The Lion, the Lamb, the Hunted: A Psychological Thriller (5 page)

I wrote it down. “What else?”

“A three-year-old boy from Corvine, Texas by the name of Nathan Allan Kingsley. Went missing from home. Never found.”

I was already reaching across the counter for my laptop. “Thanks, Sully. Call you later.”

“That’s all I get?”

“Thanks Sully. You’re the best. Call you later.”

I heard a groan before he hung up.

I logged in on Infoquest, started searching for
Lester, Missouri, Neil Adam Kershaw, strangled.
Several articles came up. I clicked on the first, dated August 6, 1976, from the
Lester Star Tribune.

Authorities Identify Man Found Strangled Outside Hog Farm

By Reggie Adamson

The county coroner has released the name of a man found dead in his car on Tuesday. Authorities say forty-six-year-old Neil Adam Kershaw was strangled. His body was found inside his vehicle parked in front of Sampson’s Hog Farm in the two-hundred block of Dunbar Lane around three a.m.

Authorities have no suspect but are asking for any information that could lead to an arrest.

And it looked like they got some. Apparently, Kershaw was quite the lady’s man. Had a wife, plus a girlfriend on the side. Unfortunately, the girlfriend had a husband, and
he
was none too thrilled when he found out they’d been carrying on. He killed her, then went after Kershaw. Authorities were able to link both crimes and make an arrest.

Case closed.

Next, on to Nathan Allan Kingsley. Infoquest brought me a story dated October 10, 1977, from the
Observer
in Corvine, Texas.

Arrest Made in Case of Murdered Toddler

By Frank D’Alessandro

Corvine authorities took 23-year-old Ronald Lee Lucas into custody last night, charging him with the kidnapping and murder of three-year-old Nathan Allan Kingsley. Detectives say they discovered evidence in Lucas’s apartment linking him to the crime, which occurred more than a year ago. An anonymous tip led them to the suspect.

Nathan Kingsley disappeared from his home in June of last year, leaving parents Jean and Dennis Kingsley devastated and officials bewildered. Mrs. Kingsley had just returned home from the grocery store with Nathan when she stepped outside to check the mail. When she returned to the house moments later, the boy was gone.

Lucas is being held without bail in the county jail pending arraignment.

I narrowed my focus on the photo and felt my gut tighten. The boy was wearing a necklace—
the
necklace
.
I was pretty sure of it.

I pulled up a few more articles. Authorities believed Lucas buried the body in the desert. As large an area as that was, chances were slim they’d ever find it.

Stop worrying. Everything is taken care of. Trust me, that’s one body they’ll never find.

Words from Warren to my mother—words that were now haunting me.

According to the story, they’d found plenty in Lucas’s apartment linking him to the crime, evidence that sealed his fate: a sneaker and underwear belonging to Nathan, and a knife—all with the boy’s blood on them. Genetic testing wasn’t a reality yet, but blood typing was, and they’d scored a match.

I shivered.

If all that hadn’t been enough, Lucas was a paroled sex offender, and if
that
wasn’t enough, a witness later surfaced, a mailman, who reported seeing Lucas in the neighborhood at the time of the kidnapping. With no viable alibi, Lucas didn’t stand a snowball’s-chance-in-hell of escaping conviction. He spent several years on death row in Huntsville, Texas, then died in the electric chair December of 1983.

And there was more tragedy. Shortly after the murder, Jean Kingsley began spiraling into series of mental breakdowns that took her in and out of a psychiatric hospital. During her final stay there, she hanged herself.

I thought about Dennis Kingsley losing his only son and then his wife—grief piled upon grief, everything that mattered to him gone in an instant. Left alone with nothing but his sadness.

I pushed on and found an interview and photo of the parents. From what I could see, an all-American family: Jean Kingsley, attractive and petite, and Dennis, large with short-cropped hair, a thick neck, and arms like oversized rolling pins. He worked at the local cannery. Both appeared young, probably in their early-to-mid twenties. And desperate. “I only left him in his playpen for a minute,” Jean was quoted as saying. “Only a minute!”

Just like that. Vanished.

No word anywhere about the necklace.

I held it up to the light and let it dangle: criminal evidence in my hand, and even worse, from a kidnapping and murder.

