by Tom Lowe
“Can I help y’all?” he asked, folding his arms across his broad chest, forearms like hams. “I’m Hank Dunn, owner of this outfit.”
“I’m Detective Mike Bradford with the Forrest County Sheriff’s Department. This is my partner, Detective Bill Lee. We’re here to speak to one of your men. Name’s Boyd Baxter. Where is he?”
Dunn motioned with his head. “He’s at the top of that old oak. Boyd’s my best climber. What’d he do?”
Bradford said, “Have him climb down. We need to speak to him.”
“No problem.” Dunn turned around and took less than three steps towards the tree. He stopped, placed a wide hand to the side of his mouth and shouted, “Baxter! Come on down. Some fellas down here say they need to talk with you.”
Dunn stepped back toward the detectives and reached in a tobacco pouch he had tucked in the front pocket of his frayed flannel shirt. He opened it, fed a brown tobacco leaf into his mouth and chewed thoughtfully for a second. He glanced back over his shoulder as Baxter descended from the tree. Dunn then looked at Bradford and said, “Hope you won’t detain Boyd too long. We got a helluva lot of work to do before the storm rolls in. Ain’t another man in the county can cut a tree like that ol’ boy.”
Bradford, Lee, and the deputies standing behind them watched as Baxter dropped to the ground under the big oak. He held the chainsaw in one hand, setting it down. He brushed woodchips from his hair and black T-shirt, then walked toward the detectives and deputies. The tree trimmers watched. Some with hands shoved in jeans pockets, others lighting cigarettes and talking in low tones to each other.
Baxter stepped up to Bradford and Lee, nodded his head. “So, we meet again. You boys spendin’ all the county taxpayers’ money to send out the cavalry just for me? I’m duly honored that y’all, somehow, think I’m such a bad ass to justify this. Mind if I have a smoke while one of you fellas tell me what the hell this is about?”
“Yes, we do mind,” said Detective Lee.
Bradford took a small step toward Baxter. “It’s about what you know concerning three recent murders in the county.”
“I’d like to hear the word allegedly … because I don’t know a damn thing, Detective Bradford.”
“You told some of our deputies that you didn’t want to come to the sheriff’s office on your own to answer a few questions, correct?”
Baxter grinned. “That’s on account I don’t have the answers y’all are lookin’ for. You want to know who’s the serial killer of Forrest County. I don’t know that, but I damn sure know it ain’t me.”
Bradford nodded. “Boyd, we can always place you under arrest and haul you downtown. We don’t need a judge to sign a warrant for that. But, at this point in time, I want this to remain your choice. Are you coming with us? You have ten seconds to give me an answer.”
“Now why should I do that?”
“Five seconds, Boyd. If you don’t come with us, put your hands behind your back. We’ll cuff you, and your arrival at the station will be a whole different matter.”
Baxter used his left hand to lift a wood chip from his belt. “I’m happy to oblige. The quicker I get this over with, the quicker I can get back to work. I plan to keep on workin’ unless one of y’all or some of your deputies put a hand on me. You start a physical fight, and I’ll finish it with a lawsuit that’ll set the county back for a long damn time. By the way, I expect to drive my truck back when we’re done today. I figure y’all had it long enough. Now, let’s get this thing over with so your Barney Fifes can go find the real killer.”
FORTY-FIVE
It was late in the afternoon when Mike Bradford called Elizabeth with a request, which she knew she’d have to deliver. She thought about the promise she made to Brandon Donnelly less than a half hour ago. Bradford said, “Elizabeth, at this point, Boyd Baxter hasn’t asked to be lawyered up. I think he’s so arrogant and cocky that he feels he can handle anything we ask him with impunity. He thinks he’s untouchable. Would you like to watch the questioning from behind the glass? I’ll wager that Baxter will fit your profile to a T.”
“I think that’s a good suggestion. When?”
“As soon as you can get here.”
“Give me twenty minutes, okay?”
“Okay.”
