Rainey with a Chance of Hale (A Rainey Bell Thriller Book 6)

by R. E. Bradshaw

  Chance shot back, “Like I said, you’ve made a lot of assumptions, and you don’t have a single fingerprint. There is nothing in this room that connects me directly to any of these crimes.”

  Rainey saw Chance pause briefly, as he looked around the room to emphasize her lack of evidence. She followed his eyes and could not believe she had not seen it sooner. It was time to end Chance’s charade of innocence.

  “I don’t have a fingerprint, but what I do have is—”

  Rainey held up the folders one at a time and continued.

  “Eileen Baker, last seen with you in Portland, Maine on January 29, 1999. Her partial remains left in St. Augustine, Florida on January 30, 2000, before ending up at the FBI lab with my name on them. You were in St. Augustine in the winter of 2000.”

  Rainey slapped that folder down on the desk and held up another.

  “Cindy Joan Amen, last seen with a man fitting your description in St. Augustine, Florida on February 6, 2000. Her remains turned up in Savannah, Georgia in August of 2001—with another request to forward the box to me at Quantico. You were in Charleston, South Carolina that fall.”

  She slapped the Amen folder down on the desk.

  “Kristen Maria Patton, last seen in Charleston on August 3, 2001, with you. Her remains were left with the police in Wilmington, Delaware in May of 2002 and forwarded to me at Quantico.”

  Down went the Patton folder.

  “Rebekah Nell Hagen, last seen on May 20, 2002, on the boardwalk at Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. She was walking with a tall young man with long blond hair. Her remains showed up in Gloucester, Massachusetts in April of 2003, again forwarded to me. You were working in Gloucester at the time.”

  Slap.

  “Jill Frances Wheaton went missing from Gloucester in April of 2003. Her remains appeared when you did in Newburyport, Massachusetts, in May of 2004. Her remains are also at the FBI lab.”

  Slap.

  “Margaret Mary Hedrick, last seen in Newburyport in May of 2004. Her remains arrived in Norfolk, Virginia in June of 2005 and landed in Quantico just days before you were questioned in the assault on Donna Hollis Travis in Newport News, Virginia.”

  Slap. Rainey held up her empty hands.

  “There are no more folders because you left the United States and did not return until January of 2009. The cases they questioned you about in South America would probably read the same. If you did not commit these crimes, you know the person that did. Nothing has changed in this narrative since the prison doors closed behind you, Chance. I have no reason to change my mind about you either.”

  Rainey crossed the room to the box left sitting in the corner. The one Chance said they did not need to see. The one his eyes paused on a few minutes before.

  “Like you said, it is circumstantial evidence at best, which I’m sure is the reason you have never been brought to trial. But like all criminals, you have made a mistake somewhere, and it will bite you square in the ass in the end.”

  Chance crossed his arms and leaned back against his chair. He did not attempt to hide his self-satisfied smile, but it slipped when Rainey reached down and tore one of the flaps off the top of the remaining box in the corner.

  She faced him, waving the piece of cardboard in the air. “You know, I knew I’d seen this type of box before.”

  Chance, still smug, said, “It’s just a box. What of it?”

  Rainey wore the smug smile now. “It’s hardly just a box. It’s physical evidence.”

  Chance uncrossed his arms and leaned forward. “What? Evidence of what?”

  “Where did this box come from?”

  “Blackman sent the files to the trucking office, and Gee brought it to me. I told you that.”

  Rainey pointed at the box by the desk, the one from which the files had been removed. “That is a Blackman Law Firm box. Look on the end. You can see his filing system numbers.”

  “How would you know?” Chance asked.

  “Just take my word that I can prove what I’m saying.”

  “Why should I take your word. You’ve been trying to put me in prison for murders I did not commit since I was sixteen.”

