Chapter 14
Maleah didn’t know whether to laugh,
cry or just slap Derek in the mouth. During the process of rolling
off her, he managed to unsnap her holster and remove her Glock
pistol before she could. He aimed and fired. The bullet hit the tin
sign hanging over the front door of the Paulk house. The pinging
sound rang out over the dog’s incessant barking.
“Unless you want the next one aimed
directly at you, then don’t fire that damn shotgun again,” Derek
hollered at the shooter.
“When did you damn bill collectors
start carrying guns?” the man called out to Derek, then shouted at
his barking mixed-breed dog. “Shut up, damn it, Pork
Chop.”
“We aren’t bill collectors,” Maleah
said, as she grabbed for her gun still in Derek’s
clutch.
“We’re from the Powell Private Security
and Investigation Agency.” Derek handed Maleah the Glock and
whispered, “Don’t holster that thing yet. You never know what
Jethro there might do.”
Jethro? If they hadn’t been in such a
deadly serious situation, she would laugh. Derek undoubtedly meant
Jethro Bodine, the big dumb character from the Beverly Hillbillies TV series of long ago.
“Are you folks lost?” the shooter
asked.
“We’re looking for Jeri Paulk,” Maleah
said as she rose to her feet, pistol in hand.
“That’s my wife.” The man lowered his
shotgun, the muzzle pointed toward the porch floor. “I’m Lonny
Paulk. What y’all want with Jeri?”
Derek stood, brushed the dirt and grass
from his slacks and took a stand at Maleah’s side. “We’re looking
for her sister, Cindy Dobbins. We think she might be in
danger.”
Lonny stepped out farther onto the
porch and came over to the edge of the steps, shotgun still
pointing down, and motioned to them. “Y’all come on up closer.” He
twisted his head and yelled over his shoulder, “Jeri, get your fat
ass out here. There’s some folks here who want to talk to you about
that fuck-up sister of yours. Seems she’s gotten herself into more
trouble.”
As they approached Lonny, Maleah noted
several things all at once. He was as hairy as a grizzly, his
greasy brown hair was pulled back in a ponytail and he emitted an
unpleasant body odor. The man definitely needed, at the very least,
a haircut and a bath.
Maleah paused when she reached the foot
of the steps. Derek halted directly behind her.
“Who the hell’s looking for Cindy?” A
short, obese woman who was almost as broad as she was wide—about
five feet—came out onto the porch. The first thing Maleah noticed
was the woman’s hair. It looked like bright yellow straw. She wore
an oversized moo-moo in some hideous floral design of purple, hot
pink, and turquoise that on a taller person would have hit them
mid-calf. But on Jeri, the hem reached her ankles and floated over
her small, broad feet and bright orange toenails.
“Are you Jeri Paulk?” Derek asked. “And
is Cindy Dobbins, also known as Cindy Di Blasi, your
sister?”
“Yeah, I’m Jeri and I got a sister
named Cindy. What’s this all about?” Jeri waddled across the porch
to her husband’s side.
“We’re from the Powell Private Security
and Investigation Agency,” Maleah told them. “We’re investigating a
series of murders and we have reason to believe your sister Cindy
is in danger. We’re trying to locate her to warn her. We want to
offer her our agency’s protection.”
“Who is it that you two are working
for?” Jeri sized up Derek and apparently liked what she saw because
she licked her lips and smiled at him.
Once again, if not for the gravity of
the situation, Maleah would have laughed. “We’re agents for the
Powell Private—”
“I heard that part,” Jeri said. “But
who hired you?”
“Several murder victims were connected
to our agency,” Derek explained. “Our employer assigned us to
investigate.”
“How’s my sister
involved?”
“The killer that we’re tracking is a
copycat killer.” Maleah watched for a reaction and when Jeri looked
as if she understood, Maleah continued. “He’s copying the style of
a murderer known as the Carver. Your sister Cindy has been visiting
the Carver, who is incarcerated in the Georgia State Prison. We
want to question her.”
