Pawing Through the Past (23 page)

49

All hell broke loose. The media from all over Virginia, Washington, and even Baltimore played up the murders. The attention was fueled by the fact that Rex and Bob had been killed on a weekend when news was especially slow and Bob had been a big sports celebrity.

Crozet, overrun by vans adorned with satellite dishes, pulled tight the shutters on the windows. Few chose to talk but among themselves the agreement was that the media was correct in dubbing these events the Reunion Murders.

The reporters waited outside the various churches, trying to nab the faithful as they emerged from late-morning services.

Public buildings were closed. The reporters were out of luck there but they hit up the convenience stores, including Market Shiflett’s. The reporter from Channel 29, having done her homework, knew that Market was a member of the class under siege. Being quite pretty, she managed to extract a comment from him, which was played on the news relentlessly.

“The big cities have lots of nutcases. Guess it was Crozet’s turn,” Market said, looking into the camera from behind the cash register of the store.

Since few other quotes were available, Market made the airwaves up and down the Mid-Atlantic.

Mim Sanburne called a meeting at her house. Invited were those she considered the movers and shakers of the town. Harry and Miranda, part of the inner circle by virtue of birth and their jobs, sat with Herb Jones, Jim Sanburne, Larry Johnson, and Mim, discussing how to divert the bad publicity.

“That problem would be solved if we could apprehend the criminal,” Harry, out of sorts, whispered, her voice still rough.

The older people quieted, each realizing that not being members of the class of 1980, they felt safe.

“You’re quite right.” Mim smoothed her hair.

50

Dennis Rablan was nowhere to be found. Rick Shaw scoured the photo shop and Rablan’s house, called his parents and his friends. No one had seen or heard from him—at least, that’s what they told Rick and Cynthia. He had stationed patrol cars at Dennis’s home, his parents’ home, and his ex-wife’s home.

Standing next to the coroner, Rick hoped Dennis would open the doors to his business on Monday morning. He was sure Dennis knew something that he wasn’t telling—assuming he was alive.

“This man died from a bullet to the brain. Apart from broken fingers, smashed knees, and both sides of his collarbone broken—the results of twelve years of pro football—this was a man in good health.” The coroner shook his head. “I’d like to take every high-school football hero and show them what happens to people who continue to play this game throughout college and the pros. They get money and maybe fame but that’s all they get.”

“How long was he dead before he was found this morning?”

“I’d say the time of death occurred about four in the morning. You examined the site, of course.”

“No sign of struggle.” Rick hoped the embalmer at the fu-neral home would be able to get the dark color from Bob’s face and he asked the coroner if that was possible.

“Usually. Once the blood drains out it will drain from the face, too, but I’m a coroner, not a funeral director.” He smiled, perfectly at home with dead bodies. “If that doesn’t work, I’d suggest a closed casket. There’s the problem of the deep crease in the neck but if he staples the collar to the skin at the back of the neck it should stay up and not distress the family. I remember Bob’s glory days at Crozet High.” He peered over his half-moon glasses. “And beyond.”

“Me, too.” Cynthia finally spoke. Autopsies put her considerable composure to the test.

“Those days are over now,” Rick simply stated. “Funny how an entire life reduces to that final moment. Bob probably thought he could get out of it, whatever or whoever. Self-confidence was never his problem.”

“Same M.O.?” The coroner pulled the sheet up over Bob’s discolored face.

“Yes. More than likely he wasn’t shot at the school. His body was carried to the high school and up the steps. He’s no feather either.”

“One hundred and eighty-eight pounds, a good weight for a cornerback. Your killer will have sore legs unless he’s a weight lifter.”

When Rick and Cynthia drove away, Cynthia said, “Harry, Boom, and Fair certainly had a shock. They didn’t know he’d been shot between the eyes until we hauled up the body. There’s that moment when you see the corpse, the physical damage—it never leaves you.”

“I was surprised that BoomBoom didn’t swoon. She rarely misses an opportunity to give vent to her innermost feelings,” Rick wryly commented.

“Remarkably restrained.” Cynthia sighed. “Considering she’d slept with the man not six or seven hours before that.”

“We’ve got her statement. She didn’t waffle. I give her credit.” Rick headed back toward the department, then turned toward Crozet.

“School?”

“No. BoomBoom’s.”

