January's Betrayal (Larry Macklin Mysteries Book 3)

by A. E. Howe

  He turned his head and watched the officers milling about in the front yard. “And, honestly, I don’t think you did it. We received an anonymous call about a shooting. Dispatch sent Officer Marks to investigate.”

  “The only time we get an anonymous phone call when a crime is taking place is when someone is trying to frame someone else for it.”

  “Exactly, and they called us instead of the sheriff’s office because they wanted us to respond, knowing that I’m in a political fight with your father. Oh, and did I mention that the call didn’t come in through the 911 system?”

  “If it had, then a deputy might have been dispatched,” I said thoughtfully.

  “Yep. They wanted police, not the sheriff’s office.”

  The man was annoyingly egotistical, but he wasn’t stupid.

  “Still leaves me with a dilemma. What do I do with you?”

  As if on cue, I saw my father’s truck pull up behind Maxwell’s Caddy. Dad jumped out and strode over to us. Maxwell stopped talking to me and turned to face a very angry Ted Macklin.

  “What the hell—” Dad started and Maxwell raised both his hands as though he knew that one hand wouldn’t be enough to stop my father.

  “You can stop right there and keep your temper under control.”

  I don’t know if Maxwell knew it or not, but telling Dad to keep his temper in check was one of the best ways to send him over the edge. But Dad stopped where he was and I could see his inner struggle to control his anger.

  “Two things,” Dad said, his eyes blazing in the afternoon light. “One, that is one of my deputies who’s dead in there,” he said, pointing toward the house. “And that means something to me. Second, my son was not involved in this shooting.”

  “First, Nichols was a law enforcement officer and I’ve met and worked with him before. I take his death as seriously as you do. I will do whatever is necessary to discover what happened to him this afternoon. Second, while I am reasonably sure that your son did not pull the trigger that killed Nichols, I’m going to treat him like a suspect until we have the evidence to clear him.”

  As Maxwell spoke these last words I could see the color rise in Dad’s face. When he explodes, will they be able to pick it up on seismographs? I wondered.

  “Think, Macklin, if we do this right and there is evidence that backs up your son’s story, then he won’t have a shadow hanging over him. But on the other hand, if I just turn him loose to your custody, there are some folks who will always wonder if there was something fishy going on. Now, I’m going to bag his hands until I can do a gunpowder residue test. And we’ll take him to FDLE to have the tests preformed. Fair enough?”

  I could see Dad processing this. Reluctantly he said, “Makes sense.”

  “His gun has already been bagged and will be tested, though I think we found the murder weapon under the coffee table. I would hope that after the powder residue test, Larry will give a statement. If everything checks out, I’ll release him tonight.”

  “That’s reasonable,” Dad said grudgingly. “What about the investigation? It was my deputy who died.”

  “If I’m comfortable that Larry wasn’t involved in the shooting, then we’ll discuss how to move forward with the investigation. At this moment in time, the case is mine.” This sounded like Maxwell’s final answer, but Dad wasn’t quite ready to drop it.

  “I want—” he started.

  “Nothing right now. Don’t push me or I’ll see that this whole thing gets turned over to FDLE.”

  This stopped Dad. If the Florida Department of Law Enforcement was called in, they’d want the files on everything—the rapes, the shooting—and they’d push until they’d ferreted out our suspicions about Matt. Dad wasn’t about to have all that taken out of his hands.

  “Fine. For now.” There was a huge bark from behind him. I looked over and saw Mauser hanging his jowly face out the window of Dad’s truck.

  “I see you brought backup,” I said to Dad.

  “Damn straight.”

  Maxwell looked like he couldn’t decide if we were joking or not. I’d heard that he wasn’t a dog person.

  He turned and called for one of his officers to bring over some large evidence bags and tape. After sealing my hands, Maxwell took me over to his car. Dad stood there watching helplessly as I was treated like a suspect. As reasonable as Maxwell was being, I could tell that the reptile part of Dad’s brain was going to want payback someday.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  I woke up Sunday morning to a call from Dad.

