Murder of Innocence (Murder Is Forever)

by James Patterson

  Since that first conversation, Susan calls almost daily, usually to pass an update on to Mark but often for no official reason at all, just to chat with Kathy.

  “Can you talk?” Susan asks.

  “Sure, Jenny is napping,” Kathy says, sitting at the kitchen table. “How’s it going?”

  “I’m just tired of these houseguests,” Susan says. “They’re eating my food, watching my TV. I tell you what—the life of a bank robber ain’t all that glamorous. Not when you spend all the money on cars and drugs and end up mooching off friends.”

  The information Susan has given Mark has been helpful—and it will be even more helpful if she agrees to testify about it in court at some point in the future—but for now Mark doesn’t have enough to make an arrest, which means Susan is stuck with her two unwanted houseguests for a while longer.

  Kathy feels sorry about what Susan endures day to day. It’s bad enough living with an unreliable drug dealer, but now she also has to live with a bank robber who hits on her constantly, despite the disapproving stares of his girlfriend. And to top it all off, Susan’s trying to raise two children in that environment.

  “I love my kids,” Susan says, “but I curse the day I ever met Clint.”

  Susan had had big dreams of finishing high school, but she didn’t even make it to high school. Growing up an honest-to-God coal miner’s daughter, Susan had eight brothers and sisters living in a home not much bigger than the trailer she lives in now. When her father was out of work, which was often, the family subsisted on welfare.

  One day a handsome man drove by on a motorcycle, stopped, and whistled at her. She climbed on the back, and that was it—she was Clint’s girl. She was fifteen; he was twenty-two.

  She went to live with him in his trailer and helped him with his business affairs. She was smart and could keep track of names, dates, dollar amounts. She smoked pot but mostly kept clear of the harder stuff.

  “When he went to prison, I thought about leaving,” she says. “But he promised me when he got out, he’d go straight. No more dealing. At first, he kept his word, so I married him. I thought we had a different kind of life ahead of us. Maybe it would be hard, but it would be lawful, and that felt good.”

  The honeymoon glow didn’t last long. Clint hurt his back at work, but his disability claim was rejected, so he went back to selling drugs.

  “We moved around, went to Chicago. He made some contacts. It was exciting for a while,” Susan says. “But then I got pregnant and realized I didn’t want this life for my kids.”

  The two ended up back in Pikeville as the marriage fell apart.

  “After we got divorced,” she says, “I didn’t have nowhere to go. What was I supposed to do? I got no money and no education. So I stayed with Clint and told myself I was doing it for my kids.”

  As Kathy listens, she looks around the home she shares with Mark. It’s no mansion by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s nicer than anything they could have bought in Connecticut. Two stories, four bedrooms, two full baths. The cost of living in this part of Kentucky is quite low, and they can afford the mortgage payments without trouble.

  During the day, when it’s just her and Jenny, the house feels almost too big. Too quiet.

  Kathy encourages Susan to use the money from the FBI to get out of Pikeville and start over somewhere new. “Trust me,” Kathy says. “I know where you’re coming from.”

  Susan makes a hmmph noise, expressing her disbelief that Kathy has any clue what her life is like. Kathy takes a deep breath. She doesn’t usually share her story, but she likes Susan and wants to help her. Mark’s right, Kathy thinks. Susan will make a good informant. If she can get me to open up about this, she can get anyone to share their secrets.

  “Once you hear what I’ve been through,” Kathy says, “you’ll realize my background’s not as different from yours as you might think.”

  “You’ve got the perfect husband and the perfect life,” Susan protests.

  “That’s true,” Kathy says, “but Mark wasn’t my first husband.”

  CHAPTER 8

  WHAT?” SUSAN SAYS, GENUINELY surprised. “You’re divorced?”

  “I got married way too young and to the wrong guy, just like you.”

