1 A Small Case of Murder Read online

  “Lulu Jefferson was mistaken,” Reverend Rawlings said. “I don’t even remember her asking me about any picture. I barely remember her.”

  “How long do we have to put up with this?” Bridgette snatched off her hat and veil with disgust. “This is boring.”

  “Oh, I assure you, Mrs. Poole,” the prosecutor told her, “before I’m through, you’re going to get more excitement than you can handle.”

  Joshua picked up his binder and climbed up onto the stage. “Reverend Rawlings, let’s go back to your service record. You stated on more than one occasion that you had met Charles Delaney in Korea.” He opened the binder and referred to a report. “You even stated that here in this very room earlier this evening.”

  The reverend sighed. “Yes, I did.”

  “Where in Korea?”

  “Seoul.”

  “Did you see any action?”

  “As much action as an army chaplain can see.”

  “But Charles Delaney was a master sergeant in the military police stationed in Seoul,” Joshua said.

  “We were stationed at the same base.”

  Joshua said, “Not according to the records I got from Washington. According to the VA, Orville Alexander Rawlings never set foot in Seoul. He spent his whole time overseas in Hong Kong.” He handed the reverend a copy of the report.

  “He could have gone there on leave,” Bridgette responded.

  “Your father just said he was stationed there.” Joshua emphasized the word “stationed”.

  “So he added color to his service record,” Mannings said. “Many public figures do that.”

  “He lied!”

  “Lying is no big deal. Presidents get away with it.”

  “What was your rank?” Joshua shot at the reverend.

  Reverend Rawlings said, “I was a captain.”

  “You were an officer. A chaplain. Charles Delaney was a sergeant in the military police. How did you become friends with an enlisted man in Seoul while you were an officer serving at a military hospital in Hong Kong?”

  The reverend was speechless.

  Mannings ordered him as he came up onto the stage. “Don’t answer that. He can’t prove anything. If he did, we’d be down at the police station, not here.”

  “I have proof.” Joshua held up his hand to stop Mannings, who froze in his footsteps. “I have proof that ties everything together,” He told the reverend. “You were in Korea in 1952. That was where you met Master Sergeant Charles Delaney. The two of you were partners in crime. Private Kevin Rice was one of your minions. You weren’t a chaplain. You were a master sergeant in charge of the supply depot—”

  “Oh, please,” Bridgette said. “My father was no enlisted man.”

  “Orville Rawlings was a chaplain.” Joshua walked towards her. Once he was face to face with Bridgette, the prosecutor whirled around and pointed at her father. “This man isn’t Orville Rawlings! He’s Master Sergeant Caleb Penn!”

  There was silence throughout the chapel.

  The reverend grinned up at Joshua.

  Bridgette laughed, at first out of humor. Then, her laughter took on a hysterical tone. “You can’t be serious.” She crossed the stage as if to leave.

  “Are you going to tell them, sergeant?” Joshua asked the man known as a pastor.

  The suspect responded in a low tone, “You can’t prove anything.”

  “Who’s Sergeant Penn?” Amused, Mannings crossed his arms.

  “The man for whom Private Kevin Rice spent seven years in Leavenworth. Oh, it was beautiful plan!” Joshua said to the reverend. “I have to give you credit.”

  Joshua crossed the stage as he explained the scheme. “You have to pay close attention to the details here. Sergeant Caleb Penn was in charge of the supply depot in Seoul. Rice was a private, who was simply following his sergeant’s orders when he got caught delivering stolen goods to a fence.”

  He climbed down off the stage. “When the operation started falling apart after Rice was arrested, Penn shot the fence to death to make sure he didn’t turn him in, and then he staged his own death.”

  So they could hear him, Joshua raised his voice while backing up the aisle towards the rear of the auditorium. “Either Penn or the master sergeant of the military police, Charles Delaney, abducted a Corporal Milton Black. Delaney, Black’s commanding officer, approved his three-day pass to go to Hong Kong. That tells me that Delaney was involved in this up to his crew cut. Black never went to Hong Kong. He was killed, and then blown up in a jeep. The body’s identification was based solely on Penn’s dog tags, which they had switched, and Delaney’s statement that he saw Penn getting into the jeep right before the explosion.”

