Above Suspicion

by Sharkey, Joe;

  Mark sensed Ray’s antagonism, but that was nothing especially remarkable. The detective had always been cool toward him, and Mark guessed that Shelby had amply filled Ray in on Susan’s claims about their relationship.

  Trying to be helpful, Mark described his whereabouts not only on the night Susan left the motel but also on the following night, Friday, when he said he had gone to the movies.

  “What did you see?” Ray asked with casual interest.

  With equal casualness, Mark replied, “Something called Road House or Rock House, something like that. Patrick Swayze was in it.”

  When Ray made a few more notes at the end of their conversation, Mark cast a quick glance and saw that the detective had jotted down the name of the movie.

  The conversation with Putnam gave Detective Ray a lot to consider, not the least of which was the extent to which Susan had been dependent on the largess of the FBI. Everybody in Pike County knew that the FBI had money to pay for information, but Ray was surprised to hear Mark confirm that Susan had received at least $9,000. In fact, he was disgusted. Here was the FBI man—with a salary roughly equivalent to a state police captain’s—peeling off big bills to coddle informants while he, a state police detective often working the same cases, had to go hat in hand to his boss for permission to put a couple of hundred extra miles a week on his police vehicle, even when he was working the extra hours on his own time.

  For his part, Mark was puzzled by what he regarded as diffident questioning on the part of the detectives. He fretted over the encounter, unable to decide what he would have done if they had asked him directly, “Did you have anything to do with this girl’s disappearance?”

  He thought that his answer might have been, “Yes.”

  What if they had then asked, “Did you kill her?” He tried to be honest with himself, but his mind was swimming with thoughts of guilt and survival. Before he fell into a feverish sleep, he decided that his answer, then and there, might have been, “Yes; yes, I did.” But perhaps he was deceiving himself. At any rate, they hadn’t asked.

  Mark flew back to Florida a few days later. Then a coal-mine strike in Pike County turned violent, with gunshots fired at trucks, and Ray was barely able to keep track of the Susan Smith case during the commotion. On June 23, Ray did manage to get a few hours free to sit down with Ron Poole at a sandwich shop on Main Street. Curiously, Poole claimed that he had been concerned about Susan’s assertions that she felt threatened by both her ex-husband and by outlaws in the Tug Valley who vowed retribution for her work as an informant. So Poole, who was by this time making his sexual intentions toward Susan clear, at least to her experienced eye, claimed that registering her at the Landmark would be a good way to keep her in sight and look after her. But he said that his main reason for putting her in the motel was to give her and his ex-partner Mark the opportunity to discuss this business about her being pregnant. Poole said he had hoped they could “work this out,” because, frankly, he was “tired of hearing about it” in Pikeville from Susan while Mark enjoyed the good life in Florida.

  Poole, too, seemed to be excessively helpful. He even suggested that Mark would come back to Pikeville to take a polygraph test “whenever we need him to.” That struck the detective as a fine idea.

  After his brief conversation with Poole, Ray studied his notes. It was possible that the two agents simply saw the situation differently, and of course there was the sensitive matter of the pregnancy and the bureau’s well-known proclivity for protecting its ass, not to mention the ill-defined undercover operation that Susan was apparently talking about to everybody she knew. Local cops never expected to hear the full story from the FBI. Maybe they had stashed her in the witness protection program, although Ray couldn’t imagine that this particular source had information momentous enough to earn that kind of treatment. What’s more, Poole had denied it.

  Another complication was Susan’s reputation. Even Shelby, worried as she plainly was, conceded that Susan was a loose cannon, a woman who had run off in the past without telling anyone where she was going. Besides, hadn’t Susan in her excitement about being an FBI criminal informant prattled on about the possibility that, if things got too hot for her in the mountain belt, Mark would recommend her as a candidate for the federal Witness Protection Program? In fact, Susan had not been lying about that. She and Mark had at least tentatively discussed that possibility, which was open to any person whose work as an informant for the bureau put them in a position where they were in grave danger from retribution.

  Still, Ray couldn’t put out of his mind how effusively helpful Putnam had been in providing details of his activities. Too many details. He wondered if he would have time to see which of them didn’t check out.

