1 A Small Case of Murder Read online

  “We’ll get it.” Tad pushed down on her head, thrust her into the back seat, and slammed the door on her.

  He heard another shot fired. Tad couldn’t tell where it came from or where it hit until Joshua answered with two more shots from the rise above them. Tad jumped in the front seat and fumbled with the keys to start the car.

  After the engine turned over, Tad lifted his head to look over the dashboard. He saw Joshua shoot towards their assailant before diving down the hill. Once he hit the ground, he went into a roll and landed next to the trunk.

  Unaccustomed to Jan’s car, Tad punched the gas pedal to the floor. The car responded by leaping forward like a jack-rabbit and landing with a jolt between the shooter and Joshua.

  Three shots were fired at them while Jan helped him to dump the trunk into the back seat. He leaped in behind it.

  “Move! Move! Move!” Joshua roared.

  Tad hit the gas without waiting for them to close the door.

  They heard a series of shots over the pitter-patter of the engine while the car fishtailed down the road.

  The phone was ringing when Joshua carried the trunk into his study. Tad and Jan hurried in ahead of him to find something to use to break into it.

  “There’s the phone,” Jan stated the obvious.

  Joshua’s hands were full with the trunk.

  “Where are your bolt cutters?” While ignoring the ringing phone inches from his hands, Tad searched the desk.

  Admiral came into the study from where he had been sneaking a nap on Sarah’s bed. While he watched them scurry about to open the trunk and answer the phone, the dog sat and uttered a long, low grunt.

  Meanwhile, the phone kept ringing.

  Joshua dropped the trunk in the middle of the floor. “Answer that, will you?” he ordered while lunging for the phone. “Hello.”

  “Commander Thornton!” the admiral barked at him.

  After years of conditioning, Joshua stood at attention.

  “What have you been doing?” Admiral Andrew Zimmerman, a Navy Seal from the Vietnam War, continued, “Inactive duty bores you, so you decided to go to the local graveyard to dig up dead bodies?”

  “Where are your bolt cutters?” Tad repeated his inquiry.

  Jan was yanking on the lock in a vain effort to break it off with her bare hands.

  “I’m only trying to identify a body, sir.” Realizing what the admiral had said, Joshua asked, “How did you know a body was found in a cemetery here in Chester?”

  “Where’s your toolbox?” Tad asked Joshua, who tried to ignore him.

  Joshua put his hand over the phone’s mouthpiece and whispered, “Check the garage.”

  “What is it with you, Thornton?” Admiral Zimmerman asked. “Wherever you go, bodies keep dropping out of no-where. Now, they’re popping out of crypts.”

  “Who is that?” Tad wanted to know.

  “Shut up,” Joshua snapped at him while trying to piece together what the admiral was reporting.

  “What did you say, commander?” the admiral shouted.

  “I was talking to my cousin, sir. I apologize if you think I directed that at you. Excuse me.” Covering the mouthpiece, Joshua hissed, “Go check the garage and take Jan with you.”

  Shooting him a glare, they slipped out of the study.

  Returning his attention to his commanding officer on the other end of the line, Joshua grabbed his notepad and pen, and sat at his desk. “I’m sorry, sir, but how did you know about the crypt?”

  “We got a report from the VA that the body of a former inmate at Leavenworth had been found in a crypt that didn’t belong to him in Chester, West Virginia. Of course, I knew instantly that you were connected to the case somehow.”

  “They identified him by his fingerprints,” Joshua muttered more to himself than the admiral.

  “That’s right. He was Army, but I was given his file and asked to give you any assistance you need.” The admiral asked, “What are you up to, Thornton?”

  “Losing my mind, sir,” Joshua answered. “Who was this inmate?”

  He was relieved to hear a smile come into Admiral Zimmerman’s voice. “Your John Doe was Private Kevin Rice. He had been convicted of stealing government property to sell on the black market while stationed in Seoul, Korea. He had been caught red-handed delivering the goods to a fence. It was also believed that he had fragged his platoon sergeant, but the prosecutor couldn’t get enough evidence to charge him with murder.”

