A Judgment of Whispers (4 page)

Five

“You get a new
dog?” Irving Stubbs strolled into Jack Wilkins's carport, keeping well away from a galvanized tub that held a smelly wet dog lathered in shampoo.

“I did.” Jack washed behind the dog's ears. Though he'd wanted to open his Teresa Ewing files as soon as the cops turned him loose, he knew Jan would kill him if he brought a dog this filthy into the house. So he'd stopped on the way home and bought a new collar and leash, plus a bag of dog food.

“You tell Jan about this?” asked Irving.

“Not yet.”

“What do you think she'll say?”

“She won't mind.” Jack scrubbed some kind of tar off the animal's chest. “As long as he doesn't bite the cat.”

Irving asked, “Where'd you get him?”

“Over on Salola Street. A cop was about to take him to the pound.”

“What were you doing over on Salola?”

“Went to a yard sale,” Jack lied, scrubbing the dog harder.

“You sure you weren't investigating Teresa Ewing?”

Irving's question took Jack by surprise. “What do you mean?”

“We were talking about it the other day, on the golf course.” Irving looked at him as if he'd suddenly come down with Alzheimer's disease. “Then again this morning at the Waffle House.”

Jack stopped his dog washing. This morning seemed weeks ago, but of course bean-counter Irving would remember everything. “No, I went over there to see if anybody was selling a pair of decent hedge clippers.”

Irving kept digging. “But why was a cop over there?”

“He had a 10-91,” Jack explained. “A stray dog call. He was taking this guy here to the pound. I felt sorry for him, so I brought him home with me.”

“So no news on Teresa Ewing?”

“Teresa Ewing's still a real cold case, Irving.” The lie came with amazing ease, but he didn't care. Irving gossiped like one of his hens. If Jack told him about those underpants, everybody in the county would be talking about it tomorrow. He was still cop enough to know to keep his mouth shut.

For a long moment, Irving just stood and watched him wash the dog, his accountant brain running the numbers. Finally he said, “Want to play golf tomorrow? Get up a foursome with Norman and Hank?”

Jack shook his head. What he really wanted to do was get the dog dry and go back to the files in his den. “Thanks, but I've got some chores to do. Maybe next week.”

“Suit yourself.” Irving started down the driveway toward his own house, then stopped. “Hey, what's your dog's name?” he called.

Jack looked at the dog, whose coat was turning out to be a rich chestnut brown instead of a dirty, muddy gray. “Lucky,” he said. “I'm going to call him Lucky.”

Jerry Cochran sighed as he looked at the cold case files spread across his desk. However addled old Jack Wilkins might be, he knew the Teresa Ewing case dead on. On February 13, 1989, at approximately 5:24 p.m., ten-year-old Teresa Ewing's mother sent her across the street to deliver a tuna casserole to Melanie Sharp, a neighbor who'd recently had a baby. At 7:16 p.m. a missing person call came into dispatch. On March 8, after a manhunt that included cadaver dogs, wildly varying readings from psychics, and sightings that ranged from California to Canada, John Ferguson was out for a jog and found the child's body not a hundred yards from her house.

Cochran shook his head, flipping through the old black-and-white police shots, feeling as if he were turning the pages of an old school yearbook. Sheriff Stump Logan, with sideburns and a white cowboy hat, stood arms akimbo as Jack Wilkins and an amazingly skinny Buck Whaley pulled the body from beneath the tree. Though Logan had put it out to the press that the little girl looked more asleep than dead, the photos showed a grimmer image. Her skull had been fractured, her hair matted with dried blood. She wore a T-shirt, jeans, and a green nylon jacket. Her clothes bore minimal traces of red clay soil, and her body did not look like it had been decomposing for almost a month.

“Underpants?” Cochran looked at the evidence inventory. She'd been found wearing unzipped jeans, but no underpants. He stared at a school picture of the girl someone had clipped to the file. She was a gorgeous child—dark hair framed a pale face with startling blue eyes. Her features were small, her mouth a perfect little bow that turned up on the ends, somehow promising more than it truly revealed.
She would have been trouble,
Cochran thought.
Had this girl lived, a long string of broken hearts would have followed behind her.

He flipped to the autopsy report. Death was due to blunt force trauma to the anterior left skull.
Almost instantaneous
, the coroner, a Dr. A.W. Core, had penciled in the margin of the report. The girl had not been raped, either vaginally or anally, and they found no other wounds on her body. Her stomach contents revealed a chocolate bar. Cochran looked to see what DNA panels they'd gathered, but he found only two pages with very sparse data. Then he remembered: criminal DNA sampling hadn't even started until '87, and that was in the big, well-funded police departments. In 1989 Stump Logan was still working out of a jail heated with a Franklin stove.