  “After I texted you I came straight home. I was in bed by one o’clock,” I told him.

  “I came into the office this morning.” He let that hang in the air for a minute. “I checked the tracker data on Matt. He was a block over from Nichols’s house during the murder.”

  “I can’t decide whether I’m surprised or not.”

  “I think this is close to a smoking gun,” Dad stated flatly. “He was off duty. Of course, there’s a chance he has a good reason for being there, but the coincidences are stacking up.”

  “What we need is some physical evidence.”

  “I talked with Maxwell after he turned you loose last night. He’s being reasonable. Agreed to sharing information on Nichols’s case. Of course, he knows that he doesn’t have the manpower or resources to handle this on his own.”

  That was very true. The Calhoun Police Department amounted to about a dozen officers. The sheriff’s office provided most of the backup for them, and we did almost all of the violent crime investigations.

  “You aren’t going to give him any of the background information?” I asked, already knowing the answer.

  “No. I’ll tell him that we have reason to believe there was a dispute between Nichols and one of our officers. Then we’ll provide him with Matt’s DNA and fingerprints and see if there’s a match with any of the forensics they pulled out of Nichols’s house.”

  Cara called later and I explained how I’d spent my Saturday night. She offered to come over and bring some food for lunch. “That sounds awesome,” I told her.

  We had a late brunch of whole grain chocolate chip pancakes with maple syrup that her dad got from a farm in Vermont.

  “It was bad?” she asked as we washed dishes.

  I knew this was one of the small tests. The relationship equivalent of a pop quiz. Had I learned anything from our troubles last week?

  “Yeah, pretty bad. I wouldn’t say that Nichols was a friend, but I knew him pretty well. Seeing him like that was… disturbing.”

  “I’m sorry.” She put her hand on my arm. “Did they actually arrest you?”

  “No. They just had to eliminate me as a suspect. Maxwell was pretty decent about it in his own pompous, in-your-face way.”

  “Do you think Nichols killed himself?” she asked, taking us onto shakier ground.

  “I really can’t talk about an ongoing investigation.”

  “I understand.” And she sounded like she meant it.

  We finished the dishes in peaceful silence.

  “Let’s clean up the yard,” I said as we left the kitchen.

  “Is that supposed to be a fun activity?”

  “I need to work off those pancakes and there’s a lot of deadfall out there from last year. We had a little rain the other day, so things aren’t too dry and we can burn it.”

  “I guess, if you think that sounds like a good time.”

  We soon had a couple piles of leaves and branches burning in the crisp winter’s air. It felt good to be near the fire, and better to be near Cara.

  Finished with as much work as we were going to do, we sat in two old lawn chairs under the live oaks and watched the fires burn down.

  “There’s just something about the smell of wood smoke on a winter’s day,” she said

  “Puts you in a romantic mood?”

  “No, it makes me think of marshmallows.” She smiled a wicked grin. “And s’mores!”

  “From your time
in the Girl Scouts?”

  “Ha, are you kidding? My folks considered the Girl Scouts a proto-Fascist movement. And they never would have let me have all those processed sugars and dyes. But I had a friend whose parents were more permissive, and when I’d stay over at her house in the winter her parents would build a fire in the backyard. Ann and I would camp out in a tent and cook a wonderful dinner of sugar, chocolate and graham crackers. I felt like I was a kid in Willy Wonka’s factory.”

  “You go get the goods and I’ll stir up the fire,” I told her.

  Cara hopped up, gave me a quick peck on the cheek and headed for her car. There was a small store a couple miles up the road. I found some good sticks for marshmallow roasting and, when she got back, we made a mess and laughed ourselves into convulsions as the marshmallows went up in flames.

  Once our blood sugar was up to dangerous levels, we leaned back in our chairs and gazed at the sparks from the fire as they sailed up to mingle with the stars.

