Almost Midnight (16 page)

Willie was gone, the roar from his engine trailing off into the woods, when Darrell heard the sound of a second four-wheeler coming his way, this one moving slow, forever slow. He raised the Benelli, waiting, then saw Lloyd and Frankie coming toward him, forty yards away, Lloyd driving, looking this way and that, Frankie sitting behind him holding onto his waist.

Thirty yards … twenty … 
almost, almost
 … 
now
. Darrell stepped out from behind the blind and blasted Lloyd in the left side, crumpling him into the handlebars. He shot Frankie in the chest, exploding her heart and lungs, the force of the blast bending her backward and leaving her head and arms dangling in midair. He
shot Lloyd again, in the right side this time, the slug ripping through his shoulder and out his chest, jerking him sideways and wrenching his head and upper torso out of the four-wheeler, facedown, like he was looking for something he’d dropped on the ground.

The blue four-wheeler drifted toward the creek. Darrell followed it ten or fifteen yards down the road and watched as it came to a stop in the shallow water.

Just then he heard a roar coming from the opposite direction.
It’s Willie
, he thought.
The kid must have heard the shots
.

Darrell saw Willie come around the bend and bomb across the creek, headed straight for him. He shot him in the chest from fifteen feet. The impact lifted Willie out of his seat and sent him crashing headfirst into the ground. The four-wheeler, with Willie splayed upside down over the side, his feet still tied to the front rack, rolled backward down the creek bank and nudged up against Frankie and Lloyd’s.

Darrell walked over and shot the kid in the head at point-blank range, spraying bits of brain over the creek bank and road. He turned the shotgun on Frankie and blew off the back of her head. Lloyd was next, a blast through the top of the forehead from four or five feet.

He slung the gun over his shoulder, reached across and took two gold rings, one of them diamond-studded, from Lloyd’s left hand, and a gold Pulsar watch from his wrist. He reached into Lloyd’s back jeans pocket and pulled out his wallet, a nice brown leather job, with two fighting cocks engraved on one side, and crossed spur gaffs on the other. He turned off the ignition of Frankie and Lloyd’s four-wheeler, then Willie’s, picked up some spent shell casings—
no time to look for them all
—and retrieved his pack and rifle from behind the blind. One last hurried look around
—move it, get outta here
.

Walking through the woods to Bear Creek, he paused to go through the wallet: six hundred dollars in tens, twenties, and fifties; a driver’s license; telephone, insurance, and veteran’s cards; a
Missouri game breeder’s card; a photograph of Lloyd’s youngest daughter, Retha. He removed the cards and photograph—everything but the money—and hid them under a log. He started walking again, and then thought he’d better ditch the wallet too; just hang on to the money—the money, the rings, and the watch. He spotted another log, fifteen feet from the first one, and stuffed the wallet underneath.

He walked down the creek to the bridge on U.S. 65, tied the orange ribbon to the tree he’d pointed out to Mary, then crossed under and made his way to the little logging road up by the junction of U.S. 65 and Route 176.

S
UNDAY AFTERNOON AT
about two, Mary was sitting at Camp Ridge trying to figure out the best way of proceeding. She knew she’d have to leave soon for Bear Creek Road but she didn’t want to get there too early, before Darrell had a chance to get away from Lloyd’s farm and make his way to their rendezvous point. At the same time she didn’t want to get there too late, leaving Darrell waiting in the woods, maybe wondering if she’d lost her nerve and wasn’t going to show up at all. It was a question of timing, and she wasn’t the least bit straight on how to get the timing right.

She’d gone down to Bear Creek the day before, on Saturday, but the ribbon wasn’t there so she’d come right back. She’d considered checking again after dark but eventually thought better of it. The risk was too great. One of Lloyd’s people might spot her, or someone might notice the station wagon with its out-of-state plates and then remember it later on for the police.

So she’d stuck it out here for the rest of the evening and all of today, trying to kill time. She’d given the dogs a good run, she’d listened to some music on the car radio, but mostly she’d worried. This whole business had left her a nervous wreck. It seemed to have just snuck up on her, scene by scene, like a plot in a movie she had no control over. That’s what it sometimes felt like, a movie, like someone else was playing her, and someone was playing Darrell, and she
was watching but couldn’t change the direction of things. She was there, but she also wasn’t there, and she was having trouble believing any of this was really happening.

