“You still should’ve told me.” He shrugged her off, strode away.
“Parker, wait,” she yelled and happened to look across the street, spotting John on his motorcycle, watching her. For a moment she couldn’t move, her feet cemented to the sidewalk. She was afraid, and yet there was something deep inside her bones telling her not to be. He’d never had a reason to harm her before. But then he turned his head in the direction of where Parker was loading the pumpkins in the back of his car. It was when he returned his gaze to her that she knew whatever had been between them, their relationship to one another, their unspoken pact, had changed.
She tried to call for Parker again, but John’s glare was like a razor in her windpipe, making it hard for her to speak. She tugged on Romy’s leash. They wove through the crowd, darting in and out of the hordes of people surrounding the stands. She didn’t have to look back over her shoulder to know John was watching her. She felt his eyes on her back, a familiar feeling and yet unfamiliar, one that had never felt so terrifying until today.
She reached Parker’s vehicle too late. He was already pulling into traffic, driving at a slow speed through the market.
Dammit, Parker. Her heart pattered in a million different beats.
Becca drove as fast as she could through the busy town, edging down River Road. The chill on her spine had nothing to do with the breeze blowing through the open windows. She caught up to Parker, followed him to his cabin. He turned into his driveway. She pulled in behind him and climbed out of the Jeep with Romy.
“I can’t believe you followed me,” he said and slammed the driver’s-side door.
Romy jumped around him. Parker bent down to pet her. The dog rubbed against his legs, licked his hands. When Romy was satisfied, she trotted away to sniff the ground.
“There’s something else you should know.” She took a deep breath. The air tasted like autumn—dead leaves, dirt, a trace of winter. “I saw someone by the river the day before the body turned up,” she said, trying to be brave, although she was feeling anything but. She hesitated, unsure whether she could say John’s name out loud. Fear was a paralyzing emotion, and telling even a small piece of what she’d seen strangled her throat.
Her phone went off. She recognized her old number from her father’s house. It was as though he knew what she was doing, and he was trying to stop her.
Parker stepped closer. He was asking her questions, but she wasn’t paying attention to him, putting her finger up, signaling him to wait.
“Hello,” she said, pressing the phone to her ear.
“You need to come home,” Jackie said, sounding more than just tired. There was a hint of something else in her voice, something that sounded very much like finality.
“I’m on my way.” She hung up. “I have to go. It’s my dad.”
“But . . .” Parker said.
She cut him off and called for Romy to come. The dog hopped back into the Jeep. Becca jumped in on the driver’s side. Maybe she was using Jackie’s call as an excuse to get away, but it was also more than that. It had to do with her father, what she’d promised him, what he’d done for her.
“What did you see?” Parker asked.
She started the engine.
“Was it a man? A Scion? Would you be able to identify him in a lineup?” Parker asked as she put the Jeep in reverse, started backing out of the driveway.
She nodded yes to all of it. She thought about the tone of Jackie’s voice on the other end of the phone, knowing why she’d been summoned. Please wait for me, Dad. I’m coming.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
As soon as Becca left, Parker rushed into the cabin for his gun. It was time he had a little chat with this John Jackson.
He was minutes behind Becca. He slowed as he approached her father’s house, pulled over. She was getting out of her Jeep. He was reacting on pure adrenaline, gut instinct that she was the witness he needed to prove that the police report Toby had given him claiming John had spent the night in jail was crap. He didn’t allow his thoughts to go beyond that, refusing to think about what she’d admitted about her pretty boyfriend. There would be time for that later.
“Hey,” he called to her.
She shook her head, waved him away as she raced inside the house.
He smacked the steering wheel. Why had she waited so long to tell him what she’d seen by the river? What else was she hiding? He stared at the house, contemplated going in after her. But then he thought about the look on her face when she’d gotten the phone call to come home. He couldn’t just barge in, make demands when it appeared her father was close to the end.
He pulled back onto the road, and in another mile, he reached the farmhouse and parked on the gravel driveway. He hesitated after putting the car in park. He should’ve had another detective riding along with him. He should’ve called Bill. But if his sergeant found out that Parker was personally involved with a potential witness, he’d take him off the case. And Parker couldn’t allow that to happen. Call it pride or whatever, but he wanted to be the guy who put a Scion behind bars. The kid in him yearned for the satisfaction of finally being able to tell his father that he’d gotten one of them. It had been the real reason Parker had become a cop in the first place, had transferred to the field station with the hope that one day he’d be able to remove the fear of the Scions from his father’s face.
He got out of the car. There was a single motorcycle parked outside the barn, but otherwise the place looked deserted.
Parker knocked on the screen door and peeked in. He didn’t hear any movement inside. From his position on the porch, he could see into the living room, the worn plaid furniture, an old TV. The place looked tidy, nothing out of the ordinary.
