Rising Darkness (8 page)

“We aren’t just letting John off the hook here, are we? If anyone is capable of cold blooded murder, it’s got to be that guy.”

“Well, if Dyer is supposed to be tailing Robin then he might have seen something about the deaths of Robin and his wife. The cops have had time to process the crime scene and the evidence by now. I have a friend who works in forensics. I’m going to see if they found anything. Maybe the killer got messy and left some clues this time.”

“I’m surprised they haven’t tried to pin that one on me, yet,” Joe said.

“Well, you have an alibi for that one. You have been at home with your girls or you’ve been hanging out with me. I’d say you are in the clear on that.”

When they got back to the car Alex called his source in forensics. She told him that the crime scene had been swept and they actually found a few pieces of evidence this time. They found a hair follicle and they found a partial print. It looks like the killer was aiming for Robin and had been surprised when Jess walked into the house. Robin had most likely never seen it coming, but Jess had tried to run based on the blood spatter patterns. She had been killed out of impulse and had fought like tiger, getting bits of hair and skin under her nails from the assailant.

“Wow, she scratched the bastard?” Alex asked.

“Well, she tried to, but it was very superficial and probably didn’t draw blood. All we got was a few skin cells and shreds of skin. Not quite enough for a DNA match, but the hair we found was definitely more than enough.”

“Great news. Do you have enough for a profile?”

“We didn’t get any matches in the database, so whoever it is may be a first time offender. They either haven’t been in trouble with the law before or they did petty stuff where the DNA was not recorded.”

“Ok, not quite what I was wanting to hear, but we will take it. What color was the hair that was found there?”

“It was dark brown in color.”

“Thanks, Shelly,” Alex said as he ended the call.

He told Joe what Shelly had said. Joe thought for a few moments about it all. He wasn’t sure they were one step closer to catching the killer or not, but it sounded like good news at least.

“Does John have a criminal record?” Joe asked.

“No, despite being an abusive psycho his record is surprisingly clean,” Alex replied.

“Shit. It seems like we take one step forward and two steps back here,” Joe said. He was no longer able to hide the frustration in his voice.

“Don’t lose heart here. We are getting close to something,” Alex replied.

“How can you be so sure? It seems like we have established a few possibilities but we don’t have anything where we can really seal the deal here. I can see my future becoming less and less bright all the time.”

Alex didn’t say anything as he drove off. Joe knew that he wanted to ease his mind, but there was really no way to do that right then.

****

Joe couldn’t sleep. He had been lying in bed for several hours staring at the ceiling and sleep just would not come to him. There were just too many things rolling around inside of his head for him to deal with at the moment. There were too many things that were just not adding up.

He wanted to think that John was the culprit, but they had no proof. If anyone was capable of committing these murders that he knew of then it would have been him. Alex said that with the murders of Robin and Jess they had some DNA evidence, but no one to match it too. This basically meant that the cops were going to twiddle their thumbs while they tried to match it to a suspect who would miraculously fall out of the sky.

Joe had asked Alex why they wouldn’t talk to the police and see if they would be interested in what they had found out, but Alex told him that the cops were really not going to bend over backwards to try to find a viable new suspect in this thing. It was almost as if they had been bought off some way.

Joe wondered if there was a way to get ahold of John’s DNA. He doubted that the obviously good natured man would succumb to a mouth swab or anything of the sort. The more he thought about John the more he wanted to kill that bastard. Joe had seldom really wanted to kill anyone in his life but an abusive wife beater like him who may have killed Tracy was someone that Joe was happy to fantasize about putting six feet deep in the ground. People like that did not deserve to be alive.

Joe rolled out of bed and put on a pair of sweats and a T shirt. He laced up his sneakers and decided that he needed to clear his head by going for a jog. He had never been one to be obsessive about exercise or working out, but he liked to jog a few times a week. Occasionally he had bouts with insomnia and jogging for just a few miles late at night seemed to do the trick for him.

He was careful not to wake the girls as he moved downstairs and slipped carefully out the door.

The night air felt good. It was the perfect time of year where it was not too warm and it was not too cool either. The nights were perfect and felt like an endless summer like he remembered from when he was a kid. Those were the best and most innocent times of his life and he often thought about how they had shaped his perception on the world.

It didn’t take long for him to break into a nice pace as he jogged along the street that he had lived on for several years. The huge estates and the perfectly manicured lawns were the things that one saw in Hollywood movies that really depicted the perfect life and the perfect community. It was anything but those things, but Joe loved it because he knew it could always be so much worse.

He ran past the end of his street and turned onto Davis Drive. He liked to venture out of the community at times, especially when he jogged. It was refreshing to see how the rest of the world lived and to be one of them, even if he was just passing through.

Joe often thought about what it would be like if he weren’t rich and if he had never been so driven to succeed at the work that he loved. He had not been born rich and he could have easily have gone on into the family business and wound up like his dad falling over dead of a heart attack at fifty-three. But he had other things in the cards for himself.

Joe almost didn’t see the shadowy figure leap in front of him. It happened so fast that he did not have time to be scared or to react at all as the burly figure brought the club down on his shoulder. He felt his whole body surge with pain as he was knocked to the side of the sidewalk. He landed rolling on his back, briefly knocking the air from his lungs, but he was thankful that his body instinctively rolled with the blow to soften it just a bit.

The burly figure came towards him quickly before Joe had time to gain his bearings, and Joe felt the pain in his back jolt throughout his body as the club came down on him again and again. He was hardly able to comprehend what was happening, but somehow he summoned the guts to throw himself into the man who was attacking him.

The man collapsed beneath him taken totally by surprise at the stamina of Joe. Without thinking Joe began to punch the man in the face repeatedly, hitting him hard in the jaw, the nose, and the eye. The man winced with pain but did not grunt. The blows almost seemed to be reflecting off him and it was tough to tell if he was even being hurt by it in the dark.

