1 A Small Case of Murder (14 page)

“This is weird,” Tad muttered while reading the package’s mailing label. He removed a pair of scissors from a drawer next to him at the counter.

“What?” Joshua studied the package to see what caught Tad’s attention. It was wrapped in plain brown paper.

“It’s from New Cumberland. My pharmaceutical company is in Pittsburgh.”

“You’re not expecting anything?”

“No.” With the scissors, Tad snipped the taped seal at the bottom of the package.

“Don’t open it.” Overcome with dread, Joshua snatched the package from his hands. “It doesn’t have a return address.”

“Aren’t we getting a little paranoid?”

Joshua said, “If Beth had been a little more paranoid she might still be alive.”

They both stared at the package Joshua held in his hands.

“I’ll take it to the post office and have them examine it.”

Tad objected, “I can take it.”

“You go take care of your patient. We’ve made her wait way too long.”

“It’s meant for me. If it blows up on your way—”

“It’s only three blocks. If it made it here in our government’s postal service with all the tossing and bumping that goes on, then it’ll survive a three block walk.” Joshua went out the back door. “I’ll be fine. Don’t worry. I’ll call you.”

Wishing he could go with him, Tad watched through the screen door while Joshua made his way down Church Alley in the direction of Fifth Street.

The package rested on the counter. While Joshua was aware of it, the postal clerk with “Eric” embroidered in red on his breast pocket was more concerned with his customer.

“You don’t recognize me, do you?” The clerk’s uniform was faded and wrinkled. His hair looked like it hadn’t been washed in weeks. His sour expression added to his unattractive appearance. “Never thought I’d see you come back to this burg.”

Joshua was certain the clerk mistook him for someone else until he recognized the whine that was as much a part of his speech pattern as an accent.

“Eric Connally, how are you doing?” He forced a pleasant tone into his voice.

“Fine,” Eric replied. “Been working here for twenty years. I have my own house out in Birch Hollow. Not bad for a guy voted most-likely-to-fail.”

Joshua cringed.

Eric Connally was a pathological liar. In school, one of his many stories had claimed that Farrah Fawcett, during the height of the actress’s fame, was his illegitimate sister.

Realizing that the outcast lied for attention, Joshua had felt sorry for him. Their peers didn’t have as much sympathy. At the end of their senior year, the student body had voted Eric most-likely-to-fail and he had retaliated by using his car keys to scratch the paint on their cars.

Joshua had the misfortune of witnessing the vandalism when he’d arrived at school late after a dental appointment and turned Eric in to the principal.

While the postal clerk directed his wrath over the world’s injustices at the embodiment of success standing before him, Joshua wondered how the post office had come to hire some-one so unbalanced.

“Heard you left the Navy…Left or was kicked out?”

Joshua answered, “Not that it’s any of your business, Eric, but it’s very hard to raise children by yourself when people are shooting at you. That’s why I left JAG.”

“JAG?” Eric’s face screwed up at the unfamiliar milspeak term.

“Judge Advocate General Corps. I was—am—a lawyer.”

“Lawyer?” Eric repeated the word.

“I learned how to kill a man with my bare hands at the Naval Academy,” Joshua said, “and at Penn State Law School, I learned how to get off for it.”

Eric glared at the threat. “Why do you want this x-rayed?” He indicated the package cluttering his counter.

“There’s no return address and Tad wasn’t expecting any-thing from anyone in New Cumberland.”

“Tad? Dr. MacMillan?” Eric shoved the package back at him in a sign of dismissal. “It’s probably a gift from one of his women.”

Joshua slid the package back towards him. “As a taxpayer, I am requesting that this package be examined for any possible explosives or bacteria. Please.”

“I’m too busy to be bothered with petty paranoia.”

Joshua observed that he was the only one in the lobby. “May I speak to your supervisor?”

“I’m in charge here.”

“I want to speak to the postmaster.”

Eric grabbed up the package. “If you insist, then I guess I’ll have to. This isn’t Washington, you know. We don’t have germ warfare here in Chester.” He stomped back behind the partitions leading to the rear of the building.

Once the clerk was out of sight, Joshua shook his head at how difficult he had made it. If Eric had run the package through the x-ray machine when first asked, Joshua and the package, assuming it was nothing, would have been on their way back to Tad’s office by now.

Joshua crossed to the brick wall next to the counter to study the faces of the FBI’s most wanted displayed on the bulletin board. There was a separate list with the pictures of those identified to be the leaders of the Al Qaida terrorist network. He was refreshing his memory of their faces when all hell broke lose.

The explosion ripped through the partitions and postal packages in the bomb’s path from the back, over the counter, and out the plate glass windows at the front of the post office looking out onto Carolina Avenue.

