1 A Small Case of Murder (21 page)

“You know, one of my biggest concerns when I became a parent was that one of my children would grow up to become a delinquent.”

Dressed in the dark green uniform of the West Virginia State police, Joshua paced the kitchen in the deserted farm-house. His children were lined up across the center of the floor in wobbly, kitchen table chairs.

“But never, in my wildest imagination, did I ever dream that it would happen to all of them.” He paused to glare at each of them, one at a time. “You have in one week gone from trespassing into a cemetery to assaulting a police officer.”

They looked over to the kitchen table where Tad and Jan were administering first aid to the scratches on Sheriff Sawyer’s face. His right eye was already swelling from Tracy’s punch.

Sarah defended herself as best she could. “Tracy was the one who punched him.”

Tad and Jan smirked at each other. “Curt, you didn’t tell us it was a girl who beat you up,” Tad snickered.

“If you tell anyone that, I’ll really kill you.” Sheriff Sawyer suppressed a cry when Tad touched one of the scratches with antiseptic.

“Sorry, I left my medical bag at home. I have to use this old first aid kit I found in the cabinet, and it doesn’t have everything.”

“What are you kids doing here?” Joshua turned back to his children.

“Sheriff Sawyer brought us,” Donny answered with a grin in an attempt at humor.

Joshua didn’t fall for it. “You’re supposed to be at the beach.”

“Would you believe we took a wrong turn?” Sarah also failed to make him smile.

“We didn’t want to go to the beach,” J.J. told him. “We wanted to be with you.”

“We already discussed that,” Joshua countered.

“And you decided that we were going to go on vacation, and you would join us later.” J.J. said.

“It was my decision to make. I’m the father.”

“But after Mom died, you also decided that you were going to leave the Navy because you wanted us all to be together,” J.J. reminded him. “Well, how can we all be together if you send us away?”

Joshua said, “That was totally different. My decision to leave the Navy was because I am the only parent you have left to raise you.”

“And you still are,” Murphy said.

“I know this is none of my business,” Tad interjected, “but your father sent you away for your own safety, and the completion of this operation we got ourselves into.”

“Which is what?” J.J. asked. “Faking your death?” He observed the police uniform.

“Faking a hit.” Joshua pointed to Curtis Sawyer, who now held an ice pack made of cubes wrapped in a torn, yellowed dishtowel to his swollen eye. “Believe it or not, our sheriff is one of the good guys. He’s been working with the feds since before he was elected.”

“You kids were right,” the sheriff told them. “It’s common knowledge that Rawlings controls all the drugs in the valley. His empire is small potatoes compared to the big cities, and that’s why the big dealers don’t try to muscle in on his turf, but it’s still lucrative. The reverend has such a ‘holier than thou’ reputation that he’s above reproach by those in high places. His granddaughter was the front man.”

This was Jan’s first opportunity to interview the sheriff. “Vicki was only seventeen years old. If he’s been a major drug dealer for generations, then who did it before her?”

“His daughter Bridgette. And before her, it was Sheriff Delaney, who had punks working for him. After Sheriff Delaney died, the feds saw their opportunity to get a man on the inside. Since my mother is their maid, my bosses thought I already had a foot in the door. So, I came home from the service,” the sheriff held up his fingers in the form of quotation marks, “and worked my way into the reverend’s confidence.”

“Wait a minute,” J.J. interrupted. “If Rawlings is a small-time operator in drugs compared to the big city dealers, then why do the feds even care? Shouldn’t they be going after the big drug dealers?”

Sawyer was impressed by J.J.’s perceptive intellect. “Good question. Yes, Rawlings is small potatoes compared to the dealers we haven’t been able to touch, but his suppliers are big potatoes.”

Jan wasn’t so impressed. “So the feds are looking to nail him so that they can offer him immunity from prosecution in exchange for rolling over on his suppliers. What about all the people he’s had killed throughout the years?”

