By the time she finished reading, her neck was stiff, and she had the beginnings of a headache. And that was all she had. The distance of time hadn't made one thing clearer than it had been five years ago.
It was a little after noon, and she debated whether to go somewhere for lunch or head home for the few hours before she had to go to work. Home, she decided. She could take some aspirin and maybe lie down for a couple of minutes, then dive back into the incredible volume of material Sally had given her.
Scenting a good story, Sally had gone above and beyond what Carey had hoped for. In addition to stories from the last five years that were on computer disk, she'd sent a huge volume of photocopies not only of
Sentinel
stories going back to the original murder of John Otis's father, but copies of clippings from other papers and the wire services. Getting through all that was going to take time, no matter how fast she read.
After an hour's nap to get rid of the headache, she settled at the kitchen table with coffee and a sandwich, and her laptop. The easiest way to do this, she decided, would be to go backward from the present.
Reading the information on the disks proved to sound easier than it really was. Sally had apparently stripped all the formatting from the articles so that they were straight text files, densely packed text that covered her entire screen.
Sighing, she started to read. This was going to take days. And days were the very thing John William Otis didn't have to spare.
9 Days
“
S
hit, I don't believe it,” Seamus said.
He looked at Gil, then they both looked at their boss, Ed Sanchez. Ed, a dark-skinned man with fine features, always looked as if he had stepped off the pages of a menswear catalogue. No day was too hot or too long for him; he was always impeccably dressed. Seamus, who started to look rumpled by early afternoon, sometimes wondered how Sanchez managed it.
“Last night,” Ed said. “It looks like the same MO, so I'm turning it over to you guys. If you need help, let me know. I can probably put Turanchek on it, too.”
Gil and Seamus exchanged glances again. “We'll manage,” said Gil. “The two of us are as good as four.”
“Right.” Ed gave them a sour smile. “Turanchek may be a pain in the butt, but he's got a good nose, and politically speaking, you may not have a choice about it if you dawdle too long.”
Seamus arched a brow. “Threats?”
“Nah,” said Gil. “Promises.”
“Get outta here.” Ed waved them away as if they were annoying gnats swarming around his face. “And give me something soon.”
Back at the table, they opened the file.
“Beatrice Barnstable,” said Seamus. “Housewife. Mother of five. Volunteer on the literacy project.”
“Well, there goes the Otis theory,” Gil said. “Our slasher must be picking them at random.”
“Maybe. Maybe not.” Seamus stared down at the Polaroid photo clipped to the report, apparently a family photo someone had given to the cops. In the background he could see a birthday cake and a stack of gaily wrapped presents. He flipped the photo over. It had been taken three weeks ago, on Beatrice Barnstable's forty-ninth birthday.
The victim had been discovered by a neighbor, apparently within hours of the killing. The neighbor said she and the victim always had breakfast together before they went grocery shopping on Saturday morning, but this morning she had found the back door open and no sign of the victim. Thinking Beatrice might have overslept, the neighbor had entered the house and discovered the body in bed.
The ex-husband had picked up the children for the weekend the night before as usual, so the victim had been home alone at the time of the killing.
“The husband,” said Gil.
“Could be.” It usually was. On the other hand, the MO was the same. “But why would he kill Harry Downs first? Downs was a prosecutor. Does the husband have some kind of record?”
“Maybe the vic was having a relationship with Downs.” Seamus nodded, considering. “Maybe. Approximately the same age.”
“So maybe that's all it is.”
“Yeah, but how does it tie in with the nightgown at the Summers place?”
“Maybe it doesn't tie in at all. Maybe that's just a whole different case. After all, nobody was killed at Summers place.”
“But we have the caller to the radio station who said he did the Summers thing, then killed somebody.”
“Maybe we're connecting the wrong victim to Summers.”
“Christ.” Seamus put the file down and rocked back in his chair. “Consistency. I could do with a little consistency across the board here.”
“Hey, consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds. Maybe our perp has a large mind.”
“He's sure as hell got a large knife. Or razor.”
