But Not For Love, page 17
part #9 of Clint Wolf Series
I waved him off, wanting to get the print examined as soon as possible so we could leave. “I don’t touch the stuff, but thanks.”
“I’ll take a cup,” Susan said quickly, her chin quivering. “My insides are frozen.”
After Abel had returned with Susan’s coffee—he’d also brought one for himself—he hitched up his baggy jeans and pointed us toward the table. As we took our seats, I pulled a one-to-one copy of the fingerprint we’d recovered from the latex glove and handed it to Abel.
“Can we get this thing compared to Walter Garner’s print card as soon as possible?”
“I texted Sheriff Chandler while I was waiting for the coffee and he said he’ll be here within the hour. I told him I’d let you go through the case file while waiting, and he didn’t seem to mind.”
“Didn’t seem to mind?” I cocked my head to the side. “Why on earth would he?”
“This was just a rough time in our history, is all. We’ve never before had a deputy-turned-murderer, so it was hard for a lot of us to stomach, especially the sheriff. As the chief law enforcement officer of the county, he felt responsible for Walter’s actions.” Abel sighed as he studied the one-to-one photo of our fingerprint evidence. “I sure hope this one’s a match.”
“What do you mean by this one?” I scowled. “Have there been other prints—other cases?”
Abel held up his index and ring fingers. “Two of them. I found them like I found your case—by scouring news reports on the internet. Their cases had the same M.O. as the Walter Garner case. They’d recovered fingerprints at their crime scenes and I was sure we’d be able to prove Walter was still alive, but when the sheriff compared the prints with Walter’s card, it was determined they didn’t match.”
Abel paused to take a sip of his coffee. His eyes were half closed and he purred as his throat muscles worked to swallow the hot liquid. When he was ready, he put his cup down and opened the box of files. “The sheriff had believed Walter perished in the wilderness, but I had argued the point. It pissed him off, and the second time the prints didn’t match, he threatened to fire me if I ever contacted another agency about this case again.”
“Is that why he can’t know you called us?” I asked.
“Yeah, he’ll make good on his word. In fact, he grilled me something fierce when he got off the phone with Detective Mallory Tuttle. He wanted to know if I had anything to do with it, but I lied and told him no.” He forced a smile. “But I’ve got a good feeling about your case. I’m certain Walter’s resurfaced and he’s killing again. Once the sheriff realizes the prints match, he’ll finally be forced to listen to me and we can reopen our cases.”
I nodded thoughtfully and pulled the file folder that had Walter’s name printed on it. “So, is there an initial report in here?”
“Yeah, but that’s not where things began.” Abel pulled out a three-ring binder and began thumbing through it. “The case begins a little before Walter killed those two people.” Abel dug through the box until he found the report he was looking for. He carefully removed it from a binder and handed it to me. “Walter was a deputy with the sheriff’s department, and he was one hell of a go-getter. I responded to a few burglaries when he was a new patrol officer and he seemed to be squared away. Well, Walter, he had a sister named Pam who hooked up with a local prick named Ian Eastman. Walter didn’t like Eastman and he tried to discourage his sister from seeing him.”
“But the heart wants what the heart wants,” Susan mumbled, reading over my shoulder.
“Yeah, and Pam wanted Ian bad enough that she agreed to marry him.” Abel sighed. “That didn’t set well with Walter and he raised one hell of a fuss, but Pam married Eastman anyway—and after only knowing him for three months. Although he wasn’t supposed to, Walter ran Eastman through every database we had, but he couldn’t find anything on the man.”
Abel went on to explain how things seemed to be okay for about a month and Walter was beginning to think he’d read Eastman wrong, but then Pam showed up at their mom’s home for Thanksgiving and she had a bruise on her cheek.
“Although she tried to hide it with makeup, Walter noticed and he hounded her until she admitted Eastman slapped her. Walter forced her to make a complaint with the sheriff’s department,” Abel recounted. “Being’s she was his sister, he couldn’t make the arrest himself, but he was there when our officers took Eastman into custody. He told Eastman if he ever laid a hand on his sister again, he’d kill him. I wasn’t there but one of my buddies was, and he said he knew Walter meant it.”
