Deadly Ruse

by E. Michael Helms

  I shook her hand. “I’m not sure. Whoever might be familiar with the kids who were living here during the seventies and eighties.”

  Melissa gazed toward the ceiling and tapped her chin with an index finger. “Let’s see, I believe Mrs. Brady would have been here then, and Reverend Sparks for sure,” she said, thinking out loud more than talking to me. Her eyes met mine. “I believe Reverend Sparks is still in his office. Let me see if he’s busy right now.”

  A few minutes later I was seated in the director of personnel’s office facing Reverend Vernon Sparks, a stooped elderly man with thick eyeglasses whose remaining trace of hair was white as fresh snow. After the usual formalities I didn’t waste any time getting down to business.

  “Todd, you say?” He leaned back in his chair, his age-spotted hands pressed together like a church steeple.

  “Yes, sir, Rachel Todd. I was told she arrived here as an infant and was adopted when she was around fourteen by a family named Todd.”

  He nodded as he slowly rocked back and forth in the chair. “Hmm, Rachel, you say? And what year would that have been, young man?”

  I remembered Kate mentioning that Rachel was three or four years younger than Eric. That would make her and Rachel around the same age. “Miss Todd would be in her midthirties today, so I’d guess she would’ve arrived here sometime around the midseventies.”

  The old man stood up with the aid of a cane and hobbled from behind his desk to the open office door. He stuck his head into the hallway. “Missy, would you look in the Baby Doe files and bring me anything you can find on an infant arrival named Rachel. Also check the adoptive parents’ file under last name Todd. Start with 1974 for Baby Doe, and, oh, ’87 or ’88 for the parents.”

  “Yes, sir,” Melissa called from the front office, just a few doors away.

  “We give our children biblical names if they arrive as Baby Doe,” Reverend Sparks explained as he started back toward the desk.

  “I have a photo of Rachel when she was in her twenties, if that would help,” I said when Sparks was settled in his chair again. I fished through the briefcase for the photographs I’d brought and found the one of Kate, Wes, Eric, and Rachel at the beach. I handed it to Sparks. “That’s her on the right. The guy next to her is Eric Kohler. He and Rachel might’ve been related.”

  Reverend Sparks sat up and adjusted his glasses. He leaned closer and squinted at the photo. His hands began to shake a little. I chalked it up to his age until the photo slipped from his fingers and fell to the floor. I hurried around the desk to retrieve the photo as the old man pulled a handkerchief from his coat pocket and mopped his brow.

  He pointed to the photo I put back on the desk. “Did you say this young man’s name is Eric Kohler?”

  “Yes, sir. He—”

  Just then Melissa Banks knocked on the door frame, hugging a couple of file folders to her breast. “Pardon me. The records you asked for, sir?”

  “Yes, bring them in,” Sparks said, looking a bit shaken.

  She set the folders on his desk. “Baby Doe Rachel was right where you said she... are you all right, Reverend Sparks?”

  He nodded. “I’m fine. Thank you, Missy.”

  She gave the old man a concerned look as she headed out the door. “Call if you need anything else, sir.”

  Reverend Sparks waited until the clacking of Melissa’s footsteps faded and then picked up the photo and stared at it again. He laid it aside and turned his attention to the thicker of the two folders. He took his time, slowly examining page after page. “Yes, of course,” he said, as if a lightbulb had suddenly switched on in his mind. “Such a lovely young child and a wonderful student, too.” A faint smile crept across his face for a moment and then disappeared until his lips were drawn into a tight slit. “Until...”

  I waited as he studied the photo another minute, which seemed to drag on for an hour. Finally he turned the photo toward me, his finger pointing to Eric. “The young man here, this is not Eric Kohler!” He frowned and tapped his finger so hard against the photo I thought he might punch a hole through it. “Eric was killed in the invasion of Iraq in 1991, Lord rest his soul,” he said, voice quivering. “He’s buried in Arlington National Cemetery.” His jaw tightened and his nostrils flared. He rapped the photo again. “This young man is Travis Hurt!”

