Love Her Madly

by Mary-Ann Tirone Smith

  “Agent Rice,” he said. “I understand you’d like me to recommend a proctologist.”

  “Actually, I’m the one with a recommendation. I recommend that you deposit twenty-five thousand bucks into your lawyer’s checking account right away. Nothing is going to stop my exposing you. I’m going to reopen some of your most egregious malpractice suits, and I’m going to get people with poor eyesight and broken noses to sue you until you’ve got nothing left to your name but a tongue depressor. I’m going after you. Be prepared to hear a fellow frat brother tell the press he only faintly remembers you when you go looking for help from him. And if you dare put anything in my way, if the numbskull cops on your payroll come within fifty feet of me, you will be arrested immediately. Tough choice, I know, but if I were you I’d choose poverty over the Texas judicial system, because we all know.…”

  The phone was dead. At what point he’d hung up on me, I didn’t know. I didn’t care, either, because he would get to hear it all again through more proper channels or I will eat dirt.

  11

  It was late. I was wired, but I forced myself to wait till morning before I called the Air Force chaplain who’d been Vernon’s other mentor.

  No explanations required. He told me he expected he’d be hearing from the FBI sooner or later. “It’s about my student. It’s about Vernon Lacker, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, sir, it is.” I always call military officers sir. They especially appreciate that from a civilian. Loosens them up.

  He said, “I can’t tell you how much I liked and admired that boy. All of us who are connected with the school are devastated by the trouble he’s in. Have you found him yet?”

  “No. I’m wondering if you might have any idea where he might be.”

  “He is looking for his wife, I’d have to say. A crying shame. There was a boy not just interested in praising God but in doing his work. Agent, Vernon Lacker was a shy boy without a pulpit, but he carried out the work of the Lord in the most challenging place there is: prison.”

  The man should have heard his shy boy exhorting the witnesses to Rona Leigh’s execution not to weep as she was only asleep. In Hebrew.

  He said, “Sadly, of course, a prison chaplain of Vernon’s sensitivity can be influenced and manipulated by his charges, as we have seen.”

  I said, “Perhaps manipulated by others as well. Did you know his second mentor when Vernon was your student?”

  He coughed. “I did.” He coughed again. Double cough means the human body is resisting what wants to come out of its mouth. But the Air Force man was a soldier. He carried on. “Reverend Tiner served as an adjunct, like several of us, but he didn’t actually teach on campus. The boys went to him. He came to all our meetings, though. It was important for him that he have … input. What you are wanting to know is whether this fellow, with Vernon’s help, orchestrated Rona Leigh Glueck’s escape.”

  I would not have a coughing fit. Very steadily, I said, “Sir, what makes you assume that?”

  “I have to tell you, Agent, my colleagues and I have spoken of little else, though only in hypothetical terms … at first, whether Vernon helped Rona Leigh escape, and then whether Tiner might have been involved. The Vernon we knew, though naïve, was so pure of heart we couldn’t imagine he would do what he knew to be wrong. But Raymond Tiner had entered Vernon’s life again when he married the killer. Last night I had dinner with a few of my colleagues. Old-timers like myself. That’s when we admitted it.”

  “Admitted what, exactly?”

  “Admitted we could no longer deny that the voice on the tapes might well be Raymond Tiner. We decided we must stop deliberating and, instead, pray for the capture of the condemned woman.”

  “Did any of you think of fingering Tiner, sir?”

  I waited. Finally, he said, “Last night we did express to one another our collective desire to finger, as you put it, Raymond Tiner. But that would have been foolish because we have nothing to prove that he is the voice of the man on the tape. And we had to consider our thorough dislike of the man. He has been an evil influence on a boy we were once so fond of. We’re only human and, deep down, we worry about what will become of Vernon, once … once this is all over.”

  “All right, sir. I can understand that.” I couldn’t. “But it will help me if I know as much as possible about Raymond Tiner.”

