Remembering Dresden (Jack Turner Suspense Series Book 2) (17 page)

“Unless they were the one making things happen,” Boyd added. He sat back in his chair. “I guess it’s a good thing this guy’s been dead for ten years.”

“I agree,” Jack said. “Does that mean you don’t think we should do anything about this?”

“I don’t know, Jack. It’s a whole lot to take in. I might need some time to digest this.” He sipped his coffee, now almost cold. “But hey, I guess since this thing’s been sitting around so long, there’s no great hurry here. Not like there’s any tie-in to the present.”

Jack’s face got real serious.

“It doesn’t, right? All this stuff happened twenty years ago.”

Jack was shaking his head.

“What’s the matter? What are you thinking?”

“Are you forgetting who owns the cabin?” Jack said. “The identity of this serial killer?”

Wait a minute. Jack had said it at the convenience store. It was….

“Senator Burke Wagner,” Jack said. “The serial killer is his father.”

“Oh, crap.”

“Right.” Jack continued. “And remember I said I found this handwritten journal with this scrapbook? Written in German, the one Rachel’s translating? I don’t know if he’ll be implicated by anything in the journal, but by our calculations, Senator Wagner was in his college years during the time his father was committing these murders, going to school here at Culpepper. What if he knew about it, or was involved somehow?”

“Oh crap,” Boyd said again. He wanted to say something worse, but he’d been working hard on his language to make Kate happy. He leaned forward, picked up his phone, looked at Jack. “You mind going through all of this one more time?” Jack shook his head no. “Good.” He pushed the button for Hank’s desk.

Hank picked up. “What’s up, Joe?”

“Can you come in here for a few minutes? There’s something I’d like you to hear.”

Jack didn’t expect this. Boyd was taking him seriously. He offered a silent prayer of thanks. The Bible verses he’d meditated on after his workout this morning talked about trusting God no matter what. All that anxiety out in the car had been for nothing. Officer Hank Jensen had just walked in and sat in the other chair.

Boyd spun the scrapbook around and slid it over to Hank. “Take a look at that. The reason why will become clear as Jack explains some things.” He looked at Jack. “Tell Hank everything you just told me.”

So Jack did, took about ten minutes. Would’ve taken longer except Boyd jumped in at several places. Jack couldn’t tell if he was sharing too many details, or if Boyd was just really into this.

As they talked, Hank flipped slowly through the scrapbook pages. He never said a word until they were through. Then he said, “Wow, that might be the craziest story I’ve ever heard. This is for real, right?”

“Totally,” Jack said. “There’s still some details to nail down, some facts to check on the internet. But I can’t think of any other conclusion that makes sense.”

“Can you?” Boyd asked Hank.

“Not off the top of my head.” He looked at Jack, then got a look on his face Jack couldn’t read. “I can see why your classes are always full, Professor. You’re one heckuva storyteller.”

“Just call me Jack. But this is not a story.”

“I’m not saying it is, or that I don’t believe you, it’s just the way you lay things out…you’d make a great attorney. Don’t you think, Joe? That was like listening to some A-plus closing argument.”

“I get what you’re saying,” Boyd said.

Jack didn’t. Was Hank saying something nice or insulting him? His confusion must have been obvious based on what Boyd said next.

“Hank means no offense. He’s just pointing out the gap we deal with all the time in this business.”

“The gap?” Jack said.

“Between what we think happened and what we can prove,” Hank said. “Between the facts and our hunches.” He looked at Boyd. “You remember that Tomlin case, Joe. What was that, four months ago? Remember how angry the DA got when all that crap hit the fan, and the judge overturned Tomlin’s conviction?”

The Tomlin case had made the national news. Jack had a vague memory of it. Some guy one county over had been in jail for ten years. He got a new trial and a jury wound up overturning his conviction. “I don’t see the connection,” Jack said.

“It was a major humiliation for the DA who tried the case,” Boyd said, “and the entire police department who’d arrested him ten years back. The whole case was built on weak circumstantial evidence, you ask me. Probably should’ve never gone to trial in the first place. The point is, our DA made it real clear to us—”

“Don’t even think about bringing a circumstantial case to me unless it’s rock solid, front to back,” Hank said, repeating it like a quote.