  On my way back to the La Quinta I stopped at a McDonald’s and ordered a Big Mac and fries to go. At a nearby convenience store I bought a six-pack of Budweiser. After my meeting with Reverend Sparks I didn’t have much of an appetite, but I could damn sure use the beer. Maybe I could choke something down later.

  Right now I had plenty enough to chew on, but it was all food for thought.

  CHAPTER 9

  It took three beers before I worked up the nerve to call Frank. I propped myself against the headboard with pillows and hoped he wouldn’t answer. He did.

  “Mac, any news?”

  “Yeah, you got an hour or so?”

  “It’s your dime. I’m parked outside a motel in Niceville keeping tabs on some Air Force major’s wife. She and lover-boy have been in there over an hour. My camera’s ready, so I’m all ears until they show.”

  I twisted the cap off the fourth beer. “How’s this for starters: Kate never met Eric Kohler. Kohler’s been dead since 1991, and the guy Kate knew as Eric was really named Travis Hurt.”

  There was silence for a moment, then, “Damn. What else?”

  “Rachel Todd and Kohler—I mean Hurt—weren’t related. Rachel, the real Eric Kohler, and Travis Hurt were all wards of the Good Shepherd Orphanage here at the same time. There’s a lot more, but I don’t want to bore you with details.”

  “Bore me, Mac.”

  I took a big swig of Bud and grabbed my notebook. “Okay, I’m still trying to sort all this crap out myself, so I’m summarizing here. Travis Hurt’s mother was a druggie from Dallas who whored around to support her habit and her son, in that order, I’d guess. When the kid was three or four she OD’d. No known surviving family, so he wound up in the orphanage here in Waxahachie. That was in the midseventies, around the same time our Rachel arrived at Good Shepherd as an unknown infant, what they call a ‘Baby Doe.’”

  “I know the term, Mac. Go on.”

  “Eric Kohler was another infant arrival, only he came with a name and birth certificate. His teenage mother died giving birth; his father was only sixteen at the time and in no position to take care of a kid. The kids weren’t married, and evidently none of the grandparents or other relatives wanted the responsibility of raising a baby, so Eric was brought to Good Shepherd. That was a couple of years before Kohler arrived. You with me here, Frank?”

  “Yeah. Real nice of the mother’s parents, huh? This world is full of assholes.”

  “I won’t argue that, but maybe Eric was better off at the orphanage. Anyway, it turns out that all three of our kids bounced in and out of foster homes during their time at Good Shepherd. Reverend Sparks, the head honcho at the orphanage I talked to, said Eric and Rachel were model kids and he was surprised neither of them found a permanent home, not until the Todds adopted Rachel when she was almost fourteen.

  “On the other hand, our boy Travis, the guy we thought was Eric Kohler, was nothing but trouble from the get-go. ‘A real hellion’ is how the good reverend described him. From what Sparks told me, Travis set the home-run record for the most foster homes visited by any kid since the orphanage opened in 1934. I think his longest stay in any one home was six weeks; that’s saying something when you consider a few foster parents are mostly in it for the money.”

  “Damn. And Katie was friends with this fellow. It just goes to show you can never tell about some people.”

  “It gets worse, Frank.”

  “I can hardly wait.”

  “Okay, you asked for it. For whatever reason, when Rachel was around twelve she took a liking to Travis Hurt. From what Sparks said, he was the Big Man on Campus and the big bully. Also, maybe him being four years older
had something to do with it, the ‘older man’ thing. Sparks did mention Rachel was an early bloomer. Anyway, by that time Travis had already earned a reputation for fooling around with any kid who showed him interest, male or female. He—”

  “Wait, wait... did you say male or female?”

  “Yep. Travis was a switch-hitter.”

  “Okay, Mac, I get the picture.”

  “Good. Then one night Rachel’s housemother was doing a bed check and noticed Rachel’s bed was empty, the old ‘pull the covers over the pillow’ trick. She started a search and finally found Rachel and Travis together in a dugout at one of the ball fields. They were, as Reverend Sparks so delicately put it, ‘getting to know one another in the biblical sense.’”

  “Let me get this straight, Mac. Travis Hurt was having sex with a twelve-year-old girl?”