“You said she might be in danger,”
Lonny said. “How?”
Derek leaned over and whispered to
Maleah, “Cindy’s here.”
Maleah didn’t know how Derek knew or
why he was so sure, but she had learned not to question his
instincts, which for the most part had proven to be
infallible.
“Jerome Browning, aka the Carver, has
had three visitors in the past year, one was a writer interviewing
him for a book about his life, the other was his lawyer and the
third person was Cindy.” Maleah paused, giving Jeri and Lonny time
to digest the info. “Browning’s lawyer was murdered earlier today.
We have reason to believe that Cindy could be next.”
Silence.
Lonny turned to his wife. “I told you
not to let her stay here. That woman is nothing but bad news. Every
goddamn time she’s around, trouble follows her.”
Jeri planted her fat little hands on
her ample hips. “She’s my sister. What did you want me to do, tell
her she can’t come to me when she needs family? Lord knows I’ve put
up with enough shit from that bunch of heathens you come
from.”
“Are you saying that Cindy is here?”
Maleah asked.
A petite figure appeared in the doorway
and stood behind the screen door.
“Cindy?” Maleah asked. “Are you Cindy
Dobbins?”
The woman pushed open the door, came
outside and moved past her sister and brother-in-law. “I’m Cindy
Dobbins.” She turned to Jeri. “You and Lonny go on back inside. I
want to talk to these people alone.”
“Are you sure?” Jeri asked
Cindy.
Cindy nodded.
Jeri and Lonny went inside, but left
the front door open.
“Y’all come on up here and take a
seat.” Cindy motioned for them to join her on the
porch.
Maleah holstered her Glock and then
walked up the steps, Derek directly behind her. Cindy sat in the
dilapidated recliner. Maleah’s first instinct was to wipe off the
metal chair before sitting, but she didn’t. When she sat, Derek
came over and stood behind her. The yellow bug light shining down
from the bare bulb in the ceiling cast a blaring amber glow across
the porch
“Is Wyman Scudder really dead?” Cindy
asked.
Maleah studied the slender, petite
woman, who certainly looked older than thirty-five. But she wasn’t
a badlooking woman, just old before her time. Hard living could do
that to a person. Her short, curly hair had been dyed a dark
burgundy red which made her pale face seem colorless. Without
makeup and wearing jeans and a Harley-Davidson T-shirt, she didn’t
look like a prostitute, just a rode-hard-and-put-away-wet
middle-aged country gal.
“Yes, Wyman Scudder is dead,” Maleah
said. “We’re pretty sure he was murdered.”
“How did you meet Mr. Scudder?” Derek
asked.
“Look, before I answer any of your
questions, I need to know that I’m not going to get in any trouble
with the law.” Cindy glanced from Maleah to Derek. “I got myself
involved in something I wish I hadn’t. But I didn’t have no idea .
. . I just needed the money. I’ve been out of the business for a
while, you know. I’ve tried waitressing and working in the chicken
plant and all sorts of odd jobs. I got a kid, see, and it ain’t
right that she’s in foster care. The only way I can get her back is
. . .” Cindy swallowed her tears.
“You have a daughter?” Maleah leaned
forward toward Cindy. “What’s her name?”
“Patsy Lynn. I named her after my
mama.”
“How old is Patsy Lynn?”
“She’ll be eleven this
October.”
Maleah looked Cindy square in the eye.
“Cindy, my name is Maleah Perdue, and I promise you that Derek—”
she glanced at him “—this is Derek Lawrence. I promise you that we
will do whatever we can to protect you and that includes protection
from the police.”
Cindy took a deep breath. “He paid me
five thousand dollars. All I had to do was visit Jerome Browning at
the Georgia State Prison and exchange a few letters and a few phone
calls.”
“Who paid you?” Derek asked. “Who hired
you?”
