The Red Scream (44 page)

“What about Stuart?” Molly asked.

“I think he’s already left, early this morning, planning to do a little hunting on the way.”

“What’s in season?”

“That doesn’t matter to Stu,” Mark said.

Molly put her cup down on the counter and said, “Well, have a safe trip to Huntsville, you two. I’ll see you there, Alison. Did they tell you where to go?”

Alison was chewing hard on her thumb. “Yeah,” she muttered, “to the Information office across from the prison at eleven-thirty.”

They both walked her to the front door.

Walking out to the truck, Molly felt she was only marginally wiser than when she’d arrived and she hadn’t been very wise then.

T
he rest of the day was the worst writing day Molly could remember in all her twenty-two years in the business, and she’d had some bad ones before. She’d sat down determined to stay at the keyboard until she had something she could fax to Richard—a start for the article, a teaser to interest him. But all she did was make false starts and erase them in disgust, stare at the wall, and eat microwave popcorn—two full bags of it. She might just as well have gone shopping or watched soaps all day for all she accomplished.

At five-thirty Grady called from across the street and gave her an excuse to quit. She opened the door and was surprised to see that he was carrying a bottle of champagne.

Once inside, he wrapped his arms around her and, holding the bottle in both hands, rolled it up and down the small of her back.

“Oh, feels good, nice and cold,” she murmured. “Too bad I can’t drink it with you.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’m leaving for Huntsville in an hour.”

“Don’t go,” he said.

“I have to, Grady. I promised.”

He kissed her quickly. “Please don’t go.”

“I have to. What’s the champagne for?”

“To celebrate the doggedness of cops the world over.”

Molly held her breath. “You’ve got something new.”

He leaned down and kissed her—a long involved kiss during which the champagne bottle eased slowly down her back and ended up rubbing the backs of her thighs. “Here’s a question for you,” he said into her neck, his breath hot, his lips moving against her skin. “Would you rather go upstairs and make wild love or stay here and talk about some dull police work?”

“Those activities aren’t mutually exclusive, are they?” She unbuttoned two buttons and slid her hand inside his shirt. “What have you got?”

“I can only do one thing well at a time,” he said, sliding his hands, champagne bottle and all, down the back of her baggy warm-up pants and pressing her hips hard against his.

“Champagne’s losing its chill.” She was suddenly short of breath. “Tell me what you’ve got.”

“It can wait,” he said, pulling her down to the rug.

T
hey never made it upstairs. It was nearly an hour before Molly got to the kitchen to put the champagne bottle in the refrigerator.

When she came back, Grady was dressed and sitting on the bottom step.

Molly sat down next to him. “Now tell me.”

“Okay. Darden Smith, the detective from the Fort Worth Assault Unit, called. Marcus Gandy told all. He was hired by a local McFarland foreman named Carl Manning. When Detective Smith leaned on Mr. Manning some, he finally admitted the orders came from the home office in Austin, from the highest level.”

“Oh, Grady, I am sorry to hear that.”

“I thought you might be.” He rested his hand on her knee. “We’ll charge McFarland tomorrow. For criminal solicitation. We need you to come sign the affidavit.”

Molly’s thoughts were spinning. “But I wonder how he could have known. Louie said he told only three people about the car: me, Tanya Klein, and Sister Addie.”

“Maybe Sister Addie’s a spy,” Grady said. “On the McFarland payroll.”

“Maybe Tanya Klein is,” Molly said mostly to herself. She looked down at her watch. It was almost seven o’clock. She stood up. “It’s a three-hour drive. I’m going to take a shower and get dressed.” She started up the stairs, but stopped halfway. “Grady, you must know about things like this. What do you wear to an execution?”

He leaned back on the stairs and looked up at her. “I’m fond of that red shirt you wore last night—the one with the missing button at the neck so it gapes open when you lean forward.” He smiled. “Bronk might like that one, too.”

Molly sighed and ran up the stairs.

When she was showered and dressed, not in the red blouse, but her usual khaki pants, white shirt, and orange blazer, she came down the stairs. Grady was sitting in the wing chair reading the newspaper. He looked up. “So when can you come in tomorrow to sign the complaint?”

“Oh, I don’t know.”

“Molly, they could have killed you.”

“Even a dog gets one bite. Let’s give him a break.”

“Molly, don’t be crazy. This is serious business. McFarland’s a killer. This gives us cause to bring him in.”

“I don’t think so. Anyway, he’s sick. Dying.”

Grady put the newspaper down on the chair with a slap. “That, at least, appears to be true. I talked with Gerald Brumder, an oncologist Charlie’s doctor sent him to. He confirms that he gave McFarland the diagnosis.”

“Has Brumder told anyone else?”

“Just the son, Stuart McFarland, who’s a colleague of his. Charlie asked him not to tell anyone, but he told Stuart as a professional courtesy, Brumder says.”

