Authors: J.F. Margos
“Yeah.” She grinned again now. “Not bad for a day’s work.”
I had started work on the CILHI bust. I had to document everything I was doing. That meant stopping frequently to photograph the progress, as well as keeping copious notes, all of which would be turned over to CILHI upon completion of the project.
Dr. Carroway had given me the gender, race and approximate age of the deceased. I could assume nothing about the victim before I began my reconstruct. I pulled the tissue-depth data from one of my charts and carefully measured and cut markers for each part of the face. This was the most painstaking part of the process for me. I worked on it for the bulk of the afternoon, but the fatigue from the trip to Hawaii caught up with me and I turned off the lights and closed the door to my studio at 4:00 p.m. I never close the door to my studio—or any other room in the house—but somehow it seemed like the thing to do this time.
I went in to the kitchen and made myself a cup of hot hibiscus tea. I took my tea back into the living room and sat looking out the French doors at the sights of oncoming spring. I went back in my mind to the first time I met Ted Nikolaides.
I hadn’t been in Da Nang for long, when my gregarious friend decided to come and meet the “new girl.” He came right into the ward where I worked and introduced himself. He saw I wasn’t wearing a wedding band and decided he would find me a man. I laughed at the time at this man so enthusiastic and determined in his old-country matchmaking. It soon became apparent that Ted Nikolaides had a special knack for the task. In the end, Ted had found the perfect man for me—a man who had become the love of my life and with whom I’d had my son. The problem I was having was that my blessings were so numerous and so very much the result of Teddy’s friendship and caring. It seemed incredible to me that this reconstruct would be the only way I would finally have to repay such a friend.
I left the living room and went to my bedroom closet. I got a stool and climbed up into the top and pulled down two
big boxes. I took them into the living room and set them on the floor. Then I went into the kitchen and brewed more tea.
I brought my tea into the living room and sat down on the floor next to the boxes. I opened the lid on the first one and found in it Jack’s badge, his gun and his various citations. I had intended a thousand times to make a special case to display all these things, but somehow I had never gotten around to it.
When Jack had died so suddenly, I had been in shock. I boxed up everything that belonged to him and put it away. It seemed at the time that it was easier to deal with that way. In retrospect, I don’t know if it really was or not. I’m not sure anything really makes that kind of separation easier.
I set those things aside and continued to dig in the box. There was a scrapbook I had made of our Vietnam experience. In it were photos of all our friends, the dog we had adopted, the barracks we’d lived in, the dive where we’d eaten and hung out, and Ted. Ted clowning, Ted beaming, Ted laughing. Picture after picture of Ted and Jack yucking it up—the two young bucks in their military uniforms—one a pilot and the other a military policeman.
I felt sick and sad. I could remember meeting Jack—how tall and handsome he was. He was smart and funny, and he had this very sentimental center that he hid from everyone else, but I saw it. Now I could remember the touch of his hand, the feel of his arms and the way he held me. I could remember the smell of his skin—not his cologne, but that wonderful masculine smell that I could only experience when my cheek was right next to his and my nose was pressed against his face.
Time seemed compressed to me now. I didn’t feel like a woman of sixty, but the same young girl who had been
in Vietnam over thirty years ago. Everything that happened between me and Jack and Ted was yesterday—but it wasn’t. Ted had been shot down and now Jack was gone. I sat on the floor with mementos scattered all around me—my past on paper in my hands.
I dropped the scrapbook on the floor in front of me and put my head in my hands, and I wept out loud. “Jack, why couldn’t you be here with me now? How could you leave me with this?”
I
slept late. I guess the jet lag really got to me. It was 10:00 a.m. and I was still sitting in the kitchen drinking coffee and eating waffles.
I was halfway through the first waffle when Chris Nakis appeared at my front door. I stood before her in an old work shirt with clay stains and holes in it, my shaggiest blue-jean cutoffs and no shoes, with my unwashed hair plastered down to my head. She, on the other hand, was wearing a crisp navy cotton twill skirt and a burgundy cotton short-sleeve shirt and her best sensible shoes. As small and youthful-looking as she appeared for a forty-four-year-old woman, she could have passed that morning for a teenager from one of the local parochial high schools.
