Dale found no evidence that anything sexual ever happened between Aubrey and the coach, coerced or consensual. Yet she certainly was aware of his lechery, just as she was aware of her stepfather’s. So when she came back to Rush City as a reporter, and needed a worthless human being to kill, to get those good clips she needed to get a better job, well, there he was, a well-known abuser of impressionable young women, currently having sex with the cheerleading advisor. Best of all, he’d been threatened in public by the irate father of a boy thrown off the football team for urinating in the gymbags of underclassmen.
After choosing the coach as her victim, Aubrey went to work framing Darren Yoder, the hapless husband of the cheerleading advisor. She learned he owned a hunting cabin in Coshocton County. Motel records showed she made two trips to that rural county, one prior to the murder, one immediately after.
As Aubrey expected, the Rush City police arrested the football player’s father. She waited patiently for a month until Yoder went to his hunting cabin. That’s when she called the police. When they searched the cabin they found a. 45 in the attic and a half-burned pair of bloody overalls in the woodburner.
Why did Aubrey use her real name at the motel in Coshocton County? The same reason she used her real name at motels in Hannawa before poisoning Buddy Wing. She was a newspaper reporter. She didn’t have any money. She had to use her credit cards. Considering her self-confidence I’m sure she saw very little danger in it.
The days Dale Marabout spent in Rush City were fruitful. He not only figured out how and why Aubrey killed Coach Reddincoat, he developed a hypothesis-a hypothesis-in-progress at least-of how and why she killed Buddy Wing. He explained it to me over lunch at Speckley’s, on a napkin:
“ STEP ONE,” said Dale as he scribbled, “Aubrey chooses a victim-somebody well-known whose death will rile people up. Coach Reddincoat in Rush City, Buddy Wing here in Hannawa.”
He scribbled STEP TWO. “Then she looks for the two schmucks she’s going to frame. The obvious one who gets arrested right off the bat and then the less obvious one she’ll uncover later.”
I was nodding like one of those bobble-head dogs some people feel compelled to put in the back window of their cars. “It’s anybody’s guess what goes on inside the noodle of a killer,” I said, “but you can see her progression. She poisoned the squirrels and got some pretty good clips. But nobody got arrested and the story fizzled out. The only job offer those dead squirrels got her was from the Rush City Gazette. She’d fix that with the football coach. And when that worked to a tee she figured, what the hell, do it again in Hannawa.”
Dale started twirling his felt-tip through his fingers like a majorette’s baton. He was perplexed. “Didn’t she think solving two almost identical cases would make somebody suspicious?”
I watched his felt-tip fly across the aisle and land under a table of old women who’d already gotten their food. He looked at the tangle of support-hosed legs and winced. I gave him a ballpoint from my purse. “That’s why she killed Buddy Wing before she got to Hannawa,” I said. “How could she be a suspect if the victim was dead several months before she arrived in town?”
Dale clicked my pen and sheepishly wrote STEP THREE. “After she’s got her schmucks in a row, she starts on the fun part, figuring out how to kill her victim and how to plant the evidence.”
By the time I reached Mansfield snowflakes as big as nickels were freezing on the pavement. I slowed to thirty-five. I wanted a mug of tea to calm my nerves but there was no way I was going to drive with one hand while I poured it. I wrapped my hands around the top of the steering wheel and plowed on. My Thermos was right there on the seat beside me. It might as well have been a thousand miles away.
His hypothesis-in-progress finished and folded, and tucked in his shirt pocket, Dale Marabout set out to prove Aubrey killed Buddy Wing.
His first stop was Tinker’s office. He learned that on the last Saturday in August, Tinker had driven to Rush City, and over a quick lunch at Wendy’s promised Aubrey a job after the first of year.
Two weeks later Aubrey checked into a Quality Inn just two miles up the road from the Heaven Bound Cathedral. She stayed Friday and Saturday night. Over the next three months she would spend five more weekends at that motel, putting nearly $1,500 on her Visa and Discover cards.
At the time of Dale’s investigation there was no way to prove Aubrey had spent those weekends planning Buddy Wing’s murder. Yes, we could surmise that she was learning her away around the Heaven Bound Cathedral, selecting Sissy as her patsy, and all the rest, but there wasn’t one whit of proof she was doing anything more evil those weekends than shopping for shoes at the Brinkley mall.
Later, of course, we’d learn everything about those weekends from her written confession, which, by the way, she typed out herself on a borrowed laptop in the city jail.
From that confession, we learned she’d already chosen Buddy Wing as her victim by the time Tinker promised her a job: “I also was considering WFLO’s Charlie Chimera. He was both hated and loved. His show was a lightening rod for nutballs. He had three angry ex-wives. But Buddy Wing ultimately had the most going for him. He was famous nationally as well as locally. He was on TV all the time-so the whole world could watch him die. He had enemies that could be exploited. And in the final analysis, he was infinitely more evil than that idiot on the radio.”
As soon as Tinker promised her a job, she started to investigate Buddy Wing in earnest. She wrote: “I taped his broadcasts and watched them over and over. He always kissed his Bible approximately halfway through his sermons. Dropping dead at his pulpit would be very dramatic and make the police think his murder was for religious purposes.”
During her first weekend in Hannawa, Aubrey attended services at the Heaven Bound Cathedral. She walked the back hallways and saw the list of Kent State television students in the bulletin. On one of her visits she appropriated a copy of the church directory. “I knew from my first visit to the cathedral poisoning Buddy Wing was going to be easy,” Aubrey wrote in her confession. “Security was almost non-existent. There were faceless college students running around. I’d only been out of school for two years. All I needed was a Kent State sweatshirt and an eager look in my eyes.”
She also spent several hours that weekend at the city library’s main downtown branch, reading microfiche copies of the Herald-Union’ s many stories on Buddy Wing and his controversial church.
So Aubrey learned early on about the nasty split between Buddy and Tim Bandicoot over speaking in tongues, and the rivalry it spawned between Tim and Guthrie Gates. “My first inclination was to make Gates look like the killer,” she wrote. “I could easily plant some kind of evidence to get him arrested. Then during his trial, or maybe after he was already in prison, I could prove he didn’t do it.”
But that all changed, Aubrey confessed, during her second weekend in Hannawa. Early Saturday morning she drove to Tim Bandicoot’s house in Hannawa Falls. She parked at end of the cul-de-sac, just as she did that Friday night in May when we followed him to Borders with his family. When Tim left his house, Aubrey followed him first to his church on Lutheran Hill and then to the rundown house in the city where Sissy James lived. She saw Tim and Sissy kiss at the door. She hid in the overgrown shrubbery and watched through the bedroom window as they pulled each other’s clothes off. “I could see immediately that Sissy James would make a much better killer than Guthrie Gates,” she wrote. “Sex always makes for a better story.”