The Red Scream

by Mary Willis Walker

  The question seemed to surprise him. “No. Why would it?”

  “Oh, I was just thinking about your coming home and finding her there, and how it might make you want to do something where you wouldn’t be so helpless in emergencies. I’ve often thought medicine would be comforting in that way. You’d always know something to do.”

  He laughed bitterly. “Now that’s a romantic view of medicine, Mrs. Cates. Lots of the time there’s nothing to be done. Like in my mother’s case. By the time I got to her the best surgeon in the world couldn’t have done anything for her.”

  “Stuart, if it’s all right I’d like to ask you a few things about that day.”

  He wiped his mouth with the paper napkin and pushed back from the table. “Sure.”

  “When you found your mother in the garage, did you notice any little cuts on her scalp?”

  He looked up, eyebrows raised. “Cuts? On the scalp? I don’t think so. Why do you ask?”

  “Oh, just something an assistant ME called to my attention. There were a number of tiny nicks done post-mortem.”

  “First I’ve heard of it,” he said. “But you know it was kind of dark in that garage. Even with the door open. Since I didn’t even notice the bullet hole at first, or the blood, I could easily have missed something else.”

  “And in moments like that, it’s hard to observe,” Molly said, remembering when the sheriff’s deputy came to tell her a body that fit her father’s description had been found floating in the lake. She’d been sixteen then, just two years older than Stuart had been when Tiny was murdered. It was something they had in common. She wondered if it had affected him as profoundly as it had affected her.

  “It really is. When I rode my bike into the garage and saw her, it was like I was underwater or in another dimension.”

  “When did you know she was dead?”

  “I was so dumb. Doesn’t say much about my aptitude for medicine, I’m afraid. I saw her there and I thought immediately I’d try CPR which I’d just taken a class in. Then I noticed the bullet wound and the blood.”

  “I’ve wondered, Stuart, why you came home early that day. Weren’t you planning to stay at Mark’s all day and spend the night?”

  “That was the plan.” He reached out and picked up a tiny piece of roll, the only morsel left on his plate, and popped it into his mouth. “But I changed my mind.”

  “Why?”

  He sighed. “I already told you Mark’s a world-class jerk. And I’ve always been a loner, basically. I just wanted to go home.” He pushed farther away from the table, stretched out his legs, and yawned. He didn’t cover his mouth.

  “Do you ever dream about it?” Molly asked, thinking of her own underwater dreams.

  “Never have. Knock on wood.” He rapped on the Formica table.

  “What about the long delay between conviction and execution, Stuart? It’s been more than eleven years since the murder.”

  “God. Eleven years—long enough for me to finish high school, college, and medical school. Almost half my life. And they’re just now getting around to carrying out the sentence.” His head moved slowly from side to side.

  “So what are you thinking?” Molly asked.

  “It sure is a long time, but on the other hand, I think it’s important for someone to have every chance to appeal, make sure the trial was fair and all. That’s the vital part of this—that we get the right person.”

  “Do you think Louie got a fair trial? You were pretty young, but you were there.”

  “I wasn’t so young—fourteen. I remember it all perfectly, kept a journal, watched most of it. I think it was fair. After all, the guy said he did it. And there was plenty of evidence.” He pushed his plate away. “You’ve been asking me a lot of questions. Now may I ask you one?”

  “Sure.”

  “I told you over the phone that I just finished your book, the only nonmedical thing I’ve read in five years, by the way. My sister gave it to me.” For the first time he looked at her with interest in his eyes. “I wondered about your motivation for writing it.”

  “My motivation?”

  “Yes. Why this case? So unpleasant. It was a gargantuan chore. Lots of tedious research. Why did you do it? Was it worth it?”

  “I have a living to make,” she said, watching his face to see if that explanation would satisfy him. “And whether it was worth it I won’t know until I get some royalty statements.”

  He shook his head. “Uh-uh. No. There have to be easier ways than that to make a living.”