I offered her a waffle, but she declined, accepting a cup of my French roast with satisfaction.
“You have news or you wouldn’t be here, so what’s up?”
“The victim we dug up yesterday morning was a male.”
“That’s interesting.”
“Definitely.”
“What’s the approximate age of the victim?”
“I’d say somewhere between the ages of thirty and thirty-five.”
“It could be Doug Hughes then. The age is right.”
“That would explain the similarity between the burial and reburial of the bodies.”
“Did you find the same kind of soil samples as before?”
“Well, it looks like it, but I’ve sent them to A&M again for comparison with the others.”
“Did they ever get back to us on the first ones?”
“Not yet, but they’ve promised me some kind of answer soon.”
“I want to start the reconstruct as soon as possible.”
“I thought you were working on this CILHI thing.”
“I am, but we need some answers in this case. I already know the perpetrator of the crimes against our MIA. I want to get an ID on this Waller Creek victim now.”
“Okay, then come on down to the morgue anytime and we’ll get started.”
“Did you determine yet how this one was killed?”
“It wasn’t a bullet to the head. I had to make a thorough inspection of the bones, but I found some marks on the ribs that indicate to me that this person was shot, a couple of times—just not in the head.”
“Have you told Leo yet?”
“Actually, she came down to the morgue late yesterday and I went over everything with her.”
“Good. I’ll be down later today to get started.”
I got dressed and went down to my son’s office. When I walked into the Homicide Division I was greeted
warmly by many old friends. I either knew them because of Jack, or I knew them because of Mike. Either way, they all knew me.
Mike and Tommy were engrossed in some discussion over an open file on Tommy’s desk. They both looked up as I approached.
“Hey, Mom. What’s up?”
“There’s something I want to do, but I don’t want to just haul off and do it without clearing it with you two first.”
Tommy and Mike looked at each other. They had that “Oh, no” look on their faces.
“I would like to go and talk to Dody Waldrep myself, and I may want to visit with Jimmy Hughes again.”
“Mom.”
“I’ll take Leo with me—unofficially, of course—but I feel the need to talk to Dody in person and to see Jimmy again.”
“Mom, you are not investigating this case. You’re doing the forensic sculptures, but we are the detectives, and—”
Tommy interrupted. “Why?”
“What?” Mike asked.
“Not you, her—why? Why do you feel you have to talk to him?”
“I want to meet Dody and get a feel for him myself. Then I may want to meet the girl, Lori, too. I want to revisit Jimmy because I feel I could make more progress than I did last time.”
“You already made more progress with him than we have,” Tommy said. “But here’s a news flash for you.”
“What?”
“We’ve had surveillance on him since the second set of bones popped up.”
“And?”
“Lori Webster came to his house yesterday, Mom, and she stayed over,” Mike added.
Tommy sighed. “We were going to go talk to him, but the truth is, I’m willing to let you try first. He’s not going to tell us anything anyway.”
“Tommy…” Mike started.
Tommy held up his hand. “Like it or not, Junior, Toni gets more out of this guy.”
“What about Dody and Lori?” I asked.
Tommy waved his hand. “Why not? That old drunk seems pretty harmless to me, and the girl is just whacked.”
Mike sighed and put his hands on his hips.
“Tommy, you cannot be real. This guy may be drunk, but who knows what he could do, and you’re actually going to let my mom go and talk to him?”
“Technically, I can’t stop a private citizen from having a conversation with another private citizen. More to the point is the fact that they all might talk more to her than any of them did to you and me, simply because she’s a woman and she’s not a cop.”
“And the risk?” Mike asked.
“Mike, you need to get real. Toni’s a black belt in aikido, and if I remember right, she outranks you, pal.”
Mike shook his head in frustration.
