Richard was already standing up. “On my way.”
He must have used some Boston driving tricks, because he was gone just long enough for Junior and me to get some iced tea from the place next door. Then Junior let me into the cell with the computer, and I went to work.
I’d like to say it was genius on my part that got me past Sandie’s password protection, or that I used secret hacker software to defeat it. In fact, all I needed was what I knew about Sandie’s obsession with his mother. He’d avoided the most obvious choices: the combinations of the name Eva Marie Volin Herron, her birth date, and the date of her death. But he’d gone with another obvious one: NILOVEIRAMAVE, which was Eva Marie Volin backwards.
I hunted through his directories, but there was little there, mostly just applications Sandie had needed to create his web site and a family-tree program that he’d used to record his mother’s side of the family for a dozen generations. Then I looked at the word-processing files and found pages of notes about his mother, and saddest of all, some very clumsy attempts at poetry about her.
I also found files of the letters he’d sent to Big Bill, along with letters to several lawyers asking what could be done about his mother’s property. Since there was no more than one letter to any lawyer, I figured they’d all told him he had no legal leg to stand on.
Since Junior hadn’t mentioned finding any financial records or even cash money, I wasn’t surprised to find home finance software that showed where Sandie’s money was. If his records were accurate, he’d had enough to fill several mattresses, and I just couldn’t fathom why he’d chosen to live in such primitive conditions. Richard had called him a hermit—had he been enforcing his own brand of penance?
I’d saved Sandie’s e-mail files for last, figuring that he must have had some sort of life online, and sure enough, he had hundreds of saved messages. I started with the most recent and skimmed half a dozen notes about shared taste in music and the best way to track ancestors, when I found the message that made me stop.
“Junior! Richard! You better come see this.”
They were there in an instant, and Junior peered over one shoulder while Richard read over the other. The message was short and brutal.
HOW CAN YOU LET BIG BILL WALTERS GET AWAY WITH WHAT HE DID TO YOUR MAMA? DON’T YOU KNOW HE RAPED HER? AND NOT JUST ONCE. THAT’S WHY SHE SOLD HIM YOUR FAMILY’S LAND, TO MAKE THE SON OF A BITCH LEAVE HER ALONE.
HE’LL BE ALONE AT HIS HOUSE TONIGHT IF YOU’RE MAN ENOUGH TO DO WHAT NEEDS TO BE DONE BEFORE HE GOES AFTER SOMEBODY ELSE’S MAMA.
“Jesus!” I said, staring at it.
“This can’t be true,” Richard said.
“It doesn’t matter, not as long as Sandie believed it. This was what set him off.” I couldn’t help but be selfishly relieved that it hadn’t been Richard’s and my visit that caused him to lose control. “Somebody sent him this note knowing what would happen. That bastard aimed Sandie at Big Bill as if he were aiming a shotgun. He didn’t care who else got hurt.” I knew that whoever it was, wasn’t really a killer—not yet anyway, because his attempts on Big Bill had failed—but as far as I was concerned, he was as much responsible for Irene Duffield’s death as Sandie Herron was.
“When did this e-mail get to Herron?” Junior asked.
“The day before yesterday, one o’clock in the afternoon.”
“Who sent it?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know. The e-mail address is a Heatmail account.”
“Which means what?”
“Heatmail provides free e-mail accounts. Anybody can open an account with them, and they don’t need to verify names or anything like that, because they aren’t charging. You can see that whoever it was used the default address rather than customizing it to their name, so we have nothing to go by. And what do you want to bet that it’s a new account?”
“Can you trace where it was sent from?”
I looked at the lines of coded information, most of which was gibberish to me. “I don’t know, Junior. This kind of thing can be tricky.”
“Laurie Anne,” Junior said, “you said you don’t like losing. Well, I can deal with losing—every cop has to learn how to do that. Being fooled is different. Somebody is trying to fool us into thinking Herron was behind all the attacks on Big Bill, and I don’t like being fooled.”
I wasn’t real happy with it myself. I looked at the computer again. “If somebody will get me another glass of iced tea, I’ll see what I can do.”
