1 A Small Case of Murder (28 page)

Bridgette laughed, at first out of humor. Then, her laughter took on a hysterical tone. “You can’t be serious.” She crossed the stage as if to leave.

“Are you going to tell them, sergeant?” Joshua asked the man known as a pastor.

The suspect responded in a low tone, “You can’t prove anything.”

“Who’s Sergeant Penn?” Amused, Mannings crossed his arms. 

“The man for whom Private Kevin Rice spent seven years in Leavenworth. Oh, it was beautiful plan!” Joshua said to the reverend. “I have to give you credit.”

Joshua crossed the stage as he explained the scheme. “You have to pay close attention to the details here. Sergeant Caleb Penn was in charge of the supply depot in Seoul. Rice was a private, who was simply following his sergeant’s orders when he got caught delivering stolen goods to a fence.”

He climbed down off the stage. “When the operation started falling apart after Rice was arrested, Penn shot the fence to death to make sure he didn’t turn him in, and then he staged his own death.”

So they could hear him, Joshua raised his voice while backing up the aisle towards the rear of the auditorium. “Either Penn or the master sergeant of the military police, Charles Delaney, abducted a Corporal Milton Black. Delaney, Black’s commanding officer, approved his three-day pass to go to Hong Kong. That tells me that Delaney was involved in this up to his crew cut. Black never went to Hong Kong. He was killed, and then blown up in a jeep. The body’s identification was based solely on Penn’s dog tags, which they had switched, and Delaney’s statement that he saw Penn getting into the jeep right before the explosion.”

Joshua was now at the back of the auditorium. “By then, Penn was in Hong Kong, looking for his next murder victim, to steal his identity to get back to the states.”

“Why not come back to the states as Black?” Jan called from the front row.

“Because Black still had another year to serve overseas. When he didn’t come back, Delaney reported him AWOL, and then as a deserter. He had to as his superior officer. They knew that Black would be wanted when he didn’t return. It wouldn’t be smart to keep the identity of a wanted man.”

Joshua stood behind the elderly man to continue presenting his case. “It was part of their plan. After getting to Hong Kong with Black’s ID and three-day pass, Penn had to find someone on his way home. He was in Hong Kong a month before he found the perfect victim, an army chaplain by the name of Orville Alexander Rawlings, who had his papers and was ready to leave. I imagine Penn found him in a bar the day before he was to ship out. He shot him in the head like he did the Korean fence, took his papers and dog tags, boarded the plane, came home and checked out. From sergeant to captain in less than a month. Not bad.”

“But wouldn’t someone notice he wasn’t Rawlings?” Tess wondered.

“It wasn’t that big a chance,” Joshua said. “The military is one giant bureaucracy, especially in war time. Things happen so fast.” He snapped his fingers on both hands to illustrate his point. “Most likely no one even looked at him. Plus, the odds of finding someone who actually knew Rawlings stateside, when he had served in Hong Kong, weren’t that bad.”

Mannings was no longer objecting or laughing.

Joshua continued. “Orville Rawlings did have a family. When they reported him missing after he didn’t come back home to Seattle, Washington, the military checked their paperwork, saw that Rawlings had checked out, and it went no further. It never occurred to anyone that he didn’t come back from Hong Kong.”

“You can’t prove any of this!” Bridgette shouted to the back of the auditorium.

For his response, Joshua helped the elderly man to his feet. The two of them crept up to the front of the auditorium.

The old man put on thick eyeglasses to peer up at Reverend Orville Rawlings. His lips trembled as he shook his head. He turned to Joshua and said with a weak raspy voice that shattered the silence, “No, that’s not him.”

Mannings’ arrogance gave way to concern. “Who is this?”

Joshua spoke up to the church pastor. “Would you like to introduce him, reverend?”

Sparks of fury shot from the reverend’s eyes.

“Let me introduce our guest of honor.” Joshua turned to the reverend’s lawyer. “Say hello to Felix Rawlings. He’s flown all the way here from Seattle, Washington, to see your client.” He chuckled up to the man on the stage. “This is Orville Rawlings’ brother.”

Even the reverend was unable to contain his shock at the revelation.

Joshua waited for the gasps that erupted from inside the church to subside before he resumed. “I guess the chaplain didn’t get a chance to tell you about his family before you killed him.”

Tad got out of his seat to help the elderly man to sit down. On his way to his seat, Orville Rawlings’ brother glared up at the man on the stage.