Abel paused and ran a hand through his thinning brown hair. “When Eastman bonded out of jail, he met with the sheriff and filed a complaint against Walter, but the sheriff nixed it.”
I glanced around the room. It was a small building, as was the jail, so I figured their manpower was minimal. “Do y’all have an internal affairs department?”
“Nah, those are for the larger departments. Around here, the sheriff does his own I.A. investigations.” Abel pulled a picture from the file and slid it across the table. Susan gasped and turned her face away. Abel quickly apologized. “I’m sorry, ma’am, I didn’t realize it would offend you.”
“No, it’s okay, I’m not offended,” Susan said, covering her mouth with a hand. “I…I just didn’t expect such a bloody crime scene. It’s just that, well, I’m pregnant and my stomach isn’t what it used to be.”
Calling it a bloody crime scene was an understatement. A woman was lying naked on a kitchen floor and it looked like all of her blood was on the floor beside her. If there was a drop of blood left in her body, it wasn’t enough to fill a mosquito’s abdomen.
CHAPTER 33
“Was she stabbed?” I asked after I was sure Susan was okay. I pulled the photograph close to my face. “Or bludgeoned to death?”
“The first one.” Abel selected another photograph from the file and handed it to me. It was an autopsy photo of the same victim after she’d been cleaned up, and it was easy to see she was covered in stab wounds.
I glanced at Susan, but her eyes were still averted. I could tell it bothered her to feel this way. I wanted to hold her and comfort her, but I knew it was better that I didn’t do any such thing until we were alone. Knowing my wife as well as I did, I also knew she didn’t like appearing weak, and I understood how she felt. I also understood what she was going through, because Michele had experienced the same thing when she was pregnant for Abigail—only Michele had complained a lot. Susan suffered quietly, like the fighter she was.
“Who’s the victim in this pic?” I asked, struck by how similar the layout looked to our own crime scenes. “Is she the woman Walter killed?”
“No, that’s his sister.”
“Walter’s sister?” I asked. “He killed his own sister?”
Abel pulled out a mug shot, under which the name Ian Eastman was scribbled. He put it on the table and stabbed it with an index finger. “Ian murdered Pam about a month after his arrest and then he went into hiding.”
My face twisted in confusion. Had Pam dropped the charges against Ian? If so, why would he kill her? If she hadn’t dropped the charges, how did it relate to our killings? I posed the questions to Abel, but he shook his head.
“No, Pam refused to drop the charges against Ian, so that’s why he killed her.”
“Wait a second—our victims appear to have been targeted for dropping the charges against their husbands, so how does your case relate to ours?”
“Well, Pam might not have dropped the charges against Ian, but Tammy did.”
“Tammy?” I cocked my head to the side. “Who’s Tammy?”
“Ian’s first wife.”
“Did Ian kill her, too?”
“No, Walter killed her.”
I sucked in a mouth full of air, even more confused now. “Why on earth would Walter kill Ian’s first wife?”
“Because he blamed Tammy for his sister’s death,” Abel explained. “Before Walter went on his murder spree, he told his mother that he blamed Tammy for his sister’s murder. He said if Tammy would not have dropped the charges against Ian when he beat her with a cowboy boot, he would’ve still been in jail and would never have met Pam.”
Abel dug another photo from the case file and slid it toward me, making sure to keep it turned away from Susan. I could tell by Susan’s expression that she appreciated the subtle move by Abel.
The new photograph he handed me depicted a blonde-haired woman whose clothes had been ripped from her body and stacked in a pile on the floor beside her nude body. Like Pam, Cassandra, and Allie, she was covered in blood from dozens of stab wounds, left for dead inside her home.
“This victim is Tammy Eastman, Ian’s ex-wife.” Abel leaned back and sighed. “After killing Pam, Ian went on the run. We had officers from three counties searching for him, but we had no credible leads. We were so busy, no one paid much attention to what Walter was doing.”
