But Not Fortuitous

by BJ Bourg

  Leah paused to take a breath. When she continued, the words flowed like music that had been rehearsed religiously.

  “Thirty years ago almost to the day—the robbery occurred on July 13—Bud and his partner were returning from a trip to southern Utah. As was his habit, he stopped in at his favorite video store in Windrift to return a tape and get a new one. According to his partner, Winona Munday, this was routine.”

  “I hate to interrupt you,” I said, “but his body was dug up on Monday night, which was July 13. That’s thirty years to the date of your robbery.”

  Leah grunted. “Huh, I wonder what it means.”

  I apologized for interrupting and asked her to continue.

  “Bud was twice married and each marriage ended in divorce. The first marriage lasted as long as it took for them to drive home from the wedding, but the second went on for ten years. They had one child together—a daughter—and they divorced when she graduated from kindergarten.”

  “That sucks,” I muttered, considering my own daughter and how she would feel if Susan and I divorced when she turned five. It would be horrible.

  “According to Winona, Bud spent most of his time watching movies. He watched them much faster than they could be produced, so he often rented the same movies over and over. She said they stopped at the video store in Windrift at least once a week for him to drop off a handful of movies and get a handful of new ones. She said he was never inside the store for more than twenty minutes, but on this day, he had been inside for at least thirty minutes when she began to get worried that they would get in trouble for taking too long.”

  “Were they supposed to check in when they made stops along their route?”

  “They weren’t allowed to make stops except for at the designated pickup points, and the video store wasn’t a designated pickup point,” Leah said. “They could’ve gotten in trouble for stopping at the video store. Winona, who was a single mother of two little girls, was afraid to get fired, so she dared not call it in. She needed her job to support her kids.”

  Amy grunted to let us know she understood how Winona must’ve felt.

  “After waiting thirty minutes, Winona decided to leave the truck—a cardinal sin—to check on Bud. The company’s rule is that one person must always remain in the truck, but Bud had left his radio in the truck and she couldn’t reach him.” She let out a chuckle that was devoid of happiness. “It’s hard to imagine now, but they didn’t have cell phones back in those days, so she had to leave the truck to get him.”

  “Yeah, I actually remember a time when we had payphones and beepers,” I said longingly. “Now I’m more attached to my cell phone than I’d like to admit.”

  “Aren’t we all?” Leah asked. “Anyway, Winona figured Bud was having a hard time making a selection, so she took the keys and hurried inside. She said there were no other vehicles in the parking lot and she hadn’t seen a car pass on the highway in over ten minutes, so she figured she’d make a quick run inside to prod him along and then hurry back to the truck.” Leah sighed heavily. “Boy, was she ever wrong.”

  CHAPTER 26

  “What happened?” I asked when Leah was quiet for a long moment.

  “It’s probably the most gruesome crime scene I’ve ever visited.” Leah took another deep breath. “She said that when she went through the door, she was temporarily blinded by the darkness inside the room. Once her eyes adjusted, she saw Bud standing behind the counter. She said he had a strange look in his eyes and his shirt was unbuttoned. She asked him what he was doing behind there, but he didn’t answer. He just turned his gaze to the floor behind the counter. Telling him they had to hurry and get back to work, Winona walked to the counter and looked down. The first thing she noticed was that Bud was naked from the waist down. His uniform pants and underwear were down by his feet and his gun was in his hand.”

  “Were his uniform pants navy blue?” I asked. “The pants on our skeletal remains appeared to be navy blue.”

  “That’s them. When Winona turned to see what Bud was looking at, she saw the video store clerk lying wide-eyed on her back. She said she thought the worker was alive and only scared, but when she didn’t blink after a long moment, she knew the girl was dead. The young girl was also naked and she had three gunshot wounds to her torso—two in her left breast and one in her stomach.”

  “Oh, wow, our skeletal remains had four spent casings in the cylinder of his revolver,” I mused aloud. “Three to your victim and one to his head, perhaps?”

  “I...yeah, I mean, I guess that’s possible.” Leah suddenly sounded choked up. “That young girl—Rebecca was her name—she was only seventeen, you know? She was set to graduate the following year. I knew her. I’d rented from her before. This job is never easy when you’re faced with a scene like that, but when it’s someone you know, it’s…”

  Leah’s voice trailed off.

  “Yeah,” I said softly, thinking back to the scene that had unfolded years ago when my first wife and daughter had been killed. I shuddered involuntarily. “I know what you mean. It’s a heart-stopper.”

  “That’s a good way to put it.” I thought I detected a sniffle from the other end of the call, but she cleared her throat and pressed on. “Winona was frightened, as you can imagine. Her first instinct was to run out of that place screaming, but she figured it would get her shot in the back, so she stood calmly and asked Bud what was going on. He didn’t say a word. He just pulled up his pants and told her they had to leave. She figured it would be safer for her if she could get outside in the public view, so she turned to walk out the door. She said she didn’t see him move, but he was on her fast—before she could reach the door and before she had a chance to draw her gun.”

  “He attacked her?”

  “Oh, yeah, he brutalized her. It was one of the more severe beatings I’ve seen.”

