Murder in Little Egypt (31 page)

Kev.

P.S. Do you really live here?

On Wednesday evening at about eight-thirty, Kevin and Charli were watching
Dynasty
on television when Sean telephoned. Kevin told him to get in touch with Dale and made final plans for the Christmas-week trip to Eldorado.

Kevin and Charli were preparing for bed at ten-thirty the next night, Thursday, December 13, when the telephone rang and Charli answered it. She did not recognize the caller, who asked to speak to Mr. Kevin Cavaness. She put Kevin on.

“Mr. Cavaness?”

“Yes. Who is this?”

“This is Detective Dave Barron of the St. Louis County Police Department. Do you have a brother by the name of Sean?”

“Yeah. Why?”

“There’s been a problem.”

“What kind of a problem?” Kevin asked. He was irritated. It was late and he wondered whether this call might be some kind of a prank. “How do I know who you are? How do I know you’re a police officer?”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Cavaness. It’s very serious. Can you come down and meet me at the County Hospital?” The man’s voice was mild and courteous. To Kevin it did not sound like a cop’s voice. “Your brother has been shot,” the man said.

Kevin felt his knees weaken.

“Is this some kind of a joke? This better not be a joke! You’re telling me he’s been killed? You better be for real!”

“You’d better come down to the hospital,” the man said. “I’m very sorry. I’m afraid that your brother Sean is dead.”

Charli drove; Kevin could not. He sat in the car slumped down, unable to speak or to feel anything except bewilderment. He prayed that there was a mistake. It could not be true. Not after Mark. That kind of thing could not happen twice.

At the hospital Detective Dave Barron ushered them into a small office. He was a big, tall fellow, nearly six feet five, in his early thirties, slightly balding, dressed in a brown suit. He had a large, pained, kindly face with small features. In his soft, almost sweet voice he offered his apologies for having to call them and upset them.

“I didn’t mean to be rude over the phone,” Kevin said. “It’s just—you see, I’ve been through this before.”

“What do you mean?” Barron asked.

“It so happens, I had another brother who was killed. Seven years ago. He was—” and Kevin choked up. Detective Barron shoved a chair over to him.

“My God, another brother? Seven years ago? Was he shot, too?” Kevin nodded, covering his face with his big square hands.

“What was his name?”

“Mark.”

“If you don’t mind my asking, how old was Mark when he was shot?”

“Twenty-two.”

Detective Barron said that Sean’s body had been found early that morning in a remote, western part of the county on Allen Road, which was near Lewis Road, off Highway 44. It was not far from the entrance to Times Beach, Barron said, which was the place that had been sealed off because of dioxin poisoning. Sean had been shot twice in the head. Unfortunately, the body would have to be identified so the police could proceed with their investigation.

Kevin got up to go perform the awful task but sat down again when Charli volunteered. Kevin thanked her. He said that he would hate to have to remember Sean as he was now. He wanted to remember him alive.

Afterward, at around midnight, they accompanied Barron over to his office at the South Central Police Station in Clayton. The station was quiet at that hour, Barron’s office clean and orderly: two steel desks, some filing cabinets, a hat rack. The county police covered serious crime in all the municipalities and unincorporated areas beyond the limits of the actual city of St. Louis. Theirs was a suburban operation. The South Central station in Clayton, a prosperous area eleven miles from the city center and headquarters of the county’s judicial apparatus, handled only a dozen or so homicides a year. All of the high-crime areas were within the city of St. Louis itself.

Dave Barron’s first questions had to do with whether or not Sean had been on drugs or associated with people involved in drugs. He pressed Kevin and Charli on these points, staring into their eyes as they answered, but they assured him that Sean’s problem was alcohol, never drugs. They described their last meeting with Sean at their apartment on Saturday and their telephone conversation with him on Wednesday and said that he had not indicated in any way that he was in fear of his life. They had no idea why he was murdered or who would wish to murder him. Everyone had loved Sean.

