The Judas Murders

by Ken Oder

  “Did she say anything to him?”

  “No.”

  “Did she tell Randy about Hazel’s respiratory problems?”

  “She didn’t say anything to him.”

  “Did you tell him Betty Lou said Hazel had breathing problems?”

  “No.”

  Cole leaned back in his chair and rubbed the back of his neck.

  “Did I miss something on this one, boss?”

  “No. You did a good job, as always.” Cole thanked Karson for his help and he left the office.

  Cole looked at the death certificate again. No one told Randy about Hazel’s respiratory condition, he spent five minutes with the body, and he didn’t research her medical history. And yet he entered pneumonia on the certificate as the cause of death.

  Cole stared out the windows. The sun had set behind Beacon Hill, tinting cumulus clouds with maroon and amber streaks.

  He buzzed Mabel and asked her to come into his office. He handed her the file and asked her to review it. She sat across from him and looked it over. When she finished, he told her the additional information he’d learned from George Hollingsworth and Karson. “What do you think?”

  She looked vexed, her eyebrows pulled together in a straight black line. “We’ll need Wiley to file a petition to exhume the body.” Wiley Rea was the commonwealth’s attorney.

  “Get Shirley West on the phone,” Cole said. “She’ll have to write up a report for Wiley, explaining the reason we need to dig up Hazel and perform an autopsy three months after her burial. Call Rachel, too, and ask her if Reba will consent to the exhumation.”

  She nodded and left Cole’s office.

  Cole looked at the death certificate again. At minimum, Randy had done a piss-poor job of examining Hazel’s corpse, but Cole was afraid he had done much worse.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  The Enemy for Life

  March 6, 1967, Monday afternoon

  After leaving Rosabelle Steeger’s house, Chase went back to Sheriff Feedlow’s office, and Feedlow gave him directions to Cantrell’s Shooting Range where Rosabelle had said Bowie met the man named Ray who hired him to hunt big game. Chase arrived at the range midafternoon. The vehicles in its gravel lot spanned the economic spectrum. He parked his patrol truck between a gleaming black 1967 Ford F-250 with a Confederate flag tied to its radio aerial and a 1947 army surplus Jeep with a missing passenger door and a bashed-in front bumper.

  At the edge of the parking lot, two long, low structures with lacquered pine pillars and canted corrugated tin roofs stretched across the base of two horseshoe-shaped earthen berms enclosing flat fields of mown grass. Between the structures, a check-in and monitoring shack on an elevated concrete platform overlooked the stations and the ranges. Life-sized silhouettes were stapled to posts at various distances up to 200 yards in the handgun range and 500 yards in the rifle range. Plywood walls divided each structure into firing stations with shoulder-high hitching posts for bracing shots from a standing position and tables with anchored stools for seated shots.

  The extraordinary heat wave had broken that afternoon and the temperature had dropped into the fifties. Cottony clouds floated in a pale blue sky. A mild breeze cooled Chase’s brow as he climbed out of his truck and headed toward the monitoring shack.

  A nonstop cacophony of gunfire filled the air, rapid-fire pops and staccato booms. Two shooters occupied stations on the handgun range, a middle-aged man in a business suit and a short young woman with long blond hair, both wearing earmuffs and using two-handed grips and wide stances. A dozen men of various ages and body styles, mostly dressed in hunting gear, stood in the stations on the rifle range. A young man in the station closest to the check-in shack looked to be in his early twenties. Tall and wiry, he wore a straw hat with the brim rolled up on the sides and a long pheasant feather curling from its red band. He sat on a stool, braced a scoped rifle on the table, and squeezed off a shot. A hole pitted the center of a silhouetted figure’s head posted beside a 300-yard marker. The young man looked over at Chase. A cocky smile came across his face and he winked.

  Chase nodded to him and climbed the concrete steps to the check-in shack and stepped inside. Behind a counter that cut the room in half, metal filing cabinets were shoved up against the back wall. A short, fat old man with a blind milky eye stood behind the counter wearing bib overalls and a Smith & Wesson ball cap. He pored over a sheet attached to a clipboard.

