Mistaken Identity (13 page)

Twenty-Four

Lucinda slipped into the back row of the small courtroom – only four rows of pew-like benches for the audience behind the bar. The few observers scattered about like fallen petals. The defense and prosecution tables were surrounded by suited men.

Lucinda preferred the rooms in the old courthouse with their soaring ceilings, arching woodwork and tall windows that imbued the place of judgment with the sanctity and loftiness of a gothic church. The practicality and compactness of this space left no room for drama, as if what occurred between these walls was of little import.

A side door opened and Lucinda gasped. Ellen Branson shuffled into the room with a pair of guards at her elbows. She wore a tan, white and black shirtwaist dress that hung from the bony peaks of her shoulders. Ellen had lost a lot of weight since the day she pulled a gun on Lucinda in the parking garage.

That wasn’t the most disturbing thing about her appearance, though. Her eyes were open but did not appear to see, her jaw hung slack, her hair lacked luster and she had no more color in her complexion than a corpse. She certainly did not look capable of aiding in her defense. It made Lucinda angry that the district attorney insisted on prosecuting this obviously pathetic woman.

Once Ellen was seated, a man in the row directly behind the defense table leaned forward and patted her on the shoulder. She turned and looked at him, emotionless. Her attorney, Richard Barksdale, flashed a smile at the man, reached out and shook his hand.
Is that Ted? It can’t be.
Then the man turned enough in his seat that she could see his profile.
It is Ted
.
What a pleasant surprise.

Lucinda paid little attention to the dueling psychiatrists on the stand with their shrink jargon. She wondered, though, if the one testifying for the prosecution had completely forgotten his oath as a physician to do no harm. She leaned forward in her seat when Ted Branson took the stand.

The attorney led Ted through the background of his romance and marriage to Ellen and the birth of their first two children. He smiled a lot, often looking over at Ellen with undisguised warmth. She, however, seemed oblivious to him and to her surroundings. When he reached the death of their third baby, Ted choked on his words, pausing to swallow and hold back the tears.

Barksdale walked Ted step by step through Ellen’s deterioration from the days she spent silent, staring at walls, to the more volatile times when she shouted and cursed and her obsession with Lucinda consumed every day. “And I was not the husband I should have been. I expected her to snap out of it. I grew impatient with her when she didn’t. I escaped into fantasies about a high school girlfriend and how my life would have been different and better with her. In the process, I neglected Ellen and did not get her the help she so desperately needed. I am more than ashamed. I’m mortified by my self-centered behavior.”

That was the Ted Lucinda knew – the high school boy she once loved, the partner in crime she could trust. She realized that he was, at last, healing from the loss of his child and what he had perceived as rejection by his wife. In the back of her mind, though, the small cynic spoke, warning her that this could all be an act. She hoped that voice was wrong.

The prosecution called Lucinda to the stand. She described the morning in the garage when Ellen had her in handcuffs, on her knees, with a gun barrel against her head. She chose her words with care, hoping to minimize the terror she felt.

Barksdale asked, “What is your opinion of Ellen Branson’s state of mind at the time of this incident?”

The prosecutor objected. “Lieutenant Pierce is not qualified as an expert in this field.”

Lucinda glared at him and wanted to tell him to shut up and sit down. The judge did it for her – although in far more diplomatic language. “This is not a trial. It is simply a hearing to determine Ms. Branson’s competency to stand trial. Objection overruled.”

“You are the victim here, Lieutenant Pierce. So, please tell the court, what outcome would you like to see in this case?” Barksdale asked.

“That Ellen Branson gets the professional help she needs to regain her mental health and return home to her children.”

“What about the pending charges?”

“I hope they are dismissed.”

With those words, Lucinda noticed that the bored reporter in the second row snapped to attention and wrote furiously in her steno pad. Lucinda felt the woman’s penetrating stare as she left the stand and returned to her seat.

After arguments from both sides, the judge ruled that Ellen was not competent to stand trial at this time. Lucinda hadn’t realized how much tension had bunched up in her neck and shoulders until relief at the decision released the crunched muscles in her jaw and upper back. Lucinda remained seated as the judge left the bench and Ellen was led from the room, as lifeless and disconnected from her surroundings as when she entered.