Chapter Twelve

Joshua dropped to the floor behind the cover of the brick wall next to the counter and covered his head. After the single shuddering blast faded to a thundering quiet, he raised his head to see bits of charred paper and other debris floating down from the ceiling like a black snowfall. The smell of burnt flesh assaulted his senses.

“Eric!”

Remembering the postal clerk, Joshua hurdled what was left of the counter and maneuvered the obstacle course of ruins that had once been packages, letters, and mail bags to the back of the building.

Sirens announced the arrival of the fire truck from less than a block away. Calls from rescuers drifted in from the street.

“Is anybody in there?” a male voice yelled.

“Call an ambulance,” Joshua shouted back before turning his attention to a pile of partitions, stacked one on top of another like a fallen house of cards. “Eric, can you hear me?” He dug through partitions, wires, and twisted metal.

At the front of the post office, the volunteer fire rescuers worked their way through the rubble.

“Back here!” Joshua shouted after he reached the bottom of the pile.

A rescuer reached him as Joshua pulled back the last partition to reveal his former classmate. Overcome with nausea at the sight of the disfigured body, the volunteer fire fighter turned away. “Is there anyone else here?” His voice choked.

“No.” Joshua tossed the partition aside.

The lack of pain convincing him that he was uninjured; Joshua objected to Tad’s request that he return to the clinic for an exam. After consenting to go back to the clinic in order to humor his cousin, Joshua was still was unaware of the blood seeping through the wounds on his shoulder which had prompted Tad’s examination.

Stella was wiping the soot off his face with a sponge.

“If he had only x-rayed the package like I told him to,” Joshua said repeatedly.

“Eric wasn’t the smartest critter to come off the ark.” Tad helped him to remove his sports coat.

Joshua groaned, “He didn’t deserve to die like that. No one deserves to die like that.” He hoped they wouldn’t notice his fingers trembling while he fumbled with the buttons on his shirt in an effort to take it off.

Tad waved his hands from the buttons to work on them himself. “Eric had issues.”

Noticing his shredded sports coat on the counter, Joshua grimaced.

After tossing the shirt on top of the sports coat, Tad took a syringe out of a drawer and a vial from the medicine cabinet. He filled the syringe.

The examination room door banged open.

Her eyes wide, Jan rushed in. When she saw Joshua, she threw her arms around him in an attempt at a hug. “Madge told me she saw you go into the post office before the explosion. When I heard someone got killed, I thought it was you.”

Joshua almost fell off the table when a sharp pain shot through his arm and across his shoulders that made him sit up straight. Tad had injected him in his bicep.

Crying out, Joshua glared at him. “You’re not very good at that.”

Tad disposed of the syringe. “That’s why I didn’t do needles when I was using.” He directed his patient to lie down on his stomach while he went to work on his wounds.

Jan took a seat at the head of examination table. “What kind of bomb was it? Was it terrorists or an old enemy from when you were in the Navy?”

“It was a mail bomb addressed to Tad. I took it to the post office to have it x-rayed, but I guess Eric Connally chose to open it.”

“So it was Eric …” Jan couldn’t say the word. “Poor Eric. He never could get a break.”

“If you ask me,” Stella said, “he didn’t know how to get a break.”

“Don’t speak ill of the dead,” Tad ordered. “You’re in luck, Josh. You won’t need any stitches. You have quite a few splinters and minor cuts, but nothing major. You’re going to feel some discomfort while I disinfect and bandage them. After I’m through cleaning you up, you can go get some sleep.”

Tad directed Stella over his back, “Go tell Josh’s kids to pack a bag for him. He’s staying up at my place tonight.”

His words sounded like tennis balls bouncing off padded walls inside Joshua’s head. “I can go home,” he objected with the strength he had left.

Tad continued working on his shoulder. “Not with your backache. You need a good night’s sleep. Murphy and J.J. can keep an eye on the others for one night.”

“Remember when Eric was arrested for vandalizing the post office?” Jan was asking Tad.

“He vandalized the post office?” Joshua lifted his head from where he had it resting in the crook of his arm. “Sounds like something he’d do.”

“Lucky thing he didn’t shoot up the place,” Tad chuckled. “If Eric ever got his hands on a gun, he’d probably shoot himself in the foot.”

“Let’s not speak ill of the dead,” Jan reminded him.

“When did he vandalize the post office?” Joshua winced when Tad removed a piece of shrapnel from his shoulder.

Jan spoke across his head to Tad. “It was a long time ago.”

“It was the same week Doc Wilson had that stroke, and I was running around like a chicken with his head chopped off covering for him. The man was like a hundred and he still kept a full calendar. Here I was covering his patients and mine.” Tad held a hunk of cotton soaked with antiseptic up in mid air. “That was the same week that the courthouse was robbed.”

Joshua struggled to stay awake while he listened to them talk amongst themselves.

“The crime editor at the paper was convinced those two break-ins were connected,” Jan was saying.

