Chapter 35
Later that evening, Dr. Bhandari—the grave, dark-eyed young hospitalist who was treating Colly—stopped by to see her. He checked the bite wounds on her leg and seemed pleased.
“When can I get out of here?” Colly asked when he had finished typing notes on his tablet.
The doctor frowned. She should remain under observation for at least four more days, he told her. Snakebites sometimes had long-term effects, and her reaction had been particularly severe. “Not that you’ll listen to me,” he added glumly when he saw her expression. “Cops make terrible patients.”
“I’m not as bad as all that. If you say four days, that’s what I’ll do.”
In the end, she lasted three. Russ, still on leave from his job, hardly left her bedside. He seemed strangely shy and solicitous, watching her closely and leaping up to adjust the pillows or close the curtains or fetch her water if she showed the slightest discomfort. Colly found this attentiveness mildly annoying, but he seemed so eager to please that she didn’t have the heart to ask him to leave.
Avery joined them in the evenings, and together they talked for hours about the case, piecing together answers to the questions that remained. Brenda had refused a lawyer and had confessed everything to Avery in the Crescent Bluff lockup before the sheriff’s people had arrived on Monday to transport her to the county jail.
Avery grinned at Colly. “Here’s a weird compliment for you—she told me she knew she was screwed when she heard Russ was calling you in to consult. She got the idea of trying to chase you off with anonymous texts, so she drove to Colorado City and bought that burner phone before you got here. When the texts and the snake booby trap didn’t work, she got desperate and staged the break-in at the farmhouse.”
At the memory of the hare’s mask in Satchel’s suitcase, Colly flushed angrily. “Why didn’t she just murder me? It would’ve been easier.”
“I asked her that. She looked at me like I was the crazy one—said she’d never kill to protect herself, only society.” Avery shrugged.
“I can’t believe she told you all this,” Russ said. “Is she trying to set up an insanity defense?”
“She knows she’s done for. Now she’s thinking of her kids—says she’ll plead guilty to spare them the spectacle of a trial.”
“What’ll happen to Logan and Minnie?” Colly asked Russ when Avery stepped out for a smoke. “Lowell’s not exactly a model parent.”
“They’re at the ranch with Momma, for now. I made Lowell come clean to her about the embezzlement.”
“Is she pressing charges?”
Russ shook his head. “The kids just lost their mother—she didn’t have the heart to send their dad to prison, too. She fired him as plant manager, of course, but says she’ll keep things quiet if he’ll go into rehab and stop gambling.”
“What about Jace Hoyer?”
Russ shifted uneasily and scratched his stubbled cheek. “We didn’t tell her he was involved. We can’t very well throw him under the bus if Lowell gets to walk. Besides, Hoyer’s lost his whole family, and he’s already in jail for assaulting you.” He cast a guilty glance at Colly. “I know it’s not by the book, but—”
Colly stopped him with a gesture. “I’m glad.” She relaxed into the pillows and closed her eyes.
Each day, Iris brought Satchel for late-afternoon visits. Colly was startled by how happy he seemed. He climbed onto her bed and babbled cheerfully about horseback riding with his cousins and trips to Dairy Queen with Avery. The events at the Rattlesnake Rodeo had given him a celebrity status at school, and he’d begun to make friends. On Tuesday, he brought a new ant farm to the hospital to show Colly—a gift from Niall, who’d volunteered to meet with him daily to help him process the recent trauma.
Satchel curled beside her, fingering the thin cotton of her hospital gown. “I don’t wanna go back to Houston,” he whispered. “I like it better here.”
In spite of all the company, Colly felt restless and lonely. She found herself hoping that Niall would visit again. But he was swamped with work—seeing Brenda’s clients as well as his own until he could hire another therapist—and he couldn’t get away. He rang her up each night, though, after visiting hours ended and Russ had gone home. And Colly waited anxiously for his calls.
On Thursday morning, she woke up hungry for the first time since being bitten, and she ate even the rubbery hospital eggs with gusto. When Russ arrived just before noon, Colly was dressed and sitting on the side of the bed.
He stopped in the doorway. “What’s going on?”
“You’re busting me out of here. I can rest just as well at home.”