“I won’t be offering him any deals,” the sheriff said in his defense. “My job is to bust him the best way I know how.”

Joshua chose this moment to confirm a suspicion. “It was your bosses who got the admiral to get the military records released to me on Private Rice.”

Curtis Sawyer admitted, “I’m no JAG lawyer. After I read Lulu’s letter and those fingerprints on that John Doe showed that he had been in Leavenworth, I knew that Rawlings and Rice had a military connection. Rice had been convicted for stealing government property to sell on the black market. Maybe Rawlings used to be one of Penn’s Hong Kong connections and, after Rice read about the great Reverend Rawlings and his church in that magazine, he came to Chester to blackmail him. Imagine what would have happened to the reverend’s church if Rice leaked to his congregation that their leader used to be a common thief stealing from our own government.”

“That’s a thought,” Joshua said. “But we can’t prove that Rawlings had anything to do with Penn, Rice, or the black market. According to the military records, Rawlings had no way of knowing any of them.”

The sheriff asserted, “Rice and Rawlings knew each other somehow. Rice tore that article out of that magazine and came to Chester for a reason. Now, Thornton, my people told me that if anyone can put this together, you can. After all the trouble we went through to get those military records released to you, you can’t go stupid on us now.”

“You’ve been working on this a long time,” Tad said to Curt.

“A very long time,” Curtis Sawyer suppressed a groan while the doctor worked on his wounds. “And this is the first time in my whole career I’ve ever gotten injured in the line of duty.”

“Did the reverend hire you to kill Dad?” Tracy confirmed their earlier suspicion.

“He didn’t actually hire me. I believe he ordered it, but it was Wally Rawlings who paid me half of five thousand dollars to kill both your father and Dr. MacMillan. I get the rest tomorrow. The only problem is the son didn’t actually say it was the reverend’s orders and his father was never present for any of the meetings. So far, I only have enough to get Wally.”

Joshua was more confident. “That may be enough to get him to roll over on his father. Loyalty isn’t one of Wally’s strong suits.”

“When did you set this all up?” Murphy wanted to know.

Tad explained, “The sheriff contacted your dad as soon as he was contracted to do the job. Josh told me what was going down.”

“This was already set up when he caught you kids at the cemetery,” Joshua said. “That gave me the perfect excuse to send you away and out of danger.”

“But why send us away?” Sarah asked.

“What have you kids been through in the last hour?” Joshua responded with a question.

“An emotional roller coaster,” Tracy answered.

Sheriff Sawyer told them, “Even if you were in on it, we couldn’t be sure with all of you that you wouldn’t confide in a friend, who would tell his or her friend, who would tell someone, who would tell the Rawlings. His church has hundreds of members, who are everywhere, who think he’s the holiest thing since the pope.”

“If one of them warned Rawlings, then Sheriff Sawyer would be killed and someone else would be hired to finish the job he was hired to do.” Joshua said, “I’ve seen it happen. I knew a guy in Naval Intelligence who was undercover. A friend of his wife saw him in a shopping mall with his target, a terrorist suspect. She didn’t know he was undercover and started asking about his wife and the kids and an upcoming barbecue. They both got bullets in the brain. I don’t mean to be blunt, but that’s the mentality we are dealing with here. In an operation as delicate as this, the less who know the better.”

“I didn’t even know about it until Sheriff Sawyer walked in with a gun pointed at us,” Jan told them. “I about peed my pants.”

Joshua gestured towards her while he told his children, “There’s someone else who wouldn’t do what she was told. So, we had to improvise.”

“All the more material for my book,” the journalist grinned.

“I thought it was an article for the paper,” Tad said.

“Hey, I’ve been killed in a professional hit. Do you think I’m going to confine myself to The Review? I scooped Tess Bauer. I wish you guys could have stopped off to let me get my laptop.”

Joshua turned apologetic towards his children, who were still lined up in their chairs. “I meant for you to find out about this after it was all over. Carol was going to tell you tomorrow morning.”

