Blood Trail, page 20
part #18 of John Jordan Mystery Series
Before I came to work here as an investigator with the Gulf County Sheriff’s Department, Sylvia had killed a group of men who had raped Reggie when she was in high school. When I arrived, the case was one of a few open, unsolveds I began to look into. Not long back, when Reggie and I were under sniper fire out near the swamp where Remington James had died, after getting shot and not being sure she was going to make it, she told me what her mom did and asked me to keep her secret. In the intensity of that battlefield moment and because I thought she was about to die, I told her I would—something I have regretted ever since.
“Thank you for the offer,” I say. “It means a lot. I really appreciate you making it. But even if I were willing to let you try, which I’m not, it wouldn’t work. Tony Ford and Darlene and others would see it for the false confession it is. There’s no evidence.”
“But I was there at the park the night he was killed,” she says. “Reggie and I rode through the campground. I’m sure someone saw us.”
“That’s not nearly enough,” I say. “Plus that would implicate Reggie.”
“I could say I went back after Reggie dropped me off,” she says. “That I saw him there when we rode through and went back and killed him later.”
“I appreciate you being willing, but . . . it wouldn’t work. Thank you, though. It means more than you can know that you offered.”
54
“I ain’t lettin’ the sheriff take the fall for me,” Merrill says.
Though Dad is no longer a sheriff, Merrill, like a lot of people from Potter County, still refer to him as such. He was, after all, the only sheriff many of us knew for all but the last few years of our lives.
“He’s not,” I say.
Because Zaire was called into emergency surgery at Sacred Heart, I picked up Merrill once he bonded out, and am now driving him back to his house in Pottersville.
“How you figure?” he asks.
“’Cause you didn’t kill Chris.”
“I beat the hell of out him,” Merrill says.
“Sure, but long after that Jake went to work on him with a baseball bat.”
Based on the evidence—the timing and partial bruising and healing of some of Chris’s wounds—and some of what Dad, Jake, Merrill, and Anna have said, I am fairly confident Dad had a physical confrontation with Chris at his house earlier in the day, then Merrill beat him up on the trail on the backside of the field when he found him stalking Anna and the girls at the Dead Lakes Campground later that evening, and then later that night Jake went to the same spot with a baseball bat and worked Chris over some more.
“Who’s to say the blunt force trauma he suffered from my fists aren’t the ones that killed him?” he says, adding as he holds up his fists, “You don’t think these are far more devastatin’ than a little Louisville Slugger?”
I laugh. “No, I’m certainly not sayin’ that.”
“So . . . he doin’ it for Jake,” he says.
“He’s doing it for both of y’all,” I say. “He said so to me when I spoke to him about it.”
He nods. “I realize it’s mostly for Jake, but even if a little is for me . . . I can’t let him do it.”
“It’ll take blunt force trauma for you to stop him,” I say.
“All I got to do is tell ’em I did it.”
I shake my head. “They’ve already made the deal with him. They’re not interested in you or Jake. You know how it is when cops get a narrative. They stick with it. They’ve got a former sheriff. Someone close to us. His arrest will do the most damage to the department, cause the most pain and embarrassment to our family. They know what they’re doing.”
“You sayin’ I confess they’ll just ignore it?”
I nod.
“Then I’ll tell the media,” he says. “Let’s see them get a conviction then.”
“It’s a confession plea deal,” I say. “There won’t be a jury trial.”
“But a judge has to sign off on it, right? Won’t do that when a black man’s on TV confessing to killin’ a white man. This is still the Deep South.”
I shrug. “It might work. Or it might get you both indicted. But he wants to do this—for you, for Jake, for me, for all of us. He wants us to accept this—this gift he’s giving us—and go on with our lives.”
“Well, I’m not so sure I can do that,” he says. “What about you?”
“I’m sure,” I say, “that I can’t.”
“So . . . what we gonna do?”
I shrug. “That’s the problem,” I say. “I’m far less sure about that.”
55
When I get home, Jake is waiting for me.
He’s sitting in one of the outdoor metal chairs beneath the pergola at the side entrance of our house.
“Come in,” I say.
He shakes his head. “Nah. I just . . . You mind sittin’ out here with me for a minute?”
“Not at all,” I say, sitting in another chair next to him.
“Any sign of that murderin’ HC asshole yet?” he asks.
I shake my head. “None,” I say. “He has completely and utterly vanished.”
He doesn’t respond and doesn’t say anything for a long moment.
“You okay?” I ask. “Sure you don’t want to come in?”
“I’m sick of my own life,” he says. “Tired of bein’ such a fuckup. Even when I try to do somethin’ good for someone . . . it gets all fucked up. I try to make things better . . . and I just make ’em worse.”
“You mean Chris?”
“I’s just tryin’ to help,” he says. “Saw what he was doin’ to you and your family. Knew he needed to be dealt with. Knew you wouldn’t do it—I mean, you know, like with a bat. Wanted to step up and do my part . . . for our family. I don’t have anything goin’ on. No career. No girl. No . . . nothin’. So . . . I got time on my hands . . . why not take care of the Chris problem? And look at the fuckin’ mess I’ve made.”
