1 A Small Case of Murder

by Lauren Carr

  Joshua took the letter out of his pocket and handed it to Mannings. “Hal states that Vicki had been killed in a crossfire between God’s angels and Satan’s demons; but that Bridgette had killed Beth Davis, one of the devil’s demons sent to destroy the reverend; and that the two of them had committed suicide together, because, together, they killed Wally. Hal thought they had a suicide pact.”

  Mannings’ mouth dropped open.

  “As I’m sure you figured out, Hal wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer.” She reminded Joshua. “If you will recall, I have an alibi for Beth’s murder.”

  “That’s right. The tanning salon located a few blocks from the hospital from which Beth had been taken after her collapse at the courthouse,” Joshua replied. “Your lawyer did supply us with the sign-in sheet. You signed in at four o’clock, and the clerk does remember you, but there isn’t a check out time, nor does anyone recall seeing you leave.”

  “I didn’t sign out because there was a line at the counter. I’m much too busy to wait in lines.”

  “What time was that?” Joshua asked.

  Mannings regained his senses. “For all you can prove, it was hours after Beth Davis was killed.” He laughed, “If you will recall in Criminal Law 101, the burden of proof is on the prosecution to prove the defendant guilty.”

  Joshua said, “Bridgette killed Beth Davis, and I’ll prove it.”

  “When?”

  “Now.” Joshua told her, “It wasn’t hard for you to convince Hal that you had to kill Vicki and Beth because they were Satan’s demons. Then, you told him that Wally had to die. You convinced him that suicide was the honorable thing to do so you could use him as a scapegoat for your murders.”

  Curtis Sawyer agreed. “You probably even convinced him that the order to kill your brother came from God himself.”

  “Why would I want to kill Vicki and Beth Davis?”

  “To frame Wally,” Sheriff Sawyer said.

  Tad said, “Wally’s fingerprint was found on Beth’s finger where it was pressed against the trigger to kill her.”

  “See!” Bridgette flared. “It was Wally’s fingerprint.”

  Tad told her, “The fingerprint was upside down. It had been planted.”

  “While you were bent over Beth’s comatose body, pressing the barrel against her temple to plant that fingerprint, a strand of your hair got caught in the gun’s chamber.” Joshua added, “That red hair proved that Beth’s killer was Vicki’s sibling. Now that we have Wally’s DNA, we have proof that while he was Vicki’s half sibling, but he wasn’t the perp. That being the case, the old no-probable-cause blockade isn’t going to hold up. ”

  “You already proved my father wasn’t what he seemed,” Bridgette answered. “It’s plain to everyone that that hair came from one of his children from his secret life.”

  “Give us your DNA and clear yourself,” Jan challenged.

  Joshua smiled at Bridgette like a hawk that had landed his prey.

  Mannings’ walrus mustache twitched.

  His client’s smug expression faltered.

  Mannings grabbed the prosecutor’s arm and turned him away from his client. “What possible motive would Bridgette Poole have to kill Beth Davis?”

  “We hardly even knew each other,” Bridgette said.

  “You two did go to the same school,” Joshua reminded her.

  “I was four years behind her.”

  “Two,” he corrected her.

  “We didn’t travel in the same circles at all.”

  “You weren’t friends?”

  “Hardly.”

  “You didn’t socialize?” Joshua went on to clarify his question. “You didn’t go out? Have drinks? Go shopping together?”

  “No!” Bridgette’s tone told everyone that she was insulted.

  Joshua asked, “What were you doing in her car?”

  “I was never in her car!” she ordered her lawyer to take over for her.

  Joshua bent from where he stood over her to whisper into her ear. “What’s the first thing you do when you get into someone else’s car to drive it?”

  She snapped, “What?”

  Joshua smiled.

  Mannings interrupted them by repeating his question about her motive for killing the small-town pharmacist.

  “She had two reasons.” Joshua held up two fingers. “Self-preservation and greed. She set out to kill two birds with two stones, but someone beat her to the punch with Vicki Rawlings.”

