First Lady (36 page)

“Cuddy!” My urgency brought him to the counter. “It was a flounder, right? We're sure it was a flounder? The fish the chess piece was in?”

He still looked angry. “Yeah, flounder, fluke, it was a flatfish.”

“A right-eye flounder or a left-eye?”

“Jesus, Justin, I don't know.”

I pointed down at the neatly layered row of wide thin gray fish with both their filmy eyes on the right side of their flattened heads. Cuddy saw the sign and knew instantly what I meant. It read, “CURL FIN TURBOT.”

“Turbot. Goddamn it, we missed it!”

We were both running, ignoring HPD staff shouting was there a problem? Cuddy yanked a young uniform right out of the cruiser where he sat behind the wheel eating a burrito.

The siren howled as we shot through the mall gates and raced past downtown stoplights at eighty miles an hour.

I asked him, “You know where Margy lives?”

“Yes!” He was calling her phone. No one answered. He called the dispatcher. Any car in the vicinity was to go to her address. Criminal assault in progress.

Judge Margy Turbot's home, a white frame Italian gothic with a mansard roof, was on one of the gentrified blocks of downtown Hillston, ten blocks from my own home. We made it there in five minutes from the time we left Southern Depot. Her BMW was in the driveway, which was hidden from the house by a tall border of boxwood shrubs. No one answered the bell. Through the windows we saw that lights were on and so was the television. Together we snapped the lock on the front door.

The large living room was wrecked, furniture knocked over, rugs awry, a phone on the floor, a broken glass. Cuddy kept calling, “Margy! Margy!” as we ran down the hall into a country kitchen. A great deal of work had gone into the renovated glass cabinets, the black granite counters and the brushed steel appliances. They were now splattered and smeared with so much blood the room looked like a butchery. “Oh Jesus God, no,” Cuddy groaned.

In the middle of the terracotta floor was the woman who'd invested all the care and taste and cost in the room. The woman whose blood now covered the floor and cabinets. Still in the pearl gray suit she'd worn to dinner with us, Margy Turbot lay sprawled and twisted beneath a large oak cutting block. There was no question this time about how the victim had died. The bloody implements had been placed neatly back on the cutting board. She'd been struck repeatedly and savagely on the head with a large serrated wooden mallet. Her throat had been hacked open to the vertebrae with a Chinese chopping cleaver. A tin biscuit or cookie cutter had been jammed into her mouth to hold it ajar. Her chest had been hacked apart, the ribs broken back, the heart sawed out with a fillet knife.

“Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.” Cuddy smashed his head so hard against the door frame that he cut open his forehead. “Stupid! How could I be so stupid?!”

The mallet, cleaver, knife, and cutter, slick with blood, lay side by side on the oak block. Beside them was a small white scale of the sort weight watchers use to count calories. A bloody human heart lay on this scale. Next to the heart stood the other queen from Cuddy's chess set.

A long-haired white Persian cat was rubbing back and forth against the dead woman's side until it saw us. It came over, rubbed against my legs and then ran away.

There were three cars at the Turbot house within minutes of our arrival. One of them was Shelly Bloom's. She'd followed Cuddy and me from Southern Depot. I'd spotted Shelly crawling around behind the high hedge of boxwood that formed a barrier between Margy's house and her driveway. The young reporter was trying to take a photograph through the living room windows. I grabbed her and pulled her back.

She looked torn between excitement and distress. “Come on, Justin. You told me you were this close to an arrest. How did he get her? I saw through the window. Judge Turbot was one of the best things in this good ole boy state. If you were so damn close, how did this happen?” I let go of her. I didn't have an answer.

I called John Emory. Where was Homer Louge? He said he had followed Homer to the ByWays Massage Parlor. The sheriff had gone into a trailer twenty-five minutes earlier and still hadn't come out. I told him to see if he could get any alibi out of Louge for the hours—I glanced up at the clock on Margy's kitchen wall—from ten P.M. 'til we saw him at the Southern Depot crime scene. A silence followed, then Roid said slowly, “An alibi for what, Lieutenant?”

