4 The Marathon Murders (18 page)

Jill uttered a muffled cry. I saw
her hand reach up to cover her mouth.

“Don’t move, babe,” I said, trying
to keep my voice calm.

The crumpled figure of a girl
dressed in a pink nightgown lay on the floor a few feet beyond us. A pair of
broken glasses lay at one side. Blood spatters marked the carpet, the sofa and
the wall behind, as if someone had thrown a can of paint in that direction. Her
face had been beaten almost beyond recognition. But there was no mistaking the
short brown hair. It was Mickey Evans.

I gripped the
Glock
,
moving cautiously, although the brown color of the blood told me this was a
crime scene several hours old. Reaching her side, I put my hand down to check
her pulse. The cold stiffness of her arm told me we were way too late. Rigor
mortis had done its job.

No matter how many homicides you’ve seen, and for me that numbered
quite a few, you’re never fully prepared for the lengths to which people will
go to desecrate the bodies of their fellow humans. It’s especially bad when the
victim is someone you’ve met.
Someone who’s already gotten a
raw deal out of life.

While Jill and I stood there
transfixed by the unholy scene before us, the retreating storm added its own
gruesome graphic as a distant flash of lightning produced a momentary glow,
highlighting the lifeless body on the floor.

“Let’s get out of here,” I said, keeping
my voice low but determined. “Don’t touch anything. I’ll get the door.”

She dabbed a tissue at her eyes as
I held the door with my handkerchief.

Out on the porch, I found the rain
had turned into a moderate but steady shower. The wind had died down a bit and
the lightning had almost disappeared in the distance. In our earlier rush to
get inside the house, I hadn’t noticed the drop in temperature. Now the skin on
my arms tingled, almost a shiver, as I hurried across to the Jeep.

After settling down behind the
wheel, I got out my cell phone and punched in the sheriff’s number. The
dispatcher answered.

“I need to speak to Sheriff
Driscoll,” I said.

The guy sounded bored. “He isn’t
in.”

“Is he still tied up with that big
operation going down today?”

His attitude changed. “I can’t
comment on that.”

“Well, you’d better get in touch
with him and advise him he’s got another corpse on his hands. And this one is
gruesome.”

The dispatcher’s tone shifted from
businesslike to full alert.
“A corpse . . . where?”

I identified myself, gave him
Mickey Evans’ name and address, and explained what we had found. I suggested he
have Driscoll call me on the cell phone.

“That poor girl,” Jill said when I
had turned off the phone. “Who could have done such a terrible thing to her?”

“Somebody who was
damned angry.”

“It’s such a waste.” She stared at
the crumpled tissue.
“First Casey, and now her.”

“Probably the same killer got them
both.”

She shook her head,
then
turned to me. “Do we need to wait around here for the
sheriff?”

I looked at my watch. It was close
to four o’clock.

“No. It will take a while for the
TBI forensics team to get here. Nothing will be done before that. Why don’t we
run over to Big Mama’s and see what she can tell us about Mickey’s movements
over the recent past?”

I drove into town, avoiding a few
fresh potholes, and turned toward the restaurant. Only two cars sat in front as
we parked and went in.

“Well, if it
ain’t
the Nashville private police force,” Big Mama said in her commanding voice.
“You up here for the big bust?”

“What big bust?” Jill asked.

“One that’s on
the TV.”
She pointed to a monitor mounted on a shelf above the check-out
counter. It presently showed a stylish
A
frame house
nestled in a rural setting. “The high sheriff was just on. He told about finding
a cave beneath that house where they was growing marijuana.
Hundreds
of plants.
Biggest bust ever in Tennessee.”

“That should’ve made him happy,” I
said.

“Oh, he was
grinnin
’
all right. Y’all can take that table over there.”

As we headed over by the front
window, my cell phone rang.

“What the hell have you done now,
McKenzie?” Sheriff Driscoll asked.

“I just did my civic duty, Sheriff.
We went to visit Mickey Evans and found her on the living room floor with her
head bashed in. I called the local authorities as I was honor-bound to do.”

He let out a noisy breath. “Well,
I’m getting a little tired of all this messy mayhem. That stuff didn’t happen
around here until you showed up. I may have to put out an order to stop you at
the county line in the future.”

“I trust you’re only joking,” I
said.

“Mostly.
But it is beginning to jar my nerves.”

I decided a new tack was in order.
“Congratulations on the big marijuana catch, Sheriff. I just heard about it.”

