Murder in the Choir (The Jazz Phillips Mystery Series)

by Joel B Reed

  5. Down by the Riverside

  I was awakened by the phone at half past seven the next morning. It took me a moment or two to figure out where I was before I answered on the fifth ring. It was Kruger and he sounded worried. He wanted to know if I was all right. He had knocked on my door twice without getting an answer.

  This worried me more than it did Kruger. Nellie tells me my hearing is not what it used to be, and I guess she’s right. I probably need to check it out at a clinic and do something about it. Knowing this is one thing, but accepting it is a different matter. I can’t seem to remember to make the appointment.

  I took a long, hot shower and was glad to find the tension in my back was gone. When I got to the cafe, Kruger was finished with breakfast and eager to get on our way. Crime Scene was due to meet us that morning in Oak Grove to go over Luther’s shack and tear up the floors of the blacksmith shop. I thought that Weaver and company would be glad it wasn’t another outhouse. While I hated breaking in on their Saturday plans, I knew they would be glad for overtime.

  Kruger was genuinely sorry to hear about Dee, but glad that we’d be working together on the case. At this point, Lonnie would normally assign an agent to replace Spinks on the case, but a couple of situations in other parts of the country had pulled away most of his people. Kruger was left in place because the case was so politically sensitive. This told me we needed to get this case cleared up as quickly as we could. The last thing we needed was to be swamped by an influx of special agents when other crises were resolved.

  The rainy weather had passed with the front the night before, and the day was bright and clear, the way it is after a storm. As we drove to Oak Grove, the colors were completely out, brilliant in the clean air. It’s on fall days like this in Arkansas I find myself most grateful to be alive.

  We arrived in Oak Grove about thirty minutes ahead of Weaver’s team. I was about to suggest we talk to the pastor when Kruger’s phone rang. “I bet it’s for you,” he said. When he answered, he was right. It was Sheriff John Tanner asking to talk to me.

  “Jazz,” he said when I got on the line. “I have some bad news. Luther Adams is dead.”

  I wasn’t surprised by that, but I found myself with a sense of loss. “What happened? Where did you find him?”

  “I didn’t,” Tanner told me. “The Highway Patrol said a fisherman found him along the river down by Wilton. It was a fluke. Where he was dumped no one would have ever found him except that was the guy’s secret fishing hole and his dog smelled him out.”

  “We better get Weaver and his crime scene guys down there,” I said.

  “I guess,” said Tanner. “But I don’t think they’ll find much. Highway Patrol said it didn’t look like he was killed there.”

  The whole world is a forensic expert these days. “Yeah, but our guy may have gotten careless. Maybe they’ll find some tracks or something.”

  “Maybe so,” he said. I knew he wouldn’t be betting on it. “By the way, I did talk to Leslie yesterday. We have the rifle. I saw it myself. The number matches. He just forgot to log it in.”

  “Maybe Weaver can pick it up on his way through,” I suggested. “Thanks. I appreciate it.”

  “They found Adams?” Kruger asked and I gave him the details. “How do you see it?” he wanted to know when I was done.

  “Someone must have seen us together,” I replied. “Either in town at the drive-in or here. We weren’t exactly inconspicuous.” I told him about Luther singing. Then it hit me. “We better check out the blacksmith shop.”

  “Someone needs to tell Pastor Jones,” Kruger reminded me. Seeing my face he added, “I will if you want me to. Adams was just another guy to me.”

  I thanked him and told him that in Arkansas we’re raised to shoot our own dogs. He nodded and followed me to the church where we could see Jones talking to two other men. I waved to get his attention, and he hurried to me.

  There’s no easy way to pass along news of the death of a loved one. Even though he was around death all the time, Albert Jones took the news hard. At first he said nothing, just turned to one side and looked down. Then tears began to roll down his cheek. By now the men Jones had been talking to had gathered around, and seeing the pastor’s face, they knew without a word being passed. “Poor Luther,” one of them said. “Well, he’s with the Lord now.”