  Sheriff Feedlow had warned Chase about old man Pinkerton Cantrell, the owner-operator of the range. “Pinky looks like a hayseed, but don’t underestimate him. He turned a big pile a dirt and an open-air cowshed into a small fortune when most people in this county don’t have two dimes to rub together. Trouble is he’s a pain in the ass and he holds grudges. You rile him, you’ve made an enemy for life.”

  Chase approached the counter cautiously. “Afternoon, sir.”

  Cantrell squinted at Chase’s uniform with his good eye and grimaced, exposing a gap where his upper front teeth should have been. “Only state troopers and Buck County law men shoot for free. You ain’t neither. You want to shoot, you pay the full fee.” The missing teeth caused a heavy lisp.

  “I’m not looking for a free turn on your range. I’m looking for information about a man I have reason to believe was here on Friday, February seventeen. He might have been here with Thurman Bowie.”

  “Bowie? You looking for Bowie?”

  “No, sir. Bowie was murdered three weeks ago.”

  “Murdered?” Cantrell’s good eye widened and the milky one narrowed. He took off his cap, set it on the counter, and scratched a full head of thick, wiry gray hair, causing it to stick out in all directions. “How was he killed?”

  “Gunshots. One to the head, one to the chest.”

  “Execution style,” Cantrell said. “I ain’t surprised. Bowie beat up on anybody and everybody. It stands to reason he’d bully the wrong man sooner or later.”

  “Did you know him well?”

  “I didn’t have much choice. He bought a volume discount package. Came here most every day. He was the best shooter in the county. Nobody else was close, except maybe that Gilchrist boy out there in station one, and he’s only in the running because his .35 Remington Carbine is a better rifle than Bowie’s weapon.”

  “What did Bowie shoot?”

  “A Brown Precision thirty-aught-six bolt-action with a walnut stock and black recoil pad. Bowie outfitted it with a Leupold scope. It’s a good weapon but not as accurate as Gilchrist’s Remington. Even so, standing or sitting, Bowie could put every shot within a two-inch ring on a five-hundred-yard target. On his best day, Gilchrist couldn’t do half that good. Bowie wasn’t worth a damn for much of anything else, but when it came to long-range rifle shots, they don’t come any better.”

  The question of Bowie’s presence on Bobcat’s summit was even more puzzling now. He had stood behind a tripod three hundred yards from Betty Lou Mundy’s house within a forty-eight-hour window around the time of her murder, and yet he wasn’t her murderer. What the hell was he doing up there?

  “Who killed Bowie?” Cantrell asked, bringing Chase out of his thoughts.

  “I don’t know. The man I’m looking for may know something about it. He may have been with Bowie the last time he was here. I don’t know his last name, but his given name is Ray.”

  Cantrell’s eyes hardened. “Tall, thin bastard, about sixty-five years old.”

  “You remember him?”

  “Hard to forget the biggest asshole come through that door this year.”

  “You remember his last name?”

  “Middleditch,” Cantrell said, curling his lip. “He signed in, paid his fee, went to the window there, and looked out at the rifle range. Had bo-nocs hanging round his neck. Must have stood there five minutes looking at the shooters and checking the targets. I finally said, ‘You paid to shoot, not to look. Take a station or get off the range.’

  “He looked like he wanted to give me some lip,
but he swallowed whatever smart-ass remark he had in mind and asked me the name of the man in station five. Thurman Bowie, I told him. Then he asked me what kind of man Bowie was. I told him I ran a shooting range, not a gossip parlor. He told me I should watch my mouth or somebody might knock the rest of my teeth out.”

  Cantrell reached under the counter and placed a pistol on top of it. “You run a shooting range you never know what kind of shithead will come along. I keep this here Luger P08 under the counter for such occasions. Lightweight, easy to handle, semiautomatic. Handy enough to get the drop on some shiftless prick thinks he’s big enough to push me around, like this here Middleditch piss-ant. I pulled it out of the drawer and pointed it at his chest. Told him he had five seconds to get out of the shack and twenty seconds to get off the property. He looked mad as a bull with a beehive up his ass, but he backed out the door and got in his truck and drove off. Ain’t seen him since.”

