The Fiercest Enemy

by Rick Reed

  Jack: “Mine?”

  Eunice: “I’m sorry. The party was outside an abandoned coal mine. Those animals carried her inside the coal mine and raped her repeatedly. She said there was more than one of them. They beat and hurt that poor girl and left her there. I don’t know how she got home.

  Jack: “Did she go to the hospital?”

  Eunice: “No. She said they caught her coming in and saw the condition she was in. Of course, they were horrified that she had shamed them. When they found out she was pregnant they didn’t let her go back to school. They starved that poor girl half to death until she was skin and bones by the time she came here. You could still see the scars on her back and arms and legs where those boys hurt her in that mine. My brother wanted her to have an abortion.”

  Jack: “What month did she come to your house, Eunice?”

  Eunice: “It was in late May. She was about two or three months pregnant. Or at least she thought she was at the time. They never took her to a doctor. I tried to take her but she refused. She was that ashamed.”

  Jack: “Did she tell you what month the rape occurred?”

  Eunice: “Sometime in March.”

  Jack: “Did she tell you the names of the boys that did this to her?”

  Eunice: “She wouldn’t say but I’m sure she knew. You could see it in her eyes. She would wake up in the night screaming bloody murder. I found her one morning sleeping in the closet. She was here a couple of months. She needed help, to see a doctor and check on the baby. She flat out refused and got mad when I would bring it up.”

  Jack: “Then what happened?”

  Eunice: “I don’t want to say.”

  Jack: “Eunice. We need to know.”

  Eunice: “The longer she stayed with me the more I got to see the girl underneath the one I thought I knew. She’d changed. I don’t know if it was because of my brother or if it was because of what she’d been through. She had this anger building inside. Oh, she was courteous, but her sarcasm was cutting at times. She’d say please or sorry but you knew she didn’t mean it. Then one day she came to me and said my son had tried to have his way with her. I told her she shouldn’t tell lies after everything we’d done for her. She said it had happened more than once. He’d come into her room at night and was touching her while she was sleeping. Well, I finally had enough of her lying and told her to get her stuff and I’d take her to the bus station the next morning. I didn’t want her telling lies about my son.”

  Jack: “Where did she go?”

  Eunice: “I don’t know. I didn’t care. She just disappeared in the middle of the night. I was so mad and disgusted I didn’t look for her.”

  Jack: “You said your son is deceased?”

  Eunice: “I’m sure you’ll find all this out, being FBI and all, so I’ll tell you. Not long after she left my son got arrested for robbing a bank and shooting a guard. The guard died. He went to prison and died there.”

  Jack: “Is there anything else you want to tell us?”

  Eunice: “Just that I didn’t understand why Shaunda would ever come back here. Her life in Dugger was pure hell on earth. Why would she come back?”

  Jack: “Before we started this recording you said something about Clint Baker being ‘the one’.

  Eunice: “Clint Baker was a janitor here at the high school. He was fired and a few months later he drowned himself in the river.”

  Jack: “Do you know why he’d drowned himself?”

  Eunice: “He was fired for messing with the young ones at school. Young girls. Young boys. Disgusting. He must’ve been ashamed.”

  Jack: “Eunice, you said he was ‘the one’. What did you mean by that?”

  Eunice: “Shaunda said something that stuck with me. She said when these boys were raping her that a man from school was watching. He didn’t do anything to her, but he didn’t try to stop what they were doing. He was smiling. That made me sick. He could have stopped them.”

  Jack: “Did she tell you the adult was Clint Baker?”

  Eunice: “Not in so many words. She just said it was a man from the school.”

  Jack: “What makes you think Baker was the man she was talking about?”

  Eunice: “When he drowned himself there was talk. He had worked at Shaunda’s high school and had a better job than janitor. He was a teacher. They fired him for the same thing as here. I maybe be wrong and I don’t want to gossip.”

  Liddell turned the recorder off.

  Chapter 40

  After the recording ended Jerrell and his men sat silent, stunned, exchanging brief looks. Jack understood what they were going through. The knowledge that one of your brothers or sisters in law enforcement wasn’t what you thought they were was a loss. A loss of respect for them, trust in them, and also a loss of your own self-confidence for not seeing it sooner.

  Jerrell was the first to speak.

  “I’ve known that woman since she took office. She was in one of the classes I taught for the Police Academy. I was impressed with her passion for the job. She would call me from time to time for advice, one chief to another. I went over there and helped her straighten out the paperwork. You’d think with only three people on the payroll, herself included, it would be simple, but the last chief hadn’t kept anything current. He was still using a notebook to keep tabs on equipment and expenses. I got to know Pen because she would have the girl at work with her sometimes. We got to be buddies, but when my son was killed we butted heads and we’ve kept our distance.”

  “I’ll admit, this doesn’t look good for Shaunda. It gives her a lot of motive if Winters and Washington and all the rest were the ones that raped her. This is just conjecture at this point,” Jerrell said.

  “What do we have that connects the victims?” Jack asked the assembled group.

  Jerrell said, “They were found in a stripper pit lake. Naked. Drugs and/or alcohol was in their systems.”

