Never See Them Again by M. William Phelps Page B

In the car on the way, though, he passed out. By the time they got to the emergency room (ER), JU was going into convulsions.
    What was the connection between JU, Brad, and Taz? the investigator wondered.
    Turned out that Brad and Taz were best friends and “had a long-standing feud” with JU and JU’s brothers. Taz had even “jumped” JU a few months before the attack and had sent JU to the hospital. It all stemmed from a beating JU had put on Taz in Seabrook some months ago, and had been ultimately arrested for. It appeared this was retaliation for that beat-down, not something that was in the least bit related to the Clear Lake case. Both Taz and Brad, however, were at Marcus Precella’s candlelight vigil a few nights before the baseball bat/metal pipe attack on JU and had “mad dogged” JU when they ran into him. Mad dogging is a term often associated with gay men staring at each other and locking eyes, but can also be used as an urban way to describe giving someone you are feuding with the “evil eye,” if you will, letting him or her know that their “time” is coming.
    Arrest warrants were issued for Brad and Taz.
    Meanwhile, the following morning, JU was “able to talk,” surprisingly, and had even requested a sit-down with police.
    JU admitted to the ongoing feud with Taz and his brother. He said he had, in fact, jumped him. Taz had called JU, he said, on the day of Marcus’s candlelight vigil and said, “I don’t like you, but on this day, we should squash it for the event.” It being the feud between them. They should act civil, in other words, for the sake of the vigil and respect to the families. “Just stay away from me,” Taz said.
    Ladd and his team, however, were still unconvinced that the attack on JU wasn’t connected in some way to the Clear Lake homicides. The other problem investigators faced was the idea that capital murder in the state of Texas, if one was convicted and sentenced to death, truly turned into a death sentence. And murdering four people in the aggravated way that the Clear Lake case exhibited was a crime that was going to be tried under the death penalty. Everyone knew it.

CHAPTER 10
    S EABROOK POLICE WERE back at the woman’s house who had called in that burglary (the rifle and the pistol stolen from her father’s bedroom) days before. She had heard about the attack on JU and claimed to have information.
    â€œI spoke to [a friend] who was present when JU was assaulted in League City,” she told the responding officer. “He said he saw Brad Carroll holding a handgun that night that matched the one stolen from my father’s bedroom. I also heard that Brad and Taz were on their way to Florida in a Cadillac.”
    â€œThat it?”
    â€œI’ll try to get the name of the city where they’re heading.”
    Â 
    Â 
    WITH ALL OF THESE names—dozens coming in every day—crossing HPD Homicide Division detective Tom Ladd’s desk, it was enough to drive the seasoned lawman crazy with frustration. How was he ever going to check out every single person’s story? And everybody seemed to have one to tell.
    â€œSome of [the stories],” Ladd said respectfully, “were just total BS from the beginning, and we didn’t deal with them—but we still had to check these people out. And, of course, everything we did, everything we learned, just went right back to Marcus dealing drugs.”
    Ladd and his brother, between them, had spent fifty-seven years of their lives in the Homicide Division. Almost six decades searching for murderers.
    â€œWe went from kids to old men working murder cases,” Ladd said with the fatigue of those years texturing his voice.
    Envision the life of a Homicide Unit cop: Every day you wake up and you’re looking at another dead person, and the life he or she led. You step into someone’s world, begin ripping it apart,