A Tangle in the Vines

by Anna Celeste Burke

  “So? Do you think Ms. Wainwright wanted to hear you run your mouth?”

  “I said, shut up! Or I’ll…”

  “What? You’ll kill me like you killed my teacher? I’m the bait, remember? They’re not going to come after you unless they hear my big mouth screaming ‘help.’” I cringed as I heard Jim slap Billie. I moved to go get him. Dustin grabbed my arm and shook his head.

  “What a wimp!” Billie hollered. “My dad slaps me way harder than that!”

  “Up there,” Jim said, “Or I’ll take my chances yelling help without you.” I heard the gritty scraping of footsteps on rock. They must be coming up an incline or climbing over rocks from the other side. Billie was silent for an agonizing minute or two.

  “Ow! I’m going. This is the dumbest thing you’ve ever done. You know why? Because I bet Austin and his crack team are already up there. Yee-haw, Austin, it’s Billie-the-kid. I’ve got the idiot with me who’s convinced he can outwit you.” Just then some member of our group shifted, and a slew of gravel trickled down the rock.

  “What’d I tell you? Watch out, below Jim!” I heard what sounded like a spray of rocks and gravel. Boots skidded on the rocks.

  “You delinquent! I’ll teach you…”

  “Let go!” Billie shouted. He must have kicked Jim who grunted. His grunting was followed by more skidding. This time I also heard someone skittering on up the rocks and getting closer to us. When I saw Billie’s face, I couldn’t wait another second. I slipped out, yanked him toward me, and then dragged him backward with me into the space where we were hiding. Less than a minute later, Jim appeared.

  “Come out, come out, wherever you are. You’re going to miss the showdown. Don’t you want to see Austin get what he has coming to him? Lily’s going to pay and pay and pay for screwing up my plans. If she’d stayed indoors where she belonged, I would have had the evidence cleaned up by morning.”

  “You’re delusional, Jim. You know what I hate more than a serial killer? A dirty cop serial killer.” That was Austin speaking in his old west marshal voice. Jim pointed his gun upward, and Dustin lunged at him. The rifle clattered as it fell to the ground.

  “You’re not my Sitter anymore!” Dustin cried. Jim fell backward and grabbed Dustin by the hoodie he had on. They’d landed on the flat rock and rolled toward the edge. Zelda and I were out on our bellies in a flash. We each grabbed an ankle and held onto Dustin as Billie and the Divas grabbed us. Marlowe squeezed between us, ran up over Dustin’s back, and snarled and snapped at Jim. Startled, Jim let go and dropped thirty or forty feet. I don’t believe he landed well. We held on as Dustin scooted back toward us, and our friends guided us all back into the hidey hole.

  “Hello, lawman,” Dustin said when he turned around.

  “Well, I’ll be ding-danged if it ain’t Ma Tucker and her whole gang,” he said shaking his head in disbelief.

  “Posse, Marshal,” I said as I threw my arms around his neck and gave him a kiss.

  20 Untangling the Vines

  Jim Brady survived the fall, but he wasn’t going to be able to hurt anyone ever again. It would be weeks before the police could question him. In the meantime, with help from a few additional sources, Austin, Rikki, and Dahlia were doing their best to piece together the story behind Jim Brady’s lifetime of vicious outbursts.

  Among Bud Lincoln’s boxed items Rachel had stashed in the garage was an old address book with information about several Lincoln family members. They were only able to locate one of them. Rikki and Diane had driven to a small town several hours away to speak to an elder member of the Lincoln family who’d outlived many of the younger Lincolns.

  “The first thing Great Aunt Mildred told us was that the Lincolns and the Watkins had buried the hatchet soon after Bart Lincoln was hanged. She scoffed at the idea that there was ill will between the two families. Bart Lincoln was a bad man and both sides of the family were glad to see him go.”

  “Well that does away with family vengeance as a motive for James Brady’s viciousness,” Carrie said.

  “Yes, it does. According to his great aunt, James Brady Lincoln was twelve years old when his parents sent him to help at the Watkins’ place. Dustin and his sister, Molly, were twins, and the home birth had been hard on their mother, who never fully recovered. As the children grew older, it became more difficult to care for them. Not only did Dustin have problems, but his twin sister did as well. Dustin says he tried to help Molly by counting things for her. Sometimes that worked.”

