have what we need to put Sheriff Burke away and—”

  “Whoa, cowboy, let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Sally cautioned. “Even if she does admit to being Elizabeth James and she says what we think she’ll say, do you really think a jury would believe her? She’s a cop who killed three other cops in cold blood. She’s not exactly the best witness in a police corruption case.”

  “She’s the perfect witness,” I countered. “No one would go through all that trouble and risk the death penalty for a lie, or for something that didn’t happen.”

  “What if she kills again before we get to her? Are you willing to live with another cop’s blood on your hands?”

  I leaned against the car and crossed my arms in front of my chest, considering the prospect. After thinking about it for about three seconds, I nodded. “Yep, I can. If you ask me, everyone involved deserves to die anyway. Sure, not the way she’s doing it, but by lethal injection. If she gets to one or two of them before we get to her, it’ll save the state a few dollars. Besides, the sheriff and his cronies are hiding under their cots at the main office. They won’t stick their heads outside until the killer is locked down solid.”

  Sally shook her head slowly. “I can’t believe I’m considering going along with this. But, more than anything, I really hate dirty cops, especially those who would kill a baby and then lie about it. Okay, what’s the plan?”