They pulled into the driveway of the beautiful white brick home. BoomBoom’s deceased husband had made a lot of money in the gravel and concrete business, a business she still owned although she did not attend to day-to-day operations. Flakey as Boom could be, she could read an accounting report with the best of them, and she made a point of dropping in at the quarry once or twice a week. She intended to profit handsomely from the building boom in Albemarle County.

A Toyota Camry was parked next to her BMW.

If anything, BoomBoom seemed relieved to see them again. Her eyes, red from crying, were anxious.

Chris Sharpton and Bitsy Valenzuela rose when Rick and Cynthia walked into the lavish living room.

“Should we leave?”

“Not yet,” Rick said.

Boom offered refreshments, which they declined.

“Ladies, what are you doing here?” the sheriff asked.

“I called them,” Boom said.

“That’s fine but I didn’t ask you.” Rick smiled, as he’d known Olivia Ulrich Craycroft since she was tiny, and no offense was taken on her part.

“Like she said, she called me, she was crying and I drove over,” Chris said. “I’m afraid I haven’t been much comfort. I told her to take a vacation. In fact, everyone from her class should take a vacation.”

“She called me, too.” Bitsy confirmed BoomBoom’s statement. “I asked E.R. if I could come over. He’s worried about all this but he relented since Chris and I were driving over to-gether.”

“The victims are men.” Cynthia leaned forward as Rick settled into his chair. “BoomBoom doesn’t appear to be in danger.”

“I’d hate to be the exception that proves the rule,” BoomBoom said.

Rick waited, resting his head on his hand.

First she sat still, then she fidgeted. Finally she spoke. “I know you think I know something, sheriff, but I don’t.” Suddenly she got up and walked upstairs to her bedroom, returning with Bob’s gold Rolex watch. She dropped it into Rick’s upturned hand. “I didn’t steal it. He left it here last night. Can you return it to his widow? I mean, you don’t have to tell. Why should she know?”

“Fine.” Rick slipped the heavy watch in his pocket.

“Were you two together in high school?” Cynthia asked.

“No. We just looked at one another at the supper and there it was. People told me these things happen at reunions but it wasn’t a case of some old wish being fulfilled.”

“Who did you date in high school? Any of the deceased?”

“Coop, I told you all this. No. My senior year I dated college guys mostly. The dances, let’s see, I went with Bittner if my boyfriend at the time couldn’t come.”

“And where is this boyfriend?” Cynthia scribbled.

“A vice president at Coca-Cola in Atlanta. I think he’ll be president someday. As you know, I married a hometown boy, although he was eight years older than I.”

“Chris, sometimes outsiders can see more than insiders. What do you think?” Cynthia asked the blonde woman, who had been listening intently.

“That I’m glad I’m not part of this.” She nervously glanced at BoomBoom. “Even if you are a woman and therefore probably safe, I’d be frightened.”

“Did you notice anything unusual when you worked on the reunion?” Coop turned to Bitsy.

“Uh . . . well, they picked on one another. No one held much back.” She smiled nervously. “But there wasn’t enough hostility for murder.”

“Did anyone ever discuss Charlie’s illegitimate child from high school?”

Bitsy replied, “Not until Dennis lost his composure.”

Chris looked Cynthia straight in the eye. “No. I didn’t hear about that until later.”

“You know that Dennis Rablan accused me of having Charlie’s baby, but I didn’t. I swear I didn’t.” BoomBoom frowned.

“But you know who did?” Rick quietly cornered her.

Boom’s face turned red, then the color washed right out. “Oh God, I swore never to tell.”

“You couldn’t have foreseen this, and the information might have a bearing on the case.” Rick remained calm and quiet.

Agitated, BoomBoom jumped from her chair. “No! I won’t tell. She wouldn’t have killed Charlie. She wouldn’t. As for Leo and the others: Why? What could the motive possibly be? It makes no sense. I don’t care what happened back then, if anything did happen. The murders make no sense.”

“That’s our job. To find out.” Coop was now perched on the edge of her seat. “What may seem like no connection to you . . . well, there could be all kinds of reasons.”

“But I thought these murders sprang from the supposed rape of Ron Brindell.” Boom paced back and forth. “Isn’t that what everyone’s saying?”

“That’s just it. No one admits to being there. Market Shiflett heard about it at school. Bittner says he wasn’t there and the same for Dennis Rablan.”