Monday morning, rainy and cool. Cement-colored clouds sagged over the Crescent Bluff police station as Colly crunched across wet gravel to the front entrance. Avery and Russ were both waiting inside. Russ had insisted on coming in when Colly told him her plan.
“You sure about this?” he asked. “I could give him a message.”
Colly shook her head. “He deserves to hear it from me.”
“And me,” Avery said.
Colly laid a hand on the younger woman’s shoulder. “You’ve handled the interviews with Brenda. Let me take this.”
Russ led Colly down some stairs and through a heavy door. “The interview room’s being repainted. You’ll have to talk here.”
She followed him along a short passage to a pair of old-fashioned, iron-barred holding cells. One was occupied.
“Hello, Jace,” Colly said through the bars.
Dressed in a dull gray jumpsuit, Jace Hoyer lay on the bed, staring at the ceiling. He lifted his head and glared. “Come to gloat, have ya?”
“I thought you might want some answers, now that we know what happened to Denny.”
Jace swung his legs over the side of the bed and sat up.
“Let me in, Russ. Give us a few minutes,” Colly said.
“No way. You can sit out here—I’ll get you a chair.”
“Jace won’t hurt me.”
Russ rubbed the back of his neck. “I’ll be watching.” He nodded towards a camera high on the wall as he unlocked the door. “Mind yourself, Hoyer.”
When he was gone, Colly sat down on the cell’s built-in bench. “You’ve probably heard Brenda Newland was the killer.”
“She was down here last weekend.” Jace nodded towards the neighboring cell. “Not that she said much. But I ain’t stupid.” His face twisted into an odd grimace. “Poor Denny. His own shrink.”
“I know.”
“And she got away with it for six months while the Rangers screwed around investigating me and Willis Newland.”
“You can’t really blame them. Brenda had an airtight alibi. Denny left the counseling center at one o’clock, and the ME says he died no later than two. But a dozen witnesses put Brenda in her office with clients till six that day. There’s lots of cameras around the counseling center—impossible to sneak out unseen. Plus—” Colly hesitated. “The Rangers had reason to think Denny was killed by the same person who murdered Adam Parker back in ’98.”
“Then how the hell’d she do it?” Jace exploded. “If you figured it out, they should’ve.”
“Real life’s not like the movies. There can be thousands of pieces of evidence at a crime scene, and ninety-eight percent of it’s irrelevant. Takes time to make sense of it all. Plus, the Rangers don’t know Brenda like I do. The crime was just so contrived that it was hard to imagine. Even now that she’s confessed, I can hardly believe it. But I should’ve solved it quicker.” Colly sighed. “It’s a long story.”
Jace waved an arm around the bare concrete cell. “I got plenty of time.”
Colly nodded. It was tough to know where to start, she said. As for why Brenda had killed Denny, her rationale was so warped that it was useless to try to understand it.
“She’s nuts?”
“Not legally. She understands society’s definition of right and wrong. But medically speaking, maybe. She took some crazy risks, and she wasn’t self-aware enough to hide all the inconsistencies in the case.”
“Like what?”
Colly shrugged. The most obvious was the body itself. There was evidence linking Denny’s death to Adam Parker’s. But Denny was found naked, and Adam fully clothed. That was odd—a break in the pattern. Serial killers were usually consistent about those types of details.
That wasn’t all. There was an orthopedic shoe insert in Denny’s backpack, though no one in his family had foot problems. And he was seen on the day he died wearing a red ballcap that Jolene swore wasn’t his. “We found that cap at the fireworks stand out by Digby’s Automotive, but it was stolen from the site before we could have it analyzed,” Colly said. “That was the first thing that should’ve pointed me to Brenda. When we found it, we’d just come from the counseling center.”
“She followed you?”
Colly nodded. “She hid in the salvage yard next to Digby’s. We dismissed that idea because the place is patrolled by guard dogs, and the Digby’s employees didn’t hear any barking. But Brenda’s a jogger, and she runs that way a lot. All the dogs in the area know her.”
“What was the ballcap doing at the fireworks stand?”
“I’m coming to that.”
