Murder of Innocence (Murder Is Forever) Read online

  “Think about it,” Christopher says. “If there’s any truth to the rumors that they were having an affair, then he certainly had motive.”

  “If what you’re suggesting turns out to be true,” Pearson says, “it would be unprecedented.” In the eighty-year history of the FBI, no acting agent had ever been convicted of a homicide.

  “If he weren’t an agent,” Christopher continues, “he’d go right to the top of the suspect list, wouldn’t he?”

  The agents look around at one another, wondering if anyone will argue with Christopher’s logic.

  No one does.

  “Okay,” Pete Pearson says finally. “Let’s zero in on Putnam. If it turns out he’s clean, we’ll scratch him off our list and move on. But if we find anything …”

  He doesn’t finish the sentence. Everyone in the room understands the weight of what they’re about to do: investigate one of their own.

  CHAPTER 32

  Miami, Florida. May 1990

  PETE PEARSON WAITS IN the conference room at the FBI’s Miami office with Agent Jack Cornell and Detective Steven Gerards from the Kentucky State Police. None of the men speak. They’ve agreed to let Pearson take the lead in the interview, although both Cornell and Gerards will be free to jump in with follow-up questions.

  Gerards, who investigated Susan Smith’s disappearance before the FBI joined in, has long been suspicious of Mark Putnam. Pearson remains skeptical. He thinks Mark might shed some new light on the case but doesn’t expect much more beyond that.

  When the special agent in charge of the Miami office, Graham Blevins, walks in with Mark, Pearson rises from his seat, putting his thoughts aside. He shakes Mark’s hand. The young man has a firm grip.

  “Thanks for agreeing to meet with us,” Pearson says.

  “No problem,” Mark says. “Whatever I can do to help.”

  Pearson thinks Mark looks a little concerned but figures that’s to be expected. It’s not every day that agents from one FBI office come to another to conduct a criminal investigation. But Mark has expressed a willingness—even an eagerness—to help with the case. He declined to have a lawyer present.

  “Mark, we’ve run into some dead ends while looking for this missing informant,” Pearson says. “It seems like you knew her pretty well, and we’re just hoping there’s something you know that might open some new avenues for us.”

  “Of course,” Mark says, sitting up straight with his hands resting casually in his lap.

  “Tell us a little about Susan and how you met her.”

  Mark describes their introduction and how crucial Susan was to the FBI’s arrest of Paul Collins, aka Cat Eyes, for a series of bank robberies that had plagued the area.

  “How old is Susan?” Pearson asks, flipping through his notes.

  “She was twenty-eight,” Mark says.

  It’s a small comment, but Pearson feels the atmosphere in the room change. He doesn’t let on that anything has happened, doesn’t glance at Jack Cornell or Steven Gerards, doesn’t miss a beat as he jumps to his next question.

  But he noticed. And he’s sure the others did too.

  Mark Putnam used the past tense: She was twenty-eight.

  CHAPTER 33

  Washington, DC. Twenty-Four Hours Later

  MARK PUTNAM SITS IN the chair trying not to feel anxious as the polygraph technician hooks him up to the machine. There’s one sensor monitoring his breathing, another for his pulse, a third for his blood pressure, and finally one to check his perspiration. Mark tries to will himself to relax. He wants to close his eyes and take a deep breath, but he doesn’t want to appear concerned about anything.

  Pete Pearson stands nearby, observing. When the test begins, he’ll leave the room, but for now, he’s making sure neither Mark nor the technician need anything. Pearson sat next to Mark on the airplane up here this morning, and the two of them chatted about who had the best chance in the NBA playoffs and whether this would finally be the year Michael Jordan got a ring. But it had been a strained conversation. Neither of them wanted to talk about the case, but they also didn’t want to just sit in silence, ignoring each other.

  After Mark was questioned for six hours yesterday, Pearson asked if he’d be willing to take a polygraph test. Mark knew they all now suspected him of being involved in Susan’s disappearance, but he didn’t know how to decline the polygraph without looking guilty.