  “They were made to look like accidental drownings or suicides,” Rudy offered.

  Rudy again. “Three of them had underwear tied on their head. That seems personal to me.”

  Jerrell. “They were all hit on the back of the head. Some of the calls were made directly to police dispatch and not a 911 call. Someone knew the direct dispatch number.” Only a handful of people, usually officers or their families had access to the direct dispatch phone number.

  Jack. “I went through the reports again. All the anonymous calls were made by a female voice, or the dispatcher couldn’t tell if it was male or female. I haven’t heard from the FBI lab yet on the dispatch tapes.”

  Jerrell held his hands up. “Whoa. Slow down. Are we looking at Shaunda for all the killings, or are we just looking at her for the hitchhiker she shot?”

  Instead of answering that question, Liddell said, “All the deaths took place near a coal mine. Shaunda told Eunice that she was raped and left in an abandoned coal mine. In March. All the killings were in March.”

  Jerrell put his hands down and hung his head. Jack asked him, “Do you know when Penelope’s birthday is? What month?”

  Jerrell said, “December first.”

  Jack. “That fits, too. Nine months. March to December. It fits with Shaunda not going back to high school and telling her aunt that she was kicked out of the house by her parents.” He asked Crocker, “Can you look through the Union High School yearbooks and see when Shaunda ended school?”

  “Ahead of you Chief,” Crocker said. “I went through them all and made sure the victims were in school all four years. I ran across Shaunda’s pictures. Shaunda was in the sophomore one but not after that.”

  “Shaunda moved back to Dugger a little over five years ago,” Jerrell said. “Two years after the first victim in Sullivan County was killed.”

  “She knew all these guys from high school, Chief,” Crocker said. “But she didn’t act like she
did. My wife said these guys all partied together from both high schools. Tina went to one or two parties and she said there was marijuana there but she didn’t say any of what Shaunda’s aunt said was going on.”

  Jack thought, and she wouldn’t tell you if she knew.

  “Second question,” Jack said. “We’ve answered most of this, but what connects these guys prior to their deaths?”

  “High school. Baseball. Parties. Maybe drugs but not the heavy stuff I wouldn’t imagine,” Sergeant Ditterline said.

  “Although they did find cocaine in some of the autopsies,” Barr said.

  “It would be nice to know if any of these parties took place on mine property,” Jack said.

  “Who was at that party in March,” Liddell said. “Maybe Clint Baker was there. He was a substitute teacher at Union when Shaunda was there. That was fourteen or fifteen years ago. We’ll have to talk to every student that attended both high schools during those years to see if they remember a party in March. It’s going to be hard to find witnesses now.”

  Jerrell stood. “I’m going to ask Shaunda. I can tell if she lies to me.”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea, Chief,” Jack said. “She’s already suspicious that we’re on to her. Otherwise she wouldn’t have insisted on coming to Hutsonville with us. I think she was keeping eye on us. If you confront her she could flee. Disappear. We’d never know the truth.”

  “Or she could confess to me.”

  “Or she could kill you,” Jack said.

  “Not going to happen,” Jerrell said. “We need to find out one way or another. If it was you or me we’d want to get cleared of this.”

  Jack said, “We need to build probable cause first. Get as much information or evidence as we can. Or to clear her. We need more.”

  “She knows me. If these assholes did that to her she had good reason to end them. I know that’s not up to us, but I…” his words trailed off.

  “What about Dillingham, Chief?” Jack asked. “Or Anderson? Did they deserve to be killed?”

  “We don’t know who killed Dillingham,” Jerrell answered without conviction.

  “We know she killed Anderson,” Jack said and everyone agreed.

  Chapter 41

  The meeting broke up. Jerrell told his men to start finding any video that was available in Linton. All of it. He didn’t care where it was from or how old it was. He was going talk to the students that went to high school with the victims in his county. Find out who else was friends with them. Maybe he’d get lucky and find out who was at that party in March.

  Jack suggested that he have someone go through the voter registration office to current addresses of the yearbook students. Jack and Liddell were back in the Crown Vic with Jack driving. Liddell asked, “Where do you want to start?”

  “We’re going to have Angelina check Shaunda’s background deeper. Financial records, telephone calls, social media, teachers, friends, anyone we can talk to. We need to find out where she went when she left her aunt’s house. We need to determine where she was when Baker was killed.”

  “Do you really think Jerrell will find anything on the video?” Liddell asked.

  “No, but it will keep him busy and away from Shaunda for a while.”

  “We hope.”

  “Yeah,” Jack said. “You know he’s going to talk to her sometime. Probably heading over there now.”

  “That’s why we’re going to set up somewhere close to Rosie’s in a little while. If he tries to interfere I won’t have any choice but to arrest him,” Jack said.

  “You’re going to arrest a Chief of Police?”

  “We’ve done worse, Bigfoot. He’ll live.”

  “Yeah, but we might not,” Liddell said. “He’s big enough to break us both in two.”

  “You’re big enough he’d have to break you into three,” Jack said.

  “You a funny man, pod’na. Anyone ever tell you that?”

  “Just you.”