Between several phone calls to folks I know in Boston who are real hackers, I eventually managed to track down the location from which that awful e-mail was sent. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a private line. “Our guy did his dirty work from Gateway Country in Hickory,” I announced.
“The computer store?” Junior asked.
I nodded. “Have you ever been in there? They’ve got a bunch of systems set up for customers to try out, and most of those systems have Internet access. I’m guessing that our guy went in and played around as if he was interested in buying a system. Instead, he sent Sandie that message.”
Junior immediately got on the phone with Tim Meyers, a friend of hers on the Hickory police force. Then we had to twiddle our thumbs for a good hour while Meyers drove to Gateway Country to see what he could find out. In the meantime, I explored more of Sandie’s e-mail files but didn’t find anything else significant.
Next I checked out where he’d been on the web. “Look at this,” I said to Junior and Richard. “He found a site that tells you how to disable burglar alarms and telephones.”
“That’s how he knew where to cut the phone and alarm lines at the Walters mansion,” Junior said. “I’d been assuming that he learned it in his wild past—it never occurred to me that you could find that kind of stuff on the web.”
“You can find just about anything you can imagine on the Web,” I said. “Of course, lots of it isn’t true, but I guess the information on these sites was accurate enough.”
Finally, Meyers called back, but when Junior got off the phone, she announced, “It’s a dead end. A sale started the day before yesterday, and the place was packed, with folks taking turns on those computers all day long. Some of them bought stuff, but most didn’t, and I think it’s a good bet that our guy didn’t leave his name written down anywhere.”
“Do we know it’s a man?” I asked hopefully.
Junior snorted. “We don’t know squat! The clerk in that part of the store was seriously frazzled from partying the night before, and he says he wouldn’t be able to reliably identify any of the customers, so a photo lineup would be a waste of time.”
“Rats, rats, rats!” I said, wanting to throw the kind of tantrum I never wanted Alice to emulate. “We’ve got nothing!”
“Not true,” Richard said. “We’ve still got leads. We never investigated all of Big Bill’s letters.”
“Richard, it would take from now until Doomsday to investigate all those people, and I don’t think it was any of them, anyway. Our guy is too good at hiding his tracks to have put anything in writing.”
“Okay, forget the letters. We’ve still got our other suspects.”
“Can you see Dorcas or Burt knowing enough to set up a Heatmail account?”
“No offense, Laura, but computers haven’t been just for programmers for a long time,” he said. “Either Dorcas or Burt could have learned how, and Mike Cooper probably already knew.”
“I suppose.” I just couldn’t see either of them as our killer, and I didn’t want to. Maybe it was because I was a new mother, but the idea of Burt killing his own father made me sick to my stomach, and casting Dorcas or Mike in the role wasn’t much better. “What about you, Junior? Have you come up with something better?”
She shook her head and in a bitter voice said, “Not a damned thing. I’ve considered those three, too, but can’t find anything to point toward or against any of them. No alibis for the time frames, and all three of them had access to what was needed for the a
ttempts.”
“What about the chemical tests and fingerprints and all that?” I said.
“I can’t make bricks without straw, Laurie Anne, and I don’t have the first piece of a straw.” She ticked off the possibilities on her fingers. “We couldn’t find the bullet from the shooting, and ballistics would only help if the shooter still has that gun. Then there’s the pickup truck that almost hit Big Bill, assuming it was really a pickup he saw. Even he had to admit he could have been mistaken, given the circumstances. Nobody saw the license plate, and since it didn’t hit Big Bill, there wouldn’t be any useful trace evidence on it if we did find it. There’s been plenty of time to wash it anyway. I thought the electrocution attempt was my best bet, but the site wasn’t the least bit secure, and it wouldn’t take an electrical engineer to know that an open wire in a puddle of water could kill somebody, especially a man as old as Big Bill. Belva and I squeezed the possible witnesses around the apartments as much as we dared, but nobody saw anything, and waving a mug shot under their noses isn’t going to change that. Then there was that party!” She threw up her hands. “Charles Manson could have walked in there with Saddam Hussein, and nobody would have noticed either of them, unless it was for wearing open-toed shoes after Labor Day.”
