Dark and Bloody Ground by Darcy O'Brien Read Free Book Online Page B

don’t want to do. You go home, and I’ll take care of this end of things.”
    In the morning Lester stuffed the money into the sack his whiskey had come in and hid it under the spare tire in the trunk of his car. He realized that he was now beyond a certain threshold.
    He decided to take a Sunday drive over to Ormond Beach, fifty miles northeast, where the automobiles Epperson and the others had been driving were impounded and where Lester thought he mightpick up some information. He was nervous about the money in the trunk. Because of its heavy drug traffic, Florida was the worst place in the country to be caught with loose cash you couldn’t explain, and besides, he didn’t trust the people he was dealing with. They might decide to fire him and take the money back, and they might find his existence an inconvenience, given what he already knew. If and when he received more, he would have to get hold of a gun to protect himself.
    At the Ormond Beach police compound, Lester turned on the charm and learned that Letcher County Assistant Commonwealth’s Attorney Mike Caudill, two Kentucky state troopers, and a couple of FBI agents had already been there with warrants to search the three cars, a Dodge conversion van, a Datsun 300ZX sports car, and a flaming red Corvette, all brand new, all purchased during the week after the Acker robbery, although registered in names other than those of the suspects. He heard again about the briefcase stuffed with money that had been found in Roger’s car, the Corvette. Guns had been discovered in Hodge’s van; marijuana, cocaine, a boot knife, and a portable two-way radio had turned up in Bartley’s Datsun. Lester would have learned all this officially soon enough, but he could use it now.
    Back at the county jail in Orlando, Lester confronted Epperson with the evidence and suggested that buying all those cars immediately following the robbery had not been the brightest idea. There were other cars, too, Roger admitted, six in all. The Toyota MR2 that Carol was driving was one of them.
    Yet Roger remained adamant against paying Lester the four hundred thousand. Lester dropped it to three. Roger went up to a hundred and twenty-five thousand and said he would throw in a Corvette, not the 1985 one that was impounded, but a 1963 classic that was not part of the Acker spoils. In a sense, you could call it a legitimate car. He had paid eleven thousand down for it and still owed about six; Lester could pay it off and it was his. Lester accepted, but they remained far apart overall.
    Leaving the jail again that afternoon, Lester encountered a pair of Kentucky state troopers who were down gathering evidence. Lester knew them both and struck up a friendly chat. He told them that he was representing Epperson but that there were questions about his fee. He would probably end up with nothing but automobiles and jewelry, and he had no use for either.
    One of the troopers, Detective Lon Maggard, said that he had been one of the first people to arrive at the Acker house on the night of the robbery and murder. The scene was horrendous. The house had been ransacked, and Maggard said he had never seen so much blood. Tammy Acker had been stabbed eleven times. The photographs were enough to make you throw up.
    “I’ll be interested to see them,” Lester said. He would take a look at them soon and would probably run into the troopers later in the week.
    “We’ll be taking those boys back to Kentucky,” Maggard said.
    “Maybe so, maybe not,” Lester said.
    But Lester knew that all three of the suspects would be going back to Kentucky to stand trial. It was not only a question of the evidence found in the cars and at the Ormond Beach condominium where they had been staying with Sherry, Carol, and apparently a third woman or girl. According to the Orlando Sentinel and what Lester had heard was being reported in papers at home and broadcast over the news, the boys were in deeper water than they had