  Joshua circled her while telling her story. “You didn’t kill Vicki. You were going to. That was what you had in mind when you got Beth out of the hospital and took her to Vicki’s place in her car, which had been left at the courthouse. You had ridden to the courthouse with your husband, so you didn’t have the problem of leaving a car anywhere. You simply followed the ambulance to the hospital in Beth’s car. You went to the salon to establish an alibi. After you were alone in the tanning booth, you signaled the front desk to turn on the tanning bed. Then, you slipped out the back door and went to the hospital to wait for Beth to be left alone so that you could take her to Vicki’s trailer to kill her.”

  Joshua said, “Ironically, when you left your DNA behind, you sent us on a wild goose chase looking for Vicki’s illegitimate half sister. It didn’t occur to us that you weren’t her aunt until we got your brother’s DNA.”

  “All circumstantial evidence, Commander,” Mannings said. “The jury is going to believe that her husband picked up her hair while they were together and he had left it behind while killing those two women. You have no real evidence to prove anything other than what he confessed to in his suicide note.”

  “How did Hal get his wife’s fingerprints into Beth’s car?” Joshua told her, “Adjusting the rearview mirror is one of those little actions no one thinks about when they get into a different car. Those prints will prove you had been in her car. You just said in front of everyone here that you and Beth weren’t friends. You stated that you have never been in her car. Those prints will prove you were lying when you said that. Now, why would you lie about that if you hadn’t done something very wrong? A jury will want to know what you were doing in her car, if not to take her to Vicki’s trailer to kill her.”

  Mannings glanced at Bridgette for a sign that Joshua was wrong.

  Joshua resumed his case. “After you killed Beth, you drove back home in Vicki’s car, a black MG with the personalized tags ‘RWLNGS4’. It was registered to Wally so there was never any question, before now, about why it’s at the estate. But, it was Vicki’s car. I myself saw it at the scene when she shot up the First Christian Church in Chester.”

  Curt Sawyer told Mannings, “Vicki’s car was impounded after she shot up the church. After her grandfather posted her bail, the same afternoon she got killed, Vicki went to the impound yard and got her car. We have Vicki’s signature on the sign out sheet.”

  Joshua noted, “Yet, that car wasn’t at her home when we found her body. Someone had taken it from her trailer to the Rawlings estate.”

  Bridgette looked up at Joshua, who smiled at her.

  The prosecutor continued his case. “Your intention was to frame Wally for the murders so that you could inherit your father’s drug empire. You planned to kill Vicki and make it look like Wally was trying to make it look like a murder-suicide, but someone else killed Vicki first. You got lucky. All you had to do was drag Beth back to the bedroom and kill her. You splattered Beth’s blood on your brother’s coat when you shot her, like you planned to do all along, and you left his coat in Vicki’s closet. I have no doubt but that a DNA match will prove that the hair found on the scene and in the gun belonged to you, which will connect you to the victim, the coat the victim’s killer was wearing, and the murder weapon found in the scene.”

  Mannings’ bushy eyebr
ows furrowed. “Do you seriously believe that my client killed Beth Davis solely to frame her brother to cheat him out of his share of their father’s estate?”

  “That, and self-preservation,” Joshua clarified. “Bridgette managed her father’s drug operations. She laundered some of the money through the church. Most of it, they transferred to overseas banks.”

  He clarified, “We’re talking hundreds of millions of dollars accumulated over decades. Bridgette saw at the courthouse that both Vicki and Beth were weak links. It was only a matter of time before one, or both, of them brought the whole drug operation down on their heads.”

  Mannings looked at his client and shook his head.

  Bridgette sat up straight. The defiance on her face was an indisputable clue to her genes. “I wasn’t responsible for my actions. Look at my upbringing. I never stood a chance.”

  “Look at her,” Jan ordered Tad to see the injustice Joshua was committing before her very eyes.

