The Blood-Dimmed Tide (John Joran Mysteries Book 22) Page 11

  “We were thinking this before he said anything,” Arnie says.

  “John and I are close,” Reggie says. “And it’s true that I lean on him—maybe more than I should—but you two are not being left out and John is certainly not getting all the good cases. I’m sorry if it seems that way. I’ll try to do better at communicating with you about . . . well, everything.”

  “We’d really appreciate that,” Arnie says.

  “We would,” Darlene says. “And that’s something that’s needed to happen for a long time now. We should’ve said something sooner.”

  “And that’s on us,” Arnie adds.

  “But the real reason we wanted to talk tonight,” Darlene says, “the reason we asked you to get out of bed and come down here is . . . We believe John is investigating some of our cases behind our backs. And we don’t think this is the first time it’s happened. Now, those other issues—y’all not communicating with us and John getting all the plum assignments . . . that’s one thing, but . . . to have our investigations reinvestigated behind our backs . . . well, that’s another. It’s disrespectful and insulting and . . .”

  Reggie starts to say something, but Darlene isn’t quite finished.

  “And I hate to say it . . .” she says, “but feel like it has to be said. Isn’t John on trial in another county for . . . well, involving himself in other people’s cases?”

  I think about what she’s saying, and perhaps she’s right. Even if I was asked, it was another cop’s case in another jurisdiction.

  “I’m glad you have both expressed what you’re feeling,” Reggie says. “I wish you would’ve done it sooner and at the office, but . . . regardless . . . I’m glad it’s out in the open.”

  “We did it here tonight because we believe he’s here reinvestigating one of our cases,” Darlene says.

  “Okay,” Reggie says, “in no particular order: Do yourselves a favor and don’t listen to Raymond Blunt—or any other busybodies like him. John and I will both be more mindful to include you two in discussions and communicate to you what’s going on and why. But the truth is . . . John doesn’t just get good cases. He makes his cases good. And part of how he does that is through hard work and his lifetime of experience and not blaming others and not being so insecure he won’t ask for help or input. And the times anyone has looked at his work, he not only listened to what they have to say but he’s reconsidered the evidence and his handling of it himself. See . . . that’s the thing that bothers me most about what you’re saying. You two ask John for help all the time. All the time. You just want it on your own terms and with you still controlling the investigation, getting credit. How many cases has John helped you on that he let you take all the credit for? And this bullshit about interfering in someone else’s case is what he’s on trial for . . . that’s not just untrue it’s low—beneath even the most insecure officer. John was asked to help and he got both my and the sheriff of Potter County’s permission, and doing what he did, acting responsibly and even heroically, has cost him far more than you can even imagine. And as far as your current cases . . . John isn’t reinvestigating them. He’s—at my request—seeing if there’s a link between any of these cases. That’s a parallel and separate and different investigation—one that I was going to tell you about in the morning at our meeting. Guess I should’ve done it this evening when it came about. That’s on me. Sorry. I thought in the morning would be plenty soon enough. Now, I’m gonna cut you some slack because we’re all stressed and in shock and overworked and overwhelmed, but . . . but if you feel that . . . even given the current circumstances we’re dealing with, the environment we’re all working in, that your investigative work can’t withstand another set of eyes, well, maybe you’re in the wrong line of work. And if it happens again, I can assure you that you’re in the wrong department.”

  “I didn’t mean—” Darlene begins.

  “Save it,” Reggie says. “Sleep on it. Think about what I’ve said. All of it. And think about how very respectful John and even I as your boss have been with you being such an inexperienced investigator. And we’ll talk about it at our meeting in the morning. Now I know you don’t think you were given a fair chance in Marianna, but that’s not the case here. And no one has given you more of a fair shake than John. I’m gonna be honest, after the way you acted toward him when we were investigating Chris Taunton’s death . . . I’d’ve been done with you if I were him, but not John. He’s still worked with you and shown you respect and given you many more chances. So think about all that. And give me a reasoned response in the morning at our meeting.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” she says.

