The Fiercest Enemy

by Rick Reed

  “Is this your office away from home?” Jack asked, indicating the old desk and book covered shelves. The shelves were filled with text books, resource books, dictionaries, classical literature, and history and so on. The worn covers indicated they were well read or had come from library sales. “Have you read all of these?”

  “Pen has. They’re mostly books recommended by a teacher friend of mine. I’m supposed to be homeschooling Pen, but the truth of the matter is, she’s teaching me some of this.”

  “Well, you taught her how to have compassion for someone down on their luck and needing help,” Jack said. “She may not have made the wisest decision, but she’s okay and she learned a good lesson.”

  “Believe me, she doesn’t get that from me.”

  “I think you might need to put a bandage on that.” He could see the wound on her head clearer with her hair pulled back.

  “I’ve had worse,” she said.

  They went back to the Tahoe, got in and she backed out to the gravel road.

  Jack said, “Last year a bank robber threw a live grenade at me. I was deaf for most of the day. Still have some ringing in my ears.”

  “You catch ’em?”

  “I shot her.”

  “Her?”

  “Yeah. It was a family of bank robbers. They’d been pulling jobs all over the country wearing flak jackets and carrying military ordinance. She was the baby in the family. Fourteen. I still feel guilty for shooting a kid.”

  Shaunda let out a low whistle. “Is that supposed to make me feel better?”

  Jack laughed. “No. I just wanted to tell you that it bothered me to shoot a kid. For all we know this guy could be a teenager.”

  “I’ll tell you to turn your head when I shoot him.”

  Shaunda drove back to State Road 54 to the cut through that accessed Dugger Lake, pulled the Tahoe down to the water’s edge and cut the engine. She pointed to the rocky area fifty to seventy feet from where Brandon Dillingham’s body had lain. “Before I got hammered I was over there poking around. I thought I saw something on the ground near that scrub brush growing under the ledge. I had to get in the water to check it out.”

  Where she was pointing the bank was restricted by solid rock, six feet high, scrub and blackberry bushes grew out of the rocky ledges around the base but there was a small area of embankment visible underneath the brush.

  “A rabbit wearing body armor would have a hard time getting through the sticker bushes,” Jack said. He wondered how thoroughly that area was searched by Crime Scene techs, but on the other hand, how the hell could a person get through that without Shaunda noticing.

  “These stripper pits are as dangerous as the mining that caused them. When they dug the coal out of the ground they hit pockets of gas or underground springs or older mining shafts. When they abandoned those, they came up top and scraped some more up. Some places in the lake are fifty feet deep. It’s public land. Idiots come out here and snorkel or dive in those underground caverns. The water’s not clear enough to see anything. I was worried I’d step into a drop-off or a hole when I walked into the water to check under that cliff ledge. I didn’t get too far because it started getting deep.”

  “You can’t swim.”

  “I swim like a rock,” she said. “Been afraid of the water since I was little. When I was three years old my dad threw me in a pond to teach me to swim. I nearly drowned.”

  Jack’s dad had done the same thing to him, but it was into deep water at the end of a pier they were fishing from. He’d learned to swim fast. He’d learned everything the hard way since then. Sink or swim.

  He changed the subject. “Did you find anything at all?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “If you walk into a lake you’re going to get wet.”

  “Were you still in the water when you were hit? You were soaked when I saw you at the PD.”

  “My legs were in the water when I was bent over, but I wasn’t anywhere near the bank when my fuse got blown. Whoever it was must have dragged me out of the water unless I crawled.”

  “Can you show me the spot where you were standing when you were hit.”

  “I’m not going back in that water.”

  “You don’t have to. Just show me where you saw whatever it was you saw,” Jack said.

  They exited the Tahoe. Shaunda walked to the water’s edge and pointed out a rock shaped like a saddle that jutted from the ground near the bank. “I thought I saw something at the base of that rock. I can’t describe it, but it could have been that drill bit. It was dark colored.”