“Wyman Scudder. I thought you
knew.”
“Are you saying that Wyman Scudder
hired you and he’s the one who paid you five thousand dollars?”
Maleah asked. “You never met anyone else, were never contacted by
anyone else?”
Cindy shook her head. “Nobody else.
Just Mr. Scudder.”
“Then you never met a man named Albert
Durham?” Derek asked.
Cindy didn’t respond immediately.
Maleah sensed that the woman was giving her reply a great deal of
thought.
“Cindy?” Maleah prompted.
“I never met him. But . . . Jerome
talked about him. You know, when I’d go visit him. The first time I
went for a visit, he said a man named Albert Durham was going to
write a book about him and make him even more famous than he
already was. Jerome liked the idea of the whole world knowing who
he was and what he’d done.”
“But you never met Durham?” Derek
said.
Cindy shook her head.
“Can you tell us exactly why Wyman
Scudder hired you?” Derek asked.
“Wyman was my lawyer, a few years back.
We . . . uh . . . sort of had a thing. You know. For a while. I
hired him to help me try to keep my daughter out of foster care. I
couldn’t afford to pay him.” Cindy hung her head.
“When did Scudder first contact you
about visiting Jerome Browning?” Maleah asked.
“About five months ago. He said he had
a client who needed a friend, a female friend, to visit him every
once in a while. I thought why not? I mean for five thousand, I’ll
do just about anything.”
“What did you and Jerome talk about?”
Derek asked.
“Everything. Nothing. Mostly about him.
He liked to brag. And sometimes, he’d give me messages for
Wyman.”
“What sort of messages?” Maleah
asked.
“Nothing really. Just things like,
‘tell Wyman to come see me’ or ‘ask Wyman to tell Mr. Durham that
we need to talk.’ Stuff like that.”
“You exchanged letters with Browning
and spoke to him on the phone,” Maleah said. “Do you still have
those letters?”
“No, I ain’t got them.” She shook her
head. “I turned each one over to Wyman as soon as I got it. They
weren’t really for me no how. That’s what Wyman told
me.”
Maleah and Derek glanced at each
other.
“What about the letters you wrote
Jerome?” Maleah asked.
“I didn’t write them letters. Wyman
gave them to me, all typed out real neat like, and told me to write
them out in my own handwriting and then mail them off to
Jerome.”
“Do you remember anything about what
was said in those letters?” Derek asked.
“Not really. I didn’t care. Weren’t
nothing to me one way or the other.”
“I understand,” Maleah told her. “But
if you could remember something, anything, about the content of
those letters, it might help us.”
“Would it help you find the man who
killed Wyman?”
“Yes,” she replied. “And the person who
has already killed five innocent people, using the same method that
Jerome Browning used in his Carver murders. If you would come with
us, let the Powell Agency give you around-the-clock protection, you
could work with us to prevent this person from killing
again.”
“But how can I help you? I really don’t
know nothing.”
“You probably know a lot more than you
realize,” Derek said. “The more you think about your visits with
Browning and about the telephone conversations and the letters you
exchanged with him, the more you might remember.”
“You think so?”
Derek smiled. Cindy responded the way
all women did to Derek’s charm.
“You help us and we’ll help you. Tell
us what you want and we’ll do our best to see that you get
it.”
Cindy studied Derek as if trying to
decide whether or not she could trust him. She nodded. “Okay.
You’ve got a deal, but I need to talk things over with my sister
first and then pack a bag.” Cindy got up and headed for the front
door, then paused and asked, “I can let my sister know where I’ll
be and I’ll be able to talk to her whenever I want,
right?”
“Absolutely,” Derek assured
her.
As soon as Cindy disappeared inside the
house, Derek and Maleah got up and walked out into the
yard.
“Do you think she really can’t remember
anything or she’s playing us to see what she can get out of us?”
Maleah nodded toward the house.
