1 A Small Case of Murder Read online

  “What if Reverend Rawlings is there?” one of the deputies asked, “Do we arrest him, too?”

  “If he’s there,” Curtis Sawyer said, “I going to make damn sure I get a statement from him confirming that the hits were on his orders. So far, we don’t have anything from Wallace to connect the reverend to the contract.”

  “Wouldn’t his being present for the payoff be enough?” Jan inquired.

  “No,” Joshua responded. “He could make a case for reasonable doubt by saying that he thought Wally was paying back a loan, or buying a car, or any legal transaction.”

  With assertions that everything was clear, they dispersed and headed down the river to New Cumberland to make the big bust. Joshua, Tad, and Jan rode with two federal agents in the back of the surveillance van picking up Sheriff Curtis Sawyer’s wiretap. The van parked in the lot next to the door leading down to Wallace Rawlings’ office.

  Joshua could see the excitement in Jan’s eyes at being in on the biggest thing in her life. When their eyes met, he shot his oldest childhood friend a smile. He was unaware of how her heart leapt at the sight of the smile meant for her and only her.

  In the deserted school building, Curtis Sawyer tested the wiretap by softly singing To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before while he descended the stairs to the building’s basement, which amused his audience in the van.

  “I’m going in.” They heard Sheriff Sawyer step into the reception area.

  Wallace Rawlings’ bleached blond secretary looked up with a grin when Curtis Sawyer in his navy blue uniform stepped up to her desk. “May I help you, sheriff?”

  “I have a ten o’clock appointment to meet with Mr. Rawlings.”

  “I’m sorry, but Mr. Rawlings isn’t in yet.”

  Everyone in the back of the van groaned.

  Sheriff Sawyer said, “You must be mistaken. His car is outside in his parking space.”

  It was the secretary’s turn to frown. “I haven’t seen Mr. Rawlings all morning. He must be at the courthouse. I’ve been here since eight-thirty, and I haven’t seen him.”

  “Maybe he’s in his office and hasn’t come out yet.” His annoyance was evident in his tone.

  She insisted that wasn’t possible. Wallace Rawlings always locked his office when he was out, and when he was there it was unlocked. The office door was locked. Therefore, he must be out.

  Wallace Rawlings’ temper being infamous, she was afraid to knock on his door, at which point the sheriff took charge and knocked on it, to which there was no answer.

  In the van, Joshua groaned. “This is getting very irritating.”

  “You’re irritated?” One of the agents said, “I can hear Sawyer’s blood pressure rising.”

  Seeing no appointments listed on his calendar, the secretary called around to the various offices in the courthouse to locate her boss while instructing Sheriff Sawyer, whose appointment wasn’t listed to sit and wait.

  “I’ve got a very bad feeling about this.” Joshua stepped out of the back of the van, walked the dozen or so feet to the corner of the school building, and crouched down to peer through the window into the office that belonged to Hancock County’s prosecuting attorney.

  “Damn!” Joshua stepped to the next window and peered inside.

  The secretary was dialing another number on the phone in an attempt to locate her boss and get rid of the lawman standing over her like a vulture waiting for her to expire.

  Joshua tapped on the window.

  The phone still at her ear, she whirled around. “Who is that?” she barked when she saw Joshua, dressed in his state police uniform, looking in at them.

  “Do you have a key for that door?” He pointed in the direction of Wallace’s office.

  “Yes,” the secretary looked from him to the sheriff, “but I can’t let you have it.”

  “Then you unlock the door,” the sheriff requested.

  “I can’t. If I did, Mr. Rawlings would—”

  “You don’t have to worry about Mr. Rawlings getting upset,” Joshua said. “I can promise you that.”

  Sawyer’s request turned into an order. “Unlock that door.”

  Worried by the tone of his command, she took the key out of her desk drawer and scurried to the door. With her own sigh of disgust at the bothersome sheriff, she turned the key and stood back to let him enter. When she stepped in behind him, she screamed.

