The Red Scream

by Mary Willis Walker

  PUBLISHED BY DOUBLEDAY

  a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. 1540 Broadway, New York, New York 10036

  DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are trademarks of Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.

  All of the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  ISBN 0-385-46858-X

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-8041-5409-3

  Copyright © 1994 by Mary Willis Walker

  All Rights Reserved

  v3.1

  To Amanda and Suzanna, always.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  acknowledgments

  For abundant help and information my heartfelt thanks to Liz Cohen of the Texas Resource Center, Charles Brown of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, Steve McCleery of the Travis County District Attorney’s office, Linda Cooper of the Austin Police Department, Mike Cox of the Texas Department of Public Safety, and especially to “The Trashy Paperback Writers”: Dinah Chenven, Susan Cooper, Susan Wade, and Jody Berls.

  chapter 1

  Believe me

  Nothing’s free

  My daddy told me.

  He give me my life

  And a hunting knife—

  Nothing more.

  He’s out the door

  We’re left dirt poor.

  Five bitches and me

  Nothing’s free.

  LOUIE BRONK

  Death Row, Ellis I Unit,

  Huntsville, Texas

  Definitely a view to die for, Molly Cates decided—180 degrees of prime Texas hill country threaded by the sparkling blue ribbon of the Colorado River. Far below, three turkey vultures floated, never flapping a wing as they rode the late afternoon thermals along the undulating ridge. This was the king-of-the-mountain location in all of Austin, pick-of-the-litter real estate, the absolute high spot for twenty miles around. It was refreshing to see that some Texans could still live like this.

  “Real pretty view, ain’t it? You ought to see it sometime with a norther blowing up.” The voice behind her was low and raspy, with an easy drawl, the kind of male voice Molly knew and liked best. If she closed her eyes and let herself float back in time, it could have been her daddy talking.

  “Sure is. Real pretty,” she said, turning from the window to look at him and duplicating the languid vowels of his West Texas twang. She did it with ease because it was her native tongue, too.

  He reacted with a slow grin as he took the hand she offered in both of his. “This is a pleasure, Miz Cates. I sure do appreciate you coming here to visit with me.” He pressed her hand warmly and looked her square in the eyes. His hands still retained the roughness of the manual laborer he had once been. A large man, Charlie McFarland was about six feet tall, his body still thickly muscled, though around the torso it was starting to go slack. He wore a red plaid shirt, baggy old jeans, and expensive hand-tooled boots.

  “It’s real gracious of you,” he said, “since I know you must be remembering all the times I said no to you.”

  He was right; she was remembering. Back when she was covering the trial for the Austin American-Patriot ten years before and then later when she was writing the book, he had staunchly refused even to take her phone calls, much less give an interview. Of course, in her business you got used to people slamming phones down and she didn’t take these refusals personally. But she sure did remember them.

  Without returning his smile, she said, “When my boss asks me for a special favor, Mr. McFarland, I try to do it.”

  The grin faded slightly. “Yes, ma’am, I did have to lean on Richard a little to get him to ask you. I wanted to be sure you’d come. Hope you’ll forgive me for that.” He raised his heavy gray and ginger eyebrows to indicate he had asked a question.

  She kept her face noncommittal; if he wanted forgiveness, let him work a little harder for it.

  “Did he mention to you this was off the record?”

  Molly nodded.

  “Good. I wouldn’t want to see any of this appearing in print.” He gestured at his enormous showplace of a living room and said, “My wife just finished redecorating in here. As a wedding present I gave her a free hand. Only woman I know who can exceed an unlimited budget.” He chuckled. “But it was featured in Southern Living this month so I guess it turned out all right.”

  Molly hadn’t heard he’d remarried. She surveyed the room quickly. The oatmeal-colored Berber carpeting, the two walls of solid glass, the beige suede and chrome sofas, the white grand piano. No books or magazines, no litter, no family photos. Cold. No draperies for the windows; at night they would be huge black voids out into space.

  She looked him in the eye and took a chance. “Handsome, but I sure wouldn’t feel comfortable pulling off my boots and reading the sports pages here. Where’s the room you live in?”

  She was rewarded by a head-thrown-back laugh—a deep male whiskey-and-sex sound that reminded her of barrooms and hunting camps and visiting oil rigs with her daddy all those years ago. “Richard said you were a pistol.”

  “Richard’s no slouch himself,” she replied, getting more curious by the minute to find out what this man wanted from her. Whatever it was, she knew he would trot out all the big guns in his arsenal, including his relationship with her boss, to get it. This made her uneasy because Richard Dutton, the editor of Lone Star Monthly, was one of the few people in the world who had any power over her.

  Charlie McFarland reached out and touched her elbow. “Let’s go back to my office and talk, Miz Cates.”