Suddenly Joe’s body was thrust backwards as the man pushed him hard. Joe rolled onto his back but was immediately kicked in the stomach. He felt his entire stomach lurch, trying to empty its contents as he struggled to find the air to breathe again.

That was when he saw the club on the ground. The man had dropped it during the scuffle. Joe grabbed it and swung it hard at the man, connecting with his nose, which busted open spraying blood everywhere. The man staggered backwards grasping his nose in pain. Joe threw his body at him and tackled the man to the ground. He reared back with the club and was just about to bash the man’s skull in when a car drove by, illuminating the two men in the headlights.

Joe saw for a second that the man he was fighting was John Myers. It was Heather’s husband. He had come to kill Joe. That split second of confusion was all that John needed as he slugged Joe hard upside the head, hitting him in the ear and the temple. The entire world went numb as a loud ringing sound vibrated throughout his entire consciousness.

Joe stumbled backwards clutching his head as John got up and ran away. Joe was not sure how a man who probably had a concussion and a broken nose was able to just walk away. The adrenaline must have been flowing through him pretty hard.

After a few minutes of reeling from the pain and wondering if the ringing in his ears would ever stop and if he had permanent damage to his eardrum, Joe realized what a gift this whole thing had actually been. As he limped back towards home cradling his possibly broken ribs and feeling his lips swell in several places where they had been mashed against his teeth, he realized that his prayers had actually been answered—he had John Myer’s DNA on the club.

He had to smile in spite of everything. He had to smile indeed.

“The asshole lawyered up.”

Detective Mitch Daniels slammed the door to the interrogation room and entered the control room. He lit up a cigarette ignoring the no smoking policy that was pretty much state wide and grabbed the lukewarm cup of coffee he had sitting on the counter.

Joe watched all of this with pained amusement. It was weird when you wanted to laugh, cry, and hit someone all at the same time. He had been pleasantly surprised by the fast turnaround between him reporting the incident where John Myers had tried to kill him on the city streets. The bastard had obviously been stalking him and watching his house, waiting for the right opportunity. The more he thought about it the angrier he became. His kids were home. What if the bastard had decided to break in and kill them all while they were asleep?

Joe had been lucky to get by with just a few nasty bruises and scrapes. There had not been any broken bones. John was not so lucky. He had a fractured jaw and a broken nose with a mild concussion. Joe had put up one hell of a fight and he was proud of it. He’d wanted to kill this piece of shit, but he was glad that he had not.

The forensics team was running the blood off the weapon that John had used and had taken more DNA from him since just for good measure. The motive that John had tried to kill Joe because he suspected that John had killed Tracy was enough for them to actually consider for a brief moment that Joe might not be the right man after all.

Of course the chief tried to play it off as John was just jealous that Joe and Alex had gone to see Heather. They had confirmed that with Dyer. He had the whole thing documented.

It would take a few days to test the DNA samples from John against those found at the murders of Robin and Jess Lydell. But the chief was still trying to say that the cases were all unrelated. He was damned determined to nail Joe to the wall for the murder of Tracy. But it didn’t really matter what the chief or the police thought; with this evidence in
place it would drum up feelings and thoughts of doubt in the eyes of the public and in the eyes of the potential jury. That was often enough to overturn cases Alex had told him. But Joe still did not like to leave anything like that to chance.

“He is guilty as sin. Anyone can see that if this guy would try to kill Joe then there is no telling who he would try to kill,” Alex said.

“Enough of your stupid theories,” Chief Caulson said.

“Wow, I have never seen a cop have it in more for an innocent man in my life,” Alex said with a big grin on his face. He loved to push Caulson’s buttons and Joe loved to see the anger flashing in the man’s stupid face.

Caulson stepped forward and glared at Alex. “Let’s get something straight here; I am a good man. I deal with the facts and I don’t formulate opinions or conspiracy theories that are not based on solid fact and solid police work. So don’t go around saying that I am just willing to convict an innocent man for no reason.”

Alex laughed as he and Joe stepped out of the control room. They left the police station satisfied that at least some of the negative light had been cast off of Joe for the time being.

“He is right thought,” Joe said. “There is nothing but circumstantial stuff linking the Lydell’s case to Tracy’s.”

“Sometimes that is all it takes in the mind of a jury.”

“I guess it depends on the jury I get, right?” Joe said.

“Well, most people don’t realize that but that is often the most crucial thing in any murder case. But we are going to try to keep you out of that court room all together.”

“Well, we are running out of time. I don’t think we are going to dig up anything else that will help us. It seems like every new thing we find out just leads to another mystery that has almost nothing to do with Tracy’s death.”

“It is all related somehow; we just have to figure out how. There is a missing piece somewhere.”

Joe sighed as the two men drove away.

****

“So, how are classes going, Elena?” Joe asked.

Elena grabbed the plates off the dinner table and began rinsing them off in the sink before she placed them in the dish washer. She didn’t answer for a moment, and Joe stared at her intently. He was trying to see through the façade the girl had so carefully constructed on her life. He knew that losing your mother to a freak accident when you were very young was tough. He had no idea how she felt because both of his parents were still alive and well, but he had tried to sympathize and he had done his best to compensate for the fact that she didn’t have a real mother anymore. Kirsten had thrived remarkably well, but Elena just seemed to closed off to everything and everyone. He wondered how they were both able to process things in such a very different way. It was not something he would ever wish on his worst enemy to lose a parent when you were so young. To lose just one parent really rocked your world and gave you a shaky foundation. You learned quickly that there was no one in the world you could really rely on but yourself because if you started to rely on people they would eventually go away and you would not be able to lean on them anymore.