Evidence of Blood

by Thomas H. Cook

  “Yes, I did.”

  “You were in the courtroom?”

  Hendricks nodded. “It was a big trial,” he said. “There were big crowds. I guess I was as curious as anybody else.”

  Kinley glanced at his notes. “Most of the Sheriff’s testimony is pretty routine,” he said, “but I have a few questions.”

  Hendricks’s eyes dropped down to the notebook, as if in sudden alarm at what might be written within its small white pages. Then, suddenly, he looked back up at Kinley. “Look, why don’t you get in my car, and we’ll go for a little ride,” he said. “Schools are gossip mills, you know, and people would be asking me a thousand questions if they saw me talking to a stranger.”

  “All right,” Kinley agreed. “Where do you want to go?”

  “Just get in with me,” Hendricks said. He pulled himself in behind the wheel and waited as Kinley took a seat on the passenger side.

  “My patrol car was like this,” he said, glancing back toward the rear seat. “No safety glass between the driver and the people in back, like there is today.”

  “So you could hear everything.”

  Hendricks nodded silently, then started the car and drove it out of the parking lot.

  “I was just a kid, really,” he said as he drove south, “a real Dudley Do-Right type.” He smiled. “Gung ho. Idealistic. The whole nine yards.”

  “How long had you been in the Department?” Kinley asked.

  “A couple years,” Hendricks said, “and nothing big had ever really happened. We busted a few bootleggers and vagrants once in a while, and there were always a few drunk and disorderlies to deal with.” He shook his head. “But the Ellie Dinker thing, that was the first murder I’d ever worked.” He took a quick left turn, heading east for two blocks, then turned right and cruised slowly along the base of the mountain, its high green slope rising like a massive wall above them. “It was all you heard about until we arrested Charlie Overton.”

  “Did you know him before that?”

  “Who, Charlie?” Hendricks asked. “No, not at all. I mean, I knew who he was. He’d been working around the courthouse while they were building it. But as a man? No, I didn’t know him.”

  The road continued to skirt the base of the mountain, then came to the place where it intersected the mountain road. Hendricks brought his car to a halt. “I waited right here for Sheriff Maddox. That’s what he’d radioed me to do. Then I saw his car pass, and I fell in behind him. Ben Wade was in the car with him.”

  “And they were going to Overton’s house?”

  “We all went right on up the mountain,” Hendricks said as he eased his foot down on the accelerator and moved the car across the intersection into the small picnic area that rested near Sequoyah High. “We can stop right here,” he said as he brought his car to a halt. “It’s nice and shady,” he added as he opened the door, “and there are benches.”

  Kinley got out of the car, followed Hendricks over to one of the picnic tables and sat down opposite him.

  “I like to rest here in the afternoon,” Hendricks explained. “It gives me peace.”

  Kinley opened his notebook again. “The Sheriff testified that Overton denied the murder.”

  “He did deny it,” Riley said, “but later he admitted it.”

  “But that was several hours later. With Ben Wade.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Did he give any indication of guilt when he was in the backseat with Sheriff Maddox?”

  “No,” Hendricks said. “He looked scared.”

  “Did Maddox give him reason to be?”

  “You mean, was he rough with him?” Hendricks asked. “No. He was real gentle, as a matter of fact. He asked a few questions and Overton answered them.”

  Kinley looked at his notes. “This is the part of Sheriff Maddox’s testimony I have a few questions of my own about,” he said. Then he read the exchange:

  WARFIELD: All right. Now, Sheriff Maddox, can you tell the court what transpired by way of conversation between you and Mr. Overton at that time?

  MADDOX: Overton was denying everything, but he admitted that he had seen Ellie Dinker on the road. He said he didn’t know her name. He said it was just a little girl in a green dress. He didn’t know her name. He said as far as he could recollect, he’d never seen her before. They’d had a little talk, he said, and after that she’d left him and gone up the road a little ways.

  WARFIELD: And this was the day of her murder?

  MADDOX: The day of her murder, that’s right. And he said that she was standing along the road there when his truck broke down.

  WARFIELD: And what did he say happened at that time?

  MADDOX: Well, when the truck broke down, he said he pulled it over to the side there, and started to fix it, and while he was doing that, Ellie Dinker came over, and Overton told me that they’d had a little conversation, what you might say, a few words between them.

  WARFIELD: Did he indicate to you what the nature of that conversation had been?

  MADDOX: Well, nothing much to it, he said. She asked about the truck and that sort of thing, about what was wrong with it, how long it was going to take to fix it, that sort of thing.

  WARFIELD: Just what you might expect then?

  MADDOX: That’s the way I’d describe it, yes.

  Hendricks listened quietly until Kinley had finished, then nodded silently.

  Kinley closed the notebook. “Is that what you remember Overton saying to Sheriff Maddox?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “Do you remember Overton saying anything else?”

  “Nothing important, no,” Hendricks said. “The ride was probably eight or nine minutes, no more than that. They didn’t have time to say too much.”

  Kinley added nothing else, and for a moment Hendricks watched him, as if trying to decide what to say.