  “You realize that we can’t live on chocolate chip pancakes and s’mores?” I told Cara, reaching out to take her hand. Our fingers were sticky from the marshmallows and chocolate.

  “Don’t be a spoilsport,” she admonished me. “I know that I’ll have to wake up from this dream eventually, but not yet.”

  I didn’t tell her that my father had called while she was gone. He just wanted to know how I was doing and to make sure I would come straight to his office in the morning. I assured him that was my plan. We had to deal with Matt Greene, and whatever we decided to do was going to be fraught with pitfalls. I managed to push those worries aside long enough to enjoy the rest of my evening with Cara.

  I woke up feeling better than I should have. I’d gotten a good night’s rest after Cara left, but I had a bunch of crap to deal with as soon as I got to the office. The more I woke up and thought about it, the worse I felt. There were a million questions that I’d been willing to ignore yesterday, but I wasn’t going to have that luxury today. It was not going to be a fun day.

  Sure enough, as I pulled into the parking lot I could see two reporters waiting at the front door to ambush whoever came up. When they recognized me they quivered with excitement.

  “Deputy Macklin!” they shouted in unison. I thought about brushing past them, but decided that I could manage a more diplomatic response.

  “Yes.” I held up my hand. “I know that you all have questions, and you know that I’m not in a position to answer them.”

  “Just a couple of questions,” a reporter from one of the Tallahassee TV affiliates said as though I hadn’t spoken. “We understand that you were first on the scene of Deputy Nichols’s death. Was it a suicide?”

  “His death is currently under investigation.” I turned and started up the few steps to the front door, listening to the two reporters shouting questions at my back.

  “I told them to hang outside,” the desk sergeant mumbled as I walked by. He wore a black band over his star. I realized I needed to find a black ribbon to tie around my upper arm. Nothing had been proven against Nichols and, as much I was sure that he was crooked, I needed to act otherwise.

  I went straight to the sheriff’s office. Dad’s assistant barely looked up. She was wearing black. I knocked once and went in. Dad was sitting behind his enormous desk, looking over a pile of reports.

  “Maxwell sent over the reports he’s gotten from his men. I had our deputies who showed up at the scene send over their reports to him.”

  “Has Maxwell received the autopsy report on Nichols?”

  “It was in the stuff he sent over. Nothing definitive. The gun was placed in the mouth and that’s consistent with a suicide. However, there was some bruising around his lips that suggests someone might have forced the gun into his mouth. Some alcohol in his system, but he wasn’t drunk. Of course, it will be a little while before a full toxicology report is ready. So pretty much, blah, blah and blah,” Dad finished, looking exasperated.

  “So?”

  “So, this is really a damn mess.”

  “We know that Matt was involved,” I stated.

  “Suspect it.”

  “We have to question him. Find out if he had a reason to be there. Remember, that’s not the only coincidence,” I argued.

  “I’m well aware of that. But we have to be careful. All we have now is a dead deputy who was somehow involved with a serial rapist. But we don’t know what the exact connection is between Nichols and Conway. Nichols, at the very least, shot Ayers in cold blood and is complicit in the murder of Angie Maitland, but we don’t have much physical evidence to back that up. We do have some solid evidence that he was at Conway’s house, though it’s not good enough for court and we’ve lost the opportunity to confront him about that.”

  “The case doesn’t sound great when you put it like that. Or, I should say, the individual parts don’t look good. Together, though, that’s another matter. From the right perspective it becomes pretty obvious that Nichols was involved up to his teeth.”

  “Pretty obvious is not a legal phrase. Arresting him because we thought he was pretty obviously guilty would not fly. The hell of it is, we can’t arrest him because he’s dead. He will never be guilty of anything. He’ll receive a funeral with honors and his family will get his death benefits. The icing on the cake is that I’ll have to stand up at his funeral and say nice things about him, suspecting that he was the scum of the earth.” Dad finished this rant and slumped back in his chair. He wasn’t taking it well.

