Thicker Than Water Page 10

  “How was Jeopardy?” Louis asked, to break the silence.

  Benjamin glanced at him suspiciously. “I missed Final Jeopardy.”

  “What was the question?”

  He shrugged. “It was dumb. Something about a shot heard around the world. The category was baseball. I don’t know a lot of sports stuff.”

  “Ralph Branca,” Louis said.

  Benjamin’s eyes widened. “Yeah, that was it! That was the answer! How’d you know that?”

  Benjamin looked up at Susan, who was standing, hands on hips, staring at Louis. She still looked angry, maybe about the cookies, but more likely about what he had suggested about the Jagger case.

  “I’m going to go see Mobley tomorrow. I need to see the Jagger file,” Louis said.

  “You’re on my payroll now, Kincaid,” she said. “Don’t waste the taxpayers’ money digging up the past.”

  “If I work for you, I work my way,” Louis said evenly.

  Susan was silent. Benjamin looked up at her, over at Louis, then back at his mother. He grabbed another burnt cookie out of the sink and bit into it.

  “Mom, these are okay, see?” he said quickly. “The outside is bad, but the inside is still okay. We can use some of them. Ma? Look . . .”

  Susan’s hand went out to cup Benjamin’s head, pulling him to her waist. She was still staring daggers at Louis.

  “This isn’t going to work,” Louis said, rising.

  “Take the pager,” Susan said.

  He looked at her in surprise.

  “I want to win this,” she said. “Bring me something I can use.”

  “We striking another bargain here, counselor?”

  “Call it what you want,” she said. “Just bring me something I can use.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Louis set the Sports Illustrated aside and stood up, glancing at his watch. Mobley had kept him waiting over thirty minutes. He went to the reception desk. A bronzed blonde in a sleeveless mint green dress looked up.

  “Can you buzz him again?” Louis asked her.

  “I told you. He gets mad if I do that,” she said.

  “Buzz him. I’ll protect you.”

  The blonde gave him a smirk. She didn’t need protecting; her biceps rivaled his own. If he remembered correctly, Mobley kept a bench press in his office. He wondered if she worked out with him.

  While he waited, Louis scanned the portraits on the far wall. It was a gallery of all the Lee County Sheriffs from the last two decades, all tight-lipped old white guys. A parade of pale stale males . . . until you got to Lance Mobley with his windsurfer hair and Robert Redford jaw. Louis’s eyes went to the middle portrait. It was larger than the others with a fancier gilt frame. The gold plaque beneath read HOWARD DINKLE, SHERIFF 1962–1970.

  Dinkle looked to be in his late fifties. He had been sheriff during the Kitty Jagger case. Probably dead by now.

  “The sheriff will see you now.”

  Louis went down the hall and tapped on the door. Mobley hollered back and he went inside.

  Mobley’s leonine head was bent over his desk, a file spread in front of him. Louis glanced at the weight bench and he had a sudden image of the secretary laying flat on her back, dressed in hot pink spandex, sweating to the oldies. He had a second vision of Mobley on top of her.

  He turned back to Mobley. On the wall behind him were the standard community recognition certificates and plaques, plus something that looked like a college degree. Louis squinted and could read the name of the school. Florida State University School of Law.

  Mobley sat back, swinging gently in his chair. “This is interesting reading.”

  “Is that the Jagger case file?”

  Mobley nodded. “Had a damn hard time finding it after you called. Locating something in that shack they call a warehouse is like digging through an outhouse for used toilet paper.”

  “Nice analogy,” Louis said.

  “Why did you ask me to pull it?”

  Louis pulled up a chair. He wasn’t sure how much to tell Mobley. He was no expert at legal maneuvering and wondered if he could hurt Susan’s case. “Cade claims Duvall gave him a lousy defense,” Louis said. “I just wanted to take a look.”

  “You don’t believe him, do you?”

  Louis shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  Mobley closed the file and stacked it on top of two others. He pushed the folders toward Louis.

  “Okay, here’s the copies you wanted. Take a look—a quiet look, if you get my drift—but I doubt you’ll be able to tell whether Duvall did a good job or not. Takes a legal mind to be able to do that.”

