The Judas Murders

by Ken Oder

  The bullet perforated her chest wall, severed an artery, and remained lodged in her spine. Shirley West performed the autopsy. “She didn’t suffer,” Shirley assured Cole. “She died almost instantly.”

  Other than the bullet that killed Carrie, Cole’s men recovered nothing helpful from the crime scene. No prints, tracks, or clues of any kind.

  Even though nothing was stolen from the house, Cole’s men thought the murder might have been a burglary gone bad.

  Cole didn’t think so. The shooter’s precise aim didn’t bear the mark of panic. Cole believed her murderer was seeking revenge against Cole. Either he came to the house to kill Cole, or he killed Carrie knowing it would cut Cole’s heart out.

  Cole’s thirty-five years of law enforcement had spawned a lot of enemies; his list of suspects was long. He spent more than two years investigating them and cleared the last man just before Christmas. Three years after the murder, he had no suspects and no leads, and he knew nothing more about Carrie’s murder than he knew the day she died.

  Cole met Carrie when he was fifteen and they were married for forty years. He had never been intimate with another woman.

  After her murder, he took an indefinite leave of absence from the sheriff’s office. He wouldn’t talk to the county’s grief counselor or to Reverend Chatham. He refused to book an appointment with the psychologist his doctor recommended.

  Their son came home the day before the funeral. Peter and Cole had never been close. They stood together at the graveside service without looking at or talking to one another, and Peter flew back to Philadelphia the next morning.

  * * *

  Two months after Carrie’s funeral, on a warm night in September, Cole sat in an Adirondack chair under a sweet gum tree in his front yard watching the light of a full moon pierce the shade trees and dapple with pale yellow more than twenty birdhouses he’d made by hand at Carrie’s request. She loved birds so much she turned the yard into an aviary.

  He looked out at the bottomland where fireflies winked over the river and crickets sang in the weeds. Whippoorwills called from the forested slope behind the house.

  Headlights on Whippoorwill Hollow Road turned onto Cole’s driveway and climbed the hill. An old blue Ford pickup came to a stop in front of the car shed and Deputy Toby Vess stepped down off its running board. Tall and lean, he walked across the yard with long slow strides and sat down next to Cole in Carrie’s chair.

  Toby took off his hat and ran his hand over his close-cropped gray hair. “Pretty night,” he said.

  In his late sixties, he had served as Cole’s right-hand man for thirty years, and he was a good friend, but Cole wasn’t in the mood for company. “I don’t mean to be rude, but I need to be alone. I’d appreciate it if you’d leave me be.”

  “I understand. I won’t stay long.” Toby fiddled with his hat and cleared his throat. “My wife died when I was twenty-eight.”

  Cole looked at Toby incredulously. Toby had never hinted that he’d been married.

  “It was forty years ago,” Toby said, “when I lived in Windmill Point on the Chesapeake Bay. Her name was Connie Patel. We were married for six years.”

  Cole struggled to find his voice. “How did she die?”

  “Influenza. There was no vaccine for it back then. No cure. No treatment. All the doctor could do was make her comfortable and hope for a miracle. She fought hard, but her lungs filled with fluid, and she couldn’t breathe.” Toby’s eyes glistened, but his voice remained clear and steady.

  “How come you never told me?”

  “Didn’t want you to know. Didn’t want anyone to know. I was a deputy in Lancaster County when she died. I tried to kill myself with whiskey. Drank my way out of my job. My father pulled me out of it. Sheriff Musgrove grew up in Irvington and was good friends with my dad when they were boys, so he offered me a job in Selk County as a favor to him. I wanted to make a clean start. When I signed on, I asked the sheriff to give me his word he wouldn’t tell anyone. He never told a soul, as far as I know.”

  They fell silent. A cow in the pasture lowed. An airplane droned across the night sky high above them.

  Toby put on his hat. “You’d be coldhearted if you didn’t think about Carrie on pretty nights like this, but if you think about her all the time, it’ll kill you. You’ve got to get up and go on. Mix with people. Go back to work.” He got up out of the chair, walked across the yard to his truck, and drove down the hill to the road.

