The City PI and the Country Cop (12 page)

“You need some sort of resolution about what
happened to your friend,” Keir said.

“Exactly. I have to find out what prompted
someone to do that to Chris and the two other boys.”

“You realize,” the chief said, “that if Irwin
is a copycat you won’t get that.”

Teague sighed. “I know. At least I, we’ll,
get some idea of the mindset that makes a man go to such
extremes.”

* * * *

After being debriefed by Chief Davis on what
went down during the shootout and capture of Bradley Irwin, Teague
and Keir returned to Teague’s motel room. Since they no longer had
to remain undercover, Teague packed his bags and, after picking up
the Trek from the airport parking lot, they moved to one of the
better motels in Faircrest, getting adjacent rooms.

Keir came into Teague’s room, once he’d
unpacked what few clothes he’d brought with him. “I have to go
shopping,” Keir stated.

Teague looked at him, realizing the young man
was wearing the same jeans and long-sleeved T-shirt he’d had on
when he first arrived in Faircrest. “I take it everything else you
brought with you was for going undercover.”

“Yeah. And if we’re sticking around…”

“You know you don’t have to. I’m sure Jake
would be glad to have you back at the agency.”

“Are you trying to get rid of me?” Keir
asked, his expression a mix of amusement and hurt.

“Not at all,” Teague protested. “I could
actually use your company until all of this wraps up.”

“You’ll have Hoyt soon enough.”

“First off, I suspect he’s going to be in the
hospital for the foreseeable future until he’s healed enough to
leave. Secondly, he does have a life and now that this is over I’m
sure he’ll want to get back to it.”

“With you as part of it,” Keir said
slyly.

“Do
not
start with that! Yeah, we
might be interested in each other on a…a superficial level, but it
wouldn’t work. He’s small town, I’m big city, and the town and city
are too far apart, both physically and in attitudes.”

“But…”

“Drop it, Keir.”

Keir looked as if he wasn’t going to, then
shook his head disgustedly and changed the subject. “I have to pick
up the car I rented and return it. At least there’s a branch here
in town so I don’t have to drive all the way back to the
airport.”

“Then let’s get that taken care of, go
shopping, and get something to eat.”

“Eat and then do the rest?”

Teague smiled, replying, “That works, too,”
happy to have diverted Keir from the subject of Hoyt.
How long
that will last is the question. And what am I going to do about the
problem?
He wasn’t certain which problem he meant—Keir’s
attempts to play cupid, or Hoyt himself. One thing was certain
though, as far as Teague was concerned. He’d be leaving town as
soon as possible, for his own good and Hoyt’s.

* * * *

It was early evening by the time Teague and
Keir returned to the motel. Jake had called to say he was emailing
Teague with what he’d found out about Bradley Irwin so the first
thing Teague did was get on his laptop to check his email and
download the file Jake had sent.

Name: Bradley William Irwin

DOB: 1982

Place of birth: Bent Township, Colorado.

Father: Corwin John Irwin—died 2013

Mother: Linda Marie Irwin nee Ham—died
2013

Father’s occupation: Pastor

Mother’s occupation: Housewife

Siblings: None

“That’s pretty cut and dried,” Keir
commented.

“Then we come to this,” Teague replied. “His
father’s church is fundamentalist, although according to what Jake
found out, not one that’s listed by the Southern Poverty Law Center
as an extreme branch.”

“So Will…Okay, I have to start thinking of
him as Bradley Irwin. Anyway, he might have been indoctrinated from
an early age to hate gays.”

“Hard to tell from this, but it’s possible.
Gays, blacks, anyone who didn’t fit into the church’s preconceived
ideas of who are acceptable in the eyes of
their
God. And if
Irwin is gay…” Teague shook his head.

“He might not be, you know. He could have
been pretending so he had an excuse to go hunting.”

“We won’t know until after Chief Davis gets a
chance to interrogate him.”

“And that won’t happen if Irwin hires a
lawyer, and you know he will since he’s facing murder and attempted
murder charges,” Keir said sourly.

“True.” Teague kept reading. “He’s college
educated. Works as a salesman for a large pharmaceutical
company.”

