“She wouldn't have had access to lab reports,” I said. “But the lab work wouldn't have been completed by the time my directory was broken into. Tox and HIV screens, for example, take weeks.”
“And Susan would have known that.”
“Certainly.”
“So would your administrator.”
“Absolutely.”
“There must be something else,” he said.
There was, but as it came to mind I could not imagine the significance.
“Waddell - or whoever the inmate was - had an envelope in the back pocket of his jeans that he wanted buried with him. Fielding wouldn't have opened this envelope until he had gone upstairs with his paperwork after the post.”
“So Susan couldn't have known what was inside the envelope while she was in the morgue that night?”
Wesley asked with interest.
“That's right. She couldn't have.”
“And was there anything of significance inside this envelope?”
“There was nothing inside but several receipts for food and tolls.”
Wesley frowned. “Receipts,” he repeated. “What in God's name would he have been doing with those? Do you have them here?”
“They're in his file.”
I got out the photocopies. “The dates are all the same, November thirtieth.”
“Which should have been about the time Waddell was transported from Mecklenburg to Richmond.”
“That's right. He was transported fifteen days before his execution,” I said.
“We need to run down the codes on these receipts, see what locations we get. This may be important. Very important, in light of what we're contemplating.”
“That Waddell is alive?”
“Yes. That somehow a switch was made and he was released. Maybe the man who went to the chair wanted these receipts in his pocket when he died because he was trying to tell us something.”
“Where would he have gotten them?”
“Perhaps during the transport from Mecklenburg to Richmond, which would have been an ideal time to pull something,” Wesley replied. “Maybe two men were transported, Waddell and someone else.”
“You're suggesting they stopped for food?”
“Guards aren't supposed to stop for anything while transporting a death row inmate. But if some conspiracy were involved, anything could have happened. Maybe they stopped and got take-out food, and it was during this interval that Waddell was freed. Then the other inmate was taken onto Richmond and put in Waddell's cell. Think about it. How would any of the guards or anybody else at Spring Street have any way of knowing the inmate brought in wasn't Waddell?”
“He might say he wasn't, but that doesn't mean that anyone would have listened.”
“I suspect they wouldn't have listened.”
“What about Waddell's mother?”
I asked. “Supposedly, she had a contact visit with him hours before the execution. Certainly, she would know B the inmate she saw was not her son.”
“We need to verify that the contact visit occurred.But whether it did or didn't, it would have been to Mrs. Waddell's benefit to go along with any scheme. I don't imagine she wanted her son to die.”
“Then you're convinced that the wrong man was executed, “I said reluctantly, for there were few theories, at the moment, that I more wanted to disprove.
His answer was to open the envelope containing Robyn Naismith's photographs and slide out a thick stack of color prints that would continue to shock me no matter how many times I looked at them. He slowly shuffled through the pictorial history of her terrible death.
Then he said, “When we consider the three homicides tha thave just occurred, Waddell doesn't profile right.”
“What are you saying, Benton? That after ten years in prison his personality changed?”
“All I can say to you is that I've heard of organized killers decompensating, flying apart. They begin to make mistakes. Bundy, for example. Toward the end he became frenzied. But what you generally don't see is a disorganized individual swinging the other way, the psychotic person becoming methodical, rational becoming organized.”
When Wesley alluded to the Bundys and Son of Sams in the world, he did so theoretically, impersonally, as if his analyses and theories were formulated from secondary sources. He did not brag. He did not name-drop or assume the role of one who knew these criminal personally. His demeanor, therefore, was deliberately misleading.
He had, in fact, spent long, intimate hours with the likes of Theodore Bundy, David Berkowitz, Sirhan Sfrhan, Richard Speck, and Charles Manson, in addition to the lesser-known black holes who had sucked light from the planet Earth. I remembered Marino telling me once that when Wesley returned from some of these pilgrimages into maximum-security penitentiaries, he would look pale and drained. It almost made him physically ill to absorb the poison of these men and endure the attachments they inevitably formed to him. Some of the worst sadists in recent history regularly wrote letters to him, sent Christmas cards, and inquired after his family. It was no small wonder that Wesley seemed like a man with a heavy burden and so often was silent. In exchange for information, he did the one thing that not one of us wants to do. He allowed the monster to connect with him.
“Was it determined that Waddell was psychotic?” I asked.
“It was determined that he was sane when he Murdered Robyn Naismith.”
Wesley pulled out a photograph and slid it across the table to me. “But frankly, I don't think he was.”
The photograph was the one I remembered most vividly, and as I studied it I could not imagine an unsuspecting soul walking in on such a scene.
Robyn Naismith's living room did not have much fur niture, just several barrel chairs with dark green cushions and a chocolate-brown leather couch. A small Bakhara rug was in the middle of the parquet floor, the calls wide planks stained to look like cherry or mahogany. A console television was against the wall directly across from the front door, affording whoever sintered a full frontal view of Ronnie Joe Waddell's horrible artistry.