Lucinda watched as the doors closed behind Ellen, then stood up and moved toward the front to speak to Ted. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the reporter moving in to intercept her on her path. Lucinda turned abruptly and strode out of the courtroom. The quick clackety-clack of the reporter’s heels on the marble floor echoed in the halls behind her, causing Lucinda to pick up her pace.

She pulled her cell out of a pocket as she walked, turning it on. She looked down as it beeped. She had one message. Without breaking her stride, she hit the playback button and held the phone to her ear.

“Lieutenant, this is Marguerite Spellman. We have a match for the fingerprint – both fingerprints.”

A fierce, tight fist formed in Lucinda’s chest. She broke into a sprint, leaving a disappointed reporter far behind.

Twenty-Five

Marguerite led Lucinda to the fingerprint analysis workspace, talking all the while. “The print under the rim of the toilet seat in the
Sterling
master bath was identical to the one found at the Whitehead house. And your boy’s been busy. We found three outstanding warrants for his arrest under three different names. Ten years ago, in
California
, Jason
^[i]
Kennedy was arrested for three counts of bigamy, released on bond and never showed up at court. But here’s the good news: his denial of his name and identity caused the state to take a DNA sample to determine the paternity of one of the women’s children. They are overnighting the profile to us. We should have it first thing tomorrow.”

“Good work, Spellman.”

“Thanks,” Marguerite said and continued, “Jack Kraft is wanted in
Florida
on suspicion of scamming a handful of widows out of their life savings. In
Rhode Island
, they know him as Jimmy Kellogg. They arrested him when they discovered he was making duplicate imprints of credit cards of customers at the restaurant where he worked. He bailed out before the locals made a match of his prints to the warrants in
California
and
Florida
. When they went to rearrest him, he was gone.”

“But nothing connecting him to a violent crime?” Lucinda asked.

“No.”

“I wonder what else he’s done without getting caught. Thanks, Spellman. Thanks for everything. Let me know what you get when you analyze that profile from
California
.”

“Captain?” Lucinda said, as she poked her head into Captain Holland’s office. “Got a minute?”

Holland
grunted and Lucinda chose to interpret that as “Yes.” Stepping into his office and sliding into a chair, she said, I need to go to
Texas
.”

“The Sterling homicides?”

“Yes.”

“Where in Texas?”

“I’m not sure if I can pronounce it.” Lucinda looked down at the piece of paper in her hand. “New Bra-un-fels,” she said, stressing the second syllable.

“Let me see that,” Holland said, stretching out his hand. He looked down at the address and asked, “German town?”

“Don’t know.”

Holland grunted again and spun around to the laptop on the console behind his desk. He pulled up Google search and typed in the name. “Yeah, it is. Must be New Brawn-fulls.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“Not totally. But I’m confident that I’m closer to the correct pronunciation than you are.”

“I can ask the locals when I get there. You will approve the travel, won’t you?”

“Do you want local back-up?”

“I just need to talk to Karen King.”

“Talk, Pierce? Yeah, I bet that’s all you want to do. You want local back-up?”

Lucinda stared at him, wondering why he had to ask.

“Of course not,” Holland said with a shake of his head. “What was I thinking? Get out of here. I need to make some calls.”

“You’re going to authorize the trip?”

“When I decide, I’ll let you know. You can leave now, Pierce.”

Lucinda stood still for a moment, thinking about making a response. She decided against it and left Holland’s office, heading for her own. On the way, she spotted Ted Branson. “Hey, Ted, I was sure surprised to see you at the hearing this morning. Surprised and pleased.”

“Yeah, thanks. But we don’t have time to go into that right now. I was just about to call you. The document analysis guys sent up copies of something interesting that was picked up in the search of Victoria Whitehead’s home.”

“Show me.”

“It’s a lot of pages. I’ll need to spread them out for them to make any sense to you. Let’s go to the conference room.”

Ted stretched out a line of paper that ran from one end of the table to the other, then went to the other side and laid down another.