The picture was becoming a little clearer. “I think there’s way more than just my hunches going on here,” Jack said. “What other explanation about this obituary scrapbook makes any sense? I’m wide open if you have anything to offer?”

“I don’t have one, Jack,” Hank said. “Not at the moment. This could all be exactly what you said. I’m just saying that, right now, all you really got is a scrapbook filled with old newspaper clippings. Everything else is you connecting up the dots for us. Very skillfully I might add. But I’m not seeing anything we could act on here. Are you, Joe?”

“You mean like arrest someone?” Boyd said. “No, we’re not even close to that. Besides, the guy who did this has been dead for a decade. But I do think there’s some real substance here. My gut tells me this is for real. Jack is on to something.”

“I’m not saying he’s not. But even if it’s all true, what can we do about it? It’s not just that the killer’s already dead, but from what Jack said, all of these killings took place somewhere else. Not even in Culpepper. Not even in Georgia. So, we don’t even have jurisdiction over any of it.”

“Not about the original killings.” Boyd looked at Jack. “You didn’t tell him who owns the cabin, or about the journal Rachel’s translating.”

“The cabin belongs to Senator Burke Wagner,” Jack said, “which means the killer is his father.”

“Senator Wagner? You’re kidding?”

Jack shook his head. “I’m staying at the cabin now, renting it for the month.”

“Tell him about the journal,” Boyd said.

“I found a handwritten journal with the scrapbook. It’s in German, which I don’t speak. Remember Rachel? She speaks it fluently. She took it home last night to translate. She should be done in a few days. Nothing may come of it, or it could be full of things that implicate Senator Wagner. He was attending college here during the years his father committed these murders. Maybe he helped his father, or at the very least, knew what he was up to and did nothing to stop him. That would be a big deal, don’t you think?”

Hank’s expression totally changed. “That would be a huge deal. Wagner’s become more than a local bigwig. He’s a bigwig on a state level. But even so, unless he was directly involved, like he actually helped his father pull these killings off somehow, I’m not sure the DA would go after him for something his father did twenty years ago. Especially with cases that were never even opened. It could certainly hurt him politically, but I’m not sure there’s a crime here. And we gotta think about this…if the DA’s drawing such a hardline over some average guy like Tomlin, he’s gonna be triple that way if we try to bring him some case against a prominent state senator like Wagner.”

“I don’t know,” Boyd said. “I guess it depends on what turns up, if anything, when Rachel translates that journal. But no one’s talking about going to the DA, not yet anyway. I agree, to go after someone with the clout of Senator Wagner, we’d have to have rock-solid evidence, and plenty of it. And like you said…” He looked at Hank. “We might not even have any jurisdiction here. A good part of the case, if not most of it, would belong to the FBI.”

Jack had to admit: they made some good points. Some things neither he nor Rachel had thought about yet. But still, how could it possibly be right to do nothing at all with this? “So are you men suggesting I just drop this whole thing? Put everything back in the safe and pretend I never saw it?”

“Put everything back where?” Hank said.

Suddenly, Jack realized how bad that sounded. “In the safe. That’s where I found these things.”

“What?” Hank said, “you broke into the guy’s safe?”

“No, I didn’t break into anything.” How could he say this without making it worse? He almost felt like he should plead the fifth. “I found the key.”

“So where was the safe, exactly? In the wall?”

“No.” There was just no good way to say this. “I found it in the crawl space under a floorboard in the living room.”

“Jack,” Boyd said, “tell me you weren’t prying up floorboards in this guy’s cabin.”

“I wasn’t prying up floorboards in this guy’s cabin. There was only one floorboard involved, and I didn’t pry it up. It was never nailed down. That’s what got my attention. I stubbed my toe on it. Then I noticed it wasn’t laid flat like all the others, which were nailed down. And it was even a different shade of wood. So, I got curious. What can I say? I’m a curious guy. I bent down to look at it and realized, it didn’t even have any nail-holes. It lifted up pretty easily, which made me think it was put down that way on purpose, which made me wonder why. I lifted it up, and there it was. The safe, staring right back at me. The other significant thing I recall is that it was caked in dust. It hadn’t been opened in years. Clearly, it was something being hidden. And now we know why.”

