Cate Culpepper - A Question of Ghosts

“Oh, come on. You’re kidding.” Becca seemed honestly puzzled. “Honey, it’s just wine.”

“You shouldn’t be buying bottles of anything.” Khadijah took off her small granny glasses and stared at Becca. “You can’t drink, Rebecca, wine or anything else. And we won’t drink around you. You know that.”

Becca glanced at Jo and set the bottle carefully on the bookshelf. “I’ve been clean since I was twenty years old, Khadijah.”

“And you’ve stayed that way by complete abstinence, remember?” Khadijah pronounced the word distinctly. “No booze, no pot, nothing. Rachel would have your head, little girl. Now is surely no time to fool with this.”

Marty was staring avidly at the television, and Jo followed her gaze. Xena was engaged in battle with a villainous blond vixen. Both were spinning high above the ground on spindly ladders in a deadly ballet. The room was filled with an ominous silence, broken only by the soft purring of the static of the radios.

“If you’re set on drinking that wine, I can’t stop you,” Khadijah said finally. “But I don’t have to sit here and watch. If you open that bottle, I’ll head home.”

“Me too.” Marty lifted her hand wistfully to the screen. “I’d have to go too. Have a heart, Bec. It’s ‘Callisto.’”

If anyone else in the room could read microexpressions, Jo knew her own face would reveal a strange combination of consternation, wariness, and sympathy. Becca had never struck her as someone with a history of serious substance abuse, but the strength of her friends’ sudden protectiveness was telling.

“All right. No wine.” The mild defiance was fading from Becca’s posture. “You guys take the bottle home with you. But this only means I’m making a pot of double-chocolate cocoa after you leave.”

Marty grinned in apparent relief, and Jo felt the palpable tension begin to ease. Becca looked embarrassed as she came back to them, but there was still a faint trembling in her hands. She settled on the rug again next to Khadijah, who leaned into her briefly.

“So, Mr. Voakes.” Becca sighed. “Why must we have the distinct displeasure of his company this evening?”

“Do you know who he is, Jo?” Khadijah asked.

Jo nodded. John William Voakes was one of Seattle’s horror stories; she doubted any native could forget his name. “Back in the early eighties, correct? Mid eighties?”

“Yeah, he was caught in eighty-three.” Marty folded her long arms around her knees. “He killed his first victim in nineteen eighty-one, the older lady. Broke into her house on Capitol Hill on a Sunday afternoon and shot her when she walked in on him. Shot and killed a married couple in their apartment in the University District. In eighty-two, a single woman, a college student, also in the U-District.”

“And in eighty-three, that entire family, back here on the Hill.” Khadijah scratched Becca’s hair lightly, as if comforting a cat. “The Walmacs — the parents and two kids. They’re all buried right across the street. Were you living here back then, Jo?”

“Yes, I grew up on the Hill.” Jo remembered little of the reports of the actual killings, or the spectacular news bulletins about Voakes’s eventual capture and trial. By her early teens, Jo’s parents couldn’t pry her from her bedroom and her books long enough to follow current events. “But all I really remember about Voakes is the public outrage when he ducked the death penalty.”

“This dick kills eight people in cold blood, two of them kids.” Marty’s tone was flat. “He sexually assaulted two of the women. I can’t abide capital punishment, but the dude deserved hard labor for life. Not ‘life’ like a twenty-year sentence; I mean hard labor every day for the rest of his miserable life. No question.”

“You would have made such a damn fine Amazon, Marty.” Becca looked at her with affection. “But when did you guys get this encyclopedic knowledge about serial killers? Why John William Voakes?”

“Kaddy saw an article about him in the Times yesterday, so we looked him up in the archives.” Marty traced a pattern on the rug beneath her bare feet. “Voakes was ex-military. He was a sharpshooter. He killed all his victims with one or two shots, not easy with a handgun. And he moved to Seattle in nineteen seventy-eight, not long before he started his crime spree. He moved here the same summer your parents died, Bec.”

Becca started to speak but looked at Jo instead.

“You’re suggesting that John William Voakes shot Becca’s parents?” Jo slipped the recorder from her pocket.

“Don’t jack the idea before we explain,” Marty said.

“I’m not at all.” Jo checked the device carefully and laid it on the coffee table. “Please continue.”

Marty frowned at the recorder. “Well, I would, except now I’m scared Becca’s mom is going to come ghosting out of that gadget at me.”

Jo approved of “ghosting” as a verb. “Who knows? Perhaps we’ll get lucky. You’re saying Voakes may have committed a crime a year before his first known murder. A crime he never confessed to.”

“He never confessed to any of them.” Marty scowled. “The asswipe claims he’s completely innocent, to this day. Mind you, this in spite of solid physical evidence, and getting caught fleeing the last damn scene with blood all over him.”

“There’s never been any doubt the man’s guilty.” Khadijah sounded less adamant than Marty but equally invested in discussing this theory. “The police never considered him when it came to the Healys, but…”

“The police never considered anyone but Madelyn Healy,” Becca murmured.

“Right?” Khadijah nodded. “The deaths of your mom and dad were way off the cops’ radar by the time the Voakes thing broke.”

“The police report on your parents’ shootings was not overly detailed.” Jo searched her memory. “The forensics back in the late seventies were still pretty rudimentary. Based on my very limited knowledge of crime investigations, the patterns drawn of the scene and the ballistics report could have been consistent with a murder/suicide. Given Madelyn’s history of mental instability and their history of arguing—”

Jo broke off, appalled that she might have mistepped again, but Becca was watching her calmly.

“So it’s feasible that the cops missed the possibility of an outside shooter.” Becca cleared her throat thoughtfully. “But wasn’t Voakes’s first known killing a robbery gone wrong? A house burglary or something?”

“Yeah, he robbed his first two victims, ransacked their places,” Marty said. “After that, the cops think he just caught a taste for murder. No more robbery, just thrill killing.”

“My nomination for the crappiest word coinage ever.” Khadijah grimaced and turned to Becca. “But that’s what we were wondering, baby. Is there any chance this maniac broke into your kitchen that night?”

“Then why am I still alive?” Becca’s voice was dull. “No one robbed this place. Why would Voakes have shot my parents and left a witness? I was sitting right out here.”

“This could have been his first time, if he broke in here,” Marty said gently. “Maybe just to rob the place. He sees your parents, freaks out, shoots them. Out the kitchen door he goes. He wouldn’t have even known you were in here. You wouldn’t have seen anything.”

“I wouldn’t remember anything, if I had seen it.” Becca rubbed her eyes. “I don’t remember anything from that night, except my folks arguing, my mom handing me that damn doll.”

“He raped two of the women, Becca. And your mother just said…” Marty looked away, and Jo remembered the last message with an uneasy chill.