“What are we looking at, Ted?”

“Family trees.”

“But William Blessing is at the top of each of these pages.”

“Yep. On this side of the table. With a different alias on each page and a connection to all these women, indicating that he fathered a child with each one of them, stretching over a forty-year period.”

“A bigamist?”

“Maybe with some of them – definitely not all of them. The second most current entry is ‘William Blessing aka Parker Sterling’, married to Jeanine Whitehead Sterling with a son named Fredrick.”

“Damn!” Lucinda exclaimed.

“And the very first chronological entry down at the other end is interesting but not very revealing,” he said, walking to the other end of the table. ‘Here William Blessing has no alias and the rectangular box has no name, simply ‘My mother’. And under it, ‘Me’.”

“That’s got to be Jason King or whatever his name his. I got a report from Marguerite Spellman pointing to several other aliases.” She pulled a copy out of the folder and handed it to Ted. She walked down the line, scanning the other names, looking for one that was familiar. “Look,” she said, “‘William Blessing aka Samuel Houston King’. Under that are Karen King and her daughter Trinity. We need to find out all we can about William Blessing and we need to cross-check all of the victims on the list of crimes from Spellman to see if there is any crossover with these documents.”

“I’ve got someone running down Blessing. I can handle the cross-check myself,” Ted said with a nod. “But first, come over and look at the documents on the other side. They’re even more baffling. They go back two centuries. It starts at this end with James Worthington in London in the middle of the eighteenth century. The down arrow indicates that he was married to one woman and had six children. Then the arrow to the right leads to another box that reads: ‘Charles Butler, Massachusetts’. But the most interesting part is what is written above the arrow. ‘Disappeared and became’. And that continues straight down the line for two hundred years. The words above the arrow either read that he disappeared or that he ‘faked death and became’.

“Most of the children on these pages have no dates at all or just a birth date without the year they died, except for a couple of them where murder was indicated. Like right here,” he said, moving up the line and pointing to another page. ‘Beneath Sarah Winslow Clark’s name it says, ‘Murdered in 1847’. The same notation is below the names of each of her four children. The right arrow next to Bartholomew Clark’s name with ‘disappeared and became’ above it points to ‘Ezekiel Young in Salt Lake City’. He had seven wives and thirty-eight children. I suspect a Mormon connection with plural marriages.

“He supposedly faked his death – heck, if I had seven wives and thirty-eight children, I’d either fake my death or take my life – one or the other.”

“If one of the wives didn’t take you out first,” Lucinda laughed. She walked down to the far end of the document string and found William Blessing. Under his name again was a box with ‘My mother’ and another with ‘Me’. The arrow to the right repeated the disappeared line and went to a box that read, ‘See full William Blessing file’.”

Lucinda’s cellphone beckoned. “Pierce.”

“Come to my office, Pierce.”

“Captain Holland?”

“Yes.”

“You approving the travel?”

“Come to my office, Pierce,” he said and disconnected.

Lucinda put away her phone and went down the hall. When she reached Holland’s office, he said, “Your flight is being booked for tomorrow morning. You will not need to check in with the local cops unless you want to do something more than talk to Karen King.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Pierce, I’m warning you. If Jason King answers the door don’t throw him to the ground and cuff him. Just pretend you’re peddling something door to door and get the New Braunfels Police to bring him in. That clear?”

“Yes, sir,” Lucinda said with a sigh.

“I hear what you’re saying but I need to make sure you understand it and know I really mean it.’

That comment really ticked off Lucinda but she held her peace, maintaining eye contact and responding with a quick nod.

‘Okay. I’ll accept that for now. Don’t make a fool out of me, Pierce. The documents will arrive on your computer shortly. Get out of here. I have work to do.”

As Lucinda walked back down the hall, her phone rang again. “Pierce.”

“Lucy!”

“Charley. What’s up?”

“Me and Daddy and Ruby are going to the Outer Banks next week. So, I had to make sure you were taking care of yourself first.”

Lucinda grinned and laughed. “Yeah, Charley, I’m taking care of myself.”

