A Judgment of Whispers

by Sallie Bissell

  “How do you know?”

  Whaley snorted. “Because his lips were moving. Hook him up to a polygraph. You’ll see.”

  “Whaley, you need to—”

  “Devin McConnell is the biggest liar of that bunch. Zack Collier’s an idiot, and Butch Russell’s only a couple of IQ points smarter than a tree stump.”

  “What about Adam Shaw?”

  Whaley shrugged. “He gave a statement right after his cheek swab. His story hasn’t changed. The girls went home, the boys stayed longer, playing with that deck of cards. Two Toes showed up and they all scattered. Adam claims he went home, which his mother corroborated.”

  “That’s not the strongest alibi I’ve ever heard,” said Cochran. “My mother would probably say the same thing.”

  “Still, I’m guessing McConnell cooked up this new, improved version with Russell. They were both over at the Tote-A-Note lot yesterday.”

  “Oh?”

  “Russell lost his campus security job, so now he’s McConnell’s detail man. I went over there to remind McConnell that we needed his cheek swab and saw the two of them.”

  “So you’re thinking Russell’s going to come in and give a statement similar to this?”

  Whaley chuckled. “I would put a year’s supply of donuts on it. Maybe not today, but tomorrow, or the day after, Russell will come in for swab and then say he wants to make a statement, probably only to you.”

  “Why me?” asked Cochran.

  “’Cause you were what—ten when Teresa Ewing died? You don’t know this case like I do. Nobody does, except Wilkins.”

  “But why hang this on Collier now? They could have done that decades ago.”

  Whaley shrugged. “Something about those panties is making them nervous. Or maybe they’re just fucking tired of always being the ones whose names come up in the news feeds. McConnell’s got a couple of kids, old enough to surf the net now. I imagine he’d rather not have it out on Facebook that their pop might be a murderer.”

  Cochran sighed. “You know, for three seconds I thought we might be making some headway.”

  “Welcome to the brotherhood of Teresa Ewing,” said Whaley. “All of us suckered in by leads that go nowhere, clues that turn out to mean squat. It’ll drive you crazy, if you let it.”

  “Is that what happened to Wilkins?”

  “Hamburger Jack was sketchy for a while, but I think he’s okay now.” Whaley stuck out his hand. “How about it? Are we on for the donuts?”

  “Sure,” said Cochran. “Though I think this is one bet I might lose.”

  Whaley laughed. “All I can say is it’s gonna get interesting when the DNA report comes in.”

  “So what did he say? How did he act?” Butch Russell shredded his napkin into small bits, a nervous habit left over from the seventh grade, when his dreaded English class met immediately after lunch.

  “I did most of the talking, Butch. I was giving a statement.” Dev McConnell dragged a French fry through the puddle of ketchup on his plate. They sat at Mike’s Grill, a place noted for its patty melts and cheap beer.

  “But did he believe you?” Butch reminded Devin of a chipmunk, with fat cheeks and tufts of hair fuzzing up over his ears.

  Dev remembered Cochran’s cop-cold eyes, the way he made him go over the story for hours. They didn’t quit until well past noon. “I don’t know. He asked me a lot of questions.”

  Butch reached for another napkin to shred. “Like what?”

  “What Two Toes said, what Adam said, what Teresa said.”

  “What did you say?”

  “The same story we’ve told since day one.” Dev took a swallow of beer. “Butch, the only thing different is what we added yesterday. That’s the only thing you have to worry about.”

  Butch gazed out into the parking lot, where two men in denim jackets pulled up on chromed-up Harley hogs. “Didn’t he ask why you didn’t say anything before now?”

  Dev nodded.

  “What did you tell him?”

  “That we were scared.”

  “What else did you say about me?”

  “I said we were best pals. I needed to get my gym lock. I asked you to go with me back to the tree because we were scared of Two Toes.”

  “Your gym lock?” Butch frowned, as if this detail were part of a complicated algebra equation. “You didn’t say that yesterday.”

