HIGHWAY HOMICIDE (7 page)

Hours later, he awoke in a panic to the sound of an engine running right outside the barn door.

Chapter Eleven

Erica Caspar had identified her sister Maria’s body, shedding many more tears in the process. She was now back at Judy’s place, having an evening meal with Carl and Judy. Almost had dropped by to introduce himself, offer his condolences and to arrange a pick up time for her in the morning. He’d be driving her back to Rutland.

Once the initial shock of losing her sister had worn off a bit, Erica was both pleasant and talkative. The two women got along very well, with Erica helping Judy to prepare the meal.

Carl and Almost put their heads together in the meantime, sharing what each had learned so far.

“So, Almost,” Carl said, “This body out at the Finlay place, you reckon it was a homicide then?”

“No doubt about it, Carl. The victim was shot, single bullet through the center of the forehead. Hard shot for a suicide to make with a rifle. An inch or so lower and it would have been right between the eyes. Whoever took this dude out was deadly serious. The rifle was lying on the floor beside the foot of the bed. Throwing it back there would be another tricky thing for a suicide to do after he’d just shot himself through the head, wouldn’t it?”

“You’re saying ‘he’, Almost. You think the victim was male then?” Carl asked.

“No, Carl, ‘he’ was just a figure of speech. It was impossible to tell, but the Burlington boys were all over it. I’m sure their pathologist will have that info for us by tomorrow and can tell us how long the victim’s been dead,” Almost told them. “From what I saw of the condition of the body, I’d say it must have been several years. Five or six would be my guess.”

“That would have been around the time Dolly Cook took off with her fancy man, wouldn’t it? I always had Jack Finlay slated for that, since they both took off at the same time. Though Lord knows why she would have preferred Jack to Errol.”

Judy said, “Errol wasn’t drinking until after Dolly left either, but Jack had been a dirty old bum for years.”

“He owned that dilapidated old house, but it was all he ever had going for him,” Carl said. “No one in their right mind would ever have bought it off of him either. So it was no wonder he just walked away from it, was it?”

Almost and Judy nodded their agreement as Carl continued.

“I always thought, like everyone else in town, he’d taken off to
California with Dolly and had just deserted that old dump of his. That was what the gossip of the day was all about, and you know how accurate that can be, don’t you?”

The other two nodded again.

“Strange to now find an old dead body in Jack’s place, though, don’t you think?” Carl said. “I’ve always felt sorrier for poor old Errol though. He’s been trying to forget his Dolly with the help of a bottle for over five years now.”

Several miles away, another man would have agreed with him completely. It was actually five years, six months and, what was it? Yeah, twelve days.

He could have even told Carl and Almost the time of day, the type of murder weapon, the victim’s name and even what the reason had been for killing him.

It was all over a woman, naturally, wasn’t it? Wasn’t it always over women or money? It was always one or the other. The ironical part of it all was neither of them had gotten the woman in the end. What had been even more ironical was that
her
death had been purely accidental.

For over five years he’d been trying to forget what had happened, but he couldn’t. He’d taken other measures to help him forget but they hadn’t worked worth a damn either. He also had the nightmares, drunken ones, but still nightmares all the same.

He’d killed a man for nothing. Absolutely nothing!

His wife had told him, in no uncertain terms, that she was going away with Jack Finlay, and he’d gone to Finlay’s dump of a place to confront them both.

Without even thinking rationally, he’d forced open a window in Finlay’s house and had climbed inside. He’d snatched down Finlay’s hunting rifle from the rack on the wall and checked it was loaded. Then, rifle in hand, he’d rushed up the stairs.

With one kick he broke open the door and had expected to find his wife and Finlay in bed together. As the door flew open, Finlay had awakened and sat up in the bed, startled at seeing a man pointing a rifle at him.

“It’s not what you think, Errol. I haven’t done anything at all. She’s not here. She’s had an ac…” He didn’t finish, as his midnight visitor shot him through the forehead.

It wasn’t until early the next morning that Jack Finlay’s midnight visitor found his wife dead in his own back yard. It looked to him as though, in her hurry to leave, she’d stepped on a garden rake whose handle had flown up and hit her in the forehead. The impact had knocked her over backwards and she’d hit her head on the decorative stone edging around one of her flower beds.

It had obviously been an accident and Finlay hadn’t had anything at all to do with it, just as he’d been trying to say. But he also had obviously had seen her lying there injured or dead and had done nothing about it either. He’d just run away instead.

His wife had threatened several times to run off with Finlay, the town bum, in order to get him all riled up. This time he’d thought she’d actually gone and done it.

He’d certainly gotten himself riled up all right! He’d walked into a completely innocent man’s house and had shot him through the head. He’d shot him in cold blood, and why? Because his own stupid wife had lied to him to make him jealous. As she’d flounced out of their house, she’d told him she was going off to California with Jack Finlay. She preferred Jack Finlay, the dirtiest old bum in the whole of New England probably, to him; she’d spat back at him as she’d stalked out

At least he’d shot Finlay with Jack’s own hunting rifle. And he’d made certain that he’d wiped the rifle and anything else he may have touched clean of his own prints. When Jack was found dead, he knew he would naturally be the prime suspect. But being suspected of something and being proven guilty of it were two different things entirely, weren’t they? As far as his dead wife was concerned, accidental death or not, they’d still have to find her first.

His house and garden were far enough away from his closest neighbors that any activity of his would probably either go unnoticed or would appear to be perfectly normal to them.

He started off by digging as deep a hole in the middle of his vegetable patch as he could manage. When it was finished to his satisfaction, he dragged his wife’s body over to the edge and rolled her over into it. She ended up face down in the bottom of the hole. He was glad of that because he didn’t want to have to see her face as he covered her with earth.

