by J. F. Margos
He was direct. He definitely did not want us there any longer than necessary. He stood behind the truck and made no move toward the house at all.
“We’ve been told by your mother that Doug had a girlfriend. A girl named Lori Webster. Do you know her?”
He shrugged again. “I know her. So what?”
“I was wondering if you could tell us anything about their relationship—how involved they might have been. It could make a difference as far as his relationship with Addie.”
“He dated Lori, and I already told you that I know he and Addie didn’t have a thing. What else?”
“I was hoping you could give us more details than that, Jimmy.”
“Like what?”
“How involved he might have really been with Lori, and anything you know about her now.”
“Can’t help you.”
That was it. He shifted from one foot to the other, and rolled some of the gravel from the driveway under his right boot.
“That all?” he asked.
I sighed. He wasn’t giving, and we knew from Mike and Tommy that Lori had just been here the day before. He was a tough case. He had seen too many things in the war, and he just wanted to be left alone. I knew too many men from my generation who were just like him.
“I got to finish working on my truck.”
I could see he wasn’t going to talk today, so we said our goodbyes and left Jimmy Hughes to finish his truck maintenance.
We drove out to Manor. It was an icky day weatherwise. It wasn’t really overcast, but it wasn’t sunny either. It was one of those depressing low-light days where the sun comes and goes and you wish it would just do one or the other and stay that way. We talked about the case on the way to Manor.
“What did you think about Jimmy?” I asked.
“He does a great imitation of a clam.”
I nodded. “The problem is, I can’t tell if he’s really hiding something, or he’s just being him.”
“I watched his eye movements while you were talking to him. His eyes shift to the left a lot, and he looks down. He also exhibits other minute body-language cues, especially the way he blinks and his eyebrow movements—all these cues that I noticed are cues for evasion and lying.”
“So, he is hiding something.”
She nodded. “I believe he is. You know the stats on who discovers the body, right?”
“You mean, the person to discover the body is usually the killer—those stats?”
“Right. The same stats would apply to someone who ID’s a body.”
“Like what Jimmy did.”
“Exactly like what he did. It could be a coincidence that he saw Addie’s face on the news and that he was the first one to call in, but the stats say it probably isn’t.”
“He was never involved with her, and he hadn’t seen her in over twenty years, so why was he so interested in identifying her?” I mused out loud.
“He had a potential motive, and he’s been seen recently with someone else who had a similar motive.”
“Lori Webster.”
“Lori Webster,” she affirmed. “Think about it, Toni, either one of them could have done this alone, or they could have done it together. Why would these two people—one who moved away to Austin almost thirty years ago, and one who moved to Georgetown sixteen years ago—why would these two people still have anything to do with each other? They have one thing in common as far as I can see.”
“He loved Addie, and she loved Doug.”
“Bingo.”
“Jimmy had been left behind years ago, but gave up when Addie married Dody, then he finds out his brother is having a thing with Addie—and at the same time Lori is getting dumped off by Doug.”
“It’ll be interesting to talk to Dody in person—to get his take on all this. Jimmy says his brother wasn’t involved with Addie. I wonder what Dody says.”
“Apparently he’s not saying much of anything to the boys.”
I pulled off the main road and drove up the gravel driveway to the front of Dody’s ramshackle little house. It looked virtually abandoned. There was an old, beat-up, partially rusted-out pickup truck parked to the left side of the house. In the front yard, a chicken wandered by, and out in the grass amongst the cedar trees two goats grazed.
“Lovely,” Leo remarked.
“What did you expect for a guy who’s drunk ninety percent of the time? He hasn’t held a job for more than six months in the last fourteen years.”
“Great.”
We walked up onto the rickety wooden porch and I knocked on the door. Dody answered. He was wearing worn and dirty jeans and a filthy white T-shirt that had a hole in the left sleeve and one in the bottom near the hem. He reeked of everything foul.
He cleared his throat. “I ain’t buyin’ nothin’ today, ladies,” and he started to close the door.
“I’m not selling anything, Mr. Waldrep. I’m the forensic sculptor who reconstructed the face of your wife. This other lady is an associate of mine.”
He stopped his closure of the door and squinted at both of us. “What do you want with me? I already talked to them cops. I don’t know nothin’ about what happened to my wife. I don’t have nothin’ else to say about it.”
“Please, Mr. Waldrep. We just have a couple of questions and then we’ll go.”
He continued squinting at Leo and me, and then opened the door. “Come on in then, but don’t tarry too long. I got things to do.”
I doubted that seriously. The only thing I imagined that Dody Waldrep had to do was to drink more than he already had. He was slurring his words, and as we watched him walk through the room back to his chair, we exchanged glances that told me Leo had also noticed the wobble in his step.
He practically fell into the chair, and then motioned for Leo and me to sit on the sofa. It was a horrible excuse for furniture and I imagined that it was probably a breeding ground for all manner of mites and who knew what else, but I sat anyway.
“So, what is it you need to know that I ain’t already been asked?”
