Above Suspicion

by Sharkey, Joe;

  Mark was startled but he thought fast enough to tug at his fly, flash a grin, and say, “Nature.”

  The woman kicked her spurs and trotted off without a word.

  It rained again that night. Great muddy sheets of water lashed at the hills. From his motel room Mark managed to call Kathy and the children, though he could not remember what he said to them. Afterward he was very hungry. He pulled himself together to drive out in the rain to the Log Cabin on Route 23 where he wolfed down a steak and drank a beer.

  It was here that he had his next scare.

  Myra Chico, the local radio reporter, had a part-time job tending bar there on weekend nights. Mark had known her for years and had tried to help her when she said she was interested in applying for the FBI. He and Poole had arranged an interview for her at the bureau office in Lexington, where the supervisors had liked her well enough to invite her to apply. But she decided she couldn’t leave Pikeville.

  She came by his table and said that she had to talk to him. “It’s very important, Mark. Can you meet me after work? I’ve got to talk to you about Susan.”

  And so the next phase began. The beer and food had worked on him, and he was as tired as if he had swum five miles. He studied her pleasant expression and asked, “What time do you get off?”

  “A half hour. Come on over to my place for some coffee.”

  He followed her home in his car, anxious and frightened, but strangely glad for the company.

  He wanted a glass of 7-Up, not coffee, and when she had brought it, they sat cross-legged on either end of her couch and talked.

  “What about Susan?” he asked tentatively.

  “Do you know where she is?”

  “No. Why?”

  “Ron Poole told me she left the Landmark sometime yesterday and didn’t go home.”

  “You know Susan.”

  “Listen, you got a problem, do you know that?”

  He waited. Tell me about it, he thought.

  “She’s pregnant. Ron showed me the test. He says you know.”

  “She told me.”

  “She says you’re the father.”

  “Ron tell you that, too?”

  “She’s telling everybody you’re the father.”

  “You believe it?”

  “No.”

  “I never touched her,” he said, aware of just how grave a lie that was.

  “Ron asked me to ask you—he wants to stay out of it—where Susan went to.”

  “I don’t know where Susan is,” he lied again. Yes you do, he thought. She’s up on that mountain where you abandoned her.

  Myra had no reason not to believe him, and none even to question him. They talked about other things. He seemed very tired, a little emotional, perhaps. She figured it was the strain. As a friend, she understood.

  The motel was as quiet when he returned. At the front desk, a groggy clerk said there were no messages. Mark’s room had been made up and smelled faintly of cheap soap and starch. He fell into bed exhausted. He switched off the lamp and tried to force everything bad out of his mind; after a while, with much effort, he succeeded. He remembered when they put Cat Eyes in jail. That had been their best time together, the time he wished he could freeze in place forever. God, it had seemed as clever as a spring caper. Who would have thought it would graft Susan onto his life? When they taught you about informants in the academy, they didn’t explain that you bought not only a piece of their time, but a part of their history, too. He hadn’t understood that in order to renounce her past, Susan had found it necessary to affirm a future with him.

  You made me a hero, Susan.

  But not without a price, of course. The urgent phone calls at home at night, as if her problems were now immutably his: “Mark, would you come and get me out of here please? Kenneth beat me up. Could you put me up someplace?”

  The bad thoughts rushed back like a squad of cops breaking in the door of his consciousness. He turned the light on to wait out the rest of the night.

  The next thing he knew it was after nine o’clock. He awoke in a nauseous sweat with the bedsheet knotted around his feet. He hurried down to get a Lexington newspaper out of the box by the service elevator. On his way he pushed the plastic bag containing Susan’s clothes into a trash receptacle. He scanned the headlines as he walked back to the room. There was nothing—at least for today.

  Numbly he pressed on with his work. A subpoena in the chop-shop case had to be delivered to a man out in Magoffin County, which took a good part of the day. When he got back into town, it was late afternoon and he had begun to think more clearly. The car was on his mind. He drove to a service station on Route 23 and in the car-wash area vacuumed the interior of the Ford. He found an earring on the floor and let it be sucked into the vacuum hose. Using a bottle of kitchen cleaner he had bought, he carefully washed bloodstains from the dashboard and console. He bent down to study the rubber floor mat on the passenger side and noticed what looked like dried mucus. He was afraid to throw out the mat in the gas station where he could be clearly seen.

  Kathy had told him to make sure he stopped by the house on Honeysuckle Lane, which was still on the market, to check things over. As he’d told Self, the garage needed straightening to spruce it up for prospective buyers. On his way over, he stopped, looked around furtively, yanked the floor mat out of the car and crammed it into a trash-bin near a ditch beside the high school track where he ran after work.

  At the house he ran into a neighbor, Cecilia Fish, who noticed the car in the drive and wandered over. She stared at his cut hand. He had lost the bandage and it had begun to bleed again. He explained that he had ripped it on a nail while stacking those paint cans in the garage, and she hurried into her house and came back with a new bandage.

