“There’s always that,” I said.
“So who do you think did it?” she asked.
“Someone who has a very personal stake in all of this,” I said. “This is about love and hate, not money or cover-up. Unless, of course, it was made to look like something it wasn’t.”
Anna’s eyebrows shot up into twin peaks. “Do you think all the brutality could be a cover?”
That same bolt of enlightenment surged through my head. That was it. “I don’t think so,” I said. “But it could be. I still think it’s twisted love, passionate revenge. Because even when something is made to look like something it’s not, it usually still feels like what it really is. I said something to Molly Thomas the other day that reminds me of this. When she was explaining why she had made the accusation against me, I told her that Anthony was lucky to have someone who loved him so much, and I had the same feeling I’m having now. Like that’s the key.”
“You don’t think Molly had it done, do you?” she asked.
“No, but she wasn’t the only one who loved him. I need to find out who else did.”
“How are you going to do that?”
“This is prison. People know things, and people can be persuaded to talk about things.”
“In other words, you don’t know,” she said.
“In other words, I don’t know,” I said.
After leaving Anna’s office, I walked out into the waiting room where a dozen inmates stared at the blank wall in front of them in silence. A couple of them nodded to me. I nodded back. A few of the inmates were engrossed in paperbacks. I recognized Zane Gray, Robert B. Parker, and Stephen King. I started to walk out when I heard the faint tappings of an electric typewriter coming from behind the door to medical. I pulled out my keys and opened the door.
Standing next to the storage room where the typewriter was, Nurse Anderson jumped when I opened the door. The door to the storage room was parted slightly, and she moved in front of it.
“Chaplain,” she said as the typing stopped. “How are you today?” she asked, her tone returning to its normal loud volume.
“Who’s in there?” I asked.
She looked puzzled. “Wh-”
I pushed past her and opened the door. Inside, Allen Jones was stuffing a sheet of typing paper into his pants pocket. I reached out and ripped it from his grip, tearing the corner of the paper as I did.
One glance let me know it was another letter warning and threatening me. I looked at Jones.
He was looking down at the floor, his weary shoulders slumped forward, his head downcast. “I’s just trying to protect her,” he mumbled.
Nurse Anderson appeared behind me. “What’s this all about? What is that?”
“Another piece of the puzzle,” I said and walked out of the room.
“Chaplain, wait,” she called after me. “You don’t understand. I was only-”
Her voice stopped abruptly when the door to medical closed behind me.
Chapter 45
I now knew or thought I knew who was responsible for the murders. I also thought I knew why. But why kill all of them, and why now? I pondered these and other questions that plagued my mind as I paced up and down the length of my trailer. I was just getting used to walking well again, and the more I walked, the more the muscles in my legs and even in my upper body began to loosen and relax. I knew that I needed to go jogging again soon, but I wasn’t quite up to it yet.
There was something else bothering me, something my subconscious picked up on that hung onto the edge of my memory like a name once known, but now forgotten.
Before finally giving in to pacing and thinking, I had tried to do many things when I had come home after work, among them, watching the local news, which had yet to clear my name; reading Crossan’s book, The Essential Jesus; and cooking a real meal, which I later abandoned in favor of a peanut butter-and-jelly sandwich.
As I paced through the tight quarters that I called home, I occasionally bumped into the thin walls or the cheap furniture.
As I walked and thought and bumped my way along, I wondered how Molly’s death figured into all of this. Skipper most likely killed her in order to keep her quiet. She was the only one who could link him to all of the crimes he was involved in, and she had nothing to lose by telling all. Nothing to lose, that was, except her life. I should’ve thought about that. I felt responsible for her death. Had I not been on such a pity-party binge, I probably would’ve thought of it. I was to blame. Just then it came to me. The thought at the edge of my consciousness slowly drifted in. I saw the stack of videotapes. Images of Maddox, Johnson, and Thomas flickered on the screen of my mind. What was it? What had I missed when I previewed the tapes?
I walked over and pulled the tapes out of the linen closet. I placed them on the floor in front of the TV stand and pulled a chair, my only chair, over in front of the TV. I turned on the TV and VCR and popped the first tape in. As it began to play, the images that had been floating around in my head the last few days came back to life, accompanied by the tape’s dull moans of both pleasure and pain.
I tried to watch other parts of the frame this time, forcing myself to look away from that which most drew attention to itself in each frame. Nothing. I did this with all the tapes and still nothing.
I sat there staring at the TV screen, now playing the late news. The anchorperson was saying that Molly’s car accident was believed to be suicide. She went on to say how distraught she had been over the death of her husband, an inmate in the local state prison.
I wasn’t really listening to her, though. I was still trying to think of what I had missed. I was sure it was on one of the tapes. What had it been? And, then it hit me like a tire iron across the face. I jumped up and ran toward my bedroom, bumping into the walls of the narrow hallway as I went. I retrieved the other tape-the eight-millimeter one-from the drawer in my bedside table and ran back into the living room, where the light was better.
While pastoring in Atlanta, I had helped our church begin a television ministry. We had a very small budget to begin with so, we used high eight tapes and equipment and did most of the work ourselves. I learned a lot about video production during that time. One of the things I learned was that it is best to fast forward a new tape all the way to the end and then rewind it to the beginning before you begin to record with it. This caused all of the loose magnetic particles on the tape to drop off so there would be fewer fade-outs during recording and playback. Most amateurs, however, did not practice this technique.
Therefore, you could tell how much tape they had used in recording because once the tape had been rewound, the part that had been used was not level with the part that hadn’t been used on the spool. This was because the tape that had been used was looser and uneven, whereas the tape that was unused was still wound tight and smooth.
As I looked at the eight-millimeter tape from Maddox’s collection, I could tell that an amateur had done the recording. Over half of the tape was loose and uneven, while the other half was smooth and tight. This meant that only half of the tape had been used before it was rewound. This also meant that an hour of footage was on the tape because it was a two-hour tape. However, we had only viewed a few minutes of it. There was more footage on the tape. I called Merrill, and in twenty minutes he was at my trailer with Uncle Tyrone’s eight-millimeter VCR.
“This better be good, man. I’s already asleep. I pulled a double today,” Merrill said as he entered the front door carrying the VCR.
“No promises, but a lot of potential. A lot of potential.”
“What is it?” he asked.
“I think there’s footage on this tape we didn’t see.”
“What? You called me over here for this. It could be Russ Maddox’s family reunion or something.”