Left behind, p.22
Left Behind, page 22
“Okay then,” Gardner said. “We’ll get the paperwork rolling to extradite. The U.S. Marshals Service will transport, so you can tell your people we’re coming to get him. Thanks a lot.”
Davis chuckled. “For once, I can truly say, it was not a problem. I wish all the perps we go to serve warrants on were as compliant.”
“That bodes well for us. There’s more involved here than what meets the eye, and we need him to talk.”
As soon as they disconnected, Gardner called Sheriff Woodley to let him know they’d picked up their suspect. There wasn’t anything Woodley could do toward aiding their case, but if Pryor copped to killing Eggers, then that would mean he’d also come after Carey Eggers, and that would clear Woodley’s case as well.
But what Gardner did not do was spread the word about Pryor’s arrest around the station. He’d long suspected that Carl Henley had someone on the inside there, and he didn’t want Carl or Junior to know that Lonny Pryor was in custody. He needed to interrogate Pryor to get his story of the missing Beretta and Junior’s truck.
***
Woodley notified Chief Sonny Warren that they’d served an arrest warrant on Lonny Pryor, so the mystery of who shot Carey Eggers might soon be solved.
“That’s good news,” Sonny said. “I’ll let my men know. At one time or another, a good number of them stood guard duty while she was in the hospital. They said she was a real sweet woman. Thanks for calling.”
He walked down to the break room to get some snacks from one of the vending machines, and saw Lilah Perry pulling a cold can of soda from a machine.
“Afternoon, Lilah. Like minds, here. It’s snack-thirty, isn’t it?”
Lilah grinned. She admired the chief and appreciated that he was congenial to everyone, regardless of their rank.
“It was for me. I’d looked at dates and numbers and logs all day until everything was running together. Thought I’d take a quick break and get a snack while I was at it.”
“I’ll likely add to your work in a day or so when I finalize an open report on that woman who was shot a few weeks back.”
“Oh. The one from Pope Mountain, right?” Lilah said.
“Yes, it appears the person who shot her had killed her brother the same day. She was a witness he chased down. But the DNA they pulled off the brother’s body matched to a man named Lonny Joe Pryor. When they went to arrest him, they found out he’d done a runner. They finally found him in Florida. We’ll extradite him back and hope he coughs up a confession.”
“Oh my God,” Lilah mumbled as the room began spinning around her.
Sonny saw her eyes rolling back in her head and bolted. He caught her before her head hit the floor and was about to call for help when Bob Yancy walked in.
“Chief! What happened?” Yancy asked.
“I have no idea. We were just talking, and she fainted. Help me get her up on the sofa.”
She was already regaining consciousness by the time they laid her on the sofa, but the moment she woke up, she began struggling to sit up, then grabbed Sonny’s wrist.
“Chief! I know Lonny Pryor. We dated briefly when I still lived in Bowling Green. And the night of that rainstorm—the one when the girl was shot—Lonny called me out of the blue. He said he needed help. That he’d had a flat during the storm and hurt himself as he was changing it. Said his knee was bleeding. I told him to go to the ER. He said he didn’t have the money, and I believed that. He just wanted help with some bandages and then he’d drive home and deal with it there.”
“What did you do?” Sonny asked.
“What anybody would do in such a situation. He asked me if I lived in the same place. I said yes, and ten minutes later, he’s at my door. Ten minutes. How far up was it from Jubilee where the girl was shot?”
The hair on the back of Sonny’s neck crawled. “About fifteen minutes or so.”
“That’s about right,” Lilah said. “I think he thought he’d drive home on his own, but he was in pretty bad shape when he got here, so I guess he changed his mind and that’s why he called me.”
“Was he shot?” Sonny asked.
“Oh no! Nothing like that or I would have suspected something. He just had a deep gash in his knee and some severe bruising. Like he’d fallen on something sharp.”
Sonny nodded. “Chasing down a woman on the mountain in the dark, in a rainstorm, will do that to you.”
Lilah moaned and covered her face with her hands.
“I didn’t know. I had no idea. I would have said something sooner!” she said.