  She looks downcast, but not as much as Arnie—who also appears to be extremely embarrassed.

  “Now, John,” Reggie says, “since we’re all here and since when we meet in the morning you’ll be in the Potter County courthouse fighting for your life, is there anything you want to say?”

  I nod.

  “Okay,” she says. “Let’s hear it.”

  “I’m pretty sure we have a predator at work here,” I say. “Since the storm hit he has been making his murders look like accidents—all in some way or another related to the hurricane. Philippa Kristiansen, Charlie West, and PTSD Jerry Garcia were all alive after the storm and were all killed with blunt force trauma that could be made to look like an accident. But none of these were accidents. They are murders. And I believe they were all committed by the same killer. I’ve looked at all the autopsy reports and all three of these victims have something in common. They all have a bone that was broken after they were already dead. I think that’s his signature—or part of it. And I’m afraid that many of these missing persons we’re looking for are going to show up with the same signature in circumstances that look like accidental death but are actually the work of a sadistic predator drawn to the pain and suffering of the most isolated and vulnerable among us, like an African lion to a wounded wildebeest.”

  Tampa Bay Times Daily Dispatch

  Hurricane Michael in Real Time

  By Tim Jonas, Times Reporter

  When is the Florida Gulf Coast going to get the funding it needs? Why isn’t anyone listening? Why isn’t Washington responding to this disaster? People, listen to me—I’m on the ground here. It’s far, far worse than you can imagine, than anyone is saying. And no one is hearing us. No one is responding. Why is that?

  Within 10 days of Hurricane Katrina, Congress had passed supplemental disaster relief funding. 10 days!

  Hurricane Ike and Hurricane Gustav took only 17 days. For Hurricane Andrew, the last Category 5 storm to strike the United States, it took 34 days. For Hurricane Sandy, which sparked bitter debate in Congress, it took 74 days.

  I know it’s still relatively early days here, but nothing is being done and it doesn’t look like there is going to be anything done anytime soon.

  Hurricane Michael decimated everything here and there’s still no supplemental disaster funding, and it doesn’t look there is going to be.

  Washington is playing politics with people’s lives, with the survival of the Florida Panhandle, and this is absolutely not acceptable. Call your congressman or woman today. Demand more.

  We can do better than this and we have to. You still haven’t done right by Puerto Rico, still struggling to recover from Hurricane Maria in 2017, and now you’re letting a big part of the Panhandle die.

  23

  “My name is Bernice Jones. I’m one of the custodians at the school.”

  It’s the following morning and we are back in court—in a courtroom that is even more polished than it has been previously, something I didn’t think was possible, and smelling even stronger of Murphy’s Oil Soap.

  “Which school is that?” Gary Scott asks.

  Looking at him at the lectern, I realize who he reminds me of. His retro suits, his ankle boots, his longish feathered hair—he looks like a ’70s-era Al Pacino, only with less charm, less intensity, and less movie-star swagger.

&n
bsp; “Oh, sorry. The high school.”

  “Potter High School?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Bernice Jones is a large, older black woman with enormous breasts that lie across her belly, the ends of which hover around her waist.

  “And were you there the morning of the shooting on April 23rd of this year?”

  “Yes, sir, I was.”

  “Can you take me though what happened?”

  “I’s in the supply closet when all hell broke loose. Pop, pop, pop, and bang, bang, bang. Sounded like a war zone. Kids done a play on that Friday before had some of those same sounds, but . . . I knew right away this was different . . . was the real thing. And I seen on the television where kids take guns to school and start shootin’ up everything. My husband said nothin’ like that would ever happen here, but I told him you don’t see what I see every day. No respect. Spoiled rotten. Actin’ the fool. No manners. Told him . . . Big Daddy you just don’t know . . . they’s crazy white kids everywhere. And that’s always who’s behind it. I ain’t tryin’ to be racial or nothing, but truths is truths. People so scared of Muslims and immigrants and young black thugs, and they kids is building bombs and shootin’ up everything.”