  Rainey leaned down, putting her face inches from Chance’s nose. “That’s right. I know you. I know who you are. I’ve seen through the different faces you wear to where the evil you were born into hides and waits. I know you couldn’t help but put evidence under my nose just so you could relish in your self-perceived superiority. Just like you couldn’t resist sending those bones to Quantico, to me personally, in a box just like that one there.”

  Chance glared at Rainey. Through gritted teeth, he said, “You’re bullshitting. You can’t match boxes. That company must have made millions of those.”

  Rainey did not try to hide the sneer that curled her lip. “I guess you didn’t know the manufacturer can identify the batch from the fiber composition. What do you think the chances are that the boxes sent to Quantico and this one could have come from the same batch? Do you think we could get a jury to make the logical assumption of linking those boxes to you?”

  It was plain from Chance’s expression he was afraid that was exactly what was going to happen. Danny, who had been quietly watching the exchange, stood and began walking toward the door.

  On his way by, he took the cardboard flap from Rainey’s hand and said to Chance, “We’re in a cancer ward. I’m sure there is a lab around here that can take a microscopic picture of the fibers in this box. A comparison with the boxes they have at Quantico should take a few hours, but we’ll know soon enough.”

  Chance glowered at Rainey, who was still inches from his nose.

  “Will it be fast enough to save your kids from the person who set me up and is now trying to bury me in this hell hole?”

  Rainey backed away from Chance. Not because he frightened her, but because she thought she might punch him if she stayed where she was.

  Calming her rage, she said, “I have no doubt you have a partner. It’s time to pay him a visit.”

  Rainey reached for the phone plug in the wall. Chance flinched. Rainey chuckled. She unplugged the phone from the wall and removed the cord.

  “Don’t want you making any phone calls while no one is looking,” she said to Chance.

  “Do we have everything we need from here?” Danny asked as he waited at the doorway.

  Rainey stood over Chance. “Let’s make sure this asshole can’t talk to anybody, I mean no one until we have his accomplice in cuffs.”

  Danny opened the door, which drew Lieutenant Holmes into the room.

  “Lieutenant, we need this inmate locked down, completely isolated until you hear from us.”

  “Consider it done. On your feet inmate.”

  Danny asked, “Which way to the lab?”

  “Down the hall to the right. Take the first left. You can’t miss it.”

  Rainey said, “Hang on a sec.”

  She walked over to the desk, where she had slapped down the files. One by one, she lifted the folders, opened them, and dumped them onto the desk. When she had emptied them all, she swept them into the box where Chance had once neatly organized and stored them. She then crossed to the corner to retrieve the other box.

  “We need to mark this as evidence,” she said, as she turned it upside down, letting the contents flutter down on top of Chance’s other files.”

  “Bitch,” Chance said, under his breath.

  Rainey smiled at him as the Lieutenant jerked his arms from behind.

  “You ain’t seen nothing yet, Chance O. Hale. You should have let me be. Before, I was just doing my job. Now, it’s personal.”

  Rainey followed Danny from the room. They could hear Chance shouting at them, as they walked toward the lab.

  “You’re playing right into their hands, Bell. They’ll get you and your whole family, just like they got Vanessa.”

  They could still hear Chance screaming, “I’m innocent,” as they turned the corner.

  Danny said, “
Did you hear that? He said ‘they’.”

  Rainey nodded, responding, “Yep. We’re looking for more than one partner.”

  “Any ideas?” Danny asked as he opened the door to the lab’s main office.

  “Agent McNally,” a voice called out.

  Rainey turned to see a CO moving toward them.

  “There is a call from a technical analyst at Quantico,” the officer said. “She said she could talk to either of you. Oh, and these came for you.

  “I’ll take it, Danny.” She handed him the box. “Go ahead, see what you can do with that sample, and start the chain of custody on this box.”

  Rainey handed Danny the box and followed the officer back to the nurses’ station main desk.

  She took the phone receiver offered her and said, “Tell me something good.”

  Part III

  “The self-same moment I could pray;

  And from my neck so free

  The Albatross fell off, and sank

  Like lead into the sea.”

