C Corwin - The Cross Kisses Back

Tinker wanted to create a secret team of reporters to investigate Aubrey’s investigation. Bob nixed the idea immediately. “Reporters are genetic blabberers,” he said. “Aubrey would find out in five minutes.”

Dale Marabout’s name just popped out of my mouth.

So we all met with Dale at my house. After an hour of pleading over coffee and an Entenmann’s low-fat cherry cheesecake, he agreed to do the story, for an outrageous freelance fee that included the continuation of his health-care coverage.

Dale’s first task was to double-check my own suspicions about Aubrey. He went to Rush City and gathered whatever records he could about her stepfather’s molestation trial and her sister’s suicide. He talked to her old high school teachers. Despite the horrors of her home life she was a very good student. She was editor of the high school newspaper, first-chair French horn player in the band. One teacher confided that Aubrey also was rumored to be a tad bit promiscuous. That same teacher confirmed that Coach Reddincoat had quite a well-known zipper problem himself, not only with the young teachers but also with senior girls about to graduate.

Dale found no evidence that anything sexual ever happened between Aubrey and the coach, coerced or consensual. Yet she certainly was aware of his lechery, just as she was aware of her stepfather’s. So when she came back to Rush City as a reporter, and needed a worthless human being to kill, to get those good clips she needed to get a better job, well, there he was, a well-known abuser of impressionable young women, currently having sex with the cheerleading advisor. Best of all, he’d been threatened in public by the irate father of a boy thrown off the football team for urinating in the gymbags of underclassmen.

After choosing the coach as her victim, Aubrey went to work framing Darren Yoder, the hapless husband of the cheerleading advisor. She learned he owned a hunting cabin in Coshocton County. Motel records showed she made two trips to that rural county, one prior to the murder, one immediately after.

As Aubrey expected, the Rush City police arrested the football player’s father. She waited patiently for a month until Yoder went to his hunting cabin. That’s when she called the police. When they searched the cabin they found a. 45 in the attic and a half-burned pair of bloody overalls in the woodburner.

Why did Aubrey use her real name at the motel in Coshocton County? The same reason she used her real name at motels in Hannawa before poisoning Buddy Wing. She was a newspaper reporter. She didn’t have any money. She had to use her credit cards. Considering her self-confidence I’m sure she saw very little danger in it.

The days Dale Marabout spent in Rush City were fruitful. He not only figured out how and why Aubrey killed Coach Reddincoat, he developed a hypothesis-a hypothesis-in-progress at least-of how and why she killed Buddy Wing. He explained it to me over lunch at Speckley’s, on a napkin:

“ STEP ONE,” said Dale as he scribbled, “Aubrey chooses a victim-somebody well-known whose death will rile people up. Coach Reddincoat in Rush City, Buddy Wing here in Hannawa.”

He scribbled STEP TWO. “Then she looks for the two schmucks she’s going to frame. The obvious one who gets arrested right off the bat and then the less obvious one she’ll uncover later.”

I was nodding like one of those bobble-head dogs some people feel compelled to put in the back window of their cars. “It’s anybody’s guess what goes on inside the noodle of a killer,” I said, “but you can see her progression. She poisoned the squirrels and got some pretty good clips. But nobody got arrested and the story fizzled out. The only job offer those dead squirrels got her was from the Rush City Gazette. She’d fix that with the football coach. And when that worked to a tee she figured, what the hell, do it again in Hannawa.”

Dale started twirling his felt-tip through his fingers like a majorette’s baton. He was perplexed. “Didn’t she think solving two almost identical cases would make somebody suspicious?”

I watched his felt-tip fly across the aisle and land under a table of old women who’d already gotten their food. He looked at the tangle of support-hosed legs and winced. I gave him a ballpoint from my purse. “That’s why she killed Buddy Wing before she got to Hannawa,” I said. “How could she be a suspect if the victim was dead several months before she arrived in town?”

Dale clicked my pen and sheepishly wrote STEP THREE. “After she’s got her schmucks in a row, she starts on the fun part, figuring out how to kill her victim and how to plant the evidence.”

By the time I reached Mansfield snowflakes as big as nickels were freezing on the pavement. I slowed to thirty-five. I wanted a mug of tea to calm my nerves but there was no way I was going to drive with one hand while I poured it. I wrapped my hands around the top of the steering wheel and plowed on. My Thermos was right there on the seat beside me. It might as well have been a thousand miles away.

His hypothesis-in-progress finished and folded, and tucked in his shirt pocket, Dale Marabout set out to prove Aubrey killed Buddy Wing.

His first stop was Tinker’s office. He learned that on the last Saturday in August, Tinker had driven to Rush City, and over a quick lunch at Wendy’s promised Aubrey a job after the first of year.

Two weeks later Aubrey checked into a Quality Inn just two miles up the road from the Heaven Bound Cathedral. She stayed Friday and Saturday night. Over the next three months she would spend five more weekends at that motel, putting nearly $1,500 on her Visa and Discover cards.

At the time of Dale’s investigation there was no way to prove Aubrey had spent those weekends planning Buddy Wing’s murder. Yes, we could surmise that she was learning her away around the Heaven Bound Cathedral, selecting Sissy as her patsy, and all the rest, but there wasn’t one whit of proof she was doing anything more evil those weekends than shopping for shoes at the Brinkley mall.

Later, of course, we’d learn everything about those weekends from her written confession, which, by the way, she typed out herself on a borrowed laptop in the city jail.

From that confession, we learned she’d already chosen Buddy Wing as her victim by the time Tinker promised her a job: “I also was considering WFLO’s Charlie Chimera. He was both hated and loved. His show was a lightening rod for nutballs. He had three angry ex-wives. But Buddy Wing ultimately had the most going for him. He was famous nationally as well as locally. He was on TV all the time-so the whole world could watch him die. He had enemies that could be exploited. And in the final analysis, he was infinitely more evil than that idiot on the radio.”

As soon as Tinker promised her a job, she started to investigate Buddy Wing in earnest. She wrote: “I taped his broadcasts and watched them over and over. He always kissed his Bible approximately halfway through his sermons. Dropping dead at his pulpit would be very dramatic and make the police think his murder was for religious purposes.”

During her first weekend in Hannawa, Aubrey attended services at the Heaven Bound Cathedral. She walked the back hallways and saw the list of Kent State television students in the bulletin. On one of her visits she appropriated a copy of the church directory. “I knew from my first visit to the cathedral poisoning Buddy Wing was going to be easy,” Aubrey wrote in her confession. “Security was almost non-existent. There were faceless college students running around. I’d only been out of school for two years. All I needed was a Kent State sweatshirt and an eager look in my eyes.”