Blood Ambush Read Online Free Page B

love my wife. I didn’t have to worry about not trusting her because we genuinely loved each other, not because I was jealous of her! You did say she was injured, didn’t you?”
    “I’m going to say she was hurt bad,” the officer said, repeating his earlier statement.
    Vernon showed Clifton and DeBerry how to bring up the last numbers on his cell phone to verify the calls he’d sent and received that day. Then, as tensions eased a bit, he said that he and Darlene had a good life, living out in the country.
    “My second wife hated it and couldn’t handle it,” he said, “and she moved back to Texas.”
    Vernon was asked if he’d noticed a hard-cover black Dodge pickup in the area that day, or if he knew anyone who owned one, and he said no. Then he was asked if he owned a shotgun. His wife’s son, Benji, had left one at their house when he moved out after living with them for a time, he said. Benji had taken the shotgun, which had belonged to Darlene’s father, and he’d had the barrel sawed off. Darlene took it away from him and hid it somewhere in the house, Vernon said, but he did not know where it was.
    When he was asked if he and Darlene had ever had any trouble with Benji, he said Benji and his mother had argued over his continuing use of drugs, calling it a “knock-down, drag-out fight,” after which Benji had moved out of their house and gone to live with his girlfriend in Rockmart, Georgia.
    When asked if Darlene had any problems with her ex-husbands, Vernon said she did not. He made several disparaging comments about the character of one ex-husband, but he went on to say that she had never had “an ounce of trouble” from him. Her other ex-husband was the father of her two children, Benji and Heidi. There were no current problems with him, either, according to Vernon.
    When the questioning concluded, Vernon agreed to his home being searched, and he was returned to the scene. A thorough search of the house, however, turned up nothing that could help with the investigation. So far, Vernon Roberts had an air-tight alibi.

8
    Investigators spent a late night at work at the pond off County Road 941, with Investigator Mark Hicks, Lieutenant Jimmy DeBerry, and Chief Deputy Tim Hays staying overnight in the rain to protect the scene. The following morning, Jolly and his team, along with a large number of other officers, reported to the pasture at first light to begin searching the area for evidence again, starting to comb through the tall weeds looking for anything they had not been able to see earlier. Quite a few items had been collected the previous night, before it grew too dark to do a detailed search, but the deep, stamped-down layer of grass surrounding the pond could be hiding many crucial pieces of evidence, which would be more easily uncovered in the light of day.
    Among the first and most obvious items that had already been recovered at the scene the previous evening were three shotgun shell casings, two blue and one red, and their wadding, found lying in the mud at the edge of the pond. Each piece was carefully bagged and labeled, to be tested for evidence in the event that the murder weapon was recovered. Some long strips of white cotton gauze had also been found and collected, one lying near the side of the Murano and one farther away, out in the field.
    Most of the green plastic stretch film had remained looped around Darlene’s neck when her body was removed from the pond, but a couple of additional smaller pieces were found floating in the water; those had rough, jagged edges and looked as if they could have been ripped away from the main piece of green film by the shotgun blasts. They were all recovered and bagged.
    The Nissan Murano was processed for evidence at its impound location, Larry’s Tire & Towing, in Centre, Alabama, by Investigator Jolly on the morning of April 7, along with Vernon Roberts’s brown GMC 1500 pickup truck, which had also been impounded until it could be