champions in Super Bowl XX. It was the year Ivan Boesky agreed to pay the government one hundred million dollars as a penalty for illegal insider trading, while Congress voted to make the rose the official U.S. flower, a choice debated off and on for a hundred years. Roger Clemens, pitcher for the Boston Red Sox, started the season with thirteen straight wins-only the seventh man in history to do so; the World Series was lost by the Boston Red Sox, won by the New York Mets in a stunning upset. Len Bias, star forward for the University of Maryland, died of a heart attack reportedly brought on by the use of cocaine at a party celebrating his signing a contract with the Boston Celtics; the space shuttle Challenger exploded seventy-four seconds after liftoff at Cape Canaveral, Florida, killing all seven astronauts aboard, including civilian Christa McAuliffe, thirty-seven, a Concord, New Hampshire, schoolteacher, the first private citizen chosen for a space shuttle flight. On August 20 the third worst murder spree in U.S. history took place in Edmond, Oklahoma, when Patrick Henry Sherrill shot and killed fourteen of his former coworkers, wounded six others, and then killed himself, after losing his post office job. In Leicestershire, England, Dr. Alec Jeffreys had discovered genetic fingerprinting, and the test for DNA evidence was put to work for the first time on a criminal case the following year. And the first American Indian to become a Roman Catholic bishop, the Reverend Donald E. Pelotte, forty-one, was ordained in Gallup, New Mexico.
Among law enforcement officials, 1986 was also remembered as the year crack cocaine came on the scene.
Stonecoat brought his mind back to the man for whom the death file was named. He knew he must go slow and easy to fully appreciate just how similar these two deaths were: Mootry today and this professional man, this medical doctor, some ten years before. Dr. Wesley Palmer had been murdered in his bed in the same brutal fashion, a steel arrow through his chest, his head severed, along with hands, feet, penis and testicles. These body parts were carried off by the madman. This had occurred at the doctor's home some six months after his arrival in the area.
The maniac had coolly gained entry to the house, found the doctor asleep in his bed, and mercilessly fired an arrow from a crossbow. As indicated in the report, the hundred pounds plus pressure behind the arrow was enough power to split apart the man's heart and send the arrow cleanly through to the floor beneath the bed.
The forensics report read like dja vu: The arrow in each case had been placed point-blank at a location that assured the heart would burst immediately. In each case, Mootry's and the older case, the deadly arrow had in fact been recovered from below each of the dead men's beds. This suggested that one, the killer had no trouble gaining entry or getting close to his victim with a large and deadly weapon, and two, perhaps the killer had some working knowledge of anatomy, since in both cases the killer had obviously managed to avoid both breastbone and ribs. According to the records, the arrow had slammed into and run completely through each victim's heart as if that were the practiced purpose.
And if the killer knew something of anatomy, then perhaps he shared the same profession as Dr. Wesley Palmer, the 1986 victim. After all, deadly doctors abounded in the annals of crime.
Lucas was now thoroughly entranced.
He went back and forth between the fresh ink of today's news clippings and a musty handful that had remained all these years in the Palmer file. He pored over the police reports and FBI reports, all of which led to so many dead ends. Usually serial killings with such a closely linked pattern happened within months, often weeks, of one another, sometimes days of one another, but these two killings were separated by ten years. It didn't figure.
According to the record, Dr. Wesley J. Palmer, like Judge Mootry, had been clean. No ties to organized crime, no outstanding gambling debts, no angry clients or customers, no relatives or others with a grudge. In fact, like Mootry, the man had been well liked, well respected, apparently by all who knew him, save a pair of would-be in- laws, parents to a young lady the doctor had planned to marry when the young woman's untimely death had ended all such plans. The woman's death was some sort of mystery in it self, and her parents had concocted the idea that Dr. Palmer had somehow caused her death. Lucas made a mental note to check more deeply into the young fiancee's death, but however bitter her parents were at the time of her death, they were, in 1986, completely absolved of any wrongdoing surrounding Dr. Palmer, their alibi standing despite a vigorous effort on the part of police to bring a charge of murder. Lucas's eyes widened at the reason investigators were convinced, for a time, that the elderly couple had acted on a revenge motive: Palmer had been dispatched in identical fashion as his fiancee! Lucas dropped his feet from his desk and rode his squealing chair to an upright position on seeing this.