  As I listen to Bernice Jones speak, I wonder what the reporters from out of town must think of her. Like many impoverished, uneducated, small town, Deep South women from her era, she speaks in a way that is common around here but must seem like a different language to those who haven’t grown up hearing it like those of us from here have.

  “Sure,” Gary Scott says, his nasally, whistling voice filling that one word with both condescension and patronization, “but getting back to the morning of the shooting . . .”

  “Like I says, I knew it was a real school shooting,” she says. “Right then and there I said my prayers. I’s thinkin’ it might be my time. ’Cause when it’s your time it’s your time and when it’s not it’s not. Nothing you can do about it. So I said my prayers and I went over and locked my door.”

  Since the storm, I’ve been trying to think of what the broken thick-bodied pines lining the highways in Michael’s path remind me of. And it comes to me as I’m sitting here on trial, listening to Bernice Jones’s testimony. Snapped about a third of the way up from the ground, the top two-thirds of the tree leaning over onto the ground, the swollen, splintered joint of the breakage reminds me of something I haven’t been able to come up with. But now I realize that the fractured spot where the tree was broken looks like the busted and split-open seam of a pair of woven paper and thin wood kids’ carnival Chinese finger cuffs given out at the school’s fall festival.

  As I’m returning my attention to Bernice’s testimony, I glance around the courtroom. To my surprise I see Rick Urich sitting in the gallery with the rest of the onlookers.

  “And then?” Gary Scott is saying.

  “I turned out the lights and got on my knees.”

  “To pray?”

  “I already told you I had done that. No, was so I could see what was going on.”

  “I don’t understand,” Scott says.

  “The door to the janitor closet—”

  “I thought you said you were in the supply room?” he says.

  “Same thing,” she says. “Gots other names too if you wanna hear them.”

  “No, that’s fine. Please continue.”

  “The door to the . . . ah, supply closet is like the ones on the classrooms,” she says. “They’re big solid wood doors but above the knob they’s a little window.”

  “When you say ‘little window’ . . .” Scott says. “Can you describe it for the jury? Its dimensions?”

  “I’d say it’s about two and half, three feet tall and about six inches wide.”

  “Thank you,” he says, “but if that’s the size and shape of the window and it’s above the door knob, why on earth would you get on your knees to see?”

  “Oh, well . . . It’s blacked out.”

  “Your window is blacked out but you got on your knees to see?”

  “Yes, sir. The window is covered with black construction paper. If it weren’t, kids be looking in on me all the time. Now, I ain’t doin’ anything in there I ain’t supposed to be, but . . . I wants to eat my lunch or call Big Daddy on my break in privacy. Don’t need no youngins staring at me while I do.”

  “Okay, but, surely if it’s blacked out you can’t see through it whether you’re on your knees or not?”

  “They’s a rip in the paper down at the bottom,” she says. “Plenty big to see out . . . and . . . with the lights out behind me I can see out but can’t nobody see me.”

  “And what did you see?”

  “Not much,” she says. “Halls was a ghost town. Everybody locked in they classrooms even as bombs going off and all sorts of shooting. Every now and then somebody would run by, a kid or a cop. I saw the shooter . . . I froze and peed myself a little. Had to cup my hand over my mouth like this to keep from cryin’.”

  She demonstrates how she held her own mouth with the old, bent fingers of her arthritic hand.

  “Had on one of them long black leather coats like a cowboy or a vampire and this spooky mask . . . all white and no expression and . . . was holding this big ol’ shotgun . . . jackin’ shells into the chamber and shooting up the ceiling.”

  “I’m so sorry you had to see that, that you had to be that close to death,” Scott says.

  “Not as sorry as I am.”

