Count on Me (Petal, Georgia) (40 page)

Shep looked Caroline’s way and she felt awful for him. But he hadn’t wavered in his support or in his belief of their father’s innocence so there was that.

Royal put an arm around her shoulder, holding her close. Reassuring her.

“Garrett, I told you to leave.”

“Sir, don’t you see how she’s ruining your family? Just like her father did. Blood will tell. You know that.”

“Blood will tell? Are you kidding me?” Royal’s gaze went sharp and venomous. “So are you one of the pure who will save us all?”

“Purer than her.” Garrett jerked his chin at Caroline.

“I think you’re looking for inbred, not pure,” Royal said.

Caroline couldn’t stop her surprised cough of laughter.

“You shut your mouth, whore.”

One moment Royal was next to her, and the next he’d sprung from the couch to his feet, using his momentum to carry him to Garrett, who let out a surprised shriek and ran for the front door.

Mindy flipped out, but their grandfather held her as Caroline leapt up to follow.

“I told you what was going to happen and that was before you called my woman a whore, you piece of shit.” Royal stalked Garrett in the front yard. Garrett’s nose was bleeding.

“You punched me!”

“I winged you as you ran past me shrieking. But I
will
punch you so don’t worry about missing anything,” Royal snarled.

“Someone is going to call the cops,” Caroline called out.

“Don’t care. He called you a whore.”

She smiled. “You’re so sweet, Royal. I appreciate the punch but we talked about this and the whole jail thing.”

Royal made a face and shrugged. Then he took two fast steps Garrett hadn’t expected, cocked back his fist and plowed it straight into Garrett’s face. Hard enough to knock the other man back a few feet before his eyes rolled up and he hit the grass.

“And once again I find myself cleaning your knuckles.” Caroline pulled him back inside to the hall bath where she left him for a moment to go out to the living room. “Let her go, Grandpa. Mindy needs to pick him up off the grass once he’s awake.” Caroline turned and went back to Royal.

“I should apologize, but I can’t. He’s lucky I didn’t beat him to death. That piece of trash calling you a whore? After his racist purity bullshit and everything else he’s done, he deserved a two broken ribs beat down.”

She looked his hand over. Once she’d cleaned it up, she realized all the blood had been Garrett’s.

Royal opened and closed his fist, and then she bent to kiss his hand. “Thank you. I hope you don’t get arrested, and if you do, I’ll bail you out and defend you.”

He grinned and kissed her. “Let’s get your info and go. This place is not for you anymore, if it ever was to start with.”

They headed back out to the living room when her grandmother came in. “Vernon Hicks used to do odd jobs for all the businesses on that stretch of road where the diner was.”

Caroline had to sit down because hope had broken free and was running riot. “Jesus. After all these years.” She looked up at her grandmother. “How did you know?”

“I keep all my date books. They’re stored in the attic in case we ever need them. I pulled the one from the year your mother was killed down and the year before it too and flipped through. I made a note. He worked on the diner a few months prior. I’d asked her his name when a friend of ours needed some work done on his property. I probably wouldn’t have found it, but it was written on one of the tabbed pages. I’d been flipping through them from tab to tab just looking.” Caroline flinched as her grandmother looked up at her. Always waiting for whatever venom would come her way.

Caroline kept her voice level. The flinch had been involuntary but she wouldn’t give anything else. “May I have that?” She indicated the date book in her grandmother’s hand. “They’re going to question Vernon Hicks tomorrow in Porter. I’d like Shane to know about this before he goes. So he understands the connection.”

Her grandmother handed it over.

“Thank you. I’ll be sure Shane gets it back to you when he’s done with it. Excuse me a moment please.” She took several steps away and called Shane. She stared at the name of her mother’s killer on the page. It seemed so immense for what should have been a small thing. Not the information, no that was huge. If they could make a connection tonight, they could serve an arrest warrant and a search warrant at Vernon’s apartment.

That was a whole different kind of immense.

It was the simplicity of a jotted note. A bunch of letters in her grandmother’s date book that spelled out the name of a person who had destroyed her family. Right next to
paint for entry powder room
.

Shane answered and she forced herself to focus. “I have the connection between Vernon Hicks and my mother.”

He rushed over to the Lassiters to take their statements and take the datebook to enter into evidence.

Mindy came back in at some point but their grandfather had made her be quiet.

“Okay, so before I call in my favors to get warrants for Hicks, run it through with me,” Shane said to Caroline. “We have a murder. We have a suspect who was seen washing blood off the night of the murder, and there’s a connection between that man and the murder victim.”

“And we have a suspect who has a history of violence. A man who has done time for manslaughter and assault. He has a history of stalking and hurting women. The murder bore really personal hallmarks. The kind a man Hicks might be. Angry at women. Obsessive. He’s got major anger problems.”

“I need some more, here, Caroline. What’s his motive?”

“I know. Damn it. Okay. He did time in the system in several places. Did he submit DNA on any of them? We could get it to the lab to see if it’s a match. You’d have a physical tie to the scene.”

“That’s a good idea. There’s a backlog but this is exigent. You’re being threatened. He’s tried to kill you. He took photos of you and the victim from your apartment. My concern is that he’s now stalking you, Caroline. We found evidence of a little sniper’s blind in a tree. The one the rifle appears to have been fired from.”

Royal cursed under his breath and took her hand.

“Well isn’t that comforting? Okay so he’s obviously stalking me. But, you don’t know that Hicks has any connection to me at all. You absolutely do need to arrest him, don’t get me wrong. But you need to run this by the prosecutor to see what he thinks. Order the DNA if it’s in the system. But if you arrest him without enough and you have to let him go before he gets charged, he might bolt. He’s changed his name multiple times, he’s moved around a lot, creating new identities.”

