The General (as he prefers to be called) and I laid our plans for Easter Day.
I obtained the necessary paperwork to search Troy's property the week before, and Davis provided the opportunity by having the doctor over with his ex-son-in law and children for Easter Dinner.
There was no entry problem. Well off the main road and very secluded, the door was unlocked and we walked right in.
The house seemed in order with nothing unusual. I was beginning to think my former chief was right. Hunches were...well...just that.
Then we found Tracy's car...hidden at the back of the heavily wooded property behind an outbuilding. It was storage shed type building about half the size of the cabin. Inside the shed were a collection of cast off items. Most broken and useless. A work bench. An old Norton motorcycle in pieces. A basket case, my dad would have called it. My late father was known to buy crates of old Harley parts and reassemble them in the winter. By late spring he would always have a running bike. Until that day in his mid-forties, when a 20 year old eighteen-wheeler driver hauling electronics, would sit on the shoulder of the interstate head-in-his-hands sobbing to the officer, paramedics and God
"I swear, I didn't see him. Came out of no where. Oh god..oh god...oh god"
and they scraped what was left of George Brinks off the hot blood-smeared pavement.
The kid would die in a big winter pile-up on I-80 later that same year.
[Louis Brinks was fairly certain, at the time, that wishing someone dead didn't actually make it happen...but wavered a little after hearing about the accident.]
In the far corner, behind all the broken crap, was an unused rust-streaked old latch type deep freeze.
When we opened the creaky lid we smelled her long before we removed the bundled tarp from the chest.
Scrambling tiny black bugs had discovered her long before we had.
There was no sign of violence or any entry/exit wounds. No blunt trauma. An autopsy and post-mortem would give us a better explanation of how and when she died. He had closed her eyes.
We had the bastard.
Sometimes a hunch is all you need.
I accompanied the homicide team as we converged on The General's place for the arrest.
He got away with it the first time.
He wasn't going to be given the chance again.
I was also naming him as a person-of-suspicion in her husband, Jerry Black's untimely death as well. Maybe it wasn't as open and closed suicide as I had first thought.
Given what The General had told me about Doctor Troy's romantic unwanted attraction to his daughter it made sense he would have gotten her husband out of the way first.
Establishing a possible motive.
He had also been the last person to see Jerry Black alive. When I had questioned him at his office he has seemed unduly tense, nervous. Out-of-sorts.
Nothing would give me more pleasure than nailing the son-of-a-bitch.