  Joshua Thornton and the rest of the sheriff’s team were already rushing in when the sheriff gave his signal into his wire mike. “It was nice doing business with you, Mr. Prosecutor. Bring two body bags with you.”

  Wallace Rawlings sat behind his desk in a position of no dignity with his arms stretched out on either side. His head hung back. He gazed up to the heavens with a third eye in the center of his forehead. Blood, reminiscent of a red halo, was splattered on the wall behind him. The balance of Sheriff Sawyer’s bloodstained payoff sat in the center of the desk.

  Sprawled to one side in his chair from the force of the gunshot to his right temple, Hal Poole sat across from his brother-in-law’s desk. A forty-five caliber Colt lay on the floor next to his chair.

  “Who’s going to put the spin on this for the reverend now?” Sheriff Sawyer wondered out loud.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Joshua studied the pistol in its clear evidence baggie. He was thinking so deeply that he was unaware of the flurry of activity around him. The federal agents, state police, and sheriff’s deputies were working the scene.

  As soon as she caught a glimpse of the bloody corpses, Jan re-treated back to the van to document it in her notebook before erasing the horrid sight from her memory, an act that Joshua knew would be impossible to accomplish.

  After the victims had been photographed and Tad had finished his on-scene job, the medical examiner permitted the attendants to begin their job of bagging the bodies for transport to the morgue.

  “Nice looking weapon, huh?” Sheriff Sawyer observed the gun in Joshua’s hand. “Well taken care of.”

  “And very old.” Joshua turned the gun over. “It still has the registration numbers on it.”

  “We’re running a check on it. Most likely belongs to Wally. He had a gun collection. None were registered. Bridgette told me that she believes the gun that killed Beth Davis belonged to him.”

  “Wally has—” Joshua corrected himself, “had—a gun collection, huh?”

  “It wasn’t common knowledge. My mother says he has more than a couple dozen.”

  Joshua laid the precious piece of evidence on the corner of the desk. ”I wonder where he got this one.”

  “Unless it was registered by the previous owner, I doubt if we’ll find that out now. Why do you want to know?”

  “It’s another piece of the puzzle.”

  Curtis Sawyer spat out his frustration, “Yeah, well, right now we have hundreds of puzzle pieces scattered all over the place. Meanwhile, Reverend Rawlings is sitting up in his mansion laughing at all of us.”

  Joshua was cool. “We’ll get the last laugh.”

  Across the room, Tad zipped shut the bag containing Hal Poole’s body. The morgue attendants wheeled his body out into the reception area and past the late prosecutor’s distraught secretary.

  “It was a murder-suicide. Happened around one o’clock this morning,” Tad announced to the sheriff and special prosecutor.

  “I called Wallace at his cell phone number shortly before one this morning to find out if he had anything to do with that attack on the kids,” the sheriff told them. “I don’t know where he was when he took my call.”

  “Well, that was around when he died,” Tad stated. “Hal Poole shot himself. There’s no denying it. There are no signs of a struggle. The gun dropped in the right spot. Those are my preliminary findings. Maybe forensics can fi
nd something else.”

  “Hal could have gotten the carbon you found on his hands when he was shooting at us yesterday,” Joshua said.

  “What are you talking about? I was hired to kill you. Why would he be shooting at you?” The sheriff sounded offended.

  Joshua said in a teasing tone, “Oh, I’m sure he didn’t mean to cheat you out of your contract with Wally. He was on a mission to protect his spiritual leader from his enemies.”

  Reverend Orville Rawlings covered his face and wept upon learning the news of his son’s murder and his son-in-law’s suicide.

  Hal had confessed his sins in an e-mail sent to the reverend. The note said that Wallace Rawlings was possessed by the same demons that had possessed Vicki and he had to be killed in order to exorcise them.

  Upon their arrival at the Rawlings mansion, a shapely young maid escorted the sheriff and special prosecutor into the living room to break the news to the reverend and his daughter of the discovery of the bodies. “Their hair stylist just left,” she told them.