  Susan sits on the steps of her trailer, the phone cord stretched out so she can listen to Kathy while keeping an eye on her kids playing out front. Alex is pushing Hot Wheels around in the dirt, and Samantha is imagining conversations between two Barbie dolls, one missing a leg and the other missing her head.

  The truth is that when Susan first started talking to Kathy, she didn’t want to like her. Kathy seemed to have everything Susan longed for, starting with a handsome, reliable husband who put a roof over her head without breaking the law.

  But Kathy’s interest in Susan’s life and her welcoming manner quickly won Susan over. Mark was businesslike; Kathy was personable.

  And Kathy, Susan realized, was in need of a friend.

  Maybe they were alike in that way.

  On the phone, Kathy explains she was directionless in high school and ended up dropping out. She drifted around, making a series of bad decisions and running off with a guy who was trouble—he sounded a lot like Clint. One day, living in South Carolina and trying to scrounge up enough money to return home to her parents, she decided to scam some guys in the military by pretending she had a hotel room full of girls waiting to do anything they wanted. When she ran off without producing what she’d promised, they called the police, who arrested her for prostitution.

  “You were arrested for prostitution?” Susan says, but there’s no judgment in her voice. When Clint was in prison, she did a lot of things she regrets in order to eat.

  The charges were dropped, but Kathy’s string of poor choices didn’t end there. She met another guy who was bad for her—and ended up marrying that one. He was ten years her senior, and controlling. She’d gotten her GED and was taking classes at the local community college, and he didn’t like that.

  “One day he beat me up and dumped me in front of my parents’ house,” Kathy says, her voice trembling on the other end of the phone. “Like he was returning a defective product.”

  She divorced the guy, earned her associate’s degree, found a job as a paralegal. Then she met Mark and life really started to improve.

  “Does Mark know about your past?” Susan asks.

  “When we were getting serious, I told him. He said he never wanted to talk about it again. Wanted to put it behind us.”

  “You’ve got it made now,” Susan says, looking with scorn at the trailer she lives in. “You’ve got yourself a good man to take care of you.”

  “I take care of him as much as he takes care of me,” Kathy says. “We’re a team.”

  Kathy explains that when she met Mark, he had recently graduated from the University of Tampa with a degree in criminology and was working as a night clerk for the FBI in Connecticut. He wanted badly to be an agent, but because of an old shoulder injury, the FBI wouldn’t let him enroll in the academy.

  “I couldn’t believe it,” Kathy says. “Mark was in better shape than ninety-nine percent of the agents he clerked for.”

  “So how did he convince them to let him in?” Susan asks.

  “He didn’t,” Kathy says. “I did.” She explains that she called every higher-up in the FBI she could find until she reached someone who would listen to her.

  “Like I said, we’re a team. That’s why I don’t mind taking messages for him. I’m sort of like his clerk now, and we’re in this together. I wouldn’t be where I am without him, that’s true. But he wouldn’t be where he is without me.”

  Susan can’t help but feel jealous. She and Clint once seemed like a team. She could do that again—be someone’s partner in love and in life—if she found the right guy. She’d been young and naive when she’d fallen for Clint. She’d fallen for the bad boy.

  Now she wants a good guy.

  CHAPTER 9

 
Elkhorn City, Kentucky. September 1987

  PAUL “CAT EYES” COLLINS pulls the black mask over his face as he approaches the back of the bank. His duffel bag, empty except for his shotgun, is slung over his shoulder. He rounds the corner of the building, pushes through the glass double doors, yanks the gun from the bag, and shouts, “Nobody move or I’ll blow your asses to kingdom come!”

  The few patrons inside thrust their hands in the air. Cat Eyes approaches the lone teller working the counter, a good-looking woman in her twenties, and points the pistol-grip shotgun at her freckled face. The nameplate displayed at her station says DEBBIE.

  “Got any kids, Debbie?” he says, his words muffled by the mask.

  “No,” she says, her voice unsteady.

  “Want any?”

