Love 'Em or Leave 'Em Dead Page 5

  The girl’s pockets held nothing but tissues, which she was going to need since tears were rolling down her cheeks.

  “You have an ID?” I asked her.

  “I . . . I don’t have a driver’s license.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Morry.”

  “Last name?”

  “Um . . . Jones.”

  Right.

  Kirk’s eyes shifted to Morry, verifying she’d just lied to me.

  “How old are you, Morry Jones, and where do you live?”

  “Eighteen. I live in Dexter Lake.”

  “Any weapons in the vehicle?”

  “Are you kidding me?” the young male said.

  “We don’t kid about these things.”

  Darlene from dispatch finally answered. “Hey, Darlene, Cal Sheehan,” I said. “I need a unit or two dispatched ten miles west of Dexter Lake and a tow. I was just coming from a scene when I came upon a car in the ditch. Passengers are chucking objects out the windows. You know what that means?”

  Kirk and Morry gave each other “uh-oh” looks.

  “Besides being dumb as dirt?” Darlene asked.

  “Bingo, and underage.”

  “I can have a unit there in ten minutes and another shortly after.”

  “Perfect. They aren’t going anywhere, but I’ll sit tight until they arrive.”

  “Ten-four.”

  “How much have you had to drink?” I asked the kids, their faces filled with regret.

  “Nothin’,” Kirk lied.

  Nothing or a couple of beers is the standard answer on DUI stops, even if the driver can hardly stand.

  “Right . . . then why do you smell like beer?”

  Miss “Jones” whimpered.

  As I made my way down to the Camaro, the driver opened the door. I placed my hand on my Smith & Wesson M&P forty-caliber and yelled, “Stay in the vehicle. Stay in the vehicle.”

  You have to repeat yourself with drunks, especially the young, dumb ones.

  “Driver, put your hands on the steering wheel. Passenger, put yours on the dash. Keep them there.”

  They complied.

  I approached the open window from behind. The acrid odor of marijuana drifted out. I shined the flashlight into the car and onto the two young people.

  “Driver, let’s start with your driver’s license and registration.”

  He pulled his wallet out and said the registration was in the glove box. I asked the girl in the passenger seat to find it. The driver was Adam Larson, twenty. He also had a Dexter Lake address. I had Larson exit so I could pat him down, then even though he wasn’t wearing boots, I directed him to stand with his hands on his trunk.

  I asked the girl for her ID. Her name was Rochelle Farber, eighteen, also from Dexter Lake. The girl had to crawl out the driver’s side, because the passenger door was wedged up against the snow bank. I patted her down.

  “The fact I smell weed and beer gives me probable cause to search you, your passengers, and your vehicle,” I told Larson.

  I searched under the seats and glove box.

  “Where’s the weed and beer I smell?”

  “Don’t have any,” Larson said.

  I shined the light through the car windows. “No, you tossed it all out into the snow. See the cans sticking up?”

  “Are you arresting us?” Larson asked.

  “I don’t have my arresting stuff with me, so that will be up to the deputies who’ll arrive here shortly. Because of the weather conditions and the fact you aren’t going anywhere, I’ll let you all wait in the car. Adam, clean the snow away from your tailpipe, so you don’t asphyxiate your passengers.”

  As I made my way up to my truck, Larson gunned the engine.

  “You’re just burying yourself deeper,” I shouted back.

  His tires whirred as he gave it another try.

  “You spin your tires one more time, and we’ll add attempting to flee.”

  I sat in the warmth of my cab, keeping a steady eye on the four in the Camaro, lest they plot to overtake me and steal my shiny, red truck.

  Eight minutes later, I heard a siren. Within seconds the red and blue lights flashed through the veil of snow. Veteran Deputy Greg Woods pulled up in front of me. He turned the spotlight on the Camaro. We both exited our vehicles and walked toward each other.

  “They’re in there pretty good,” he said.

  “That they are. You’re on nights now?”

  “Dan Blackwell slipped on the sidewalk in front of the department, hurt his back, so I volunteered to cover for him tonight. Jenny Deitz is on her way.”