  “From the way Jim’s great aunt described their behavior, these days they would have been diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder. Dustin’s sister was more impaired than he was, and would often injure herself. It’s not uncommon for young children with autism to engage in self-harm, but with intervention, most can grow out of it,” Diane explained.

  “Why didn’t the parents get help from professionals?”

  “Apparently, Judy, they were raised in a religious tradition that prohibited seeking medical care from doctors—not Christian Science, but a smaller sect. Their reclusiveness was a way to avoid trouble with the law about their religious beliefs.”

  “What does this have to do with Jim Brady becoming a serial killer?” Zelda asked.

  “While Dustin’s not always the best source of information, he explained that the Sitter, as he called him, tried harder and harder to keep them out of trouble. His parents either didn’t care or were oblivious, but Jim began to tie them to the bedposts or in chairs. He put pillows on the bedpost to keep the girl from banging her head and made ‘fat arms’ so she couldn’t bite them. Dustin said that meant he wrapped her arms in wet rags that tasted bad. If she pulled them off, Jim tied her arms to her side. He often struck or kicked them.”

  “That’s beyond belief,” I said.

  “It’s difficult for me to hear, too, despite the things I’ve seen during my career at Children’s Services. Twins are challenging, but with developmental delays or other disabilities, parenting can be overwhelming.”

  “It couldn’t have been any easier for a twelve-year-old!” I declared. Billie was a self-reliant child for his age, but I couldn’t conceive of the idea that he could be left alone to care for three or four-year-old twins for hours. “Jim Brady must have been desperate and angry to do what he did to the children. I can’t see how it made Dustin’s sister easier to handle.”

  “Dustin said Molly didn’t like it. She scratched, bit, and kicked him. One day after she bit him, he hit her with an iron doorstop. Dustin still says it was his fault, which is what he told his parents. The family buried her in the woods, far away from their place. A year later, on the anniversary of her death, Jim told Dustin she was coming back to kill them all out of revenge. Shortly after that warning, the fire broke out. Dustin, who was searching for his sister, wasn’t inside when the house went up in flames, but the blast was so strong, it threw him away from the house.”

  “How awful! I wonder why Jim didn’t leave rather than turning into a killer.”

  “He tried. Soon after he arrived, he ran off and called his mom, asking her to let him come home. He was severely rebuked, and when he returned to the Watkins’ place, ‘he probably got what was coming to him’ according to his great aunt. He never called them again. In fact, he never returned home at all,” Rikki explained.

  “That was harsh,” Zelda said. “He was trapped, wasn’t he?”

  “He could have gotten help from us,” Diane responded, “but for a child who was brought up to see the authorities as untrustworthy, he really was trapped.”

  “After the house burned down and they took Dustin to the hospital in San Francisco, Jim followed him there. Jim was only fourteen, so he didn’t last long as an underage kid on the streets. When he was picked up as a runaway, he must have dropped Lincoln and became James Brady,” Rikki said. “Austin found a driver’s license issued to him using that name a few years later.”

  “We found a birth certificate for James Brady,” Austin
commented. “As clever as he was, Jim could easily have found someone to make him a fake one.”

  “True. More than one, perhaps.” Rikki added. “Not long after he was issued the driver’s license, Jim visited a group home where Dustin Watkins had eventually been placed. They believed he was James Watkins, Dustin’s brother. For years, Jim visited Dustin as James Watkins, while he earned a GED, an associate degree in criminology, and became a police officer as James Brady.”

  “Don’t tell me he visited Dustin because he felt guilty or responsible for the fact that he was so badly burned in the fire,” Zelda asserted. “I won’t believe it.”

  “No. Dustin said Jim visited him for help with numbers. When Diane asked what kind of help, Dustin said ‘numbers to win guessing games.’”

  “He meant gambling, didn’t he?” Zelda asked.

  “Yes, he did,” Rikki replied.

