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  “You’ve got to be kidding me.” How many times had he witnessed J.D. doing the same? “We have a witness who’s almost certain she heard his voice after an attack.”

  “Almost? Not like your girlfriend actually saw Lavon.”

  Harlan picked up the baggie with the collected shotgun shells and waved them at J.D. “She was almost killed. You really going to let this slide because Lavon went crying to his daddy? We need to get a subpoena for his guns and run a ballistics test to see if they match the shell casings.”

  “That won’t hold up in a court of law and you know it.”

  “Doesn’t mean we can’t start building a circumstantial case. Who knows? Maybe it’ll even be enough to scare Lavon into a confession.”

  “Or maybe your rash actions for swift justice will result in a lawsuit against us as well as charges of tainting the evidence.”

  Harlan stared, dumbfounded. J.D. had been his mentor, had been grooming him to take over as sheriff and now he treated him like this? He’d done nothing wrong. Harlan’s conscience was crystal clear. But there was no point in continuing the discussion.

  “And if I refuse to leave work?” Harlan asked.

  J.D. stood, hitching up his belt. “Son, you don’t want to cross me. Get your ass out of here, think the situation over and we’ll talk next week.”

  Harlan went to the door and then turned. “Why are you so afraid of Thaddeus Tedder?”

  “I’m not.” J.D. sat down and pulled a stack of papers toward him.

  “Has he got some kind of hold over you?” Harlan asked quietly. Maybe Lilah was right. Maybe her uncle did pay J.D. for favors. It could have started years ago if Thaddeus had caught J.D. in a moment of weakness, and then his boss had been sucked into staying on the take.

  “If you’re in hot water with the Tedders, I can help you,” Harlan offered.

  J.D. nailed him with a glare. “What makes you say that?”

  “You were recently seen accepting money from Thad.”

  J.D.’s hands slammed on the desk. “That’s a damn lie. You got proof?”

  “Not yet.”

  Harlan softly closed the door. Let his boss stew on that one.

  Zelda scurried toward him with an empty cardboard box. “Thought you might need to pack up a few things,” she said sympathetically, trying to push the box into his hands.

  All eyes from the dozen or so cubicles were on him. So they’d heard J.D.’s rant.

  He shook his head. “I don’t need that box. I’ll only be a gone a week. I’m coming back.”

  At least, he hoped so. No telling what kind of trick J.D. might have up his sleeve. Back in his office, he collected a few odds and ends, preparing to leave.

  Wait. Not so fast. Just how crooked was his boss? Last time J.D. had been in his office, he’d disapproved of his reviewing the old Hilltop Strangler case and had taken Lilah’s leather bracelet. On a hunch, Harlan looked up the number to the forensics office in Atlanta. If there was to be any progress on the case, he’d have to push it. Wouldn’t hurt to prod one of his old friends and see if they could prioritize examining the bracelet. J.D. was already ticked off with him, so why not? He punched in the number and spoke to Doug almost at once. At least luck was with him on this.

  But the news he received was a bombshell.

  The bracelet had never been sent.

  * * *

  WAIT UNTIL UNCLE JASPER lit his eyes on this. Lilah kept a hand on top of the covered casserole dish as she swung into the potholed slash of dirt that passed for his driveway.

  Jasper looked up, frowning, from where he was hoeing the vegetable garden. When he recognized his visitor, he nodded and walked to the house, laying the hoe alongside its exterior wall.

  Lilah got out of the vehicle, holding up the covered dish. “A chicken and biscuit cobbler. Your favorite.”

  “It ain’t my birthday. What’s the occasion?”

  “Just my way of saying thanks. If you hadn’t directed the search team to the cave, I might have ended up spending the night in it.”

  He shrugged it off, as she knew he would. “Anyone would have done the same. That dish will do right nice. I’ll slice up some fresh tomatoes and cucumbers to go with it.”

  “Which reminds me...” She laid the dish on the car’s hood and opened the back door. “I told Harlan I was coming so he sent a few pepper plants by me to replace the ones he ran over the other day.”

