[Jess Kimball 01.0 - 02.0] Fatal Starts Page 9

  “Love at first sight, then?” Ben asked. “She stole your heart back then, and in all these years, you’ve never wanted to be with anyone else?”

  Oliver knew it sounded dumb. Men didn’t feel like that about women these days. Men were worldly now, more experienced. But here Oliver was, at the end of his life, and he still wanted only Helen; loved only her, desired exclusively his wife of twenty-five years.

  “What kind of a sap does that make me?” Oliver had laughed out loud for the first time in several months.

  The sound of it surprised them both, and Ben laughed with him.

  As he sat at his desk tonight, thinking about leaving Helen forever, their first meeting and laughing with Ben about his enduring love for his wife washed over him anew.

  He remained lost in his memories until something jarred him back to the present.

  He shook his head and tried to make sense of whatever it was that had roused him.

  That’s when Oliver heard the cries, not human, but animal. They came from outside. The horses in the barn.

  What could have stirred them so? Normally they were quiet at night.

  Without thinking, he picked up the house phone and speed-dialed Todd Dale. His friend Todd was the manager of the ranch and took care of the horses. Oliver couldn’t do it himself anymore. No strength. Just getting up and walking was more than he could manage without his cane.

  Todd’s phone rang repeatedly. Oliver counted ten, fifteen, twenty rings. “Damn it, Todd! Where the hell are you?”

  The whinnies and cries grew louder, more urgent.

  Oliver pushed his chair back from the table and reached for his cane. Slowly, like the sick old man he’d become, he stood upright, slipped the cell phone into his pocket, and began the twenty-foot trek to the front door.

  It seemed to take forever to reach the exit, but when he glanced again at the grandfather clock in the corner, he saw he’d made it in five minutes.

  By this time the horses were wild.

  And something else—he smelled smoke. The acrid odor filled the air, carrying the horses’ fear from the small barn to where Oliver stood on the front porch in feeble panic.

  He reached into his pocket and pulled out the cell phone Helen insisted that he keep on him at all times.

  He pressed the 5 key, programmed to ring Helen’s private line at the Governor’s mansion in Tallahassee, or wherever she might be.

  As it rang, he struggled to descend the three steps from the porch and make his way toward the small barn nearest the ranch house.

  Helen would answer. She kept the companion phone near her all the time, too. At this moment, her constant worry seemed more like a gift than a nuisance.

  Oliver planted his right foot and then dragged the other, inching forward as quickly as he could.

  The noise from the horses’ panic became more dissonant, overwhelming his reason. Smoke filled his lungs. If he could reach the barn door, open it, the stallion, Maggie’s grandson, could get out. The horses could run free.

  He didn’t care about the barn, but the horses were his family now. They depended on him as much as Helen did. He couldn’t—wouldn’t—leave them inside a burning building to die.

  He heard Helen’s voice mail message kick in. “Honey, I’m not able to pick up right now. I’ll call you right back.”

  “Shit!” He threw the phone to the ground and began to stumble along a little quicker.

  Maggie’s grandson whinnied so loudly Oliver could distinguish Jake’s terror-filled cries from the terror of the other five horses inside the barn.

  Oliver struggled to move faster. He tripped over a tuft of grass, just as the left side of the barn burst into flames and Jake’s screaming became the sound of all Oliver’s nightmares, throwing him off balance.

  He stumbled and fell.

  Oliver struggled to right himself, rose and noticed the pain in his left knee when he tried to walk. He winced when he put his weight on the leg, but kept moving toward Jake.

  “Hold on, baby,” he whispered under his breath. “I’m coming. I’m coming.”

  Tears streamed down his face from smoke-filled eyes. He couldn’t see. He bent into his forearm and wiped his face on his shirt sleeve, but the stinging pain in his eyes continued.

  How could this be happening? Where was Todd? Where was Helen?

  He patted his pocket for the cell phone and remembered he’d thrown it into the dirt. He couldn’t go back for it.

  “Hang on, Jake. Please hang on,” Oliver pled, coughing, choked with sobs as well as smoke.

