Shadows from the Grave

by Haddix, T. L.

  “It’s off,” she assured them. “I’ll close the door. Just knock when you’re ready.” With a quick glance over her shoulder to make sure no one was near enough to hear, she wished them luck. As soon as the door closed, Chase let out a hard sigh.

  “Have you called your parents?” John asked.

  Chase shook his head. “No, I don’t want to worry them unless I don’t have a choice.”

  “Good. Let’s hope you don’t have to,” his uncle replied. “Have they read you your rights yet?”

  “Not yet. I’m not sure why they haven’t,” he admitted. “Hart tried to strike up a conversation in the car, but I didn’t respond.”

  “Tell me everything that’s been said since they arrived,” John ordered. Chase recounted the conversation, and John winced as he heard Beth’s accusations.

  “Just how much do you trust this Gordon character?” John asked.

  Chase responded immediately. “I trust him with my life. I’ve known Gordon a long time. He plays things close to the vest, but he’s solid.”

  “If you’re sure…” Seeing the resolve on Chase’s face, he nodded. “Okay, then. As your attorney, I’m advising you to cooperate as fully as you can. Answer the questions as honestly as you are able to, but don’t volunteer anything.” When he saw the sardonic look on Chase’s face, he held up a cautionary hand. “I know, you know all this. It doesn’t hurt to hear it again, and much like doctors make the worst patients, lawyers make the worst clients. Do you have any problem giving them the DNA sample?”

  Chase pulled a chair out from the table and sat down. “No. They only way they’ll find my DNA on anything is if someone else put it there, and frankly, I wouldn’t be surprised if they did. Let’s face it, John, if the Bledsoes go that far, I’m hosed. It won’t matter what we do.”

  John sighed and laid a hand on Chase’s shoulder. “Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that. Are you ready?”

  “Yeah, I just want to get this over with.”

  John went to the door and opened it. “We’re ready,” he told the deputy who’d been stationed outside the room. He returned to the table and sat down, pulling two tablets and pens out of his briefcase. He pushed one to Chase, who smiled. John had an eidetic memory, Chase knew, and didn’t need to take a single note. However, in addition to giving them a method to communicate, it was expected by the others in the room.

  “Nice shirt, by the way,” Chase commented. John sent him an arch look as Wyatt walked in with Stacy, Detective Hart close behind them.

  Wyatt set three bottles of water on the table and pushed one toward Chase. “You need to keep hydrated. I don’t want you passing out from heat exhaustion on me, Chase.” He picked up the bottle and saluted him with it before taking a long drink.

  “Thanks, Sheriff,” John said.

  Wyatt nodded. “Detective Kirchner and Detective Hart are going to be conducting this interview,” he announced. “Agent Gordon and I are going to be observing from the other room. I’ll leave you to it.” He left, pulling the door closed behind him, as Stacy moved to turn on the recording equipment. She sat down next to Detective Hart, who had opened his portfolio and was glancing through his notes. He cleared his throat.

  “Let’s get started, Mr. Hudson. We have a lot to discuss.”

  Chapter 19

  After Wyatt left the interrogation room, he hurried next door to join Gordon in observation. As he sat down next to the younger man, he studied him. Gordon had taken off his suit jacket and rolled up his sleeves. He was leaning forward in his chair with his elbows resting on his knees. He had his hands, fingers steepled, up near his mouth, and Wyatt thought about asking whether he was praying. Remembering what he’d learned about the man last year, and Gordon’s apparent aversion to God, he decided against it.

  “You nervous?” he asked instead.

  Gordon sighed and ran his hands through his hair, causing it to stand on end. The calm and composed façade he’d worn since his arrival that morning, in fact since Wyatt had known him, was completely shattered. “No, sir,” he answered. “I’m scared to death. This could all go so very wrong today. I don’t want to see that happen.”

  Stacy flipped the switch that allowed observers to hear the sound from the other room, and both men faced forward. As much as Wyatt wanted to deny Gordon’s words, he knew the younger man was right to be concerned. While Detective Hart started the introduction, Wyatt said a quick prayer in his head. Gordon’s faith in a higher power might have been destroyed, but Wyatt’s had not. He just hoped his faith and the truth would be enough to make a difference today.

