February's Regrets (Larry Macklin Mysteries Book 4) Read online

  “You know, I have some notes around here someplace and a scrapbook of the murders that an old woman gave me. Be right back.” He got up and hurried off through the piles. I hoped I’d be that spry when I reached his age.

  I felt a dozen needles pierce my ankle. “Ouch!” Looking down, I saw two black-and-white paws slapping at my shoelaces. I played with the prickly monster until Mr. Griffin came back.

  “He has been a menace since he got here.” Mr. Griffin looked down and frowned good-naturedly at the spastic little creature still clawing at my laces. Suddenly the kitten quit playing and ran out of the room. The black cat with the fierce eyes I’d seen the last time came in through another door and sat frowning at the place where the kitten had been.

  “About time you got here, Brutus. You need to take a firmer hand with that youngster.” Mr. Griffin turned to me. “Without my cats, the mice would have reduced my archives to confetti long ago.”

  He sat back down in his chair and put the scrapbook and an old yellow legal pad on his lap. “Now I’m ready. Where were we? The bodies. The first one was discovered in November. Let me see…” He flipped a couple of pages in his yellow pad. “On the twentieth of November, the authorities got an anonymous tip. When a Leon County Sheriff’s deputy responded, they found the body of Tara Dunaway in a swamp near Tallahassee. Right before Thanksgiving. Not much was made of it at first. The body’d been out there for a week so the hack marks weren’t as blatant. It wasn’t until the first of December that they knew she’d been taken from Adams County.”

  “They never found a murder site,” I mused.

  “That’s right. Speculation at the time was that he clubbed them to death and then used a pickup truck to transport the bodies to the dumpsites.”

  “Was the hacking done when they were murdered or when the bodies were dumped?”

  “That’s information you’ll have to get from the autopsy reports. There was a lot of information that they never released. Not because the reporters didn’t ask.” He tapped the thick scrapbook.

  “The second and third bodies were discovered in mid-December, right?”

  “That’s right. And the publicity around the cases started to go crazy. Jim Merrell and Tiffany Falls, college students. He was white, she was black. Also, those bodies were found by a hunter only a day after they were placed in the swamp just off a main road. With the cool weather and the fact that they’d only been out there a day, the wounds from the cleaver were very obvious. Connections were made back to the previous murder and the papers and TV proudly announced that there was a serial killer on the prowl.”

  “They were from Adams County too.”

  “Exactly. Which put the bull’s-eye squarely on us. The two victims had gone to Adams County High School and a lot of people knew them. The fact that it happened right before Christmas didn’t help. Lots of memorials and vigils.”

  Mr. Griffin opened up the scrapbook and flipped to the front. He turned it so that I could see two front-page newspaper articles. Pictures of the victims showed happy, good-looking kids. Below their pictures were photos of flowers and crime scenes. One headline read: “Who’s Hunting Us?”

  “Is that your scrapbook?” I asked.

  “Oh, no. I was given this by Mary Dolan.”

  “The sheriff’s wife?” Richard Dolan had been the sheriff of Adams County from 1984 to 2008. I’d known him and his wife well.

  “She gave it to me about two years ago, just before she died. Richard had passed away the year before. Mary broke down and cried when she entrusted me with this scrapbook.” He ran his hand over the binding. “She told me that she’d started it after the fourth victim was found. She wanted to have a record of the case so that when Richard solved it, someone would be able to write a book or make a movie about it. Richard himself could never let it go. According to Mary, this case was one of the last things he talked about when he was in hospice care. Very sad.”

  “A case like this affects a lot of peoples’ lives.” I thought of my own family. How might our lives have been different? Even with the passage of time, I knew that Dad still returned to the case from time to time.

  “Now things got very interesting. The fourth body was found here in Adams County. Sierra Randal was discovered at the end of a dirt road near the county line. In fact, the road crosses the line at one point and then re-crosses it.” I saw the scene clearly in my mind’s eye. How much of what I remembered was reality and how much had my mind embellished over the years?