“Of course, you wouldn’t know. All the details of that incident were going through the sheriff’s department. But this is valuable information they’ll need to know when they interrogate him, especially if he tries to deny being in the vicinity. I’ll need to take your statement. Are you okay with this?”
She frowned. “Of course, I’m okay with it. I’m just thanking my lucky stars he didn’t consider me a witness he needed to remove.”
Sonny nodded. “Yancy, would you help Lilah up and walk her to an interview room so we can get that statement? And Lilah, don’t open that pop you just bought. It’ll spew all over. I’ll bring you another one when I come, okay?”
Lilah nodded. “Yes, Chief, and thank you.”
Sonny gave her arm a quick squeeze. “No, ma’am. Thank you.”
Yancy helped Lilah up and walked her out of the break room, while Sonny hurried back to his office. He made a quick call to the sheriff’s office, and as soon as Rance Woodley answered, he unloaded the latest news.
“I’ll get a copy of her statement to you as soon as it’s typed up and signed. You can let Bowling Green PD know. It might help with their interrogation.”
“Will do,” Woodley said. “I’ll tell you one thing. This is the most convoluted case I’ve worked on in a while, and this just added another knot.”
They disconnected, and while Sonny headed to the interview room with a fresh can of soda from the dispenser, Woodley made a quick call to Detective Gardner to fill him in.
***
Lonny Pryor was kicked back in the Miami jail cell, going over and over the story he intended to spin. He was confident to the point of cocky. And after a discussion with a jailhouse lawyer, he opted not to fight extradition. There was no purpose in it. His DNA had tied him to a murder.
Two days later, two U.S. Marshals arrived to transport him back to Bowling Green, Kentucky. They walked him out of the PD in leg irons and handcuffs, put him in the back of a government van, and handcuffed him to the inner wall.
“Make yourself comfortable, Mr. Pryor. This is a fifteen-hour drive,” the marshal said, then climbed out of the back of the van and shut and locked the doors.
“Well, hell,” Lonny said. The bench he was on was hard and narrow, and it was going to get a lot harder and narrower before this ride was over.
***
Detective Gardner walked into the Bowling Green PD the next morning, ready for Pryor’s interrogation. He knew Pryor had been booked into their jail sometime after midnight, and a lawyer had been contacted. They were just waiting for word that the lawyer was on-site, and it came just before 11:00 a.m.
Gardner took his partner, Detective Rainey, to the interview room with him and entered to find Pryor handcuffed to the table, his lawyer sitting at his side, and a guard in the room with them. Both Pryor and his lawyer looked up as the detectives entered.
Gardner and Rainey sat. Gardner opened his file, sifted through a couple of papers, then nodded to his partner, who turned on the recorder.
“For the record, Detective Gardner, and Detective Rainey, in the interview room, beginning interview at 11:12 a.m. with Lonny Joe Pryor, and his lawyer, Ellis George. Mr. Pryor, for the record, please state your name, age, and occupation.”
Lonny was ready. He wanted this over with, and hedging would only delay the inevitable.
“Lonny Joe Pryor. Fifty-seven years old. Self-employed.”
“And what kind of work do you do in that capacity?” Gardner asked.
“I served in the military. I have worked as a bouncer, a security guard, and a bounty hunter. For the past four years, I’ve worked for Carl Henley.”
Gardner’s heart skipped. “Exactly what did you do for Mr. Henley?”
“Oh, delivered messages, ran errands…pretty much whatever he needed done that he didn’t want to do for himself.”
“Did you work for Junior Henley, too?”
Lonny snorted. “To a degree. Junior Henley is his daddy’s mouthpiece. He delivers orders, but he does not give them.”
“What was your relationship with Billy Dean Eggers?”
Lonny blinked. “Was that his middle name? I never knew. We knew each other. Sometimes we ran in the same circles. We often played poker at the same club. Sometimes at the same table.”
“Would you consider yourself Eggers’s friend?” Gardner asked.
Lonny shook his head, and then remembered the tape. “I don’t have friends. I have acquaintances.”
