by BJ Bourg
“But wait a minute,” Alf said, “that land doesn’t belong to Shelly, because Chester died before they could get married. It’s not community property yet, right?”
“It’s not about community property,” I said. “He can leave his property to whomever he wants.” I crossed my arms and leaned back against the tree. A breeze was blowing and it helped to keep us a little cooler in the shade. “Have either of you ever filled out any paperwork with your dad relating to the property? Are either of you on the property deed?”
Patricia and Junior shook their heads in unison.
“Did your dad talk about making Shelly sign a prenuptial agreement before the wedding?”
“No,” Patricia said. “And do you know how I know she was using him? She told him she was pregnant and then she proposed to him—all at the same time. Father was raised in a traditional way and she knew it. She heard him tell Junior and Dickie that if they ever got a girl pregnant, they would have to marry her, so they shouldn’t sleep with any woman they weren’t willing to marry—”
“Wait, is Shelly pregnant?” I asked, surprised.
“Nope,” Patricia said. “That’s how I know she’s using him, because it was a lie. If she really loved him and he thought he loved her, she wouldn’t have to trap him with a baby.”
“But how do you know she isn’t?”
“It’s been three months and her stomach is flatter than mine.”
That made sense. I turned to Junior. “Why do you think the will’s a fraud?”
“Because Pops wouldn’t do that to us. His land was important to him. Our family had been removed from what was our land once before and he would never let that happen again.”
“Marrying her would put your land in jeopardy,” I pointed out.
“The will is a lie,” Junior said doggedly.
I mulled on it, then said, “Well, if the will is a fraud, we’re going to need some evidence.”
“What kind of evidence?” Alf asked.
“We’d never be able to prove the will was written while your dad was under duress, because he’s not around to say so and I doubt there would be any willing witnesses available to testify, even if it was true.” I turned to Patricia. “The only way we can prove the will is a fraud is if it’s not written in your dad’s handwriting, but we’ll need known samples of your dad’s writing. Do you have any?”
Patricia nodded. “He keeps detailed logs of his alligator catch, and he keeps a journal for his garden.”
“Would you recognize your dad’s handwriting if you saw it?”
“Yes, I would,” Patricia said.
“Great, before y’all retrieve his logs, I’ll need you to view the will.” I pushed off of the tree and headed for my Tahoe. “Y’all can ride with me.”
“I’m staying with the boat,” Junior said. “We heard about the truck that was stolen, so…”
I wondered if they’d also heard the truck in question was Shelly’s father’s truck and that it was related to the murder of their dad. If they hadn’t, I certainly wasn’t going to be the one to tell them. I didn’t want to be the reason they killed Shelly and her whole family.
After she followed me to my vehicle, I drove Patricia to the police station and showed her to the interview room while I retrieved the will from the evidence locker. If it was her dad’s handwriting, they would soon find themselves homeless.
Patricia’s face was as pale as freshly-fallen snow when I stepped into the interview room with the envelope. I carefully opened it and removed the document. Once I’d unfolded it, I turned it so it was facing Patricia. The color immediately returned to her face and her eyes flashed with anger.
“That’s not his handwriting! The bitch forged this will and killed him to steal our land!”
CHAPTER 34
Twenty minutes later…
Patricia promised to return to the Bayou Tail Boat Launch later that evening with her dad’s handwritten journals, and I headed to the office after dropping her off with Junior. Alf had already left. Junior said the elderly man had headed home to change because he wanted to travel with them to visit his daughter’s gravesite.
“He’s supposed to be here any minute now,” Junior had said. “I promised we wouldn’t leave without him.”
I had wanted to tell them I didn’t have time for that, but resisted the urge.
Susan was booking a prisoner when I returned to the office. It was a young kid with an ugly disposition. I wanted to step in and warn him not to try anything with Susan, but I figured some lessons were better learned the hard way.
“Damn, Susan didn’t waste any time,” I said to Lindsey.
“No, she stopped him right when she got back into town from La Mort.” Lindsey was standing in the hallway—up on the tips of her toes—staring through the window to the booking room.
“What’d he do?” I asked.
“DWI.” She shook her head. “Can you believe it—he was already drunk and it’s not even lunchtime yet.”
Before I could answer, Lindsey spun around and brushed by me. “Oh, I almost forgot, I’ve got a message for you.”
I followed her to the dispatcher’s station, where she tore a message from her pad. “A police sergeant with Lafayette PD called to say he stopped the caravan of fair workers and he’s got Joel in custody.”
“No way!” I took the note and hurried to my office. The door was closed and I realized I hadn’t been in it since Friday. I pushed through but stopped when I saw a large stack of compact discs on my desk. There had to be a hundred of them. Names, dates, and times were scribbled on all of them. “Lindsey,” I called cautiously, “why do I have so many discs on my desk?”
“Oh, Melvin put those there.” She walked to my door and looked in. “He handed out CDs at the fair and asked everyone to download all of their photos and videos from the night of the shooting. He said a few people told him to go to hell, but most of them were happy to help. He went out and collected them earlier.”
