1 A Small Case of Murder

by Lauren Carr

  “Well,” Amber replied, “I was afraid to try to leave, be-cause I thought he would kill me. I mean, he’s crazy. So, I had to watch him carry her in. He laid her down next to the bed, and he put this gun to her head and blew her brains out.”

  “Amber,” Morgan asked, “who did you see kill Victoria Rawlings and Elizabeth Davis?”

  “Vicki’s grandfather. Reverend Orville Rawlings.”

  Joshua stood up. “I’m going to the studio.”

  Joshua never did like Pittsburgh’s freeways and one-way side streets. He always seemed to be heading away from where he wanted to go. By the time he found the television studio, Morgan Lucas was in the newsroom surrounded by fellow journalists giving and getting high fives over their scooping the competition by breaking the Rawlings and Davis murder case with an eyewitness.

  Upon seeing the special prosecutor, Morgan seized the opportunity for another exclusive interview. With her most charming smile, she cocked her head, tucked a lock of hair behind her ear, and offered Joshua a slender hand with long fingers. “It is a pleasure to meet you, Commander Thornton. I followed the Admiral Thompson case when I was in college. I’m a fan.”

  Joshua shook her hand. “Lawyers don’t have fans. Where’s Amber?”

  “She left a half an hour ago. Listen, I told her to go see you before I interviewed her on the air, but she was afraid.”

  “Afraid?” he replied. “If she was so scared, why’d she announce to the whole Ohio Valley that she witnessed two murders?”

  “She’s afraid of Reverend Rawlings,” Morgan explained. “He killed his own granddaughter. She thought if she publicly told her story that he would know that if anything happened to her, then he wouldn’t get away with it.”

  “Morgan Lucas, I want to talk to you!” Tess’s voice carried across the newsroom.

  Dressed in a pale blue pantsuit, Tess charged toward the anchorwoman. Her hair was brushed into loose waves down to her shoulders. Her shoulder bag, filled to bulging, bounced clumsily from where it hung from her shoulder.

  From his vantage point between the two women, Joshua observed that Morgan was at least five years younger than Tess. He guessed that it was Morgan’s looks and charm that won her the starring role on the program.

  “Who do you think you are interviewing my source on the air?” Tess pointed an accusing finger at the news anchor.

  Joshua ducked in time to keep from being stabbed in the crossfire by the lethally-long, magenta-colored fingernail.

  Morgan studied the finger aimed between her eyes. Her eyes narrowed to slits. After a beat, she launched her defense. “You weren’t here and I was.”

  With her hands on her hips, Tess declared, “I was following a lead. I was doing real news journalism, not playing a talking head.”

  “It’s not my fault. Amber came in looking for you, and you didn’t answer your cell phone.”

  “The battery had run low.”

  “That’s your tough luck. It was either we run with the story or lose it. Richards made the decision to go with it. If you don’t like it, talk to the producer.” In a gesture of farewell, Morgan nodded her head politely at Joshua before walking away with an air of justification.

  At her desk, Tess hurled her shoulder bag to the floor. When the bag dropped open, Joshua caught a glimpse of a pair of black panties and cosmetics case.

  Maybe it wasn’t a lead she was following, he thought.

  “Sorry about that,” she shot him over her shoulder while she repacked the bag. “In this business, you have to protect your stories or the vultures will steal them right out from under you.”

  He asked, “Did you know that Amber’d witnessed the murders?”

  “If I had I would have told you.” She stood up. “I’d give my right arm to have that monster put away.”

  With a hand on his elbow, she guided him towards a kitchenette out of earshot of her colleagues and competition. While pouring a cup of coffee, she told him in a low voice, “Rawlings killed my sister. Not him, but his drugs did.”

  “What’s Amber’s last name?”

  “I can’t tell you.”

  Joshua cocked his head at her. “You just said that you’d give your right arm to get Rawlings. Now, you have a source with the power to get him, but you won’t tell me where I can find her?”