  Cole returned to work the next day, and over time, he settled into the rhythm of the job again. He got up every morning and went to work. He walked on, step by step, but he was not the same man.

  Chapter Six

  The Broken Heart

  March 2, 1967, Thursday morning

  The day after Reba Emley talked with Sheriff Grundy at the old schoolhouse, she drove in to Jeetersburg to meet with a lawyer. Thirty-three years old and six feet tall with hazel eyes, an aquiline nose, and curly, shoulder-length black hair, Rachel McNiel sat at her desk in a dark blue suit jacket and skirt and a white blouse while Reba sat across from her in a black leather miniskirt and a red sweater with a deep V neck, her legs crossed, smoking a cigarette.

  Reba recounted for Rachel her meeting with the sheriff. When she finished, she said, “I didn’t tell him everything. There’s a lot more to the story.”

  “What did you hold back?” Rachel asked.

  Reba took a deep draw on her Kool and stubbed it out in a silver tray. She opened her purse and withdrew a miniature revolver. She held it in her hand and looked at it for a moment, then placed it in the center of the desk.

  Rachel looked it over. An old pistol, small enough to fit in the palm of a woman’s hand. Its pearl handle was scratched and worn, its snub-nosed barrel as dull as pewter; no trigger guard.

  Reba said, “I tried to kill Betty Lou with that gun.” Her jaw was clenched, her lips pressed together.

  “When?”

  “Twenty years ago.”

  “Why?”

  “She stole Leland from me.”

  Rachel took a moment to digest that. “How did she steal Leland from you?”

  Reba lit another Kool, pulled mentholated smoke deep into her lungs, and blew a long stream toward a picture window that looked out on Lighthorse Street. “I met him first. Him and me fell in love. We planned to get married. We were tryin to find a way to raise the down payment for a little house on Beale Street.” Reba’s hand shook as she lifted the cigarette to her lips and inhaled again. “One night, out of the blue, he said he didn’t love me anymore. Said he was heartbroke about it. Said it wasn’t nothin I did wrong and I didn’t deserve to be hurt so bad. Cried. Hugged me. Packed his bag and left me.” She propped her elbow on the arm of the chair, held the cigarette at eye level, and stared at it. No tears. A hard look on her face.

  Rachel watched gray threads of smoke drift toward the ceiling and waited for Reba to continue.

  “You know Luther Boaz?” Reba asked.

  “The building contractor?”

  Reba nodded. “Betty Lou was his secretary back then. One of my girlfriends was his bookkeeper. She said Luther called Leland into the office about a plumbin job. Him and Betty Lou struck up a conversation when he found out she was my sister. My girlfriend said Betty Lou gave him a real heavy come-on.”

  “How old were you then?”

  “Nineteen. Leland was twenty-three. Betty Lou was twenty-four.”

  “Did Betty Lou know about you and Leland when she came on to him?”

  “She knew. She didn’t care.” Reba’s voice was strained.

  “You said you tried to kill her. When? How?”

  Reba breathed out a swirling gray cloud. “Bout a year after they got married they bought their house out in the hollow. I got drunk and drove out there. Parked by the road and sat in my car lookin at it, thinkin it should be me and Leland livin in it. I took that gun and went inside. Found Betty Lou in the kitchen, fryin up supper. I fired all five rounds at her.�
�� She drew on the cigarette. “It’s hard to hit your mark with that little gun, and I was drunk. I only hit her once.”

  “What happened then?”

  “She stood there squeezin the wound on her leg, lookin at me like she couldn’t believe it. Leland came runnin in the kitchen, sat her down, tended to her wound, called the rescue squad.” Staring out the window, Reba’s eyes glistened. “He looked at me like he hated me. Told me to get out. Real cold-like.” She blew out a heavy breath. “So I went home. Went to bed. By myself. Like always. Cried till daybreak.”

  Rachel gave Reba a moment. Then, “Did the police arrest you?”

