A Specter of Justice (8 page)

I looked at Hewitt. His face had gone white as cotton. “You'd better sit down.”

He joined Shirley on the swing and his tough as nails office manager buried her face in his shoulder and sobbed.

Newly stepped closer to Nakayla. “Last night you said Molly Staton wasn't wearing the white dress she was supposed to.”

“That's right,” Nakayla whispered.

“Lenore Carpenter was found in a vintage white dress,” Newly said. “Forensics is only starting, but I believe we're looking at a second homicide and a killer who dressed Lenore in Molly's dress. He's purposely linking his crimes. I need to make sure everyone, and I mean everyone, is accounted for who played a role in last night's fundraiser. Someone might be acting out Asheville's ghost tales and leaving a trail of bodies behind.”

Chapter Nine

Homicide Detective Newland placed a call for the Buncombe County mobile crime lab to come to Lenore Carpenter's home as soon as they wrapped the scene at the Grove Park Inn. Between the previous night and today's discovery of the second victim, the forensics team had their work cut out for them. Trace evidence would be crucial if links were to be established. As an investigator, I believed any break in the case would come from something small and not from the obvious connections like the switched dresses.

“I don't want to chance any further contamination of the scene,” Newly told us. “I want each of you to tell me where you went in the house.”

Shirley wiped her eyes. “I found the front door unlocked. I called out and when no one answered, I walked across the living room to the hallway. I saw the dress on her bed and knew something bad had happened.”

“Did you go anywhere else?” Newly asked.

“I made a quick check of the other rooms to make sure Lenore wasn't lying unconscious somewhere, and then I stayed by the front door. I guess I sensed things should be left untouched. I called Nakayla first and then Hewitt.”

Newly glanced at the vehicles parked in the street. “Who rode together?”

“I came with Hewitt from my office,” I said. “Shirley took us straight to the bedroom. I'm the only one who followed the dirt trail through the kitchen.” I looked at Hewitt, expecting him to confirm my story, but he stared at the front door as if trying to remember the simple details of our entry.

“Is that correct, Mr. Donaldson?” Newly asked.

Hewitt eyed Nakayla and Shirley, and then nodded. “Yes. We came to the porch where you found us.”

“I'll need prints from each of you for elimination purposes.” Newly glanced back to the street. “I've got a kit in the car.”

We all looked at Hewitt, expecting him to protest some violation of his constitutional rights. He only said, “Then let's go to your car.”

After we were inked and printed, Newly gave Hewitt and Shirley a direct order. “It's of the utmost urgency that you contact everyone involved with the ghost tour. Let them know what happened and warn them that right now we're not sure of either motive or the extent to which this killing could go further. And if anyone is missing, call me immediately.” He reached in his pocket and handed his card to each of them. “I need Sam and Nakayla to give me more information on the other ghost tour locations.”

As Hewitt walked past me, he whispered, “My office.”

Newly led us to the front porch. Nakayla and I sat on a slatted swing and the detective pulled a wicker chair closer to us. He rested his note pad on his knee and clicked his ballpoint. “Okay, run through the tour and what roles were played at each site.”

“Not every site had an actor,” Nakayla said. “Some were only covered by the tour guide's commentary.”

“Better give them all to me.”

Nakayla set the swing in motion and let the rhythm guide the pace of her story. “The walking tour started at the registration booth at the Splashville end of Pack Square.”

Splashville was the name of the fountains located at the far side of the square from our office. The streams of water opened and closed in a variety of combinations and were designed to soak kids and adventuresome adults who played in their spray.

“The first stop was City Hall and the story of the financial manager's suicide. We didn't have an actor. Just a chalk outline where we imagined his body struck the sidewalk.”

In 1929, the stock market crash took the value of Asheville's investments from over one hundred eighty-seven million dollars to eighty-eight million. The nearly hundred million-dollar loss plunged the city into debt, and the financial manager threw himself off the eight-story, magnificent Art Deco building in one of the more spectacular suicides of the era. Splashville indeed.

“So, your tour guides told that story,” Newly said.

“Yes. We'd stay there about five minutes and talked about how the manager's ghost had been seen multiple times in the lobby or office hallways.”

