by Ken Oder
He set his lunch pail on the bench.
She laughed. “Lemme guess. Peanut butter and banana sandwiches.”
He smiled. “You got me pegged.”
The fountain trickled peacefully while Cole’s heart drummed in his chest. He drew in a deep breath and let it out and reached into his shirt pocket. He took Carrie’s hand and slipped the ring on her finger, a gold band with a garnet centerpiece, sparkling crimson in the sunlight, and two little diamonds, one on each side of the garnet.
She sucked in her breath and squeezed his hand, shaking all over. He didn’t know what to say and he couldn’t have spoken at that moment anyway, so he just held her hand and hoped the ring would say the words for him. After what seemed like an eternity, her hand relaxed and she ran her fingers over the ring, as though she needed to touch it to convince herself it was real.
She looked up at Cole, her brown eyes full, smiling through her tears. “I love you, Cole,” she whispered. It took his breath away.
Forty years later, staring at the park bench, Cole’s breath stopped again and tears beaded in his eyes. She loved him so much then. If only he could go back and start from that moment and live his time with her again. He wouldn’t take her love for granted. He would keep her close and show her he loved her as much as she loved him.
He took in another deep breath and let it out long and slow. He had thought less about Carrie the last few days, immersing himself in the effort to solve the crimes, but that morning, she weighed heavy on his mind. Chase Dooley’s brush with death was the reason, he thought.
He looked at the fountain, water spilling over the lip of each urn to trickle down to the pool at its base. When Chase came along ten years ago, they’d quickly bonded. There was no mystery about the reason. Chase didn’t know who his father was. Cole’s son had turned away from him when he was a little boy.
When Karson called to tell him Chase had been shot, Cole rushed to the hospital and sat in the waiting room all night thinking about loss and grief. He had lost Peter thirty years ago. Carrie three years ago. And that night he almost lost Chase.
“Your man Deford,” the surgeon told Cole, “saved Dooley’s life. Without the combat bandage he applied to the gunshot wound, he would have bled out before the rescue squad arrived.”
Cole took a last look at the fountain and the park bench, started the car, and drove away from the town square.
* * *
That afternoon he sat at the head of the conference table in his office at headquarters. Shirley West sat to his right; Karson Deford to his left.
“None of the veterinarians sold succinylcholine to Dr. Hotchkiss,” Karson said. He told Cole about Ashburn’s Animal Hospital and Percy McDibble. “Ashburn’s succinylcholine is manufactured by Sandoz. He gave the drug to no one except McDibble, and McDibble only made one sale of the drug, three vials of it to Ray Middleditch one week before Hazel Emley died.”
Cole looked at Shirley and frowned. “Could this man Middleditch have murdered Hazel Emley?”
“The timing of Middleditch’s purchase fits, and we know Randy died from succinylcholine manufactured by Sandoz. Unless we think Ashburn or McDibble killed him, Middleditch is the only man who could have done it.”
“Is Middleditch a doctor?” Cole asked Karson.
“He told Clayton Fiddler he was a retired real estate agent from South Carolina.”
“I don’t understand,” Cole said. “I’d never heard of succinylcholine until we found the needle beside Randy’s arm. How could a man with no medical training choose it as a murder weapon and kill someone with it?”
“I did some research on that question,” Shirley said. “My guess is he heard news reports about it.” She withdrew documents from her valise and placed them in front of Cole and Karson. “These are copies of newspaper articles about the Coppolino murder case. The press ran stories about it all through the fall of last year, leading up to a trial in December.”
Cole thumbed through the articles. The New York Times, Richmond Times-Dispatch, Jeetersburg Daily Record. Articles starting in August and running through mid-December. Headlines: “The Perfect Crime,” “Doctor Death,” “The Untraceable Poison.”