  Instead of arranging a polygraph in Miami, Pearson said they would fly him up to the headquarters in Washington, DC.

  “We’ll make sure it gets done right,” he said. “We’ll clear all this up.”

  He said this matter-of-factly, but they wouldn’t be flying all the way to headquarters if the agency wasn’t taking this very seriously. A polygraph test would be inadmissible in court, but Mark knows that if the results suggest he is being deceptive, they’ll keep investigating him until they find evidence. If he passes the test, they’ll finally leave him alone.

  “We’re ready,” says the technician.

  As Pearson leaves the room, the technician positions himself behind his machine, which fits inside a briefcase. From where he sits, Mark can’t see the needles scrolling out results on the moving paper.

  The technician starts with typical yes-or-no questions to establish baseline readings.

  “Is your name Mark Putnam?”

  “Are you married?”

  “Do you live in Florida?”

  “Do you work for the FBI?”

  But once he’s through those, the technician gets straight to the point.

  “Did you have a sexual relationship with Susan Smith?” he asks, his voice monotone.

  “No,” Mark says, trying to believe his own answer.

  “Did you have a role in her disappearance?”

  “No.”

  “Did you kill her?”

  “No.”

  The technician looks at his monitor, his expression blank. “Excuse me for a moment,” he says. “We’ll take a short break.”

  Without further explanation, the man leaves the room. Less than a minute later, Pete Pearson walks back in.

  “Mark, can I talk to you for a second?”

  “Sure.”

  The technician disconnects the cables, freeing Mark to step into the hallway with Pearson.

  “I think you know there’s a problem with your test,” the agent says.

  Mark hangs his head, unable to look at his superior.

  Pearson’s tone is firm but not adversarial; he sounds like a father advising his son that it’s time to come clean. “Will you tell us the truth?”

  Mark raises his head to look at Pearson. “I need to talk to my wife.”

  CHAPTER 34

  KATHY IS A NERVOUS wreck. She doesn’t have the focus to take the kids to story time at the library or to the swimming pool in their condominium complex. She parks them in front of the TV with Sesame Street on, and when that’s over, she puts in a Disney video.

  Until today, she hadn’t been worried about any of this business with the Susan Smith investigation. Her concerns started this morning when she walked Mark to the door before he left for the airport. He looked like he hadn’t slept. His face looked positively gaunt. My God, she thought. How much weight has he lost? “Try not to worry,” she told him. “Won’t it screw up the results if you’re stressed?”

  “I need to warn you,” he said, “this might not go well for me.”

  Kathy straightened his tie and looked him in the eye with complete confidence. “You can do this,” she said. “You’ve got nothing to hide.”

  She’d felt certain this would all be over by nightfall, but after Mark left, she started to feel a growing dread. His nervousness had been contagious. It took her a while to realize what was bothering her, but then it hit her like a thunderclap.

  Mark had an affair with Susan.

  She suddenly knew it with complete certainty. How could I not have seen it before?

  Clearly, whatever he had with Susan w
asn’t serious, Kathy tells herself. I was miserable and probably insufferable to be around when we lived in Pikeville. Mark was completely stressed out. We never had time alone. We rarely had sex. So what if he screwed around a little when things were tough? But we’ve made it to the other side of that black period.

  Together.

  With Pikeville behind them, Kathy believed their marriage was stronger than ever. They were finally on track to have the life they’d always wanted.

  The problem was that if the FBI found out that Mark had an inappropriate relationship with Susan, his career would be over. He would never work in law enforcement again.

  When the phone rings, Kathy snatches it from its cradle.

  “It’s me,” Mark says, his voice hollow.

  “What’s wrong?” Kathy says, not bothering with small talk.

  “I’ve got a problem here in Washington,” he says. “I don’t know what to do.”