“Did he participate in the investigation?”
“No, but he did show up for Pam’s autopsy. He insisted on seeing his sister, so the attending detectives allowed him to view the body before the medical examiner started cutting on her. He ran out of the room cursing and crying. I was just driving up when he left, and that’s the last time I ever saw him.
“We all talked about it later, and no one remembered seeing him after that day. I know the funeral home tried to call him because his mom said he was in charge of arrangements, but they never could get a hold of him. It didn’t take us long to figure out why. A few days after the murder, the sheriff goes to Tammy Eastman’s house to see if she’d heard from Ian, but he was too late.”
Abel shifted his weight in the chair and took a labored breath. “From what we could gather, Walter goes to Tammy’s house and takes her hostage. He uses her phone to send a text message to Ian saying she heard about the false accusations against him and offered to let him hide out at her place. She offered him a hiding place, money, and said he could use her car to get away. It was an offer he couldn’t refuse.”
Abel paused. After a moment, he frowned and tapped the photo of Tammy’s body. “Instead of a car and cash, this is what Ian found when he walked inside. I’ve got no pity for Ian because he was scum, but this poor lady didn’t deserve what happened to her. It was truly disturbing. Probably the worst crime scene I’ve ever witnessed.” He shook his head as though to clear it of the awful memory. “Anyway, Ian didn’t have time to get a good look at Tammy, because the evidence shows that Walter got to him quick.”
Abel removed another photograph from the file and handed it to me. I scowled involuntarily as I took in the scene near the back door. The man that Abel had identified as Ian was positioned on his back in the kitchen, his legs extending under the kitchen table. He wore a white shirt that was almost completely saturated in blood. There were dozens of holes in his shirt where the knife had passed, and the stab wounds on his arms, legs, and face were too numerous to count.
Although the act had been brutal and the wounds plentiful, the most remarkable part of the scene was the top of Ian’s head—there was a large kitchen knife protruding from his skull and it was buried to the hilt.
CHAPTER 34
Susan and I had been going through the file with Abel for about an hour when the exterior door down the hall opened and sucked all of the warm air from the small conference room. I had been staring at a picture of Walter Garner, trying to imagine what he looked like now, when a large man swallowed up the doorway. He was as wide as he was tall, but it wasn’t all fat. Although he looked peculiar in his baggy sweatpants, leather sandals, and thick wool jacket, he walked with authority.
“Abel, a word,” the man said in a gruff voice, not acknowledging Susan and me. His hair was sticking up in patches, as though he’d just rolled off the sofa to meet with us, and his eyes were swollen.
When Abel stepped out of the room, I leaned toward Susan and showed her the picture of Walter. “There’s something familiar about his face in this picture, but I can’t figure out what it is.”
Susan’s eyes narrowed as she studied the photograph closely. Before she could say anything, the large man reappeared in the doorway with Abel.
“Detective Clint Wolf and Chief Susan Wolf,” Abel said, clearing his throat, “this is Sheriff Ralph Chandler.”
“Where’s the print you recovered?” the sheriff asked, skipping the pleasantries.
Abel snatched up the copy I’d given him and handed it over. “This is it.”
The sheriff nodded and unzipped his thick coat, removing an evidence envelope from inside the flap. He strode to a small desk at the far corner of the room and took a seat. After turning on a desk lamp, he pulled an applicant print card from the envelope and laid it on the table in front of him.
I leaned closer to Abel and asked, “What’s he doing?”
“He’s comparing Walter’s prints to the fingerprint you recovered from the glove,” Abel said simply. “As I said earlier, he’s our fingerprint examiner—”
“No, why is he sitting way over there?”
“It’s our only piece of evidence,” Abel explained, “so he’s very protective over it.”
I scowled as I watched the older man dig a fingerprint magnifier from his pocket and lean over the cards. He grunted as he studied the prints.
“Did you find something?” I stood and pushed my chair back. “Is it a match?”