  “Man made good on his promise, then.”

  “You can always count on Harlan.” She transferred the plants into his thin weathered hands. He was too lean, she decided. The fattening casserole would do him good. She should start doing this once a week to make sure he put some meat on his bones.

  “You go on in. I’m gonna pick us some fresh vegetables and water these here plants. They look a little peaked.”

  “Don’t be too long,” she said with a smile. “I’m hungry.”

  It seemed like she stayed that way these days. Lilah marched up the porch steps, careful not to bump into the crates and other junk her uncle insisted on keeping. She itched to pile it all in the front yard and burn it, but Jasper would never forgive her.

  Truthfully, the inside of his place was almost as cluttered. He never threw anything away. Lilah placed the casserole on the table and then went to the den and sat on his old sofa. Dang, if she wasn’t all tuckered out from working with Harlan this morning and then cooking. The events from yesterday must have been catching up to her body.

  She kicked off her shoes and propped her feet on the coffee table, kicking aside a huge leather tome of some sort. Curious, she picked it up and riffled through it. A bible—should have guessed it. Uncle Jasper was devout, but in a hail-fire-and-brimstone kind of way that made her vaguely uncomfortable. Little slips of delicately aged paper were stuck willy-nilly among the pages of King James script. She took one out and read. “Everyone who hates his brother is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life present in him.” 1 John 3:15.

  And another: “Whoever brings ruin on their family will inherit only wind, and the fool will be servant to the wise.” Proverbs 11:29.

  Well, wasn’t that just cheery. Carefully, she tucked the paper slips back into their hidden homes. Whatever her uncle chose to extrapolate from the bible was his own business and reading his notes felt like a violation of his privacy. So instead, Lilah flipped the pages to the middle. Smack dab in the center, a long ancestry tree lay folded accordion-style. Its pages were yellowed and scribbled with Jasper’s chicken-scratch handwriting. Generations of Tedders were recorded, but she skipped down to the latest entries. Her spirits took a nosedive at the sight of her dad and sister’s dates of death. One day hers would be alongside them.

  Enough with the gloomy thoughts. In a few months, her baby’s name would be listed as a birth on the family tree and that counted in the blessings column of life. Her fingers traced over the names of great and great-great grandparents.

  Ernest Tedder was a cruel man. Aunt Vi’s words popped into her mind and she searched for the man’s name. It was easy to spot. Amidst a sea of black and blue ink, his name was recorded in crimson.

  “Reading the Family Bible?”

  She gasped and glanced up as Jasper stepped through the screen door. “You scared me,” she admitted with a slight laugh.

  He slanted her an approving nod. “Does my heart proud to see a young’un reading the Holy Bible.”

  “I was just looking at our family tree,” she admitted. “Can I ask you something, Uncle Jasper?”

  “Reckon so.” He settled cautiously into the chair across from her.

  “I heard that your father was...” She hesitated. “A harsh man.”

  His ruddy face darkened. “Yer daddy tell you that?”

  “It doesn’t matter where I heard it.” She glossed over his question. No
sense getting him riled up at Aunt Vi. “Is it true?”

  “Wicked.” His thin lips clamped shut so tight they were white at the edges. “Despicable. Perverted.”

  Poor Uncle Jasper. It was obvious he’d suffered.

  “Was Dad mistreated, too?” She had to know.

  “Not so much. He was the baby. Thad and I were the ones that bore the brunt of his wrath.”

  He stared into space, apparently lost in painful memories.

  “Would it help to talk about it?” she asked gently.

  “Nope.”

  Now or never—she had one last question on the subject. “I heard he died in a hunting accident.”

  His eyes snapped to her. “What about it?”

  “Was it really an accident?”

  Silence roared in her ears, heavy and dreadful.

  “Some have their suspicions,” he answered at last.

  With that open-ended response, she did have one more question left. “What do you think?”

