Free The Killing Kind by M. William Phelps Page B

each had been with Danny Hembree.”
    Danny Hembree seemed like the perfect candidate to place inside the box (interrogation room) and interview. If nothing else, they needed to conduct a complete study of his life of crime and interview people who knew him. Find out what he’s been up to the past few months—a guy like Danny Hembree, he could be ruled in or out quickly.
    Law enforcement decided that a search warrant of Nick’s house was in order. It was based mostly on that devastating (and quite promising) information from Stella that her daughter was in possession of Randi’s jewelry. This was potentially explosive evidence. Why in the world was the sister of one dead girl wearing the necklace from a second dead girl?
    But then you added the common denominator to that question—Danny Hembree—and it all seemed to come into focus.
    Hensley and Wallace agreed to sit on the Catterton house as they waited on the warrant. They would park down the block and keep an eye on the ebb and flow of the residence.

CHAPTER 23
    S ommer Heffner was a stunningly attractive, petite seventeen-year-old girl with shiny brown hair, bright and alluring aqua-colored eyes, along with the perfect little nose and high chiseled cheekbones some actresses might spend tens of thousands of dollars trying to obtain. Sommer had grown up with Heather. They had known each other, Sommer later explained in her cute, comforting Southern accent, “since we was kids.”
    Sommer called Heather “my sister,” describing Heather as “outgoing” and “fun” to be around. “She wouldn’t never hurt nobody,” Sommer told me. Another common phrase associated with Heather from Sommer’s perspective was “heart of gold.”
    The rainbow-colored toe socks Heather wore on the day she was murdered summed up the life Heather had dreamt of for herself.
    “Heather wanted to work with kids, actually,” Sommer said. “Special-needs kids.”
    Like those toe socks, Heather’s dreams were vibrant and varied. There wasn’t one particular color that best depicted Heather’s usual upbeat, jovial demeanor, her far-reaching cheerful attitude, and her optimistic outlook on a life that had pretty much been stuck since as long as anyone who knew her could recall. The color missing from that rainbow, the darkest shade of black, represented the thunderstorm of trouble Heather had been mixed up in during those days before her death.
    “You could have the worst day in the world,” Sommer said, “and there was Heather to put a smile on your face.”
    Mud pies and water sprinklers and chasing boys were the things Heather and Sommer did as kids. They built Legos. They weren’t the type of girly-girls to play with Barbies or baby dolls. One of Sommer’s fondest memories was the two of them as very young kids planting sunflowers together, something they did every spring, a sign of a new beginning, a rebirth.
    Heather’s desire to work with children was born from having to take care of her sister Nicole’s two kids, when Nicole wasn’t around.
    “She was only, like, twelve or thirteen,” Sommer explained, “and she was taking care of her sister’s two babies.”
    Nicole was sixteen when she had her first child; she was seventeen when she had her second.
    According to Sommer, who witnessed most of it firsthand while hanging out at Heather’s house as a child, it was the “environment she grew up in” that introduced Heather to the bottomless, merciless world of hard-core drugs. It was all around her, Sommer said. Everyone in Heather’s life was doing it.
    The girl didn’t have a chance.
    “And she never really got away from it until she went into foster care,” Sommer said.
    Heather stayed with one foster family for a few years.
    “But she did miss her own family,” Sommer remembered.
    And it was that blood bond that ultimately pulled Heather out of a calm, unchaotic, healthy atmosphere of a family unit enjoying a quiet, normal life. As warm and caring as her