Bleeding Through: A Rachel Goddard Mystery (Rachel Goddard Mysteries)

by Parshall, Sandra

  “You know,” Tom said, “I think it’s time I went to the state pen to see Vance Lankford. I’ll drive over there in the morning.”

  ***

  That night, Tom fell asleep quickly, and his rhythmic breathing made Rachel feel lonely as she lay beside him staring at the ceiling, replaying their argument in her head. They had fought about Michelle, speaking in whispers to prevent her from overhearing.

  “It’s you I’m worried about,” Tom had said. “You were out there alone in the woods today, and some maniac with a shotgun was right there with you. Anything could have happened.”

  “I realize that. But you said it wasn’t necessarily the stalker. It could just as easily have been somebody who wants to derail the Beecher investigation.”

  “We don’t know anything for sure,” Tom said. “But we could eliminate one possibility if Michelle went home.”

  “My sister needs help. I can’t ask her to go home and take her problems with her.”

  Tom sighed. “We’ll tackle this tomorrow, okay? Right now, all of us need some rest.”

  Sometime after two in the morning, Rachel finally drifted off, only to be awakened by the ringing telephone. The dispatcher was summoning Tom to an emergency at the home of Vance Lankford’s parents.

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Deputy Keith Blackwood stood at the open gate when Tom pulled up in front of the Lankford house.

  He climbed out of his cruiser, Maglite in hand, and stared at the chaos laid out before him.

  The moon and a dim porch light illuminated a scene that looked more like a landfill than a front yard. Tom switched on his flashlight and swept it over the mounds and layers of trash, picking out beer cans, banana skins, pizza boxes, used tea bags, and garbage he couldn’t identify. He caught the stench of rotting meat from somewhere in the mess. Styrofoam packing peanuts lifted a couple of inches on a breeze and blew across the front walk like scuttling white beetles.

  On the porch Jesse and Sonya Lankford, both in robes and slippers, stood two feet apart. The front steps dripped a red liquid that immediately made Tom think of the blood thrown on the porch of his and Rachel’s house.

  “Christ, what happened here?” Tom asked Keith Blackwood.

  The deputy shrugged. “Nothing new, just worse than ever before. Whoever did this spent a lot of time getting their act together. Looks like they raided the county dump.”

  Gritting his teeth against an explosion of fury, Tom strode up the walk, kicking aside the peanuts—god, whoever invented those damned things deserved a special place in hell. He leaned over the steps and sniffed at the red liquid. Paint, not blood.

  “You don’t want to step in that while it’s wet,” Sonya said. “Go around to the back door if you want to come in.”

  She met him at the back door and double-bolted it again once he was inside. Then, without warning, she burst into tears. “I can’t do this anymore,” she sobbed. “I’ve had enough. It’s just too much.”

  Her husband entered the kitchen from the hallway. “We’re not giving in to them now. They’re not going to win. You shouldn’t have called the police.”

  “I don’t care about winning!” she screamed. “I just want one day, one night, of peace and quiet. I can’t stand this anymore. We’re not safe in our own home.”

  “Did you see who did this?” Tom asked. “It must have taken a while.”

  The husband and wife glared at each other across their kitchen. “I wanted to call you while they were still here. You could’ve caught them in the act. But he wouldn’t let me.”

  “Filing a complaint will just make matters worse,” Jesse said. “We still have to live in this county.”

  “You call this living?”

  “I don’t want to hear that kind of talk anymore,” Tom said. “The Sheriff’s Department was called, we’re here, and I expect cooperation—from both of you.”

  “It was the Hadley boy.” Sonya spoke to Tom, but her angry eyes never left her husband’s face. “I’ll sign any papers you need me to sign. I’ve had enough of this torment.”

  “Well, if you think it’s been bad,” Jesse said, “just wait, because it’s about to get hell of a lot worse.” He turned and stalked out of the room.

  Sonya began to cry again, a hand pressed to her mouth, her shoulders shaking. “This is hell,” she said, her voice muffled.

  “Come on and sit down.” Tom took her by the arm and urged her toward a chair at the kitchen table. “Tell me what happened.”