  “So what?” Dev looked around the restaurant to make sure no one was sitting nearby. “Write this down, shit-for-brains. I made you go back to the tree with me. We sneaked up on the tree, to make sure Two Toes wasn’t there. We heard a noise. Then we looked around and saw a tall man in a dark hoodie carrying Teresa toward Zack’s house. She looked dead.”

  “What about Adam?”

  “Forget Adam, Butch. I don’t know where the fuck he was. He isn’t part of this story.”

  “But won’t they ask?”

  “Yes,” said Dev, fighting the urge to stuff French fries up Butch’s nostrils, “they’ll ask. You say you don’t know. It’s okay. Nobody has the whole picture. Nobody remembers everything in exactly the same way.”

  “I don’t know.” Butch shook his head. “I think I ought to put Adam in there somewhere.”

  “No!” Dev slammed his fist down on the table. “You put Adam in there and we’re dead men.”

  “But … ”

  “Butch, Adam is real smart. If he finds out that we put him in the story, it’ll piss him off and he’ll figure out a way to frame us. You’ve lived next to his parents all your life. You know what they’re like.”

  “Yeah.” Butch stared at his little pile of shredded napkin. “I guess I do.”

  “Okay, then. You need to stick with what we’ve already worked out. Don’t add anything, don’t leave anything out.”

  “I’ll go down there, then. Ask for Cochran.”

  “Wait a minute—I thought that was the way to go yesterday. Now I’m not so sure.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If you go in there and do exactly the same thing I did, it’s going to look like we worked it out beforehand. That’s not good.”

  “But you said it would look better if we both volunteered the story when we had our cheek swabs!” he cried. “Now I’m sitting here looking like I’m hiding something.”

  “I know, I know. Let me think a minute.” As Dev took another swallow of beer, he realized he might have laid too heavy a load on Butch’s brain. Already the guy was close to freaking out. Adam would have been better to partner up with. He could have handled Cochran like a pro. But it was too late now. If he left Butch out at this point, he’d blow it for both of them.

  “Just wait and see what they do,” he finally said. “If they call you in, then we’ll know they’ve bought the story. If they don’t call you, then just go give your DNA. There’s no point in your going through hours of saying the same if they aren’t going to believe it.”

  For an instant Butch looked relieved; then his brows drew together in a new frown. “So I have to just sit here and sweat?”

  “Don’t think about it,” said Dev. “You’ll just make things worse.”

  Butch had just opened his mouth to say something when suddenly his phone rang. He dug it out of his jeans and answered it. “Yeah,” he said to the caller, a moment later. “I can do that. No problem at all.”

  He clicked off and looked at Dev. “That was Sheriff Cochran. He wonders if I’d be willing to give an interview when I give my DNA.”

  “Damn!” Excited, Dev gave a fist pump. “It’s working, brother. It’s fucking working!”

  “Yeah,” Butch said weakly, his already pale complexion now the color of paste. “The thing is, Cochran also thinks I need a lawyer.”

  Twenty-Four

  Mary Crow looked around the small bedroom that served as Jack Wilkins
’s office and smiled. In the course of her career she’d visited a number of retired detectives. Every one of them had a bedroom or a den devoted to their glory days—pictures that traced their ascent from trim young patrol officers to paunchier plainclothesmen. Jack Wilkins was no different. His room was decorated with a number of photographs and commendations in one corner, including a shadowbox frame that displayed a gold star of a badge, seemingly from the days of Wild Bill Hickok.

  “That’s an interesting memento,” she commented as Wilkins brought two mugs of coffee from the kitchen. He carried them on a tray, with paper towels for napkins and a little plate of Oreo cookies.

  “That was my granddad’s.” He put the tray on the desk. “He was the sheriff of Fargo, North Dakota.”

  Mary turned to the tall, lanky Wilkins. “Fargo, like in the movie?”

  “Yeah. He predated the movie by nearly a century, but he was just as Swedish. Just as no-nonsense.”

  “So if your family’s from North Dakota, how did you wind up so far south?”