A faint smile broke Newly's serious expression. “The manager's ghost allegedly seen. I'm after a flesh and blood culprit.”

“We conveyed the sightings as fact to enhance the mood. And then we added a little bit about the building's architecture.”

“Did everyone start at City Hall?”

“No,” Nakayla said. “We had a shotgun start. Groups headed to different locations but then followed a planned order. I got the busload of Japanese and our first stop was Helen's Bridge.”

Newly jotted a note on his pad. “All right. What was after City Hall?”

“The tour headed toward Marjorie Street and the area where town hangings occurred. No actors were involved. We mainly got people clear of that end of the square to loop around and come up Spruce Street to the Jackson Building.”

“More jumpers?” Newly asked.

“Yes. But in addition to chalk outlines we had actors positioned in the two windows. You know the tales. The woman on the fifth floor would yell ‘Taxi!' out her window for each new group.”

Detective Newland nodded. He probably knew the stories from his childhood. I'd only learned them from Nakayla after the Jackson Building, Asheville's first skyscraper, had been chosen as one of our tour stops.

The fifteen-story Spanish Renaissance building was an architectural jewel. Built in 1924 on the site of the monument shop of Thomas Wolfe's father, the Jackson Building was capped with an ornate tower that was used in the 1939 film,
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
. Leopard gargoyles leaped from each top corner, and when it first opened, the tower held a four-hundred-times telescope and a powerful searchlight.

In 1929, a businessman on the twelfth floor lost all his assets in the crash. Like the city manager, he jumped to his death rather than face the shame of bankruptcy. In 1942, a young woman leaned too far out of her fifth floor office window and fell to the sidewalk. Witnesses said they thought she was trying to hail a taxi that was cruising the square.

Our actors had been stationed on each of the two floors and their respective offices were the only ones whose lights were on. To add to the ghoulish reenactment, the chalk outlines on the sidewalk were drawn holding hands, even though the deaths were separated by thirteen years.

“Lenny Colbert played the man,” Nakayla said. “He simply paced back and forth and was seen as a silhouette. Nicole Worthington was the young woman. We hit her with a spotlight as her cue to yell taxi.”

Newly wrote down the names. “Was she leaning out the window?”

“No. We didn't want to take a chance.”

“Have you seen either of them since last night?”

“I haven't,” Nakayla said.

I shook my head. “I'm sure they'll be at the top of the call list.”

“Let's move on,” Newly said.

“The next stop was the Battery Park Hotel,” Nakayla said.

Newly shifted in his chair. “That's a good little hike on foot.”

“We went by way of Church Street where the cemeteries used to be. The guides spoke about spirits seen walking in the moonlight, searching for their graves that had been moved as the land-locked churches expanded. They also talked about some of the old legends for which there are no standing structures.”

“No actors in sheets?”

“No. We made use of the distance by selling drinks and snack food along the route to Battery Park.”

“Was Helen your ghost?”

“Helen and her murderer.”

Newly knew his ghost stories. This Helen wasn't Helen of the bridge but a nineteen-year-old woman brutally shot and slashed in her hotel room. In the summer of 1936, Helen Clevenger came down from New York to visit her uncle and see Asheville. On the morning of July 17th, he became alarmed when she didn't answer his knocks. He found his niece lying in a pool of blood, shot through the chest and cut around the face and throat. Police arrested a twenty-two-year-old hotel employee and got a confession out of him. I say got because the rumor is the confession was forcibly coerced. His motive was robbery and the means was a thirty-two-caliber pistol discovered in his room. It was enough for his execution.

But on the night of Helen's death, an eyewitness saw a running man believed to be the murderer. The physical description didn't match the accused. It did match the build of the hotel manager's son. The son was never seen in Asheville again. Now the Battery Park Hotel exists as senior apartments, and the elderly residents claim to catch fleeting glimpses of a young girl walking the hall near room 224, the scene of the murder.

“We paid for the current resident of what had been Helen's room to spend the night in the Haywood Park Hotel,” Nakayla said. “Then we used a gel to cast a red aura over the interior of the room. Catherine Bagley played Helen and Tyler Winston was the murderer. They staged a brief scuffle in front of the window, and then disappeared from view. We played the sound effect of a gunshot.”

