Chapter 34
Lafayette Johnson maneuvered Ricky Pink in the back seat of Trooper Teague’s patrol car.
There was no cage separating the front and rear seats.
DPS troopers seemed to rely on the threat of pulling over and giving the prisoner an ass whipping if they got unruly rather than the safety of any screen or partition.
Johnson locked his sidearm in the trunk and rode in the back seat with the prisoner, while Cutter sat up front.
Cutter’s intention had been to go straight to jail, but considering his own injuries and the massive goose egg on the side of Pink’s head, decided it was better if a doctor looked them both over.
Allen Duvall got a ride in the ambulance, handcuffed to the gurney.
LJ read Pink his Miranda rights from the back of a business card he would eventually staple to his written report—so some snake of a defense attorney would be less likely to question the exact wording he’d used for the warning.
The fact that Pink was only fifteen was bound to draw increased scrutiny. Everything had to be by the book.
Pink didn’t do anything but glare all the way to the hospital.
“I’m going to uncuff your hands for a second and hook you to the bed so the doc can have a look at you,” LJ said after they’d been shown through the Emergency Room lobby and into a room with a door, rather than the flimsy privacy curtains. “Stay still or—”
“Or what?” the kid snarled. “Your partner will murder me like he murdered my friend?”
Johnson took off a handcuff and then attached the loose end to the metal rail of the hospital bed. “I wish you would move,” he whispered.
Pink slouched on the bed and glared.
Cutter ended up with eight stitches over his eye and a wrap around his ribs—along with a cautionary tale from the Emergency Room doctor about letting himself get hit in the head so much. This wasn’t the first time they’d met under similar circumstances.
Visits to the ER often took hours, but Ricky Pink’s intimidating size and grim demeanor made hospital personnel speed matters along.
LJ let it slip to one of the nurses that Pink was one of the two prime suspects in the brutal shotgun slayings of not only the armored car guards but others as well, including Jack County Deputy Sheriff Gary Ewell.
ER staff were happy to see the young hoodlum out of their hospital ASAP.
Allen Duvall was still in surgery when Cutter and the others escorted Pink back to the trooper’s patrol car.
The elation of the capture waned before they departed the hospital.
Foster was their only witness to the actual robbery, and he was dead.
The Bryants’ neighbor had seen the two men running from the house.
Proving burglary wouldn’t be too difficult.
Cutter knew he’d need more. Fingerprints, tracks, something at the scene of Trina Foster’s murder.
Movies and TV shows made circumstantial evidence sound like a bad thing.
The truth was, investigators rarely found a smoking gun, and eyewitnesses were famously unreliable.
In the lion’s share of cases Cutter saw go to trial, it was circumstantial evidence that convinced a jury.
What he really wanted was a confession.