  “That’s a believable reason for a man like Jim to take an interest in the Numbers Man,” Melody added as she passed the pizza around again. Billie would have loved it, but he was having dinner with Brandy and her family. We’d taken his absence as an opportunity to untangle the twisted vines of the Watkins-Lincoln family ties and bring closure to a mystery forty years in the making.

  “I’m not sure that was his original reason for visiting Dustin. He may have just been interested in finding out what Dustin remembered or believed about the circumstances surrounding his family’s deaths. Anyway, Jim brought cards and taught Dustin how to play hearts, and when Dustin ‘learned fast,’ he moved on to blackjack and poker. He got permission to take Dustin on outings, picked up Dustin, and took him to tribal casinos where, from what we’ve learned, Jim often won big.” That was Dahlia chiming in. She’d been relatively quiet and on her best behavior tonight—so far.

  “Dustin didn’t mind being seen in the casino?” I asked.

  “No,” Diane said as she jumped into the conversation. “In fact, he was often treated special because he was different—his behavior as well as his appearance.”

  “Eventually, when Dustin turned eighteen, Jim moved him out of the group home and brought him back to the Calistoga area. By then, Jim had used some of his winnings to purchase the Watkins’ property, hiding his ownership behind the LLC. He’d fixed up the shack for Dustin, and parked his pricy Camaro there most of the time, covering it with a tarp.”

  “When did he move the body of Mrs. Watkins into the grave with her daughter?” Carrie asked.

  “What I want to know is why?” Judy added.

  “He was still manipulating Dustin by using the old threats that his sister would get out and kill again if Dustin didn’t keep watch. Dustin suggested she might rest better if her mother was with her. At some point, Jim dug up Mrs. Watkins’ body from where her sister had buried her in a small family plot on the property, and moved her to Molly’s gravesite.”

  “That’s gross,” Melody said. “I can’t believe Jim would have done that to make Dustin feel better. What was really going on?”

  “Penney Lincoln’s what was going on,” Dahlia replied. “Jim was on patrol in his cruiser and picked her up one night for being out after curfew. When he dropped her at home, we think Bud must have recognized him, and maybe Penney overheard her stepdad talking to someone about it.”

  “How?” I asked wondering if that’s what had happened to Rachel Lincoln the day that she’d fainted onstage. Jim had been sitting in a front-row seat near the stage.

  “He has a birthmark on his left hand that’s distinctive. We asked his great aunt about it, and she said it’s common among the Lincoln men. That could have caught Bud’s attention,” Diane replied.

  “If Penney’s stepdad also had the same mark on his hand, maybe that’s all it took for her to put two and two together. Unless Jim tells us, we may never know for sure. Dustin said she called Jim ‘Uncle Link,’ which made Jim angry.”

  “That could be the incident my informant in prison witnessed right before Penney Lincoln went missing. Jim was in the Camaro, though, not his police cruiser,” Austin added. “It’s possible Rachel Lincoln wasn’t lying when she said she thought someone else was driving the Camaro.”

  “Why did she lie to her mother?” Jesse asked.

  “Dustin said she told the Sitter she needed money,” Dahlia replied.

  “If she was blackmailing Uncle Link, telling her mother would have let the cat out of the bag,” I suggested.

  “Yep. She knew him as Officer Jim Brady, so that’s how she must have contacted him. He tried to keep his identity hidden by switching to the Camaro when he picked Penney up at school and again later at her home,” Dahlia asserted.

  “It’s no wonder he was angry when my informant saw him chewing Penney out,” Austin added. “That couldn’t have been too long before she was killed.”

  “You must be right,” Rikki said. “Except for the deaths of the Watkins couple in the fire, the crime lab hasn’t pinned down the exact dates the others were killed. Even in Ms. Wainwright’s case, she was missing for days before her body was dumped in the drainpipe. So, it’s hard to pinpoint when Penney Lincoln was killed in relation to the informant’s testimony. I wouldn’t be surprised if Jim started up the scary talk about bodies rising from the grave because he had a body, or planned to have a new body, to dump.”

  “So that’s the 1999 murder,” I said, sighing deeply. “I’m guessing Ms. Wainwright became a problem for Jim when she discovered she was pregnant.”