  “I can certainly tell you what I know. As I said, he was an adjunct here. He served as mentor to third-year students only. Vernon was entrusted to Reverend Tiner and was sent to the camp the man ran for incorrigible boys. Reverend Tiner invented the tough love movement, a movement having nothing to do with love but rather with cruelty and deprivation. The goal was to break the child’s will. Easy to do when there is no one to advocate for that child. He’d have the boys lie down, and he’d play the music of the wind in swaying trees, the ocean waves, birdsong, things of that nature. And while he played his tapes, when he had the boys almost asleep, hypnotized, he’d clang a pair of cymbals together and shout, Satan!

  “I told Tiner it was the kind of things the Communists in Hanoi did to our captured men. Men I served with.”

  Had to keep him on the main track. “Do you know what has become of Tiner?”

  “Once Tiner severed his ties with us, I never heard anything about him until last year. Vernon called me periodically as he worked his way through the Texas prison system, always bursting with excitement over each promotion. But that all came to a halt. I did not respond in the way he’d hoped when he told me of his decision to marry the killer. I advised him strongly against such an irrational act. I reminded him of his training. How important it was not to become emotionally involved with the people who needed him. Who placed their trust in him. I told him it was unethical to do otherwise.

  “It was a terrible conversation. He was calling me to ask me to perform the ceremony. He truly thought I would be happy for him. I made him realize that the opposite was true. All I could do was emphasize that what he was planning was a dreadful mistake.

  “He said to me, ‘But she’s my girl,’ as if this killer were a high school sweetheart.

  “And after the deed was done, I never heard from him again except for a note telling me of the marriage and that Raymond Tiner had performed the ceremony. Tiner had entered Vernon’s life again. In effect, he brought down a fine young man, involved him in what reflects his own madness. I suppose, then, that this is one piece of information that would be useful to you, Agent. Tiner was in the women’s prison. He’d met Rona Leigh Glueck.”

  Where he perhaps had been bewitched as well.

  “Sir, you never contacted Vernon after that?”

  “No. My stubbornness, sadly, prevailed.”

  I asked him where Tiner might go. Say, if he wanted to start another camp or some religious community.

  He said, “I’m sorry, Agent. The man was a closed individual.”

  “If you think of anything, if any of your colleagues at the school…”

  He promised he would think and he would ask around.

  A short time later, my director called me again. He wasn’t going through Delby anymore. The capture of Rona Leigh Glueck had become a top priority.

  “Poppy, we’ve got all the data we can get out of the videotapes. We want you in on this. Can you get here today?”

  I looked at my watch. Still early. “I’ll be there this afternoon.”

  The airline reservations clerk I’d been dealing with now recognized my voice without my having to say who was calling. I ordered up two tickets. Scraggs had a right to be in on things too. I reached him on his cell phone. He was grateful.

  When Scraggs spotted me at the airport, he put down his newspaper, stood up, came over, and took my overnight bag from me. He was stiff—made a little face when he stood. Takes a while to recoup after your car slams into a concrete wall. The handshake, though, was as solid as ever. “Never been to the nation’s capital. Hope you’ll be able to show me a few sights.”

  Wo
nderful.

  * * *

  We arrived at the crime lab, and as I walked to the screening room everyone came out from behind their tables, up from their microscopes, turned off their Bunsen burners to welcome me back. I was damned proud of all of them.

  Auerbach sat at the computer. He said to me, “Hey, Poppy!”

  I said, “Hey, Auerbach!” and then I introduced Max Scraggs to all of them.

  What Auerbach was looking at was blown up and projected on a movie screen. A dozen of us sat close by him: me, my director, Scraggs, a couple of technicians, various agents, Delby. Auerbach moved his arrow across a frame of the first video, across Rona Leigh’s near-dead body and face until it set down on the headboard of the bed. Click. He zoomed in.

  “The headboard is pecan, hand-carved.” The arrow meandered across the headboard. Click, click, click. He zoomed in until we were at the eye of his microscope. The grain of the wood looked like a sandbar. He said, “Fine wood from a tree forty-seven years old.”