Sure, they’d talked about it often enough, Darrell telling her how they needed to come back and deal with Lloyd, the two of them taking the trouble to buy the shotgun and the rifle, but she’d never really thought it would come to this. She’d expected, well, she wasn’t exactly sure what she’d expected—she’d
hoped
that somewhere along the line things would have taken care of themselves. Lloyd would have grown tired of chasing them and called off the dogs. Or they would have slipped into new identities and started up a new life, free of worry, maybe somewhere in California.

Even over the past day or so she’d found herself hoping. Hoping that Lloyd wouldn’t even be at his farm this weekend. Or if he was, that Darrell would just confront him and scare him into backing off—for good. Hoping, one way or another, that Darrell would get out of there safely so they could move on.

But now she had to think about going down there again and picking up Darrell—and hope she got the timing right. And there was something else. What should she do about the camper? Yesterday she’d left it at the campground, not wanting to risk maneuvering it around those back roads. But what if they needed to make a quick getaway? Once she got Darrell, they might not have time to come back for it. On the other hand, what if Darrell still wasn’t ready to be picked up? She’d only make herself that much more conspicuous hauling the thing around. She decided to leave it where it was for the time being.

It was somewhere past four when Mary pulled off U.S. 65 onto Bear Creek Road. She saw the orange ribbon on the tree under the bridge, swung the car around, and drove to the designated pickup spot.
Where was he? Why couldn’t she see him?
Mary hung on for a few minutes, once or twice thinking she saw some movement in the woods, then pulled back out onto U.S. 65 and headed north for the camper. It wasn’t something she reasoned out, more like an instinct. Somehow she just knew that once she and Darrell hooked up,
if they hooked up
, they’d better be prepared to run.

It was almost dark when Mary returned, camper in tow. She’d tuned the car radio to a local country station, hoping the music would calm her nerves. She sidled along Route 176, looking, looking, and there he was. Darrell came out of the woods and got in beside her. “Let’s move,” he said. “Let’s go.”

Just two minutes up U.S. 65, the music was interrupted for a news bulletin. Mary was too wrapped up in her driving to pay much attention, but she caught bits and pieces of it, more than enough to realize it had something to do with Darrell.
Three bodies found in a remote corner of Taney County … multiple gunshot wounds … a man, a woman, and their nineteen-year-old grandson … investigators on the scene …

She said nothing for a while, not even looking at Darrell, giving it a chance to sink in.

“Who was it?” she finally asked. “Lloyd and Frankie?”

Darrell nodded.

“And the grandson?”

Darrell said it was Willie. “It’s over with,” he said. “It’s finished.”

They took the first Springfield exit off U.S. 65 and headed east along U.S. 60. They didn’t have a particular destination in mind, no plan except getting as far away from Taney County as they could.

Thirty or forty miles outside the town of Cabool, Darrell showed Mary the watch and rings he’d taken from Lloyd. She looked at them with horror and disgust. She couldn’t believe he’d taken these things and was showing them to her. She told him she wanted no part of them. Darrell rolled down his window, flung the watch into the night, and told her to forget it. He couldn’t stand her being so upset.

He tucked the rings into his jacket pocket, thinking he’d pawn them or unload them at a truck stop somewhere down the line. Chances were they’d need the money.

They drove late into the night, tough going with the camper on the twisty two-laner, crossing into Illinois near Cairo. Working a road map, Darrell suggested they steer clear of the Interstate and head north on Route 127.

About fifty miles up Route 127 from the Illinois state line, not far from the village of Alto Pass, a huge cross constructed of marble and steel stands more than a hundred feet tall atop Bald Knob Mountain. The cross was built in 1963 as a monument to Christianity in America, and at nighttime, lit by powerful floodlights at its marble base, it can be seen for miles around.

Years later, thinking back on it, Darrell couldn’t remember exactly how they came to spend that first night sleeping in the station wagon at the foot of Bald Knob Cross. Maybe they saw it shining in the nighttime sky from Route 127 and just gravitated toward it. Or maybe, finally giving into fatigue, they just turned off onto the mountain road leading up to it not realizing what they’d find at the top.

CHAPTER SIX

F
OR THE FIRST
couple of hours after the bodies were found, there was some confusion over jurisdiction. No one knew for sure whether the murder site was in Taney County or Stone County. It was right near the border between the two, everyone was agreed on that, but it wasn’t until maps were consulted and local residents queried that the jurisdictional issue was resolved. The killings, it was finally determined, had taken place in Taney County, less than a hundred yards from the Stone County line.

