The Night Killer

by Beverly Connor

  No one asked any more questions. Diane wondered if Frank used David to help him. They both just loved a good algorithm. And David could do some scary stuff off the grid with computer searches and face recognition.

  Frank smiled at Diane and winked.

  “Let’s go talk with Slick Massey,” he said.

  Slick was sitting in a room similar to the one Tammy was in. He was drinking an RC Cola. Diane noticed there was a second, empty bottle sitting on the table. Frank and Ben walked in and sat down.

  “I have to go to the guy room,” he said.

  “We won’t be long,” said Ben. “Miss Tammy has told us most everything.”

  “Wha’chu mean?” said Slick.

  “About the Social Security and retirement checks—the bank accounts.” Ben rattled off several of Tammy’s aliases.

  “She wouldn’t have told you that stuff,” said Slick.

  “How else would we know?” said Ben, looking completely innocent. “What we need from you is where you buried the bodies.”

  “She wouldn’t have said we killed them, because we didn’t,” he said. “Sometimes people just die—’specially when they’re old. Their time just comes.”

  “Is that what happened to all the elderly women Tammy brought to your house? Their time came?” asked Frank.

  “They wasn’t healthy to begin with and they had no place to go. Tammy took real good care of them. She’d sit up at night working out a, uh, a medical plan for them. She was real good. Tammy’s smart. She told me it was good for them to pet my puppies. It was good for the puppies too. They need to be close to humans to get to be good hunting dogs. You know, some people think that keeping dogs by themselves and not feeding them much—keeping them hungry—makes them good hunters, but that’s not true. My dogs is the best around and it’s because I take good care of them. They like people and will hunt for them. They got good voices too. That’s important for Walker hounds. You want to recognize your own dog when it’s off in the woods.”

  Frank and Ben glanced at each other and smiled.

  “We’re glad to hear you take good care of your dogs,” said Ben.

  “But, see, Tammy took good care of the old ladies too. Tammy gave them vitamins, showed them how to eat right, gave them funny movies to watch, and taught them good personal high jinks—she was good to them.”

  Garnett and Agent Mathews snickered. Diane shook her head. Frank and Ben just smiled again.

  “We’re prepared to believe that,” said Ben. “But we still need to know where they are,” he said.

  “Can I talk to Tammy?” he asked.

  “Not right now,” said Frank.

  “Is she all right?” he said.

  “She’s fine,” said Frank. “But this isn’t the most pleasant place to be. You know that.”

  “You need to come clean,” said Ben. “It will be better for you and for Tammy. If you didn’t kill anyone, then there shouldn’t be a problem.”

  “We didn’t kill nobody,” he said, then closed his mouth.

  “Maybe you let them die,” urged Ben.

  “How do you let somebody die? People don’t need my permission,” he said. “You get old, you die.” He brushed his hair from his face and rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. “Am I going to have to get me a lawyer for you to let me go take a leak?” he said.

  “Just a couple more questions,” said Ben. “Why did you chase Dr. Fallon?”

  “I thought she might be hurt,” he said.

  “Slick,” said Frank, “we are past that explanation. We know she saw the skeleton on her car. Even the sheriff admitted there were bones in the tree. Now . . . why did you chase her? What were you going to do?”

  Slick’s dark eyes darted back and forth. “I wasn’t going to hurt her. Just make her forget.”

  “Make her forget?” asked Frank. “How?”

  “Nothing bad. Just give her some medicine to make her forget,” he said. “Then take her to the hospital and say she wrecked. Which she did.”

  “Medicine like Rohypnol, roofies?” said Frank.

  “Maybe,” he said. “It don’t hurt you. Just makes you forget,” he said. “That’s all we wanted—for her to forget she saw the skeleton.” He stopped and looked at each of them. “You see,” he added, “we didn’t want to get blamed for it. We didn’t know how it got in the tree.”

  “Just one more question,” said Frank. “Tell us about the fight with Roy Barre over your land.”