Barron turned to the matter of the other brother who had been killed. That murder had taken place in southern Illinois in April of 1977, Kevin said, and he described the circumstances of Mark’s death, the shotgun in the truck, the body lying out in the open. So far as Kevin and Charli knew, no suspects had ever been identified. Detective Jack Nolen of the Illinois D.C. I. had told them that Mark’s case remained an open homicide.

Dave Barron wrote down Jack Nolen’s name, along with Tina Crowley’s and the names and addresses of every friend or acquaintance of Sean’s that Kevin and Charli could supply. He also got Sean’s address and the make and model of his car from them. Barron had known little more than Sean’s name and a former address before talking to Kevin and Charli.

Twice while they were talking, Kevin asked to use Barron’s telephone and attempted to call Dale at the house on Walnut in Harrisburg. There was no answer. They were out partying, Kevin figured. He would have to keep trying. He was not ready yet to call Marian. He would have to get himself psyched up for that one.

After being with him for an hour and a half or so, Kevin found himself drawn to Dave Barron. He seemed so calm, straightforward and understanding, he was like a big brother.

“I’m real sorry about the way I acted on the phone,” Kevin said.

“Hey,” Dave Barron said. “Forget it. You should hear some of the people I talk to.”

“It’s just . . .” Kevin faltered. “It’s just that I’ve been through this before.”

The second that Kevin had said that he had another brother who had been killed seven years before and indicated the circumstances of that murder and Mark’s age in 1977, Dave Barron immediately thought that there must be a connection between the two homicides. A quick calculation showed that Sean was also twenty-two. Like Mark’s, his body had been abandoned in a remote area. More than that, Barron could not discern, but he kept the similarities in the forefront of his mind. What a lot for one family to suffer, he thought. They must have a curse on them like the Kennedys.

By the time Barron let Kevin and Charli go home, it was after midnight, Friday morning. Barron had been on the case since about eight A.M. Thursday when, having breakfast at home with his wife and two daughters, he was called to proceed on the double to a place near the southwestern corner of St. Louis County.

He took Interstate 44 some twenty miles to Lewis Road, passing by the sealed-off entrance to the evacuated town of Times Beach, where a guard was stationed to prevent people from driving into the dioxin-contaminated area, and turned right onto Allen Road. There, about three tenths of a mile ahead, other officers were gathered around a body, which lay beside the gate to a pasture. Two stone pillars framed the gate.

This was the Meramec River Valley, farm country, rolling hills and trees, the grass already faded from the first frosts, a low morning mist dampening the area, the air about thirty-eight to forty degrees. Dave Barron spoke to the man who had discovered the body. He was Charles Goad, a retired quality-control inspector at a Chrysler plant, who had been driving out to feed the filly he kept at the end of Allen Road. It was about seven-forty-five when he drove past the body, stopped to examine it and saw no signs of life. He telephoned the police from a house at the corner of Allen and Lewis.

Barron looked more closely at the body and noted down the details: white male, dressed in brown corduroy slacks, a cream-colored V-neck short-sleeved sweater and blue tennis shoes, lying on his back with his head pointing in a northerly direction, feet pointing in a southerly direction, both arms parallel with the body. There was one bullet wound to the lower right back of the head, another on the right side of the head; a third wound on the left side under the eye appeared to be an exit wound.

A search of the victim’s pockets revealed no personal identification of any kind, no personal effects whatever.

Barron was struck by the freshness of the body, still warm to the touch. At nine-fifty A.M. an investigator from the St. Louis County medical examiner’s office arrived and took the body’s temperature by means of an electronic thermometer with a long needle probe, which he inserted into the liver. The thermometer registered ninety-five degrees Fahrenheit. Based on this and on subsequent readings taken at twenty-minute intervals, which showed that the body’s temperature was dropping at the rate of approximately one degree every twenty minutes, the surgeon who performed the autopsy later that afternoon determined that death had occurred anywhere from three to five hours before the time of the first temperature reading. That put the time of death at anywhere from five to seven o’clock that morning, perhaps as little as an hour or less before the body had been discovered by Mr. Goad.