“How about the Barnstable killing isn't connected at all to the Downs killing? Maybe it's a copycat.”
Seamus shrugged. “We'll have to take a look at the prelim and see.”
One corner of Gil's mouth lifted. “Straws.”
“Exactly. Well, where do you want to start?” He took another look at the file, scanning the rest of the police report and transcribed notes. “Well, fuck me,” he said finally. “She had sliding glass doors.”
“Hell,” said Gil, leaning forward to look over his shoulder. “Sliding doors, no sign of forced entry, slashing …”
Then Seamus's heart stopped. Beatrice Barnstable had been nude when she was killed. But across the foot of her bed had been a pink silk nightgown.
He looked at Gil and saw the same knowledge in his partner's eyes.
“That screws the pooch,” Gil said.
Twenty minutes later they were on their way to speak to the victim's ex-husband.
Talking to the bereaved was the least enjoyable part of the job, as far as Seamus was concerned. He could handle the murder scene a whole lot better.
Jerry Barnstable was at home, taking time off work to stay with his now-motherless children. When the detectives arrived, he sent the children out back to play for a little while. They went with heads down and gathered out back, sitting on the patio, looking listless and miserable. Seamus could see them through the sliding glass doors, and his heart went out to them.
Jerry Barnstable was a corporate manager with a local drugstore chain. He smoked one cigarette after another and stubbed them out in an overflowing ashtray while he talked with Gil and Seamus.
“Bea and I split because we'd gone our separate ways,” he said. “All we had in common anymore was the kids. I work anywhere from sixty to eighty hours a week, and she's got her own life. It happens. I think it was dead before either of us knew it was dying, you know?”
Gil and Seamus both nodded understandingly, although neither of them had experienced anything similar.
“I'm divorced,” Gil said, as if that made them members of the same club, although his own marital breakup had been over his wife's affairs.
Jerry's hand was trembling as he lit another cigarette.
“At least I thought it was dead.” He shook his head and gave a short, unsteady laugh. “This hurts more than I would've thought. Anyway, I let her keep the kids because she's home more than me. This isn't gonna be good for them, having only me. I need to find a way to cut my hours …”
He trailed off and looked out toward the patio, where his kids were sitting like sorry little statues. “I don't know what to tell them. It's so crazy! They'd understand better if it was a car accident.”
He looked at them again, his eyes reddened as if he was fighting tears. “You don't want to hear about my problems. And honest to God, I don't know why anyone would want to hurt Bea. She had a good heart. Everybody liked her.”
“Did she work?”
“No.” He shook his head. “We both felt that until the kids were a little older she should be home with them. But she was going to school over at USF, studying to be a teacher.”
“So you were supporting her?” Seamus asked.
Jerry Barnstable shrugged. “Only until she got her degree. I'd be paying the child support anyway. She could have lived on that.”
“Did she happen to know Harry Downs or Tricia Summers?”
Jerry's eyes widened, but he shook his head. “I don't think so. Why? Do you think there's a link to what happened to them?”
“We have to check everything out, sir,” Gil said. “It's just a routine question.”
“What about John Otis?” Seamus asked.
Jerry thought a moment. “I don't know. She never mentioned any Otis. Why? Do you think he did it?”
Seamus hesitated. “I'm talking about the John William Otis who is on death row.”
Jerry started and paled instantly. “My God,” he said hoarsely.
“That
Otis? She was on his jury five years ago!”
Seamus felt as if he'd just been gut-punched. He hardly heard Gil's last few questions, and was glad when it was time to escape.
“Bingo,” said Gil, as they stepped out into the sunshine.
They paused under the magnolia that shaded the driveway and shed their coats before getting into the car.
“So okay,” Seamus said, as they opened the car doors and let the blast-furnace heat out before climbing in, “that makes two links. So what the hell does it mean?”
“Beats me. Revenge? Copycat? Robin Hood?”
“Robin Hood?”
“Yeah, somebody trying to get Otis off.”
“The caller to the radio station said Otis didn't do it,
he
did.”