“I see,” Molly said. “That’s interesting.” She sat down. “I wonder if Stuart told his sister and his cousin the news. If he did, that gives both children, and Mark, a real powerful financial motive for killing Georgia before Charlie dies.”

“I’d call ten million a real powerful motive, yeah.”

“Better than any motive you’ve been able to come up with for Charlie.”

“That’s for sure,” Grady said, “since I haven’t come up with any motive at all. He had multiple motives for killing the first wife, but none that I can find for Georgia.” He came up behind her chair and leaned down, resting his cheek against her head. “Molly, I wish that just this once you’d take my advice: stay home tonight.”

“Come with me. When it’s over we can find a nice place to spend the night.”

“I can’t. I have to go back on this drive-by. We’ve got a suspect to interrogate. I could send a uniform to drive you.”

“No. If you’re not coming I don’t want anyone. I’m going to work in the car, talk into the tape recorder, and figure out some things.”

“Well,” Grady said, “they’re predicting a norther. Bundle up, at least.”

chapter
24

A rolling stone,

A restless bone

Ain’t got no boss,

Don’t grow no moss.

I make do with what I find.

I don’t leave nothing behind.

LOUIE BRONK
Death Row, Ellis I Unit,
Huntsville, Texas

S
he gave herself the first hour, from Austin to Caldwell, for listening to Willie Nelson and letting her mind float. Some loose easy time for thinking about Grady and how sweet it would be to get home tonight and find him there, in her bed, and press up against his back and sleep for ten delicious hours while the norther rattled the windows.

Her hour was up when she hit Caldwell. She switched off the tape player and tried to focus on the problem of how she was going to write this story. One thing was sure: it couldn’t be just the usual execution story. She’d read plenty of accounts of death-row procedures. She knew exactly what had happened to Louie on this, his last day. Early this morning they had transferred him and his possessions. They had driven him, shackled and cuffed, the fourteen miles from the Ellis Unit to the Walls Unit inside the city limits of Huntsville, where the law mandated executions should take place. There his guards had passed the buck and turned him over to new guards, who had locked him in a holding cell on the old death row a few yards from the execution chamber.

That cell was barred and reinforced with fine mesh so visitors couldn’t pass him any contraband—no tranquilizers, no drugs, no poisons to cheat the state of its duty. Two guards had been posted near the cell all day and the chaplain, in this case Sister Addie, had
sat with him, outside the cell. He could have visitors, as many as he wanted, but no contact visits were allowed. In Louie’s case it didn’t matter. There was no one who wanted contact—no family, no friends. His three remaining sisters wanted nothing to do with him.

He had been asked what he wanted for his last meal—it could be anything, so long as they had it on hand in the kitchen.

Sometime during the day the warden had come to see him to talk about arrangements—the disposition of his worldly goods and the disposal of his body. The thought made Molly’s stomach contract.

And this, for a murder she was absolutely convinced he didn’t commit. The only true elements in the account she’d written of Tiny McFarland’s death were that it happened on the morning of July 9, 1982, and that Tiny was shot dead. But not by Louie Bronk. By someone else—someone Tiny knew, someone she loved, someone in her family.

She was rich. She was married. She was a mother. She liked to take chances. She was promiscuous. All those things may have contributed. Plus that one other ingredient that all murder victims shared: she got unlucky.

Molly had started the story in her dreams two nights ago. Now she struggled to flesh it out.

Tiny McFarland, dressed in a white linen sheath and high heels, had cut an armful of red gladioli from her garden. On the way back to the house, she’d run into a lover. A lover in the garage. David Serrano—young, attractive, hot-blooded, available. She had dropped the flowers so her hands were free for a lover’s purposes. The big garage door must have been closed; lovers require some privacy. Little Alison was asleep and no one else was home, so it wasn’t such a big chance to take.

At this point the story got difficult.

First Molly thought it through with David killing Tiny in a jealous rage over someone else, a new lover maybe, or Tiny’s desire to end the affair.

Then she envisioned Charlie coming home, using the automatic door opener and finding them there. Nightmare time.

She could see Stuart coming home early and finding them there and killing his mother in some sort of Oedipal rage.

Or even Alison, a nervous girl with great possessiveness toward
the men in her life, coming on them and panicking, thinking someone was being hurt. No. She was only a little girl—eleven years old.

Or Mark. Maybe he was infatuated with Tiny. Maybe he’d spied on some of her trysts; he had a history of that. Maybe he was getting revenge on Charlie.

One thing was clear: whoever did it had a clever idea that worked better than he could possibly have foreseen. He’d been reading the paper about the Scalper and decided to make the murder look like just another Scalper killing. What a thrill it must have been when Bronk actually confessed to it. Of course, Frank Purcell had fed him some information, she felt sure, but that must have been after Louie had already confessed.

As for the recent murders, surely David had been killed over what he knew about Tiny’s death. He had gotten too nervous and was about to tell it all. Georgia—well, that just got too complicated for her at this late hour. Time was running out.