Evidence of Blood (25 page)

Kinley took his seat at Ray’s desk, turned on his computer and typed in the relevant code:
OVER:MYS
.

Then he typed in the first series of questions under the heading:

Once the questions had been recorded, Kinley returned to the only account he had of Ellie Dinker’s whereabouts after leaving her house at the base of the mountain, Overton’s initial statement to Sheriff Maddox.

He read it over carefully, then read it again, his eyes moving slowly from word to word, waiting for something to emerge that might give him a clue. Sheriff Maddox had been dead for several years, but as he went through the statement the Sheriff had given of his talk with Overton,
he noted one particular reference to a third person in Maddox’s testimony at Overton’s trial:

WARFIELD
: Now, Sheriff, did you have occasion to talk to Charles Overton after his arrest?

MADDOX
: Yes, sir.

WARFIELD
: When was this, Sheriff?

MADDOX
: Well, I got in the backseat of Patrolman Hendricks’s car, and he drove the two of us down to the Sheriff’s Department.

WARFIELD
: So you were in the backseat with Overton at that time?

MADDOX
: Yes, sir.

WARFIELD
: And Deputy Hendricks was driving?

MADDOX
: Yes, he was.

Deputy Hendricks had been driving the patrol car as Overton and Maddox spoke about Ellie Dinker in the backseat.

According to Ben Wade, Hendricks had retired not long after the Overton trial, and now worked at South Side High School. Kinley glanced at his watch, his mind calculating the probable times for class breaks if things hadn’t changed drastically since he’d been in high school.

He arrived at South Side High a few minutes later, walked into the office, and asked for Riley Hendricks.

“He’s in class right now,” the woman behind the desk told him.

“When will he be out?”

“That would be lunch period, at eleven-thirty.”

“Could I leave a message for him?”

“Why sure,” the woman said cheerfully. “I’ll take it myself.”

“Just tell him that someone would like to talk to him,” Kinley said. “I’ll be waiting in the faculty parking lot.”

“You want to leave your name?” the woman asked.

“That’s okay.” He moved to the office door, then
turned. “By the way, so I don’t miss him, what kind of car does he drive?”

“It’s a Chevrolet, I believe,” the woman said, “a light green station wagon.”

Kinley nodded. “Thanks.”

Kinley walked out of the school, made a hard left and headed into the faculty parking lot. He could see the green Chevrolet sitting beside a large orange dumpster, and for the next few minutes he watched it casually, his eyes only occasionally glancing up toward the mountain, as if drawn there involuntarily.

After only a short time, he saw Riley Hendricks walk energetically out the back door of the school and head toward his car. He was smaller than Kinley had expected, leaner too, as if he’d been careful to keep his fighting weight despite the onslaught of late middle age.

From his position a few yards away, Kinley advanced toward him slowly, coming up from the right, just as Hendricks was opening the door to his car.

“Excuse me,” Kinley said. “You’re Riley Hendricks, aren’t you?”

Hendricks turned to face him. “Yes, I am.”

“I left a message for you at the school office,” Kinley told him.

“You did?” Hendricks asked. “Well, I didn’t go back to the office.” He smiled sheepishly. “To tell you the truth, I stay out of the office as much as I can.”

“I wanted to talk to you in private for a minute,” Kinley said.

Hendricks gave him a wary, apprehensive look. “You do? What about?”

“An old murder case.”

“Murder case?” Hendricks asked doubtfully, adding nothing else. “Well, who are you, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“My name’s Jack Kinley.”

“Are you with the Justice Department or something?”

Kinley shook his head. “No, I’m a writer,” he said. “I was a friend of Ray Tindall’s.”

Something seemed to catch in Hendricks’s mind. “I see.”

“Ray was working on the same case.”

Hendricks said nothing.

“The Dinker case,” Kinley added.

Hendricks stared at him stonily. “I didn’t have much to do with that,” he said. “That was Sheriff Maddox’s doing.”

“Doing?”

“He handled it,” Hendricks said quickly, “not me.”

“You mean the questioning?”

“I mean everything,” Hendricks said flatly. “I was just a rookie in those days.”

Kinley slowly drew the notebook from his coat pocket and opened it to Sheriff Maddox’s testimony. “You drove the car when Maddox questioned Overton.”

Hendricks nodded slowly, with a strange reluctance, as if the admission made him culpable.

“At the trial, Sheriff Maddox testified about what Overton said to him while you drove them down the mountain,” Kinley told him. “Did you hear that testimony?”

“Yes, I did.”

“You were in the courtroom?”

Hendricks nodded. “It was a big trial,” he said. “There were big crowds. I guess I was as curious as anybody else.”

Kinley glanced at his notes. “Most of the Sheriff’s testimony is pretty routine,” he said, “but I have a few questions.”

Hendricks’s eyes dropped down to the notebook, as if in sudden alarm at what might be written within its small white pages. Then, suddenly, he looked back up at Kinley. “Look, why don’t you get in my car, and we’ll go for a little ride,” he said. “Schools are gossip mills, you know,
and people would be asking me a thousand questions if they saw me talking to a stranger.”

“All right,” Kinley agreed. “Where do you want to go?”

“Just get in with me,” Hendricks said. He pulled himself in behind the wheel and waited as Kinley took a seat on the passenger side.

“My patrol car was like this,” he said, glancing back toward the rear seat. “No safety glass between the driver and the people in back, like there is today.”

“So you could hear everything.”

Hendricks nodded silently, then started the car and drove it out of the parking lot.

