“Now, Doris, you have to keep this under your hat. You cannot tell anyone. I’ll tell you all the details later, if you keep it all a secret. We have no proof at this point, and we don’t want him to get away.”

“Well, I certainly do not want him to get away. So, how do you go about getting proof?” she asked.

“Well, we may have it soon. The Texas State Crime Lab is working on it, and what you have just told us helps a lot.”

“It does?”

“Yes, it does. Do me a favor, Doris, and don’t talk to anyone about this right now. I’ll let you know sometime in the next few days when you can tell, but for right now, I need your help and I need you to keep it all confidential.”

Doris grinned and then popped her chewing gum real loud.

“Like one of those informers for police that you see on TV on them crime shows.” She nodded her head and widened her eyes.

“Exactly,” I said.

Doris clapped her pudgy hands together with her long red nails making a clicking sound.

“This is exciting,” she said. “I’m happy to do whatever you ask, Toni.”

I reached across the table and patted her on the arm.

“You’ve been a tremendous help through all this, Doris. I’ll make sure that the Texas Ranger we’re working with knows what a great resource you’ve been.”

“Texas Ranger,” she said in a hushed voice.

“Yes.”

“Ohhh, when y’all are done with the case, bring him for pie. A Texas Ranger right here in my café. Wouldn’t that be the limit? The people in this town would all know I helped solve the case, and the Texas Ranger came to say thank-you and eat pie.” She grinned from ear to ear.

I only hoped I could talk Drew into it.

Chapter Seventeen

It seemed that death had been following me lately like a little, ugly black shadow. Never before in my career had I done so many reconstructs at once. I was tired-not physically, but emotionally. I felt I had almost no time to decompress and regroup in between each one and it was wearing on me mightily. I needed a vacation on an island somewhere, but not Hawaii this time. I was thinking Patmos in the Med-some reflection and meditation there and time on the beach to sit and watch the boats go by. A month without bones or reconstructions or murder cases.

I had called Drew on the way back from Viola, and had left him a message to call me. I was sitting at home on the sofa decompressing with a cup of hot chamomile tea, when the doorbell rang. It was Drew. He came in and I got him some tea, and we sat down on the sofa together.

“So, how did it go?” he asked.

I filled him in on all the details about Jimmy and Lori. He shook his head and looked sad. Then I told him about my brainstorm.

“Leo came over today and looked at the crime scene photos and she and I were brainstorming and she got confused over the reference to the old Gunther place and thought the crank who lived there was Gunther. So I explained it to her.”

“So?”

“So, then after we found out Jimmy and Lori weren’t suspects in all this, I started thinking about the confusion over the names, how that family hadn’t lived there in a while, etcetera.”

“And?”

“I drove Leo up to Viola and we had pie at the Main Street Café and talked to my friend Doris.”

“Now who’s jerking whose chain, Toni?”

I grinned. “Dody’s mother’s family had a place down at Angler’s Point near Hempstead. It was his granddaddy’s place. His granddaddy’s name was Gunther.”

“No way!”

“Yep. So, with that bit of evidence, don’t you think we have enough to connect Dody to the crime scene and maybe make a case?”

“We have more of a case than you think, my friend. While you were tracking down that all-important piece of information, I was doing a little legwork myself.”

“I’m waiting…”

“You know Dody has had a lot of jobs in the last fourteen years.”

“Yes,” I said impatiently.

“Two months ago Dody had a different job than the one he has now.”

“Drew!”

He laughed. “All right, Toni. He was one of the crew on the sanitary sewer job.”

“Sanitary sewer job?”

“Yes, you know the one the city of Austin had going down at Red Bud Isle two months ago.”

“Oh man! Drew, that is sweet!”

He laughed and clapped his hands together. “And that’s not all, Toni.”

“There’s more?”

“Mmmm, hmm,” he said, sipping his tea. “The lab got hair and fiber samples out of the crime scene in Hempstead. Stuff that they say is fresh. They sifted that soil and found evidence in the grave itself.”

“How do they do that?”

“I don’t know. It’s what they do. They sift that stuff and bag everything. It blows my mind. They look at it under microscopes, put it into centrifuges and gas chronometers. It’s incredible.”

“So, you think they’ll match fiber or hair samples?”

“I hope so, but that’s not all. Our murderer left a wadded-up hankie there.”

“Where?”

“In the hole, under the dirt. Apparently, he used it and just threw it down or lost it. It got covered up with the bones. You know, he never thought we’d find them, and if it weren’t for those women and their ‘bird-watching’ outing, we never would have.”

“A hankie?”

“Yep. Now, the fiber I don’t hold out much hope for. It seems like too much of a needle in a haystack to me, but those forensic people never cease to amaze me, so who knows? We do have a hair sample and fluid in the hankie. We can match the hair under a microscope and we can match both with DNA.”

I shook my head.

“You know, Drew, he was probably six sheets to the wind when he dug them up. He’s drunk all the time from what I can tell. I imagine he saw Mrs. Ferguson on television and got all upset about her son, and went off down there in a drunken stupor, did all of his digging and reburying, dropped that hankie and never realized it.”

Drew nodded. “Yeah, and that property would be easy to get on to. For all that Burkhardt’s bravado, he’s so bent over, he couldn’t possibly police all that land.”

“After your lecture the other day, I don’t imagine he’ll be policing much of anything.”

Drew grinned.

“So, what’s next?” I asked.

“I’m outta here is what’s next. I was on my way to get a court order for hair and DNA samples from Dody Waldrep, and now I am totally fired up to do exactly that.”

“Great, but before you go, I just want to know one thing.”

“All right.”

“Do you like pie?”

Chapter Eighteen

Drew and I got out of the car, and Tommy and Mike got out of their car behind us. The State Crime Lab had made an exact match on the hair sample from Dody Waldrep. They were still working on the fibers, and the DNA would take a while, but the hair, combined with what we knew about Dody’s connection to the burial site, was enough for an arrest.

As we began to approach the house, Dody came outside onto the front porch with a shotgun in his hand. He had a wild look in his eye.

“Stop where you are,” he screamed, but we had already stopped.

Dody’s thin wrists trembled and his weathered fingers wrapped the gun barrel like a rope binding. The weapon was pointed somewhere between Drew and me and I was afraid Dody would discharge it inadvertently with his tremors.

“Dody, don’t you think you’ve killed enough innocent people already?” Drew asked calmly.

“Innocent?” he screamed. “They weren’t innocent! Adulterers! Fornicators!”

“Not Brian, Dody. He wasn’t an adulterer. He was innocent.”

“The young man,” Dody almost wailed. “I didn’t mean to kill him. Tell his mama I didn’t mean to…” His voice trailed off and he began to sob softly.

“His mama on the television begging for someone to come forward about him-that’s what did it, isn’t it, Dody?” Drew said. “That’s why you dug them all up.”