“Hey!” Richard said sharply. “If you two don’t start showing some optimism, I’m going to start quoting Shakespeare at you, and I won’t stop until you cheer up.”
“I don’t think he’s bluffing, Junior,” I said with mock alarm. “He’s just overeducated enough to do it!”
“Damned straight,” Richard said. “So are you two going to pull yourselves together, or do I start quoting?”
“All right,” Junior said. “I know when I’m licked. And I have to admit that we’re better off than we could have been. After all, that so-and-so came mighty darned close to getting to Herron’s computer before we did. If he had, we’d never have known anybody else was involved.”
“What about my deductions?” I asked.
“Those helped, too,” Junior agreed, “but it’s good to have something other than that to work with. Especially since I’ve got to go to Big Bill and tell him he’s still a target.”
“In fact, it’s even worse,” I said. “The killer must know by now that Big Bill was never married to Aunt Maggie, and that he’s not sick. Plus he probably knows that you’ve got that computer, and that there’s a good chance you found the e-mail to Sandie.”
Richard said, “Does that mean that he’ll go after Big Bill right away, or that he’ll wait until we’re no longer watching for him?”
“Without knowing why he wants Big Bill dead, it’s hard to say,” Junior said, “but if he’s as smart as I think he is, he’ll lay low for as long as it takes.”
I nodded dispiritedly. The killer was still out there. We knew it, and he knew that we knew it. Unfortunately, he also knew that we couldn’t keep him away from Big Bill forever.
I didn’t like to lose, and Junior didn’t like to be fooled—neither of us was happy that day.
Chapter 26
That evening was Miz Duffield’s visitation. She hadn’t had any close family, so Dorcas had taken charge of the arrangements. I waffled about going but finally decided I owed it to Miz Duffield. Though I knew intellectually that her death wasn’t my fault, I couldn’t help feeling that if I’d been a little smarter, she’d still be alive. The least I could do was pay my respects properly.
Since the triplets had barely known Miz Duffield, they weren’t going to the visitation, and came to Aunt Maggie’s house to babysit instead. They were trying to see if Alice could tell the three of them apart when Aunt Maggie, Richard, and I left.
I asked Richard to drive so I could sit with Aunt Maggie in the backseat. It was the first chance I’d had to speak to her since the night of the Halloween Carnival. I was pretty sure she’d been avoiding me, and I thought I knew why.
She confirmed it with what she said first. “I suppose you’re right put out with me.”
“You mean because you lied to Richard and me, even when we were knocking ourselves out trying to help you and Big Bill?”
She nodded.
“No, I’m not put out. What I am is royally pissed.”
She flinched but didn’t say a word about my language, which showed how guilty she felt. I know she doesn’t like profanity, and try not to use it around her, but I thought it was justified this time.
“I’m as sorry as I can be, Laurie Anne. You know I’m not the kind of person who likes to lie. I wanted to tell y’all the truth, but Bill said it would be safer if we told everybody the same thing. Not that I’m blaming him—I went along with it, so it was just as much my doing as his.”
“Yes, it was,” I said, “but that’s not what I’m pissed about. I’m not saying that I like being lied to, but I can see why y’all played it the way you did. Honestly, I don’t think Richard’s and my knowing would have made a bit of difference in the way we went about investigating. So I won’t hold a grudge unless you make a habit of telling tales.”
“That’ll never happen. I’m so embarrassed about this one that I can hardly stand it,” she said. “But if that’s not the problem, then why are you mad?”
“I’m mad because you shut us out. What happened the other night was so awful, and I know it upset you. Given the circumstances, I can see why you wouldn’t go to Big Bill, but I can’t see why you didn’t come to me. Or to one of the aunts or somebody else in the family. You’re a strong woman, Aunt Maggie; they don’t come any stronger than you. But even a strong woman needs somebody to talk to in bad times, somebody other than your dog.”