“A little of both. I’m sure it didn’t
escape your notice that Cindy isn’t the sharpest knife in the
drawer.”
Maleah grunted. “I noticed, and
apparently it runs in the family.”
“I figure if Griff can find a way to
get Cindy’s daughter out of foster care and if we can promise to
return her daughter to her, she’ll tell us everything she knows.
And I can guarantee you that she knows more than she’s told
us.”
When he had left Ardsley Park, he had
fully intended to check into a downtown Savannah hotel and get a
good night’s sleep. He had planned to kill Saxon Chappelle’s cute
little sixteen-year-old niece tomorrow evening. But as fate would
have it, he had decided to stop for a bite to eat and had carried
his Netbook into the coffee shop café. While drinking an
after-dinner cappuccino, he had removed a keychain flash-drive from
his pocket, hoping it contained some useful information. After
killing Wyman Scudder, he had downloaded the files from the man’s
computer before wiping Scudder’s computer clean. It would take an
expert a good while to restore those files, if it was even
possible.
Just as he had hoped, Scudder had kept
a current address and phone number for Cindy “Di Blasi”
Dobbins.
Never put off until
tomorrow what you can do today.
He laughed. He had put off killing
Poppy Chappelle, but not without a good reason. He wanted her alone
when he killed her. No witnesses. No collateral damage. Following
in the Carver’s footsteps as closely as possible didn’t allow him
much leeway.
He wasn’t sure exactly how much Cindy
knew, but if she knew anything at all that might help the police or
the Powell Agency, she was a liability, just as Wyman Scudder had
been. He no longer needed either of them, just as he no longer
needed Jerome Browning. But Browning didn’t pose a threat. He had
used the convicted killer for his own purposes. And as smart as
Browning was, his ego had prevented him from realizing the complete
truth. However, by now, the Carver knew that Albert Durham would
never write Jerome Browning’s life story.
He could have waited until tomorrow to
hunt down Cindy. Maybe he should have. But the moment he read the
info from Scudder’s file on Cindy, he realized that she was
probably hiding out at her sister’s place in Apple Orchard, South
Carolina, and he had gotten an overwhelming urge to get the job
done as soon as possible. And that’s why he had driven straight
from Savannah, a nearly three-hour trip. That’s why he had set up
about 250 yards into the woods, just far enough in so that he
couldn’t be seen from across the road at Jeri and Lonny Paulk’s
house. He had parked his car at a safe distance, but close enough
to make a quick getaway. Hitting a small target, the size of a
human head, at between 200 and 300 yards required the type of skill
that he had acquired years ago and had used numerous times. He
never became attached to a specific weapon, neither pistols nor
rifles nor knives; instead he used whatever he considered perfect
for the individual job. Tonight he had brought along a recent
purchase—an M24 SWS.
One clean shot was all he needed. One
shot directly into the kill zone where the bullet would sever the
brainstem and cause instantaneous death.
He hadn’t been there more than six or
seven minutes now, watching and waiting for the right moment to
strike. How long had the Powell agents been talking to Cindy?
Lifting his Bushnell binoculars, he zeroed in on the Paulks’ front
porch. Cindy had gone back into the house and the Powell agents
were standing in the front yard talking. Just what had Cindy told
them? She couldn’t have told them something of any real importance
because her knowledge was limited. And with her out of the way, the
agents would have no way to verify what, if anything, she’d told
them.
Minutes ticked by, four, six, ten. The
Powell agents hadn’t left, which meant they were waiting for
something or someone. During the wait, he had gone over his plan,
preparing for several different scenarios, one that included having
to kill the Powell agents as well as Cindy’s sister and
brother-in-law. Having to kill that many people would complicate
the situation, make it messy. He preferred neat loose ends, all
tied up, no usable evidence left behind. He always wore thin
leather gloves that had been handmade in Italy, thus leaving no
fingerprints. Whenever there was a possibility of leaving
footprints, he made sure he wore inexpensive shoes that could be
picked up at Wal-Mart. He prided himself on not making mistakes.
