Chapter Twenty-Two

The main desk at the local police station was manned by the same bored officer who had taken Ashara’s statement just a few days ago.

He snapped to attention, though, when Stephen marched in, plopped a pile of files on the counter, and announced, “I know who killed Molly McClatchey and I’ve got the evidence to prove it.”

The officer, taken aback, almost stammered. “The police have the investigation under control,” he finally managed to spit out. But he started to reach for the files, anyway.

“No, you don’t. Because you don’t know everything that I know. But what I know is right here in these files.” He leaned on the counter, crossing his arms over the file folders.

“And as soon as you get a detective in here, I’ll be happy to go over it with him.” He smiled politely.

The officer stared at him for a few seconds and then stepped away to a phone on another desk further back from the counter.

I stayed next to Stephen, but I heard a few words of the muttered phone conversation. Words like “maybe a nut-job” and “could be crazy,” but also words like “but I think you ought to take a look at what he’s got.”

Good, I thought. Maybe now the right men will go to jail.

The officer returned to the counter. “Detective Green will be here in just a few moments. If you’ll have a seat, he’ll be happy to see you when he arrives.” He gestured toward a couple of wooden benches. Stephen sat down. I floated back and forth in front of him in a sort of ghostly form of pacing.

“Don’t forget to tell him about the Nazi-Aryan-white-supremacist bullshit newsletter in Howard’s house,” I said.

“And be sure to find some way to let him know that the unidentified blood in Molly’s bathroom is Howard’s. Tell him you overheard it in a conversation or something. I don’t know if they can use it, but you can at least get them started on figuring out a way to get a DNA sample from him. Oh. And don’t forget to tell them. . .”

Stephen interrupted me—not in words, because the officer behind the counter was watching Stephen out of the corner of his eye as he ostensibly filled out paperwork. So Stephen faked a sneeze. Only it sounded a whole lot like “Shut up!”

I got the message. Dropping to the seat beside him, I said, “I just babble when I’m nervous. Sorry.”

He patted the bench where my hand was, and for once I didn’t mind the chill of another person’s body passing through mine. He meant it to be comforting, and it was.

* * *

Detective Green came through the door looking harried. His light brown hair stood up on end as if he’d been running his hands through it all too often. The officer at the counter pointed at Stephen. Stephen stood up.

“Detective Green,” the detective said, sticking his hand out.

“Stephen Davenport,” Stephen said, clasping the proffered hand firmly.

“So,” said Green, “I hear you have some information on the McClatchey case?”

Stephen picked up the pile of folders and handed them to Green, whose eyes widened at their heft.

“This is going to take a while, isn’t it?” Green asked.

Stephen nodded. “Probably so.”

“Let’s go back to my desk, then.”

I followed behind them. Green’s desk was a clutter of paper, but he stacked it all haphazardly on one side and set the folders down in the middle of the cleared space. He gestured to a chair across from the desk for Stephen and pulled a notebook out from the middle of the now-teetering pile. He flipped it open to a fresh page and sat down, pen in hand.

An hour later, they were going back over all the details for the second—and in some cases, the third—time.

“So you started looking into this because . . .” Green trailed off.

“Because I knew Rick couldn’t have been the one to kill Molly.”

“And you suspected this Howard guy because you saw Jeffrey McClatchey hand off a briefcase to him.”

It wasn’t a question, but Stephen answered it anyway.

“Yes.”

“And why didn’t you report this to the police?”

Stephen gave a short bark of a laugh. “Hello, officer?” he said, holding his hand up to his ear like a phone. “I just saw one guy give a briefcase to another guy. I need you to check it out.”

Even Green, who was looking more and more exhausted, cracked a smile at that one.

“Okay, okay. So we wouldn’t have done anything. So instead you decided to check it out yourself by breaking into a closed crime scene and two private residences.”

“Yes.”

“Even though you knew those were criminal acts in and of themselves.”

“Yes.”

“What made this so important to you?”

“Rick is my boss and my friend. He’s my friend who signs my paycheck. He goes to prison; I lose my job. And he didn’t do it.”

Green nodded. “Tell me again about the money.”

“I think it came from a 1940’s bank robbery in Atlanta. Fourth Federal. If you run a check on the serial number of the five-hundred-dollar bill in there, I think you’ll see I’m right.”

Green pulled the bill out and looked at it appraisingly.

“And Howard and McClatchey arranged to kill Molly and frame her husband in order to get the money and keep it from becoming general knowledge that Molly was part black.”

“Yep. That’s it.”

“Because Molly was going to set up a scholarship in her grandparents’ names?”

“Yes.”

“Why didn’t she just give the money back to the bank?”

“Rick says she checked into it. The bank was insured and paid back long ago. No one lost their life savings from it. The statute of limitations had run out on the robbery.” Stephen shrugged. “Rick said that Molly wanted to put the money to good use.”

Green leaned back in his seat. “How do I know you didn’t kill her off to get the money? How do I know that you aren’t just coming in here to frame them? Or just to save your boss because you’ve got a beef with his brother? You two are co-workers, right?”