  “You were how old?” he asked as though he’d read my mind.

  “Fifteen.”

  “I imagine you remember it pretty well. Especially since your dad was so involved. People truly lost their minds. The sheriff put a curfew in effect and had extra patrols out every night. What added to the terror was that no one knew where the victims were killed or where they’d been abducted from. People didn’t know what or where to avoid or who should be afraid. The answer seemed to be everyone. At least everyone under the age of thirty or who cared for someone under the age of thirty.”

  “Kayne Stone was the next victim,” I recalled.

  “Yep. A twenty-seven-year-old African American who’d moved here with his family when he was a teenager. Here was a strong, healthy guy who, like everyone else, knew that there was a serial killer on the prowl and still he was killed. A fact that did not make anyone feel better.”

  “His body was actually found in Jefferson County.”

  “But still in a swamp. Everyone wondered if the killer had been forced to change the type of victim and dumping location because of all the stepped-up measures of law enforcement.”

  “And the citizen groups. I remember all the landowners, hikers and hunters being told to be on the lookout for anything strange in the woods. Dad had to run down hundreds of tips.”

  “Obviously nobody knows for sure why he changed his pattern. Maybe he just wanted to bring in a whole ’nother group of law enforcement officers and panic another county. We’ll probably never know. What we do know is that he skipped March and killed his last victim, Erika Sykes, in April, a week after Easter.”

  “I remember people talking about the fact that he started a week before Thanksgiving and ended a week after Easter.”

  “That’s right. Some folks thought he ought to be called the Holiday Killer. Kind of a double meaning there, ’cause he sure killed most of the holidays for folks that year. But some reporter at the Democrat dubbed him the Swamp Hacker after the second and third bodies were found and nothing was going to rid us of that hyperbole.”

  “Dad hated that name.” I remembered him cursing under his breath every time someone used it.

  “And, of course, he bashed them to death rather than hacking them to death. But no one has ever accused journalists of being slaves to the truth.”

  “Dad always hoped to find the blunt object that was used.” Every time they had a suspect, he’d tag and bag anything that might have been the murder weapon. It must have driven the labs crazy.

  “There must have been a tremendous amount of pressure on your dad.” Again, Mr. Griffin read my thoughts.

  “Most of it was placed there by his own sense of duty. He never felt pressure from the sheriff. In fact, I know Sheriff Dolan did everything he could to help Dad and to take the burden of responsibility onto his own shoulders.”

  “Two honorable men stuck in a trap not of their own making. The world can be a cruel place.”

  I glanced at my watch. I would need to leave soon if I was going to meet Shantel on time. “Mr. Griffin, I’ve got a meeting at three. Could I borrow the scrapbook?”

  He looked down at it and seemed to consider my request. Then he slowly offered the book to me. “Take care of it and bring it back as soon as you’re done.”

  “I will.”

  “I’d like to read your article when you’re done. You should really think about writing a book about the case.”

  I nodded. I’d almost forgotten the white lie I’d t
old. Maybe it wasn’t a lie. Maybe the last chapters of the book were being written as we spoke.

  Chapter Four

  I’d chosen the Walgreens parking lot because it was far enough away from the sheriff’s office that we shouldn’t run into anyone else from the department. I didn’t want to get into a how’s-it-going meeting right now.

  Shantel was waiting for me when I got there. She was standing by my car before I even had a chance to turn it off. “What have you found?” she asked, hanging in the window as the cold air blew around her.

  “Nothing much. Get in the car and we’ll figure out our next move.”

  After she was seated, I told her what I’d found out about Tonya and the Sweet Spot.

  “No. No way she’d go there. By herself on a Saturday night? I don’t believe it. Let’s go talk to Jenny and find out why she’s lying,” Shantel said through clenched teeth.

  “She wasn’t lying. She’s no Mensa candidate. I’m not sure she’d be capable of telling a convincing lie. I’ve met lots of folks who could lie straight to my face and I wouldn’t have a clue. She’s not one of them.”