“This case made succinylcholine famous,” Shirley said. “Carl Coppolino was an anesthesiologist in New Jersey. He had an affair with Marjorie Farber, a married woman. Her husband mysteriously died in his sleep. Then Coppolino’s wife died in her sleep. Later, when Coppolino jilted Farber, she told the police he killed them both with succinylcholine. The court ordered exhumations. The medical examiner found injection punctures in both corpses, but he encountered the same problem I experienced with Hazel Emley’s autopsy. If succinylcholine killed them, it disappeared by breaking down into metabolites that are normally present in the body. In the Coppolino trial, the medical examiner testified that he found abnormally high levels of these byproducts in the corpse of Farber’s husband, but Coppolino’s lawyer, F. Lee Bailey, forced the medical examiner to admit on cross-examination that he couldn’t say with any degree of certainty that the high levels were caused by an injection of succinylcholine. The jury found Coppolino not guilty. He goes on trial for his wife’s murder next month, but the state will face the same problem. There’s no sign of succinylcholine in her corpse.”
“So you think Middleditch knew about the drug because of this case?” Cole said.
“When the jury acquitted Coppolino, the press touted succinylcholine as the perfect poison. If Middleditch wanted to make Hazel’s murder look like a death by natural causes, the publicity about the drug could have caught his eye and it would have been a simple matter for him to learn how to kill someone with it. Medical treatises list overdose amounts and manuals provide instruction on filling a syringe from a vial and administering an intramuscular injection.”
Cole mulled over what Karson and Shirley had said and shifted his focus to the new murder suspect. “What do we know about Middleditch?” he asked Karson.
“Chase spent the last couple days tracking him down. I went over his notes this morning.” Karson summarized Chase’s information. “It’s clear that Ray Middleditch is a false identity. The Social Security number he gave the South Carolina DMV belongs to a Texas resident born in 1871. I called the last known address for that Ray Middleditch this morning. His daughter said he died ten years ago, but Jolley, McDibble, and Fiddler all identified the man in the driver’s license photograph as the Ray Middleditch they met.”
“Let me see the photograph.”
Karson handed Cole a copy of the license. A long, thin face, thinning gray hair, gray beard, tired eyes. Something about the man’s face seemed familiar to Cole, but he couldn’t place him.
Frank Woolsey and Mabel walked into the room. Both were pale. Mabel looked frightened. She walked over to the conference table and stood beside Cole. He looked up at her, then at Frank. “What’s wrong?”
“We found tire tracks in the driveway at the Jolley place,” Frank said. “The tire tread matches the tracks we found at Walt Ballard’s house. Boot prints we found in both locations also match.”
“So Middleditch shot Walt Ballard?”
Frank nodded. His green eyes darted around the room and then settled on Mabel. “You tell him,” he said. He looked down at the floor.
Cole looked at Mabel. “What is it?”
“The bullets the surgeons recovered from Walt’s shoulder and thigh were fired by the same gun . . .” She stopped and seemed to gather her emotions. “The same gun that shot Carrie.”
A block of ice swelled up inside Cole’s chest and he couldn’t breathe.
Mabel put her hand on his shoulder.
Her touch brought him back. He took a breath. Then another. He looked down at the photograph of the man who had killed Carrie. The ice melted away as heat flooded his chest and blood rose into his face.
“That’s not all,” Frank said.
Cole looked up at him, his heart pounding.
“When I saw the driver�
�s license photo, I thought I recognized him.” Frank grimaced, looked down at the floor, and then at Cole. “It’s my fault we didn’t know earlier. I didn’t search our personnel files for matches with the partial fingerprint on the shell casing Chase found, but when I saw that photo, I checked our records going back forty years. He’s aged a lot and the beard makes him look different.” Frank looked at Mabel and then back at Cole and swallowed. “Ray Middleditch is Jim Lloyd.”
Cole’s throat closed over. Mabel put her hand on his shoulder again, and again she brought him out of it. He breathed deeply and looked down at the photo.
“Who’s Jim Lloyd?” Karson said.
“He was a deputy sheriff,” Frank said. “Sheriff Musgrove hired him forty years ago, before he hired Cole. He was here when I came on board. He worked here until 1938.”
“Why did he leave?” Karson asked.