  “Roger that.”

  “That’s statutory rape in a lot of states.”

  “Yeah, I’m no expert in Texas law, but the way Reverend Sparks explained it, Travis was several months past the age where he could’ve had a viable defense against the charge. Something to do with being more than three years older than the other juvenile involved, I think.”

  “So what happened?”

  I drained my beer and opened another. “Long story short: The charge was reduced to a misdemeanor, and Travis wound up in juvenile detention for six months. But almost as soon as he returned to Good Shepherd, him and Rachel hooked up again. Travis went back to the juvie slammer, and a few months later Rachel was adopted by the Todds.”

  “What’s the real Eric Kohler’s story?”

  “Eric and Travis knew each other at the orphanage but didn’t get along very well. Travis was the typical older bully, and Eric was the model orphan. He joined the Army in 1990 shortly after he left Good Shepherd when he turned eighteen. A little over a year later he was killed during the invasion of Iraq.”

  “Sounds like this Hurt guy stole Kohler’s identity. Easy enough to do, especially before 9/11. It’s called ghosting, for your information.”

  “Yeah, I read about it in one of the books you gave me, believe it or not. It makes sense, especially since Hurt didn’t have the greatest reputation when he got out of Dodge. Reverend Sparks said Hurt and Kohler were around the same height and had the same coloration. I guess it—”

  “Whoa, gotta run, Mac. The lovebirds just exited the room.”

  “I’ll check in tomorrow,” I said, but Frank’s phone was already dead.

  I was up bright and early Saturday morning. Got dressed, grabbed my briefcase, and drove to McDonald’s for breakfast. While I was eating I opened my laptop and tried to access the Ellis County court records but struck out. Then I tried the online archives of the Waxahachie Daily Light and came up empty there, too. Great, this being Saturday the courthouse was closed. Maybe I should’ve rearranged my priorities list, but it was too late now. My best bet was a visit to the newspaper’s office and finding a cooperative employee who’d be willing to help me find what I was looking for.

  I finished my sausage biscuits and coffee, and headed toward downtown. One good thing about Waxahachie is that the town is easy to get around. The drive to the Daily Light on West Marvin took only a few minutes, almost a straight shot down Ferris Avenue that leads into the heart of town.

  Inside the lobby I told the receptionist what I needed. She got on the phone, and in a couple of minutes a husky young man in his late twenties or early thirties walked into the room and greeted me with a big smile and a friendly handshake. Bill Danner was built like a linebacker, and during our chitchat heading to the room where the microfilm and other archives were stored I learned he had indeed played football at North Texas as a walk-on. A journalism major, Danner had come to work for the Daily Light shortly after graduating from UNT.

  We entered a huge room with shelves jam-packed with thousands of yellowing newspapers from floor to ceiling along two walls. Another section of the room contained desks with computers, printers, and other electronics and equipment. I followed Danner to one of the desks and took a chair beside him. “Where do you want to start?” he said.

  “I’m looking for information on a Theodore and Mary Todd of Waxahachie, both deceased. They probably died sometime in the mid-nineties. How about 1994?”

  Danner turned to a desktop computer and keyed in the Todds’ names. I couldn’t see the screen clearly from where I sat, but a minute later he stood and motioned for me to follow him.

  He stopped before another tall storage shelf, searched through several reels of film, selected a few, and then sat down at the desk. “We’re hoping to go to full digital with our archives someday, but right now my best guess is we’ll find what you’re looking for on microfilm,” he said, loading a reel into what looked like a glorified computer monitor with push buttons, dials, and other gizmos located below the screen and on a remote keyboard.

  Danner grinned. “This ain’t your granny’s old microfiche reader that you probably used in libraries back in your day.”

  My day? Who the hell was I, Father Time?

  “It’s a Canon 800 Microfilm Scanner. This baby can handle almost any format you throw at her. Only problem is, she’ll be a dinosaur herself in a couple of years.”

  Less than an hour later I thanked Bill Danner for his help and walked out of the Daily Light with several eight-and-a-half-by-eleven-inch printouts of news articles and obits added to my briefcase. Back inside the rental car I scanned the map and found Virginia Avenue, the street where the Todds had lived. It was only a few blocks away, up West Marvin.