  From the living room window seat, Sheriff Sawyer, Tad, and Jan watched Tess Bauer interview Joshua. The rest of the Thornton family watched from seats out of the camera shot.

  The journalist and the subject of her exclusive interview sat in his two leather wing-backed chairs in front of the fireplace. Her clipboard with her list of questions resting in her lap, she sat up straight at the edge of the chair.

  “So much for my exclusive,” Jan pouted.

  Tad soothed her envy. “Keep watching.”

  “I guess,” Tess concluded, “Reverend Rawlings got there before Bridgette and killed Vicki before she could reveal that he was really her father.”

  Joshua disagreed. “Reverend Rawlings would never have killed Vicki.”

  “Family loyalty? He killed his own wife.”

  “The man we knew as Reverend Rawlings wasn’t stupid. He knew that Vicki’s death would eventually lead to the truth about what he did to Cindy, which would mean the downfall of his church. That’s why he had sent the mail bomb to Dr. MacMillan after Vicki had died. He was afraid Tad would discover the truth and he’d end up with the same problem he had with Doc Wilson, if not worse. Before Vicki’s death, the reverend terrorized Tad with threatening e-mails, which we traced to his laptop. He was trying to drive Tad back to the bottle, which would discredit him or, better yet, drive him out of town. He also manipulated Vicki to stalk him. Orville Rawlings had to get rid of Tad because he didn’t know if Cindy had told him about the rapes. Once Vicki was dead, then Tad had access to the physical evidence that’d prove who her real father was.”

  “Since killing was so easy for the reverend, why not just have Tad killed?” Jan interjected a question to spear-like glares from Tess and her news crew.

  Joshua responded, “I asked that question myself. I’m guessing here, but I think he didn’t kill him because everyone here in Chester knows how close Tad and I are. The local media has followed my career and my tenacity is no secret. If someone hurt Tad, I’d be back here in a heartbeat, and no one would stop me from finding out who did it. He didn’t want to take that chance.”

  Tess regained control of her interview. “But you came back anyway.”

  “Yeah, I did, didn’t I?” Joshua returned to the previous question with a slight shake of his head. “The reverend couldn’t let anything happen to Vicki, if only to protect himself. That’s why, with all the trouble she caused him—the DUIs, the car accidents—he never had her killed.”

  “But Vicki was going to tell all about Rawlings’ drug operations. She told Amber,” Tess pointed out. “Amber saw him kill Vicki—”

  “And Beth Davis?” Joshua reminded her of Amber’s interview with Morgan. “She claimed she saw him kill Beth, too, and we proved Bridgette Poole did that.”

  “W-well,” Tess stammered, “Amber did do a lot of drugs.” She sucked in her breath. Joshua saw her grimace before she asked, “Who did kill Vicki Rawlings?”

  With a laugh, he said, “That was the murder that tripped me up.”

  Tess joined in his amusement before asking, “How did it do that?”

  “Well,” Joshua began, “the problem I had was in the way I looked at Beth’s and Vicki’s murders. We had two murders, but we kept looking at it as one crime, even though we knew the murders had been committed two hours apart. I thought, assumed, that the two murders were connected.”

  “But that wasn’t the case?”

  Joshua held up two fingers. “When I looked at the crime scene as two separate murders, with two murderers with two separate set of motives, whose crimes coincidentally happened in the same location, like two puzzles in the same box, then it made sense. Then, I saw what happened.”

  The journalist asked, “What happened?”

  “Tess, you killed Vicki Rawlings.”

  Her face blank, Tess stared at Joshua.

  Silence filled the room.

  Joshua broke the silence. “Remember the glove you made sure everyone at my news conference knew about?”

  “One of my sources told me about the glove,” Tess said.

  “There was a bloody fingerprint on that glove.”

  “Amber explained that to me,” Tess said. “She said she had picked up the glove to see what Rawlings dropped on his way out.”

