Music of Ghosts (25 page)

Thirty-four

“I think you're becoming
obsessed.” Eleanor Cochran peered at her son as he sat glued to the computer screen.

“Really?” Jerry replied absently.

“Jerry, you're working on a closed case. Stratton's been indicted. He's awaiting trial. Yet when I went to bed at one thirty last night, you were still on that computer.”

“Uh-huh.”

“You and Ginger haven't had a fight have you?”

“No.”

“Then why aren't you over at her house? You used to spend practically every night over there.”

“We're both busy.”

“Busy doing what?”

“She's writing about mountain music. I'm working on the Wilson case.”

“Forgive my aged, chemo-addled brain, but as I said five seconds ago, hasn't Nick Stratton already been indicted for that girl's murder?”

Cochran took a deep breath and rolled his chair back from the desk, his eyes gritty with fatigue. He wondered how much he should share with his mother. With her new writing career, everything served as grist for her next plot. He wouldn't want to see this case thinly disguised in the paperback racks. On the other hand—his mother was a bright woman. Maybe running his theory by a mystery writer wasn't such a bad idea. “I'll tell you what I think, but you'll have to keep it confidential.”

“Okay.”

“I'm serious, Ma. No telling your agent or your writer cousin from Philly.”

“I won't tell anybody, Jerry. I promise.”

“It just seems improbable that a smart, successful, law-abiding guy would lure a girl into the woods, strangle her, carve indecipherable letters into her skin, then the next morning make an extremely public appearance at the sports park opening. I mean, why go to the trouble? Why not just push her off a waterfall at the end of the summer?”

“Because if he did that, you would immediately suspect foul play. You're always suspicious of waterfall deaths.” Eleanor shook her head. “What he's set up now is perfect—he's miles away, the girl's killed at a haunted cabin, with strange figures cut into her body. Her pals don't find her until he's safely away, getting ready to fly his eagle. It's brilliant. He doesn't even need an alibi with a time frame like that.”

Cochran frowned. “It's too dicey, Ma.”

“So what's your theory?”

“I'm thinking there's some kind of connection to the Fiddlesticks cabin.”

“Jerry, that was fifty years ago!” She gave him the same look of disgust she'd had when he was fifteen and wanted to join Streptococcus, Ricky Joyner's garage band.

“It's just a theory, Ma.” Knowing how his mother loved charts, he took a piece of paper from the printer. “Let's say whoever killed Lisa Wilson was either connected to her or connected to that cabin.” He drew a stick figure of a girl. “Everybody connected with her is accounted for—we've got a video that proves none of the interns left the cabin that night, Willy Jenkins was in Tennessee, and Artie Slade was playing pinochle with his brother. Even her ex-boyfriend was banding birds in Costa Rica.”

“What about Stratton?” asked his mother.

“Stratton claims to have been at home alone, that entire night. But for argument's sake, let's say it's not Stratton.” He drew a figure of a house. “Let's assume some mountain-man type killer has connected himself to that house. The interns thought they saw a gray man that night at the cabin. Artie Slade claims there's a gray man who stands at the edge of the forest and stares at him with abnormally wide eyes. Rob Saunooke told me that the Cherokees think a ghost named Eyes haunts that cabin. Even Butch Messer and I saw something weird up there, back in junior high school.”

She frowned. “When did you and Butch Messer go to the Fiddlesticks cabin?”

He told her about Messer and Pearl Ann Reynolds and their ill-fated trip to steal condoms. She listened, fascinated.

“We were looking around the living room when suddenly, a face popped up in the window. A man, grinning. He had these wide, awful eyes.”

“What did you do?”

“We jumped back on Butch's motor bike and rode like hell. I had nightmares for months.”

“You never told me.”

“I was thirteen, Ma. I wasn't going to tell my mother that I was afraid to go sleep at night.”

She pursed her lips, skeptical. “Do you think Butch Messer really needed condoms at thirteen?”

“Probably not.” Cochran chuckled. “But the trip made us both feel like read studs, until that guy popped up in the window.”

She pulled a stool from the kitchen and sat down, intrigued. “How old did the man look?”

“Ancient, back then. Thinking about it now, he was probably in his forties.”

Eleanor gazed at him, mental wheels turning. “Which would make him close to seventy now.”

“Right.” Cochran turned back to the computer. “Remember the girls Ginger wrote about in that Fiddlesticks piece? Officially, they're still missing persons. But shortly before they disappeared, every one was in or near the Fiddlesticks cabin.”

“When did they vanish?” asked his mother.

Cochran clicked the mouse. A file popped on the screen, showing pictures of three young women. “Vicky Robbins disappeared in 2001, Carolyn James in 1992, Doris McFadden in 1986.”

