Fire Blight

by Nat Williams

  “So you’re writing him off?”

  Bachelor shook his head.

  “I’m not finished. On the other hand, he was allegedly driving a stolen truck that was seen pulling out of the Van Okin drive early Saturday morning. He’s not a stranger to crime. His alibi is less than weak; it doesn’t exist.

  “Right now, he’s suspect Number One. Sometimes motive follows opportunity. But we gotta dig some more. And keep open minds. Suspects Number Two and Three may be out there.”

  “Like the Purcells?”

  “Now that you mention it, I believe it’s time to talk to them again. Separately. There’s been some trouble in Purcell paradise. Maybe we can get one to slip up, turn on the other. But first we need to have a conversation with someone else.”

  “Doug Munro?”

  “I like the way you think. Because it’s the way I think.”

  Bachelor picked up the phone and called Munro.

  “Voice mail,” he said to Carroll as he waited for the beep. Bachelor left a message for Munro.

  “I believe Tucker’s mixed up in this somehow. He either had something to do with it or he knows something about it. Hell, he might be our killer, who knows?”

  “But like you said – what’s the motive?” Carroll said. “Nothing was taken, apparently. We don’t have any connection between Manny Tucker and the Van Okins.”

  Bachelor stood up and walked around his desk, pencil in hand. He suddenly threw it across the room, sticking it in a dartboard on the wall. Twenty-four points.

  “Motives are funny things,” he said. “I remember a case when I was in Altoona. I was a uniform. But we were usually the first ones on the scene of a major crime. A guy had been stabbed. Quite a few times. There was a lot of blood.”

  “Homicide?”

  “Actually, this one wasn’t. He survived. He was able to talk. He said it was his daughter.”

  “His daughter?”

  “Yeah. His teen-age daughter. Sixteen, I think. She tried to kill him while he was sleeping. The guy and his wife – her mom - had separated a couple months earlier. She was spending the night at his place. She was on K2 or something, maybe mixed with some alcohol. She got active on social media. Some of her online people got her all worked up. Got her thinking her dad was the cause of all her troubles. She tried to kill him. Later, she claimed she had no memory of the assault. Didn’t deny it; just said she blacked out or something.”

  Carroll was entranced. “Pretty weird.”

  “Take serial killers,” Bachelor said. “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?”

  Carroll took the bait.

  “OK, that sounds familiar. Shakespeare?”

  “No, different medium,” Bachelor said. “Old, but not Shakespeare old. A series – The Shadow. Thirties, I believe. The dawn of radio.”

  “And so, did they tell you?”

  “Tell you what?”

  “You know, who knows what evil hangs around

  in the hearts of men?”

  “Lurks,” Bachelor said. “C’mon! That’s the word that makes it such a great line. Anyway, it’s The Shadow, of course. The Shadow knows.”

  “Then maybe we oughta call The Shadow,” Carroll said.

  Bachelor picked up another pencil and began tapping it on his desk.

  “Shadows. Of course. It rained pretty good early Saturday morning, didn’t it?”

  Carroll scrunched up his face, like he usually did when he was thinking.

  “I’m a pretty good sleeper, but I think I remember hearing some thunder. I thought I might have been dreaming, but it could have been a cloudburst.”

  Bachelor was pulling on his holster and putting his hat on. “Remember the tire tracks on the grass, just wide of the driveway? I asked FSC to check on them. Hopefully, a mold was taken. At the very least, they took photos.”

  “So where are we going?”

  “To the Van Okin place,” Bachelor said.

  They arrived at the crime scene in just a few minutes. Bachelor pulled off the blacktop onto the driveway, stopping the car near the point where the drive met the road. He and Carroll got out and walked to the area where the tracks were made.

  “Do you see what I see?” Bachelor said.

  “Uh, I don’t know. I see grass. I don’t see any tire tracks.”

  Carroll’s expression quickly changed from puzzlement to understanding.

  “Now I get it,” he said. “It’s what we don’t see that is important.”

  “Right. The rain that morning worked like a time capsule. The tracks would have had to be made shortly after the rain.”

  “I like the way you think, because it’s the way I’m thinking,” Bachelor said.

  “So we need to check with FSC, right?”

  “Yeah, but first, let’s make a social call. You know Win Romines?”

  “The teacher?”

  “Yep.”

  “What’s he got to do with this?”

  “You’ll see.”

  CHAPTER 31

  Winthrop Romines was dressed in long purple swim trunks that hung down past his knees, a white V-neck T-shirt and teal sandals. He was watering some flowers in his yard when Bachelor and Carroll pulled into his drive in a police car. They got out and walked up to the house.

  “How you guys doing?” Romines said as he turned the outdoor faucet off. “I have a feeling this isn’t a social call.”

  “Afraid not, Win,” Bachelor said, shaking his hand. “We’re hoping you might help on a case we’re working.”

  “The Van Okins?”

  Bachelor nodded.

  “I’m not sure how I could help. But I’ll be happy to do what I can.”

  Romines taught physical science at Cherokee Camp High School. But his true love was meteorology. He had taken a couple classes in college and was drawn to the subject, but didn’t see himself on television, telling the viewers about heat indices, cold fronts and isobars.

  Instead, he made meteorology his avocation. He set up a regional network of weather watchers, all nerds like himself, armed with barometers, rain gauges, anemometers and other instruments.

  In return for the data, Cloverfield College provided the instruments and software. Instructors in the school’s Introduction to Meteorology program also helped train weather watchers.

  Romines compiled, sorted and cached the readings. Journalists in the region occasionally contacted him when they were doing weather stories. He would provide a good regional average of temperatures, precipitation and other data.

  Best of all, he lived not too far from the Van Okin place.

  “How many weather watchers you got nowadays?” Bachelor asked him.

  “Right now I have 18, from a line east of St. Louis to the Indiana border and south to the Ohio,” Romines said.

  “Any around C-Camp?”

  Romines smiled. “You’re looking at him.”

  “I’m assuming you keep pretty tight records.”

  “Oh, about as tight as they come,” he said.

  “Can you call up your data on the early morning hours of August the third? And anything before midnight?”

  Romines motioned for the officers to follow. They entered the modest, ranch-style home and headed toward Romines’ “weather room.” It was impressive. Two large-screen computer monitors sat on a desk. One wall was covered with framed charts and maps. Half the room displayed the teacher’s collection of antique weather instruments, including a 19th century French barograph. Several photographs and framed newspapers articles about disasters such as the 1900 Galveston hurricane dominated a wall.

  Carroll put on his reading glasses to examine a selection of articles, photographs and facts documenting the Tri-State Tornado, which ripped through the region in 1925.

  “Look at this, Frank,” he said. “I remember hearing about this.”

  “It was the deadliest tornado in U.S. history,” Romines said. “Nearly seven hundred people were killed, most of them in southern Illinois. It star
ted in Missouri and ended in Indiana. Some say it holds the record for duration of a single tornado. Others say it was more than one tornado. Difficult to substantiate either way. Obviously, we didn’t have the same technology back then.”

  “Fascinating,” Bachelor chimed in, giving Carroll a glance. “Maybe someday we’ll have time for the guided tour. Right now, we need to check on that precipitation data.”

  “Let’s see,” Romines said as he brought a laptop out of sleep mode. “You said late August two, early August three, right?”

  He peered at the screen, logged in and brought up an Excel spreadsheet file. Romines Win turned the laptop toward Bachelor and Carroll.

  “Cloudburst just northeast of C-Camp right after midnight. I call it a pop-up storm. This time of year, you can get an isolated thunderstorm that dumps some rain – maybe some hail – on a relatively small area.”

  Bachelor looked at the screen, transfixed.

  “With the air temperatures, humidity, everything else going on in early August in southern Illinois, how long would that ground be soggy from that cloudburst?”

  Romines rubbed his chin. Then he tapped a few more times on his laptop.

  “It depends on the surface, of course. Hard to say. If it was bare ground, probably quite a while. This time of year, the ground dries up pretty quickly after a rain.”

  “What about a grassy surface?”

  Romines rubbed his chin.

  “Probably not very long. Dew could cover it, and the sun beating down on it after sunrise could draw the moisture out, obscuring the tracks later in the morning.”

  “Thanks, Win,” Bachelor said. “I’m not sure any of this will be relevant, but it’s worth a try. If it does turn out to be important, you wouldn’t have a problem with testifying in court, would you?”

  Romines imagined being a witness who turned a case around through his weather acumen. A natural teacher, he would enjoy sharing his knowledge of meteorology with a rapt audience, something that doesn’t happen often in class.

  “You know I’d be happy to. Anything you need, Frank.”

  Bachelor shook Win’s hand and Carroll followed.

  “You probably can’t tell me exactly what this about, can you?” Romines asked Bachelor.

  “Sorry, not yet. But we’ll let you know, one way or another. We really appreciate your help,” Bachelor said.

  CHAPTER 32

  Vernon Hilliard heard the door open as he sat at his desk in the state’s attorney’s office in the Gilbert County Courthouse. He looked up to see Bachelor.

  “Donna sent me in,” Bachelor said. He was referring to Hilliard’s secretary, Donna Hess.

  “Did she have a choice?”

  “Not really. Anyway, I’ll make this short and sweet. I believe we have plenty of cause to get that search warrant for Jake Alvis’s pickup truck.”

  “He didn’t give permission?”

  “He’s incommunicado. In Canada, fishing.”

  “Oh, yeah, that’s right. What do you have?”

  “We got the truck on video at Jack’s Shack right around the time of the murders. It’s obviously not being driven by Jake Alvis, since he was a thousand miles away.”

  Bachelor briefly discussed his interrogation of Manny Tucker.

  Hilliard bobbed his head up and down slightly, a sign that he approved. “You’ve done your homework. I’ll write up the warrant and get it to Judge Greer. I’m pretty sure he’s in his office today.”

  “Thanks,” Bachelor said. “Let me know when it’s ready. I’ll have a deputy camp out at Alvis’s property to make sure nothing happens in the meantime.”

  “Good idea. Should be an hour or less. Unless he’s having a long lunch or something.”

  Hilliard wrote up the warrant request and had an intern deliver it to Judge Richard Greer’s office on the second floor of the courthouse. It was back in no time. Approved.

  After securing the warrant, Bachelor swung by the Alvis place. He had asked FSC to have a couple of investigators meet him there.

  Zilli and Bibb were parked behind the pickup truck, listening to the radio in the squad car and playing on their phones. It had been a boring non-stakeout and they were glad to see Bachelor and the FSC agents pull up and get out of their cars.

  Claude Pearce and Allison Heady headed toward the truck.

  “Is it locked?” Heady asked. She was thin and attractive, with long, brown hair that draped her shoulders.

  “Nope,” Bachelor said. “But there was no way I was going to open it. Not before getting a warrant.”

  “Smart,” Pearce said. He was about forty, sporting a dark beard on his wide and expressive face. “Don’t wanna screw up a case before it starts.”

  The agents took a forensics kit out of their car and began processing what they could of the old pickup. They meticulously powdered the door handles, steering wheel, gearshift, visor, rearview mirror and other places that may have been touched, hoping to pull usable prints.

  They applied luminol to the interior. The chemical agent detects blood by reacting to iron in hemoglobin. They took a close look at the truck’s tires. They had previously sprayed the faint tracks at the Van Okin home with a substance that preserved them

  Bachelor watched in admiration. They were obviously professional, and knew exactly what they were doing. At one time he had considered getting into that field of police work, but decided instead to become an officer who worked the streets. It seemed like all three had made the right decision.

  “These tracks don’t match those at the crime scene,” Pearce said.

  He showed Bachelor the cast taken from the Van Okin yard, placing it alongside the front passenger tire of Alvis’s truck.

