by A. E. Howe
Though I didn’t know it yet, this would be far from an ordinary case—no drug deal gone bad, suicide, accident or overdose. Death is never good, but some cases are resolved quickly, easily and with a hefty dose of justice. Other investigations try the foundations of our system. This was going to be one of the latter.
The small wood-frame house was rundown, its yard more dirt than grass. A couple of older cars were parked haphazardly in the driveway and two Adams County Sheriff’s patrol cars were lined up at the curb. I pulled in behind them. As I got out of my car, one of the deputies, a woman who’d joined the department a year before, came up to meet me.
“Hey, Sandy, what have we got?”
“Somebody went to town on this kid,” she said, obviously shaken up by the scene.
I’d worked with Matti Sanderson a few times. She was tough and professional. Her solid 5’9” frame always looked comfortable wearing her uniform and equipment. Unlike some rookies, Sandy seemed a natural, so if she was shaken up then it must have been bad.
“Martel is watching over the body. We’ve got three people in the house. One of them, David Benson, called it in. I’ve been out here making sure that they don’t leave and that no one else tries to enter. I hope you don’t mind, but I went ahead and told dispatch that you’re going to need the crime scene techs.”
“Good job. Run some crime scene tape across the driveway and get someone else out here to help. If none of our deputies are available, see if you can get a trooper from the highway patrol or an officer from the Calhoun police.” On Sunday mornings we usually ran a light detail. If there was an accident or another emergency, then we had to take help from wherever we could find it.
“When someone shows up, go inside and make sure that the witnesses are behaving. Keep them separate.”
It was probably too late to keep them from talking to each other, but it was better to close the barn door after the cows were out than to never close the door at all. Or whatever.
I retrieved a pair of rubber gloves from the trunk of my car, put on protective booties and headed around to the back of the house. The side of the house was almost completely hidden by azaleas that hadn’t been trimmed in a decade or more. I had to step around an old screen that had fallen from one of the windows, but I knew it wasn’t a clue as it was half buried by leaves and dirt.
Deputy Andy Martel was standing near the screened-in back porch, looking at anything except the body of the young man that lay about ten feet from the steps of the porch. He was on his side in a fetal position, his hands raised as though to protect his head from the blows that had crushed his skull. I understood what had bothered Sandy. He looked like a child curled up, defenseless against the onslaught that had killed him.
“Have you found anything interesting?” I asked Martel.
“Nope.”
He was the most laconic deputy I’d ever met. Most cops love to hear themselves talk, but not Martel. If you wanted information from him, you had to ask. Someone had told me it was because Martel’s family was from northern Wisconsin. Something about those long winters, I guess.
“Do we have a name?”
“Todd Harper.”
Todd? Something about the name and the body rang a bell. I bent down and gently lifted the elbow that was blocking most of his face, then backed away quickly, feeling dizzy. My mind froze as I tried to make sense of what I was seeing. Then it raced ahead, considering all the possible ramifications of this murder.
Of course the name had rung a bell. I had seen the young man just the afternoon before. I couldn’t prevent my mind from replaying the events of Saturday.
I’d spent the morning in Tallahassee with my girlfriend, Cara Laursen. We’d strolled through the arts and crafts at the Downtown Marketplace in the city’s chain of parks, then sat on the terrace at Harry’s and enjoyed some of the best New Orleans-style food this side of the Crescent City. We were headed home when I remembered that Pete Henley, my old partner, had wanted me to come to his daughter’s softball game that afternoon. Eager to keep the beautiful day going, I looked over at Cara.
“Would you like to go to a softball game?”
She gave me a funny look. “I didn’t know that you were a fan.”
“It’s Pete’s daughter. She’s got a big game this afternoon. Scouts coming and the whole bit.”
“She a senior?”
“No, junior, but with a good game Pete says she might be able to lock up a scholarship. She’s been contacted by a couple of schools already. And they’re playing Leon High School today.”
“She must be excited.”
“I’m not sure who’s more excited, her or Pete. With two daughters and the hope that they’ll both go to college in the next few years, he’s desperate for some financial help. Deputies don’t exactly pull in the big bucks.” I certainly knew that to be true. Even without kids, there were months that I felt like I had to scrape up the money for my bills.
“I’m game. Pun intended,” Cara said, flashing a smile.
“You play any sports?” I asked naively.
“Are you kidding? You’ve met my parents. They both think that team sports are the stepping stones to conformity, which leads to the subjugation of the soul,” she answered with a grin.
I should have known better. Cara’s mom and dad were what I’d imagine you’d get if you dropped an Irish country girl and a Viking warrior down in the middle of a commune. In fact, they currently lived in a co-op down in Gainesville that was only a few steps removed from a commune.
We parked in the Adams County High School lot, where several cars and a couple of buses were taking up about half the spaces. We walked out to the softball field where dozens of people were milling about while another seventy-five people sat in the bleachers, watching the Leon High girls warming up on the field.
I saw Pete right away. At almost three hundred pounds, he was hard to miss. He was standing near the dugout, talking to his oldest daughter, Jenny, who was dressed in her uniform and trying not to look like she was talking to her dad. I spotted Pete’s younger daughter, Kim, sitting in the stands with her mom, Sarah.
