Chapter 13 #2
“I’m good. When you get back, let’s head out to Cherise Henderson’s place. Her dad’s belongings have been released, and I wanna get those back to her. Maybe seein’ his stuff will shake something loose.”
“You got it.”
As soon as Trick left, I picked up my phone and dialed.
“Sheppard,” Lincoln answered after the second ring.
“Hey, brother, it’s Hayes. I got a job for you or one of your guys. You put someone on this and I’ll pay whatever you want. But I need this looked into, and I need it done fast.”
“This have somethin’ to do with a certain brunette’s car bein’ parked outside your place all night long?”
For fuck’s sake. “Look, you’ll have plenty of time to gimme shit about this another day, but right now I got a case that needs solving ’cause it’s already taking me away from my woman when I only just got her back last night, so I don’t have time to dick around.
I need this done so I can concentrate on her and not a dead body. Can you do this for me or not?”
Cutting to the point, he said, “Tell me what you need.”
I shared everything Tempie had revealed to me earlier that morning about the note and what it said. “I need someone to look into her life back in Chicago.”
“What is it you want me lookin’ for?”
“I don’t know,” I replied, rubbing my forehead in frustration. “Any connection to her life in Hope Valley.”
There wasn’t a single ounce of humor in his voice as he asked, “You think someone planted that note to get her outta the house?”
“I can’t be sure. All I know is Hope Valley’s only had three murders in more than two decades.
The first were directly tied to her, and the last happened almost the exact same time she came back.
I think it’s too much of a coincidence that she found it the same night her folks were killed.
The puzzle pieces aren’t even close to linin’ up, but something’s not sitting right with me.
Someone knew what went down at that party, and my gut’s telling me that they also knew Tempie was about to forgive me.
I have a real bad feelin’ about what I know now.
Someone played us, Linc, and I wanna know who.
Those twenty-one years are a black hole of information. ”
“I’m on it,” Lincoln replied instantly, his voice like granite through the line. “And it’s not gonna cost you shit.”
“No marker on this one,” I proclaimed. “For this, I’ll pay.”
“The hell you will,” he returned. “And it’s not gonna cost you a marker either. If what me and my boys find leads to somethin’ as ugly as you’re suspecting, it’s gonna be all hands on deck. This one’s on me.”
“I appreciate that.”
“Besides,” he said, his tone shifting again, “you’re gonna need all the money you got. It’s been a while for you, brother, but women like nice things. That means the shithole you’ve been livin’ in has to go.”
Dropping my head, I rubbed at the back of my neck. “You done?”
“For now,” he shot back. “But I’m guessin’ it’s only a matter of time before word spreads to Eden and her girls, so the shit about to be piled on you hasn’t even begun to start.
Brace, man. Those girls are hell on wheels when they’re together, and they’ve officially brought your woman into the fold. ”
“Fuckin’ brilliant,” I grumbled, but the truth was, if teaming up with those women gave Tempie a strong network of friends that tied her even tighter to Hope Valley, I’d write each and every one of them into my goddamn will.
“Gotta go,” Lincoln said. “Got calls to make and contacts in Chicago to reach out to. I’ll let you know what I turn up.”
“Thanks. Talk to you later.”
“You know it.”
He disconnected and Trick returned with his coffee. Five minutes later, we rolled out of the station on the way to visit Martin Henderson’s daughter.
Cherise Henderson was in her late forties, and thanks to a lifetime of heavy smoking, hard liquor, and being bitter toward the world, she looked at least half a decade older than that.
The woman’s disposition matched her father’s, meaning she was unpleasant on good days and a downright pain in the ass on bad ones.
But the fact still remained, her father had been killed and she deserved some answers.
“Detectives,” she greeted through a plume of cigarette smoke after opening the door of her run-down house in a not-so-nice area of town.
“To what do I owe the honor? If you’re stoppin’ by to tell me your thumbs are planted up your asses and you still don’t know who murdered my dad, you wasted a trip. I already knew that.”
Brushing off her snide remark, I kept my tone civil as I asked, “May we come in?”
Rolling her eyes, she stepped to the side and waved us in with a hand that contained a tumbler of bourbon. It was barely after noon, and it was already clear by the way she smelled and her bloodshot eyes that this wasn’t her first drink of the day.
We stopped just inside the entryway, and I placed the box I’d been carrying on the dust-covered table inside the door. “We’re sorry it’s taken so long, but your father’s personal effects were finally released and we wanted to return them to you personally.”
Her demeanor changed as she stared at the box. Everything that had been on his person or collected as evidence and came back clean was inside.
The hardness suddenly washed out of her expression, revealing the pain she had hidden beneath. Her face took on an unnatural pallor, and the shaking in her hands had nothing to do with the alcohol as she reached out and removed the lid.
Trick and I remained silent as she started sifting through the box’s contents, giving her the time she needed to process everything she was feeling.
She removed Martin’s wallet a minute later and flipped it open. “This is everything?” she asked, looking up at us with wide, glassy eyes.
“Yes,” Trick answered. “We went through the inventory to make sure it was all accounted for before bringing it to you.”
“Something’s missing.”
My back went straight, every instinct in me going on red alert, and I could feel the same energy radiating off Trick as well.
“What are you talking about?” I asked.
“There was a picture,” she stated, flipping the wallet toward us and pointing to the empty bill section. “My dad always carried a picture of him and my mother in his wallet, always.”
“You’re certain?” I asked, taking a step closer. The wallet had been found in the jeans he was wearing, but there had been nothing inside when we looked.
“Positive,” she cried. “It was right here.” She stabbed her finger back at the wallet.
“Maybe whoever it was grabbed the photo when he took the money,” Trick mused, but I could tell by his tone that he wasn’t so sure.
Cherise shook her head frantically. “He didn’t keep his money in that part. That was for the picture only. He stuffed the cash in the credit card slots.”
Fucking hell.
“I’m tellin’ you,” she continued, growing frantic, “he never, ever took that picture out. Not since the day she died. I even got him a new wallet for his birthday one year a long time ago, you know, one that had those picture flap thingies? He tore the flap out and put the picture in the same damn bill section.”
“Have you been inside your father’s house recently?”
Her chin pulled back in surprise at my question. “I—no. I haven’t been back. I can’t—” Her throat bobbed on a thick swallow.
“Do you still have a key?”
“Well, uh, yeah,” she answered in confusion. “Why?”
“If you’ll allow us access, we can do a sweep for that picture. Is that something you’d be okay with?”
She pulled her hands in front of her and squeezed the wallet to her chest, hesitating for a second before nodding.
She gave us the key, and we left a minute later with the promise to let her know right away if anything turned up.
Later that afternoon, Trick and I, along with a couple patrolmen, combed every square inch of that house, coming up empty. The photograph Cherise had described was nowhere to be found.
“I got a bad feelin’ about this,” Trick stated a while later as I maneuvered our department-issued car through downtown Hope Valley. “Didn’t make sense before, takin’ the money out of his wallet then putting it back in his pocket. Now this?”
I’d felt a deep, nagging unsettlement since leaving Cherise’s place. “He took a trophy,” I muttered.
“It’s lookin’ that way.”
That meant how we’d gone about investigating the case so far had just been turned on its head. This was no longer a one-off. If the killer really did take a trophy with him, we’d been looking at this all wrong.
And I had a sick feeling gnawing at my stomach, telling me things were about to get even worse.