Murder of Innocence (Murder Is Forever) Page 10

  She delivers the words in a playful, teasing tone, but she intends them to have a little bite.

  “Don’t worry,” he says, stretching his arms out for a hug. “It won’t be for long. I’ve got plans.”

  He wraps her up and lifts her off her feet, and she forces an uncomfortable laugh. He smells like he hasn’t showered in a week. One of his hands cups her butt and gives it a squeeze. She smacks his arm and twists out of his grip. Crystal is eyeing them without a hint of good humor.

  Cat Eyes holds Susan by the shoulders and stares at her like she’s a trophy he’s wanted to win his whole life. “How’s the prettiest girl in Pike County?” Cat Eyes says, apparently not caring that his girlfriend is standing only a few feet from them.

  Susan wants to squirm away, but she holds his intense gaze. He gets his nickname from his eyes, which have bright emerald-green irises that look more feline than human. A lot of women have fallen for those eyes, but not Susan. She knows Paul “Cat Eyes” Collins too well, and to her, his eyes don’t look seductive.

  They look cold. Calculating. Predatory.

  “Come on in,” Susan says, forcing a smile. “My house is your house.”

  CHAPTER 3

  KATHY PUTNAM STANDS BY the stove, stirring a pot of spaghetti sauce with a wooden spoon. Her and Mark’s two-year-old daughter, Jenny, is on the floor playing with Barbie dolls. Kathy tastes the sauce. She’s starving.

  She’s eating for two now, after all.

  The pregnancy is just starting to show, but already she has a ravenous appetite. She hopes Mark will be back soon. He came home about an hour ago, quickly changed into his running clothes, promised to be back in time for supper, and headed out. She doesn’t know where he gets his energy. He lifted weights in the garage before going to work at seven a.m., and still that wasn’t enough; he had to get a run in before the sun went down. Maybe he needs to work off the anxiety brought on by his stressful job.

  It can’t be easy being a rookie FBI agent in a brand-new town.

  They arrived in Pikeville in February, and since Mark has no office assistant, no one to help him, Kathy has been filling that role, taking messages for him at home, relaying information to various contacts, and sometimes typing his reports.

  The cordless phone on the counter rings, and Kathy answers it, tucking it into the crook of her neck so she can keep stirring.

  “Is Mr. Putnam there?” asks a female voice. She sounds young but confident, not the least bit timid.

  “He went out for a run,” Kathy says. “He should be back soon. May I take a message?”

  The person on the other end is quiet for a moment, as if she’s thinking. “No,” she finally says, some of the confidence gone from her tone. “That’s okay.”

  “May I tell him who called?”

  “No. I’ll call back.”

  “Hang on,” Kathy says, “this might be him now.”

  Mark walks into the kitchen, his forehead beaded with sweat. He strips off his soaked T-shirt and stands before Kathy shirtless, moisture glistening on his muscles.

  Kathy cups her hand over the receiver so the woman on the other end can’t hear. “For you,” she says. “A woman. Won’t give her name.”

  Mark takes the phone. “Mark Putnam speaking,” he says. “Oh, hi, Susan.”

  As he talks, Mark kneels and kisses Jenny’s forehead. Then he takes his wet T-shirt and wipes his brow with it. Kathy listens to his half of the conversation. She hears something about cat eyes, which she doesn’t understand, and something about bank robberies, which sounds intriguing.

  “That was my wife who answered,” Mark says to the woman. “Her name’s Kathy. If you ever need to leave a message for me, you can do it through her.”

  Kathy has enjoyed being Mark’s unofficial secretary. Working, even informally, for the FBI has been a welcome addition to days otherwise filled with cooking, doing laundry, and attempting to potty-train Jenny—which has thus far been an exercise in frustration.

  When Mark hangs up the phone, he claps his hands together with excitement. “Got a fantastic lead,” he says.

  As they sit at the table and eat, Mark explains that before they arrived in Pikeville, there had been a series of bank robberies throughout the tri-corner area. Hundreds of thousands of dollars had been stolen from small-town banks in the Appalachian Mountains of Kentucky, West Virginia, and Virginia. The FBI suspected a guy named Paul “Cat Eyes” Collins, but they didn’t know where to find him.

