Lisa studied the black-and-white photograph of Benjamin Gray’s body sprawled out on the city street. He wore an expensive suit and shirt with cuff links, and his necktie appeared neat and tight even though splattered with blood.
His body had collapsed in an awkward position, indicating that Gray was dead before hitting the ground. The pool of blood surrounding his body was smeared with footprints, handprints, and dozens of streaks, most likely from people trying to help the man.
“The detectives would’ve had a hard time working this crime scene,” Lisa said.
She sat back in the dining room chair where she’d had hundreds of meals with her mother, and sometimes her father. Dad usually came home after they’d gone to sleep, and ate from the plate Mom had covered in butcher paper and set in the refrigerator for him.
“Yes, that’s a textbook example of a compromised crime scene,” Rosalyn said, scooting her chair closer to Lisa. “I can’t believe I found the pics on the Internet.”
“Who posted it?” Lisa asked.
“It’s a site for official crime scene photos. It was listed as anonymous.”
“We should contact the site for more information. Not many people would have this picture other than the Fort Worth police.”
“I already e-mailed them, but we’ll see. It might help to have some credentials to encourage their cooperation.” Rosalyn smiled at Lisa.
Lisa studied the picture again, wondering why Rosalyn was still here. Half the point of Lisa coming to Dallas was to spend time with her father, not with some strange woman who acted as if she were part of the family. Lisa glanced at Rosalyn’s left hand—no ring. So she probably didn’t have anyone waiting at home for her.
Dad sat across from them with his hands on the table and appeared lost in his thoughts. His face had gained wrinkles in the years since she last saw him. There was still a gruff strength about him like an aging cowboy, and Lisa wondered about how this case might harm his health.
Lisa’s arrival in Dallas had continued in a downward spiral after leaving the airport. The Texas dry heat shocked her. Boston was in full spring, but the sunbaked fields and farmland between the airport and Dallas filled the air with a sense of late summer. Perhaps she had subconsciously hoped she and Dad would have a sudden connection and finally grow close as they put together a case that might free a man before his execution.
Instead, there was the Rosalyn surprise, and then a detached father who insisted on fathering her in his odd way. At Lisa’s hotel, Dad and Rosalyn waited for her to check in. Lisa hadn’t decided on the number of days she was staying, so she tossed out a number to the woman in guest services.
Lisa noticed Rosalyn’s surprise and overheard her less-than-quiet whisper to Dad. “Just four days? What are we going to accomplish in four days?”
Dad made no response, but he insisted on carrying Lisa’s luggage to her room instead of using the valet. He wanted to save Lisa the money for a tip, all the while gazing around the hotel as if she’d spent her retirement on the stay.
Rosalyn made the situation worse by gushing over the hotel’s marble floors, the shops, and every inch of decor.
“I’ve only stayed in a place this nice when my aunt married a wealthy guy in Phoenix. I felt like a queen.”
“You don’t have to rent a car. You can drive the wagon,” Dad said, interrupting Rosalyn as they rode the elevator.
“You still have the wagon?” Lisa asked.
“There’s no reason to sell it.”
“She probably likes having a dependable car,” Rosalyn said. She raised her eyebrows with a short shake of her head in warning toward Lisa.
“The wagon is dependable.” Dad sounded offended.
“Well, I . . .” Lisa tried to come up with a response Dad couldn’t counter. “You know, I don’t remember how to drive a stick shift very well. I’m pretty comfortable with the newer vehicles.”
Dad seemed to consider that. “The clutch can be a little tricky.”
“Then it’s settled,” Rosalyn said in a satisfied tone as they reached Lisa’s room.
Lisa wanted to groan when Rosalyn raced inside with oohs and aahs. “Can I have one of these soaps?” she called from the bathroom.
“Sure,” Lisa said.
“Would you like to rest after your flight and start fresh in the morning?” Dad asked and parked her suitcase on the luggage rack in the closet.