  The next day, having already run the Ford through a carwash in Pikeville and carefully cleaned the inside, he got rid of it. He drove back up to the tiny Huntington airport a hundred miles away and told the clerk at the counter in the terminal that the windshield had been cracked by a chunk of coal falling off a speeding coal truck. That was not an uncommon occurrence on those mountain roads, and they gave him another Ford Tempo without any problem. He made the long drive back to Pikeville.

  He wondered why he hadn’t heard from Poole. Usually, Poole was as alert as a burglar when it came to the comings and goings of Susan and Mark. Poole knew Susan wasn’t in her room at the Landmark and he’d probably already called Shelby looking for her. But Poole did not call him, and Mark had no idea where he was. That night, Mark was so exhausted that he fell asleep while talking to Kathy on the phone.

  On Monday, three days after he’d left Susan’s body in the ravine, Mark took another step to cover up his crime. He made a phone call to Shelby Jean Ward in Freeburn and asked, calmly and deliberately, whether she had heard from Susan.

  “No, I haven’t heard, and I’m worried. It ain’t like her,” Shelby said tentatively, not wanting to show any courtesy to a man she believed had used her sister, gotten her pregnant, and abandoned her after she had served his purposes. Shelby thought that Mark Putnam had monumental nerve expressing concern for Susan at this point. Ron Poole had kept Shelby well posted on Mark’s evasiveness about the pregnancy.

  Mark said, “Listen, I’m worried, too. She told me she was going to meet—”

  “Ain’t nobody seen her for three days, after she was out to the Landmark,” Shelby interrupted.

  Mark told her, “I was thinking that if you don’t hear from her, you should probably file a missing person’s report.”

  “I know that. I already thought of that. Somebody already told me I should do that.”

  Mark didn’t need to ask who that might be.

  “You seen Ron Poole, Shelby?” Mark asked.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Never mind. Just tell him I was looking for him, please.”


  After talking to Shelby, Mark called the Pikeville state police and spoke with Paul Maynard. He told Maynard that he was worried about Susan. He said she had left the motel on Thursday or Friday and not returned to Shelby’ house in Freeburn. He made sure to mention that Susan had told him she was planning to meet some of her drug contacts from up north on Saturday when they were to pass through West Virginia on their way south. He also told Maynard that he had called Shelby and advised her to make a missing person’s report. “She thinks something might have happened to her sister,” he said.

  “Mark,” said Maynard, “this girl has a habit of taking off: You know that.”

  Aware that Poole had already told people about his problem with Susan, Mark anticipated Maynard’s next question. “Well, I’ve known her pretty well for two and a half years. If you need any help on this, send a couple of the boys over to talk to me.”

  Maynard thanked him for the offer.

  Shelby had also phoned the state police that day. The initial report summarized her call succinctly:

  SHELBY WARD of Freeburn, Kentucky, telephoned Post to report that her sister SUSAN SMITH of Freeburn, Kentucky, was missing.

  Victim was brought to Pikeville by the FBI and left at the Landmark motel. She arrived on June 5, 1989, and stayed until June 8, 1989, when she left the motel for unknown reasons. She left a few articles of clothing and makeup in the room. Her sister talked to her last about noon on June 8, 1989. FBI agents state that they do not know where she went.

  A report of this kind is routine, filed as an alert for possible reference in case an unidentified body is found in a highway wreck or some other mishap. It is not regarded as an indication of a crime. The police assume that an adult is free to disappear if he or she wishes and does not break the law in the process. The standard police procedure is to wait seventy-two hours before initiating an investigation, by which time most missing people return home, call, or turn up dead.

  Susan Smith had done none of those things by the time that period expired. When Det. Richard Ray came to work on Friday morning, he found her missing person’s report on his desk. On it was a note from his boss, Lieutenant Maynard, instructing him to get in touch with the woman’s sister Shelby Jean Ward and see if anything had turned up.

  The detective called Shelby and took down the information quietly and politely, his big fingers thumping at a keyboard to enter into the state and national law enforcement data networks the facts of the missing woman’s existence, as stated by her sister: Susan Daniels Smith; white female; twenty-seven years old; short brown hair; five feet five inches tall; 130 pounds; tanned complexion; no occupation. Address, Freeburn, Kentucky, lives with sister, Shelby Ward; missing as of June 8. Sister last saw her wearing white shorts, blue University of Kentucky “Wildcats” T-shirt, gold necklace with gold cross.

  Ray looked this information over. He was the kind of detective who notices the wayward rustle of a curtain or the dent on a car even when he is not working, and he detected in Shelby’s voice an angry undertone. He asked her a few questions, listening intently to the answers. Then he told her he would be out to see her.

  At the age of fifty-four, Richard Ray was the most experienced detective in the Pikeville post, a distinction that gave him more leeway than most other detectives, who complained that they had to get permission for virtually every move they made away from their desks. Understaffed and chronically underfunded in a state where politicians were historically uneasy about having an independent-­minded law enforcement network on hand, the Kentucky State Police tended to keep its detectives on a short leash and off balance. A detective with decades of experience could find himself starting a murder case in the morning unable to follow up in the afternoon because he was switched to highway patrol—and unable to find an empty desk or a free telephone when he got back to the office.

