Chapter Twelve #3
The restaurant was hopping as usual, and Seth saw Kerry interacting with two guys sitting at the bar.
The fellas seemed to be completely enthralled with the brawny bartender, but his cousin seemed impervious to their flirtations.
Seth caught Kerry’s eye and gestured for his cousin to meet him at the end of the bar.
“What’s wrong?” Kerry asked.
Seth couldn’t tell him anything that had happened at the jail, and Kerry didn’t ask, but that was only because Tony was there.
Kerry would be all over Seth otherwise. Instead, he rattled off the names of a few deputies and corrections officers who hung out with Odell.
Seth thanked him for his help, and they headed back to his SUV.
“Where to next?” Tony asked.
Seth’s cell phone rang before he could respond. “Daniels is calling.”
“Put him on speaker,” Tony said.
Seth accepted the call but didn’t have a chance to greet Daniels before the man spoke.
“The ME is pretty sure Carson died of anaphylactic shock,” his lieutenant said.
“Based on what?” Tony pressed.
“His tongue is severely swollen,” Daniels said. “I’ve talked to the head cook and every single person on her staff. There are no peanuts or byproducts on the premises. No nuts of any kind. We searched the kitchen and the staff’s vehicles. We found nothing, sir.”
“Has the ME taken Carson to the morgue?” Tony asked.
“Yes, sir,” Daniels replied. “We secured the cell again so the feds can collect evidence as they see fit. Carson only ate a small portion of his dinner, so they’ll be able to test it for peanuts.”
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. He needed to find Odell. “Thanks for the updates. Let me know if the feds arrive before I do.”
“Will do, sir.”
“This was no accident,” Tony said. “Do you think Quinton shut him up before he could talk?”
“It’s possible.” Maybe even probable. There were still two members of the cult that had eluded their capture.
Cain and Abel were described as loyal followers, and they were key weapons in Mick’s terrorizing.
Keegan might be able to fill in some more gaps.
He’d reacted viscerally to their names when Seth interviewed him nine months ago, and he hadn’t pressed since to avoid causing trauma.
The time to revisit the pair with Keegan was near, but he wanted to find Odell first.
Seth tracked down the deputies and corrections officers Kerry provided.
He reached most of them by phone and visited the others at home.
No one had much to say about Odell. He kind of appeared out of nowhere six or seven months ago.
He was friendly enough but kept to himself a lot.
They didn’t think he had a girlfriend or dated much.
“Where the hell did this guy go?” Tony asked.
“It’s time to speak to his mother,” Seth said.
Janice Odell’s house was still bustling with people when they returned.
It seemed Odell wasn’t the only one who loved his mama’s pot roast. The woman who answered the door was petite and frail.
It looked like a good wind would blow her over, and Seth was grateful the storm had subsided for the moment.
She took one look at Seth and covered her heart. “What’s happened to my Jasper?”
Seth tried to dance around the truth, but Mrs. Odell wasn’t having it.
He kept his answers as vague as possible, but he had to give her something to get her talking.
Mrs. Odell didn’t take a direct approach to giving up information about her son.
She talked about his military service and the toll it had taken on him.
Jasper hadn’t been able to hold down a job after his service ended, and then he’d gone on a spiritual journey for over a year.
Afterward, he was more like the son she remembered and got so excited when he landed the job at the county jail.
Seth’s Spidey sense went off again at the mention of a spiritual journey.
He searched for an unoffensive way to approach a sensitive subject when Tony took the bull-in-a-china-shop approach.
“Do you mean he was a member of Salvation Anew?”
Mrs. Odell’s shoulders went rigid, and Seth knew Tony had fucked up. He wished he could kick the shit out of him. “Jasper said the media portrayal wasn’t fair. He promised me it wasn’t a cult.”
Son of a bitch. Jasper Odell was likely Cain or Abel, and he’d been right under their noses the entire time. The rest of the conversation became stilted when Mrs. Odell refused to accept vague answers to her questions. She eventually got fed up and told them to leave her property.
“What the fuck are we going to say to the feds?” Tony asked when they got back in the SUV.
“Right now, we suspect a lot, but we don’t know anything. They don’t even want us investigating what happened. Let’s head back to the jail and wait for the transport team and Agent Johansen to arrive.”
The marshals who’d brought the Carsons to Last Chance Creek were the same ones to pick Quinton up.
They made snide remarks about the jail’s shitty hospitality before they secured Quinton and took him out to a van.
The younger Carson gave an Academy Award–winning performance, crying and trembling with fear as he mourned his uncle and claimed someone wanted him dead too.
Seth caught a hint of a smirk on the asshole’s face when the marshal secured him in the back of the transport vehicle.
“Do you guys want an escort?” Seth asked.
The marshal who opened the driver’s door scoffed. “I think you guys have done enough, Sheriff, but thanks. We’ll take it from here.”
Seth, Tony, and Daniels returned to the lieutenant’s office and discussed everything they knew up to that point, which wasn’t much.
They reviewed every documented detail throughout Odell’s hiring process, and nothing looked out of order.
He hadn’t admitted to being a part of Salvation Anew, and all his references had checked out.
“I wonder if any of these references are from the other missing cult member,” Seth said out loud. “If they’ve been planning this for a while, they could’ve gone to great lengths to make sure they got someone on the inside.”
“The press is going to slaughter us,” Tony said.
And the bigoted candidate for sheriff might not look so bad to the constituents. “We need to keep looking for any kind of clue that might tell us where to find Odell.”
“Could they be hiding at the abandoned compound?” Tony asked.
“Possibly, but it’s not likely. Odell’s been living in plain sight. The other guy probably is too. I’ve got security measures to keep nosy people from snooping around back there. Nothing has tripped the security cameras.”
“Where the hell do we look next?” Daniels asked.
They continued interviewing the jail staff and put a BOLO out on Jasper’s vehicle. Seth’s phone rang, and the noise seemed loud and ominous in the small room.
“It’s one of my deputies. Maybe he has some news about Odell.” Seth accepted the call and greeted him.
“Sheriff,” Deputy Smithson said breathlessly. “Dispatch just took a 9-1-1 call. Armed assailants ambushed the transport vehicle. The marshals exchanged fire with the gunmen. We’ve got one fatality reported, and Quinton Carson escaped.”