The Night Killer df-8

by Beverly Connor

  “Diane?” Frank’s voice was like cool water, or music, or chocolate-comfort. “Are you all right?” he asked.

  She must look a fright. That was what she was-affright-sick with it.

  “You’re pale,” he said. “Are you ill?”

  “I’m fine,” she said, hoping her voice didn’t come out as a squeak, hoping they couldn’t see how she trembled.

  “Hello, Ben. It’s good to see you.” She held out a hand and shook his. She saw the concern in both their eyes. She smiled weakly and told them she’d be right back as soon as she changed.

  She hurried to the bedroom and into the bathroom and threw up. When she finished heaving, she rinsed her mouth out, brushed her teeth, and changed into comfortable jeans and a tee. She ran a brush through her hair and stared into the mirror at herself. She looked pale and frightened. Where had her bravery gone? She had hung precariously on rock faces literally by her fingernails with less fear than she had been having lately.

  She went back out to explain herself to Frank and Ben. Frank met her with a glass of wine.

  “Did something happen?” he asked.

  Diane held the glass of wine and took a sip and wished it were whiskey.

  Both Ben and Frank were in suits-probably the suits they went to work in. Frank looked good in suits. He looked good in everything. He smiled at her as she sipped the wine, and waited for her answer. Frank was rational, kind, and handsome, and she loved the way his eyes crinkled at the corners when he smiled. Looking at him, she wondered if her friend Laura was right. This sudden explosion of fear was because she was coming out of the numb state she’d been in since Ariel had died.

  She sat in a stuffed chair by the fireplace now covered with a wrought-iron grate ornamented with a sculpted metal branch of cherry blossoms.

  Since Ben was here, they must have news for her, but now they both waited for her news. Diane calmly related the last few miles of her trip home.

  “Here? Just down the road?” said Ben. He looked out the window as if he could see the stretch of road where it occurred.

  Ben’s gray suit was slightly wrinkled and slightly small. He looked like an old-fashioned door-to-door salesman. He was a few years older than Frank. Frank always said Ben could blend in well. He had an ordinary face and his graying hair was thinning and receding.

  “Yes, just a couple miles down the road,” she said.

  “We need to call the police,” Frank said.

  Diane took a deep breath. “I suppose.” The last thing she felt like doing was talking to the police all night. “I’ll call Chief Garnett and give him a rundown over the phone.”

  Douglas Garnett was her boss on things concerning the crime lab. After a rocky start, she had developed a good working relationship with him. She punched in his number and, after apologizing for calling him so late, she explained what had happened.

  “I really don’t want to spend the rest of the evening talking with policemen. I’d like to report it to you this evening and go in and make a statement tomorrow morning.”

  “Do you have any idea who it was?” he asked.

  “I have ideas, but no proof of anything. There are a lot of things going on.”

  “I’ve been reading about that murdered couple you found. Does this have anything to do with that?” he asked.

  “Either that or the skeleton in the tree,” she said.

  “Skeleton in the tree?” he said.

  “It’s a very long story. I’ll tell it to you tomorrow,” she said.

  “It sounds like it would have to be a long story. Can you give me any kind of description of the vehicle?”

  “It was a truck. Something big enough to shine its lights in the rear window of my Explorer. It was a dark color, but I couldn’t tell what color. It will have red paint from my Explorer streaked down its right side, and probably on its front bumper. That’s about the best I can do.”

  “Okay, that’s pretty good. Could you see if the driver was a man or a woman?”

  “No, I couldn’t tell. Whoever it was, was pretty skilled at doing what they did.”

  “This is enough to start with. I’ll put out a BOLO. You get some rest. I’ll see you tomorrow morning,” he said.

  Diane sat back down with her glass of wine and gave the two of them what she hoped might pass for a winning smile.

  “Tell me about your day,” she said to them. “I’ve been anxious to hear about it.”

  Chapter 30

  Frank brought in more coffee and Ben laid a top-bound spiral notebook on the walnut coffee table. The tan grid pages of the notebook contained small, neat handwriting Diane couldn’t read upside down. Like Frank, Ben had his own shorthand. Frank placed an empty cup and saucer in front of Diane and put a tray with a fresh pot of coffee, sugar, and cream on the table.

