Page 5 of Maverick Detective Dad
That was the million-dollar question, and he didn’t have anywhere near a million-dollar answer. “Her body was only discovered yesterday so I’m at the preliminary stage of the investigation. I don’t have any suspects, only a few persons of interest. Jill’s drug dealer and a couple of ex-boyfriends.”
With Jill’s drug abuse and checkered past, it was going to take him a while to work through everything to narrow down a motive and then suspects.
Noah paused and decided to lay this all out for her in the hopes that she’d hear something he might have missed. “Jill was on and off drugs since she was a teenager. She lost custody of her daughter, got clean and messed up enough to lose custody again.”
“She abused the girl?” Everly asked.
“Yeah. Abuse and neglect. Nothing that required the girl to be hospitalized, thank God.” But enough to ensure she’d need a whole lot of therapy. “The daughter is twenty-one now, and she has an alibi for the time frame of the murder. She was at a movie with a group of friends.”
Everly stayed quiet a moment. “Tell me about the drug supplier and the exes.”
He pulled up the photos of the three men. Mug shots, and Everly could no doubt see that all three looked like the thugs they were.
“They’ve all been arrested multiple times for assault and other charges,” Noah explained. “These are men who use their fists to settle disputes. Other than the cut on her thigh that severed her femoral artery and a slight puncture mark where the killer drugged her, Jill didn’t have any other injuries.”
Noah knew Everly was trying to wrap her mind around this, trying to make the pieces fit. Since he was doing the same, he pulled up Jill’s arrest record and went through it. Again. In the past twenty-four hours, he’d read and reread it at least a half dozen times.
And then something hit him.
Not the words of the previous police reports. But what wasn’t there.
“No jail time,” Noah muttered.
Of course, he’d noticed that before, but now he had to wonder if it was important. Jill had been arrested three times. Once as a juvenile for possession and use of drugs, and she’d been sent to court-mandated rehab. There’d been another drug arrest five years later as an adult, followed by more rehab that’d kept her from seeing the inside of a cell. A third arrest for neglecting and abusing her daughter which had led to the child being removed from her custody. Jill had gotten yet more court-mandated counseling and probation for that one.
“No jail time,” Everly repeated, her gaze skirting over the screen to read the reports.
Noah saw, and felt the exact moment that Everly froze, and he could have sworn that everything in the air came to a dead stop. He hadn’t expected her to pick up on the same thread he had, but that’s obviously what she’d done.
“I didn’t get jail time,” she added. Both her tone and expression went stark.
“Because it was an accident,” he quickly reminded her.
Everly shook her head. “I was the one driving that night.”
“And I was the one who distracted you.”
He’d done that by kissing her while she was driving back from the make-out spot by the creek where they’d had sex. So, yeah, they’d both been distracted, careless even, and because of it, a woman was dead. During that distracting kiss, Everly had swerved into the oncoming lane and had hit Helen Fleming’s car. Helen, who hadn’t been wearing a seat belt, died at the scene.
“Is it possible that what happened fourteen years ago is the reason I got the threat?” Everly came out and asked.
“Not likely.” But since it was one possible explanation for what was going on—one thin possible explanation—Noah opened the statewide crime database. He’d already checked it for victims matching Jill’s description and the method of her murder and had gotten way too many hits that he was still going through. Now he added a search for murders that’d happened where the victim had received a box from an unknown sender.
And he got two hits.
That put a knot in his gut, but he had a quick look at both cases. One male murdered in the Houston area and a woman in Kerrville, about an hour away from here. Both had died from stab wounds. Both had been drugged. Both, stripped of their clothes. Just like Jill.
Hell.
“The man, Delbert Washington, was killed two months ago,” Everly said, reading it along with him. “There’s no photo of the box he received, and one wasn’t found at the scene. His neighbor reported he’d gotten one because the delivery guy had left it with him when Mr. Washington wasn’t home. That happened the day before the victim was killed.”
“Here’s the description of the box itself.” Noah pointed out, causing his gut to tighten even more. Because the description matched the one left on Everly’s porch. Still, he reminded himself that it could all be a coincidence. “There was nothing in the box.”
However, there had been something in the second box, the one delivered to the female victim, Winona Billings. It had contained a typed note with one sentence, “You’ll die for what you did.”
So, a threat very similar to Everly’s.
After he did some silent cursing, Noah again went searching through the database, and this time he dug into the pasts of the two victims. It didn’t take him long to find connections he hadn’t wanted to be there.