She disconnected and looked at the phone message slips Claire had given her earlier, the numbers to newsrooms and reporters. She picked up the messages, tearing the papers in half and dropping the pieces into a trash can. She stood, pulled her purse strap to her right shoulder and walked out of the office, locking the door.
In the lobby, Elizabeth paused, scouting the parking lot through the high glass windows. A light rain was falling across the university campus, people walking under umbrellas. She unzipped her purse, glancing down at the grip of her pistol when she heard the sound of hard-soled shoes coming up behind her. She turned to face Dean James Harris.
A tall man, with thinning salt and pepper hair, Harris wore a charcoal gray suit with a white starched shirt and emerald green tie. His pale blue eyes looked almost opaque behind the thick lens of black-rimmed glasses. “Elizabeth, I saw your television interview last night.”
“Okay. I assume there is an and coming next, Dean Harris.” She smiled.
“The and segues into caution. Perhaps, I’m incorrect; however, there seemed to be a connotation or subtext to your comments about the person or persons responsible for these murders.”
“Can you be more specific?”
“More blunt, you mean. Possibly. It’s one thing for someone of your stature, a renowned criminal psychologist, to help profile criminals for police, and it is yet quite another to wave a red cape in front of a bull.”
“I’m the first to appreciate a good analogy, but I think you’re reading too much into what I had to say.”
“Elizabeth, you used words in your profile to describe the perpetrator as … I’m quoting you here: an amateur … someone who makes amateurish mistakes and leaves evidence. And, then you suggested that he is a monster who can’t hide because monsters are too delusional to tell the forest from the trees. There’s implication in there.”
“He is a monster. That’s what police are searching for … a monster. That’s what I profile—monsters. That’s what I teach our students to learn to do. To find and put these people behind bars. To separate them from innocent victims, I have to use subtext. I have to wave that red cape in front of a monster. Because, when you get him or her to charge, that’s the moment of truth. That’s the moment the monster is either forced to fall to its knees, or it circles back. Either way, he’s pressed to decide. I’d like to believe, the majority of the time, it’s a fatal decision and the monster falls.”
“That’s a gamble.”
“But it’s a calculated gamble with the odds in favor of us, because at that moment, when the red flag is waved, the police are no longer in a defensive mode for the deadly game. They’re on the offensive, and they’re locked and loaded.”
Dean Harris said nothing. He tilted forward silently on the balls of his black wingtip shoes. He glanced at the rain against the window and said, “Are you going out in this?”
“Yes, detectives will be interrogating a suspect. They’ve asked me to offer an analysis when it’s done.” Lightning streaked from leaden clouds and thunder rolled in the distance. Elizabeth cut her eyes from the rain to Dean Harris and said with a smile, “Sometimes you have to walk out into a storm to find a monster. It seems that’s where they all live.”
FORTY-SIX
Boyd Baxter sat in a metal chair in a room by himself, listening to falling rain outside. Inside his head, he was listening to voices—voices that were always there to guide him. They’d never been wrong. It’s just that sometimes he refused to listen closely to them—to the heart of what really matters. And, almost every time, there had been bad consequences.
He picked at a wood splinter under his fingernail and half smiled. Some folks may call the voice inside their head a conscien
ce, but he knew that it was separate from him as much as the moon was separate from the sun. The moon had no light of its own, he thought. It could, though, reflect the light from the sun. At least some of the time. But even the ol’ man in the moon had to hide every now and then. After all, he was a man, a mere mortal.
Baxter smiled and waited for his interrogators to enter. The detectives did not intimidate him because he knew his life was part of a bigger plan, one that came from the heavens and was as plain as a rainbow after the storm. Life after death.
• • •
Elizabeth stood behind the one-way glass in a darkened observation area and watched Boyd Baxter sit alone. She saw him pick at something under a fingernail. She observed his lips moving, but even with a microphone near him, she couldn’t hear any words come out of his mouth. It was as if he were talking to himself for a few seconds without making sounds, only brief pantomime gestures.