  Joshua was now at the back of the auditorium. “By then, Penn was in Hong Kong, looking for his next murder victim, to steal his identity to get back to the states.”

  “Why not come back to the states as Black?” Jan called from the front row.

  “Because Black still had another year to serve overseas. When he didn’t come back, Delaney reported him AWOL, and then as a deserter. He had to as his superior officer. They knew that Black would be wanted when he didn’t return. It wouldn’t be smart to keep the identity of a wanted man.”

  Joshua stood behind the elderly man to continue presenting his case. “It was part of their plan. After getting to Hong Kong with Black’s ID and three-day pass, Penn had to find someone on his way home. He was in Hong Kong a month before he found the perfect victim, an army chaplain by the name of Orville Alexander Rawlings, who had his papers and was ready to leave. I imagine Penn found him in a bar the day before he was to ship out. He shot him in the head like he did the Korean fence, took his papers and dog tags, boarded the plane, came home and checked out. From sergeant to captain in less than a month. Not bad.”

  “But wouldn’t someone notice he wasn’t Rawlings?” Tess wondered.

  “It wasn’t that big a chance,” Joshua said. “The military is one giant bureaucracy, especially in war time. Things happen so fast.” He snapped his fingers on both hands to illustrate his point. “Most likely no one even looked at him. Plus, the odds of finding someone who actually knew Rawlings stateside, when he had served in Hong Kong, weren’t that bad.”

  Mannings was no longer objecting or laughing.

  Joshua continued. “Orville Rawlings did have a family. When they reported him missing after he didn’t come back home to Seattle, Washington, the military checked their paperwork, saw that Rawlings had checked out, and it went no further. It never occurred to anyone that he didn’t come back from Hong Kong.”

  “You can’t prove any of this!” Bridgette shouted to the back of the auditorium.

  For his response, Joshua helped the elderly man to his feet. The two of them crept up to the front of the auditorium.

  The old man put on thick eyeglasses to peer up at Reverend Orville Rawlings. His lips trembled as he shook his head. He turned to Joshua and said with a weak raspy voice that shattered the silence, “No, that’s not him.”

  Mannings’ arrogance gave way to concern. “Who is this?”

  Joshua spoke up to the church pastor. “Would you like to introduce him, reverend?”

  Sparks of fury shot from the reverend’s eyes.

  “Let me introduce our guest of honor.” Joshua turned to the reverend’s lawyer. “Say hello to Felix Rawlings. He’s flown all the way here from Seattle, Washington, to see your client.” He chuckled up to the man on the stage. “This is Orville Rawlings’ brother.”

  Even the reverend was unable to contain his shock at the revelation.

  Joshua waited for the gasps that erupted from inside the church to subside before he resumed. “I guess the chaplain didn’t get a chance to tell you about his family before you killed him.”

  Tad got
out of his seat to help the elderly man to sit down. On his way to his seat, Orville Rawlings’ brother glared up at the man on the stage.

  Mannings was too stunned to make any more objections.

  Joshua went up onto the stage. “In Hong Kong, the body of a man listed as an American John Doe was found with a bullet in his head in an alley the day this man left. He was stripped of all identification, because Penn took everything, including his Bible. The American embassy in Hong Kong still has the slug from that murder. In the last few days, they com-pared it to the slug from the Korean fence in Seoul and found a match. The same gun was used in both murders. They will compare the John Doe’s dental records to the military’s dental records for Orville Rawlings.”

  Joshua crossed the stage to stand before the man seated on his throne.

  “It won’t be hard to prove you’re Penn. Even your lawyer knows that all military people are fingerprinted when they go into service. Your fingerprints will prove you’re not Orville Rawlings, but rather Master Sergeant Caleb Penn, which will prove you knew Kevin Rice, which will explain why he was in Chester with this article in his pocket.”