“Judge Turbot's dead. Just see what you can pull out of him without making it formal. But don't let him get away from you.”

An hour later, Margy Turbot, with her hands and head bagged, in a black plastic body pouch on a mortuary gurney, was wheeled from her house past a crowd of reporters and TV cameras. Carol Cathy Cane herself was there. Two bodies in one night and one of them a judge? It brought out the big guns. When Cathy (her hair and make-up perfect even at five A.M.) trotted toward us with her mike thrust out like an Olympic torch, Cuddy said in a dead voice, “Keep her away from me. I mean it.”

I blocked the cameraman's path while Ralph Fisher led Cuddy past the police to a patrol car and drove him away from the scene. Cathy made the best of things by asking me if I was ready to admit that we had a serial killer running amok in Hillston. Was I ready to admit Hillston was in an absolute crisis, a disaster zone, that the whole town would soon panic and riot?

I said the town wouldn't panic unless people like her talked it into it.

“Three women, that's three, have now been murdered in one week!”

“I know that, Cathy.”

By dawn, the bloody weapons, the chess queen, and the scale had been secured and booked into HPD property.

By dawn, every inch of the living room, hall, and kitchen had been videoed, dusted, and vacuumed by the Identification Section detectives, and the house sealed. Margy had been transferred to a stainless steel table where her body was photographed with an MP-4 Polaroid and scanned with a laser for prints. Trace evidence was being collected in small metal evidence boxes. Serological evidence was sought. Dick Cohen's external exam was being recorded on tape. Endocrine, urinary, hemic, biliary—the tests went on and on in the morgue while down the hall our task force supervised a county-wide dragnet for a Ford Explorer with gray carpet.

By dawn, we'd talked to Margy's ex-husband, a local tax lawyer, who seemed to me both very decent and very pained. He'd done what he could to help—including giving us his alibi (he'd been home with his new wife and two children all night). He'd volunteered to call Margy's parents and they were now on their way to Hillston by plane from Florida.

By dawn, John Emory had called in with Sheriff Homer Louge's alibi. It was as solid as his third wife, his grown son, and his son's fiancée—all hefty people. With the three of them he'd been driving back from an emergency visit to his wife's sick mother in Cummings, Georgia. They'd all been inside the Haver County Sheriff's cruiser on I-85 from seven P.M. 'til nearly two A.M. Despite the late hour, Louge had then dropped off his family and headed out for a “massage” to relieve the stress of the trip, but had stopped along the way to check out the crime scene under the lights at Southern Depot.

So Homer Louge wasn't Guess Who. It was a blow to Cuddy. But at least, thank God, Roid had managed to elicit the alibi without having to confront the sheriff, who would have run straight to the city council, howling against HPD. Roid found out by calling Louge's family and pretending to be Mayor Carl Yarborough. I was proud of him.

As the sun came up, six of us—Bunty, Rhonda, Etham, Lisa Grecco, Cuddy, and myself—were still in Room 105 going over the scenario we'd pieced together. Lisa, for whom the young judge had been an admired role model, couldn't stop crying. Cuddy was still so beside himself, so maddened by his failure to stop the murder of his friend, that he periodically burst out in a rage of self-hatred. Why hadn't he taken Margy home? Why hadn't he picked up on the flatfish/turbot connection? Why hadn't he thought about the fact that his name was publicly linked with Margy's because of his support for her candidacy as state's attorney general—so that if Guess Who's purpose had been some deadly game of wits with Cuddy, he would naturally choose a woman Cuddy was known to like?