  I hung a right out of the parking lot, wracking my brain trying to remember what I’d read about conducting a neighborhood investigation from one of the books Frank had given me. I planned to knock on a few doors and find a neighbor or two who might’ve known the Todds, someone who might be able to provide more info on Rachel and her relationship with her parents.

  Among the articles Bill Danner found was a front-page piece reporting how Theodore and Mary Todd, ages seventy-one and sixty-nine, respectfully, met their tragic end perishing in a house fire during the early morning hours of December 26, 1997. Source of the fire was determined to be a defective or dirty chimney. A fire erupted in the flue, turning it into a giant Roman candle and setting the roof and attic on fire. A strong back draft sent sparks and embers flying out of the fireplace onto the den carpet, resulting in a toxic smoldering fire. By the time firefighters pulled the couple from the burning house, both were beyond help. Cause of death was asphyxiation due to carbon monoxide and smoke inhalation.

  Daughter Rachel had been visiting her adoptive parents for the Christmas holidays. Fortunately for her, she’d caught a flight Christmas evening back to Pensacola, Florida, where she worked as a missionary pilot with Sacred Word Missions.

  A red flag was waving inside my head. Rachel had missed dying with her parents in a house fire by a few hours. Rachel had disappeared from Kate’s life shortly after her “brother” Eric, Wes Harrison, and Robert Ramey supposedly perished in the Gulf of Mexico, not even sticking around for the memorial service. And just two weeks later, Rachel’s airplane had mysteriously wandered off course and was lost somewhere in the jungles of South America. Something smelled rotten, and it sure as hell wasn’t in Denmark.

  I eased along Virginia Avenue through an older but very nice middle-class neighborhood, checking addresses on mailboxes. Most of the houses sat on quarter-acre lots with plenty of shade trees and well-maintained lawns. I found the number I was looking for and pulled to the side of the road opposite the house. It was a split-level home, with tan brick and sage vinyl siding, and looked a little out of place cloistered between the decades-older wooden houses flanking it on either side. A red and white tricycle lay tipped over on the sidewalk leading from the driveway to the front steps, and a basketball hoop stood at the end of the drive. The trees were leafed out in new spring foliage, and the green yard appeared to have been recently fertilized. It was hard to imagine this be
ing the scene of a tragic fire in the not-too-distant past.

  Eeny, meeny, miny, moe. The house facing me on the left won. I opened the briefcase and slipped the manila envelope containing a few photos into my inside coat pocket. I crossed the street and followed the walkway up the steps and onto the wide covered porch. The rails were boxed in with ornate lattice. At the far right a wooden swing was anchored from the ceiling by heavy eye-hooks and chalky-white chains. A patio table and padded chairs stood at the left side of the porch, and colorful potted plants lined both sides of the front railing. With just a little imagination it could’ve been my grandparents’ home up in North Carolina.

  Using the toe of my shoe I nudged aside a battered toy dump truck and plastic fire engine parked haphazardly in front of the door. I rang the bell, and a few seconds later the front door swung open. A barefoot young woman wearing denim shorts and a loose T-shirt stood facing me behind the screen door. She shifted a curly-haired kid around a year old from one hip to the other and swept her long brown hair out of her face.

  She managed a quick smile. “Hey there, can I help you?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” I held one of Frank’s cards close to the screen where she could see it. “I’m Mac McClellan, representing Hightower Investigations. I’m trying to find out information on the people who used to live next door,” I said with a quick tilt of my head to the right. “Unfortunately there was a fire and—”

  “You must mean the Todds,” she said, just as a youngster carrying something black and white by the neck flashed through the room behind her and disappeared down a hallway.

  The young mom turned and hollered, “Jordan, I told you that puppy ain’t no toy! Put him down now!”

  She turned back to me. “Sorry, mister, but I’ve got to go before he kills that pup.” She pointed toward my rental. “You need to talk to Mr. Chatwood across the street yonder where that car’s parked. Him and his wife was good friends with the Todds.