We walked over to Pete and Jenny, whose eyes lit up as soon as she caught sight of me. I figured that she had been standing there looking for a way to escape her dad, and I was her salvation.
“Mr. Macklin. Wow! It’s so cool you came,” she said, interrupting her father and causing him to look around.
“Hey, Larry!” the big guy said, all smiles. “Cara, how are you?” he asked, pulling her into a big bear hug. He had recently given her a few shooting lessons out at the department’s gun range and they had quickly formed a mutual admiration society.
“I was just telling Jenny to listen to Coach Terry. He’s been after her all season to—”
“I’ve got it, Dad. Don’t worry.”
“And don’t get nervous.”
“You’re the one that’s nervous.”
“I’m the one that’s going to have to shell out the big bucks for college if you don’t get a scholarship,” he joked. Pete had one of the best relationships with his family of any deputy in the department. Even though my father was the sheriff, Pete was my model for how to do the job and have a home life that made the job worth doing.
“I’ve got this,” Jenny said.
“She’s the starting pitcher today,” Pete said proudly.
Jenny blushed and rolled her eyes.
“I’ve got to go warm up.”
“Hug for luck,” Pete said, giving her a quick one before she turned and trotted through the gate onto the field.
We all went up into the stands to sit with Sarah and Kim. Sarah was one of the nicest people I’d ever met, with a dry sense of humor and eyes that were soft but deep. She reminded me of the folks that my grandmother had called “old souls.” Granny would always say that they were too wise to have only lived once.
I found myself sitting between Kim and Cara. “Are you working on any murders?” Kim asked me.
<
br /> She was fourteen and, to her father’s blushing admiration, wanted to go into law enforcement. The young lady had come out just a month earlier to help with a search for a missing person, and her observation of a group of vultures had led to the body being discovered inside a drainage pipe.
“Not right now. And I’m happy about that,” I told her, smiling.
“Yeah, I can understand that.”
“How are you doing?” I was worried that finding a dead body might have caused her some distress, but I avoided mentioning it directly in case I dredged up memories that she was trying to push down.
“Okay,” she answered, then went on as though she had read between the lines of my question. “I had some nightmares after finding that body. But they’re gone now.”
“So have you changed your mind about being a cop?”
“No. When I told Mom about the bad dreams, she said that my imagination was probably worse than the reality.”
Pete had kept her back so that she hadn’t actually seen the bloated and decaying body inside the culvert, but having seen it myself I doubted that her mother was right.
“So she bought me a book called Death’s Acre about the body farm they have up in Tennessee.”
My eyebrows lifted.
Pete was sitting on the other side of Kim and had been listening in on our conversation. “I’m not sure you should be telling the whole world that we got you that book,” he told her.
“You didn’t want to,” she said accusingly.
“Mother knows best, I guess,” he responded.
“I don’t have nightmares anymore,” Kim the realist told him. “And I may want to be a pathologist.” She turned back to me. “Did you know that, after the first twelve hours, insects and the different stages that they go through are the best way to tell when someone died?”
“I’m afraid that I did,” I joked with her. Actually, it wasn’t that much of a joke. I really did wish that I knew less about dead bodies and their decomposition.
“I think it’s really interesting. Now I wish I could have seen that body,” Kim said as much to her dad as to me.
“No, you don’t,” Pete said firmly. “When you become a pathologist you can look at all the corpses you want, but for right now you should be thinking about kid stuff.”
“You take me out to the range,” she responded. I’d seen her shoot and she wasn’t bad.
“Hush,” Pete said, looking around comically. “You’re going to get your mother and me thrown in the poky for child abuse.”
I noticed that several of the other folks sitting around us were trying to suppress smiles. Probably everyone in the stands knew Pete and his family.
Out on the field, practice was over. The two teams came out and lined up in front of their dugouts, and we all stood for the national anthem.
“Crap,” I heard Pete mutter under his breath just after we sat back down. I looked over and saw him staring at a young man who’d just walked up to the fence next to the home team’s dugout. Pete was shooting daggers at the back of the kid, who looked scruffy even from this distance.
The game went well for Jenny. She didn’t allow any runs and only a few hits during the first seven innings. Whenever she returned to the dugout she would give the young man a slight wave and a quick look, but at one point I thought I also saw a frown cross her face. Several times I heard Pete actually growl, and Sarah would place her hand on his knee, restraining him as effectively as if she had wrapped both hands around him.
Jenny was finally taken out of the game and a relief pitcher put in. Adams County ended up losing, but it was clearly not because of Jenny’s performance. With the game over, we all made our way down the bleachers. I could feel the stands rock with each step that Pete took. He was watching the young man, who was heading directly for the team as they came off of the field.
Jenny stopped outside the gate and said something to the young man, who put his hand on her arm. She backed away from him, and he immediately stepped toward her again.
I was following Pete with Cara, Sarah and Kim trailing us. Pete was focused on Jenny and the man and I decided to stick close to him. This had the feel of a situation that could spiral out of control quickly.