As she waited for detectives Mike Bradford and Bill Lee to enter the room with Baxter, the door to the observation area opened. Sheriff Erwin Dawson and his chief deputy walked in. The sheriff was a fleshy man, crimson jowls, skeptical, deep-set dark eyes. He wore a spotless white Stetson. “How you doin’, Doctor Monroe?” he asked, removing the wide-brimmed hat and releasing a deep breath as if he had climbed three flights of steps.
“Fine, Sheriff, and you?”
“Be a lot better if the feller in that room is our serial killer. Department’s phones have been ringin’ off their hooks. Residents of the county are very worried … no, they’re damn scared. And they have ever’ right to be.”
The chief deputy, a lanky man with small ears, wide mouth, and a dark mole on his left cheek, said, “Good to see you, Doctor Monroe.”
“You too, Gary,” she said, nodding.
Elizabeth turned to watch Baxter in the room alone as the sheriff and his chief deputy speculated as to what they thought was going to happen during the course of the questioning. “Mike Bradford and Bill Lee are very practiced at the good-cop-bad-cop approach,” said Sheriff Dawson.
The chief deputy folded his arms and said, “Yeah, but somehow this guy seems different from most brought in for questioning. Hell, he’s a murder suspect in three homicides. Guilty or not, the majority of people would be fidgeting, looking around the room like they were trying to spot a mosquito. But, he’s just sitting there staring at the wall as if he was wondering where the stud joints could be located behind the paint and dry wall.”
“Doctor Monroe,” said the sheriff. “What do you think?”
“It’s too early for that. But I will disagree with you on the good-cop-bad-cop approach to questioning.”
“Oh, why’s that?”
“Because it won’t work with Boyd Baxter. The detectives can’t intimidate him. He’ll be glib if he wants to. Or he’ll be cagey and selective in how he chooses to answer their questions. If Baxter is who Detective Bradford thinks he is, and the physical evidence appears to be pointing in that direction, he’ll run hot or cold, depending on what persona shows up today. Before you two entered, Baxter was holding a conversation, almost in pantomime with himself. Now, the question is … was he doing it because he knows a camera is trained on his face, and we’re back here … or is he truly insane?”
The chief deputy, eyes impassive, said, “I suppose that’s where we’ll have to rely on your expertise, Doctor Monroe.”
“People, like Baxter, if he is a psychopath, are chameleons. They can beat a polygraph test because their physiological responses of guilt and anxiety can’t be measured, because there are none. Detectives, like Lee and Bradford, are highly trained in finding physical evidence and connecting it to a suspect. Often, part of that correlation is because of the visible cause and effect that ‘gotcha’ has on a typical criminal. But this doesn’t apply to a real psychopath. A polygraph machine, under a good administrator, is a detective of emotions, perhaps in a way like a criminal psychologist. However, since psychopaths are immune to feelings of guilt and anxiety, these physiological changes don’t happen to them. It’s as if they don’t have sweat glands because they don’t have a conscience—that’s why they will never have a guilty conscience.”
“Here they come,” said the sheriff as detectives Bradford and Lee entered the room.
“It’s showtime,” said the chief deputy.
“Let’s get this guy,” said the sheriff, sitting down and groaning.
“What if he’s not guilty … at least not guilty of killing three people?” Elizabeth asked, not taking her eyes off Baxter. She studied his body language as he watched the detectives take their seats, Bradford directly opposite from Baxter. Lee sat on the left side of the table—to Baxter’s right.
The sheriff said, “Because the physical evidence doesn’t lie. He was at the scene, and according to the medical examiner’s report and the time-stamp on that video from the church, Boyd Baxter and his truck were at New Shepherd Cemetery within three hours after Wanda Donnelly was murdered. That indicates he held her captive from the time she disappeared Wednesday morning, killed her somewhere away from the cemetery yesterday, and then decided to bury her body there.”
“Maybe,” Elizabeth said, looking above the one-way glass window to a forty-inch, high-definition television monitor, Baxter’s image in the center. She stared at his eyes, his hand movement, and the way he moved or tilted his head. “You do have that physical evidence from the cemetery, but, unless something has changed, you have nothing from the crime scene in the national forest.”
