Treacherous Secrets novel Chapter 22

Janice Carter scratched her head and pushed her dark blonde bangs away from her face. She looked over at her partner, Harold Jones. "This is going to be a very messy case."

He nodded. "Yep."

"Let's go over what we've got again. Maybe we're missing something," she said and placed the reports from the depositions in order. "Okay, the wife, Emily Jenkins. She says that her husband had never been physically violent before the episode a few days ago. He had been verbally and emotionally abusive toward her, the housekeeper and the gardener. He had discouraged her from having contact with her parents by making her and them uncomfortable any time he was around her parents. He insisted she be available for his call at all times. The one time she decides to have her own party and invite her friends and family, he shows up and flips out. But, she says she wasn't home when he was murdered. That she was at a hotel with the gardener's nephew, and swears that there is nothing going on between them."

"Right," Harold said, "and the manager at the hotel backs up their story that they were there all night, or at least they didn't go out the front or side doors where there are cameras."

"And their room was on the third floor, so they most likely didn't go out the window to commit the murder," Janice said. "Unless we find more evidence or something that links them to a hit on Jenkins, I think we can mark Emily Jenkins and Mario Rodriquez off the list."

Harold said, "I agree. Now, the Butlers are another story. Both are swearing that they were together at home all night, but Mario Rodriquez and your friend Kim place Damon Butler at the Twister around eleven, where Jenkins and he were having a lover's quarrel."

"Which the Butlers initially denied, but then both said that it was true that Damon and Kenton had been having an affair, and that Kenton had been having an affair with Carol Butler, which makes them both suspects," Janice said.

"But, we have to get one of them to give the other one up. Right now they are both protecting each other and we can't prove that either of them was at the Jenkins' house around two in the morning.

Janice picked up one of the coroner's pictures of a close-up of Kenton Jenkins' head. "The coroner said that the blunt force trauma was not enough to kill him, and she doesn't think the chair was the murder weapon, the way we initially thought. After recreating the scene, she said that it was more likely that Jenkins fell into the chair after being hit in the head the first time. He stumbled forward and fell, or was pushed, hitting his head again on the side of the pool before falling into the water and drowning."

"So, whoever hit him didn't hit him hard enough to kill him to start with. Maybe they didn't intend to kill him, maybe they just were going to beat the shit out of him and when he fell in the pool, they just walked away," Harold reasoned.

"Maybe; or maybe whoever hit him was not strong enough to hit him hard enough to kill him."

"What does the Doc think was used to cause the initial blunt force trauma?" Harold asked.

"She wasn't sure," she pointed to the picture. "There are strange indentations around the temple that are hard to make out. She's hoping to get a better picture of them today. Whatever they hit him with was angling downward, so I would say he was most likely sitting in a chair when the killer first struck him."

"Okay," Harold said. "Let's get a search warrant to look at all of the Butler's, Jenkins', and the Rodriquez's jewelry.

"The Rodriquez's?"

"We still haven't determined for sure where the older couple was at the time of the murder. It sounds like this Kenton guy was a dick to everyone. They had worked for him for a long time and had become fond of Mrs. Jenkins, maybe even started thinking of her like a daughter. Wouldn't you fuck someone up if they did what Jenkins did to his wife? I would have, especially after she told us about the rape part."

Janice nodded. She had to admit, she would have wanted to kill the son-of-a-bitch, too, if he had done that to her daughter, if she had one. "Well, then we better get one for Mrs. Jenkins' parents too."

Getting the search warrants proved to be a little more difficult than they had hoped. The judge refused to give them one for the Rodriquez's or Emily Jenkins' parents. "You don't have any evidence that points to any of these people to substantiate giving you a warrant to obtain their jewelry," the judge said.

It was true. They were only guessing that the Rodriquez's or Emily's parents might want to kill Kenton. Really, at this point, the only real suspects they had were the Butlers and they didn't have much on them. They were still waiting on the CSI's evaluation of the evidence collected at the Jenkins' house, hoping that something would stick out. The ring angle was the only potential clue they had right now.