Blood Ties (John Jordan Mysteries Book 16)

by Michael Lister

  “I can understand why you’d like to interpret all her actions in as favorable light as possible, but—”

  “I’m aware of what I’m doing,” he says. “I just feel so bad for her and what she’s been through and I feel so guilty for not being there for her. She’s my little girl and somehow I let her down.”

  “I understand,” I say. “I do.”

  “I haven’t given up on finding her and getting her the help she needs,” he says. “I don’t think she’s beyond saving.”

  I don’t want to believe anyone is beyond saving, but if Randa is a sociopath or has a borderline personality disorder, which I suspect is at least possible, then what she needs saving from more than anything else is herself.

  “Has Daniel said anything that might help us find her?” he asks.

  “He really doesn’t remember much of anything at all,” I say. “Maybe in time, but . . . I think it’s doubtful.”

  “Has she been in contact with you anymore?” he says.

  For a while, Randa was calling me quite often, but I haven’t heard from her in a while now.

  “Not lately, no,” I say.

  “Will you please let me know if she does or if Daniel remembers anything that might help us?” he says. “Please help me find my little girl and get her home safely.”

  If we ever find her, something we have so far not even come close to, I imagine her home will be prison or a mental institution. Not sure that’s the home he means.

  “I’ll do my best,” I say, and I mean it.

  11

  That night after we’ve put the girls to bed, Anna, Sam, Daniel, and I watch Trace Evers’ music video for the song about and featuring Mariah.

  The song is called Never Leave You Again and opens on a scene with Trace in prison and Mariah coming to visit. The two are separated by glass in a metal visiting booth and talk to each other on old fashion phone receivers.

  “I miss you, Daddy,” Mariah says into the phone as she holds her little hand up to the glass.

  She’s not only a truly beautiful photogenic little girl, but a natural entertainer, her performance relaxed and natural.

  “I can’t believe that energetic little beauty is dead,” Anna says.

  “I . . . want to . . . help . . . you burn . . . the . . . fucker . . . who . . . did it,” Sam says from her hospital bed.

  “I’m counting on all three of you to help,” I say.

  Without taking his eyes off the screen, Daniel nods. “Count on it.”

  “You know I’ll always be your Watson,” Anna says. “Or your huckleberry or whatever you want me to be.”

  While in the midst of an intensely emotional scene that has Trace apologizing to Mariah, guards come and drag him away, his hand yanked away from the glass, leaving only her little hand on the glass as she yells, “No, Daddy, don’t leave me. Daddy. Daddy. Daddy. Don’t leave me.”

  The music, which is mostly a beat, then comes up and by the time Trace starts to rap, he’s walking out of prison, Mariah running toward him from where she had been waiting with an older woman I believe we’re meant to think is Trace’s mother.

  “I will never leave you again,” Trace raps to a slow beat as Mariah jumps into his arms. “No, not ever. No, no matter what. I will never leave you again. My girl, my girl, my little girl.”

  After their tearful reunion, the two, father and daughter, take a tour of Atlanta together—zip-lining and rock climbing at SunTrust Park, eating cheeseburgers at the Varsity, climbing Stone Mountain.

  “You, you are my life,” Trace sings. “My reason for rapping, my reason for everything.”

  He sings from the empty stage at Chastain Park Amphitheater, her an audience of one with the best seat in the house.

  They tour the MLK Center and the Georgia Aquarium and eat giant pieces of chocolate cake at the Landmark Diner.

  “The old me is dead and gone. You got me rapping a brand new song.”

  In quick succession, shots of them at CNN, The World of Coca-Cola, The Fox, Underground, Piedmont Park fill the screen.

  “I’m sorry for the pain I’ve caused. But that’s over and done with now. You will never hurt again. I will never let you down. I will never leave you again. No not ever. No, no matter what.”

  When the video has concluded we all sit in silence for a few moments.