  “In the beginning, I covered the case for the American-Patriot and I just got hooked on it. I don’t know if I can explain it, Stuart.”

  He planted his elbows on the table and rested his chin in his hands. “Maybe you feel that if you can really understand one murderer, then violence will lose its mystery.”

  Molly was about to answer when Stuart frowned and raised a hand to someone across the room. “Oh-oh. There’s Alison.”

  Molly turned and watched the girl approach. She wore the same torn jeans and white T-shirt from yesterday. Her narrow shoulders sagged and her hair hung in her face, limp and greasy. She looks like she did a vigil last night, too, Molly thought.

  Alison leaned down and kissed her brother on the cheek. “Hey, Stu,” she said, resting her hand on his shoulder.

  He got up and pulled a chair over for her from a nearby table. “Sit down, Al. God, you look awful. Don’t you ever wash your hair?”

  “I know. I was going to have lunch with David, but he stood me up, so I decided to come see you before my shrink appointment.” She turned to Molly. “Hi, Mrs. Cates.”

  Molly was feeling a cold chill at the news about David Serrano. “Did you try going over there?” she asked.

  “No. I might have gotten the time or place wrong, though.” She put a hand to her forehead and closed her eyes. “Lately I seem to be getting lots of things wrong.” Eyes still closed, she said, “Mrs. Cates, I don’t want to be rude, but I need to talk to my brother in private. Are you almost done?”

  Stuart answered before Molly could get a word out. “Yes. We are. And I have to be back in a few minutes anyway.”

  Molly didn’t feel anywhere near finished, but Alison looked so desperately in need of some comfort from her brother that Molly decided to withdraw quickly. She stood and said, “Thanks, Stuart. Could we talk again?”

  “Maybe in Huntsville,” he said. “I know the execution’s not until after midnight, but I’m going to drive over early Monday—take the day off. Maybe I’ll see you there.”

  “Okay.” Molly was about to walk off when the thought of David Serrano stopped her. She turned back to the table. “I’m worried about David. I’ve been trying to get him since yesterday. When did you-all last see him?”

  “I haven’t had a chance to see him at all yet,” Stuart said.

  “He was over Monday night,” Alison said. “Mark was going to go running with him Tuesday, but he didn’t. I can’t remember what happened. David finked out, I think.”

  “Well, if you hear from him,” Molly said, “please tell him to give me a call right away.” She looked down at Alison. “And we’re on, Alison, for tomorrow at eight-thirty?”

  Alison pushed her hair back from her forehead. “Oh, yeah. You’re coming to my house so we can talk for your article. I already gave you directions, right?”

  “Right. Take care,” Molly said, thinking it would take a great deal of care indeed to fix whatever was wrong with Alison McFarland.

  chapter 10

  Roses are red

  Violets are blue

  We all end up dead

  Whatever we do.

  LOUIE BRONK

  Death Row, Ellis I Unit,

  Huntsville, Texas

  Molly’s town house in Northwest Hills was her refuge from the world. It was perfect—sunny, compact, tranquil, and, best of all, she didn’t have to share it with anyone. No child, no roommate, no dog, no husband. Only recently had she ad
mitted to herself how much she loved having a space that was all her own, where she could arrange things as she liked and have them stay that way, where she could live according to her own time schedule. Her single women friends all said they would sell their souls for the presence of a good man in their lives and Molly could see their point for sure. She’d enjoy a good man in her life, but not in her house. One of her goals in life was never again to share a bathroom with a man.

  The phone rang just as she walked in the door; uncanny, as if someone were watching her.

  “Molly Cates, Grady here. You’re home finally. Listen, how about dinner tonight?”

  “Grady, was there anything in my mail?”

  “Well, now, it’s real interesting you should ask. That’s one of the things we can talk about over dinner. How about the County Line? I’m in the mood for some serious grease.”

  “I can’t, Grady. Jo Beth and I exercise tonight.”

  “Exercise? Molly! You? Since when?”

  “Grady, you don’t know me anymore. I’ve been exercising regularly for years now,” she lied.