“I’d like to get started today if you don’t mind,” Lisa said, not wanting to stretch out these days in Dallas. The allure of the beach only grew by the moment.
“Then it’s off to the Bat Cave,” Rosalyn said with a wink, holding up a leaf-shaped bar of soap.
Dad and Rosalyn left Lisa to go ahead to the house, which allowed her time to clear her head. After picking up a rental car near her hotel, Lisa drove to the older suburban neighborhood and then into the driveway of her old house. She stared at the three-bedroom, two-bath home as if gazing into a memory.
The trees in the front yard had grown wider and taller with the front lawn manicured as Dad always had it. The house had been repainted from blue and white to neutral beige with white trim, but otherwise it looked the same.
Rosalyn raced outside to greet her, flapping the photograph of Benjamin Gray’s corpse as if it were an invitation to a birthday party.
“I’ve been doing some digging on the Internet every day, and look what I came up with,” she said, pushing the photograph toward her as Lisa grabbed her satchel from the car. Before Lisa could even look around the house, she was ushered to a seat at the table to study it.
But what gain could be found from the old image? Lisa wondered. She glanced at her father, who stared out the front window.
“If this were today, we’d have DNA evidence, fingerprints, footprint casts, security camera footage from various angles. Seems we don’t have much more than old photographs and conflicting witness reports,” Lisa said.
“If it were today, we’d have dozens of cell phone photos and videos from bystanders,” Rosalyn interjected, moving close until her shoulder rested against Lisa’s arm. Lisa fought the urge to push the woman away, but moved carefully a few inches over.
“What are you thinking?” Lisa asked Dad.
Dad pushed away from the table. “Why don’t we go out to the workshop?”
Lisa followed Dad’s lead, but Rosalyn scooped up her purse and turned toward the front door.
“You two enjoy the afternoon in the Bat Cave. I need to run down to my office,” she said. Before they barely said good-bye, the woman was gone.
Lisa followed her father through the house, taking everything in. The carpet throughout the living room and hallway was a worn brown, possibly the same carpeting from her childhood. The kitchen looked like a faded, out-of-date version of the house she remembered, with the counters a sixties mustard yellow. It hadn’t seemed old-fashioned when she lived here.
Dad held the back door for her as she stepped out. She took in the small fenced yard of her childhood with the detached garage and workshop to the side. Her old swing set had disappeared, but the fort in the huge oak tree remained—though several rungs and boards were missing.
“I haven’t had a chance to mow back here lately,” Dad said as if in apology.
Lisa wondered about the overgrown lawn dotted with brown spots. During her childhood, Dad had been diligent about tending the yard and keeping his cars clean. His days off were punctuated with the sound of the lawn mower or the hose spraying the walkways and cars.
“Rosalyn was a surprise,” Lisa said.
Dad paused and glanced back at her. “I should have told you about her before you came.”
“You’re her . . . consultant?” Lisa asked pointedly.
“Is that what she said?” Dad gave her a sideways glance.
“That isn’t true?”
“It is. But I guess it’s more than that now.”
“More?”
Dad shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess it might seem as if she’s my girlfriend. We get along.”
Lisa pinched the skin between her eyes where a headache was forming. “So is she your girlfriend or not?”
“Yes, I think so.”
Lisa didn’t want the details to become more personal, so she dropped the questions that bounced in her head.
Dad unlocked the padlock to the workshop door. He flipped a switch, and rows of fluorescent lights flickered on and brightened as they warmed. Lisa stepped inside to what looked like a secret police headquarters. No wonder Rosalyn called it the Bat Cave. The walls were broken into sections and covered with photographs, diagrams, and notes. The counters no longer housed Dad’s organized tools, vise grip, and projects, but were covered with files, stacks of papers and books, and file boxes.
“This is . . . extensive,” Lisa said.
Dad’s setup reminded her of a museum display compared to her resources or even Drew’s studio with its illuminated counters, film equipment, and computers.