  From across the bare, concrete table, Kinley could see something move behind Hendricks’s eyes, shifting, darting, like a creature looking for a way out. He decided to give it seven seconds to find its own way before prying open a larger space with another question. He counted them off in his mind: one two three four five …

  “Ray talked to me, you know,” Hendricks said suddenly. “About three months ago. He had a few questions, too.”

  “Ray talked to you?” Kinley asked. “What questions?”

  “He went over the same things you did,” Hendricks answered. “He wanted to know if Overton had said anything else on the way to the courthouse.”

  “I see.”

  “Something bothered him about what Overton said,” Hendricks went on. “Ray had been a cop a long time, and he could see things, situations, you know, in his head.”

  “Yes, I know what you mean,” Kinley told him. “What did he see in this situation?”

  “Well, you have this young girl on the side of the road,” Hendricks began, “and a strange man pulls over in a beat-up old truck, and he gets out, and you’re a girl there all by yourself.”

  “Yes?”

  “Well, would a young girl go over to a man like that?” Hendricks asked. “And those questions she asked. Why those questions? I mean, about what was wrong with the truck, how long it would take to fix, stuff like that. I mean, why would she give a shit one way or another, you know?”

  Kinley nodded.

  “That’s what bothered Ray,” Hendricks said. “What Ellie Dinker did and said on the road, it didn’t make sense. It didn’t fit with the situation the way Ray imagined it.” He paused a moment, the ferment still building slowly in his face. “And that made me remember something later,” he went on. “I meant to tell Ray about it, but I waited, and so …”

  “What did you remember?”

  “Well, Overton described the Dinker girl just like the Sheriff said in court, the way she came over to him, and the questions she asked, but he also said that she looked strange, and I remember the word he used to describe the way she looked to him.”

  Kinley fel
t the tip of his pen press down onto the open notebook. “What word?”

  “He said she looked ‘nervous-like,’” Hendricks said. “You know, jumpy.”

  Kinley quickly jotted the word down in his notebook, then looked back up at Hendricks. “Just her manner? Just the way she acted when she talked to him?”

  “That’s right,” Hendricks said. “The way she looked to him, nervous-like.”

  “That’s all?”

  “I guess,” Hendricks said softly as his eyes lowered somewhat, as if to avoid discovery. It was a movement Kinley had noticed many times on other occasions, and which had always signaled the presence of something more. In Colin Bright, it had been nothing more than the way his hand had suddenly inched forward toward Kinley’s own hand, lingered a moment, then retreated. In Willie Connors, it had been something almost melodramatic, a trembling of his lower lip. Mildred Haskell had made no sign at all.

  He looked at Hendricks steadily while his mind went through its bag of tricks, frantically searching for the one question that would set Riley Hendricks free as it had the others, whether guilty or innocent, cowardly or fearless, the one question that would penetrate the wall. After a moment, he found it.

  “Ben Wade told me that you quit the Sheriff’s Department not long after the trial,” he said. “Is that true?”

  Hendricks’s eyes remained discreetly lowered. “Yes, it is.”

  “Did it have something to do with Charlie Overton?”

  Hendricks’s eyes lifted slowly and stared directly into Kinley’s. “No,” he said. “With Ellie Dinker.”

  “What about her?”

  “Her body,” Riley said. “The one her mother wanted to find so bad.”

  “What about it?”

  “Well, the way they sort of lost interest in it,” Hendricks said. “I mean, I was no great cop, but one place seemed obvious to me.”

  “Where?”

  “Well, we arrested Overton in his backyard,” Hendricks answered. “And I remember that when I put the cuffs on him, I happened to glance over his shoulder, and I could see it plain as day, just like Sheriff Maddox could.”

  Kinley waited anxiously, but careful to keep himself in check.

  “Well, there was a well back there,” Hendricks said. “I could see it standing right in the middle of the yard.”

  Kinley nodded, his hand motionless on the notebook page as he listened.

  “And nobody ever looked for Ellie Dinker there,” Hendricks added. “Why not? It was the most obvious place.”

  It seemed so to Kinley, and the new information surprised him as much as it had always baffled Hendricks. “They never looked at all?” he asked.

  Hendricks shook his head. “No. Never.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because it would have been me they’d have sent to do it,” Hendricks explained, “you know, the rookie.” He laughed, but with a curious edginess. “I mean, there’s no way Sheriff Maddox would have climbed down some old muddy hole in the ground to look for a body. No way. He liked his uniform too much. He would have sent the new boy for sure.”

  “How about Ben Wade?” Kinley asked. “He wouldn’t have sent him?”

  Hendricks stared at him thoughtfully. “I don’t know about Ben Wade,” he said.

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning he was always sort of a mystery to me,” Hendricks said. “But then, just about everybody is, don’t you think?”

  Kinley’s mind raced through the catalogue of his acquaintances, editors, writers, all of them more or less transparent in the grand simplicity of their needs. It did not stop until it got to Ray, his face a black-and-white photograph. Except for the eyes, which Kinley’s mind had eerily insisted on painting the same dark green as it had already imagined Ellie Dinker’s dress.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Once again at Ray’s desk, Kinley typed in the appropriate code: OVER:MYS.