  She sat in the chair, clutching the collar of her robe tightly around her neck, and rocked back and forth. Her gray hair was messy from sleep and a strand fell down her forehead and over one lens of her glasses, but she seemed not to notice. “The sounds woke us up. They weren’t yelling like they usually do—”

  “They? Who?”

  Sonya sniffled, pulled a tissue from the pocket of her robe, and blotted her nose. “Skeet and his friends. Marty Bohannon and Billy Hodges. Usually they’re drunk and yelling. But this time they didn’t say anything. I woke up and thought I heard somebody moving around outside. I woke up Jesse. We both looked out, and there they were in our front yard.”

  “All three of them were trespassing?” Tom asked.

  “Well, Skeet was in the yard. He must have climbed over the fence. The other two were throwing trash bags over, and he was cutting them open and dumping out the trash. They’d been at it for a while before I woke up, I guess, because the yard was already full of garbage. They came in a pickup, and they must have had the whole truck bed full of trash bags. Skeet emptied it all, then he picked up a can and came up to the house and poured the paint on the steps. He climbed back over the fence and they all got in the truck.”

  “How long after they left did you call it in?”

  Sonya shook her head. “They didn’t leave right away. They got back in the truck and we thought they were leaving, but—” She broke off, choking up.

  “What happened? Did they do something else?”

  Her voice fell to a whisper, as if she feared anyone overhearing. “They shot at us, Tom. He did, Skeet. He was in the passenger seat of the truck, and he rolled down the window and stuck a rifle out and started shooting at our house. Shooting at the window where we were standing. He almost hit us. Another few inches and we’d both be dead.”

  ***

  Bathed in the light of the full moon, the Hadley house looked peaceful, closed up and darkened for the night. Tom sent Keith Blackwood around to the back door with his gun drawn. Standing to the side with his own pistol in one hand, Tom banged a fist on the front door.

  It took a few minutes for Blake Hadley to appear, wearing a tee shirt and boxer shorts, his hair rumpled from sleep. “What the hell? What do you want? Do you know what time it is?”

  “I’m here for Skeet. Where is he?”

  Blake’s eyes narrowed and his face hardened. “What do you want with him?”

  “Just get him—”

  “Captain!” Keith yelled from the backyard. “He’s running!”

  Tom leapt off the porch and darted around the house. In the moonlight he saw Keith sprinting toward the woods on Skeet’s heels. Skeet stumbled, righted himself, stumbled again and went down. As he scrambled to his feet again, Keith tackled him and knocked him onto his back. Skeet writhed under Keith’s weight, flailing with his fists.

  Tom dropped to his knees, yanked plastic cuffs from his equipment belt, and helped Keith flip Skeet face-down so they could cuff him.

  “You get off my son!” Blake yelled, marching toward them.

  Maureen was right behind him, screaming, “Don’t you hurt my boy!”

  Tom and Keith dragged Skeet to his feet.

  Blake and Maureen came to a stop in front of them and stood there, both with their fists on their hips, as if defiance would be enough to stop the arrest.

  “Stay out of the way,” Tom told the parents. To Skeet, he said, “You’re under arrest for assault with a deadly weapon. And we’ll be add
ing a few more charges to that.”

  “Go fuck yourself!”

  “Let’s get him in the car,” Tom said to Keith. “Maybe he’ll be ready to cooperate after he’s spent some time in a cell.”

  “You’re not taking him anywhere,” Blake said.

  “Get out of the way,” Tom warned, “or you’ll go to jail with him.”

  Tom and Keith kept moving, shoving past the Hadleys, pulling Skeet with them as he resisted every step. A strong odor of whiskey and beer came off him, and Tom knew he was unsteady, too out of control to summon his full strength. Sober, he would have been a lot harder to handle.

  Maureen hustled alongside them. “He didn’t do anything. You’ve been persecuting him from the start. He didn’t kill that girl.”

  “I haven’t charged him with killing anybody,” Tom said. “He’s under arrest for shooting at Jesse and Sonya Lankford tonight.”

  “What on earth are you talking about? Are they claiming that? It’s a damned lie. ”

  Tom didn’t bother answering her. He and Keith wrestled Skeet into the back of Tom’s cruiser and slammed the door on him. Tom told Keith to stay behind and stand guard over Skeet’s truck until Dennis Murray could wake up a judge and get a warrant to impound the vehicle and confiscate the rifle that hung on a gun rack behind the seats.

  With Blake and Maureen yelling at him, Tom got in his car. The Hadleys tried standing in front of the cruiser to block it, but when Tom started the engine and crept forward, they jumped out of the way.

  He listened to his passenger’s drunken rant all the way to town, hoping he would hear something useful, but Skeet seemed most interested in running through his entire vocabulary of four-letter words and other curses. Tom winced when he heard Skeet pause to retch. The odor of vomit from the back of the car forced Tom to lower his window and let in the cool night air.

  ***

  Tom let Skeet stew in a cell for a while after he was booked before having him cuffed again and hauled over to the Sheriff’s Department. By the time Tom entered the conference room to question him, Skeet’s truck and gun were securely in police hands, along with the brass casings from the ammunition he’d used.

  When he saw Tom, Skeet jumped up, knocking his chair over backward.

  Tom righted the chair and pushed Skeet back into it with a heavy hand on his shoulder. Switching on a small tape recorder, Tom walked around to sit opposite. He placed the recorder in the middle of the table.

  Before Tom could speak, Skeet blurted, “My folks’ll have a lawyer over here to get me out.”

  “I wouldn’t count on seeing a lawyer until morning. This isn’t exactly an emergency.”

  “I don’t have to talk to you without a lawyer.”

  “No, you don’t.” Tom shrugged. “Want to go back to your cell? It doesn’t make any difference to me.”

  Skeet glared, tried to hold Tom’s gaze, but couldn’t. He shifted his gaze.

  “Come on,” Tom said, “stop wasting my time. What’s it going to be? If you’re not in the mood to answer questions, I’ll be just as glad to go back home to bed. I’d rather be getting a good night’s sleep than sitting here looking at you.”

  “You gonna take their word over mine? People that raised a killer?”

  “Since you can’t seem to make up your mind, let’s make this official in case you decide to say anything.” Tom recited the Miranda warning and asked, “Do you understand your rights?”

  “Yeah, Sherlock, I’m not stupid.”

  Tom let that pass without comment. “Why don’t you just tell me your version of what happened?”

  Skeet leaned forward and spat out his words. “Nothing, that’s what happened. I never went near their house tonight.”

  “Then I guess the bullet casings we picked up there won’t match your rifle. Which we’ve got here under lock and key, by the way. The weapon and the brass will all go to the ballistics lab in Roanoke for testing first thing in the morning.”

  Skeet looked startled by that, his face going slack for a moment, and Tom could see he was beginning to sober up. “You didn’t have any right to take—” He broke off, frowning as if doubting his own statement.

  “Why can’t you leave those poor people alone?” Tom asked. “Their son’s in prison. What more do you want from them?”

  “I want them to quit trying to get his guilty ass out. He killed my brother.”

  “It’s the innocence project that’s working on Vance’s appeal for a new trial. I don’t think his parents have been involved in it.”

  “They could stop it if they tried hard enough.”

  “It’s not up to them. They don’t have any say in it. The innocence project is working for Vance, not for his parents.”

  Skeet shook his head. “I thought with Shelley gone, the whole thing would fall apart. But I called up there today, I talked to the woman who runs that outfit, and she said nothing’s changed, they’re going right on ahead with it.”

  Stifling an urge to grab Skeet and shake some sense into him, Tom settled for raking a hand through his own hair. “Did you really believe if you got rid of Shelley, that was all it would take?”

  “Hey, now, don’t go twisting my words. I didn’t say—” Skeet raised his cuffed hands and in an awkward movement swiped the sweat off his upper lip. “Aw, hell, your mind’s made up. You’re gonna think what you want to, no matter what I say.”

  “I know you don’t have an alibi for the evening Shelley disappeared.”

  “I was sick! I was sick all that week. Ask my mom. But oh, wait a minute, cops don’t believe mothers, do they?”

  “I know you’d been harassing Shelley for months,” Tom continued. “Calling her, going to see her in Fairfax. Plenty of people saw you together, heard the two of you arguing.” Tom paused. “Heard you threatening her.”

  “That doesn’t mean I killed her.”

  This was progress, Tom thought. No one had told Tom about overhearing a specific threat, but Skeet’s response confirmed that he had threatened Shelley in some way.

  “I wasn’t really going to hurt her,” Skeet added. “I just wanted her to stop what she was doing.”

  “But she refused to stop.”

  “Damned stubborn girl,” Skeet muttered.

  “I can imagine how frustrated you got, begging her to—”

  “I never begged anybody for anything in my life.”

  “Okay, then. You threatened her, you warned her about what might happen if she didn’t stop.”

  “I didn’t threaten her.” Skeet had turned sullen, his voice flat.

  “Exactly how would you describe your conversations with her? Calm and reasonable discussions? That’s not what witnesses have been telling me.” Tom leaned forward. “In fact, you know what I heard? Sometimes you broke down and cried and Shelley patted you on the back like you were a little kid.”

  Chewing on his lower lip, Skeet stared at the wall behind Tom and didn’t answer.

  Tom stood. “I’ll get somebody to take you back to your cell. If you decide you’ve got something to say to me about Shelley or what you’ve been doing to the Lankfords, it’ll have to wait for daylight. I’m going home to bed.”

  When Tom glanced back at him before leaving the room, Skeet’s face was stripped bare of bravado and pretense, exposing an expression of naked fear.

  Chapter Thirty-two

  “I don’t know if I buy it.” Tom leaned back on the desk next to Dennis Murray’s in the squad room. He’d come in at eight o’clock, after just enough sleep to leave him groggy. “It feels too obvious.”

  “Sometimes,” Dennis said, “the obvious answer really is the answer. Skeet lost it and killed the girl. I don’t know where he kept her body for a month, but I wouldn’t be surprised if his father helped him get her to the bottom of that ravine.”

  “Well, for now we’ve got Skeet for what he did to the Lankfords, and I’ve got a feeling the judge is going to set his bail pretty high because of the gun charge, so we might
have him here for a while.” Tom stood. “Meanwhile, I’ve got some other questions that need answering, like why it’s so important for Jordan Gale to make us believe he wasn’t in Mason County the night Brian was killed. And who Shelley was talking about when she told her sister she was trying to get a woman to come forward and tell what she knew.”

  “Do you think it’s Rita?”

  “Possibly,” Tom said. “Being straight with cops goes against Rita’s moral principles, but I’ll swing by and see if I can get her to talk to me before I head over to the prison. I’ll be out of touch for a few hours. I ought to be back in time for Skeet’s arraignment.”

  ***

  Rita Jankowski shared a house with her widowed mother in a sparsely populated area a few miles outside Mountainview. The narrow road they lived on had been graded and paved at some point but hadn’t been touched in years. Tom bumped over ruts and broken slabs of asphalt for a quarter mile before he arrived at the house. The one-story wooden structure, painted white and faded to gray, occupied most of its small lot. Although the driveway Tom pulled into had a fresh layer of chunky gravel, the weeds-and-dirt front yard looked as if it had never been tended.

  Mrs. Jankowski opened the door and eyed Tom with a frown. She had a face like a dachshund’s, with a long nose and a receding chin. Her frizz of orange hair looked like a wig added for comic effect and made Tom think of a circus clown. Hard to believe this mother had produced a beauty like Rita.

  Before she could speak, Tom said, “Good morning. I need to talk to Rita. I see her car’s here.”

  Mrs. Jankowski hesitated, then jerked a thumb to the right. “In back. Hanging out the wash.”

  She shut the door in Tom’s face.

  By the time he walked up the gravel driveway and around to the backyard, Mrs. Jankowski was over by the clothesline, talking to Rita.

  When her mother gestured at Tom, Rita glanced his way, a twist of wet blue towel dangling from one hand. Although the night’s chill lingered in the air, she wore a tee shirt and cutoff jeans, both a little too snug on her voluptuous figure. As he approached, she turned her back on him and flapped the towel before hanging it.