Privately Cuddy must have been cursing his myopic focus on Lee as the killer's inevitable next victim, for he'd done so out of emotions that Guess Who couldn't possibly be aware of, and the energy spent worrying about protecting Lee should have gone elsewhere. He asked himself endless questions. Why hadn't it dawned on him that the chess queen could symbolize Judge Turbot of Superior Court, the first lady of the judicial system in our county? “The queen of her court,” a newspaper had actually called her only a month earlier. Clearly Guess Who was very aware of Margy's high position. He had weighed her heart on the scales of justice and placed the queen he'd taken from Cuddy beside it.

Cuddy was furious that he hadn't paid more attention to Paul Madison's books on early church saints. If he had, he would have noticed the book illustration that Bunty Crabtree was now showing him of St. Margaret. It hadn't registered on him that Margy's full name was Margaret (she never used it) and that Margaret was another of the martyrs whose head had been cut off. Bunty held up a picture of St. Margaret leading by a chain the dragon who'd swallowed her (as the chess queen had been swallowed by the fish) and then been forced to spit her out.

It was no consolation to Cuddy that none of the rest of us had been any smarter that he. Guess Who had challenged him personally. And won. Finally Bunty offered to call him in a prescription for a tranquilizer. Offended, he refused. It was Etham Foster who ultimately calmed him down by grabbing him from behind when he started kicking a dent in the wall. We'd just heard that Guess Who might have killed Margy as early as ten P.M., so that if Cuddy had driven home with her from the Pine Hills Inn, the assault might never have happened. Or if he hadn't told her he might drop by later, she might not have opened her door to the killer.

Etham told his police chief flatly, “You want to blame yourself, go home and do it. You're wasting our time.” Then he unlocked his arms—long enough to reach the full length of the table that he pressed Cuddy against—and he let him go. When he did, Cuddy took a very slow deep breath, then turned around toward the task force. Everybody in the room looked as if they were playing a game of “Freeze.”

Then Cuddy said, “Doctor D is right. I apologize. Excuse me.” He left the room. When he returned, his hair and face were damp and he was calm.

Soon afterwards, Nancy came back from Trinity Church. An old woman living at the homeless shelter there had told her that two nights ago she'd watched from her bed as Lupe Guevarra had gotten up at three A.M., put together a bag full of clothes and food, and sneaked off. It had been her impression that Lupe was frightened. Immediately we sent out a description of the Garifuna migrant and wired the photo we'd taken of her to precincts up and down the East Coast.

Nancy brought us in the early edition of the July 3
Hillston Star
with its “EXCLUSIVE! GUESS WHO STRIKES TWICE IN ONE NIGHT!” article by Shelly Bloom. In her scoop, she quoted the head of Hillston homicide (in other words, me) as saying, “We are extremely close to an arrest. Guess Who has made some serious and very stupid mistakes—sociopaths always do—and these errors have given us invaluable leads. I can't say anything more specific, but we have a prime suspect and his arrest is imminent.”

“JayJay, what the hell does that mean?” Rhonda asked.

“It means flushing your pheasant,” Bunty said, nodding at me.

Cuddy said, “It means the lieutenant's got twenty-four hours to make Shelly an honest woman.”

I understood him completely. We didn't have a prime suspect. We needed to arrest one by July 4. It was July 3.

Nancy also brought news from Augie Summers at Southern Depot. As I'd suspected, the killer had thrust the murder weapon deep inside another of the hundreds of large garbage bags that lay piled in the loading area. The weapon was a short steel-handled grapple hook used for slinging fish around by the gills. The grip was caked in blood. There were no prints on it.

Nancy had already heard on the radio dispatch in her car that Judge Margy Turbot had been murdered that night. She sat down miserable. “Guess Who's killed three women in one week.”

We were all very much aware of that.

An hour later, a message came from the morgue. By means of a chemical thermometer (the body loses one to two degrees of heat every hour after death), Dick Cohen now placed Margy's murder somewhere close to eleven. Rigor had just been setting in when we'd discovered her. So the killer now had more than a six-hour lead.