  Eventually I say, “Some of the lines from the song are referenced in the ransom note.”

  “In . . .ter . . . esting,” Sam says.

  “He seems to really love and adore her,” Anna says. “Not a lot of rappers with the image he portrays would write a song about their daughter and make a video of it.”

  I nod. I don’t know much about rap music and rarely listen to it, but I recall a hit Eminem song from maybe a decade ago being about his daughter.

  “Doesn’t mean he didn’t kill her,” Daniel says.

  “No it doesn’t,” Anna agrees.

  “It had quite a few views before the murder,” I say, “but since then it’s shot up by six million.”

  “The visibility and media coverage of this case is staggering,” Anna says.

  “And it’s just starting,” Daniel adds.

  As if to punctuate their points, when I exit out of YouTube and the TV returns to the cable feed, a news-as-entertainment talk show panel is discussing Mariah’s case.

  In the brief moments before I am able to turn it off all I hear from the so-called experts are self-serving statements and irresponsible speculation.

  “You don’t want to hear what they have to say?” Daniel asks.

  I shake my head. “Not yet. Not sure if I ever will, but if there comes a time when I feel like I need to know what the public is hearing, I want to know far more of the facts than I do now. And at the moment it’d be hard to imagine knowing less.”

  12

  With Anna asleep beside me, I strain to read the murder book by the narrow, pale light of a battery powered reading lamp on a clip.

  The base of the small light is clipped to the front cover of the binder, the flexible arm bending down to position the lamp just above the area I’m trying to read, but the binder is too big and bulky to be reading in bed and the book light is too small, its illumination too weak to make this entire exercise anything but frustrating.

  Next to me, Anna’s constant, rhythmic breathing is reassuring, her warm, bare leg touching mine both comforting and arousing.

  Both the fan and window unit are on low so the baby monitor, which is turned up to almost max volume, can be easily heard. Every breath and stir, toss and turn, of both girls is amplified, exaggerated, and I’m grateful for every decibel.

  Having Johanna here on the weekends during the school year is nice, but frustrating in its brevity. Having her here with us nearly all the time for nearly all the summer is heaven.

  Beside me on the nightstand are both of the weapons I wear each day, but with Chris in town, acting the way he is, posing the potential threats he does, it’s nice to have Daniel, who is also armed, sleeping in the living room.

  Daniel, the retired college professor who suffers from panic attacks and has never carried a weapon in his life, has said since his return from wherever Randa Raffield had him that he will never be unarmed anywhere anytime again.

  All of this recedes a bit as I read the murder book and am transported back into Mariah’s rented bedroom as her body is discovered.

  When Trace reaches under the bed and pulls out the broken body of the greatest love in his life he begins to wail in ways Arnie has never heard.

  And even as evidence is being contaminated and destroyed, Arnie finds it nearly impossible to tell the young anguished father to place the body of his daughter on the floor and leave the room.

  Behind him the K-9 dog is yelping and Ronnie Wyrick is saying something he can’t make out.

  Eventually, Ronnie orders the dog out and helps Arnie coax Mariah’s body out of Trace’s arms and Trace out of the room.

  Suddenly alone w
ith the body, Arnie gets his first unimpeded glance at the unimaginable horror of what’s before him.

  Only partially visible because of the fleece throw she’s wrapped in, Mariah’s body tells two different tales. A glance at her flawless young face and she appears to be sleeping, but the black ropes coiling around her cold skin and connecting her wrists and ankles like deadly serpents attempting to consume each other contradict what that first glance seems to say.

  Part of the reason she appears to be asleep is there are no visible signs of violence, no obvious trauma or clear cause of death.

  Wake up, he wants to tell her. Please just wake up.

  But he knows with the certainty of skin that is cold to the touch that this exquisite, innocent child will never wake again in this life.

  “John,” Anna whispers. “John.”

  I open my eyes to see her hovering over me.

  “What’s wrong?” I say, pushing myself up.