  “He went to prison for seven years for bank robbery,” Mark says. “And sure enough, this most recent string of robberies started right around the time he was released.”

  Mark says that his new informant claims that Cat Eyes and his girlfriend, Crystal Black, are going to be staying with her for a while.

  “Their names are really Cat Eyes and Crystal Black?” Kathy says in disbelief. “They sound like characters in a bad movie.”

  Mark laughs. “No kidding. And apparently this guy idolizes Burt Reynolds. Susan said he showed up today in a Firebird like the one in Smokey and the Bandit.”

  Kathy rolls her eyes. She tries not to be judgmental about the people in the community, but there’s no doubt that Pikeville, Kentucky, is far different from New Haven, Connecticut, where they came from. Located deep in the Appalachian hills, Pikeville is a good two-hour drive to Huntington, West Virginia, and another hour farther than that to Lexington, Kentucky. Pikeville is surrounded by other dot-on-the-map towns tucked into the mountains, with dirt-road hollows—or hollers, as the locals call them—splitting off into the hills. With the coal-mining industry suffering, the region has one of the highest poverty rates in the country and one of the lowest high-school-graduation rates. Drug use is rampant. Much of the criminal activity in the area is associated with drugs, from dealers pushing their products to addicts breaking laws to make quick cash to pay for their next fix.

  Kathy was wary when Mark received the news that he’d be heading to a sleeper office in Kentucky that no one seemed to care about. Pikeville seemed like the kind of place careers went to die, not begin. But Mark told her that the assignment was a good thing.

  “They don’t expect much out of that office,” Mark said. “That means if I do a good job, they’ll really take notice.”

  They moved to Pikeville, and it turned out that Mark liked the area a lot. He poured himself into his work during the day, went for runs in the evening, and fell asleep with case files spread out around him in their bed. He hadn’t made any close friends yet, but he was so busy he didn’t seem to care.

  It was Kathy who’d been lonely these past few months, sitting at home with Jenny all day and hoping for phone calls from Mark’s contacts to relieve her boredom.

  “What’s this Susan like?” Kathy asks, not expecting much from a woman who is apparently friends with bank robbers.

  “You’d like her,” Mark says, taking a bite of spaghetti. He says that Susan is a high-school dropout, like half the population in the tri-corner area, and lives with her two kids and her ex-husband, a known drug dealer. “But she’s got a lot of moxie. If she had been born in different circumstances,” he says, “I think she could have really made something of her life.”

  “Will I get to meet her?” Kathy says.

  “I hope so,” Mark says. “I think you two would hit it off.”

  CHAPTER 4

  THE FBI OFFICE IN Pikeville, Kentucky, consists of a single small room in the federal courthouse building. There are two desks, each with its own filing cabinet, and a single window looking out over the town. The brick walls are adorned with maps of the three states that converge on the tri-corner area—road maps, topographic maps, and detailed city maps of all the small municipalities hidden in the Appalachian hills. There’s a small table, a fax machine, a paper shredder, and a coffeemaker.

  Mark sits in a square of sunlight at one of the desks waiting for a call back from his supervisor at the Covington office.

  The other desk sits empty.
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  When Mark arrived in Pikeville, the other agent, Jack Cornell, was just days away from transferring to Lexington. He took Mark to lunch at one of the few restaurants in town and gave him a quick rundown of the territory and a warning about what Mark had gotten himself into.

  “You’re a Yankee in the mountains of Appalachia,” he said. “This place will chew you up and spit you out if you ain’t careful.”

  Cornell was concerned about Mark being solo and not having a proper mentor. He said that Mark would be better off in a bigger office, with more agents around to show him the ropes. Apparently, whoever assigned Mark to this office thought he’d been a Connecticut state trooper before joining the FBI, someone with ample law enforcement experience. But that wasn’t the case—Mark was a rookie fresh out of the FBI Academy who’d previously worked only as a clerk for the FBI, not an agent.

  But once the mistake was discovered, the Bureau didn’t want to pull Mark out. And Mark didn’t want to go. He was ready, he assured Cornell.

