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Chapter 626 Dead Man Walking

"

Jax ended the call with Hale, a smile on his face. That went better than he thought it would. Not only was Hale giving him what he needed to look into his father's death, but he wanted the MC's help with Louise's murder. It was perfect. With the guys unable to work, they had plenty of time to look into Louise's murder. As far as the promise not to follow up leads, both he and Hale knew the MC would follow up leads. And they both knew that if the MC found Louise's killer, that person might not be alive long enough to be arrested. Hale knew asking the MC for help carried that risk.

Could Hale have another plan in mind? Suppose the MC found Louise's killer and killed him? Hale would come after the MC. He would like nothing better than removing SAMCRO from Charming and that meant getting them locked up. He didn't understand that the MC was necessary for keeping the crime rate down. Sometimes the best way to maintain the law was to break it.

Was Hale that clever? He might be. He and the MC would have to tread carefully. He remembered Scarlett wanting Violet's killer to be locked up in prison forever and not killed. He'd deal with what to do with the killer when he and the MC found him.

"*

Hale gave Jax a box filled with copies of every single scrap of paper he found in the box containing all the paperwork on his father's fatal motorcycle crash. Since it was copies, Hale told Jax, he was free to keep the paperwork, but to keep it confidential.

Along with the box on JT's crash, he gave him a slim folder with a few sheets of paper containing suggestions on where the MC might begin the hunt for clues to Louise's killer. He put the Louise file aside and dug into the box on his father.

He had always been told that his father's bike had malfunctioned. At the time, he'd been young and so grief stricken that he hadn't questioned what he'd been told. Now with years of experience as a mechanic, he was skeptical that a mechanical malfunction could have caused his father to swerve into the path of an oncoming semi-truck causing his death. The driver hadn't stopped or made a call to get his father help.

At the time, the theory was that the driver was using meth to stay awake and was afraid to call for help because his drug use would have been discovered or the driver hadn't realized he'd run over JT and thought he'd hit an animal. Without doing a blood test, animal and human blood look alike. Maybe the trucker never knew he'd hit and killed a person or he wanted to escape any legal repercussions.

Jax spread the contents of the box on Scarlett's bed and began to sort through the papers. Hale had made copies and dumped them into a box with no organization. He didn't complain. It must have taken him more than an hour to copy everything.

After more than forty-five minutes of sorting, Jax was finally ready to read and discover the truth about what really happened to his father. The police report simply said a semi-truck struck JT's bike. Unser was the one who wrote the report. When he was seventeen, he'd been in a car accident and seen a copy of the police report. He'd been hit by a drunk driver. It mentioned which lanes the vehicles were traveling in. The report on his father's accident didn't mention it. It did state that JT was found in his lane.

Jax frowned. That didn't make sense. He'd been told JT had veered into oncoming traffic due to the bike malfunctioning. Was it possible that JT veered into oncoming traffic, was hit and then knocked back into his lane?

Jax shut his eyes and tried to picture how the accident happened. There was no way JT was driving on the wrong side of the road as a result of a malfunction. That wasn't the way malfunctions worked. JT was a mechanic. If the bike had been acting up, he wouldn't have driven it along a high speed stretch of highway. He would have taken safer back roads or called for the flat bed to take his bike to TM.

The police report didn't mention anything about mechanical issues with the bike. He looked through the dozen piles of paperwork and failed to find a report on the bike. If a malfunction had been suspected, why wasn't there a report on the bike's mechanical condition? Unser's fingerprints were all over this. He was a corrupt cop, but he wasn't incompetent. Why didn't Unser get a report on the bike's mechanical condition?

Jax remembered back to after his father's accident. Once the bike was released, Lowell repaired the bike and sent it out for bodywork so it returned looking good as new. He never said anything about finding a problem with the bike and then he mysteriously disappeared. Did he just take off or was he buried somewhere because he knew something about JT's bike?

Jax dug into the file looking for any kind of proof that JT's bike had malfunctioned, but there was absolutely nothing. Why was the lie about a bike malfunction told? It didn't make sense. There had to be some reason.

His blood ran cold at another thought—that JT had driven into the semi deliberately in a suicide by 18 wheeler move. He didn't buy that either. Nothing that he'd read in his father's box indicated he was suicidal. The opposite appeared to be true. He was going to kick Clay out of the MC and take him from Gemma. Those weren't the actions of a man giving up on life. The JT he'd gotten to know from his father's writings would never have killed himself.

It was back to accident or murder and he was leaning towards murder. It made the most sense, but he wasn't going to jump to conclusions. He was going to take a methodical approach.

As he slogged through the paperwork, he came across a scrap of paper just a piece of paper with a partial number on it. Jax knew immediately it was a partial license plate number. There was nothing else on the paper, but that plate number looked familiar. It was the plate number off one of Unser's trucks. He remembered it well because as a prospect one of his tasks was washing and waxing the truck. His now brothers made him do it three times and he'd remembered staring at the license plate and cursing the truck.

If he wanted to jump to conclusions, it looked like someone had gotten a partial plate number, written it on a piece of paper and handed it to someone probably Unser. Why wasn't it mentioned in the police report?

Jax looked at a couple of the witness statements. They were all taken by Unser, so Jax was immediately suspicious. No one seemed to have seen the semi actually hit JT, but they all mentioned JT was in his lane after the crash.

And then he found it; a witness statement that was handwritten, dated and signed by the witness. Unser never wrote it up into an official witness statement. The man said he saw the truck veer into the lane with the motorcycle and run the rider over before swerving back into his lane and continuing down the highway. He'd gotten a partial plate number. Based on the way the man wrote the date, the handwriting looked like the same as on the scrap of paper with the partial plate number.

When Clay was in Vietnam, he drove a truck and before JT started TM and brought Clay in as a partner, he was a truck driver. He had the skill to drive one of Unser's trucks and run his father down. As far as opportunity, after all these years it was impossible to figure out exactly where he was when his father was killed.

He doubted he could get many details on Unser's truck after all these years. He didn't own it anymore and if that truck was used to kill his father, he was certain that it had been given a thorough power cleaning and even if he could track down the truck if it hadn't been crushed, it was unlikely there would be any evidence not after all these years.

If Clay killed JT and Unser helped him cover it up by suppressing a witness statement and writing a police report with holes in it, what was he getting out of it? Clay might have paid him, but more likely Unser's motives had been personal. He'd always had a puppy dog like devotion to Gemma. He could have helped Clay cover up JT's murder so Clay and Gemma could be together because JT had to die for Gemma and Clay to be together.

If JT had divorced Gemma and not gotten Clay tossed from SAMCRO, he still would not have been able to get with Gemma. Your brother's wife, old lady and ex were off limits because you can't be brothers if you're screwing each others' old ladies. It destroys the brotherhood.

Clay would have to leave the MC or JT could die. Those are the only two ways for Clay and Gemma to be together. JT's death solves the problem of JT revealing the truth about Clay and Gemma's affair and getting him kicked out and it solves the problem of how they can be together.

Can he prove it? Jax's search of every scrap of paper Hale had given him hadn't revealed a definitive piece of evidence. There were the facts that Unser did a poor job on the police report and his failure to write up the witness statement and include it in the police report. It wasn't enough to prove anything, but he didn't have to prove anything to anyone. He knew Clay killed his father.

As far as he was concerned, Clay was a dead man walking.