Once Bitten, Twice Dead Read online

  I did feel reassured, like I did when the dentist always said, “This won’t hurt.”

  Anyway I was now talking with Caylee Anderson in the back room of the Harley Street Community Center. The slightly overweight older woman was explaining what her work was all about. “So many girls abort their babies, Detective, and still others keep them but have a terrible time because often there’s no one to turn to. We try to help both of those situations.

  “Of course some parents do help, and also schools have gotten better at providing counseling, but girls slip through those cracks. And more often, a girl at fourteen or fifteen, for instance, who has a baby has no one for support. The welfare cases are stacked one upon the other, till the tower reaches to the sky.

  “Years ago I was an unwed mother, and luckily I had my parents’ support. Rochelle is now 27 and doing well as a computer analyst. She was happily married four years ago, and just two months ago had a child herself. Luckily she has a husband who gives her total devotion. She also has me and her grandparents. These girls we see at Young Lives are not so lucky. They need someone to prop them up and tell them there’s hope.”

  “How many girls in the program?”

  “Twenty two as of yesterday—we just got a new one. We’re staffed totally by volunteers who will baby sit, talk about child hygiene, and provide recreation with games and even dances here at the Center. As you can see we have card tables, ping-pong, and pool. We try to give the girls a little fun in their life and relieve the pressure of child-care. Also, in the summer we take all the girls to camp at Lake Webster in the Poconos.”

  “It sounds like a good program.”

  “It is. Some girls hook back up with the original father, eventually get married, and leave the program. We are not trying to foster dependency. Our place here is just a stop along the road. So why are you here to talk to me? Has one of my girls stepped over the line?”

  “My Chief told me you had called about one of your volunteers that might provide information for another case I’m working on. The Byron Smith situation.”

  “Oh, that one. Yes, I had called. Most of our volunteers are women, but we do have two male helpers, also. Or I should say, ‘had.’ About six months ago Smith came to me and said he wanted to do something for the community. He seemed a little brash, but some of the girls could use a little realism, and our other male volunteer had worked out well, so I didn’t hesitate to take Byron on. Everything seemed to be all right until one of our clients, Missy Sebastian, came to me a week ago and told me her tale.

  “She said that one of the volunteers had been abusing her, and she named Byron Smith. Apparently after getting to know her, Smith demanded sexual favors, and then when Missy wouldn’t comply he slapped her around. She showed me the bruises. I was shocked. I wanted to believe her, but sometimes our girls do tell tall tales. When I asked Missy if she was sure she wanted to make these charges, she said Smith had done the same to other girls. The next day I held a meeting of just our clients without the volunteers being present, and two other girls did come forth with a similar story about Smith. I immediately called the police, and Smith was arrested here at the clinic.

  “The arresting officer told me that Smith had been a suspect in a murder case in another precinct. The cop had a friend in your department. I called your Chief, and he said he’d contact the right person. I guess you’re the detective on the case.”

  “That’s right. A wealthy financier was murdered a few months ago, and Smith is a suspect.” I didn’t go into details of Smith being Randall Procopius’ lover. Smith seemed to be falling into the category of people who are not exclusively gay; that is, unless Smith was having sex with those girls so that he could get close to them and then abuse them. In my experience almost all gay people seem to respect the opposite sex, even though they don’t physically indulge with them, but certainly there could be a person who has become gay because of his hatred of women.

  Somewhat apprehensively, Caylee asked me, “Is Smith still in jail?”

  “No, he posted bail. I guess he’s been a fairly successful artist, and the judge didn’t think he’d be a flight risk. His trial will be in a couple of months.”

  “I’m a little worried. He’s forbidden to come back here of course, but that doesn’t mean he might not try.”

  “I’ll leave you my card. If you catch sight of him at all near here, give me a call.”

  “Thank you. The girls have told me many horror stories of men they’ve had to deal with.”

  I thought it was time to have another talk with Byron Smith.

  An hour later I buzzed his farmhouse apartment and took the elevator to his third floor loft. Smith was busy mixing paints when I entered.

  “You’ve come to buy a painting, Detective Stolle?”

  I remembered the grotesque crucifixion one I had seen when I was first here. “No thanks, Mr. Smith, your painting doesn’t suit my taste.”

  “How about this one?” He turned the canvas toward me. I saw beautiful gold colors blending into shades of red showing a small dove rising into the air and seeming to melt into the evening sunset. It really was quite striking.

  “Not bad, Mr. Smith.”

  “I call it, ‘the end.’”

  “Why do you call it that?”

  “Because the dove will die. Can’t you see it?”

  “I guess I missed it. But I’m not here to talk about your paintings.”

  “Then just why are you here, Detective?” Smith stood there with his hands on his hips, and he did that thing I’d seen with his chin, sticking it out defiantly.

  “I’ve been notified about your activities at the Community Center with the group called, Young Lives.”

  “Right. I was volunteering my services.”

  “Did your services include having sex with the girls and beating them up?”

  “Is that what you’ve been told?”

