“First of all, Mr. and Mrs. Branson,” said Hargis formally. “Let me offer my condolences. Ms. Branson was well thought of in Madisonville. She was a pillar in the community. The whole town’s shaken by her murder.”
Jack nodded. “Any leads?”
“Not yet.”
“Have you checked out her renters? There was one she was concerned about. He was always calling her to chase the ghosts out of his house.”
“Yeah.” Hargis placed his folded hands across his stomach. “We brought him in for questioning. Seems harmless. Just a little crazy.”
“Did he have an alibi?”
Hargis nodded vaguely and changed the subject. “We’re trying to determine if anything was stolen. Do you know of any valuables Ms. Branson kept in her house?”
“She had several large diamond rings.”
“We’ve accounted for all but one of those,” said Hargis. “And we’ve accounted for all but one of her furs. The housekeeper said she thinks there’s a mink coat missing. Did she keep any weapons in the house?”
“She had a factory engraved Smith & Wesson .22 caliber revolver,” Jack offered. “It was my Uncle Carroll’s. She used to keep it in the kitchen cabinet, but I’m not sure where she’s kept it recently.
“She told me at Christmas that she and Bob, her fiancé, had tried to see if it was loaded. They looked down the barrel to try to see the bullets. That scared me—neither of them knew anything about guns. I told her to put it away and let me look at it next time I was there.
“Call Bob. He’ll know where she’s been keeping it.” Jack paused, then: “Do you think robbery was the motive?”
The captain’s eyes apologized for what he was about to say.
“This was no robbery, even if a few things are missing,” Hargis struggled to find the right words. “This was a crime of rage. Whoever killed her wanted her more than dead.
The captain’s demeanor softened, and it seemed as though his shoulders sagged slightly from the weight of what he was about to say. Jack and I braced ourselves for his next words.
“Ms. Branson was such a dignified lady,” said Hargis. “It was like…”
He paused, then: “It was like the killer wanted to take away her dignity. Her body was pretty messed up.”
“She was stabbed?” Jack’s voice was even, but I knew the words were painful.
“Hit with a blunt object—maybe a hammer. Then stabbed,” answered Hargis. “They took her body to the state police crime laboratory in Louisville. We don’t have a forensics lab here. You’ll have to delay the funeral until after the autopsy.”
Silence hung heavy in the air.
“Did you find DNA or fingerprints?” asked Jack.
Hargis shook his head. “We’re not sure yet about the DNA, but not a single print. We took the paint off the handrails trying to get even a partial print—nothing.”
“That basement’s dark. It would be hard to wipe away every fingerprint,” Jack observed. “I took a shower down there when we spent the night back in August, and you could hardly—-”
Hargis interrupted. “You took a shower in Ms. Branson’s basement?”
I could see that Jack was grasping something I had not yet grasped. “Yeah,” he said slowly. “No one used that shower after my uncle died. We were running late, so I used the basement shower while my wife got ready upstairs. I’m sure I would have been the last person to use it.”
I was overcome by nausea as I realized the scenario the men were suggesting. The killer had wiped the crime scene free of fingerprints, then taken a shower in Ann’s basement. With Ann’s body lying a few feet away.
“So you’re not looking at anybody in particular?” Jack’s voice jolted me back from the image, and I knew he’d pulled himself away from it as well.
“Nobody yet. I hope it’s not like the Granstaff murder. It took us nine years to solve that one.”
Ann Granstaff was murdered twenty years ago, and it was the last high-profile murder in Madisonville. Granstaff was a speech therapist. Earl was one of her clients. She’d bought a greyhound dog that had been used for racing and trained not to bark. Because of her speech training, she challenged herself to teach the dog to bark. Soon his hearty barks could be heard by neighbors on the crowded street.
When Granstaff didn’t show up for work one morning, co-workers went to her house and discovered her body. She’d been choked with an electrical cord. Her dog had not barked, so everyone assumed that she and her dog knew the killer.
The case went unsolved until a suspect was picked up five years later in Chicago and convicted of murder, rape and burglary. But some people still doubted the convicted man was the killer, since Granstaff’s dog hadn’t barked.
“Who’s assigned to the case?” Jack asked.
“I’ve put all three detectives on it,” replied Hargis.
“How much homicide experience do they have?” Hargis’ almost-imperceptible pause spoke clearly before his reply: “None of them have worked a homicide. It’s been a long time since I have.”
“Captain, if there’s anything I can do, please let me know. I have investigative experience, and I’ll do whatever’s necessary to solve this case.”
Jack’s family can best be described as stoic. We arrived at Iva Ray’s to find no tears over her sister’s death. No quivering voice. No outward grieving. But I’d known the Winsteads for thirty-five years, and I understood that she was hurting.
“Start locking your doors,” Jack warned his mother as he carefully hugged her fragile five-foot-three body against his six-foot frame. She nodded, but we both knew she wouldn’t change her small-town pattern.
Earl lived a half block from Iva Ray, so we walked across the snow to his one-story yellow brick house, upper class thirty years earlier but now solidly middle class.
His son, Russell, answered. We only came to Madisonville for funerals, and I was surprised at how much Russell had changed since Carroll’s funeral nine years earlier. He’d shaved his mustache, maybe because he now had more gray hair at thirty-seven than Jack had at fifty-four. He looked much thinner than I remembered him, probably 175-180 on his six-foot-one frame.
Russell looked exhausted as he hugged me and shook Jack’s hand. We were all tired, and our ordeal had just begun.
Earl was sitting in an overstuffed chair in his den. The utilitarian room was void of a woman’s touch. Earl’s wife, Sue, had died fourteen years earlier, and he’d sold the house they shared and eventually moved to this one. The only touches of warmth in the house were family photos, and I was certain Earl’s son and daughter had supplied them.
I glanced around, imagining the touches Sue would have added to the house. Her home was always neat but cozy and welcoming. One day, she woke up with a fever and went to see her doctor for medication. The next day, she felt well enough to mow the yard, using a riding lawn mower.
But halfway through mowing, her fever rose again. It was Saturday and her doctor was unavailable, so she drove herself to the emergency room. Moments after being admitted, most of her major organs shut down and she was dead. Her body swelled and darkened, and it was necessary to have a closed coffin at the funeral. Iva Ray later told us doctors suspected a rare blood disease but that she never felt the cause of death