  Ray found the maid who had worked the second floor of the Landmark that week. She told him that the woman in Room 224 had kept mostly to her room, watching television all day with the door bolted. She had not seen her with anyone. Her checkout bill, which Poole had paid with his American Express card, showed that she ordered room service and ate in her room. Nothing extravagant—$9 one day, $10 another—certainly nothing to indicate that she was entertaining visitors. There were a couple of short local calls, and three long-distance calls to her sister in Freeburn, two of them on the morning of the day she disappeared, just as the sister had said. The maid had collected a few of Susan’s clothes, including a pair of shorts, her purse, and some makeup that she had left behind and taken them down to the lobby. The fat FBI man took them with him when he paid the bill, which came to $251.46.

  As a matter of standard procedure, Ray took the shorts and other items and labeled them as possible evidence.

  Ray finally raised his concerns with his superiors in July nagged by the worry that he was missing something obvious, and frustrated by his inability to spend any time on the case. He was convinced it was time to formally question Putnam with regard to what he knew about Susan’s disappearance. But he was told that there were probably better things he could be doing with his time as an investigator. Putnam had long since left town; there would be no state police junkets authorized to Miami, of all places, not without a good goddamned reason. Besides, wasn’t the bureau itself looking into it? Wasn’t Poole making his own investigation? Why waste time on a routine missing persons case?

  The girl was wild, Ray was told again and again when he asked questions out on Peter Creek and in Freeburn. So what if an FBI agent or two had screwed her? Hadn’t she run away before? Hadn’t she always turned up? And if she were double-crossing a drug operation, she’d turn up for sure—in the morgue in Cincinnati or Chicago.

  Yes, he thought. That much was probably true.

  When August rolled around, there still was no sign of her. But Ray had only speculation, innuendo, and instinct to go on. If there had been any sort of unpleasant confrontation between the missing woman and either of the FBI men, he could find no one at the Landmark who knew about it. No one had seen Susan and Putnam together on either the day she disappeared or the day before; moreover, Charlie Trotter and another man staying at the motel who talked to Putnam that week said that Mark had made it clear he was doing everything he could to avoid her. Reasonable enough, Ray thought, since she was accusing him of getting her pregnant and running off. Furthermore, if they did have a confrontation—and from what Shelby had said, Susan was looking for one—Ray had found no one who saw or heard it.

  The complications troubled him. He tried to separate what little he actually knew from the nagging suspicion that something was very wrong. A poor mountain girl who has been on the FBI payroll as an informant—something near $10,000, maybe more—turns up missing. From the way it looks, she and this FBI man were involved; she gets knocked up, he’s gone to Florida with the wife and kids. He comes back to town on government business; the FBI sets her up in the same motel. The FBI sets her up in the same motel with this guy who doesn’t have any further government business w
ith her? And she turns up missing.

  But the FBI man isn’t the only one this girl has been involved with. To hear people tell it, she gets around pretty good. She is also a wildcat who fights at the drop of a hat, and just before her disappearance, she gets coldcocked by the girlfriend of the bank robber that she sent to the penitentiary. She turns up missing.

  Furthermore, he thought, this is a girl messed up bad on drugs, whose ex-husband beats her up, not to mention the other enemies she has obviously made, being an informant out on Peter Creek where mountain people tend to frown on such things. Besides that, she has been known to run with a bad crowd out of Cincinnati and Chicago in the past and has supposedly been in contact with some of that crowd recently. And her sister Shelby Jean, who has had her own run-ins with Susan, and who is nervous about her working as an informant, takes a phone message for the girl while she’s in the Pikeville motel at the FBI’s expense. The message is that she is supposed to meet some drug dealers on Saturday at a rendezvous in West Virginia. On Friday, she turns up missing.