Mistakes could be deadly. And he intended to live to a ripe old
age.
When the front door opened, it was
Lonny Paulk who came out onto the porch, not Cindy Dobbins. This
time he wasn’t carrying a shotgun.
“Cindy’ll be out soon,” Lonny told
Maleah and Derek. “The wife ain’t too happy about her going off
with you two. She says we don’t know y’all, don’t know if we can
trust either of you. But Cindy says she trusts you, so I reckon
that ought to be good enough.”
“We’ll make sure Cindy is kept safe,”
Maleah assured Lonny. “She can call her sister every day if she’d
like. We’re not taking her prisoner.”
“She says that the lawyer she hooked up
with a while back got himself whacked and that the guy who killed
him just might come after her next,” Lonny said. “Any chance that
me and the Mrs. might be in any danger?”
“I don’t think you and Jeri have to
worry. The killer has no reason to harm either of you, especially
once Cindy is no longer staying here with y’all.”
Lonny turned halfway around and
hollered into the house, “You two women stop your yakking and get
out here. You’re keeping these folks waiting.”
When she glanced his way, Maleah noted
the smile in Derek’s eyes although he hadn’t changed his expression
in any way.
“Hold your horses,” Jeri told her
husband as she held the screen door open for her sister. “I needed
time to say my good-byes to Cindy.”
“I’m ready,” Cindy said as she followed
Jeri onto the porch.
Derek moved forward, reached up and
took Cindy’s small, seen-better-days suitcase while Jeri and Cindy
walked down the steps and into the yard, the two women arm-in-arm.
Maleah opened the SUV’s driver’s side door, slid behind the wheel
and impatiently strummed her fingertips on the steering wheel.
After placing the suitcase in the back of the Equinox, Derek stood
outside the SUV. The sisters hugged each other and shed a few
tears. Cindy released Jeri and walked toward Derek, who had opened
the door for her and waited to help her up and into the
vehicle.
Suddenly, halfway to the SUV, Cindy
dropped like a stone falling through water and instantly hit the
ground. The crack of rifle fire pierced the bucolic stillness just
as the bullet entered Cindy’s head. The sound was familiar in a
rural area where hunting was a major pastime. But Maleah quickly
realized that this nighttime shooter’s prey had been human and that
Cindy Dobbins had been killed by a skilled rifleman.
Jeri screamed at the top of her
lungs.
Lonny mumbled, “What the
hell?”
After reaching inside the SUV to grab
the Beretta Maleah kept under the seat as a backup weapon, Derek
got to Cindy first and checked for a pulse. He looked up at Maleah,
who rushed in behind him, and shook his head, then rose to his
feet.
“Call nine-one-one,” Maleah yelled as
she flipped open her holster, pulled out her Glock, and headed
across the country road.
Derek caught up with her just as she
entered the woods. “Hold up,” he told her. “We don’t know where
this guy is. It could take us a while to find him, if we can find
him. Slow down and think this thing through.”
“Damn it, Derek, while we’re thinking,
he could be getting away.”
As if on cue, a car started somewhere
nearby.
Without hesitation, they both rushed
from the edge of the wooded area and ran up the road toward the
sound of the vehicle’s screeching departure. The red taillights
winked mockingly at them as the car sped off in the opposite
direction.
Maleah cursed under her breath as she
turned and raced back up the road toward her SUV still parked in
the Paulks’ driveway.
“She’s dead,” Jeri wailed. “My sister’s
dead.”
“Shot clean through the head,” Lonny
said, a look of shock in his eyes.
“Call 911, damn it,” Maleah told them.
“Get the sheriff out here.” She jumped in the Equinox and revved
the motor.
Derek barely got the passenger’s side
door open before Maleah started backing up the SUV. By the time he
managed to jump inside the Equinox, she had the vehicle headed up
the road, back toward the main highway.