“No, you aren’t, Lucy. I talked to Rambo. You didn’t come in to see him like you said you would.”

Damn that Doctor Rambo.
“Sweetie, I’m really tied up with a case right now.”

“I know you’re busy, Lucy, that’s why I made a late appointment for you. Rambo said he’d stay and see you tonight at seven.”

“Charley …”

“Lucy, if you don’t go I won’t have any fun on the beach. I’ll just be worrying about you and stuff the whole time. And I’ll just make Daddy and Ruby miserable, too. Please, promise me you’ll go. Promise?”

Lucinda knew she could see Burns and still have plenty of time to pack and make arrangements for her cat’s care before her morning flight. She also knew that Charley wouldn’t give her any peace unless she did.
Damn Burns for playing dirty and dragging in Charley.
She sighed. “Okay, sweetie. You have a deal. You have a good time on your trip and call me when you get back and tell me all about it.”

“You promise you’ll go see Rambo today?”

“Yes, Charley, I promise.”

Charley was happy but Lucinda was filled with dread as they wrapped up the call. At her computer, Lucinda printed out her travel documents and headed over to the doctor’s office.

“Even though it was pretty low of you to drag Charley into this, Dr. Burns, I was on my way to your office because of her.”

“Don’t get huffy, Lieutenant,” Rambo said. “Charley is putting a lot of pressure on me.”

“She’s a child,” Lucinda said.

“Yes, but a very persistent one, as you well know. I’ll see you in a few minutes then?”

“No, something’s come up in the investigation that requires my immediate attention. I’m sorry you stayed late on my behalf but I simply cannot make it.”

“I could stay a bit later.”

“I’m not sure how late it will be, Dr. Burns. I’ll have to call you back and reschedule.”

“Charley will be very disappointed.”

“There you go again with the dirty tricks,” Lucinda said with a grimace.

“I’m only asking you to listen to what I have envisioned for your care and consider one additional procedure at a time. You know as well as I do, if you don’t, you’ll have to answer to Charley.”

Lucinda didn’t really care what Rambo Burns thought but Charley was another story. The thought of disappointing her put a lump in her throat and a burning in her eye. “I’ll think about it,” she said.

“Think about it? That’s it?”

“I’ve got a homicide case as my priority right now. I’ve got to catch a man before he flies out tonight and then I’ve got a flight out to Texas in the morning to follow up a lead. When this is done, I’ll get back to you.”

“Charley will be pleased to hear that.”

Lucinda sighed. “Later, Doc.”

She disconnected and tossed the cellphone into the passenger seat of her car with a little too much force. It bounced down to the floor. “Damn you, Burns,” Lucinda said. Part of her yearned to look like the woman she was before that shotgun blast. And another side of her wanted to tell everyone to go screw themselves. But she knew one thing unequivocally: even if Burns could repair all the scarring on her face, he could never return her missing eye and he could never heal her deepest scars – the ones with no physical manifestation. She knew she would never be the same woman she was before the day she leaped in front of that shotgun to push another woman to safety.

Arriving at the airport complex, she turned into the executive section and headed to the hangar where Ted told her she’d find Gary Finnerman. She approached a suited man with broad shoulders; a substantial guy with an impatient look on his face. “Gary Finnerman?” she said, stretching her hand in his direction.

“Yes,” he answered, wrapping beefy fingers around hers. “Lieutenant Pierce, what can I do for you? And what happened, line of duty injury?”

Lucinda ignored the second question and answered the first. “I’m looking for background on your ex-wife Victoria.”

“Not a subject I like to think about but here goes. We were married for five years. Everything was fine for the first three, until she got all goofy on me. I filed for divorce but even though I instigated the separation, I was generous with the woman. Did I get any expressions of gratitude? Hell, no.

“I offered and dutifully paid her spousal support for ten years – twice the length of our marriage. But the first month the check didn’t come, she was on my case – nagging about all the bills she had to pay and about how I owed it to her to help her maintain her lifestyle. I told her, ‘I owe you nothing. Go find another husband.’ And damned if she didn’t. Picked an old guy that time – a bit too feeble-minded to notice her wacko tendencies, I think.”