This wasn’t a normal search for answers. This was an obsession. Lisa knew from her years as a federal prosecutor how a consuming passion could blind people in numerous ways. If Dad’s doctor was concerned about stress, this certainly was feeding it.
“I have more to show you in the garage,” he said. “I’m trying to re-create the story of what happened. Somewhere in all this, I believe we’ll find the real killer and the truth.”
Lisa followed Dad to the side door of the workshop that connected to the adjacent garage, and her eyes widened. Where the old wagon had been parked, Dad had set up a reenactment of the crime scene.
The cement floor was outlined with duct tape to depict the streets and angle of turns. Several mannequins stood in the street and off to the sides. Dad pointed out how one mannequin was Benjamin Gray, and behind it, the shape of his corpse was outlined on the garage floor. Red poles with strings attached depicted possible bullet trajectories.
As Dad explained this, Lisa realized that there were mannequins outside of the street line representing her father, herself, and the little black girl sitting beside her when Benjamin Gray was shot.
Dad had brought the copy of the photograph of Gray’s corpse. He carried it in front of the man’s mannequin, carefully avoiding the bullet poles.
“This is where the photographer was standing.”
He stared at the printed photo and the outline on the floor, then off toward the left. Lisa followed his line of sight to the mannequins representing them. On the wall beyond, in the dim light, she noticed a poster-sized image beyond Dad’s reenactment. The pixilation in such a large format made the image blurry, but Lisa recognized it as the snapshot of herself and the little girl sitting on the round concrete pillar.
She wondered how many hours Dad had spent out here setting this up, staring at it and studying it from every angle. He might not be as obsessed as he was haunted, she realized, but that was little comfort.
She tried to refocus on what they were here to do. A quick solve would clear out the garage and get the old station wagon where it belonged—she hoped.
“The picture Rosalyn found today was obviously taken at least ten minutes postshooting, probably longer,” she said. “There wouldn’t be as many prints if the blood was in the initial flow stages. It had to have been taken before police arrived, or else it was a crime photo of theirs. I wonder if paramedics were called. How long did you stay on the scene?”
“I got you out of there almost immediately. That’s why I know Dubois wasn’t the killer. Let me show you.”
Dad took a notepad from a workbench and handed it to her. “These are my notes from that day. You can go over them when you get a chance, but everything I’ve set up correlates with these.”
Lisa flipped through the pad filled with her dad’s familiar handwriting and the scribbled diagrams and one-word notes he’d scrawled into the edges. The familiarity brought a desire to cherish his written words, though the sudden feeling also surprised her.
“Benjamin Gray had come up the street with the other marchers.” Dad pointed to the street behind the corpse. The road veered from straight to a diagonal toward the left. “He stopped with the others gathering here while the rest of the parade concluded. He would have proceeded that way.” He pointed the opposite direction from where Gray had walked. “It’s not set up because of course I ran out of room, and it wasn’t relevant. But beyond the garage door, that would be the platform where Gray would have given a speech if he hadn’t been shot.”
Lisa reached for a stool in the corner and pulled it closer to her father before sitting down.
“No, don’t sit on that, you’re too heavy,” Dad said, reaching out for her as Lisa heard a distinct crack. She hopped up and looked at the stool suspiciously.
“Gee thanks, Dad,” she said with a wry grin.
“I meant the stool is too weak. Sorry. A few years ago I discovered that my retirement dream of doing woodwork wasn’t realistic. I’m terrible. That was one of my failed projects.”
“Okay, go on,” Lisa said and jumped up on the workbench, then thumbed through Dad’s notes.
“When I was taking pictures of you, I had my back to Benjamin Gray. Most people were still looking the opposite direction of him, like the two women in the snapshots I took, watching the remaining marchers coming up the street.” Dad walked to the workbench and picked up a stopwatch, then moved in front of the mannequin that represented him.