  The file flashed onto the screen, and Kinley scrolled down until he reached the questions he wanted:

  1)Why did Ellie Dinker want to meet at the Slater house instead of her own, which would have been much closer to their ultimate destination, the courthouse in Sequoyah?

  2)Why did Ellie Dinker leave for Helen’s five hours before she needed to?

  3)Why did Ellie Dinker move in a direction opposite to the one she should have taken if she’d been planning to go directly to the Slater house?

  4)Why did she stop on the mountain road?

  To the first four questions, he wrote a fifth, sixth and seventh:

  5)Why did she approach Overton after his truck broke down?

  6)Why did she ask him what was wrong with the truck and how long it would take to fix it?

  7)Why did she appear “nervous-like”?

  Once the questions had been written, Kinley let his eyes linger on them silently, doing what Ray had evidently done from time to time as well, imagining the scene, recording it like an invisible camera bearing down upon it from the overhanging cliffs.

  In his mind, he could see Overton’s truck as it slogged wearily up the mountain, laden with tools, dusty with the red clay of the courthouse construction site. Overton was behind the wheel, as Kinley now imagined him. He was sweating, his stomach churning uncontrollably as he fought to keep the old truck crawling up the mountain road.

  But he had failed, and suddenly she was there in the distance, standing by Mile Marker 27 in her dark green dress, her head turning toward him as the truck ground to a halt on the weedy shoulder of the road.

  Now the camera was outside, and Kinley could see the two of them on the mountain road. Overton was holding his stomach as he bent over the truck’s steamy engine. Dinker was poised a few yards away, watching, waiting, until she began to move toward him, slowly at first, then faster until she was at Overton’s side, her mouth twitching left and right as she fired her questions in a crisp, staccato voice: What’s the matter? Can you fix it? How long will it take?

  Overton, still clutching at his stomach to keep it from exploding, groaned his answers as he continued to lean under the raised hood of the truck, his eyes now peering blearily into the oil-splattered engine: The motor’s leaking. I have to find out how bad it is.

  In his mind, Kinley could see Ellie Dinker in her green dress as she stepped away from the truck to watch nervously as Overton eased himself onto the pebbly earth, then pulled himself under the truck.

  How bad is it?

  Bad.

  Can you fix it?

  Now Overton was staring up into the worn metal innards of the engine. Oil was everywhere, everywhere, dripping from the engine block, oozing from the wide crack in the oil tank’s ancient seal. All around him, like a thousand edgy, fluttering birds, Ellie Dinker’s questions kept diving at him. Can you fix it? Can you fix it?

  Overton’s stomach heaved and bellowed, as his face grew taut under the relentless volley of her questions.

  Can you fix it? Can you fix it?

  To shut her up, he answered her at last: I don’t know.

  But his answer had not silenced her, and the questions continued to assail him: How long will it take? Will it take an hour? Will it take half an hour? Will it take …

  Flat beneath the truck, his eyes staring achingly at the devastated engine, he had put it to her bluntly: A long time.

  And after that, a silence must have descended upon them, Kinley thought, as he continued to envision the scene, a frozen instant before Ellie Dinker skirted away from him, her white legs moving rapidly through the weedy growth along the shoulder of the road, taking her away from Overton, away from the truck, past the white, pointed obelisk of Mile Marker 27, and “on up a little ways,” as Overton had told Sheriff Maddox, “on up a little ways” …where she stopped.

  Kinley’s mind halted a moment, his eyes concentrating on all the small details of what he’d gathered so far about Ellie Dinker’s last day on earth. He thought of her early departure, of the route she’d taken, one which would not have led her
to Helen Slater’s house, but straight up the slope of the mountain, where she would have reached the mountain road at—precisely at—Mile Marker 27.

  He glanced at the list of questions he’d compiled under Ellie Dinker’s name, then answered question three:

  3)Why did Ellie Dinker move in a direction opposite the one she should have taken if she’d been planning to go directly to the Slater house?

  Quickly, Kinley typed his answer under the question: Because she was not going to Helen Slater’s house. She was going to Mile Marker 27, which is directly in line with her path, and where she was seen standing when she met Charles Overton.

  Kinley’s eyes moved up the screen’s illuminated page and settled on questions one and two:

  1)Why did Ellie Dinker want to meet at the Slater house instead of her own, which would have been much closer to their ultimate destination, the courthouse in Sequoyah?

  2)Why did Ellie Dinker leave for Helen’s five hours before she needed to?

  He thought a moment, then typed the most reasonable answer to both questions: Because she wanted to go up the mountain, rather than in any other direction, and because she needed time to go wherever it was she wanted to go, and to do whatever it was she wanted to do.

  Next Kinley moved quickly to the four remaining questions:

  4)Why did she stop on the mountain road?

  5)Why did she approach Overton after his truck broke down?

  6)Why did she ask him what was wrong with the truck and how long it would take to fix it?

  7)Why did she appear “nervous-like”?

  For a moment he considered the possibilities. It was conceivable that one answer might fit all four questions. In his mind, he tried once again to reconstruct the events, this time from Ellie Dinker’s perspective, rather than from Overton’s.