Dark and Bloody Ground (33 page)

An hour or so later, coming back down on the return trip, Spicer said, he passed the car again, only it was slightly farther down the hill.

Spicer’s account matched others. One man said he had seen a 1978 or 1980 blue Chevrolet sedan with three laughing men in it at McRoberts the afternoon of the murder. The men had been wearing suits. Two Fleming residents recalled seeing a blue or gray car parked in Dr. Acker’s driveway between nine and ten o’clock on Thursday evening, while a man wearing a suit stood by the front door as it opened. Both witnesses had thought this “strange.” A clerk at the Edge of Town Market gave a similar description of the men and recalled the car as blue or silver, possibly an Impala. And Debbie Benge, a clerk at the Rite Aid drugstore in Whitesburg, described how three strange men had entered the store as she was opening Thursday morning. One had asked for film, without showing any intention of buying some; another had asked how long it took to drive to Neon. Two were in suits, the third in casual clothes. They had driven away in “a big blue car.”

An interview with Steve Reynolds provided indications of how someone could have known about Dr. Acker’s money. Describing himself as Tammy’s flaneé, Reynolds, who was twenty-one, said that he could not imagine anyone wanting to kill her. Everybody had liked her; she was “so good to everyone.” She had been frightened of living alone in Lexington but felt at ease in her hometown. If only she had not come home to visit her father on that one evening!

Reynolds was suspicious of a handyman who had a key to the Acker house. Money had started missing after this fellow was
employed there. One day Reynolds caught the man in the garage with a stack of fifty-dollar bills sticking out of his pocket. He had pulled his shirt down over the money. At that time, Dr. Acker was keeping his cash in an old trunk that was not even locked. He had the alarm system but evidently had trusted anyone he let work inside the house. It was Reynolds’s “hunch” that Dr. Acker had bought the safe because of this incident.

An interview with the handyman produced nothing substantial. He had obviously not been one of the intruders and gave no indication of being the type of person to make elaborate plans for a break-in. He may have shot his mouth off about the cash, but that the doc had money appeared to have been relatively common knowledge, or was at least suspected, around Fleming-Neon.

The man Danny Webb most wanted to talk to could not be located until Sunday, August 11, when Webb finally found Roe Adkins at home in Isom and interviewed him there. He had taken a trip to Lexington on Tuesday, August 6, Adkins told the lieutenant, staying at the Continental Inn with a friend, Tid Adams. It had been strictly for pleasure. On Friday they were still drunk and decided to stop at the Abner Motel in Stanton instead of driving on home.

He had learned of Tammy Acker’s murder on Friday, when his mother called his daughter about it, and he had happened to reach his daughter that afternoon.

“You called her from the Abner Motel, even though you were too drunk to drive?”

“I like to keep in touch,” Adkins said.

“So you were gone from Tuesday till Saturday?”

“You can check on it.”

Webb knew Adkins, had had occasion to speak to him many times over the years, gathering evidence on various charges. That Adkins would decide to travel to Lexington to get drunk in the middle of the week, that particular week, when his name was being used to gain entrance to a house was interesting. The hotel records would probably give him an airtight alibi.

Webb asked him how long he had known Roger Epperson. For about two years, Adkins estimated. He had met Roger through Sonny Spencer of Viper. At that time, “there was a seam of coal to be mined,” and he and Tid Adams, Spencer, and Roger Epperson had combined to do the job. They had gone broke on the operation and
had parted ways. Adkins said that he had had no contact with Epperson since that time. It was true, however, that Epperson knew of Dr. Acker’s former business dealings with Adkins. And yes, Epperson would have known about Dr. Acker’s money. Adkins had told Epperson about the doc. He had told many people the story of how Dr. Acker had produced a bundle of cash one Thanksgiving Day. But the Acker riches were common knowledge. It was a crying shame what had happened, but the doc had been a sitting duck, you could say.

Leaving Adkins, Lt. Webb decided that a Sunday drive over to the Epperson family house near Hazard was in order. He assumed that the Eppersons would be expecting him, since their eldest’s name was by then all over the newspapers and the airwaves. He knew the family well and had had friendly relations with them, particularly the father. This time he was not sure what sort of a reception to expect.

It was hostile. Mildred Epperson, flanked by her two younger sons, came to the door and told the lieutenant to leave them alone. They were not about to permit him to harass them just because of some rumors. The sons were silent, cold-eyed.

