Bitter Blood (6 page)

By the Fourth of July, she’d finished her work at school, received her diploma, and moved out all of her equipment. But she remained in her apartment and seemed reluctant to leave.

“I went back to the Dr. on Mon.,” she wrote Phil. “He said the same old thing—I’m anemic and continue taking my thyroid med.—also I’d gained 4 lbs since Dec. I know I’ll not be able to hold down a job in dentistry feeling this bad—so I’ll probably try another Dr. for a 2nd opinion or just go into hibernation.”

The following weekend, Janie went to Lexington to visit an old friend, Vicky Graff. Janie had gotten to know Vicky at the University of Kentucky in 1969, when Vicky was an undergraduate student. Vicky later went to graduate school at Vanderbilt University in Nashville and Janie visited her there several times. Vicky married a doctor, a pathologist, and in 1979 they settled in Lexington. Now Vicky was pregnant with her third child, and she and her family were temporarily living in an apartment while their new house was being completed.

More than two years had passed since Vicky had seen Janie, and she was surprised at the changes. Janie was still perky, all smiles, but worn and older, with a harder edge. “She seemed a little more cynical, a little more sarcastic,” Vicky later recalled. A little more like her mother, Vicky thought.

As Janie played with Vicky’s children, reading stories to William well past his bedtime, Vicky sensed remorse in Janie that she hadn’t yet found her place, settled down, married, and had children. But that possibility seemed far away. Janie gave Vicky the distinct impression that she had no intention of pursuing her romance with her young friend in New Jersey. “Maybe with Janie,” Vicky said later, “the harder you pushed the more she ran.”

Later, Vicky took Janie to see her new house, and as they stood in the unfinished living room, Vicky said, “The next time you come, we’re going to be in here having a gin and tonic.”

Vicky wanted Janie to stay for a few days, but when they got back to the apartment, Delores called. Her car had broken down. She’d had a big fight with the man at the Boy Scout camp, who’d pushed the car out of the entrance. She was alone and upset and didn’t know what to do. Vicky saw that Delores was pulling the old guilt trip, and it worked, as always. Shortly afterward, Janie left to return to her mother and the big house on Covered Bridge Road.

Three days later, on Wednesday, Janie wrote to Phil for the first time in two weeks. When she had told him earlier that she wouldn’t be coming to New York after all, Phil, sensitive to any perceived slight, had hurt feelings. He didn’t write or call for a week. When he did write, it was only a short, meaningless note that he signed “Thank you, Phil.”

His hope was that she would realize his pain and, if not change her mind about the trip, at least rush to comfort him with affection.

“Dear Phil,” she wrote. “Hope your summer has been a good one. It has gone really fast and will soon be over.

“Thought you might be interested in your fall semester book list—each year the book list, fortunately, gets smaller and smaller.

“Have a good rest of the summer. Sincerely, Janie.”

It was the only letter she wrote to him that she didn’t sign with love—and it was the last letter she would ever write.

After removing all of her belongings from her apartment on Thursday, Janie returned to the dental school on Friday to say her good-byes. Denise Payne ran into her and got the impression that Janie was having a hard time separating herself from this place that had consumed so much of her energies for the past four years.

The next day, Saturday, July 21, Delores and Janie remained home all morning. That afternoon they drove into Crestwood to drop off some small appliances to be repaired at Stoess Hardware. Delores looked at holsters. She wanted one for her revolver, she said, a .32, but she put off the purchase until Monday. That night, Janie went with her mother to the Little Colonel Theater to see the summer student production “Aunt Abby Answers an Ad.”

Delores went backstage after the show to congratulate the cast and director Bill Aiken, to whom she gave a big hug, but Janie lingered in the background, as she usually did in her mother’s presence, smiling but saying little.

The next morning, while her mother was at church, Janie did not go out for doughnuts as usual. Nobody would ever know why.

