Every House Has a Secret - 19

 

 

Brady didn't get back to the office until late afternoon. As he said to Faith when he arrived, "The things I do to make a client happy. At least this time he will be. The guy I was following was about as injured as…as you."

 

"Meaning you caught him doing things he shouldn't have physically been able to."

 

"Yep, on camera, so he won't be able to deny it."

 

Going into his office, he downloaded the photos and sent them to the insurance company, along with the bill for his time. Then, he set to work looking for information on the Dennis Hodges in the story Rand had found and emailed to him.

 

He was able to confirm the details of the story, but then he'd expected to. What he didn't expect was to find out that Hodges's wife Emila had been murdered in a similar incident a month prior to his going off the deep-end.

 

That should have been a mitigating factor when he came up before the review board. Not that it would have cleared him of any blame for his actions, but still.

 

Next, he searched for other stories about Hodges and the man he had shot, after beating him within an inch of his life. What he found was a grainy booking photo of the man in one of the articles, as well as a good photo of Hodges. The accompanying story went into Hodges life in some detail. He had had an exemplary career as a police officer, with two citations for bravery, until the death of his wife. It mentioned that he had two sons, eight and eleven who had been placed in the care of their maternal grandparents after he had been put on suspension. We were off by a year on the older kid's age.

 

The interest in Hodges had apparently died out right after he left the police department. The next thing Brady found was a wedding announcement from five years later when Hodges married Irene Long. Of course, newspapers being what they were, the story began with 'Disgraced police office to wed daughter of local baker'. Brady wondered if Hodges could have sued them for defamation of character. Probably not, since it skirted the edge of truth.

 

Moving on, he found a birth announcement for Alan Hodges, and one from a year later—nineteen-seventy-seven—for Steven Hodges. That was the last time Hodges or any of his family made it into the papers.

 

Hitting a dead end with that, Brady went to the website for the Office of the Clerk and Records, moved to divorce records, and ran a search. Hodges and his second wife, Irene, had divorced in nineteen-eighty. A follow-up search revealed she had married one Lawrence Thatcher a year and a half later.