Fact or Fiction_A Sam Prichard Mystery

by David Archer

  “In that case, I’ll go to your friendly reporter, first. Let’s see how he reacts to having a bungled case spread all over the news. By the time I give that reporter everything I know, that prosecutor’s chance of reelection will be pretty slim.”

  Moore looked over at him with a sideways grin. “Man,” he said, “you’re not a bit afraid of making enemies, are you? Larry Zigler has been prosecutor here for fifteen years, and he’s not going to take kindly to that kind of opposition.”

  “Then he should have make sure his investigators weren’t bullying people of reduced capacity into confessions. Just about any decent defense attorney could have made a strong case that Ross was coerced, but he obviously didn’t have one.”

  “Nope. Public defender, a guy named Paul Lambert. Lambert is all about plea bargains; I don’t think he’s ever actually defended a client.”

  Sam shook his head. “Unfortunately, that’s the way most of them are,” he said. “At least, that’s been my experience with them.”

  “Ain’t that the truth,” Moore said. “By the way, I sent some deputies out Saturday to ask around that trailer park where Daisy lived. Rosie Parks wasn’t the only one who saw Daisy getting shoved into a car, but nobody thought enough of it to get a license plate. One woman thought the car looked like her son’s car, which is a late-model Nissan, but all we really know is that it was a white sedan. The trouble is that this could easily be called the land of white sedans. Probably a third of the cars in this area are white four-doors.”

  Sam frowned. “Too bad,” he said. “In a town this small, you’d think that most people probably know what everyone’s car looks like. Would have been nice if someone had recognized it.”

  “If it had been young men who saw it, somebody probably would have. Those trailers are mostly just old folks, though, and most of the ones I know can’t recognize any car after about 1980.”

  They arrived at Hoover Excavation a few minutes later, and Sam followed the detective into the old brick building.

  “Frank, this is Sam Prichard. He’s a private investigator, but he’s helping me out on a couple of murder cases. Do you remember the one I mentioned to you?”

  Frank shook hands with Sam and then nodded. “I do,” he said. “Mrs. Cameron, the lady who was murdered in Thompsonville a few years back, right?”

  “Right. We got everything settled with the judge, so we’re ready to go dig her up. I’ve already got Doctor Havelock arranged, and he’s waiting for you to bring the coffin to him.”

  “Okay, then,” Frank said. “Let’s go do this. I already found out where she’s buried, so I’ll just meet you out at Freeman Cemetery.”

  Moore and Sam agreed and went back to the car, and Frank pulled out ahead of them a moment later in a truck towing a backhoe. Moore fell in behind him and followed as he headed south, then took a right onto Mcleansboro Street and followed it back over to Highway 34 and then east toward Thompsonville.

  It took almost twenty minutes to get to the old cemetery, mostly because the truck seemed to have a little trouble climbing a few of the hills with the big backhoe on the trailer behind it. Once they got there, however, it only took Frank a few minutes to unload the machine and drive it to where Millie’s grave lay under a marble marker.

  He set the safety legs of the backhoe once he had it in position and began digging. It was the work of only another fifteen minutes to expose the concrete vault that held the coffin, and then he put a chain on the bucket of the machine and used that to lift the lid away. Millie’s coffin, protected by the vault from the elements and the earth, was still clean and relatively shiny.

  Frank climbed down into the vault and passed a couple of straps under the coffin, then hooked them on to the bucket. He climbed back up onto the backhoe and pulled a lever, and Millie Cameron rose from her resting place. With the coffin swinging on the straps from the bucket, Frank raised the safety legs and drove the backhoe slowly toward his truck, where he set the coffin down gently on its flatbed.

  Sam and the detective waited until he had the backhoe loaded onto the trailer again, then shook his hand and thanked him. “I’ll stop by your office on the way back and pay the bill,” Sam said.