His voice mellowed. “Yeah, that was
nice. Our multi-county Drug Task Force has been working on it for nearly five
years. We finally got the bastards. You wouldn’t believe what they were doing
in there.”

“It was a cave?”

“They built the house on top of it.
Nobody lived there. They had a passage leading underground where they had the
most sophisticated operation you ever saw. Lights and climate control. They
could raise a crop in two months that would take four-and-a-half on the
outside.”

“Make any arrests?”

“Yeah.
We
got the three dudes that ran it.” He was silent for a moment. “The TBI crew is
about ready to wrap it up over here. I don’t imagine they’ll be all that happy
about it, but it looks like they’ll have to set up again in Hartsville. I’d
better get with Wayne and tell him what’s happened. That Evans woman was Casey
Olson’s girlfriend.”

I looked out at the rain that
continued its steady drum beat on the window.
“Right.
My guess is the same guy got her that killed Casey.”

“Maybe so.
Where are you?”

“We’re at Big Mama’s.
Just sat down.”

“Enjoy your meal, and stick around.
We may need to talk again.”

Big Mama came over when she saw I
was off the phone. “What can I get you folks?”

“It’s a little early for supper,” I
said. “Just bring me a cup of decaf.”

“Make it two,” Jill said. “No cream
for either of us.”

After Big Mama left to get our
coffee, Jill put her elbows on the table and rested her chin on folded hands,
her eyes fixed on me. “What do you want to ask her?”

“Anything she can tell us about
Mickey over the last forty-eight hours.”

When the oversize proprietress
brought our cups a few minutes later, I asked if she’d like to sit down, that I
had some bad news for her.

With the help of a little huffing
and puffing, she lowered herself onto the chair across from me. “What’s going
on?”

“We just came from Mickey Evans’
house. I’m afraid she’s met with some terribly foul play.”

The heavy jowls sagged as her face
took on a look of dismay. “I don’t understand. You mean—” She stopped as she
saw tears well in Jill’s eyes. “No . . . no . . . what happened?”

I reached across and took her large
hand in mine. “I’m sorry, but she’s dead. We found her at her house a little
while ago.”

She began to whimper. “I knew it. I
knew that girl would come to a bad end. I tried to help her.”

“You did help her,” Jill said. “She
told me you put her to work when everything was falling apart. Some terrible
person killed her. We hope you can help us get some idea of who did it.”

“We need you to think really hard
and tell us everything you remember about what she did from the time she came
to work Saturday,” I said.

A small waitress with a slight limp
brought Big Mama a glass of water. After a few minutes, she calmed down enough
to begin her reminiscing. I sipped my coffee as she recalled the past two days.

Mickey had come to work as
scheduled at three on Saturday afternoon. It was a routine evening.

“The only unusual thing I remember
is her talking a lot to a red-headed woman who was a newspaper reporter from
out of town. I had to get onto her about taking care of her other customers,
but she said the woman kept asking questions.”

“What kind of questions?” I asked.

“Mostly about
Casey Olson’s murder.
Pierce Bradley, too.
Said she
was writing stories on the case for a paper up north.”

Just what Mickey had told Jill on
the
phone.
Big Mama said Mickey left when the café
closed at nine. On Sunday, Mickey came to work at eleven A.M.

“Anything particular you recall
about that shift?” Jill asked.

“That newspaper woman came back
late in the afternoon. She cornered Mickey again, looking real intense, asked a
couple of questions and left.”

“Did Mickey say what she was
after?”

Big Mama screwed up her face,
thinking.
“Something about Casey’s boss at
Samran
.
I think she wanted to know where he hung
out.”

“Did Mickey know?”

“She told her some place she knew
about, but I don’t know where it was.”

I pushed my coffee cup aside. “Do
you recall anything else?”

She shrugged her large shoulders,
like a buffalo getting ready to move on. “I don’t think so. She left around
seven that evening. That’s the last I saw of her. Oh, God, I can’t believe
this.”

She pulled a napkin from around a
set of utensils, wiped her eyes and blew her nose. Getting up from the table,
she excused herself, said she needed to go to the kitchen.

That’s when my cell phone rang. I
made a mental note to put it on the charger when we got back in the car.

“This is Patricia Cook, Mr.
McKenzie. We just got back from Lebanon, and I found your note in the door.”