“I know why you did what you did,” I say, “and I appreciate you doing it for us.”
“But as usual I fucked it up,” he says. “And now Dad’s gonna spend the rest of his life in prison.”
He pauses, but I can tell there is more, so I wait.
“Thing is . . .” he says. “I can’t let that happen. I have to do somethin’. But I’m scared if I do, if I try to, all I’ll do is fuck things up worse. ’Cause . . . that’s what I do. So . . . I’m askin’ for your help. Help me get Dad out. Tell me what to do. How to do it. I’ll gladly take his place.”
I nod. “I’m working on it. I’ll let you know what we can—Actually, you can start by answering a few questions for me.”
“Sure. Anything.”
“Do you think you killed Chris?”
He nods. “Had to have. Didn’t mean to. Just meant to hurt him. Teach him a lesson. Bust him up some so he’d leave y’all alone.”
“Exactly,” I say. “And he was alive when you tossed the bat into the swamp and left.”
“I thought he was.”
“And you didn’t break into the camper in the field and get things to stage the crime with, did you? You didn’t put a hood over his head and stab his dead body twelve times and drag it over and prop it up at the picnic table, did you?”
“No. I just left.”
I nod.
“You sayin’ I didn’t kill him?”
“If you did, why would someone come along and do all those other things I just mentioned, plus steal a phone and call dispatch and report it?”
He shrugs. “I don’t know. Why?”
“Because—”
My phone vibrates, and I pull it out of my pocket and glance at it.
It’s a text from Reggie saying she finally got the lab results and final autopsies from FDLE and that she has just emailed them to me.
“Hold on a second,” I say to Jake and call Reggie.
“Hey,” she says. “Get my text?”
“Have you read the reports yet?” I ask.
“Yeah. Glanced over them. Why?”
“Any surprises?”
“Chris’s cause of death,” she says. “It wasn’t blunt force trauma from the beating he took, and it wasn’t the stabs after he was already dead.”
“What was it?”
“Asphyxia,” she says. “He died from asphyxia as a result of an overdose of OxyContin.”
“Thanks,” I say, as Anna appears at the door.
“Who killed him?” she asks.
“Someone he’d trust enough to take pain medication from.”
“What is it?” Anna says as she opens the door. “What’s wrong?”
56
“I know you killed Chris,” I say.
“Me?” she says, her voice rising.
“Yeah. He called you for help. He was in excruciating pain. He had been beaten up three different times that day. He was a user. He called you when he needed something. So he called you. He called you, and you came. And you brought the pain meds you had left over from your surgeries.”
I am sitting in the interview room in the investigative unit of the Gulf County Sheriff’s Department, pictures of Chris and copies of his autopsy and lab results and crime scene photos splayed out on the table in front of me.
Across the table from me, having been read her Miranda rights and being recorded on audio and video, is Chris Taunton’s murderer, his mother, Audrey Taunton.
“I don’t know if you brought them with you with the intention of killing him or just to help with this pain, but you brought them, and you did kill him with them.”
She doesn’t say anything.
“I had to ask myself why were there all these calls to you that night—you and your husband—and then they just stopped. They stopped because you told him you’d come help him. Then a while later, time enough for you to drive over to help him, there was one final call from you. That was the call once you had arrived to see exactly where he was, wasn’t it?”
Her lips twitch, but she still doesn’t say anything.
Apart from the lip twitch, she appears completely calm, an old lady in her own little world, sitting on a bench at a department store waiting for her daughter and granddaughters to finish shopping—or something like that.
“You get there, and you see what kind of shape he’s in, and you ask him what happened and what he’s doing here, and somehow it comes out that he was beaten up by Anna’s family and friends. And maybe you say something like let’s call the police, but he says no. Don’t call the police. Why? Because he was there stalking Anna and our girls. And Anna had just told him the damage he paid a madman to inflict on her had actually caused developmental delays in his own daughter. He didn’t want anyone to know what he had done, what he was still doing. He just wanted you to help him, give him something for the pain and get him home.”
I lift a picture of Chris, the one in his best suit before his world began to unravel, and say, “Your own son—”
“Was a weak, using, obsessive, stalking, manipulative, murdering . . . who wasn’t going to stop. He was going to keep on harassing Anna and my granddaughter until he killed them or someone stopped him.”
“So you stopped him.”
“I did what any responsible mother would do. I stopped him myself. He was in pain, so I said, ‘Here, take these. They’ll help. And when they take effect, I’ll help you home.’ And he said, ‘Isn’t that too many, Mom?’ And I said, ‘No, dear. It’s just some mild pain pills and an anti-inflammatory.’ And he took them.”
“Of course he took them,” I say. “Just like he did when he was a sick child and his mother was caring for him.”
“He wasn’t going to stop on his own. He had to be stopped. It was the most humane way to stop him. I just . . . helped his pain go away, just helped him go to sleep.”