  “No one else was down here? Crime Scene? Your deputy?”

  “All I know is I woke up. I had already sent Joey home. Jerrell’s Crime Scene people were still up by the road. I still had my gun but my badge was gone.”

  Jack said nothing.

  “Maybe they realized they’d lost something and came back for it. Maybe they were surprised to see me, knocked me out and wrote that stuff on the back of my shirt to warn us—me off.”

  “There were armed policemen on the road and you were armed. This guy took one hell of a chance.”

  Jack had learned from experience that nothing was impossible. No matter how improbable it sounded. Even knowing that he was still bothered by the fact that someone had been able to sneak up on Shaunda. A kid had just been found killed. Her senses should have been working overtime.

  She walked to the water’s edge and stood with her hands resting on her gun belt and stared across the lake.

  Jack got as close to the rock ledge as possible without getting into the water and ran his eyes over the brush and stickers and rock. He didn’t see anything that didn’t belong, but he smelled something like rotten eggs. He sniffed and wrinkled his nose. “What is that smell?”

  Shaunda came up beside him and sniffed. “Sulfur.”

  “Sulfur?”

  “This is mining country. There’s sulfur damn near everywhere.”

  “I didn’t smell it when we were here this morning,” Jack said.

  Shaunda raised an arm and swept it through the air. “All around here,” she said. “Mines and stone quarries. I grew up with the smell of burnt charcoal and coal dust from the trucks and train cars that ran through here day after day. One of the chemicals in coal is sulfur. Smells like rotten eggs.”

  Jack made a mental note to ask Penelope and Cretin if they smelled anything when they had met the hitchhiker/homeless guy.

  “Can you think of any reason Brandon might have been down here?” Jack asked.

  “Yeah,” she said. “I mean, this whole state is honeycombed with mine shafts. Some of them were closed because they were flooded. A good hard rain, or the shaft is drilled into an underground spring and the shaft will collapse and fill with water. If Brandon was a spelunker I’d say he might be exploring the flooded shafts like some idiot. He was an idiot but I don’t think he was brave enough to do that. Like I said, I’ve run him off the Dugger Mine property a couple of times. This time he’d taken his clothes off. He might’ve had some girl down here to go swimming—or something else. The angry father angle makes more sense to me than anything.”

  “This is a make out spot?” Jack said.

  “This and any other place,” Shaunda answered. “The abandoned mine property doesn’t have security. Maybe a fence, but that doesn’t stop anyone. You could put a fence all around this lake and it wouldn’t matter one bit.”

  Jack thought about it. Brandon gets caught down here doing the nasty with some underage girl, dad shows up, bim-bam-boom, Brandon dies. Maybe murder wasn’t the plan, just an ass kicking. But Brandon dies from the blow to the back of the head. What do they do now?

  “I’m sure we have some news clippings in the file, but do you recall how much of the details of the case got into the news, Chief?” Jack asked.

  “This is a small community. Th
e death of the son of Linton’s Police Chief would get around, even without the news media.”

  “That’s what I thought.” They must have heard about where Troy Junior’s body was found. A lot of the details had leaked to the public by word of mouth. Jerrell and his troops had been charging around like a bull, asking questions, searching. Brandon’s murder is made to look like Troy Junior’s. He, or she, dumps Brandon in the water, uses Brandon’s phone to report the body. As there are two of them, father and daughter, or brother and sister, they drive both vehicles away from the scene.

  That just left the attack on Shaunda to be explained and the use of a similar weapon to the other killings. A drill bit is an unusual thing to carry around with you but maybe the killer had something like that in his, or her, vehicle for work or as a tire knocker or whatever. If the killer knew Shaunda it would answer the question of the warning written on her uniform shirt.

  That’s a lot of coincidence and too complicated.

  “What’re you thinking,” Shaunda asked him.

  “Nothing.”

  They got back in the Tahoe and didn’t speak again until Shaunda was entering Linton city limits and Jack’s phone rang. It was Liddell.