“Jack, no need to get upset,” Boyd said.

“Do I sound upset?”

“A little bit.”

“Then I apologize.” Jack no longer enjoyed the feeling that he was being taken seriously. He was starting to regret ever coming here at all. “Can we at least wait and see what Rachel turns up when she translates that journal? What if it directly implicates Senator Wagner?”

“If it does,” Boyd said. “You get on the phone and give me a call.”

Located down the hall just one door from Boyd’s office was the men’s restroom. Officer Tony Campbell just happened to be coming out of the restroom five minutes ago. He had planned on just walking past Boyd’s office back to his desk. That is, until he’d heard someone mention the Senator Wagner’s name. His ears perked right up like a dog hearing the dinner bell.

Campbell stood still, very still, and listened to what the men were saying. It was Boyd talking with Hank Jensen, Boyd’s pet. There was a third man who was clearly the one stirring up all this talk. Campbell recognized him from that big shootout case that happened last year out at the college. Jack something. He didn’t remember his last name. An easy problem to solve.

He didn’t really understand everything they were saying. Something to do with the Senator’s father. Campbell had never met the old man. But for the last two years, Campbell had been receiving a steady monthly check from the Senator for what they had agreed to call “private security services.” It was easy money. So far, he’d just wanted Campbell to alert him to any conversations about him that took place at the police station, or anything that concerned him, his law office, or his dealings as a state senator—no matter how small.

This certainly qualified.

He hadn’t had anything to report for about six weeks, so he was actually glad he’d stumbled into this. Wouldn’t want to give the Senator any reason to cancel this lucrative arrangement. Campbell was making his bass boat payment with it.

When he got back to his desk, he spent some time digging through the online reports until he found those related to the college shootout last year. He didn’t have to read long before he found the name he’d been looking for. He’d remembered the guy had been wounded. Sergeant Boyd had actually received a commendation for saving the man’s life.

His name was Jack Turner. Back when this whole thing went down, he’d been a guest lecturer at Culpepper. Campbell had heard something about him teaching there full time now. He pulled out his personal cell phone, looked up the number the Senator had given him for Harold Vandergraf, the Senator’s aide. He was instructed to always call Vandergraf first. Vandergraf would decide when, or if, Campbell’s information needed to be passed up the ladder.

Campbell got up from his desk, pulled out his cigarette pack and showed it to one of the guys as he headed outside. “Smoke break.” He pushed the send button.

After a few rings, Vandergraf answered the phone. “Officer Campbell, been a while since I’ve heard from you. I was wondering if you’d forgotten about us.”

“No, nothing like that. Just nothing worthwhile to report. Guess no news is good news, though, right?”

“I suppose that could be true,” Vandergraf said. “You calling must mean you have something worthwhile now…”

“Potentially,” Campbell said. He lit his cigarette. “Overheard a conversation just now in Sergeant Boyd’s office. He was talking with another officer and a professor at the college, who’d come in to see him.”

“And this is significant because….”

“I heard them mention Senator Wagner’s name. A few times, in fact. Couldn’t hear everything they said, because the door was half closed. I was out in the hallway. Piecing together the parts I did hear, it seemed this college professor had come in to talk about something to do with the Senator’s father. Like maybe he was trying to push them toward looking into something he thought the father might have done years ago.”

“You don’t say.”

“I didn’t hear anything specific, but I did hear somebody use the phrase
implicate Senator Wagner
. That sounded pretty significant to me.”

“Hmmm. I’d have to agree with you on that. Did it sound like this professor was persuading the officers to pursue this, whatever it is?”

“No, I’d say it was just the opposite. Sounded like they were trying to talk him out of it…whatever it is.”

“Well, that’s good to hear. Maybe this will be the end of it then. Whatever it is. Between you and me, I know very little about the Senator’s father. From what I understand, they weren’t all that close. I do know he’s been dead for ten years and that anything he might have done while he was alive is likely irrelevant and would likely be of no interest to the Senator.”