But Not Forever: A Clint Wolf Novel (Clint Wolf Mystery Series Book 4)

by BJ Bourg

  “I rarely touch the stuff.”

  He let out a grunt of disapproval and settled into a homemade wooden chair that had a bear hide stretched over it. He pointed to a matching chair. “I don’t get much company up here, so excuse the order of the place.”

  “Not a problem,” I said, watching him loosen the red bandana that was tied around his throat. His hands were rough and cracked. They were even bleeding in a couple of places. I pointed to the pistol in his holster. “Model 1911—is it a Browning?”

  “Is there any other 1911?”

  I turned up my hand, acknowledging his point. Realizing there would be no need for small talk and establishing a rapport—he would either tell me what I wanted to know or not—I just jumped right in. “What can you tell me about the incident involving Melissa Underwood Cooper?”

  He studied me for a long moment, and then finally let out a growl and stood to his feet. He walked to a back room, which I figured was the only bedroom in the place, and I could hear some rustling noises and something fell to the floor. He cursed a bit, there was more movement, and then he mumbled something I couldn’t decipher. When he reappeared, he was carrying a single piece of paper—it was the same kind of flyer Burton had described.

  I took it from him and then looked up. “What about it?”

  “I found that floating around town a few weeks ago. As far as I can tell, they’re still missing and they’ve never been found. I’m afraid old man Underwood was right—his daughter was in danger and she met with her demise somewhere out there in the world.”

  “So, you don’t think she murdered Larry Cooper anymore?”

  He sighed. “It wouldn’t be the only mistake I’ve made in my years.”

  “I was hoping you could tell me what you found at the scene.”

  “Son, I’m old and tired. Do you know how many cases I’ve worked in my career? Without the report in front of me, I’m afraid I can’t answer your questions. The only independent recall I have is that Fowler Underwood was a pain in my ass, and I’m not too sorry to hear he’s gone.”

  “That’s not a nice thing to say,” I mumbled, feeling disheartened by this turn of events. I’d originally figured he’d be happy to help me solve an old case, but I was smart enough to know that some investigators didn’t appreciate Monday-morning quarterbacking. If he couldn’t solve the case, I guess he figured no one could, and he didn’t appreciate new blood coming along and second-guessing his actions. I decided to try once more. “Didn’t you keep copies of your reports?”

  He shook his head. “All of that stuff stayed at the sheriff’s department.”

  “Don’t you remember anything at all about the scene?”

  “Anything I’d say would be guesswork, and you know we’re not supposed to guess at such things.”

  I asked question after question, verbally attacking him from several different angles, but got nowhere. The man was a steel trap and wouldn’t provide the slightest amount of information. I finally thanked him and left.

  CHAPTER 37

  After leaving Sheriff Burns’ cabin, I drove around until I found a gas station. A young kid pumping gas was nice enough to give me the directions to the sheriff’s department, and forty minutes later I was seated in a small office watching a man who was even older than Burns walk in carrying a cardboard box that had seen better days. It was ripped on one side and some pages were sticking out of the bottom. The old timer, a detective named Yates, dropped the box at my feet. “This is everything we’ve got on the Cooper killing.”

  I removed the flimsy lid and placed it on the floor beside the box. The first file in the box was labeled “Investigative Report”. I pulled it out and flipped through the lower half of the report until I came to the last page, where I found Sheriff Burns’ signature. The report was 126 pages long. I’d encountered cases that were mishandled before, and in almost all of those cases the one glaring common denominator was a lack of paperwork, which pointed to improper documentation.

  “It sure is weird seeing this file again,” the detective said. “I remember this case like it was yesterday. It’s not too often we get a missing woman and baby under mysterious circumstances.”

  I nodded absently, thumbing through the report. I had learned early in my career that proper documentation was crucial to any case, and if this report was any indication of the efforts that had gone into the investigation, I’d say it was handled properly. I held up the report and glanced back up at Yates. “Did Sheriff Burns write this report himself, or did one of his detectives do it?”

  “He wrote every word. Each time he’d get a new lead or some crack-head would confess to the murder, he’d follow up on it himself and add a supplemental report to the file. He was determined to see this case through to the end, even if it killed him.”

  I looked at the heading of the report. The call had come in at eleven-forty-eight at night; right after Fowler had gone to the trailer to see if they wanted some barbecue.

  “I knocked on the door,” Fowler said in his transcribed statement, “but they didn’t answer. I figured they couldn’t hear me because of the fireworks going off, so I opened the front door. That’s when I saw him on the sofa, shot full of holes.”

  “Saw who?” asked Sheriff Burns.

  “My son-in-law, damnit—I saw my son-in-law dead on the sofa, shot full of holes. Now, where the hell’s my daughter?”

  “I’ve got a team of investigators out there looking for her,” Burns had said. “As for now, I need you to tell me exactly what you saw and heard from the time you left your house to the time you found Larry.”

  “I already told you everything.”

  “I heard Sheriff Burns put a beating on Fowler Underwood,” I said after reading in silence for a bit. “I heard it’s what cost him his position.”

