by An Anthology
“Earl?” I scoffed. “I wouldn’t count on it.”
Ballistics proved that the two men were, indeed, shot from different distances, so there was no way they could have shot each other. As for how Cady tied herself up with duct tape, that was still a mystery.
Since the shootings were connected to a bank robbery, we had the FBI’s manpower available to track down every possible lead. They interviewed anyone who knew either the victims or the suspects: friends, family, business associates, but after two days of intensive investigation, Cady Clark got away clean, probably thanks to help from Mike Delgado.
The evidence suggested he’d been waiting in his State Police cruiser on a dirt road behind the motel. We knew this from the footprints Cady had left between the bathroom window and a set of tire tracks on the dirt road, where the prints disappeared. The tire tracks matched Delgado’s radials. His cruiser was found in the Portland Airport parking lot.
Delgado had once been a good police officer while he was on the Bangor force, but left due to a conflict with his partner, Robert Parrish, who’d been sleeping with Delgado’s wife. Delgado found out about it, fists were thrown, both were written up, Parrish took medical retirement (due to a heart condition), and Delgado quit the force.
Delgado was an ex-marine trained to work with explosives, and had raced stock cars and done stunt driving. He lived in a cabin in the woods and considered himself a modern-day mountain-man with a badge who believed “God and Family First, Law and Order Second,” and reportedly had twin tattoos—one on either bicep—to prove it.
The FBI did a dump on Cady’s home phone, which showed an interesting (to me) cluster of calls to a Dr. Robert Atkinson, OB-Gyn, of Belfast. She’d called his office dozens of times and had even called him at home several others. I had to wonder if something personal, not medical, had been going on. Meanwhile, Cady had made no calls to any ophthalmologists, internists, or cancer specialists.
She’d also taken out a life insurance policy on Earl a few days before the bank robbery. The beneficiary was someone named Amanda Hitchcock (Cady’s sister Amanda?) and the policy was good for half a million dollars. The FBI immediately began trying to track down this Amanda Hitchcock.
The third day after the murders was sunny yet cold and I had a training session with a couple of pit bulls named Fuji and Nessie—good doggies with sweet dispositions (like most pit bulls) but with spotty recalls, which means they didn’t always come when called. Luckily, they loved to jump up, which can increase the reliability of almost any dog’s recall. Within twenty minutes of getting them to chase me around and jump on me, their recalls had improved by almost 50 percent.
When I got back to the kennel, Frankie my black-and-white English field setter, and Hooch, my dog de Bordeaux, jumped around the office, but not on me (they’re only allowed to do that on command); they were very happy to see me. Then D’Linda, Mrs. Murtaugh’s assistant groomer, told me that a woman had come by earlier to pick up Charley.
“Cady Clark’s poodle? You didn’t let her, did you?”
“Yeah. She said she was the owner’s sister, Amanda.”
“D’Linda!” I yelled; Frankie thumped his tail nervously against the front counter.
“Don’t yell at me, Jack. She had proof.”
“Sorry, Frankie. What kind of proof?”
“An affidavit. Plus, she had a cop with her.”
“A cop? What was his name?”
“I don’t know. He was a state trooper.”
“He didn’t tell you his name?”
“No.”
“Did you see his name tag?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think he was wearing one.”
“Jesus, D’Linda. Was he in a state police car?”
“No. He came in her car.”
“Oh, this is just great.” I resisted an impulse to shout at her again. “What did this woman look like?”
She gave me a description that could have been Cady Clark except she had brown eyes and brown hair, and dark skin.
“How dark?”
“I don’t know. Like she’s part Asian or something.”
“Did she have a scar on her left cheek?”
“No. She had perfect skin. And I’m not a total idiot,” she said, handing me a slip of paper and a legal document. “Here’s the affidavit. Plus, I made her leave her address and phone number.”
I took the slip of paper to the phone and dialed it. I got a recording saying the number I had reached was no longer in service. D’Linda hovered while I made the call.
When I hung up she said, “Can I go back to work now? I was in the middle of doing Susie Q.”
“No, get out; you’re fired,” I wanted to say, but grumped and told her that she could go back and finish work on the Maltese but that she was never to do anything like this ever again.
“Okay, I get it.”
“I don’t think you do.” I picked up the phone to call Sinclair and told her, “That woman may be the only lead we have to solving a couple of homicides.”
“How was I supposed to know that?”
“D’Linda, just go finish Susie Q, okay? I’m sorry I yelled at you.”
“Okay. Jeez Louise.”
I told Sinclair what had happened with the dog and the sister. He said he’d have someone look into the address, and that he’d come out himself to pick up the affidavit and show Delgado’s picture to D’Linda, to find out if he was the cop Cady’s sister Amanda had brought to the kennel with her.