  Liddell said, “It’s a good thing Shaunda wanted to come with us this morning. If we hadn’t caught her in that lie about her aunt we wouldn’t have gotten this far. With Shaunda staying at Rosie’s I’m not looking forward to being there tonight. Maybe we should get rooms somewhere else?”

  “She would think we were avoiding her,” Jack said. “My mom always said, ‘Keep your friends close, but ‘keep your enemies close too because you might have to shoot one of them.’”

  “Did your mom really say that?”

  “It might’ve been one of the nuns at St. Anthony Grade School, come to think of it. Sister Alphonse Capone,” Jack said.

  Liddell said, “Let’s go check on Angelina before we get tied down. I’ll text her and get directions.”

  Angelina texted right back with the address.

  “It’s about fifteen minutes south of here,” Liddell said and told Siri the address. Siri responded. “Here’s the address. Would you like me to navigate?”

  “Yes, please and thank you,” Liddell said.

  “I’m glad you can get some sense out of that thing. She hates me. If I asked for the address she would send me to Kansas.”

  Liddell said, “You should be nice to her. She doesn’t like it when you call her names.”

  “It’s a program, Bigfoot. Not a person. It doesn’t recognize the words I say.”

  “Oh, I’m sure Siri does. You even sound angry when you’re just asking Siri a question. I’m surprised she even lets you make a call.”

  “My cell phone doesn’t ‘let’ me do anything. I’m the human. It’s just a piece of talking junk. You hear that Siri?” Jack said in a loud and angry voice.

  Siri’s voice came from Liddell’s cell phone. “I’m sorry. I don’t understand that command.”

  “I have the voice activation turned on, pod’na. You called. She answered,” Liddell said and chuckled.

  “Bite me, Siri!”

  The phone didn’t answer. “Now you’ve hurt her feelings,” Liddell said. “I apologize for him Siri. He doesn’t mean it.”

  “Where the hell am I going?” Jack asked Liddell.

  They were soon on State Road 59 going south. Where State Road 59 took a 45 degree turn to the west they got off on County Road 200 South. The roads were paved until they were halfway down a farm road. Plumes of limestone dust filled the air. Without the verbal instructions from the GPS Liddell would have missed the turn into the Pleasant Grove Farms Resorts.

  Not far down the road the dust settled and a sign on their left pointed to Pleasant Grove Farms Main House. A little farther down a sign pointed to the south for “Quail Run Cottage.” A grove of trees and evergreens hid the cottage from the road until they made the turn into the driveway. The cottage looked newly built with cedar plank siding, a wood railed porch with rockers and a two person swing. The tin roof was painted blue. A flagstone walk worked its way around the cottage. Angelina’s SUV sat in one space and Jack pulled into the other.

  Angelina was sitting in the wooden swing beside a distinguished looking gentleman in his seventies. Even sitting, he was clearly tall and lanky. A full head of white hair, a bushy walrus mustache that drooped over his lip, western boots, faded blue jeans and Levi jacket gave him the appearance of a cowboy. All that was missing was a Stetson a rope and a Marlboro.

  They got out of the car and Liddell said, “Wow! How’d you manage this? It must cost a few coffee beans and the director is definitely a bean counter.”

  Without getting up Angelina made introductions. “This is John Cline. He’s the owner of all you see. The director was going to put me in a little cabin on the property but when I got here John upgraded me for free.”

  John Cline came off the porch and shook hands with Jack and then Liddell. “She’s been telling wild stories about you two,” Cline said. “Makes you sound like lawmen in those old westerns that
I love. Like that show, Tombstone, where Kurt Russell was a sheriff.”

  “Tombstone,” Liddell said. “Yeah, Jack would make a mean Wyatt Earp.”

  “Well, I’ve got to get back to the ranch,” Cline said with a grin. “I came over to help Angie get all that equipment inside. Hey, you’re not Russian spies, are you? All that computer stuff can’t be for bird watching.”

  “Don’t mess with them, John. Jack’s shot people for less,” Angelina said.

  Cline chuckled and said, “No offense intended Agent Murphy. Angie said you might need some education on coal mining operations, equipment, things like that.”

  Jack gave Angelina a curious look and wondered what kind of stories she’d been telling.

  “We might at that, Mr. Cline,” Jack said.

  “I come from a family of miners but my grandparents gave it up when the Depression hit and started farming. My dad still did some mining but this farm became more than he could handle. He had to put all his focus here. I’m actually an accountant, but I inherited this place from my dad. I didn’t want to run a farm so I built this into a bed and breakfast and it just kept growing. You like it?”

  “It’s beautiful out here,” Jack said.

  “If you need a place to stay I can let you have rooms inside the main house.”

  Cline said goodbye to Angelina and left, his western hand tooled leather boots crunching on the gravel.

  “Let’s see the place,” Liddell said.

  They went inside and Jack was surprised at the spaciousness of the rooms. The cottage didn’t look that big from outside but inside was a large living room slash kitchen. Two bedrooms and a full modern bath were off the living room. A stairway led up to a loft where another bedroom and bathroom were located.

  “You’ve got a three bedroom cottage in a primo location and we’re stuck in small rooms over a bar,” Liddell said.