The kids hung their heads. J.J. offered an apology. “Dad, I don’t know what to say. We really blew it this time, huh?”

Sheriff Sawyer let them off the hook. “Maybe you didn’t. Maybe you sealed it. The news people got everything, and you can be sure it will be all over the news. You kids really believed your father was dead, so your reaction was genuine.”

The sheriff told Joshua, “If Rawlings got suspicious about you sending your kids off right before the hit went down, their reactions in front of Tess’s cameras would certainly do away with it. That meant you didn’t suspect anything and letting them find out that way—” He shook his head with a wicked laugh. “What kind of father would do that to his kids?”

“So we didn’t blow it?” Sarah grinned hopefully.

“You’re still grounded for life,” Joshua said.

“What do we do now?” Murphy slipped an arm around his shoulders. “Start making funeral arrangements?”

Joshua slipped his arm from his shoulders. “This will be over as soon as Sheriff Sawyer arrests Wally and, hopefully, Reverend Rawlings, when he pays him off. For now, you’re going to go home, call Aunt Carol and tell her what you did, and say nothing to anyone.”

Jan had other questions for Sheriff Sawyer. “I can understand why Wally wanted Josh killed, but why Tad?”

“Only that he hated him.” The sheriff squinted at Tad. “Interesting thing, MacMillan. Wally says he wasn’t Vicki’s real father. He says you were.”

“No, I’m not. Cindy and I never slept together. In a week, you’ll get the test results from my DNA to prove it.”

“Well, we’ll find that out.” Sheriff Sawyer drawled, “But if you aren’t Vicki’s father, and Wally is telling the truth, then we’ve got an interesting twist in this case. He swore to me that he never consummated his marriage to Vicki’s mother.”

“Hot damn!” Jan scribbled on her stationary pad. “This is more than a book. It’s a movie!. I wonder if they’ll get Drew Barrymore to play me.”

“How much do you want to bet Reverend Rawlings will claim it was Immaculate Conception?” Murphy said.

Sheriff Sawyer cracked, “With Vicki Rawlings, the devil himself would have had to have been the father.”

Joshua was in deep thought when he murmured, “Maybe he was.”

Chapter Eighteen

“I wasn’t Vicki’s father,” Tad reasserted after the sheriff left to take Joshua’s kids home.

They were reading Dr. Wilson’s files by the dim light from the overhead lamp above the kitchen table. Tad had put the trunk into the patrol car before being ‘murdered’.

“Keep saying it. Maybe we’ll start to believe it,” Jan said. “I remember how you two used to hang out together. It was like the princess and the frog.”

“Don’t worry,” Joshua assured him. “Your DNA tests will prove everything. The only problem is that it’ll be at least a week before we get them and we need to know the results now.”

“What woman in the tri-state area have you not slept with?” Jan asked Tad with a giggle.

“You,” he answered.

“Why would he lie?” Joshua sat back in his chair with his arms folded across his chest.

Jan struggled to come up with an answer to the query. “Why should we believe him?”

“Because Tad has no reason to lie about it,” he pointed out. “Think about it. You pointed out that Tad MacMillan has the reputation of having slept with every woman in the tri-state area. He’s had a reputation of being a stud since the day he lost his virginity, and he’s never done anything to dispute it.”

She agreed, “He likes people thinking he’s a rogue.”

“Better than being frigid,” Tad chuckled at his biting insult to the proper journalist.

Joshua interrupted her defense. “My point is that it would only improve his reputation as a stud if he bedded the virginal Cindy Welch. Just think. Here we have a stud so virile that not only does he seduce the valley’s virgin queen, but he sires her baby after she is newly wed to the son of the valley’s most prominent citizen.” He laughed quietly, “Talk about a notch in your belt.”

She countered, “Tad admits that he loved Cindy. Maybe he cared enough about her to not want to ruin her reputation.” When the thought struck her, she added, “Or maybe he cared enough about his hide to not want Wally to kill him for sleeping with his wife!”