How had she died? He searched the report for more information. It was vital to know how the fiancee had died the year before; what did the '86 coppers mean by “dispatched in identical fashion”? Did they actually mean by bow and arrow?
He could find but scant details of the earlier death filed with Palmer's paperwork. What he found was far too sketchy. Still, he read all there was on the 1985 Alisha Reynolds, Marietta, Georgia, case mentioned in the file. The information about the previous murder of the doctor's fiancee in Palmer's former palatial home in Georgia was teeth-gnashingly superficial and insufficient.
Lucas searched high and low for more information on the dead fiancee, but there was no more here. Had Meredyth Sanger lifted it? There had to be more. How precisely did Dr. Palmer's fiancee die? Was there some revenge motive in the Palmer case that involved the dead girl? Had the parents hired a hit man in retaliation after the courts found Dr. Wesley Palmer innocent in the wrongful death of his intended bride? Had she been strangled, shot, poisoned? Had she been given too many barbiturates or uppers? Had she stumbled off a balcony? The damned reports were infuriatingly silent on exact cause of the woman's death, as if details of her death had been ripped from the file and tossed out as unimportant, the only tantalizing smidgen of detail left the single phrase “dispatched in identical fashion” to Palmer's own death. Could he trust this image? And if so, did this mean there were three intended victims of the crossbow killer? Or had the fiancee stepped into the crossfire?
Was it possible that the parents, a year later, still filled with grief over the loss of their daughter, hired a professional who preferred the sound of an arrow to the sound of a gun? That could explain the coincidence of a ten-year separation in “jobs” for this killer, but it wouldn't explain who killed the daughter.
Lucas made another notation to check the national crime files for any information on professional hits or hit men who used a crossbow or bow and arrow. It seemed as far-fetched as finding an alien hit man or a Geronimo out of time, but it could sound off some bleeps and alarms, so he'd give it a try. But then, perhaps Dr. Sanger had already done as much. He didn't want to ask her, however. Instead, he wanted to dig a little deeper before committing himself to her little covert operation.
Just as in the hit movie Pulp Fiction, hit men did come in all sizes, shapes, colors, sexes, and brainpan sizes these days; perhaps there was one out there with a Robin Hood fetish? Maybe he or she even wore tights? If it was a she, that might explain how she had gotten so close to two men-at their bedsides-with a deadly weapon the size of a shotgun.
Lucas needed a break. The information was coming in too fast for him, and his legs needed stretching, and his back was beginning to trouble him again. If he was going to be behind a desk for as many hours as this a day, he would have to get a contoured, expensive-as-hell chair like the one Johnnie Cochran and the rest of the O. J. dream team had had for the duration of what had become the longest trial in the history of jurisprudence in America and the world.
On a notepad, he jotted down the name of Palmer's fiancee-Alisha Reynolds-along with a note about her parents, Dick and Mildred Reynolds of 1224 Cherry Lane Drive, Marietta, Georgia. By now they could have moved out of the country, or out of life, he reminded himself even as he wrote. Still, he'd have to find out what he could about the would-be in-laws. Most crime started in the home, in one fashion or another.
Lucas pondered further what he'd learned about the similarities in the Mootry and Palmer cases. Why were these supposed good men, pillars of the community, targeted for murder in such heinous fashion? What did both men have in common? What clubs did they belong to? Did Mootry know something about the Palmer case? Had he known Dr. Palmer? Had he known of Palmer's murder? What did he know about the earlier problem in Georgia, when Palmer's fiancee was killed? Was Mootry dispatched for what he knew about Palmer? Had the judge ever been to Georgia? Did the judge know Alisha Reynolds's parents, perhaps? Perhaps.
While the cleanly efficient method of dispatching both men seemed wholly practiced and professional, why decapitate and remove hands and feet and private parts? That was not the sort of work your usual hit man bought into. He didn't want to leave the scene covered in blood; he didn't want to make a mess. So why the mutilation of the two bodies? It certainly didn't seem to be for reasons a hit man would enjoy. Hit men and women worked on