“Meaningless,” said Gil. “You know that Give me some
proof.”
Seamus looked at him across the top of the car. “Doesn't it give you just a little qualm that the wrong guy might die in a little more than a week?”
“You're spending too much time with that radio lady, Seamus. The jury convicted him. They said we got the right guy. And that's the way it's gonna be unless somebody gets some proof otherwise.”
“So maybe I ought to ask the M.E. to compare the Kline autopsy report with these.”
“Be my guest. But all it's gonna do is say we got us a copycat. And take my word for it, the chief isn't gonna be happy if you run around trying to solve a five-year-old closed case when we got a murderer running around right now.”
“I know, I know.” But he was damned if he was going to let it go.
Carey was just getting ready to leave for work when the phone rang. She picked it up with one hand while she continued to put the articles she'd read back into the box. There was still a stack waiting for her attention, but it no longer looked so overwhelming. In fact, she was beginning to get disheartened because she hadn't found anything yet that caught her attention. Basically, everything was a rehash of what she already knew.
The tension was beginning to kill her. A little more than a week remained. Time was getting so short it felt like a constant pressure on the back of her head, driving her to exhaustion. And now, making it worse, she was beginning to have dreams about John Otis, dreams in which she watched him being strapped into the electric chair, all the while protesting he was innocent. Dreams of him screaming and burning when the chair was turned on.
Dreams that she was throwing the switch herself.
God. She had a constant tension headache that no aspirin could touch. Her stomach hurt all the time, and she was so much on edge that she had to keep biting her tongue to keep from biting someone's head off.
And nothing. Absolutely nothing. Why had she ever thought that she might find something in all this media rehash of the events? Why had she thought the press could point her to something that the cops and the entire investigative team of the prosecutor's office hadn't been able to find?
Hubris, pure and simple.
She put the phone to her ear, expecting to hear some cheerful salesperson's voice offering to sell her credit-card insurance or ask her for a donation. Instead she heard Seamus's voice.
“Carey?”
Shock kept her silent for a moment. He hadn't called, and she hadn't seen him since the night when they'd had it out. She had figured she would never hear from him again unless their paths crossed by accident. “Yes?”
“Be on your toes tonight. You might get a call from the killer.”
“Why?”
“I'll meet you tonight after your show. We need to talk.”
“Seamus, what's going on?”
“You know I can't discuss a case. Have you seen today's paper?”
“I didn't even open it.”
“Take a look at the front page of the metro section.”
“Now?”
“Now.”
“Hang on a minute.”
She'd tossed the paper on the lowboy in the foyer. She went to get it, heading back to the kitchen as she tried to pull the metro section out. It was wrapped around all the others, though, so she had to open it on the kitchen table to get the section out. Once she had it in her hands, she picked up the phone and tucked it between her shoulder and her ear. “I've got it.”
“Look below the fold, front page.”
She flipped the section over and saw a vaguely familiar woman's face beneath the headline
Woman murdered in bed.
Scanning quickly she came to the woman's name, and a gasp escaped her. “I know her!”
“Tell me how.”
“She was the jury forewoman on the Otis trial.”
“I'll see you at eleven.”
With a
click,
he was gone, leaving her to listen to the dial tone and stare at the face of Beatrice Barnstable.
Seamus got home that night around eight-thirty, feeling like he'd been dragged behind a tractor. He was sticking to his clothes, and he stripped gladly, tossing the summer-weight suit into the dry-cleaning pile, the shirt into the hamper along with his underwear. Then he stepped into a cold shower, which around there meant the water was tepid. He soaped every inch of his body, washing away the sweat and the grime that had stuck to it.
When he had toweled off, he dressed in khaki shorts, a PAL T-shirt, and Top-Siders without socks. Florida chic, someone had called it, but he was damned if he could remember who. Chic or not, it was necessary for comfort in the subtropical climate. He knew it got hotter up north and many places out West, but Florida's dress code had been developed before air conditioners and by tourists. Shorts could take you just about anywhere.