by Ninie Hammon
Sarabeth took the old metal Nikon out of its bag and slipped the strap around her neck and began to capture images in it. A short time later, the ambulance pulled away, driving slowly down the gravel road and out to the highway. There was no need for haste now and every need for dignity. It wasn’t an ambulance anymore; it was a hearse bearing the body of a small murdered child.
Sarabeth was about to put her camera away when she saw a woman running down the gravel road from the highway. One shoe was missing and she paid it no heed. Her hair was wild, her eyes wilder and she wore a nurse’s uniform. The image was a powerful, prize-winning news photo, but Sarabeth didn’t shoot it.
The crowd of people standing at the yellow Police Line tape parted to let the woman pass.
Sonny saw her, too, and tried to intercept her, but she blew by him and dashed to the van. She threw the back doors open as if she expected to find her little girl there. What she found was her daughter’s blood instead. There was a lot of it. She staggered backward from the sight, whirled around and started to scream frantically.
“Maggie Mae! Maggie Mae! Do you hear Mommy? Maggie Mae, you come here to me right this minute, do you hear me! Maggie Mae!”
The sheriff stepped to her, took both her hands in his and got so close he filled all her view, then spoke to her softly. Sarabeth couldn’t hear his words. But as she watched him, she understood for the first time the sheriff/minister fit: strength and compassion, two sides of the same coin. Like the other coins of his twin professions: right and wrong, good and evil, life and death.
At one point, the woman jerked back from him, tried to wrench her hands out of his grip, shook her head frantically in denial.
“No, no, no, you’re wrong, that wasn’t Maggie Mae, you know it wasn’t. Now, you tell me it wasn’t Maggie Mae!” She begged Sonny to change reality somehow, to make the horror pass her and her precious child by, leave her and her little girl unharmed. Her pleading broke Sarabeth’s heart.
As he spoke, Sonny gently eased the woman toward one of the Kentucky State Police cruisers parked near the edge of the woods. The trooper took his cue, stepped up, removed his hat and opened the back door for her. Sonny helped her inside, then turned to the crowd of onlookers.
“Anybody here a neighbor, a friend of Karen’s?”
A large woman who had been crying softly stepped forward.
“She lives right down the road from me,” she said.
“Can you ride with her into town? She shouldn’t be alone right now.”
The woman went immediately to the cruiser and got into the back seat with the little girl’s mother. The trooper closed the door, got in behind the wheel and slowly drove away.
As Sarabeth made her way through the crowd of onlookers toward her car she overheard a snatch of conversation, “ … found that money in a box by the road right after Derby Day … ”
Sarabeth felt the 18-wheeler slam into her chest again. Maggie Mae was Margaret Davis! This little girl was one of the three children who found $5,000 by the side of the road, money everybody knew had to belong to dopers.
Sarabeth had been in California for her checkup when the story broke. Bobby had covered it, had done a pretty good job, though his picture of the children hadn’t been terrific. The focus was too soft. And, of course, in the black-and-white photo, you couldn’t tell the little girl had red hair.
You couldn’t tell she was Moriah.
• • • • •
The fat man in a bloody t-shirt and jeans sat in a straight-back chair at a table in a small room off the sheriff’s office. Commonwealth’s Attorney Simon Henry reached over and pushed “record” on the tape machine in front of him, said the date and time and identified the people present in the room with them: Sheriff Sonny Tackett and State Police Detective Darrell Hayes.
“Mr. Burkett, you—” Henry began.
“I ain’t Mister Burkett. Name’s Doodlebug.”
“All right, Doodlebug, you need to know that everything that is said in this room from this point forward is being recorded.” Henry waited.
When he realized everyone expected him to respond, Doodlebug grunted. “Recorded, yeah. Ok, I know you’re recording this. Is that what I’m s’posted to say?”
Then the Commonwealth’s Attorney gave him his Miranda rights and asked if he understood them.
“I understand.” His voice was surprisingly quiet. “I understood it when the sheriff said it and when the trooper said it, too. I don’t want me no lawyer.”
Henry relaxed imperceptibly. Anderson Bertrand would almost certainly end up the defense attorney in the case. Bertrand loved publicity. Henry was profoundly grateful for a chance to question the accused before Bertrand jumped in with both feet and muddied the waters.