5

Delores was sprawled on her left side by the garage, her knees sticking up, legs apart. The top of her head and the left side of her face were gone. The hot sun had blackened the remains of her head, which squirmed with maggots and was swarmed by flies and ants, the most grotesque sight Police Chief Steve Nobles and Detective Tom Swinney had ever seen.

The officers moved past the body, holding their breath against the stench, and headed toward the back of the house, where a stone wall rose to the backyard. The second floor of the house was on the same level as the backyard, and stone steps at the back of the house led to it.

As Nobles and Swinney were climbing the steps, Officer Steve Sparrow announced by radio his arrival at the front of the house.

“Don’t let anybody come up here,” Nobles told him over his hand radio.

But Sparrow misunderstood him to say “Come up here,” and he got out of his car and started for the back of the house.

He called to Nobles and Swinney as he topped the steps and saw them on a small concrete patio checking a locked sliding glass door. Both jittery officers whirled on him with their revolvers drawn.

Sparrow returned to secure the front of the house, and Swinney made his way to another door near the far end. He saw that the glass storm door was closed, but the inner door stood open. As he was about to open the storm door, he noticed what appeared to be a bullet hole in the gutter drain at the end of the house and silently pointed it out to Nobles.

Both officers were anxious about what they might find inside. Nobles’s first thought—that the daughter who was supposed to be in the house might have gone berserk, killed her mother, and still be holed up inside—had been joined by other possibilities. Perhaps the daughter, too, was dead, the victim of murder or suicide. Maybe she had killed her mother and fled. Or perhaps she had been kidnapped by the killer. Maybe she had been taken hostage and her mother’s killer was at this moment waiting for a policeman to stick his head inside the house so he could blow it off, too.

The storm door was unlocked, and Swinney pulled it open gingerly, to be greeted not by gunblast but by the barking of two small skittish dogs weakened by hunger. The smell of dog feces and urine assaulted his nose. The door opened into the kitchen, and as the two officers stepped into the air-conditioned coolness, crouching, seeking cover from a counter jutting out to their left that enclosed the electric stove, they saw two drops of dried blood on the floor beside the counter, just inside the door, near a telephone on the wall.

From the kitchen, the officers could see into the family room at the back of the house and the dining room at the front. Swinney checked the dining room and adjoining living room, stepping over a folding dog gate as he went. He noticed that expensive Oriental carpets on the floors and a silver tea service in the dining room were undisturbed. Nobles stepped over another dog gate into the family room, where he saw nothing out of the ordinary. A cheap, plastic-webbed chaise longue sat in the middle of the floor near the sliding door, as if somebody recently had brought it inside from sunning on the patio. Nobles peeked into the hallway at the foyer, where he again was joined by Swinney.

Neither officer spoke as they clung to the walls, creeping down the hallway, pushing open doors to peer into a bathroom and seldom-used bedroom. The door to the linen closet in the hallway stood open, revealing a tiny red light aglow on a control box, indicating that the burglar alarm was off.

As Swinney poked his head around Janie’s open bedroom door on the front side of the house at the end of the hallway, he saw the contents of her purse scattered on her bed and a jewelry box dumped upside down. Boxes filled with items moved from Janie’s apartment occupied one side of the room. An open suitcase lay on the floor. Swinney started to call to Nobles, who’d just stepped into Delores’s bedroom at the back of the house, but Nobles called first.

“Tom, she’s in here. I found her.”

Janie lay facedown on a small rug in a sun room with jalousie windows that reached nearly to the floor on two sides. The room adjoined Delores’s bedroom at the end of the house. The sun rarely penetrated the room because Delores kept the beige draperies drawn most of the time. Visitors who pulled into the parking area at the side of the house often saw her peering through those draperies to see who was outside. The room was called the French room because of the double doors that opened into it from Delores’s bedroom, the only access. The French doors always stood open, and bead curtains had been hung there. The French room was filled with wicker furniture and a few plants. On one wall hung a bamboo scroll bearing the reassuring rules for serenity of the
Desiderata,
some of them incongruous considering the present setting.