  Frank shook his head. “No charge,” he said. “My wife used to babysit this woman’s daughter Debbie. When I told her Johnny called about exhuming the body, and how it might finally come out that Ross didn’t do it, she was pretty happy. I know the family don’t have much money, so this is on me.” He turned to Detective Moore. “I’ll drop the backhoe at the shop, then head down to Carbondale. Ain’t the first body I’ve taken down to Havelock. He’ll have it in a couple of hours.”

  He climbed into the truck and started up, while Sam and Moore went back to the car and got inside.

  “That was pretty decent of him,” Sam said.

  “I’d have to say,” Moore said, “if anybody around here could be called a pillar of the community, it’s Frank Hoover. He does an awful lot of good things for people around here.”

  Sam nodded. “It sounds like it. Well, all we can do now is wait for the pathology report. Anything come up on Daisy Willis’s killing?”

  “Not so much yet,” Moore said. “I’ll probably hear something from the CSI guys today or tomorrow, but I’m not expecting much at this point. The footprints they saw at the scene might help if we come up with a suspect, but I kind of doubt they’re going to find anything that points to somebody in particular.” He let out a sigh. “Thing about Daisy is, she might have been a bit weird, but she never hurt anyone. There are some old folks around Thompsonville who swear by her potions. She made some kind of a tea drink out of some tree bark that apparently makes a pretty good painkiller for folks with arthritis and such. They’re going to miss her.”

  “What about the other murders that fit the same pattern? Have you managed to get any further information on any of them?”

  “Nothing yet, but I got calls out to police departments and sheriffs’ offices in all those jurisdictions. Hopefully somebody will still remember the cases, and I might pick up something that could help.”

  “I can’t help thinking we were on track about the killer being a local. If Millie was his first victim, then he probably did the next one trying to recapture the thrill he got from it. Same for the ones after that, he’d be looking for that adrenaline rush that serial killers talk about. With Daisy, though, the only thing that makes sense is that he somehow knew I’d be poking around this case. He might’ve been watching the house, waiting to see if I showed up there, and when he saw her talking to me it probably made him wonder what she knew, what she might’ve told me.”

  “I think the same thing. Whether she actually knew anything or not, I believe the killer thought she did. That’s the only explanation I can come up with for why she’s lying at the University morgue today.”

  He dropped Sam off at the courthouse and drove away, while Sam got into the Ridgeline and headed back to the motel. He didn’t know what else to do at the moment, but it was not yet ten thirty, so he figured he would go back and hang out with his family until it was time for lunch.

  Indie, however, had been busy. She looked up at Sam as he walked through the door and motioned for him to come to where she sat at the table with her computer.

  “I thought I’d see how Herman was doing,” she said, “because it’s been a few days and he still hasn’t turned up any new descendants we didn’t know about—but you remember day before yesterday, I added in Lynette Cameron and Bill Parkinson? Well, I found out they definitely did get married; it was about two weeks after Lynette’s baby was born, in a place called Pikeville, Kentucky. Unfortunately, that’s the only thing he found. There is no record of Lynette’s baby’s birth, at least not in any database Herman can get into, and I can’t find any reference to Bill or Lynette Parkinson that could possibly be them, not anywhere. It’s like they fell off the planet right after they got married.”

  Sam frowned. “Did you try calling the county clerk i
n Pikeville? Maybe they’ve got some old records that haven’t been digitized, something they can look into for you.”

  “Tried that,” Indie said. “A very nasty lady told me that a lot of their old records were destroyed in a flood back in 1977. The only reason I even found where they got married is because they had just started transferring records to microfilm at the time, and those had been moved to an upper floor of the courthouse. Marriage records were done by the time the flood struck, but a lot of other records were still on paper in the basement of the courthouse.”

  “Well, that sucks,” Sam said. “Moore says Lynette is dead, but he doesn’t know what ever happened to Parkinson. If we can track him down, it’s possible he might be able to shed some kind of light on this, but I doubt it.” He shrugged. “It was worth a try, though.”