  “You ever have any questions about anything,” Jack Cornell said, “you call up to Covington and ask, you hear me? You’re not out here on your own.”

  Mark promised, and he’d kept that promise. He was in regular communication with his superiors. He wanted to make a name for himself in Pikeville; he didn’t want to cut any corners or do anything wrong.

  The phone rings—the call Mark has been waiting for. Mark tells Supervisory Special Agent Trent Cavanagh that he’d like to pay a new informant. “She claims she had a relative who was an informant who never got paid,” he says. “I’d like to give her some good-faith money to show that this is for real.”

  Mark asks for five hundred dollars, nervous that his supervisor will balk at the amount.

  “Why so little?” Cavanagh says.

  “Um, well, she hasn’t done anything yet,” Mark says, surprised.

  “Listen,” Cavanagh says, “we’ve got deep pockets when it comes to paying informants. There’s money at your disposal, understand?”

  When Mark hangs up the phone, he’s relieved.

  He’s also excited to share the news with Susan. He’d meant what he said to Kathy last night about how Susan might have done something with her life if she’d been born into different circumstances. Maybe the FBI can help her get out of a bad position and make some improvements in her living situation.

  And maybe Susan can give Mark information that will break open some cases for him.

  Maybe the two of them will be good for each other.

  CHAPTER 5

  I CAN’T SLEEP, MOMMY. It’s too noisy.”

  “I’m sorry, honey,” Susan tells Samantha, adjusting her covers. “I’ll tell them to keep it down.”

  In the living area next to where the kids and Susan share a bed, Clint and Cat Eyes are talking loudly over a radio blaring Lynyrd Skynyrd. Susan walks into the cigarette-smoke-filled room and turns the radio down, then says, “The kids are trying to sleep. Why don’t y’all head out to a bar or something? At least go sit outside.”

  “We’ll leave soon,” Clint says, opening the refrigerator door and pulling out three bottles of beer. “After we drink these.”

  Before Susan can object, Clint twists the top off the first one and hands it to Cat Eyes. The second he gives to Crystal, who’s sitting on the couch next to her boyfriend. The third he swigs himself.

  The table is filled with empty bottles and overflowing ashtrays. Cat Eyes has tapped out four lines of cocaine onto a magazine cover. “You want to do the first line?” he says to Susan, holding a straw out.

  She considers it but declines. As much as she’d love a good temporary escape from her reality, she has bigger goals on her mind these days.

  Cat Eyes snorts two lines and then sits back on the couch, rubbing his nose and blinking his watery eyes. Susan thinks now might be a good time to ask some questions.

  “So tell me,” she says, sitting down on the couch with Cat Eyes and Crystal, “what are these big plans of yours?”

  “Banks,” he says with a smile, shifting so his leg touches Susan’s.

  Crystal eyes them both reproachfully, but Susan ignores her.

  “Not banks again, Paul,” Susan says playfully. “Didn’t you do enough time for that already?”

  “It’s the only thing I know,” he says. “It’s the only thing I was ever good at.”

  If you’re so good at it, Susan thinks, how come you got caught? “What do you do when you rob a bank?” she asks. “How is it done?”

  Cat Eyes laughs at the question. “What, you gonna start robbing banks?”

  “Maybe,” she says, smiling at Cat Eyes, then giving Clint a hard stare. “I’ve gotta get out of this dump somehow.”

  Cat Eyes and Clint laugh as if this is the funniest thing they’ve ever heard. Clint takes a break from laughing to snort a line.

  “Okay, little Susie,” Cat Eyes says, leaning over to grab his duffel bag. “I’ll teach you.” He unzips it and reaches his hand inside. “First thing you need is one of these.” He holds up a black ski mask, then roots farther down in the duffel bag. “And one of these!” he announces.

  He holds up a single-shot twelve-gauge shotgun whose stock and barrel have been cut off. The whole thing isn’t more than about a foot and a half long and it fits in Cat Eyes’s hand like some kind of large dueling pistol.

  “Is it loaded?” Susan asks, trying to keep the tremor out of her voice. That duffel bag has been sitting on the floor for days and her children have walked by it and played around it. Alex even crawled on top of the duffel bag earlier today, treating it like a beanbag chair.