  Chapter 38

  Slick held up his hands, palms forward, and pushed the air in front of him.

  “Whoa, now. You ain’t gonna mix me up in that. No way. I ain’t got nothing to do with what happened to the Barres or the Watsons.”

  “Who do you think did it?” asked Frank.

  “Been some talk about some crazy person running around in the woods. Maybe that woman—she was acting kind of crazy.”

  Garnett looked over and smiled at Diane.

  “You mean running away from someone who was going to drug her?” said Frank. “That kind of crazy?”

  “She didn’t know I was gonna drug her. She didn’t know what I was gonna do,” said Slick.

  “Exactly,” said Frank.

  Slick looked confused.

  “Just tell us about your disagreement with Barre,” said Frank. “What was that about?”

  “It was mostly between Daddy and Roy. Roy’s land joins mine—what used to be Daddy’s before he died. The property line between us is a creek, which is dumb, if you ask me, ’cause creeks change. Hargus Creek has always been the property line. But there’s two creeks running side by side with about fifty acres between them. Roy said Hargus Creek is the one nearest us. That give him the fifty acres. Daddy said no, Hargus is the one closest to the Barres—which give the fifty acres to us. See? That was the feud—or, at least, part of it. They argued over it for years.

  “Daddy needed some money, so he cut the timber on the fifty acres, and Roy caught him at it. There’s some law that says if you cut timber on somebody else’s land you gotta pay three times what you can get out of it. Well, if Daddy had three times what he could of got for the timber, he wouldn’t of needed to cut it.”

  Slick brushed some of his stringy blond hair out of his eyes.

  “Anyways, it got mixed up in court. Daddy always told me to stay out of court, ’cause it ain’t never fair, it costs a fortune, and the damn lawyers end up with all the money. Well, there Daddy was in court having to pay a lawyer to tell him he was wrong to cut the trees and he’d have to pay up. Weren’t fair. Fifty acres was nothing to Roy. He had thousands. We only had a couple hundred, on account of my granddaddy sold most of it off to the paper company years ago when the land belonged to him. And Roy was only winning ’cause he found some map that showed Hargus Creek where he claimed it was.”

  “Did your father pay up?” asked Ben.

  “With what? You can’t get blood out of a turnip. Daddy accused Roy of making the map up hisself. Then Daddy died and Roy tried to collect from me. Something about the debt being part of Daddy’s estate. Like I was going to have that kind of money, and like Daddy had an estate anyway.”

  “Were you still having the feud with him when he was killed?” asked Frank.

  “You thinking maybe I killed him? I was thinking about giving him some of that stuff that makes you forget, but Tammy said it don’t work that way,” he said.

  “Incredible,” muttered Agent Mathews.

  “I was out with my dogs looking for that woman when the Barres was getting killed,” said Slick.

  “Can the dogs verify that?” asked Ben.

  Slick looked at Ben, squinting his eyes. “Well, no, but I didn’t kill the Barres,” he said. “The sheriff ain’t been out asking me about it. Only the deputy, one time when he come over with that woman.”

  That woman, thought Diane. She needed to have a T-shirt with That Woman written on it.

  “If the sheriff don’t think I did it, then I guess I didn
’t,” Slick said. “Look, I really need to go to the bathroom. And I’m not going to talk any more. I want a lawyer and I want to go to the bathroom.”

  “Just one more thing,” said Frank.

  “You been saying that. My bladder’s about to bust, man,” Slick said.

  “How are things with your debt to Roy Barre?” asked Frank.

  “Well, I reckon I owe his kids now, so I ain’t any better off. Now I’m getting up and going to take a piss.”

  He stood up. Frank and Ben stood up with him.

  “Damn it,” Slick said, and before they could do anything, he had his fly open and was peeing on the wall in the corner of the interview room.

  Diane put her head in her hands.

  After watching the interviews, Diane drove back to the museum, hoping there would be something dramatic going on so she could get the image of Slick urinating on the interview room wall out of her head.

