Evidence of Blood (10 page)

“Ray brought it,” Dora said, as she eased herself down in one of the blue chairs. “He liked it, but he always played it the wrong way.”

“How do you want me to play it?”

She shrugged. “Well, do you think anybody’s prince ever comes?”

Kinley shook his head. “No, I don’t think so.”

She smiled. “Then play it like that,” she said.

He did. Slowly, haltingly, missing a note here and there, but with a long, disillusioned refrain that drifted out the door and over the edge of the mountain, disintegrating as it fell, so that not a single melancholy note of it ever reached the sleeping town below.

When he was finished, he looked up from the keys, stared directly into her eyes, and fired his question once again. “What was Ray doing in the canyon? Did it have anything to do with you?”

She did not seem at all surprised by the question. “No, I don’t think so,” she said. “There wouldn’t be anything in the canyon that had anything to do with …” She stopped.

“Anything to do with what?”

“Ray was strange. He had his own way of doing things.”

“But he was working on something, wasn’t he?” Kinley asked urgently. “I mean, for you.”

She nodded slowly. “Yes.”

“What?”

“He was trying to find out what happened to my father,” Dora told him. She paused a moment, and in those few seconds, the stony features of her face gave a bit, grew softer and more pliant as Mildred Haskell’s never had. “Have you ever heard of Ellie Dinker?” she asked.

Ellie Dinker, Kinley thought, the lost daughter of the woman in black. “Yes, I’ve heard of her,” he said. He remembered the afternoon in Jefferson’s Drug Store, Mrs. Dinker’s ghostliness, Ray’s young eyes staring at her.

He shook his head. “Surely, after all these years, Ray wasn’t trying to …”

Dora nodded determinedly. “Yes, he was,” she said.

“But why?”

Dora smiled delicately. “To finally get some sleep, I guess.”

Several hours later, as he lay awake in his bed, thinking back over everything Dora had told him during the preceding hours, he remembered a passage he’d written in his first book, and which, despite the academic archness of the language, still struck him as not too bad for a kid who still had a lot to learn:

Ellie Dinker
.

His mind shot back to her from the lofty aerie of his more windy philosophical pretensions, and he heard Dora’s voice once again. It was low and husky, and he imagined Ray lying in her bed, listening to that voice, as he stared sleeplessly at the ceiling overhead while she narrated the story of her father’s execution.

In the case of Charles Herman Overton, it had been by means of electrocution, and Kinley had had no trouble imagining how he had been strapped into the chair and assaulted with a searing jolt of electric power. He had seen the same thing happen to Colin Bright, and at Dora’s very mention of electrocution, his mind had returned in full and excruciating detail to the only execution he’d ever witnessed. As if in a slow-motion reel, he saw Bright’s body suddenly jerk forward and grow extremely taut, the skin drawing back along the bones, as if Bright’s soul were trying desperately to escape the body in which it was
imprisoned. The eyes popped out beneath their taped lids, a white froth gathered over the mouth, and a strange bluish smoke rose around him, danced for a moment in the light-green room, then vanished when the electricity was suddenly turned off. After that, Bright’s body had slumped down, his head drooping very deeply, the muscles and tendons letting go, so that he appeared miraculously stricken with unbearable remorse, his head bowed heavily, as if weighed down by shame.

They executed Charlie Overton on January 4, 1955
.

That was all she’d said before adding the fact that she’d been born only a few months before. He’d nodded quietly, then said:
And so you never knew your father?
To which she’d replied:
Only that he was innocent
.

But as he thought about it, Kinley was not so sure that Overton was innocent. The evidence against him, even as Dora had gone on to describe it, struck him as unbreakable in its thoroughness, much as he’d seen before in murder convictions, one detail piled on another until the mound of accumulated evidence was so great no jury could fail to see it. It rose like a mountain, massive, impenetrable to that small light which might yet have cast the shadow of a doubt. Once it had been constructed, the prosecutor only needed to point his finger in the same direction as the evidence pointed.

