Heroes In Uniform (267 page)

John glanced around and then nodded his head. He couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong. Sam Denton had grown up on construction sites with his father. He’d been foreman for at least twenty-five years. It seemed as if avoiding an accident like this would be second nature to him. And, John wasn’t willing to believe this was a coincidence. Any connection he’d begun to make between Sam Denton and Caroline Bowden’s murder was a loose one—hell, it was full of holes—but something told him there was a whole lot more going on here than a construction site accident.

“I do. Let’s do a full autopsy. Also, run a tox screen. I want to know why he went through those boards up there. It’s possible this was an accident. Charlie Hanford described some behavior…episodes…that might explain him going through them on his own. That’s most likely what happened, but let’s just check and recheck everything so we can be sure about that before we sign off on this one.”

John glanced up and angled his body away from the crowd of onlookers, making sure only Danny and the coroner could hear him. “We’re going to treat this as a suspicious death, but I want that information kept quiet for now. I don’t want anyone to know that we think this is more than just an accident.”

If this crime scene had anything to do with Caroline Bowden’s murderer, John wanted to be sure they didn’t chase the killer right back into hiding. May Bishop was right. The more active this killer became, the more likely a screw-up was going to happen. And John planned to be there when this killer made a mistake.

“You got it,” Cathy said, her trademark commitment to thoroughness no doubt making it easy for her to agree with John. “Labs’ll take a week or more. I’ll keep you posted.”

“What do you want me to do, boss?” Danny asked.

Danny’s eager-young-pup demeanor would come in handy here. “Check on the pieces of wood down here and up above to be sure there aren’t any signs they’ve been tampered with. And I want you to continue to ask all the guys working under Sam about his behavior lately. See if they saw anything like Charlie described. But let them think you’re just checking off the routine boxes on an accident investigation. Heck, for all we know, that’s what this is. If you have to, gripe about me making you do busy work. Just be sure no one thinks this is us trying to take this to a higher level of investigation, got it?”

“You got it, boss.”

* * *

Katelyn walked into the kitchen just as John was starting the coffee brewing. As she reached into the cabinet to pull down two mugs, his arms came around her from behind, pulling her into him and immediately setting her body ablaze. John seemed to be taking things slow with her, not pushing her to have sex yet, and she appreciated that. His sleeping on the couch could have too easily turned into an excuse for them to jump right into more. That didn’t mean his simple act of holding her didn’t start an ache for something more racing through her body. It was getting harder to ignore that ache.

“I love waking up to find you here with me,” he said, nuzzling the side of her face and neck with his mouth.

Katelyn laughed. “It’s my kitchen. Where else would you find me?”

“Oh yeah,” John said, pulling back and turning her so she faced him, then caging her against the counter with his arms.

Katelyn smiled. “I like waking up to find you here,” she said, her hands running over his chest. She liked that he hadn’t pressured her to share her bed yet. He slept on the couch every night, despite the fact that it was likely the most uncomfortable contraption ever made and at least four inches too short for his legs. It was nice.

Really nice, now that she thought of it. She knew he was as turned on by her as she was by him—he couldn’t actually hide that—but she didn’t feel any pressure to have sex with him yet. He was incredibly different from Devan in that way. For Devan, as it turned out, his whole motivation was sex. Apparently, with a newborn at home, he’d decided he had to go elsewhere and she’d been the elsewhere.

With John, she knew it wasn’t just about getting in her pants. Or her bed.

“What are you smiling at?” John asked, breaking into her thoughts.

Katelyn shook her head. “Just happy, that’s all.”

John released her with a grin as he reached around her for the now-full coffee pot and filled their cups.

“Hey, how did things go with that boy? That one you’re trying to help? Did he come in to talk to you like you asked or was he a no-show again?” she asked.

“Trent? He checked himself into rehab. I’ve got a couple of people in town who said they’d give him a job when he gets out, and he seemed pretty motivated to make it through the program. He’s got thirty days in there and then, we’ll see what happens.” He shrugged as though he didn’t care, but she knew he did. A lot.