  “Did you say he killed his sergeant?” Joshua asked.

  “Yes,” the admiral said. “The investigators had questioned Rice about the series of thefts, but had let him go because they felt he wasn’t smart enough to run the operation so smoothly. They had hoped Rice would roll over on his boss. That was Master Sergeant Caleb Penn. He ran the supply depot. Rice confronted him, and they got into a big fight. Penn beat the shit out of him. Before the investigators had enough on Penn to arrest him, he got blown up.”

  “How did it happen?”

  “Ignition bomb. He got into his jeep to drive across the base and boom.” The admiral went on. “They convicted Rice of stealing, but they couldn’t connect him to the bomb. They gave him seven years in Leavenworth for theft of government property and a dishonorable discharge.”

  “What was Rice’s defense?”

  “He said he was only following his sergeant’s orders and made no profit from the thefts. He knew something fishy was going on, but he felt he was in no position to make waves. The prosecution found evidence that he did take money for his part. Therefore, he had to know that whatever he was doing was illegal.” Zimmerman added, “But the prosecution did believe Penn had been the mastermind behind the operation.”

  “But you can’t lock up a dead man,” Joshua pointed out. “If his sergeant was still alive, Rice could have rolled over on him and would have gotten a lighter sentence. Was he smart enough to realize that?”

  “From the tone of the statements in this file, I don’t think so.” The admiral continued reporting from the case file, “Sergeant Penn seemed to be a smart guy. When he got him-self blown up, the Korean police wanted him for questioning about the death of a Korean civilian.”

  “What civilian?” Joshua asked.

  “The fence,” the admiral answered. “He was shot in the head as soon as he got released by the military police.”

  “And the prosecution didn’t try to pin it on Rice?”

  “He had an alibi. He was still being held in the stockade.”

  Joshua wanted to know, “What time period was this?”

  “Beginning of 1952,” the admiral told him. “Rice was picked up on suspicion of killing his sergeant one week after he got caught with the truckload of goods.” Joshua could hear the reports being shuffled. “February 1952.”

  “And the Korean?” Joshua asked.

  Admiral Zimmerman replied, “What about him?”

  “Did the Korean police ever find out who killed him?”

  “Since Rice had an alibi, they decided it had to be one of his other suppliers. This guy dealt in everything.”

  “Maybe Penn did it,” Joshua suggested. “You said they wanted to question him about it.”

  He listened to the admiral hum on the other end of the line while he read the reports in the file. “Penn had an alibi. He was in a meeting with another sergeant.”

  Joshua tapped the end of his pencil on the notepad while he thought. “First, the fence gets shot, and then the suspected mastermind is blown to bits.”

  Admiral Zimmerman told him, “The prosecutor’s case was that Rice wasn’t the innocent stooge he pretended to be for the investigator. The extra money in his bank account proved that. He got caught with his hand in the cookie jar, and the guy who put him up to it was putting all the bla
me on him, so he got mad and decided to blow him up.”

  “Why and how did Rice end up in West Virginia?” Joshua wondered out loud.

  “I have no idea,” the admiral answered. “He was released from Leavenworth in 1959. That’s the last the military knew of him.” He asked, “Since when have you gone to work for the DEA, Thornton? I thought you requested inactive duty so that you could run for president of the PTA.”

  “I’m not working for the DEA, sir. The state attorney general appointed me special prosecutor in a double homicide.”

  Realizing the significance of the admiral’s inquiry, Joshua fired off a question that flashed in his mind, “How did the feds know about this John Doe?”

  “Your state medical examiner ran his fingerprints through the federal database to ID him. The Penn case had been flagged because it was considered a cold case. Since Rice had been in Leavenworth, his records belong to the military. The Army sent his file to me, since, officially, I’m still your commanding officer, even though you are on inactive status. I need to know what’s going on.”

  Joshua rubbed his forehead while he recounted for the admiral the adventures of his move back home, and Lulu’s news that Rice and Rawlings had served together in Korea.