  “Come back to Florida,” Kathy says, panic filling her heart. “We’ll get a lawyer. Don’t say another word to the FBI without a lawyer.”

  “I want to get this off my chest,” Mark says. “I can’t live with the guilt anymore.”

  “Not this way,” she says. “Come back to Florida and tell me here. Then we’ll figure this out together. We’re a team, remember?”

  After Mark hangs up, Kathy is slow to put the phone back in its cradle. She stares out the window at the palm trees swaying in the summer breeze.

  I want to get this off my chest, Mark said. I can’t live with the guilt anymore.

  He sounded like someone who wanted to confess to more than an affair.

  CHAPTER 35

  Three Weeks Later

  MARK SITS IN THE conference room at the office of his lawyer, Dominic Newman. Kathy isn’t here. She’s been alternating between fits of crying, hugging him close, and shouting at him. But so far she hasn’t asked for a divorce, which Mark sees as a good sign.

  When Pete Pearson arrives at the lawyer’s office, he has another agent with him as well as a stenographer.

  “I just want to say,” Mark begins after the five of them sit down around a large white table, “that I’m sincerely sorry for the shame I’ve brought to the FBI. I loved working for the FBI, and the last thing I wanted to do was taint its image in the eyes of the public.”

  “Thanks for saying that, Mark,” Pearson says, and he encourages him to begin his story. “I’ll stop you with questions if I have any, but I thought I’d just let you start by telling it the way you want to.”

  Mark takes a deep breath.

  For the past two weeks, his lawyer and the commonwealth attorney in Pikeville, Adam Raymond, have been negotiating. The Pikeville judge will have to abide by the attorney’s recommendation. If the judge doesn’t, everything Mark says today will be inadmissible.

  Mark’s lawyer was against this. He knows the FBI has no case. He urged Mark not to say anything, to roll the dice and let the FBI try to take it to trial.

  Kathy agreed with the lawyer. “Think of the kids,” she said. “They need their father.”

  But Mark is consumed by guilt. He knows he’ll go to prison, but maybe there he’ll be able to live with himself again.

  He doesn’t know where to begin. He thinks of the mischievous smile Susan flashed him when they met, of how he was drawn to her personality from the moment they first spoke. He remembers her massaging his shoulders and the way he’d taken comfort in her touch.

  How can he explain what happened when he can hardly believe it himself?

  I have to say it, he thinks. I can’t hold this inside anymore.

  “I had an affair with Susan Smith,” he tells them. “And I killed her.”

  As he says it, Mark feels a physical relief, as if the burden that’s weighed on him is finally easing.

  Mark tells the whole story, beginning with when he met Susan and not stopping until he’s described pulling her body out of the trunk and tossing it down the embankment next to the old coal-mine road.

  “She accused me of treating her like a piece of meat I could just throw away,” he says. “In the end, that’s exactly what I did.”

  When he finishes speaking, Mark puts his head in his hands and sobs.

  “I wish I’d come forward sooner,” Mark says, wiping his tears with a tissue his lawyer hands him. “I just couldn’t bring myself to admit it. I think I always knew I’d get caught and everything would come out. I think I wanted it to come out. When I reported her missing, maybe a part of me thought I was covering my tracks. But another part of me wanted someone to find her—so they could find me.”

  CHAPTER 36

  AN HOUR LATER, IN the fading glow of sunset, with police lights flashing around them, Detective Steven Gerards and a team of police officers and FBI agents stand at the top of the embankment where Mark Putnam claimed he’d left Susan Smith’s body. The ravine is overgrown with thorns and brush. On the other side of the gulch are mounds of rock, piled there back when this part of the mine was operational.

  “Let’s get started,” Gerards says. “Fan out.”

  The men descend, spaced out in order to cover the maximum area. It’s only a matter of minutes before someone calls out, “Over here!”

  Gerards fights his way through the thicket and comes to where the trooper is standing.