  “Did he sexually assault her?”

  “No, he beat her to within an inch of her life. Both of her eyes were swollen shut. He broke her jaw and her nose. Her arm was fractured, three ribs cracked, and he stomped her in the groin, fracturing her pelvis. She…she said she began to think—”

  Leah quit talking abruptly. After a few seconds, she apologized. “No matter how many times I tell her story, I get choked up on this part. While Bud Walker was trying to beat her to death, she wasn’t thinking about herself or the trauma she was enduring. She was thinking about her girls. She was wondering who would take care of them if she died. She said she could see them at her funeral, crying and heartbroken. She didn’t want to break their hearts by dying, so she decided she would live.”

  I sat there transfixed, frowning deeply. It was all too reminiscent of the beating Susan had taken a few months ago. The emotional wounds were all too fresh.

  “What did she do?” The words that spilled from my mouth sounded like it came from someone else’s voice.

  “She knew that if she ever wanted to see her girls again, she would have to convince Bud to stop beating her. And the only way that would happen was if she was dead, so she died. She closed her eyes and went limp, playing dead. Although she was writhing in pain on the inside, she held her breath and kept a relaxed expression on her face. It worked. He saw her go limp and stopped a few seconds later. He hit her one last time to check for a response. That’s the blow that cracked her pelvis. She said it was the most excruciating pain she’d ever endured, but she’s alive today because of it.”

  “Wow,” I said, glancing over at Amy. Her jaw was set and her fists were clinched. I knew that if Bud Walker hadn’t already been dead, Amy would’ve quickly made it happen.

  “Yeah, it was horrible,” Leah said. “She was in the hospital for over a month and spent another six months in rehab. She’s been seeing a therapist ever since, but the pain in her eyes has never faded.”

  “Do you still talk to her?”

  “Every now and then she’ll drop by the police department to see if we have any leads. The armored car company had put out a
reward for his capture and the police department doubled it. Some business people from town also put up a separate reward, but we haven’t gotten as much as a single bullshit lead. It’s been complete radio silence since the day it happened.”

  “Was the truck left at the scene?” Amy asked, leaning forward to speak directly into the mic on the phone.

  “No, it was abandoned near a canyon about twenty miles outside of town,” Leah explained. “It was located three days after the murder by a couple of teenagers who were fishing in the area. It had been doused with gasoline and set afire. We might’ve found it earlier had it been burned near a neighborhood, but it was burned in a desolate area. There was no one around to see the smoke.”

  “How was the crime discovered?” Amy wanted to know.

  “Well, the truck was reported missing ten minutes after four when it didn’t show up at company headquarters. Since the stop at the video store was unauthorized, no one thought to check there until about five o’clock, when the owner showed up to change out the register. That’s when he found Rebecca dead on the floor and Winona lying in a pool of blood, barely breathing.” Leah paused to tell someone in the background to give her a minute, that she was still on the phone with the detectives from Louisiana. “If the manager had been a few hours later, he might not have made it in time. The ambulance arrived within minutes and rushed Winona to the hospital. She had already been transported by the time I arrived. I didn’t get to interview her for about a week.”

  “Is it safe to assume your medical examiner completed a sex crimes kit on Rebecca?” I asked, wondering how difficult crime fighting was back in those days. There had been rapid technological advances in the eighteen years since I’d first joined the ranks of law enforcement—especially in the area of DNA—and I couldn’t imagine what things might have been like twelve years before that time.

  “Yes,” she said. “About fifteen years ago, I requested that the DNA samples from the crime scene and from the victim be entered into CODIS, but we haven’t had any hits yet.”

  “The lab will be entering the DNA from the weapon we recovered and from tissue that was scraped from Bud’s bones,” I said. “Hopefully it’ll match up to your case.”

  “God, I hope so. It would be nice to put this case to rest before I retire.”

  I pursed my lips, lost in thought. Finally, I asked, “Detective, do you think Bud planned this as a robbery and just killed Rebecca and tried to kill Winona as an afterthought? Or do you think his attack on Rebecca was a spur of the moment thing, done in the heat of the moment, and the robbery was the afterthought?”

  “Hmm, that’s a good question. I’ve always figured the entire ordeal was planned, from beginning to end. I also thought he must’ve had an accomplice, because I thought it was impossible for him to have escaped the area of the burned truck on foot. I strongly believe someone gave him a ride, especially since he lit off with two million dollars in cash. There’s no way he lugged that on his back.” She grunted. “Several of my colleagues argued the point, saying there was no way he had an accomplice. They argued that it’s harder for two people to keep a secret than it is for one, and that it had to be a one-man operation and that the one man had kept his mouth shut. However, in light of what you’ve found, I’d say they were wrong. His accomplice must’ve gotten greedy.”

  “I’m sure you know the old mafia adage,” I commented dryly. “Three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead.”

  CHAPTER 27

  I had a lot of questions for Detective Leah Anderson. I began by asking her if they had developed any additional suspects.