  ― Samuel Taylor Coleridge,

  The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

  16

  March 25, 2017

  I-85 South from Butner

  Toward Hillsborough, NC

  Rainey drove her wounded baby, the custom ordered pursuit model Charger SRT8, down through the Piedmont Province of North Carolina. The torrential rains had passed, but the severe storm system moved slowly, pushing quarter to golf ball sized hail and damaging winds out in front of it, toward Hillsborough, where Rainey and Danny needed to be. Dreary, gray, low-hanging clouds filled the atmosphere above. White tendrils of mist the texture of an old man’s thinning beard curled down just above the treetops. The gloomy skies above, the new dents on Rainey’s car’s body, and the ominous clouds directly in their path did not bode well.

  “That sky over Durham looks like someone threw a strobe light into a pot of boiling black ink,” Rainey said, pointing out the windshield at what lay ahead.

  “That’s a damn angry sky,” Danny said. “Do you want to stop and wait it out?”

  “My car is already going to need extensive body work. No need to shy away from storm damage now. Can I tell you I fucking hate Chance Hale?”

  Danny chuckled, “You can’t seriously think he caused that hail storm?”

  “No, but he’s the reason my car was not in the garage. He’s the reason I am not enjoying a cold beer while watching the NCAA basketball tournament. He’s the reason I am looking for a threat to my family on a Saturday afternoon instead of enjoying the kids being at their grandparents’ home for the evening.”

  “Okay, I concede your deserved indignation,” Danny said.

  A jagged bolt of horizontal lightning crashed across the sky, followed by an instantaneous thunderclap that vibrated in Rainey’s chest.

  “Wow,” Danny said. “I think maybe we should just pull off and sit for ten minutes and it will be gone.

  Rainey slowed to below the speed limit, which she wasn’t sure her car would understand.

  “I’ll try not to catch up to it. We’re grounded in the vehicle, and the gust front squall line is way ahead of us. We’ll just take this tail wind into Hillsborough.”

  Brooks had provided information identifying the IP address associated with Jean Berry’s network provider as the source of the email sent to Chance. The Hale land and still the home of Jean Berry lay southeast of Hillsborough, below Interstate 40, and only thirty-one minutes from the Butner Federal Correctional Complex on a sunny day.

  The leading edge of the storm blew through earlier, littering the highway with small branches and tender new leaves. Drifts of quarter and dimed-sized hail lined the roadway. Thick bolts of lightning shot out of the boiling black ink sky up ahead. It was dangerous. It also stood in the way of Rainey finding the person threatening her family.

  Interstate 85 cut southward through rolling hills freshly greened by recent spring rains. Crumbling, ancient stone ridges broke up the undulating horizon. Scattered among the hardwood forest oaks and flowering dogwoods, tall evergreens stood out on the southern slopes. Lakes and rivers snaked through the jigsaw puzzle-worthy scenery. This was the part of the Carolina colony that brought wealthy land developers out of Virginia, where the accent of the antebellum south still tints conversations with implied privilege.

  Before leaving Butner, Rainey set up her laptop in its console holder and opened the emails from the various agencies from whom she and Danny had requested information. Orange County sent the arson investigation file. Sheila sent all the info she had on Tammy Gaskill, including the fact that related charges were brought against Robby Hughes for giving a minor a controlled substance and resisting when he was arrested. Because of those charges, Rainey had looked into Jean B. Berry back when that first business card was taken from her father’s office. It implicated her but did not prove she sent the card along with the bones to Rainey at Quantico. Yet, the sum of the information Rainey knew about this case suggested that all roads led to Jean Berry.

  An alert sounded from Rainey’s phone through the hands-free audio system.

  “A severe thunderstorm has been detected in the area. Seek shelter and wait for it to pass.”

  Rainey tightened her grip on the steering wheel. “Well, that’s not going to happen.”

  Danny, who hated storms, tried to ignore the weather as he gathered intelligence on Jean Berry’s location, the former home of Hale Trucking.