A sleep he would never wake up from, I think.
“He cut me out of his life,” she says, her small, moist, hooded eyes locking onto mine. “Acted like I was dead for decades. He killed that young girl he was having an affair with, Ashley. Tried to kill you. Almost killed Anna and my granddaughter. I knew what he was capable of. What I did for him was far more merciful than anything he ever did for anyone else. He never did anything decent for anyone—not that didn’t benefit him in some way.”
I can’t imagine getting to a place so dark, being in a situation so hopeless, that I could think my best or only course of action would be to kill my own child.
Johanna and Taylor’s sweet, smiling faces flash in my mind, and I know with absolute certaintyI am incapable of ever getting to such a place. No matter what. It’s unfathomable. Unthinkable.
I feel bad for Audrey.
To have a son like Chris, to live with the knowledge of who he was and what he was doing for so long, knowing he wouldn’t stop, knowing the damage he was inflicting, then arriving at the desperate moment of utter despair where she became convinced that death by her hands was better than the half-life he was living.
“I don’t think it was premeditated,” I say. “And I’ll tell you why. Breaking into the camper, getting the things you did so you could stage the scene. Shows you didn’t bring anything to use except the pills themselves, which you can argue you brought just to help with his pain.”
“I don’t care,” she says.
“About?”
“Whether anyone thinks it was premeditated or not. I don’t care if I get a long sentence or a short one. Either way, it will be a life sentence and either way my life won’t be any different than it is now. I live in a one-room cell as it is. Have no life. Failed at the only job I ever had—being a mother.”
“Why did you break into the camper?” I ask. “Why’d you put the hood on him, stab his body, move it over to the picnic table?”
“I didn’t,” she says. “I didn’t stab him. I couldn’t . . . do . . . something . . . like . . . that.”
“You didn’t stab him with a Swiss army knife after he was already dead?” I ask.
She looks as confused as she does alarmed. “No. Gracious me no. Was he . . . Did someone do that to him?”
“Let’s just stick with what you did for right now,” I say. “Then we can talk about anything else you like. Okay?”
She nods slowly. “Okay. I . . . I covered his head with the pillowcase because . . . and I . . . I couldn’t leave him out there in the swamp to rot. And I couldn’t stand to see his face after I . . . after he was . . . So I covered his head. I moved him so he’d be found sooner. I covered his head to . . . hide his face.”
“Did you have help moving the body?” I ask.
She shakes her head. “I needed it. It’s why I didn’t move him very far.”
“Where did you move him to?”
She looks confused again. “Where you found him, I’m sure. I dragged him out of the swamp to the . . . to where the trail begins. Just at the backside of the field where that empty camper was. I’m not as frail or weak as I appear—or have pretended to be since Chris’s death. It wasn’t easy. It took me a while. But I was determined. I rested a lot. And . . . well . . . in certain circumstances we are capable of far more than most of us think—even old ladies who’ve had their knees replaced.”
So she hadn’t been the one to stab him or move his body over to the picnic pavilion.
“Then I drove back home,” she says. “On the way, I called Lyle and told him he needed to go check on Chris, where he nor anyone else would think I had.”
I nod and try to think of anything else I need to ask her. “Is there anything else you’d like to say?”
She nods. “Just that I’m sorry. I’m sorry for all the damage Chris did. I’m sorry to the families of all his victims. I’m sorry to Anna and Taylor and Johanna and you. I didn’t raise him to do the things he did. And for myself . . . I’m sorry to your father and brother and friend for letting them be arrested for something I did. I wanted to say something. I did. I picked up the phone so many times to call and confess, but each time . . . found I was weaker than I thought I was. And in that, and to my shame, I reminded myself of my son.”
57
“I think I know why you staged the crime scene and body the way you did,” I say. “But I’d like to hear it from you.”
“Am I supposed to know what you’re talking about?” she asks, though it’s obvious she does.
I’m in an interview room at the Liberty County jail with Randa Raffield because I don’t want her back inside the lax Gulf County jail even for a brief visit. She had already escaped once and she now had leverage over Patch McMyers, the correctional officer who let her do it. I didn’t want to risk bringing her back there again. So I came to her.
She’s wearing a white inmate jumpsuit with large black stripes, yet still has the appearance of someone to be reckoned with.
“We’ve made an arrest in the case,” I say. “We have a confession. I’m not looking to jam you up or add any charges to you. Just seeking answers, searching for confirmation.”
“Who’d you arrest?” she asks. “Who confessed?”
“The same person you saw trying to drag the body off the trail and into the field,” I say.
“You’ve got to give me a name if you want me to talk,” she says.
“Chris’s mom,” I say. “Audrey.”
“Poor weak old thing,” she says.
“You saw her struggling to move the body so it’d be discovered sooner,” I say.
“I saw her making a mess of things,” she says. “Decided to clean up a little after her. After all, she had just done what I had come there to do.”
“How’d you know he was going to be there?”