  “No, not a one. We dug deep into Bud’s past, but we couldn’t find a single person who might have acted in congress with him. He was living alone at the time. We investigated both of his ex-wives, his daughter, and every friend he’d ever had since grade school. Every person we interviewed—and there were hundreds—had an alibi.”

  I leaned back in my chair and tried to figure out what his connection to Mechant Loup might be. “In all of your interviews, did you talk to anyone from Louisiana?”

  “Nope. They were all locals. I don’t know if Bud ever left the area. According to his second wife, he never liked to travel. He just wanted to sit home and watch television. He liked movies and he was a sports fanatic. She said she couldn’t get him out of the house on the weekends and it drove her crazy. That’s part of the reason she left him. We spent years trying to figure out where a man with two million dollars would go if he never liked to travel. I guess the swamps of Louisiana are about as off-the-grid as it gets.”

  “What about other jobs?”

  “He worked construction straight out of high school and went to work for the armored car company when he was twenty-seven,” Leah said. “He never missed a shift and was always volunteering to work extra shifts. He also covered for his coworkers who had families during the holidays. By all accounts, he was a good man. I guess he just snapped.”

  “That’s some snap.” I grunted, shaking my head. A thought suddenly occurred to me and I bolted upright in my chair. “Detective Anderson, we didn’t find any money, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t down in that hole. The only reason I can think of for digging up a dead guy is if there’s something valuable in that hole. They didn’t go down there for his gun, because it was still in his holster.”

  “Are you thinking they dug him up for the money?”

  “Absolutely. Greed is a powerful motivator and two million in unmarked cash makes an enticing prize.” I drummed my fingers on the arms of my chair. “That would mean someone from Utah drove down here with him and buried him in that grave, or someone from Louisiana went up there and helped him pull the heist. What’s your best guess for a suspect from Utah?”

  “I’ve got no idea,” she said. “What about you?”

  “Not a one. Whoever killed him did it thirty years ago on private property, and the owner of the property is dead, the wife is in an assisted living home, and the son has been living in Colorado for nearly forty years.”

  “Colorado?” Leah sounded curious. “Where in Colorado?”

  “He lives in Sage County, but he works for Fairfield Brewery in Durango. His name’s Albert Boudreaux.”

  “Hmm, there might be a connection. Want me to check him out?”

  “It wouldn’t hurt, but Amy spoke with his employer and his wife while I kept him on the phone. They both verified he’s been home since February, so—even if he was the one who planted Bud down here—it couldn’t have been him who dug up the grave.”

  We were all silent for a moment, Amy and I trading glances and Leah breathing lightly on the other end. Finally, I asked her if she would show me the case file if I drove to Utah. Amy’s brow furrowed and she mouthed the word, “Drive?”

  “Sure, I’ve never filed it away,” Leah said. “It’s still in my office. But…why wouldn’t you fly? You could be here in four or five hours.”

  “I doubt our suspects would risk bringing two million in cash on an airplane.” I nodded, sure of it. “They’re on the road and they’re probably heading back to Utah. I’d have a better chance of running into them on the road than in the air.”

  “Okay, I’ll be expecting you. Meanwhile, I’ll start going through my list of witnesses from back then and making contact with them. If any of them have been on a long road trip, it should be easy to uncover.”

  I glanced at the time on my computer. It was almost eight o’clock. We had been on the phone for over an hour.

  “I’ll head out tonight,” I said, accessing the map on my computer and calculating the time and distance. “I should be there by Saturday morning.”

  Once we’d ended the call, Amy threw up her hands. “And what am I supposed to do?”

  “Can you check with every motel, hotel, and bed and breakfast in the area to see if anyone from Utah checked in within the past two weeks?” I asked. “Now that we know there’s an out-of-town link, we need to pursue that angle. Let’s hope t
hat whoever they are, they’re felons and the lab will be able to match their DNA to the flashlight and shovel through CODIS.”

  “If this happened on Monday night, why should I go back a couple of weeks?” Amy wanted to know. “If it were me, I’d roll into town the weekend before the exhumation, get what I came for, and haul ass out of Dodge.”

  “You’re probably right, but they might’ve been in town for a few days before the dig. Would you go straight to the location after thirty years of waiting, or would you put the area under surveillance first?” I waved a hand around my office. “I bet everything’s changed around here in thirty years.”

  Amy nodded. “You have a point. I’ll begin with check-out dates and work backwards from there.”

  I stood and donned a pair of gloves. Amy did the same and helped me secure the items from the wallet into separate evidence envelopes. Once that was done, we entered them into the evidence lockers and I told her I’d stay in touch during my trip.

  “You’d better,” she retorted, and led the way out into the warm evening air.

  I drove straight home with Achilles and we found Susan in the gym. She was working over the heavy bag that hung at the center of the boxing ring. Sweat flew from her arms with each punch she threw. Achilles stretched out on the concrete and watched Susan with interest. We all felt at home when Susan was working her bags.

  She must’ve sensed our presence, because she abruptly stopped and whipped around. She relaxed when she saw me standing there. She smiled and approached the ropes that surrounded the boxing ring. Draping her glistening arms over the top rope, she smiled down at us. “What’s up, love?”