Murder Comes by Mail

by A. H. Gabhart

  “He’d target someone whose death would be sure to bring you back on the scene.”

  “Why doesn’t he just jump off another bridge? I wouldn’t stop him again.” Michael picked up another pencil and began connecting dark lines on the paper again.

  “I suppose not.” The doctor made a sound that might have been a laugh. “Unfortunately the deranged mind is rarely that logical. That might make sense to you or to me, but who knows what Mr. Jackson is thinking?” The doctor paused a moment before adding, “Or planning.”

  “Look, Dr. Colson, nothing would make me happier than seeing Jackson behind bars, but Detective Whitt is the man you need to talk to. He’s handling the case.” Michael was ready to end this counseling session.

  “Oh, you can be sure I will attempt to share my thoughts with the detective before Jackson strikes again, but I would be remiss not to warn you of the danger to your loved ones. Your wife? A daughter perhaps? Especially in light of this young newswoman’s death.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Just that Jackson is getting more personal.”

  “I still have no reason to believe Kim Barbour’s death has anything to do with Jackson or me.”

  “You may not have any reason to believe it, but you do believe it.” The doctor paused, but when Michael didn’t say anything, he went on. “As a matter of fact, I talked with Ms. Barbour myself early yesterday. She wanted to know how she might contact Jackson to do a follow-up on her hero story. To see if he was grateful. I think we can assume not, right?”

  Michael forced his hand to relax on the phone and didn’t respond.

  Silence hummed on the line a moment before the doctor continued, his voice taking on a doleful sound. “She didn’t know about Jackson murdering that poor child, and I couldn’t very well tell her since Detective Whitt was quite adamant in demanding I not share that information with anyone as yet. But the fact that Jackson had walked out of the hospital—I think she used the word ‘escaped’—mesmerized her. I’m sure if Jackson had called her, she would have arranged a meeting with him without hesitation. Even knowing about the dead girl might have made no difference. Young people never seriously consider the prospect of death.”

  “I advise you to report your talk with Ms. Barbour to the Eagleton police right away.” Michael used his best official tone.

  “Don’t worry, Deputy. I know the rules. What you need to remember is that Jackson is operating without rules.” The man disconnected the call without bothering to say goodbye.

  Michael put the phone down.

  “What did the doctor want?” Betty Jean kept her eyes on her computer screen. “He know something that might help catch his guy?”

  “Not really. I guess he was anxious to report in now rather than be accused of not cooperating in the investigation later.” Michael stared down at the dark squares he’d drawn while talking to the psychologist. “Plus he said he wanted to warn me.”

  “Warn you?” Betty Jean swiveled her chair around toward him. “Does he honestly believe Jackson is killing people to get your attention? Sorry, but I couldn’t help but overhear.”

  “That was his theory.” Michael massaged his forehead. Could the day get any worse?

  Betty Jean was silent for a moment as she frowned at him. “Do you think he could be right?”

  “I don’t know. It seems crazy to think so, but I don’t know. Right now I don’t know anything.” Except he did know the killer had planted Hope’s earring in his house. The earring he had in his pocket and still hadn’t reported. The day was going to get worse when Whitt returned his call. “Nobody from the Eagleton police called, did they?”

  “No.” Betty Jean turned back to her computer. “Hank did, but he was screaming in my ear. So I hung up on him.”

  “Screaming?” Michael’s stomach flipped. “About what?”

  “I couldn’t make it out. Something about Rebecca Ann. I figured he’d call back and I’d let him yell in your ear.”

  The front door of the courthouse crashed open. Michael had barely gotten out from behind his desk when Hank ran into the office and slung a plastic grocery bag with an envelope inside it at Michael.

  Michael dropped the sack on his desk and caught Hank by the shoulders. The man’s face was beet red, his glasses were fogging over, and his whole body was shuddering.

  “Take a deep breath,” Michael ordered.

  Betty Jean pushed a chair toward Hank. “Should I call the paramedics?” She actually sounded concerned.