  In Pike County, where the per capita felony statistics always came in near the top among the state’s 120 counties, the workload was especially fierce. A detective might handle 130 or more cases a year and report to a boss who had spent most of his career in the driver’s license department. As a result, case coverage tended to be, as one detective said, “forty miles wide and one inch deep.” In fact, Ray had already decided that he’d had it with the state police. He was planning to put in his retirement papers the next year.

  Freeburn was a forty-five-minute drive away, but Ray was glad that he took the time to indulge himself on a hunch. It seemed that the missing woman had enemies. She had worked as an informant and put one local boy in the penitentiary. Yes, she had run off before, but she always called to check on her two small children, who were with their father. He was also interested to hear that the missing woman had been over to the Health Center behind the courthouse a couple of weeks earlier for a pregnancy test—and had named as the father FBI special agent Mark Putnam. The sister evidently hated Putnam, from what Ray could tell, even though she had only spoken to him on the phone. Shelby explained that the other Pikeville FBI man, Ron Poole, had checked Susan into the Landmark motel so that she could confront Putnam with the bad news. And then she had disappeared.

  Ray was a taciturn man, with eyes that betrayed no surprise, a man who saw no need to punctuate conversation with anything more than a nod. He took down Shelby’s information, thanked her, and said he would be back in touch.

  Ray knew Mark Putnam slightly. He thought of him mostly as a typical FBI man who had been taught never to trust the local cops. On the other hand, he had run into him on enough major investigations to regard him, if only grudgingly, as a hard worker who wasn’t afraid to get his hands dirty. If he had to sum Putnam up in one word, from what little he knew at that point, the word would have been overzealous. But then that was how he would have described himself when he’d first started out as a state cop in Harlan County more than thirty years earlier.

  On Monday, Mark was out of town serving a subpoena. The next day, Ray and another state police detective, Kenneth Sloan, found him at the federal building for a pretrial hearing on the case. During lunch break, they borrowed an empty office and spoke informally for about an hour.

  Ray gave Mark a copy of the missing person’s report. Mark read it quickly and saw that the document had only routine information—vital statistics, the fact that Shelby had last seen Susan in Freeburn on June 5 (that would have been the night before she first came to his room), that her dental and medical records were available, and where. In the space beside the words Tattoos or Deformities, he saw that Ray had printed None but added, between tactful parentheses, 5 months pregnant.

  Watching him, Ray thought that Mark was nervous but cooperative—a little too cooperative. He was all over the field, and the detective had to scribble fast to get everything down:

  Agent Putnam told me . . . he knew Susan Smith and that she was a witness against Carl “Cat Eyes” Lockhart in the bank robbery trial. He said that Lockhart’s girlfriend, Sherri Justice, had beaten up Susan while Susan’s brother watched. Putnam said that he had talked to Susan’s husband, Kenneth Smith, about being an informant against Lockhart. He said that Kenneth demanded money and probation on a drug charge and he would not deal with him. Susan had been paid money for being a witness. Putnam said that Kenneth came for Susan’s $200 one day and he ran him off as Susan had said not to give it to Kenneth. Susan was paid about $9,000 for being a witness and an informant.

  According to Ray’s report, Mark told him, “Kenneth would call me and complain about how we used Susan. Kenneth called my wife and told her I was fucking Susan. Susan talked to my wife and denied it. Susan was trying to help Agent Ron Poole with some drug buys.”

  Mark described to the two state detectives Susan’s dependency on him and Kathy. He said that the last significant work Susan had done for him was in the fall, but that they had stayed in touch afterward and had spoken on the telephone a few times after he went to Florida.

  Mark a
lso told the detective that he had spoken with Susan at the Landmark several times during the week before she disappeared—once in his room—about “her problems.” He said they discussed the possibility of her having an abortion, and that he had offered to help her find the money for it. She did not want to have an abortion, Mark said.

  He said that the last time he spoke with Susan was about ten-thirty on Wednesday night when she phoned his room after he got back from his meeting in Lexington and asked him to join her in the lounge for a drink. He told her he was too tired and had to be up early. She then told him about a “strange phone call” she had received about a meeting in West Virginia in a few days with drug contacts, “some guys from Chicago, the amigos,” she called them. She described one as a “Spanish cop” from Cicero. Mark said that she declined his offer to follow her to the meeting “in case of trouble.”

  Why was Susan at the motel in the first place? Mark told the detectives that Poole brought her there “to do some undercover work” for him.

  Did Mark know she was pregnant? He knew she was saying so, he said, because she had told him herself just before he transferred to Florida. Had she told him that he was the father? No, he replied. Furthermore, he wondered if Susan really was pregnant, since she didn’t appear to be showing. “I tried to feel her stomach at the motel, but she jumped away,” he said. Did she ever tell him who the father was? “No,” said Mark. “She wouldn’t tell me.”

  So he hadn’t seen her after the Wednesday-night phone call? No, Mark said. Charlie Trotter told him that Susan had checked out of the motel at the end of the week. He hadn’t heard from her since, although he knew that Ron Poole was making inquiries, trying to find her. Mark offered to do whatever he could to help.