Webb persisted. When was the last time they had seen Roger? Did they know where he was? They had neither seen nor heard from him in years, Mrs. Epperson said, and asked Webb to please leave.

Eventually Eb Epperson agreed to come out and talk to the lieutenant on the front porch. Webb was as soft as he could be. He said he knew how painful this was, but he had a job to do. How long had it been since Roger had come around?

"I don’t have a son named Roger,”
Eb Epperson blurted—and suddenly he burst into tears, covering his face with his hands as he sobbed and sobbed.

“You don’t understand ...” he managed to choke out. “I just buried my best friend, the other week. This ... it’s too much. I am real upset,” and he continued crying.

“Who was that?” Webb asked. “Bug, who was it you buried?”

For a moment he did not answer, struggling to contain himself. Then he said:

“Ed Morris. Him and me ...” and he turned and went back into the house.

By the time Danny Webb was down the porch steps, the links had joined in his mind. He felt like a child who, tinkering with a chemistry set, ignites an explosion that scalds and alters everything.

Jackson County was not one of those for which he had direct responsibility, but he knew about the double homicide in Gray Hawk, because it had occurred close to his territory and remained unsolved. Ed and Bessie Morris ... Ed Morris’s turning out to have been Eb Epperson’s best friend ... Roger Epperson ... Tammy Acker ... a father who disowns his son ... the uncontrollable tears. Probably without intending to do so—and without providing anything that would stand up in court or even be admissible as evidence—Eb Epperson had connected Roger to the Gray Hawk killings. It was the first link to any suspect there. As significant as his emotional outburst was, what Eb had
not
said seemed to Webb also telling. There had been no pro forma parental denial of a son’s guilt—only the expression of grief and frustration over the murder of a friend, as well as what came across as shame.

Webb sat in his cruiser for a minute or so, letting everything sink in, feeling the pieces slide together. The more he thought about these fragments in relation to one another, the more they became part of one big, bloody, probably still-unfinished picture. The Gray Hawk killings were now one incident in a spree of at least four over three months’ time. Webb had no further doubt.

All at once his chest tightened. Roger and the others may already have killed again, and most certainly would, the longer they were loose.

But where were they?

He raced to his office to call Rod Kincaid.

21

W
HERE THEY WERE BY THEN WAS IN HALLANDALE
and elsewhere in and around Miami enjoying their spoils and feeling on top of the world. That Sunday afternoon, as Danny Webb experienced revelations, the gang roamed shopping malls like kids on some dream of a spree, scarfing up forty thousand dollars’ worth of doodads at one jewelry store alone. Roger bought cluster and solitaire diamond rings for himself and a three-karat number for Carol; Donnie traded Tammy Acker’s bracelet for another; Sherry bought Benny a gold lion’s head pendant with diamonds for eyes and a big diamond stuck in its mouth, to match the ring she had already given him because his birth sign was Leo. She imagined how he would get all silly when he found it under the Christmas tree or maybe a coconut palm on the island where they would be living happily ever after—she made every effort to hope.

As the others shopped on, Roger drove through thick heat down to the Miami waterfront to negotiate for a ninety-six-thousand-dollar cigarette boat to take them to Bimini. He inquired about false passports for everyone except Sherry, who, for just such a contingency as this, had carried a bona-fide one since her days as Mr. Wong’s bride. Fake documents would cost maybe twenty-five thousand apiece—but what did it matter? They were up to their armpits in cash and, as any fool could tell you, money made money.

To jump-start a life, or to end one, there was no place like South
Florida. Aside from its polyglot population—Cubans and Central and South Americans fleeing Communism and other tyrannies; Italians and Jews down from the Northeast to retire in the sun; blacks drawn from the rural South; Anglos who had been there for generations and some who had not; always the tourists, lines of them boarding and leaving cruise ships—what gave South Florida its distinctive hum was crime. For the bottom-feeders as for the high-rollers, for the desperate and the unscrupulous on every level, it had been a sizzling crapshoot for at least fifty years, since Meyer Lansky established the beachhead of an international syndicate on the Broward-Dade county line in 1936. For Eastern Kentuckians and East Tennesseans like Roger and his pals, it was where you went to gamble on the future. It meant no more chicken-fried steak, bring on the prime rib and the butterfly shrimp and the daquiris; no more up-a-hollow Mountain Motor Speedway, this was the fast lane. Glitzy, tacky, sexy hot, it meant the promises of tangerine and aqua nights. Dope-heads, dealers, smugglers, pimps, whores, hitmen, cons—you could find them anywhere, but here the bitterness of nonentities fed on dreams as broad as the Atlantic, as seductive as the Caribbean.

