Cowboy Conspiracy
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Joanna Wayne
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Prologue
It was a country club neighborhood. Sprawling brick houses. Manicured lawns. A guard at the gate. The kind of community where people should be resting safely in their beds at 2:00 a.m. on a Sunday.
But in the Whiting home, one resident would never wake up to the smell of morning coffee—the latest Atlanta homicide to drop onto Wyatt Ledger’s overflowing plate.
Home murders were the worst, he lamented as he pulled up and stopped behind the two squad cars already parked in the driveway of a columned, two-story brick structure. A lone, bare tree stretched its creaking limbs toward the covered entry. Welcome to paradise gone brutal.
Not that murder was any more horrid or final here than in the backstreets and alleyways where so many of the city’s gang and drug-related killings went down. But a home was a person’s refuge, the haven from the outside world. Blood seemed so repulsively out of place splattered over pristine surfaces where violence had never struck before.
And home murders hit way too close to the nightmarish memories Wyatt could never lay to rest.
He turned at the squeal of brakes as a blue sedan joined the scene. A second later his partner rushed up the walk behind him, catching up just as he reached the door.
“Be nice if murders occurred during waking hours,” Alyssa said as she twisted her skirt until it hung straight over her narrow hips. Even slightly disheveled, she looked good. In any other setting, no one would guess she was as tough and smart as any homicide detective in the city.
“Didn’t you have a hot date tonight?” Wyatt asked, but his focus had already moved from Alyssa to the house’s surroundings. Lots of trees and shrubs to offer cover for a perp. An alarm-system warning was planted in the front garden. He’d have to check and see if it had gone off.
“Kyle and I went out with friends and didn’t get home until after midnight,” Alyssa said. “I was sorely tempted to ignore the phone.”
“You’d be yelling if you weren’t invited to the party.”
“Wrong. I hate crime scenes. I love arresting murdering bastards, so I forego sleep.”
“I figure we may lose a lot of sleep over this one.”
“Why?” Alyssa asked. “What do you know about the crime?”
“Probably the same as you know. Cops were summoned by a 911 call. Found a woman fatally shot. House belongs to Derrick and Kathleen Whiting.”
Wyatt opened the unlocked door and stepped inside a high-ceilinged foyer. A multifaceted crystal chandelier dripped light over a marble floor and an antique cherry credenza. Cold air blasted from the air-conditioning unit, though it was already October and in the high sixties outside.
Low voices drifted down the hallway. Wyatt’s gut tightened as he strode toward the conversation. He’d been in Homicide six years. This part of the routine never got easier.
He saw the blood first, streams of it flowing away from a body partially hidden by two uniformed officers. Wyatt knew both of the policemen—Carter and Bower. They’d worked night shifts for as long as he’d been with the Atlanta P.D.
“It’s ugly,” Carter said, stepping back for Wyatt and Alyssa to move in for a closer look. He added a few expletives to make his point.
The victim was lying facedown on the living room floor, wearing a pair of black pajamas. Her feet were bare. She’d been shot in the back of the head at close range. Two bullet entry points were clearly visible.
The wounds were enough to make most men puke. It worried Wyatt a little that he’d become so desensitized to the gore that he didn’t pitch his dinner onto the sea of off-white carpet.
“The back door had been jimmied open,” Carter said. “The TV is unplugged and pulled out from the wall. Looks as if the victim may have come downstairs and interrupted a burglary in progress.”
“Or someone meant it to look that way,” Wyatt said. “Did you check the rest of the house for other victims?”
“Yep. All clear. No one else is home. There are men’s clothes in the closet in the master bedroom, but only one side of the bed appears to have been slept in. There’s another bedroom. Looks as if it belongs to a teenage boy. Slew of baseball trophies on some cluttered shelves and a poster of the Atlanta Falcon cheerleaders on the wall. Dirty clothes piled on the floor. Bed hasn’t been slept in.”
A boy who’d come home soon to find his mother had been brutally murdered.
A surge of unwanted memories bombarded Wyatt. Events replayed in his mind in slow motion. Staring at his mother’s brutally slain body, the pain inside him so intense he’d had to fight to breathe. The panic. The fear. The smell of burning peas. To this day he couldn’t stomach the sight or smell of peas.
“Who called the police?” Alyssa asked.
“A neighbor. He said he heard what sounded like gunshots from the Whiting home, but that the alarm system hadn’t gone off. When we got here we found the back door wide open, so we came in that way and then unlocked the front door for you guys.”
“Have you talked to the neighbor?” Wyatt asked.
“We figured Homicide would want to be the first to do that,” Bower said.
The front door banged shut. Either the wind had caught it or someone had joined them. Wyatt’s hand instinctively flew to the butt of his weapon.
“Mother.”
The voice coming from the foyer was youthful, male and shaky with panic.
Wyatt and Alyssa rushed to the hallway.
“What’s wrong?” the boy asked. “Where’s my mother?”
The boy looked to be twelve or thirteen, the same age Wyatt had been when his world had exploded. A man in a blue flannel robe stood beside him, his hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Has something happened?”
Alyssa flashed her badge. “Alyssa Lancaster, Atlanta P.D. Are you Derrick Whiting?”
“No. My name’s Culver. Andy Culver. I live across the street and a few doors down. Josh, here, was spending the night with my son Eric. He woke up and saw the squad cars in front of his house. Was there an accident?”
“There’s a problem,” Alyssa admitted. “Josh, do you know where your dad is?”
“He’s out of town on business.”
“Do you have any brothers or sisters?” Wyatt asked.
“No.”
“Any other relatives who live nearby? Grandparents or maybe an aunt?”
“My grandparents live in Peachtree City. Why? What happened to my mother?” His voice had turned husky, as if he were fighting back tears.
“Why don’t we step out on the porch while I explain the situation,” Alyssa said.
Explain? As if they were talking about the boy’s math homework instead of the end of life as he’d known it. Thankfully, Alyssa was better at talking to the family of a victim than Wyatt was, especially when they were kids.
Wyatt could handle the cold, hard facts of the crime, but he needed the sharp edges of personal boundaries to keep distracting emotions in check.
“Where’s my mother?” Josh’s voice had become almost a wail.
“I’m sorry, Josh.” Alyssa stepped toward him.
Josh broke loose from the cluster and made a run for the living area where his mother’s lifeless body lay drenched in blood. Wyatt grabbed for him as he scurried past, but Josh went in for the slide as if he were stealing home. By the time Wyatt reached him, the boy was standing over the body, his face a ghostly white.
Josh trembled, but he wasn’t crying yet. That would come later. Now he was in a state of semishock, consumed by the nightmare and ghastly images his mind wouldn’t let him accept.
“Mom’s dead, isn’t she?” His voice broke.
Alyssa slipped an arm around his shoulders as Wyatt took a position that hid the worst of the scene from the boy’s line of vision. But nothing either of them could say or do could protect Josh from the horror or the agony that would follow. No one knew that better than Wyatt.
The best Wyatt could do was to apprehend the killer and see that justice was served for Josh’s mother. That was a hell of a lot more than anyone had done for Helene Ledger.