  “Tess, you’re a respected journalist.” Joshua sat up in his seat. “You’re up for an award for your series on drugs in the valley. Years ago, you interviewed a presidential candidate in Pittsburgh, did you not?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  Jan, Tad, and Curtis Sawyer stood up from the window seat. The children sat at the edge of their seats while the poised journalist’s composure slipped away.

  Joshua spoke in a soft tone. “We got a match on the fingerprint off the glove that you picked up after Rawlings dropped it at the courthouse. We ran it through national security. Did you forget? To interview a presidential candidate, you have to pass security background check. They take your fingerprints, which remain on file in the government database.”

  Thinking quickly, Tess observed the people in the room. “There must be some mistake.”

  Stunned by the change in the tone, the camera operator forgot about taping the interview. The station manager and news producer stepped forward from where they had been watching in the background.

  Joshua was shaking his head. “No, Tess, there wasn’t any mistake. For years, you’ve been telling everyone that you blamed the Rawlings for your sister’s death. You claimed that you turned down the network offer because you were going to stay here to get the drug dealers who killed your sister.”

  “Yes.”

  Joshua indicated his front porch outside. “Right out here on my porch, you told me that drugs killed your sister, and that was why you were after the Rawlings.”

  “I remember.”

  “You never mentioned that she bled to death from cuts on both her wrists.”

  Tess cleared her throat and swallowed. “I was too ashamed to tell you. She killed herself. The drugs were destroying her, and she couldn’t stand it. She was weak. The Rawlings fed on that weakness. Vicki got her hooked. Diana never would have killed herself if she hadn’t have gotten her hooked.”

  Joshua watched her closely. “I was in the Navy when the wall came down in Germany. Then, something interesting came out. You see, during the Cold War, the Soviets were accusing the Americans of all these awful things we were doing: bribery, blackmail, and murder for secrets. What’d come out afterwards was that the Soviets diverted suspicion from themselves by accusing us of the very things they were doing. It’s a very interesting little ploy.”

  Tess stared at him with wide eyes.

  “You killed your sister because she stole your boyfriend.”

  “No!” Tess cried out.

  Joshua said, “It was supposed to look like a suicide. When the medical examin
er in Hookstown wasn’t able to rule that with certainty, because there wasn’t any hesitation in the slashes on her wrists, you had to make sure no one suspected you. Shortly before Diana’s death, you got into a huge fight with her in front of witnesses. If your sister’s death was being investigated as a murder, you’d be the prime suspect. So, to divert suspicion, you cried foul and pointed your finger at the Rawlings.”

  Joshua leaned toward her. “Vicki knew the truth and was blackmailing you. So, you had to win her confidence to get close enough to kill her. That was another reason you didn’t go to New York. You couldn’t afford to live there with all the blackmail you were paying her. She was as ruthless as her birth father. But she didn’t know who she was dealing with.”

  Sheriff Sawyer interrupted. “We checked your bank records. A lot of cash had been disappearing, leaving you barely enough to live on. Not only did it stop disappearing after Vicki Rawlings died, but the day after her death, you got a safety deposit box at the same bank. Care to show us what’s in it? Could it be a bundle of drug money that you stole from Vicki after killing her? It seems kind of odd that with all the drugs Vicki was dealing that no cash was found at her place.”

  “I was lending money to a friend and they finally paid me back. I put it in the safety deposit box so the government wouldn’t know about it.” Tess turned back to Joshua and sputtered, “I would never kill my sister. I loved her.”

  “We talked to the state police in Pennsylvania.” Joshua reported, “A girl with short dark red hair and gothic make-up was seen outside Diana’s boarding house the very night she died. They suspected she was the one who supplied her with the drugs. Her description matches Amber to a ‘T’.”

  Tess choked, “Amber killed my sister?”

  “As suddenly as she showed up on the drug scene with your sister, Amber disappeared. Then, according to the drug underground—we’re talking years later—she reappeared, right in time for your series on the drug culture and Vicki’s murder.”