  “Of course it is,” Cat Eyes says, breaking the gun to reveal the double-aught buckshot shell inside. “What good is a gun if you can’t shoot nobody with it?”

  CHAPTER 6

  SUSAN WALKS THROUGH A path in the forest. The sun is low, casting long shadows across the grass and giving the woods an eerie look. It’s silent; the birds and insects have quieted for the day. Susan nears a spot where the roads intersect and then stands back out of sight. She doesn’t want anyone driving by to see her.

  A car approaches, its headlights off even though it’s getting darker by the minute. When Mark’s sedan rolls to a stop on the gravel shoulder, Susan emerges from where she’s been hiding as if all of this is completely normal. She opens the passenger door and jumps in, feeling an electric excitement. It reminds her of sneaking off with boys when she was a teenager, drinking and making out on back roads, or of when she ran off with Clint, knowing he was going to be trouble but unable to stop herself.

  “I don’t want to talk here,” she says to Mark. “Just drive somewhere. Anywhere.”

  Mark drives, saying nothing. Susan looks at his strong hands on the wheel, his cool demeanor as he navigates through the hills. Dusk is giving way to night, and he switches on the headlights. He finds a remote back road and pulls the car over next to a ravine. They’re behind a coal mine and can see the glow of lights from over the ridge.

  “You got something for me?” Susan asks, giddy.

  “First, I want to get something straight,” he says. “You’ve got a reputation for exaggerating, making stuff up. If you’re going to be an informant for the FBI, I need to be able to trust what you tell me.”

  Susan rolls her eyes. “Pike County is about as boring as it gets,” she says. “Girl’s gotta do something to keep life interesting. I just make up fun stuff, nothing that would hurt no one.”

  For example, she says, one time she told everyone she used to have a pet parrot named Paco but Clint made her get rid of it because it would listen to Clint on the phone and repeat what he said. It would squawk, Where’s my money? and How much for a kilo?

  “I told people I let it go and it flew off through the woods. ‘It’s out there somewhere,’ I’d say, ‘a beautiful bird with amazing colors that has no business in the woods of Kentucky.’ None of it was true. We never had no bird. It was just a nice story.”

  At hea
rt, Susan lied so she could see her life the way she wanted it to be instead of the way it was. She’d tried to convince Clint to get a parrot, but he’d dismissed the idea outright, so she’d made up a story where she actually got what she wanted.

  “Okay, but listen, Susan. This is important. When it comes to us,” Mark says, pointing back and forth between himself and Susan, “I need to trust you. That’s the only way this will work. I need your word that you’ll be truthful.”

  Susan is moved by his sincerity. Most people didn’t care if she was telling the truth because they didn’t really care what she had to say. It was a nice change to have someone want correct and reliable information from her.

  “I can do that,” she says earnestly, then adds with a grin, “The whole truth and nothing but the truth.”

  Mark pulls an envelope from his jacket pocket. “There’s five hundred dollars in here,” he says. “It’s good-faith money to let you know we’ll pay you for information. There’s more where this came from if your tips lead to any arrests.”

  Susan reaches out to take the envelope, but Mark doesn’t let go yet. He fixes her with a serious stare, discernible even in the shadows.

  “If you take this,” he says, “you will be a paid FBI informant. It’s official. No turning back. Are you ready for this?”

  Susan grins and snatches the envelope from him. “You bet your ass I am.”

  CHAPTER 7

  August 1987

  PUTNAM RESIDENCE,” KATHY SAYS, tucking the phone between her ear and her shoulder so she can continue wiping down the kitchen counter.

  “Hi, Kathy. It’s Susan.”

  “Oh, hi!” Kathy says, excited to have someone to talk to.

  It’s been over two months since Susan became Mark’s informant, and she and Kathy have struck up a friendship. Although they haven’t actually met in person, they’ve become telephone buddies, spending time almost every day talking. Susan seemed hesitant at first to talk to Kathy, but Kathy quickly put her at ease by asking questions about her children. Susan is a few years younger than Kathy, but her children are older, and Kathy is worried about having two to contend with and welcomes any advice.