“And their whereabouts?” Newly asked.

Nakayla shrugged. “I don't know. When Sam and I left you last night, we went back to the Kenilworth. Shirley was the first and only person I spoke with before coming here.”

Newly wrote what I assumed to be the names of Catherine and Tyler. Then he stared out over the front yard for a moment. “Of the actors you've mentioned, which ones are members of Asheville Apparitions?”

“All of them. Since the group did so much of the organizational work, we agreed they should have first dibs on the ghost roles.”

Newly cocked his head and eyed me with surprise. “You belong to these ghost hunters?”

“No. I was just a host in a costume.”

“Was Battery Park the last stop?”

“The last walking stop. From there, shuttle buses transported people to three locations. Three buses left at the start, each going to a different spot. Then all the other shuttles went first to the Samuel Reed House, followed by the Grove Park, and finally Helen's Bridge before returning to Pack Square.”

“The Reed House. That's now the Biltmore Village Inn, right?”

“The owners gave a tour of their B and B while dressed in Victorian formal wear. They served hot cider and crumpets.”

“So, no actors,” Newly said.

“No. We had a loop of Gay Nineties music with the occasional footsteps and sounds of a pool table.”

Samuel Reed had been George Vanderbilt's attorney and he built his Victorian home in 1892 on a mountain overlooking Biltmore Village on the south side of Asheville. No murders occurred in the home, but of Reed's nine children, only four made it to adulthood. Residents of the house have heard footsteps on the back stairs and the crack of balls and children's voices in what had once been the billiard room.

For the first time, Newly flipped back through his note pad, searching for something he'd written earlier. He stopped and tapped his ballpoint on the center of a page. “Hewitt Donaldson was on the south side last night. Was he at the Reed House?”

“You'll have to ask him,” Nakayla said. “He was mobile as a troubleshooter. With all the vans going back and forth, we wanted a quick response in case someone was left behind or a vehicle had mechanical trouble.”

Newly pressed the point. “So, he could have been in the Reed House?”

“What are you driving at?” I asked.

He closed the note pad. “Nothing particular. Just getting a sense for where everyone was. Sounds like you planned for everything.”

“We didn't plan for a double homicide.”

“No.” Newly stood. “But somebody did.”

Nakayla and I took his cue and rose from the porch swing. I figured our conversation had ended.

“And you didn't see anything in the shed or yard that could have left those dirt tracks through the house?” Newly asked.

“No,” I said. “But I have my suspicions.”

“Care to share?”

“After you answer a question for me.”

He crossed his arms against his chest. He didn't like negotiating over information. “What's that?”

“Why are you so interested in Hewitt?”

“I'm not. At this point, I'm interested in everyone.” Newly was a good detective, but a terrible liar. “So, what's your suspicion?”

“Look for a wheelchair.”

We left Newland waiting for forensics, but not before he admonished us not to mention anything about the scene or our conversation. What did he think we were going to do? Call the newspaper?

Nakayla dropped me at the office and headed to her home in West Asheville for a shower and change of clothes. She would check in later and we'd grab lunch somewhere in town.

I exited the elevator and passed by our door, heading straight for Hewitt's office down the hall. His whispered message had carried an urgency that he wanted to see me without delay.

I found him at Shirley's desk where he must have been waiting for me.

“Let's go to the conference room,” he said.

“Where's Shirley?”

“I told her to make her calls from home. She knows those apparition people better than I do.”

Hewitt's conference room was unlike any other lawyer's I've known. Instead of a long table, a circular one filled the middle of the floor. Even though he had a massive ego, Hewitt displayed his tenet that all are created equal in the eyes of the law. There was no head of the table.

The walls were empty of the obligatory shelves of leather-bound books or professional degrees and awards attorneys put on view to impress their clients. Hewitt's walls were covered in framed album covers from the 1960s. Dylan, Rolling Stones, Cream, Beatles, Byrds, and Iron Butterfly to name a few. I was surprised he didn't have tracks piped through overhead speakers like Muzak on speed.

He took a seat and gestured for me to sit across from him.

“What's up?” I asked.