I stared first at the note in my hand and then at the stack of discs. I didn’t have time to go through all of them, but I figured I could start tackling the pile while I made the call. I grabbed the disc at the top of the stack and slid it into the CD bay on my computer while dialing the sergeant’s number.
When the sergeant answered, I told him who I was and why I was calling.
“I understand you’re working a murder case involving this Joel Barker,” the sergeant began.
I was about to answer when the video began playing on my computer and Cajun pop music blared through the speakers. I quickly leaned forward and muted the sound. “Sorry about that.” I leaned back and began watching the video play out. A young girl was filming herself walking around the fairgrounds. Every now and then she thought it was important to show the crowd, but, for the most part, she was the star of her own video. “Yes, Joel Barker was a suspect in a murder case, but I don’t have much to go on.”
“Are you looking for a murder weapon?”
“I am.” I started to say I had a possible weapon in our possession, but decided to keep it simple. For all we knew, Terry’s rifle had nothing to do with the case. Until I knew for sure I had the murder weapon, I was still looking.
“Well, I recovered a thirty-thirty lever-action rifle and a twenty-two semi-automatic rifle from this joker.”
I jerked to attention. “The murder weapon was a twenty-two caliber firearm!”
“Well, I’ve got one right here…and it’s a beauty. We located both rifles under a mattress in a back bedroom of Joel Barker’s camper.”
My mind raced, wondering how I could get that rifle to La Mort. “My evidence from the murder case is at the La Mort Crime Lab,” I explained. “If I could get someone to come down there—”
“Say no more,” the sergeant said. “I’ll have it delivered to the lab before they close today. We do a lot of business with their firearms division. Their turn-around time is phenomenal.”
I thanked him profusely
and hung up the phone. Since I had already started watching the first disc, I decided to continue. The girl was very active and must’ve had an all-day pass, because she rode every ride at least twice, and if she liked it, she went back several times. I kept watching to see if she rode the Battle Swing and, finally, she did. The time stamp on the video was a little after ten in the morning on Saturday, the day Chester was murdered.
I leaned closer to the screen when Chester came into view. He was dressed the same as he was when we found him on the toilet, except he was actually wearing his clothes. The image of Chester was fleeting, but I backed up the video and paused it to get a better look at what he was doing.
“Damn!” I stabbed at the screen with my index finger. He had his head bent and he was playing with a cell phone. When I tried to enlarge the image it got too grainy to tell what kind of phone he had, but it was a phone nonetheless.
I looked at the date on the bottom right-hand side of my computer screen. My wedding was in five days. It would take at least double that amount of time to get cell phone records back on Chester’s phone, but I needed the GPS coordinates to find it. Unless…
I called the portable toilet company and asked for the owner. I knew him from a damage case I’d worked at his business several months ago, and he remembered me.
“Hey, detective, what can I do for you?”
“Have you had a chance to head over to the sheriff’s office and clean out the waste tank on the unit that was involved in the murder at the fair?”
“Yes, sir, we did. Were you looking for something in particular?”
“You didn’t find a phone in there by any chance, did you?”
“We didn’t, but if we had, it wouldn’t have been the first time.” He chuckled. “You’d be surprised the kinds of things we find in the tanks.” He suddenly stopped chuckling and his tone grew somber. “I once found a baby stuffed up in there. It was the worst day of my life…”
After listening to him describing the horrific event, I told him goodbye and returned the handset to the cradle. Before I could apply for a search warrant, I needed to know the name of Chester’s service provider because I needed to know who to name in the search warrant. An idea occurred to me.
I turned to my notes and searched them until I found Shelly’s number. She picked up on the first ring. “Did you find out who killed Chester?”
The name of the police department must’ve shown up on her caller ID box. “No, but I’m thinking you might be able to help.”
“Me?” She sounded hesitant. “How?”
“Do you know the name of Chester’s cell service provider?”
“Yeah, I went with him to get it. I even put him on my account and paid for the phone. What do you need to know?”
I explained that I wanted to retrieve the GPS coordinates so I could locate the phone.
“Oh, that’s easy. I’ve got one of those apps that can track his cell phone.”
“You do?”
“Yeah, as long as the phone isn’t shut off.” Her voice sounded distant. “I’m pulling up the app now…”
I could hardly hear what she was saying, and it was obvious she’d removed the phone from her ear and was looking at the screen. I waited about two minutes before her voice sounded loudly in my ear again.
“Got it! It shows that his phone’s in town.”
“Can you get me an address?”
“It doesn’t show an address, but I can see the street name and a satellite image of the house it’s at.”
“What street is it on?”
“Coconut Lane.”
That was four blocks away. Could the killer have taken his phone before shooting him? “Can you take a screenshot of the house and send it to my cell phone?” I gave her my number.
“Sure.” Shelly began mumbling in the background again and then my cell phone chirped on my desk.
I grabbed it and checked the satellite image she’d sent me. The house was located on Coconut Lane, but on the section west of Main Street. “Can you tell if it’s being used?”