Mannings was too stunned to make any more objections.

Joshua went up onto the stage. “In Hong Kong, the body of a man listed as an American John Doe was found with a bullet in his head in an alley the day this man left. He was stripped of all identification, because Penn took everything, including his Bible. The American embassy in Hong Kong still has the slug from that murder. In the last few days, they com-pared it to the slug from the Korean fence in Seoul and found a match. The same gun was used in both murders. They will compare the John Doe’s dental records to the military’s dental records for Orville Rawlings.”

Joshua crossed the stage to stand before the man seated on his throne.

“It won’t be hard to prove you’re Penn. Even your lawyer knows that all military people are fingerprinted when they go into service. Your fingerprints will prove you’re not Orville Rawlings, but rather Master Sergeant Caleb Penn, which will prove you knew Kevin Rice, which will explain why he was in Chester with this article in his pocket.”

There was silence when Joshua handed the copy of the magazine article to Clarence Mannings while speaking to the large man glaring up him.

“Kevin Rice had spent seven years in Leavenworth for following your orders and was accused of killing you. Imagine his fury when he saw that article with your picture. Here you were a respected church pastor, making how many tens of thousands a year, while Rice was a convicted thief and suspected killer. It wouldn’t have been hard for him to figure out what you did. So, he came here to confront you, maybe even try to blackmail you, and you killed him. By then, killing was easy for you.”

“You can’t prove Rice even saw this man,” Mannings said.

“Oh, but I can.” Joshua whipped the bagged murder weapon of Wallace Rawlings from his breast pocket. “This is the proof. It’s the gun Hal Poole used to kill Wallace Rawlings. It came out of Wally’s gun collection.”

Bridgette Poole let out a shriek and covered her face.

Joshua asked the reverend, “Sergeant Penn, what happened to the gun you were issued when you joined the army?”

As the sequence of events over the years fell into place in his mind, the pastor frowned.

Joshua crossed the stage to show the gun to Bridgette Rawlings Poole. “Bridgette, what was the first gun your brother got to start his collection?” 

She peered at the gun in the bag. Her hands trembled when she touched it. She jerked her fingers away as if she had received an electric shock. “It was his thirteenth birthday. Father gave it to him.”

Joshua turned back to the reverend. “The other day, Tad, Jan Martin, and I were shot at. It wasn’t hard for me to see that whoever was shooting at us was a lousy shot. He couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn, but he could hit the broad side of a trunk.” Joshua took out the envelope containing the slug from the chest. “This slug came from this gun.”

Joshua showed the gun to the old man. “Army records show that this gun, with this serial number, was issued to Master Sergeant Caleb Penn. Ballistics would show that the slugs used to kill the Korean fence, Chaplain Orville Rawlings, Kevin Rice, your son-in-law, and your own son, all came from this same gun. Since the first three were killed before your son was even born, and you were in possession of it to give to your son, that puts the smoking gun into your hands.”

Silence hung over the church while everyone waited for the man known as Reverend Orville Rawlings to respond to the evidence.

The church pastor kept his eyes on Joshua Thornton when he raised his bulk out of his seat and crossed to the center of the stage as if to confess his guilt to everyone.

Instead of confessing, the reverend chuckled. His chuckle rose to laughter while he reached into his inside breast pocket, pulled out a gun, and shot Joshua Thornton in the chest.

Chapter Twenty-Two

The force of the impact of two bullets to the chest knocked Joshua to the floor.

When the former master sergeant turned to shoot the sheriff, he was caught in a hailstorm of bullets coming from deputies, state police, and federal agents. They had been hiding in every conceivable place since the service had ended. Considering the trail of bodies left in Caleb Penn’s wake, Joshua ensured they were prepared for anything.

Everyone dropped to the floor to hide, except for an elderly man from Seattle who stood to get a better view.

With a curse, Felix Rawlings shoved Tad away when he tried to help. With a sense of justice, Orville Rawlings’ brother smiled while he watched Penn’s body riddled with bullets. He had been waiting more than half his life for this moment, and nothing, even deadly danger, was going to rob him of it.

Bridgette Rawlings Poole and Clarence Mannings were the only ones in the chapel not expecting any violence. It took a full moment for the lawyer to realize that they were in the line of fire. Rooted center stage, Bridgette screamed hysterical demands to know what was going on. When Mannings tried to yank her off the stage, she shoved him away, which propelled him backwards into the baptismal pond.