The sheriff started to say something but stopped when Mike Bradford looked Baxter in the eye and said, “We appreciate you coming here today, Boyd. That says a lot.”
“A lot about what?” Boyd asked in a low voice.
“About you being a standup kind of guy.”
Baxter grinned, slumped back in the metal chair and said, “Detective Mike Bradford, after you and Detective Lee paid me a visit at my place, I got a notion that I knew you. Maybe not you personally, Detective, but the Bradford family. I recalled some of my folks runnin’ with some of your folks.”
Bradford said, “It’s a small world, Boyd.”
“Y’all been in southern Mississippi ‘bout as long as the Baxter clan has. Looks like your daddy’s daddy farmed the land. All the while, one of your uncles went astray. I hear your Uncle Ken … Kenneth D. Bradford, is serving forty years for armed robbery and assault. He shot and crippled one of ‘em poor old rent-a-cops sippin’ his morin’ coffee in the First National Bank of Mississippi. The guard’s in a wheelchair for life.”
The sheriff said, “Baxter’s tryin’ like hell to throw Mike a curve ball.”
Bradford didn’t bat an eye. He leaned slightly forward in his chair and said, “Let’s talk about family, Boyd … your family. You strangled and stabbed Wanda Donnelly seven times. And you stabbed her after you’d already strangled her to death. And then you drive out to your family cemetery and bury her body less than seventy feet from your own grandma’s grave. I want to know why?”
“Oh shit,” said the sheriff under his breath. “Let’s see how he answers that.”
FORTY-SEVEN
There was absolute silence in a room designed for interrogations. Boyd Baxter sat back in the metal chair, glanced at the one-way glass in the rear of the room, shifting his eyes to Mike Bradford. Baxter lingered for a few seconds, deadpan expression, and said, “My, my, Detective Bradford. It’s amazing how you jump to erroneous conclusions.” He shifted his gaze to Bill Lee and asked, “How about you, Detective Lee? Are you sharing the same fantasy as your pal, Eliot Ness?”
“If you have nothing to hide, Boyd,” asked Lee, “why don’t you answer the question?”
Baxter grinned. “Because the question is so farfetched, it doesn’t justify an answer from me. Comin’ in here today, I spotted an American flag flappin’ in the breeze high above the sheriff’s building. I’d like to believe that those stars and stripes give me the right to refuse to answer absurd questions.”
Bradford said, “Why did you come down here today if you had no intention of answering our questions?”
“Maybe I got tired of standin’ up in a tree and felt I could use a change of scenery.”
“I’ll rephrase the question,” Bradford said. “Why were you in the New Shepherd Cemetery yesterday?”
“Now, Detective … that’s a whole lot better. I was there to place some flowers on grandma’s grave. I brought her favorite … magnolias. It’s something I try to do often. How ‘bout you, Detective Bradford, when was the last time you put flowers on your granny’s grave?”
Elizabeth jotted notes on a pad of paper. Both the sheriff and deputy sheriff were silent.
Bradford said, “Boyd, as much as you’d like to make this session about me, that’s not going to happen. You see, it’s all about you. Just the way you like it. Everything revolves around Boyd Baxter. Problem is, Boyd, you love to hear yourself talk. And you talk a lot, just like you did that night at the Front Porch Café when you accosted Wanda Donnelly. When she rebuffed your advances, you stalked her. Parked right outside her house. But unlike the truck you drove through the cemetery when you buried Wanda’s body, you drove your car to her home. We found your car in that barn behind your farmhouse.”
“So, I got a second vehicle. Most folks do. That doesn’t mean I drive it. Prefer my truck.”
“But you drove it recently. Approximately thirty-two miles from the time our deputies first found it in your barn to the day we discovered Wanda’s body. And that thirty-two miles is about the distance of a trip from your property to Wanda Donnelly’s house and back.”
Baxter stared at Bradford and said, “You don’t have a key to my car.”