Lorraine Smith was the woman whose hysterical 911 call about Charley Hatch had brought not only the police, but an ambulance, the medical examiner, the media, and the team from the Morris County prosecutor’s office, including the prosecutor himself, Jeffrey MacKingsley.
Fifty years old and the mother of eighteen-year-old twins, Lorraine gradually regained her composure sufficiently to join the investigative team in the breakfast room of her Federal-style home on Sheep Hill Road. “Charley got here about one o’clock,” she told Jeff, Paul Walsh, Angelo Ortiz, and Mort Shelley. “He comes every Tuesday to do the lawn.”
“Did you talk to him at all?” Jeff asked.
“Today I did. Normally I might not run into him for a month at a time. I mean, he just arrives, unloads his equipment, and gets to work. In a couple of weeks he’ll be, I mean, he would have been, taking out the impatiens and the other annuals and putting in the fall flowers, and normally I’d go over everything with him then. But when he’s just doing the lawn, I don’t necessarily talk to him.”
Lorraine knew she was talking rapidly and excessively. She took a sip of coffee and resolved to calm down and just answer the questions the prosecutor was asking.
“Why did you go out to speak to him today?”
“Because I was annoyed at him for being late. Charley’s supposed to come at nine o’clock in the morning, and I had friends over for lunch today. We were on the patio and had to listen to the roar of his power mower. I finally went outside and told him to come back and finish tomorrow.”
“What did he say?”
“He kind of laughed and said something like, ‘You know, Mrs. Smith, it’s okay for me to be tired and sleep in once in a while. You better take advantage of my services while you still have the chance.’ ”
“Then what happened?”
“His cell phone rang.” Lorraine Smith paused. “Or I should say, one of his cell phones rang.”
“He had two of them?” Paul Walsh asked quickly.
“I was surprised, too. He took one phone out of his breast pocket, but then, when the ringing kept going, he rushed to get the other one out of his back pocket.”
“Did you happen to hear the name of the person who called him?”
“No. In fact he obviously did not want to talk in front of me. He told the person who called him to wait a minute, then said, ‘I’ll load my stuff and get out of here now, Mrs. Smith.’ ”
“That was at one thirty?”
“Twenty-five of two at the latest. Then I went back inside. My friends and I finished lunch, and they left at about two fifteen. They were parked in the circular driveway in the front of the house, so I didn’t realize that Charlie’s pickup truck was still in the back by the garage. When I saw it, I went looking to see where he was.”
“How long was that after your friends left, Mrs. Smith?” Angelo Ortiz asked.
“Only a few minutes. I could see he wasn’t in the backyard, so I walked around the fenced area where the pool and tennis court are. Just past them is that row of boxwoods that we planted for privacy, because on that side, our property ends at Valley Road. Charley was lying on his back in the little space between two of them. His eyes were open and staring, and there was a lot of blood on the right side of his face.” Smith rubbed her hand over her forehead as if to erase the memory.
“Mrs. Smith, when you dialed 911, you said you thought he was dead. Was there any reason why you thought he might still be alive when you found him?”
“I don’t think I knew what I was saying.”
“That’s understandable. Let’s go back to one thing, Mrs. Smith. You say that Charley Hatch made some reference to your taking advantage of his services while you still had the chance. Have you any idea what he meant by that?”
“Charley was a very touchy guy. He did a good job, but I never had the feeling that he enjoyed what he did. You know how some landscapers love working with growing things? To Charley it was a job, and I think the fact that I was annoyed with him meant he was going to quit working for us.”
“I see.” Jeff stood up. “We’ll ask you to sign a statement later, but thank you for being so helpful. It makes our job easier.”
“Mom, what’s going on? Are you okay?”
Two identical teenage girls who, like their mother, had auburn hair and slim athletic bodies rushed into the room. Lorraine Smith jumped up as they ran to embrace her. Both were traumatized. “When we saw the police cars and all the people here, we thought something happened to you,” one of them said.
“She may have been lucky that she wasn’t talking to Charley Hatch when he was hit,” Mort Shelley commented to Jeff as they walked through the foyer to the front door. “What do you think?”
“I think that whoever paid Charley Hatch to mess up the house on Old Mill Lane got nervous and was afraid that if we started putting the screws on Charley, he’d tell us who he was working for.”
Detective Lola Spaulding from the forensic unit had been gathering evidence. She met the four men as they came out of the house. “Jeff, his wallet is in the truck. Doesn’t look touched. No sign of a cell phone. But we did find something in his pocket that I think you’ll find interesting. It hasn’t been tested for fingerprints yet.”
The photograph she was offering him, like the one that had been in Georgette Grove’s shoulder bag, had been cut out of a newspaper. It showed a stunningly attractive woman in her early thirties. She was wearing riding breeches and a hunt coat and holding a silver trophy.
“This was in Charley Hatch’s vest pocket,” Lola said. “Any idea who it is?”
“Yes,” Jeff said. “This is Liza Barton’s mother, Audrey, and this is one of the pictures the newspapers used last week when they carried the story of the vandalism.”
He gave the picture back to Spaulding and walked to the yellow crime scene tape that had been strung up to hold the media back. Audrey Barton lived in the house on Old Mill Lane, he thought. The key to what is going on has to do with that house. The psycho who killed two people is leaving those pictures, and is either playing a game with us, or is begging to be stopped.
What are you trying to tell us? Jeff mentally asked the killer as light bulbs began to flash at his approach. And how can we stop you before you kill again?