“So he probably travels all over the country.
Why did he end up here and start killing? What set him off about
Faircrest specifically?”

“It fit whatever parameters he had?”

Keir nodded. “Or it…no, it couldn’t remind
him of the towns where the original killings happened. He’d have
only been eleven or twelve then.”

“I wonder…” Teague scrolled through the
information Jake had sent. “When Irwin was nine, his father was
relocated by his church from Bent Township to the town of Glenley.”
Going to his search engine, Teague typed in the name and hit enter.
“There are three towns with that name in the country and guess
what.”

“One of them is in Colorado.”

Rather than reply, Teague brought up a map
site and input ‘Glenley, Colorado’. “Bingo.” He tapped the map.
“Sixty miles north of Collingswood. I need to call Slater with this
info, and Chief Davis.”

“Just because they lived there…” Keir said.
“I mean, I don’t see a twelve-year-old…”

“No, but what if it was his father who did
those
murders?”

“Like father, like son?” Keir replied almost
disbelievingly.

“That is a stretch, I agree, especially
considering that Irwin didn’t do anything until now.” As he replied
to Keir, Teague dialed Detective Slater’s number. His call was
answered almost immediately and after letting Slater know who was
calling, Teague said, “We caught the man who murdered the two boys
here in Faircrest.”

“So I heard. Congratulations,” Slater said.
“Have you been able to talk to him?”

“No. That won’t happen for at least a couple
of days at the earliest. I do have information on him.” Teague
filled Slater in on the bare details before saying, “I’m going to
email you the file. I want you to go through it and see what you
think rather than my telling you my thoughts now. I don’t want to
prejudice you, if that makes sense.”

“It does.” Slater gave Teague his email
address, and after congratulating Teague again, they hung up.

By then it was late enough that Teague
thought Chief Davis would have gone home for the day. So he called
the police department, planning on leaving him a message. Instead
his call was transferred to the chief.

“My people pulled together information on
Bradley Irwin,” Teague told the chief when he answered his phone.
“Some of it is quite interesting.”

“Bring it over if you would.”

“I can send you the file via email.”

“Please do, and come by now, if that’s all
right with you, so we can go over it together.” The chief chuckled.
“I suspect you’ve already formed some opinions about him.”

“Definitely. We’ll be there in twenty, give
or take.” With that said, Teague hung up and then emailed the
file.

“Grab your jacket, we’re—”

Keir laughed. “I was standing right here. I
know.”

* * * *

Despite why they were back at the police
department, the first thing Teague asked Chief Davis was, “Is there
any update on Hoyt?”

Closing a file he had open on his computer,
the chief replied, “He’s out of intensive care and doing as well as
can be expected. We haven’t talked yet because he’s still sedated.”
The chief added, in amusement, “Right now he looks like a mummy
from his neck and shoulder to his right elbow due to the bandaging.
The doctor who did the surgery assured me that Hoyt will probably
regain full use of his arm, although he’ll need physical therapy
for a while.”

“Thank God.”

“As for Mr. Irwin. He’s set for a second
surgery in the morning to finish repairing the damage done by
Hoyt’s bullet.”

“Too bad Hoyt didn’t kill him and save the
state the bother,” Keir muttered angrily.

“Then we wouldn’t be able to find out why
Irwin started killing in the first place,” Teague pointed out,
gripping Keir’s shoulder.

“I know, but damn.”

Turning back to Chief Davis, Teague asked,
“Have you looked at the file yet?”

“I just started and from what I read so far
it contains the same information we’ve come up with. When you
called I was working on a report about our search of the furnished
apartment Irwin rented.”

“Find anything useful?”

“Like a diary where he wrote down every kill?
I wish. Unfortunately there was just what you’d expect for a man
who travels for his job. Clothes, toiletries, sample cases of drugs
he was peddling for the company he works for. Also, a couple of
well-read bibles. One, from the flyleaf, belonged to his
father.”

“His parents died last year. A
murder/suicide, according to…If you open the file again I can show
you,” Teague said.

“Interesting.” Chief Davis opened it then
moved so Teague could sit. Teague scrolled down to the death
information for Irwin’s parents. “The father was shot at close
quarters with a gun they kept in their bedroom for protection. His
wife then shot herself, according to the coroner.”