  “That’s disappointing,” Bachelor said. “Strike one.”

  “I did pick up a full print from the dash and a partial from the inside door handle,” Heady said. “We’ll see if it matches anybody’s. Of course, we don’t have Mr. Alvis’s prints.”

  “I’m not too concerned about Mr. Alvis,” Bachelor said. “But I know where to find some prints.”

  CHAPTER 33

  Bachelor returned to his office and contacted the Illinois State Police Bureau of Identification. The bureau maintains the Automated Fingerprint Identification System, commonly referred to as AFIS. Prints from all who have been guests of the Illinois Department of Corrections or law enforcement agencies in the state’s 102 counties are on file.

  The bureau was created following one of the most notorious crimes in Chicago history, the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. The killers – later determined to be connected to Al Capone – wore police uniforms as they herded seven members of a rival gang into a warehouse and opened fire with Thompson submachine guns. Police determined through fingerprint identification that the victims were members of Bugs Moran’s North Side gang.

  Bachelor requested that prints from one Manuel Alonso Tucker be sent to FSC. Tucker’s rap sheet included burglary, drug possession and a domestic violence case that was later dropped.

  Unlike with the search warrant, the fingerprint search process raced at the speed of light. In no time, forensics had the prints and matched them with Tucker.

  “It’s time for another heart-to-heart with Tuck,” Bachelor said to Carroll. “As Desi would say, ‘He’s got some ‘splainin’ to do.’”

  Carroll shot him a puzzled look.

  “You know, I Love Lucy,” Bachelor said. “Don’t you ever watch TV Land?”

  “I don’t know where you come up with that stuff,” Carroll said. “We’re not gonna have to go through another wild goose chase to find this dickhead, are we?”

  “No. I got his number and his current residence. That is, if he hasn’t been kicked out yet. Let’s head over there. I’m not sure if he’ll be answering his phone.”

  They got into the squad car and drove to a small house on Fourth Street. It was occupied by Johnny Palmer (Foss?) and served as Tucker’s latest crash pad.

  This search was much
more efficient than the first one. Tucker himself answered the door. He was dressed in jeans and no shirt. He had a beer in one hand and an unlit cigarette in the other.

  “Aw, Gilbert County’s finest,” he said as he opened the screen door. “You here for the tea party? Sorry, we’re fresh outta crumpets.”

  “You need to come to the office,” Bachelor said. “We have new information, so we’ll need new answers. And truthful ones this time. We’ll drive you there.”

  Tucker didn’t seem concerned.

  “Care if I grab a shirt?”

  He came back to the door wearing a T-shirt and turned toward the inside of the house.

  “Be back in a few,” he said to Palmer. “Keep my beer warm. Your refrigerator sucks.”

  Tucker sat alone at a table in the interrogation room in the sheriff’s office. He looked around at the sparse furnishings and tapped his fingers on the table.

  Soon Bachelor and Carroll walked in and sat down. Bachelor didn’t beat around the bush. He slapped down two printouts of fingerprint images on the table.

  “Can you see the difference between these prints?”

  Tucker picked them up, gave a cursory glance, and threw them back on the table.

  “Is this a trick question?”

  “There isn’t any difference. They belong to you. So why were they found in a stolen pickup truck that was seen leaving the Van Okin place after they were murdered?”

  Tucker was silent. But Bachelor wasn’t finished.

  “This isn’t all we have. We have video. We have witnesses. We have lots of stuff that could put your ass in the joint for life.”

  Tucker began to shift uncomfortably in his seat.

  “I told you – I didn’t steal no truck and I didn’t kill nobody.”

  Bachelor slammed his fist on the table.

  “You know, I’ve been patient with you so far, but my patience is running out. I got a double murder here and I believe I’m looking at the guy who did it. I’m through fucking around. Now maybe you didn’t mean to. Maybe it was just gonna be a quick burglary and you got surprised. Maybe Dr. Van Okin had a gun and threatened you. But nobody is going to know your side if you keep up this bullshit!”