Blood Trail Read online

  Blood Trail

  a John Jordan Mystery, Book 18

  Michael Lister

  Pulpwood Press

  Copyright © 2018 by Michael Lister

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  ISBN: 978-1-947606-10-4

  Edited by Aaron Bearden

  Design by Tim Flanagan

  For Tony Simmons

  a gifted wordsmith, an insightful artist, a person of great integrity.

  I’m honored to call you friend. I’m grateful to have been able to do so for so long.

  Contents

  Blood Trail

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Also by Michael Lister

  Blood Trail

  1

  “Who was that?” Anna whispers.

  Her voice has that sweet, sleepy quality that is irresistibly soft and sexy.

  I replace the phone on the bedside table and turn back toward her. “Reggie,” I say.

  She glances at the red numbers on the ceiling—the time of 3:43 A.M. being projected from the clock on her bedside table.

  Our bedroom is dim, the only illumination coming from the blood-red digital readout on the ceiling and the small nightlight inside the master bath.

  The room is cool and breezy, the constant swirl of cold air coming from a window unit and box fan, which we run all night, every night, even though we have central air conditioning. We both sleep better when our bedroom is just this side of arctic.

  Because of the unhinged and threatening actions of Chris Taunton, Anna’s ex, and my own personal trauma of recently working a child murder case, we have moved our girls’ beds into our room—Taylor’s baby bed and Johanna’s big girl bed, which they are sound asleep in now.

  “What is it?” she asks.

  “Chris,” I say. “He’s dead. Been murdered.”

  Chris is not only Anna’s ex but also Taylor’s father.

  I reach over and put my hand on her shoulder not because I think she needs comfort, but because she might need support. It’s shocking, if not completely unsurprising or unwelcome news.

  She doesn’t say anything.

  “You okay?”

  “I’m not sure how to feel about it,” she says. “I assumed I’d feel nothing . . . but . . . I don’t know. It’s strange. I do feel something. Just not sure what it is.”

  I caress her arm beneath the covers.

  “It’s a jolt,” I say, though I’m not sure it is. She doesn’t seem particularly surprised. “There’s no right or wrong way to feel about it. Feel what you feel without judging yourself or asking what you’re supposed to feel.”

  She nods. “Thanks. Part of what I feel is relief.”

  “Of course,” I say.

  Not only had Chris tried to have Anna and I killed, he had been stalking us for months, and had recently broken into our home with a gun and taken Anna and the girls hostage.

  “It’s like . . . like waking from a bad dream but still being affected by it,” she says. “I want to believe it was a nightmare and it’s over, but I can’t yet.”

  That nightmare is over. Chris’s death ensures that it truly is, but it almost certainly means another one is about to begin.

  I’ve just driven back from Atlanta and I’m exhausted. I feel myself shake awake when she starts talking again.

  “No more stalking,” she says. “No more threats. No more wondering if he’s about to break in again and . . .”

  Images of Chris holding a gun to Johanna’s sweet little head fill my mind. As do ones of me killing him with my own bare, blood-spattered hands.

  “Taylor has a chance at a normal life now.”

  “We’re gonna make sure she has an exceptional one,” I say.

  At that Anna begins to cry.

  It starts as a soft, intermittent line of tears streaming down her face but quickly turns into sobs.

  I slide over and pull her into me, wrapping my arms around her and holding her tightly as her body convulses.

  We stay like this for a while.

  I feel as if I’m absorbing all the emotions being released from her being—all the sadness and fear and dread and embarrassment and anger and rage and frustration and disappointment and betrayal and relief and happiness. Everything she has been carrying around for so long is finally flowing out of her. Like a river flooding its banks, she can no longer contain the torrent of feeling that has been rising, building, expanding for these many months.

  “I’m sorry,” she says between sniffles and sobs. “I know you have to go.”

  I shake my head. “I don’t have to go anywhere.”

  She stops crying as suddenly as she started and pulls back enough to look at me. “But you’ve got to get up to the crime scene.”

  I shake my head. “I can’t work this case—even if I wanted to.”

  “You have to,” she says.

  “Not only do I have zero desire to work it, it’d be a conflict of interest. I could never—a defense attorney would shred a case where an investigator worked the murder of his wife’s ex.”