  “I’m looking at the satellite image of the property on Google Earth. The pavement stops at the end of Station Road. Moving forward from there requires going down a gravel path that leads into a thickly wooded area and to Jean Berry’s home. In an earlier image taken in winter, most of the leaves are gone. I can see fences and the scar on the ground from the explosion. That is a big hunk of land. This clump of evergreens in the western section must be masking the grotto. I don’t see it anywhere else.”

  “Maybe they tore it down, plowed it under,” Rainey suggested.

  “There isn’t any other scarring evident other than the house explosion site. I gotta tell you, that crater doesn’t look like a propane explosion. Didn’t the arson investigator suspect OB Hale stored some explosives in his basement? They found traces of plastic explosives in the rubble.”

  “Who stores contraband C-4 in the family home?” Rainey asked, shaking her head at the absurdity. “And what arson investigator assumes the plastic explosives belonged to the dead man and not the someone who made him dead.”

  Danny leaned in to get a better look at the image on the computer screen, then said, “Okay, here’s a different image and I can clearly see the cage structure over the grotto, as it is described in the police report from the night of the explosion. There are two existing houses, one on either side of the property. The one on the northern boundary is Jean Berry’s. There are several large garages on the east end of the property. When this last satellite image was taken, there were still trailers and truck parts scattered about.”

  Rainey concentrated on the freshly puddled bridge, as they crossed Falls Lake. She asked, “What else do you see? There has to be another way in. Big trucks wouldn’t have used Station Road.”

  Danny manipulated the image. “Yeah, on the north side of the property, parallel to the I-40 service road, there is a wide paved drive that leads to those big garages. You have to take a right there where US 70 splits off and then a left under the interstate to reach it.”

  Rainey smiled and reminded Danny, “These are the stomping grounds of my misspent youth. I know the Eno River Park area and University like you know Quantico. What I didn’t know is that there was still that much undeveloped private land over there.”

  “The train tracks appear to delineate most of the south side of the property, except where the road runs near the other house location.”

  “The area is called University Station because that was the train stop for people going to Chapel Hill to the University. They would get off the train at the station and
then have to make their way down University Road to the school. There’s a creek through the Hale property, Stoney Creek, that connects back up to the Eno River.”

  The speakers in the car came alive, “You have an incoming call from Katie.”

  Rainey said, “Don’t tell her we’re going to question a murder suspect, please,” to Danny and then hit the appropriate button on the steering wheel. “Hello, is this the owner of this phone or a tiny imposter?”

  “Good, you aren’t in prison anymore,” Katie’s voice filled the car.

  “We busted out. I’m glad you have your phone back,” Rainey said.

  “The kleptomaniac was thoroughly searched for other items she shouldn’t have. Why is it always my things she takes off with?”

  “She is emulating you. Take the compliment. At least she’s over the diamond infatuation. I thought for a while she was a cat burglar in training.”

  “She’s on to communications specialist now. Apparently, the toy phone your mother gave her doesn’t do all the things a ‘reeEAaal’ phone does,” Katie whined, imitating their daughter. “I explained that the consequences for touching my phone again would be very real.”

  “Oh no, not the dreaded consequences,” Rainey said, laughing.

  Katie chuckled too. “I know, right. She is so your kid. Boundaries are suggestions, not hard rules.”

  Rainey steered the conversation away from her bad influences on Weather. “How was the movie?”

  “We didn’t go. We shopped until we were famished and then ate until we couldn’t move.”

  Rainey laughed. “I guess Danny and I should eat before we go home then. You two probably won’t be hungry for a bit.”

  Katie’s voice brightened, when she asked, “Are you on your way now?”

  “Not quite yet. Danny and I are going to check a few details in Chance’s story, and then we’ll be home.”

  Katie said, “We are leaving the restaurant now and should be home in about an hour. I have to take Ann home first. You’re going to love the tiny houses. They made the safety changes you asked for. I can’t wait for you to see them.”