  As he led the way, she was surprised to see how slowly and painfully he walked. His pace was a slow shuffle and he held his back ramrod stiff.

  She followed him along a hallway that was a picture gallery with paintings hung only inches apart—all landscapes, Texas bluebonnet scenes mostly. Molly liked bluebonnets as well as the next person, but, God, she was sick of all those murky pictures of the damn things everywhere she went—one of the curses of being a Texan.

  He stood aside at the open door at the end of the hall. When she entered, she couldn’t help smiling with satisfaction. It was exactly the room she would have predicted for a West Texas good ol’ boy who’d made it big—a large, dark-paneled study with a ten-point buck’s head over the stone fireplace and a buck’s rump over the door. A gun cabinet with a beveled glass door stood to the right of the fireplace. One wall was packed with built-in electronic equipment: stereo, large-screen TV, VCR, and other gadgets. On the desk sat an IBM computer with a twenty-one-inch color monitor that she coveted on sight; it was big enough so you could see two full pages of fourteen-point type side by side.

  The window out to the view was covered with tightly closed mini-blinds. How delightful, Molly thought, to be so rich that you could pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for the best view in Central Texas and then keep it covered.


  He walked to a worn Naugahyde recliner, turned, and grabbed the arms so he could lower himself into it. With a movement of his head he directed her to an armchair slipcovered in a hunting print. Molly was glad to see that the new wife who’d decorated the living room had not been allowed to make a statement in here.

  She sat down and was about to cross her legs when she paused, feeling a flush of heat radiate from her neck into her face. On an end table next to his chair lay a copy of her book, Sweating Blood. It was open at about the middle, the gaudy orange and red cover facing up. Somehow, she had never considered the possibility of this man reading it. And for just a moment, here in his house, the cover struck her as so tasteless, so sensational and tawdry, that she felt a hot blush prickling her cheeks—a reaction she could not remember ever having in her many years of being a crime writer who often violated the rules of good taste.

  From the minute her publisher had first showed her the cover art, she had loved it because it was so attention-grabbing. The painting depicted a lonely stretch of highway with a woman’s body lying in a ditch alongside; from the body blood flowed and surrounded the entire cover, front and back, with a shiny vivid red. She had recognized immediately that it would sell books. It was commercial, yes, sensational even. But that was the nature of true crime books and she wasn’t going to apologize for it.

  Certainly, when she was writing it, she had wrestled with the problem inherent in writing a book for entertainment which was based on other people’s private disasters. And here was a man who’d been personally devastated by the violence she’d carefully researched and portrayed; from the place the book was open, she figured he must have already read that vividly detailed scene of his first wife’s murder and the cold description of the act Louie Bronk had given in his confession to the police and again when she’d interviewed him in prison. Eleven years had passed since the murder, true, and McFarland had heard it all rehashed at the trial, but seeing it in print, dramatized, was a different matter; it had to be damned painful for him to read.

  She forced her eyes away from the book and finally finished crossing her legs.

  Charlie McFarland had been watching her. He steepled his thick callused fingers over his belly, closed his eyes, and took a deep breath. “Do you have daughters, Molly?”

  She was glad he’d switched to first names. “Yes, Charlie. I have one daughter. She’s twenty-four.”

  He nodded and opened his eyes as if that made it all right for him to go on. “Then you know that you’d do damn near anything for a daughter. Alison’s twenty-two now. She’s a real fan of yours, reads everything you write. Maybe you already know that since you’ve been in touch with her.” He gave her a hard look as if he was expecting an answer.

  Molly remained silent; she wanted to see where he was heading.

  He reached out and placed a hand on the open book next to him. “The girl reads too much of this sort of thing if you ask me—always has. I can’t believe it’s good for her, especially when you consider her history.” The thick, tanned skin of his brow furrowed. “Now I wasn’t planning on even giving this a glance—no point to it—but she bought a copy the day it appeared in the bookstores and stayed up all night reading it. Then she gave it to me. Said reading it might help me lay it all to rest.”

  He kept his hand on the open book and drummed his fingers on it. “You’re real good at what you do and I admire that. It’s clear you do your homework; you’re thorough, but”—he began to shake his head slowly from side to side as he spoke—“I just can’t imagine why anyone would want to do this. All that time you spent with him—” He screwed up his mouth in distaste. “To get so close to him, to try to get inside—” He shook his head furiously now. “Even his poems. No, I can’t see it, but maybe that’s because I got hit so close to home. I wish I could just forget it, but it keeps coming back.”

  Molly thought about her own experience with violent death hitting close to home. She sighed and said, “I don’t think forgetting is an option, Charlie. And I think Alison has a point. Sometimes looking at it closely and trying to understand can … well, this may just be rationalization for what I do, but I think that exposing it to the cold light of day can de-fang it some.”

  When she looked up, he was studying her face with increased interest. “In the book you describe me as a small but growing Austin builder. What do you know about me now?”