  Indie looked at him, and her eyes were wide. “Worth a try? Sam, what I’m telling you is that there is absolutely no record of them after they were married in 1972. I mean nothing, not even any kind of Social Security records on either of them. Herman has a back door into the SSA database, so I told him to check. Parkinson had a Social Security account, just like every other adult American, and Herman was able to find him in the SSA database, but all activity on that account stopped within a month after they were married. Now, it’s possible they went completely off grid and never paid taxes, but that would be pretty hard to believe. And as far as I can tell, Lynette never got a Social Security number at all.”

  Sam leaned back in his chair and cocked his head to one side. “Okay, I see what you’re getting at. The chance that they could go completely unnoticed by the government after their marriage would be pretty slim. Even if Parkinson just did odd jobs, sooner or later he’s bound to have run into something that would require him to use his Social Security number. Heck, even opening a bank account requires one.”

  “Yeah, and so does life insurance, getting a driver’s license, and just about anything else you can do in our modern society requires that stupid number. Sam, I’m beginning to think he changed his name.”

  Her husband narrowed his eyes and frowned. “I know that it used to be possible to get a new identity by using the name and Social Security number of someone who died. All you had to do was get your hands on their birth certificate, because birth and death records weren’t correlated at the Social Security Administration. With the birth certificate, you could get the Social Security card that was assigned to that person, and then you could get any other kind of identification. I think you’re onto something, babe. Now, how do we find out what he changed it to?”

  “I’m ahead of you, like always,” she said with a grin. “I told Herman to search for death certificates of males who would have been around Parkinson’s age within two hundred miles of Pikeville. Then, I told him to match them to Social Security numbers and check to see if any of those numbers became active again after the date of death. He’s crunching on that now, and he’s already found three SSNs that seem to have come back from the dead. I’m beginning to think it wasn’t all that uncommon, back then, but it should hopefully give us a possible lead on Parkinson.”

  Sam smiled at her. “Did I ever tell you that I really just married you for your brains?”

  “No, but I almost believe it.”

  He let his eyes roam up and down her body for a moment, then focused on her eyes again. “Good, because I didn’t. You being brilliant is just a bonus—it’s your body I’m really in love with.”

  She stuck her tongue out at him. “Lucky for you, I can take that as a compliment. And I need it right now, when I’m fat as a hippo.”

  “You, my love, are not fat,” Sam said. “You are merely slightly fluffy. But don’t worry, once the baby is born, that will go away.”

  “Yeah? They say baby fat is the hardest to get rid of.”

  Sam shot her a wicked grin. “Not with me around. I’ll be chasing you all over the house—you’ll get more exercise than you’ve ever had.”

  “Hey,” his mother called from behind him, where she and Kim were watching TV with Kenzie. “Keep it PG, okay? There’s a child present.”

  Sam and Indie snickered.

  Sam called Detective Moore and told him what Indie had found out about Parkinson, then took his family to McDonald’s for lunch. Kenzie particularly liked McDonald’s, especially when she got the toy out of the Happy Meal. This one happened to be one of her favorite Disney characters, and she delightedly told all of them the story of the movie it came from.

  “And then she fell in love with the Beast, ’cause he was really a nice guy, and she kissed him and he turned into a handsome prince.”

  “And was that all?” Sam asked. “Was that the end of the story?”

  Kenzie shook her head. “No,” she said emphatically. “They lived happily ever after.”

  “And do you know what that tells you?” Indie asked her daughter.

  Kenzie looked up at her. “What?”

  “It tells you you can’t tell what a person is really like just by looking at the outside. Sometimes people aren’t who they seem to be when you just look at them.”

  Kenzie screwed up her face and thought for a moment, then smiled and nodded. “Yeah,” she said. “Like when they wear the skies.”

  Sam furrowed his brow. “The skies? Why would anyone wear the skies?”

  The little girl looked at him as if he were stupid. “’Cause they want to look like someone else.”