  Click. The arrow settled on the blanket covering Rona Leigh. Auerbach said, “Hand knit, lightweight wool, worsted.” Zoom and click. We were looking at ship’s ropes. He said, “The sheet is linen. Homespun. The sheet, the pillowcase, Rona Leigh’s nightgown. All linen, woven by two separate hands.”

  He spent ten minutes describing the difference in weave that showed him two people had contributed to the work. Scraggs tapped me. I whispered that there was no rushing Auerbach.

  We spent a much longer time on the adobe wall behind the bed.

  “There is a thin coat of whitewash over a type of adobe that is between 296 and 299 years old. Rona Leigh Glueck is in a mission built by North American natives under the direction of Spanish priests.” We learned all we never wanted to know about how one can deduce such a thing.

  The arrow flowed up and down over the wall. Auerbach said, “The adobe is incredibly preserved. There is no explanation at this time as to how it could have remained in this near-perfect state over such a long period of time. The makeup of the adobe shows us the mission was built in Texas. Rona Leigh is still in Texas.”

  The time had to come where I would interrupt. I said, “There’s adobe in Mexico, too. In Arizona. California. How do you know—”

  He was only a little short with me. “First, they don’t bother preserving adobe in Mexico. And the adobe in Texas is different from the adobe in Arizona, which is different from the adobe in California.”

  Click, click, click. He fed us pictures of microscopic comparisons of adobe. He pointed out the characteristics of Texas adobe as compared with the others. We were educated further.

  He said, “She’s in Texas.”

  Then he pressed a button. The screen went white and the lights came up.

  I got up and stood behind Auerbach. I asked him how long he’d been sitting in front of the computer.

  He said, “What day is this?”

  I told him to go home, get some sleep, and not return to his office for twenty-four hours.

  He refused. He said, “Don’t make me miss something, Poppy.”

  I gave him a ten-second professional shoulder massage. I said, “Your muscles feel like a headboard made of pecan wood.” Then I asked, “So, Scraggs, how many missions in Texas?”

  “Two million, give or take a hundred thousand. I don’t know. There are a dozen official ones under the U.S. Park Service, starting with the Alamo. Most of those, like the Alamo, needed restoration; a couple are in such good shape they’ve needed no work at all other than to protect them. But none in the shape this gentleman has described, far as I’ve heard.

  “Then there are many, many buildings and pieces of buildings built by missionaries that are abandoned. If that retired minister of yours is in one of them, fixed up so that it’s habitable, with walls that are intact, the Rangers will find him. We’ve got the resources to locate every ruin in Texas in a few hours.

  “’Course, we got an all-points bulletin out on Tiner.… It’s a bitch when there’s no recent photo.”

  We had all despaired that the last photo taken of Raymond Tiner was thirty years old. Now we were using a frame from the Church of Christ lady’s home movie instead. That was only twenty years old.

  I said, “Well, tell the Rangers there’s a mission out there populated with people who know how to weave and sew and knit and make some very lovely furniture, and these people have some serious tools. They can refurbish a vehicle so it replicates an ambulance or a police van. They’ve got computers and webmasters who can develop and destroy a site in short order. And they sure as hell have medical people too, because whoever saved Rona Leigh’s life is a genius. That is, unless God did it after all.”

  My director said, “Captain Scraggs, no word yet on what happened to her blood?”

  “Was about to bring that up. I got word. About an hour before I left Texas this morning. The warden in Gatesville has known since the get-go what happened to the blood. Hushed it up. Had so many strikes against him, he felt he had to do something to save his skin. The blood samples were there all along, but they didn’t match up to what the prison knew to be her blood type. Her blood had been replaced with someone else’s. Harley Shank’s. The missing guard.”

  The director said, “Jesus.”

  I said, “How come you didn’t tell me?”

  “Didn’t want you jumping out of the airplane.”

  “That warden been fired yet?”

  “He has.”