  When the bed is harder than it’s supposed to be and doesn’t give when I push up on it, I realize I’m not in our bed at all, but on the floor in the girls’ room.

  The nightlight gives the small room a nice warm glow and Johanna and Taylor’s breathing sounds like the sweetest music I’ve ever heard.

  “Nothing,” she says. “I woke and you weren’t in bed.”

  “Came in here to be close to them and must have fallen asleep.”

  She nods and gives me a smile and a kiss on the head.

  “Lay back down,” she says. “I’ll be right back.”

  I do as I’m told and in a few moments she returns with our pillows and a blanket and joins me on the floor between our children.

  “Not that they’ll let us sleep that long, but I brought your phone so you’ll have your alarm,” she says.

  “You’re the best wife in the world,” I say.

  “Did you come in here because of what you were reading?” she asks.

  I nod. “And thinking. And it’s not just Mariah. Brings back Nicole Caldwell, Martin Fisher, LaMarcus Williams, Cedric Porter . . . so many . . . so much.”

  She pulls me into her arms and the warmth of her body and the kindness of her concern vanquishes all thoughts of the vulnerable and victimized, and soon I am drifting back into sweet oblivion surrounded by my three favorite girls in the world.

  13

  The next morning, Arnie, Keisha, Jessica, and I meet with Reggie in her office to go over the FDLE crime scene collection log.

  After FDLE processes the crime scene, they send us an inventory of what evidence they collected and we have to determine what to test and how.

  Jessica Young is our department’s non-sworn crime scene tech. Keisha Colvin is the FDLE agent assigned to assist in the investigation.

  It’s Reggie’s first day back and she’s still moving quite gingerly.

  “Okay,” she says, looking at her copy of the list we all have, “let’s figure this out as fast as we can so we can get moving on this. Lot of people are waiting for these results and it seems like the whole world is watching.”

  Because of limited time and resources and because certain types of testing exclude others, we’ve got to let the FDLE lab know what we want done with each item they collected—even if what we want done is nothing at all.

  “Let’s start with the biggest nightmare,” she says. “Fingerprints.”

  “It’s a rental,” Arnie says, “and there are a lot of prints, but not as many as you’d think.”

  “I’m assuming it’s cleaned pretty well between guests,” Reggie says.

  “It is,” he says, “and that’s our saving grace.”

  “We’ve printed the cleaning lady,” Keisha says, “and the family, workers, friends, and neighbors who we know went into the house. We’re also trying to track down the past few guests before Mariah’s family to print them for exclusion too.”

  Keisha Colvin is a stout and powerful forty-something African-American woman with dark skin and shortish hair that appears to have a will of its own.

  “Once we’ve finished with all that,” Arnie says, “we’re going to be down to a pretty reasonable amount of unknown prints to deal with.”

  “Most important objects to check prints for are those that came into the house with family,” Jessica says. “We know no previous guests’ prints should be on those.”

  “True.”

  “And of course anything used in the commission of the crime,” she says. “The ropes, the blanket, whatever the weapon is determined to be.”

  “We meet with the medical examiner tomorrow,” Reggie says. “Get the preliminary autopsy results back. Maybe we’ll find out cause of death and figure out what was used.”

  “Hope so,” Arnie says.

  “Okay,” Reggie says, “let’s work our way through the list of what was collected. All the bedding from Mariah’s bed. Assuming we want DNA testing on all of it and the blanket Mariah was wrapped in and the pajamas she was wearing.”

  Jessica nods and says, “Touch DNA tests too, right?”

  Everyone agrees.

  Certain tests conflict with each other and can’t both be done, so part of what we’re doing is assigning priority. If touch DNA and fingerprinting or some other test can’t both be done, we’re going with touch DNA.

  Keisha says, “The lab has identified what they believe could be semen smears on the bedsheets, along with a pubic hair.”

  “That could be huge,” Arnie says. “It’s something like that that’s going to help us get a conviction.”