That evening the gang entertained Pat Mason and her friend at the Shangri-la restaurant in Plantation, west of Ft. Lauderdale. From the moment they had arrived at her apartment driving an English sports car and a pricey conversion van, it was apparent that they were not broke. Within an hour Roger forked over thirteen thousand plus for a gold Toyota MR2—faster than a Ferrari from a standing start, it was said—that Pat happened to have in her inventory as sales manager at Autoputer. Roger fetched the cash from his car but permitted Carol to hand Pat the stack of bills. It was the third automobile he had bought in the past twelve hours, and he wasn’t even warmed up yet.

The day before, on Saturday morning up at Ormond Beach, only Sherry had shown concern about getting rid of evidence and keeping track of the money and trying to stay cool. She asked the others to help her gather up the Bank of Whitesburg wrappers scattered all over the condo. She deposited these, the badges and fake FBI IDs, Donnie’s bloodstained suede hush puppies, and his and Benny’s dress shirts and ties, which she cut into shreds, in various Dumpsters up and down Atlantic Avenue. She left their suits at a dry cleaner’s, with no intention of ever picking them up, and took Carol and Becky to an
office-supply store in Daytona to purchase what she called pilot’s cases (map cases or salesman’s sample cases) for the cash. Carol and Becky fancied leather ones; Sherry settled for vinyl. Each was equipped with a lock; for fear that the others would forget the combinations, Sherry wrote the numbers down.

That afternoon Roger drove the Olds to Terry Taylor Ford in Daytona, where a ruby-red 1985 Triumph TVR convertible had been sitting on the lot catching his eye since July. Carrying an attaché case and the pilot’s case, he approached a salesman and asked to take a test drive. The salesman, who introduced himself as Bob Loturco, invited Roger into his office and told him that the asking price was twenty thousand. He would be getting a great deal, Loturco said, because the car was technically used, but it had only sixty-five hundred miles on it. Custom-built. What a beauty. Terms could be arranged.

“No problem,” Roger said. “If I like it, I’ll pay cash,” and he patted the cases. “Might need more than one. Looking for a van. Got anything?”

Aroused, Loturco said he had several possibilities. He could work out some super prices, with more than one car involved, especially if this was a strictly cash arrangement.

“I had some business deals come through,” Roger said.

“Great,” Loturco said. “Many of our customers pay cash.”

Roger sensed accurately that he had chosen a salesman who would not be overly scrupulous about the source of a cash payment. Had he known that Robert Loturco had spent fourteen years behind bars in Michigan for armed robbery, Roger would have been even more confident. From a crook’s point of view, that was one of the great things about Florida: if you wanted to find someone sympathetic to your needs, the odds were always in your favor. Another customer had already put a deposit on the Triumph, Loturco said; but with cash, something could be worked out.

Roger drove the car around the block and returned ready to buy. Closing the door to the office, Roger opened both cases and let Loturco gape at the bundles of greenbacks and a chrome-plated .45 semiautomatic resting atop the bills. He paid nineteen thousand for the sports car and fourteen thousand six hundred for a 1984 Dodge van.

At first Roger listed the buyer of the TVR as Carol Malone and
that of the van as Dale Epperson, then asked that a Ron Dykes of Daytona be named as the purchaser of both vehicles. He indicated that he might be interested in additional transportation: he was leaving town for a few days but would be back in touch. Advising that his associates would retrieve the van and the Olds, he took off in the Triumph with the top down.

There actually was a person named Ron Dykes, a fellow in the drywalling (Sheetrock) business whom Roger had talked to at the Pelican Lounge about going into business together. Telephoning Dykes from the condo, Roger told him that the time was right to start a new company, which they would call Hang Rite. He would have his lawyers and accountants in Miami set things up. In the meanwhile Dykes, whose own van had broken down, should pick up the Olds at Terry Taylor Ford and feel free to drive it for the time being.