  Diane sipped her wine and curled up in the chair.

  As if that were his cue, Ben began a description of their inquiries that day into the past activities and associations of Tammy Taylor. He and Frank had spent most of the day showing Tammy’s picture to people at shelters and clinics in the Atlanta area. In relating their investigation, Ben was using the same monotone voice that Diane guessed he used in court-straightforward and unemotional.

  “Tammy Taylor was a nurse’s aide for five years before she hooked up with Slick Massey,” Ben said. “She volunteered at a number of places in and around Atlanta. We didn’t go too far out from the city. Not enough time.”

  “There was plenty of information to be had where we did go,” said Frank. “I’m not sure we have ever been this lucky, have we, Ben?”

  “No, I don’t believe so,” he said.

  “We felt that Atlanta would be an ideal hunting ground for her,” said Frank. “Close enough for easy access, but far enough away from home that she could still remain anonymous. No one would know her personally. So it was a good bet.”

  Ben nodded. “If you do your thinking ahead of time, you don’t waste time,” he said in a way that Diane figured he’d said it many times before.

  “We also acquired a mug shot of Theodore Albert Massey, his legal name.” Ben smiled for the first time. “Frank and I were relieved to discover that his mother didn’t name him Slick.”

  Diane smiled too, and took a sip of wine. “What was he in the system for?” she asked.

  “Petty theft, mostly. A few bar fights,” said Ben. “No felonies.”

  Though Ben had put his notebook in front of him, he never referred to it, or even glanced down at it.

  “We didn’t find anyone at the shelters who recognized Slick,” he said.

  “I don’t think he could be as convincing as Tammy at luring ill, elderly women to come live with him,” added Frank. “But the staff at several shelters did recognize Tammy. Not immediately. They had to study the photo before it dawned on them. She changed her appearance a lot. . and her name-Terry Tate, Theresa Thomas, Tracy Tanner, to name a few. I guess she always wanted to match the monogram on her luggage.”

  “We thought we struck gold just by confirming that Atlanta was her hunting ground,” said Ben. “Then we interviewed Norma Fuller, the latest woman Tammy had lured to her house. Now, that was real gold.”

  “Did Norma have a lot to say?” asked Diane.

  “A lot would be an understatement,” said Ben. “I don’t think Frank or I could’ve made her shut up. The shelter took her to the hospital when she was returned to them, and that’s where we interviewed her. After you and Deputy Conrad paid Tammy and Slick a visit, they decided that things were too hot, and they took their current ‘charity case’ back where they had found her. You probably saved Mrs. Fuller’s life.”

  Ben stopped and poured more coffee in his cup and added sugar and cream. He took a sip before he continued.

  “Interesting taste,” he said.

  Diane couldn’t tell if that meant he liked Frank’s blend or not. He set his cup down and began Norma Fuller’s narrative. He turned a page in his notebook but still didn’t look
at the pages.

  “Mrs. Fuller had to leave her apartment because she was six months behind on her rent. She couldn’t afford medicine, food, utilities, and rent too. . and she had to have her medicine. . so she let her rent slide, until she was evicted. The community clinic where she went for checkups and her prescriptions referred her to a shelter. That’s where she met Tammy. The shelter uses volunteers to teach hygiene, nutrition, budgeting, and the like. They call them ‘life skills.’

  “Because Tammy was a nurse’s aide and had a résumé to prove it, the head of the shelter welcomed her. She said Tracy-Tammy’s pseudonym-was good with their guests and spent a lot of time talking with them and making them feel comfortable.”

  Ben looked up and smiled at Diane.

  “I’ll bet she did take a lot of time sweet-talking them-and finding out if they had any retirement income,” he said.

  “And how sick they were,” said Frank. “Tammy had access to all the client records in the places she volunteered.”

  “That’s incredible, and scary,” said Diane.

  Ben grunted. “You don’t say? It was her own private shopping mall.”

  He went on to tell Diane how Tammy offered Norma Fuller a room in her home-actually Slick’s house-for nominal rent of fifty dollars a month. She told Mrs. Fuller she could help her get back in good health again. All she needed was the right kind of care and to be in a situation where she could save her money.

  “Mrs. Fuller told us that the room was nice enough. It had freshly painted walls, a bed with a pretty bedspread, a chair, even a small TV set-that didn’t get any reception, but did have a DVD player. The room had a small attached half bath with a sink and toilet. Mrs. Fuller had asked about a shower and, get this, Tammy told her she could get just as clean taking sponge baths, and she could do it herself and be more independent. Tammy told her that the thing the shelters didn’t tell people was that if the shelter found she couldn’t live independently, they would put her in a state-run nursing home, where she would have to live on a ward with a bunch of other people, male and female, all of them strangers.”

  “I imagine that was frightening for her,” said Diane.

  “It frightened her. She bought into Tammy’s wellness program,” said Ben. “Tammy fixed her food and brought it to her room. When Mrs. Fuller complained about the small amounts, Tammy sweetly showed her a study that said people with low calorie intake live longer and are generally healthier.”

  “Tammy had an answer for everything,” said Frank. “She even gave Mrs. Fuller old Shirley Temple movies and vintage comedies to watch. I imagine she got those really cheap DVDs you can get at discount stores. Tammy told Mrs. Fuller that laughter is good medicine, and in places like shelters, people don’t get enough laughter.”

  Diane shook her head. “She had a little health plan all worked out. What did Mrs. Fuller think of it?” she asked.

  “She actually liked it. She said Tammy was nice to her,” said Frank.

  “Are we talking about the same Tammy Taylor I met at Slick’s?” said Diane. “The backwoods bitch from hell?”

  “Apparently she has many different sides to her personality,” said Frank. He grinned. “Tammy occasionally brought Mrs. Fuller a puppy to pet from Slick’s dog pens. She told her it would lower her blood pressure to play with a puppy.”

  “Mrs. Fuller said the barking dogs made her nervous, and the puppies were a little too frisky,” said Ben. “But she went along.”

  “It sounds to me like Tammy developed her health plan from women’s magazines she got at the supermarket checkout,” said Diane.

  “I think she did,” said Frank. “But there was enough surface credibility to convince Mrs. Fuller that Tammy knew what she was doing.”

  “What about living way up in the mountains on a dirt road?” said Diane. “Didn’t that bother her?”

  “At first, but Tammy told her to give it a chance. Before long, she’d be out helping with the chores,” said Frank.

  “Tammy could make a good argument that she meant well,” said Diane.

  “Maybe, and maybe not,” said Ben, raising a hand over his notes and pointing a finger as if at Tammy herself. “Mrs. Fuller said that at night Tammy brought her hot chocolate and it made her sleep well,” said Ben. “Tammy told her it was the milk. I’m wondering what was in the chocolate.”

  “Oh, my,” said Diane.

  “That’s not all,” said Frank. “Every morning she gave her a health drink. Mrs. Fuller said it was a fiber drink-to keep her digestion healthy. She’d had them before, but the taste was a little different from what she was used to and she felt jittery during the day. I think Tammy gave her an over-the-counter fiber drink and spiked it with an energy drink. They would have similar citrus tastes. The energy drink would act to offset the feelings of weakness that would result from the deficient calorie intake. But with Mrs. Fuller’s high blood pressure, it would be dangerous.”

  “For someone with precarious health, you don’t have to shoot them to kill them,” said Ben. “There’re a lot of things you can buy at the grocery store that’ll do the job just fine. Take a little longer, but harder to detect. It would look like natural causes.”

  “What kind of impact did it have on her health?” said Diane.

  “Not good. Like I said, we interviewed her in the hospital. Her blood pressure was through the roof and she was malnourished.”

  “Is she going to be all right?” Diane asked.

  “The doctors think so. She’s elderly and, like I said, her health is precarious. But she has genuine help now.”

  “What happened the night of the storm?” asked Diane.

  “She hadn’t drunk her cocoa,” said Ben. “She said she was feeling nauseated that day and the milk made it worse, so she was awake. She said the storm was frightening and the roof started to leak in her room. She heard the tree fall and said Slick rushed out to take a look. After that, she told us, things got hectic around there. She heard Tammy and Slick rushing around, arguing with each other. Slick issuing orders about the dogs and for Tammy to do what she could about cleaning up the tree. He said he would come back and move the big logs. Mrs. Fuller heard him say something about Tammy needing to make sure she got all the pieces. Mrs. Fuller thought that meant the tree.”

  “We guess he meant the bones,” said Frank.

  “Mrs. Fuller said she finally got to sleep, but several hours later she heard voices outside. That was when you and Deputy Conrad got there,” said Ben. “She went out on the porch to see what was going on and Tammy shooed her back inside.”

  “The next morning,” said Frank, “they loaded her into the truck and told her they had to take her back, that a family emergency had come up.”

  “Mrs. Fuller protested, especially because, earlier in the week, Tammy had taken her to the bank to change her account and have her Social Security check direct-deposited to a joint account in both her and Tammy’s names. Tammy had convinced her that what she was going to do was teach her how to budget her money so that she could afford an apartment and be independent. She told her that with the money she saved by living with them, she would have a nest egg before she knew it,” said Ben.

  “How did Tammy explain putting her own name on the account?” asked Diane.

  “Tammy said it would make it easier for her to put a little money in Mrs. Fuller’s savings account, help pay her bills, and get her medicine for her if Tammy’s name was on the account too,” said Ben. “And that’s where we can get her.”

  “The morning they took Mrs. Fuller back to the shelter, Tammy refused to go by the bank to change the account back to the way it had been. She said she would do it later,” said Frank. “Norma Fuller is worried about her money. She doesn’t remember which bank they went to and she doesn’t have the checkbook. And remember, she knew Tammy as Tracy Tanner. Mrs. Fuller doesn’t know how to get in touch with Tammy. She doesn’t really know where Tammy took her in the mountains. Tammy gave her the fictitious name of some
town she made up. She’s afraid the shelter is going to put her on a ward in a nursing home. She is a very frightened woman.”

  “We spoke with a friend in the GBI and we think we have enough to classify this as an Atlanta crime and require Sheriff Conrad to cooperate.”

  “Leland Conrad is going to hate that,” said Diane.

  “He can hate it all he wants,” said Ben. “He is about to be forced to do his job.”

  They spent the remainder of the evening talking about a recent trip Frank and Ben had made to Nashville to find an embezzler who was stealing in order to fund his ambition to become a country music star. The two of them had Diane laughing so hard it hurt by the time Ben was ready to leave.

  Tammy had been right about one thing: Laughter was good medicine. Diane was back to her centered sense of peace by the time she got in bed and cuddled up against Frank.

  Diane spent all the next morning telling the police and Chief Garnett her harrowing tale of road rage. She didn’t expect there was much of anything they could do. She just needed the report on record.

  The patrolman who took her statement seemed to think it was probably a garden-variety maniac and that it wasn’t personal. He opined that it was a long stretch of road with not a lot of traffic, and so it was a good play-ground for dragsters, and he would put the area under regular patrol so that it wouldn’t happen again.

  Diane thanked him and the chief and drove to the museum, parking her battered vehicle in the impound lot at the west end of the museum.

  Earlier that morning she had collected paint samples where the truck had rear-ended and sideswiped her. She headed to the crime lab with the samples and checked them in. David and Izzy were busy, and she waved at them through the glass partitions and locked the evidence in the safe.

  Diane went to the restaurant to grab a quick lunch. She was standing near the front, near the bank of Internet computers, waiting for her takeout. Just as the waitress handed her boxed lunch to her, she heard a voice that drifted her way, and the sound went though her like an electric shock. A voice that was deep, smooth, with a slight nasal quality and not a hint of North Georgia twang to it. The voice of the mystery man in the woods the night of the storm. He was somewhere nearby in the restaurant.