  God, she thought, wasn’t that typical of us all—out of a four-hundred-page book he picked out the one sentence that was about him. “You started McFarland Construction with two bulldozers and a wetback stone mason,” she said, “and built it up to a hundred-million-dollar-a-year business. And you’re one of the few builder-developers who’s not only survived the real estate crash intact, but prospered during it. Recently you got the contract for a new office building downtown and you’ve got several environmentally controversial new developments under way.”

  He nodded. “That’s all true, but your numbers are low.” He grinned at her. “My company grossed almost two hundred million this year.”

  “Well, I was under-informed,” Molly said. “Congratulations. I’m impressed that anyone in the construction business is still standing.”

  “Me too, me too. It hasn’t been easy.” He cleared his throat and looked away from her.

  Now he was going to get down to it, Molly thought, whatever it was that had caused him to use his considerable influence to get Richard Dutton to ask the first favor he’d ever asked of her—“Molly,” he’d said, “do something for me: when Charlie McFarland calls you, and he will call, just pretend to be nice if you can manage it. Listen to the man.” Charlie had called the next day, and she had agreed to come see him at his house. Of course, even without Richard’s intervention, she would have agreed; the book was finished, but her interest in the Bronk case sure wasn’t. She still wanted to hear what this man had to say, even off the record.

  McFarland was slumped down in his chair now, staring into the empty, blackened fireplace. Well, she had seen it before—people having trouble getting started. When you wrote about crime, you met people who had suffered grievous pain and they often had a hard time getting started.

  She sat and waited for him, studying his face. Though she had watched him testify at the trial ten years before and had seen his picture in the business section of the newspaper often since then, she might not have recognized him on the street. She knew he was sixty-two, but he looked older. The powerful bone structure of his jaw and Roman nose was holding, but the flesh, being more transient, was sinking. Swollen pouches of skin under his eyes seemed to be dragging the lower lid down and pads of fat under his chin almost obscured his thick neck. Gravity was having its way with this man. Maybe grief had helped it along.

  Finally he raised his head. “You must be sitting there thinking I’m some crazed old coot with a loose cinch. The thing is, this is a real delicate matter; I have a favor to ask, but I don’t want to insult you.”

  Molly found herself suddenly even more interested in what he had to say, interested enough to help him along. “Would it help if I promise not to be insulted no matter how outrageous it is? Give you advance absolution?”

  “Yes, ma’am, it sure would help. But that’s not my only problem here; see, it’s something I haven’t talked about in so long it’s like I’ve forgotten how to do it.”

  She hoped he wouldn’t back down now; she was beginning to feel the erection of those sensitive little hairlike receptors in her brain that alerted her to the proximity of a good story.

  He leaned forward in his chair and rested his hands on his broad knees. “Here’s my problem.”

  Molly settled back to listen.

  “Alison is having a difficult time of it right now. She’s back at school now, at the University, after taking some time off. She’s real smart, Molly. Valedictorian of her high school class at Austin High, National Honor Society, National Merit finalist—you name it. For the past two years she’s been going to see th
is psychiatrist because she’s been having nightmares and … oh … anxieties. She’s come to the conclusion it all has to do with her mother’s death. She was just eleven then. Of course, you know all about that—her being there when it happened and testifying at the trial and all. Now I know she’s agreed to talk to you for the article you’re writing; she told me. Here’s where the favor comes in.”

  His eyes flicked up to meet hers and then lowered. “I want to ask you not to talk to her. As her father, I truly believe it would be harmful to her right now. Too much pressure. And I don’t think any of this would help her brother either. He’s doing a medical residency in emergency medicine. The last thing he needs is a revival of all this horror to distract him.”

  He put the heel of his right hand to his forehead and pressed as if he felt a headache coming on and could force it back. “There’s more. I want to ask you not to write anything more about my wife’s murder.” He reached out his left hand and rested it on her book as if blessing it. “Doesn’t this say it all? Let it be the final word.” He picked the book up with one hand and snapped it shut. “Enough.”

  It wasn’t the first time someone had asked her not to write a story, or even the first time that the welfare of a child had been invoked as the reason. But she sensed a difference here: Charlie McFarland wouldn’t stop at just asking.

  “Charlie, I’ve been following the Bronk case for eleven years and I am going to see it through to the end. The final word will be when Louie Bronk is executed.”

  He took in a long breath before speaking. “So this article you’re planning to write is in honor of”—his mouth tightened into a mean slit—“Mr. Bronk’s slated execution. My sources tell me this time it will go through since he’s exhausted the appeal process.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I think your sources are correct. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals has turned him down. The Supreme Court has run out of tolerance and the governor’s not about to intervene.”

  “They also tell me that he’s asked for you to be one of his witnesses. At his execution.”