Chapter 24 #2
“When I was talking to him tonight,” Camden shared, “he mentioned that he never married, that he had a girlfriend way back when, but she didn’t love him back.”
At that, Mark looked over at him, his eyes wide, and he nodded. “I think I remember something about that, her saying something about trying to get rid of the boyfriend.” Mark frowned. “I wonder if he just pushed it too far.”
“It’s quite possible,” Camden noted. “There’s no mention in the file of whether she was raped or not, but her body was in rough shape.”
Mark winced. “Good God, I would hate to think that she went through that too.”
“Yeah, but it could explain the whole thing. She rejects his advances. He sexually assaults her, then realizes she’s likely to tell and ends up killing her. What if the dad shows up, finds whatever is happening at that point, and then Jerry would have had to kill the dad?”
Mark grimaced. “The girls probably came home from school at different times because they had different after-school activities.” Mark stared at him with a slow nod.
“It would have been easy to drop one and then the other. And the same for the mother, as she was involved in all kinds of charity things.”
Camden nodded. “A remaining question is, why cut them all up, and what would he have used?”
Mark stared at him. “Jerry used to chop wood for money. Many, if not most, people used wood for heat back then, you know, in their fireplaces. He would have had an axe close by. … I’m pretty sure he was chopping wood for that family too.”
“I wonder where that axe is.”
“Oh God,” Mark wailed, with a downing dread as if something had just twigged. “He had one in his hand.”
“Good God,” Camden whispered in horror. “You let him walk out with the murder weapon?”
The old man stared at him, clearly devastated. “I didn’t even know until this moment. It really was him. Dear God, he’s been walking around scot-free all these years because I never spoke up.” Tears filled his eyes, and he started to sob again.
Camden walked over and said, “Add that to your statement right now.” He watched as Mark cried while he wrote it out.
Then with a nod, he signed it, dated it, and handed it over to Camden.
He shared, “I don’t know how bad this will get or even how far it’ll go, but we need to pull him in and talk to him. ”
“No, first you need to find that axe. Even if he’d moved a dozen times, he would not take the chance of letting it go.
He would have hung on to it the whole time to make sure.
For one thing, it’s his own souvenir, and he would want to ensure that nobody could possibly have evidence that would put him behind bars. ”
“That’s good to know,” Camden replied, “because he is literally my neighbor, so chances are the murder weapon hasn’t gone far from the murder house at all.”
“You live right there in the same area?” Mark asked him in shock.
“Yes, we talked about this earlier. Not only that, Devon, the woman you met earlier, she was sold the house that everybody was killed in. The Realtor didn’t tell her, so she and those twins have been living in that house, with all the ghosts,” he added.
“Believe me how that’s caused her more than a few sleepless nights herself. ”
Mark’s jaw opened wide and then slowly closed. “I’m sorry. My memory is not so good when I’m in and out of these fits of anger and misery.”
Camden shook his head. “Now that she does know, she needs it solved so she can get a semblance of her own life back, and then it’ll be a fight with the real estate agents.”
He closed his eyes. “I am so sorry for her sake.”
“Me too,” Camden said, “and there has been more than a few ghostly sightings too.”
Mark nodded. “That was something the mother was really big on. She was big on ghosts, big on the spirits of the ancestors. She would talk about calling them back, and she said that it was good to keep them close. She considered them helpful, said they weren’t there to hurt people, only to help everybody else, and that we shouldn’t be scared of them,” he shared, opening his eyes.
“Maybe, but Devon and the twins are pretty freaked out.”
“Oh my.” Mark flinched. “Yeah, I’m sure they would be.”
“Also, the deceased mother of the twins that Devon’s now looking after is related to that whole Herschel family somehow. So, everybody is a little overdone with all this.”
Mark nodded. “You need to go home to her. Keep her safe,” he exclaimed. “There has been enough death already.” And, with that, he waved him off and said, “It’s definitely time for you to go.”
Camden, with the witness statement in hand, walked out to his truck, and, just to make sure, he took photos of both pages and sent them to the captain, and with a note saying that, just in case anything happens, he was heading home tonight.
The captain called him just as he was pulling into his driveway. “I’ll send over a car to pick up Jerry,” he announced. “Let’s bring him in for questioning.”
“Yeah, but you also know nobody is in the office right now. We’re so short-staffed that it’s ridiculous.”
“I know, but we also don’t want anybody alerting this guy or him having the chance to take off before we have a chance to talk to him.”
“Good luck with that,” he muttered, as he hopped out of the vehicle, right in time to see Jerry driving away. “He just left his house, so I don’t know when he’s coming back.”
“Great,” the captain muttered. “You probably spooked him already.”
“Maybe, and maybe that means we need to just go pick him up. I’ll leave that to you. Right now, I’m heading over to Devon’s place to make sure she’s okay. The last thing I want is to walk into a scene like Mark did.”
“Jesus Christ,” the captain whispered. “Now you better fucking text me when you get there to confirm that everything’s okay.”
With a laugh, Camden replied, “Will do.”
He quickly walked over to the front door of Devon’s house and knocked. When he heard a voice call out to come in, he stepped in and looked at her.