“Thank you for calling,” I said. “I
wondered when it might be convenient for my wife Jill and I to come over and
talk with you for a few minutes?”

“Where are you?”

“We’re in Hartsville at Big Mama’s
restaurant.”

“That woman,” she said with a
chuckle. “If you’d like to come over now it would be fine. I think I have
something you’re looking for.”

My heart skipped a beat. “What is
it?”

“Some papers from Marathon Motor
Works.”

Patricia Cook and her daughter, Marcie, met us at the door. Mrs.
Cook’s face had gained a bit more color since we’d seen her at the funeral, but
her hair still resembled what my mother called a rag mop. She gave us a polite
smile, though, and invited us in.

I shook my little collapsible
umbrella. “We’ll just leave these out here.”

“Nonsense,” she said. “Give them to
me. I’ll just set them here in the foyer. It won’t hurt anything.”

The foyer was floored with tile.
The living room had a large stone fireplace that reminded me of our own in
Hermitage. We sat on a brocade sofa with a floral design while Mrs. Cook took a
chair across from us. She lifted a black leather case that sat beside it. I
recognized the type used by Air Force pilots to stow maps and charts, radio
frequencies and the like.

“This was Pierce’s,” she said. “He
carried his important papers in it. I told you about the argument we had the
afternoon before he . . . before he disappeared.”

“Yes, I recall,” I said when she
hesitated, swallowing hard.

“He left in such a rush I didn’t
notice if he had it or not.”

“Where did you find it?”

She looked across the room with a
meek, tentative smile.
“Behind that chair over there, where
he had sat.
I should have seen it, but I hadn’t gone around that way, I
guess. Then, after the sheriff came by, I was so upset I wasn’t fit to look for
anything.”

“Did you just find it tonight?”
Jill asked.

She nodded. “We spent a couple of
days with my brother-in-law. They helped get my emotions back under control.
When I read your note, I went right to it.” She opened the case, pulled out a
large brown envelope and held it out to me. “I believe this is what you’ve been
looking for.”

I got up and took the envelope,
which had “Liggett” printed in large letters on the front. As I returned to sit
by Jill, I opened it and slipped out a sheaf of yellowed paper. Clipped to it
was a note bearing the signature of Sydney Liggett and the date August 7,
1914.

I looked up. “Mrs. Cook, you have
just saved the day for my clients. I can’t thank you enough.”

“As I understand it, Pierce had
intended to deliver the envelope to a Mr. Liggett in Nashville. I presume he’s
your client.”

“Actually, we were retained by his
granddaughter. But we’ll see that it gets to Mr. Liggett.”

Her face had a forlorn look.
“Maybe, if Pierce had carried it to Nashville that night . . .”

Her voice trailed off.

I had to agree with her, but in
this case fate didn’t allow second chances.

“We had better get this on back
before anything else happens,” I said, stuffing the papers into the envelope. I
didn’t mention the latest victim of the Marathon murderer. She wasn’t ready to
take on any more bad news.

As Jill and I got up to leave, I
thanked Patricia again.

“I’m sorry my husband wasn’t in
here to meet you,” she said. “He’s out back unpacking. His sister-in-law gave
us tons of string beans and corn and tomatoes she’d been canning. Lord, that
woman has to clean jars off the shelf every year to make room for new stuff.”

Marcie, who had sat out of the way,
watching silently, all during our stay, stepped over beside her mother and
waved. “Bye,” she said. “Hope you don’t get caught in another storm.”

“We do, too,” Jill said. “Bye,
bye.”

As we walked out to the car, I
stared at the envelope. This wasn’t the time or the place to start digesting
its contents, but I couldn’t help wondering what could be in it that warranted
all the destruction of life it had triggered. I handed it to Jill as she slid
into her seat.

“I feel like we should have a safe
in here to put this in,” she said.

“Not a bad idea. But for the
moment, just stick it under your seat.”

Before starting the car, I called
Warren.

“I’m getting worried as hell,” he
said. “Kelli hasn’t showed up and hasn’t called. Mrs.
Zander
—she
and her husband run the place—said Kelli’s bed wasn’t slept in last night.”

“Did you ask what kind of car she
was driving? A lot of motels require that information.”

“Yeah, I checked. It was a blue
Malibu.”

“Did they get the license number?”

“No, but Mrs.
Zander
is a sharp little lady. She went out front to talk to Kelli one time and
noticed the car tag was from Nashville. It had a Titans sticker on the back
bumper.”