“Then, let me ask this another way. Did you and Billy Eggers have a fight on the day he died?”
“Yes. We’d been playing cards most of the night at my place. We had a row. He accused me of cheating. We roughed each other up a little. He left before daybreak.”
“Were you cheating?” Gardner asked.
Lonny grinned. “Yeah. Billy was smart. He was on to me before I knew it, and I didn’t have the balls to admit it. That’s why we had the ruckus.”
“When was the last time you were at Billy’s place?”
“Maybe the week before. I don’t remember exactly,” Lonny said.
“You were seen driving Junior Henley’s truck. We have video of you in it at a car wash.”
“Yeah, Junior wanted it washed. I took it to the car wash and then drove it back to his place.”
“Junior says you won it off him in a poker game.”
“Well, I did, but he never gave up the title, and he’s the boss’s son, so I didn’t challenge him on it. Anyways, I haven’t owned a car in some years. I like to drink. So I take an Uber to get where I need to go, or someone picks me up.”
Gardner was worried. This wasn’t going the way he’d planned. It was time to quit pulling punches.
“Billy Eggers is dead. Your DNA was all over his body and beneath his fingernails. You were seen driving Junior Henley’s truck prior to the murder. That truck was seen at Eggers’s property the morning of his murder. You called in to the station hinting that Carl and Junior Henley were people to look at in the death. Would you like to explain that?”
Lonny’s gut knotted. Who in hell had seen him at the house besides the girl? He glanced at his lawyer, then sighed.
“What I know is that somebody put a bug in Carl Henley’s ear about a new crew trying to muscle in on Carl’s territory. Carl thought Eggers might have heard something specific about it. I know he told Junior to deal with it. But Carl Henley did not, by God, tell me to do anything to Billy Eggers. He did not send me to his house. I had not even talked to Carl Henley in at least four days before Eggers was murdered.”
“What do you call Carl Henley’s business dealings?” Gardner asked.
Lonny shrugged. “He buys and sells stuff.”
“What kind of stuff?” Gardner asked.
Lonny shrugged. “I don’t know for sure.”
“For someone who thinks he’s in the know, you don’t know a lot, do you, Lonny? Did you know someone else was in the house when Eggers was murdered?”
Lonny blinked. “I can’t say as I did.”
“Well, there was. She was Eggers’s sister, and she got away. Or at least she tried. Someone trailed her all the way through two counties, then into the woods during a storm up on Pope Mountain, and shot her in the back.”
“That’s a terrible thing to hear…brother and sister dying like that on the same day.”
“Oh, she didn’t die,” Gardner said. “She survived. Tough little thing. Oh…I see you are favoring your left knee. Did you hurt it?”
The skin was crawling on the back of Lonny’s neck. The girl was alive? “Yeah, fell and cut it on a rock while I was changing a flat.”
Gardner leaned forward. “Do you know a woman named Lilah Perry?”
Lonny had a good poker face, but his gut just tied itself into a knot.
“Yes, I know Lilah. What’s she got to do with anything?”
“She can place you within ten minutes of Jubilee on the same night Carey Eggers was shot, that’s what. You called her for help. Said you cut your knee and she felt sorry for you and helped you. But when she found out your DNA was all over a murdered man, she didn’t feel sorry for you anymore.”
Lonny hadn’t prepared for these two revelations, and he was backpedaling, trying to come up with reasonable excuses for all of it.
“So, it’s common knowledge that you issued an arrest warrant for me, and she read it in the papers or something. So maybe she just wants to get back at me for when we broke up.”
“Nope. We did not publish your name. Her boss told her.”
“Her boss? What are you playing at here?” Lonny asked.
“Oh, we’re not playing. Lilah Perry is a records clerk for the Jubilee PD. Her boss is the police chief. He mentioned it in passing, and she put two and two together.”
Lonny blinked. The police? Lilah works for the police?
“So, Mr. Pryor, do you have anything you want to add to your statement before I charge you with the murder of Billy Eggers and the attempted murder of his sister, Carey?”
