Shattered Image

“What are you working on out here, Toni?”

“Just a carburetor overhaul on my old Jeep.” I wiped some of the grease off my hands with a rag and headed for the Go-Jo canister. I smeared Go-Jo all over my hands, loosening all the grease, and then wiped my hands clean with a dry rag.

Leo sauntered over to the workbench and started to inspect the carburetor.

“Touch that and you’ll be sorry.”

“I-eeee…wasn’t…” Her voice trailed off as if she’d been caught with her hand in the cookie jar.

“I just spent half an hour getting all those needles lined up just right so I could get that thing back together,” I told her. “You knock it over or mess it up and your name is mud.”

I turned around to see that Leo was leaning over the workbench with her hands behind her back, eyeing the carburetor closely. She looked like a heron perched on a log.

“You know, Toni, most people take stuff like this to a mechanic.”

“Yeah well, four things are true, kid. Most people don’t have a mechanic for a dad. Most people weren’t practically raised in a garage. Most people don’t know a thing about carburetors, and I’m not most people.”

“That’s the truth—the ‘you’re not most people’ part, anyway.”

“Are you here to harass me and disturb my auto-mechanican therapy session or do you have something important you’d like to impart?”

“Grump. You call me in the middle of my busy day and ask me to go look at a bunch of old bones dug up out of the river bottom, and when I come by to give you the benefit of my report, this is how I’m treated.”

I sighed. “Truce already. I can’t spar with you anymore today.”

“Hey, lighten up. I was kidding. What gives?”

“It’s just been a bad day. It has to do with old times in Vietnam. I’ll work it out. Distract me by giving me your brilliance on our Red Bud case.”

Leo nodded. “I’m afraid there’s no brilliance yet. There’s not much I can say because there’s not much to go on. But there were a few things that came to mind based on the apparent cause of death and the reburial.”

“Lay it on me.”

“Well, I looked at the photos of the burial site and I looked at the bones themselves and talked to Chris about the autopsy. I definitely tanked any idea that they were moved because someone thought they’d be discovered where they were. I think it’s significant that they were reburied in a shallow grave on the dam side of Red Bud. According to the photos, the bones were in a place where they would have washed away in the first floodgate release. The kayaker was the unknown quantity that foiled that plan.”

“Okay, so why do you think they were reburied and not just discarded—thrown into the river, for instance.”

“I think the fact that isn’t what happened is very significant. I think the deceased either meant something to the killer and he couldn’t do that, or maybe he felt too much guilt to do that, or maybe a little of both. I suspect he wanted to be rid of her, but he wanted nature to do the ultimate dirty work so he wouldn’t be responsible for it.”

“So, why dig her up and try to get rid of her after all this time?”

“That’s the twenty-five-thousand-dollar question. Something changed in the killer, or something else happened that caused him to dig her up and move her like that. He may have just wanted to be rid of the memory of it, or it could have been a combination of things that happened at once. When we figure that out, we’ll have all the answers.”

“What about the way she was killed? You said you thought she might have meant something to the killer, but it looks to me like he just executed her.”

“I think he did, but that doesn’t mean she didn’t mean something to him. In fact, he had more of a reason to kill her if she meant something to him. He may have even planned it out in his mind before.”

“Elaborate.”

“Maybe the killer believed she did something to him for which she deserved to be ‘executed’—and it’s possible that the deceased may not have even actually committed the offense for which she was killed.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that if the killer was paranoid, which is totally possible, and thought she did something to deserve being killed, then he probably thought about killing her for a while. It satisfied the paranoid feelings he had. In fact, it may all be in his mind anyway, and we may find in the end that this victim didn’t even do what the killer thought she did. This kind of killer would kill for some offense with or without any real proof, based solely on what he believed, because he convinced himself in his mind that it’s absolutely true, that someone is to blame, and he believed that the person deserved to pay.”

“That’s interesting. What gives you the impression the killer might be this kind of killer?”

“The way she was killed seems calculated and organized and I don’t see any passion in it. The lack of passion leads me to believe that he thought she deserved this in some way. In other words, it wasn’t done spur of the moment—thought went into it. Hence the execution style to the shooting. But this burial and reburial and what I see in that isn’t organized or thought out at all in my opinion—and he reburied her in a way that he wouldn’t be responsible for discarding her remains. It’s completely irrational. Plus, in my gut I feel that his attempt to discard her is part of his denial of guilt and that goes hand in hand with this kind of personality—‘Someone else is to blame in all this, not me. She deserves all of this.’”

“So, in a nutshell, he thinks she’s done something to him and he kills her. He plans the killing, but then later his actions—the reburial—are committed in response to some other event?”

“Right.”

“This helps a lot.”

“It’s all just my impression—a gut feeling at this point—based on an execution-style bullet hole and bones dumped and carelessly reburied in a shallow grave. I just let it run through my head and try to see the event the way it might have happened. Then I try to imagine why the person would have done the murder that way. What was his motive in carrying out these actions?”

I smiled. It was the way I worked a crime scene—letting it run through my mind, but I didn’t have the knowledge of behavior that Leo had, just an eye for detail.

“Anything else?” I asked.

“Nope. Just keep me in the loop, because now I’m tantalized.” She smiled broadly.

“Oh, one more thing.”

“Yeah?”

“We both have been referring to the killer as ‘he.’ Any chance the killer is a woman?”

“Sure. I was just using the ‘he’ in a more general sense, but a woman could have all the same issues and could be the killer. I’ll tell you, though, the statistics say it’s more likely to be a guy.”

“I hope my work sheds more light on it all.”

“Your work usually does, Toni.”

“I’ve already started the bust.”

“Good. So, got any root beer in this place?” Leo grinned.

“Brat. Come on inside and we’ll drink the best root beer anywhere.”

We went into my kitchen and I pulled two ice-cold IBC root beers out of the fridge. IBC is bottled in Plano, and it’s genuine old-fashioned Texas root beer. I grabbed two frosted mugs from the freezer and poured the soda down the sides of each mug for minimum suds.

“Let’s drink these on the patio. What do you say?”

“You’re twisting my arm, Toni.”

We sat down in the Adirondack chairs I had outside and got into a relaxed mode. I took a long, slow swallow of the bubbly stuff.