What Robyn's friend had seen the instant she unlocked the door and pushed it open as she called out Robyn's name was a nude body sitting on the floor, back propped against the TV, skin so streaked and smeared ` with dried blood that the exact nature of the injuries could not be determined until later at the morgue. In the photograph, coagulating blood pooled around Robyn's buttocks looked like red tinted tar, and tossed nearby were several bloody towels. The weapon was never found, though police did determine that a German made stainless steel steak knife was missing from a set hanging in the kitchen, and the characteristics of the blade were consistent with her wounds.
Opening Eddie Heaths file folder, Wesley withdrew a scene diagram drawn by the Henrico County police officer who had discovered the critically wounded boy behind the vacant grocery store. Wesley placed the diagram next to the photograph of Robyn Naismith. For a moment, neither of us spoke as our eyes went back and forth from one to the other. The similarities were more pronounced than I had imagined, the positions of the bodies virtually identical, from the hands by the sides to the loosely piled clothing near the bare feet.
“I have to admit, it's eerie as hell,” Wesley remarked. “It's almost as if Eddie Heath's scene is a mirror image of this one.”
He touched the photograph of Robyn Naismith.”
Bodies positioned like rag dolls, propped against boxlike objects. A big console TV. A brown Dumpster.”
Spreading more photographs oh the table like playing cards, he drew another from the deck. This one was a close-up of her body at the morgue, the ragged tangential circles of human bite marks apparent on her left breast and left inner thigh.
“Again, a striking similarity,” he said. “Bite marks here and here corresponding closely with the areas of missing flesh on Eddie Heath's shoulder and thigh. In other words” - he slipped off his glasses and looked up at me - “Eddie Heath was probably bitten, the flesh excised to eradi
cate evidence.”
“Then his killer is at least somewhat familiar with forensic evidence,” I said.
“Almost any felon who has spent time in prison is familiar with forensic evidence. If Waddell didn't know about bite mark identification when he murdered Robyn Naismith, he would know about it now.”
“You're talking like he's the killer again,” I pointed out. “A moment ago you said he doesn't profile right.”
“Ten years ago, he didn't profile right. That's all I'm Asserting.”
“You've got his Assessment Protocol. Can we talk about it?”
“Of course.”
The Protocol was actually a forty-page FBI questionnaire filled in during a face-to-face prison interview with a violent offender.
“Flip through this yourself,” Wesley said, sliding Waddell's Protocol in front of me. “I'd like to hear your thoughts without further input from me.”
Wesley's interview of Ronnie Joe Waddell had taken place six years ago at death row in Mecklenburg `County. The Protocol began with the expected descriptive data. Waddell's demeanor, emotional state, mannerisms, and style of conversation indicated that he was agitated and confused. Then, when Wesley had given him opportunity to ask questions, Waddell asked only one: “I saw little white flakes when we passed a window. Is it snowing or are they ashes from the incinerator?”
The date on the Protocol, I noted, was August.
Questions about how the murder might have been prevented went nowhere. Would Waddell have killed his victim in a populated area? Would he have killed her if witnesses had been present? Would anything have stopped him from killing her? Did he think that capital punishment was a deterrent? Waddell said he could not remember killing “the lady on TV.”
He did not know what would have stopped him from committing an act he could not recall. His only memory was of being “sticky.”
He said it was like waking up from a wet dream. The stickiness Ronnie Waddell experienced was not semen. It was Robyn Naismith's blood.
“His problem list sounds rather mundane,” I thought out loud. “Headaches, extreme shyness, marked daydreaming, and leaving home at the age of nineteen. I don't see anything here that one might consider the usual red flags. No cruelty to animals, fire setting, assaults, et cetera.”
“Keep going,” Wesley said.
I scanned several more pages. “Drugs and alcohol,” I said.
“If he hadn't been locked up, he would have died a junkie or gotten shot on the street,” Wesley said. “And what's interesting is the substance abuse did not begin until early adulthood. I remember Waddell told me he had never tasted alcohol until he was twenty and away from home.”
“He was raised on a farm?”
“In Suffolk. A fairly big farm that grew peanuts, corn, Bans. His entire family lived on it and worked for owners. There were four children, Ronnie Joe the youngest. Their mother was very religious and took the children to church every Sunday. No alcohol, swearing, cigarettes. His background was very sheltered. He'd really never been off the farm until his father died and he decided to leave. He took the bus to Richmond had little trouble getting work because of his physical strength. Breaking up asphalt with a jackhammer, lifting heavy loads, that sort of thing. My theory is he could not handle temptation when he was finally faced with it. First it was beer and wine, then marijuana. Within a year he was into cocaine and heroin, buying and selling, and stealing whatever he could get his hands on.“
”When I asked him how many criminal acts he had committed that he had never been arrested for, he said he was doing burglaries, breaking into cars - property crimes, in other words. Then he broke into Robyn Naismith's house and she had the misfortune of coming home while he was there.”
”He wasn't described as violent, Benton,” I pointed out.
“Yes. He never profiled as your typical violent offender. The defense claimed that he was made temporarily insane by drugs and alcohol. To be honest, I think this was the case. Not long before he murdered Robyn Naismith he had started getting into PCP. It is quite possible that when Waddell encountered Robyn Naismith he was completely deranged and later had little or no recollection of what he did to her.”