“You don’t git it. I done what I done and I don’t need no slick lawyer to get up and say I didn’t. I didn’t mean to hurt that little girl! Didn’t none of us mean to hurt those kids, we just wanted to scare ’em so they’d give us our money back.”
“What money?” Sonny asked.
“The money we hid in that shed,” Doodlebug said, and then poured out the tale in one long stream.
By the time he was finished, Doodlebug was sobbing. Tears squirted out of his eyes and down his cheeks. “I wish it’d been me instead of that little girl. I wish I’s dead ’stead of her. I didn’t have no right to keep on living and breathing with her just laying there limp in my arms.”
The three other men looked at each other. Henry’s mouth was set in a thin line and Hayes had the detached look he got when he was concentrating hard. But Sonny couldn’t help it—he felt sorry for Doodlebug. What a pathetic waste.
Then the men set about unpacking Doodlebug’s story, getting specifics, details. Once Detective Hayes got the names, addresses and descriptions of Doodlebug’s accomplices, he stepped out of the room to call the information in to the Columbia State Police post for broadcast to every trooper, sheriff and police department in the state.
A short time later, the sheriff stepped out of the room and dispatched Deputy Jude Tyler to an abandoned shed in the woods near Cade’s Crossing. The deputy returned before the interrogation was over.
“There was no money in that shed,” he told Sonny after the sheriff closed the interrogation room door behind him so Hayes and Henry could continue their questioning. “All I found was this.” The officer emptied the contents of a brown grocery sack onto a table—an old alarm clock; a handful of chewed-up pieces of canvas; six metal grommets; a small buckle, like from a belt or a strap; a tattered 18-inch zipper and an envelope containing about a tablespoon of what looked like fuzz, or confetti. “I used a pocket knife to dig this white stuff out of the cracks in the floorboards. And there were mouse droppings all over that loft; I didn’t bring any back with me.”
The sheriff looked in wonder at what the deputy had laid out for him. He picked up the alarm clock. “What in the world?”
Tyler shrugged his own bewilderment.
Sonny lifted the zipper with frayed, chewed-on edges and held it up to the light.
“If there was a canvas bag in the loft of that shed, all that’s left of it is this stuff right here,” the deputy said and held up a ragged piece of canvas. “Mice ate the rest of it.” He picked up the envelope and poured out the contents into his cupped palm. “And I don’t know what this white stuff is, but I think I could make a pretty good guess.”
The sheriff shook his head. “Bag that as evidence and send it to the Kentucky State Police lab for analysis.”
He looked into the deputy’s eyes, still trying to take it all in. “Mice?”
Tyler nodded. “Mice.”
Chapter 16
Jimmy Dan got lucky, or at least he thought so at the time. He had run through the woods for what seemed like hours, up into the knobs, just running, seeing the blossom of red on the little girl’s dress before him as he ran.
He kept replaying the scene over and over trying to figure out what had happened. None o
f it made sense. But sense or not, the reality was that he had shot that little girl, probably killed her.
When he couldn’t run another step, he collapsed in the tall grass on the side of a field next to the road. Given the general direction he’d been running, he figured the road must be KY 28 between Cade’s Crossing and Crawford. A few minutes later, a farmer drove down through the field toward the road pulling a hay wagon behind his tractor. Jimmy Dan stole out of the high grass, jumped on the back of the wagon and covered himself with loose hay.
Wherever the farmer was taking that hay, whether to the next field or to the other side of the county, Jimmy Dan was going with him. That’s when he got lucky. The farmer chugged down the highway, not going more the 15 or 20 miles an hour for what seemed like an eternity, before slowing to turn off down a dirt road. Jimmy Dan peeked out of the hay to get his bearings and saw big, black barrel warehouses on top of a distant knob. He slipped off the back of the wagon and hid in the weeds in the ditch until the road was empty. Then he sprinted across it and into the woods on the other side. But he wasn’t just running blind anymore. He knew where he was going. Bubba Jamison’s house was out there by Double Springs Distillery. It wasn’t more than two or three miles as the crow flew from where Jimmy Dan had jumped off the hay wagon.