The cause of death had been two gunshot wounds, either of which could have been fatal. Powder stipplings indicated that the shot to the back of the head, which exited below the corner of the left eye, had been a close shot, fired from an inch or less away. The other shot, which entered beside the right ear and, as X rays showed, had lodged in the brain, had been fired from a distance of eighteen to twenty-four inches. The weapon had been a pistol, probably a .357 magnum or possibly a .38: Fragmented bullets were often difficult to identify.

It was not until after six that evening that Detective Barron finally thought he could identify the victim. In the absence of a driver’s license or any other personal effects—no abandoned automobile that could be connected to the crime had turned up—Barron had to rely on the fingerprint bureau. A set of prints matching those of the victim was at last dug up from the county police files. They belonged to Sean Cavaness, who had been stopped more than a year before for failing to yield to an emergency vehicle—only a misdemeanor, but Sean had been booked and his fingerprints taken.

When the name Sean Cavaness did not appear anywhere else in police records, Dave Barron cursed. He and his fellow detectives at South Central had managed to clear every other 1984 homicide off the books; now it looked as if he would have an open case hanging over him as the New Year approached. With only a piddling misdeameanor on his record, Sean Cavaness, whoever he was, seemed unlikely to have criminal associates who would be or could lead to suspects. The case was beginning to look like a bitch.

The address given on the Cavaness arrest record was for a house in the Shenandoah development in Chesterfield. Barron drove out to the house, but the family in residence had never heard of a Cavaness. A check with the local real-estate salespeople, however, told Barron that Marian Cavaness, who was now living in Wisconsin, had owned the house and raised three sons there, including Sean, who had lived at the address with his mother and younger brother, Patrick, until the previous June. Another brother, Kevin, was supposedly married and living somewhere in St. Louis. Barron returned to his office and, by ten-thirty, was on the phone to Kevin.

Barron was inclined to believe everything Kevin and Charli told him. Their statement that Sean was not involved with drugs but had a drinking problem was corroborated by the blood-alcohol level in the body, 0.26, which was enough to render someone Sean’s size (five feet eight, a hundred and eighty pounds) incoherent and possibly unable to walk.

Who would wish to kill him? The girlfriend? From what Kevin and Charli said, Tina Crowley was hardly the homicidal type, just a poor young woman trying to care for her child, drawn toward Sean out of mutual sympathy. She might know something or someone, however, that Kevin and Charli did not.

As Barron sat in his office trying to piece what little he had together, he noticed that it was two in the morning.

Barron decided that he had enough energy left to check out Sean Cavaness’s neighborhood. It was a difficult area to classify—a Bohemian kind of place made up of veterans of the counterculture, teachers, aging students, a sprinkling of the elderly: not a high-crime area but unpredictable. Unlike many of St. Louis’s neighborhoods—the black areas shunned by white taxi drivers, the Italian Hill, the lush enclaves of
Fortune
500 executives and doctors and lawyers, the suburbs peopled by aspiring whites—Sean’s district had no distinct ethnic or sociological character. Most of the buildings were two-story brick houses designed to accommodate four families, built late in the last or early in this century. It was a pleasant part of the city, full of trees, a refuge for moderate-to low-income people who shunned the suburbs.

Sean’s building at 4170 Arsenal was at the corner of Bent Drive, across the street from the park, called either Shaw’s Gardens or the Missouri Botanical Gardens; and there on Bent Drive sat the Olds Cutlass that Kevin and Charli had described as Sean’s.

A break? Maybe.

“Please let there be blood in this car,” Barron said to himself as he took his flashlight and approached the Cutlass. It was unlocked.

In the car Barron found neither bloodstains nor anything else that looked like evidence. He had been up for more than twenty hours working on this case. He knew that he could not last another twenty; better to get some sleep and start here again tomorrow.

Kevin telephoned Wausau at about half past midnight. He was hoping that Les would answer; he could not bear the idea of breaking the news to Marian. When she said hello, Kevin disguised his voice and asked to speak to Les, who sounded half-incredulous, half-appalled when Kevin told him that Sean had been murdered, with no clues as yet to a suspect. Les agreed to tell Marian. There were no words of comfort or hope possible, only the fact of death. Kevin said that he would call again in the morning to speak to his mother.