“Besides, my girlfriend is going with her, and she
is
a cop. She also knows a lot about behavior. I’d like to hear what she thinks about all of them.”
“It’s our case, Tommy.”
“That’s ego, man. I’m interested in information. Leo will go with her—off duty.” He glared at me.
“Absolutely, off duty,” I agreed.
“Leo’s a trained law enforcement officer.” He picked
up his cell phone and dialed. “You’ll be fine with her along.” He spoke into the cell phone now, “Hi, talking to Toni here about the two of you going to see Jimmy Hughes again, this Waldrep character, and maybe even the Webster woman…” He paused, so I knew Leo must be talking. “Well, if you’ll keep your shirt on five seconds and let me finish, okay? All I was going to say is, they might do more talking to the two of you than they did to us, but you go off duty only, Leo, and wear that ankle holster I gave you like before. No arguments…” He paused again, and then he said goodbye and hung up.
“I’m sure she agreed to those terms,” I said.
“She did.” He smiled. “Finesse them, Toni. Get me some new information, would you? Right now all I’ve got is bupkes and two skeletons dug out of the mud.”
“I’ll do my best.”
Leo drove into town from her houseboat on the lake and parked her Jeep in front of my house. I came outside just as she drove up. She got out of the Jeep wearing jeans, a T-shirt and a windbreaker. She pulled up her trouser leg and smiled.
“As ordered,” she said.
“I see,” I said. “Let’s go in my Mustang.”
“Cool! I haven’t ridden in this hot rod in a while, it’ll be fun.”
“I think we should visit Jimmy Hughes again first. I want to ask him about Lori Webster and his brother. Let’s see if we can get him to tell us anything.”
“Works for me. Tommy says he’s not talking to them. Just stalls them.”
I cranked up the Fastback and we backed out of the driveway and took off in a blue streak.
When we got to Jimmy’s, he was outside working on his truck in his carport. He pulled his head out from under the hood as we pulled up. He wiped his hands on an old red rag as we walked up the gravel driveway.
“Y’all back again?”
“Hi, Jimmy, how are you?” I asked.
“All right, I guess. Got too many people asking a lot of questions, but other than that, I’m all right.”
“I want to ask questions, too, Jimmy. I want to ask questions because I have to know what happened to Addie. Don’t you want to know what happened to her?”
He shrugged. “I guess so, although she’s gone now and there ain’t nothin’ I can do about it. Already figured she was gone a long time ago.”
“I know you care, Jimmy, because you came forward and identified her.”
“Way I look at it, I just did what I was supposed to. So, what is it you want to know now?”
He was direct. He definitely did not want us there any longer than necessary. He stood behind the truck and made no move toward the house at all.
“We’ve been told by your mother that Doug had a girlfriend. A girl named Lori Webster. Do you know her?”
He shrugged again. “I know her. So what?”
“I was wondering if you could tell us anything about their relationship—how involved they might have been. It could make a difference as far as his relationship with Addie.”
“He dated Lori, and I already told you that I know he and Addie didn’t have a thing. What else?”
“I was hoping you could give us more details than that, Jimmy.”
“Like what?”
“How involved he might have really been with Lori, and anything you know about her now.”
“Can’t help you.”
That was it. He shifted from one foot to the other, and rolled some of the gravel from the driveway under his right boot.
“That all?” he asked.
I sighed. He wasn’t giving, and we knew from Mike and Tommy that Lori had just been here the day before. He was a tough case. He had seen too many things in the war, and he just wanted to be left alone. I knew too many men from my generation who were just like him.
“I got to finish working on my truck.”
I could see he wasn’t going to talk today, so we said our goodbyes and left Jimmy Hughes to finish his truck maintenance.
We drove out to Manor. It was an icky day weatherwise. It wasn’t really overcast, but it wasn’t sunny either. It was one of those depressing low-light days where the sun comes and goes and you wish it would just do one or the other and stay that way. We talked about the case on the way to Manor.
“What did you think about Jimmy?” I asked.
