Page 58 of Always My Love

ChapterEighteen

The day after he’d finished rebuilding Harper’s shower, Nick sat at his desk in the station and scrolled through mug shot after mug shot.

He’d widened his search to beyond Georgia. Still, he hadn’t come across any men named Fred LeRoy that resembled the image Harper had taken of the man stalking them.

During his lunch break, he went down to the Golden Oar and sat at the bar to eat lunch with Harper while she worked.

It was during his break that he came up with another idea. Unfortunately, he had a call afterward about a four-car wreck on the highway that kept him out of the office until his shift ended.

Since Harper wasn’t due to get off work for another hour, he figured he’d swing by the station and run a few more searches.

When he walked in, Aiden was the only one in the office, and he was on the phone with his door shut.

He booted up his computer and punched in “Heidi Davis” and re-read everything the state of Georgia had on the woman.

When her charred body had been found in the wreckage of her home, it had been assumed that she had died of natural causes. Then the autopsy came back with the overdose and time of death, which had been a full two days before her body had been found. Amongst the wreckage there had been plenty of drug paraphernalia which, along with her lengthy rap sheet, had closed the case quickly.

No one had even looked for the woman’s two underage daughters at that point. There was actually no mention of them. Nor of Fred, a boyfriend, or a drug dealer who had been living with them.

Switching over from the official channels, he searched for news articles. Surely, there must have been something about the fire in the small town’s newspaper.

When all he found was a simple paragraph or two about Heidi Davis’s death in the fire, he almost gave up.

There was an image of the burned building along with a grainy photo of Harper and Hailey’s mother.

Instantly, he could see slight resemblances between the daughters and the woman. The image was obviously an old photo. Heidi Davis looked young, around seventeen or eighteen. She looked more like Hailey than she did Harper. In the photo, she looked high, even back then.

He was about to turn off his machine and call it a night when he decided to search for Fred and the place Harper mentioned he’d worked, Iron Works.

Instead of typing in Iron Works Construction, he just put in Iron Works and got a few links to a strip club called Iron Works just outside of Atlanta.

He clicked on the business profile of the business and was shocked to see Fred’s image as the business owner.

“Son of a…” He leaned forward and scanned the information.

Fredrick Leeroy, was a forty-eight-year-old businessman who had purchased the very successful Iron Works Strip Club six years ago. The man had worked at the club as a bouncer for the two years prior to purchasing the business.

So how did a low-life drug dealer manage to come up with enough money to buy a successful strip club shortly after Harper’s mother died?

Since he had the man’s real name now, he ran a search and came up with a very long rap sheet. He printed a copy and then ran another internet search to find out all he could on the man.

The more he looked into the man, the more disgusted and pissed off he became.

Seeing that Aiden was still in his office, he knocked on the door.

“Yeah,” Aiden called out.

“Hey, boss,” Nick said as he opened the door.

“What are you still doing here?” Aiden glanced at his watch and sighed. “What am I still doing here?” He chuckled.

“This is Fred.” He walked over and set a copy of the printout on Aiden’s desk.

Aiden glanced over the paper and then nodded. “Okay, I’ll put out an APB.”

“There’s more.” He set the next paper down. “Months before Heidi Davis died of an overdose, Fred purchased a large life insurance policy on her and her two daughters, along with insurance on their property, which had been handed down to Heidi Davis from her folks. To the tune of half a million dollars. When Heidi Davis died, the policy paid out on her and the property.”

“Okay, so Fred got the payout,” Aiden said with a shrug. “What does he want with the sisters?”