  “But—”

  “Think about all that Chris has done to us,” I say. “All the threats and harassment and attempts at murder.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Chances are someone close to us, who cares about us, killed Chris for us,” I say.

  “That’s exactly why you have to work the case,” she says.

  2

  The little town of Wewahitchka is eerily empty, its streets appearing abandoned in the thick fog.

  Nothing is stirring, not a soul in sight, only darkness and a few fog-muted smudges of illumination, the red flashing of the stoplight at the intersection of 22 and 71 seeming to warn of far more than oncoming traffic.

  Before leaving home, I had pulled out my phone to call Dad or Merrill to ask one of them to come guard Anna and the girls, but realized with Chris dead there was no need.

  Chris is dead.

  The reality of it—if it is indeed real—has yet to fully register, but the potential implications have. If it’s true it solves certain problems for us—but only as it creates new ones.

  I take a left onto Highway 71 and head out of the deserted downtown. My destination is the Dead Lakes Recreational Area about a mile north of Wewa at the end of Gary Rowell Road.

  The recreational area, once a state park, is more a campground than anything else, with sites for both tents and RVs. The primary park is on the left side of Gary Rowell, which in addition to camp sites, has nature trails, a playground, picnic pavilions—all around a two acre pond with a fountain at its center and two docks, one covered, extending out into it.

  On the right side of Gary Rowell are a smaller pond and a boat launch into the Dead Lakes.

  The park is far enough out of town to be its own little world, but close enough that it’s convenient for locals to use—though I’m not sure how many actually do on a regular basis. Every Halloween the high school puts on a fundraiser at the park called Haunted Trails, and it seems as though the entire town turns out for what is essentially a very long haunted house in the woods along the park’s nature trails. Anna and I attended it last year and absolutely loved it—not just the haunted trail itself but seeing friends and neighbors, hanging out around campfires, taking the girls on a hayride. We also regularly bring Taylor and Johanna to play on the playground and for family cookouts and picnics.

  Recently the park had garnered national attention among a certain narrow, niche segment of the population when an elderly man swore he saw Bigfoot on one of the trails near the campground. The story was published on the Backpackerverse website with the headline: A Kind Old Man Swears Bigfoot Lurks At This Florida Campground. In it, the seventy-five year old Michigan man, who is an avid birdwatcher, describes gazing into the woods and seein
g something huge pass between two willow trees—something huge that moved fast, was covered in dense, brown hair, and smelled like a wet, dirty dog and rotten meat.

  I have been visiting the park since childhood and though I’ve never seen Bigfoot, I have had some exciting adventures, some great times, and some meaningful experiences at it. I hope what has happened to Chris won’t change that.

  My phone rings, the vibration in my left pocket in the quiet car on the dark night at nearly four in the morning startling.

  I glance down long enough to see it’s Merrill, then answer.

  “Ding dong, the bitch is dead,” he says.

  I laugh. “That’s what I hear,” I say, wondering how he already knows. “Wouldn’t have taken you for a Wizard of Oz fan.”

  “That’s what that’s from? Never knew. Just hear shit and repeat it.”

  “And put your own spin on it,” I add.

  “Anybody in this world ever been a bitch, it was him. Gonna break in your house and put a gun to your little girl’s head—and that after months of harassing y’all, and that after trying to kill your ass. He a bitch.”

  “You won’t get any argument from me,” I say.

  I cross over West Arm Bridge and can see enough from the spill of my headlights and the street lamps to tell the lakes and therefore the rivers are very high right now.

  The beautifully haunting Dead Lakes is a nearly seven-thousand-acre flooded hardwood forest that occurred when the Appalachicola River drifted over and blocked the Chipola River downstream, submerging a huge swath of the cypress swamp and killing the trees, which now rise out of the black, tannic water like the jagged bones of an ancient graveyard.

  Merrill says, “I’m hoping you and ol’ Sheriff Reg got sense enough to know whoever put the bitch out of our misery did the world a favor and deserves to be left the hell alone.”

  “You tryin’ to tell me somethin’?” I ask.

  “Just did.”

  “Just wanted to make sure I wasn’t missing any crucial subtext I was meant to get.”

  “Never known you to,” he says. “The question alone shows your perceptive ass ain’t missed anything this time neither.”