“No note left,” the chief said, reading over
Teague’s shoulder. “And according to this, the neighbors stated
that the couple appeared to be happily married.”

“What if…?” Keir paused, looking at Teague.
“What if you’re right and Pastor Irwin was the original killer?
Somehow Mrs. Irwin finds out what he did, well after the fact, is
horrified, and decides he needs to pay for his sins. So she shoots
him and then, unwilling to face the consequences of her actions,
kills herself.”

“And interesting theory,” Teague agreed. “It
could explain why Bradley Irwin began his killing spree, even
though he waited a year to start up.”

“How would he know about what his father
did?” the chief asked.

“Presuming we’re onto something here, the
same way his mother did, however that was. Damn it, I wish Hoyt
hadn’t shot him so we could ask him now.”

“If Hoyt hadn’t, we be three more of Irwin’s
victims,” Keir said sardonically. “We’ll get our chance, or rather
the chief will, once Irwin is out of intensive care and
recovering.”

“And has lawyered up which means we may never
find out,” Teague stated angrily. He looked at Chief Davis. “There
was nothing in the apartment pointing directly to his crimes? No
rope or objects he used on the boys?”

The chief rolled his eyes. “Don’t you think
I’d have told you if there was?”

“Yeah. Sorry. I’m just frustrated. I’ve been
living this for the last two years. Ever since they identified
Chris’s body and linked him to the murders as another of the
killer’s victims.”

“Meaning you need closure,” the chief said,
patting Teague’s back. “Understandable. You’ll get it. It will just
take time.”

Teague nodded, getting up from the computer.
“Okay, we should get out of here so you can go home. Do you think
they’ll let me see Hoyt in the morning?”

“I’ll check,” the chief told him, “but I
don’t see why not. I’ll let them know you’ll be stopping by.”

“Thank you.”

* * * *

Soon after he got up Friday morning, Teague
got a call from Detective Slater.

After thanking Teague for the file, Slater
said, “My first thought, going through it, is that Pastor Irwin was
the man who killed the boys in this area, based in part on the fact
his wife killed him and then herself, even though that happened
years later.”

“That’s the theory we came up with as well,”
Teague agreed. “Not that we can prove it.”

“Let me do some investigating from my end,
now that we have a name. I might be able to find out more about
Pastor Irwin than is in your file.”

“If you do…”

“Of course I’ll let you know. I really hope
he’s our man. I’d like to write ‘Solved’ on my files about the
murders.”

“We both would.” They talked a bit more,
Teague filling Slater in on the details of Irwin’s capture, and
then they hung up.

Keir showed up a few minutes later,
suggesting they get some breakfast before heading to the hospital,
which they did.

When he and Keir entered the hospital an hour
later, Teague checked in at the front desk. The receptionist said
he was expected, telling him that Hoyt was in room 310.

“Do you want me to wait here?” Keir asked
when they got to the third floor waiting area.

“No. I know you want to see him, too. To make
certain he’s really alive and…well, not kicking but…” Teague
replied with a smile.

“And to thank him,” Keir added.

“That, too.”

Following the directions from a woman at the
nurses’ station, they made their way to Hoyt’s room. Teague opened
the door slowly and peered into the room, afraid he’d awaken Hoyt
if he was sleeping. Hoyt wasn’t, and when he saw Teague he smiled
in obvious relief.

“Finally, someone who isn’t wearing scrubs.
Well, don’t just stand there. Come in. Come in. I’m dying for human
companionship.”

Teague chuckled, crossing to the bed with
Keir trailing behind him. “How many drugs do they have you on?
You’re way too cheerful for a man with tubes and IVs and enough
bandages to make you look like, well as Chief Davis put it, half
mummy.”

“Let’s just say I’m feeling no pain,” Hoyt
replied, his smile dimming. “How are
you
doing? The last
thing I really remember is that bastard shooting you and trying to
strangle Keir.”

“Minor flesh wound is all.”

“And I’m fine now,” Keir put in. “Sore neck
but that’s about the size of it.”