  Indie laughed at the look on Sam’s face. “Not the skies,” she said. “She means a disguise.”

  “Yeah, the skies,” Kenzie repeated.

  Sam chuckled, and they finished up their lunch, then headed back to the motel. He felt like he should be doing something, but he didn’t have any idea where to start looking for new leads. It seemed he was at a dead end until the pathologist finished his autopsies on Millie and Daisy, and he had no idea when that would be.

  He spent the rest of the day lounging around the motel. It was one of those days, he said, that made him want to just chill out for a while. The motel had a good selection of movies on its pay-per-view system, so they ordered a pizza for dinner and relaxed with some movies.

  The following morning, Sam called Detective Moore to ask if he’d heard anything from the pathologist, but there was no news yet. Moore promised to let him know as soon as he heard anything, and Sam thanked him.

  With no new information, however, Sam couldn’t just take off and leave his family. Instead, they went out for breakfast and spent the morning just looking around the countryside. The weather was a little cool, so they put jackets on and took another drive around Rend Lake. While they were doing that, they discovered that there were two other lakes close by and went to look them over, as well. It was a nice, relaxing way to spend the morning, and then they went out for lunch.

  When that was over, though, Sam was starting to get antsy. Since it was just after one, he told Indie he just had to do something to try to make some kind of progress on the case, dropped his family off at the motel, and headed back toward Thompsonville. The air had warmed up quite a bit by then, so Sam tossed his jacket into the back seat on the way. There was at least one person on his list of potential witnesses that he hadn’t spoken to yet, and that was the man who had employed Ross.

  Gary’s Auto Repair was located just off Highway 34 near the middle of Thompsonville. Sam pulled in and parked, then climbed out of the truck and walked into the big open garage. Several men were working on a number of vehicles, and Sam stood just inside the entrance until one of them had a moment to look his way.

  “Help you?” the fellow asked, and Sam held out his ID.

  “My name is Sam Prichard,” he said. “I’m a private eye. Is Gary Burgess around?”

  The man raised one eyebrow. “That’s me,” he said. “What can I do for you?”

  A big air compressor started running, and Sam winced at the loud noise. “Is there somewhere quieter we could talk?”

  Gary grinned and moti
oned for Sam to follow him into an office that was attached to the side of the building. The sound vanished as soon as the door was closed. “Extra soundproofing,” Gary said. “Sometimes I just have to get away from the racket myself. Have a seat.”

  Gary sat down behind a battered desk, and Sam took the chair opposite. “I’m working for the family of Millie Cameron,” he said. “I understand Ross used to work for you?”

  Gary looked at him for a moment before answering, then nodded slowly. “You said you’re working for her family? I’m assuming you mean Debbie?”

  “Yes, but I was actually originally employed by a distant relative. He simply wanted to find some missing relations, but when I told him about Millie and Ross, he instructed me to do everything I could to ascertain the truth. A lot of people don’t believe Ross killed his mother, and frankly, neither do I.”

  Gary grinned at him then. “God, it’s good to hear someone say that. That boy couldn’t have hurt anybody, let alone his own mama. And now, we’ve got another woman killed the same exact way from what I hear. I’m guessing there’s a connection?”

  “I certainly think so, and so does Detective Moore at the sheriff’s office. Earlier today I arranged to have Millie’s body exhumed and sent to a forensic pathologist down in Carbondale. Daisy Willis, the woman who was murdered on Saturday, will be examined by the same doctor. With any luck, he’ll be able to tell us that there is a reasonable certainty that both women were killed by the same person.”

  Gary nodded, leaning back in his chair and putting his feet up on the corner of his desk. “I reckon that ought to clear Ross,” he said. “How can I help you?”

  “Well, I’m wondering if you might have any suspicions as to who might have actually killed Millie. From what I’ve heard about you, you probably know everybody in this little town, and both Moore and I have come to the conclusion that the killer most likely lives here.”

  Gary’s eyebrows shot upward. “Here? In Thompsonville?”