  There was silence when Joshua handed the copy of the magazine article to Clarence Mannings while speaking to the large man glaring up him.

  “Kevin Rice had spent seven years in Leavenworth for following your orders and was accused of killing you. Imagine his fury when he saw that article with your picture. Here you were a respected church pastor, making how many tens of thousands a year, while Rice was a convicted thief and suspected killer. It wouldn’t have been hard for him to figure out what you did. So, he came here to confront you, maybe even try to blackmail you, and you killed him. By then, killing was easy for you.”

  “You can’t prove Rice even saw this man,” Mannings said.

  “Oh, but I can.” Joshua whipped the bagged murder weapon of Wallace Rawlings from his breast pocket. “This is the proof. It’s the gun Hal Poole used to kill Wallace Rawlings. It came out of Wally’s gun collection.”

  Bridgette Poole let out a shriek and covered her face.

  Joshua asked the reverend, “Sergeant Penn, what happened to the gun you were issued when you joined the army?”

  As the sequence of events over the years fell into place in his mind, the pastor frowned.

  Joshua crossed the stage to show the gun to Bridgette Rawlings Poole. “Bridgette, what was the first gun your brother got to start his collection?”

  She peered at the gun in the bag. Her hands trembled when she touched it. She jerked her fingers away as if she had received an electric shock. “It was his thirteenth birthday. Father gave it to him.”

  Joshua turned back to the reverend. “The other day, Tad, Jan Martin, and I were shot at. It wasn’t hard for me to see that whoever was shooting at us was a lousy shot. He couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn, but he could hit the broad side of a trunk.” Joshua took out the envelope containing the slug from the chest. “This slug came from this gun.”

  Joshua showed the gun to the old man. “Army records show that this gun, with this serial number, was issued to Master Sergeant Caleb Penn. Ballistics would show that the slugs used to kill the Korean fence, Chaplain Orville Rawlings, Kevin Rice, your son-in-law, and your own son, all came from this same gun. Since the first three were killed before your son was even born, and you were in possession of it to give to your son, that puts the smoking gun into your hands.”

  Silence hung over the church while everyone waited for the man known as Reverend Orville Rawlings to respond to the evidence.

  The church pastor kept his eyes on Joshua Thornton when he raised his bulk out of his seat and crossed to the center of the stage as if to confess his guilt to everyone.

  Instead of confessing, the reverend chuckled. His chuckle rose to laughter while he reached into his inside breast pocket, pulled out a gun, and shot Joshua Thornton in the chest.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  The force of the impact of two bullets to the chest knocked Joshua to the floor.

  When the former master sergeant turned to shoot the sheriff, he was caught in a hailstorm of bullets coming from deputies, state police, and federal agents. They had been hiding in every conceivable place since the service had ended. Considering the trail of bodies left in Caleb Penn’s wake, Joshua ensured they were prepared for anything.

  Everyone dropped to the floor to hide, except for an elderly man from Seattle who stood to get a better view.

  With a curse, Felix Rawlings shoved Tad away when he tried to help. With a sense of justice, Orville Rawlings’ brother smiled while he watched Penn’s body riddled with bullets. He had been waiting more than half his life for this moment, and nothing, even deadly danger, was going to rob him of it.

  Bridgette Rawlings Poole and Clarence Mannings were the only ones in the chapel not expecting any violence. It took a full moment for the lawyer to realize that they were in the line of fire. Rooted center stage, Bridgette screamed hysterical demands to know what was going on. When Mannings tried to yank her off the stage, she shoved him away, which propelled him backwards into the baptismal pond.

  The gunfight continued while Mannings experienced the helplessness that Eleanor Rawlings had felt in her last moments of life before he was able to pull himself up out the water only to duck back down when bullets hit the wall behind him.

  The firefight lasted six seconds.

  “Hold your fire!” Joshua ordered over the roar of the gunshots.