Once that gruesome task was completed, he rested on a bench at the side of the vegetable garden for a few minutes. But his job was far from finished. When he felt sufficiently rested, he went over to his garden shed, took out his gasoline powered rototiller and tilled the entire vegetable garden, including right over the spot in the middle where he’d just buried his wife.

His neighbors, had they heard him, apart from it being rather early in the morning, would have thought nothing at all of it. After all, he did the same thing around this time every year. The very next day, he planted the entire plot with seed potatoes.

That same evening, he went to one of the local bars, and over a few drinks, he put out the story that his wife had run off to
California with her fancy man. Just to add reality to his story as he got progressively more drunk, he swore he’d kill them both if he ever saw them again. His sad story received sympathetic nods from many of the other patrons of the bar. One or two of them had found themselves in much the same situation in their own marriages or relationships. But he’d made damned sure that he hadn’t named Finlay at the time. He knew very well, from experience, that the Cooper’s Corners gossip mill would take care of all the details for him.

And it did, in its usual very thorough way. It’d been noticed that Jack Finlay’s house was now deserted, and the local gossipers put their twos and twos together. It was then considered to be an undisputed fact that Dolly Cook had run off with Jack Finlay, though Lord knows why. Once the gossip had decided those were the facts of the situation, it was as concrete a decision as any of those handed down in the courthouses of
Burlington or Montpelier. The pair was guilty of philandering and that was a fact until it could be proved otherwise, and who was ever going to bother?

If any old house had been left empty and deserted like that in a larger community, someone would have checked it out for anything of value, vandals would have wrecked it and most probably the local police would have taken a look as well.

But this was Cooper’s Corners, and anyone who’d had the misfortune to ever go inside Jack Finlay’s place, knew it contained absolutely nothing but filth and junk. There just wasn’t anything worth taking. The place wasn’t even worth vandalizing and it always smelled so bloody awful as well, as Jack himself did.

That was why the wife of the man who’d shot him would goad her husband with threats of running off with Finlay. She was suggesting in no uncertain terms, that she preferred the town’s filthy old bum to him. It was actually very, very far from the truth. Like almost everyone else in Cooper’s Corners, she had absolutely no time for the filthy bum at all. But her words had been enough to get the poor man killed.

The house itself had remained untouched until it has been invaded in the middle of a blizzard by David Gates, the mystery man from the highway. It was a house that contained nothing but dirt, junk, vermin and just one murdered skeleton!

Back down in Rutland another man was doing some hard and serious thinking as well. He’d been standing over the bludgeoned body of Maria Caspar, improvised weapon in his hand, when David Gates had burst into the room. To the man’s utter astonishment, David had looked down at Maria’s body and his mouth had dropped open. The man watched as David’s eyes rolled up in his head and he’d slumped heavily to the floor.

The man frowned. He could have sworn, in just that split second, that David hadn’t even noticed him. If he had, then it hadn’t registered in his brain. He’d just passed out when he’d seen the bloodied body of his former lover lying there on his living room carpet.

The man thought for a moment and then reached into his parka pocket. He pulled out a plastic pill container. It contained the date rape pills that he’d planned to use on Maria but it hadn’t got that far. She’d realized his intentions and had started to scream her head off. He’d panicked and had slapped her hard across the face but she’d continued to scream.

In desperation, he’d grabbed up a bronze figurine from one of the end tables and had hit her with it. She’d already turned away from him and the blow had hit her across the back of the head. She fell to her knees but had still kept screaming. He hit her several more times until she fell sideways and was silent. She’d rolled partly as she fell and now laid face up, eyes wide open in shock, on the carpet in front of him. He was just straightening up when David had burst into the room.

Now both of them were lying there at his feet, one quite obviously dead and the other one unconscious.

He really wasn’t quite sure what had made him take his next course of action. Reaching down he turned David’s limp form over so he was face up also. Then, opening up the container of pills, he pulled David’s head back and forced his mouth open. He tipped some of the pills into David’s mouth and then held his hand over David’s mouth and nose. Even unconscious, unable to breath David gave an involuntary gulp as the man removed his hand again. Pulling David’s mouth open again, the man saw a couple of the pills were still on his tongue. He repeated the process until he was satisfied that, conscious or not, David had swallowed them all.

That should delay his return to consciousness for some time, the man thought, or it might just kill him. It didn’t matter too much either way, did it?

Fortunately for the killer, David’s small house had access to his garage through a door in the front hallway.  David had parked his Chevy station wagon in the garage not more than a few minutes ago and he’d left his keys on a small table beside the door. The man picked up the keys, put them in his pocket and opened up the door to the garage.

Then, after returning to the living room, he dragged David out to the garage. He opened up the Chevy’s rear doors and maneuvered David headfirst into the cargo space. Next, he rushed back in and wrapped Maria’s body in a comforter he’d taken from David’s bedroom. Then he dragged her out to the garage as well. With Maria’s body being so much lighter than David’s, he was also able to get her into the wagon much easier as well. He put her into the car head first as well but as he pulled her in, the comforter parted, revealing the massive head wounds he’d inflicted on her.

But, as he’d worked, a plan had been forming in his head. He thought for a moment more and then returned to the inside of the house. When he got back, he was carrying a small hand towel from the bathroom. His stomach heaved a little as he first wiped the towel over Maria’s bloodied head and then wiped the blood covered towel over David’s boots. When he was finished, he threw the towel into the back corner of the garage.

Finally, he closed the Chevy’s rear doors and climbed into the driver’s seat. Taking David’s keys from his pocket, he started the car up and immediately, using the garage’s remote control to put the door up, drove on out. His own car was parked a short distance away from David’s house on a side street.