  Chapter 20

  In the interrogation room, Chase drew in a deep breath and slowly let it out as Detective Hart established the interview for the camera. He identified himself and Stacy, gave the date, time and location, and asked Chase to state his full name.

  “Richard Chase Hudson, the second,” he answered. He then gave his date of birth and address as requested.

  “You’re an attorney here in Leroy, is that correct?” the detective asked.

  “I am,” Chase confirmed.

  “And you are represented here today by your uncle, John Hudson. Mr. Hudson, you are also an attorney, correct?” When John answered that he was, Detective Hart nodded. “The purpose of this interview is to resolve some questions that have arisen in Mr. Chase Hudson’s involvement in the death by homicide of one Kiely Jeanne Turner,” he stated. “To that end, Detective Kirchner, if you wouldn’t mind reading the suspect his rights?”

  Stacy complied, and then asked, “Do you understand these rights, Mr. Hudson?” she asked.

  “I do.”

  “Good,” Hart said, taking back the reins. “Now that that’s out of the way, I’d like you to take me back ten years, Chase. That was a busy summer for you, wasn’t it?” he asked.

  Chase sat back in the chair and carefully stretched his legs out under the table. “It was a very busy summer.”

  “Tell me about it,” Detective Hart requested.

  “What do you want to know, exactly?” Chase asked.

  The corner of the detective’s mouth quirked up in a sneer. “That’s an excellent response, Counselor. Very attorney-like to turn it back to me.” When Chase just raised an eyebrow and didn’t respond, Hart sighed. “Look, gentlemen, this will go a lot faster if we just talk about what happened.”

  Chase and John exchanged a look, and Chase picked up the bottle of water to drink as John responded, “If it hasn’t escaped your notice, Detective Hart, my client is here voluntarily. He’s here to address specific concerns you have about this case. He’s not here to chat. He is not here to do your job for you. If you want your questions answered, I suggest you use a direct approach instead of this ‘let’s be friends’ routine. We have no interest in obstructing your investigation, but I’ll be damned if I’ll let you play cat and mouse all day. Do we understand each other?”

  Chase sat quietly and watched the battle of wills play out between the two men. The tension in the room was palpable, and he could almost see the chess pieces Hart had carefully placed on the board as they shifted into new positions to accommodate John’s offense. The slight tightening of the detective’s mouth and jaw was the only indication of the man’s agitation.

  Finally, Hart nodded. “Tell me about the job you had that summer,” he instructed. “Dates, names, duties.”

  “It was an internship with the Commonwealth Attorney’s office. I was basically a gofer at first, and then as the summer wore on, I was given more responsibility. It started in late May, and lasted through September.”

  “Who was your supervisor?” Stacy asked. He told her, and she wrote the name down.

  “How old were you, Chase?” Detective Hart asked.

  He thought for a minute. “I was almost twenty-one when it started, but I had a birthday that July.”

  Hart frowned. “So you weren’t in law school, but you managed to get into the Commonwealth Attorney’s internship program?”

>   “That’s unusual?” Stacy asked, unfamiliar with the program.

  “Very unusual,” Chase responded. “I was in law school, the end of my first year. I was about a year ahead of my classmates. One of my professors sponsored me, and when I was offered the chance, I wasn’t about to pass it up. I wasn’t allowed to do anything in court, but I assisted the various attorneys and other office staff.”

  “Kiely wasn’t too happy with that decision, was she?” Detective Hart asked.

  “No, she wasn’t,” Chase confirmed.

  “And why was that?” The detective leaned forward as he waited for Chase’s answer.

  Chase sighed, remembering. “Kiely wanted me to go back to Ashland with her, at least for part of the summer. Her parents were traveling, and I guess she wanted to ‘play house.’ When I refused, she didn’t take it very well.”

  Hart picked up his pen and played with it as he studied Chase skeptically. “Let me get this straight. You’re twenty years old, your girlfriend whom you proclaim to love is offering you a whole house to use, all to yourselves with no adult supervision, and you refuse so you could pull eighty-hour weeks at the CA’s office. Unpaid, I might add. Is that right?”