  “Joined the army, got stationed at Fort Bragg. Liked the fact that North Carolina had four seasons instead of North Dakota’s two.”

  “When did you start working on the Pisgah County force?”

  “1989. I worked up to detective in Fayetteville, then came here as a lateral hire.”

  The year after Mama was killed, thought Mary. He wouldn’t have been on that case at all. She looked again at the framed star, bright against a black velvet background. “Well, I’m sure you’ve made your grandfather proud.”

  “I’ve tried.” Jack stared at the badge for a moment, then turned to Mary. “So what do you want to know about Teresa Ewing?”

  “Everything,” she replied. “Except what’s in the paper.”

  He laughed. “Defense lawyers usually thrive on the crap in the paper.”

  She looked at him, serious. “Before I came here, I was a prosecutor in Atlanta. They used to call me Killer Crow. I won every capital case they assigned me.”

  Jack frowned. “Then how did you wind up working the dark side of law?”

  “I came back here for a prosecutor’s job that mysteriously vanished the moment I walked into George Turpin’s office. I’d spent a lot of money moving up here, so I figured I’d better practice some kind of law.”

  “And you started defending criminals just to aggravate Turpin?”

  She laughed. “Mostly I do wills, house closings, property disputes. Since I can’t prosecute killers, I occasionally defend people I think are wrongly accused. Some are women, some are Cherokee. Almost always, they are poor.”

  “Sounds like you’ve got some skin in the game.”

  “My mother was Cherokee. And the victim of a homicide,” she said flatly. “So yeah, I guess I do have some history there.”

  At that point Jack must have decided she was okay. He opened his files and spread them out, making little piles of paper across his desk, on his sofa, and finally on the floor. As the dog lay sleeping in the kitchen, they went through each pile, studying the crime scene photos, reading transcripts of the suspect interviews, going over the coroner’s report. The sight of Sheriff Stump Logan’s scrawl on some of the pages made Mary recoil inside, but she tried to put her hatred of Logan aside and regard his observations as those of just another law officer doing his job.

  “There’s an awful lot of confusion in this case,” Mary said as they read through the reports. “The coroner first said she’d been dead for three weeks. Then he said she’d died just hours before they found her under the tree. Then he reversed himself again.”

  “I think the coroner was high on formaldehyde,” said Jack. “He resigned his office about six months after his last report. But he was only part of the crazy stuff swirling around this case. We had calls from Arizona, Florida. One man said he’d seen Teresa on the boardwalk in Atlantic City, New Jersey. That was hard on her parents. All that hope, then nothing.”

  “But when was she killed, exactly?”

  “Ultimately, they decided she died the day she went missing.” Jack frowned. “You ever hear of a Cherokee guy named Two Toes McCoy?”

  She laughed. “He was notorious when I was a girl. I haven’t heard anything about him lately.”

  “Then old age and his parole officer must have slowed him down some. Back in ’89, when Two Toes wasn’t in jail, he did odd jobs in Teresa’s neighborhood. Yard work mostly—pulling up poison ivy, grubbing out ditches. All the kids knew him—if he was sober and in the right mood, he would tell them stories about that old tree.”

  “Undli Adaya,” said Mary. “The tree that saved the tribe.”

  “Yeah. Well, Two Toes had worked for Norah Ferguson that afternoon, cleaning out her gutters. I floated the theory that maybe Two Toes had abducted the child. Hid her on reservation land. Kept her, killed her, then brought her back.”

  “Did he have an alibi?”

  “Oh all his friends swore he was with them. You know how that goes.”

  Mary shrugged. “Anybody else look good?”

  “Arthur Hayes, a sophomore at Western, who’s since died. Lived in a basement apartment at 912 Salola. The campus cops had busted him twice for peeping outside the girls’ dorm, plus he had a couple of indecent exposure charges.”

  “He sounds at least as good as Two Toes,” said Mary.

  “He did. Plus he had a car and could easily have hidden a little body for a month. ”

  “So what took him out of the running?”