“Bang!” he shouted and pressed the stopwatch. “I reached you before there was another gunshot. We ducked low, then after the second shot I looked around and saw the person down. I almost ran toward Gray on the ground—instinct from the job—then I grabbed you instead and ran down the alleyway behind us.”
Dad took one of the mannequins and ran to the back corner of the garage. He then turned and clicked the stopwatch.
“That’s additional time for my explanations,” he said.
Lisa was amazed at how having the actual setup of the scene made everything clearer. She’d worked with 3-D computerized renderings that depicted crime scenes, bullet trajectories, and blood splatter, but having the scene surrounding her presented a unique perspective.
“When we reached the end of the alley, I spotted Leonard Dubois being arrested. First off, it’s not possible that Leonard Dubois shot Benjamin Gray, then ran past us and around to that alley directly opposite the shooting. He would’ve had to go right by us. I’d have seen him. But let’s say that I didn’t. Even then, he couldn’t have run down the alley, crossed through the parade, and been arrested in that time period.” Dad held up his stopwatch. “It was only around thirty seconds. And the police already had him surrounded.”
“What does that mean?” Lisa said.
“Leonard Dubois was already being cornered by police during the shooting. In Dubois’s testimony, he said he pulled out his gun when he heard gunfire, and immediately the police surrounded him.”
“You think the Fort Worth police were in on this?”
“No, not in on the killing. I really don’t believe that, at least I hope not. A lot of evidence was buried, eyewitnesses ignored, and my own inquiries hit a brick wall. But I don’t see any reason for the police or anyone besides a fanatic to have killed Benjamin Gray. He was impressive and growing in power but not overly controversial.”
“Then the police were already following Leonard Dubois?”
“Yes. I think they were after Dubois for some reason. He was part of early Black Panther groups. I’m not sure what else. But how could the police already have him surrounded in less than a minute? Perhaps he made a convenient killer.”
“That makes our job a lot harder, unless we can find a guilt-ridden retired policeman who wants to confess to a cover-up or to smudging evidence. That would get Dubois free without much more effort—if we could prove the conviction was tainted with false evidence and a police conspiracy.”
“I have the names of every guy there written in that notepad. Three are dead, one is in a home with Alzheimer’s, and that leaves Sergeant Ross. He won’t answer my calls.”
Lisa knew it was a stretch but made a mental note to do some more digging about Sergeant Ross.
“The real shooter would have escaped in that direction.” Dad pointed behind them, the opposite diagonal from where their mannequins were placed and beyond where Benjamin Gray was shot.
“There were fewer marchers that way, plenty of exit routes. A car could’ve easily been parked on one of the streets beyond here because there weren’t parade roadblocks that way. Not only does it not work logistically for the shooter to run in the direction where Leonard Dubois was captured, it makes no sense. He was running into the marchers, toward road blockades, and into an even denser population of police officers.”
Lisa nodded. “This other direction makes sense. Unless he was a complete imbecile, he would’ve gone that opposite way. I see in your notes that this is where most of the eyewitnesses said they saw a white man running from the scene?”
“None of those reports was taken seriously by the police.”
“Interesting,” Lisa mused.
“I want you to see something that I noticed recently.” Dad went to a shelf and handed her the two snapshots he’d taken of her and the other girl. These were the originals that Dad had kept in pristine condition for decades. He positioned them in the place of his mannequin, moving it aside.
Lisa hopped down from the edge of the workbench.
“I was taking pictures here.” He held up his hands as if holding a camera. In the first image, the white girl, Lisa, was walking up to see the little black girl sitting on the stone round.
“The second photo was taken at the precise moment that I heard the gunfire behind me.”
In the second image, the girls sat together and appeared to be looking into the camera as if Dad might have gotten their attention.
“We’re both looking at the camera in this one,” Lisa said.