  Louis glanced at the diploma on the wall. Massage the ego.

  “How about some help?” Louis asked.

  Mobley caught the look at the diploma. “I’m not the person to ask, Kincaid. I’m on the other side here, remember?”

  “Your part is done, Sheriff. It’s up to the lawyers now.”

  “The lawyers,” Mobley said quietly. “Ever wonder what the world would be like if we didn’t have any lawyers?”

  Louis ignored the comment.

  “Okay, then let me ask you this,” Mobley went on. “Did you ever stop to think about what happens if you find out Duvall did fuck up the Jagger case? That gives your client more motive to kill him, doesn’t it?”

  “Not if somebody else had a better reason.”

  “You’re wasting your time.”

  “What if he didn’t do it?”

  “He’s out now anyway, so who cares?”

  “I do,” Louis said. “And you should.”

  Mobley’s jaw twitched, but he just leaned back in the chair and leveled his eyes at Louis. “I don’t question any conviction without evidence to the contrary. Especially a case that happened when I was too young to care about anything other than getting laid.”

  Louis had a thought. “You were here then?”

  Mobley rose and went to the bench. “Yeah, I grew up here.” His eyes snapped to Louis’s face. “I didn’t know her, Kincaid.”

  “This is a small town,” Louis said. “It was even smaller then. Why didn’t you know her?”

  “I was a senior, she was a freshmen. Big gap in those days, even at a small school like Fort Myers High. Plus we just ran in different crowds. You know how cliques can be.”

  Mobley was rolling his hand gently over the circular weights.

  “You don’t remember anything about her?”

  Mobley drew a breath, letting it out slowly. “I remember she was pretty. We never got it on with the greasers.”

  “Greasers?” Louis said.

  “Frats and greasers. That’s what the world was divided into in my salad days, Kincaid.”

  “Greaser? You mean like John Travolta?” Louis asked.

  Mobley was smiling slightly, enjoying his trip back in time. “Yeah. Guys in black leather who took shop, dropped out or got drafted.”

  “What about the girls?”

  “They got pregnant.”

  Louis was silent. Somehow that didn’t jive with the picture he was building in his brain of Kitty Jagger.

  “But you remember the murder?” Louis asked.

  Mobley’s hand dropped from the weight bench.

  “Yeah. They made an announcement over the PA system. Some of the girls were crying.” He shook his head. “I remembering thinking what phoneys they were because none of them ever looked twice at Kitty Jagger.”

  Mobley looked at Louis. “He killed her, Kincaid. We all know it.”

  “I still want to take a look. At everything.”

  Mobley walked to a credenza and opened a large cardboard box. On the side was written: #4532, Homicide, LCSO, Florida, April, 1966, Jagger, K.

  He pulled out some plastic bags and a stack of photos, spreading them on his desk. Louis moved to it. The plastic bags held some bloody clothing, some torn clothing that looked like red cotton, and a pair of girl’s panties, turned inside-out. They appeared to have droplets of brown blood a
nd several large yellowish stains, along with some discoloring Louis assumed was from the lab testing.

  “Is this semen?” Louis asked.

  “Yeah, that’s how they pinned the panties to Cade. He’s a secretor.”

  Louis knew that meant his blood group could be typed from any body fluid. “So’s eighty percent of the population,” Louis said. “What’s Cade’s blood type?”

  “O positive.”

  “Most common type. Did they break it down into subgroups? Proteins?”

  Mobley shook his head. “It was 1966, the dark ages for serology. I doubt they went beyond seeing that big O come up.”

  “Could they now?”

  Mobley was getting irritated. “Hell, I don’t know. That shit’s awful old. Samples break down.”

  “Did Cade offer an alibi?” Louis asked.

  “Yeah, some guy named Atterberry. But they were never able to find him.”

  “What about the weapon? You have it?”

  Mobley reached into the cardboard box and pulled out another large plastic bag. He extracted a tool and laid it on the desk between them. It looked like a pickaxe, about a foot and a half in length with a wooden shaft.

