Page 130 of We Are All Guilty Here

Emmy placed another photo in front of Jude. “Here’s Woody’s mugshot from the arrest.”

Jude couldn’t look away from the teenager’s face. He had a nasty smirk on his lips. His beady eyes glared back at the camera. She could see tattoos on his bare chest. A fresh gash on his forehead. There was something eerily familiar about his features. She felt a chill go down her spine.

Jude asked, “Is Woody related to Bubba Rawley?”

“Yep,” Virgil confirmed. “That’s his grandson. Tanya abandoned him. He was raised by his grandmama. She died a few years back. Fentanyl.”

Jude made herself look away from the photo. “What was he charged with on the Fourth?”

“Originally? Drunk and disorderly with a side of assault,” Virgil said. “Lawyer got it kicked down to public nuisance.”

Emmy tapped one of the memory sticks. “This has the footage of Woody’s police interview. Stone cold, just sits there refusing to answer any questions until they give up.”

“Takes after his grandfather.” There was only one name left on the board. Jude said, “Dale Loudermilk. What was his alibi?”

“He didn’t have one,” Emmy said. “He was at home by himself that week. His wife was visiting her sister in Carrolton. He had two days off from the rec center. His neighbors were at the fireworks show. No one saw him until five thirty on the morning of July fifth, when he was seen by a neighbor in the driveway washing the car.”

Jude remembered a detail from the podcast. “What made you follow Dale in the hallway at school that day?”

Emmy didn’t reach for a photo or tap a memory stick. She went to the laptop Cole had been using. She clicked through several folders until she found what she was looking for. Jude looked at the monitor. A school hallway filled the screen. The color was washed out, the blue lockers blending into the tan-looking floor. Two of the lockers were open, one several down from the other.

Emmy said, “I was standing with Celia in her office when we saw Dale on one of the CCTV monitors. He didn’t know that the hall camera was fixed a few days before. The open locker belongs to Cheyenne. The photos of her and Madison in matching bras and panties were taped to the back.”

Jude watched Dale Loudermilk appear on the screen. She had seen the man’s booking photo, but in three-dimension, he looked exactly the way she expected him to: perfectly normal, like every other teacher you’d find at any school in America. Tan cargo shorts. Green shirt from the rec center. Bushy mustache. He was walking down the hallway, but he stopped at Cheyenne’s locker. Several seconds passed as he looked at the photos inside. Then his head turned left. Then right. Then he reached inside.

Emmy said, “That’s the nude photo of Cheyenne where she’s exposing herself. I left it face-down inside the locker.”

Jude kept her focus on Dale. He was staring at the obscene photo. His face was only in profile, but she could see no emotion. Time spooled out. Nearly half a minute passed before he returned the photo to the locker and walked away.

Emmy said, “I spliced together the footage to track him to the auditorium.”

Jude followed Dale’s progress down the long hallway. His hands kept moving in his pockets. He was distracted, not paying attention to the fact that Emmy was trailing him from several yards away. He did a cursory look to the left and right before he opened the doors to the auditorium. Another angle showed Dale walking across the lobby toward another set of doors. Seconds later, Emmy jogged through, catching the door before it closed.

Emmy stopped the video. “There weren’t any cameras behind the stage.”

Jude let her appreciation show. “You didn’t confront him. You followed him instead. That shows damn good instincts.”

“Well,” Emmy shrugged it off. “Maybe not. Dale looks a hell of a lot better for this right now than Adam Huntsinger.”

Cole asked the obvious question. “Why didn’t y’all think Dale was the murderer?”

Emmy listed it off, “None of the photos on his laptop were of Cheyenne and Madison. They were both fifteen years old. All of the girls in Dale’s collection were between the ages of nine and eleven. We spent hours going through every piece of footage from the school’s CCTV to see if there was anything on camera that showed Dale acting inappropriately with either Madison or Cheyenne. We found nothing to link them. We did extensive interviews with all the teachers and every student who had even a passing association with the girls. We talked to people at the rec center and the outlet mall. And whenever Dale drove them home from choral practice, the times made sense. Practice ended at five, and the girls were home ten minutes later. Both Hannah and Ruth testified to the times at Adam’s trial. There wasn’t a shred of evidence that we could use to pin it on him.”

Virgil said, “And Adam made more sense. You know the reasons, but my money is still on him. For what that’s worth.”

Jude still wasn’t sure. She looked back at the names on the board again. She’d been gone for decades and she had a passing familiarity with at least four of them. “Do we know if any of these men on our list knew each other?”

“I mean—” Emmy shrugged. “Most of them are North Falls people. They might know each other in passing. We only looked at them in relation to the girls.”

Jude asked Virgil, “Did they ever call each other on their phones?”

He paused for a moment, as if he needed to let the question sink in. “We didn’t have probable cause on a warrant for anybody but Adam and Dale, and there was no record of those two communicating with each other.”

Jude asked, “Was Adam on his parents’ cell phone plan?”

Virgil paused again. He wasn’t a man who was used to missing small details. “Yeah, I got copies of all the family call logs going back six months. The landline, plus Walton and Alma’s cell phones. They’re all in a box in my basement. Didn’t think we would need them.”

“Hold on.” Emmy had her hands up like she needed everything to stop. She asked Jude, “Do you think Adam was using his parents’ phones to communicate with an accomplice?”

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