“He does a great imitation of a clam.”
I nodded. “The problem is, I can’t tell if he’s really hiding something, or he’s just being him.”
“I watched his eye movements while you were talking to him. His eyes shift to the left a lot, and he looks down. He also exhibits other minute body-language cues, especially the way he blinks and his eyebrow movements—all these cues that I noticed are cues for evasion and lying.”
“So, he
is
hiding something.”
She nodded. “I believe he is. You know the stats on who discovers the body, right?”
“You mean, the person to discover the body is usually the killer—those stats?”
“Right. The same stats would apply to someone who ID’s a body.”
“Like what Jimmy did.”
“Exactly like what he did. It could be a coincidence that he saw Addie’s face on the news and that he was the first one to call in, but the stats say it probably isn’t.”
“He was never involved with her, and he hadn’t seen her in over twenty years, so why was he so interested in identifying her?” I mused out loud.
“He had a potential motive, and he’s been seen recently with someone else who had a similar motive.”
“Lori Webster.”
“Lori Webster,” she affirmed. “Think about it, Toni, either one of them could have done this alone, or they could have done it together. Why would these two people—one who moved away to Austin almost thirty years ago, and one who moved to Georgetown sixteen years ago—why would these two people still have anything to do with each other? They have one thing in common as far as I can see.”
“He loved Addie, and she loved Doug.”
“Bingo.”
“Jimmy had been left behind years ago, but gave up when Addie married Dody, then he finds out his brother is having a thing with Addie—and at the same time Lori is getting dumped off by Doug.”
“It’ll be interesting to talk to Dody in person—to get
his take on all this. Jimmy says his brother wasn’t involved with Addie. I wonder what Dody says.”
“Apparently he’s not saying much of anything to the boys.”
I pulled off the main road and drove up the gravel driveway to the front of Dody’s ramshackle little house. It looked virtually abandoned. There was an old, beat-up, partially rusted-out pickup truck parked to the left side of the house. In the front yard, a chicken wandered by, and out in the grass amongst the cedar trees two goats grazed.
“Lovely,” Leo remarked.
“What did you expect for a guy who’s drunk ninety percent of the time? He hasn’t held a job for more than six months in the last fourteen years.”
“Great.”
We walked up onto the rickety wooden porch and I knocked on the door. Dody answered. He was wearing worn and dirty jeans and a filthy white T-shirt that had a hole in the left sleeve and one in the bottom near the hem. He reeked of everything foul.
He cleared his throat. “I ain’t buyin’ nothin’ today, ladies,” and he started to close the door.
“I’m not selling anything, Mr. Waldrep. I’m the forensic sculptor who reconstructed the face of your wife. This other lady is an associate of mine.”
He stopped his closure of the door and squinted at both of us. “What do you want with me? I already talked to them cops. I don’t know nothin’ about what happened to my wife. I don’t have nothin’ else to say about it.”
“Please, Mr. Waldrep. We just have a couple of questions and then we’ll go.”
He continued squinting at Leo and me, and then opened the door. “Come on in then, but don’t tarry too long. I got things to do.”
I doubted that seriously. The only thing I imagined that Dody Waldrep had to do was to drink more than he already had. He was slurring his words, and as we watched him walk through the room back to his chair, we exchanged glances that told me Leo had also noticed the wobble in his step.
He practically fell into the chair, and then motioned for Leo and me to sit on the sofa. It was a horrible excuse for furniture and I imagined that it was probably a breeding ground for all manner of mites and who knew what else, but I sat anyway.
“So, what is it you need to know that I ain’t already been asked?”
“First of all, Mr. Waldrep, are you aware that more bones were found near the river yesterday?”
“Heard sumpthin’ about it on the news. Didn’t pay much attention.”
“You didn’t think that it sounded familiar to the way in which your wife’s bones were found?”
“Didn’t think about it. She’s been found, we buried her, end of story.”
“It didn’t occur to you that these might be the bones of Doug Hughes?”