  Louis picked it up, his eyes drawn to the forged steel double head. “Jesus, what is this?” he asked.

  “Gardeners use it to loosen hard dirt. Cade’s—and only Cade’s—fingerprints are all over the handle.” Mobley gave a twisted smile. “It’s called a Clot-Buster. Catchy name, huh?”

  Louis turned it over in his hands. It was heavy, one end of the steel blunt-edged and coated with rust. The other metal end had three thick prongs, covered with a brown grit that Louis was sure was dried blood. It was hard to think of the evil-looking thing being used for something as innocent as gardening.

  “She was stabbed with this end?” he asked, nodding at the three prongs.

  “Yup. I was reading the autopsy report when you came in,” Mobley said. “The wounds all showed that three-prong profile.”

  “How did they know this was Cade’s?” Louis asked.

  Mobley pointed to a blurred mark on the handle. “It’s hard to see, but there’s a phone number there, done with a laundry marker. It was Cade’s business phone.”

  “Anybody could have put it there.”

  “Cade’s wife admitted she marked his tools with their phone number because she was tired of him losing them. Cade claims this one went missing a couple days earlier.”

  Louis set the Clot-Buster on the desk.

  “What else you got?” he asked.

  Mobley picked up a stack of photos and handed them to Louis. They were crime scene photos, each labeled with an evidence number from the trial. Louis went quickly through the first ones, which showed the dumpsite and wide-angles of the body.

  He flipped to the next series of photos, all shots of Kitty Jagger’s body. Blood smeared across her bare, bruised thighs. A close-up of her hands. And a shot of her torso with its gaping wounds in a slender chest.

  He paused at the next photo. He was staring into Kitty’s face. He was trying to see some resemblance to the smiling girl of the newspaper photo. But this face wasn’t even human-looking anymore. The body had lain in the dump for two days and he knew from experience what that could mean.

  It was blood-streaked, the eyes open, the corneas milky with death. Rigor had frozen her lips into a horrible grin, revealing her small teeth. The left part of her cheek had been pecked away, probably by the gulls that he had seen circling over the dump.

  He set the photos down, running his hand over his eyes. Mobley had walked back to his desk and was sitting when Louis turned to face him.

  “Why are you wasting your time with this?” Mobley said. “From what I hear, Outlaw hasn’t got anything that’s going to help Cade beat this Duvall thing. I’d think you’d be working on that.”

  Louis was still looking down at the photograph of Kitty Jagger’s ravaged face.

  “It was twenty years ago. Let it go, Kincaid,” Mobley said quietly.

  The door opened and the secretary poked her head in. “Sheriff, Vern Sandusky is on hold.”

  Mobley picked up the receiver, finger poised over a button as he looked at Louis. Louis was still staring at the photo of Kitty.

  “Kincaid.”

  Louis looked up.

  “Forget her. She’s dead and her killer has been convicted. There’s nothing you can do for her now.”

  Mobley jabbed at the phone and swung his chair around away from Louis.

  Louis gathered up his files and left. When he walked out, the Amazon was looking at him.

  “How’d it go?” she asked.

  “Hard to convince your boss of anything, isn’t it?”

  She smiled. “Not if you know how.”

  Louis’s beeper went off, and he tried to shift the files so he could turn it off, but she beat him to it, reaching across her desk to his hip.

  “Need to use the phone?” she asked, leaning on the desk.

  Louis shook his head, seeing Susan’s number. “Nah. It can wait.”

  “Let me know if there is anything else I can do for you.”

  The look in the Amazon’s eyes wasn’t hard to translate. Okay, he’d use it. “What about a transcript from Jack Cade’s 1967 trial?” he asked.

  “You don’t want much, do you?”

  He tried a smile. “It would be a big help to me.”

  She cocked her head, tapping her pen against her cheek. “Okay, give me your number,” she said. “I’ll call you if I can get it.”

  Louis rattled off the pager number. The Amazon waved the paper between two long pink fingernails. “Got it.”

  He was going to ask for her name, but he had the feeling it would open doors he didn’t want opened right now.

  “Thanks, I owe you one,” he said.