  “That’s about right, yes,” Chase said.

  The detective shook his head. “I’m sorry, but I just have a hard time believing a twenty-year-old man would pass up the chance to spend weeks on end screwing his girlfriend and partying.”

  Chase leaned forward and put his arms on the table. “Here’s a newsflash for you, Detective. Just because it’s outside your realm of experience doesn’t mean it isn’t true. Sure, I was tempted to take Kiely up on her offer. I cared for her, deeply in fact. I wanted to be with her. But I knew how hard it was to get a shot at that internship as a third year student, much less a first year student, like I was. I thought Kiely would understand that choice. I took a gamble, and it didn’t turn out the way either of us expected.”

  While Hart contemplated Chase’s words, Stacy spoke up. “So Kiely went back to Ashland. You stayed in Lexington. When did you see her again?”

  “I didn’t see, hear from, or talk to Kiely until the first week of classes that fall. She tracked me down in the library.” Chase held up a hand. “I say she tracked me down. I suspect now that she probably engineered that meeting, but at the time, I thought it was accidental.” When John laid a hand on his arm, Chase shook it off. “Full disclosure, John. I know Detective Hart has probably memorized the interview from back then. My opinion of that day has changed since I was interviewed, and it won’t mesh with what’s in the tapes and transcripts. That’s all.”

  Stacy leaned forward and, mimicking Chase’s pose, crossed her arms on the table. “Why is that? What made your impression change?”

  Chase exchanged a look with John, who nodded. He struggled for words for a minute before figuring out what he wanted to say. “After Kiely died, I had a confrontation, I guess you could say, with her sister, Amy Lynn. She told me that Kiely had been pregnant, and that they had decided to set me up as the father, even though I wasn’t. The real father wasn’t in the picture, and they needed a patsy. I didn’t want to believe her at the time.” He paused to finish off the last of the water, giving himself time to regain his composure. Telling this to Annie had been hard enough. Having to recount it to practical strangers and in front of people he was friends with was humiliating. “When I received the letter from the killer a couple of weeks ago, and it reiterated what Amy Lynn had told me, I guess it finally just clicked.

  “So you had no idea before she disappeared that Kiely was pregnant? That it wasn’t your child?” Detective Hart asked.

  “None whatsoever.”

  “And there’s no chance the child was yours?” Stacy asked, her voice quiet.

  Chase’s jaw clenched, but he answered. “No, Stacy. Kiely and I were never intimate.”

  When Detective Hart laughed, Chase, John, and Stacy all looked at him. “Oh, come on,” he said, chuckling. “You were twenty years old, Hudson. Guys that age nail everything that moves, especially when it’s offered to them on a silver platter. You never screwed Kiely Turner? Pull the other one.”

  When the water bottle collapsed in Chase’s hands, he looked down, startled. He drew in a deep, calming breath and carefully set the bottle on the table. “Once again, Detective, don’t use your own moral yardstick to measure my life.”

  Detective Hart looked at Chase with derision. “Next thing you’ll know, you’ll be telling us you’re still a virgin.” When Chase just stared at him, the detective laughed, incredulous. “I’ll be damned,” he breathed. He turned to Stacy. “Do you believe this?”

  Before she could answer, John spoke. His voice was ice cold. “Detective, I would like to remind you that we are here to discuss the death of Kiely Turner. We are not here to discuss my client’s sexual conduct outside the very narrow context specific to that summer. If you want this interview to continue, you had damned well better remember that.”

  Detective Hart ignored John, and spoke directly to Chase. “You’re something else, Hudson. I keep hearing how you’re some kind of frigging paragon. Let’s go back to that summer, then. So you’re working eighty-hour weeks, you’re a year ahead of your class, and you aren’t screwing your girlfriend. I can believe all of it except the last part. Who were you screwing, Chase?”

  Chase laughed. He leaned back in his chair, raising the front legs off the floor. “If you’re the best detective Lexington has to offer, it’s no wonder Kiely’s murder is still unsolved.”

