First Lady (32 page)

—The headshot of Mavis slipped under Cuddy's door had been an insert in a program sold at the Haver Field concerts. Possibly Guess Who had bought one there the night of the first concert, which meant he had gone to see Mavis. (Of course, so had forty-seven thousand other people.)

—We still had no printout of Lucy Griggs's Haver University transcript. Although their computer system was back up and running, now apparently Lucy's name wasn't listed in registration files because of some glitch. John Emory was pursuing the matter.

—The kitchen matches left in the earth around Kristin's head, the white candles in Lucy's hat, the baggies in which her eyes had been mailed—all were brands sold at a Kroger's in North Mall.

—Also in North Mall, a Walmart's sold cardboard glitter stars of the brand attached to Cuddy's slider.

—A search was in progress at Lucy's lodging (a shabby one-room furnished with items from the dump). Unfortunately, at least so far she didn't seem to be very sentimental (no cards, no tickets stubs, or pressed flowers from a lover), nor very introspective (no old-fashioned diary, no letters, no inscribed books). She had collected clothes, makeup, and rock'n'roll. There must have been five hundred CDs in her bedroom where a huge poster of Mavis hung over a lumpy mattress on the floor.

“Now folks, drum roll!” Cuddy did a tattoo on an imaginary snare drum. “This is the big one.” He told us that while there were no gray car fibers in the Frances Bush coeds' Tuscadora rental where John Walker had arranged for Kristin Stiller to stay, the relevant fibers
had
been found in Lucy Griggs's apartment. Forensics had pulled them, for example, from the bottom of a pair of her heavy-tred walking shoes.

“There it is,” I said. “Guess Who knew Lucy. He was around her prior to the night he killed her.”

Cuddy nodded. “We are on Terra Firma, friends. The Eagle has landed. If he knew her before, there's a thread between them—a place, an occupation, mutual acquaintance, something.” He turned to the blackboard. “Let's talk suspects.” His chalk flew squeaking along as he wrote:

—Guess Who—Unknown local or transient? Or Cadmean Building job-related?

—Lucy's lover, Kristin's blackmail victim?

—John Walker

“Okay, let's look at the full list, see if we can clear things out.” He drew a line and then added the following names:

—Andrew Brookside

—Randolph Percy

—Dermott Quinn

—Ward Trasker

He paused, the chalk moving in air, and then added another name:

—Lee Haver Brookside.

“Okay.” He gestured at his list. “We're not discussing
why
these names might be up here. Let's just talk alibis for the Lucy Griggs homicide. Because of the shared car carpet fibers, we're saying whoever did Lucy did Kristin too. And maybe Cathy Oakes. So who can we definitely clear on Lucy? Bunty, ready?”

Bunty twisted around uncomfortably in her rocking chair and found a file folder. “Okay. We can drop the first lady. I guess she's there with a jealousy motive, thinking it's Mavis she's shooting?” Bunty looked around. Nobody said anything. She nodded. “Well, doesn't matter. Phil Golden at SBI interviewed six of Mrs. Brookside's staff. She's not viable. From three to seven, she's alibied: speech to the NAACP, tea with the state library association. Never out of view of at least two staff members 'til she went to her rooms at the Governor's Mansion at 7:15. From then 'til midnight, couldn't have left that place without being seen by a dozen people.”

I wondered if any of them had noticed her leaving at three in the morning to drive herself to Cuddy's office in downtown Hillston. But that nocturnal visit was outside our time frame and why bring it up?

Cuddy held the eraser over Lee's name. Everyone nodded and, expressionless, he wiped her off the blackboard. “Okay, then, how about Dermott Quinn? He was wandering around The Fifth Season grounds the night of the Griggs's murder. He was in the area again back in January when Mavis went to Windrush. Maybe Cathy and Kristin were crazed Mavis fans like Lucy and this was his sicko way of protecting her.”

“Can we just go one time on my instincts?” I asked.

Everyone laughed as Etham grunted, “That's how you go
all
the time.”

I argued that Dermott Quinn was by nature incapable of stepping on a roach, much less cutting women's throats or shooting them in the face. He hated guns, he was scared of knives. “I'd stake my life on it.”

Wendy quipped, “What about Cuddy's job?”

Rhonda took Cuddy's eraser and removed Dermott's name. “Quinn's a white-out. His taxi driver got lost bringing him from the Sheraton to The Fifth Season. He was stuck in that cab from nine-thirty 'til ten-thirty and Lucy was already long dead by then.”