“You did a good thing.”

He grunted. “Maybe. We’ll see if it makes a difference. I can’t turn my back on it again if I catch him drinking. He’s underage. Luckily for him, a lot of people in this town want to see him get out from under his dad’s thumb and make it. He’s got people willing to help him.”

“I have a feeling they’re willing to help you and by extension they’ll help him. It’s the fact that you’re going out on a limb to help him that’s making the difference,” Katelyn said.

She saw a tiny telltale pink tinge beneath John’s tan and decided she’d let him off the hook. She changed the subject. “Do you like running?”

“Hate it,” he said. “It’s my least favorite form of exercise. Why?”

Katelyn frowned. “Oh. Never mind.”

John gave her his look again and pulled her into his arms, tipping her chin up so she had no choice but to look at him.

“Why, Kate?”

“Katelyn.” She said into his chest, burying her head again. She loved the smell of him.

“Why?”

“I wanted you to run with me. I don’t want to go alone.”

“I said I hate running, not that I don’t do it. It’s sort of a requirement when you’re a cop. Gotta keep in shape. Besides, I won’t mind running with you,” he said as his mouth began to trail over her shoulder, sending heat and shivers through her in a delicious combination.

“Why?” she asked, hearing the way her breath caught as his mouth ran up her neck and he explored the soft spot behind her ear. Her heart sped up and her mind began to wander to her bedroom, wondering why they hadn’t slept together yet. Maybe—

“Because I’ll just stay behind you. I have a feeling I’m gonna love running behind you, Katelyn,” he said, drawing her name out with the sexy huskiness that told her he was as affected by what he was doing as she was, as one hand traveled down to cup her backside.

All thoughts of running and exercise and fear of leaving the house alone left her brain, just skittered right on out of her head as John and his kisses took over.

Everlasting: Chapter Fifteen

John kept Katelyn close to him over the next few days. If he wasn’t with her, one of his men was. She visited her father in the hospital every day despite the fact that he had more and more days where he wasn’t coherent. John could see Alan was slipping away from them. He and Katelyn both wanted to bring Alan home, but with everything going on, John was nervous about having him at the house. It seemed safer to leave him at the hospital where he was surrounded by staff 24/7.

With Sam Denton’s death, construction on Katelyn’s studio slowed for a few days, but Charlie promised he’d have a new foreman in place by the end of the week to get things up and running. Rumors about Sam’s strange behavior seemed to surface overnight and filled conversations in the Two Sisters’ booths. What bothered John most about that is that no one had mentioned any of this before his death, and all of the stories sounded like one reiteration or another of the ones Charlie had told John. John was willing to bet if he dug hard enough, he’d find that all of those stories led back to one source.

All of these things ate at the back of John’s mind as he followed the long dirt road out to Holland Barnett’s farm and took the cutoff he knew would take him around the back to the old barn and pond. Holland didn’t farm his land anymore and he hadn’t had any children to take it over. He’d sold off some parcels of the once-large piece of property to the surrounding farms, but kept the land that held his barn and house.

John had a vague memory of hearing that the county’s search and rescue team ran drills on Holland’s land, but he hadn’t expected to get a call from them like the one he’d had this morning. He parked his cruiser behind one of the search and rescue trucks and got out. Adam Dean greeted him almost immediately, while the rest of the search team stayed back with their dogs either sitting by their sides or in dog crates in the back of SUVs parked around Holland’s old barn.

“Hey, Adam,” John said, shaking the search team leader’s hand. “Tell me again what you told Berta. She was all up in arms about dead bodies in Holland’s pond.”

“Well,” Adam said, rubbing the back of his neck as he spoke. “She’s probably overreacting. Heck, we all probably are, but I figured I should call it in.”

“Okay,” John said slowly, looking at the rest of the team then back to Adam.