  “Well,” Admiral Zimmerman told him, “from what our records indicate, Rawlings had no reason to know any of them. He had served as a chaplain in a military hospital in Hong Kong. Rice and his friends were in Seoul.”

  “Speaking of Rice’s friends, I wonder if he knew Charles Delaney?” Joshua mumbled. “He’d served in Seoul. Maybe Rice came to Chester to see him.”

  Joshua recalled that it had been Sheriff Delaney who had warned his accomplice to hide Rice’s body after his parents had found it in the barn.

  How can we prove the call was to Rawlings if the reverend didn’t serve with Rice in Korea? What possible threat could Rice be to a chaplain who’d served in Hong Kong? Could Delaney have made the phone call to another war buddy mixed up with Rice and his illegal dealings? There’s no telling what else Rice could have gotten himself into after his release from Leavenworth in 1959. But then, if Reverend Rawlings hadn’t been involved, why did Rice have that article about him in his pocket?

  “Thornton, are you still there?” Admiral Zimmerman’s voice snapped.

  Joshua started out of his thoughts. Apologizing, he asked the admiral to repeat what he was saying.

  “I was telling you that Rogers told me to tell you that there was one enlisted man, a Corporal Milton Black was AWOL from Sergeant Delaney’s command.”

  Forgetting his request for the lieutenant to find out who in Sheriff Delaney’s unit had been reported missing in his quest to identify the missing body, Joshua asked why Rogers wished for the Admiral to report that information to him.

  “Because you told him to,” the admiral reminded him.

  Joshua cleared his throat and asked for the rest of Rogers’s report. As long as his assistant had done the work, the least he could do was to listen to the report, even though he now didn’t consider the information relevant to the case. “When was this corporal reported AWOL?”

  “February 5, 1952.”

  Joshua squinted at the date he had scribbled on his note pad that Rice’s commanding officer was killed: February 1952.

  Admiral Zimmerman went on, “According to the report that Rogers got from his file, Black had been a disciplinary problem from the get go. Didn’t fit in. His CO finally gave him a three-day pass. He took off to Hong Kong and never came back. I don’t think he has anything to do with any of this. He had no connection with Rice or supply. He was military police.”

  Joshua wrote down the dates and made a timeline on the notepad. “Under Delaney?”

  “Delaney was his CO. He was the one who signed off on the three-day pass. Got a reprimand for that. Command wanted to know why he gave a three-day pass to a man with disciplinary problems. He said he thought a break would do him some good. Anything else, commander?”

  “Yes, sir,” Joshua answered. “Were any American John Does ever found in Hong Kong during that time period?”

  “Now, why do you want to know that, Thornton?”

  “I’m looking for all the pieces of a puzzle, sir. You did say that Black went to Hong Kong. What became of him? Did they check to see if maybe he didn’t come back because he was dead?”

  “He most likely came back to the states and went into hiding.”

  “In Chester, West Virginia.” Joshua asked, “Can you have Rogers check on American John Does found in Hong Kong about that time period for me, sir?”

  An exasperated sigh came from the other end of the line. “Okay. Can I do anything else for you, commander?” the admiral asked in a sarcastic tone. “Would you like me to send Rogers to rotate the tires on that Corvette of yours?”

  Joshua heard Lieutenant Rogers laugh in the background until he abruptly stopped. He could imagine the commanding glare the admiral fired off at him to halt the laughter. “Could I please have copies of all those files?”

  Despite the order to cooperate with his subordinate, Joshua was still surprised when Admiral Zimmerman responded that he would have the files sent overnight via courier to the recruiting office in East Liverpool.

  Joshua was examining the lock and the key when Tad and Jan returned.

  “Are we permitted to enter now?” Jan asked sarcastically from the study doorway.

  “I am still in the reserves.” Joshua held his hand out for the bolt cutters. “I had to maintain a military attitude, or get my ass kicked the next time I go to Washington.”

  “Well, while you were talking to your admiral, I got a call on my cell from the state lab about our John Doe,” Tad told them.