  Yates took a deep breath and exhaled. “That wasn’t his finest moment. He had tried to be patient, tried to understand the pain Mr. Underwood felt, but the man’s behavior finally got to him. Sheriff Burns was putting in countless hours on the case, running down every lead that came in, but every time he’d put up his flyers, Underwood would come behind him and tear them down. That didn’t make the sheriff happy.” He scowled. “Underwood was intentionally impeding the investigation into the case, and the sheriff began to think he had something to do with killing Larry and then helping his daughter get away.”

  I continued reading the report. According to the scene reconstruction, six rounds had been fired. Larry had been hit five times. One of the bullets had traveled above his head and through the thin trailer wall behind him. Other than Larry’s dead body, there was no other evidence of injured persons in the trailer.

  “So, what do y’all think happened to Melissa and the baby?” I asked.

  “The sheriff thought Underwood helped them get away,” Yates said simply. “He firmly believes Melissa killed Larry and he still thinks she’s running from the law—even today. We did consider other possibilities, such as someone else killed Larry and Melissa managed to escape with her baby, but that seemed unlikely.”

  “What about you? Do you still think she’s out there somewhere? Running?”

  “Absolutely.” Yates sat on the corner of the desk and rubbed his white hair. “She’s in the NCIC database, so if she would’ve been found anywhere in the country—either dead or alive—we would’ve known about it, so she has to be out there hiding.”

  I flipped to the next page of the report and whistled. This is interesting!

  CHAPTER 38

  “I see y’all recovered fifty thousand dollars worth of heroin in a gym bag under Larry’s body on the sofa,” I said. “Couldn’t the murder have been drug-related?”

  Yates leaned over to tap the report. “We recovered what we thought was heroin. Spoiler alert; when you get to page twenty you’ll see that we performed a presumptive test on the drugs. Turns out it was bunk.”

  “Wait, are you saying he’d been selling counterfeit drugs to people? That’s motive fo
r murder if I ever heard one.”

  “No,” he said. “Larry never had a chance to sell an ounce of it. When the sheriff found the packages, they were still wrapped up nice and neat. He had our narcotics agents pull in the usual suspects of dealers and users. Several of the local users said they received word from Larry that he was getting a shipment in on the Fourth. The consensus was that Larry would call when he got the stuff in, but they never heard from him. Most of them got their fixes from someone else that night and then the next day they heard about Larry getting shot.”

  I pondered what I’d just heard, flipping through the report as I did so. “Who was his supplier?”

  Yates shrugged. “We were never real sure. We worked that angle for years, but haven’t been able to identify his supplier.”

  “Did you find any money in the house?”

  “Not a dime, which was why we believed Melissa left on her own. The way we figured it, she killed Larry, took all the money he’d made on his drug dealings, and then ran off to start a new life somewhere else.”

  “But why not take the drugs?” I asked.

  “According to my snitch, Melissa didn’t know anything about his dealings.”

  “How could she live with a man and not know what he was up to?”

  Yates shook his head. “My snitch said Larry always sent Melissa to the back bedroom when anyone dropped by to make a deal. She said Larry was always very secretive. He would talk in whispers and kept his stash concealed in that gym bag. It was always by his side.”

  “But he was dead, so why didn’t Melissa take the bag? For all she knew, it was loaded with money.”

  “She probably didn’t want to touch her dead husband. After he was shot, Larry had slumped over and come to rest on top of the bag, so she would’ve had to pull his body off the bag to get to it. Besides, I imagine she was in a hurry to get out of there after what she’d just done.”

  I dug around in the file box until I found a thick packet of crime scene photos. They were printed on traditional four-by-six photo paper. I began sifting through them, and the crime scene came alive for me. The entire house was tidy, so the search must’ve been easy to conduct.

  Larry’s body was slumped onto his right side on the couch. There were five red blotches on the front of his shirt that highlighted the location of his bullet wounds. I held the photo close to my face but could barely see the gym bag under his torso. He was a heavy fellow, as one would expect from a corn-fed country boy, so it made sense that Melissa might not have been able to get the bag out from under him.

  One of the subsequent photographs showed the bullet hole in the wall behind the sofa. It was about a foot above the top of the sofa and directly in line with where Larry’s body would’ve been when he was seated upright.

  “The bullet in the wall must’ve just missed his head.”

  Yates nodded. “The sheriff thought that was the first shot and it was meant for his face. We believe he lunged upward and took the next five shots in his chest, which caused him to fall back to a seated position, where he then slumped over on his side.”

  According to the medical examiner’s report, Larry had taken one bullet to the heart, two to the left lung, one to the far left side of his chest, and one in the abdomen.

  “No shell casings?” I asked.

  “Not a one. It led us to believe the killer used a revolver.”

  I didn’t see any holes in the sofa that would’ve lined up with the trajectories of the bullets. “Did any of the bullets pass through and through his body?”

  “No, they were all removed from the body during autopsy.”

  I found the evidence recovery sheet and examined it, locating the five bullets that were recovered from the autopsy. They were listed as “undetermined caliber”. I ran my finger down the entire list and frowned, turning it over to see if there was a backside.