  Chase suppressed a smile. Sheriff Feedlow’s warning about Cantrell hit the mark. You rile him, you’ve made an enemy for life. “What kind of truck did he drive?”

  “1965 Dodge-100 light duty pickup, black.”

  “I don’t suppose you got the plate number.”

  Cantrell gave Chase a smug look, turned to the filing cabinets, pulled out a drawer, flipped through folders, extracted a piece of paper, and handed the page to Chase. Scrawled across the top in ink was “February 17, 1967.” Below that were three columns with headings: “Name, DL No., Plate No.”

  Halfway down the page Chase found Ray Middleditch. Under the driver’s license column, Cantrell had written “S.C. 100264309.”

  “S.C. stands for South Carolina?”

  “That’s right. He showed me a South Carolina driver’s license. Said he’d moved to Virginia couple months ago and hadn’t had time to get a Virginia license. The truck had a Virginia plate on it, though.”

  Chase looked at the plate number: 684–651. He wrote the driver’s license and plate numbers on his notepad. “Anything else you can tell me about Middleditch?”

  “He was toting a Winchester thirty-thirty, lever action, old. He didn’t take good care of it. Barrel hadn’t been blued in a good while. Dulled down bad. Walnut stock had a satin finish but it was mostly worn off. He had a handgun, too. He didn’t show it to me, but in my business, you develop an eye for concealed weapons. Whatever he was carrying, it was big enough to swell his coat pocket.”

  Chase made more notes. “Anything else?”

  Cantrell put his hand to his chin, closed his milky eye, and looked up at the ceiling with his good one. He leveled his one-eyed gaze on Chase. “He’d dealt with trouble before. He’s experienced.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “When I pulled the Luger on him, he was mighty pissed. A hothead who’s never stared down the barrel of a gun might have let his temper get the best of him. An amateur would have gone for that gun in his pocket or tried to cock his thirty-thirty, and I would have dropped him in his tracks. Middleditch knew better. He made the smart move and backed down. He knew what he was doing. He’d been in tough spots before.” Cantrell picked up the signup sheet for February 17, filed it away, and put the Luger back under the counter. “Middleditch is either a career criminal, or he’s a lawman.” A half smile, half sneer twisted Cantrell’s mouth. “Or he’s both.”

  Chase gave Cantrell a long look and then touched the brim of his hat. “Thank you, Mr. Cantrell. You’ve been a big help.”

  He went out the door and walked down the steps. The young man Cantrell referred to as the Gilchrist boy stood in station one behind a shoulder-high hitching post, his rifle braced on it. He fired his Remington. The butt of the rifle kicked his shoulder but he barely moved. Smoke curled from the end of the barrel. The black silhouette posted at 300 yards sported a bullet hole in its head, dead center, and yet Cantrell called Bowie a better marksman than Gilchrist.

  Gilchrist looked over at Chase. His pheasant feather quivered in the breeze. A self-satisfied smile came across his face.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  The Drunken Doctor

  March 6, 1967, Monday night

  That night, Cole and Mabel went out to Fox Run in Cole’s patrol car. They parked across the road from Randy’s house, a yellow two-story home with a wide front porch and a green tin roof. The house was dark except for a soft light that glowed in a row of little square windows across the top of the front door. Cole knew that when Randy drank himself into a stupor and passed out at the kitchen table, which was most every night, kitchen light spilled down the hallway to cast a faint glow in the little windows.

  “You gonna be okay, Cole?” Mabel asked. At the end of the day, when he decided to question Randy about Hazel Emley’s death, she’d suggested that she come along. “He was your close friend until he took to the bottle. You’re conflicted. You shouldn’t do this alone.”

  Cole agreed. He and Randy had been close friends, but he didn’t believe Hazel Emley died of pneumonia. He thought Betty Lou killed her mother and Randy covered it up, but Mabel suspected Randy of much worse.