  “I’m not making the allegation. One of the girls there, Missy Sebastian, has brought charges against you.”

  “She’s always off into fantasy land. All those charges are false.”

  “You didn’t have sex with her?”

  “A couple of times I held her close to comfort her, but that’s it.”

  “And of course you also didn’t beat her up. She showed Mrs. Anderson the bruises.”

  “Those are from her wacko boyfriend. She’s afraid of him, so she blamed me.”

  Smith seemed to have an answer for everything, but I wasn’t convinced. Immediately after I left his loft, I had our crime scene experts take a second look at my case. Two days later one of the technicians told me that buried in the forensic files he did find a notation of some blood under Procopius’ fingernails. “We never tested it,” he said. “It was just plain negligence—we’ve been swamped lately with the murder rate going up each year in Philly, but that’s no excuse. I am sorry, but I can tell you it is on the record, and now we’ll check it with the suspects in the case.”

  A day later a match was confirmed. Byron Smith was caught. Randall Procopius had Smith’s blood under his fingernails. With that evidence, I was able to get a search warrant for Smith’s loft and came up with a further surprise. In a back storage closet were four empty gasoline cans. Smith later explained this was something he did when gasoline was going up so high. “My mother always taught me to be thrifty. I bought five or six cans of the stuff when it was $2.20 and people said it was going to rise—then I gloated when it went to $4.00.” My thought was that maybe Byron was gloating while Randall was burning up.

  But then one of the most damning pieces of evidence against Smith occurred when I double-checked all the police reports of witnesses to the fire itself. Usually these were people who had come onto the scene after the fire was full blown; however, the person who had called the fire department when he had first seen smoke billowing out of Procopius’ second floor mansion had also stated that he had seen someone walk out of that house immediately before. No attempt had been made to i
dentify the person because the witness had said that it was so dark he couldn’t really give an account of what that person looked like.

  I had collected a picture of everyone I had ever interviewed in all three of my murder cases. I took out my snapshot of Byron Smith and then got ten other pictures of cops in the precinct from our files. For good measure I even put in a picture of my brother into the mix. The witness immediately picked out the picture of Byron Smith.

  “How can you be so sure now when you weren’t sure that night?” I asked him.

  The witness replied, “I had gotten out of my car to go up toward the porch. Randall owed me money for some plumbing work I had done for him. I was at the bottom of the steps when this fellow came down in a big hurry and brushed past me. He had a cap pulled down tightly over his face, like some kind of baseball cap, so I couldn’t see his face, but I did see his ear.”

  “His ear?”

  “Yeah, it was deformed—kind of smashed in and twisted.”

  Byron Smith had such an ear, he said on the witness stand, “from playground scuffles.” And he also added during his trial that plenty of people had twisted ears, fooling around with their brother, or being on a wrestling team in high school or college.

  I had turned in all my evidence, and the District Attorney felt it was a case that could be prosecuted. In a twist of fate, Byron Smith was acquitted in the Missy Sebastian case, but he wasn’t so fortunate in the Procopius trial four months later.

  The residue of gasoline in the cans found in Smith’s storage room matched the blend that had been doused over Randall. The eyewitness who had identified my picture of Smith proved to be unshakable upon cross-examination when he talked about that ear. Added to all this, the blood under Randall’s fingernails which matched Smith’s DNA sealed the verdict.

  Smith boldness in refusing a lawyer and conducting the trial himself didn’t help him. The clincher was when he put himself on the stand. He asked himself good questions, but the switch from lawyer to defendant became almost humorous because of Smith excessively serious demeanor. I couldn’t believe the last words of his arrogant summation. He turned to the jury and said, “If all of you sitting there have any brains, you’ll know I didn’t do this horrible deed.”

  It took the jury only three hours to convict Smith. I had solved my first case.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  Celebrating with David the night after the verdict, I was on top of the world.

  David and I had been on good terms lately after I had put all that being wealthy stuff out of my brain, deciding to not bring it up to him. Why should it matter, anyway, if I had plenty of money? What mattered was the relationship David and I had with each other, which was pretty darn good.

  David had praised my solving of the case. “You stuck with it, Raven. I’m proud of you. I was glad I could be there for most of the trial. Here’s a toast to the best detective in the civilized world.”

  “I’ll drink to that,” I said, raising my glass.

  But then David being David and always having a strong sense of realism brought up a point that I had to admit could be true. “What percentage of people, Raven, who are in prison are innocent, do you think?”

  “I never want to think about that. I’d guess just one percent.”

  “I think it’s higher—possibly ten percent.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Just think of all the things that can go wrong with an investigation: faulty evidence, accidental connections, and then, like your case, the reliability of an eyewitness.”

  “That guy could not be shaken at the trial.”

  “I know, but often we all think we’re right even when the world is telling us different.”

  “How about Smith’s blood underneath Randall’s fingernails?”

  “Smith answered that at the trial by saying it was probably from the rough sex the two of them had. And with the eyewitness testimony, Smith did admit that he had been at Randall’s mansion that night—he had come back supposedly to try to reconcile with Randall after they had split, but found him already smoldering in the fireplace. He said he tried to put out the flames, but caused the fire to spread further.”

