Chapter 13

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

After the interview with Bitsy, Dudley and Jack had found rooms in a cheap motel on the outskirts of Little Rock so they wouldn’t have to fight city traffic the next morning. Both of them collapsed to get a few hours of sleep.

Jack’s snores raised the rafters in his room, but Dudley tossed and turned, tangling the covers in a wad around his legs. Peaceful sleep eluded him. He was haunted by his brother calling to him, Find me, tortured by his bones somewhere in the dark unknown screaming for justice.

At four the next morning, Jack drove back to Memphis. Both of them knew the trip to Little Rock had turned from following a promising lead to finding a dead end. With the knowledge heavy on them, neither said much on the way home. Both needed to let the Maxey Cayson/Laura Stephens collusion angle rest and start digging for clues in another direction.

It was barely six when they arrived back in Memphis. They drove straight to the Memphis Police Department. There was no use for Dudley to go home. His wife would be explaining to the girls why they weren’t heading to the Smokies today, probably in terms extremely unflattering to him. Patching things up with Gloria Jean would have to wait until evening.

He and Jack joined the team in the war room. They were all grabbing doughnuts and coffee when the call came in from the Memphis Fire Department.

“We’ve put out a blaze and found two bodies inside. Cut up really bad. Lots of blood.”

As the rest of the details unfolded, the similarities to Charlie’s murder had Jack and Dudley assembling a squad to check out the residence of Brad Williams in Germantown.

As soon as they turned into Windy Oaks Drive, the smell of smoke permeated their car. Germantown was an upscale suburb that bordered the east/southeast side of Memphis. The Williams’ Georgian brick home was on a quiet, tree-studded street of houses that cost half a million or more.

All manner of emergency vehicles had converged on the scene—firetrucks pulled close enough so the firemen could assure there were no smoking embers left, an ambulance standing ready for the bodies, cars marked MPD as well as the unmarked cars of the detectives.

Spectators were gathering on the periphery, neighbors, some still in nightclothes and robes, coming to gawk.

The red brick walls were blackened with soot but remained intact. The next-door neighbor, a retired doctor with a headful of silver hair and thick glasses, said he had gotten up early to have coffee on his second-floor balcony and detected smoke at the back of the house beside his. He called the fire department in time to prevent the house and everybody in it from being burned to cinders.

Dudley asked how many lived there, and his heart sank when the man told him, “The parents and two young children.” He hated this part of his job, discovering the many ways evil could find and destroy children.

The fireman who placed the call to MPD said they had found two bodies, both adults, but Dudley would bet they would find the children in there, too, tucked out of sight somewhere. Probably dead. Even if the intruder hadn’t killed them, they couldn’t have survived the smoke inhalation.

The homicide squad entered through the front door, led by Dudley and Jack.

The first thing they noticed was the strong smell of gasoline, a sure sign the fire had been set. The blackened hole in a large sitting room downstairs where the back door had collapsed and fallen onto the patio, as well as the heavy damage to the immediate area around it, told them that was where the fire started.

They found the first body in the kitchen. A female, her body protected from the fire by the wall that still stood between the kitchen and the sitting area. She appeared to be around thirty-five. The upper part of her body leaned against the blood-spattered refrigerator door, her head hanging at a macabre angle where her throat had been deeply slit. Her bare legs and arms were covered with so many knife wounds they were nothing more than bloody masses of flesh. A pool of crimson spread out around her.

The brutal nature of the attack suggested rage and revenge. The killing was personal.

His brother’s garage suggested worse than that. He pulled himself together. His team was counting on him, and so was Mawmaw.

Dudley quieted his mind and stood beside the body studying the room, putting himself in the mind of the killer, searching for something there that didn’t belong. The coffee carafe was full and two ceramic mugs sat on the counter beside it. A pack of English muffins, the plastic covering melted and curling, sat beside the toaster. The victim had been making breakfast.

He continued his visual search. There. On the edge of the bar sat a take-out coffee cup from Dunkin’ Donuts. He motioned to Jim Foote on the forensics team, who carefully bagged it.

While one team set to work dusting for fingerprints, taking scrapings from under the victim’s fingernails, and searching for evidence, another team spread out to search the downstairs. Dudley and Jack headed upstairs where the second body had been found. The stench of gasoline rose from the charred carpeting and walls going up the stairs and continued down the carpeted hallway to an office at the far end.

“It took a while for the killer to do all this.” Dudley pictured how the murders had unfolded. “Somebody entered the house through the back door in the wee hours of the morning and killed the wife in the kitchen first so she wouldn’t sound an alarm. Then he went upstairs to kill the rest of them. He probably got the father next so he wouldn’t come to the rescue when he killed the children. He took the time to leave a gasoline trail from the upstairs hall, down the staircase, and to the back door. He was planning to destroy all evidence.”

“He didn’t count on the neighbor’s quick phone call.” Jack pushed through the door on their right.

The room was obviously an office, walls lined with bookcases of charred books, expensive file cabinets in ruin, a mahogany table-top desk filled with stacks of paper, office equipment, and pens, all covered with soot and blood. The victim was still sitting in his desk chair, bullet holes riddling his head and chest.

The wall behind him and the Persian rugs at his feet were also drenched in blood.

“Somebody wanted to be sure he was dead.” Jack pointed to the knife wounds that covered his face and body. Twenty-five of them.

Dudley was awestruck. Not by the wounds, but by the victim’s similarity to his brother. Same tall frame and husky build, same sprinkling of gray in his hair and beard, same large hands. Even with the face slack by death, he could see how Charlie might have been mistaken for this man.

“You see what I see, Dudley?”

“Yeah. He’s a dead ringer. No pun intended.” He studied the desk. “I wonder if Charlie knew him. That desk is similar to furniture I’ve seen him make.”

“If we can get your sister-in-law to tell us the whole truth, we can find out.”

The search for evidence in the room yielded a fiber from an area of the carpet that had been protected by the large chair sitting there. There was a bloody footprint near the door, the markings of the shoe clear.

Dudley’s excitement grew. “It looks like the one I found in Laura’s backyard.”

Jack agreed. “The perp thought he was burning the evidence, so he got careless.”

Forensics entered to bag, tag, and photograph while they searched the rest of the upstairs. The children’s rooms were at the head of the stairs, connected by a bathroom. The little league trophy and small baseball glove was enough to crack their hearts in two. Small ballerina slippers and a child-size tutu in the adjoining room made them want to smash their fists into the wall.

The children were not there. The large, bloody footprints on the soot-stained beige carpeting of both rooms confirmed Dudley’s theory of the killer’s hunt through the house.

“Did he take them?” This, from Jack.

“Not alive. With the parents dead, who would feel the hammer of revenge by kidnapping the children?”

The homicide squad combed every inch of the house.

They found a blackened lighter at the back entrance that opened onto a patio backed by woods. Though there was nothing left of the wooden door but cinders. The bent metal deadbolt and the dents in the metal surrounding it indicated the lock had been jimmied.

It appeared whoever murdered the Williams had entered and exited by the back door, tossing his lighter onto the gasoline saturated floor, thinking that nothing would be left of it but a blackened twisted piece of metal, indistinguishable among the rest of the debris from a completely burned-out house.

But even though they looked in every closet, underneath every piece of furniture, inside the showers and bathtubs, behind the canned goods in the pantry, and even in the giant wooden toy-box, the two children were nowhere to be found.