  While lying flat on his back where the force of Rawlings’ shots knocked him, the prosecutor had managed to fire off two rounds from his own gun, which he had concealed in a holster strapped onto the back of his belt.

  As abruptly as it started, the shooting stopped.

  The auditorium was filled with quiet.

  The man known as Reverend Orville Rawlings looked down at Joshua Thornton, who was sprawled on the floor at his feet.

  Ready to shoot again if need be, Joshua aimed his gun

  up at him. The two bullets Penn had fired into his chest had exposed the kevlar lining of a bulletproof vest.

  Joshua held his breath.

  “Holy shit,” the old man said before he dropped to the floor.

  Dead.

  Everyone in the auditorium was afraid to make the first move for fear it would be inappropriate.

  Felix Rawlings had no such fear. He broke the silence with a standing ovation.

  “I had no idea,” Bridgette Rawlings Poole repeated over and over again while dabbing at her eyes.

  While the law enforcement officers went about the business of removing the body of the man known as Reverend Orville Rawlings from the church building he had built with his father-in-law’s money, Bridgette and her lawyer had retreated to her office located in the business wing.

  Tess was gloating over witnessing the drama, while the rest of the media had to wait along with Joshua Thornton’s children in the parking lot. Seeing Joshua lead Sawyer, Tad, and Jan head back to Bridgette’s office, she ordered her camera operator to continue filming and followed.

  Mannings acted appalled when Joshua knocked on his client’s office door. “Do you have to get her statement now?”

  “We have another puzzle to put together.” Joshua forced his way into the office of the heir apparent to Reverend Orville Rawlings’ dynasty.

  They found Bridgette Poole seated on the sofa with her feet curled up under her. Dry-eyed, she was sipping a snifter of brandy.

  The prosecutor observed, “I’m glad to see that you aren’t totally incapacitated by the revelation of your family’s legacy.”

  “I knew nothing about what that man did before I was born,” she argued.

  “But you do know about what happened this summer.” Joshua leaned against her delicately designed red cherry desk.

 
“Talk to my lawyer.” She waved a hand towards Mannings, who resembled a walrus with his wet bald head and bushy mustache dripping water down his chin onto his suit.

  Even though he looked at her lawyer, Joshua spoke to her. “You were the one who called the hairstylist to change your appointments before your husband’s and brother’s bodies had even been discovered.”

  He took a copy of the suicide note from his breast pocket to show Mannings. “It wasn’t hard to track down what public network had been used to send this e-mail. It was sent from the courthouse’s public wi-fi network twenty minutes after our witnesses heard the two fatal gunshots.”

  “Your witnesses are wrong about the time they heard the shot,” Bridgette said.

  Clarence Mannings shook his head. “You can’t narrow their time of death down to twenty minutes.”

  Sheriff Sawyer disagreed. “We have two witnesses who heard the shots that killed Wallace and Hal. The couple living in the house behind the school heard them. They thought it was a car backfiring, so they didn’t call the police. They were watching a movie and recall the exact point in the film when they heard them. Based on that, the cable company was able to place the time of the shots as being ten minutes after one.”

  Joshua held up a sheet of paper. “This e-mail was sent at one-twenty-eight. The server confirms the time.”

  Before Mannings could object further, Joshua added, “Why would Hal use his wife’s laptop to log on under his father-in-law’s password to go into the reverend’s e-mail to delete his original suicide note more than an hour after sending it from his own computer at his home? Then, why did he log off and log back on less than one minute later under his own password to recompose another suicide note to send to the reverend—all on his wife’s laptop?”

  Joshua laid his hand on top of her computer, which rested in the center of her desk. “And how did that laptop get here? Who removed it from the scene and why?”

  He told her, “You were there when Hal killed Wally. You put him up to it. After they were both dead, you used your father’s password to check the suicide note and found that it had something in there that you couldn’t let the police read. Our forensics people retrieved Hal’s original note from his computer—with a warrant, of course. It had been on his hard drive. Even though something’s deleted, it isn’t really gone.”