  “I’m not having a heart attack.” Hank gasped for breath. “At least I don’t think so.” He put his hands over his heart.

  Michael pushed him down into the chair. “What’s happened?”

  Hank motioned toward the brown envelope that had slipped out of the sack. “That.”

  Michael looked at the envelope with dread. The front was blank, no address or name. Michael raised it up with a pen. The seal had been torn open. “I told you not to open any envelopes.”

  “I didn’t open it.” Without warning, Hank put his face in his hands and began to weep.

  “I’m calling Dr. Hadley.” Betty Jean reached for the phone. “He may not be having a heart attack, but he’s having something.”

  Hank didn’t seem to hear her as he looked up at Michael, his face lined with despair as he said, “I didn’t, but Rebecca Ann did.”

  17

  Betty Jean put down the phone and pulled a couple of tissues out of the box on her desk before handing the box to Hank, who snatched out a handful to mop up his face. Michael took one of the pink tissues and lifted the envelope to slide the pictures out far enough to get a look at them. Kim Barbour, the light gone from her eyes and her face frozen in terror, stared back at him.

  Michael let the pictures slide back out of sight in the envelope. He wished he could slide them out of sight in his mind as easily, but the image of the woman’s face burned in front of his eyes the way a too-bright burst of light lingered on the back of your eyelids.

  “All right, Hank, tell us what happened.” Michael put a steadying hand on Hank’s shoulder. “How did Rebecca Ann get these pictures?”

  It took a while but finally Hank got out his story. Rebecca Ann had been walking home from a friend’s house. The friend had a pool. Rebecca Ann went over there most every day. She was watching the yards for this neighborhood cat that sometimes came out for her to pet it and didn’t even know the car was beside her until the driver spoke her name.

  “I’ve told her not to talk to strangers, but I’ve never harped on it. It didn’t seem that important here in Hidden Springs. There aren’t any strangers. Strange people maybe, but no strangers.” Hank pulled out another tissue and blew his nose loudly.

  “Was it Jackson?” Michael asked.

  “Who else could it be?” Hank added the tissue to the pile on the desk beside him. “She said she didn’t know the guy, but Rebecca Ann doesn’t pay much attention to the paper, so she might not have recognized him anyway. I was too upset to ask her much of anything. I told them—her and Barbara—to lock the door and not open it to anybody while I brought these to you.”

  “Did the man in the car try to grab her or anything like that?”

  “No, he just handed her the envelope and told her to give it to me. Said she could look at it first if she wanted to, and then he drove off.” Hank swallowed hard and rubbed his hands up and down his thighs.

  “So she looked.” The death picture of Kim Barbour was back in front of Michael’s eyes. Not something a kid should see.

  “She looked.” A tear slipped down Hank’s cheek.

  “Did you ask her about the car?”

  “She thinks it was blue, some beat-up old model. Sounded like the car Jackson drove to the bridge.” Hank swiped the tear off his cheek and spoke in a steadier voice.

  “T.R. was supposed to call if anybody came for the car.”

  Michael turned away from Hank and dialed the service station’s number.

  J
ackson’s car had been there when T.R. closed up last night and gone when he got to the station that morning. He aimed to call Michael, but Holly Baxter called in a panic with a dead battery because she was going to be late to work. He was sorry, but he let calling about the car slip his mind. Besides, the guy stuck a hundred-dollar bill in an envelope on the door and that about paid the storage and towing charges. So he didn’t really have any complaint against the guy, who did him a favor getting the junker out of his way.

  On the way to Hank’s house, Michael asked, “Rebecca Ann real upset?”

  “Some, but not like Barbara. Not like me.” Hank stared out the windshield. “Rebecca Ann hasn’t ever really seen a dead person not already fixed up for a funeral, but she’s all the time watching those scary movies with blood splashing everywhere. Maybe that’s how she thought this was. Something pretend no matter how real it looked. But this.” Hank hesitated as if searching for the right word. “Well, this isn’t pretend. Barbara already had the suitcases out from under the bed when I left.”