Donnie caught a ride into town on a milk truck. He told the driver, a guy he used to shoot pool with, that he’d been at some woman’s house when her husband came home unexpectedly and he’d had to hightail it out of there. The driver laughed all the way into Brewster about that, trying the whole way to wheedle it out of Donnie who the woman was. Right before they got to town, two sheriff’s cars, three Kentucky State Police cruisers and an ambulance blew by them going the other way, and the truck driver joked that he bet that woman’s husband figured out what she’d been doing and took his shotgun to her. Donnie tried to grin in agreement, but felt such naked terror at the sight of the police he very nearly wet his pants.
When Donnie got home, he ran inside, slammed the door shut behind him, leaned against it and sobbed.
He tried to calm down, tried to make his heart stop racing and think, but his mind just wouldn’t be still. The sound of the gunshot reverberated in his head, and every time he got a thought process going, the gunshot would explode it and he’d have to start all over again.
He did know one thing, though. He couldn’t go to prison. He didn’t let himself think about the things his uncle had done to him when he was a little boy, but he remembered them well enough to know he’d rather die than be assaulted in prison.
He had to get away to Canada or Mexico. Yeah, Mexico! Where nobody could find him. He grabbed a suitcase, threw ridiculous things into it because he couldn’t think—underwear and socks but no shoes, two shirts, pictures of two different girlfriends, a tube of toothpaste and his razor—bolted out to his car and drove away.
Heading west, he aimed for Interstate 65 south toward Nashville. He’d take I40 to Memphis and Little Rock, I30 down to Texarkana and cross the border in Laredo or El Paso.
But he never even made it to the Kentucky state line. He forced himself to drive five miles under the speed limit so as not to draw attention to himself, so when the Kentucky State Police trooper who passed him whipped his cruiser around and turned on his lights, Donnie knew he’d been caught. Panicking, he shoved his foot to the floorboard of his little Ford Taurus and took off down the road.
He was going somewhere close to 90 when he missed the turn, crossed the center line, hit the ditch on the other side and flipped over. Donnie wasn’t wearing a seatbelt so he flew halfway out of the car through the windshield when he hit the ditch. The car rolled four times before it finally came to rest upside down in a soybean field. Donnie Scruggs didn’t have to worry anymore about going to prison.
If Bubba hadn’t been there to call them off, his dogs would have ripped Jimmy Dan to shreds while he was still in the woods outside the fence behind Bubba’s house. Early that morning, Bubba had released the dogs through the back gate to chase rabbits. As it was, Daisy sunk her teeth into Jimmy Dan’s calf before Bubba had time to whistle. She let go and Jimmy Dan collapsed in the dirt, blood squirting out twin puncture wounds.
“Ain’t you got better sense than to come here without calling first?” Bubba spit the words out in contempt and made no effort to help Jimmy Dan to his feet. It was obvious the man was more afraid of whatever he was running from than he was of Bubba and three snarling dogs, which meant he was running from something fierce indeed. Bubba was curious to find out what on earth that could be. “What do you want with me?”
“I need your help, Bubba,” Jimmy Dan blubbered, almost crying. “Something terrible has happened and I ain’t got nobody to come to but you.”
Bubba said nothing, so Jimmy Dan poured out his story. Doodlebug and Donnie had hidden some gambling money in an old shed, he said, and some kids found it and turned in part of it and kept the rest. And when they went to get their money back, they hurt one of the kids. He reached into his belt, pulled out the pistol and tossed it on the ground in front of Bubba, stammering that it had gone off accidentally, all by itself, they hadn’t meant for it to, and now he had to get away.
Bubba still said nothing. He stood looking at the bleeding man, mulling it over in his head, trying to make up his mind. He wasn’t deciding whether or not he was going to help Jimmy Dan, he was deciding how he was going to kill him.
He’d suspected last summer that those three morons were stealing dope, so he’d nosed around, found four different buyers they’d sold weed to. He couldn’t let them get away with that, of course, and had already begun to make plans. Now it looked like the problem had just solved itself.
“Know what I do to a man who steals from me?”
Jimmy Dan’s eyes grew huge.
“I let my dogs eat him.”