  “He’s old enough to be one of Betty Lou’s Papa Bears,” she had said. “He started drinking heavily about five years ago. His wife left him shortly afterwards. Betty Lou told Reverend Chatham she had an affair with an older, well-off, married man about five years back. He has a dark blue Cadillac, and Bessie Tilden saw a big car like that the night of the murder. His Cadillac has big wide tires, like the tire track left near the gate at the Mundy place. The morning of the murder, he fell on Betty Lou’s dead body, sobbing. Chase thought he was drunk, but he could have been overcome with guilt and grief.”

  Cole believed Randy could have been one of Betty Lou’s lovers, but he didn’t think he was capable of murder. The evidence against him on that count was circumstantial and thin, raising questions, but it fell far short of proving guilt.

  Cole thought he could extract the truth from Randy because of their long friendship, but as he and Mabel sat in front of Randy’s house, he wasn’t so sure. Cole’s friend drowned in a sea of vodka years earlier. The man he had become was a stranger.

  Cole broke open his gun and checked that it was loaded.

  “You think you’ll need that?” Mabel asked.

  “I hope not.” Cole holstered it and got out of the car.

  A purple night sky framed the house. The barren branches of the big oaks in the front yard swayed in a cold wind, the temperature having fallen into the forties. Cole’s back ached as he and Mabel crossed Randy’s brick walkway and climbed the porch steps. At the front door, Cole peered through the row of little windows. The entry hall and parlor were dark. As he’d assumed, the light in the kitchen was on.

  He pounded on the door. “Randy?”

  No response.

  “Maybe he’s not home.”

  “He’s home.”

  Cole tried the door. It was unlocked, as usual. Randy had stopped caring enough to lock it years ago. They walked through the entry hall and down the hallway and stood in the kitchen doorway.

  Across the room, Randy sat slumped over the kitchen table, his head resting on his left arm, his right arm stretched toward an empty fifth of vodka and an overturned bottle of orange juice. The juice had pooled around his arms and puddled at his feet. His tweed jacket lay in a heap on the floor, the coattail sopping up the juice. Wind blew through an open window by the table, carrying the stench of rancid orange juice and alcohol across the room.

  “Oh,” Mabel gasped, covering her nose with her hand.

  Dried-out orange juice stains splotched the speckled linoleum floor. The sink overflowed with dirty dishes and glassware. Fragments of burned toast and crumbs covered the stove top. The refrigerator door stood open, its interior light burned out.

  Cole crossed the room and closed it.

  Mabel stayed at the doorway. “How can he live like this?”

  “Too drunk to care.”

  He searched the cabinets for clean linen but found no
ne. A dirty dish towel lay on the floor. He picked it up, moved a pile of dishes from the sink to the countertop, ran hot water on the rag, wrung it out, and carried it over to Randy.

  Mabel walked across the room and stood beside Cole. “I didn’t know he was this far gone.”

  “Alcoholism is a progressive disease. It’ll kill him in the end.”

  Cole took Randy by the shoulders and pulled him up to a sitting position. His body seemed stiff, his head unnaturally cocked to one side, dried orange juice crusted in his scraggly hair and beard.

  Mabel’s eyes widened. She grabbed Cole’s arm. “Look, Cole.”

  Randy’s right sleeve was rolled up to his bicep. An auburn line ran from a puncture mark at the crook of his elbow down his arm to a crusted pool of blood on the table. Beside it lay a syringe.

  Cole’s chest tightened. He put his hand to Randy’s throat. His flesh was cold, and there was no pulse. Cole dropped the towel and stepped back from the table. Mabel stepped back with him, clutching his arm so tightly her nails bit into his flesh through his uniform. They stared at Randy, speechless. Then Mabel said, “We’d better call Shirley West.”

  “The telephone’s in the parlor.”

  Mabel lingered for a moment, then let go of Cole, and went down the hall toward the parlor.

  Cole took in Randy’s appearance, his matted hair and tangled beard, his sagging shoulders and pot belly, his gray, fleshy face bloated by liquor fat. He’d tried hard to drink himself to death, but apparently vodka worked too slowly for him.

  The cold wind that belled the curtain died down. It fell back to the window, its hem dragging across a medicine vial by the empty vodka bottle. Cole leaned over and looked at its label. Blue letters against a white background: “Succinylcholine.”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven