Page 5 of Justice for JoElla

“JoElla, stop. Just cut it out. Look, I’m going to be retiring in a couple of years. Hell, I let my chief deputy do most of the heavy lifting these days. But I just got a budget increase from the fiscal court, and I know what I want to do with it. I want to hire at least one detective. Be that detective, JoElla. I’m not going to lie to you?I talked it over with my staff, and they overwhelmingly said I should ask you. But just think, if you help bring this guy to justice, you could run for sheriff in the next election cycle and, by god, I think you could win it.”

“No, I?”

“You don’t have to give me an answer right now. Just think about it and I’ll come back in a couple of days. But if you decide you want it, you know where to find me.” He stood and picked up his beer bottle. “By the way, Brenda says hello. When I told her I was going to talk to you, she was really excited. Talked to Laura too. She said she thought you’d be a great addition to our staff.” Roy and Brenda’s daughter, Laura, had married one of the Walters men who lived out in Shelbyville, but she’d been military too. People didn’t just like Laura?they respected her. She’d even been on a commission investigating sexual assault in the military. JoElla had heard that she got a call from the president?of the UnitedStates?at a Thanksgiving dinner at TonyWalters’ big house in Shelbyville. If Laura Walters endorsed someone, it carried a lot of weight. JoElla remembered Laura from school and if there was anything she knew about the tall brunette, it was that she spoke her mind.

She closed her eyes and let out a big sigh. “Okay. I’ll think about it. And thanks for the vote of confidence.”

“No, thank you for listening. Now, try to calm down, get a good night’s sleep, and I’ll talk to you in a couple of days, okay?” All JoElla could do was nod. “I’ll lock the door behind me.” Roy headed to the door and when he reached it, he turned and chuckled. “You picked the lock? Wow.” Then he was gone.

All she could do was throw out what was left of her pitiful dinner and go to bed. She lay there in the darkness, staring at the ceiling and wondering what it all meant. A boy was killed. A woman was missing. And RoyBillings wanted her to come to work for the Spencer County Sheriff’s Department.Thank you for listening. That’s what he’d said to her. Maybe she was actually worth something. Maybe she needed to think about it.

After all, at that point, what did she have to lose?

* * *

Sleep.Ten minutes worth would’ve been nice, but no. It hadn’t come, not a single minute. JoElla had tossed and turned and gotten up and gone back to bed and gotten up again and had a beer and… Nothing had worked.

But her sleeplessness had given her something: Time to think. That was the one thing she shouldn’t have been doing, but there she’d been, doing exactly that. Events from the night Kevin Warren Matthews had been killed just kept replaying in her mind in a loop. It was almost like a movie, one that just went on and on and on.

And then the replay of the questioning. Of course, that was easy. She and Lance had been arguing. Hell, that was all they’d done for months. He’d promised her that he was going to leave his wife, but he hadn’t. He insisted he couldn’t just yet. JoElla had asked him repeatedly why he couldn’t. It wasn’t like they had kids or something. They owned a house together, but it was nothing expensive or spectacular on a cop’s pay and a bank teller’s salary. He’d just kept insisting that he would, but not right then.

On the evening of the shooting, she’d finally gotten the whole picture. They’d been in a convenience store, and his phone rang. He headed to the back of the store, stepped into the restroom, and closed the door. Through its thin wooden construction, JoElla could hear him arguing with someone, and she’d assumed it was his wife, Kendra.

Until she heard him say, “I will, I promise, but I can’t yet. Please, don’t be like that. What? No. JoElla is my partner. Nothing more. I’m all yours, Michelle, and you know that.”

She’d waited until they got back into the cruiser before she turned and glared at him. “Who’s Michelle?”

“My neighbor.”

“What’s going on with her?”

“Oh, nothing. We’re just friends.”

“Friends with benefits?”

He’d slammed on the brakes and the car’s tires squealed on the pavement. “What makes you think that?”

“I could hear you in the bathroom, Lance. The whole damn store could.”

“Then you misunder?”

“No. I did not misunderstand. So, besides me and Michelle, who else?”

“There is no one else, JoElla. Just you.”

“And Michelle.”

“No! God damn it! What do I have to…” They’d kept arguing as he drove, yelling back and forth, and it went on for at least thirty minutes, until the sound of breaking glass caused him to slam on the brakes again.

They’d chased the little bastard straight into the building, guns drawn, and when he lifted that handgun, she’d screamed, “WEAPON!” and fired. In a split second, there were gang members everywhere. She got off one shot and when her weapon failed, it was left up to Lance to get them out of there.

And he did. He was a hero, a good cop who’d saved himself and his partner. She’d been the weak link, the one who’d caused the problem in the first place… somehow. How that had become her role, she wasn’t sure.

As the investigation wore on, the gang members who did survive told an interesting tale of what was supposed to have happened. “The Gang of 9ine,” as they tatted themselves, was an offshoot of a large gang in Chicago. The whole event had been carefully orchestrated. They’d filled the fake weapon with buckshot so it was heavy, and the fourteen-year-old high school freshman hadn’t known it wasn’t real. His role had been to lure a cop into the warehouse so the gang members could kill him or her. They needed that on record for their parent organization to deem them worthy of their affiliation with the larger gang. And it had worked?sort of.

Because while they were being interviewed, charged, and arraigned, the questions kept coming at JoElla. What had she done on watch that night? Had she gone anywhere she shouldn’t have? What was she doing when the brick smashed through the back window of the cruiser? Why hadn’t she been paying attention to her surroundings? Several times, she asked, “Are you asking Lance these questions too?”

And every time it was met with an admonishment to not worry about him and worry about herself instead. At one point, she’d even been told, “You shouldn’t be worried about him. He saved your life.He’snot in any trouble.”

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