“So much for forensics,” he whispered. He closed the autopsy report and opened the thick binder of case notes. Wilkins and Whaley and three SBI agents had seemingly interviewed everyone in the county. By all accounts, Teresa Ewing was a precocious child who dressed as a gypsy every Halloween and took acting classes at the Flat Rock Playhouse. Father Bob sold insurance and mother Corinne worked two mornings a week at the county nursing home. Until the night Teresa disappeared, the police had never received a call from
the Ewing home.

Cochran read through pages of interviews with dozens of possible suspects. With the sex offender registry seven years in the future, they ranged from the janitor at Teresa's school, to a funny old bachelor who sat on his porch, giving candy to passing children, to the Ewings themselves. The prime suspects ultimately evolved into six people—the four neighborhood boys (Zack Collier, Devin McConnell, Lawrence Russell, and Adam Shaw), a Cherokee ex-con named Two Toes McCoy, and Arthur Hayes, a college sophomore by day and Peeping Tom by night. Logan and Whaley had actually gotten the Collier boy to confess to the crime, but his lawyer had his confession thrown out, on grounds that the kid was mentally incompetent. After that, they didn't have enough evidence to arrest anyone else. Still, Jack Wilkins hadn't given up. His notes indicated that he'd worked the Teresa Ewing case until the day he retired.

“The only case he didn't clear,” said Cochran, turning to Wilkins's employment record. He earned a BS from the University of Minnesota, then a stint with the 82nd Airborne brought him to North Carolina. Logan hired him in '79; he retired in 2004. With several commendations, his record indicated that he was a smart cop—probably smarter than either Logan or Whaley. So why did he drive in all the way from Azalea Road to wander around that old tree? To bury a pair of fake underpants and get the only case he couldn't clear ginned up again?

“Possibly,” said Cochran. But a lot of other scenarios were possible too. Practically everybody involved in the construction of Lone Oak Development had tromped around that tree—from architects to site planners to backhoe drivers. Any of them could have heard about the murder and buried those underpants as a prank. And the yard sale was a factor too. Yard sales started at daybreak. Who knows how many shoppers could have gone up there before Saunooke arrived.

He uncapped a pen and started an outline on a yellow legal pad. On the first line he wrote
Jack Wilkins
; on the second line
Sick joke
. On the third line he scribbled the thing he dreaded most:
Trophy/warning
.

That would be the worst. That would mean that whoever killed Teresa Ewing was still alive, still in town, and still taunting the police. Maybe even planning to abduct another child.

He thought of his own daughter, Chloe—eleven months old, red-haired like her mother, an angel he'd loved at first squawk. The idea of some stranger touching her made him sick to his stomach, and his first inclination was to bring all the old suspects in and let Whaley grill them until they screamed. But he could not do that. He had to tread carefully. Pisgah County had once gone on a witch hunt; Cochran was not going to let that happen again. He would not officially re-open the Teresa Ewing case until he found out more about those underpants.

He started to gather up all the old photos. He'd just put the cold case file back in its box when he heard a knock on his door. Wondering if Whaley had found something, he said, “Yeah? Come in!”

The door opened. His wife, Ginger, stood there in a yoga outfit, holding Chloe on one hip. “Ready for a surprise?”

Cochran loved surprises from Ginger. Sometimes she brought apple strudel, sometimes fresh coffee, sometimes, in the privacy of their bedroom, treats of a different nature. He closed the case file. “Bring it on.”

“Get the camera on your cell phone ready.”

Cochran reached for his phone. “Ready.”

“Okay. Hit record!”

Cochran turned to the open doorway. Ginger put Chloe down and pointed her at Cochran, saying, “Go on, honey. Go see Daddy!”

As Cochran filmed, the chubby little red-headed baby walked toward him, wobbling as if she'd had too much to drink.

“She's walking?” Cochran cried. “All by herself?”

“She started when I got home from Mary's speech!” said Ginger. “She let go of the dining room table and walked into the living room, all on her own.”

“Chloe!” Cochran called, keeping his phone trained on the child. “Look at you, sweetheart! You're walking!”

Chloe listed far to the right, but then regained her balance, heading straight for Cochran. “Daaa-deeee!” she cried. She walked a few more steps then fell laughing into his arms.

“What a big girl!” he cried, scooping her up, nuzzling behind her ear. How he loved her! The way she smelled, the way her hair curled when her neck grew damp, the way she slept, her little rosebud mouth quivering as she dreamed. He'd thought that Ginger had completed him; then Chloe came along and he wondered how they had ever lived without her. He lifted her high in his arms. As she squealed with delight, he brought her down, catching a glimpse of the Teresa Ewing file on his desk. He thought of the girl's father, Bob. He'd probably once held his arms out to his toddling daughter and thought that he would provide all the shelter and protection Teresa would ever need until she was grown and gone.