“I fired him,” Cole said.
Cole stared at the hollow eyes in the photo. An ancient hatred, long dormant, roared back with a vengeance. Cole had to look away from the photograph and keep breathing to keep from fainting. This can’t be true, he told himself. Jim hated Cole more than any man alive, but he could not have killed Carrie under any set of circumstances. “You’re wrong,” Cole said to Frank. “You’ve made a mistake.”
Frank shook his head. “There’s no mistake. Jim Lloyd is Ray Middleditch. He shot at you from the white pine on Bobcat. He shot Walt and Chase. And he murdered Carrie.”
Cole leaned forward, put his elbows on his knees, and covered his face with the palms of his hands. He rolled his memory reels back forty years, searching for an explanation. He could find none.
“Are you all right, Cole?” Mabel’s voice. Strained. Tight.
Cole leaned back in his chair and looked around the room. All eyes were on him.
Shirley said, “Step back from this one, Cole. Let Toby handle it.”
Cole clenched his jaw. “What’s the status of the search?” he said, his voice low and guttural.
“We set up checkpoints on every road leaving the county,” Karson said. “Unless he fled on foot, he’s still here.”
“Any leads on where he is?”
“Not yet.”
Cole hadn’t seen Jim in thirty years, but they were best friends at one time, and Cole knew him well. He was shrewd and careful. He would stay out of sight. He wouldn’t make a mistake, but like all men, he had tendencies, preferences, patterns of behavior. Cole had the best chance of anyone in the county of analyzing Jim’s predilections to discover where he would hide. He needed time to think. “You all go on with the search. Let me know of any developments.”
They all looked at him with concern.
“I’ll be all right,” he said. “I want to be alone to review the case files, see if I can find something we missed, figure out where he might be hiding. You all go on and do your jobs. You can’t find him sitting in my office.”
Karson, the veteran, was the best at taking orders. He left the office first.
Frank’s waxed moustache twitched. “I’m sorry I missed the match on those fingerprints. It never occurred to me the murderer could be one of our own.”
“You identified him before he got out of the county,” Cole said. “That’s what’s important.”
Frank shook his head back and forth, then walked out of the office.
Shirley got up from her chair slowly, walked to the door, and looked back at Cole. “Be careful, Cole. Don’t do anything foolish.” She gave him a hard look and left the office.
Mabel still stood beside him. “Why did you fire this man Lloyd?” she asked him.
“Poor performance.”
“I see,” she said in a tone of voice that told him she knew he was lying. “You sure you’re all right?”
He nodded.
She put her hand on his shoulder again, squeezed it, went to the door, looked back for a moment, and then left him alone.
Cole looked at the driver’s license photograph of Ray Middleditch. Now that he knew he was looking at Jim Lloyd, he could see remnants of the young man he had known buried under the ravages of age. Jim looked spent, worn down, miserable. He and Cole had a lot in common, he thought, just like thirty years ago.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
The Last Hit
March 10-11, 1967, Friday night-Saturday morning
That night, Jim Lloyd drove into Jeetersburg and ate a late supper at an all-night diner. At midnight, he drove out to Hukstep’s Trailer Park, parked behind the copse of cedar trees along Whiskey Road, and headed into the woods on foot, a half moon’s gray light piercing the pine canopy to speckle the forest floor.
He stopped fifty feet inside the trees and flexed his knee. He had taken arthritis medication before he left the church, and against his better judgment, given himself another shot of morphine, but his knee had already begun to swell and it hurt.
He rubbed it for a while and moved on, limping badly. About a hundred feet along, he stopped again to rest on a fallen pine. He swallowed two more arthritis pills dry and waited for them to kick in.
A fox farther up Saddleback Cove bayed at the moon. The sound of a vehicle moving along Whiskey Road traveled into the cove and faded away.
