“The wife?” Addy inquired, her voice somber.
“Nearly dead.” Henley shook her head. “During the struggle he rammed her head through a set of French doors. There was bruising on her throat. We figure he thought he’d killed her. For whatever reason he just didn’t choke her long enough.” The lady sheriff shrugged. “Or maybe he just didn’t care. He’d intended for her to be dead in the end. The bastard had been in the process of burying her in the basement when my men arrived on the scene and he cut and ran.”
Wyatt kept a watch on Addy from the corner of his eye. This horror just kept piling up. “But she’s alive?”
“She’s hanging on.” Henley stared at the file on her desk. “We believe he’d been planning to kill her for several days. The floor of the basement is rock. He’d removed enough to prepare a grave. My guess is he intended to bury her, then replace the rocks and suggest that she had gone missing.”
“Anyone else in the family have any ideas on the reason he did this?” Addy rubbed at her forehead as if a headache had begun there.
“The wife’s mother and father have never cared too much for Jamison,” Henley related. “But he’d eventually grown on them. He’d been married to their daughter for ten years. Good job with the postal service. No financial troubles. No marital problems that anyone was aware of. The couple has a son, Danny. He’s with his grandparents.”
“The boy was unharmed?” Wyatt hoped like hell that was the case.
Henley nodded. “My deputies found him hiding in the closet under the stairs. According to his grandparents he’s smart as a whip. Has been reading since he was four years old. An exceptionally bright student. But if he saw or heard anything, he isn’t talking.”
Addy’s gaze collided with Wyatt’s. This story just continued to get worse.
“Lydia, the wife,” Henley went on, “had advised her mother that there was some tension related to her pregnancy. She was terrified of telling her husband that she’d learned the baby was a girl.”
“She’s pregnant.” Addy’s face paled.
“About seven months,” Henley confirmed. “It’s a miracle, but the baby seems to be okay. If we can keep the mother alive, that’ll truly be a miracle.”
Wyatt’s cop instincts were roaring. “Did the wife’s parents mention anything else that the daughter related regarding this tension in her marriage?”
“Jamison didn’t want any more children. She’d already defied him once and ended up having a miscarriage. Fell down those same basement stairs. We don’t know yet if he had anything to do with that. The wife never mentioned to her parents that she suspected anything along those lines.” Henley slid the file she’d opened across the desk in their direction. “Two days after he almost killed her, the wife’s parents hired a private investigator to find out if their initial suspicions about him had been correct.”
As Wyatt and Addy reviewed the findings, much of which they had already heard from Father Grayson, Henley continued. “He spent almost eleven years in a mental institution, then another four and a half in a supervised living situation. His biological father killed his wife and would have killed the children, ironically, if Jamison hadn’t stopped him.”
Wyatt didn’t mention that they already knew that part. There was no need to bring Father Grayson into this investigation—at least not at this point. “Was he taking any medications? Antipsychotics?”
Henley laughed but the sound held no humor. “When he and Lydia married he stopped taking his mood stabilizers as well as the medication for the bipolar diagnosis. Apparently, they interfered with the sex life.”
“You said he worked for the postal service,” Addy noted. “They do background investigations on their employees. How did a guy with his medical history get the job?”
“According to his supervisor,” Henley explained, “his record came back as clean as a whistle. Nothing about his medical condition popped up. Evidently this guy knows how to work the system. That’s not all,” she added, “he worked at the supervised living facility as a nurse’s assistant the last year he was a resident there.”
Wyatt wasn’t sure where she was going with that point but judging by the fury in her eyes he was about to find out.
“That’s how he got into his wife’s room at the hospital so easily.”
“He made another attempt on her life?” Wyatt understood now. Henley had mentioned that a nurse and a police officer were dead.
Henley nodded, the movement visibly weary. “He dressed like a nurse’s assistant, conducted himself as one. He killed a nurse to access the drugs. Then killed one of my deputies with the same drug he partially unloaded in his wife’s IV. Potassium chloride. Stops the heart. It was too late for my deputy, but the code staff managed to resuscitate her. I’m here to tell you, that woman does not intend to go down without a fight.”
God have mercy. When would this end? “I take it he wasn’t apprehended.” Wyatt felt fairly certain of the answer before he asked.
“He got away.” Henley’s lips flattened with fury. “But we’ll get him.”
“I’d like to see any photos you have of Daniel Jamison.”
Wyatt glanced at Addy. This man was her brother. As horrific as he found the whole thing, she had to be reeling. He kept forgetting that nightmarish fact.
Henley shuffled through the file, tapped an eight-by-ten photo of a man, his wife, and son. “That’s him.”
Addy’s hand shook as she picked up the photo and stared at it. Not only was her brother in that photo, but a nephew. Wyatt’s gut twisted.
“The wife,” Henley nodded to the photo, “I don’t know if she suspected her husband really intended to hurt her or not, but she’s one smart cookie. When she made the 911 call, instead of hanging up when she heard her husband coming back into the room, she left the line open and slid the receiver under the sofa so he wouldn’t see it. The dispatcher couldn’t make out all that was said and we’ve listened to the tape twenty times. Most of the verbal exchanges are inaudible. But there’s one statement that’s loud and clear. It’s his voice, the in-laws have already identified it. So, if he gets his wish and his wife dies, he can’t show up claiming to have been kidnapped and say it was an intruder. It’shim.”