  “Chase,” John warned, his voice low.

  “Sorry, John, but it’s true,” Chase said. “Now, Detective, how about you ask me something relevant? I have a roof to finish shingling.”

  The detective stroked his chin thoughtfully. “You know, for someone who purportedly cared deeply for Kiely, you don’t seem to give a rat’s ass about helping solve her murder. Is that because you already know who raped and strangled her and dumped her body in Hickman Creek?”

  Chase let the chair fall back to the floor. As he leaned forward, he saw anticipation light up the detective’s eyes. He knew that Hart was trying to push him, goad him into incriminating himself. What the detective hadn’t counted on was the years of experience Chase had at maintaining a poker face when it came to the subject of Kiely Turner. There were only a handful of people Chase let his guard down for, and Hart wasn’t one of them.

  “Detective Hart, let me explain something to you. For the last ten years, I’ve spent more hours and days than you can possibly know thinking about that summer, that week, that day that Kiely disappeared. I’ve gone over it in my head ten thousand times. I’ve been pitied because I lost her; I’ve had rampant speculation as to whether or not I choked the life out of her with these hands.” He held up his hands. “And, I have flat been accused of murder by her family. I’ve been screamed at, stared at, whispered about. I’ve kept up with the investigation at least twice a year until this past year when my sister was shot, and then I decided to let it go. I’ve also been contacted by more bloodthirsty reporters than I care to count, and let’s not get into the private investigators the Bledsoes have hired to follow me around my hometown.”

  “I am sick to death of having my life interrupted several times a year by this person or that, usually someone who claims to be seeking the truth, when I know all they really want is for me to admit to them that I killed Kiely in some fit of rage. Now, whether you’re here to find the truth, or whether you’re a damned sock puppet for the Bledsoes, I don’t know, and frankly, I don’t care, because the answer doesn’t change either way.” He paused for breath, and Detective Hart sneered.

  “That’s an interesting—”

  Chase cut him off. “I’m not finished, Detective. I’m going to tell you what I told the original investigators, Kiely’s family, and half a dozen people since. I did not kill Kiely. I did not have her killed. I did not have knowledge then, nor do I now, of who killed her.” He paused. “I know y
ou must have some new evidence in regards to her murder, and that it must be compelling in order for you to have gotten this particular group together.” He gestured around the room. “Why don’t you ask me whatever it is you came here to ask, and let’s cut the bullshit?”

  Detective Hart sat back and clapped his hands slowly. “Bravo, Chase! Bravo! How long have you been rehearsing that little speech? Am I supposed to be impressed by your suffering?”

  Chase stood abruptly, the chair scooting back behind him to hit the wall with a loud clang. The sudden movement wiped the smug grin off the detective’s face and made him reach for his holster, which hung empty on his shoulder. Chase knew that if it had contained a weapon, it would have been drawn and pointed at him, and the knowledge that he had so unnerved Detective Hart made him smile.

  “We’re done here,” Chase said. He looked at Stacy, feeling not quite civilized. When her eyes widened, he took a deep, calming breath and tried to hold on to his anger. “You need my DNA for the warrant, right?” he asked, as John stood and started packing his briefcase.

  “Yes, we do,” she told him. “If you’ll come with me, I’ll do the buccal swab.”

  “No, sorry. Not happening,” he said. He picked up the now-empty water bottle and took the lid off. His eyes on Detective Hart’s, he spit inside and recapped the bottle. “Will that do the trick, Stacy?”

  “Um, I guess it will,” she replied, and any other time, Chase would have found her expression amusing. He handed her the bottle.

  “Let’s go,” he said to John. As they started toward the door, Detective Hart moved to block them. His face was a mottled red, and Chase could feel the anger emanating from him in waves.

  “We aren’t done here,” the detective said.

  “Oh yes, we are,” Chase said. “Either arrest me or get the fuck out of my way.” He leaned in closer to the detective, who was a few inches shorter than Chase, silently daring the man to raise a hand to him. Before Hart could either speak or act, the door swung open behind him, and Wyatt hurried inside, Gordon close behind.