How wrong he had been about that,
thought Cochran, remembering the picture of the little girl's body under that tree.
How very, very wrong
.

Six

Grace Collier was gripping
the steering wheel of her car so hard that her fingers had gone numb. She and Zack had fled the Salola Street yard sale immediately after their encounter with Leslie Shaw, Zack cradling his box of old videotapes as another man might carry a child. For a long time Grace just drove—over to the college, then up into the Reservation, wanting to put as much distance as possible between them and their old neighborhood.

“It's good they're tearing all those houses down,” she said to no one in particular. “That street's been cursed ever since Teresa.”

Teresa. The name stuck in her throat—she hadn't spoken it in years. Te-reee-saaaa. The syllables themselves seemed to give voice to the tragedy—an explosive
T
, then a
reee
like a scream, then a lingering soughing of sadness and mystery. Never had the little priss been Terry, or Tee, or any of the sweet nicknames she might have engendered. Always, she was Teresa. First shouted by the searchers, then cried by her mourners, then whispered for what seemed like forever.
What do you think really happened to Teresa Ewing? Where was she for those three weeks? How do you think Zack got away with it? He's retarded, you know. Dumb as a post but strong as an ox. And he loved her …

“Mama!” Zack cried from the backseat, interrupting the soundtrack playing in her head. “Watch out!”

Grace's attention snapped back to the highway. She was driving down Fodderstack Mountain on a narrow two-lane and had drifted over to the shoulder of the road. Her tires crunched in the gravel, veering to the edge of a fifty-foot drop. She jerked the steering wheel in the opposite direction, only to hear the angry blast of a horn. She looked up to see a red semi chugging up the mountain in low gear. She turned the wheel again and zoomed by the truck with only inches to spare, garnering another blast of the horn and a fleeting glance of the driver's angry, cursing face.

“Mama, are you okay?” Zack's voice was shaky.

“I'm fine, honey.” She felt weak, her hands tingling now, thick and useless on the wheel.

“You want me to drive?” he asked, laughing.

“No, but thanks for offering.” Zack had never driven. She kept her car keys hidden, to make sure he never would. She took a deep breath and tried to stop trembling. “Want to go to Hornbuckle's?”

“Sure!”

Hornbuckle's had been part of their lives since Zack was a baby. One of the curious little Tsalagi shops that sold everything from tomahawks to hunting licenses, Fred Hornbuckle scooped up ice cream from behind a small counter in the back of the store. At two years old, Zack had eaten his first bowl of ice cream here, shivering at the sudden cold, then grinning as the sweetness melted in his mouth. By four, Zack's speech was still garbled, but he could gurgle “ice cream!”
when they pulled up in the parking lot. By six, they'd gotten the official
diagnosis of autism and Zack had settled on his dish of choice— Bear Tracks in Snow, chocolate ice cream with marshmallow sauce, topped with chocolate sprinkles. For nearly forty years, Hornbuckle had brought Zack a Bear Track and a tall glass of water, ice cream spoon placed precisely on a paper napkin perpendicular to the table. As Hornbuckle had gone from a middle-aged man to a senior citizen, Grace figured Zack's lifetime total for Bear Tracks in the Snow was around two thousand.

She came off the twisty mountain road and took a right, pulling up in Hornbuckle's small parking lot. Zack hurried into the store, heading straight for the ice cream counter in the back. Grace followed more slowly, nodding to the wizened Fred Hornbuckle, who stood behind the cash register wearing a tattered straw cowboy hat.

“Sheeoh,”
he greeted her in Cherokee
. “Doehuhduhnay.”

“Fine, thanks. How are you?”

He gave a noncommittal Cherokee grunt as he cut his eyes toward Zack. “A Bear Tracks in Snow and a caramel sundae?” Though their order never varied, he always checked, to be sure.

Grace smiled. “Same as always.”

She threaded her way through the tight aisles to the little counter and took a seat next to Zack. As Hornbuckle scooped their ice cream, she noticed Zack frowning.

“Are you okay, honey?” Never did Grace know what Zack was ruminating about. Sometimes it was a bit of overheard conversation, sometimes the way someone had looked at him, sometimes a bird in the sky or the sequence of numbers on a license plate.

He shook his head, his eyes downcast.

“What's the matter? You got so many new tapes today.”

He cracked his knuckles, a habit reminiscent of his father. “I miss Salola Street.”

“You do?”

He nodded. “I had fun there.”

“What was fun about it?” she asked, wondering what he would say.

“Playing with Adam. But Teresa was fun too. When she didn't squeal.”