“Do you remember what he stole, if anything?” I asked. “I wonder if there was clear evidence when he broke into her house that his intent was to commit burglary.”
“The place was ransacked. We know her jewelry was missing. The medicine cabinet was cleaned out and her billfold was empty. It's hard to know what else was stolen because she lived alone.”
“No significant relationship?”
“A fascinating point.”
Wesley stared off at an old couple dancing soporifically to the husky tones of a saxophone. “Semen stains were recovered from a bed sheet and the mattress cover. The stain on the sheet had to be fresh unless Robyn didn't change her bed linens very often, and we know that Waddell was not the origin of the stains. They didn't match his blood type.”
“No one who knew her ever made reference to a lover?”
“No one ever did. Obviously, there was keen interest in who this person was, and since he never contacted the police, it was suspected that she had been having an affair, possibly with one of her married colleagues or sources:' “Maybe she was,” I said.”
But he wasn't her killer.”
“No. Ronnie Joe Waddell was her killer. Let's take a look.”
I opened Waddell's file and showed Wesley the photographs of the executed inmate I had autopsied on me night of December thirteenth. “'Can you tell if this is the man you interviewed six years ago?”
Wesley impassively studied the photographs, going through them one by one. He looked at close-ups of me face and back of the head, and glanced over shots of the upper body and hands. He detached a mug shot from Waddell's Assessment Protocol and began comparing as I looked on.
“I see a resemblance,” I said.
“That's about as much as we can say,” Wesley replied. “The mug shot's ten years old. Waddell had a beard and mustache, was very muscular but lean. His face was lean. This guy”-he pointed to one of the morgue photographs - “is shaven and much heavier. His face is much fuller. I can't say these are the same man, based on these photos.”
I couldn't confirm it, either. In fact, I could think of old pictures of me that no one else would recognize.
“Do you have any suggestions about how we're going to resolve this problem?” I asked Wesley.
“I'll toss out a few things,” he said, stacking the photographs and straightening the edges against the tabletop. “Your old friend Nick Grueman's some kind of player in all this, and I've been thinking about the best way to deal with him without tipping our hand. If Marino or I talk to him, he'll know instantly that something's up.”
I knew where this was going and I tried to interrupt, but Wesley would not let me. “Marino's mentioned your difficulties with Grueman, that he calls and in general jerks you around. And then, of course, there is the past, your years at Georgetown. Maybe you should talk with him.”
“I don't want to talk with him, Benton.”
“He may have photographs of Waddell, letters, other documents. Something with Waddell's prints. Or maybe there's something he might say in the course of conversation that would be revealing. The point is, you have access to him, if you wish, through your normal activities, when the rest of us don't. And you're going to D.C. anyway to see Downey.”
“No,” I said.
“It's just a thought.”
He looked away from me and motioned for the waitress to bring the check. “How long will Lucy be visiting you?” he asked.
“She doesn't have to be back at school until January seventh.”
“I remember she's pretty good with computers.”
“She's more than pretty good.”
Wesley smiled a little. “So Marino's told me. He says she thinks she can help with AFIS.”
“I'm sure she'd like to try.”
I suddenly fel
t protective again, and torn. I wanted to send her back to Miami, and yet I didn't.
“You may or may not remember, but Michele works for the Department of Criminal justice Services, which assists the State Police in running AFIS,” Wesley said.
“I should think that might worry you a little right now.” I finished my brandy.
“There isn't a day of my life that I don't worry,” he said.
The next morning a light snow began to fall as Lucy and I dressed in ski clothes that could be spotted from here to the Eiger.
“I look like a traffic cone,” she said, staring at her blaze orange reflection in the mirror.
“That's right If you get lost on a trail. It won't be hard to find you.”
I swallowed vitamins and two aspirin with the sparkling water from the minibar.
My niece eyed my outfit, which was almost as electric as hers, and shook her head. “For someone so conservative, you certainly dress like a neon peacock for sports.”
“I try not to be a stick-in-the-mud all of the time. Are you hungry?”
“Starved.”
“Benton's supposed to meet us in the dining-room at eight-thirty. We can go down now if you don't want to wait.”
“I'm ready. Isn't Connie going to eat with us?”
“We're going to meet her on the slopes. Benton wants talk shop first.”
“I would think it must bother her to be left out,” Lucy said. “Whenever he talks with anyone, it seems she isn't invited.”
I locked the room door and we headed down the quiet corridor.
“I suspect Connie doesn't wish to be involved,” I said in a low voice. “For her to know every detail of her husband's work would only be a burden for her.”
“So he talks to you instead.”
“About cases, yes.”
“About work. And work is what matters most to both of you.”
“Work certainly seems to dominate our lives.”
“Are you and Mr. Wesley about to have an affair?”
“We're about to have breakfast.”
I smiled.
The Homestead's buffet was typically overwhelming. Long cloth-covered tables were laden with Virginia cured bacon and ham, every concoction of eggs imaginable, pastries, breads, and griddle cakes. Lucy seemed immune to the temptations, and headed straight for the cereals and fresh fruit. Shamed into good behavior by her example and by my recent lecture to Marino about his health, I avoided everything I wanted, including coffee.
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