The man put his hand on Jenny’s arm again and this time she slapped it away. When that happened, Pete broke into a jog and I ran to catch him. Jenny saw her father coming and stepped between him and the young man.
“No!” she shouted. Behind Jenny, I saw a slight smile cross the man’s lips.
“Get your hands off of her!” Pete said through clenched teeth as he continued to bull his way forward. At this point I managed to cut in front of him with only six feet to go before he’d be nose to nose with them. Pete pushed me another three feet as I tried to slow his momentum.
“Pete, cool down,” I said, planting my feet and putting my hands against his chest.
“Get out of my way,” he said, looking past me at the young man.
“Todd’s leaving,” Jenny said to Pete.
“He’d better be running,” Pete said louder than was necessary. A small crowd of people was now watching our little tableau. I even saw a couple of phones pointed our way.
“Stop it!” I barked straight into Pete’s face and, for the first time since this had started, I had his full attention.
“He grabbed her arm,” he growled at me.
I had never seen Pete go full Papa Bear. His anger was truly impressive. I decided that I needed to focus a bit on the other half of the problem. “You need to get the hell out of here,” I told Todd, who had only three feet, Jenny and me between him and an unpleasant evening at the hospital.
“No way. This is a public—” he started, but Jenny turned to him and put a stop to his suicidal declaration.
“Go home, Todd. I told you I don’t want you here,” she said, clearly frustrated with him.
“I want to see you again.”
“Not now.”
“Meet me later,” he pleaded.
“Can’t you understand, she doesn’t want to see you,” Pete said and started pushing forward again like a bulldozer.
“Maybe,” Jenny said to Todd, clearly not wanting to, but eager to bring an end to this embarrassing situation.
“When?” Todd asked.
Pete growled.
“Later. Just go!”
“My house.” And then he reached out, possessively running his hand up Jenny’s waist toward her breast.
A batboy chose just that moment to stop within arm’s reach of us with a duffle bag full of bats and Pete, quick as lightning, reached out and grabbed one of the bats. I saw it happen in that weird slow motion of accidents and made my decision. I lowered my hold on Pete and then pushed forward, taking him down using leverage. I had to clench my teeth and lock my arms around his legs to keep him from struggling free.
“I’ll take care of you. Don’t you come near my family again, you son of a bitch!” Pete raged. I heard the bat thump on the ground a couple of times as I clung on for dear life.
Anyone watching at that moment or seeing the video later would have thought that Pete was completely out of control. I knew differently. The man had a .45 caliber Glock 21 on his waist that he could have pulled at any time. He was the department’s firearms instructor and was one of the fastest and best shots I’d ever met. Pete never made a move toward his gun. But that argument paled next to the frothing anger that everyone could see.
Holding onto Pete, I couldn’t tell what was going on behind me, but Cara told me later that Todd took off as soon as Pete grabbed the bat. Jenny had looked mortified, and Sarah had taken her to their car as Pete tried to regain a measure of his composure—no small challenge with me wrapped around his legs.
“He’s gone. You can let go of me,” Pete said in a small voice. I turned my head to see the crowd beginning to disperse. Half of the audience looked embarrassed while the other half looked like they had enjoyed the show.
I helped Pete to his feet.
The batboy was still standing there in shock. Pete, shamefaced, gave him back the bat. Two large men, one of whom I recognized as the coach, were standing behind us.
“Pete, I’ve got to report this,” the coach said.
“Mr. Henley, I should tell you that I don’t know if I can let you back on school property. We have very strict rules about fighting at school events,” said the other man, who I later learned was the principal. “Especially adults.”
“I’m sorry,” Pete said lamely. “I’m…” He wanted to explain, but he had been on the other side too many times and knew that you can’t explain your way out of a justified punishment. He just put up his hands and said, “You’re right,” then turned and started toward his car.
“Pete,” I said, catching up with him. “Don’t worry. I’ll talk to Dad.”
Pete and I both knew that videos were going to be circulated and that this was going to be a problem for the department. I would’ve never used the fact that my father was the sheriff for my own benefit—truth was, I probably couldn’t—but I was more than willing to do anything I could to help Pete. If I had any influence with Dad, I’d use every bit of it to defend a man I knew to be one of our best.
“This is going to be a shit storm,” Pete said morosely. “I saw the cameras.”
“Maybe no one will post the video,” I said, knowing that it was probably uploading to various platforms as we spoke.
“I hate that kid. Jenny tried to break it off with him a month ago, but he won’t let go. Scares me.” Pete stopped and looked me in the eye. “How many cases of assault, stalking, even murder, have started like this?” he asked.
“You aren’t wrong. But you’ve put yourself in a position now where you can’t go anywhere near him. Look, I’ll help you with this any way I can. Right now, you need to go home and take care of Jenny. Don’t worry about anything except making things right at home.” I knew that a plea to his nesting instinct was the best way to get him focused on something productive.
“You’re right.” Pete looked toward his car where his wife and two daughters were talking. Jenny looked devastated as her mother comforted her.