J. Margos - Shattered Image

“You didn’t think that it sounded familiar to the way in which your wife’s bones were found?”

“Didn’t think about it. She’s been found, we buried her, end of story.”

“It didn’t occur to you that these might be the bones of Doug Hughes?”

“Huh,” he grunted. “Who in blazes cares?”

“Mr. Waldrep, don’t you wonder what happened to them after they left Viola.”

“I don’t have no reason to wonder. I know what they done, and I don’t care what kind of trouble they run into. Whatever it was, it’d serve ’ em right I say.”

“Then you do believe that Addie and Doug were having an affair?”

“I don’t believe it-I know it.”

“How do you know, Mr. Waldrep?”

“I know, that’s all. I was her husband, you know. You people are incredible. You think I lived with her and I don’t know,” he snorted, and then wiped his nose on his sleeve.

“Do you have any idea who might have wanted to kill Addie and Doug?”

“Well, it wasn’t me, that’s all I say. They run off before I had any kind of opportunity for that, and I was too busy trying to make ends meet and all after they left.”

“So, then, you don’t have any idea who it could have been?”

“What did I just say, lady? Isn’t that what I just said?”

“Well, I guess I just thought you might want some of these questions answered yourself.”

“I don’t have no questions, lady. My wife run off with him, she’s dead now and buried. There ain’t no more questions as far as I’m concerned. Got it?”

Leo looked at me and nodded. We had indeed “gotten it” and we said our goodbyes to Dody and left.

Once we were safely back in my car, we talked about our brief encounter with Dody.

“Tommy won’t be happy with me, since I learned nothing new from either Jimmy or Dody,” I said.

“We did learn something new, though.”

“What?”

“We learned that Jimmy is definitely hiding something, and we learned that Addie’s husband believed that she was having an affair with Doug. So, one of them is right and the other is wrong, but they’ve both given us some interesting things to think about.”

“You think he could have killed them?”

“Dody?”

I nodded.

“He could have. He’s pretty disorganized, though. I don’t see him planning everything the way it would have been planned originally. He’s the right personality for the dumping of these bodies, though.”

“What if he wasn’t this messed up back then?” I asked.

“Didn’t that lady at the diner say he always had problems?”

“She said he was cantankerous,” I said, “but she didn’t say when specifically he began having a drinking problem. His daughters didn’t go live with their grandmother until two years after their mother disappeared.”

“Well, I suppose if he were less impaired by the alcohol sixteen years ago, he might have been capable of the crime, but it’s really impossible now to know.”

“Let’s pay a visit to Lori Webster,” I suggested, “and see what we can find there.”

“Okay. I’m game if you are.”

We sped up the highway to Georgetown and I wheeled the car into the town square, scoping for a spot in front of the store where she worked. We found a space just around the corner, and I parked the car.

Once inside the store, we asked for Lori and we were directed up to the office. There we introduced ourselves to her, and she led us into a small room off the main office. The room contained a copier, a fax machine and several file cabinets. Lori wore a dark green skirt and white blouse with a beige cardigan over it. She was a frail-looking woman, with stringy shoulder-length brown hair. I think her eyes were gray, but from the moment we met her, she never looked us in the eye. It was just as Mike and Tommy had said.

“You said you’re the artist who reconstructed Addie’s face?”

She fidgeted with her hands, fluttering her eyelids when she spoke and punctuating her phrases with frustrated sighs.

“Yes, that’s right.”

“So, what can I do for you?”

“Well, we found similar remains in another location in Austin the other day, and it’s been determined that they are the remains of a man.”

She looked up from her hands and looked upward. “Doug? Is it Doug?”

She still didn’t look at either one of us. Her eyes shot to the right wall. She was as strange as the boys had said.

“We don’t know yet. I’ll be doing the reconstruct, just as I did with Mrs. Waldrep. I mostly just wanted to let you know what was happening, and to see if there was anything else you think of that you hadn’t told the officers the other day.”

She sat for a while. She was looking at her hands again. She was becoming more emotional now. She began to cry. I reached into my purse and pulled out a tissue and handed it to her. She mopped up her tears with the tissue.

“I don’t know anything more than what I said the other day. He just disappeared and that’s all I know.”

She was sobbing now and I tried to comfort her, but she pulled away. She regained control of herself somewhat, and I decided to try for another question.

“Ms. Webster, do you know Doug’s brother Jimmy?”

“Of course,” she said. “He’s been a good friend to me.”

“You’ve seen him recently, then?”

She hesitated and became more nervous. She seemed confused. She looked down at the wadded-up tissue she held in her hands.

She hesitated a second and then said distantly, “He takes care of me. He helps me with things.”

“Like what things?”

She wadded the tissue into twists and knots.

“Just things,” she said. “I don’t think I feel very good now. I don’t want to talk anymore.”

Leo and I looked at each other, and Leo nodded.

“All right, Ms. Webster, I guess we’ll go.”

“When will you know if it’s Doug?”

She still looked down at the tissue.

“It will be several days, but I’ll ask the detectives to contact you and let you know.”

She nodded but didn’t look up.

We excused ourselves and left her sitting there fidgeting.

“Very strange girl,” I said when we got back in the car.

“That’s the understatement of the century,” Leo said.

“So, what’s your appraisal?”

“She has a serious mental problem. I don’t think she’s completely in touch with reality, and she has a kind of childlike or withdrawn nature. She even seemed to be drifting in and out of her grip when we were talking to her. If she’s had declining mental health all this time, she could have committed the crimes back then, and now she definitely fits as the kind of person who would carry out this disorganized and illogical reburial situation.”

“She acted genuinely surprised about us finding the second set of bones.”

“Maybe she is,” Leo said, “or maybe she’s so delusional it did surprise her.”

“Think Jimmy helped her?”

“I think he could have helped her, and that could be what she was talking about, or he knows what she did and he’s covering for her, or the other way around even.”

“Think there’s any possibility that Addie and Doug did run off, and someone else killed them?”

“Anything’s possible, Toni. I want to see the face on those bones we just found.”

“I’ll start on it as soon as we get back.”

“The guy we found yesterday had been shot multiple times, and it wasn’t in the head. In fact, the bullets scraped and bounced off his ribs.”

“So what does that mean to you?”

“It means whoever he was, he wasn’t executed like Addie. It means this guy was killed in haste and that wasn’t part of the killer’s plan.”