“One a decade,” said Eleanor.

“Now Lisa Wilson,” said Jerry.

“Good Lord,” she whispered. “You might be on to something.”

“I know. And I'm going to keep at it until I figure out what really happened up there.”

Her mouth curled in a wistful smile. “You sound exactly like your father when you say that.”

Cochran didn't know what to say. His father had been a teacher. A history professor who'd dropped dead when Jerry was a sophomore in college. He wondered, sometimes, if Lawrence Cochran would be pleased that his scrawny bookworm of a boy now wore a badge and locked people up on a regular basis.

“He would be so proud of you,” said his mother, as if reading his mind.

He smiled, happy to think that his father would find him worthy. Then his gaze returned to the faces of those girls on the computer screen. “I'll be proud of me, too,” he told his mother. “If I ever figure all this out.”

Thirty-five

Mary lay in bed,
trying to make sense of the day, re-reading Jonathan's note. Though the handwriting was his, the words typically terse and direct, she still couldn't believe he'd gone. Alex had immediately called Sam Hodges, then her husband Charlie in Texas. Hodges said Jonathan seemed fine when he dropped him off at the motel; Charlie had not heard a word. Since then she'd called him every fifteen minutes, explaining that court had gone well, that the judge would rule tomorrow, but Jonathan neither answered his phone nor returned any messages.

The endless afternoon had darkened into night. After a tasteless supper at the motel, she and Alex bid each other good night.

“Do you want me to call a detective?” asked Alex. “See if we can find him under the radar?”

Mary shook her head. “It would be a waste of time. If Jonathan doesn't want to be found, he won't be. I'm leaving him one more message, then it's up to him.”

Alex looked at her, surprised. “Are you sure?”

“Yep.”

“Okay, then. See you tomorrow. Call me if you need me.”

That had been hours ago. Mary had left Jonathan a final message—apologizing for the surprise in court, telling him that the case still looked good and that she loved him. After that she'd simply lain in bed wondering where he was and if his two-sentence note would be the last she would ever hear of him.

For hours she twisted from one side of the bed to the other, the mattress too lumpy, the pillow too hot. Finally she sat up and turned on the light. The motel bar had long since closed, and she'd packed neither a novel nor any sleeping pills. She resigned herself to another long night of worry when her gaze fell on her laptop, sitting on the desk. That brought to mind Lige McCauley and the weird fiddle tune he'd learned in prison. Throwing off her clammy sheets, she walked over and unzipped her computer bag.

“I'll just play Nancy Drew,” she whispered. “At least it'll give me something to do while I wait for Jonathan to call.”

She booted up the machine, wondering where she should start her research—Central Prison? Fiddlesticks? Shape note music?

“Begin at the beginning,” she whispered, quoting her favorite line from
Alice in Wonderland
. She Googled the
Hartsville Herald,
then did a document search for “Fiddlesticks.” Ginger's special report filled the screen—columns of text, plus a picture of the original Fiddlesticks, Robert Thomas Smith, being escorted from the courthouse by two burly deputies. He was a slight man, with reddish hair and boyish features. He looked too insignificant to have killed much beyond a fly, but Mary had long ago learned that the most vicious killers could still look like choirboys.

She read Ginger's feature carefully—surprised at how close the ghost story mirrored the facts. On November 23, 1958, Robert Thomas Smith had come home unexpectedly and found his wife, Bett, having sex with a man named Ray Hopson. Smith flew into a rage and killed them both with a knife. Whether he'd stuck around fiddling while they died was up for grabs, but Smith disappeared. After a month-long manhunt, he was apprehended on Christmas Eve, coming out of the cemetery, having put two red roses on Bett's fresh grave.

“How romantic,” Mary whispered. “A killer with a heart.”

Ginger's article went on. Smith's trial began April 2, 1959, with spectators spilling out of the courtroom and into the halls. Testimony concluded after two days; the all-male jury deliberated only an hour. They found Smith guilty of two counts of capital murder. He was sentenced to death, due to the “particularly heinous nature of his crime.” On May 8, 1971, Smith died in the gas chamber just after midnight at Central Prison in Raleigh. His unclaimed body was buried in the prison graveyard.

“Okay,” Mary said. “Lige McCauley was in Central Prison the same time as Robert Thomas Smith. So maybe it was Smith McCauley heard fiddling from death row. But how does the same tune show up thirty years later, carved into Lisa Wilson's skin?”

She got up from the computer and heated some water in her in-room coffee pot. As she steeped some lemon-raspberry tea, she considered McCauley as a suspect. He'd been in prison the same time as Smith, had sung the tune carved on Lisa's body. But he was skinny as a pencil and had trouble getting out of a rocking chair. Plus, he lived nearly three hours away, in Grapevine. He probably wasn't the killer, but she still wondered if McCauley knew more about this than he was admitting.