  “The jury didn’t buy his stories, though, did they?”

  “No, they didn’t. It didn’t help with Smith strutting around like a peacock, proclaiming his innocence. Not much sympathy from the jury.”

  “It got worse when he tried to bringing in his paintings. He did it to show his artistic flair, and how sensitive he was to colors and shadings, but what he ended up showing was what a diseased mind he had.”

  “Most paintings I’ve seen don’t have a place setting for six at an elegant table with an eyeball in the center, having a steak knife sticking out of it.”

  “And how about the one that had the face with all the cockroaches running in and out of its mouth and nostrils?”

  “The more Smith told us about himself, the worse it got. Remember he said that most of the content of his paintings came from his childhood experiences when his next door neighbor physically tortured him for two years. ‘Nothing sexual, just physical pain,’ he had said.”

  “Afterwards Smith seemed to revel in his conviction, saying to a reporter he was going write a tell-all book about his life. He told the reporter that after what he had experienced in his lifetime, jail would be easy.”

  “Well, congratulations again, Raven.”

  We sealed the night with a kiss, and a lot more.

  * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

  THREE YEARS LATER

  The Butcher and Strand murder cases both went cold. Chief Brown finally got me off the cases, and assigned another one to me. Also, he finally got me a new partner, who just happened to be David Selby.

  “I don’t notice everything around here, Stolle, but it was hard not to notice you and Selby, hanging around each other like a pair of love-sick puppies. You two are already working together at other things—you both might as well be partnered up at work, too.”

  The pairing proved to be excellent. In the space of these last years together we solved five murder cases, the most bizarre one involving a graduate student at Villanova University who was so influenced by a movie he viewed, that he imitated the murders he saw in that film.

  The real life crime was horrible, maybe worse than the film. Three sets of neighbors had been slaughtered in their summer homes at Newport, Rhode Island. One of their older children, who had been away in Europe at the time of the murders, knew David, and asked him to look into the killings as a favor to her. He did it on his own time.

  I went along with him on a summer weekend, questioning people in the Newport area for two straight days. When asked who could have done such a thing, one name surfaced: a pre-med student, Alistair Burgone, who vacationed in the area with his parents, and whom everybody knew. The people we talked to said Alistair was either “strange,” “odd,” or “shy.” One person we questioned said he had noticed Alistair that day walking up and down the road where the murders had occurred.

  The next time David and I had a free day from work, we visited Alistair in his dorm. We both had agreed beforehand that just because a person was shy that didn’t make him a murderer.

  When we entered his dorm room, Alistair had been watching a video and quickly shut it off when he saw us. I noticed the empty jacket sitting by the TV—the video was titled, Fun and Games. Of course Alistair denied doing any killings.

  David and I rented that same video, and before it was half over we knew Alistair was our killer. The video featured two crazy college students who force themselves into summer homes and gradually torture and kill the occupants. The deaths in the video were eerily similar to the real life killings in Newport. We had no proof that Alistair was the killer, but we tried a tactic. We went back to Alistair and praised him for how clever he had been to match real life to that movie. The kid was so proud that he confessed right on the spot.

  It was very satisfying
working with David because he often saw motivation for crime that I wasn’t aware of. His years of experience on the force helped tremendously.

  “You’d make a good criminal yourself,” I had told him.

  “I just use my imagination,” he said.

  Our personal relationship grew stronger and stronger until one night out to dinner there was a small white box near my plate after I had been to the rest room. The ring sparkled probably as much as my eyes when I saw it. And then David actually got down on one knee and proposed.

  We were married a year later, and just recently David and I have quit the police force and opened up our own detective agency. We’ve been in business two months, and so far no murders, but there were two infidelities we traced, plus one extortion that we uncovered. I had never solved the Butcher and Strand murders—they remained cold cases—the failure was regrettable, but I had moved on. The strange thing that would happen was that during the next six months those cases would come back to haunt me.

  First of all, people connected to those cases began to die, but in ways that seemed unconnected to the original murders. As I had said, I was no longer working in Chief Brown’s office, but David still had some contact with people there, and he kept me apprised.

  The first killing involved Candace Pramp, Carla Strand’s sister, who was shot to death while jogging in the park one night. There had been no robbery or rape attempt, and the police were puzzled, David said. But then a person kept inquiring of the police if that case had been solved.

  This woman, Olive Perkins, had called five times in a month about the Candace Pramp murder, so naturally the police turned their attention on her. It turned out that she was a girlfriend of Sidney Pramp, Candace’s father. She finally broke down and told that when she was going out with Sidney, in a weak moment he had told her about his abuse of Carla as a teen-ager., and that he had always been afraid that Candace might try to get back at him for that. Sidney told Olive that Candace knew about what he had done, and he feared some eventual retribution. Whenever Olive was with Candace she always seemed nice, so Olive had dismissed Sidney’s fears.