“Are you? That’s what I thought, but look closer,” Dad said. He motioned for her to follow him to the workbench, where he turned on a lighted magnifying glass over the image. Lisa pushed the elbow of the magnifying glass toward the paper. The light illuminated the paper, and Lisa could see the girl’s dark eyes.
“Oh, she’s not looking at you. Not directly. She’s looking behind you.”
“Yes,” Dad said. “That’s what I thought, but with these old eyes, even with two sets of glass on the photo, I couldn’t be sure.”
“And in that line of sight behind you was Benjamin Gray?”
Lisa walked to the mannequin representing the other little girl and faced Dad. Right beyond Dad and a little over his right side was Benjamin Gray. It was nearly exactly the placement of the shooting.
“The street was crowded with the parade, but that girl was looking in the exact direction of Gray before the shots were fired.”
Dad nodded. “We need to find that girl.”
“Uh, that should be easy,” Lisa said. They had an old photograph of a young black girl in Fort Worth from 1965. How would they ever find her?
“You have people looking at the photo?” Dad asked.
“Yes, a friend of mine. He sent a copy to a forensic photo expert he knows. But I can’t imagine that he could find that little girl from these snapshots.”
“Maybe they will turn something up,” Dad said, studying the layout in the garage again.
“And you don’t have the police report or crime scene photographs?” Lisa asked.
“The Fort Worth Police Department was less than helpful, as I said. My boss said it was because of that old grudge against federal officers.”
“What’s the grudge about?”
“The JFK assassination.”
Lisa frowned, trying to catch the connection.
“There was sort of a fight over the still-warm body of our president. Dallas police wanted to keep President Kennedy in Texas. Secret Service, the Feds, Jackie, and the family wanted him out of there. Vice President Johnson needed to get out of Dallas; they were worried about him being killed too. No one knew Oswald was the shooter. It could’ve been the Communists or Mafia or a government coup. But Jackie wouldn’t leave her husband here. It nearly came to blows, and by all rights the jurisdiction was Dallas.” Dad chuckled. “But the Secret Service pushed through and loaded the president’s coffin into Air Force One, and they got out of there.”
Lisa watched Dad, realizing he’d never told her any details about the assassination or his investigation. She only knew the generalities.
“Lyndon Johnson was sworn in as the new president before they left the runway. It was pretty dramatic, from what my old buddies tell me, though of course everyone was in utter shock that President Kennedy was leaving in a coffin after arriving at Love Field only hours earlier. Awful times, those were. But the police in Texas were livid about the move. Not just in Dallas, but Fort Worth, everywhere.”
“So they were never cooperative in your investigations afterward?”
“Not very,” Dad said with a grimace. “But it was more than being uncooperative when it came to Benjamin Gray’s death. They were a roadblock.”
The door suddenly creaked open, and Lisa saw her father make an involuntary reach for his belt as if he were armed.
Rosalyn leaned in, looking flustered. “It’s the Ripley case. I found out the wife and kids are on the Arizona-Mexico border. I need to get over to the house.”
“Need me to help?” Dad asked.
“I can handle it. Unless you want to?”
Dad turned to Lisa. “I’ve been helping her with this domestic case. Rosalyn was hired to find a wife who cleaned out the couple’s bank accounts and took the kids. She crossed state lines, making it a federal offense, but we thought she might make a run back to Mexico where she’s from.”
“Go ahead, Dad. We’ll do this tomorrow. I’m a little tired anyway,” Lisa said, though she wasn’t. There was a lot to process, and she did that best alone.
“Oh, then get some rest. You’ll be all right tonight? I could meet you later for supper?”
“I’ll be fine. I’ll make some calls, and tomorrow morning I think I’ll stop in at the Fort Worth Police Department before coming here,” Lisa said.
Dad raised his eyebrows. “That should be interesting.”
Lisa smiled. “We’ll see if I can get anywhere.”
“Good luck,” he said, and she caught the doubt heavy in his tone.
Lisa always took doubt as a challenge . . . especially when it came to her father.