Tracing Margy's steps wasn't that difficult. She'd left the Pine Hills Inn at 9:30, dropped Dina Yarborough off at 9:50, declining an invitation to come in for a nightcap. There was no sign of a break-in at Margy's house; it seemed probable that Guess Who had arrived just after she returned home. She hadn't changed her clothes yet, but she had listened to her messages, poured herself a drink of single malt, turned on and muted a news channel, and fed her cat. Our best guess was that she'd incautiously answered her doorbell (perhaps assuming it was Cuddy).

Guess Who must have pushed his way in and struck her immediately, knocking the glass out of her hand. It looked from the disarray of furniture and rugs as if he'd knocked her unconscious right there at the door. Neighbors had heard no scream or sounds of a struggle. There were no defensive wounds or skin and hair traces under her nails to suggest that she'd fought her assailant. But what had he hit her with? With her skull so battered and fractured by the wood mallet, would it be possible to distinguish a blow from a different blunt force instrument? It looked as if he'd then dragged her back into the kitchen (one of her shoes had caught in the phone line on the floor) and there found the means to finish the murder.

Bleary with lack of sleep, our stomachs in cramps from too much coffee, we went over the sequence again and again. I acted it out. “He drags her down the hall, drops her in the kitchen by the cutting board, beats in her head with the mallet. Then what? He uses the tin cutter to pry open her mouth? He does his thing before he hacks open her throat?”

Rhonda said yes. “The way her lips bled, looks like she was still alive when he jammed that cutter in her mouth. And you know why the son of a bitch did it too.”

Cuddy called the morgue for the tenth time. Had Dick Cohen found any evidence of semen or pubic hair in the mouth cavity? No, Dick had not; he promised we'd know ASAP if he did.

Bunty was looking out the window at the slow purple lightening of the sky. She said quietly. “G.W.'s lost it. Lost control. And he hates that.”

Cuddy studied her eyes. “It looked more like Jeffrey Dahmer in that kitchen. Blood splatter everywhere. At least ten blows to her throat, another dozen to her chest.”

Bunty nodded. “He had to use his hands to break those ribs, pull that heart out. He wouldn't like that. Not at all. Our boy's always been into neat and tidy. Everything under control. Matches just so, candles just so. Everything's disintegrating on him now.”

I pointed out, “There's no way, with that cleaver flying around, that he didn't get her blood all over him. I don't understand why there's
nothing
on the floor, walls, somewhere, on his exit route.”

Rhonda studied the photos of Margy's cloth Roman shades pulled down over the three kitchen windows. “He dragged her back here unconscious, took off his clothes, cut her up, washed off in the sink—look at the water here on the counter—put his clothes back on and walked out.”

I said, “Doesn't sound disintegrated. Sounds careful.”

Lisa said, “But those clothes are blood soaked. Wherever they are.”

“They're someplace we aren't going to find them, like the bottom of the Shocco River.” Cuddy looked directly at me, almost the first time since he'd found me with Mavis. “Okay, that's it? Is Guess Who done? If he killed her just to show me he could do it, is that checkmate?”

It was hard for me to believe that the man who'd hacked the heart out of the breast of Margy Turbot would be able to stop now, even if he wanted to.

• • •

At seven in the morning on July 3, Bunty and Rhonda were asleep on air mattresses they'd inflated and set up in a corner. Lisa had gone home. Etham was back in his lab. Cuddy was down the hall in the morgue with Dick Cohen looking at autopsy results on Margy. I was studying a DMV list of Ford Explorer registrations that he had left on top of his briefcase. I noticed that among the five vehicles he'd circled was a black '97 model registered to a Dr. Roger Ferraro at 5171 Dumfries Court. Dumfries Court sounded familiar, but I couldn't place it. When I reached over into my jacket for my pen and note pad, the manila envelope that Roid had given me at Southern Depot fell out of the pocket. It was the information he'd obtained finally from the Registrar's Office at Haver University. I'd forgotten all about it.