  “Amber is up to her eyeballs in the drug underground. She’s obviously running for her life.”

  “We can protect her.”

  “Yeah. Right.” She sipped the coffee.

  “Where can I find her?”

  “I don’t know.” When she saw his glare, she said, “Really. I don’t know. She finds me.” She dumped the coffee into the sink.

  “Well, the next time she finds you, if you’re serious about getting Rawlings, you’ll convince her to call me. That little show she gave for the valley isn’t going to be enough to convict Rawlings. There’s a thing that’s guaranteed in the constitution. That’s the right to face your accuser. If she thinks she can give her statement to the media and not show her face in court, then Rawlings will never spend one day in jail no matter how good a show she gives for the cameras. Got that, Ms. Bauer?”

  “Got it, Mr. Thornton.”

  Tad rested his head on his folded arms on the tabletop in the corner booth at Allison’s Restaurant. Inches away, the silver key taunted him from the center of the table.

  In her seat across from him, Jan buttered the roll that came with her dinner of meat loaf, mashed potatoes and gravy, and sweet peas. “Do you think that if you stare at it hard enough it might speak to you?” She dipped her roll into the gravy pooled in the center of her mashed potatoes before taking a bite of it.

  On the corner, one block up from Joshua Thornton’s legal office, Allison’s Restaurant, like the other businesses in Chester, was short on sophistication, but long on quality. The food was good and inexpensive.

  When they spotted the two diners through the restaurant’s front window, Joshua and his twin sons waved before joining them inside.

  “Just the guy I was looking for.” Joshua slapped Tad on the back before sitting next to him. J.J. sat next to Jan, and Murphy pulled up a chair to the end of the booth.

  Disgusted, Tad continued to slump. “I don’t want to talk to you unless you can tell me where this key goes.”

  Joshua greeted Jan with a smile, followed by a quizzical frown. “You look different.”

  “Do I?” Before taking her dinner break, Jan had put on the wildest earrings she could find at the pharmacy and tied her hair back with the most colorful scarf in stock.

  “She’s wearing make-up,” Tad told him.

  “Nah, that’s not it. She was wearing make-up last week.” Giving up, Joshua turned his attention back to Tad. “You still owe me a hundred dollars for finding that key.”

  “Sue me.”

  Jan said, “He’s been to every bank in the valley, and that key doesn’t belong to any of their safety deposit boxes.”

  “I could have told you that,” Joshua said. “It’s too small.”

  “Why didn’t you?” Tad sat up.

  “You didn’t ask me.”

  “Could it be a post office box?” Murphy asked.

  Joshua said, “Post office keys have USPS stamped on them.”

  “Bus station locker,” J.J. suggested.

  “Not the right shape and too big,” Tad responded.

  “Looks like a padlock key to me,” Jan told them before eating the last bite of her meatloaf.

  The server, Madge, a plump woman with a bleached blond beehive and long red acrylic fingernails, handed Joshua a typewritten menu stuffed inside a scuffed up plastic cover. “Coffee anyone?”

  Joshua didn’t have to read the menu. He handed it back to her and ordered three apple pies a la mode.
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  “Make that four,” Jan chimed in.

  Madge smiled at Joshua while she retrieved the menu and went to get the pies. The twins chuckled to each other about the waitress’s attraction to their father.

  “Did you see the news?” Jan asked Joshua.

  “Yes, I did.” Curious for his cousin’s reaction, Joshua turned and laid his arm across the back of the booth behind Tad’s shoulders. “Did you see Amber’s interview?”

  Resting his head in a hand he had propped up against the windowsill, Tad continued fingering the key. “She’s lying through her rotten little teeth.”

  “Why are you protecting Reverend Rawlings?” Jan accused him.

  “I’m going by the evidence and what I know about the man. He doesn’t kill people. He orders people to do it for him. Besides, Amber’s story contradicts the evidence. She said Vicki was fighting him when he gave her the shot.” Tad shook his head. “She didn’t put up a fight. The only evidence of any fight was a days old bruise right below the left temple where a certain someone—” he pointed a thumb in Joshua’s direction, “slugged her alongside the head.”

