An Evil Mind--A Suspense Novel (2 page)

“About two hundred miles from Dallas. I went there to see Edward Phillips.”

“Why?”

“I got a letter from him last week. He said he had something important to tell me.”

“You never told me he sent you a letter.”

“I didn’t think it was important.”

“So what did he tell you?”

“He said that he’s innocent and that he knows who killed Helen.”

“When are they going to execute this son of a bitch?”

They were silent for half a minute, and then Joan said, “Phillips said he knows who killed Helen. Did he tell you who it was?”

“Last August, a young woman was killed in Austin in the same manner as Helen. Phillips said she was murdered by the guy who killed Helen.”

“Does he know his name?”

“No.”

“What’s that woman’s name?”

“Laura Sumner.”

Joan stood up, put a tea bag in a cup, filled the cup with hot water from the kettle, and said, “He’s lying. I’m sure of it.”

Mark nodded.

“I hate him so much,” Joan said.

They both thanked God that their daughter’s killer had been caught so quickly.

The police had gotten their first lead just hours after they arrived at the crime scene: there was a fingerprint on Helen’s belt buckle that didn’t belong to her. They ran the print through the database and found that it belonged to Edward Phillips. Phillips’s fingerprints were in the system because he had been arrested for driving while intoxicated two years before (Phillips must be really pissed about that arrest).

Phillips was arrested at home at seven p.m. the day after Helen’s murder.

The police discovered three small blood stains on Phillips’s Levi’s jeans and traces of blood on the soles of his Timberland boots. DNA tests revealed that the blood belonged to Helen. They searched Phillips’s house for the murder weapon and didn’t find it.

Phillips had no drugs in his system on the day of Helen’s murder, so it wasn’t mind-altering substances that made him kill her. The police suggested two possible motives for the murder. According to one theory, Phillips killed Helen to cover up a rape he’d been unable to complete. According to the other, he was a psychopath who enjoyed killing.

3

Joan was staring at the TV remote as if it were the most interesting thing in the world.

“We should have bought her a Taser,” Joan said, running her thumb along the side of the TV remote.

“Who?”

Helen used to say that when she put batteries in the remote, she felt as if she were loading a shotgun.

“Helen. If she’d had a Taser, she’d still be alive. She would have tased Phillips and run away.”

If Helen had been home with the flu that day, she would still be alive, Mark thought.

Mark took Joan’s hand and squeezed it lightly. Sighing heavily, Joan put the remote on the coffee table.

The more Mark thought about what Edward Phillips had said, the more convinced he became that he should look into his claims. He would have dismissed Phillips’s assertions if there had been a videotape of him killing Helen, but there was no such tape, and therefore it was possible Phillips was telling the truth.

Who had murdered Laura Sumner?

Was it a copycat? Helen’s murder had not been a high-profile case and not many people had followed it, so the likelihood of it being imitated was quite low. On the other hand, all it took was one lunatic with an itch to kill. The lunatic would have had no problem finding out how Helen had been killed because it had been described in detail in the newspapers.

They say that the simplest answer is usually the correct one. In this case, the simplest theory was that there was no connection between Laura Sumner’s and Helen’s murders. For some reason Mark felt that this theory was wrong.

Could Laura Sumner have been killed by the bastard that had murdered Helen? Mark supposed it was conceivable.

He had hated Edward Phillips for so long that he found it very hard to believe anything the man said. However, he was willing to listen to Phillips and to investigate his claims. Call it curiosity.

How did Phillips know what the killer had done to Laura Sumner? Had it been reported in the newspapers?

Mark opened his laptop, typed “Laura Sumner stabbed in the chest cut open stomach” into the search box, and pressed the Enter button. The top search result was a story on the website of NBC’s Austin affiliate, which mentioned that Laura Sumner had two stab wounds in her chest and that her abdomen had been cut open.

That night, before going to bed, Mark put a screwdriver in his jacket pocket: he was going to use it to remove the vent cover screws at Sam Curtis’s place tomorrow.

He didn’t fall asleep until three in the morning, and he knew exactly what kept him awake: when Phillips received his sentence, Mark had regained a semblance of emotional balance, and now it was gone.

1

On Monday, October 9, Mark called Glenn Baxley, the Assistant Warden of the Dallas County Jail, and asked him to confirm that Sam Curtis and Edward Phillips had shared a cell for a month last winter. Baxley said he would call back within an hour.