  “What are you saying?” It spoke to how upset Shantel was that she needed to be walked through this.

  “You need to consider the fact that Tonya had a life of her own and that she didn’t always do the right thing or the smart thing.”

  Shantel thought about it for a few moments. “I know I was a bit blind to what she was getting up to in Tallahassee, but to go to the Sweet Spot? Lord, what was she thinking?” Her voice was pleading.

  “Tonya loves you a lot. And she wouldn’t want you to be disappointed in her or to disapprove of her choices. That’s going to make this a little harder than it might otherwise be. But you can make it easier, and possibly help to find her faster, if you think about her more as an independent person. If I have to fight you to get you to see the truth, it’s just going to slow us down.”

  “Tonya is a good girl,” Shantel said, staring at me with eyes that were dark and challenging.

  “I’m not saying she isn’t. If she was bad, she wouldn’t care what you thought of her and you wouldn’t find this so hard to believe.”

  Shantel considered this for a minute. Finally, still not happy, she said, “Okay.”

  “So we’re good?” I pressed her. Another beat passed before she nodded her head. “Then what you need to do is call Pete. We need to have a look at any calls for service to the Sweet Spot or in the surrounding area Saturday night.” I paused. “I can’t call because I’m not officially working this case. Pete thinks a lot of you. He’ll get us what we need.”

  She called him and Pete agreed to pull the information. He had already opened a case on Tonya and the information was public record anyway.

  “He’s going to meet us at Winston’s in half an hour.”

  I had mixed feelings about seeing him. Pete Henley was my best friend in the department and had been my partner, but he was very miffed when I resigned without talking to him first. I hadn’t seen him at all since I’d stopped working full time.

  Shantel and I took a seat in the back of Winston’s. The dinner crowd was still an hour away, so there were only half a dozen people talking and eating.

  Pete shook his head and frowned when he saw me sitting with Shantel. “I hope you just bumped into him,” he told her.

  “He’s helping me look for Tonya,” she answered.

  “I’d be able to work on it on the clock if we weren’t so short-handed,” he said, still standing and looking pointedly down at me.

  “You can’t blame me for Matt, Edwards and Nichols. My resignation is my business,” I defended myself.

  “You didn’t resign, you quit,” Pete shot back. For a man who almost never got angry, he could do it well when he wanted to.

  “Can we just work on finding my niece. Please!” Shantel hissed at us. Ashamed, Pete and I broke eye contact with each other and he dropped his nearly three-hundred-pound frame into a chair beside us.

  A waitress I didn’t recognize, but who clearly knew Pete, came over to the table with a cup of coffee for him. The older woman then turned to us as though we had appeared out of thin air. The reception for Pete was not surprising since he made Winston’s his office away from the office, but it still made me feel like a poor relative. Hadn’t I left a full twenty percent at lunch?

  After Pete ordered a piece of pie, he pulled a couple folded papers out of his jacket pocket. “There were the usual public nuisance calls, a report of gunfire, and one of the patrol deputies nabbed a guy for public indecency. Nothing unusual for Saturday night at the Sweet Spot. Actually, it’s been quieter around there since the Thompsons were hauled in.”

  I looked at the reports. None of them seemed to point toward Tonya. Deputy Julio Ortiz was the deputy on the wienie-waving report. I made a note to get in touch with him. Since it hadn’t been a call for service, it meant that Ortiz witnessed the suspect breaking the law, which meant he’d already been at the Sweet Spot looking around. The time on the arrest report was eleven-thirty, half an hour after the bartender said that Tonya was groped by the old man. She might still have been close to the bar. The rest of the reports occurred either before or hours after the time that Tonya was seen there.

  Pete ate his pie and we filled him in on what we’d been doing.

  “I’m not going to give you a hard time for sticking your nose in this,” he told me.

  “Gee, thanks, sir,” I said a little too sarcastically, but he took it well.

