Heat (Tortured Heroes Book 2) by Jayne Blue

Author:Jayne Blue [Blue, Jayne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Nokay Press, LLC
Published: 2016-07-18T21:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fourteen

Mitch

By mid-morning, the task force assembled in the conference room outside my office. I’d sent three texts to Stella that she hadn’t returned. I would have been out of my mind crazy from it, but Lori Walling had checked in at the top of the hour to tell me everything was under control. Stella was still at the hospital. I didn’t have time to get more information about her neighbor’s condition before Agent Caulkins and Stan entered the room. Detective Chapman followed Stan in. Stan called earlier and said he wanted to bring him in for the day because we were all fairly certain the incident at Stella’s house was at least loosely connected.

“Please tell me you have good news,” I asked. Chapman and Caulkins looked at each other then back at me. “From either of you,” I clarified.

Chapman sat down first and reached across the table to grab the carafe of crappy coffee Stan kept on hand. “Not much,” he said. “One of the neighbors remembers seeing a dark-colored sedan passing through the neighborhood about ten minutes before the shooting. She says she saw it go down the street three times and she got a partial plate. So far nothing’s turned up and she has no idea whether that vehicle was involved in the shooting. Everyone heard the shots, but nobody looked out the window until afterward. Still waiting to talk more to the son, the one who threw Stella out of the way.”

I nodded. “She doesn’t think you’ll get much out of him.”

Chapman nodded. “Maybe not, but he seemed sharp. Your girl doing okay?”

I stiffened at the characterization. Stan put a hand up and smiled. “Stella’s good,” he answered for me. “Thank God.”

“What about you?” I looked at Caulkins.

He gave me a grim nod then sat back hard in his seat. “We’ve had a break. That’s why I wanted to meet. I mean, even before I knew about this incident at Stella Terry’s house. Actually, it came quicker than I would have expected. There’s a clerk down in records at the State Police office in Royal Oak whose story didn’t quite hold up. Our investigator found some of her answers evasive. He pressed her and she cracked a little. She gave us a name. There’s a detective down there she says has made some requests of her pertaining to some of the clearance checks they’ve done recently that seemed a little odd.”

“In what way?” I asked.

“Nothing overt. Just having her run repeats on some stuff claiming there was a foul-up with some of the software. It could be something, it could be nothing. But what concerns me is one of the clearance checks he wanted repeated was Stella Terry’s.”

“Shit, Caulkins, that sounds like something. You have a name for this detective?”

Caulkins nodded. “Larry Edwards. He transferred in from a post in New Mexico a few months ago. That’s the other thing I thought you’d find interesting.”

I sure as hell did. Some of Stella’s bogus drug charges were initiated by a New Mexico court.

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