  “What’s the matter?” Yates asked when he saw the expression on my face. “It’s all there.”

  “Where’s the bullet that went through the wall? It’s not on the evidence sheet.”

  He sighed, rubbing his face. “That bullet was a pain in our asses. The sheriff made us tear that place apart three times looking for it, but we never did find it. If you look through the photographs, you’ll see that we tore up every piece of furniture and scanned every inch of the floor and walls in the master bedroom, but we didn’t find it.”

  I flipped through the photos until I found a picture of the master bedroom. The bed frame on the queen-sized bed would have been in line with the trajectory, unless the bullet glanced off of something inside the wall. To the left of the queen bed was a baby crib. “Did y’all search the baby bed?”

  “We searched every inch of that room. We even cut open the mattresses and separated the stuffing from the springs and ran a metal detector across the stuffing to make sure we didn’t miss anything.” He paused and nodded his head. “I tell you, if that bullet would’ve been in that room, we would’ve found it.”

  “Did y’all consider the possibility it was carried away?”

  “We did. In fact, the sheriff thought it got stuck in the sole of one of our boots and it was carried off that way. He made us retrace our steps in search of it, but we never did find it.”

  That was certainly a possibility. “What if there was a second victim and it was carried off that way?”

  Yates rubbed his face in thought. “What do you mean?”

  “Well, I was looking through the report and saw that there was a history of abuse. It seems Larry would beat Melissa on a regular basis.”

  “Just about every time he’d get drunk, but when our patrol deputies would go out there Melissa would deny it. She’d claim she’d fallen or hurt herself moving furniture or some other hogwash story. I think Fowler moved them close to his house because he thought Larry wouldn’t dare touch Melissa if he was just down the road.”

  “If she finally had enough of the beatings and shot him in self-defense, who could blame her?”

  “That’s what the sheriff has been screaming for years, but Fowler doesn’t want to even consider the fact that his daughter might’ve shot Larry. He won’t even acknowledge the beatings, because that would give his daughter motive and make her a prime suspect.”

  “But if all of that were true, why would she run?”

  “Because she just committed a murder.”

  “Not if it was self-defense.” I spread the photographs out on the table so I could better recreate the scene in my mind. “When women kill their husbands because of abuse, they don’t usually haul ass. They typically call nine-one-one and either claim it was an accident or they offer a compelling reason for the killing, but they don’t usually disappear.”

  “So, you don’t think she did it?”

  “I’m not ready to exonerate her just yet, but I do think there was a second victim.”

  “A second victim?” Yates scoffed. “Who?”

  “The baby.”

  Yates stared at me for a long moment as though he’d just seen the antichrist. “By all accounts, that woman loved her baby. She’d never kill her child. In all my years, I’ve never worked a case where a woman took the life of her own child. Mountain women are not made that way.”

  “I’m not saying it was on purpose.” I slid the photo that depicted the exit bullet hole into the bedroom and stabbed at it with my finger. “This is the right height to hit a baby in that crib. The angle’s a little off, but I didn’t see where y’all put a rod through the hole to determine the exact angle. Did y’all?”

  He shook his head and remained silent.

  “If the bullet glanced off of a stud or a nail it could’ve changed course and hit the baby, which would explain why you couldn’t find it. The bullet would’ve been removed from the scene when Melissa took the baby out of there.”

  Yates shook his head. “We checked every hospital in the state of Tennessee and North Carolina and in the northern portions of Alabama and Georgia, but no woman or child w
ere admitted with injuries.”

  “If she murdered her husband and accidentally shot her baby, she wouldn’t go to a hospital because they would immediately call the police and she would be arrested.”

  Yates stared down at the photographs. “But where’s all the blood? If the baby would’ve been shot, wouldn’t there have been blood in the crib?”

  I plucked the close-up photograph of the crib from the pack and handed it to him. “What’s wrong with this picture?”

  He stared blankly at it and then shrugged. “There’s no blood?”

  “No, there aren’t any blankets or sheets on the mattress. It’s bare.” I lifted the photo of Larry’s shirt. “Notice how the blood was confined to the front of his shirt?” When Yates nodded, I continued. “That’s because the entry wound was small enough that it didn’t allow much blood to be spilled. If the baby was hit with a small caliber round that had already passed through and through a wall, the bullet would most likely enter the body and stay there. If Melissa ripped the blankets and sheets from the bed and wrapped them around the baby, it would’ve contained the blood.”

  Yates’ eyes narrowed as they moved from one photograph to the other. After studying them for a bit, he nodded slowly. “So, you think it’s possible Melissa carried the sixth bullet out with the baby?”

  “If she was the shooter, I do think it’s possible she hit the baby, and that would explain why she fled the scene. If someone else did the shooting, it’s possible they took her hostage and carried the baby away with her.” I flipped through the stack of photographs in my hand. “Where are the pictures of the projectiles removed from Larry’s body?”

  Yates reached into the box. After shuffling some files and envelopes around, he handed me another packet of pictures. “These are from the autopsy.”

  I removed the pictures from the envelope and went through them. When I came to the photo of the bullets that had been removed from Larry’s body, I cursed out loud.