He arrived an hour later, showed D’Linda a photo of Mike Delgado, gray hair, balding, and a face that was going pouchy, but she said she couldn’t tell if it was the same man or not.
“It looks like him, but I’m just not sure.”
Then he showed her a Polaroid of Cady Clark that he’d taken at the motel. She said that the woman who’d come to pick up Charley looked similar to the one in the Polaroid, but that it definitely wasn’t the same one.
“She had dark hair and eyes,” she said. “And no scar.”
He thanked D’Linda and she went back to work brushing Saki, a black-and-white akita.
I gave Sinclair the affidavit and pointed out that the name and signature were those of Amanda Hitchcock, which might be Cady’s sister Amanda.
He said the state police and the FBI’s search hadn’t found anyone named Amanda Hitchcock yet. “But we’ll keep on it, obviously. And what’s the disappointed face for, Jack? Did you like the yappy little dog that much?”
“Who? Sir Barksalot? Not really.”
“Don’t let him kid you,” D’Linda said from the grooming room, now brushing out Saki’s undercoat. “It takes him about two seconds to fall in love with any dog.”
“That’s beside the point,” I snapped at her.
“What interests me about this girl,” I told Jamie while she stood in pajamas, brushing her teeth that night, “is how there’s always a bit of truth spersed among her lies.”
“Spersed?” She rinsed, spit in the sink, and said, “There’s no such word, Jack.”
“I know. It’s my own back-derivation of interspersed. It means scattered.”
“Maybe so, but it makes you sound like an idiot.” She dried her mouth on the sleeve of my terry cloth robe, which was hanging on the back of the bathroom door.
“Honey, could you do that on a towel, next time?”
“Yeah, whatever.”
“Anyway,” I said, putting the cap back on the tube of toothpaste, “she tells me this sad background story about Earl, for what purpose I can’t quite figure, when she could’ve kept quiet about it or made up a complete fabrication. Some pathological liars are like that, I guess. They can’t tell the whole truth about anything, but they can’t shut up about things either. And they can’t help giving themselves away a little by mixing the truth in with the lies.”
She pushed past me through the door to the bedroom. “Why do I get the feeling that you kind of like her?”
“Cady? She’s a cold-b
looded, sociopathic killer. At least I think she is. And I have a bad feeling that what happened at the motel wasn’t her first murder.”
“Really? But…” She got under the covers and Frankie, who was lying next to the pillows, moved to the foot of the bed. (Hooch has to sleep in the kennel; he snores.) Jamie patted the mattress for me to come join her “I still think you sort of like her, even if she is a serial killer.”
“I just find her intriguing, psychologically speaking,” I said, getting in next to her. “And she’s not a serial killer, honey. There’s a huge difference between the psychopathology of a serial killer and that of a sociopath.”
“What is it?”
“You really want to talk about this before bed?”
“Why not?” she asked.
“It’ll give you bad dreams.”
“Not if I’m sleeping next to you it won’t.”
“Okay.” I explained that a sociopath lacks empathy for others and has no conscience. They’ll usually only kill someone if that person stands in the way of a goal they have. They don’t have a compulsive need to do it.
“A serial killer, on the other hand, knows that what they’re doing is wrong; they just don’t care, they have to kill in order to satisfy their sickness. They’re usually the victims of childhood abuse or suffer some kind of neurological damage during a development phase. They can’t feel sexual pleasure unless it’s strongly associated with extreme violence against others. For them killing is intensely pleasurable. For a sociopath it’s more of an annoyance than anything.”
She shuddered and clutched me tight.
“I told you you’d get bad dreams.”
“I’ll be okay. So I guess if Cady Clark is a sociopath, then someone must’ve gotten in her way at some point.”
“Right.” I turned off the lamp. “And although she supposedly needs some kind of surgery—for cancer or an eye operation—the only phone calls she made to any doctors in the last six months were to an obstetrician.”
“So?”
“So? Dozens of phone calls, even to his home?”
“Ohhh.”
“Yeah, ”oh‘. You have to read the little clues that are spersed among the mundane data.“
“There you go again, Jack. The word is inter—”
“I know. That time it was just to annoy you. Besides, interspersed means ‘scattered among,” but you never hear anyone say ’the clues were interspersed the mundane details.“”
“Maybe so, but spersed is not a word.”
“Well, it should be. Anyway, I’ve got an appointment tomorrow afternoon to talk to Dr. Atkinson to see if he and Cady Clark were having an affair or something.”
“Good idea.” She yawned and put her head on my shoulder, then laughed softly. “I wish I could be there to see you in the stirrups. One word of advice, though, honey…”
I shook my head. “What’s that?”
“Make sure he warms up the speculum before he uses it.”
“Oh, that’s cute.”
“Though I can’t imagine where he’d put it!”