  “Hmmm. I’d have to see that.”

  “So, what about my mail?”

  “Can’t discuss it over the phone, Molly, you know that.”

  He was playing with her. She wouldn’t let it get to her.

  “But I could come in and deliver it to you,” he said.

  “Where are you?”

  “Outside your front door.”

  Molly set the receiver down on the table and walked to the door, smoothing her hair. She opened the door and looked out. The white Ford Tempo parked across the street had a long straight antenna on the back.

  She closed the door and walked back to the phone. “You don’t give much notice when you drop in, do you?”

  “I called first, didn’t I?”

  He was waiting at the door when she opened it, looking freshly shaved and showered, his shirt creamy white, his suit surprisingly unrumpled. Jane, or whatever her name had been, had certainly upgraded his wardrobe and his grooming.

  He looked around and whistled in appreciation. Then he pulled some envelopes out of his pocket. “Oh. Here’s your mail. Two bills, one that’s overdue, your car registration renewal, a note from your agent about possible British rights at a nice figure, and a letter from one Charles Logan, attorney-at-law, who says he still thinks about those nights in Abilene.” He looked down at her with a sour expression. “Still at it, huh?”

  Molly reached out and grabbed the envelopes from his hand.

  He took a step back and said, “But nothing from your poet pen pal today.”

  She leafed through the envelopes. They were all sealed, looking as though they had never been disturbed. “Why did you open them?”

  “Just to be on the safe side. Now that he’s threatened you directly.” He glanced at his watch. “Five fifty-nine,” he said. “I’ll be off-duty in one minute.”

  He wandered around the living room, looking it over, then settled himself in her most comfortable armchair and checked his watch again. “Six on the nose,” he said, leaning back. “Officially off-duty.”

  She ignored the hint for a drink. “Do sit down, Grady. Make yourself at home.”

  He smiled up at her, his tanned skin breaking into a sunburst of lines radiating out from the corners of his eyes.

  “Now,” Molly said, still looking through her mail, “you can tell me what you’ve found out about David Serrano.”

  He crossed his legs. “Same thing you found out when you went by his cousin’s house last night. He’s vanished, leaving behind his clothes, his briefcase, and his high blood pressure medication. We know he’s not back home in Brownsville. There’s a BOLO out for him and his vehicle—a black Lincoln Town car.”

  Molly put the mail on the hall table and walked toward him. “This is bad news, isn’t it?”

  “He’s either on the run or he’s belly up somewhere. You know him. What do you think?”

  Molly recalled Serrano’s nervous gestures, the sweat on his upper lip. “I think he was afraid of something. I told you he was armed, but he looked too nervous to shoot straight. I think he may be dead.”

  Grady nodded again. “Molly, why don’t you stand Jo Beth up and come to dinner with me?”

  “Because I want to go to exercise class with her and I don’t want to go out to dinner with you.”

  He leaned his head back on the wing chair and ran an index finger along his mustache, just above his long upper lip. “Oh, Molly, that’s one of the things I’ve missed about you.”

  Molly found herself watching his finger and thinking about how it would feel to run her own finger along his lips. Damn. She promised herself not to do this. “Grady,” she said in a hard voice, “are you courting me, or did you just come to spy on my correspondence?”

  He frowned. “Are those my only two choices?”

  She sat down in the other chair, across from him. “Tell me about the postmortem and I’ll tell you something juicy sometime.”

  He sighed. “All right. The postmortem. Forty-eight-year-old Caucasian female. Dr. William Mixter, Travis County Assistant Medical Examiner, began with a Y incision, the standard cut from each shoulder to the pit of the stomach, and then a straight line down to the pubic bone.”

  “Come on, Grady, you don’t think you can gross me out, do you? I’ve probably seen as many posts as you have.”