  Our chemical researcher’s turn. She and Auerbach had changed seats. Took her awhile to get her data up. Numbers and x’s and y’s filled the screen. We followed the arrow as it went from line to line, unable to understand any of it. But her narrative was easy. That’s because she’d gotten nowhere.

  She said, “These are our conclusions based on no real data. We’ve looked at studies where rats were given minuscule amounts of potassium chloride, with the idea of building up these amounts slowly over a period of time to see how much they could tolerate. They couldn’t tolerate any. Less than a thousandth of a milligram, and their little hearts came to a screeching halt. I’m sorry. That’s it.”

  I said to her, “Don’t feel bad. At least we know Rona Leigh isn’t a rat.”

  Then I took a turn. These people had always worked best when they weren’t relegated to a vacuum. I filled them in on the bizarre life history of Raymond Tiner and his influence on Vernon, as described by the Air Force chaplain. I looked to my sad researcher. “I don’t have a lot more than you.”

  My director said, “Where the fuck do these nutcases come from?”

  I said, “Texas.” I turned to Scraggs. “No offense.”

  The meeting came to an end.

  On the way back to the airport, I reminded Scraggs about Melody Scott’s brother wanting to talk to me.

  “You brought me to DC to thank me for a favor I didn’t even concede, right?”

  Cynical fellow, Scraggs. “I know it looks that way, but that wasn’t the reason.”

  “Where’s this guy live?”

  I gave him the address Delby had gotten to me.

  He said, “I know it.”

  I got on my cell phone and had Delby change our plane tickets from Waco to Houston. She made overnight hotel reservations and then I finally returned Fred Helton’s call. He was relieved when I told him I would be happy to see him.

  He said, “We saw you on television. After you were attacked during the escape. When I heard the rumors—that you were going to investigate whether or not Rona Leigh got a fair trial—well, maybe, finally, someone would listen to us.”

  “By us, you mean the juror as well as yourself?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is tomorrow morning okay? Say nine?”

  “It surely is.”

  Scraggs whispered, “What’s the juror’s name?” and I asked Helton.

  He told me Candy Sinclair.

  I mentioned I’d be bringing a Ranger, the one in charge of finding Rona Leigh. He asked me why I’d d
o that. And then he immediately excused himself for being intrusive. He said, “I guess you need protection, don’t you, ma’am?”

  “I guess I do. And I need a witness to hear what it is you’ve got to say. An official Texas witness.”

  He understood.

  In Houston, Scraggs ordered a car. “No way I get in one of yours,” he said to me.

  We checked into the hotel, shook hands in the elevator, planned to meet for breakfast at the coffee shop at six-thirty, said good night. Business being business.

  * * *

  At the appointed hour he was waiting for me, a pot of coffee already on the table. He was in uniform.

  I said, “I bet they issue you great sunglasses.”

  “You know it.” He took them out of his pocket and put them on.

  “Godzilla would look sexy in those.”

  “I will take that as a compliment.”

  “Can you get me a pair?”

  “No. But I can tell you where you can buy yourself a knockoff. Cost you.”

  He told me.

  We ordered.

  I said, “Scraggs, if Rona Leigh didn’t get a fair trial, if she was entrapped, I need a very serious report to that effect so that when you capture her—”

  “Moot. You know what the penalty is for escaping prison?”

  “A thousand years.”

  “Something like that.”

  “Maybe she wasn’t in on the escape.”

  “You know better than that.”

  “Maybe she just trusted in God and he made good.”

  “Falls under the category of escape. C’mon, Poppy. Let me tell you a little story. Couple years ago, guy was scheduled for execution. When his date came up he was dying. Cancer. They didn’t think he’d make it through the trip from death row to the death house. He did, but he lapsed into a coma. So they took him to a hospital, did God knows what to him, and managed to get him to a semiconscious state. Brought him directly back to the death house, and his sentence was carried out right then.

  “Poppy, once we get Rona Leigh, she’ll be executed in a matter of hours.”