  “Maybe,” she says, confused. “Someday.”

  “If you want to live long enough to have any,” he says, dropping the bag on the counter, “you’ll fill this up for me.”

  As she reaches for the duffel bag, he thrusts the gun closer; the sawed-off barrel is only inches from her eyes.

  “Don’t try anything,” he says.

  He watches as she opens her drawer and begins dumping in stacks of money. He spins around and surveys the customers, making sure no one has any bright ideas. When Debbie is finished, he tells her to take him to the vault. He follows her into the large walk-in safe. His eyes widen when he sees all the money stacked in neat rows on the stainless-steel shelves.

  As the woman kneels to get the bundles off the bottom shelf, Cat Eyes stares at the flesh of her leg showing through a slit in her skirt.

  “You’re cute,” he says. “Want to go out on a date after this is over? I’ll take you somewhere nice. I can afford it.”

  She ignores him.

  “Your loss,” he mutters. “Bitch.”

  When the duffel bag is full, Cat Eyes grabs it and heaves it over his shoulder. It’s so full, the zipper can’t close; the money is nearly spilling out. He wants to laugh, he feels so happy. But he doesn’t express any of this to the teller next to him. Instead, he places the barrel of the gun under her chin.

  “Don’t call the cops for ten minutes, Debbie. If you do, I’ll come back here and blow a hole in your head so big, you could drive a car through it. Got it?”

  With tears streaming down her cheeks, Debbie nods slightly, the gun below her chin keeping her from moving any more. Cat Eyes heads out the door, walks as fast as he can down the alley behind the bank to where his Trans Am is parked, strips off his mask, and shoves it and the shotgun into the bag.

  He opens the passenger door and drops the money onto the seat. But then he hears a loud crack, like a gunshot. He jumps in surprise, and red liquid splatters his chest and face.

  Oh, my God! he thinks. They’ve shot me.

  Then he realizes it’s not blood.

  It’s ink.

  He yanks open the duffel bag. His money and shotgun are dripping with reddish fluid. That teller must have slipped a dye pack into the bag. He spins around and looks back toward the bank; he has half a mind to go in there and teach that teller a lesson. But then the bank alarm goes off, its loud peals ringing through the streets.

  Probably every person in town can hear it.

  “Shit!” he snaps. He runs around the car, gets into the driver’s seat, and jams his foot on the gas pedal; the air fills with rubber smoke. As he barrels out of town, he curses his bad luck. This has never happened to him before.

  It’s almost as if they knew he was coming.

  CHAPTER 10

  October 1987

  MARK IS SITTING AT his desk typing up a report on Paul Collins’s arrest. They found him yesterday hiding out at his mother’s house in West Virginia, right where Susan said he would be. The fact that he was caught with a bag of money stained with dye should make the conviction easy.

  That and Susan’s testimony … assuming she’ll testify.

  As he’s writing about Susan’s contribution to the arrest, she bursts through the doorway, her face flushed with emotion.

  “You shouldn’t be here,” he says, surprised. “What if someone sees you?”

  “I don’t give a damn,” she says.

  “I’ve got your money,” he says, assuming that’s why she’s barged into his office. “I was going to arrange to bring it to you but I didn’t want to call. I know Clint is usually home in the mornings.”

  “That ain’t why I’m here,” she says, obviously angry about something. In her hand is the local newspaper, and she slams it down on his desk for him to look at. On the front page is an article about the arrest and a photograph of Mark escorting a handcuffed Cat Eyes across his mother’s front lawn, the Trans Am visible in the background.

  “Have you seen this?” Susan says, her face red.

  He can’t imagine what she’s angry about. The article didn’t mention her in any way—no one will know she’s the informant.

  “It was a big arrest,” he says. “Of course the newspaper is going to cover it.”

  She leans over the desk—he gets a quick whiff of her perfume—and runs her fingers down the article. Her nails are polished a glossy red.

