Evidence of Blood (39 page)

Once back on Beaumont Street, he walked to Ray’s office and took a seat in front of his computer. He called up various files, stared at the questions he’d posed, quickly rearranged them in the order his mind demanded now, and typed in the answers he’d been able to track down so far.

QUESTIONS ABOUT THE INVESTIGATION

Only a moment’s further thought unearthed the answer to Question 7, and he immediately typed it in:
Because she did not want the man she’d planned to meet at Mile Marker 27 to be recognized
.

But who would have recognized him? Overton? Was it possible, Kinley wondered, that Overton would have known whoever it was that Ellie Dinker had planned to meet that day, and that because of that she was “nervous-like,” demanding immediate answers to her questions before walking as far up the road as she could without entirely leaving her point of rendezvous?

Kinley fixed his eyes on the console, making sure there was nothing else, then typed in his last remaining questions, their letters burning like small hot coils on the monitor’s bright screen:

For a moment, he thought that these might be the only questions left in the case. Then, slowly, as if inching its way cautiously into his mind, yet demanding to be gathered within the circle of the others, a third and final question rose insistently:
Why did Ray come to my grandmother’s house?

He waited for Serena in front of Lois’s house, the cold fall chill of late afternoon already gathering around him by the time he saw her emerge from the building.

“I wasn’t sure you were still in town,” she said as she approached him.

“I’m still looking into a few things.”

She did not seem surprised. “I’m glad,” she said and left it at that.

“As a matter of fact,” Kinley added, “I was hoping you might help me a little.”

Serena looked excited at the prospect, as if she’d just been asked to join a trek into other, more adventurous worlds.

“It’s about Ray,” Kinley went on. “Just a few questions about him.”

Serena nodded. “Sure.”

“Good,” Kinley said. He shivered slightly. “It’s a little chilly out here,” he said. “Why don’t we find a place inside?”

They found it on Beaumont Street, and after a few, brief pleasantries about how things were going at the high
school and Serena’s plans to return to college the following week, Kinley moved directly into the matter at hand.

“Ray was working very hard on an old murder case,” he said, “the Overton case. Have you ever heard of it?”

Serena shook her head.

“It happened in 1954,” Kinley told her, “and Charles Overton was sentenced to death. I think Ray had come to think that Overton was innocent.”

Serena smiled sweetly. “That sounds like him.”

Kinley nodded. “You mentioned to me at one point that you and Ray had grown apart not long before his death,” he said. “Do you remember exactly when that was?”

Serena thought for a moment, then answered. “It hadn’t been very long,” she said, “only about a month before he died.”

“Around late July or early August then?” Kinley said.

“Yes.”

“How did he seem?”

“Worried,” Serena answered. “Preoccupied.” She thought a moment longer, as if trying to find the most precise word to describe him. “Suspicious,” she said finally. “He’d started locking things up. His office. His desk. Those file cabinets.”

“But they were unlocked later?” Kinley asked.

“They were unlocked the day he died,” Serena said.

“Not before then?”

Serena shook her head. “No. That’s what made me think that someone had been in Daddy’s office. But it didn’t look like anybody had broken into anything. The only thing I noticed were the missing files.”

Kinley’s mind produced the relevant letters instantly. “S, O and D.”

“Yes,” Serena said. “Have you found them yet?”

Kinley shook his head, unwilling to tell Serena that her mother had taken them in order to conceal Ray’s relationship with Dora Overton.

“That’s the key,” Serena said flatly. “That’s the key to what happened to Daddy.”

Kinley returned to his original question. “So, Ray was suspicious, you said?”

“Yes.”

“Of what, did he ever give you any hint about that?”

“No,” Serena said. “I just know that he was always locking things up and that he was spending a lot of time reading transcripts.”

“Trial transcripts?”

“Yes.”

“Of the Overton case?”

“I don’t know,” Serena said. “But there were lots of transcripts in his office.”

“Lots?”

“Volumes and volumes.”

Kinley’s mind immediately flashed to the short stack of transcripts which Overton’s brief trial had generated. “Volumes and volumes?”

“That’s right.”

“How long did it take him to read them?”

“A couple of weeks, I guess,” Serena said. “He was reading during his spare time. Mostly at night. In his office.”

“When did he stop?”

“Around the middle of July, I think.”

“Which is when he started locking things up,” Kinley said, as if to himself.

Serena nodded. “Yes, at that same time.”

“Do you know what the transcripts were about?”

“No.”

“Or where they came from?”

Serena shrugged. “The courthouse, I guess.”

“You mean here in Sequoyah?”

“Yes,” Serena told him. “He’d load them into the back of his car and bring them home. He spent hours in his office. He was always taking notes.”

“Notes?”

“On legal pads,” Serena said.

“Do you know what he did with the notes?”

Serena’s face turned very solemn. “He burned them.”

“How do you know?”

