What cops didn’t do was make case-related calls from their homes or charge them to their home numbers, but beginning the evening of August 8, when Mrs. Finlay was already dead and in the morgue refrigerator, Barber started making calls from his home phone, seven of them between five p.m. and midnight.
7
Win’s condo is on the third floor of a brick-and-sandstone building that in the mid-eighteen-hundreds was a school. For someone who had so much trouble getting into schools, it’s strange that he ended up living in one.
It wasn’t premeditated. When he was hired by the Massachusetts State Police, he was twenty-two, had nothing to his name but a ten-year-old Jeep, secondhand clothes, and the five hundred dollars that Nana had scraped together for a college graduation present. Finding an affordable place in Cambridge was out of the question until he happened upon the old schoolhouse on Orchard Street, abandoned for decades, then being converted into condominiums. The building wasn’t habitable yet, and Win made a deal with Farouk, the owner: If the rent was sufficiently cheap and Farouk promised not to raise it more than three percent per year, Win would live there during the extensive renovation and provide security and supervision.
Now his police presence is enough. He doesn’t have to supervise anything and Farouk lets him park his Hummer H2 (seized from a drug dealer and sold at auction for a song), his Harley-Davidson Road King (repossessed, gently used), and his unmarked police car in a small paved area in back. None of the other tenants have parking, fight it out along the narrow street, get dinged and crunched and scraped.
Win unlocks the back door and walks up three flights of stairs to a hallway lined with units that once were classrooms. He lives at the end of the hall, number 31. He unlocks the heavy oak door and steps inside a private enclave of old brick walls that still have the original chalkboards built into them, and fir floors and wainscoting and vaulted ceilings. His furniture isn’t of the period, a brown leather Ralph Lauren couch (secondhand), a chair and Oriental rug (eBay), a Thomas Moser coffee table (floor sample, slightly damaged). He looks, listens, engages all of his senses. The air seems stagnant, the living room lonely, and he retrieves a flashlight from a drawer, shines it obliquely over the floor, the furniture, the windows, looking for footprints or fingermarks in dust or on shiny surfaces. He doesn’t have an alarm system, can afford just the one in Nana’s house. Doesn’t matter, he has his own way of dealing with intruders.
Inside the coat closet near the front door, he opens a safe built into the wall, gets out his Smith & Wesson .357, model 340, internal hammer, or “hammerless,” so it doesn’t get snagged on clothing, and constructed of a titanium and aluminum alloy, so lightweight it feels like a toy. He tucks the revolver into a pocket and walks into the kitchen, fixes a pot of coffee, looks through mail Farouk has stacked on the counter, most of it magazines, thumbs through Forbes while coffee drips, skims an article on the fastest cars, Porsche’s new 911, the new Mercedes SLK55, Maserati Spyder.
He heads into his bedroom with its brick walls, another chalkboard (for keeping score, he tells some of the women he dates, winks at them, just kidding), sits on the bed, sips coffee, thinking, his eyes heavy.
Sykes wishes she had thought of bringing a bottle of water with her and something to eat. Her mouth is dry, tastes like dust. Her blood sugar’s dropping.
Several times she has thought about venturing upstairs again and asking Detective Jimmy Barber’s widow for a little hospitality, but the one time she went up to inquire if she could use the bathroom, Mrs. Barber, who was supposed to be asleep, was sitting at the kitchen table, drinking straight vodka and as unfriendly and unpleasant as a skunk.
“Go on.” Drunk as hell, jerks her head toward the bathroom down the hall. “Then get on with your business and leave me the hell alone. I’m sick and tired of all this, done my bit.”
Alone and exhausted in the basement, Sykes continues studying Barber’s baffling phone bills, trying to make sense of his charging so many of them to his home phone. Five of them have the area code 919, the same number each time, and Sykes tries it, gets an answering service for the North Carolina State Medical Examiner’s Office, someone asking if she wants to report a case.
“No. Oh, I’m sorry,” she says. “I must have the wrong number,” and she hangs up.
She notes that at least a dozen other calls Barber charged to his home phone over the days after Vivian Finlay’s murder have the area code 704. She tries the number and gets a recording — the area code has been changed to 828. She redials.
“Hello?” a groggy male voice answers.
Sykes checks her watch. It’s almost seven a.m., says, “Really sorry to bother you so early, sir. But do you mind telling me how long you’ve had this phone number?”
He hangs up on her. Maybe it wasn’t the best approach. She tries again and says right off, “I promise this isn’t a crank call, sir. I’m an agent with the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation and I’ve come across this phone number in a case I’m looking at.”
“Good Lord,” he says. “You’re kidding.”
“No sir. Serious as a heart attack. A case that happened twenty years ago.”
“Good Lord,” he says. “You must mean my aunt.”
“And that would be…?” Sykes asks.
“Vivian Finlay. This number was hers. I mean, we’ve never changed it.”
“So I’m assuming she had another home besides the one in Knoxville.”
“That’s right. Here in Flat Rock. I’m her nephew.”
Sykes calmly asks, “Do you remember Jimmy Barber, the detective who worked your aunt’s case?”
She hears a female voice in the background: “George? Who is it?”
“It’s all right, honey,” he says, then to Sykes, “My wife, Kim.” Then back to his wife, “I’ll just be a minute, honey.” Then to Sykes, “I know he tried hard, probably too hard. Was downright territorial about it, and I kind of blame him for it not going anywhere. You know, the case of his career, him not sharing information, working in secret. I bet you’re familiar with things like that.”
“ ’Fraid so.”
“As best I recall, he seemed to have this notion he was onto something, hot on the trail, wouldn’t say just what that trail was, guess nobody else knew what it was, either. That’s probably one reason it never got solved. That’s always been my belief.”
Sykes thinks of the calls made from Barber’s home phone. Maybe that’s the explanation. He was secretive, didn’t want any dispatchers or his fellow investigators to catch the scent of what he was following. Maybe Barber wanted to solve the case himself, didn’t want to share the glory. Yes, she’s all too familiar with that MO.
“Honey,” George is talking to his wife again, clearly trying to soothe her. “Why don’t you go make us some coffee? It’s all right.” Back to Sykes. “Kim took it the hardest, was as close to my aunt as a daughter. Oh Lord, I hate all this has to come up.” He keeps sighing.
Sykes questions him a little further. George was in his early forties when his aunt was murdered, is the son of her only sibling, Edmund Finlay, and when Sykes tries to make sense of how George and his aunt could have the same last name, he explains that she was quite strong-willed, proud of her distinguished family name, and refused to give it up when she married. George is an only child. He and his wife, Kim, have two grown children who live out west, the couple spend all of their time in Flat Rock, left Tennessee for good not long after the murder, just couldn’t be there anymore, couldn’t handle the memories, especially Kim couldn’t, practically had a nervous breakdown afterward.