It was fairly complicated, what with all the police departments that were involved. Bladesville said, sure, pick the guy up. The upstate coroner had determined that something like a garden shovel had been the weapon, so that was what the local police would search for at the Childs house, albeit very reluctantly. Jerry Childs was well known in town, well liked, an all-around good citizen. He was pretty far from the usual suspect in a bludgeoning case.
Getting a warrant to search the Childs premises was a lot harder. It isn’t easy to get a judge on a weekend. They like their days off as much as the rest of us, and the first one the police tried to contact wasn’t home. The second one wanted something more substantial than what he referred to as vague suspicions. Fortunately, while one detective was on the phone with the judge, another detective was able to get a fax of Childs’s December cellular telephone bill. Late in the evening of December thirtieth he had called his home number from the central office that served Bladesville. As far as I was concerned, we had him. The judge apparently agreed and said he would sign a warrant.
When the detective talking to Bladesville was finished, Jack got on the phone and asked whether a pen had been found in the house. There was a lot of discussion and a pause while, I assumed, questions were asked about whether a pen had been logged in. He hung up looking unhappy.
“Pencils and ballpoints,” he said. “Nothing that a man would notice was missing.”
“Unless he patted his shirt pocket the way I’ve seen you do and realized that the cheap little pen he’d had in the morning wasn’t there and he had a good idea where he’d lost it.”
Jack gave it a second’s thought. “He wouldn’t mention it to his wife. It must have been a decent pen, maybe one she gave him as a gift. Let’s see if we can hold his attention before the cops come to execute the search warrant.”
We drove back to the Childs house but the empty space in the garage was still empty. Then I saw a child in an upstairs window.
“He’s come and gone, Jack.”
“Uh-oh.” He stopped in front of the house and we dashed up the front steps.
Mrs. Childs opened it. “Can you tell me what’s going on?” she said, looking distressed.
“Where’s your husband?” I asked.
“I have no idea. He came home a little while ago and when I told him you’d been here he got very upset. Then I said something about his missing pen and he just—” She held her hands apart, indicating she had no more idea where he was than we did.
“He took off,” Jack said.
“Yes, but why?”
“Come on, Chris. Thanks, Mrs. Childs.” He started moving back toward the car and I ran after him. “Want me to drop you at the police station and ask them to take you home?”
“You’ll lose him. Just go. I know the best way to get there.”
It was one of those moments when I wished we had a phone in the car. We should have called ahead to Bladesville for a welcoming committee to greet Mr. Childs, but we couldn’t take the time. Jerry Childs had probably made this trip in the dark and might have to slow down to look for landmarks. I had done it during the day and somewhat more recently than he had and I was sure I would recognize every turn.
When we got there, a black Mercedes was parked up near the house and Jack pulled in tight behind it to keep Childs from fleeing.
“Stay back,” he said to me, and I watched the other personality take over, the one that was all business. He took the off-duty revolver he was carrying from the belt holster, went quietly up the steps, moved to the side, and opened the door.
When he was inside I followed him up the steps and into the foyer, listening for a sound that would tell me where Jack was. I didn’t want to go any farther in case Childs showed up, although I was pretty sure he wasn’t armed. All he wanted to do was find the missing pen and get out. He wasn’t expecting a confrontation and surely didn’t want one.
And then I heard it, loudly. “Police! Don’t move!”—the universal phrase. It had come from the kitchen and was followed by exclamations and sounds of disgust and fear.
“What’s your name?” Jack shouted.
“Jerry Childs. William J. Childs. Who the hell are you?”
“Down on the floor,” Jack shouted.
“What the hell is going on?”
“Mr. Childs, you’re under arrest for the murder of Delilah Butler,” Jack said, as I walked with relief and confidence toward the kitchen. He recited the Miranda warning as the man complained loudly.
When I got to the door of the kitchen, I saw that he was sitting uncomfortably on the floor, handcuffed by his left hand to one foot of the old iron stove that had given D.D. her only heat.