“I saw him do it,” she said. “I just dropped by after school one day, and he was doing it.” Her mind seemed to drift back slowly, drawing in upon the moment. “He was standing by the fireplace. All his papers were in a big box, and he was feeding them into the fire.” Her eyes moved reflexively toward the fireplace. “He was standing there. He didn’t have a shirt on.”

Kinley looked at her quizzically.

“Because it was so hot,” Serena explained. “It was in the summer. As a matter of fact, I know exactly what day it was because we’d just gotten out of school for the holiday weekend.”

“Which holiday weekend?”

“The one for the Fourth of July,” Serena said. “It was that Wednesday.”

“July 3,” Kinley said.

Serena nodded.

Kinley glanced toward the fireplace, but saw the one in his New York apartment instead. It had never worked, and so he’d put a planter in it, then watched over the next few days as the plants had wilted and died from lack of attention. He’d been trying to revive them that same afternoon when the phone had rung suddenly, marking the date forever in his mind. He’d been surprised to hear Ray’s voice at the other end:
Sorry, Kinley, but if s Granny Dollar; I found her dead this afternoon
.

The courthouse was still open when Kinley arrived a few minutes later. In the large room which led to the evidence vault, Mrs. Hunter was busily straightening up the day’s disarray, neatly shelving books to make the office presentable for the following day.

“I have a favor to ask,” Kinley said as he moved down the corridor toward her.

Mrs. Hunter glanced at the clock. “It’s about quitting time,” she said.

“It’s very important,” Kinley told her.

Mrs. Hunter gave him the weary nod of the exasperated but dutiful civil servant. “Well, I’ll do what I can,” she said.

“It’s the log,” Kinley said. “The one you use to keep track of things in the vault.”

Mrs. Hunter nodded.

“I’d like to look at it,” Kinley said.

Mrs. Hunter looked relieved that so little was being asked of her. “Well, I can do that for you, I guess,” she said.

Kinley followed her to the front counter and watched as Mrs. Hunter retrieved the same vast ledger in which he had written his own name several days before. “Here it is,” she said.

“How far does it go back?”

“We start it over once a year.”

“So this goes back as far as last January?”

Mrs. Hunter nodded. “Yes, sir. Do you need to go back further than that?”

“I don’t think so,” Kinley told her.

“Well, go ahead and look at it then,” Mrs. Hunter said. “I’ll just finish up a few things.” She glanced at the clock. “You’ve got about fifteen minutes before the office closes.”

Kinley quickly turned to the front of the book and began going through the ledger, searching for any entries for Ray Tindall, any notation of anything he’d taken from the vault.

He found the first one on February 19, only six weeks after he’d met Dora. It was for the Overton trial, the same transcript Kinley had already pored over, and Ray had checked out each of its six volumes over the next three weeks.

Ray’s next withdrawal from the vault, on March 1, was the first two volumes of Case Record 217394-C, the final code letter “C” indicating, as Kinley knew, that it was a criminal case.

Over the next two weeks, Ray had checked out the remaining three volumes, returning all five of them on April 1.

Kinley quickly wrote the case number and dates in his notebook, then returned to the log, leafing slowly through its wide pages, his eyes now intent on every withdrawal.

He found the next one on April 24, Case Record 641739-A. Kinley noted immediately that the “A” was a general designation, which meant that it was a civil action, rather than a criminal case, the parties in the dispute having finally taken their irreconcilable differences before a judge.

Again, Kinley wrote the number into his notebook, then began moving through the log again, his eyes bearing down more and more intently on the pages as spring passed into summer, each day moving steadily toward that moment when Ray had taken all his accumulated notes and fed them into a blazing fire.

He stopped at May 15. On that day, Ray had checked out yet another transcript, this one for Case Record 217560-C, another criminal proceeding.

Kinley scribbled the number into his notebook, then continued through the book, turning through the rest of May, then all of June, and finally the first week of July.

Nothing.

“Would it be possible to look at these transcripts?” Kinley asked as he handed the open notebook to Mrs. Hunter.

She looked at the numbers unbelievingly. “All of them?”

“I have the whole night,” Kinley explained. “And all of tomorrow.” He shrugged. “Whatever it takes.”

She considered it for a moment. “Well, Mr. Warfield said to help you any way I could,” she said at last, “but you’ll have to carry them yourself.”

Mrs. Hunter had been right. The accumulated volumes of trial transcript had been a formidable burden, and Kinley had had to make several trips back and forth from the courthouse to his car before the last of them were loaded into the backseat.

The process had been repeated when he’d arrived at the house on Beaumont Street, and within a few minutes, the transcripts sat in a ragged pile beside Ray’s old metal filing cabinet.

Kinley had arranged them in the same order in which Ray had checked them out, and as he plucked the first one from the stack and brought it over to Ray’s desk, he felt again the odd sensation that he was following a well-worn path, that Ray’s broad back was always in front of him, leading him on, just as it had been in front of him that first time so many years before, when they’d gone down into the canyon together to find the little shack behind its wall of vines.