Vendetta Stone (10 page)

“Ge
t outta here, you little snot-head. And you better stay off the road. Next time, I won’t miss.”

Peeling
out as the shaken kid scrambled home, Wolfe leered as he formulated a plan to solve most, if not all, of his problems.

Still curled up in bed, Sarah Fletcher prayed about the last week’s haunting events. Sarah kicked herself for lacking the courage to attend the funeral, but she couldn’t face Jackson over what she thought happened to Angela.

Herb and Sarah
had argued for the better part of a week over his inability to land a job, any job. Herb refused to take just
any
job, while Sarah said
any
job beat
no
job. And then it got personal, making her wonder if she could remain committed to the marriage. And in that instant, Sarah’s rash decision would cost first Angela and then others their lives.

Sarah liked to party back when she was in her twenties, and now she decided she needed some companionship. Months had passed since she and Herb had sex. Herb started drinking more, and she grew distant and withdrawn. Angela, a sympathetic sounding board, didn’t want to offer advice that might cause either of them to blame her for what sounded more and more like an impending divorce. She hoped they could patch up their marriage. Sarah had called Angela the morning of her disappearance to see if she wanted a liquid lunch, but the phone went unanswered.

“S
crew it,” Sarah said. Angela always kept her cell phone close; they’d hook up later. The phrase echoed in Sarah’s mind. Yeah, a hook-up sounded like a fun way to spend an afternoon. Two job interviews would keep Herb occupied until five or six. Plenty of time to scratch an itch, and Herb would never be the wiser.

So she locked up the house, jumped into her car
, and went hunting across town for an afternoon boytoy who would ask no questions. Sarah ended up in Hillsboro Village, not far from the Vanderbilt campus, looking for a discreet fern bar that would not be too seedy. She wanted a certain type of man, one with loose morals and not-so-loose lips. Wolfe was prowling in the same neighborhood.

A human chameleon,
Delmore Wolfe cleaned up for this occasion and hungered, but not for food. He wanted some money and a higher-class victim. Wolfe spotted Sarah going into Darlene’s Hideaway Lounge, a quaint little pub off the main drag, and followed her in after a couple of minutes. She sat at the bar with her long legs crossed, dressed in a red skirt and blue top. Wolfe heard her order a mojito and smiled. He walked behind her and took a seat at the end of the bar near the flat-screen TV showing a replay of the Arkansas-Tennessee game from last season. He had shaved off his beard but not the mustache, his long hair tied back in a ponytail. The dark shirt open at the top two buttons revealed a hairy chest. He wore a tan blazer and Polo sunglasses—and an attitude that said he was the man all women wanted for a good time with no questions asked.

Wolfe ordered a scotch on the rocks and lit a smoke. Within three minutes, Sarah asked for a light; within ten minutes, they were out the door. In Sarah’s blue Corvette, no chit-chat except for those first couple of minutes when Wolfe took a CD out of his blazer’s inner pocket and lecherously asked if he could stick it in.

“Hey, I haven’t heard that in years. Turn it up, baby. Doo doo DOOdoo doo DOOdoo doo DOOdoo dooDOOdoo doooodooooo,” she sang.

Sarah “giggled like a schoolgirl,” he
would later write in his journal. Wolfe closed in and wrapped his muscular arms around her lithe, pulsating body. After a few minutes of heavy action in the front seat in broad daylight, Sarah wanted to go to his place to continue.

“No good, baby,” he said. “I’m in town for a few days and staying with friends.”

Sarah nipped at his ear and suggested a motel room.

“Wherever you want
it, baby.”

After a few more minutes, S
arah hit fever pitch and suggested her place. Doing something crazy, why not go all the way? Wolfe pawed at her the entire drive home and at that moment she didn’t care who saw her.

Wolfe exited the car first and opened the door for Sarah, playing the perfect gentleman. He paused long enough to take his smartphone out of the front pocket and push a button. The same song that had been pla
ying in the car started, and he planted a lust-filled wet one on her full lips.