Zack's hypersensitive hearing had always been an issue. Certain noises—high-pitched sounds, loud voices—would send him either running away with his hands over his ears, or into a rage, where he screamed
Smackertalker
and lashed out at whoever was speaking. With a chill Grace looked at her son's big hands, now folded on the table. Had he bashed Teresa Ewing's skull in, just to stop her from squealing?

She pushed the thought away. Zack was compromised, true. But where strangers saw a hulking man obsessed with inappropriate videotapes, she saw a tender boy who kept their bird feeders filled and cried when they passed a rabbit killed on the highway.
He could not have killed that girl,
she told herself for the thousandth time.
It's just not possible.

They ate their ice cream, Zack scraping the last bit of chocolate from the frosty little dish, then he stood up, ready to go.

“Hurry, Mama.” He bounced on his feet. “We need to go home.”

She paid Hornbuckle and followed Zack out to the car. As he began admiring his new videos, she headed for home. Despite Leslie Shaw's hatefulness and their near miss with the semi, it had been a good day. Zack hadn't had one meltdown, he'd apologized for bumping into that little girl, and he'd behaved respectfully toward Hornbuckle. She hoped his new tapes wouldn't disappoint him.

She turned down the shady, meandering lane that led to her house, wondering if Zack might get engrossed in his tapes long enough for her to get some work done. She had a landscape show coming up in an Asheville gallery, and volunteering for Mary Crow's campaign had put her behind schedule. If he got involved in a tape for a couple of hours, she could get back to her painting. Selling a couple of canvasses would do their bank account a lot of good. She and Zack might be able to go to the beach for a long weekend. It had been years since either of them had seen the ocean. She was dreaming of warm sand and seagulls when Zack began to scream.

“No!” he cried. “No, no, no!”

She jammed on her brakes, her heart pounding. “What's wrong now?” she cried.

With wide, terrified eyes, Zack pointed at their house. “He's come back! He's here!”

She leaned over to peer through the passenger window. Her house stood on a small hill, overlooking the street. Parked in her driveway was a white Crown Vic with a whip antenna and a state license plate. Her stomach clenched. Detective Whaley was here. The day that she had just deemed good was turning sour, fast.

She turned to her son. “Remember what you do when he comes, Zack? You stay in the car and sit still. That way you won't get hurt.”

“Don't let him zap me, Mama. Please!”

“I won't, Zack. But you've got to sit still, okay?”

“Okay, okay, okay, okay, okay.”

She turned into the driveway, trying to take a deep breath. The last time Whaley had come, Zack had run out of the car, flapping his hands and crying. Whaley had spooked and tasered him. Zack had lain on the ground, twitching, urinating on himself while the big cop stood there laughing. If she'd had a gun, she would have shot Whaley dead on the spot.

“Just stay in the car, Zack,” she whispered as she parked beside the police car. “Sit there and look through your new tapes.”

She got out of her car, lifting her hands high over her head. Whaley had never drawn a gun on them, but she'd seen too many cops on television, killing people of color for not much reason at all.

“Is there a problem, officer?”

Whaley looked at her as if she were an idiot. “You don't need to put your hands up. I've come to talk to your boy.”

“Why?”

“I'm
asking
for DNA.”

“But you took some, years ago.” She remembered another long-ago nightmare, where three cops wrestled with Zack in a jail cell, trying to pull hairs from his arms and groin. They finally had to sedate him to complete the test.

“We need more.”

“But why?”

“I'm not at liberty to say.”

“So you just come out here and demand it? Do you know how traumatic that is for an autistic person?”

“A lot less traumatic than getting your head bashed in.”

Grace closed her eyes. Always, it was Teresa Ewing; it would forever be Teresa Ewing. She'd made a big mistake in staying here. She should have followed Mike to Colorado. So what if he didn't want to be married to her anymore? She could have gotten a new start, in a new place. Painted the Rockies instead of the Appalachians.

She looked at her son. He was sitting in the passenger seat with his head down, clicking the tapes together. He was scared but trying to control himself. And it had been such a good day.

She turned back Whaley. For once, she was going to stand up to him. “Do you have a court order for this?”

“No.” He straightened a little, as if she'd surprised him. “Right now you would be cooperating with an ongoing investigation.”

“What would it be if I refused to let him give you any more DNA?”

“Then it would look as if you had something to hide.”

“We don't have anything to hide, officer. You have badgered my son for most of his life and have gotten no more evidence against him than the day that little girl disappeared.”

“So you're refusing to comply?”

Grace took a deep breath and nodded. “Until you come with a court order, Zack Collier will not be giving any DNA.”

Whaley looked at her, his eyes flat with hatred. “You need to rethink this. If I have to come back with a warrant, it'll mean handcuffs, a cage in a squad car, the whole nine yards.”

She turned and walked back to her car. “I'll take that chance, officer. Sorry you wasted a trip over here.”