He knocked again, harder this time. When he didn’t get an answer, he made his way to the barn, pausing next to the motorcycle. The engine felt cool. The keys weren’t in the ignition. The large barn doors were thrown open. He stood off to the side, looked in. Several hay bales were stacked along the far wall. To his right sat an old wooden stool, and in front of it, a workbench. A greasy towel rested on top. Tire tracks from one or more motorcycles covered the dirt floor along with boot prints. He spied a rifle leaning against the inside door to his left. His pulse spiked. Easy. Its barrel was small, probably a .22, and they were as common as kitchen spoons in these parts. Besides, they’d found the .30-06 that had been used in the crime. There was no sign of a hunting knife lying out in the open. He didn’t see anything that would allow him to get a search warrant to search the property. A breeze rustled the leaves.
Walking around the side of the building, he came upon a fire pit, smelled the scent of burning leaves. He got closer, looked at the ashes, the blackened stone. A bird took off from one of the nearby trees. He jumped. Shit. His heart thrashed against his sternum.
He continued around the barn, alert to every sound, every movement, the groundhog peeking through the tall grass, the squirrels darting between the trees, the cackling crows overhead. But other than the animals and birds, he was alone, and wherever John Jackson was, it wasn’t here.
Parker had forgotten about the pumpkins in the trunk of the car. He was pacing in his living room, planning to return to John’s farmhouse once he’d had a chance to talk with Becca again. He was still mulling over what she’d seen at the river. He’d tried not to think about her confession about her boyfriend this entire time. But now that he was home, there it was. Her cheating boyfriend. He ran his hands through his hair and down his face, wondering what the hell he was supposed to make of that. He still couldn’t wrap his mind around it. But she couldn’t possibly stay with the guy, not after what she’d admitted about him. Could she? Was she so in love with the jerk she’d simply overlook his betrayal? Was it true girls picked men like their fathers?
He dropped onto his favorite chair, knocking into the stack of fishing magazines piled on the floor by his feet. Several of them toppled over onto the area rug. He didn’t bother picking them up. The trut
h was, he didn’t know what Becca would do. The Becca he thought he knew would never have put up with that kind of bullshit.
He tried calling her. Twice. He had more questions for her obviously, but he also wanted to know if her father was okay, how he was holding up. He left two messages with Jackie. All he could do now was wait for Becca to call him back.
His cell phone went off. He recognized the number from the lab.
“Working overtime again?” he asked.
“You know me. I can’t stay away from this place,” Mara said. “We’ve got a partial print.”
He pictured her bushy hair, her white lab coat, her sitting in front of a microscope looking at the killer’s fingerprint. The image reminded him of every crime show he’d ever seen on TV. In fact, he’d only ever been inside the forensic lab a handful of times since his promotion.
She continued. “There were a couple of rounds in the clip. I lifted a partial print off one of the casings. My guess is that the magazine must’ve protected the print from the friction of the water current. It’s not the best, mind you, but I’d say we got lucky finding this one at all.”
“Did you run it through the system?” He hated how he sounded, fresh, new, hopeful, and as excited as she was. He imagined the seasoned investigators in his troop would take the call in stride and not get too worked up over a partial print.
“Not yet. I wanted to call you first,” she said. What they didn’t tell you in the TV crime shows was how tedious a forensic scientist’s job really was. They could go days, weeks, months running tests, examining evidence, and still not come up with anything conclusive. Not to mention being shut in a laboratory all day and sometimes all night. And in Mara’s case, sometimes all weekend too.
“Thank you, Mara. You’re the best.”
“Aw, shucks, go on. No, seriously, go on.”
He laughed. Mara was smart and young and, like Parker, a newbie in her field, but already she’d made a name for herself, bringing knowledge of the latest technology from one of the best schools in forensic science. She was also engaged, not that Parker was interested. “Find me a match,” he said.
“I’m on it,” she said and hung up the phone.
Parker pulled himself out of the chair and went into the kitchen. The original river body case was in a box on top of the table along with his notes and the files from his own recent case. He settled into a chair and flipped open a manila folder. He started pulling out reports, the medical examiner’s report, Candy’s statement, the tampered-with police report from Toby on the Scions. Lastly, he pulled a photo of the victim’s body. He spread everything out on the table, trying to put the pieces together in his mind, forming a timeline of the events that had led up to the crime.
He stood and paced the room. There was stubble on his chin from not having shaved since the day before, or maybe it had been the day before that. He scratched it absently. He continued pacing, only stopping to use the bathroom. More than once he considered packing it up and driving over to headquarters. It would be easier there, where he had access to bulletin boards, where he could hang the evidence he’d collected and re-create a better visual of the sequence of events. Also, it would help if he had another set of eyes on it, maybe two more sets. He was sure Bill and the other detectives expected him to come to them. They would give him shit, but they would help without hesitation. Parker liked the camaraderie, the trust the men in his troop developed that said, I’ve got your back. All he had to do was ask.
And yet, he couldn’t go to them. He was alone. The case was his because it was his hometown, the crime having taken place in his backyard. And now with Becca’s involvement, it had become even more personal. He thought about his father. And then he thought about Rick, how he couldn’t seem to move past the original case. Parker wondered if he would end up like Rick had, living his life haunted by the river bodies.
