Mystery: The Sam Prichard Series - Books 1-4

by David Archer

  Carl's breath was coming fast, suddenly, as he described what had happened, and he had tears running down his face. “I hit her again and again, and then I hit my daughter again and again and I can't stop, and I hit my son again and again, and I know I need to stop but I can't stop, and then I hear a voice and it says stop, to go and lock the doors and go to sleep, so I stop and I lock all the doors, then I lay down and then I wake up in the jail, and someone told me what I'd done...”

  He was becoming agitated. “Carl, relax, that's all over now, just relax. Carl, can you tell me whose voice you heard, who told you to lock the doors and go to sleep?”

  Carl was beginning to breathe slower, and he seemed to think about the question for a moment. He leaned his head one way and then the other, and then he said, “I think it was God.”

  Dr. Stratton looked at Kennedy, but he was obviously shaken. She turned back to Carl, and said, “Okay, Carl, let's come back to today, now. You're going to wake up in a moment, but you're going to remember everything we've talked about. You won't be upset about it, but you'll remember it all. When I count to three, Carl, you're going to wake up. One—two—three.”

  Carl's eyes slowly opened, as tears continued to fall down his cheeks. He looked at the doctor and smiled. “Thank you,” he said.

  Kennedy told Sr. Stratton that he wanted a copy of her report, and she promised to send it to him within the hour. He and the deputies chained Carl again, and led him out to the van. They drove him back to the Detention Center in silence, and shortly he was back in the cellblock with Sam.

  He told Sam all of it, and Sam sat in the cell with him as he wept anew.

  “Well, that tells us what he really wanted was for you to kill his wife,” Sam said, “but by telling you that you couldn't let anyone see you go, he caused the deaths of your family. Carl, I know this is hard on you, but you've got to accept the fact that you were not their killer; Connors was. You were just the weapon he aimed irresponsibly.”

  Carl nodded. “Yes, I know. I just hope they can bring him to justice, Sam.”

  “Yeah,” Sam said. “Me, too.”

  * * * * *

  Indie had gone down to the Mitchells' house to ask if Kenzie could stay over again, and Anita had assured her it was no problem. “The twins are in heaven,” she said, “they're getting all their wildness out! This is good for us, too!”

  She told Kenzie that Sam loved and missed her, and promised to give her love to him when she talked to him again, then went back to the house. Her mother was still there, and they sat and talked for a bit, then Kim asked about something to eat. It was well past lunchtime, so she and Indie went into the kitchen and made chicken noodle soup together.

  When they'd eaten, they went back to the living room and found a movie. The two of them sat on the couch, mother and daughter, and laughed their hearts out at Adam Sandler's adventures as a shoe repairman who learns the true meaning of “walking in another man's shoes.”

  Indie's phone rang at just before 4 p.m., and she looked to see that it was Carol calling.

  “Hello?”

  “Indie, we're making some serious progress,” Carol said. “I've got Will Burton, the deputy prosecutor, ready to sit down and listen to everything in the morning. I tried to get him today, but he's been in court all day and won't give me the time until tomorrow, but we got Carl's hypnosis report today, and it shows that Connors tried to make him kill Mrs. Connors, but—oh, God, it's just too horrific to go into. The poor man did kill his family, but he couldn't possibly have stopped himself.”

  “Oh, that's awful,” Indie said. “But will he be held responsible?”

  “Not if I can help it,” Carol replied. “I'm out to hang Alex Connors for it, and for his wife's murder, too. The good news is, I'm pretty sure we can get Sam out in the morning, and back to you!”

  “Carol, that would be wonderful! Let me know, okay?”

  “I will, as soon as I know. Oh, wait! I wanted to tell you, I talked to Albert Corning a bit ago! He wanted to let me know that his wife is slowly regaining some of her memory, and I got to speak to her doctor and let her know that we've learned about Connors through Carl and your mother, and she said she'd already begun the deprogramming process, based on things Sam told her. Mrs. Corning will probably be able to come home within a few days. I just thought you'd want to know that. Bye!”

  She hung up, and Indie let herself breathe a sigh of hope. “That was Carol,” she told her mother. “She says the prosecutor is going to look at all of this tomorrow, and there's a good chance Sam will be released. The other man, Carl, it turns out he killed his family, but only because of what Dr. Connors did to him. I don't know the details, yet, but we'll find out tomorrow.”

  Kim smiled sadly. “When I think that if you hadn't taken precautions, I might have hurt you—Indie, I feel so sorry for that man. I don't know what he's gone through, but I know how I'd feel if I'd done something like that. It would be devastating.”

  Indie nodded. “I know. If I woke up and found out I'd done something to Kenzie...” She let the thought trail off, because there was nothing suitable to say.

  Sam called a little after six. “Hey, babe,” she said as she answered. “Have you talked to Carol today?”

  “No,” he sighed. “She was hoping she might get me out of here today, but I guess it isn't going to happen.”

