“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.
Thirty-Six
“What the hell?” cried Mary. She scrolled down, thinking there must be some kind of further addendum, but Pisgah County Smith’s records ended there, his autopsy report showing the face of a totally different man.
She clicked back several screens, thinking she’d gotten the two Robert Thomas Smiths mixed up. Pulling up both sets of records, she compared them. The two men were similar in size—both 5'8", around 150 pounds, but where Pisgah County Smith was redheaded and young looking, Iredell County Smith had dark hair and coarser features. Iredell Smith’s photo was the one attached to Pisgah Smith’s autopsy report.
“Some clerk’s messed this up,” she muttered. She read on, amazed by the similarities between the two men. Both had been fingerprinted in August 1960, both had been sentenced to death for capital murder. But according to the Department of Corrections, Iredell County Smith’s execution had been stayed twice on appeal by the ACLU, arguing grounds of mental competence. The last entry in his file was an appellate court case number, dated September 23, 1974. After that, nothing. She went back to Pisgah County Smith. According to the NCLERC records, he was executed on May 8, 1971. Iredell County Smith was still awaiting an appellate court ruling in September of 1974.
“So what happened?” Mary whispered, as she fished around the site. “Did they put the wrong picture with the wrong record?”
Exasperated, she left NCLERC and searched for North Carolina executions. She found that capital punish
ment had a varied history in the Tar Heel state, and in the early 1970s, North Carolina had squabbled with the Supreme Court over having a death penalty at all. In 1976, Washington slapped Raleigh’s hand, overturning a long-standing mandatory execution statute.
“The Court vacated the sentences of over a hundred inmates awaiting execution,” she read aloud. “Many received new trials, though most were re-sentenced to life in prison.”
She tapped her pencil on the computer screen. “So they executed one Robert Thomas Smith in 1971. But what happened to the other one? And which is which?”
Her tea had grown cold, so she got up and fixed another cup. To her surprise, a pale, anemic dawn was beginning to lighten the room. She looked at her watch. It was 6:46. Abashed, as if she’d shirked some important duty, she hurried over to the window and looked for Jonathan’s truck. She didn’t see it—just a few cars in the parking lot and a white cat meandering toward the trash dumpster, its tail a curl in the air.
She checked her cell phone, but she’d gotten no messages, so she returned to the computer. “Let’s see what Iredell County Smith was in for,” she whispered.
She left Google, logged onto Lexis-Nexis, and typed in “Robert Smith, Iredell County, NC.” The hourglass icon turned while the computer went through the files, then an index of records from the local paper appeared on the screen. The articles were ancient, dating from 1960, when Robby Smith of Troutman, North Carolina, was found guilty for the murder of Officer Frank Quinn of the Statesville police force. “Somebody put Robby up to this,” his grandmother was quoted as saying, “I raised that child to be a good boy, but anybody could talk him into anything.”
“Like change places with someone on death row?” asked Mary, scrolling through the articles. The paper reported that Smith was arrested, provided with a public defender, brought to trial in 1961, was found guilty, and received the death penalty.
At that point, the story died. She found only two more articles—one in 1962, describing how Smith spent his days open-mouthed and staring at the walls of an 8x8 cell. The last one appeared in 1974, stating that Smith remained on death row, awaiting a decision from the Court of Appeals.
“Which means he should be in the NCLERC database,” Mary whispered. Logging out of Lexis-Nexis, she returned to the Department of Corrections website. As she waited for the home page to appear, she thought of Ginger. What a story this would make. At the very least it was grossly inept record keeping—at the worst, they may have executed the wrong man.
“Okay,” she told herself. “Robert Thomas Smith, Iredell, gets you a guy still waiting on a court decision in 1974. Let’s try Grandma’s name for him—Robby Smith.”
She keyed in “Robby Smith.” The computer hummed, but no records appeared. She keyed in “Robby Thomas Smith,” then “Robby Tommy Smith.” Again, nothing.
“Well, nuts,” she said. “The guy can’t just evaporate.” She thought a moment, then decided to widen the search. Still in the Central Prison database, she left the first name field blank and keyed in “Smith, Iredell, 1974.” The computer churned for a second, then came up with four names. Audie Smith, Indigo Sayles Smith, Robert Thomas Smith, then Thomas Robert Smith.
“Did somebody reverse the names?” She clicked on the file. The information for Thomas Robert Smith was identical to the Robert Thomas Smith file, except it continued beyond 1974. Iredell County’s Smith had lingered on death row from 1962 to 1977, then they transferred him to Naughton State Hospital.
“That’s it!” she cried. Iredell Smith had been caught in the glitch when Raleigh and the Supreme Court were fighting it out over the death penalty. She scrolled down through a dozen more reports until finally, she came to the last record. She blinked, unbelieving. The last record was a mug shot—not of a coarse-featured, brown-haired man, but the same boyish-looking man pictured in Ginger’s article. Though the red hair was graying and the face had grown pudgy, it was definitely the man who had walked down the courthouse steps in handcuffs.
“Fiddlesticks, alive and well.”