  A skeleton lies in the gravel. Some of the bones are scattered—perhaps torn away from the body by animals—but for the most part, the skeleton remains intact. The bones seem tiny to Gerards; he hadn’t realized just how petite Susan was. He thinks of how strong and athletic Mark Putnam looks.

  You poor girl, he thinks. You never stood a chance against him.

  There are no signs that Susan was wearing any clothes, but tangled in the vertebrae of her neck is a small gold chain with a tiny cross, glinting in the last light of sunset.

  Gerards climbs up the embankment as the forensic team begins collecting the bones. Standing on the edge of the road, police lights flashing around him, the detective is lost in thought. He’s been looking for Susan Smith since Mark Putnam first called the state police to report her missing, but finding her—what was left of her—this way doesn’t feel like anything to be proud of.

  When Pearson called to tell him the location of the body, he also quickly summarized how Putnam said he’d killed her. But Gerards is not satisfied with Mark Putnam’s version of the story, and his mind is full of lingering questions. Was it really a crime of passion? Or was it premeditated? Did he invite her to go for a drive, knowing he would kill her?

  And even if it was a crime of passion—even if Putnam let his anger get the best of him for a moment—what kind of unhinged psychopath drives around with a body in his trunk, letting the car sit at a parking meter while he’s at work?

  Gerards knows he’ll have to let go of these questions and learn to live with the outcome of the case. Susan Smith didn’t live to tell her side of the story. Mark Putnam said he just wanted to shut her up.

  It worked.

  He silenced her forever.

  As Gerards prepares to head back into town to call Pearson in Miami with an update, a coal truck rolls down the road and slows as it approaches the flashing lights. It pulls to a stop and the driver leans out of the open window.

  “What y’all doing?” he asks.

  “We’re recovering a body,” Gerards says. “Homicide investigation.”

  “Good timing,” the trucker says.

  “What do you mean?”

  “See all that rock?” the man says, gesturing to the mounds of gravel on the other side of the ravine. “We were planning to bulldoze all that into the gulch tomorrow. Another twenty-four hours and whatever is down there would have been buried beneath fifty feet of rock.”

  CHAPTER 37

  Pikeville, Kentucky. June 1990

  MOLLY DAVIDSON APPROACHES THE courthouse in Pikeville on the morning Mark Putnam is scheduled to appear for his hearing. She walks with purpose, her handbag slung over her shoulder
, here to represent her kid sister Susan.

  As she approaches the newspaper reporters clustering around the door, Molly hears one of them say, “That’s the sister,” and suddenly they converge on her, throwing out questions.

  “Molly,” one of them says, “are you satisfied with the sentence the commonwealth attorney is recommending?”

  The attorneys had put forth a charge of manslaughter, not murder, and were recommending sixteen years in a federal prison, not a state prison. Mark would be eligible for parole in a decade.

  “Absolutely not,” Molly says, raising her head high and preparing to get off her chest all the thoughts that have been building up inside her. “Mark Putnam could be out of prison in ten years, but my sister is dead forever. Where is the justice in that?”

  “Have you talked to Adam Raymond about why he took the deal?” one of the reporters asks.

  Molly isn’t the only one who’s been critical of the authorities. Newspapers in the tri-corner region had been lambasting the FBI, the commonwealth attorney’s office, and the state police for bungling the investigation and prosecution. Molly understands that some of this criticism isn’t warranted. Detective Steven Gerards took her concerns seriously from the start, and commonwealth attorney Adam Raymond didn’t have much choice—it was either make a deal or risk letting Mark Putnam walk.

  But Molly believes the FBI deserves all of the criticism it’s received—and more.

  “I understand the commonwealth attorney’s hands were tied,” Molly continues, “but the FBI sat on their hands for almost a year after my sister went missing. They’re all proud of themselves for solving this case within weeks of getting involved. But she went missing June of last year. They used Susan as an informant and then when it was obvious to anyone who would look that one of their agents had something to do with her disappearance, they turned their heads the other way and acted like they had no responsibility.