  However, they had been fruitful interviews. Ben and Frank had gotten Tammy and Slick to admit quite a lot—more than Slick and Tammy probably realized. Frank had asked about the Barres. That was something he didn’t have to do, and it pleased her that he had.

  Diane pulled into her parking place and surveyed the lot as she exited the vehicle. There was only one tour bus and much of the lot was empty. Not completely unusual at this time of day, but she preferred to see a full lot.

  She walked to the administrative wing and into Andie’s office, making a dead stop in the doorway. She was hit in the face immediately, both visually and aromatically. Andie’s office was filled with bouquets of red roses, violets, and daisies.

  “I guess he wasn’t taking any chances,” Diane said, looking at all the flowers.

  Andie was sitting at her desk working on the computer. She grinned at Diane. “So far he’s doing pretty well with the groveling,” she said.

  “Certainly very lovely in here,” said Diane. “And it smells so nice.”

  “You want to take some back to your office?” asked Andie.

  “No, I think you should keep them up here. Looks very dramatic. How are you feeling?”

  “Better. Not because of the flowers. I just got my head together. Chocolate does that for me. Also talking things over with you. Thanks,” she said.

  “I thought you would do fine,” said Diane. “Anything going on I should know about?”

  “I put all the items you have to look at on your desk. This here”—she pointed at her computer screen—“I can handle. You know, we are still getting requests to examine our mummy.”

  “I imagine they will never stop,” said Diane.

  “You have a fund-raiser in Atlanta at the end of the month,” said Andie, frowning.

  “And this is a problem how?” asked Diane, studying her face.

  “I’ve gotten e- mails from several board members wanting to go,” said Andie. “You know how some of them are.”

  Diane smiled. “I think we can trust them not to embarrass us in public. I can’t very well keep my board away. It’s appropriate that they go. It’ll be fine.”

  Andie was concerned, Diane knew, because Thomas Barclay, one of the board members, tended to be a little heavy-handed with prospective donors. Diane shared Andie’s concern, but she wasn’t aware that Barclay had ever cost them donations. Madge Stewart was another matter. She was just as likely as not to say something like, “The museum is better now that they stopped receiving stolen artifacts.” Leaving Diane to explain what Madge meant and that the museum was not a receiver of stolen antiquities.

  As museum director, Diane had a lot of power. The governance of RiverTrail was different from that of many museums. Most of the power rested with the director, which was Diane. The board was only advisory. But one thing she had no power over was who was on the board, and there were a couple she would like to have sent packing.

  “I’ll be in my office,” she said, going through the adjoining door, closing it behind her.

  Diane called Beth, one of the archivists, and asked her about the speed-readers Sierra had recommended.

  “I need someone to read through the diaries we have of Roy Barre’s grandfather. I’m looking for a reference to a lost gold mine. It will probably be in the early diaries, but may be mentioned in later ones,” said Diane.

  “How many diaries are we talking about?” Beth said.

  “I’m not sure. There are three pretty good-sized boxes of them. The grandfather started keeping a diary when he was a teenager and kept it up until he died in his seventies,” said Diane.

  “How interesting,” Beth said. “You don’t find many diarists. Mikaela and Fisher will be happy to do it. They’ve been wanting a . . . ah, to be more helpful to the museum.”

  Diane knew Beth started to say they’d been wanting a patch. Someone on the museum staff had designed a small patch to give to whoever did consulting with what they called the Dark Side—meaning the crime lab. Diane had never seen one. She suspected they kept it from her. She shook her head. The museum staff was always up to something.

  “I appreciate their help. The boxes of diaries are in Jonas’ office. Thanks, Beth,” said Diane.

  Diane called up her e-mail. She scrolled down to look at the senders. Several were from other museum directors asking about diverse topics, from the RiverTrail’s educational webcam project, to requesting tissue samples of the mummy, to asking if Diane had used radio-frequency identification for special tours. Diane answered all their questions.