  “That’s not good for Dan. Okay, here’s what we have . . .”

  I stayed until Jenny arrived. She was new enough for the eagerness to show in her eyes. Nights could be long and lonely for patrol. It was nice to get the drunks off the road and have a good arrest to help pass time.

  BULLET WAS WAITING BY the back door, furiously wagging his tail, so I let him out. Up to his haunches in snow, he stopped to sniff the air, then tromped through the drifts to find the perfect place to do his thing.

  I’d missed dinner and was headed for the refrigerator when Clara walked in wearing her pajamas and robe.

  “Did I wake you?” I asked.

  “No. How were the roads?” she asked.

  “Poor. I would have been home an hour ago, but some drunk kids going way too fast slipped in the ditch. Why are you up so late?” I said.

  “Can’t sleep. Did you find your plate in the fridge?”

  “Haven’t looked yet.”

  She pulled out a plate heaped with some sort of macaroni dish and put it in the microwave. She poured me a glass of milk, and herself a glass of water.

  When the microwave beeped, she placed it in front of me. I took a bite.

  “This is really good.”

  “It’s just hamburger hot dish—the twins liked it, too.” She stayed to watch me eat.

  “What’s on your mind, Clara?”

  “I’ve been thinking. What if Shannon stayed here while she’s recovering and going through treatment? Then I can help her and watch the kids at the same time. Shannon’s folks are flying back from Florida before the surgery and Christmas. You get along great with them, so they shouldn’t mind visiting her here.”

  “Whatever it takes to take care of our girl.”

  She nodded and smiled. “Good, then.”

  “Clara, I’m not sure how Dallas will feel about having Shannon here.”

  “She’ll be okay with it.”

  “You make sure you tell her it was your idea.”

  “She’s not the jealous type.”

  “Did she hear anymore from Vince?”

  “He sent flowers today.”

  “I sent her flowers.”

  “There was no card, so she assumed they were from Vince.”

  I guess I didn’t send them often enough. I hated that she assumed Vince sent them.

  “Is there anyway she’d give him another chance?”

  “No, but I hope he gives up soon.”

  “Me, too.”

  If not, we may have to have a face-to-face meeting.

  7

  Tuesday, December 16

  WHEN MY EYES POPPED OPEN, I smelled Shannon’s perfume. It took me a few seconds to realize I’d been dreaming and the fragrance was an olfactory illusion. In my dream Colby was still alive, and Shannon and I were back together—and happy. Must have been my brain trying out Clara’s suggestion she stay here while she recovered. I doubted Shannon would agree anyway. And no matter what Clara thought, Dallas would not be pleased with the arrangement.

  I glanced at the time: eight o’clock. I purposefully hadn’t set my alarm but rarely slept this late. I rolled out of bed and stopped to glance out the window. The town was silenced by a thick blanket of snow, and there wasn’t a car in sight.

  Time for me to get up and clean off my driveway. I dressed in warm clothing, then headed downstairs. Bullet met me a
s I stepped off the bottom step. I knelt beside him and loved him up before I entered the kitchen, where Clara was feeding the “Twinks” oatmeal. I kissed the tops of their heads, avoiding their faces smeared with goo.

  “They’re having a late breakfast,” I said.

  “They slept in like their daddy,” she said. “What would you like to eat?”

  “I’m going to clean the driveway first.”

  Clara pointed to the couch. “It’s a snow day, so Shannon dropped Luke off at 6:45. She had nowhere else to take him.”

  “Hi there, Luke,” I said. “Glad to have you here.”

  Luke was Shannon’s eleven-year-old son from her first marriage. I’d adopted him right after Shannon and I were married. Luke and I never fully bonded, and after the car crash that killed his younger brother, Colby, he withdrew from me completely. In his mind, I was to blame. His mother and I had a fight that morning, and she was distracted. She entered an intersection on a green light and didn’t see the semi running the red light. Since last summer, Luke had “allowed” me to attend his soccer and basketball games, but still refused to stay at my house during my weeks with the twins. But with his grandparents now in Florida, he had no choice of where to go today.

