“She’s changed a lot lately, hasn’t she?” I asked.
He nodded. “She’s like a whole different person since her surgeries.”
“What happened?”
He was quiet for a long moment before responding. “I think she finally felt … you know, like she had options. I mean, look at her.”
I did. Even without the battered face and blood, she wouldn’t have been my type. She had that fake, plastic, Barbie Doll look. She appeared sad, even pathetic more than anything else—a middle-aged woman trying to pass for a pop princess.
Feeling guilty for my harsh assessment of Melanie and sorry for Joe, I nodded, and said, “She’s very beautiful.”
“Look at her now,” he said. “Who could’ve done this to her?”
It was cruel to make him stand here staring at his dead and disfigured wife for so long, but he was our most likely suspect. Most forensic profilers say that when a victim’s face has been beaten, their killer was someone close to them—or at least knew them. Most closers, cops who specialized in getting confessions from suspects say that having something of the victim’s in the room breaks the killer down.
“What’s she doing in here, Joe?” I asked. “Just tell us. We’ll understand. I’ve been divorced. I know how hard it is to be married, how cruel beautiful women can be.”
“She wasn’t difficult,” he said. “She was just a little lost, but she was trying to get better, seeing a counselor, trying to break things off with her boyfriends. I always thought we’d wind up together.”
Just a few minutes before, he had indicated there was no chance of reconciliation.
“How did it happen?” I asked. “It was obviously an accident. You didn’t mean to kill her. Everyone’ll understand. This kind of thing happens all the time.”
“You think I—
I
didn’t kill her,” he said. “I swear on my daughter’s life. I’ll take a lie detector test—whatever you want, but I didn’t kill her.” He looked up from the body, turning toward the rec yard gate. “I’ve got to go be with Kayla. She doesn’t know, does she?”
“She’s fine,” I said. “She doesn’t know.”
“I’ve got to be with her,” he said.
“You can in just a little while,” I said.
He shook his head. “No,” he said. “Now.”
“Just help us understand how your wife got in here,” I said, “and what happened to her.”
“I didn’t do this,” he said. “There’s nothing I can tell you. I swear to God on my daughter’s life. I wouldn’t say that if I had done this. I love Kayla more than anything in this world. I’m going to be with her. If you want to arrest me, then arrest me and get me a lawyer. If not, let me go check on my girl. I know my rights.”
“Don’t you want to help us figure out who did this to your wife?” Stone asked.
“Of course I do,” he said, “but I’m not stupid. I know you think it’s me. Hell, I’ve watched enough cop shows to know. Husband’s always the number one suspect.”
“Because he’s usually the one who did it,” Stone said.
“Well, not this time,” he insisted. “I told you—give me a lie detector test.”
“Tell you what,” I said. “Just give us your clothes and the names of the men your wife was seeing and you can go be with your daughter.”
Stone looked over at me, eyebrows raised, frown deepened.
“More like boys,” he said. “Some of them half her age.”
“Any of them work here at the prison?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Probably, but I’m not sure. I wasn’t her pimp. I didn’t keep up with who she was sleeping with, but according to some busybodies it was half the town.”
“We need names,” I said.
“I don’t have any,” he said, but I knew he was lying. He had heard the same small-town gossip we all had. “You might want to talk to Brother and Sister Clark. She was going to them for help.”
Roy Clark was the pastor of Eastside Baptist Church in Pottersville. He and his wife Gwendoline lived in the parsonage next to the church out on River Road.
Stone and I were heading toward it in his state-issued warden’s car. He was driving.
FDLE had arrived and was processing the crime scene, the D dorm wicker, and Joe Wynn’s uniform.
“Pete should be here, not me,” I said.
“The inspector’s happy to be dealing with FDLE,” he said. “He knows he’s not very good at this, and he doesn’t seem to mind you helping. But even if he did, it doesn’t matter. We can’t worry about protocol or hurt feelings. We’ve just got to find out how a civilian got into our institution and got killed.”
I nodded, and we rode along in silence for a while.
“You think he did it?” Stone asked.
I shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“Do you have a feeling either way?”
I shook my head. “Not really.”
“What if he runs?”
“We’ll know he did it,” I said.
“But—”
“Pull in the co-op up here and I’ll get Dad to put someone on him.”
Forgotten Coast Electrical Cooperative consisted of a large redbrick office building in front and an acre filled with light poles, transformers, cable, trucks, a warehouse, and utility sheds in back— all surrounded by a tall chainlink fence.
Dad was on the side near the large gates where the vandals had broken in. Stone stayed in the car while I got out to talk to him. The two men, each king of his respective kingdom, had often been at odds over the role of the sheriff ’s department in criminal investigations inside the prison. They didn’t care for each other, and didn’t seem to care much that I was often the one caught in the middle of their conflict.
“Your warden doesn’t want to get out and talk shop a while?”
“What’s going on here?” I asked, attempting to change the subject.
“What happened to the good ol’ days when kids’ idea of joy-riding was taking their parents’ car around the block?” Dad said.
I didn’t say anything.
“They used bolt cutters they stole from Linton’s to get in here and Whitehurst Timber Company,” he said. “Drove some of the trucks around and defaced them with spray-painted stick figures and misspelled obscenities. Why they broke in up here instead of around on the other side, I’ll never know.”
The large, double front gates were well-lit and right off the main highway, but the small, single gate on the side was dark and hidden.
“Nothing scarier than a brilliant mind bent on crime,” I said.
He smiled.