  “Well, I talked to her a little while ago, and she said she's got a meeting with the prosecutor in the morning. She think she's going to be able to convince him to arrest Alex Connors, and drop charges against you, and then she's going after Carl's charges. She wants to have Connors held responsible for that, too, and hopes to get Carl released, and Annie Corning is already showing signs of improvement and getting her memory back.”

  Sam sighed. “Well, that's something, at least. Carl told me what happened with the hypnotist, and it's helping him, but he still feels some responsibility.”

  “That's understandable,” she said. “It's got to be hard to realize that you did something so terrible, even if you couldn't have kept from it because of something some evil person did to you. I mean, how could you ever accept completely that it wasn't your fault? I know if it was me, I'd be thinking that I should have been strong enough to stop, no matter what had been done to me.”

  “That's what he's going through, I'm sure. It's just that part of us that thinks we're always in control; when we find out that it's possible for someone else to make us do things so totally against our own natures, it makes us wonder what kind of evil we're capable of on our own. If we're so weak that someone can use a drug to make us do things against our will...”

  “I did a little research,” Indie said, “and to me, it looks like Connors stumbled across a method of using hypnotic suggestions to actually direct the behaviors of his victims when they're under the influence of the zolpidem, and since those behaviors are even more intense and uninhibited when alcohol is involved, he figured out that giving them potent alcohol along with it would make them even more likely to do what he wanted them to do. If I were in a college psych class, I'd start writing a paper on it! This is incredibly sinister, but I'd almost bet the government adopts it.”

  Sam felt a chill. “That's terrifying,” he said. “Imagine being able to turn everyday people into assassins or spies, without them even knowing it. I can see Harry Winslow now when he hears about it. 'Hmmm,' he'll say, 'hmmm.' I like Harry, but he's as devious a spy as ever lived, and if he can think of a way to use this to make the country safer, he'd do it.”

  Indie laughed. “True, but at least he'd only use it for good. Connors was using it to make himself feel like a god, and a man can't get any more evil than that!”

  “I know, babe, I know. And speaking of feeling like a god, Carl says that after he killed his family, there was a voice that told him to lock his doors and go to sleep. He says he thought it was the voice of God, but my gut says it was someone a lot more human. I wish there was a way to find out who else could hav
e been there; I'd just about lay odds that Connors was there, somehow, but there's no way to prove it. Carl didn't see whoever was talking to him, so we'll probably never know.”

  Indie said, “It had to have been whoever called in the tip, Sam. If it was Connors, maybe they can unscramble the voice and prove it that way. I know there's ways to do that, depending on how it was altered.”

  “They said they were trying, but hadn't had any luck and weren't sure they could. I'm gonna suggest they check traffic stops, too; sometimes when people are nervous after a crime, they do things that get them stopped, and once in a while, we just get lucky and they get pulled over for a bad taillight or something.”

  “Sam,” Indie said, “Herman can check that—and what about that neighborhood, do they have cameras up on the lights out there? If I could find a picture of Connors' car out there that night, that might help nail him.”

  Sam smiled into the phone. “Babe, that's brilliant! West Garvin Court, that's in a ritzy neighborhood, and they'd have cameras up because it's a residential area with a lot of kids, and some main streets go through there. You can also check the security companies, see if any of the neighbors use video security. Any camera that could show Connors' car anywhere in that area around that time that night, and the coincidence would be too much to dismiss!”

  Indie was excited. She'd been wishing there was something more she could do to help prove the case against Connors was legitimate, and this might be it. What were the odds, she figured, that someone else would have showed up at Carl's house and told him to lock the doors and go to sleep? No one but Connors would even know he'd respond to such suggestions, and anyone else would surely have screamed and run out the door.

  She and Sam said their love words and ended their call, and Indie told her mother what she was going to do, and they went to the office. Kim wasn't very computer literate, so Indie had to explain as she went along.

  “Herman, my search bot, can get into just about any database around here, because we've had to do it at one time or another. I'm telling him to check all of the stoplight cameras within two miles of Carl's house between midnight and three AM that morning. He'll get me all of the photos they took, and I can scan through them to see if I can spot Connors' car, which is a...” She looked at a quick report she'd had Herman do for her, and read, “two thousand fifteen Jaguar F-Type Coupe. That's a pretty distinctive car, so it shouldn't be too hard to spot.”

  She tapped a few more keys. “I'm also telling him to get into all of the local security companies that offer video security, and check to see if any of Carl's neighbors have it. Most people have cameras facing the street, and the video is stored on a server so it can be checked later if necessary. If he finds a house on Carl's street that has it, he'll get me the links to their video storage, too.”

  Kim watched, fascinated. “The thing I'm wondering,” she said, “is how can you tell the police you got this if you do find him? I mean, isn't this illegal without a warrant?”

  Indie smiled. “It would be,” she said, “but remember that case where Sam stopped the terrorist? He was granted a Homeland Security Badge and Security Clearance over that, and Harry likes Sam, so he let him keep it. That means that if I find something Sam can use in an investigation, and it turns out we need it to be admissible in court, all we have to do is let Harry know, and he'll arrange a subpoena or a warrant for it. Then I can have Herman generate a report dated after that, and it's good to go.”