“Wally assumed Tad slept with her anyway, and he’s lived this long,” Joshua said.

“Until he hired Sawyer to kill us,” Tad said.

Joshua surmised, “Most likely the reverend ordered Wally to have me killed to stop the investigation, and Wally had become so consumed with hatred for you that he decided to throw you in on the contract as a favor for himself.”

Returning to the subject of Tad’s claim of innocence, Joshua shook his head at Jan. “No, for Tad to lie about being Vicki’s father doesn’t make sense. He had the reputation before he even met Cindy. It only improved his reputation for people to think that the virtuous Cindy Welch gave in to his animal magnetism and fell in love with him.

“Ah!” Joshua sighed mockingly, “Tad MacMillan must be some man for a woman of Cindy Welch’s purity to give in to him.”

“Give me a break,” Jan said.

Joshua continued, “What I want to know is why Wally would lie about being Vicki’s birth father?”

“Because he hated her,” she answered.

“Then why not simply disown her? It isn’t like he didn’t have the heart to do that.”

Tad suggested, “Maybe his father forbade it.”

“Rawlings didn’t forbid Wally from publicizing it both to me and the sheriff that he didn’t have a loving relationship with his wife and she bore another man’s child?” Joshua said, “I doubt it. Why make up a lie about sleeping with Cindy and claim that Tad is Vicki’s father? Could it be because it’s true that he never consummated his marriage? Therefore, someone else has to be Vicki’s father.”

Jan suggested a solution to find out the answer to their questions. “Why not get a DNA test from Wally? That will prove if he was, or wasn’t, Vicki’s father. Besides, what does it matter if he isn’t?”

Joshua confessed, “Because DNA evidence left on the scene proved to come from Vicki’s half sister. If Wally isn’t her father, then we’re not looking for one of his offspring by another relationship.” He added, “To answer your question about why we don’t get DNA evidence from Wally, his lawyer said no. Since he has an alibi, there’s no probable cause for a warrant.”

“Who else could be Vicki’s father except Tad?” she asked.

Tad mused, “If Wally isn’t Vicki’s father, then that would eliminate Alexis Hitchcock as a suspect.”

“Who’s Alexis Hitchcock?” Jan wanted to know. Her eyes widened when Tad gave her a rundown about Wally’s illegitimate family that had disappeared.

Joshua sorted the brown envelopes into two separate files. “Doc Wilson has the patient files for all of the Rawlings here. There has to be a reason he wanted us to read them.” He shuf-fled through the folders. “Here’s Vicki’s.” He asked Tad, “Was it before or after Wilson died that Vicki started harassing you?”

“After.” He added in a low voice, “Soon after.”

Joshua made a “Hmm” noise before he returned to the stack of files. “We also have Bridgette’s file, and Hal Poole’s.”

“Hal was living in the same house as Cindy,” Jan reminded them. “Maybe the two of them formed some sort of alliance that led to other things.”

“Let me see Wally’s file.” Tad reached for Vicki’s folder and opened it up.

Joshua laid out Wally’s and Vicki’s folders open next to each other. The doctor checked one fact before asking for Cindy’s file.

“What are you looking at?” Jan peered at the papers on the other side of the table in an attempt to read them upside down.

Tad replied, “I’m using the old-fashioned way to find out if Wally is telling the truth about not being Vicki’s father.”

“Vicki’s blood type was A positive. She was RH positive.” Joshua suspected he knew what information Tad was studying.

“Cindy was O, RH negative.” Tad moved his finger over to Wally’s folder. “Wally was A RH negative.” He looked up at them and said, “Wally couldn’t be Vicki’s father, not if she was RH positive. One of her parents would’ve had to have been RH positive. Since Cindy was negative, then it had to come from the father.”

“Wally must have been telling the truth about never con-summating the marriage,” Joshua concluded. “You said Cindy confessed her love for you on their wedding night.”

