Archer Mayor - Scent of Evil

I nodded. “The curare is common knowledge; no need to explain.”

J.P. resumed. “I tried the FBI and the State Police, as well as our own files, but no bells went off. After Joe pegged Buddy, though, that gave me something to go for. Trouble was, how to get Buddy’s prints legally without letting him know?”

“Raid the janitor’s closet,” Dennis muttered.

J.P. smiled. “I thought of that, but he’s not the only person to handle that stuff. Anyway, the Lieutenant remembered that when Buddy stole him a table fan to keep the heat down, he wiped it off before putting it on Joe’s desk. I checked it out, got a perfect set, and made a match with the prints from the curare bottles.”

“You ruled out Lieutenant Gunther’s prints, of course?” asked Dunn, who by now was taking notes.

“Yes, sir.”

I picked it up from there. “That connected Buddy to the curare, but it didn’t necessarily make him the man who used it on Jardine. So we began digging deeper into the similarity between the deaths of John Woll and Toby Huntington. J.P.?”

“What caught our attention was that they, like Milly, had both been shot, and that, as the autopsies revealed, Toby had died first by a day or so. The bullets Hillstrom recovered weren’t in great shape-one of them was in fragments-but the crime lab still managed to make a comparison and came up with the fact that all three of them, including the only good one recovered from Milly, had been fired from the same gun, the gun we found in John’s hand.”

“That,” I broke in, “wasn’t necessarily a mistake on the killer’s part, by the way. Buddy knew that John was still a prime suspect in Charlie’s murder, and a lesser one in Milly’s; the gun would have been concrete evidence linking John to their deaths. The scenario would have been that John shot both Milly and Toby and then used the gun on himself.”

Dennis snorted derisively.

“The mistake he did make was discovered by the crime lab: All three bullets had passed through the same silencer, an item we didn’t find attached to the gun in Woll’s hand.”

Dunn held up his pen. “Hold it. Explain that about the silencer.”

“Most silencers aren’t in perfect alignment with the barrel, so they’ll mark each bullet slightly on the way out, which means that you can match a bullet to a silencer just like you can match it to an individual barrel. The first tip-off to the lab boys was that, while the gunpowder marks on John’s T-shirt were proximity burns, they were inconsistent with an open barrel.”

As Dunn continued taking copious notes, I broadened the scope somewhat. “Right now, pinning the tail on Buddy is still theoretical; we don’t have enough to get a warrant for him or to search his place, even with the fingerprints. He could, for example, claim he’d been at the vet’s a year ago and had handled those bottles out of curiosity. So we’ve taken a background approach, rechecking all the evidence we’ve accumulated so far, with Buddy’s name plugged into the equation as the bad guy. The results have been encouraging. Ron, you spent most of the day reinterviewing some of your more competent, and discreet, high-school sources. What was the bottom line on Buddy?”

Like J.P. before him, Ron took his time before speaking. “Moody, introverted, bookish, quick to anger and slow to forget, got very good grades but was too broke to go on to college without help. He was a competitor for the scholarship that John won in his senior year, but grades were only a portion of the award’s criteria. John wasn’t straight-A, but he was considered ‘well-rounded.’ Buddy was just the reverse: never a B in his career, but a real oddball. From what I heard, he was resentful as hell when John got it over him.”

“And no doubt doubly so when John threw it away to get married to Rose,” I added.

Ron pulled out another sheet of paper. “More than we guessed. I found out that Buddy’s mother checked him into the Retreat right after graduation. He stayed there for a year, but I don’t know what his diagnosis was. We’d have to get a subpoena for the files.

“Rose might have played a part in his breakdown, in fact. Buddy had a thing for her in high school. Apparently, he and Rose had tried out the back of Buddy’s car, and according to my source, things didn’t go too well. Buddy mooned over Rose for a long time afterward, but by that time she was going with Charlie Jardine. Buddy never forgave Jardine for ‘stealing’ his girl-although the choice for Rose had obviously been easy.”

Dunn broke in. “That’s all too vague. Will your source be any good in court?”

Ron nodded without hesitation. “I think so. I didn’t give him much time, since we were all trying to cover a lot of ground fast, but he implied it was no deep, dark secret. We should be able to tighten up his testimony and get others to back him up.”

Dunn nodded without comment.

“While we’re on the psychological angle,” Ron added, “I did a little checking into what might have triggered Buddy to flip out ten years after getting out of school. Turns out his mother died about a year and a half ago, which is when he began laying the groundwork for his mayhem. I talked to a psychologist friend of mine, who said that if the mother-son attachment had been intense, her death, coupled with Buddy’s long-standing mental problems, might have been enough to push him over the edge.”

“One other background item,” I added, and I described Fred McDermott’s connection to Buddy’s mother. When I finished, I sat back down. “Again, none of this will secure a warrant, but it reveals bad blood between Buddy and several of the victims.”

“What about Jackson?” Sammie asked.

I turned my palm up in a shrug. “Don’t know yet.”

Ron responded. “I heard a rumor that long ago, like twenty years or so, Jackson almost got into serious trouble. I couldn’t get any details, but something sexual was implied.”

“With one of his students?” Dunn asked.

Ron shook his head. “I can’t be sure; that’s the feeling I got. I asked a couple of his contemporaries and got nowhere. But if something was hushed up, surely a retired principal or administrator might know.”

“What do we care, if it happened before Buddy’s time?” Dennis asked.

“It may have given Buddy ammunition,” Brandt explained. Since the beginning, Luman Jackson has displayed an extraordinary interest in this case, above and beyond what might have been expected, even for him. It’s possible somebody was putting the squeeze on him, for whatever reason…” He suddenly stopped and looked at Ron. “Did Jackson ever teach Buddy?”

“Yes.”

“Any feedback on that?”

“Not particularly with Buddy. The general consensus was that Jackson treated all his kids like shit, attacking their weak spots and humiliating them in front of their friends.”

Brandt made a face. “Charming. Still, that would supply Buddy with an ax to grind. What he had on Jackson, I don’t know, but it must have been pretty bad.”

Sammie had been staring at the tabletop through all this talk of Jackson. Now she finally blurted out, “What went wrong at the high school? Why didn’t our trap catch Buddy, if he was the bad guy?”

I hesitated. J.P. and I had already discussed this privately, and while I was going to enter our conclusions in the final report, I thought I’d sit on it within reason until then.

Tyler got me off the hook, however. “Because I screwed the pooch. When Joe told me he thought his office was being bugged, I knew we’d probably have to wander around the building looking for its source. So I went to Buddy for a passkey to all the offices. He must have had a good laugh listening to us later, trying to set him up.”