  “It’s just unlucky that some asshole quit his job so that I’m busy as hell doing his work as well as my own. Seriously, I feel like crap that I can’t jump on this.” He turned to Shantel. “Tonya’s probably fine. You know the statistics—almost all missing persons are missing because they want to be.”

  Shantel shook her head. “She would have called or texted.”

  “We can get the cell phone company to check the pings coming from her cell phone.”

  “Please. I don’t know what I’m going to do if we don’t find her soon.”

  “I’ll do it as soon as I get back to the office,” he said, cramming the last bite of pie in his mouth and standing up before he swallowed. “I better get back. Did I mention that we’re snowed under?”

  “Who are they going to move up to investigations?” I asked.

  “I’m more concerned about when. But they are advertising three patrol positions and one investigator position. So it looks like they’re going to promote one deputy and hire another experienced investigator from outside the department. That ought to be fun. But who knows? Your dad might change his mind.” Pete dropped a ten on the table and left.

  “What do you think?” Shantel asked, sounding tired and looking apprehensive.

  “We just have to keep knocking on doors. If you can put more pressure on friends and family, all the better.”

  “I don’t know how I can stand another night not knowing where she is.”

  “Let’s go find this boy she went to the Sweet Spot with,” I said, which had the desired effect. Shantel’s eyes lit up with anger.

  “Nothing I’d like better.” She stood up and I touched her arm.

  “Listen, when we find him, you can’t go in there with guns blazing. We need to come at him from an angle. You with me?”

  “Whatever you say,” Shantel said flippantly.

  I locked eyes with her. “I’m serious. We can’t go crazy. Remember, you may need his cooperation.”

  “I understand.” This time she sounded more serious, but I still had my doubts that she’d be able to control her temper.

  “We’ll leave your car here and go together,” I told her.

  Chapter Five

  Shantel dialed around Tonya’s circle of friends until she found someone that would give up the boy.

  “His name is Jarvis Monroe.” She gave me his address, which was in the same historically black neighborhood where Shantel lived. “He’s just two blocks behind my place,
and I’ve never met him. How could Tonya be seeing some boy from the neighborhood and not bring him by?” Shantel was talking more to herself than to me.

  Cara called as I was driving. “I got off a little early. Do you want me to come over? I can bring something for dinner.”

  Yes, I thought, I want that very much. Aloud I said, “Shantel and I are still out talking to folks. If you want to go on to my place, you can feed Ivy and I’ll be there just as soon as we get done.” On an emotional high after we’d survived a rough patch in our relationship last month, I’d given Cara her own key to my place a few weeks ago.

  “Ivy and I probably need some girl bonding time anyway,” she said good-naturedly.

  I promised to call as soon as I was headed her way.

  The day was beginning to fade and the temperature had dropped by the time we found the small, shotgun-style house where Jarvis lived. The house was painted in bright blues and greens, and the front porch was wrapped in plastic to winterize it.

  I parked on the street rather than block the narrow driveway. The yard was hard-packed dirt with neatly organized flowerbeds lying dormant. I knocked on the outer porch door, but it was evident that no one in the house would be able to hear the knocking over the sound of a loud TV. I opened the door and we stepped onto the porch and into a veritable jungle of potted plants. I recognized some—spider lilies and philodendrons—but others were a mystery. I knocked as loud as I could on the interior door, trying to be forceful enough to be heard without sounding like a raiding party.

  The door was opened by a tall, thin young man with a boyish face. He was wearing an FSU sweatshirt and jeans that barely clung to his butt.

  “Yeah?” he confronted me, trying too hard to look tough. He failed miserably. Shantel was standing behind me and, when he caught sight of her, his eyes went wide.

  “I’ve seen you,” Shantel said accusingly.

  “Oh, man.” He almost moaned the words. “You’re her auntie. Where’s Tonya? I’m going crazy.” He seemed very upset. His hands never stopped moving as he rambled. “I haven’t heard from her since Saturday. It’s not like her. I know we’re not like boyfriend and girlfriend, but we’re close, man, and she doesn’t leave me hanging—”