“You OK?” Jack said as he saw me.
“Fine.”
“Don’t touch anything. We’re going to do this by the book.” He turned to his prisoner. “You got that cute little cell phone you always carry with you?”
Childs reached into his pocket with his free right hand, pulled something out, and tossed it to Jack.
“Thanks. This will spare you a trip,” he said to me. Then he opened it up, dialed the police, and we sat back and waited.
It didn’t take them long. Two uniformed deputies came into the house and introduced themselves.
“We’re looking for a pen,” Jack explained. “The suspect here may have lost it when he murdered the Butler woman.”
“I thought they had a girl in New York for that,” one of the officers said.
“They have no case. Chris, you have any idea where to look for that pen?”
“It could have rolled under the mattress or behind one of these cabinets.”
The men started looking, poking around, sticking their hands beneath and behind anything movable or slightly off the ground. There was no pen under the stove, under the mattress, under any of the clothes still piled on the floor. They moved, pushed, reached, and poked. No pen.
“There’s a bedroom upstairs,” I said, “where it looks like she slept in warmer weather. All of her papers were taken. If they were lying on the floor up there, he might have bent over to pick them up. I’ll show you where it is.”
I led the way up the stairs to the second floor, then to the bedroom with the old dresser and bedframe. I was about to take my little flashlight out of my bag when the deputies both reached for theirs.
The floor of the room was pretty clean, except for dust. They shone the light under the dresser, under the bed, and around the perimeter.
“Let’s try the closet,” I suggested.
One of them went into it, shining his light on the floor. “Hey,” he said. “I think maybe I’ve got it.” He stopped and put a plastic glove on. Then he knelt. When he stood up he was holding something black and shiny. “This what you’re looking for?”
“I think you’ve done it,” I said.
They put the pen in a plastic bag, sealed it, made notes on the paper label, and then took Childs into custody. He was angry and confused, more worried, it seemed to me, about his Mercedes than about his future.
“You didn’t have to kill her,” I said, as they prepared to take him outside.
“I didn’t kill anyone. I just talked to her. I told her to leave us alone.”
“Was she blackmailing you?”
“Not me, my father. She killed my father. She dug in and she wouldn’t let go. There was nothing he could give her that would make her stop. She wanted to destroy his life, his family, my mother especially. She had no right.”
“Why did you come up here that particular night?” I asked.
“She told my father to come on New Year’s Eve in the morning. He thought she wanted to kill him, that she’d be waiting for him. I told him I would go instead, come early and surprise her, see what I could do to get her to stop. About an hour after my father and I talked, he had a heart attack and died.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Not as sorry as I am. I came up here the night before New Year’s Eve. I didn’t know she lived like this. She was a nobody and she pushed people around. She didn’t want to talk. We got into a fight and she hit her head on the stove.”
I knew it wasn’t true. There was no blood on the stove and she hadn’t fallen anywhere near the stove. It was the beginning of a story to keep himself from paying the full price for what he had done.
“I’m not sure she wanted to kill your father,” I said, aware that the two local cops were listening with fascination to this unsolicited confession. “She wanted a kind of family reunion.”
“She wanted that, too,” Childs said. “I found her script for New Year’s Eve when I went through the house. The bitch had it all written down like a play, who would say what. It was going to be a massacre. It was crazy.”
“Then you knew who the other players were,” I said.
“Not for a while. She had them coded. She just called them Mother, Father, Sister. I wasn’t included. It was just her half sister she invited. My father never told me the names.”
“Did you figure out who the half sister was?” I asked.
“When Susan came back I put it together. I decided it was better to treat her as if she was innocent than make an issue of it. I couldn’t see how anyone would ever connect me to this place.”
“It took a little doing,” I said.
“OK, Mr. Childs, we gotta go,” the younger deputy said. “You got a big mouth on you. One of these days it’s gonna get you in trouble.”
I couldn’t imagine a greater understatement.