  Dabbing her eyes with a lace handkerchief, Bridgette handed Curtis Sawyer a printed copy of the e-mail. He scanned it before handing it off to Joshua.

  It read:

  Dearest Father,

  Forgive me, Father, for I am about to sin. Brother Wallace has been possessed by the same demons that took his daughter, and they must be exorcised. First, he led his daughter down the path of drugs, alcohol, and promis-cuity. In her travels down the path of evil, Satan seduced her into conspiring with him in his battle against God and goodness by defeating our family. I had no choice but to thwart Satan in his scheme by killing his concubines.

  The killing has to stop. I have to stop him. It was too late to call Brother Wallace back to God. The only way to exorcise our family of these demons is to kill him, and then myself, to spare the family the shame of our sins.

  May God have mercy on our souls.

  “God forgive him,” Reverend Rawlings gasped through heavy sobs. He laid his head on his daughter’s shoulder.

  Joshua gave the note to Sheriff Sawyer, who slipped it into an evidence bag.

  “When did you get this e-mail?” Joshua asked the reverend.

  “This morning,” Reverend Rawlings answered. “I down-loaded my e-mail on my computer after breakfast as I always do. I found it then.”

  “What time was that?”

  “Ten o’clock. I called Hal’s office at the church and got no answer.”

  “Why didn’t you call your son’s office? He was the one in danger from Hal,” Joshua said.

  “Why do you ask?” The reverend turned to Sheriff Sawyer. “Why is he here? His job is to find my granddaughter’s killer—a job at which he has failed miserably. He’d still be chasing his own tail if Hal hadn’t confessed.”

  Sheriff Sawyer answered with a repeat of the question. “Why didn’t you call your son’s office?”

  “Who’s to say I didn’t?”

  “I was there at ten o’clock, and no call came from you.”

  “The line was busy.” His eyes now dry, Reverend Rawlings stood up. “If you will excuse me, I must plan a memorial service for my son and son-in-law, and prepare a statement for the media. Our maid will show you out.”

  On cue, the maid appeared in the doorway and gestured in the direction of the front door. Their visitors dismissed, Reverend Rawlings and his daughter exited out the other door.

  Joshua and Sheriff Sawyer rose to their feet. The prosecutor squinted at Bridgette, who, feeling his gaze on her, smirked at him before closing the door behind her.

  “What are you looking at?” the sheriff asked when he saw Joshua staring at the door that Bridgette had shut between them and their visitors.

  “I was noticing what a lovely shade of red Bridgette’s hair is.”

  To reinforce the command for them to leave, the servant cleared her throat.

  “It’s not natural.” The sheriff ushered him to the foyer.

  “Neither was that hair found caught in the chamber of Beth’s murder weapon,” Joshua whispered.

  “Bridgette was Vicki’s aunt, not her sister.”

  “Not even that, since Wally wasn’t her father.” Joshua stopped at the door the maid held open for them.

  “My mother was fired this morning,” Sheriff Sawyer said when his mother’s replacement slammed the door on them.

  “What time this morning?”

  “Bridgette called her at home before she left for work to tell her that her services would no longer be needed.”

  Joshua asked, “That was like—”

  “Six o’clock this morning.”

  “Sounds like there’s a leak somewhere,” Joshua said.

  They continued their conversation on their way to the sheriff’s squad car.

  Curtis speculated, “Tess Bauer and her minions were at Tad’s place minutes after 911 got the call. If one of those news hounds caught you and Tad in the police uniforms leaving his apartment last night, and word got to one of Rawlings’ informants; that can explain the attack on your family and Wally’s sudden death. Needless to say, the reverend is capable of anything, even killing his own son, to cover his butt.”

  “According to the physical evidence” Joshua said, “Hal shot Wally and then turned the gun on himself. He confessed to Vicki’s and Beth’s murders.”