  “Oh, you just want the results? Why didn’t you say so? Death resulted from a forty-five-caliber hollow point bullet—what we police like to call ‘controlled expansion’—that entered her back at the left shoulder and nicked the heart. A second bullet entered the middle of the spine and lodged in the left lung. We’ve got the bullets, but those dumdums tend to self-destruct so they aren’t in good shape for a ballistics comparison even if we had a weapon, which we don’t. We’ve checked all the McFarland guns and there isn’t a .45 among them. The shots were fired from more than two and a half feet away. The head was neatly shaved, with a safety razor, probably after death. She does not appear to have been sexually assaulted. Is that what you wanted to know?”

  “Time of death?”

  “Well, I wish this were a more exact science like on TV where the ME says the deed happened between 7:42 and 7:44, but Mixter tells us it happened between 6 and 9 A.M. Maybe. The month he can pinpoint exactly.”

  “So it’s not going to help eliminate any of the family members as suspects, is it?”

  “No.”

  She leaned forward. “Grady, something’s been worrying me and I want you to be honest with me.”

  “I will,” he said.

  She took a deep breath. “When I got the first master poet letter, you know the I-may-give-his-craft-a-try one, it seemed like it could possibly be a threat, some sort of general threat. You may find this incomprehensibly stupid, but it never occurred to me it might be a threat to the McFarlands, in spite of the fact that the pages he sent with the poem were about Tiny McFarland’s murder. I got it at about five o’clock and later, when I showed it to Jo Beth, she said we should call you right then and let you look at it. I wouldn’t let her do that. I took it to Stan Heffernan the next day at noon and he didn’t think it was anything to get excited about. Of course, Georgia was already dead by then, lying out there in the sun with ants and buzzards at her.”

  Molly took another deep breath. “What I want to know is, if I had shown it to you Tuesday night, would you have seen in it a threat to the McFarlands and would you have warned them?”

  He studied her face. “This has really been worrying you.”

  “Yes. Of course it has. It’s bad enough having this master poet creep saying he’s going to use my book as a blueprint for killing, without thinking I’ve contributed to it with my negligence, too.”

  “I can see that,” he said.

  “Well? Would you have warned them?” she demanded.

  “No.”

  She let out a breath she didn’t know she’d been holding.


  He smiled. “Actually Jo Beth did call me after she got home. She’d memorized the poem—clever girl. I told her it sounded like business as usual. So if there’s blame here, Molly, we can split it.”

  She felt an urge to get up and kiss him on the cheek, or maybe on the mouth.

  He leaned closer to her. “It’s no fun being brought into this as a participant, is it?” he asked.

  “No. While I wrote the book, I kept telling myself that writing about a real-life crime with the purpose of entertaining readers was possibly a bit voyeuristic and sleazy. But I couldn’t see any way it could do any harm. And on my best days, I thought it might even be educational in some way.”

  “I think it’s very unlikely that it’s done any harm, Molly.”

  “Don’t you think those poems are from the killer?” she asked.

  “They could be. But even if they are, I think it will turn out to be someone trying to focus attention away from the likely suspects on to some crazy Louie Bronk copycat. I believe Georgia was killed by someone she knew well.”

  “Why?”

  “Several reasons. Here’s one. You remember the Thermos?”

  She nodded.

  “Guess what was in the pocket of her robe?”

  “What?”

  He stood abruptly. “Let’s continue this conversation over dinner. And a drink, especially a drink.”

  She reached up and took hold of his arm. “Tell me what was in her pocket and I’ll get you a drink here,” she said.

  “Deal.” He sat back down and crossed his legs.

  “So—” she said, “what was in her pocket?”

  “Two foam cups and a packet of Sweet’n Low. Now how about that drink?”

  Molly headed to the kitchen. “She was expecting to meet someone for coffee at the gazebo,” she said back over her shoulder.

  Grady got up and followed her. “Looks that way doesn’t it? If your master poet is the killer, it’s also someone she’d have coffee with in her robe.”

  The thought made Molly queasy. “What do you want?” she asked, opening the fridge.

  “I don’t suppose you’ve learned how to make a strawberry daiquiri.”