Ward Trasker's name was erased because Ward's children had sent him and his wife on a world cruise that had begun last New Year's Eve; he'd been playing putt-putt aboard a ship off Bali when Kristin Stiller was killed. That brought us to Randolph Percy.

“No way,” I said. “Come on, Cuddy. He did it to save the election for Andy? I doubt it.”

“And his job.” Cuddy shrugged. “By the book, okay? He's covered 'til the banquet starts, but after that we lose him. He could have bopped off to The Fifth Season, shot somebody he thought was Mavis, zipped back, and told the governor she'd killed herself.”

A hoot from Lisa Grecco. “Sure right! Bubba Percy stood six inches from a woman's face, mistook her for Mavis, and blew her away with a gun he stole out of this lobby. Trust me, Bubba gets that close to a woman, he knows who she is. And he's not there to stick a
gun
in her face.”

We all looked curiously at the young voluptuous deputy counsel, wondering if she meant what it sounded like she meant. She saw our stares and shook her head at us. “I'm not even going there,” she said.

“Sounds like you already went,” muttered Rhonda.

Wendy said she'd bet her job as SBI's chief documents examiner that Bubba's handwriting couldn't be made to match Guess Who's.

Rhonda adjusted Bunty's heating pad for her. “Guys, he's cleared by the gun in the display case. The Bernardelli got put back in that case yesterday and let's face it, the killer's not about to ask a pal to do something like that for him.” She made a vertical line in the air. “We know it happened after ten A.M. because an eighth-grade class was looking at the case on a field trip at ten sharp and they would have noticed that Guess Who tag.” She made a second line. “And it was put there before six-thirty P.M. because that's when Justin and Nancy spotted the switch.”

Bunty read from her notepad. “At 9:40 that morning, Percy was in the governor's jet on his way to JFK to meet Mrs. Brookside. They landed back in North Carolina at 7:53 P.M.”

Rhonda comically stuck her leg out in the air and wiggled her foot. “Not to mention the Nike shoe print in the shower was size nine and Percy's got some serious Longfellows. They must be like size fifteen.”

Wendy leaned over to Lisa and whispered something.

“Oh yeah,” Lisa nodded. She and Wendy laughed together. “Definitely.” Bubba would have been thrilled.

Cuddy held up his eraser. We all nodded yes and Randolph Percy's name was erased. Above it was the name, “Andrew Brookside.”

“Hey, I voted for him,” said Wendy. “You're kidding?”

Cuddy looked over at me. “Everyone in this room already knows the governor was in Bungalow Eight the night of the murder. The question is, can we legitimately eliminate him?” I nodded. “Then do it,” Cuddy said.

I told the group, “Last night I had a second interview with the driver of Mavis Mahar's limo. It's taken me a long time to persuade him to admit that the governor had ever been in that car on the 20th, but finally he opened up. He drove Mavis and Lucy to The Fifth Season. Forty minutes later, he drove the governor out of there. He says when they left, Lucy Griggs was standing, very much alive, on the porch of the main house and she was talking on a cell phone. If we believe him, then the governor's covered. After that, he's at the mansion and then the Capitol for the gala.”

Bunty said, “Well, they could have gotten to the driver.”

“I don't think they did. Brookside may have a few of JFK's bad habits but nothing in the ‘let's have Bobby take out Marilyn' league.”

“Yeah,” said Rhonda, “Brookside doesn't have a brother.” Apparently she wasn't a fan of the governor's. Jumping from the table, she erased Brookside's name. “JayJay, wait a second. Where's Lucy's cell phone? We could pull the last number off it, whoever she was calling.”

I explained that we had been able to find neither the phone nor any record of Lucy's ever having cellular phone service. It was possible that the killer had taken the phone after the murder; it might even have been his.

“You try John Walker or his mother on the phone registration?” Walker was Rhonda's pick for our killer. While Cuddy didn't think the surly “musician” was bright enough to be Guess Who, he was certainly a strong candidate. He had claimed to have an alibi for the time of the Lucy Griggs homicide: for the six hours after I'd seen him in the Tucson staring sullenly at Mavis Mahar and his ex-girlfriend Lucy, he'd been “rehearsing” with Griffin Pope, the other guitarist for the Mood Disorders. He and Griffin had been alone in their apartment “practicing” all that time.

Etham growled, “Not even white people could practice six whole hours and still sound as bad as that band on that tape you just played.”