The gunfight continued while Mannings experienced the helplessness that Eleanor Rawlings had felt in her last moments of life before he was able to pull himself up out the water only to duck back down when bullets hit the wall behind him.

The firefight lasted six seconds.

“Hold your fire!” Joshua ordered over the roar of the gunshots.

While lying flat on his back where the force of Rawlings’ shots knocked him, the prosecutor had managed to fire off two rounds from his own gun, which he had concealed in a holster strapped onto the back of his belt.

As abruptly as it started, the shooting stopped.

The auditorium was filled with quiet.

The man known as Reverend Orville Rawlings looked down at Joshua Thornton, who was sprawled on the floor at his feet.

Ready to shoot again if need be, Joshua aimed his gun

up at him. The two bullets Penn had fired into his chest had exposed the kevlar lining of a bulletproof vest.

Joshua held his breath.

“Holy shit,” the old man said before he dropped to the floor.

Dead.

Everyone in the auditorium was afraid to make the first move for fear it would be inappropriate.

Felix Rawlings had no such fear. He broke the silence with a standing ovation.

“I had no idea,” Bridgette Rawlings Poole repeated over and over again while dabbing at her eyes.

While the law enforcement officers went about the business of removing the body of the man known as Reverend Orville Rawlings from the church building he had built with his father-in-law’s money, Bridgette and her lawyer had retreated to her office located in the business wing.

Tess was gloating over witnessing the drama, while the rest of the media had to wait along with Joshua Thornton’s children in the parking lot. Seeing Joshua lead Sawyer, Tad, and Jan head back to Bridgette’s office, she ordered her camera operator to continue filming and followed.

Mannings acted appalled when Joshua knocked on his client’s office door. “Do you have to get her statement now?”

“We have another puzzle to put together.” Joshua forced his way into the office of the heir apparent to Reverend Orville Rawlings’ dynasty.

They found Bridgette Poole seated on the sofa with her feet curled up under her. Dry-eyed, she was sipping a snifter of brandy.

The prosecutor observed, “I’m glad to see that you aren’t totally incapacitated by the revelation of your family’s legacy.”

“I knew nothing about what that man did before I was born,” she argued.

“But you do know about what happened this summer.” Joshua leaned against her delicately designed red cherry desk.

“Talk to my lawyer.” She waved a hand towards Mannings, who resembled a walrus with his wet bald head and bushy mustache dripping water down his chin onto his suit.

Even though he looked at her lawyer, Joshua spoke to her. “You were the one who called the hairstylist to change your appointments before your husband’s and brother’s bodies had even been discovered.”

He took a copy of the suicide note from his breast pocket to show Mannings. “It wasn’t hard to track down what public network had been used to send this e-mail. It was sent from the courthouse’s public wi-fi network twenty minutes after our witnesses heard the two fatal gunshots.”

“Your witnesses are wrong about the time they heard the shot,” Bridgette said.

Clarence Mannings shook his head. “You can’t narrow their time of death down to twenty minutes.”

Sheriff Sawyer disagreed. “We have two witnesses who heard the shots that killed Wallace and Hal. The couple living in the house behind the school heard them. They thought it was a car backfiring, so they didn’t call the police. They were watching a movie and recall the exact point in the film when they heard them. Based on that, the cable company was able to place the time of the shots as being ten minutes after one.”

Joshua held up a sheet of paper. “This e-mail was sent at one-twenty-eight. The server confirms the time.”

Before Mannings could object further, Joshua added, “Why would Hal use his wife’s laptop to log on under his father-in-law’s password to go into the reverend’s e-mail to delete his original suicide note more than an hour after sending it from his own computer at his home? Then, why did he log off and log back on less than one minute later under his own password to recompose another suicide note to send to the reverend—all on his wife’s laptop?”

Joshua laid his hand on top of her computer, which rested in the center of her desk. “And how did that laptop get here? Who removed it from the scene and why?”

He told her, “You were there when Hal killed Wally. You put him up to it. After they were both dead, you used your father’s password to check the suicide note and found that it had something in there that you couldn’t let the police read. Our forensics people retrieved Hal’s original note from his computer—with a warrant, of course. It had been on his hard drive. Even though something’s deleted, it isn’t really gone.”

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 eyebrows 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.”