  As soon as I end the call with Merrill, I call the Gulf County jail administrator and ask him to get confirmation that Randa Raffield is still in custody—and was last night when Chris was killed.

  3

  “What’re you doing here?” Reggie asks.

  “I’m not,” I say.

  “Good. ’Cause you can’t be.”

  She has walked over to where I’m standing in the dark, some fifty feet or so from the circle of light around the crime scene.

  It’s a hot, dark July night. The air is thick and humid, still and stale, nothing stirring beneath the starless sky. Beyond the bowl of the small lake, the campers and tents on the other side are illuminated by the faint white light of a security lamp and the random dots of nightlights left on both inside and outside the campers. Near one of the tents the embers of a campfire continue to glow.

  “Actually, I’m glad you’re here,” she says. “We’re gonna need your help with this one. You’ll just have to be unofficial and way, way in the background.”

  “You saying it’s not straightforward or obvious who did it,” I say.

  Most homicides are. Usually there’s no big mystery on how a person was murdered, why, and by whom, but occasionally you catch a baffling murder that presents far more questions than can be answered by even the most thorough of investigations. I’ve worked both types over the years, but have specialized in the latter.

  She nods. “I’m saying without your help, this one’s likely to go unsolved.”

  “Would that be a bad thing?”

  “Not necessarily, no, but . . . suspicion is going to fall on you and your family first and our department soon after. I’ve already heard talk. Now . . . don’t get me wrong, it’s sympathetic. People are on your side. Everybody understands why you can’t let a guy break into your home and put a gun to your little girl’s head, but do you want your family to live under that kind of cloud for the rest of your life? I think a big part of what we’ve got to do is prove you and Anna and your friends and family didn’t do it, as well as figure out who did.”

  “And what if one of us did?” I ask.

  She turns and looks at me, and though I can barely see her in the darkness, I can feel the intensity of her penetrative gaze.

  After a long moment, she finally shakes her head. “I . . . I’m not . . . I don’t know then. I really don’t. But I’d think it’s better if we find out. Either way—no matter who did it—it’s better if we find out than some other agency. ’Cause if we don’t or it looks like we’re not giving this case our best effort, then FDLE will step in and they’ll be the ones not only conducting the investigation but slappin’ the cuffs on who they think did it. And that could very well be you or Anna.”

  I think about what she has said, but only for a moment.

  In an instant I am thinking of Anna, hearing her say earlier in the evening before the phone call came that Chris wasn’t going to be a problem for us any longer, hearing her say, after the phone call came, that I needed to get up instead of over to the crime scene, as if she knew where the crime scene was. If she had assumed Chris was killed at his house, as I first did, she would have used the word over, but she had instead used up—the word I would expect her to use about the Dead Lakes Campground, where his body was actually found and where the crime scene actually is. Did she know? If so, how? I can think of only two ways.

  “Regardless of who did it,” she says, “regardless of how much it needed to be done . . . aren’t we—your family and friends and our department—better off if we conduct the investigation?”

  I continue to think about all the implications of the case and my involvement.

  “I owe you, John,” she says. “Big time. And I’ll do whatever you want me to, but I’m reconciled to the fact that I’m going to be a one-term sheriff, so I don’t have to calculate the politics or perceptions of my decisions, which is very freeing. Everything I’m saying, I’m saying because I want to do what’s best for you, for all of us. I’m calculating the people, not the politics, but like I said . . . I owe you. I’ll do whatever you want, but if at all possible I’d like to avoid looking inept or foolish or corrupt.”

  4

  “Take me through it,” I say.

  Reggie smiles and nods, knowing my request means I plan to work the case from the shadows like she wants me to.

  We are waiting for the FDLE crime scene unit to arrive—the only job until then securing the area, protecting evidence.

  “Dispatch gets an anonymous call,” she says, “but as we’re responding to it, Chris’s dad calls from Tallahassee, says Chris called him and his mom repeatedly saying he was dying and needed their help.”

  “I thought Chris’s mom was dead and he didn’t speak to his dad,” I say.

  “His dad said he only calls them when he’s high or desperate, but this time he sounded sober and genuinely hurt and scared. His folks don’t live together. Divorced decades ago. Think he called both of them over and over. Chris’s mom is in a nursing home and kept calling his dad until he finally called us.”