“Whoa!” Jan breathed, “What a damper to hand your husband on your honeymoon.”

Joshua agreed. “For a man of Wally’s ego, that had to be like driving a stake through his balls.” He said to Tad, “If Wally was telling us the truth about never sleeping with Cindy, and she confessed to loving you, then it would be natural for him to assume you were the baby’s father when she got pregnant.”

The doctor laid his hand on Vicki Rawlings’ patient file. “Doc Wilson had to have known the second he saw the results of Vicki’s blood tests that Wally wasn’t the father. Like Wally, he probably assumed that I was.” He answered their unasked question. “I’m A positive and Wilson knew it. Theoretically, I could have been Vicki’s father, but I’m not.”

“Then that leaves only one other option. Cindy had to have been with someone else,” Joshua said. “Someone who has RH positive blood factor, who also fathered another child that was on the scene when Beth was killed.” He asked his two companions, “Am I correct in assuming that you both, having known Cindy, are in agreement that she didn’t have another child that no one knows about? That she’s not the common parent between Vicki and the suspect we’re looking for?”

“Impossible,” Jan answered. “Cindy led a very public life. She was the princess of Rawlings’ church. She was their lead vocalist and the leader of the women’s group. If she got pregnant, other than when she was pregnant with Vicki, everyone would have known about it.”

Joshua said, “That’s what I thought.”

“What about Hal Poole? Who would blame him if he had a mistress or two?” Jan suggested. “Bridgette treats him like crap. Cindy was so sweet. They probably got together to give each other strength. Vicki could have been Hal’s and who’s to say that Hal didn’t have another bastard child from someone else.”

“Hal Poole? I don’t think so,” Tad said.

“He may be a wuss in public, but you never know what a man is like behind closed doors,” she argued. “If Hal and Cindy were having a love affair and Bridgette found out about it, then he would stand to lose a whole lot. Bridgette is the one with the money. That would give Hal motive to kill Cindy.”

When he considered the scenario, Tad shook his head with a knowing smile. “From what I heard, Wally and Cindy weren’t the only Rawlings couple that never consummated their marriage.”

Joshua smiled. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

Tad’s chuckle turned to laughter.

“He’s kidding.” Jan wasn’t amused by what she considered to be his sick sense of humor.

Tad said, “I heard from a former church member and friend of Hal’s that Bridgette convinced her groom that sex, other than to make babies, was a sin. Now, they have no children. You tell me.”

Joshua asked, “Why would she marry him if—”

“Because her daddy ordered it,” Tad replied. “The Poole family is a big supporter of the Rawlings’ church, both financially and politically. By political I mean that since early in Reverend Rawlings’ ministry Hal’s parents have brought a lot of people into the church and a lot of Rawlings’ followers follow the Pooles. If the Poole family left, it’s safe to say that a large portion of the congregation would go with them, along with a dependable source of income. If Bridgette had turned down Hal’s proposal, do you think his family would have continued attending their church?”

Jan screwed up her face in disgust. “So Bridgette married a man she didn’t love, and then manipulated his little pea brain to keep him from touching her? Those two deserve each other.”

Tad’s shoulders shook while he chuckled. “Now you know why I find it so laughable for you to suggest that Cindy would have an affair with him.”

Joshua’s ringing cell phone interrupted the debate. His watch said that it was near midnight. Sheriff Sawyer was calling to report that the children were home safe, and he had already spoken to Wallace Rawlings, who assured him that he could pick up his money in the prosecuting attorney’s office at ten o’clock in the morning.

Joshua found it ironic that a hit man was picking up his pay off for two murders in the prosecutor’s office. He hung up the phone and looked at his partners in crime.

“Ten o’clock tomorrow it will all be over,” Jan sighed.

Joshua studied the tips of his fingers in the dim light. “No, I expect at ten o’clock tomorrow, it will be just beginning.”