  “And while you were kneeling there looking out into the hallway did you have occasion to see anyone else?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Who was that?”

  “The defendant,” she says, and points at me as if she has been told just how to do it—or has seen it on TV. “John Jordan.”

  “And what did you see him do?”

  “He run by the first time, heading to the right,” she says. “Had his gun drawn, looking like he wanted to shoot somebody.”

  “Objection, Your Honor,” Anna says. “How does one look like he wants to shoot somebody?”

  “Sustained,” Wheata Pearl says. “Ms. Jones, please only tell us what you saw and not what you think other people were thinking or feeling or wanting to do.”

  Bernice nods. “Yes, ma’am. Sorry.”

  “He had his gun drawn?” Scott asks.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Where was he pointing it?”

  “All around,” she says. She forms the shape of a handgun with her thumb and forefinger and waves it about. “You know like how they do on TV when they raiding a drug house. Like sweeping it around before they yell clear or shoot somebody.”

  “Was he walking or jogging or running or . . .”

  “Running flat out,” she says. “Didn’t even slow down to take the corner. I figured he’d stop at the corner and check both directions in the main hallway but he never even slowed down. If someone would’ve been there, he wouldn’t’ve had time to tell who it was before they shot him or he shot them. I thought to myself at the time . . . he gonna get hisself killed running into that firefight like that.”

  “Or kill someone else before he knew what he was doing,” Scott says.

  “Your Honor,” Anna says.

  The judge holds up her hand as if there’s no need for Anna to continue. “Mr. Scott, this is your final warning. Say anything like that again and you’ll be in contempt and we’ll see if a little time to reflect on your actions in a nice jail cell will improve your manners.”

  “Sorry, Your Honor.”

  “No, you’re not,” she says. “That’s the most sorry-not-sorry apology I’ve ever received in this courtroom. But I promise you this . . . You will be. You will be very sorry if you ever pull a cheap stunt like that again.”

  Wheata Pearl pauses, takes a sip of whatever’s in her rattlesnake mug, and then turns to the jury.

  “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, what Mr. Scott has just done is wrong and he knows it. He’s trying to tell you want to think. He’s trying to sli
p in his own testimony, and I’ll tell you this . . . It has been my experience that when an attorney resorts to that it’s because his or her case isn’t going all that well and he or she thinks he or she has to tell the jury what to think because the evidence isn’t doing it. This is a serious offense because Mr. Scott knew exactly what he was doing. It’s a cheap whorehouse parlor trick that has no place in a court of law. You are to disregard his statement and try to completely forget you ever heard it.”

  “I am truly sorry, Your Honor,” Scott says. “I got caught up and I was wrong. It won’t happen again.”

  “See that it doesn’t,” she says. “Now, you can continue, but tread very carefully, sir. Very carefully.”

  “I do apologize, Ms. Jones,” he says, “for putting words in your mouth. I was wrong to do that. What else did you see or hear during the shooting that morning?”

  “Kept hearing explosions and gunshots and screams and crying and I saw the defendant running in the other direction a little while later. The main hallway is a circle. So first time I seen him he was running flat out to the right, and the other he was running even faster to the left and it was only a few minutes later.”

  “And then I heard somebody yell, Don’t shoot. Don’t shoot. But I heard shooting after that. A few quick shots. Pop. Pop pop pop.”

  “Do you have any idea who yelled ‘don’t shoot’?”

  “No, sir,” she says. “I mean I didn’t see anyone say it. I just heard it but . . . it sounded like a male student.”

  “You heard what sounded like a male student yelling ‘Don’t shoot. Don’t shoot.’ And then you heard several shots fired?”

  24

  “Ms. Jones—” Anna begins.

  “What’s all this Ms. Jones? Call me Bernice. Everybody does. I ain’t one to put on.”

  “It’s just a sign of respect and some formality for the court,” Anna says. “I just have a few questions for you. I know everybody’s getting hungry and we need to break for lunch soon.”