  Reba shook her head. “Leland and Betty Lou told people she shot herself by accident. He come to my door a couple days afterwards. Told me I had to back off. Claimed him and Betty Lou cared about me, but if I tried to hurt her again, he’d come after me for it. Made me promise I would stay away from her. I cried. He hugged me. Said he was sorry, but he couldn’t help it that he loved Betty Lou more than me. Kissed me on the forehead, and went away. I stayed away from them after that. I never spoke to him again until I saw him in Carter’s Tavern that night last summer.”

  So Reba’s hatred for Betty Lou wasn’t mutual, Rachel thought. She looked at the revolver. “Where did you get this gun?”

  “Betty Lou gave it to me.”

  “When?”

  “Long time before I shot her, when I was ten years old.”

  “Why did she give it to you?”

  Reba looked out the window. She seemed to be debating in her mind whether to answer the question.

  A gentle breeze blew across Lighthorse Street. The white and yellow limbs of the sycamores lining the sidewalk swayed. “You know about my momma?” Reba asked.

  “I heard rumors.”

  “The rumors are true. She was a whore.” Reba put the cigarette out and folded her arms over her chest. Her shoulders trembled. “I think she sold Betty Lou.”

  Rachel paused. “You really think your mother could have done that?”

  “Momma would do anything for the right price.”

  Rachel took a moment to adjust to that. Then she said, “What makes you think your mother sold her?”

  “Betty Lou ran away from home when she was fourteen and never came back. The day she ran off, she gave me that gun. Wouldn’t tell me why she wanted me to have it. Took me out to the field behind our place. Showed me how to shoot it. Watched me practice with it. Said to keep it close.”

  Rachel pushed her chair away from her desk, crossed her legs, and took a moment to think it through. “So you think Betty Lou gave you the gun because she thought your mother would sell you, too.”

  Reba nodded. She uncrossed her arms, clasped her hands in her lap, and looked down at them.

  She wants to stop the conversation there, Rachel thought. Rachel would, too, but she had to know everything to represent Reba competently. “Did your mother sell you, Reba?” she asked gently.

  “I won’t talk about that.”

  Rachel pulled her chair up to the desk and leaned forward. “I know it may be hard to talk about, but I can’t do my job if I don’t know the whole story.”

  “It’s got nothing to do with Leland’s murder.”

  “It’s my job to decide what’s relevant. That’s why you hired me.”

  “I won’t talk about it. That’s my final word.”

  Reba looked as tight as a coiled spring. Rachel decided to let it go and come back to it later.

  “You said Leland followed you home from a bar last summer,” Rachel said. “With the history between the three of you, I’m surprised he did that.”

  “I was surprised, too. I’d finally given up on him after he told me to stay away from him and Betty Lou, and I’d tried to move on with my life.” She smirked. “Didn’t do so good at that, what with three broke marriages and all.”

  Rachel stared at her pensively. Past forty, single, childless, lonely, with no man on the horizon. The thought flitted across Rachel’s mind that she might find herself in the same place in ten years unless she changed her ways.

  “That night last summer in Carter’s Tavern,” Reba said, bringing Rachel’s attention back to her, “I figured I had nothin to lose so I threw out a line and Leland bit down hard on the bait. I was excited. I thought maybe he’d leave Betty Lou and take up with me again, but after we made love, he said he was sorry and he shouldn’t have done it. He left my trailer fast as he could, and I thought that was the end of it. But he kept comin back.”

  Reba wrapped her arms around her shoulders. “That last night, the night before someone killed her, he seemed worse off than before. He made love like he was desperate. Three go-rounds. When he was spent, I told him I couldn’t go on with him showin up whenever he felt like it. Said I had to know what he planned to do about me and him. Told him he owed me. Shamed him. The shaming is what pulled it out of him, I reckon. He said Betty Lou had been cheating on him. Said he knew she was with a man that very night. Claimed this wasn’t the first man. Told me she was with a man last summer when I hooked up with him at Carter’s Tavern, a different man, and it sounded like there might have been others before that.”

  “Why did he stay with her?”