  “I see the clothes on the floor and the sheets, pillow cases, and blankets from the bunk beds as low priorities,” Reggie says. “Whatta y’all think?”

  We all agreed.

  The clothes Trace was wearing when he pulled Mariah out from beneath the bed and held her were also collected, and we all agreed they needed to be checked for hair and fibers and DNA.

  “Everyone agree the ropes used to tie the vic—to tie Mariah up, should have extremely high priority for DNA testing?” Reggie says.

  Everyone agrees.

  “I think we need handwriting analysis and fingerprinting done on both notes,” Reggie says.

  “We’ve collected handwriting samples from everyone who was in the house that night,” Keisha says. “We also took some of Mariah’s writing samples from a notebook with her things and her dad’s songwriting journal that she doodled in sometimes too.”

  “She actually wrote some lyrics in both notebooks,” Arnie says. “Wanted to be a songwriter like her dad. So we should have plenty to use for comparison.”

  “As the investigation widens and we speak to more and more people,” Reggie says, “I want handwriting samples and fingerprints from everyone and I want to know anyone who refuses.”

  “Will do,” Arnie says.

  “What about the zip ties?” Reggie asks. “If we can’t do both, and I’m pretty sure we can’t, fingerprint or DNA?”

  Even though rope was used to tie Mariah up, three zip ties were found at the scene—one in her bedroom, one on the stairs, and one on the porch.

  Checking them for fingerprints is the consensus.

  “Glove,” Reggie says. “Same question.”

  A single aqua latex glove had also been found at the scene—in the bathroom connected to Mariah’s bedroom. According to statements by Trace, Ashley, Nadine, and Irvin, the glove wasn’t there the night before and didn’t belong to anyone in the house.

  “Definitely DNA,” Jessica says.

  “And the metal pieces?”

  Two tiny metal pieces—one flat, the other cylindrical—were discovered on the floor near the door inside Mariah’s room. Above them on the wall was a scuff mark and indentation in the sheetrock Nadine said was not there the night before when she put Mariah to bed.

  “Prints,” Jessica says.

  Everyone seems to be in agreement.

  “Okay,” Reggie says, “Let give the lab a call and cover this and see what kind of time we’re looking at.”
>
  She calls the lab and puts the tech on speaker.

  As she goes over the list, it becomes increasingly obvious that much of the testing is going to take far longer than we would like.

  “You caught any of the news lately?” Reggie says. “This is the highest profile murder case in the country right now. We’re under tremendous pressure to clear it, to get results . . . like yesterday. Isn’t there anything you can do to help us get the results back any faster?”

  “We’ll do what we can,” the tech says, “but it won’t be much faster no matter what we do. Especially the DNA. Might want to use a different lab for it—or at least some of it.”

  The services FDLE provides for smaller departments like ours costs our department nothing. The crime scene investigation that was done, the lab work that will be done, the agent provided, in this case Keisha Colvin, is absolutely free. If Reggie wants another lab—either an independent one or one belonging to a larger county such as Broward, Dade, or Hillsborough—she will have to pay for it out of her limited department budget. Unless, as is sometimes the case, the sheriff of a larger department with a dedicated lab insists on running the tests as a favor because it has no budgetary impact on his or her department.

  “I’ll call around and see what I can find out,” Reggie says.

  If Reggie finds another lab to run the tests sooner, the FDLE lab will box up the evidence being transferred and ship it via FedEx so that when it’s signed for, chain of custody can be maintained.

  It takes several calls and a fair amount of logistics, but Reggie finally finds a couple of labs that can do the test sooner and that we can afford. FDLE will be taking care of the fingerprints and certain other tests while a lab in Tampa and one in Miami will take care of the others.

  “It’s the best result we’re going to get,” Reggie says, “and though it’s going to be relatively fast, the case will already be long since concluded in the court of public opinion before we get a single result back.”

  14