There were other signs she’d missed, Colly said. Denny’s therapy appointment got moved from Thursday to Friday the week of his death. Brenda said Jolene changed it. But Jolene said Brenda requested the switch. “I figured one of them just misremembered. It didn’t seem relevant.”
“But it was?”
Colly nodded. “Jolene always drove Denny to his Thursday appointments. But on Fridays—”
“She’d been picking up extra day shifts.”
“Right. Somehow, Brenda knew Denny would have to ride his bike to therapy on Friday. He probably told her himself.”
“So what?” Jace leaned forward, nervously bouncing his knees.
“Her plan wouldn’t have worked otherwise,” Colly said. “Jolene gave us other clues, too. She mentioned that Denny sunburned quickly, and that he was supposed to return some library books after his appointment with Brenda. But the books were still in his backpack when we found it. And when his body was discovered, his skin wasn’t burned the way you’d expect if he’d ridden his bike all the way to the stock pond.”
“Meaning?”
Colly met Jace’s eyes. “Denny never left the counseling center.”
Jace stared. “What?”
“Brenda’s already confessed—she killed Denny inside her office.”
“The hell she did. His Little League coach saw Denny riding his bike past Digby’s.”
“Sorry, I’m getting ahead of myself.” Colly paused. “You have to understand—Brenda’s got an obsessive-compulsive streak. She’s a planner.” Once she’d decided to kill Denny, she’d mapped out every detail in advance. She didn’t want to run the risk of going to prison and losing her kids.
Opportunity was the easy part. Brenda spent a court-mandated hour alone with Denny each week. As long as she killed him quietly, her risk of being caught in the act was almost zero. But there was a catch—when someone walked into a therapist’s office, they were expected to walk out again. And if they didn’t, the therapist would be the only possible suspect. Brenda considered several ideas, from giving Denny a slow-acting poison to injecting him with a hypodermic full of air to create a pseudo-heart attack. But she dismissed them as too risky.
Then one day, Denny commented that he and she were the same height, which gave Brenda an idea. She liked going to thrift stores, and Iris had recently given her several sacks of old clothes to take to the donation center. Some belonged to Iris herself, and some to her housekeeper, Nadine. Brenda went through those sacks and scavenged an old-lady dress, shoes, hat, and a gigantic purse.
“Nadine has bad feet,” Colly added. “I noticed she was limping when I was at the ranch my first night here. I found the shoe insert in Denny’s backpack the same day. And Iris gave Brenda more sacks of old clothes right in front of me. I should’ve connected the dots.” Colly shook her head. “Anyway, Brenda chose that Friday for the murder because Lowell would have the kids. When Denny arrived for his appointment, she gave him a Xanax-laced coke. And when he fell asleep, she strangled him with an extension cord. Very quiet. No cleanup.”
“Christ Almighty.” Jace looked sick.
“Sorry, I’m used to talking to cops.” Colly waited while he collected himself. Finally, he nodded for her to continue.
“Brenda has this huge suitcase full of play-therapy toys in her office closet. I’ve seen it myself,” Colly said slowly, watching Jace. “She undressed Denny and put him in it. That’s another clue I missed, at first. Carmen mentioned she found toys all over Brenda’s office that night when she came to clean. She said the closet in Brenda’s office was locked, so she couldn’t get the suitcase out to put them away. The Rangers didn’t think anything of it, but I should’ve. Brenda’s super-tidy—she’d never leave toys out like that, unless she had no choice.”
After stowing the body, Brenda emptied Denny’s backpack and put the old-lady outfit and purse inside. Then she put on Denny’s clothes, plus a red ballcap she’d brought to hide her face—she’d cut her hair short the week before, so she’d look more boyish. Carrying the backpack and wearing her own running shoes, she rushed past Pearl, the office manager, and out the front door of the counseling center a little after one p.m. She’d already told Pearl not to disturb her because she’d be doing paperwork in her office until her two o’clock appointment. Pearl went off for a late lunch. Later, she swore to the Rangers that she’d seen Denny ride away on his bike and that Brenda never left the building. CCTV footage backed up her story.