  He kept his attention on his iPad. My instinct was to get in his face and teach him some manners, but I had to pussyfoot around the kid because he was “sensitive.” There was a lot of power in being miserable. People were always trying to make him happy. In my opinion, he knew it and worked it.

  “Luke, before I go to work, I’m going outside to blow out the driveway. I’d appreciate if you’d shovel the front porch and steps.”

  He tapped his device screen, ignoring me.

  I glanced at the indoor/outdoor thermometer on the kitchen counter near the sink. Thirty degrees. Nice winter day. I put on my parka and boots and opened the backdoor. Bullet pushed through and beat me outside. He leapt into the snow and his legs disappeared. We must have had at least ten or eleven inches.

  As I did my preliminary shoveling on the back steps and in front of the garage, Bullet bounded and jumped through the snowdrifts like a puppy. He romped ahead of me as I slogged down the driveway and around to the front of the house to set the shovel on the front porch. I wasn’t going to say another word to Luke. That was how both my grandpas handled me. They’d give me my jobs (raking, shoveling, stacking wood, or mowing the grass), and I always did what they asked without hesitation. We’d see about Luke.

  The streets weren’t plowed yet and void of traffic or human movement. I took in the beauty of nature’s blast. The pine trees were veiled like nature’s brides, their branches swooping from the weight of the snow. The deciduous tree limbs, bare yesterday, were now trimmed with thick slabs of white. The blinding white against the cerulean sky was breathtaking.

  I glanced across the street to Eleanor Kohler’s plowed driveway. I suspected her boyfriend, Deputy Matt Houser, got up in the wee hours to clean her driveway, so she could make it to her bakery. He was that kind of man. He would make a good sheriff.

  The stillness was broken by the sound of a snowplow rumbling a block down on Fifth Street. A snowblower started up in the distance. My elderly neighbor lady across the street had come out with a shovel and began scooping snow. She has a grown lazy-ass son who lived with her, and yet she did all the outdoor work. I shouted across the street.

  “Mrs. Anderson. I’ll clean your driveway after I finish mine.”

  “Oh, how nice. I have a doctor’s appointment this morning at ten.”

  “Okay, then I’ll do yours first. But you should call to see if the doctor’s office is even open before you venture out.”

  “I didn’t even think of that.”

  This deep, wet snow was too much for most people to shovel. Every year 911 got medical calls because people didn’t realize how dangerously out of shape they were. I fired up my snowblower, then made a path down the driveway and across the street. By the time I was finished with Mrs. Anderson’s driveway, my next-door neighbor, Doug Nelson, had his machine going, an arc of snow cascading through the air as he cleaned the elderly couple’s drive next door to him on the other side. We gave each other a friendly wave, and I continued to clean my own driveway and sidewalk. By the time I was finished, Luke still hadn’t appeared. I whistled for Bullet.

  I grabbed the dog’s towel off the hook by the back door, then threw it over him before he could shake the wet snow clinging to his fur across the room. He smelled like what he was—a wet dog. He gave two good shakes, then skidded across the floor to find the kids. I heard squeals and giggles when he found them.

  “Where’s Luke?” I asked Clara. “He needs to clear the deck and steps before the mail carrier comes.”

  “He’s playing with the twins in the living room. Go look. They made a zoo of the stuffed animals. I’ll encourage him to do his chore after you leave. That might work better with him.”

  “I’d like to see if he does it on his own. Call it my little experiment.”

  She arched her brows like I was playing it all wrong.

  LUKE HAD ARRANGED the dining room chairs to create spaces for the stuffed animals. He was sitting on the floor and talking for Henry’s stuffed rabbit toy. The twins were trying to copy him.

  Clara came up behind me. “Aren’t they adorable?”

  “Yes. Luke’s good with them.”

  “When are you going to buy a Christmas tree?”

  I groaned. “Does Shannon have hers up?”

  “For a week now.”

  “Can’t it wait until it’s closer to Christmas, so the kids don’t destroy it?”

  “Where are your decorations?”

  “I think Shannon took them.”

  “She says not.”