“What do you think?” BoomBoom asked Cynthia.

“It’s not my job to point the finger until I have sufficient evidence. Right now what I think is immaterial.”

“It’s not immaterial to me.” BoomBoom pouted, pacing faster. “You’re asking me to betray a lifelong trust and I know in my heart that this woman has nothing to do with these awful murders.” She sat down abruptly. “I know what you all think of me. You think I’m a dilettante. I have, as Mrs. Hogendobber so politely puts it, ‘enthusiasms.’ I sleep with men when I feel like it. That makes me a tramp, to some. I guess to most. You all think I take a new lover every night. I don’t, of course. You think I’m overemotional, oversexed, and underpowered.” She tapped her skull. “Think what you will, I still have honor. I refuse to tell.”

“This could get you in a lot of trouble,” Rick softly replied.

“Trouble on the outside, not trouble on the inside.” She pointed to her heart.

51

Rick had been on the phone for fifteen minutes. On a hunch he had Cynthia call the San Francisco Police Department.

He decided he wanted to talk to the officers on the scene that night. Luckily, Tony Minton, now a captain, remembered the case.

“—you’re sure the note was his handwriting?”

Captain Minton replied, “Yes. We searched his apartment after the suicide and the handwriting was his. Our graphologist confirmed.”

“Enough is enough.” Rick quoted Ron’s suicide note.

“That was it.”

“There were three reliable witnesses.”

“And others who didn’t stop. They reported a young man climbing on the Golden Gate Bridge, waving good-bye and leaping. We never found the body.”

“And the witnesses could describe the victim?”

“Medium height. Thin build. Young. Dark hair.”

“Yes.” Rick covered his eyes with his palm for a moment. “Did he have a police record?”

“No.”

“Captain Minton, thank you for going over this again. If you think of anything at all, please call me.”

“I will.”

Rick hung up the phone. He stood up, clapped his hat on his head, crooked his finger at Cynthia, who was again studying lab reports. “Let’s go,” he said.

Silently, she followed him. Within twenty minutes they were at Dede Rablan’s front door.

She answered the door and allowed them to come inside. She then sent the two children, aged eight and ten, to their rooms and asked them not to interrupt them.

“I’m sorry to disturb you again, Mrs. Rablan.”

“Sheriff, I want an answer to this as well as you do. Dennis wouldn’t kill anyone. I know him.”

“I hope you’re right.” Rick reassured her, by his tone of voice, that he felt the same way. “Has he called today?”

“No. He usually calls in the evening to check on the kids. He has them next weekend.”

“You met just out of college?” Cynthia referred to her notes from an earlier questioning.

“Yes. I was working for a travel magazine. Just started. A researcher.”

“Dede.” Cynthia leaned toward her. She knew her socially, as they took dance classes together. “Did you ever get the feeling Dennis had a secret—even once?”

“I had hunches he was unfaithful to me.” She lowered her eyes.

“Something darker?”

“Cynthia, no. I wish I could help but he’s not a violent man. He’s an undirected one. A spoiled one. If he had a dark secret, he kept it from me for twelve years. You have to be a pretty good actor to pull that off.”

Rick cleared his throat. “Did you ever think that your husband might be a homosexual?”

Dede blinked rapidly, then laughed. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

52

Monday proved to be even more chaotic than Sunday. Print reporters snagged people at work, and television vans rolled along Route 240 and the Whitehall Road as reporters looked for possible interviews.

Harry and Miranda refused to speak to any media person. Their patience was sorely tested when the TV cameras came inside anyway, the interviewer pouncing on people as they opened their mailboxes.

“Ask me,”
Pewter shouted.
“I discovered the garotte.”

“I discovered the body. I smelled it out!”
Tucker tooted her own horn.

“You two better shut up. This is federal property and I don’t think animals are supposed to work in post offices,”
Murphy grumbled.
“They don’t listen. They never listen. It’s Dennis Rablan—dumbbells—Dennis and someone drenched in English Leather cologne.”

“Bull! The government rents the building. As long as they don’t own it we can do what we want.”
Pewter had learned that fact from Miranda, though she had neglected to confirm that the renter could do as they pleased. But then the federal government did whatever they wanted, pretending to have the welfare of citizens at heart. The fact that Americans believed this astonished the gray cat, who felt all governments were no better than self-serving thieves. Cats are by instinct and inclination anarchists.