“Get this,” he said, “they wiped everything down, but left the Potter Elementary School gym shirt they used.”
“Just make sure they have to take art and spelling at boot camp.”
“Whatta you got?” he asked. “Why you slumming with the warden?”
I told him.
“You think Wynn’s gonna run?” he asked.
I shrugged. “Can you put someone on him without him knowing?”
He nodded. “I’ll call you if he runs.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“Sure,” he said, “just tell the warden he owes me.”
“Yeah,” I said, “I’ll be sure to do that.”
I got back in the car, and we continued toward the Clarks’.
“What’d he say?” Stone asked.
“That since it was you, he’d do it,” I said.
His perpetual frowned deepened again.
“He’ll call us if Joe runs,” I said.
“You think they can handle it?” he asked. “Looked like that vandalism was taxing them.”
“Dad’s a good sheriff,” I said, “and he’s got a decent department.”
He didn’t comment, and we rode the rest of the way without speaking.
Gwendoline Clark was a large woman with enormous breasts and a slightly masculine manner. She dressed in loose clothes meant to help conceal her bulk, but their formlessness gave her a shapeless appearance that had the opposite affect.
“Hey, Warden, Chaplain,” she said when she opened the door. “Come on in.”
She knew both of us from various prison events and the annual volunteer banquet.
Ushering us into a livingroom and offering us coffee, Gwen acted as if she were genuinely glad we had dropped in unannounced. This gift of hospitality made her popular among her husband’s parishioners, who felt their preacher and his family were as much theirs as the home they lived in.
It’s how most congregations feel, and one of the reasons I wasn’t suited for pastoral ministry and why Susan had chafed at being a pastor’s wife when we were together in Atlanta and serving a large church.
Of course, I was fairly certain the Clarks were happy to have the little parsonage. The church paid Roy so little that even without a mortgage, Gwen had to clean businesses in town at night to keep them just slightly north of the poverty line.
“Roy’s over at the church,” she said. “Let me give him a call. He can be right over.”
“Thank you,” Stone said.
She called Roy, then poured coffee for all of us, bringing it into the living room on a coffee-and-cream-ringed serving tray.
“Ma’am, we’re here to talk to you and your husband about Melanie Wynn,” Stone said when she sat down across from us in a faded recliner that bore the indentation of her generous backside.
We were on a soiled and stiff sofa.
“Poor girl,” she said. “She’s doing better, I think, but she’s had a rough spell. Just sort of lost. Roy meets with her far more than I do, but I doubt there’s much he can tell you—confidentiality and all.”
In another moment, Roy arrived and we all stood to greet him.
Unlike his short, round wife, Roy Clark was tall and narrow, his stomach seeming concave beneath his flat chest. When they were standing beside each other, the physical oddness of their pairing was accentuated, and I wondered, as I always did with such unusual couples, what sex was like for them.
“They’re here about Melanie Wynn,” Gwen said when we were all seated.
“Is she okay?” he asked.
He was sitting in a high-back chair on the other side of the room from his wife’s. The chair, which clashed both in style and pattern from the other furniture in the room, seemed overdressed and out of place.
“Is something wrong with Joe?” he asked. “Kent said he’s been having a very difficult time.”
Kent Clark, aka ManSuper, the Wynn’s youngest and very much closeted gay son, was part of our K-9 unit and on the pistol team.
“We understand you’ve been counseling her,” Stone said.
Roy nodded.
“We need to know who she’s been seeing,” Stone said. “We understand it might be quite a number of young men.”
“I’m sorry, Warden,” Roy said, “but I can’t talk about anything Melanie’s discussed with me—though I can assure you it hasn’t been that.”
“Confidentiality is not an issue,” I said. “Melanie’s been murdered.”
“Murdered?” he said in shock.
“Oh, my dear sweet Jesus,” Gwen said. “That poor girl. Any idea who did it?”
“That’s what we’re trying to find out,” Stone said.
“I don’t understand,” Roy said.
“I know it’s a shock.”
“Yes, it is, but that’s not what I meant,” Roy said. “Why are you two here about it? I would think the only possible connection would be Joe. Is he a suspect? Are you trying to clear him?”
“It’s complicated,” Stone said, “but we
are
trying to help Joe. He’s the one who sent us to you.”
“That poor man,” Gwen said. “He really loves Mel so much.”
“Confidentiality’s not an issue,” I repeated, “Joe sent us to see you. Please tell us who she was involved with.”
He hesitated, then nodded to himself slowly.
“The only person I know for sure was Judy Williams’ son, Sean,” he said.
I nodded. Sean Williams was a correctional officer. His mother, Judy, was one of Melanie’s fellow teachers at PES. They had been close friends until recently, when suddenly they weren’t, and no one seemed to know why. It was little wonder. Sean was barely twenty and Melanie was just a few years younger than Judy.
“That one nearly split our church in two,” Gwen said. “Judy and her family stopped coming and took a lot of their friends with them after Roy preached a sermon on not judging one another and defended poor Melanie, who was working so hard to get her life back together.”
“Judy just can’t forgive Melanie,” Roy said. “And now she hates me and our church.”
“Roy just told her what the Bible says,” Gwen said. “Warned her about the path of hate she was headed down.”
“Surely
she
didn’t do anything to Melanie,” Roy said.
“She couldn’t have,” Gwen said. “She was angry, but she’s no murderer.”
I was surprised when Sean opened his door so quickly. I had assumed he’d be asleep. I was even more surprised when it wasn’t Sean opening the door, but his mother, Judy. I had expected her to be at the school.