  Assuming something bad happened to her, Ray thought, that made for a fair number of suspects. Even in normal circumstances, the first suspect was always the husband or ex-husband or boyfriend. And here was an ex-husband who abused her and whom she keeps going back to. That made one prime suspect. Then there were the drug dealers she was supposedly going to see. Add the bank robber’s girlfriend, the bank robber’s buddies, any other outlaws she’d informed on—not to mention Poole, the sister herself, and maybe even some still-unidentified pillar of the Pikeville community whom she’d tried to shake down in a motel. Hell, even without Putnam, that was already a regular damn Las Vegas chorus line of star suspects—assuming she hadn’t just run away.

  And Ray had to assume first that she had, in-fact, merely left town on her own. What Ray couldn’t quite understand was why, given that, given all of the other likely suspects if foul play were actually the case, the earnest, well-chiseled face of Mark Putnam stayed in his mind as if it were painted there.

  Aside from his bosses at the state police post, the only other person Ray confided his suspicions to was Myra Chico, who was friends with most of the cops in town. One night when Myra was tending bar at the Log Cabin, they were talking about Susan Smith’s disappearance, and Ray surprised her by saying, “I think Mark Putnam had something to do with it.”

  Myra laughed and said, “Richard, you’re nuts!”

  Ray didn’t often say things twice. He shrugged and changed the subject.

  11

  The change from Pikeville to Miami had been abrupt. Overnight they’d traded the black and gray of an Appalachian late winter for the sudden Technicolor blare of southern Florida in spring.

  “Daddy, you can see the sky all over,” Danielle had exclaimed with childish delight from beside the pool of the residence hotel where the bureau had installed them while they looked for a new house. At four, she was already learning to read and write. Mark Jr., at sixteen months beginning to exhibit his father’s dark good looks showed his appreciation for the improvement in scenery in a way that reminded Kathy of her husband—he’d simply hurl himself onto the thick rich grass beside the pool and roll around in it like a pooch freed from its kennel.

  Kathy felt like a woman awakening from a trance. She thought of the joke about pounding your head against the wall because it feels so good when you stop. At once, she was renewed; she felt young again, not haggard and ashen as she had been in the last months in Kentucky. The troubles in Pikeville swirled out of mind.

  Only the phone calls intruded, and these she accepted with the mild annoyance of someone fending off telephone sales solicitations. Soon after they left, whenever Susan called for Mark, as she did several times a week, Kathy exchanged a few arm’s-length pleasantries, handed the phone to Mark, and walked away to do other things.

  There was plenty to do. It fell largely to her to settle her family into a new home, a task that she threw herself into with verve. Mark had a new job to acclimate himself to, and old business in Kentucky to finish. She figured that after the chop-shop trial, Pikeville and all that went with it, not the least of which was Susan, would be history, to be filed away with her old calendars.

  For the first time, she felt like part of the “FBI family” that she had read about in orientation brochures from the academy. Mark finally had bosses, colleagues, and a support system at work. With help from the bureau’s relocation office, she quickly found a house, a three-bedroom condominium in a new subdivision beside a canal. The town, Sunrise, lay at the western edge of the coastal sprawl, on the fringes of the Everglades, but still only a forty-five-minute commute from the FBI office in North Miami Beach.

  And then, in June, the phone calls from Susan had stopped. With so much emotional and physical distance between them, Kathy accepted the news of her disappearance impassively. She had done her best with Susan, who never listened. If Susan had taken off for Chicago or Cincinnati, as Kathy assumed she had, the futility of what she had tried to do was another unpleasant memory to forget about and write off to experience.

  So eager was she to embrace a new life that Kathy failed to calculate the emotional distance that still separated her from Mark. He was the more sensitive, introspective one, and the one who had shouldered most of the burden; she figured he required more time to rejuvenate than she did. In her elation, she discounted a number of signs that her husband was deeply troubled in the summer of 1989. He wasn’t sleeping or eating normally. Sometimes she would wake in the night aware that he lay beside her motionless and alert. He was losing weight, and he had developed a nervous habit of scratching at his chest, to the point where a raw patch of skin appeared on his sternum.

  These symptoms she attributed partly to Mark’s anxiety about establishing himself in a new job in a competitive and hierarchical work environment. And the echoes from Pikeville hadn’t totally ceased with the end of Susan’s calls. Poole still checked in, usually with word that nothing had been heard of Susan. Myra Chico also called from time to time to pass on Pikeville gossip, but Kathy made it clear to Mark that she had little interest in it.

