Free Bitter Blood by Jerry Bledsoe

women’s prison, then took the job of clerk-receptionist at the police post. Later, Dan and Karen moved into a small brick house on Highway 53 overlooking ninety-acre Crystal Lake, where he could fish for bass whenever he pleased. He put covered horseshoe pits in his backyard, set aside one room for his pitching trophies, and hung over his bed a large painting of Jesus holding a protective hand over a state trooper’s car.
    The change from Harlan County was dramatic. Oldham was a prosperous rural county with almost no poverty and little violence. “For a long time, I kinda felt like I didn’t have anything to do,” Davidson remembered.
    By 1982, Davidson had attended the FBI National Academy, where local law enforcement agencies send their elite for training, had served as president of the National Academy’s graduates in Kentucky, and had risen to the rank of lieutenant. After his promotion, he was sent to another post on temporary duty to help solve some difficult homicide cases, then was offered a chance to move to headquarters in Frankfort as head of intelligence. He tried the headquarters job for six weeks and requested a return to Oldham County. He chafed at desk work. His heart lay in catching outlaws, not in administration. As deputy post commander and head of criminal investigation, administrative duties took up most of his time, but he still could be a detective, still could get his juices stirred by an intriguing case.
    But by July 1984, when he got the call about the murders on Covered Bridge Road, Davidson had begun entertaining notions of retirement. Being so often in the presence of death, violence, and evil bothered him more now than it had in his days of youthful exuberance. Under his tough veneer, he was a gentle and sensitive man who soon would miss a day’s work while grieving over the death of his dog, Sarge. Unlike most men who grew up in the mountains—and many of his friends—Davidson didn’t like the sport of hunting. Tracking the animals was fine, but he’d never been able to bring himself to shoot a rabbit or deer. He often dreamed of being in shootouts in which he was wounded, or in which he had to shoot somebody, a prospect he dreaded. Only once had he fired at a human being. That was in his second year as a trooper, when he had to stop a fleeing kidnapper who had hit him in the head and escaped. Davidson fired two warning shots before aiming low to stop the man and hitting him in the foot. “A lucky shot,” said the onetime state marksmanship champion, whose eye was so keen that he could throw ringers in horseshoes 80 percent of the time. Davidson even resisted using his nightstick in scuffles—and he had been in many. He took a lot of ribbing from other officers when, while trying to subdue a marauding, drug-berserk motorcycle gang member who’d attacked several people, he chose to stop him with an uppercut instead of his nightstick, and broke his little finger for his humanitarian effort, keeping him from the horseshoe pits for weeks.
    Other things, too, had set Davidson to thinking about retirement. He wasn’t sure he liked the direction police work was taking. He saw too much interagency rivalry, too much demand for credit. “They forget the objective is to put the outlaws in jail,” he said. “When I first started in law enforcement, we just tried to put the goddamn outlaws away and it didn’t matter who shut the door.”
    He also feared that the day of the old-time detective who followed his intuitions, using legwork to chase leads wherever they led until he solved the case, was past. He foresaw a day when detectives would spend most of their time at computer terminals following the directions of bureaucrats. He resented the by-the-book, no-common-sense, bureaucratic young officers who seemed to be seizing command without really knowing how to work a difficult case.
    “Homicides, you’ve got to live ’em,” he said. “You can read all the books in the world and that