  “Then, it looks like we don’t have anything on the reverend. We can’t even prove he was behind hiring me to kill you and Tad.”

  “I wonder what time that e-mail was sent.” Joshua turned to the sheriff. “Why would Hal kill Vicki and Beth?”

  “He was a fanatic. Everyone knew that.”

  Joshua wasn’t listening. Something else had his attention. Across the driveway, around the corner of the house, the rear bumper of a black MG convertible peeked out from behind a hedge.

  There was one more piece of the puzzle.

  “Amber said she saw the Reverend Rawlings kill Vicki and Beth.” Joshua stepped around the law officer to take a closer look at the sports car with a bumper sticker announcing “Jesus Lives!” He could make out the license plate: “RWLNGS4”.

  “She was lying,” Sheriff Sawyer said. “Won’t be the first time someone lied about witnessing a murder to get their mug on television.”

  “What about Wally’s trench coat with the red hair from the same suspect who left her hair in the gun? What was that doing in the closet? It’s summer. It’s hot. Why wear a coat?”

  The sheriff chuckled at the question that had an obvious answer. “He wore it to frame Wally.”

  “Hal was almost bald and he certainly never colored his hair.” Joshua was on a roll. “In your experience, sheriff, do fanatics usually go to the trouble of framing other people for their deeds in the name of God?” He answered his own question. “It’s been my experience that fanatics trip over each other to take the credit.”

  “Are you saying you think Hal Poole didn’t kill Wally and then shot himself?”

  Joshua shook his head. “No, he did it. I think he had some help.”

  Joshua forgot all about the murders and his daughters in the hospital when he saw the sealed moving box resting on top of his desk in his study. He ripped it open and dug through the plastic bubble wrap to find the picture in the cut glass frame he had always kept on the corner of his desk.

  He gazed at the image in his hands. Valerie was so young, so filled with love. Her long auburn hair was swept up. It seemed entwined with the pearl crown from which her veil flowed. Her cheeks were flushed with excitement while she smiled at the photographer’s camera.

  Blinking back tears he felt welling up in his eyes, Joshua traced the outline of her image with his fingertips.

  “Hey, Dad, I think everything’s here.”

  At the sound of Murphy’s
call from the hallway, Joshua wiped away his tears with the back of his hand and placed the picture on his desk. He turned his attention to the remaining contents of the box. He removed a stack of framed photographs to sort through.

  Murphy held the inventory clipboard up for his father to see. “Everything is checked off. It seems to be in good shape, too, considering that it has probably been tossed around half the summer.”

  He picked up the picture that was on top of the pile Joshua was making on his desk from the box’s contents. “What’s this?”

  Upon noticing the one beneath it, Murphy laid the two pictures next to each other. One picture was of a black cat with a white background. The other depicted a mirror image of a white cat with a black background. “Looks kind of tacky for Mom’s taste.”

  Smiling with fondness at the memory, Joshua wiped the glass frames with his forearm. “Those are a couple of puzzles your mother got me the first Christmas we were married. It was two puzzles in the same box. It took me two months to do them. I was so proud of myself, your mother had them glued together and framed.”

  “Two puzzles at once.” Hearing that, Murphy admired them. “That must have been hard.”

  “It took a real adjustment of my thinking to figure them out.” Joshua recalled, “It wasn’t only one puzzle that I had to figure out. It was two that were connected only by virtue of being in the same box. Once, I figured that out, it all made sense.”

  He stared at the two puzzles he held in his hands and saw Vicki’s and Beth’s dead bodies.

  Two murders. Two times of death. Two murder weapons. One crime scene.

  Two puzzles in the same box.

  Joshua handed the frames back to him, and headed for the door.

  “Where are you going?”

  “To catch a couple of killers.”

  Dressed in his gloves and leather apron, Tad was hosing down the autopsy table with scalding hot water when Joshua came into the morgue. The prosecutor had two thick brown envelopes tucked under his arm.