  He’d lost everything else. He had to save Jake. Eric’s beloved Jake.

  Oliver stumbled and fell again. He couldn’t rise. He tried, but he couldn’t do it.

  He lifted his body weight up on his right forearm and right leg.

  He wriggled toward the barn door, dragging his left side, hearing the horses bucking, hitting the walls with their feet, the walls built to protect the horses from the strongest hurricane winds, walls with shuttered windows.

  Walls that were just too far away. He couldn’t get there. He was too tired. He couldn’t see. He couldn’t breathe.

  He fell backward, landing in the dirt again. He couldn’t move.

  Was this it then? Was this how he would die? Not from the stroke or suicide, but from exhaustion, smoke inhalation, fatigue?

  “No. I won’t do that. I won’t,” Oliver said aloud, forcing his weight onto his belly and using his one good arm to crawl closer to the building.

  He felt the heat of the barn ten feet from the structure, the roaring blaze deafening.

  He reached the door and tried to stand up to open it.

  He grasped the white hot metal handle, burning his palm, not caring.

  He rested his full weight on the handle. He pulled with his entire body and all of his feeble strength as he fell to the ground.

  The door was locked. He couldn’t open it.

  “Jake,” he cried, his voice too weak to carry over the noise of the fire.

  But Jake heard. He whinnied again, even more alarmed.

  He was in there and Oliver couldn’t get him out. Oliver was just so tired. He closed his eyes a moment, tried to breathe.

  The roar of the fire from inside the barn was the last thing he noticed.

  6

  Dentonville, Florida

  Thursday 8:45 p.m.

  Lucky’s was just as Jess remembered it: a run-down diner seven miles out of town on an old truck route “at the crossroads of nowhere and nothing,” as Vivian Ward had told her the first time she visited the place.

  Jess took a moment to get her bearings. There were no other cars in the parking lot except Vivian’s ten-year-old Chevy.

  Maybe Jess would be the first to locate Arnold Ward’s wife tonight. If Vivian were here, and if she hadn’t been contacted by the local news vultures yet, that would change soon. Jess wanted to spare Vivian at least that much, if she could.

  Jess glanced at the clock on the SUV’s dash and noticed the time, a bit surprised to see she’d made the trip in less than two hours by using her radar detector and ignoring the speed limits.

  She grabbed her bag and opened the door to duck out. She’d wasted too much time already.

  “Are we going inside?” Mike asked.

  Jess glanced over at the kid. Crusted blood darkened the area over his right eye. He was going to have a nasty looking bruise around the orbital socket tomorrow and maybe a scar worth keeping. Reporters liked to brag about their physical exploits and Jess guessed Mike hadn’t had many opportunities to do so in the past.

  “You wait here. Vivian knows me.”

  “Okay.” He actually sounded more relieved than annoyed.

  “If you want to help,” she said, “you could take some still photographs of the diner while I’m in there. We might be able to use them.”

  She had one foot out the door before she remembered she was still wearing the heels she’d donned for the governor. She had jeans and
more useful shoes in the back but she couldn’t afford the time to change.

  She stood outside for a few seconds, oddly reluctant to enter, despite the urgency. She knew all too well the impact of the sorrow she was about to inflict on a woman who had already suffered too much. Down the road, Jess knew, hearing the news from her instead of a total stranger might make a difference to Vivian’s grief recovery. Jess wished she could do more for Vivian, and for all the parents of murdered children.

  “Okay,” she whispered to herself, and opened the door.

  Lucky’s was a throwback to another age, a piece of Southern culture not found in much of Florida anymore. Booths were upholstered in tufted red vinyl, flanking tables of chrome edged red laminate. Dishes were cream-colored melamine scratched by daily battles with stainless flatware worn thin. Coffee was served in thick mugs, grits came with the breakfast, and iced tea was always sweetened with sugar before it arrived at the table. A working jukebox stood in the corner.

  Jess eyed Vivian sitting in the back playing solitaire with an old deck of cards, precisely where she’d interviewed her the last time.