“My favorite song,” he explained. “We’re the same age, both produced in 1982. It gets my juices flowing, baby.”

That brought a smile to Sarah’s face, and they howled the refrain to Duran Duran’s “Hungry Like The Wolf” in unison as they scrambled for the house.

“
Doo doo DOOdoo doo DOOdoo doo DOOdoo dooDOOdoo doooodooooo.”

Inside the kitche
n, Sarah began tugging at his pants as the song continued. Wolfe swept her off her feet, laying her on the kitchen floor, and he pulled at her bra. Sarah loved every second of it even if he started playing rougher and rougher by the minute. His bizarre diaries would reveal that Wolfe’s pattern was working himself into a state of “bliss” that ended with his taking a life just as she reached ecstasy.

But
he never achieved that moment of “bliss” in Sarah’s house, because of a noise at the back door. Horrified, Sarah looked up and saw Angela’s face in the window with her hand over her mouth.

T
ransfixed and too shocked to move, Angela realized that the glows of inhuman pleasure on their faces meant Sarah wasn’t being victimized. She fled when Sarah’s eyes opened and locked in on her.

“
Ohmigod,” Sarah gasped.

T
he magic spell broke, for Wolfe, as well as Sarah. Anger replaced blood-lust, followed by fear of a witness who might identify him if something happened to this woman now. Sarah crumpled on the floor crying, guilt-ridden. She felt dirty and disgusted with herself. She didn’t realize the high price she would pay.

The cameras departed and the media honored Jackson’s request to stay out of the way and act as silent witnesses to this private—yet most public—final tribute to Angela Stone. I watched the line weave through the funeral home for the visitation and recognized several people who would be staying for the graveside services. Jackson’s attorney shook hands with Chief King’s media relations mouthpiece, Darrin Jensen. I recognized a couple of councilmen, as well as several of Jackson’s friends and neighbors I’d interviewed over the past week.

At 11:45 a.m., the funeral director announced the conclusion to the visitation and asked pallbearers to follow his assistant. Greaves gathered
the family for a few final moments while media members began heading across the cemetery to the Stones’ plot about a quarter of a mile from the Davis Chapel’s main building. The Stones, Angela’s relatives, and about fifty other people from their work, volunteer efforts, and church attended the service.

Angela’s father
, Fred, said it was Jackson’s decision to hold a graveside service rather than over at the Stones’ church, Belle Rive Baptist. Jackson thought it would be more private, Fred explained. The sun beat down, and everyone sweated as the crowd gathered. The limos arrived and the Stone/Crosby clan filled the rows of plastic seats under the makeshift tent. Jackson was flanked by his sister-in-law Sheila on one side and his mother-in-law Mona on the other, each holding a hand. Tears streamed down the women’s faces, but Jackson’s eyes remained dry.

His gaze never left the
casket as pallbearers ushered Angela’s coffin to her final resting place.

“God, have mercy
,” Jackson whispered.

At
noon, Reverend Robert Armstrong stepped forward to shake hands and offer encouraging words of faith to Jackson and each family member, then addressed the crowd.

“Friends and neighbors,
we are gathered to say farewell to our beloved sister, Angela Stone. Join me in saying The Lord’s Prayer. ‘Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name . . .’ ”

As a rule, reporters act as
observers, not participants in a story, but this sorrowful time seemed the exception to the rule. I bowed my head and prayed with the others. For Angela.

Delmore Wolfe’s senses were edgy as he made his way across town to East Nashville. At approximately 11:45 a.m., he parked three blocks away from the Fletchers’ house and crept from house to house peering into windows to make certain of no witnesses. It seemed all the closest neighbors attended the visitation. The loud, buzzing mower made him grin again. That noise would drown out any screams.

Ups
tairs, Sarah remained curled in bed, lost in her thoughts about that day Angela caught her cheating.