  “Sins of the father repeat from one generation to the next. Beware, Lilah. I’d hate to see anything happen to you.”

  He stood. “And that’s all I have to say on the matter. Ever. Understood?”

  When Uncle Jasper made up his mind, that was that.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Very well. Let’s enjoy that meal you prepared.”

  But all through the midday meal and during the drive home, she replayed his cryptic remarks about the sins of the fathers repeating themselves through the generations.

  All the way down to Cousin Lavon, who no doubt picked them up from his father. The gloom-and-doom path led her to even wilder imaginings. Uncle Jasper believed they were cursed. Intellectually, she knew there was no such thing but she couldn’t shake the ugly questions and insinuations.

  She was a Tedder. And it certainly seemed as if her family was cursed. First, Dad was killed and then Darla met the same fate. Who was next? And by whose hands?

  It wasn’t until later that evening, when she was drifting to sleep, that what had bothered her most of all that afternoon—that had been niggling in her subconscious for hours—made her sit bolt upright.

  Just like Ernest Tedder’s entry in the Family Bible, Dad and Darla’s names had also been penned in crimson ink.

  Chapter Thirteen

  “He did what?” Lilah asked, nearly dropping the pan of water she had been setting on the stove.

  Harlan took a seat at the table and ran a hand through his still-wet-from-the-shower hair. He’d debated not telling her what had happened, but she was bound to find out anyway. Besides, the lie of omission had sat heavily on him last night. He’d stayed out late at the bar with Sammy and Alvin, who’d insisted on buying him a couple of drinks and commiserating with him about his enforced leave of absence. When he’d finally returned home, Lilah had been fast asleep in front of the TV and he’d gently carried her to bed.

  He’d reconciled himself to her deception and neither of them had spoken of it again. It was his baby after all and their futures were tied. But their relationship still seemed fragile, and he had to concede his own part in that.

  “J.D. put me on administrative leave for a week. I’m not going to work this morning.”

  “That’s so unfair. I shouldn’t have insisted on going to the cave with you yesterday—”

  “It was my decision,” Harlan said firmly. She had enough worries without shouldering blame for his career hiccup. “And it was a culmination of several issues that have been brewing between us.”

  “Still.” She set the pan on the stove and brought him a cup of coffee before sitting across from him at the kitchen table. “I’ve caused you nothing but trouble since I came home. I should leave.”

  “Don’t you dare.” That would be what finally did him in.

  “What are you going to do?” she asked. “Return to work next week and hope J.D.’s cooled off?”

  “No.” He hadn’t realized he’d already decided until that very moment. “I won’t work for him again. Going back would feel like complicity in his crooked games. I won’t be a part of it.”

  “Now you believe me when I say he’s been on the take?”

  “Should have from the start.”

  “If you don’t go back, what are you going to do, then?” She hesitated, smoothing her hands over her jeans. “I have a little money saved, plus I might get a portion of that money Dad had socked away.”

  “I’ve got money,” he said gruffly. “Not a problem.”

  “And I have health insurance with my job,” she continued, eyes clouded with uncertainty. “That should cover most of my childbirth expenses. So I can certainly help there.”

  The baby. J.D.’s timing was lousy.

  “Stop worrying. I’m fine,” he said, reasoning out the possibilities. “I have plenty of contacts with other law enforcement agencies. I’ll take a temporary position elsewhere and, hopefully, I’ll win the sheriff’s election.”

  “Doesn’t seem right, though, that J.D.’s such a crook and gets to ride out his time until retirement.”

  “No free rides.”

  She cocked her head to the side. “What do you mean?”

  “I believe J.D. might be the mole in the sheriff’s office. The one that tips off the drug distributors before every raid that leads to a dead end. And I intend to find out the truth.”

  “How can you prove it?”

  “I’m going to the state and federal people to tell them my suspicions. Convince them to set up a new raid bypassing J.D. and his entire office.”

  “That would be epic. But there’s no telling how many people J.D. has under his influence,” she warned. “Could be hard to get anything past him.”