“I didn’t think anybody would want to talk to me,” she said. “Not after I lied to y’all.”
“Then you were wrong. We love you, all of us from Uncle Buddy on down to Alice, and there’s not a thing in this world we wouldn’t do for you.” I made a face like an irate schoolteacher. “You better not forget that again, young lady!”
Aunt Maggie half laughed, half sniffed. “Can I have a hug?”
“Damn straight you can,” I said, risking more profanity. It wasn’t a long hug, because Aunt Maggie just isn’t much of a hugger, but it was a good one, for both of us.
Afterward, she rubbed her eyes as if not wanting to admit that they’d held tears. “At least all this mess is over with now.”
I hated to say it, but I had to. “That’s the thing. We don’t think it is.” I told her what we’d found on Sandie’s computer, and our idea that there was another killer waiting to get to Big Bill. She was so still and silent afterward that I cursed myself for not breaking it to her more gently.
“Are you all right?” I finally said.
“I’m fine,” she said automatically. Then she shook her head. “No, I’m not. I lied to the whole town, including my family, but the only thing I accomplished was to get Irene Duffield killed.”
“Aunt Maggie, you can’t possibly believe that it’s your fault.” Not only was I telling the truth, but it was a pointed reminder to myself not to feel the same way.
“Why can’t I? If I’d made Bill go to Junior when this all started, Irene would still be alive.”
“Nobody’s ever made Big Bill Walters do a single thing he didn’t want to. If you’d gone to Junior behind his back, he’d have denied everything, and he’d have been that much more in danger. You were doing your best to keep the man you love safe, Aunt Maggie.”
She gave me an odd look. “I was trying to keep him safe, but I never said that I love him.”
“Oh. Do you?” I winced. “I’m sorry, that’s none of my business.”
“No, it’s not,” she agreed, “but I’d tell you if I knew.” She sighed. “I was starting to think that I did until Pudd’nhead showed up. Now I’m not sure anymore. I’m too old for this kind of confusion, Laurie Anne.”
“It’s so hard being irresistible to men,” I said in mock sympathy.
She blinked, then snorted, sounding a whole lot more li
ke the Aunt Maggie I was used to.
The parking lot at the funeral home was nearly full already, even though we were early. It made me wonder what kind of arrangements had been made for Sandie Herron. I had mixed feelings about him. He’d been manipulated cruelly, but the fact was that he’d shot and killed an innocent woman because he was willing to believe an anonymous e-mail. I decided I wouldn’t want to attend a visitation for him.
“I hear Dorcas booked the Magnolia Room,” Aunt Maggie said.
“Really?” I said. The Magnolia Room was the best the funeral home had to offer, and Giles Funeral Home was the best in Byerly. Dorcas really had thought a lot of Miz Duffield.
“Do I look all right?” Aunt Maggie asked. She’d taken time to dress for the occasion and was wearing the same pantsuit she’d worn for her ersatz wedding reception. “This is the only outfit Irene ever saw me in that she didn’t turn her nose up at.”
“I’m sure she’d appreciate the thought,” I told her.
When we got inside, we saw that a receiving line was set up with Big Bill, Dorcas, and Burt. Aunt Maggie took one look and hurried past, not even glancing toward Big Bill. He saw her anyway and followed her with his eyes until Dorcas nudged him to shake the hand being offered to him.
“Have they spoken?” Richard asked me.
“Since their ‘divorce’?” I said. “I don’t think so.”
“Do you think they’ll get back together?”
“With Aunt Maggie, there’s no telling. I’ve never known her to be so subdued before. She’s never much cared what people thought of her before, but she’s just mortified about having deceived everybody.”
“I know—I eavesdropped on your conversation in the car. You said all the right things, by the way.”
“Thank you.”
“Do you think she might also be embarrassed by how she treated Big Bill the other night?”
“It wasn’t her fault,” I said. “She’d had a big shock.”
“So had he.”
“I know. I don’t think either of them should hold what happened against each other, but I don’t know if they realize that.”
Toni L.P. Kelner - Laura Fleming 08 - Wed and Buried Page 21