  “Maybe they should go visit her folks down in Georgia for a while.” Michael kept his eyes on the street. Everything looked the same. The red salsa flowers bloomed bright as ever in the half barrels on the street corners. Gordon Evermon, the president of the Hidden Springs Bank, was out washing the bank’s entrance door the way he did almost every day. He said he liked seeing what the weather was like on the other side of the glass. A bunch of kids in baseball uniforms were coming out of the Hidden Springs Grill, carrying soft drinks and chips. Bill Wharton and Sanders White stood in front of the drugstore, catching up on the news. It looked like any other Tuesday afternoon. The town gave no notice of the fact that evil had come to call. That evil might yet be riding its streets.

  “You don’t think she’s in any real danger, do you?” Hank asked.

  “He knew her name and where she lived.” There was no need pretending.

  “You’re scaring me, Mike.”

  “Good.”

  “Barbara says all this is my fault. That I’d do anything for a story.” Hank dropped his head in his hands as if his thoughts were too heavy. “If she goes, she might not come back.”

  “She’s scared. Once she has time to think about it, she’ll see you didn’t have any way of knowing he’d get personal.”

  Hank looked over at Michael. “He’s laughing at us, Mike.”

  “What makes you think that?” Michael kept his eyes on the road and forced himself to relax his grip on the steering wheel.

  “I don’t know. It’s almost like I can hear him.”

  “Get hold of yourself, Hank. Things are already strange enough.” Michael kept his voice calm, even though he knew what Hank meant. Monster laughter was in the air.

  A few minutes later, inside Hank’s home, things got stranger. Rebecca Ann looked at the picture of Jackson in the paper and, without a second’s hesitation, shook her head. “That’s not him.”

  Hank stared down at the paper as though to make sure he had the right one. “Take another look, honey.” He poked the picture of Jackson. “This man right here. His hair might be different, but the eyes would be the same.”

  “He had on sunglasses,” Rebecca Ann said. “Those mirror kind you can’t see through.”

  “Well, the nose then or the shape of his face,” Hank said.

  Rebecca Ann looked from her father to the picture again. She was thirteen, but baby fat still plumped her flushed cheeks. Michael could tell she wanted to say whatever her father wanted her to say, but that she didn’t know how to say anything but the truth. “I didn’t look at him real close.” She peered at the picture, then shrugged a little. “It was just some old guy with a beard. The man in that picture doesn’t have a beard.”

  Hank yanked his pencil out of his pocket and drew a messy beard on the man’s picture in the paper. “How about now?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “Maybe?” Hank tapped his pencil on the man’s picture. “Take a better look.”

  “I’m looking, Daddy.” Tears floated up into Rebecca Ann’s eyes. “I don’t know whether it was him or not.”

  Michael put his hand on Hank’s shoulder. “Easy, Hank. She’s doing her best.”

  Hank stared up at him. “But it has to be him.”

  “Let me talk to her.” Michael stooped down to eye level with Rebecca Ann. The tears were still there and she was struggling to keep her lips pressed together over the braces on her teeth. “Forget the picture, Rebecca Ann. Just describe him the way you remember him looking.”

  She wiped the corners of her mouth with the back of her hand as she thought about it. “I didn’t pay much attention except for the sunglasses. I could see my reflection in them, one of me in each lens.”

  “Did you notice his hair? What color it was?” Michael asked.

  “He had on some kind of hat. Like a fishing hat or something. I think it was dark green.” Rebecca Ann sighed. “He was just some old guy I didn’t know. When he gave me the envelope, I figured it was wedding pictures or something for Dad to put in the paper.”

  “So did he hand you the pictures and drive off?” Michael asked.

  “No. He kind of acted strange. He waved the envelope out the window at me, but then when I tried to take it, he held on like he wasn’t going to give it to me after all. Then all of a sudden he let go and leaned out the window to tap me on the forehead and tell me not to forget.” Rebecca Ann frowned. “The weirdest thing, he had on gloves.”

  Behind them, Barbara gasped, but Michael kept his eyes on Rebecca Ann. “Gloves?”