  “Nothing, really. Claimed he was studying at the library. We could neither confirm nor deny that. Nobody had security cameras back then.”

  “So if you had two viable adult suspects, why did you guys come down so hard on these kids?”

  “Honestly?”

  She nodded.

  “The newspaper ran with the kid angle. Somebody said they were playing strip poker, games that were getting way out of hand.”

  “Was that true?” asked Mary.

  He handed her one pile of interviews. “Not the day she died. All the kids said the boys asked the girls to play that last afternoon. Shannon Cooper and Janie Griffin refused immediately and went home, apparently in a huff. Everyone said that Teresa lingered behind and talked to the boys some more.”

  “So she played strip poker?”

  “No. The boys said Teresa went home. They stayed there looking at the deck of marked cards until Two Toes showed up and ran them off.”

  “And my client confirmed this as well?”

  “Mostly your client said, ‘I want to go home’ over and over. We never got any good information out of Collier.”

  “But how does he figure in the whole case?” she asked.

  “We liked him because he was older—fifteen, as opposed to ten or twelve. A young buck where the others were still boys.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I observed them take the DNA samples. Zack Collier had a man-sized penis and pubic hair. None of the others were that well developed.”

  “But Teresa hadn’t been raped.”

  “That’s not to say somebody didn’t try to rape her.”

  “And maybe got frustrated because they couldn’t and smashed her head in?” Mary thought of all those holes Zack had put in the living room wall.

  “Possibly,” Jack replied. “Or maybe she screamed, and so they hit her to make her be quiet. Collier had some kind of super-sensitive hearing.”

  “Okay,” said Mary. “But any of the boys have done that. Ten- and twelve-year-olds can have erections.”

  “True.” Wilkins walked over to the stack of papers that described the suspects. “But not many twelve-year-olds can lug seventy-eight pounds of dead weight and hide it someplace.”

  “What from I’ve seen of Zack, he would have needed help too. He’s not exactly a logical thinker.”


  “But don’t forget he weighed a hundred sixty-two pounds,” said Jack. “And he had parents who protected him. His father went on French leave a couple of years after this girl’s death.”

  Mary frowned. It was again hard to hear that the cops suspected Grace Collier of abetting her son in murder, but she knew that’s what good cops did—looked at a crime from every possible angle.

  “I wish I could see this scene, you know, like it was back then,” she finally said, looking at all the piles of paper spread out before them.

  “Then let’s go up there,” said Jack. “I’ve got to go to the post office anyway. Follow me and I’ll show you exactly how things were on Salola Street that day.”

  Twenty-Five

  Adam was pushing the big wheelbarrow out of the shed when his phone rang. Before he answered, he checked the number. A local area code, but not his parents. Wondering if Butch or Devin were cooking something up, he accepted the call. A breathless voice greeted him.

  “Adam? This is Grace—Grace Collier.”

  “Hi, Grace,” he answered. surprised. “What’s up?”

  “I’m so sorry to call you, but I’ve got an emergency. Zack’s caregiver called, frantic. She says Zack found some dead animals in our front yard and he’s having a bad meltdown. I can’t leave my class right now—I was wondering if you could possibly go by Bell’s Pharmacy and pick up a prescription for him? I know this is a huge favor to ask, and I’ll be happy to pay you.”

  “No need to pay me, Grace,” replied Adam, liking the way her name felt in his mouth. “I’m glad to help. Is Bell’s Pharmacy still on Keener Avenue?”

  “Yes. Downtown.”

  “I’m on my way,” he said, rolling the wheelbarrow up against the shed.

  “Bless you, Adam.” Her voice cracked. “I can’t thank you enough.”

  He told his parents he was going out and drove over to pick up Zack’s prescription. “Holy shit,” he said, reading the label on the bottle. “This stuff would knock out an elephant.” But maybe that’s okay, he decided. Maybe if Zack passes out, I can find my old tapes. When he wakes up he’ll never miss a dozen out of the hundred he’s got in that box.