“First of all, Mr. Waldrep, are you aware that more bones were found near the river yesterday?”
“Heard sumpthin’ about it on the news. Didn’t pay much attention.”
“You didn’t think that it sounded familiar to the way in which your wife’s bones were found?”
“Didn’t think about it. She’s been found, we buried her, end of story.”
“It didn’t occur to you that these might be the bones of Doug Hughes?”
“Huh,” he grunted. “Who in blazes cares?”
“Mr. Waldrep, don’t you wonder what happened to them after they left Viola.”
“I don’t have no reason to wonder. I know what they done, and I don’t care what kind of trouble they run into. Whatever it was, it’d serve ’em right I say.”
“Then you do believe that Addie and Doug were having an affair?”
“I don’t believe it—I know it.”
“How do you know, Mr. Waldrep?”
“I know, that’s all. I was her husband, you know. You people are incredible. You think I lived with her and I don’t know,” he snorted, and then wiped his nose on his sleeve.
“Do you have any idea who might have wanted to kill Addie and Doug?”
“Well, it wasn’t me, that’s all I say. They run off before I had any kind of opportunity for that, and I was too busy trying to make ends meet and all after they left.”
“So, then, you don’t have any idea who it could have been?”
“What did I just say, lady? Isn’t that what I just said?”
“Well, I guess I just thought you might want some of these questions answered yourself.”
“I don’t have no questions, lady. My wife run off with him, she’s dead now and buried. There ain’t no more questions as far as I’m concerned. Got it?”
Leo looked at me and nodded. We had indeed “gotten it” and we said our goodbyes to Dody and left.
Once we were
safely back in my car, we talked about our brief encounter with Dody.
“Tommy won’t be happy with me, since I learned nothing new from either Jimmy or Dody,” I said.
“We did learn something new, though.”
“What?”
“We learned that Jimmy is definitely hiding something, and we learned that Addie’s husband believed that she was having an affair with Doug. So, one of them is right and the other is wrong, but they’ve both given us some interesting things to think about.”
“You think he could have killed them?”
“Dody?”
I nodded.
“He could have. He’s pretty disorganized, though. I don’t see him planning everything the way it would have been planned originally. He’s the right personality for the dumping of these bodies, though.”
“What if he wasn’t this messed up back then?” I asked.
“Didn’t that lady at the diner say he always had problems?”
“She said he was cantankerous,” I said, “but she didn’t say when specifically he began having a drinking problem. His daughters didn’t go live with their grandmother until two years after their mother disappeared.”
“Well, I suppose if he were less impaired by the alcohol sixteen years ago, he might have been capable of the crime, but it’s really impossible now to know.”
“Let’s pay a visit to Lori Webster,” I suggested, “and see what we can find there.”
“Okay. I’m game if you are.”
We sped up the highway to Georgetown and I wheeled the car into the town square, scoping for a spot in front of the store where she worked. We found a space just around the corner, and I parked the car.
Once inside the store, we asked for Lori and we were directed up to the office. There we introduced ourselves to her, and she led us into a small room off the main office. The room contained a copier, a fax machine and several file cabinets. Lori wore a dark green skirt and white blouse with a beige cardigan over it. She was a frail-looking woman, with stringy shoulder-length brown hair. I think her eyes were gray, but from the moment we met her, she never looked us in the eye. It was just as Mike and Tommy had said.
“You said you’re the artist who reconstructed Addie’s face?”
She fidgeted with her hands, fluttering her eyelids when she spoke and punctuating her phrases with frustrated sighs.
“Yes, that’s right.”
“So, what can I do for you?”
“Well, we found similar remains in another location in Austin the other day, and it’s been determined that they are the remains of a man.”
She looked up from her hands and looked upward. “Doug? Is it Doug?”
She still didn’t look at either one of us. Her eyes shot to the right wall. She was as strange as the boys had said.
“We don’t know yet. I’ll be doing the reconstruct, just as I did with Mrs. Waldrep. I mostly just wanted to let you know what was happening, and to see if there was anything else you think of that you hadn’t told the officers the other day.”
She sat for a while. She was looking at her hands again. She was becoming more emotional now. She began to cry. I reached into my purse and pulled out a tissue and handed it to her. She mopped up her tears with the tissue.
“I don’t know anything more than what I said the other day. He just disappeared and that’s all I know.”
She was sobbing now and I tried to comfort her, but she pulled away. She regained control of herself somewhat, and I decided to try for another question.
“Ms. Webster, do you know Doug’s brother Jimmy?”
“Of course,” she said. “He’s been a good friend to me.”
“You’ve seen him recently, then?”
She hesitated and became more nervous. She seemed confused. She looked down at the wadded-up tissue she held in her hands.
She hesitated a second and then said distantly, “He takes care of me. He helps me with things.”
“Like what things?”
She wadded the tissue into twists and knots.
“Just things,” she said. “I don’t think I feel very good now. I don’t want to talk anymore.”
Leo and I looked at each other, and Leo nodded.