  “Yeah. I mean it was really hot today and he had on these black gloves. Like Daddy’s leather gloves he wears in the winter. I didn’t notice them till he reached out to touch me. I didn’t like that. I mean, grownups are always patting you on the head and stuff, but this was different.” Rebecca Ann shuddered a little.

  Hank hovered behind her as though unsure of whether to comfort his wife or grab Rebecca Ann in a hug. Michael ignored him and kept his eyes on Rebecca Ann. “Why?”

  “I don’t know. The gloves maybe. The sunglasses. I don’t know. It just creeped me out. Anyway, when I jerked back away from him, I tripped on the edge of the sidewalk and fell down.”

  “Then what happened?” Michael asked.

  “That was creepy too. He laughed—you know, like he thought it was funny that I fell down. Then he waved and drove off.”

  “Did you notice his license plate?”

  “Uh-uh. I dropped my swimming goggles and stuff when I fell, and by the time I got it picked up, he was gone. So I came on home and got something to drink.”

  “You weren’t curious about the pictures?”

  Rebecca Ann shrugged. “Not really. I turned on the TV and sort of forgot about them. I mean, the guy was weird, but when I go out with Dad, we’re always running into weird people. Mama says you have to be weird to live in Hidden Springs to begin with.” Rebecca Ann glanced behind her at her mother.

  Barbara Leland sat up too straight on the couch, twisting a tissue into shreds. She hadn’t said anything since Michael got there, but she looked ready to spring to her child’s defense at the first wrong word.

  “But you did look at them.” Michael kept his voice soft.

  “Obviously,” Rebecca Ann said, then blushed. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to be smart.”

  “That’s okay. I guess that was obvious.” Michael gave her a little smile. “Just tell me what you did.”

  “Mom saw the envelope and asked what it was. I told her they were probably wedding pictures, but when I pulled them out, they weren’t.” Rebecca Ann peeked back at her mother again and then stared down at her hands. “Mom got real upset.”

  “So she called your dad?”

  “Actually I called him. I thought he might be able to calm Mom down, but he went totally berserk. Even worse than Mom. You’d have thought it was me in the pictures.”

  Behind her, Barbara moaned and covered her face with her h
ands. Hank lost his indecision and wrapped his arms around Rebecca Ann. “Don’t say things like that, honey.”

  She pushed her father away. “Stop it, Dad. You’re squishing me.”

  Hank stepped back reluctantly, but kept one hand on her arm.

  Rebecca Ann looked past him to Michael. “It was that reporter on TV, wasn’t it? The one who came out here and interviewed you after you kept that man from jumping off the bridge.” She didn’t wait for an answer. “I saw something on TV about her. She was really pretty in the pictures they showed of her.”

  “She was,” Michael said.

  “But why did you think it was the guy on the bridge that gave me the pictures?”

  “Because of some other things that came in the mail,” Michael said.

  “Other pictures?” Rebecca Ann asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Of somebody dead?”

  “Yes.” There was nothing for it but to tell her the truth.

  “You think the guy that took the pictures did that to her?”

  “Seems the reasonable thing to think,” Michael answered.

  “Was he the guy who gave me the pictures?” Rebecca Ann shivered and wiped the corners of her mouth again.

  “I don’t know,” Michael admitted.

  18

  There was a lot he didn’t know. He left Hank hovering over his daughter and drove around town looking for the blue Oldsmobile. The man was surely long gone, but Michael needed to do something while he waited for Whitt and company to arrive from Eagleton. He wasn’t looking forward to Eagleton’s finest taking over Hidden Springs. Maybe that’s why he hadn’t been more insistent about getting through to Whitt about the teddy bear earring still in his pocket.

  Kim Barbour had been wearing gold earrings in the picture he’d seen, but if Jackson tried to plant something of hers in his house, at least he’d have to break a lock or window this time. Somehow Michael didn’t think that was going to happen. The killer didn’t seem to be following a specific pattern, but Michael had no doubt the man had a plan. A plan that included Hidden Springs.