He opened the box containing the files on the original case and began sorting through them, pulling out the reports and statements and laying them on the table next to the others. He laid the photograph of the first victim next to the other one. What did these two men have in common? Both victims died of a single gunshot wound to the chest, both shots fired from a .30-06 rifle. Both were stripped of their clothes, gutted, and their bodies dumped into the Delaware River, only to turn up twenty-four hours later. The crime scenes were twenty yards apart. And both victims had rap sheets and were known to have connections with motorcycle gangs, indirect connections with the Scions. The motive for the killings looked to be gang related, but nothing jumped out at the crime team handling the OMGs (outlaw motorcycle gangs). The rifle used in the latest shooting had been the only weapon found.
The suspect in the first case, Russell Jackson, had been a hunter. His son, John, was a hunter. Both men would know how to field dress. Russell had been the enforcer in the club. Now, John was the enforcer. Was John just following in his old man’s footsteps, imitating his old man’s crime? After all, there’d been two different kinds of knives used in the field dressings. One was a five-and-a-half-inch large-blade knife, and the one in the most recent case a hunting knife with a gut hook. He’d been looking at each case as though they were together but separate, each having a different suspect.
Parker thought about his own father again, remembered a conversation he’d had with him after Russell had shown up at the house, the back of Russell’s arm slit open from a knife wound, his knuckles busted on both hands.
“He fought in Vietnam. Did you know that?” his father had asked.
Parker had shaken his head.
“He was trained to be violent. I’m not sure that can be turned off so easily, not without help anyway.”
His father’s words struck him now, the psychology of it, how violence was thought to be a learned behavior.
Russell had been a violent man. And John had been raised by him.
But still, something about it wasn’t right. He picked up the photos of the victims again, studied them. He reread the medical examiner’s reports. He stood, paced around the kitchen table. Something nagged at him in the back of his mind.
The more he thought about it, the more he was convinced the gutting wasn’t just a pure act of violence carried out by two separate individuals. It was too personal. It had meant something to the killer. Otherwise, why not just walk away once the victim had been shot? Perhaps the killer was satisfying some kind of perverse compulsion or need? Or maybe it was a scare tactic to keep the other members of the club in line?
Whatever it was, this guy had put his own personal stamp on his victims; his signature, so to speak, like Rick had said; his private MO.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
John was running, ducking under low-lying branches, weaving through oak and maple and hickory trees. Sweat soaked his back underneath the layers of camouflage. He gripped the rifle in his moist hand, moving as sure-footedly as any forest animal. He wasn’t supposed to have been the driver on this hunt, but at the last minute his father, Russell, had needed him. The club had needed him. Hap, the presiding member of the Scions even then, had agreed John was the fastest in the woods. He was the one most suited for the job, especially if he was going to take over Russell’s position one day.
Russell had debated with Hap whether to involve John, but he was twenty-five years old and by no means a boy. He was a man, and it was time he earned his full-member patch.
John continued running, cutting left and right, stomping the soft earth with his boots. He loved being in the woods, running, tracking, hunting. The mountains and the river were the two places John called home. He’d often sleep outside underneath the stars next to the fire pit behind their barn. Sleeping in a room, in a bed, a roof over his head, had suffocated him as a boy. By the time he’d been twelve years old, he’d been sleeping outside more than in. Around the same time, Russell had handed him a rifle. He’d said, “If you’re going to sleep with the animals, you’d better learn how to protect yourself.”
And John
had. He’d slept with a rifle by his side, picking it up once when a lone wolf had startled him awake. He’d fired a warning shot, chasing the wolf back up the mountain.
He pushed on. Dew soaked the bottom of his pants. He told himself this was just another hunt. He was chasing a deer. He crested a hill and came to an abrupt stop. It was only then that he heard the river’s rapids, or maybe it was the blood rushing in his ears. His chest moved up and down, his breathing heavy. Russell was waiting off to John’s right. And the target John had been chasing, the traitor in the club’s eyes, had stopped in the middle of a small clearing in the center of their trap.
The traitor pulled out a knife, turned in a full circle before he spied Russell pointing a rifle at his chest.
John sucked in a sharp breath, waited for the gunshot. He waited. And waited. The silence was deafening. Why was it taking so long? Pull the trigger, Dad. He wanted it over with. He wanted to go home. And then his father lowered the gun. Had he changed his mind? Had he realized this was a mistake? Was he flashing back to the war like he sometimes did, shell-shocked?
Panic swelled inside John’s rib cage. He didn’t move, still waiting, knowing as each second passed that something was wrong. The traitor pointed the knife at John’s father, took a step toward him. Russell raised the rifle again, and this time John saw his father pull the trigger, but nothing happened. The gun didn’t fire.
A slow smile spread across the traitor’s face. He waved the knife in front of him as though he were saying to Russell, I got you now. He took two more steps toward John’s father.
Oh, shit. John hesitated, unsure what to do. Dad? Then John raised his own rifle and peered through the scope, lining up a shot. His hands were steady, but his knees were shaking. His guts churned, his stomach protesting, growling as though he were hungry. I can do this, he thought. I have to do this.
River Bodies (Northampton County Book 1) Page 20