“All right, Ms. Webster, I guess we’ll go.”
“When will you know if it’s Doug?”
She still looked down at the tissue.
“It will be several days, but I’ll ask the detectives to contact you and let you know.”
She nodded but didn’t look up.
We excused ourselves and left her sitting there fidgeting.
“Very strange girl,” I said when we got back in the car.
“That’s the understatement of the century,” Leo said.
“So, what’s your appraisal?”
“She has a serious mental problem. I don’t think she’s completely in touch with reality, and she has a kind of childlike or withdrawn nature. She even seemed to be drifting in and out of her grip when we were talking to her. If she’s had declining mental health all this time, she could have committed the crimes back then, and now she definitely fits as the kind of person who would carry out this disorganized and illogical reburial situation.”
“She acted genuinely surprised about us finding the second set of bones.”
“Maybe she is,” Leo said, “or maybe she’s so delusional it did surprise her.”
“Think Jimmy helped her?”
“I think he could have helped her, and that could be what she was talking about, or he knows what she did and he’s covering for her, or the other way around even.”
“Think there’s any possibility that Addie and Doug did run off, and someone else killed them?”
“Anything’s possible, Toni. I want to see the face on those bones we just found.”
“I’ll start on it as soon as we get back.”
“The guy we found yesterday had been shot multiple times, and it wasn’t in the head. In fact, the bullets scraped and bounced off his ribs.”
“So what does that mean to you?”
“It means whoever he was, he wasn’t executed like Addie. It means this guy was killed in haste and that wasn’t part of the killer’s plan.”
“That might fit if Lori were the killer. You know, she killed Doug in a rage, then executed Addie.”
“It’d be the other way around, the way I see it. She executed Addie, Doug caught her, so she killed him in haste—may have even regretted it instantly.”
“That could be the source of her reality gap.”
“It would also explain dumping Addie’s bones on Red Bud, while burying Doug to be discovered up on the trail.”
“I’ll do my work, and then we’ll see for sure if this is Doug Hughes that we’ve found.”
I had worked two days on this bust already. The first day, I had done all the grueling work of measuring, cutting and applying all the tissue-depth indicators, until the skull had the full “eraser measles.” Then I had tediously applied the clay across all the markers. Now I sat on my high stool in front of the workbench with a cup of hot hibiscus tea in my hands and looked at the almost completed work. I only had to finish and smooth a few areas and it would be done.
The head of this man was broad and round, the cheekbones big and high. The brow was low, but not particularly pronounced and the nose was like an upside-down anvil, with a strong long line down the middle, but with the sides flaring out at the nostrils. The lips were thick and the mouth large. It was a handsome face, but not in a pretty-boy way. It was a rugged face. Now the question would be, was it Doug Hughes’s face?
Chapter Twelve
One month earlier, on all local channels, the plea of a mother had been broadcast. Her name was Nadine Ferguson and her son had been missing for over sixteen years. The day of the broadcast had been his birthday. Mrs. Ferguson, now a widow, was seriously ill and dying of cancer. She only wanted to see her son one last time, or at least to know what had happened to him. Mrs. Ferguso
n lived in Houston, but her son had lived in Hempstead at the time of his disappearance. He was a good boy, she had said. He loved his simple life in Hempstead, working in a local clothing store as a salesman, walking and hiking in the local area observing and sketching birds. He hadn’t an enemy in the world and, in fact, everyone in Hempstead who knew him loved to be around him.
Brian Ferguson was thirty years old at the time of his disappearance from Hempstead. Now we knew that he was thirty years old at the time of his death. I had worked for three solid days to get the image out and get it right. Mike and Tommy knew as soon as I was done with it that it wasn’t Doug Hughes. I didn’t want to see his photo, in case I ever had to do another reconstruct that might be him. Tommy and Mike had pulled his Texas driver’s-license photo and compared it to my bust.
“It’s not him, Mom.”
I couldn’t believe it when Mike told me.
“That can’t be right.”
“It can and it is. It’s just not him, Mom.”
“Then who in blazes is it?”
“Don’t know, but we’re broadcasting the image and releasing it to all the papers.”
The image was only broadcast once when Mrs. Ferguson called in to the number on the screen to tell Tommy Lucero that the image on the bust was the face of her son. His Texas driver’s-license photo was pulled and compared. It was a match. His mother provided dental records for comparison and the forensic dentist in Chris’s office reviewed them. They were a match also. The bones belonged to Brian Ferguson.
As soon as I got the news, I called Leo.
“Guess Tommy told you, it’s not Doug Hughes. So, now what do you think?” I asked.
“I think we have a whole new mystery on our hands. I think we need to find out if there is any connection between Addie and this guy, Brian Ferguson.”
“What about Doug Hughes? Do you think any of this could have anything to do with why Doug is still missing?”
“Who knows? Until we find him, we won’t know. Tommy said Brian’s mother had put out some kind of plea for information on television about a month ago, right?”
“Yes.”
“No matter who the killer is, that was the trigger, Toni.”