Even if they could, they hadn't. Griffin Pope had spent that evening in a holding cell right upstairs, a probability that Walker should have looked into before he offered up Pope as his alibi. Walker also had a large collection of S&M porno sites bookmarked on his web browser. And he'd flunked a lie detector test. He'd been hauled into the Cadmean Building often enough on petty charges to draw its blueprints and to nourish a grudge against the Hillston police. He knew two of the victims and had been rejected by one of them. He even had a cousin in Neville where Cathy Oakes had been killed. I said, “No, it wasn't his phone. And listen, we've got to charge him or let him go.”

Lisa Grecco, the assistant D.A., didn't think so. “You brought him in on possession, right?” I nodded. “Didn't you say he pulled a gun on Nancy Caleb-White?” I nodded. “New charge. Attempted assault, deadly weapon.”

When I told her it was just an air pistol, Lisa shrugged. “You can shoot your eye out with an air pistol,” she said. “Didn't you see
Christmas Story
?”

We worked 'til midnight and started again early Monday morning. It was almost six P.M. when the fax machine finally began to beep with the report that Etham had been impatiently waiting for all day: the fax from the pathologist Dr. Chang. Eagerly he watched the paper curving slowly out of the feed. The rest of us waited while he read the first two pages. With a puzzled headshake, he rubbed hard at his grizzled hair. I noticed for the first time that there was gray in his sideburns.

Cuddy joined him. “That from Chang?”

Etham pulled his wide expanse of shoulders to his neck. “Hang on.” More pages fell from the machine. Etham finally looked up from them and said, “Guess Who didn't kill Cathy Oakes.”

Bunty made a sharp gentle noise. “Didn't think so.”

Etham skimmed the pages as he spoke. “Knife blade's different on the first victim, stroke's different too. Killer came up from behind Oakes, tall guy, no hesitation. Then he ran over her twice pre-mortem with a pickup truck. Broke nine bones.” He looked at us.

Cuddy said, “That doesn't mean he's not Guess Who.” Etham silently handed him the fax sheets. He raced through them and then whistled. “Chang's amazing. He pulled a partial off the petal of one of the roses the guy tossed on her stomach. He pulled a latent off the skin on her ankle, where the guy had dragged her. He has Neville homicide feed them in the computer and out pops a ten-print card right there in their own county. The killer's an ex-con, did three years in Dollard State Prison for attempted rape.”

I asked, “How do we know he isn't Guess Who?”

Cuddy handed me the first page of Chang's report. “Because he's dead. His brother killed him the Saturday after Thanksgiving. They got in a fight about a football game.” He looked up from the pages he was speed-reading. “Stick to basketball, right, Etham?”

“I don't like either one,” mumbled the famous Doctor Dunk-It.

“Well, there goes our St. Catherine on the wheel idea,” I said.

Rhonda rubbed my back. “There goes the Guess T-shirt too, buddy.”

Bunty sipped at hot tea from a thermos. Quietly she said, “Kristin Stiller's a copycat of Cathy Oakes. But not for the fun of it.”

I asked, “You mean, he tied it together after the fact?”

She nodded. “Exactly what I mean. He mimicked Cathy Oakes's Guess shirt to connect his homicide to hers and start the press on a stampede to screaming serial killer.”

Bunty had to be right. Perhaps he'd even thought of St. Catherine's wheel when he read about Cathy's broken bones, and then set up corresponding mutilations in his victims to represent other female saints.

Etham's long forefinger pointed out something on a fax page to Cuddy, who gave a long whistle when he saw it. “Boys and girls,” he told us, “when you go to bed, thank Elvis in heaven for Dr. Chang. Listen to this.”

The pathologist thought we should know a few things, based on his preliminary examination of Kristin Stiller before he returned to Hillston for a second look at her torso: the knife used on Kristin was similar to but was not identical with the one used on Cathy Oakes. Slashes on Kristin's throat had been tentative at first and then deep and extensive. The excess seemed to Chang designed to mask bruises from a choking. Kristin had been
strangled
before her throat was cut, and that strangulation was the cause of death. The tongue might have been cut out to hide that evidence. There had been a probably postmortem act of sexual perversion: deeply embedded at the base of her gumline, the pathologist had found (and managed to extract) a miniscule piece of male Caucasian pubic hair. Preliminary analysis showed it to be compatible with a pubic hair found on a pair of thong panties on the floor of Lucy Griggs's closet.