“Love you too, Mom.” After she ended the call, she dropped to her knees in front of her daughter. “How was your nap, baby?”
Jeriah rubbed her eyes, still not fully awake. At nearly three years old, in some ways, she was so grown up, but in moments like this, Donna was reminded of how little she still was, and that these moments were fleeting.
“I have a surprise. After Elijah and Jayden get home, we’re going to go over to Grandma’s house.”
Now that she was up from her nap, Donna could get their clothes from the bedroom. While she did, she let Jeriah have her iPad.
Donna not only had bags packed for herself and the three kids before the boys got off the bus, but she also had them in the minivan. She and Jeriah met the boys when the bus dropped them off, and she brought the three kids directly to her minivan and strapped them into their seats. They loved their grandmother, so saying they were going for a sleepover was seen as a treat.
***
The weekend flew by at her mom’s house. She was able to put the encounter with Detective Leo Davis out of her mind for the most part until Sunday after church when they were in the parking lot of her mother’s church and a black Camaro SS rolled by very slowly. As the windows were tinted, she couldn’t see who the driver was. She did get a good look at the plates, though. She repeated the license plate numbers in her head several timesto memorize them. She hadn’t thought about getting Detective Davis’s plate numbers on Friday, but at least now, if he showed up at her house again, she’d know if he’d been the one who just drove by.
“Is something wrong, Donna?” her mom asked.
The kids were getting into their seats. “No, everything’s fine,” she said. Then she leaned in to help buckle them in.
Through the afternoon, as she and her mom played games with the kids, Donna convinced herself it hadn’t been Leo Davis’s car driving by the church. What were the odds? She wasn’t in her own neighborhood, and she doubted he’d be in her mother’s.
Just as they were getting ready to sit down to an afternoon dinner, Rich called. Donna stepped out of the back door to take the call as her mom was getting the kids settled at the dining table. “Hi, I’m glad you could call before I go home,” she answered.
“Me too. How are you?”
“I’m good,” she said. “What about you?”
“Day’s going fast. We may be wrapped up here and be able to head back to HQ tomorrow,” he said.
She didn’t know where ‘here’ was, but she assumed wrapping it up and heading back to HQ was a good thing. “That’s good.”
“So, you’ll be heading home after dinner?” he asked.
“Within an hour or so, I’d guess. I need to get them home and into bed on time. Tomorrow’s a school day.” She didn’t tell him about the black Camaro SS at church.
“My team hasn’t dug anything up on the potential victim and nothing on the cop either,” he said. He’d just talked to Smith on the Digital Team before he called her. “There isn’t anything in his personnel folder of concern.”
“Isn’t that suspicious in itself?” she asked. “I mean, he’s been on the force for a long time. Wouldn’t there be complaints about him? All cops have complaints filed against them, even the good ones.”
Burke chuckled. “I get what you’re saying. And yes, there are the normal run-of-the-mill complaints in his jacket, but nothing concerning and no Internal Affairs red flags. I’m not saying the guy isn’t dirty, or that he didn’t choke out that guy that you saw happen. All I’m saying is he’s not on anyone’s official radar. And no victim matching your description has turned up.” Not that her description of the man had been that good. It loosely fit thousands of men in the Richmond area.
“So that’s that, then,” she lamented. “What do I do now?”
“You keep your head down and don’t go out of your way to cross paths with Davis. And if he comes up to your door again, you play it cool, and you stick to your story that you didn’t see anything. And if he hits on you again, tell him that you’llbe moving to Chicago soon to move in with your ATF agent boyfriend.”
Donna laughed. “Should I throw in my much better-looking, younger boyfriend?”
Burke laughed with her. “Nah, I think pulling rank with my federal badge and telling him you're taken should dissuade him.”
“And if it doesn’t?”
“Then you call me,” he said, his voice no longer light or laughing.
After he hung up, he pushed through the door to return to where the rest of Charlie Team waited for him. They were currently checking out a boarded-up restaurant owned by Mark Ellison, located just outside of Minneapolis.
After they’d wrapped it up at the cabins in the Wisconsin Dells area, they’d returned to HQ. Instead of being dismissed as they’d expected, Shepherd handed them a list of six more possible locations Brandon Ellison had identified as possible locations his father could be hiding out at.
The two men they’d apprehended at the cabin were identified from their fingerprints. They both had lengthy arrest records in Minnesota that mirrored Brandon Ellison’s. Brandon Ellison positively identified them as members of the militia. Neither gave statements, and they both refused to answer any questions.
The next morning, the four men of Charlie Team boarded the agency Lear, which flew them to Minneapolis. So far, they’d observed and then entered four of the locations they’d been given. None of them yielded any arrests. They were all vacant. The FBI and Minnesota State Police had other locations they checked, as well as a long list of people to question and possibly arrest that Brandon Ellison had identified as members of the militia.
