Twenty-Four
Mary Crow looked around the small bedroom that served as Jack Wilkins’s office and smiled. In the course of her career she’d visited a number of retired detectives. Every one of them had a bedroom or a den devoted to their glory days—pictures that traced their ascent from trim young patrol officers to paunchier plainclothesmen. Jack Wilkins was no different. His room was decorated with a number of photographs and commendations in one corner, including a shadowbox frame that displayed a gold star of a badge, seemingly from the days of Wild Bill Hickok.
“That’s an interesting memento,” she commented as Wilkins brought two mugs of coffee from the kitchen. He carried them on a tray, with paper towels for napkins and a little plate of Oreo cookies.
“That was my granddad’s.” He put the tray on the desk. “He was the sheriff of Fargo, North Dakota.”
Mary turned to the tall, lanky Wilkins. “Fargo, like in the movie?”
“Yeah. He predated the movie by nearly a century, but he was just as Swedish. Just as no-nonsense.”
“So if your family’s from North Dakota, how did you wind up so far south?”
“Joined the army, got stationed at Fort Bragg. Liked the fact that North Carolina had four seasons instead of North Dakota’s two.”
“When did you start working on the Pisgah County force?”
“1989. I worked up to detective in Fayetteville, then came here as a lateral hire.”
The year after Mama was killed, thought Mary. He wouldn’t have been on that case at all. She looked again at the framed star, bright against a black velvet background. “Well, I’m sure you’ve made your grandfather proud.”
“I’ve tried.” Jack stared at the badge for a moment, then turned to Mary. “So what do you want to know about Teresa Ewing?”
“Everything,” she replied. “Except what’s in the paper.”
He laughed. “Defense lawyers usually thrive on the crap in the paper.”
She looked at him, serious. “Before I came here, I was a prosecutor in Atlanta. They used to call me Killer Crow. I won every capital case they assigned me.”
Jack frowned. “Then how did you wind up working the dark side of law?”
“I came back here for a prosecutor’s job that mysteriously vanished the moment I walked into George Turpin’s office. I’d spent a lot of money moving up here, so I figured I’d better practice some kind of law.”
“And you started defending criminals just to aggravate Turpin?”
She laughed. “Mostly I do wills, house closings, property disputes. Since I can’t prosecute killers, I occasionally defend people I think are wrongly accused. Some are women, some are Cherokee. Almost always, they are poor.”
“Sounds like you’ve got some skin in the game.”
“My mother was Cherokee. And the victim of a homicide,” she said flatly. “So yeah, I guess I do have some history there.”
At that point Jack must have decided she was okay. He opened his files and spread them out, making little piles of paper across his desk, on his sofa, and finally on the floor. As the dog lay sleeping in the kitchen, they went through each pile, studying the crime scene photos, reading transcripts of the suspect interviews, going over the coroner’s report. The sight of Sheriff Stump Logan’s scrawl on some of the pages made Mary recoil inside, but she tried to put her hatred of Logan aside and regard his observations as those of just another law officer doing his job.
“There’s an awful lot of confusion in this case,” Mary said as they read through the reports. “The coroner first said she’d been dead for three weeks. Then he said she’d died just hours before they found her under the tree. Then he reversed himself again.”
“I think the coroner was high on formaldehyde,” said Jack. “He resigned his office about six months after his last report. But he was only part of the crazy stuff swirling around this case. We had calls from Arizona, Florida. One man said he’d seen Teresa on the boardwalk in Atlantic City, New Jersey. That was hard on her parents. All that hope, then nothing.”
“But when was she killed, exactly?”
“Ultimately, they decided she died the day she went missing.” Jack frowned. “You ever hear of a Cherokee guy named Two Toes McCoy?”
She laughed. “He was notorious when I was a girl. I haven’t heard anything about him lately.”
“Then old age and his parole officer must have slowed him down some. Back in ’89, when Two Toes wasn’t in jail, he did odd jobs in Teresa’s neighborhood. Yard work mostly—pulling up poison ivy, grubbing out ditches. All the kids knew him—if he was sober and in the right mood, he would tell them stories about that old tree.”
“Undli Adaya,” said Mary. “The tree that saved the tribe.”
“Yeah. Well, Two Toes had worked for Norah Ferguson that afternoon, cleaning out her gutters. I floated the theory that maybe Two Toes had abducted the child. Hid her on reservation land. Kept her, killed her, then brought her back.”
“Did he have an alibi?”
“Oh all his friends swore he was with them. You know how that goes.”
Mary shrugged. “Anybody else look good?”
“Arthur Hayes, a sophomore at Western, who’s since died. Lived in a basement apartment at 912 Salola. The campus cops had busted him twice for peeping outside the girls’ dorm, plus he had a couple of indecent exposure charges.”
“He sounds at least as good as Two Toes,” said Mary.
“He did. Plus he had a car and could easily have hidden a little body for a month. ”
“So what took him out of the running?”
“Nothing, really. Claimed he was studying at the library. We could neither confirm nor deny that. Nobody had security cameras back then.”
“So if you had two viable adult suspects, why did you guys come down so hard on these kids?”
“Honestly?”
She nodded.
“The newspaper ran with the kid angle. Somebody said they were playing strip poker, games that were getting way out of hand.”
“Was that true?” asked Mary.
He handed her one pile of interviews. “Not the day she died. All the kids said the boys asked the girls to play that last afternoon. Shannon Cooper and Janie Griffin refused immediately and went home, apparently in a huff. Everyone said that Teresa lingered behind and talked to the boys some more.”
“So she played strip poker?”
“No. The boys said Teresa went home. They stayed there looking at the deck of marked cards until Two Toes showed up and ran them off.”
“And my client confirmed this as well?”
“Mostly your client said, ‘I want to go home’ over and over. We never got any good information out of Collier.”
“But how does he figure in the whole case?” she asked.
“We liked him because he was older—fifteen, as opposed to ten or twelve. A young buck where the others were still boys.”
“What do you mean?”
“I observed them take the DNA samples. Zack Collier had a man-sized penis and pubic hair. None of the others were that well developed.”
“But Teresa hadn’t been raped.”
“That’s not to say somebody didn’t try to rape her.”
“And maybe got frustrated because they couldn’t and smashed her head in?” Mary thought of all those holes Zack had put in the living room wall.
“Possibly,” Jack replied. “Or maybe she screamed, and so they hit her to make her be quiet. Collier had some kind of super-sensitive hearing.”
“Okay,” said Mary. “But any of the boys have done that. Ten- and twelve-year-olds can have erections.”
“True.” Wilkins walked over to the stack of papers that described the suspects. “But not many twelve-year-olds can lug seventy-eight pounds of dead weight and hide it someplace.”
“What from I’ve seen of Zack, he would have needed help too. He’s not exactly a logical thinker.”
“But don’t forget he weighed a hundred sixty-two pounds,” said Jack. “And he had parents who protected him. His father went on French leave a couple of years after this girl’s death.”
Mary frowned. It was again hard to hear that the cops suspected Grace Collier of abetting her son in murder, but she knew that’s what good cops did—looked at a crime from every possible angle.
“I wish I could see this scene, you know, like it was back then,” she finally said, looking at all the piles of paper spread out before them.
“Then let’s go up there,” said Jack. “I’ve got to go to the post office anyway. Follow me and I’ll show you exactly how things were on Salola Street that day.”