Deputy Jerry Dodd of the Stone County Sheriff’s Department, who had been videotaping the crime scene, asked Taney County sheriff Chuck Keithley if he had any plans for kick-starting the investigation.

“Same plan as always,” Keithley said. “I’m going to put in a call to Tom and Jack.”

Sergeants Tom Martin and Jack Merritt worked out of the Division of Drug and Crime Control at the Missouri Highway Patrol Troop D headquarters in Springfield. The DDCC had been established in 1983 as a statewide support agency for rural counties that didn’t have adequate resources for investigating serious crimes such as homicide. As the mainstays of the Troop D unit, Tom and Jack had a tough beat: eighteen counties in southwest Missouri—most of them intractably rural, dirt poor, and drug infested. The two men were widely regarded in Missouri law enforcement circles as crack investigators, among the very best the state had to offer, but this didn’t mean their services were always eagerly sought after. The fact is, Tom and Jack could investigate crimes in any given county only through the invitation of the local sheriff. The invitation was sometimes slow in coming; sometimes it didn’t come at all. More than a few sheriffs were zealously territorial. Their counties were their fiefdoms; they didn’t want hotshots from Springfield or anywhere else coming in and stirring things up, suggesting (by their very presence) that the local bossmen weren’t fully in charge. Any investigating that needed doing, they’d take care of themselves.

Chuck Keithley was too good a sheriff to get caught up in petty issues of territoriality. Since being elected to office in 1972 he’d developed a close rapport with state and federal law enforcement agencies and over the past five years he’d routinely called Tom and Jack whenever a homicide struck close to home. He knew they were good at what they did, and he also appreciated that both men had worked the roads as state troopers before joining the Highway Patrol’s crime unit. Chuck had a soft spot for state troopers. Just three years earlier, Trooper Jimmie Linegar had been gunned down by a baby-faced white supremacist from Idaho named David Tate during a routine traffic check south of Branson. Jimmie Linegar had been one of Chuck’s closest friends. A devout Christian, he used to witness to Chuck while the two men played pool in the Keithley family home. Jimmie’s death had a profound impact on Chuck. Just weeks afterward, almost by way of homage to the slain trooper, Chuck converted to Christianity.

Tom Martin drove down from Springfield as soon as he got the call. It was a Sunday and he’d been relaxing at home with his wife, Alice, but he knew this was a case that couldn’t wait. A triple homicide was big enough; a triple homicide with Lloyd Lawrence as one of the victims just about broke the bank.

Tom knew a great deal about Lloyd; he’d been tracking him for years but hadn’t succeeded in pinning him down. He’d come close in August 1984 when a police task force busted a meth laboratory in a shed on Lloyd’s family property down near Shell Knob. It was close—but not good enough. One of Lloyd’s longtime associates, an Oklahoman named Richard Gerald Williamson, took the fall on this one and was eventually sentenced to a three-year term at a federal prison in Texas. Lloyd actually testified for the prosecution at Williamson’s trial, saying he had rented the shed to the defendant but had no idea how it was being used.

A year and a half later, in March 1986, Tom discovered that Lloyd had recently purchased a truckload of chemicals and laboratory equipment from a firm in Tulsa. There was no question in Tom’s mind what this stuff was meant for but he wasn’t able to close the circle. All his trails went cold.

Things heated up again in February 1987 when a desperado named Glennon Paul Sweet murdered Trooper Russell Harper on U.S. 60 east of Springfield after the patrolman had stopped him for speeding. Sweet was closely connected to the outlaw drug culture of southwest Missouri, which meant of necessity that he was also connected to Lloyd. While heading up the investigation into the slaying, Tom obtained intelligence on the operation of at least a dozen clandestine meth labs within a seventy-mile radius of Springfield. Over the next couple of months, Tom and Jack and DEA agent Harley Sparks took down several major labs in Douglas and Webster Counties. They would have taken down even more if the people running them hadn’t been tipped off. In every case it was the same story. There was plenty of evidence linking Lloyd to the labs but not quite enough to make any charges stick. Lloyd’s influence was ubiquitous. Tom and Jack and Harley had even linked him to a doctor selling meth out of his office in Barry County.