  “There,” she says, pointing to a quote from Mark’s supervisor, Trent Cavanagh, who came down from Covington for the press conference.

  The quote mentions the joint work of the FBI and various law enforcement agencies in the tri-corner area.

  “They didn’t give you credit at all!” Susan says, her voice cracking with emotion. “You’re in the picture but they don’t say it’s your arrest. This was your case and they don’t mention your name once.”

  “Oh, Susan,” he says, “I don’t care about having my name in the paper.” Mark’s touched that Susan’s upset on his behalf. It’s sweet, he thinks, in a way. “Listen,” he says, taking her hand and directing her to the chair at the other desk, “my superiors are tickled pink with me right now. They know I’m the one who put this together. I might not be getting credit in the public eye, but I sure am in the eyes of the agency. That’s where it matters to me.”

  “I just think it’s ridiculous you don’t get your name in the paper,” Susan says, crossing her arms.

  Mark dismisses the notion with a wave of his hand. “What’s in the paper doesn’t usually tell the whole story,” he says. “The truth is, you’re the one who deserves the credit. My supervisors are grateful for your help, and they wanted me to tell you that.” This finally puts a smile on her face. “We make a good team,” Mark says, which makes her smile grow bigger.

  Mark is glad to have relieved the tension in the room. He likes Susan. She’s different from any woman he’s ever known; she says what’s on her mind, she wears her heart on her sleeve, and there’s a hint of flirtation in just about everything she says to him.

  Mark knows they can’t talk all day—although Susan has settled into the seat and looks like she’s ready to do just that—so he opens his desk drawer and pulls out the envelope he’d set aside for her. “Here you go. Fifteen hundred dollars. As promised.”

  She rises from her seat, her demeanor changing again. “No,” she says. “You keep it. You didn’t get credit in the newspaper. You should have this.”

  He frowns as he holds out the envelope for her. Susan makes no move to take the money. “This money is for you, Susan.”

  “I’m not taking it,” she says. “You deserve it.”

  She raises her hands in a gesture that communicates there’s no way she’s touching the envelope. As she backs out the door, she gives him a wink.

  “See you later, partner,” she says, and then she’s gone.

  CHAPTER 11

  Freeburn, Kentucky. December 1987

  MOLLY DAVIDSON PUSHES A snow shovel along the path to her house. Her gloved hands ache from clearing the driveway. As she tosses the last shovelful of snow onto the pile, she spots a familiar car—a maroon-and-green Nova—slip-sliding its way up the road. It pulls into her driveway, and out pops her kid sister, Susan,
with her two children in tow.

  “Well, hello,” Molly says. “To what do I owe this pleasure?”

  “Could you watch the kids for a couple days?”

  “A couple days?” Molly says, a little taken aback. Even for Susan, who has a habit of arriving out of the blue and asking for favors, this is unexpected. “I suppose so. You got time to visit with your sister before you take off?”

  “Just a minute,” Susan says. “I’m heading to Huntington to do some Christmas shopping.”

  Molly and Susan step into the kitchen while the kids run into the living room and pull toys out of the box Molly keeps behind the couch for them, toys from when her own kids were still living at home.

  Molly doesn’t know what could be so important in Susan’s life that she needs her to watch the kids for two days, but her little sister sure is dressed up. She’s wearing nice blue jeans, a pair of boots Molly has never seen before, and a clean Members Only jacket, all of which look brand-new.

  Molly has eight siblings, but Susan—nineteen years her junior—holds a special place in her heart. She’s always had a spark that was irresistible, and it broke Molly’s heart to see her running off with that drug dealer Clint, looking for an exciting life and a quick and easy way to make money. Molly took a different path. She married a stable man who could hold down a job, and she worked part-time to give them a little extra money. Their house isn’t big, but it’s not a trailer, and Molly works hard to keep it clean and looking nice.

  She hates visiting Susan and seeing the world her niece and nephew are being brought up in.