Jimmy Dan shook his head no, but didn’t have the breath to form words. Bubba watched him, a half-smile playing across his face. J.D. knew he was going to die and seeing that knowledge on his face sent a thrill all over the big man’s body.
“Guard!” Bubba commanded softly, and the dogs instantly surrounded the man on the ground, growling, their dripping fangs bared inches from his face. Bubba lifted his eyes with crocodilian menace and fastened them on Jimmy Dan’s.
“How’s it feel, huh? Knowing them dogs is gonna feed on you?”
The terror in Jimmy Dan’s eyes was priceless.
“My dogs is trained to attack if you move, if you so much as blink. So if I’s you, I’d sit real, real still.”
Bubba saw horror soak all the way through the man at his feet. The big man reveled in that kind of horror, bald and almost smoking, the kind that lay beyond the curtains and furniture of simple, ordinary lives.
He could smell the little man’s fear sweat, saw him cut his wide eyes from one snarling dog to the next—without blinking!—and he almost laughed out loud. Jimmy Dan didn’t last long, though. Bubba knew he wouldn’t. A sudden, odd noise burped out of his throat, the kind of sound an animal caught in a hay baler might make, and then he broke, scooted backwards in the dirt and scrambled to get to his feet to run. The three dogs leapt as one, knocked him to the ground and tore into his flesh, snarling and growling. He screamed, tried to fend them off, flopped around in the dirt kicking and fighting and shrieking in agony and terror. Lucky, the German Shepherd, got to his throat first, sunk sharp canine teeth into the soft flesh and ripped it out. Jimmy Dan stopped screaming abruptly, made a strangled, gurgling sound and went limp, but the dogs continued to attack and tear at him. Bubba let them. He watched for a little while before he called them off.
“Down,” he commanded, and all three dogs dropped to the ground, panting. “Stay.”
Bubba was a masterful dog trainer. His animals could respond to more than a dozen verbal commands and hand motions. The three dogs would remain on “down/stay” until he released them, wouldn’t move an inch to chase a rabbit if it hopped up to one of them and kicked
him in the nose. Bubba could come back tomorrow morning and they’d still be right where he left them.
The big man looked around until he spotted a tree with limbs growing out of the trunk chest high about two feet apart. He picked up Jimmy Dan’s mauled body as if it were a rag doll and hung it between the limbs, draping the dead man’s right arm over one limb and his left over the other. Then he unbuttoned his own shirt, took it off and placed it on the ground beneath the dangling corpse. He unhooked the clasp on the knife sheath on his belt, took out his hunting knife, and in one quick motion, stabbed the knife about an inch deep into the dead man’s chest just below the sternum and ripped downward to his pubic bone. When he sliced horizontally at the base of Jimmy Dan’s belly from pelvic bone to pelvic bone, most of the dead man’s internal organs slid out in a slimy pile on top of Bubba’s shirt—just like gutting a deer. After he cut all the organs free of the body, Bubba tied them up in his shirt, leaving one long sleeve dangling. Then he picked up the warm bag and headed back in the direction from which Jimmy Dan had come.
It was easy to back-track Jimmy Dan over the hill and down the other side and Bubba moved quickly for a big man. When he’d gone about half a mile, he found the spot where Jimmy Dan had turned and started up the hill. Jimmy Dan’s trail led back west; Bubba set the shirt/sack on the ground on that spot, took hold of the dangling sleeve and headed east, dragging the sack on the ground behind him.
The bag was wet, from body fluids, not blood, and left a slimy snail trail behind on the ground. That would dry in a few minutes and be invisible to the human eye. But not to a bloodhound’s nose.
Careful not to leave any footprints, Bubba wound through the woods until he came out of the trees on the bank of the Rolling Fork River. About 100 yards downstream was a walking bridge.
Keeping to the edge of the tree line, Bubba made his way to the bridge. He scanned the riverbank up and down to be sure no one was in sight. Then he dragged the bag up the steps and out on the plank floor to the middle of the bridge, held the make-shift sack out over the river, opened it up, and dumped Jimmy Dan Puckett’s guts into the Rolling Fork. He pitched the shirt into the river after them and set off the way he had come, careful to turn back up the hill at the exact spot where he had begun to drag the bag. He stopped there to listen, but the woods were silent.