After talking to the assistant warden, Mark ran the address of Eddie’s Mini Mart through the system and found that the convenience store had been robbed on April tenth of last year. The perpetrator had made off with nine hundred and ninety dollars. The case was still unsolved.

The robber had worn a ski mask and carried a pistol. He had fired a shot at the ceiling of the store, and the bullet had been recovered. Mark was pleased to see that the images of the bullet’s rifling marks had been added to the ballistics database.

He spent the next half hour studying the incident report for the armed robbery of the McDonald’s restaurant on Grand Avenue and Meadow Street that had occurred last night. When he was finished with the report, he began searching for information on Sam Curtis.

Sam Curtis was thirty, two years younger than Edward Phillips. He had been booked into the Dallas County Jail for drunk driving and resisting arrest on December 16 of last year, five days after Helen’s murder. He was released on bail on January 13 of this year. At the end of January, Curtis accepted a plea bargain and was sentenced to time served.

Curtis’s bail had been only three thousand dollars. A bondsman’s fee for posting it would have been about three hundred bucks. Why had it taken Curtis almost a month to come up with the money?

At the time of his arrest last December Curtis resided at 4540 Spring Lane, Dallas. Mark punched Sam Curtis’s driver’s license number into the Department of Motor Vehicles’ database and scanned the information that appeared on the screen.

Curtis didn’t live at 4540 Spring Lane, Dallas anymore. Last February he changed his address to 2111 Walnut Avenue, Arlington. Mark ran Curtis’s old address through the database and found that Tyler and Rhona Stelter currently resided there.

The only vehicle registered to Curtis was a four-year-old Mazda 6.

Mark’s plan was to go to the Stelters’ house later today, after he interviewed the employees of the McDonald’s on Grand Avenue.

If the Stelters refused to cooperate, he would not request a search warrant.

Could this be a trap?

He doubted it was a trap, but he would watch his back anyway.

The chances were small that the gun was still in the air vent: people usually didn’t leave their firearms behind when they moved.

The Assistant Warden of the Dallas County Jail called at nine-thirty. He told Mark that Curtis and Phillips had shared a cell from December 17 to January 12.

2

The house at 4540 Spring Lane was a one-story bungalow with an attached garage. A gray Honda Accord sat in the driveway. As Mark climbed the porch, he heard a TV murmuring inside. He unsnapped the clasp on his holster. He needed only two seconds to draw his gun and fire a round.

Strangely, part of him wanted the Stelters to refuse to let him in.

He pushed the doorbell button. The chimes rang cheerfully. A dark-haired man in a wife-beater and shorts opened the door. Mark held up his badge and said, “I’m Detective Mark Hinton with the Dallas Police Department. Can I come in?”

“What is this about?”

“The previous tenants left something important in this house, and I came to retrieve it.”

The man stepped back. “Please come in.”

Mark went inside. In the living room, the man grabbed a remote from the coffee table and muted the TV. “What did they leave?”

“You’ll see. What’s your name?”

“Tyler.”

“Tyler Stelter?”

“Yes.”

Tyler was not carrying a gun: there were no bulges in his pockets or wife-beater.

“Where’s the master bedroom?”

“Let me show you.” Tyler led Mark to the master bedroom, which adjoined the kitchen.

“Do you know who lived here before you?” Mark asked, looking around the room.

“No,” Tyler replied. “Did they leave something valuable?”

“When did you move here?”

“Last March.”

Mark patted his pants pocket to see if the screwdriver he had brought with him was there. Then he took out a pair of latex gloves and slipped them on. Tyler Stelter stood by the dresser with his arms folded across his chest, silently watching him. Pointing to the air vent, which was located above the door, Mark asked, “Have you ever removed this vent cover?”

“No.”

“Do you mind if I remove it?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Can you bring me a chair, please?”

“Sure.” Tyler walked out of the room. When he came back, he carried a wooden dining chair. He stood in the doorway and asked, “Here?”

Mark nodded, and Tyler put the chair down.

“Thank you.” Mark climbed onto the chair.

“Did the people who lived here before us put that thing in there?”

Mark peered through the grille, and saw only blackness.

“Yes.”

Mark pulled out the screwdriver and undid the cover screws. He put the screws and the screwdriver in his shirt pocket, removed the cover, and looked inside the vent.