“Pewter, if we appear on television, all it takes is one officious jerk to make life difficult,”
Murphy, calmer now, advised her.

“I’ll fight! I’ll fight all the way to the Supreme Court!”
Pewter crowed.

“Animals don’t have political rights or legal ones, either.”
Tucker sat under the table.
“Humans think only of themselves.”

“Be glad of it.”
Mrs. Murphy watched from the divider.
“If humans decided to create laws for animals, where would it end? Would chickens have rights? Would we be allowed to hunt? Would the humans we live with have to buy hunting licenses for us? If we killed a bird would we go to jail? Remember, we’re dealing with a species that denies its animal nature and wants to deny ours.”

“Hadn’t thought of that,”
Pewter mumbled, then threw back her head and sang out.
“To hell with the Supreme Court! To hell with all human laws. Let’s go back to the fang and the claw!”

“Someone has.”
Murphy jumped down as the TV camera swung her way.

Bitsy Valenzuela opened the door, saw the commotion and closed it. A few others did the same until the television people left.

“Damn, that makes me mad!” Harry cursed, her voice actu-ally huskier than the day before. Her throat hurt more, too.

“They hop around like grasshoppers.” Mrs. Hogendobber walked to the front window to watch the van back out into traffic. The sky was overcast. “‘But if any man hates his neighbor, and lies in wait for him, and attacks him, and wounds him mortally so that he dies, and the man flees into one of these cities, then the elders of his city shall send and fetch him from there, and hand him over to the avenger of blood, so that he may die.’” She quoted Deuteronomy, chapter nineteen, verses eleven and twelve.

“What made you think of that?”

“I don’t know exactly.” Miranda flipped up the hinged part of the divider and walked into the mailroom. “There’s a pall of violence over the land, a miasma over America. We must be the most violent nation among the civilized nations of the earth.”

“I think that depends on how you define civilized. You mean industrialized, I think.”

“I suppose I do.” Mrs. Hogendobber put her arm around Harry. “You could have been killed, child. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

Tears welled up in their eyes and they hugged.

“The strange thing was, Mrs. H., that I wasn’t scared until I got home. I was glad to have Fair there and Tracy, too.”

“Tracy is very fond of you. He’s . . .” She didn’t finish her sentence. Bitsy slipped back in now that the television crew had left.

“Hi.”

“Hi, Bitsy.” Miranda greeted her.

“Just came for my mail.”

Chris pushed open the door, said hello to everyone, then exhaled sharply. “It’s like a circus out there. Do you think there’d be this many reporters if someone in town had won the Nobel Prize?”

“No. Goodness isn’t as interesting as evil, it would seem,” Harry said.

“Still under the weather?” Chris came up to the counter, followed by Bitsy.

“Laryngitis. Can’t shake it.”

“There’s a dark red mark on your neck,” Chris observed. “Girl, you’d better go to the doctor. That doesn’t look like laryngitis to me. Come on, I’ll run you over.”

“No, no,” Harry politely refused.

“If there’s color on your neck, Harry, this could be something quite serious. You’re being awfully nonchalant.”

“Chris, don’t tell me the seven warning signs of cancer,” Harry rasped, then laughed.

“It’s not funny!” Chris was deadly serious.

Miranda stepped up to the counter. “I’ll take her at lunch. You’re quite right to be concerned. Harry is bullheaded—and I’m being restrained in my description.”

The animals watched as Chris and Bitsy left, each getting into separate cars.

“Do you think those present can keep from telling what really happened to Mom Saturday night?”
Tucker worried.

“They’d better. Mom is in enough trouble as it is.”
Pewter sat by the animal door. She couldn’t make up her mind whether to stay inside, where it was cozy, or whether to take a little walk. She was feeling antsy.

“But that’s the deal. The killer will come into this post office. He’ll know that Mom doesn’t have laryngitis. If she pretends that is her problem, it could rattle his cage. I flat-out don’t like it and I don’t care what the humans say—this person will strike like a cobra. They think because there’s a human with her at all times, that she’s safe. Remember, this killer gets close to his victims. They aren’t threatened. Then—pow!”
Tucker was deeply worried. How could two cats and one dog save Harry?

Murphy, listening intently, hummed “The Old Gray Mare” under her breath.