Chapter 5 - The Battle on the EmbankmentThe woods around the farmhouse were quiet, save for the rhythmic dripping of melting frost from the pine needles. I kept low, using the thick brush and red clay ridges to mask my movement as I circled around toward the south side of the dirt road where I had seen the reflection.
My boots made no sound on the damp pine straw. Years of tracking game in these hills, combined with state police tactical training, allowed me to move like a ghost through the brush.
Fifty yards from the gravel shoulder, I spotted the dark gray rental sedan. It was backed into a logging cut, obscured by dead kudzu vines and pine branches.
A man was sitting in the driver's seat, a pair of long-range binoculars pressed against his eyes, aimed directly at my front porch. He was heavy-set, in his early fifties, with thinning gray hair, a red face, and a thick leather jacket. On the passenger seat beside him sat a long black case—a camera with a telephoto lens—and a manila folder stuffed with legal papers.
Richard Jenkins.
I approached the vehicle from the rear driver's side quarter panel—his blind spot. When I was three feet from his window, I tapped the muzzle of my service weapon sharply against the glass.
Jenkins jumped violently, dropping the binoculars onto the floorboards. His head whipped around, his face draining of color as he looked up into the barrel of my gun.
"State Trooper! Keep your hands where I can see them! On the steering wheel! Now!" I ordered, my voice echoing through the quiet woods like a rifle shot.
"Hey! Hey, officer, calm down!" Jenkins yelled, his hands shaking as he slapped them against the top of the wheel. "I'm not doing anything illegal! I'm on a public logging road!"
"Open the door with your right hand. Step out slowly," I commanded.
He fumbled with the latch, pushing the door open and stepping out into the cold damp air, his hands held high above his head. "Look, trooper, you're John Mercer, right? The guy who rescued my niece and nephew? I'm Richard Jenkins. Clara's uncle! I'm their family!"
"You're a predator," I said, stepping close enough to smell the stale tobacco and sweat on him. "You sat outside my home yesterday, intimidated a child who witnessed her mother's murder, and now you're staging illegal surveillance on my property."
"I have a right to see where my family is staying!" Jenkins sneered, his fear quickly twisting into greasy, arrogant indignation. "I'm their legal next of kin! You're just a cop playing savior because you couldn't keep your own wife alive!"
The air in my lungs went stone cold. He had pulled my file. He had researched my personal history to use it as leverage in the custody hearing.
I didn't hit him. I didn't lose control. I reached out, grabbed him by the front of his jacket, spun him around, and slammed him against the side of his rental car.
"Search warrant exceptions apply to motor vehicles under reasonable suspicion of felony witness tampering," I whispered into his ear as I reached through his open car window, pulled his camera from the passenger seat, and popped the digital memory card out of the side slot. "Let's see what's on this card."
"You can't do that! That's illegal search!" Jenkins roared, struggling against my grip.
"Try me in court, Richard," I snapped, pulling a set of handcuffs from my belt.
Before I could lock his wrists, a sudden heavy crunch of tires echoed from the main dirt road. A second vehicle—a beaten-up pickup truck with no front license plate—swerved hard off the shoulder, sliding through the mud directly toward us.
Jenkins let out a triumphant bark. "You think I came here alone, cop?!"
The passenger side door of the truck flew open. A muscular man in a grease-stained hoodie stepped out, holding a heavy steel pry-bar. It was one of Jenkins' associates—a hired muscle he had brought from Atlanta to ensure things went his way.
"Drop the cuffs, officer!" the man in the hoodie shouted, taking a wide stance.
I didn't drop the cuffs. I pulled Jenkins in front of me as a human shield, drawing my sidearm with my right hand and leveling it at the driver of the truck. "State Police! Turn off the engine and step out of the vehicle!"
Everything happened in a blur of motion and sound.
The driver of the truck slammed the accelerator down, spinning his tires in the mud, trying to pin me against the rental sedan. I shoved Jenkins hard into the brush, dove to the left across the hood of the sedan, and rolled into the ditch as the truck smashed violently into the rental car's side door with a sickening crunch of twisted metal and shattered glass.
The man with the pry-bar lunged into the ditch after me, swinging the steel bar downward toward my head.
I raised my left forearm, blocking the blow—the impact sending a sharp, white-hot flash of pain straight up to my shoulder. I ignored the pain, grabbed the front of his hoodie, brought my right knee violently up into his ribs, and threw him over my hip into the frozen mud.
He hit the ground hard, winded. I drove my boot down onto his wrist, disarming him, and brought the butt of my sidearm down once against his jaw, knocking him cold.
Behind me, engine revs roared again. The truck was backing up, aligning itself to run me down in the narrow ditch.
Then, from down the dirt road, the sharp, wailing scream of police sirens ripped through the forest.
Two marked highway patrol cruisers burst through the fog, their red and blue lights flashing wildly, cutting off the logging road entrance. Detective Miller's unit slid to a halt directly behind the pickup truck, her pit-maneuver bumper locking the truck into place against the embankment.
Four state troopers spilled out of the cruisers, weapons drawn, shouting commands that filled the woods with absolute authority.
"DRIVER! OUT OF THE VEHICLE! HANDS ON YOUR HEAD! DO IT NOW!"
The driver of the truck threw his hands out the window, surrendering instantly.
Richard Jenkins, covered in mud and pine straw, tried to scramble up the slippery clay bank toward the deep woods. I stepped up behind him, grabbed him by the collar, dragged him back down into the ditch, and clicked the steel cuffs around his wrists with a sharp, final snap.
"You're under arrest, Richard," I said, breathing heavily, my arm throbbing with a deep, dark bruise. "Felony witness intimidation, conspiracy, assault on a law enforcement officer, and reckless endangerment."
Jenkins looked up at me from the dirt, his face pale, his eyes filled with pure terror as Detective Miller stepped down into the ditch and flashed a cold, victorious smile.
"We checked his phone records while we were driving over, John," Miller said, handing me a printout. "He was in contact with Vance Mitchell three days before Clara was killed. He offered Mitchell ten grand to tell him where Clara was hiding."
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I looked down at Jenkins. He wasn't just a greedy relative trying to steal a trust fund. He was an accessory to the events that had led to Clara Jenkins' murder.
"Take him away," I told Miller.