There was a pistol in the duct. Covered with dust, it lay about five inches from the edge of the vent hole. Mark picked up the gun with two fingers and took it out of the duct.

It was a nine-millimeter Heckler & Koch USP. Its serial number had been filed off.

Mark was surprised by how excited he was to see the gun. Edward Phillips’s story had checked out: Sam Curtis had indeed told Phillips where he had hidden his Heckler & Koch. Phillips’s credibility had just grown a little.

The question now was, had this pistol been used in the Eddie’s Mini Mart robbery?

If he dropped the gun off at the crime lab today, he would have the answer tomorrow.

“It’s a gun,” Tyler said.

Mark stepped off the chair, laid the vent cover on the floor, and placed the pistol in a plastic bag.

Why hadn’t Curtis come to get his gun back? It was eight months since he had moved.

Maybe he had kicked the bucket shortly after he moved.

“Are those people criminals?” Tyler asked.

“They’re suspects.” Mark stripped off the gloves and shoved them in his jacket pocket.

“What are they suspected of?”

“Robbery. This is confidential information, so don’t share it with anyone.”

“What if they come here to get their gun?”

“Don’t let them in.”

“What if they break in?”

“Call the police.”

Tyler frowned. “Have they ever killed anyone?”

“No.”

“Do you think we should move?”

Mark shook his head. Tyler still looked worried.

“If they come to you, call me.” Mark handed Tyler his card.

He and Rhona are probably going to move, he thought.

“Can you put the cover back in place?” Mark pointed at the vent.

“Yes.”

“Thank you.” Mark took the screws from his shirt pocket and gave them to Tyler.

3

On the drive to Dallas PD headquarters Mark came up with a new theory.

Maybe Edward Phillips had gotten one of his friends to kill someone the same way he had murdered Helen. Maybe that friend had helped him kill Helen. It could be his folks that Phillips had gotten to imitate Helen’s murder: most parents would do anything for their children, and Mark figured some of them would take an innocent life.

After dusting Sam Curtis’s gun, Mark found two full fingerprints on the grip and one on the barrel. He lifted the prints and then went to the Crime Scene Response Section, where he asked the specialist to run the prints through the system. The specialist’s name was Lydia Afonso. She had a sweet face and wore her hair in a ponytail.

“It’s urgent,” Mark said.

“It’s always urgent,” Lydia replied.

Ten minutes later, she gave Mark a report, which said that all three fingerprints belonged to Sam Curtis.

The fingerprints proved that the Heckler & Koch hadn’t been planted in the vent by Sam Curtis’s enemies.

When Mark got back to his desk, he wiped the pistol clean with a paper towel and sealed it in an evidence bag. Then he called assistant wardens of the Allan B. Polunsky Unit and the Dallas County Jail and asked them to send Edward Phillips’s visitor logs. Both assistant wardens promised to provide the information tomorrow.

4

Mark arrived at the crime lab at ten minutes past nine. The building was quiet. As Mark filled out the laboratory submission form, a wave of doubt washed over him.

Was it wise to let the convicted killer of his daughter influence him? Had he betrayed Helen by thinking that Phillips might be innocent?

In his mind’s eye Mark saw Helen looking down at him from heaven, shaking her head disapprovingly.

Phillips is pulling the wool over my eyes.

Or maybe not.

If it turned out that Sam Curtis’s gun had not been used in the Eddie’s Mini Mart robbery, he would stop the investigation.

When Mark handed him the submission form and the pistol, the clerk, a bald black man in his thirties, said, “Want to hear a joke?”

“Sure.”

“What’s the difference between boogers and spinach?”

“What?”

“You can't get your kids to eat spinach.” The clerk’s face broke into a broad grin.

A moment later, Mark burst out laughing.

“It’s a funny joke,” he said.

“My son told it to me. He’s ten.”

I had a daughter. She was murdered when she was fifteen, Mark said in his head.

If this conversation had taken place in the first three months after Helen’s death, he would have said that out loud: back then he had told anyone who would listen about what had happened to his daughter. He hadn’t done it to get sympathy—he didn’t care for sympathy. He had thought that talking about his tragedy eased his pain.

After leaving the crime lab, Mark went to Sam Curtis’s house to see if he was still alive. Luckily, he did not have to stake out Curtis’s place: Curtis’s Mazda 6 was sitting in the driveway when Mark arrived there. 

Sam Curtis was still alive, so it was possible that he had murdered Laura Sumner.