  Albert Jones was facing me when the man said this. I saw a blaze of anger flare in his eyes and for a moment I thought he would strike the fellow. Then he forced it down and let out a deep breath. He turned and patted the man on the shoulder. “Yes, LeRoy, he is. Luther is at rest now.” Then he looked back to me. “Please excuse me, Dr. Phillips,” he said. “We can talk later, if you don’t mind. There are things I need to do right now.”

  Kruger and I walked back to his car. “What do you think?” I asked as he dug a couple of flashlights and a camera out of the trunk.

  “About the pastor?” he asked. I nodded. “He’s for real,” Kruger said. “No one can fake that kind of grief. But I think he knew before you told him. Not knew for sure, maybe, but he had a good idea.”

  “I think he knew the minute he saw the lock and chain yesterday,” I said. “I think there’s a lot Pastor Jones isn’t telling us.”

  While we were there, we took a quick look around the blacksmith shop. Kruger had thought to bring along a pry bar, but we needed to get to Wilton and decided to wait and let the crime scene people take up the flooring. With all the traffic in and out the day before, I couldn’t tell if there were any fresh tracks in the dust and neither could Kruger. There was nothing more to see, so we took off for Wilton and I called the Highway Patrol and asked for one of the officers who recovered the body to wait for us out on the highway.

  It wasn’t far from Oak Grove to the Millwood River near Wilton. Yet, the road is narrow and full of curves, and Kruger didn’t push it today. The trip took us the better part of an hour, but I was able to get in touch with Weaver. I called on Kruger’s phone and told Weaver about Luther Adams. I asked him to skip Oak Grove until he was headed back and join us at the crime scene near Wilton.

  When we got there the state trooper was someone I knew and he was glad to help us out. It was his last week on patrol before retirement, and the last thing he wanted was excitement. He told us the other officer who answered the call was back on patrol but available if we needed a statement. When he showed us where the body was found, I was glad to see he had sealed off the area with yellow crime scene tape.

  We looked around a little, but there wasn’t much to see. Luther’s body lay behind a bush to one side of a little used path at the edge of the water. I didn’t look that closely, but there was nothing along the path, and when I touched Luther’s face, it was cold. What got me was the expression on his face. He was smiling the way he had while singing the hymn at the drive-in.

  “Jesus,” Kruger murmured from behind me. He was not being irreverent.

  “Something like that,” I answered. It wasn’t obvious how Adams died, but the old man had left this world in peace.

  There was nothing to do but wait for Weaver and his team, so I spent the time going over the autopsy report while Kruger caught up on his paperwork. I turned to the very last page to read the pathologist summary and discovered two pages stuck together. When I gently peeled them apart, I discovered one of them was a fingerprint chart. The name at the top was Wilbur O. Jones and the date was about ten days before.

  I mentioned this to Kruger, but he was deep into something and simply murmured and nodded. When I chuckled, he looked up. I told him we must have been working together too long since his answer to me had been much like the old standard, “Yes, dear.” He smiled and nodded, but gave me an odd look. It was clear that he was not amused.

  Reading through the slice-by-slice autopsy report, I came across something else. As Pastor Jones told us, our killer had won out over mother nature by just a few weeks or months. Smiley Jones had stage four colon cancer and he had not received t
reatment. This time Kruger was more attentive when I told him what I found, but he didn’t see the significance.

  “He was aware of his cancer,” I told him. “Albert Jones told me so. But there was no sign he had been treated.”

  “I still don’t see the connection,” he replied.

  “Well, if he knew, maybe he wanted to spare himself some pain.”

  “You mean, he arranged his own murder?” Kruger looked at me as if I had lost my mind.

  “It happens, but I wasn’t thinking along those lines,” I replied. “What if he knew someone was after him and simply didn’t do anything about it?”

  This got Kruger’s attention. “You don’t suppose he left a message, do you?”

  “I hadn’t thought about that, but it’s something to keep in mind. You know, as one of those back burner possibilities. Or, maybe he knew someone was after him, but he didn’t know who. Maybe he just accepted it.”