Tad disagreed. “Computer equipment was stolen from the courthouse. Eric trashed the post office because he was mad about being passed over for promotion.”

“A jury said he didn’t do it.”

“Who defended him?” Joshua’s tongue felt like cotton.

“Wally,” Tad answered. “That was the last case he de-fended before he ran for prosecuting attorney.”

“This all happened four years ago?” Joshua yawned.

“About then.” Tad patted him on the shoulder that had escaped the explosion. “I’m done. I’ll get your kids to help you upstairs.”

Even while Jan was helping Joshua to sit up, the patient couldn’t decipher the revelation loitering at the edge of his mind. “Four years ago. What happened four years ago?” The pain killer slurred his speech so that the words came out as gibberish.

Jan asked, “What did you say?”

He repeated his question, but she still failed to understand him.

“Four years ago. What happened four years ago?”

As he drifted off to sleep, Joshua was aware of Tad setting a pitcher of ice water on the nightstand next to the bed. His face was so numb that he couldn’t feel the pillow against his skin. The scent of pizza drifted in from the kitchen in the apartment. Dog slept on the floor next to the bed.

All seemed quiet, quieter than Joshua had experienced since he had become a parent.

He felt the bed shake. The feeling of four paws circled next to him until Dog laid down and groaned as if to say that a dog’s work is never done.

Outside his door, Joshua could hear Tad’s voice. It was a one-way conversation.

“Honey,” Joshua heard him say in a soothing tone, “you don’t have to worry. The DNA didn’t indicate any relationship between whoever the hair belonged to and your mother. That alone eliminates you as a suspect. The sheriff only needs to get your statement to verify your whereabouts at the time of the murder for the record.” Tad was warning Maggie about the sheriff’s impending phone call.

Joshua groaned and sank deeper under the covers. He couldn’t deny that he’d do the same thing if it were one of his kids connected to the murder.

“Four years ago.”

Joshua went to sleep asking himself what was the significance of four years ago. Tad had said it. Joshua heard him say it, but the drugs prevented his brain from making the connection.

Joshua Thornton was in high school again. It was the big game against Weirton High School and Oak Glen’s rival was winning. Oak Glen had the ball with thirty seconds to go in the fourth quarter.

On the field, quarterback Joshua Thornton called the play. The ball was snapped. He faked a hand-off to Reggie Fields. When Weirton went after Fields, Joshua dropped back to send a long pass to Mickey Brewer.

Somehow, Joshua heard cheerleader Beth Davis call out over the roar of the crowd. “Josh! Look out for Norton!”

Out of the corner of his eye, Joshua saw the freight train racing towards him with hatred for its fuel. He didn’t have time to waste on Norton. Joshua let the ball go a split second before Norton knocked the quarterback’s feet out from under him. Joshua flew into the air, turning head over heels, before landing on his head.

Oak Glen’s star quarterback was unconscious when Brewer caught the pass, made the touchdown, and won the game.

Dr. Russell Wilson was standing over him when he woke up in the hospital. “How are you feeling, Joshua?”

“I’ve had finer moments,” Joshua muttered as it all came back to him: the faked hand-off, Norton’s charging bulk, the long pass, and his flight through the air. “Am I going to live?”

“You got a concussion,” the doctor reported. “We need to keep you here a couple of days to keep an eye on you.”

“But I have to go to Charleston with the debating team in the morning. It’s the state championship. Then, student council is meeting on Tuesday, and I have to prepare a presentation to the school board—”

“You take after your mother,” Dr. Wilson stated as if it was an accepted fact. He was checking his patient’s eyes with a penlight while he asked, “Tell me, Josh, have you ever experienced joy?”

Not knowing what to say, Joshua looked up at the doctor’s kindly old face. Then, he heard a ringing in his ears. He looked around the examination room for the source of the ringing.

It was the phone.

By the time Joshua found it in the dark by slapping the nightstand, Tad had run into the bedroom while ordering him not to answer the phone.

Joshua knocked over the pitcher and spilt water onto the floor.

Tad cursed the caller.

“I’ve got it.” Joshua put the phone to his numb ear.

Tad rushed into the bathroom to get a towel to mop up the spill.

“Joshua? Joshua Thornton?” He heard a voice inquire across the phone line.

He felt like he was drifting on a cloud. “Who is this?” His mind was so muddled that he couldn’t determine if the voice was man or woman.

Tad came back from the bathroom with towels. “Who is that?” He squatted to mop up the water.

“This is Amber,” the voice said.

Tad ordered, “Josh, hang up and go to sleep.”

“Amber?” Joshua muttered.

“Josh, are you still awake?” Before his patient could stop him, he grabbed the phone. “Who is this?” he asked into the receiver.

“Amber.” Joshua reached for the phone but missed.

Tad hung up the phone.

“What did she say?”

“Whoever it was, they hung up,” Tad said. “Go back to sleep.”