He walked on, each step grinding bone on bone. He stopped twice more and took another pain pill before he came to the edge of the woods at Reba’s backyard. Her trailer and those on both sides of it were dark. The floodlight painted the yard pale yellow except for slate-gray shadows cast by the shed and the trailer. Before his knee went bad, Jim would have run in a crouch to the shed and dashed from there to the trailer. He couldn’t even manage a fast walk now.
He looked at his watch. Quarter to one. He withdrew his Colt Python from his side pocket and limped to the shed. Inside it, out of the light, he picked up the folding chair and carried it to the open end of the shed. He looked at the yard and the trailers. No movement. No sound.
He hobbled to the kitchen window and stood under it, listening. The park was quiet. He flattened his back against the wall and edged past the living room window to the bedroom window. He stopped and listened again. Nothing. He unfolded the chair and set it under the window.
He took a moment to concentrate. The bedroom was small and narrow. The bed would be no more than five feet from the window. Three quick shots while Reba slept. Three more if a man was sleeping with her. The silencer would suppress the reports, and if he was lucky, the muted gunfire along with the shattering window wouldn’t wake the neighbors. If it did, the old lady in the gray trailer would pose no problem. The NRA member in the double-wide worried him, but it would take him at least thirty seconds to get out of bed, look out the window, and fetch a weapon. Even with Jim’s bum knee, he could make it to the woods by then.
He drew in a breath, let it out, planted his right foot on the chair, and pushed up to a crouch under the window. He straightened up to peek over the sill. The moonlight fell across the bed, where Reba had the covers pulled up over her head. He gripped the Colt Python with both hands and took aim.
Something blunt and solid jammed hard against his crotch. He flinched.
“Don’t move or I’ll blow your balls off.” A woman’s voice, raspy with a lisp.
He looked down. Reba Emley’s lipstick was glistening in the moonlight. She had a gun in her hand and was pressing the barrel into his crotch. “Drop your gun.”
He considered making a move but assessed the odds of success as nil. Her gun was tight against his crotch.
“You got five seconds to drop it.”
She had him dead to rights. He dropped the gun.
Reba picked up Jim’s gun, put her pistol in her back pocket, and aimed the Colt Python at him. She looked like she knew how to handle it. Walt Ballard’s service revolver was a Colt Python. He’d probably taught her what to do with it.
She took a step backwards. “Get down off that chair. Slow and easy.”
When he bent his right leg to descend, it gave way, causing him t
o land hard on his left. A bolt of fire shot through his bad knee and he almost toppled over. He grabbed the back of the chair and fell into it.
Reba thrust the gun at him. “You stay back!”
He held his hands up in the air. “I fell,” he said through clenched teeth. He groaned. “I’ve got a bad knee.”
“One more false move, I’ll blow you away.”
“I couldn’t help falling. I’ve got arthritis.” He slowly lowered his hands and rubbed his knee.
She stood over him, watching warily, the gun trained on him. “Stand up.”
He struggled to his feet.
“Move.” She gestured at the corner of the trailer.
He limped to the corner and stopped.
“Go around to the front door.”
He did as she said, stopping at the concrete stoop.
“Go on inside.”
He climbed the steps, leading with his right leg, dragging his left along behind. He opened the door and stepped inside. She followed him in and jabbed him in the back with the barrel of the Python. He took a couple steps into the darkness. She flicked a light switch and he shielded his eyes from the glare.
“Get your hands up! Raise em high!”
He raised his hands, squinting until his eyes adjusted to the light. The room came into focus. He was in front of a little sitting area with a kitchen counter and stools to his right and a bedroom on his left. The bedroom door was open and the living room light fell across the bed. Pillows were arranged under the bedcovers in the shape of a body. Apparently she wasn’t as dumb as he thought.
“Stand over there.” She motioned to a spot in front of the bedroom door.
He stepped over to it.
“Turn around.”
He faced her. She wore tight jeans, knee-high black leather boots, and a sable fur coat over a denim shirt. She stood with her feet wide apart, cradling the butt of the gun in the palm of her left hand, gripping the trigger guard with her right, her jaw clenched, a hard look in her blue eyes. “I been waitin for you since you shot Walt.”