by Jordan Dane
Hanover left one cop out front. I followed Hanover and the other uniform to the rear of the home. We entered the premises through the kitchen, in silence with weapons drawn.
Hanover and I split up at the stove. I covered a hall and cleared rooms as I crept toward the front of the house—two bedrooms and an adjoining bath. When I stepped into the living room, Hanover entered from the other side after he’d cleared his half of the home. The cop on the porch gained entry when his partner let him in through the front door.
We only had one more room to clear—the office where the cop had seen a man sitting at a desk.
I peered through the half-open doorway into a dark room. Backlit through drapery sheers and the glow from a TV on low volume, I noticed the shape of a man sitting in a chair. In the murky light, I couldn’t tell if he faced me or had his back to the door. I gripped my weapon tighter and let out the breath I’d been holding.
I kept one eye on the man and glanced at Hanover. The detective had sweat draining from his hairline as he held his gun in a two-handed grip. I shoved the door open and yelled from the threshold.
“Keep your hands where I can see them.”
When the man didn’t raise his arms, I called out again and braced for a ‘suicide by cop’ scenario.
“Dallas police. FBI,” I said. “We only want to talk, Mr. Wilson.”
No answer.
Hanover reached a hand through the doorway and flipped on the light switch. Jake Wilson sat at his desk with his back turned. When he didn’t budge, I narrowed my eyes and stepped into the room with Hanover beside me. We split up and approached Wilson from different directions.
I eased in close to the man and peered over his shoulder to see blood spatter over his desk. Jake Wilson sat slumped back in his chair, shot through the head. It looked like suicide.
“What the hell?” Hanover cursed.
I lowered my weapon with a heavy sigh as adrenaline drained from my body—feeling as if I’d been kicked in the teeth.
Chapter 10
Ryker Townsend
Jake Wilson did not leave a suicide note. That didn’t surprise me. Last words were rare, except in the movies and on TV.
I spent much of the night and most of the next day at the scene where Wilson had died, trying to make sense of his life and how he’d crossed paths with Evangeline Cross, beyond them working together.
Detective Hanover had a full CSI team at Wilson’s home. I appreciated his thoroughness. I would’ve hated to see him jump to the conclusion of suicide, as his brother had done when he investigated the Cross murders, without keeping an open mind and investigating the scene as if it were a homicide first.
While looking for a suicide note, one of the techs at the scene found emails on Jake’s computer. Jake and Evangeline had been lovers. She’d opened her heart one last time. I ached for how that played out.
Images from the night Bram confronted his past still haunted me.
Before my appointment for the autopsy of Jake Wilson, I pored through the Cross crime scene photos in my hotel room until I could draw them from memory. They found Lily’s body in the living room. The disembodied blood drops I had seen fall onto the floor as I watched, had to have been from her small body. Someone had carried her from her bed, where she’d been shot. Benny had died without waking up.
‘Someone carried my sister Lily in his arms…like a f-father.’ Bram’s words rushed into my head as if he’d spoken them in my ear. I wondered again whether Max Whitaker would’ve been capable of killing his own children.
Or if Jake and Evangeline were lovers, could it have been him who carried Lily, trying to save her? That made no sense, if he’d been the one to wield the gun. I left my hotel with more questions than answers and headed for the Medical Examiner’s office.
***
Institute of Forensic Sciences
Medical Examiner’s Office & Crime Investigation Lab
Off North Stemmons Freeway
Late afternoon
Ryker Townsend
I attended the autopsy for Jake because I had too many questions. Unlike the homeless man in D.C., Jake did not grace us with his presence. That oddly disappointed me.
The naked body of Jake Wilson lay on a stainless steel gurney covered in a white sheet up to his neck, with his bagged hands exposed. The man’s head was misshapen from the gunshot that had taken his life.
After the M.E.’s assistant processed Jake Wilson’s hands—looking for trace GSR to examine the body for proof he had fired a weapon—I asked the M.E. to scan Wilson’s fingerprints. I wanted a digital comparison for the unidentified prints obtained from the Cross murders. Wilson’s fingerprints were transmitted to Detective Hanover for analysis. He sent me a reply by text that he’d put a rush on the work and he would send the results as soon as he heard back from the lab.
Since Wilson had lawful permits for his weapons, many people would assume his fingerprints would be on file in law enforcement databases, but that wasn’t always the case. With countless digital prints obtained from gun permits and renewals every year, the sheer mass of data often did not make it into AFIS, the Automated Fingerprint Identification System. It would take time to dig for what we needed as confirmation.
Before the M.E. made his ‘Y’ incision, he had the white sheet pulled off the body and I couldn’t contain my reaction to what I saw. Even the M.E. stopped to take a closer look.
“Well, I’ll be damned.”
I pulled out my phone and took a photo—a close up of Jake Wilson’s chest. It shocked me, when not many things did.
Inked over one of his pectorals was a tattoo of a large maniacal snake head tearing through flesh as if it had ripped its way through his body. The snake vision I had seen through my gift, and what I felt certain Bram would soon confirm, put Jake Wilson at the scene when the Cross family had been killed.
On a night fraught in terror, if Bram had seen Wilson with his shirt off and come face-to-face with the vicious snake bursting through the man’s skin in the shadows of a dark hallway, I could easily imagine how that would look to an already terrified twelve-year-old boy.
Bram had indeed recovered key memories that placed Jake Wilson in the house that night—from the uniform shirt with an eagle on an emblem to the hidden tattoo on the man’s chest. With his fingerprint analysis coming, that would seal the deal on the man’s guilt. I sensed we were close to putting a name to the real killer.
I couldn’t wait to show Bram what we’d found.
***
Dallas Police Department
North Central Division
Two days later
Ryker Townsend
“Thank you for coming in to help us sort through this, Mr. Godwin,” I said. “Mr. Wilson worked for you a number of years. I figured you would know him best. He didn’t leave a suicide note.”
“Yes, of course. I understand. How can I help?”
Charles Godwin, owner of the On Target Gun Club, sat solemnly in his chair in an interview room of DPD’s North Central Division. He’d come in of his own accord and dressed for the occasion, wearing khaki pants and a navy blazer with a white, open-collar dress shirt. His graying hair looked damp, from a morning shower.
“Can you take a look at these photos and tell me if you recognize anyone?” I handed him enlarged images of six men, one by one. “Take your time.”
Godwin held each one in his hands and took a second look after he laid them on the table in front of him. He shook his head and handed them back to me.
“Sorry. I don’t recognize any of these men.”
“That’s okay. You examined them and came up empty. I appreciate your effort.” I gathered the photos and set them aside in a manila folder.
“Tell me about Jake.”
I initiated our conversation with open-ended questions about how the two men had met. The more we connected, the more the man revealed about Wilson. When I brought up Evangeline and how she got along with Jake, I let Godwin steer me wherev
er he chose to go. It didn’t surprise me that he knew more than he’d previously let on, during our first conversation at the gun club.
Witnesses were often guarded about pointing a finger at someone they knew.
“I was afraid Jake would do something like this.” The gun club owner shook his head. “Now that he’s dead, there’s no point in keeping the secret of an old friend.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked.
The man heaved a deep sigh, as if a huge burden had been lifted off his shoulders.
“He spiraled into guilt after the death of Evangeline. I saw the difference in him. We were friends for years, you see. At least, I thought it might be guilt. I was never sure.”
Godwin opened up about rumors surrounding Jake Wilson at the gun club. When he couldn’t prove anything and didn’t give me facts to chase down, I asked him about the unexplained deposits into Jake Wilson’s bank account.
“Do you know anything about cash deposits going into his checking account? We couldn’t tie the money to his employment, or anywhere else.”
“Mind you, I can’t be sure. Rumors are often exaggerated, but Jake told me he did private, off-the-book work for associates of the gun club.”
“Doing what?”
“He never told me directly, but after Evangeline died, I decided to confront him on the rumors, to see if I could get him to open up to me.”
“What rumors?”
“That Jake was an assassin for hire, and that he used his connections in the gun club to find work.”
“You said you confronted him about those rumors and Evangeline’s death. Are you saying someone paid him to kill her?”
“He denied it, but—” The man shrugged.
“Who would’ve hired him?”
“She told me once that she had an abusive ex-husband. She had to file a restraining order against him. She didn’t open up to many people, but I like to think she trusted me.” Godwin fixed his gaze on me. “Do you know where her ex is? Maybe you should talk to him.”
“Yes, perhaps we should,” I said. “Did you believe Wilson was capable of killing Evangeline…and her children?”
“Nasty business.” The man heaved a sigh. “I must say I was relieved when police ruled her death a murder-suicide. Not because she died or killed her children before she took her own life, but I figured Jake hadn’t been involved, officially. He was off the hook.”
Godwin stared at his hands resting on the interrogation table.
“Truth be told, I was afraid of him,” he said. “Even if I had fired him, I couldn’t be sure he wouldn’t have come after me.”
“Didn’t it bother you to have a suspected killer working for you?”
He grimaced.
“Jake liked being mysterious. I can see him getting off on people talking behind his back. It made him sound tougher. I didn’t want to believe the rumors, so when the police closed Evangeline’s case, I was…relieved.”
Everything Charles Godwin said rang true with the facts. He’d obviously given what he knew a great deal of thought.
“Yes, I bet you were. Very relieved,” I said. “You’ve been very careful not to allow your fingerprints to be registered anywhere.”
“Excuse me?”
“You don’t even have firearms registered in your name, which I thought was odd for a gun club owner.”
“I run a successful business. So what if I don’t own a gun? There’s not a law against it.”
When I heard a knock on the interrogation room door, Hanover barged into the room without a word and grabbed the photo array that Godwin had looked at. When he had his back to the gun club owner, Hanover winked and left the room without a word. Before Godwin asked about the interruption, I shifted topics with questions out of order, to keep him off balance, a tactic of interrogators. I went on the offensive.
“How did you keep Jake from telling the police?
“Telling them about what?” The man’s words carried an edge.
“That you were there that night. You brought a gun from your illegal collection, something not traceable to you.”
“That’s ridiculous. You said it yourself. I don’t have a gun to my name. Why would I go to that woman’s house in the middle of the night? That’s insanity.”
“You told me just enough truth to make me believe the rumors about Jake were true, that he earned money as a hit man.” I shrugged. “But he can’t defend himself now, right?”
Tensing his jaw, Charles Godwin stared without saying a word. Something switched off in his eyes. He glared, waiting for what I would say next.
With the next knock on the interrogation room door, Detective Hanover returned, ready to make an arrest.
Hanover glanced at me before he headed for Godwin and said, “Fingerprints confirmed. He was at the Cross murder scene.”
I nodded and let the detective make the arrest.
“You’re under arrest for the murder of Evangeline Cross and her two children, and the attempted murder of her son, Bram. And any more charges I can come up with. Stand up.”
Hanover pulled at the man’s arms and clamped on the cuffs.
“This is absurd. You have nothing.”
“Those photos you looked at earlier? I handed them to you to get your prints.” I stood and fixed my gaze on Godwin. “You were careful not to have your fingerprints on any database, so we had to get creative. We’ve matched your prints with a set of unidentified ones at the Cross murder scene. And as we speak, your house is being searched for illegal weapons and other evidence. We’re investigating your bank records, too.”
With Godwin caught in his many lies during his interrogation—recorded on police video—he knew what a search of his home would produce.
“You almost bought it, didn’t you?” He smiled with vacant eyes. “I want my lawyer.”
As Godwin walked out of the interview room, I thought about Jake Wilson.
The M.E. found enough evidence at the autopsy to rule his manner of death a homicide, even though the final postmortem would take time to complete because of lab work. As thorough as Godwin had been in staging Jake’s death as a suicide, he didn’t count on me, or a Dallas detective who would never jump to a conclusion before investigating a suicide like a homicide first.
Jake’s gun hand had GSR traces, but there were ‘voids’ on his skin where the powder residue from unburned carbon didn’t show, as if someone had held his hand to pull the trigger. The M.E. found an odd pooling of coagulated blood in Jake’s ear that suggested his head had been moved and the angle of the shot looked suspect to the meticulous examiner.
When Jake’s prints didn’t match the unidentified set at the Cross murder scene, I opened my mind to other possibilities.
I had theories on his relationship with Charles Godwin that only time and a good financial investigation would prove. After what I’d experienced with Bram, as he relived his tortured past by stepping back into it, I had elements to the mystery and gut instincts that a crime lab would never understand.
I believed Jake Wilson had been a killer for hire who worked at the On Target Gun Club. When Charles Godwin heard the dark rumors swirling around Jake, he confronted the man. Godwin wouldn’t have let something like that go. After Godwin cut himself in on the action and discovered that Jake and Evangeline were lovers, it didn’t take long for paranoia to flourish.
Any man who could kill innocent children and a single mother trying to provide for her family would have to be a psychopath. Psychopaths didn’t form emotional attachments or feel empathy, but they could be disarmingly charming and manipulative and could easily gain people’s trust, as Godwin had with Jake and Evangeline.
Psychopaths planned every detail with contingency plans. They’re cool and calm under fire, are meticulous strategists, and seldom leave clues for authorities. Godwin would’ve demanded Jake let him in on the action, to feed his psychopathic tendencies and get paid to fulfill his dark fantasies.
Godwin could’ve easi
ly blackmailed Jake into doing anything he demanded—even shove a gun into the mouth of his lover, Evangeline, and pull the trigger. Once Godwin had won that argument with his silent partner, he had Jake forever.
My heart ached for Evangeline and her innocent children caught in the crossfire—and Bram, the walking wounded. The kid would never be whole again.
Chapter 11
Calvary Hill Cemetery
Dallas, Texas
Morning
Ryker Townsend
I had a plane to catch in three hours, but I followed the Malloy truck to the cemetery after I ate one more addictive breakfast from Skye.
A stop at the cemetery, where Evangeline was buried, struck me as a fitting end to Bram’s ordeal—and mine. Perhaps I shouldn’t call it an ending for him, more like the start for what would come next. Bram had been a kid held hostage by a tragedy. He existed and survived despite it now, like a Phoenix spreading its wings for the first time.
Bram had been in a hospital ICU for his mother’s funeral. He wouldn’t have gone anyway. When he was well enough to hear what happened, he blamed her for killing everyone he loved and he believed she’d stolen his childhood—and his life. His fragile twelve-year-old mind and faltered memories wouldn’t allow him to accept she hadn’t been the one to pull the trigger.
Today would be the first time he’d come to the cemetery. I knew what it meant to him.
I pulled in behind Malloy’s truck and watched as Bram stepped out of the vehicle. The kid wore jeans and polished cowboy boots with a dress shirt, jacket, and tie he’d probably borrowed from Jax.
In his hand, he carried beautiful flowers cut from the Malloy garden. Skye helped him make three arrangements. Jax had contacted the cemetery to find the location of the Cross graves and led Bram through the headstones and shrubs and walkways until he found the ground markers for Evangeline Cross and little Benny and Lily.