The sheriff looked up as I approached the desk. He shielded the applicant card with his arm. I cocked my head suspiciously to the side.
“Excuse me, but can you please give me some space?” the sheriff said. “I need to concentrate.”
I was about to ask if he was hiding something, but Susan called out to me. I knew she was intervening to keep me from getting into an argument with the sheriff. We needed his cooperation, so she was right to stop me. I turned slowly and returned to my seat. Abel leaned forward, glancing in the direction of the sheriff before whispering, “I wasn’t joking when I said he was very protective over those prints. If something happens to that print card, we’ll never be able to prove it was Walter.”
“I understand that, but I don’t understand why he won’t let us see it.” I shook my head, but kept my voice low. “That doesn’t make any sense at all. He’s acting like we’ll steal it right out from under him.”
Abel scowled, whispered, “He hasn’t really been the same since he encountered—”
“It’s not Walter’s print,” the sheriff called loudly, slamming his fingerprint magnifier on the table. He cursed and moaned for a bit. “I knew this was a waste of my time.”
I stared across the room toward the print card as I drummed my fingers furiously on the table. I wanted to get my hands on that card. I pointed to it. “Sheriff, can I get a copy of that card? I’d like to get a second opinion.”
Sheriff Chandler’s eyes turned to slits. I thought for a minute there that he was going to tell us to get the hell out of his station, but then he took a deep breath and exhaled forcefully. He sat quiet for a moment. Probably counting to ten in his mind. He finally spoke. “I’m afraid not, son. It’s evidence and can’t be disseminated. I don’t know how things work in your jurisdiction, but we don’t freely turn our evidence over to everyone who asks for it.”
I started to respond, but he lifted a hand to cut me off.
“Look, if your print would have matched, I’d happily give you a copy. The truth is, your case has nothing to do with ours, so”—he stood and walked toward me carrying our print—“I don’t need your evidence and you don’t need my evidence.”
“I understand your position,” I said, trying to keep my voice even, “but I don’t see the harm in bringing in a second set of eyes—”
I clamped my mouth shut when Susan yelped in pain and bent forward violently, clutching at her stomach.
CHAPTER 35
“Sheriff, help me,” she called out, reaching a hand toward the large man. “Please…I…I need a bucket. Quick! I’m pregnant.”
Fear propelled me into action. A little miffed that she was calling out to this strange sheriff for help, I kicked my chair back—it flew across the room behind me and crashed into the wall—and rushed to her side. Abel’s face was pale and his eyes were wide. I caught movement out of the corner of my eye and saw the sheriff rushing toward us.
“Help me down,” Susan said, grabbing onto my arm. “I need to lie down on the floor—on my left side.”
“Get her other arm,” I said to Abel. “Help me get her down.”
“I need a bucket,” Susan said, her teeth clenched. “Sheriff, for the love of God, get me a bucket!”
As Abel and I lowered Susan to the ground, the sheriff rushed out of the room. My hands shook and my heart pounded in my chest. Susan had a higher pain threshold than most people I knew, so if she was in this much pain it couldn’t be good. I was about to pray out loud for God to help her when we locked eyes. The muscles in her face relaxed for a brief moment and she winked as the left corner of her mouth curled up into a slight grin.
I sucked in a mouthful of air, quickly glanced at Abel. He hadn’t noticed. I suddenly realized what she was doing.
“I need a glass of water.” Susan moaned and clutched at her stomach. “Clint, please go tell the sheriff I need water.”
“Keep her comfortable,” I said to Abel, jumping to my feet. As I made my way across the room, I jerked my cell phone from my pocket and used a thumb to navigate to the camera feature. I stopped briefly at the corner of the small desk and, while Susan groaned loudly and begged God and Abel to make the pain stop, I flipped the fingerprint card over so I could see the front of it and took several snapshots of the rolled prints.
I was just tucking my phone away when I heard rumbling from the hallway. I strode toward the doorway and ran right into Sheriff Chandler as I turned the corner. The plastic bucket that had been clattering against the wall slipped from his hands and fell to the ground.