  “He’s Kevin Rice,” Joshua beat him to the punch. “Got out of Leavenworth a few years before Mom and Dad found him in Bosley’s barn. That was what the admiral called to tell me.” He went on to recount the information he received from his commanding officer, which Jan wrote it down in her reporter’s notebook.

  “Did he also tell you the murder weapon is a forty-five caliber Colt?”

  “Forty-five caliber Colt?” Joshua stopped working on the padlock. The military was often issued Colts as weapons. “Are they sure?”

  “How would they know that?” Jan asked.

  “Every gun causes a particular type of marking on the slug when it leaves the barrel,” Tad said.

  “I know that,” she interrupted. “What I’m asking is how do they know without the gun that it was a Colt, and not a Smith and Wesson or a Magnum?”

  Tad responded while Joshua stared in deep thought. “Certain types of guns leave certain types of markings that are characteristic of only that type of gun. Now, when they find the murder weapon, there will be other markings that are characteristic of only that individual gun.”

  “Forty-five caliber Colt, huh?” Joshua resumed working on the lock.

  “Yeah,” Tad responded, “and here’s something else for you to chew on. The toxicology report came back on the drug used to incapacitate Vicki. It was succinylcholine. A big dose of it, too. That alone would have killed her.”

  “A controlled substance?” Joshua asked.

  “Of course. It’s a powerful muscle relaxant that causes paralysis in breathing. It’s usually used by doctors when a breathing tube is inserted.”

  Jan asked Tad, “Didn’t you say she was shot up with it?”

  Tad told her about the murder. “Vicki was looking for a good time with her killer. She thought her killer was shooting her up with something to enhance their sex when in fact, the succinylcholine cut off her breathing.”

  She watched with wide eyes while he summarized Vicki Rawlings’ death.

  “By that time, Vicki had to know what was going down, but there was nothing she could do about it. She had to
fight just to catch her breath and the drug prevented her from doing that. All she could do was lie there while her killer held that steel spike over her head and plunged it into her heart.”

  Jan gulped and shuddered.

  Seeing that she had no other questions, Tad returned his attention to the trunk and broke through the lock.

  They smiled at each other.

  “Now, watch this be filled with old sheets.” Joshua rubbed the lid like a magician about to perform an illusion.

  “Don’t even joke about that,” Tad warned. “As long as I’ve been waiting for this, God has to be kind.”

  “You do the honors then.” Joshua sat back to give him access to the trunk.

  Tad said a small prayer of hope before lifting the lid to reveal a chest filled to the rim with thick brown envelopes. Each one had been sealed and labeled. A white envelope that was yellowed with age rested across the top of them with Dr. Wilson’s familiar, arthritis-plagued, jagged handwriting across the front: “To Whom This May Concern.”

  Tad opened the envelope and read the letter inside. A frown, followed by a broad smile, crossed his face while he read it.

  “What is it?” Jan demanded to know.

  Joshua took out the thick envelopes and read each label.

  “It’s everything,” Tad said. “This letter is from Doc Wilson. He had it notarized in Pittsburgh. He says these are the real autopsies with the true findings on—”

  “Here’s Lulu Jefferson’s autopsy.” Joshua held up the envelope. “And Eleanor Rawlings and Sam Fletcher.” He continued to take envelope after envelope out of the trunk.

  Joshua’s pace slowed while he read the label on one of the envelopes. “Here’s the patient file for Victoria Rawlings.”

  “Vicki’s patient file?” Tad asked.

  Joshua read the label on the next envelope. “And here’s Wally’s patient file.” He flipped through the next few envelopes. “The patient files for the whole Rawlings family are in here.”

  Tad, who was still reading the letter, interjected, “He says he tried to do the right thing, but Chuck Delaney threatened him and his family if he said any of these deaths had been anything but an accident or natural causes. The autopsies he had done previously only said what he had been told to report. These are the real reports with the real findings. Each one has been witnessed and notarized by an official from Pittsburgh. He couldn’t use a local notary because she was a member of the Reverend Orville Rawlings’ church.”