  Joshua agreed. “She also said Rawlings carried Beth into the bedroom, and then shot her. Beth was dragged in.”

  They stopped talking while Madge served their pies.

  After the server left with Jan’s dinner plate, Tad sighed with disgust once more and laid the key flat in the middle of the table. “What else do you want to know?”

  “J.J. and Murphy said some of their friends had told them that Reverend Rawlings killed his wife.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Jan responded, “I’d forgotten all about that.”

  “That’s old news,” Tad said.

  “I don’t believe it.” Joshua uttered a whispered gasp.

  “How did the reverend kill her?” J.J. asked.

  Jan shot a question at Tad. “Her death was ruled accidental, wasn’t it?”

  “She drowned in the bathtub. They said she fell, hit her head, knocked herself out, and then drowned.” The doctor chuckled. “Let’s not forget Doc Wilson was the medical exam-iner. He’s the same one who said Cindy’s death was natural causes.” He sorted out the long unused data in his mind. “Vicki Rawlings was a little kid when her grandmother died. Maybe five years old. It was before she started school.”

  Joshua asked, “Why would Reverend Rawlings kill her?”

  “Why else? He was sick of her. You remember who the reverend was married to, don’t you, Josh?”

  Unable to remember anything significant, Joshua shrugged, and then shook his head. “Her name was Eleanor. She never did strike me as quite right. Once, at the Hookstown Fair, we ended up sitting at the same picnic table as the Rawlings. That was the only time I remember ever seeing her up close. She had this weird look like—”

  “I know exactly what you’re talking about,” Jan interjected. “She had bad vibes. She always seemed scared or spaced out or something.”

  “She never said anything,” Joshua agreed. “I don’t recall her ever saying a word.”

  Engrossed by the exchange, J.J. and Murphy ate their desserts in silence.

  “Do you know who her father was?” Tad asked.

  With the excuse that Eleanor Rawlings’ father died before he was born, Joshua confessed that he didn’t know.

  “Sam Fletcher,” Tad said. “He owned the land that Rawlings’ church is built on. He also owned all the land that Rawlings Meadows, that big subdivision out by the high school, was built on. And that big shopping center out in Calcutta. Rawlings sold them that property. All inherited from Sam Fletcher.”

  “I guess he was rich,” Murphy said.

  “Sam Fletcher didn’t look like he had a dime,” Tad recalled. “Always wore old blue jean overalls with patches all over them and a beat-up straw hat. He drove the same old pickup truck as long as I knew him. Every single day, he’d get up at the crack of dawn to milk the cows. He had a big dairy farm out towards the state line, and was as tight with a dime as they come.”

  “Doesn’t sound like he would be friends with the Reverend Orville Rawlings,” Joshua said.

  “Most likely not,” Tad agreed. “Eleanor was a WAC. She joined the women’s army corps right out of high school. Her folks never even saw Pittsburgh. She went off to see the world and brought back the reverend. They lived with Sam at the farm, until after he died. By that time, Reverend Rawlings had a small following. He preached in an abandoned theater in East Liverpool. Rawlings sold the farm before Sam’s body was cold and built that church of his. The rest is history.”

  “It sounds like Reverend Rawlings would never have been who he is today if it hadn’t been for his father-in-law’s money,” Murphy pointed out.

  Also suspicious, J.J. asked, “How did Sam Fletcher die?”

  “Now, there’s a story,” Tad said. “He went nuts. One day, my dad went out to see him about buying a milk cow Sam had for sale and found him up on the roof of his barn. He was ranting and raving about snakes, tearing at his clothes, and screaming for Dad to get the snakes off of him. Scared Dad to death. He never saw anything like it.” He shook his head. “Sam was the sanest man you ever would have met. Out of the blue, he lost it.”