  Vivian’s mostly white hair was gathered in a wide barrette at the nape of her neck. She wore purple nursing scrubs that barely touched her skinny body except where the soiled white apron was tied around her waist.

  Scuffed white nursing shoes made her feet seem oversized for her ankles. “Most comfortable shoes there is,” she’d told Jess before.

  A long brown cigarette dangled from a mouth covered in deep red lipstick.

  A gold chain with two baby shoe charms on it dangled from her scrawny neck. Bony hands covered with age spots, fingernails chewed below the quick, dealt the cards.

  All the signs were there if, like Jess, you knew how to interpret them. Vivian couldn’t forget the two sons she’d lost, her two grown daughters insufficient to fill the hole in her life.

  “Kids ain’t cars,” Vivian had told her a few weeks ago. “You can’t just get new ones down at the dealership.”

  In truth, Vivian’s daughters had moved on. They called home once in a while, but not often, according to Vivian. With Arnold dead, Jess thought, Vivian was alone in the world.

  Vivian glanced up from her game as Jess came across the room.

  “Hey, Jess,” she called, looking back down at the deck and turning over the next three cards, as if Jess had been in the diner yesterday instead of weeks ago. “I figured you wouldn’t be coming around until after Friday night when they kill that bastard, once and for all.” Kilt and figgered and Fridee. Vivian’s drawl was as strong as ever. She sounded like a country music singer from a bygone era, except her tone lacked all emotion.

  So she didn’t know about Arnold. Jess pasted a smile on her face and approached. “How are you doing, Viv?”

  “Good, sugar. You?” She shuffled another three cards and flipped them over, revealing a four of clubs that would play and put it up on the five of diamonds. She squinted around the cigarette smoke that drifted upward and filled the crinkles around her eyes.

  “Like coffee?” She nodded toward the pot behind the counter and pulled the next three cards from the deck, revealing another playable card.

  “Sure,” Jess said, glad to delay the inevitable, since she’d arrived in time. She walked around to snag a mug off the shelf and fill it half full with coffee that smelled fresh enough. “Pour one for you?”

  Vivian nodded. Jess took the pot over and refilled her cup, then returned the pot to its warming plate and carried her own mug to Vivian’s table.

  Jess waited until Vivian finished her game. The cards were worn, corners bent, the white spaces dingy, sticky with dried sweat and grease. Vivian played solitaire over and over, night after night, until the cards wore out or got lost. She didn’t seem to mind that often there were fewer than fifty-two cards by the time she tossed the deck. Then she’d unwrap the cellophane on a stiff new deck and start over. Her ritual had continued for years. Marking time. Occupying her mind with alternating red and black suits kept her despair manageable.

  When Vivian reached the point in her game where she could no longer make a move, she put all the cards face up on the table and raked them together. She lifted her fingers to her cigarette and took a final puff before crushing it out in the full ashtray that stood on a pedestal next to the table. She gathered the cards up and began to shuffle, but Jess reached over and covered both of Vivian’s hands with one of hers.

  “Viv, honey,” Jess began, and then stopped. The words she’d rehearsed in the car suddenly stuck in her chest.

  Vivian pulled her hands away, still wrapped around the card deck, and returned to her shuffling.

  Jess cleared her throat. “I have some bad news.”

  “Ain’t no other kind,” Vivian said. She shuffled the cards a few more times. Fanned and then stacked them together. Set the deck down on the table and cut. Rapped the deck with the first two knuckles of her right claw. Then picked them up again and began to deal the familiar layout. She kept her gaze firmly down, watching her hands expertly arrange the cards.

  “It’s Arnold. He’s been hurt, Viv. It’s bad.”

  Vivian placed the remaining cards in the deck on the table and played the hand she’d laid out. She moved a new cigarette around with her tongue and took a deep drag, allowing the smoke to seep from her nostrils and trail upward.

  “Did you hear me? I said Arnold’s been hurt.”

  Vivian picked up the remaining cards in the deck and continued with her game. “I heard. About the truck and the explosion. I figured it was him. I didn’t hear anything about Manson, though. Is he dead?”