  “Jack, I’m with Jerrell at the Greene County morgue. We’re just finishing. Are you close?” Liddell asked.

  “How close are we to the morgue?” Jack asked Shaunda

  “Fifteen minutes.”

  Jack passed that on to Liddell and disconnected.

  Chapter 24

  Shaunda stayed on SR 54 going east, which turned into US Highway 231 and then into Main Street as she entered downtown Bloomfield. The coroner’s office was a gray squat brick building that resembled a funeral home. Like in Evansville they had to ring a buzzer to gain entrance.

  Inside Jack and Shaunda were met by the forensic pathologist, Lacy Daniels.

  “You must be Agent Murphy,” she said, taking his hand in both of hers and giving it a friendly squeeze. “I’m Doctor Daniels. Coroner, forensic pathologist, secretary, and staff.”

  She turned her attention to Shaunda. “What happened to you? Accident?”

  “You should see the other driver,” Shaunda said.

  Dr. Daniels was wearing a stark white lab coat over a set of gray scrubs. She still wore paper booties over her shoes but had stripped off the latex gloves. Her hair was jet-black contrasted with a creamy white complexion. She was short like Shaunda, a little older, maybe in her forties, with a little more meat on her bones, but she wasn’t pudgy, just well filled out. No jewelry or makeup, of course, given what she had just done. She was pretty with a charming smile and pleasant manner. Jack had been expecting someone rough around the edges, like the Chief Deputy Coroner back home, Lilly Caskins, aka/Little Casket. In fact, Lacy was the opposite of Little Casket.

  “We’ve just completed the post on Brandon. I’d offer you coffee but no food or drink is allowed. Follow me,” she said, and led the way down a hallway. “Your constable was here with the mother to identify the body.” They came to an unmarked steel door with a keypad lock on the wall where she punched in the code and they entered.

  The autopsy room was laid out in the same fashion as the one in Evansville. Two steel tables were bolted to the floor canted slightly into an industrial sized steel sink. Microphones were mounted from the ceiling above each table. On the left side of the room light boards for viewing X-rays were mounted to the wall. Chief Jerrell stood staring at X-rays clipped to the light boards. Liddell still wore white Tyvek zip-up coveralls, a paper hat, mask and paper booties.

  Jack said, “You look like someone threw a sheet over a mountain.”

  Jerrell said, “I asked your partner if he’d do this one. Three Big Macs, three fries, a chocolate shake and two bags of cookies and here we are—finally,” Jerrell said. “Don’t you ever feed this guy?”

  “I was hungry,” Liddell said pulling off the protective gear and disposing of it in the hazardous waste receptacle. “The cookies are for Janie when I get home. Janie’s my little girl. She’s teething.”

  Jack ignored them and focused on the body. White male, pale chalky skin, medium length brown hair, no tattoos or scars, fingernails on the first two fingers of the right hand were ripped from the quick and hanging. He’d missed this at the scene. The body would have been washed down after the examination and before the autopsy. The Y incision ran from the top of the breastbone to below the navel and was expertly stitched together.

  Jack examined the face closely. The eyes were half open in that accusatory stare only the dead could acquire. Brandon appeared to be younger and more pitiable than he had been at the scene. Even if he was the bad boy everyone said he was, he didn’t deserve to die like this. If he’d lived maybe he’d have gone on to do great things. Or maybe someone would have shot him. Jack stared into the dead boy’s eyes and said in a whisper, “Who did this to you?”

  Shaunda spoke up close to his ear and made him jump. “There’s a waiting list. I always knew he’d end up badly. I wanted to kill him myself a few times. Don’t feel too sorry for him. Feel sorry for his mother. She had to live with him.”

  Jack glared at her.

  “Don’t look at me like that. You didn’t know him. Tell him, Troy.”

  Jerrell continued examining the X-rays. “Shauny’s right. He was a dip-shit. Had to happen sometime. Barr just called me. He found two bags of marijuana under the seat of the Jeep and around a thousand dollars. He also found a kit with an 8-ball but no syringe or spoon.”