Thirty-seven
Bett scratched at his window the night the moon was full. He thought she might—for days he’d felt a tingling in the pit of his stomach that wavered between terror and excitement. He’d gone to bed with a snootful of whiskey, hoping Dr. Jack Daniels might render him immune to her. But his eyes had flown open with her first rasp on the screen, as clear-headed as if he’d never touched a drop of liquor in his life. So much for Jack D. Even the mighty doctor is powerless against Bett Lovelace.
She scratched again, cat’s claws on slate. He sat up in bed and turned toward her. It always gave him goose flesh, the way she stood there, staring at him with those near-colorless eyes. Tonight her skin looked like untracked snow, her hair a mass of long, black curls. A scarlet cape draped across her shoulders. It matched the shade of her lips, exactly.
“Bobby?” Her voice sounded the same as always—low, but musical, as if he’d just done something she found amusing. “You awake?”
He nodded, knowing it was pointless to feign sleep. Bett never left until she got what she came for.
She smiled, coy and wheedling. “May I come in?”
Before he could answer she vanished from the window, a dark form swirling through the night. A moment later she stood at the foot of his bed, bringing the smell of lilacs and moldering earth.
“How have you been?”
He glanced wistfully at the half-empty bottle of whiskey. “I’ve been okay.”
She sat down on the side of the bed. “Have you missed me?”
He looked down at her cape, a curl of crimson against his dirty sheets. That question was harder to answer. He loved her. He missed her. He’d been terrified of her since the day they met.
She reached forward, lifting his beard-stubbled chin. When his gaze met hers, she smiled. Those pale amber eyes flashed behind dark lashes, like distant lightning in mid-July. He caught his breath, once again wondering how anything this beautiful had ever been his.
“I think you’ve missed me, Bobby,” she whispered.
She leaned forward and kissed him. Her lips were juicy as a plum, her tongue inebriating parts of him that not even Dr. Jack could touch.
“I think you’ve missed me quite a bit.” Laughing, she pulled her lips from his and let her cape drop to the floor. She stood before him naked and luminous. She seemed composed of only three colors—white skin, black hair, and three touches of red—a succulent mouth and two rosy, erect nipples.
He felt himself grow hard as she pushed him down and climbed on top of him. With her breasts pendulous above him, she started kissing him, working her way by inches from his mouth to his throat, then down his chest. By the time she reached his waist, he was hard as a rock. Just as she began to move lower, she lifted her face to look up at him.
“They’re talking about us again.” Her voice was still low, but less musical now.
He couldn’t speak; he felt as if he might explode.
“You know how that makes me feel.”
He clung to the bedstead, as if some vortex might suck him up into space.
“They’ll spread lies about us again. Call me a whore. And you a fool.”
He tried to answer her, but he felt only her warmth on his hips, her breath on his skin, the agony of a release she would not allow.
“You need to stop that woman, Bobby.” She licked him; a sweet, sick fire crackled through his whole body. “You need to make them leave us alone.”
She might have spoken in English; she might haven spoken Chinese. He whimpered like a dog.
“Will you do it? Or should I get Ray?”
Ray Hopson: his oldest enemy. How like her to mention him now. He looked up at her and managed to shake his head.
She licked him again. “Do you mean no, you won’t do it? Or no, don’t get Ray?”
“Don’t get H
opson,” he croaked, a cold sweat soaking him. “I’ll take care of it.”
“Good. I thought I could persuade you.”
She lowered her head—a sudden warmth enveloped him. All at once she granted him release—he exploded, every fiber in his body sending rage and shame and God knows what else out of him. As he screamed with the pure, hot pleasure of it, she lay back on the bed and laughed.
For a while he lay there helpless as a baby, his muscles drained, his body limp. When he could open his eyes, Bett again stood by the side of his bed, her red cape draped across her body.
“So you’ll fix it, Bobby?” Her eyes glittered with the question.
“I’ll fix it,” he mumbled, his voice coming out dry as a corn husk.
“I knew you would.” Smiling again, she knelt beside the bed. “You always were the best.” She kissed him, all tongue and teeth and teasing, then as he felt himself grow hard again, she rose to leave.
“I’ve got to go now,” she said. “But after you make things right, I’ll come again.” She laughed. “And so will you. Many times over.”
He watched her leave, her cape swirling as she crossed his bedroom, then let herself out his front door. He heard soft footsteps on the gravel outside, then he heard nothing more but the hoot of an owl, far off in the night.
He closed his eyes, fighting tears. Always, he kept the small hope burning that she might be different, might be kind. But every time she flicked his hope out like a cheap match. Still, he knew he would do what she asked. He would do anything to see Bett Lovelace standing naked in front of him.
Thirty-eight
Abruptly, someone knocked on her door. Mary jumped, startled. She’d been utterly enrapt in the unfolding drama in the databases on her screen. Hurriedly, she crossed the room and opened the door. Alex stood there in shorts and a T-shirt, bringing her a cup of coffee.
“Have you heard from Jonathan?” she asked.
“No,” said Mary.
Music of Ghosts Page 26