“I’d better hire that lady. Most
people don’t even pay attention to what state’s involved. What else has
happened since you’ve been there?”

“It’s been quiet, except for a
wrong number. I guess that’s what it was.”

“On your cell
phone?”

“Yeah.
Guy
asked who it was. When I told him Colonel Jarvis, he said, ‘Oh, sorry,’ and
hung up.”

“Well, we’re presently in
Hartsville. We’ll keep an eye out for Kelli. Damn, I almost forgot about the
good news. Patricia Cook, Pierce Bradley’s sister, found the Marathon papers.”

“That’s great, Greg. Have you
determined what it’s all about?”

I looked up at the windshield as
the spattering rain picked up in intensity. Although it was early evening, the
dark overcast gave the landscape a look more like the fading shades of dusk.

“The papers look pretty fragile,” I
said. “We’ll need to sit down at a table and take a close look at the whole set
of documents before we can make any kind of assessment.”

“What do you plan to do now?”

I told him about Mickey Evans’
death and the sheriff’s instructions to stay around Hartsville for the present.
I also mentioned what Jill had learned at
Samran
about Kirk
Rottman
, and the word Big Mama had given
us about Kelli looking for information on Casey Olson’s boss.

“Sounds like you two have been
busy,” Warren said. “I may head that way soon. I’ll give you a call.”

Closing my phone, I plugged it into
the charger connected to the car battery.

I turned to Jill. “Where’s our
Mapquest
map of Hartsville?”

Jill spread the map out in front of
me as I switched on the overhead light. We had cobbled the map together by
printing several scrolled out views from the computer, then taping the pages to
make a single sheet. I found the street where Kirk
Rottman
lived running off of Old Lafayette Road east of town. It was in what you might
call, for lack of a better term, the Hartsville suburbs, if a town with one
traffic signal could be considered to have any such.

“You know what we haven’t done?”
Jill asked.

“Tell me.”

“We haven’t checked the office
phone to see if Shelby Williams called with names of the people he gave Dallas
Lights.”

“Then best we do it now, babe.”

She powered up her cell phone and
called. After a moment, she punched in our answering machine replay code and
listened.

My own phone rang about that time,
and I grabbed it up and answered.

“Who is this?” a male voice asked.

I gave my usual answer. “Who wants
to know?”

As he stammered around for a
moment, I checked the caller ID. It showed a number in Hartsville. “I guess I
have the wrong number,” he said and hung up.

“Who was that?” Jill asked.

I laid the phone down and frowned.
“Who knows? What did you find out?”

“There were five people on
Williams’s
list. One was Kirk
Rottman
.”

I swung around in the seat and
stared at her. “Did any of the others sound familiar?”

“No. He said Kirk was the only
person from within the company.”

I rubbed the stubble on my chin.
“That is troubling.”

We reviewed what we knew about
Camilla and Roger’s son, Kirk. He had been a troublemaker as a kid, drank too
much, gambled, smoked pot,
had
been “chummy” with
Casey Olson in the past week or so. He had visited Mickey Evans’ house, but she
was turned off by him. And he smoked Dallas Lights.

“Let’s go check out Mr.
Rottman’s
house,” I said, starting the car.

“Shouldn’t we call the sheriff or
Wayne Fought?”

“I imagine they’re pretty busy at
the moment. We’ll call after we see where young Kirk lives.”

I drove over to Highway 25 and hung
a right. I spotted the turn-off, also known as Melrose Drive, just past the
funeral home where we had attended Pierce Bradley’s service on Saturday. I
drove slowly, so as not to
miss
Rottman’s
street in the semi-darkness.

We found it in a wooded area with
only a smattering of houses. The first one we came to was under construction.
The framing and roof appeared finished, with work just beginning on the outside
walls. An old portable concrete mixer sat beside the driveway, which had been
covered with gravel. As I started past the house, Jill shouted:

“Stop, Greg! Back up.”

The anti-lock brakes did their
thing. I shifted into reverse.

“What’s up?”

“That car up next
to the new house.
It’s blue, maybe a Malibu.”

I pulled into the driveway, eased toward
the parked car.

I saw the Malibu nameplate and
Davidson County markings on the license tag. Nashville and Davidson County were
one under the Metro umbrella. The bumper contained a sticker with a T-shaped
Roman sword surrounded by three stars and a trailing flame, the familiar Titans
logo.

This was Kelli’s car.