  “That plus Lydia Wainwright had also seen Jim behind the wheel of the Camaro. According to Dustin, ‘she liked numbers, too,’ and they’d met at one of the casinos. The two of them were seen several times when they spent the weekend together at a casino farther south. Without Dustin, Jim didn’t do so well.”

  “Amazingly, they were able to keep their affair secret,” Julie commented. “She wouldn’t have been able to do that much longer since she was pregnant.”

  “Making their relationship public would have been risky for Jim, too. Lydia had discovered his ‘double life’ as a gambler with expensive tastes,” I said. “He was trapped again.”

  “Yes, and he got in deeper and deeper each time he came up against a situation in which he found himself trapped,” Rikki observed.

  “So, what about the unidentified victim with Lincoln family DNA?” I asked.

  “Jim’s elderly aunt says she’s a great-niece who disappeared after visiting the area. Bud Lincoln was still alive then, and the aunt said she’d gone to Calistoga to see Bud and Rachel. When her great aunt called to ask about her whereabouts, Bud and Rachel told her that she must have decided to visit San Francisco instead of going home because they got a postcard from her,” Diane said.

  “A postcard sent from San Francisco would have been easy enough for Jim to fake,” I groused.

  “Yes, and Jim’s aunt said that’s what they thought she’d done at first. Eventually, even though it went against their beliefs, the aunt insisted that they file a missing person report with the San Francisco County Sheriff’s Department,” Rikki said.

  “As you can imagine, that went nowhere,” Austin added.

  “We’re still not clear how it happened—maybe Bud mentioned they had another relative in the area and she looked Jim up. Dustin says a new girl showed up with Jim at the old Watkins’ place. Dustin was confused about it because her name was Lincoln, and she called his mother Lincoln and Jim Lincoln instead of Jim Brady. ‘Too many Lincolns until Jim told him it was his sister in disguise, trying to confuse them. Anyway, that was the last anyone reported having seen the young woman.”

  “Poor Dustin. What’s going to happen to him?” Melody asked.

  “He’s been given a thorough physical exam and is being evaluated by a psychiatrist. I doubt he’ll be regarded as fit to serve as a witness against Jim Brady, but we have plenty of evidence to convict Jim without Dustin’s testimony. We found the murder weapon hidden in the shack.”

  “Was he trying to pin the murders on Dustin?” C
arrie asked Dahlia.

  “He may have convinced himself he could do that, but who knows? There’s other evidence, including DNA, to tie Jim to the victims. Maybe if this had all ended differently, he could have tampered with the evidence to set Dustin up. You made that impossible once you found the bodies, Lily.”

  “Jim made it clear he didn’t approve when I caught him glaring at me from the dark. What’s amazing is that he could be so calm and civil—smiling and joking even—sitting in our kitchen or dining room while wanting to kill me.”

  “Dustin warned you he had a bright and shiny face,” Judy reminded me. “He was good at playing the mild-mannered, good-natured local police officer.”

  “I know. Thank goodness Dustin decided not to let Jim hurt Billie or me, and trusted us enough to show us how to help. Although, Austin and his guys probably could have rescued Billie without us.”

  “Probably?” Austin asked. “Who arrived moments after you did, avoided Jim’s trap, and disarmed the bomb?”

  “You and your posse,” I responded. “Dustin thought he’d stopped the countdown rather than resetting it. Will the prosecutors’ office file any charges against Dustin?”

  “If he’s judged unfit to testify, I doubt they’ll find him fit to be bound over as a defendant even if they could figure out what offenses to charge him with,” Dahlia responded, stretching her arms above her head.

  “He’s paid dearly as Jim nearly killed him, abused, manipulated, and kept him confined in the woods for most of his life,” Judy said.

  “Dustin is going to be placed into the disability service system where he’ll get case manager coordinate his care,” Diane added. “I’m not sure he’ll ever be allowed to live on his own, but you’ll be able to visit him.”

  “As long as he gets to spend some time in the woods, he’ll be okay,” I murmured, wondering what we could do to make that happen.

  “A toast!” I said, jumping up from my seat and picking up my glass of wine. “To closing the case before the case closed the curtain on the Calla Lily Players—before it ever went up. The show must go on!”