  The last e-mail was from her own head of conservation for the museum—Korey Jordan. Diane had delivered to him for analysis the piece of weathered paper Liam discovered at the campsite of the missing girl and her boyfriend. In Diane’s entire operation, Korey had more experience than anyone else with recovering images from paper. He had e-mailed her the results.

  She had thought that bringing out the words would be difficult because of the weathering of the paper, but Korey had used the electrostatic detection apparatus, an elegantly simple procedure. He had only to sandwich the paper between a glass plate and clear Mylar, place it on the machine, charge the whole thing with an electric field, and coat the Mylar with electrically charged black powder. The powder settled over the indentations in the paper and, voilà, there were the words.

  Diane glanced at the photograph of the newly exposed words, then read what Korey had transcribed. It was indeed a list, as Liam suspected. The part that was visible to the naked eye said, get Barre’s diary. The beginning of the sentence was, Break in and.

  Well, hell. The unnamed missing couple went to the top of Diane’s list of suspects.

  She silently read the list over several times.

  Break in and get Barre’s diary.

  Diane wondered if their break-in was at the time she was lost in the woods and things got out of hand. She also wondered if there was some reason the couple might have thought the Watsons had the diary. She was still trying to fit the Watsons in. It was a hard fit.

  Talk to CND’s—

  The rest of that sentence was torn away, but it had to refer to a person. Talk to some person. Who? Who was CND? Diane thought a moment, thinking back to her discussion with Liam. Cora Nell Dickson—the woman in the nursing home whose father was a friend of LeFette Barre’s. The note had to mean a relative, hence the possessive punctuation.

  Buy book on spelunking.

  Jeez, that wasn’t good. Perhaps Liam was right after all, and they went caving when they shouldn’t have.

  Find equipment—

  Here, too, the rest of the sentence was torn away. But Diane could guess what it was about. She imagined it was caving equipment. This wouldn’t have a good end. Diane was familiar with many of the caves in North Georgia. Most were hard caves to explore. And the mines were particularly treacherous. Caves had their own stability, being carved out by nature as they were—removing the weaker materials, leaving the stronger. Mines, on the other hand, were dug out by man—taking what was considered valuable, leaving behind what was not.
Mines required supports to hold up the ceilings of tunnels, and those supports—usually timber—weakened over time and collapsed. Not that cave tunnels were immune to collapsing. On the contrary, they could be very dangerous. But nature tended to be a better mining engineer than man—that was Diane’s observation.

  It appeared that the two young people had more spirit of adventure than they had good sense.

  Could they have been so frustrated that Barre wouldn’t share his grandfather’s diary that they killed him and his wife in a rage? Then, the next evening, had the same rage and killed the Watsons? Still the problem with the Watsons.

  Perhaps it was simply a serial killer. In which case there might be more to come. Diane shook her head. Or perhaps either the Barres or the Watsons were a decoy, a red herring. It could be that all the analysis she had been doing about the Barres was completely useless and it was the Watsons she should be concentrating on. Or maybe she could leave the Watsons out of the equation completely and look further into the Barres’ history. Diane was looking forward to the coming Sunday. She was still deep in thought when Andie put through a caller.

  “Diane, Lynn Webber. I’ve finished the Barre and Watson autopsies. I cleared out my morning and afternoon so I could get all four done. I thought you’d like to have my preliminary findings.”

  Chapter 39

  “Lynn, yes, I am anxious to hear what you found,” said Diane. “Thank you for doing this. I’m sure you had to do a lot of rearranging of your schedule and I appreciate it.”

  “Just a little changing. I didn’t mind,” Lynn said. “I have to tell you, Hector and Scott are so precious. And such a hoot. They even made Grover laugh, and you know how hard that is.”

  Diane smiled. Grover was Lynn’s very solemn diener in the morgue.

  “They can be very entertaining,” agreed Diane.

  “I was very interested in the research they are doing. They gave me a bang-up proposal,” said Lynn.