Death Trap by M. William Phelps

and I am sure that was appealing to Alan.”

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    Williams and Vance had a ring to it, maybe like Cagney & Lacey. The only difference being that Bureau agent Kimberly Williams and MCSO investigator Sheron Vance were focused on catching a real killer. A double murderer, in fact. Or pair of murderers. There was nothing Hollywood about any of that. Two people were dead. Two fine human beings had been shot and their bodies burned. Two families were now trying to understand what had happened. Trying to deal with this loss.
    The ripple effect of murder—how it spread out so far and wide.
    Forever.
    Vance and Williams stayed in town on the night of February 16, 2002. They knew the answers to their questions regarding the murder of Alan and Terra Bates were most likely going to be found in and around the Birmingham region. Both had a feeling Alan and Terra never made it out of Birmingham alive. The Bureau was certain the crime scene was somewhere in town—not Georgia, which was, Williams said, clearly nothing more than a “dump site.” Convincing the HPD of this was going to be a bit more complicated, Williams and Vance considered. HPD investigators still weren’t sold on the idea that Alan and Terra were murdered in their jurisdiction. After all, Alan and Terra could have met their demise somewhere along the road between late Friday afternoon in downtown Birmingham and early Saturday morning in Rutledge, Georgia. There was over two hundred miles of roadway and wilderness separating the two places. Anything could have happened. And until it was clear, Williams and Vance were sticking around to see it through.
     
     
    Contacted the previous night while bowling, HPD detective Laura Brignac got to the station house first thing the next morning, February 17, 2002. Detective Tom McDanal explained to Brignac that there was a lot to do. Interviews. Tracking down basic information. Canvassing. Checking out cell phone records. Computers. Keeping tabs on the McCords, who seemed to be moving from one place to another. Writing up search warrants. Studying what type of evidence the Bureau was processing and seeing how it fit into what the HPD was uncovering in Alabama.
    Brignac was the perfect fit for the job. She grew up in a town of about forty thousand, so there was that shade of the small-town Southern belle in her demeanor; yet she understood the nuances of the big city. She was the middle child of three girls. Brignac had studied sociology and earned a master’s in counseling and guidance from, of all places, Alan Bates’s alma mater, the University of Montevallo. Her main focus in school, and later in life, became children and families—troubled juveniles, specifically. Brignac worked at various shelters with probation officers dealing with kids who ran away from home. She wanted to help. She wanted to make a better life for kids who never really had a chance. After college she went to work at a group home for children. Working there, Brignac became friends with one of the HPD’s juvenile officers who brought kids to the home. One day the juvenile officer called Brignac to say good-bye. “I’m getting married and moving to St. Louis.”
    “Well, congratulations,” Brignac said.
    “You should go to Hoover and apply for my job,” the woman suggested. She knew Brignac was the perfect fit.
    That was 1985. Brignac didn’t think twice about it and took the bait.
    “The next thing I know,” Brignac told me later, a mixture of humility and shock in her voice, “I’m being sworn in, given a badge and a gun and . . . I’m like, ‘Wait a minute!’”
    Brignac was fortunate in the sense that when she started on the job, she went to work for a progressive chief who just so happened to be in need of an investigator with some experience working with kids and families.
    “So I am probably the only [detective] in the country who was never a patrol officer first,” Brignac added. “He just put me right into investigations and the