Lonny froze. His eyes widened as he sat there, absorbing the reality that his witness was still alive and that Lilah worked for the enemy. Then he leaned over and whispered something into his lawyer’s ear.
At that point, Ellis George spoke up. “Mr. Pryor might have more information to share, but it would involve charging him with lesser offenses.”
“We can’t ignore murder,” Gardner said.
“Manslaughter on Billy Eggers,” George said.
“And ignore the bullet in Carey Eggers’s back? I think not.” Gardner said.
Lonny whispered in his lawyer’s ear again.
“That’s the deal,” Ellis George said.
“In return for what?” Gardner asked.
“Testifying against Carl and Junior Henley for running drugs in and out of the country,” George said.
Gardner’s eyes narrowed. “Mr. Pryor, would you care to revise the elaborate story you just gave us now?”
“Not until I have your word regarding the charges,” Lonny said. “Otherwise, I’ll take my chances in court. You can wave your security footage in front of the jury, and I’ll repeat in court what I just said to you.”
Gardner eyed his partner. “I can’t make that call. I’m pausing this interrogation to consult with my superiors. The time is 12:02 p.m.”
Then he and his partner got up and left the room.
Lonny glanced at his lawyer. “I’m just gonna rest my eyes a bit. I’m a little short on sleep.” Then he scooted his chair back just enough to lay his head down on the table and wished himself to hell.
***
Gardner was in the conference room with his captain and the Bowling Green police chief, on a Zoom call with the district attorney. It didn’t take long for them to come to a consensus. Taking Carl Henley down mattered. A lot. They knew the court would agree that both Eggers and Pryor had fought, because Eggers’s knuckles had been bruised and bloody. With a good lawyer on Pryor’s side and evidence of a fight between the two men, the court would have a difficult time proving premeditated murder. But Pryor wasn’t getting off of the attempted murder charge. That bit about tracking prey through a storm and shooting her in the back was in cold blood.
Gardner had his orders. He and his partner went back into the interview room, resumed the recording, and began again.
“Your charges will be reduced to manslaughter for Eggers, but you do not get a free pass on hunting down an innocent woman and shooting her in the back. That’s attempted murder any way you look at it. And you can’t admit to one and deny the other, because the same gun was used in both crimes. Now start talking.”
Lonny sighed. It was the best he could expect, and he wasn’t going down alone. If Junior Eggers hadn’t sent him there with a gun, none of this would have happened. But he was glad the woman was still alive. That shit had bothered him to no end.
“Junior Eggers called me to come to the house, so I did. Carl wanted Junior to pay Eggers a little visit, and Junior didn’t want to go, so he sent me instead. All I was supposed to do was talk to him. Tell him what Carl had heard and ask him if he was involved.”
“What had Carl heard, and involved in what?” Gardner asked.
“Drugs. Word on the street was some new crew was about to muscle in on Henley’s territory, and he wanted to know if Eggers knew anything about it, or if he was involved. So, as I’m about to leave, Junior hands me this gun. I didn’t know it was Carl’s until later, and yes, I was driving Junior’s truck. I drive up. The only car there is Billy’s. I didn’t know anyone else was there, and it wouldn’t have mattered to me anyway. I was just asking questions and delivering a message.
“Eggers let me in. I asked him about what Carl wanted to know and warned him that if he was involved, Carl would not let it slide. Billy freaked out on me. Started shouting, telling me I was wrong and full of shit. He took a swing at me. Then we fought, and I panicked in the fight and pulled the gun, thinking he’d back off and that would be that. But he jumped me. The gun went off. And he was dead. None of that was supposed to happen.”
“So how did you come to go after his sister?” Gardner asked.
Lonny shrugged. “I didn’t know until later that it was his sister. But I think that’s why he freaked out on me. When he saw the gun, I reckon he was thinking about protecting her. I saw her running to his car from the living room window. By the time I got outside, she was already out of the driveway and flying. I ran back inside in a panic, grabbed Billy’s phone to see if he had a tracking app on the phone for his car, and he did. That’s how I found her. I couldn’t let her get away and give me up.”