  “I’ll collect later,” she said.

  Chapter Thirteen

  It shouldn’t have bothered him. It was just a normal wound chart—the simple line drawing of a generic female body that pathologists used to record injuries to the deceased. Louis stared at the sketch. The body portion of the drawing was oddly neutered with no nipples or pubic area. The pathologist had dutifully drawn in the twelve stab marks on the torso.

  But something about it was bothering him.

  Then he saw it. The drawing’s face. Unlike the body, it was detailed, with eyes, hair—shit, and a smile.

  Jesus. He had heard about these old wound charts, but he had never seen one before. They had been phased out years ago when someone finally realized how grotesque they were.

  He tossed the diagram aside, hoisted himself off the bed and went to the kitchen. He returned with a Dr Pepper and it was several minutes and half a can later before he returned to Kitty Jagger’s autopsy report.

  The pages of the twenty-year-old report were yellowed, some even mildewed from lying in the damp bowels of the municipal filing system. A musty odor rose up to him as he carefully turned the pages.

  Katherine Lynn Jagger. DOB: 2-29-51. Height: 5 ft. 5. Weight: 122 lbs.

  Cause of death: cerebral hemorrhage.

  Manner of death: blunt trauma to the skull.

  Mode of death: homicide.

  Issy jumped up on the bed. The cat stared at him for a moment, then laid down on one of the open folders.

  He was looking for something that might provide a clue about where she had been killed before being dumped. But so far there was nothing.

  Contents of stomach: partially digested beef, potatoes, bread, unidentified sugar liquid, alcohol.

  Louis shifted his weight and the bed creaked. He was trying to see her now, trying to imagine where she had been, what she looked like, what she had done the night she died. She had worked that night at Hamburger Heaven. She had probably eaten a hamburger, fries and a Coke sometime during her shift.

  Tissue analysis: nothing unusual.

  Lung analysis: nicotine, potassium monopersulfate.

  Okay, she was a smoker. And
she had at least one drink about an hour before she was killed.

  Mobley had said she was a “greaser,” the wilder crowd, the kids who smoked, drank, dropped out, got pregnant.

  Louis flipped the page back to the internal organ analysis. She hadn’t been pregnant.

  But she definitely had been raped. Semen had been found in her vagina and on her thighs. Coupled with the extensive bruising on her inner thighs, everything pointed to rape, not consentual sex.

  He started to set the report aside but paused, something registering that had not struck him before. He flipped back to the lung analysis. Potassium monopersulfate. What the hell was that?

  He pulled his notebook closer and made a note to call Vince Carissimi, the medical examiner, in the morning.

  The low rumble of thunder pulled Louis’s attention to the window. A cool breeze, smelling of rain, wafted in through the jalousies. He glanced up at the wet stain in the ceiling above his bed. It had rained almost every night in the last week and he knew he was living on borrowed time before the whole damn roof gave way.

  He set the autopsy report aside and scanned the bed, looking for the police report. Issy was sleeping on it. He tried to ease it out from under her.

  “Off, cat,” he said.

  With a quick move, he jerked it out. The cat didn’t even look up at him.

  He opened the folder. He was looking for the lead investigator on the case and finally zeroed in on a Detective Robert Ahnert. His signature appeared on all the reports. Ahnert’s own accounts, including his initial call to the dumpsite, were written in a concise, unemotional style. Even his report of going to the Jagger home to deliver the news that Kitty’s body had been found was handled in the same detached manner.

  Louis started to gather it all up but then paused. Something in his memory was nagging him. He went to his dresser and got the file that held the newspaper clips about Kitty’s murder. He found the interview with her father, Willard Jagger.

  Damn. There it was. Willard Jagger said he had reported his daughter missing on April 9th. Two days before her body was discovered in the dump.

  So where was the missing person’s report? He knew that cops usually let twenty-four or even forty-eight hours go by before they acted on a missing person’s report. But this wasn’t a big city where teenagers normally went missing. This was a small town where the disappearance of a fifteen-year-old girl would probably send up a red flag. Why hadn’t Ahnert acted when Willard Jagger reported his daughter missing?