“Okay, defense attorney, knock holes in it,” Shane said.

“This is all totally circumstantial. So Vernon Hicks knew Bianca Mendoza when she was murdered. That’s not a crime. A nearly ninety-year-old woman who remembers blood from sixteen years ago? There’s no evidence she came forward at all with this information. You have nothing to tie Hicks to that murder but acquaintance.”

She blew out a breath and realized her sister was crying, her head on their grandfather’s shoulder. He looked absolutely wrecked as he stared at her. She tore her attention from however much they hated her for this and got back into the right headspace.

“Maybe your father would have better advice. You have probable cause to arrest, but arrest him on a stalking charge. I’m being stalked and threatened. He’s a stalker and threatener with a history of being locked up for violence and obsessive harassment of women. The current victim is the daughter of a murder victim Vernon Hicks is also a person of interest in. If you arrest him for that, you have him in while you serve the search warrant. He seems the type to trophy collect. Some of my mother’s hair was taken. The pictures from my house. He’s a collector. If he really did do it and he hasn’t had to dump it when he ran or went inside, proof should be there.”

“And while he’s in interrogation and we’re in his house, he’ll go crazy imagining us going through his stuff. Touching his trophies can probably use that fear to get him talking if he doesn’t lawyer up.”

Caroline snorted. “He’s a career criminal. He’s going to lawyer up ten minutes after you get him in a room. If you don’t find anything at his house, you’re screwed. You’ll have to let him go.” She continued to pace as she thought. “So assuming
that
doesn’t happen, we have ten minutes. All right. We’ve both dealt with his type before. He thinks he’s way smarter than he is. He’s got a hair trigger. Poor control means if you hit the right buttons in interrogation you can get enough to make a dent on holding him before he realizes he’s screwed up and asks for a lawyer. Especially if you find something at his apartment.”

“All right. I’m calling now. I’ll have to run this all by the prosecutor and then a judge to get those warrants. I’d like to hit him as soon as we can. We’ll need to coordinate with Porter on this obviously. I’ll let you know when I can.” Shane hugged Caroline. “It’s nearly over.”

Caroline smiled. “Thanks, Shane.”

They walked him out and she went back in to grab her purse. She hugged Shep. “It’s gonna be okay. Call me if you need me.”

Shep looked between Caroline and Royal. “I hate this.”

“If I’m right, this will be the beginning of the end of this whole thing.”

“No not that. Though yeah, that’s bad too. I mean the family. I mean the way this has gone down and you’ve been dumped on.”

She hugged him again. “It was worth it. And I have you back in my life. You gotta take your victories where you can.”

She turned her back on her grandparents, and Royal escorted her out.

Chapter Twenty-Four

“Are you all right?” Royal asked her as he helped her into the car.

“Not really, no.”

“You mad that I punched Garrett?”

“Nope. He needed punching. Thank you for punching him.”

“I’m sorry your grandparents are horrible people and your sister is a useless whiner.”

That made her laugh.

She reached out and he took her hand.

“I can’t think about it right now. Okay? I can’t think about it or talk about it. Warrants being argued over. They could say no. If they do, he can bring him in to talk. But a career criminal knows his rights, trust me on that, so even if they bring him in, he’ll talk but he won’t tell them anything. And then he knows we’re on to him. We lose our edge. He can run.”

“Do you want to keep not talking about it? Like how it doesn’t matter because you have literally shed blood for this. This is going to happen. I can feel it. You have put so much into this. Years and years of your life. If anyone has the will and the persistence to make something like this happen successfully, you do.”

He took her home and they had sweaty sex and she pushed all the stuff she needed to deal with really far away because she just couldn’t do it that night.

He slept, and she got herself snuggled into him and closed her eyes.

And when she woke up again, it was to the sound of her phone ringing. A bleary look at the phone told her it was four in the morning. She grabbed it quickly; the ID told her it was Petal PD.

“Caroline Mendoza.”

Royal turned one of the bedside lamps on.

“I just got back from Porter. I desperately need to sleep but before I do that, I wanted to call to let you know what happened. Hicks is in custody. For first-degree murder.”

“What?”

“It took a few hours to get the warrants, but we got them and my friend in Porter served them with me. Hicks opened the door bitching about being woken up, and then he saw it was us and he ran for it. We chased him six blocks and took him down. We took him back to his place, and we walked inside where some of Porter PD were executing the search warrant. Anyway, there was enough there that we tossed him in the back of a cruiser and down to the station for processing. We charged him on stalking and got him in a room and my God. He just opened his mouth and started talking. First about you and then about your mother.
He confessed
. Without any prompting on our part.”

“I don’t… What the hell is going on? He confessed to killing my mother?”

“Caroline, I have seen a lot tonight, and I know you’re eager to know all the details, but I want to come out there to you and tell you everything face to face. I want to shower, sleep for a few hours and then hug my wife and son. Can I come out to the ranch at ten?”

“Yes, yes. Come on out then. Thank you.” She put her phone down and turned to Royal. “They arrested Hicks on the stalking charge, but they also charged him with first-degree murder. Shane says he confessed after whatever they found in his apartment but wouldn’t say what it was. Now I’m freaked and imagining things like heads in aquariums or zombies on leashes. He didn’t tell me the whole story but he’s going to sleep a few hours, he just got back. And then he’s coming out here at ten so I’ll let Shep know when it’s a more appropriate time to call a seventeen-year-old.”

“Come back to bed. Rest for a bit.”

She cuddled with him a while but couldn’t go back to sleep. He couldn’t either so he headed out to work. She’d work from home until Shane came by.

Before she got started though, she made all the calls she needed to make and ended up spending an hour on the phone with her uncle.