Brenda didn’t have time to go far—she had to be back before two. She rode north on the Old Ranch Way, passing as many security cameras as she could. “She didn’t anticipate Denny’s coach seeing her,” Colly said. “Her only option was to blow past him and hope he didn’t follow.”
She hid the bike in the tall weeds behind the fireworks stand, then put on the old-lady clothes, except for the shoes—she had to run to get back in time. She left the ballcap there, but she stuffed Denny’s backpack and the rest of his clothes into the purse and took them with her.
“She couldn’t risk going back the way she’d come, in case Tom Gunnell spotted her,” Colly said. “So she cut across the fields onto Salton Road. At least one farmer saw her from a distance but thought she was a local, since the farm dogs didn’t bark—but like I said, they all knew her.”
“Didn’t folks think it was strange for an old woman to be running?”
“She only ran till she got near town. Then she put on the old-lady shoes and walked back to the clinic. Getting back in her office was the riskiest part. If Pearl came back from lunch a little early, the jig would be up. But Brenda’s luck held. My first day here, she told me that an elderly woman wandered in from the alleyway looking for a bathroom while she was alone in the building. I was asking questions, and she got nervous that we might have a witness or footage of her coming in the rear door.”
Back in her office, Brenda put on her own clothes, hid the suitcase and all of Denny’s belongings in her office closet, and saw clients till six o’clock, then did some paperwork. She went home and washed Denny’s clothes to make sure she hadn’t left behind any evidence. In the middle of the night, she returned to the clinic and entered through the alley.
Colly shrugged. “There’s a camera back there, but she gambled that the cops wouldn’t check it. Why would they? Footage showed Denny leaving through the front door hours earlier.”
Brenda planned to redress Denny, but by then he was in full rigor mortis in a fetal position. She put the suitcase—with Denny’s body inside it—into her van, along with his belongings, and drove out to the Newland Ranch, stopping on the way to pick up the bike from behind the fireworks stand.
Wearing an old pair of Lowell’s rubber boots—for the mud, as well as to make police think the murderer was a man—she wheeled the suitcase to the stock pond.
“They saw the tracks,” Colly said, “smoother and narrower than a hand truck’s. But the Rangers never thought of a suitcase. Neither did I.”
Brenda left Denny’s body and his bike on the shore and threw his backpack in the water, not knowing an insert from the old-lady shoes was still in it. “Then she planted something on Denny that she knew would make us think we had a serial killer in town.”
“Planted what?”
“That’s confidential, for now. It was the mother of all red herrings—a stroke of genius, Brenda thought. But it backfired, in the end. It’s how we caught her.”
Colly fell silent. Jace sat staring at the cell floor. After a few minutes, he looked up with a furrowed brow. “Who’d I see messing with the van at the ranch Monday night?”
“That was Brenda. She slipped away sometime after dark during our family get-together, put on Lowell’s ranch coat for a quick disguise, and rigged up that rattler. I don’t know where or when she got it, but she knows how to catch snakes—she does it every year for the Rodeo.” Colly shook her head. “I should’ve guessed. She parked in the one security-camera blind spot that night.”
“Then who stole the printouts in my garage freezer? Brenda didn’t know about them.”
“She did. Denny told her. Kids find everything. She knew you couldn’t go public with them without incriminating yourself, so she wasn’t worried. But when Carmen told her you’d left, she got scared we’d search the place and find those papers. She figured you took them with you, but she wanted to make sure.” Colly laughed suddenly. “It’s ironic—everything Lowell did to keep her from finding out about the embezzlement, and she knew all along.”
“She could’ve destroyed him.”
“Not without hurting her own kids’ futures.”
The cell grew quiet. Finally, Colly leaned forward. “Listen, Jace, I want to apologize. If I’d known how fragile Jolene was, I might’ve done things differently, questioned her differently.”
Jace blinked. “Ain’t your fault. She’s been hanging by a thread since Denny died.”
“Well, your family’s suffered more than it should’ve, and I’m sorry.”
Jace nodded, tugging distractedly at a clump of mud-colored hair. “What happens now? Y’all sending me to county?”
Colly stood and shook her head. “Avery and I discussed it. We’re dropping the assault charges. You’re off the hook for embezzlement, too, as long as you keep your nose clean. You’re free to go.”