  Kim nodded. “So it's illegal when you do it, but Harry makes it legal to use it, right?”

  Indie laughed. “Something like that, yeah.” She tapped a few more keys, and Herman got busy. “Okay, this is going to take a couple of hours. Let's go find something to do.”

  The two of them went back to the living room, and Indie brought a bag of chips and some soft drinks in so they could relax and find a movie. They looked through the list, and found Maleficent, which appealed to them both, and decided to watch it.

  They enjoyed the movie, and the time together. Indie and her mother had a somewhat tumultuous relationship most of the time, but Kim was a bit subdued after realizing how closely she'd come to trying to harm her daughter, and they were getting along pretty well. Indie was glad, and was enjoying the time while she could; she was sure it wouldn't last long.

  When the movie ended, they went to the office to see how Herman had done. There was a list of cameras on the screen, with hundreds of links that would allow Indie to see what each of them had seen during the time period she had chosen. She clicked the first one, and saw a photo taken at midnight at one of the intersections. There was one car visible, but it wasn't a Jaguar so she went to the next one.

  She clicked the link, and looked at another image. This time there were three cars visible, but again, none were Jaguars. She closed it and went to the next.

  “We're gonna be at this a while,” Kim said, and Indie nodded as she went to the next link.

  10

  Orville Kennedy was a good cop, and he knew it. He'd been a cop for one force or another for almost thirty years, and his record of arrests was one that was envied by every other cop in Denver County, and probably in the whole state, so he felt justified in feeling that he was good at his job.

  Every once in awhile, though, a cop ran across a case that made him feel completely inadequate, and this Carl Morris case had him almost ready to hit the bottle, something he hadn't done in more than ten years. He was sitting in his chair, the one he considered his own chair, the one that was big and worn in and comfortable, and that no one else ever sat in. His wife Jeanie wouldn't sit in it, and when his son Travis had been around, he wouldn't sit in it; it was Orville's, and everyone knew it. It was the chair he sat in when the job was getting to him. He could sit there and let all of the stress sort of leak out, slowly, and after a few hours, he could put it behind him and let it go.

  This case wasn't letting go.

  He'd known, the night he'd gone into that house and seen the bloody mess, that there was something not right about it. It wasn't the first time he'd seen a family massacred, not the first time he'd seen it done by a family member and not even the first time he'd found the perp so drunk that he seemed to be in a coma at the scene.

  It was, however, the first time he'd seen such a thing after an anonymous tip from someone who took pains not to be identifiable. In crimes like this, anyone who knew enough to call it in was usually crying, screaming, panicking—they weren't under control of themselves enough to take the time to get on a computer or use some smart phone app to disguise their voices. In Orville's experience, the only ones who could do such a thing were people who not only knew about the crime, but were in some manner involved in it. For such a tip to come in meant that there was a person out there who knew that Carl Morris had hacked his family to death, and had done nothing to try to prevent it, done nothing to try to get help before it was too late, and wanted Morris to be seen as the only perpetrator.

  Only an accomplice or co-conspirator would want that, and this one fact had troubled Orville ever since he'd walked into that house. Someone knew, but did nothing to try to save those people.

  As he'd done his job and investigated the case, there was nothing to explain that to him, and nothing he found could explain why a well known health nut and teetotaler, a man who was considered a model husband and father who loved his family more than anything, would suddenly get himself dead drunk and take some drugs, then decide in the middle of the night to murder the people who were most important to him in the whole world—and not kill himself in the process.

  That was it; when people murdered their families in any way similar to this, they always took their own lives, as well, but Carl hadn't even tried to. From everything they could tell from the crime scene, he had murdered his family, then locked his doors and simply laid down right beside them and passed out cold. The fingerprints on the doors showed that he had blood on his hands when the locks were secured, and that was another odd thing: w
hy weren't the doors secured before the crime? Most people would have locked them first, so that no one could come in and interfere.

  These factors bothered Orville, and they had bothered him even before he had gone to the psychiatrist with Carl and his escort that afternoon. He'd heard about the escort just before it was to begin, and since he didn't have anything scheduled at that moment, he decided to ride along and see if any new facts actually came to light. All he'd known was that Carl's lawyer wanted him to be hypnotized to try to learn more about what had happened that night, and if anything new came out, Orville wanted to hear it. The lawyer hadn't objected to his presence at the interview, so he'd gone along.

  He reached into his pocket, took out another cigarette and lit it with trembling fingers. He'd gone along, and he couldn't make up his mind whether he would have done so, if he'd had any idea what he was going to hear.

  Carl had done it, from the purely physical standpoint of wielding the weapon and delivering the fatal injuries that claimed the lives of his wife and children. Of that, there was no doubt, and while the report from the psychiatrist could not be considered a confession for the purposes of prosecution, there was no doubt that it detailed precisely what happened during the relatively few moments that were required to bring their lives to their grisly ends. Carl Morris had first struck his son, and when the boy cried out, he had reached for what he knew would be a deadly weapon and used it to kill the boy, and then to kill his daughter and his wife. He had known, at that moment, that he was silencing them permanently, which meant that he was killing them.