Wolfe
slipped on Latex gloves, jimmied the backdoor lock, and stepped inside.

Sarah thought about that day she was with “Chuck,”
the man she was almost certain had killed Angela. She knew she should have gone to the police, but couldn’t bear the shame. She had to drive Chuck back to his car, then he wanted money. She recalled driving him to the ATM and withdrawing three hundred dollars, how he asked about her friend, wanting to talk to her to smooth things over.

“No,” Sarah
shouted as they pulled into the parking lot at Darlene’s. “Just get out Chuck. NOW! And don’t let me see you again!” Wolfe eased out of the car. “Later, baby.”

Sarah
had hurried back home, showered, and tried to compose herself. She needed to talk to Angela, whose car remained parked out back. Sarah tried calling, first on the home phone, then to Angela’s cell phone. Angela’s voice answered both times: Please leave a message. But Sarah desperately wanted to look Angela in the eye and somehow explain her inexplicable actions. She’d pounded on Angela’s

front
door, crying for her to please open it. No answer. Finally, Sarah went home weeping. Getting late, with Herb due to return anytime, she’d try talking to Angela tomorrow. But tomorrow would never come for Angela.

Those next few hours were horrible. Herb had gotten home and innocently asked what she’d been up to all day. She’d felt dirty and guilty, staying silent through dinner. Thinking she was still mad at him, Herb had given up trying to talk to her and said he wanted a beer and to watch a ballgame. She’d gone to bed. He had thoughts of staying up and watching the news, then maybe some Leno and Letterman, after the game. He noticed blue lights flashing out the window. He looked outside and counted five police cars, with another roaring down the street. “Something’s going on next door,” he’d yelled up to Sarah.

Now her best friend was being buried, and Sarah was, again, in bed. She snapped out of her thoughts and back to the present when she heard raps on the wal
l down the hall. She froze when Chuck, looking very different, stepped in her bedroom. He smiled viciously, remorselessly.

“Hello, baby.”

 What was Chuck doing here?
 
A terrorized scream died in her throat as she cringed. The grandfather clock in the hall chimed noon, and Wolfe closed in for the kill. Sarah began reciting The Lord’s Prayer, her last rites. “Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be—”

His
well-timed, left-handed chop to the throat snapped her trachea, and she died instantly. Step one proved easy enough, but staging it like an accident might prove harder.

“What could be suspicious about next-door neighbors mysteriously dying within weeks of each other?
Get a grip, Delmore,” he wrote in his diary entry.

Maybe he’d make it look like she fell down the steps and broke her neck or banged her throat against a stair edge. Wolfe always solved messy details and worked out a solution. He hovered over the body and studied the scene and the layout of the bedroom before finding his way around the house. He made a ham sandwich and turned on the TV.

The brief, emotionally wrenching funeral service concluded with a loving and eloquent eulogy from the pastor, and each relative laid a white rose on Angela’s casket before it was lowered into the ground. Brother Armstrong said a closing prayer, and friends closed in to say a few parting words to Jackson before going back to their own busy lives.

I took it all in and headed back to the funeral home where I compared notes with fellow
TenneScene Today
reporter Shelley Finklestein, who would write the online story and handle a sidebar for print.

“I felt so bad for Stone and his family,” Shelley said. “That
preacher made me feel like I’d known Angela all my life. Very touching.”

“
And very compelling. Let that come through in your story. You want to evoke emotion,” I advised her.

“So
now what? Sorry I got here late and we didn’t get a chance to talk before the visitation. I saw you talking to a few people in line and did the same. I corralled Casey and got her to shoot some of the people I spoke with.”

“Great. Stone said he would talk with the media after the funeral, but I don’
t know if he’s going to do it now that we’re here or will want to hold off awhile. I’m going to find Greaves and see what he knows.”

Jackson had remained under the tent staring down at Angela’s casket for a final time, searing it into his memory. He looked up as a heavy hand closed over his left shoulder.