  One night in the summer, after speaking with Poole, Mark abruptly mentioned to Kathy that Susan had been saying that she was pregnant right before she disappeared. “So who’s the father?” Kathy said with a trace of sarcasm Mark shrugged his shoulders.

  She found his diffidence irritating. “When are you going to put that behind you?” she demanded. “Forget about Susan. She isn’t your problem anymore.”

  “How can I?” he said almost plaintively.

  “Look, if she’s still missing, the next thing you know, Mark, you could be pulled into this. She could be lying dead somewhere.”

  His face darkened and he replied quietly, without meeting her eyes, “Don’t ever say that.”

  Kathy believed that, Mark’s sluggish recovery aside, they had settled in happily. The cost of living in south Florida was higher than Kentucky; with Mark earning $33,000 a year, a little more with overtime, they had to make the money stretch, which Kathy always knew how to do. To put a little aside for their next summer vacation, she took a part-time job on Saturday and Sunday mornings, waiting tables at an International House of Pancakes near Fort Lauderdale. One of the waitresses she met there was a woman with two children and a husband in prison. When Kathy told Mark how sorry she felt for her, he looked away and changed the subject.

  For Mark, there were many such moments as he contemplated the calamity that he knew lay ahead. In retrospect, he would wonder how he managed to fool anybody during that time as he waited for what he knew was the inevitable moment when he would either be caught or give up. “My insides were frazzled,” he recalled.

  Outwardly, he projected a sense of purpose. It helped that the work in the Miami Bureau was nearly as fast-paced as it had been in Pikeville, with the huge difference that he was not off on his own. The new environme
nt offered both the collegiality of a large group of fellow cops and the reassurance, at least in those unguarded moments when he focused on the job and not on his secret, of being adequately supervised. For once, Mark felt he didn’t have to make it up as he went along. He appreciated his circumstances with a sense of poignancy, aware that they would last only until he was exposed.

  Nevertheless, he impressed his bosses. Without exception, his supervisors in Miami regarded him as likable, talented, and extraordinarily hardworking. In many ways, with his steady demeanor, polished manners, physical bravery, and good looks, Mark represented the FBI’s image of itself, and in retrospect, it would help to explain why the bureau would be almost the last to believe the worst about him. In Miami, it was obvious to everyone except Mark himself that the young agent had a bright future in the FBI.

  At several times during the year Mark believed his time was up.

  Not long after he got back from Pikeville, on July 5, the day after his thirtieth birthday, he was summoned to the office of the top man in the Miami Bureau, the special agent in charge, William Gavin. But instead of arresting him, Gavin slid a memo across the desk from Louis DeFalaise, the US attorney for eastern Kentucky. It read in part:

  I want to formally express to you our thanks and appreciation for the work and assistance of Special Agent Mark Putnam of your Miami office. Special Agent Putnam, prior to assignment to your office, was in the Federal Bureau of Investigation office in Pikeville, Kentucky. While that was his first office assignment, you would not know it.

  While he was there only two years, his reputation for hard and diligent work left its mark in the area. Our office had the pleasure of working closely with him during his tenure and I can say confidently that he is a unique Special Agent whose career with the bureau will be long and fruitful.

  I want to specifically call your attention to the excellent job he just completed leading up to the successful conviction of seven defendants in the case of U.S. v Vernon Andrew Mullins et al. . . . Special Agent Putnam was involved from its inception in the investigation of a multistate “chop-shop” operation centered in a remote section of eastern Kentucky. Following the execution of a state search warrant which uncovered the remains of millions of dollars of trucks and truck parts, Mark worked with one of our assistants in identifying the vehicles, tracking down the owners and ownership documents and preparing the case for trial. As stated, all seven defendants were convicted on a thirty-eight-count indictment. . . . Special Agent Putnam’s in-depth knowledge of the case was primarily responsible for the government being successful in its case. He worked long hours and weekends assisting our office in preparing and presenting this case. Without his hard work and dedication, the result would not have been so satisfactory.