“Yeah, that’s very cute,” I said, but she was laughing too hard to hear me, so I kissed her till she shut up (though a few of her giggles got spersed amongst my kisses).
Frankie just grunted and thumped his tail. Then— when things got more enthusiastic—he jumped off the bed and curled up by the door.
It poured buckets the next day, which made life at the kennel work-intensive. I spent two hours mud-ding around with the dogs in the play yard, a fenced-in area downhill from the kennel building, roughly the size of the infield at Fenway Park. I always give them two hour-long play sessions: one in the morning and one in the afternoon. When it rains you have to hose them down afterward then dry them off with a towel. Mrs. Murtaugh wasn’t much help since her hip always acts up when it rains. And D’Linda had an emergency involving a sister-in-law’s car that was stuck in the mud somewhere.
Jamie called around three and said she wanted to go over some things with me at the morgue, so I drove up to Augusta before making the trip to Dr. Atkinson’s office in Belfast.
I came into the autopsy room just as she was speaking into a microphone: “The blood also showed elevated levels of creatine kinase MB—oh, hi, honey.” She switched off the recorder. “I didn’t know you were here.”
“Yeah,” I said, “Keith let me in.”
She laughed. “You mean Kenneth?”
“Okay, Kenneth. You know, Dr. Unger.”
“Udall,” she said, laughing some more. (I can never keep the names of her friends or co-workers straight.)
I said, “So what was that you were just saying?”
“Hmm? Oh. The blood work on the bank guard came back. He wasn’t killed by a bullet. He had a heart attack.”
“Really? How can you be sure?”
“First of all, it’s what I do,” she said. “Secondly, the bullet caused very little damage. It didn’t hit any major arteries or internal organs. Secondly, there are certain substances in the bloodstream that prove definitively that the victim was having a cardiac event at the time of death.”
“Okay,” I took a seat on a metal stool. “What are they?”
“Troponin, a protein found in the heart muscles.”
“Oh, yeah. I remember that from my first year at Harvard Medical School.” (I’d dropped out after my mother committed suicide during my second year.) I said, “Troponin shows up in the blood because during a heart attack it leaks out of the heart cells and into the bloodstream.”
“That’s right, Jack. Very good. Then there’s creatine kinase MB, which is an isoenzyme that—”
“Okay,” I put my hands up. “I believe you. Still, couldn’t the robbery have caused the heart attack?”
“Well, I suppose it could be argued that’s what happened, but I’m a medical examiner, not a DA.”
“I guess it doesn’t matter much, since Joe Bruno’s the one who shot him and he’s dead.” I paused. “It makes you think about this guy, Earl, though. He was ready to protect his cousin by confessing to a crime he didn’t commit.”
“Yeah, you almost have to admire someone like that.”
“Yeah,” I shook my head, “almost. So, how’s he doing?”
“Earl? He’s stable but guarded. Oh, and forensics found some skin cells under Joe Bruno’s fingernails, along with pyroxylin, which is a form of nitrocellulose.”
“Nitrocellulose? Isn’t that guncotton?”
“Sort of,” she smiled. “I’m surprised you know that.”
I shrugged. “If I recall, I got an A in my organic chemistry classes in college. Plus, I was a cop for fifteen years so anything that explodes, I remember.”
“Good point. And from what I understand, you got an A in all your college courses.” Then she explained the difference between pyroxylin, or tetreinitiate, which is what’s called collodion (and is safe), and frexanitrate, which is guncotton (and explodes easily).
“Collodion sounds familiar; what’s it used for?”
“Making photographic emulsions. It also has surgical applications as an adhesive to close small wounds and hold surgical dressings. In an emergency situation it can even be used in place of surgical gloves.”
“Hmmm. So maybe that’s how it got under his fingernails? He was using it to hide his fingerprints?”
“It’s unlikely. There would have been a lot more of it then just the one little speck we found.”
“Okay.” I stood up. “I’m going to the gynecologist’s. I know there’s another use for this collodion stuff, but I just can’t put my finger on what it is right now.” I yawned.
“You look tired.”
“I’ll be all right. I’ve just had a long day.”
“Too tired to come to yoga class with me later?”
“No, I love going to your yoga class; it energizes and relaxes me. It just depends on how things go with Atkinson.”
“Okay. And when you see him, remember what I said.”
“I know. Have him warm up the speculum. Hah-hah.”
He was a shortish, slender, ugly, crook-toothed man with thinning brown hair and a sparse red beard. He said good night to a thickset office nurse and invited me into his private digs in the back. There were no stirrups or specula visible. He nodded me to a chair as he hung up his smock. Then he sat behind his desk, and said, “So, how can I help you?”
I settled in. “I’m looking for information about a young woman named Cady Clark. I think she may have been a patient of yours?”