Stephen laughed again. “You’ve got all the evidence I have. It’s right there in the folders. And you were already suspicious of Jeffrey McClatchey, or you wouldn’t have arrested him this morning. All you have to do is make the connection between McClatchey and Howard by getting the list of subscribers to that newsletter. And if you can find McClatchey’s half of the cash, it would be even better. Last I saw, Howard’s half was in the rolltop desk in his living room.”

“So tell me again: why didn’t you take the newsletter from Howard’s home?”

“Because I didn’t know it was important at the time. I grabbed the bill from the rolltop desk and saw the publication but didn’t realize it could connect him to Jeffrey.”

Green shook his head. “You’re not telling me the whole truth,” he said, his eyes narrowing.

Stephen sighed. “What else can I do to convince you?”

Green leaned forward intently. “Give us a DNA sample.”

Stephen stared at him, confused.

“Oh!” I said excitedly. “They’re trying to figure out where that extra blood drop came from. It’s Howard’s. Say yes, Stephen, say yes!”

“Okay,” said Stephen, shrugging. “Sure.”

Green tilted his head and looked at Stephen thoughtfully. “You know this might place you at the crime scene.”

Stephen shook his head. “Not possible. You might find something in the study where I searched for the files or the master closet where I hid to go through them, but you’re not going to find anything around where Molly was killed. Or . . .”—he paused, reluctant to say the word—“or dismembered because I wasn’t there.”

Green picked up the phone and made a call, asking someone to bring over a DNA swab kit. Then he turned back to Stephen. “You know what?” he said. “I actually believe you. I believe everything you’ve told me. But there’s something important you’re leaving out.” He shook his head.

“And whatever it is, it’s important to you. And that makes me suspicious.”

“Make it about Ashara,” I suggested.

Stephen chewed on his bottom lip and looked at the ground as if trying to decide whether or not to answer. Hell, for all I knew, he really was trying to decide whether or not to answer. I’m sure he didn’t really want to drag Ashara into this if he could avoid it.

Finally, his shoulders slumped for a second, and then he took a deep breath, preparing himself to speak.

“My girlfriend was with me for some of this,” he said.

“I didn’t want to drag her into it, in case I got in trouble for the breaking and entering.”

Girlfriend, I thought. He’s calling her his girlfriend now. Interesting. I’d have to pass that little tidbit on to Maw-Maw at some point when the other two weren’t around.

“What’s your girlfriend’s name?” he asked, pen poised over the paper.

“Ashara Jones,” he said.

Green made a note.

“Tell him that Howard knows about Ashara,” I urged.

“Actually,” said Stephen, “there should already be a report on file. Clifford Howard saw her at one point, and he’s been kind of following her around. She came in a few days ago and reported him trying to run her off the road.”

Green looked at him hard. “A man you suspected of brutally killing Molly McClatchey has been after your girlfriend and you just now come in to tell us about it all?”

Stephen shook his head. “You wouldn’t have believed us before. We didn’t have enough evidence.”

Green nodded—almost unconsciously, it seemed—and began flipping through the files. He picked up Mary McClatchey’s letter to her grandson James. He read through it, nodding again.

“Okay,” he said. “Wait here for a moment.”

He stood up and headed toward the back of the office, where he pulled a file out of an enormous filing cabinet.

He came back and sat down, flipping the file open in front of Stephen.

In it were full-color pictures of the crime scene. On the top of the stack was one of Molly, lying in a pool of blood, her joints separated from each other by inches.

Stephen’s face blanched, and he swallowed convulsively. “Oh, God,” he said, and closed his eyes, turning his face away from the photographs.

“If you’re right, this is the monster who’s been chasing your girlfriend,” Green said. “You should have come to us earlier.”

“She tried,” Stephen said, meeting Green’s eyes squarely and avoiding looking at the picture. “She put in a report that the guy tried to run her down.” His voice grew angry. “No one followed up on it. No one from this station even called her. No one.”

Green nodded and flipped the folder closed again.

“Point taken.”

He moved away from the desk again to put the folder back in its drawer. On the way back, he stopped at a phone and made another call.

He leaned back in his seat again, tapping his desk.

“Someone will be here in a few minutes to take that DNA sample.”

Stephen nodded. “Fine. But you might want to take a sample of Howard’s DNA while you’re at it.”

Green smiled. “Oh, we’ll get to that. But we might have to have to get that subscribers’ list before we’ll have enough for a warrant. I’ve got a call into a judge right now.

We’ll see what he thinks.”

At that moment, I started getting a strange feeling in my middle. A rubber-band feeling.

“Oh, shit,” I said. “Something’s wrong. Maw-Maw’s—” and then pop! I was no longer in the police station.

For a moment, I wasn’t entirely sure where I was. It was dark, and I was bouncing around a lot. Then I realized I was in the back seat of Jeffrey Howard’s SUV. Clifford Howard was driving, gripping the wheel tightly and staring at the road intently.

I heard a moan come from behind me. I turned around to see Maw-Maw and Ashara, both lying in the back of the SUV, their hands bound behind and tied to their feet by a running rope—hogtied, I thought in horror, remembering the rodeos I’d gone to when I was still alive in Texas. Their mouths were covered by strips of duct tape.

And I had no way to get back to Stephen to tell him what had happened.