  Jess had seen victims of shock many times, recognized it in Vivian, she thought. The flat affect and lack of emotion that sometimes accompanied the receipt of terrible news. Unfortunately, the numbness didn’t last forever. How much more tragedy could Vivian handle? After Tommy Taylor was executed, would she fall apart?

  “Manson wasn’t hurt.”

  “Too bad,” Vivian said, continuing to play the game. The stark words struck Jess like a sucker punch. In all her prior interviews with Vivian, Jess believed her an irretrievably broken spirit, but not vindictive and never less than compassionate.

  “Why did Arnold do this, Vivian? Do you know?”

  “To stop Manson from getting Tommy Taylor out of prison with his new DNA evidence, what else?” Vivian’s matter-of-fact explanation might have been a description of the IRS tax code. No concern entered her tone. She spoke as if the answer was obvious. And it was anything but.

  “What evidence, Vivian? There is no new evidence. The governor told me that herself. Taylor’s going to die tomorrow. He’s run out of rope. That’s it. He’s done.”

  Jess felt her anger growing. It was just like Manson to goad Arnold into attempted murder by pretending to have new evidence that didn’t exist—and the Wards’ lousy luck for Manson to survive while a good man like Arnold died.

  “Oh, there’s evidence all right,” Vivian said, continuing to play with the cards. “Always has been. Or at least, there was.”

  Jess was confused. Had Vivian lost her mind? Was the pressure, once and for all, more than she could take? Jess watched Vivian’s face for signs of madness, but if insanity dwelled within her, its existence was well concealed.

  “That can’t be right,” said Jess. “Arnold testified at all three of Taylor’s trials. He was examined and cross-examined. If he’d known about any other evidence, it would have come out back then.”

  Vivian didn’t argue. She raised her eyebrows, tilted her head to one side and flipped over another set of cards. She took a last drag on the cigarette and pulled the butt out of her mouth long enough to replace it with a new cigarette and light it from the still smoldering butt before she crushed and twisted it down hard into the ashtray, knocking every last tobacco ember out of the filter.

  “Gotta be careful. Land’s as dry as tinder out there. They been fighting little wild fires all around these parts the past fe
w weeks.” She picked up the deck and continued the game.

  Jess thought back to Arnold Ward’s testimony. At all three trials, his testimony had been consistent—and sufficient to convict Taylor in the end: Arnold had been watching Taylor’s house for hours, a long, lonely vigil, when he saw Taylor walk around from the back yard, the red tip of a cigarette dangling from Taylor’s lips and glowing in the dark.

  As he neared the streetlights, Arnold saw that Taylor was carrying Matthew Crawford’s body.

  Taylor struggled to open the trunk of his car and then bent over to put the body inside. When he stood upright, the glowing cigarette ember was gone.

  Taylor bent over again and looked into the trunk, rummaging around for something, then closed the lid. Arnold waited until Taylor went into the house and then he drove to the nearest pay phone and called the police.

  It was a straightforward account. No variation. The same story, each time he told it, consistent with the statement he gave to the police, the defense investigators, and the reporters.

  Jess wondered whether the story was too consistent. “Did Arnold lie? Is that it?”

  Vivian let the smoke out of the corner of her mouth. “Lies don’t hold no DNA,” she said. She studied the layout of the cards.

  So Arnold lied. But about what? Jess remembered the protesters’ chanting this afternoon. “DNA. DNA. DNA.” She tried another tack. “Something physical? A piece of trace? Is that what it was?”

  Again, Vivian didn’t respond, leaving Jess to work it out for herself. She thought back to the physical evidence presented at the trial.

  Unlike Taylor’s other victims, Matthew Crawford, Jr. hadn’t been sexually molested or tortured. His body was found lying on his back, as if he’d been sleeping peacefully in Taylor’s trunk. The medical examiner testified that Mattie died of strangulation. Pictures and charts depicted bruises around his throat consistent with Taylor’s grasp.

  Mattie’s cotton Superman pajamas and underwear were admitted into evidence, although they proved nothing except his youth and innocence. Taylor’s blue jeans, red t-shirt, sneakers, white boxers and socks were admitted, too.