“We usually use this location to work our live find dogs, but this morning we were running our newer cadaver dogs out here. They’re trained to detect human remains,” Adam said. John nodded. He was familiar with search and rescue dogs. A live find dog is trained to find any live human in a given area. Cadaver dogs were just the opposite. They’d alert on any human remains—tissue, blood, placental or fetal tissue, teeth, bone. They’d occasionally used cadaver dogs for finding evidence like a blood trail when he was a cop in New York City.

“We weren’t working the pond, but one of the dogs went off in that direction on her own and we didn’t stop her. She gave an alert on the water.”

That was new to John.

“They can do that? Smell human remains under water?” he asked. He knew they were good, but that seemed miraculous.

“Sometimes, especially with such a small body of water. If there are human remains in the water, the vegetation all around the pond will have the scent of the remains growing right in them. We don’t start cadaver dogs out with anything as complicated as a water find, but when our dogs get more experienced, we work them on water. She’s a green dog so she wasn’t working water yet and the alert was weak. But, I brought another dog over to the area to have them run it just out of curiosity.” Adam looked almost apologetic as he spoke, and John had a bad feeling about what this was leading up to.

“And?” He was almost afraid to ask. He could see Holland walking toward them from the house, and the last thing he wanted to deal with was telling Holland Barnett they had reason to believe there was a dead body on his property.

“He alerted also. I called in two of our experienced cadaver dogs to check it before calling you. All four dogs have alerted on the pond.”

Before John could respond, Holland joined them, seemingly unconcerned that John was there.

“Hey, John, I was fixin’ to come out and get you earlier in the week, but I hadn’t gotten around to it,” Holland said, holding a key out to John, apparently thinking nothing of the fact that John was out there. John quickly eliminated Holland off any mental suspect list. The man wouldn’t have let the search team or anyone else run around on his property if he’d known there was a body in the pond.

John looked down at the key Holland had put in his hand. “What’s this?” he asked.

Holland jerked his head toward the barn. “Key to the barn. Sam Denton rented it from me for the last twenty-five years.”

John frowned. He hadn’t realized it had been that long since Holland had farmed this land, but it made sense. The man was well into his eighties, and he’d been injured in an accident sometime before John had moved to Evers. He got around surprisingly well, but farming would have been more than he could do.

“He used it for storage and such. I don’t know what all he kept in there, but seeing as he had no kin around here, I thought I should give the key to you.”

“Thanks. I’ll have to deal with that another day,” John said, wondering what he’d do with Sam Denton’s junk. Sam’s landlord had cleaned out Sam’s small apartment after John and Conner had gone through it.

“We have a bit of a sensitive issue with your pond. Seems the cadaver dogs have alerted on it. Can I send a diver in there to take a look, see what they might be alerting on?”

Holland looked at him like John couldn’t pour water out of a boot if the instructions were written on the heel. “There’s all kinds of dead animals in that pond, I’m sure.”

Adam shook his head. “They’re trained not to alert on any dead tissue that’s not human. The first two dogs that alerted are green so they might still make that mistake, especially with the find under water, but not the two seasoned dogs we brought in. There’s something in there.”

Holland looked at Adam and back to John, then back to Adam before he started to laugh. It was a chuffing, breathless sort of laugh that made John wonder if they’d need to call in paramedics to give him oxygen before all this was over. Holland never did really recover the ability to speak. He just waved his hand and nodded, then walked in the house, almost bent over with laughter at the two of them.

“Guess that’s permission to search,” John said and keyed his radio.

“Berta, call Dale Byer. See if he can come dive this pond for me and take a look. And see if Danny and Carter are free. Send them out here, too.”

The radio crackled with her reply and John and Adam sat down to wait. They tried to send the rest of the search team home, but no one was budging, and John knew it wasn’t worth the effort to try to make them. They’d most likely already texted the rest of the town to come out and watch the show, too.

Sure enough, cars started creeping up the drive soon after, and Danny and Carter were put to work keeping people away from a possible crime scene instead of doing any real work for John. He watched and waited as Dale suited up to go under and take a look. Chances were he wouldn’t find anything. John hoped he wouldn’t, anyway.