And that was precisely what Thomas Warfield had done in the fall of 1954. He had pointed his finger at Charles Overton and demanded that Ellie Dinker be avenged. He’d used words that Dora’s mother had never forgotten, and that she had repeated in a morbid, bitter litany to her daughter:

Or had he?

Kinley got up, still thinking about all Dora had told him. He was certain that he had been able to remember all the details, and for a moment he simply let his mind play them back, as if it were a machine bound to him in service.

Once this silent, inner recitation was completed, he stood up, grabbed the laptop computer from its place beside the bed, carried it into Ray’s office, plopped it down on his small metal desk and turned it on.

The high-tech light from the screen fell incongruously over the less modern means of information storage and retrieval upon which Ray had relied, hundreds of books, thousands of sheets of paper, dusty and cumbersome, relics of an older time. Compared to them, the sleek lines of the laptop appeared mercifully lean and uncomplicated.

He began by making a file for the computer menu. At first he didn’t know what to name it. Then her face swam into his mind, and he typed out the file name:
DORA
. For a sub-file, he established the code
OVER:TON
for Dora’s father, then proceeded to type everything he’d learned so far into it, all the details the prosecution had presented on behalf of Overton’s guilt, as Dora had detailed them.

First, he listed them chronologically, moving through Overton’s activities on the day of Ellie Dinker’s disappearance.

These were the bare bones of Overton’s day as Dora had laid them out. The crucial time was obvious. From approximately 12:40 until 3:00 in the afternoon, neither Overton nor Ellie Dinker had been seen. They had disappeared into the woods, and what had happened after that, the prosecution had contended, was murder.

Kinley leaned forward again and began typing a new heading.

Kinley stopped again, his eyes peering at the screen as he pondered the one important piece of evidence which the prosecution had never been able to unearth: Ellie Dinker’s body.

It was what prosecutors called a “large item,” something missing that was absolutely crucial to an air-tight case. It might be the murder weapon or the motive, but whatever it was, the absence of the “large item” always presented a problem. Not having a body in a murder case was one of the largest items a case could have, and Kinley had seen more than one case peremptorily dismissed for the lack of it.

According to Dora, District Attorney Warfield had escaped this particular pitfall by claiming that the substantial quantity of blood and hair found on Dinker’s dress was enough of her body to merit a finding of murder. To buttress this contention, Warfield had displayed the dress during the course of the trial, carefully pointing out the enormous red stains and even offering Dr. Stark’s testimony that such a large amount of blood could only have come from a life-threatening assault.

Still, there had been no body, and the question remained as to how and where Overton had managed to hide it.

Kinley went back over the time sequence. It was here that the laws of physics and the laws of time had to intersect. The accused had to be able to be at a certain place at a certain time if his guilt was to be proven. Overton had
been seen with Ellie Dinker at approximately 12:40
P.M
. Neither had been seen again until Overton had arrived home two hours and twenty minutes later.

So that was it. Two hours and twenty minutes to murder a sixteen-year-old girl, bury her, and walk back to his own house, a trip which Dora said would had to have taken at least an hour. This last hour reduced the time left for Overton to murder and then bury Dinker to a scant one hour and fifteen minutes. It was not a lot of time, but it was enough.

In the end, however, it was neither the undiscovered body nor the small amount of time available to Overton which had finally persuaded Ray to look into the case. Dora had made that completely clear just before Kinley had finally gotten up to leave her house on the mountain’s edge. He’d already been halfway down the stairs when she’d called to him.

Kinley?

Yes
.

The day before he died, Ray was pretty upset about something
.

What?

I don’t know, but he looked more troubled than I’d ever seen him
.

But you don’t know why?

He wouldn’t tell me, but I knew it was something about this case
.

How do you know that?

Something he said the last time I saw him. He was standing at the bottom of the stairs, just like you are now, and he looked at me very seriously, the way he could look serious, and he said, “This one’s killing me, Dora.”

What did he mean?

I’m not sure, but I think it had to do with all that he was uncovering, that there was something in it that was, I don’t know, breaking his heart
.

Breaking his heart
.