On another wall, a wide-eyed owl stared down from a calendar onto a scene of horror.

Janie was barefoot. Her slim, sun-browned legs protruded from black nylon jogging shorts. The black-and-white-striped jersey that she wore had been torn by a bullet that struck her in the back near the right shoulder blade. Her hair was in white plastic curlers, one of which had been driven into her brain by a second bullet, which caught her at the base of her skull and exited from the left side of her neck, leaving a gaping hole. Her left eye stared blankly. Definitely no suicide.

Nobles and Swinney continued their search of the house, moving on downstairs, even checking closets to make sure that nobody else was present, before going back outside through the kitchen door. Both knew they’d have to call a mobile evidence lab.

“Let’s call Jefferson,” Nobles said, meaning the Jefferson County Police in Louisville, “and I’m going to go ahead and call the state.”

Nobles’s cursory inspection had told him that this was going to be a difficult case—two women murdered in a big house in a wealthy area with no weapon in sight and few clues evident. His entire department amounted to nine officers, only two of them detectives, one of whom—his brother, Lennie—only recently had been elevated to the job. He had neither the manpower nor the money to conduct a big murder investigation. He would need the Kentucky State Police and their far greater resources. Besides, he didn’t want to shoulder full responsibility for the case. If it weren’t solved—and from the looks of things, it might well not be—he wanted to share the blame.

Nobles told his dispatcher to call an evidence unit and inform the state police that he had a double murder. “And get Dennis out here,” he said.

Sergeant Dennis Clark was the department’s public information officer. Nobles knew that reporters soon would be swarming on Covered Bridge Road, and he wanted Clark there to hold them at bay.

The previous weekend had been a busy one for Katy and Howard Cable, Delores’s next-door neighbors. They’d driven to Akron, Ohio, so that Howard, a retired engineer, could play in a golf tournament with their son, who lived there. As always when they were to be away, Katy called Delores to tell her how long they’d be gone. The two neighbors looked out for one another’s houses when either was away. The Cables felt confident with Delores looking after their place. She was quick to call the police at the slightest hint of suspicion.

Whenever the Cables traveled, Katy usually brought a small gift back for Delores—a book, a whatnot, a household gadget—and delivered it to her on their return in appreciation of her watchful eye. But this had been a rushed trip, the Cables hurrying back on Sunday because their daughter from Virginia was to arrive with her family for a visit. The Cables got home Sunday to find their daughter already there, and in the excitement of the visit, Katy forgot to deliver her present to Delores, or even to call and let her know of their return.

Two days later, Howard walked into his house and said, “Honey, the police are next door. There’s something wrong.”

Katy drove over only to be stopped at the top of Delores’s driveway by Officer Steve Sparrow. She explained who she was and that she had a key to the house.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“Something’s happened to Mrs. Lynch,” Sparrow said.

“Oh, for goodness sakes,” Katy said. “Whatever you do, be sure you don’t let her daughter, Janie, come in and just walk into something like this. She and her mother are really close.”

Sparrow thanked her and told her that somebody would be over to talk with her later.

Susan Reid soon returned to the house on Covered Bridge Road. Still trembling from shock, she was driven by a co-worker, Terry Barrickman. Susan also had keys to Delores’s house. Sparrow let her car into the driveway and called Swinney to talk to her. Swinney confirmed what she’d feared—that Janie, too, was dead. She told him that Delores had a son in Albuquerque, a dentist, TJ, Tom; somebody would have to let him know. Swinney assured her that they’d take care of it.

“What about the dogs?” Susan asked.

“They’re all right.”

“Can I have them? Can I take them to the vet? They were like Delores’s children.”

Maybe later, Swinney told her. Meanwhile, he’d feed and water them. “You go on home and try to rest, Mrs. Reid,” he told her, “and we’ll call you after a while.”