Survival Clause, стр. 27
“I would appreciate that,” I said sincerely. “Let me know if you discover anything.”
The tiny flyspeck on the map that is Damascus appeared on the horizon, and a minute later we were in the thick of town. A minute after that, we pulled up in front of a small rambler set on a postage sized lot. I looked around. “This is where Laura Lee Matlock lived?”
Grimaldi nodded.
“Yvonne’s house is over there.” I pointed across the street and half a block down. “And there is Millie Ruth Durbin’s house.”
“Who’s Millie Ruth Durbin? Another classmate?”
I shook my head. “Teacher. Science or something like that. Rafe had her, I didn’t. I think she retired in the couple of years between. She taught Dix and Catherine, I think, but not me.”
“But all this was much later than Laura Lee.”
“Oh, definitely. Rafe graduated almost fourteen years ago. I graduated almost eleven years ago. Laura Lee was thirty-three, you said, when she died? She would have graduated fifteen years before that, and that was sixteen or seventeen years ago…”
“She might know something,” Grimaldi said. “Which house?”
“Ms. Durbin? The little white one with all the flowers. She gardens. And has cats, I think.”
Grimaldi gave me a dubious look, but legged it down the street. I grabbed the baby and followed. On the other side of the white pickets, a broad figure started the process of getting from her knees and up to standing.
Millie Ruth Durbin is a dumpling. Short, round, cute, with swaying skirts and a demeanor much younger than her years. When she got upright, she put her grubby gloves on her ample hips and contemplated us.
It took a moment, then… “I know you.”
“Savannah Martin,” I told her. “Collier now. I married Rafe.”
She nodded. “I remember. And this is…?”
I made the introductions. “Tamara Grimaldi’s been the chief of police for Columbia since January.”
“Sad business about Carter,” Millie Ruth said, and stripped the dirty gloves from her chubby little hands. She slapped them against her thigh a couple of times while she contemplated us from under the brim of a ratty sunhat, her eyes bright in the shadows. “We’re outside Columbia here, though. Sheriff Satterfield takes care of us.”
“We’re just doing some legwork,” Grimaldi said easily. “Savannah’s husband is working with the sheriff of behalf of the TBI, and we’re just tying up some loose ends.”
Millie Ruth nodded. “Loose ends pertaining to what, exactly?”
“There was a body found at the truck stop down by the interstate a couple of days ago, and we thought—”
Millie Ruth nodded. “You thought of Laura Lee. Of course.”
“Did you know her?”
“From school,” Millie Ruth said. “And then later, she moved into the house down the street with Frankie.”
“Her husband.”
Millie Ruth nodded. “Always in trouble, that boy. I had him in school, too, and he spent more time in the principal’s office than in class.”
“What happened to him?” I asked. Grimaldi probably had this information already—Laura Lee’s husband would have been a viable suspect, I assumed, before the authorities realized she’d been the victim of a serial killer—but if she knew, Grimaldi hadn’t mentioned it.
“After Laura Lee died, you mean?” Millie Ruth turned to me. “The kids moved in with her mama. When Frankie got out of prison, he came back into the house for a bit, but it didn’t stick, and within a year, he was back in trouble.”
“Would you happen to know where I could find him now?” Grimaldi wanted to know.
“I’m sure I don’t know,” Millie Ruth told her. “He sold the house eventually, took the money and left. Her folks live over in Sunnyside, if that helps.”
Grimaldi allowed as to how that helped a lot, and took down the names of Laura Lee’s parents. “Savannah tells me you were a teacher at Columbia High.”
“I told you that,” Millie Ruth said tartly. “Almost forty years I taught. I retired the year before she started.” She glanced at me. “Had her sister and brother and her husband in class, though.”
“I don’t suppose you taught Latin?”
“You suppose right,” Millie Ruth said.
“Who did?”
Millie Ruth thought back. “When I first started, Mr. Wilkins was the Latin teacher. Older than God, he retired five or six years after I came on. Dead now, rest his soul.” She thought for a moment. “Then we got Mr. Hanson, or maybe Mr. Olson, for a year. But something happened there, something to do with a student, as I recall, and he left under something of a cloud. And now there’s Miss Stevens.”
“I remember Miss Stevens,” I said. “She was there when I attended Columbia High.” Not that I’d studied Latin. But I’d known who the Latin teacher was. “Did Laura Lee take Latin? Or Frankie?”
Millie Ruth giggled. “I doubt that very much. Not really scholars, the two of them.”
I had assumed as much. Scholars, from what I know about them, don’t usually end up in prison or working at truck stops.
We bid Millie Ruth a polite goodbye, and went back to the SUV.
“About Frankie’s prison record…” I said, when the car was rolling down the street.
Grimaldi nodded. “I’ll pull the records. But I know for a fact that he was locked up when his wife was killed. He was cleared as a suspect because of it.”
“He might have killed the others, though. You said the origin kill may have tipped the serial killer over the edge, right? Maybe the murder of his wife, by someone else, tipped Frankie over the edge. He wasn’t there to protect her, and she got murdered. That would be enough to tip anyone over the edge.”
Not into serial murder, of course, but into depression and self-flagellation and guilt.
“Possible,” Grimaldi admitted. “If he’s been in and out of prison for the past sixteen years, there might have been enough time between sentences to commit the murders.”
Her eyes were distant, looking beyond the road and into her own head. Behind us, Damascus faded into