  “His luck has to run out sometime,” Harlan muttered, stirring sugar in his coffee.

  She gave a sigh. “Suppose so.”

  “You don’t sound convinced.”

  “It’s just that... I wonder how this will affect my family. I don’t want to believe Uncle Thad’s involved with a drug ring, but if he is, Aunt Vi and his kids will be devastated at the news.” She brought a hand to her mouth. “Oh, no. What about Ed? If he’s in it, my nephews will suffer. If Ed goes to prison, they won’t have a mother or a father.”

  He took her hand in his. “Let’s agree to handle only one problem at a time. Deal?”

  She drew a shaky breath. “Deal.”

  “How did your afternoon with Jasper go yesterday?” he asked, wanting to distract her from their problems.

  “Unnerving.”

  “Oh?” He leaned back in his chair and sipped his coffee. “Jasper not his usual sociable self?” he joked.

  Lilah snickered. “Right. Anyway, we got to talking about his father—my grandfather, Ernest. Jasper. He started going off the deep end talking about the sins of the fathers visited on the children, et cetera. So I asked him about the hunting accident, the one Aunt Vi said wasn’t really an accident.”

  Harlan sat up straighter, pulse racing. “And?”

  “He didn’t come right out and say it, but he insinuated it wasn’t an accident.”

  “I’ll take a look at that old file, see what the official report says.”

  “Can’t do that now can you?”

  “I’ll get Sammy to scan it and send me an email copy.”

  He’d also ask Sammy to check the evidence room and see if the leather bracelet was still there. Much as he mistrusted J.D., it was possible he’d locked it in storage and had forgotten about it.

  Harlan took one last sip of his coffee and rose. “Let’s go out for breakfast. It’ll do us both good to get out of here.”

  “You sure? I’ve already started cooking.”

  “Save it for tomorrow.”

  She shrugged. “Suits me. I’ll grab my purse.”

  T
hat was one of the many things he liked about Lilah. She wasn’t some glamour girl who would waste thirty minutes on hair and makeup. In less than five minutes, they were in her car and pulling out of the driveway. She’d insisted on driving, saying after the kind of day he’d suffered, he needed to relax and be chauffeured.

  “Where are we going?” she asked, easing onto the county road.

  “I could use a steak and—whoa!—slow down around that curve!”

  Her compact car whipped around it way too fast for his comfort.

  “Harlan—I can’t!” Her voice rose several octaves. “The brakes aren’t working!”

  What the hell? He unbuckled his seat belt, practically crawled into her lap and pressed his left foot on top of hers. The brakes pounded to the floorboard, but the car didn’t slow one iota.

  They gathered speed as the car plummeted downhill. Trees flashed by the windows at tornado-level speed. Damn. He thought fast, scooting back to the passenger side. “It’s okay, Lilah, keep steering. After the next curve, we’ll come to a field. Make a sharp right into it when I give you the word.”

  The Mothershed’s cow pasture was fairly level and, with luck, the car would grind to a stop with no harm to Lilah.

  They rounded the curve.

  “Now!” he yelled.

  Lilah jerked the steering wheel to the right. Her car careened on its right side, and then fell back down to the ground on the opposite side with a crash of metal and broken glass. He tried gripping the dashboard, but his body toppled forward and his head hit something hard and unyielding. Pain exploded behind his eyes and then, mercifully, a black abyss of nothingness descended.

  * * *

  LILAH BLINKED. HOW ODD. She was in her car, but it wasn’t moving. And she was parked in a field, with not a road in sight. The front windshield was cracked, and through the spider-webbed fissures, a cow chewed a mouthful of grass and stared at her indifferently.

  Her hands hurt. Frowning, Lilah looked down and saw they were scratched and bloody. Cuts tattooed their backsides and spread up her wrists and forearms. How had that happened? She turned her head to the side and reality and remembrance slammed into her gut.

  The brakes had failed and she’d wrecked. Harlan lay lifeless, and a deep gash on his forehead oozed blood.