the jail cell.
The prisoner shrugged. “What do I need a lawyer for?”
It wasn’t the deputy’s job to tell him. He said, “I’m just telling you that if you do want one, you can call him now. And if you can’t afford to hire an attorney, we can have one appointed to represent you.”
He shrugged. “I don’t need no help to say I didn’t do it.”
“Where did you get the jewelry?”
Another shrug. “Found it.”
The interrogation had yielded precious little information after that. Fate Harkryder sat there sullen and silent, refusing all offers of food and soft drinks with a quick shake of his head, as if he were determined to say as little as possible.
At first Spencer tried asking simple questions in a firm but courteous tone. When that got nowhere, he switched to shock tactics, describing the mutilated condition of the bodies and declaring that an unrepentant killer would get no sympathy from judge or jury. “If you want to be as dead as they are, you just keep sitting here saying nothing,” he said. “You can’t talk your way out of having that jewelry in your possession.”
“Doesn’t prove nothing.”
The jury thought otherwise.
* * *
Joe LeDonne hated the telephone. Its shrill peal was mechanical nagging as far as he was concerned, and he never answered it without an inward curse at the interruption. If he had not been in law enforcement, he would not have had one in his house. It was ironic, he thought as he stared at the
instrument, an electronic spider on his desk, that so much of police work required proficiency in telephoning.
He and Martha had agreed to give it one more day before they told the sheriff about the homicides. The TBI was conducting its own investigation, but Martha and Joe were going to complete all the scut work of canvasing for witnesses, so that there would be little for Spencer to do by the time he was informed of the case. Joe didn’t think there was much chance of keeping him on the mountain once he heard about the new Trail Murders, but he reasoned that the sheriff was bound to find out sooner or later, and the news had better come from them.
So far they had played it by the book, with all the thoroughness they could pack into sixteen-hour days. They had investigated the crime scene, and then gone over the site again when the TBI arrived. The next few days had been spent talking to residents in the vicinity of the site, questioning people at the local bars and cafés, and to suppliers of camping goods and army surplus equipment.
Martha had refused to believe that the two Trail Murders, separated by twenty years, were in any way connected, but she had studied the old case file anyway. Willis Blaine, the forest ranger, was dead, but she had questioned Harmon Ritter, still a fixture out at the truck stop. She had even tracked down the two firemen from Alabama, but they had not been able to tell her anything helpful. She had expected no link between the two cases, and she found none.
LeDonne focused his attention on the individuals most likely to be involved in criminal activity. First he checked the list of parolees in residence in the area, phoning the ones whose crimes had included robbery or violence and checking on their current employment status. He had not ruled out the ex-cons entirely, but he was reasonably certain that they would have to look elsewhere for the killer.
That morning he had called the park service and asked that they fax him a copy of the sign-in sheet from the date of the murders from the two shelters on the Appalachian Trail nearest the crime scene. Maybe one of the hikers saw something. Maybe one of them was the man they were looking for. He had spent several hours in the tedious process of tracking down addresses and phone numbers via the Internet and calling the hikers or, in some cases, E-mailing them. Most of those who were hiking all the way to the end of the Appalachian Trail in Maine could not be reached, but he had been able to reach a fair number of weekend campers, and park visitors who had hiked for only a few days. It was now early evening and LeDonne was still at it, reasoning that the dinner hour was the best time to catch people at home. Beside the list of names, the cup of coffee