The Lyons Den by Kendra Norman-Bellamy

Author:Kendra Norman-Bellamy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Urban Books
Published: 2011-12-12T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fifteen

“You had to do what?” Stuart looked at Chiefs Overstreet and Reinhart as though both men had lost their minds. For Stuart, the past few days since Saturday had been some of the happiest in recent years, and the past few nights since that time had been some of the most restful. Now, with six words, Chief Reinhart was threatening to erase all of the good from the past six days.

“We had to let him go.” Chief Reinhart repeated the words as though Stuart’s question wasn’t rhetorical and he really hadn’t heard him the first time.

“When did—? How could—? Why would—?” Stuart babbled. “I thought we had the evidence we needed to charge him.”

“No, Lyons,” Deputy Chief Overstreet said. “We had enough to justify our need to pick him up and hold him for questioning. But that was just circumstantial evidence. We hoped it would lead us to concrete evidence to indict him, but that didn’t happen. His alibi panned out, and we couldn’t continue to hold him just because we still had our personal doubts. He was released on his own accord this morning.”

“So you admit it,” Stuart said, pulling up on his belt and tucking his starched shirt deeper in his pants. “You do believe Joe is the one that’s been doing all this.”

“He’s not been personally doing it,” Chief Reinhart said. “But there’s still a possibility that he could have had it done. Truth is, it doesn’t matter what we believe. We need proof.”

“But when you guys picked him up, Sergeant Bowden said that Joe had missed work on the same Monday that the crime was carried out. He was a prime suspect. Why couldn’t he have done it?”

Before answering, Chief Reinhart sipped from a steaming cup of coffee, taking special care not to burn his tongue. “Like Chief Overstreet said, our prime suspect, as you call him, had an alibi to justify his whereabouts. We checked it out, and it’s legit. The guy definitely has a chip on his shoulder. He confessed to not being your biggest fan and even admitted to being ticked off that his ex-wife walked out on him. But there’s no crime in either of those things. You know the law, Lieutenant Lyons. If we’re going to hold him, we need substantiated proof that he had something to do with the constant threats and the defacing of official government property. We don’t have that, so we had to let him go.”

“What about the fact that I didn’t receive one letter or a single threat of any kind from the infamous Dr. A.H. Satan while Joe was in custody?” Stuart was grasping at straws. He knew what the response was going to be before he even posed the question.

“Mr. King was held for five days, Lieutenant,” Chief Overstreet said, placing his own coffee mug on the table in the precinct conference room where they talked. “Even before we picked up him up, there had been times that you’d gone for a five-day stretch, and sometimes longer, without being hounded.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.