  Kruger thought about that a moment, then shrugged. “You would think it would show up in his behavior somewhere. None of the witnesses I’ve talked to noticed any difference in his behavior or his mental state, and I haven’t seen it in any of the reports, either.”

  “Well, it’s definitely back burner, but it would be interesting to know if he was settling his affairs.”

  “As far as I’ve been able to discover, he didn’t even leave a will,” Kruger told me. “He had some savings and a few residual royalties he used to support himself, but nothing worth hiring a professional hit man. He was comfortable, but not wealthy.”

  I asked how much the estate was worth, and Kruger gave me an estimate. “You’ve seen Oak Grove,” I told him. “While a couple hundred thousand dollars might not seem like wealth to you, to black folk in rural Arkansas, it could seem like all the money in the world.”

  Kruger thought about it for a minute. “I wonder who went through his stuff? Or if anyone looked at his bank records. I didn’t see anything mentioned in the reports. Did DiRado say anything about it to you?”

  I shook my head. “Not a thing. I don’t even know where Smiley lived. I think maybe you and I ought to go through his place.”

  “Maybe we need to go back to square one,” Kruger suggested. “Maybe we need to approach this as a fresh homicide. Not much has really gotten done until the last few days, and we’re the ones who did it.”

  Weaver and his team arrived about then. He told us he had left one of his team in Oak Grove to begin work on Luther’s shack while he and the other two handled the crime scene here. Normally the four of them worked in two separate teams with Weaver floating between, but this case had top priority and the guys liked working together.

  There wasn’t much at the river for Weaver and his people to find. They determined rather quickly that the cause of death was probably a single deep wound entering just over the left kidney. Weaver guessed it was made by a knife with a seven or eight inch blade which penetrated the heart, causing immediate arrest and almost instant death. There was very little blood around the wound and only a few smears on the leaves and grass behind the bush. Nor was there any sign of the murder weapon, even though they searched the brush along the trail carefully.

  “I don’t think you’ll ever find the murder weapon,” Weaver told me as he nodded toward the river. “Most likely it’s out there somewhere, but it’ll be a miracle if you find it. I guess you could fish with large magnets.”

  I told him about the commando knife, and he nodded again. “That would do it, all right. As a matter of fact, the placement of the wound suggests that the killer knew what he was doing.”

  “You mean, like a professional?” Kruger asked.

  “More like a commando,” Weaver told him. “This is how they teach the Marines and Special Forces to do it: quick and silent. The poor bastard never knew it was coming.”

  “Then we may get lucky,” Kruger said. “Those guys are attached to their weapons, particularly blades. He may have kept the knife.”

  “Then he may have kept the rifle, too,” I added and Kruger nodded.

  “The other thing is that Adams wasn’t killed here,” Weaver added. “I bet you already guessed that, but it’s for sure now. I didn’t see any sign he was killed between here and the van, either, and I looked.”

  I nodded. “So he was killed somewhere else and brought here,” I said softly, talking to myself. I looked around. “I wonder if the killer knew about this spot. He took some trouble to hide the body. Any idea of when it happened?”

  Weaver shook his head. “I would guess at least twelve hours and no more than twenty-four. On the other hand, it’s been cool. It could be a little longer.”

  I glanced at my watch. “No, not really. I left Oak Grove at a quarter to nine last night. So we’re looking at fourteen hours at the most. Ask the Highway Patrol when the body was discovered. I expect it was fairly early this morning.”

  Weaver nodded. “Will do, boss.” Somehow, I missed the irony.

  “Well, keep an eye out around Adams’ place in Oak Grove when you go over it,” I added. “I doubt he was killed there, either, but he might have been. You might keep an eye out for a likely place between here and Oak Grove, too.”

  Weaver gave me a look that was eloquent, but said nothing. It was a very gentle reminder that I was no longer in charge of CID. “Never mind,” I said. “I guess I’m being unreasonable, aren’t I.” Weaver answered with a smile and left to supervise his team.