  Dr. Daniels stood by the corpse’s feet. She slipped Latex gloves on and spread the toes of the right foot. Jack could plainly see new and old needle marks in the web between his toes.

  “Speaking of which,” she said. “He’s not a newcomer to cocaine. You don’t usually see this until they’re in for the long haul. I’m surprised no one noticed he was a junkie before now. Surely his mom must have suspected but she seemed angry that we pointed it out.”

  Liddell said, “The doc’s getting a full toxicology workup.”

  “What’s the cause of death?” Jack asked.

  “Hypoxia,” she said. “I think he quit breathing before he went in the water. I’ll know for sure when we get toxicology back. The contusion on the back of the skull would have rendered him unconscious. He might have shot up before he was hit, or someone might have shot him up afterwards. It happened before he went in the water. The mark left on his scalp is almost identical to the one on Troy Jerrell Junior.”

  Jack asked, “Were there any differences in Jerrell’s and Brandon’s cases that you can think of, Dr. Daniels?”

  “Not really, except for the O.C. in Jerrell’s lungs. Did they tell you about that?”

  Jack nodded.

  “Brandon didn’t show signs of exposure to an irritant.”

  “Is there anything else?” Jack asked.

  “I did notice something, but it’s not odd considering where we live.”

  “What do you mean?” Jack asked.

  “When I did the post on Troy Junior I noticed something under his toenails. The same thing was on Brandon’s clothes, on the bottoms of the blue jeans and shoes.”

  Jack waited.

  “I didn’t have the equipment to test it here but I put it under the microscope and it is sulfur.”

  “Do you still have the sample?” Jack asked.

  “I’ve got it, but it doesn’t mean anything. Sulfur is common around here. You can get it on your clothes walking across the yard.”

  “Does sulfur smell like rotten eggs?” Jack asked.

  “If you have enough of it, or if it’s in a gaseous form. You’re not going to smell anything like that on the bodies unless they were coated with it.”

  Jack said, “We stopped by Dugger Lake just now and I smelled something like rotten eggs. Chief Lynch said she smelled it earlier when they were at the scene.
”

  “I didn’t smell anything like that when I was down there,” Chief Jerrell said.

  “I asked her to show me where she was standing when she was hit,” Jack said.

  “Someone hit you?” Dr. Daniels asked.

  “I’ve had worse,” Shaunda said.

  Jack said, “Anyway, we were over by that rocky ledge near the water. She said she thought she saw something under the brush. When she went to bend over to see what it was she was hit. She said she smelled sulfur just before that.”

  Jerrell, Liddell and Dr. Daniels all turned toward Shaunda.

  “So what?” Shaunda said.

  Jack said, “Why didn’t we all smell it the first time we were down there? Is it possible the person that attacked you had somehow gotten into a bunch of the stuff and was hiding in that thick brush?”

  Shaunda shrugged the question off.

  Jerrell said, “I didn’t smell anything like that coming from the Jeep. Or around that campsite. Why? Did you, Jack?”

  “I smelled all kinds of stuff. I thought it was because we were near the railroad tracks. The campfire was fairly recent. It could have covered the sulfur smell.”

  Shaunda rubbed the back of her neck. “Seriously? You think what’s important is the smell of rotten eggs? We searched the whole damn area and didn’t find anything or anyone. No one else mentioned that smell. I shouldn’t have said anything.”

  Jack wasn’t done. “Didn’t you say you stopped Brandon this morning after you saw him coming off mining property?”

  “Yeah. So?”

  “Bear with me here,” Jack said. “Dr. Daniels tells us she found sulfur on the bottom of Brandon’s blue jean legs, bottoms of his shoes, and under Troy Junior’s toenails.”

  Jerrell grinned. “I think you city boys have a lot to learn about this part of the country. You just made Shauny’s point for her. You’re going to find that shit just everywhere. If that was a clue to who the killer is, we’d have to arrest damn near everyone in four counties.”