“There's got to be a Central Prison connection here,” she said. She returned to her computer, this time searching for “North Carolina prison records.” A slick website came on the screen, but it was informational, for the families of inmates and victims. She needed the inside scoop, access to historical prison records.

Sipping her tea, she considered whom she might call. Jerry Cochran came to mind first, but she doubted he'd give her the tools to take the wheels off Turpin's case. She closed her eyes, trying to think, when suddenly it came to her. Her go-to PI, Omer Peacock, was retired SBI, retired detective of the High Point Police Department. He would help her out.

She grabbed her cell phone and punched in his number. The phone rang several times, then a recorded voice asked her to leave a message. She almost clicked off, thinking she would call him at a more decent hour, when Omer himself came on the line.

“Mary? That you?”

“All the way from Tulsa, Oklahoma.”

“You in trouble?”

“No, I'm fine, but I need a favor.”

“Shoot, girl, you scared me.” He coughed, as if clearing phlegm from his throat. “What can I do for you?”

“Can you get into the North Carolina prison database?”

“Anybody can do that. You just Google—”

“No, I mean the restricted one. We had one in Georgia we called gofer—Georgia Official Felons Records. It was for police, DAs.”

“I gotcha. You want NCLERC in Carolina.”

“Can you get me in there?”

“You can use my password. It ain't exactly legal, but I won't tell if you won't.”

“I won't.”

“Then get a pencil and write this down.”

She hurried to pull a pen from her computer case. A few minutes later, she had the website and Omer's password written on the palm of her hand. “Thanks, Omer,” she said. “I'm sorry if I woke you up.”

“Not a problem, sweetheart. I haven't had a late-night call from a pretty girl in a long time. I'll go back to sleep and dream of you.”

Laughing, she clicked off the cell and returned to the computer, entering the web address Omer had given her. A screen appeared, giving dire warnings that this site was for law enforcement professionals only and all hackers would be summarily drawn and quartered. Ignoring that, she keyed in Omer's ID and password; a few seconds later she was in the system.

“Okay,” she whispered. “First let's check out McCauley.” She typed in his name. The computer whirred a moment, then a mug shot came on the screen. It showed a youthful version of the old man—his hair dark instead of white, jaw firm instead of flaccid. He'd served two years of a five-year stretch for bootlegging, released early on good behavior. The April dates matched exactly what he'd told her the other day.

“So far he's been straight,” said Mary. “Let's try Robert Thomas Smith.”

She typed in the name. The computer whirred for a moment, then produced a list of over five hundred variations of “Robert Thomas Smith,” all having been in the North Carolina penal system at one time or another.

She narrowed the field, typing in Robert Thomas Smith, 1960. Still, over fifty names appeared. “Damn,” she whispered. “This will take me forever.” She thought for a moment, then remembered that Central Prison in Raleigh was the only place executions were carried out. She typed Smith's name and date in again, this time adding “Central Prison.”

Once more, the computer whirred, this time coming up with only two names. Robert Thomas Smith from Pisgah County, and Robert Thomas Smith from Iredell County. “Bingo,” she said. “There's our boy.”

She clicked on the Robert Thomas Smith of Pisgah County. An enormous number of official records popped up—a warden's report, a witness report, the official order of rejection from the North Carolina court of appeals. She scrolled through them quickly, stopping at a death certificate, dated March 8, 1971. It stated that Robert Thomas Smith had died of asphyxiation by hydrogen cyanide, administered by Officer Harlan Howard and Officer Rufus Slocum, in accordance with said ruling of the North Carolina Appellate Court. Carlisle Wilson, governor, headed a long list of officials who signed the death certificate.

She scrolled down farther, going through an official inventory of Smith's possessions, then a notification of next-of-kin. Finally, she came to the end of the file—the coroner's report on Robert Thomas Smith. The date of death was May 8, 1971, time of death 12:16 a.m. deceased: Robert Thomas Smith, aged 27, residence Pisgah County. He had red hair, hazel eyes, stood 5'8" tall and weighed, at time of death, 147 pounds. Other identifying marks included a scar on his chin, a tattoo of a cross on his right forearm.

There were several more documents signed by witnesses, another form signed by a doctor, then, at the very end, was an autopsy photo. As that image came on the screen, she gasped. The autopsy photo showed a slack-jawed body lying on a table, covered from the waist down by a sheet. Though it was a white male, his features were thick and his hair dark. What made her gasp was not the dead man's appearance, but the fact that he looked absolutely nothing like the light-haired, boyish-looking man in Ginger's article.