Mariah Stewart - Cold Truth

“No.”

“Where did she go, if she didn’t go with you? Did she just stand there by the car, waiting?”

“I think…” Cass tried to recall. “I think she might have gone into the backyard. I think she said she was going to wait on the swings. You saw them, they’re still there, in the yard. To the far right of the house.”

He nodded.

“Anyway, I went inside. I heard something on the second floor, so I started up the steps. It all happened so fast after that. I saw… I saw Trish. He threw her.” Cass’s hands began to shake. “He just picked her up and threw her, like a doll.”

“This is all in the file. Does she have to go through this?” Chief Denver protested.

“I’m afraid so, Chief.” Annie took over again. “Cass, you saw him?”

“No, no. I didn’t see him. I wasn’t looking at him, I was looking at my sister. She had flown through the air… and I was wondering how she was doing that. I ran up the steps and he grabbed me.”

“From which direction?”

“I don’t know. I only remember being surprised. I don’t know where he came from. He started stabbing at me then… with the knife.” Cass fought to control herself, and Rick moved his chair closer to hers but did not touch her.

“Then you saw his face.”

“No. No, I didn’t. I’m sure of that,” she protested. “I think I blacked out after the first time he cut me.”

“Now, all this time, your cousin, Lucy, was outside, playing on the swings?”

“I guess she would have been, yes.”

“Did anyone talk to her about what she might have seen?” Annie directed the question to the chief.

“No. No reason to. We found the killer in the garage.” Denver ’s jaw tightened. “The girl was in the backyard when we got there.”

Annie’s attention returned to Cass. “What happened next?”

“I don’t know. Chief, you would know more than I.”

“Mrs. Donovan-Cass’s aunt-started to wonder where her niece was. She got out of her car and went into the house to find out what was taking so long. She stepped inside and heard some sound-she described it as a soft moaning sound-from the kitchen. She went in, and found Wayne Fulmer-he had a room in one of those old motels out along Route Nine, hung around town most days- Wayne was crying, sitting on the floor next to Bob Burke’s body. His hands and clothes were covered in blood. According to Mrs. Donovan’s testimony, she started screaming, ‘My God, what have you done?’ And Wayne, he started screaming back at her, ‘No, no, not me. Not Wayne.’ Then he ran out the back door, and she went upstairs, screaming for her sister. She found you where you’d fallen,” he nodded to Cass, “on the steps.”

“Who called the police?” Annie asked.

“Someone driving past saw Wayne running down the road, covered with blood. By the time we got there, he had run back into the Burkes’ garage to hide, that’s where we found him.”

“Was the knife recovered?” Rick asked.

“We found it on the floor at the bottom of the steps.”

“Prints?”

“The handle and blade were so slick with blood, we couldn’t get a print.”

The chief slanted a glance in Cass’s direction to see her reaction, but there was none.

“When you questioned him about why he was there, what did he tell you?” Rick asked.

“Said he’d run into Bob down at the marina an hour earlier and that Bob told him he’d had a big catch, that if he stopped by the house, Bob would give him some fish.”

He began to fiddle with his glasses.

“You have to try to understand how this hit the community. Everyone in town knew and liked the Burkes. Bob’s family lived here before there was a town. Nothing like this had ever happened in Bowers before. As far as I knew, nothing like this had happened anywhere around here. It left everyone speechless. Everyone was up in arms when the news leaked out about us finding Wayne hiding in the garage. That we had had that murderous scum living right here in Bowers Inlet, walking our streets… well, people were pretty outraged. But relieved, you know, that he’d been locked up.”

“Frankenstein’s monster,” Annie murmured.

“What?” Denver frowned.

“The scene from the old Frankenstein movie just popped into my head. The one where the angry mob is chasing the creature.”

“We were angry, Dr. McCall. Good people-a wonderful family-had been massacred in their own home. Everyone felt that if it happened to them, it could happen to anyone.”

Denver sighed heavily. “I knew Bob and Jenny, had known them all my life. My brother had gone to school with them, and back in high school, he had the biggest crush on Jenny.”

The chief felt everyone’s eyes on him then, and shook his head. “Don’t even think it could have been him. We lost him in Vietnam. He was long gone, come the summer of ’79.”

He cleared his throat.

“Anyway, we were talking about the day… that day. We-me and Jack Cameron, he’s dead now about six or seven years-we went into the house, and it was like walking into a horror movie. Cassie was there on the floor upstairs, covered with blood. We thought she was… well, we thought there were no survivors. Then we noticed that she seemed to move, and we called an ambulance. Gave her mouth-to-mouth to try to keep her going.” He wiped a tear from his face without seeming to notice he had done so. “I’d never seen anything like it. The carnage. That little girl, her neck snapped like it was a twig. And Jenny there on the bedroom floor… Bob on the floor in the kitchen. And Wayne Fulmer cowering in the garage, whimpering and shaking and covered in Bob’s blood.” He looked at Rick. “Who would you have thought did it, Agent Cisco, if you’d walked into that scene?”

“Well, I admit it looks pretty bad for Wayne.”

“We had no DNA back then, just fingerprinting. And that wasn’t always accurate, depending on who was reading the prints. None of this electronic matching. No profilers to come in and tell us what kind of personality we were supposed to be looking for.” He stared at Annie with dull resentment.

“Chief, I’m sorry. We’re not accusing you, we’re not judging you-” Annie began, but he cut her off.

“Yes you were, Dr. McCall. You were judging, and you were criticizing and you were accusing us of shoddy police work. Don’t judge our actions or our decisions twenty-six years ago by the way we do things today. We didn’t have the tools back then.” Denver got up and left the room before anyone could stop him.

“Shit,” Rick said softly.

Cass rose to go after her boss.

“Let me, Cassie. This was my fault. I’ll talk to him.” Rick followed Denver from the room.

“Cass, could we finish up here? I only have a few more questions for you.” Annie reached over and laid a hand on Cass’s arm.

“I think I should go in and see if he’s okay.” She gestured in the direction of the chief’s office.

“Rick made the mess, Cass. He’ll clean it up.”

“All right. I’ll give him five minutes to come back in. If he hasn’t cooled off and come back by then, I’m going to go and talk to him. It usually doesn’t take him much more than that to calm down, no matter what he’s angry about.”

Just then, Cass’s cell phone rang, and she glanced at the number displayed on the small screen.

“I need to take this,” she told Annie.

“Khaliyah. How are you?” She rose and walked to the window.

“I’m okay, Cassie. I was wondering how you are. I saw on the news, about your cousin. I wanted to make sure that you…” The girl paused, her voice shaky. “I just wanted to make sure that you were okay, that’s all.”

“That’s really sweet of you. I appreciate the call. But I don’t want you to worry about me. I’m fine.”