  I had little motivation to decorate for Christmas. Last year, the holiday spirit was nonexistent. It didn’t feel right to celebrate without Colby, but we numbly forced ourselves through the motions. Shannon sent me out to buy a tree, she bought the kids presents, we plastered on happy faces and faked Christmas joy for the kids. This year the grief was somewhat diminished, but her cancer loomed like a storm warning—and a part of me wanted to take cover and hide.

  Clara offered to make my breakfast while I got ready for work. Then as I ate scrambled eggs and sausage, I watched the news on TV. The storm that hit the Midwest was the big news of the day. The snow was to end by afternoon. Nothing about a celebrity dying in Birch County. Perhaps the storm had distracted the local reporters, or she wasn’t that well known.

  THE MAIN THOROUGHFARES THROUGH town were plowed, so I was able to drive to the Sportsman Cafe to pick up three dozen cinnamon rolls to celebrate Tamika’s return. When I walked into the office, Greg Woods was sitting at the table having a cup of coffee. He eyed the boxes. I opened one and he dug in.

  “Thanks, what’s the occasion?”

  I smiled. “Tamika’s coming back today. How did it go last night with the drunk kids in the ditch?”

  He chuckled. “They denied the beer cans they tossed in the ditch were theirs. Some were half full, and you could see a trail of beer from the car window. They attempted to bury a bag of weed right outside the front passenger window.”

  We laughed.

  “We snapped good photos of it all. Anyway, Jenny got all four to admit they’d been drinking. She’s got a way with kids that makes them feel like their world isn’t going to crash down on them for one citation. We wrote up the passengers for underage consumption, gave them a break on the pot, and then Jenny drove the three of them home. I arrested the driver for a DUI and brought him in. He acted all pissy about his car being towed, but he was scared because when he called his parents to come and get him, his dad said he wasn’t driving in that kind of weather and to sit in jail.”

  “Good choice. I’m curious about the girl who called herself Morry Jones?”

  “Jenny said the girl insisted on getting out with Kirk. She had another call, so she couldn’t follow her home.”

 
“Why were they out in a storm?”

  “Celebrating a sure snow day. The driver thought it would impress me if he said he was a friend of the sheriff’s grandson.”

  “Patrice doesn’t have grandkids, so he must mean Jack Whitman, and the friend is Zach.”

  “Exactly. Stupid kid obviously didn’t even know Jack wasn’t the sheriff anymore.”

  I chuckled at how the kid thought dropping Zach Whitman’s name would help him out of a DUI. Zach always seemed to be on the fringe of trouble, and hanging out with the town druggies didn’t help. One of these days he was going to get caught with drugs, and being the former sheriff’s grandson was not going to help him. Although Granddaddy Jack was a current county commissioner, so maybe it would.

  “Cal, speaking of sheriffs, are you supporting Matt Hauser or Sheriff Clinton? She’s doing an okay job, but she acts like we don’t know ours. You know what I mean?”

  “Yeah, I do. It’s a long way off yet. Well, I better get to my detecting.”

  “Any leads?”

  “Too soon.”

  “Thanks for the roll.”

  “Have another.”

  He reached into the box.

  Since neither Patrice nor her secretary were in yet, I went to my office.

  TAMIKA AND I WERE IN the conference room across from our offices, nibbling on cinnamon rolls and plotting our strategy when Clara texted to tell me Luke had finished the shoveling. I texted back a happy face. Emojis were faster, even though I disliked how human communication had deteriorated to symbols.

  Patrice entered holding a travel coffee mug. I held up the box of rolls, of which there were two left, but she waved them away.

  “You’re declining a Sportsman cinnamon roll?” Tamika asked.

  Patrice patted her trim stomach, then studied the whiteboard where we’d written what little we knew of Sonya’s death.

  Tamika shrugged and grabbed another. She mouthed, “More for me.”

  “You okay?” I asked Patrice.

  “Not really. How about you, Tamika?”

  “Happy to get out of the house.”

  “Good you’re back. We need all the help we can get on this investigation.” She handed me a sheet of paper. “These are all the people Justine and I could come up with. We also wrote the connection to Sonya, but unfortunately, we don’t have phone numbers or addresses for all of them.”