“I was just a kid, really,” he said as he drove south, “a real Dudley Do-Right type.” He smiled. “Gung ho. Idealistic. The whole nine yards.”

“How long had you been in the Department?” Kinley asked.

“A couple years,” Hendricks said, “and nothing big had ever really happened. We busted a few bootleggers and vagrants once in a while, and there were always a few drunk and disorderlies to deal with.” He shook his head. “But the Ellie Dinker thing, that was the first murder I’d ever worked.” He took a quick left turn, heading east for two blocks, then turned right and cruised slowly along the base of the mountain, its high green slope rising like a massive wall above them. “It was all you heard about until we arrested Charlie Overton.”

“Did you know him before that?”

“Who, Charlie?” Hendricks asked. “No, not at all. I mean, I knew who he was. He’d been working around the courthouse while they were building it. But as a man? No, I didn’t know him.”

The road continued to skirt the base of the mountain, then came to the place where it intersected the mountain road. Hendricks brought his car to a halt. “I waited right here for Sheriff Maddox. That’s what he’d radioed me to
do. Then I saw his car pass, and I fell in behind him. Ben Wade was in the car with him.”

“And they were going to Overton’s house?”

“We all went right on up the mountain,” Hendricks said as he eased his foot down on the accelerator and moved the car across the intersection into the small picnic area that rested near Sequoyah High. “We can stop right here,” he said as he brought his car to a halt. “It’s nice and shady,” he added as he opened the door, “and there are benches.”

Kinley got out of the car, followed Hendricks over to one of the picnic tables and sat down opposite him.

“I like to rest here in the afternoon,” Hendricks explained. “It gives me peace.”

Kinley opened his notebook again. “The Sheriff testified that Overton denied the murder.”

“He did deny it,” Riley said, “but later he admitted it.”

“But that was several hours later. With Ben Wade.”

“That’s right.”

“Did he give any indication of guilt when he was in the backseat with Sheriff Maddox?”

“No,” Hendricks said. “He looked scared.”

“Did Maddox give him reason to be?”

“You mean, was he rough with him?” Hendricks asked. “No. He was real gentle, as a matter of fact. He asked a few questions and Overton answered them.”

Kinley looked at his notes. “This is the part of Sheriff Maddox’s testimony I have a few questions of my own about,” he said. Then he read the exchange:

WARFIELD:
All right. Now, Sheriff Maddox, can you tell the court what transpired by way of conversation between you and Mr. Overton at that time?

MADDOX
: Overton was denying everything, but he admitted that he had seen Ellie Dinker on the road. He said he didn’t know her name. He said it was just a little girl in a green dress. He didn’t know her name. He said as far as he could recollect, he’d never
seen her before. They’d had a little talk, he said, and after that she’d left him and gone up the road a little ways.

WARFIELD
: And this was the day of her murder?

MADDOX
: The day of her murder, that’s right. And he said that she was standing along the road there when his truck broke down.

WARFIELD
: And what did he say happened at that time?

MADDOX
: Well, when the truck broke down, he said he pulled it over to the side there, and started to fix it, and while he was doing that, Ellie Dinker came over, and Overton told me that they’d had a little conversation, what you might say, a few words between them.

WARFIELD
: Did he indicate to you what the nature of that conversation had been?

MADDOX
: Well, nothing much to it, he said. She asked about the truck and that sort of thing, about what was wrong with it, how long it was going to take to fix it, that sort of thing.

WARFIELD
: Just what you might expect then?

MADDOX
: That’s the way I’d describe it, yes.

Hendricks listened quietly until Kinley had finished, then nodded silently.

Kinley closed the notebook. “Is that what you remember Overton saying to Sheriff Maddox?”

“Yes, it is.”

“Do you remember Overton saying anything else?”

“Nothing important, no,” Hendricks said. “The ride was probably eight or nine minutes, no more than that. They didn’t have time to say too much.”

Kinley added nothing else, and for a moment Hendricks watched him, as if trying to decide what to say.

From across the bare, concrete table, Kinley could see something move behind Hendricks’s eyes, shifting, darting, like a creature looking for a way out. He decided to give it seven seconds to find its own way before prying
open a larger space with another question. He counted them off in his mind:
one two three four five …

“Ray talked to me, you know,” Hendricks said suddenly. “About three months ago. He had a few questions, too.”

“Ray talked to you?” Kinley asked. “What questions?”

“He went over the same things you did,” Hendricks answered. “He wanted to know if Overton had said anything else on the way to the courthouse.”

“I see.”

“Something bothered him about what Overton said,” Hendricks went on. “Ray had been a cop a long time, and he could see things, situations, you know, in his head.”

“Yes, I know what you mean,” Kinley told him. “What did he see in this situation?”

“Well, you have this young girl on the side of the road,” Hendricks began, “and a strange man pulls over in a beat-up old truck, and he gets out, and you’re a girl there all by yourself.”

“Yes?”

“Well, would a young girl go over to a man like that?” Hendricks asked. “And those questions she asked. Why
those
questions? I mean, about what was wrong with the truck, how long it would take to fix, stuff like that. I mean, why would she give a shit one way or another, you know?”

Kinley nodded.

“That’s what bothered Ray,” Hendricks said. “What Ellie Dinker did and said on the road, it didn’t make sense. It didn’t fit with the situation the way Ray imagined it.” He paused a moment, the ferment still building slowly in his face. “And that made me remember something later,” he went on. “I meant to tell Ray about it, but I waited, and so …”