  Once the body was loaded, there was nothing more for us to do there, and we followed the crime scene van back to Oak Grove. About halfway between Ben Lomond and Mineral Springs, we were crossing the Saline River when something caught my eye. It was a turnout on the north side of the road, the kind that fishermen use to get to the river, and I could see two trucks through the brush about fifty yards off the road.

  I asked Kruger to stop and go back. He gave me a strange look but did so, and I directed him down the primitive road until we came to a clearing. I asked him to stop before we got to the trucks. I got out and looked around the clearing and Kruger joined me.

  I was about to give up and head back to the car when I spotted what I was looking for. It wasn’t much, just a small dark stain on the ground toward the middle of the clearing. I called Kruger over, and when he got there he nodded and handed me his phone. “I’ll get the tape. You call Weaver.”

  I could tell Weaver really didn’t believe me when I told him I had a spot, but he humored me and came back, anyway. When he saw the faint tracks by the stain, his attitude changed. He very carefully took a smear of the stain and took it to the van to test it. A few minutes later he came back. “It’s blood, all right. Human blood. I can’t tell you for sure it’s Adams’, but it’s the same type—O negative—which is pretty rare.” He looked at me and shook his head. “I don’t know how you do it.”

  “The secret is mineral water and clean living,” I laughed. “Come on, I just got lucky this time, Ben.”

  Weaver looked at Kruger. “You wouldn’t believe how often this guy gets lucky this way. His batting average is over seven hundred.”

  “I believe it,” Kruger said.

  “You guys are embarrassing me,” I told them. “Let’s see if we can get some plaster impressions of these foot prints.” I looked around and pointed. “Let’s try those tire tracks, too. They look like car tires.”

  Weaver grinned and spoke to Kruger again. “If you ever want to get Jazz off your case, just say something nice about him.”

  The crime scene team spent over an hour going over the site. There was more there than at the river side, but none of it was conclusive in pointing to the killer. One set of foot prints matched Luther’s shoes, but the others were from a major brand of running shoe sold in every department store in the country. The size was a bit small—nine medium—but that only gave us a rough idea of the size of the man. They could belong to a tall man with small feet, or a short man with feet to fit his stature, or even a woman, for that matter. One thing we did l
earn was that he was not as heavy as Luther. His tracks were not as deep.

  When his team was done, Weaver came over to where Kruger and I were talking. He waved his hands in the air and bowed. “Where to now, oh Great One?” he said. Kruger laughed.

  I played along, pulling my fingers together on the bridge of my nose and looking down. “The Force tells me...Oak Grove! I see an old shack and a lonely crime scene technician who wonders where in the hell his boss is.”

  Weaver took off for Oak Grove, and Kruger and I debated our next step. It would take Crime Scene a while to go over Luther’s shack and take up the floor of the blacksmith shop. There was no one in Oak Grove we needed to interview other than the pastor, and he would be busy with his flock for a while. There was little else we could do and I suggested that we might head back to Texarkana and check out Slide’s alibi since we were so close. Kruger thought that was a good idea, and I called Ben Weaver on Kruger’s phone to let him know.

  “Don’t tell me that you’ve found another one,” Weaver said when he heard my voice. I laughed and told him what our plans were and how to reach us.

  Kruger was in a much better mood as we drove south. He even told me a little about himself, and I told him about me and Nellie. He was from a large family in a small town in North Dakota, the first in his family to go to college. He had been with the Bureau five years and was still unmarried, a point I asked about since Nellie would want to know. While he was not sure why; he was sent to Arkansas since his performance reviews were always excellent, he was glad it wasn’t Mississippi.

  Since it seemed an appropriate moment, I told him what I thought about his doing better in private industry. He agreed and told me he was hoping to be able to take leave from the Bureau to complete law school soon. Once that was behind him, he thought he might find a place he liked to live and think about a family. Seattle interested him, as did Anchorage. He also liked Little Rock, too, but wasn’t used to the heat down here.