  He said with a note of sadness, “Eleanor tried to control him. They locked him up in the house. One night, he escaped. A couple of days later, they fished him out of the Ohio River. He had left everything to Eleanor, and Rawlings did very well with it.”

  Joshua asked, “When did Cindy die?”

  “Nine years ago,” Tad answered.

  “When did Wally’s mother die?”

  Jan answered, “If Vicki was five, then that was twelve years ago.”

  “Why didn’t Wally run for prosecutor as soon as he was eligible, which would have been as soon as he graduated from law school…about twelve or thirteen years ago?”

  “Well, he started to,” Jan responded while looking at Tad to confirm her answer. “He did announce his candidacy.”

  “That’s right,” Tad breathed. “I forgot all about that. Wally held a big press conference in the church to announce it.”

  “Then what happened?” Joshua asked.

  Jan told him, “His mother died, and he said that he felt it was best to withdraw from the election for personal reasons. Everyone figured he was distraught over her death.”

  Joshua raised his eyebrows. “Or Dr. Wilson told him he had better withdraw or go to jail for murder.”

  “Kill his mother?” Tad chuckled. “I’d rather believe the reverend did it.”

  “Either way,” Joshua picked up the key and examined it, “we need to find out what this key goes to if we want to stop speculating and end this killing spree.”

  Chapter Eleven

  As soon as Amber’s latest news hit the air, Reverend Rawlings called his lawyer to return to Chester to act as his intermediary with the authorities. Even though no formal charges had been filed against the pastor, he wasn’t ashamed to “lawyer up” early.

  As if to add insult to the injury of Amber’s public statement, Joshua Thornton requested that the Rawlings come down to his office in Chester to answer questions.

  The power struggle lasted for a full week. It was a matter of home field advantage. The Rawlings insisted that Joshua Thornton come to see them at their estate. Refusing to show any fear of the Rawlings, the special prosecutor countered with an invitation to come to his office voluntarily, or be served subpoenas and brought in the sheriff’s patrol car, which wouldn’t look good for the reverend on the news.

  In the end, Joshua won when he suggested that they meet in neutral territory across the street from his office at the Chester police chief’s office on the second floor above the volunteer fire department.

  As expected, Clarence Mannings did the talking while the Rawlings fami
ly leader, looking cocky and bored, sat at the head of the table in the tiny conference room.

  Joshua displayed no intimidation when he looked Reverend Rawlings straight in the eye and asked where he had been between four and six o’clock on the day his grand-daughter was killed.

  “My client was in meditation,” the lawyer answered while Reverend Rawlings chuckled.

  “From four o’clock to six?” Joshua looked at the reverend with a raised eyebrow to show his doubt.

  The reverend snickered.

  “He has been quite distressed about the soul of his grand-daughter. He has been praying unceasingly ever since this whole thing started.”

  “I see.” Joshua sat back in his chair.

  The pastor laughed with a broad grin at the special prosecutor, who responded with “Thank you for coming down.”

  After a week of negotiations, Clarence Mannings was startled by the short duration of the meeting. “What?”

  “I said thank you. That will be all for now.” Dismissing the lawyer and his client, Joshua made cryptic notations on his notepad.

  “You mean you called us all the way down here for that one question?” the lawyer said with annoyance.

  “Yes. Good day.”

  “Aren’t you going to ask us about this Amber’s statement on the news?”

  Touché!

  “I thought you wouldn’t want her statements dignified by being asked to comment on them,” Joshua told them.

  Clarence Mannings snorted through his mustache. He had been had.

  If Amber had lied, then the Rawlings wouldn’t be so concerned about the authorities looking into her statement. The prosecutor would surely discover that she had been lying. Therefore, why would they wish to discuss them?

  “Since you opened the door—” Joshua drawled.

  “All we have to say about Amber is that as soon as our people find her, she will be slapped with a gigantic lawsuit,” Mannings said.

  “If not something more lethal,” Joshua said. “I’ll be in touch with you and your client.”