  I sat down in a chair across from his desk and leaned in. “What’s important is that we still have a killer on the loose. A dirty cop. Stopping him has to be our top priority.”

  Dad looked at me with hard, flinty eyes. The look I remembered from childhood that meant I was pushing him too hard.

  “I don’t need you to tell me what our priorities are. I hired both of these men. One of them has escaped justice. I won’t allow the other one to do the same. I’ll remind you that if we make a move too soon, we might just end up watching him walk.”

  “I’m not trying to tell you what to do. I wish I wasn’t involved in this at all. But I’m the one that discovered Matt sneaking around with the Thompsons. I feel responsible too.”

  Dad’s eyes softened a bit. “And I appreciate the fact that you have a sense of duty. I’m proud of you. But the decision rests on my shoulders.”

  “What about bringing in some more people? Pete?”

  “Not Pete. Everyone in the department knows about the bad blood between Pete and Matt. A defense attorney would be able to paint anything that Pete did as a form of payback.”

  “So who can we bring into the investigation?”

  “Who could we trust?”

  “Matt doesn’t have a lot of friends. Heck, he really doesn’t have any close friends in the department.”

  “People are funny, though. Particularly in law enforcement. Some of that thin blue line stuff is nonsense, but not all of it. No, the only option is to bring in FDLE. Of course, at this point I could be criticized for not bringing in outside investigators sooner.”

  “So…”

  “Once we open that can of worms, we better be prepared to fish. That’s all I’m saying.” He leaned back and closed his eyes.

  We sat like that for several minutes before he spoke again. “There’s no way around it. I’ll call FDLE and ask them to come in and oversee the investigation of Matt.”

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  I spent the rest of Monday organizing my notes in preparation for a meeting with FDLE. It was frustrating not being able to tell Pete what we were doing and I felt as if I was betraying our friendship. But no one else could know until FDLE decided how we should proceed. I felt especially bad for Dad. Not only did he have to admit that the department needed outside help, but it would require that he turn over control of the investigation into Matt’s behavior. Dad was a control freak. This had to be gut-wrenching for him.

  He called me at four. “They want to me
et tomorrow. I’ve arranged for them to come out to my house around noon. I want you to be there, and bring a thumb drive with copies of all the files they’ll need. I’ll have the tracking information on Matt.” Dad’s voice was flat and he hung up as soon as I acknowledged his requests.

  Tuesday was cloudy and rainy, signaling a cold front. I got to Dad’s at eleven-thirty and helped him organize and make copies of the paper files. To distract himself he talked about the Great Americans parade coming up on Saturday. Every time I tried to bring up Matt Greene, he changed the subject back to whether he needed to body clip Finn, or how he needed to clean all of his leather parade gear.

  At five minutes before noon a professional knock on the front door was met by ear-shattering barks from Mauser, who ran to the door, jumping up and down on his front paws in excitement. Dad tried to body-block Mauser as he opened the door, but the huge beast was determined to give the visitors a full Great Dane greeting.

  The two agents standing on the porch looked like they’d been sent by central casting for MIB auditions. The first agent squeezed past Dad and Mauser and suffered through the greeting ritual. The second agent, who looked strong enough to bench-press two Mausers, ran ten feet back from the door, shaking his head vigorously.

  “Hell no,” he said, trying to regain his composure. “Sir, could you put your dog in another room, please?” he asked, shaking his head.

  Dad gave him a cold look, but finally nodded. “Come on, boy-o,” he said to Mauser, who had to be leashed and lured with a peanut butter Kong before Dad could get him into the bedroom. Even then, we could hear pitiful whining as the big lunk bemoaned his cruel imprisonment.

  The meeting didn’t take long. We presented our evidence, weak as it was, and they listened. They took all the files that we gave them, said they’d review them and get back with us. That was it.

  “Did they really just tell us to do nothing?” I asked incredulously as Dad let Mauser out of the bedroom. The big moose tried to crawl into my lap and looked at Dad reproachfully, still holding a grudge for being locked up.