“It’s got eighty percent battery life, so someone’s been charging it.”
My heartbeat quickened when I realized I might be looking at the house where Chester Raymond’s killer was living.
CHAPTER 35
“Are we going in hot?” Susan asked when I turned onto Coconut Lane an hour later.
While she had finished booking her prisoner, I’d run an address inquiry through our database and learned that our officers had been called to the house in question three times over the past few years. Two of the complaints had been because keys were locked in a car, and the other complaint involved a kid named Trent egging the neighbor’s house. While I hadn’t anticipated problems, we didn’t know who we were dealing with, so we’d called for Takecia to drive up the street behind the house and take up a position in the back yard.
“I think we’ll just walk up and knock on the door.” I slowed when we reached the location. It was a light gray house trimmed in white. The yard was well-maintained. An old cistern was positioned to the right side of the house and an American flag flew proudly over the front porch. “If our killer does live here, we don’t want him or her to think we’re on to them.”
I was about to step out of my unmarked cruiser when I saw Shelly driving by slowly in her car. I hurried to the road when she stopped in front of the house.
“What are you doing here?” I hissed.
“I wanted to see if they killed Chester.”
“Please,” I said, as calmly as I could, “go back home. I’ll call you as soon as I know something.”
Shelly pouted, but she drove off.
“She doesn’t act like someone who killed her fiancé,” Susan commented as we walked toward the front porch.
“Her actions might be deliberate.” I pointed when I saw that the main door to the house was open. There was a screen door, which was common in southeast Louisiana, and it was closed. “Can you see inside?”
Susan was a step ahead of me. She nodded. “I can see through to the back yard. Someone’s sitting on the sofa in the living room.”
Before we could make it up the brick steps, a small-statured woman approached the screen door and stood there watching us. Susan waved and took the lead on the questioning.
“Hello, Diana, how are you?”
“I’m good.” Diana looked from Susan to me and then back at Susan again. “Is there a problem? Is it Trent?”
Trent was the kid I’d read about who egged the neighbor’s house.
“Well, we’re looking into this case and we got a weird reading on some phone records,” Susan explained. “You see, the records indicate the cell phone we’re looking for is inside your house.”
“Wait—here? Inside my house?”
“Weird, I know.” Susan rested her elbow against her firearm and gave a casual wave of her opposite hand. “We don’t think it’s here, but we were wondering if we could just have a look around.”
Diana stepped back cautiously. “Sure, I mean, I don’t have anything to hide.”
She didn’t sound sure of herself, and I figured she was probably wondering if her son had been up to no good.
I followed Susan and Diana inside, our boots echoing loudly on the hollow floor. I glanced around the living room. The place was small, but there were things everywhere. It would take us forever to search this place. Not wanting to make it harder than it had to be, I pulled out my phone and dialed Chester’s number.
Diana’s head snapped around when she heard a ring from the back of her house. “What is that?” she asked.
I held up my cell. “I just called the number of the phone we’re looking for and it started ringing.”
Her shoulders drooped. “That’s Trent’s bedroom.”
“May we?” Susan asked, pointing in that direction.
Diana nodded and led us to the back. She pushed open a door with a sign that read, No trespassing! Violators will be shot! She stepped back
and allowed us to enter the messy room. Model cars, airplanes, and ships were everywhere. Empty potato chip bags and a half dozen Coke cans were scattered on a desk.
Amongst the clutter on the desk was a cereal box. When I called the number again, the cereal box began ringing. I moved forward and flipped the flaps open, stared inside. It was half filled with cereal. I tilted the box and shook it. Sure enough, there was a cell phone at the bottom of the cereal.
“Dear Lord,” Diana said when I pulled the phone out of the cereal box. “How much trouble is he looking at?
“It depends on what he tells us,” I said, pressing the button to open the screen. It wasn’t pass-protected, so I was able to easily get in and look around. The first thing I did was look at his text messages. They were all to the same number, and I recognized it to be Shelly’s. Every message between the two of them seemed cordial, and most of them were downright raunchy. They were carrying on like two teenagers sneaking around behind their parents’ backs.
Next, I checked the call log. Like the text messages, all of the calls were to and from the same person, Shelly. The missed calls from Shelly to Chester confirmed her earlier statement, as did her text messages letting him know where she was along her route to Biloxi.
Of course, it could all be a ruse…like the will. I would need the GPS coordinates on her cell phone that corresponded with those messages to be certain.
After going over the call log, I then checked to see if the Internet had been accessed. I grunted when I saw the last few search terms. I waved Susan over. Thinking I’d found something significant, she closed the gap between us quickly and looked at the screen. She groaned when she saw the search terms for various parts of the female anatomy—none of which had anything to do with the medical field.
“What is it?” Diana asked. “Did you find something? Is Trent in trouble?”
“It’s nothing major,” I said, “just a boy being a boy. Is Trent in school right now?”
She nodded. “He attends the middle school down the street.”
“How old is he?”