Next came more questions. Should I turn the necklace over to authorities? I considered it, but there was a risk. The possibility my own mother might have had a hand in it certainly raised the stakes. Not that it mattered; she was dead. But Warren wasn’t, and it looked as though he was just as involved as she. A man who wielded considerable power. No way I should go traipsing off to authorities, necklace in hand, until I at least knew more.

Time to apply some of the basic principles from journalism school. I had the
what,
where
, and
when.
What I didn’t have was the
who.
But I
knew where I might find it: Corvine, Texas.

I went back online for airline tickets, then once again packed my bags. The revolving door to my apartment was about to take yet another spin. I looked around, realizing I’d only actually been here a few days this month. Then I frowned.

I hadn’t missed it one bit.

Chapter Eight

I arrived in Corvine later that evening and found a room at the Surfside Motel in the middle of town. No surf, just an empty old swimming pool that looked as though it hadn’t held water in a number of years.

The next day, I went out to familiarize myself with the place. While it had probably changed some though the years, I got the impression that Corvine hadn’t grown much since the kidnapping. A smallish-looking desert town, about as nondescript as they come. Desolate, too. The downtown area consisted of nothing more than a series of outdated strip malls filled with shoestring operations: an Amvets store, a five and dime, and a hat shop that looked as though it hadn’t seen a living head for quite some time.

Who lives in places like this?

CJ Norris was a reporter for the
Corvine Observer
who had written a number of stories about the Kingsley case through the years. The press likes to do that; follow-ups, we call them. We’d revisit the birth of Christ if we could squeeze a new angle out of it. I called the
main switchboard. After several rounds of
punch-the-number-to-get-the-department-you-want
, I got a female voice that sounded rushed.

“Norris.”

I heard keyboards clicking in the background. Glancing at my watch, I understood why: it was 4:47 p.m., crunch time in the newspaper biz. Even small towns have them. I hadn’t thought about that. I should have.

“Patrick Bannister here,” I said, “and I’ve just realized what a lousy time it is to be calling. You’re probably chasing a deadline.”

“You sound like you’ve got some first-hand knowledge there,” she said, still clicking away.

“Guilty.”

“Reporter?”

“
News World
.”

“Ah,” she said, “nice.”

“If it’s a bad time...”

“Sweetie, it’s never a
good
time, you know that, but I can always spare a moment for a comrade. What can I do for you?”

“Well…I’m actually in town.”

That made her stop typing. “In Corvine?”

“Yeah.”

“On purpose?”

“Far as I can tell.”

“Can’t be for pleasure, so it has to be business.”

“It is …”

“Yeah, well we don’t have much of that around here, either.”

“I’m working on the Kingsley case.”

“Nathan Kingsley?” A pause. “You know you’re about thirty years too late, unless there’s something new going on there?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Hmm.”

“What?”

“Just hmm, is all…”

“Can you expand on that?”

“Oh nothing…just seems a little odd. You being from a national news magazine, calling me out of the blue about a kid who’s been dead for a long time.”

“Is there some rule against doing stories about dead people?”

“Well, no, I just—”

“And you do follow-ups on it yourself from time to time, don’t you?”

“Yeah, but I’m local. I
have
to do them. You, on the other hand, well, you’re from somewhere out in the real world.”

“Define real world.”

“Anyplace but here.”

I laughed a little. Funny gal, this Norris.

She went on, “And last I checked, you folks in the real world have plenty of missing and murdered kids to chase after. So what gives? Talk to me.”

I thought about how to answer that, searching my mind for a logical response, knowing full well what a horrible liar I am.

She cleared her throat. “Still with me there, Pat?”

“Still here, yeah.”

“So…the Kingsley case. Why him?”

“I’m actually doing a story about missing and exploited kids, and we’re looking at several cases. Kingsley just happens to be one of them.”

“I see,” she said, sounding less suspicious but not completely convinced, either.

“So I was hoping maybe we could meet and you could get me up to speed on the case.”

“I can do that, sure.”

“How about after work? Got some time?”

She paused, and then, “You sure seem in a hurry.”

“Just to get out of here, is all.”

“I’m feeling you there, Pat. I’ve been trying to do that for years. Okay, there’s a bar. The Sports Page, right across the street from our offices. Order me a Tom Collins. I’ll probably need one.”

Chapter Nine

My older brother Benjamin died when I was two. I don’t remember him, but my mother told me he passed away at the age of four from the same kind of heart abnormality as my father.