  A look of defeat came across Reba’s face. “I tried to get him to leave her. I told him she didn’t deserve him. Told him I loved him, and I’d make him forget her.” Reba paused, her eyes beading with tears. “He said he couldn’t leave her because it wasn’t her fault. He claimed she couldn’t help herself because of the way Momma treated her. He told me he cared for me, but he loved her more, too much to leave her. Said he was weak because every time she pushed him away he gave in to his needs and took advantage of me.”

  Rachel pushed a box of tissues across the desk. Reba took one and wiped her eyes. “Leland cried that night,” she said. “Just like he did twenty years ago when he threw me over for Betty Lou. When he drove away that mornin, I knew he wouldn’t come back.”

  Rachel considered everything Reba had told her. She had a powerful motive to kill Betty Lou, and she’d tried to do it once before. Her story about sleeping with Leland at the time of the murder was uncorroborated and unverifiable. Not a good mix.

  “Too many people know about your old relationship with Leland for it to go undiscovered,” Rachel said. “The sheriff will learn that Leland left you for Betty Lou and that you were angry about it. Does anyone know you shot Betty Lou with this pistol?”

  “Walt Ballard.”

  Rachel grimaced. Ballard was known for his loose tongue, and he was a deputy. Rachel had to assume he would tell the sheriff.

  Rachel looked at the portrait of a young woman in a Victorian gown that hung on the wall across from her desk. The girl was twirling an umbrella, strolling past a park bench under a maple tree with russet leaves. It was a serene image that sometimes eased Rachel’s mind and helped her think more clearly in tense times.

  The best course of action might be to tell the sheriff everything before Ballard did, if he hadn’t reported what he knew already. “Touch the open wound,” Burton Jaffee, Rachel’s old mentor, used to say. “Better to expose the weakness of your case on your own terms than to have your adversary cast it in its worst light.” That usually made sense, but it might not work here. Reba had withheld part of the story and Rachel couldn’t make an intelligent decision about disclosure without knowing all the details.

  “Let’s go over everything from the beginning,” she said. “When and where did you first meet Leland?”

  Reba lit another cigarette and drew hard on it.

  Chapter Seven

  The Witness

  March 2, 1967, Thursday afternoon

  While Reba was going over her story with Rachel the second time, Sheriff Grundy drove out to Whippoorwill Hollow to interview Leland Mundy’s neighbor, despite his doctor’s orders to rest his back. Bessie Tilden had told his deputy she heard a gunshot the morning of the murder, but she clammed up when he asked follow-up questions an
d refused to meet with Chase Dooley again. Now that Reba had cast doubt on Leland’s guilt, Cole was determined to make Bessie tell him whatever she might know about the murder.

  The sun hung low over the field across the road when Cole parked his patrol car in front of Bessie’s house at the foot of Bobcat Mountain. She and her husband, Milton, bought the four-acre lot in 1946. They moved into the farmhouse and sold the small cottage next door to Leland and Betty Lou Mundy a few weeks later. Three months after Milton retired from thirty years as a rural mail carrier, he died of a massive heart attack. With help from their daughters and their husbands, Bessie had managed to retain the farmhouse and eke out a meager living from Milton’s government pension.

  The place had seen better days, Cole thought as he limped over the concrete stepping stones to the porch. Strips of yellow paint had peeled off the wood siding and patches of rust were spreading across the tin roof.

  Bessie opened the door when Cole rapped on it. She’d teased her silver hair as big as a five-gallon bucket and troweled a thick layer of makeup onto her face. Charcoal eyebrows arched over her eyes and neon-pink gloss shellacked her lips. She’d always favored loud outfits, but that afternoon she’d outdone herself with lavender wool slacks and an orange blouse with purple flowers on the sleeves. She looked like an aged circus clown.

  “Afternoon, ma’am. You look mighty pretty,” Cole said politely.

  She scowled at him. “What do you want?”

  “I have some questions about the murder.”

  “I told that young deputy all I know. I don’t want to talk about it any more.”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am, but I’m afraid we have to talk about it.” He stepped into the house.