Mobley sat back, swinging gently in his chair. “This is interesting reading.”
“Is that the Jagger case file?”
Mobley nodded. “Had a damn hard time finding it after you called. Locating something in that shack they call a warehouse is like digging through an outhouse for used toilet paper.”
“Nice analogy,” Louis said.
“Why did you ask me to pull it?”
Louis pulled up a chair. He wasn’t sure how much to tell Mobley. He was no expert at legal maneuvering and wondered if he could hurt Susan’s case. “Cade claims Duvall gave him a lousy defense,” Louis said. “I just wanted to take a look.”
“You don’t believe him, do you?”
Louis shrugged. “I don’t know.”
Mobley closed the file and stacked it on top of two others. He pushed the folders toward Louis.
“Okay, here’s the copies you wanted. Take a look-a quiet look, if you get my drift-but I doubt you’ll be able to tell whether Duvall did a good job or not. Takes a legal mind to be able to do that.”
Louis glanced at the diploma on the wall. Massage the ego.
“How about some help?” Louis asked.
Mobley caught the look at the diploma. “I’m not the person to ask, Kincaid. I’m on the other side here, remember?”
“Your part is done, Sheriff. It’s up to the lawyers now.”
“The lawyers,” Mobley said quietly. “Ever wonder what the world would be like if we didn’t have any lawyers?”
Louis ignored the comment.
“Okay, then let me ask you this,” Mobley went on. “Did you ever stop to think about what happens if you find out Duvall did fuck up the Jagger case? That gives your client more motive to kill him, doesn’t it?”
“Not if somebody else had a better reason.”
“You’re wasting your time.”
“What if he didn’t do it?”
“He’s out now anyway, so who cares?”
“I do,” Louis said. “And you should.”
Mobley’s jaw twitched, but he just leaned back in the chair and leveled his eyes at Louis. “I don’t question any conviction without evidence to the contrary. Especially a case that happened when I was too young to care about anything other than getting laid.”
Louis had a thought. “You were here then?”
Mobley rose and went to the bench. “Yeah, I grew up here.” His eyes snapped to Louis’s face. “I didn’t know her, Kincaid.”
“This is a small town,” Louis said. “It was even smaller then. Why didn’t you know her?”
“I was a senior, she was a freshmen. Big gap in those days, even at a small school like Fort Myers High. Plus we just ran in different crowds. You know how cliques can be.”
Mobley was rolling his hand gently over the circular weights.
“You don’t remember anything about her?”
Mobley drew a breath, letting it out slowly. “I remember she was pretty. We never got it on with the greasers.”
“Greasers?” Louis said.
“Frats and greasers. That’s what the world was divided into in my salad days, Kincaid.”
“Greaser? You mean like John Travolta?” Louis asked.
Mobley was smiling slightly, enjoying his trip back in time. “Yeah. Guys in black leather who took shop, dropped out or got drafted.”
“What about the girls?”
“They got pregnant.”
Louis was silent. Somehow that didn’t jive with the picture he was building in his brain of Kitty Jagger.
“But you remember the murder?” Louis asked.
Mobley’s hand dropped from the weight bench.
“Yeah. They made an announcement over the PA system. Some of the girls were crying.” He shook his head. “I remembering thinking what phoneys they were because none of them ever looked twice at Kitty Jagger.”
Mobley looked at Louis. “He killed her, Kincaid. We all know it.”
“I still want to take a look. At everything.”
Mobley walked to a credenza and opened a large cardboard box. On the side was written: #4532, Homicide, LCSO, Florida, April, 1966, Jagger, K.
He pulled out some plastic bags and a stack of photos, spreading them on his desk. Louis moved to it. The plastic bags held some bloody clothing, some torn clothing that looked like red cotton, and a pair of girl’s panties, turned inside-out. They appeared to have droplets of brown blood and several large yellowish stains, along with some discoloring Louis assumed was from the lab testing.
“Is this semen?” Louis asked.
“Yeah, that’s how they pinned the panties to Cade. He’s a secretor.”
Louis knew that meant his blood group could be typed from any body fluid. “So’s eighty percent of the population,” Louis said. “What’s Cade’s blood type?”
“O positive.”
“Most common type. Did they break it down into subgroups? Proteins?”
Mobley shook his head. “It was 1966, the dark ages for serology. I doubt they went beyond seeing that big O come up.”
“Could they now?”
Mobley was getting irritated. “Hell, I don’t know. That shit’s awful old. Samples break down.”
“Did Cade offer an alibi?” Louis asked.
“Yeah, some guy named Atterberry. But they were never able to find him.”
“What about the weapon? You have it?”
Mobley reached into the cardboard box and pulled out another large plastic bag. He extracted a tool and laid it on the desk between them. It looked like a pickaxe, about a foot and a half in length with a wooden shaft.
Louis picked it up, his eyes drawn to the forged steel double head. “Jesus, what is this?” he asked.
“Gardeners use it to loosen hard dirt. Cade’s-and only Cade’s-fingerprints are all over the handle.” Mobley gave a twisted smile. “It’s called a Clot-Buster. Catchy name, huh?”
Louis turned it over in his hands. It was heavy, one end of the steel blunt-edged and coated with rust. The other metal end had three thick prongs, covered with a brown grit that Louis was sure was dried blood. It was hard to think of the evil-looking thing being used for something as innocent as gardening.
“She was stabbed with this end?” he asked, nodding at the three prongs.
“Yup. I was reading the autopsy report when you came in,” Mobley said. “The wounds all showed that three-prong profile.”
“How did they know this was Cade’s?” Louis asked.
Mobley pointed to a blurred mark on the handle. “It’s hard to see, but there’s a phone number there, done with a laundry marker. It was Cade’s business phone.”
“Anybody could have put it there.”
“Cade’s wife admitted she marked his tools with their phone number because she was tired of him losing them. Cade claims this one went missing a couple days earlier.”
Louis set the Clot-Buster on the desk.
“What else you got?” he asked.
Mobley picked up a stack of photos and handed them to Louis. They were crime scene photos, each labeled with an evidence number from the trial. Louis went quickly through the first ones, which showed the dumpsite and wide-angles of the body.
He flipped to the next series of photos, all shots of Kitty Jagger’s body. Blood smeared across her bare, bruised thighs. A close-up of her hands. And a shot of her torso with its gaping wounds in a slender chest.
He paused at the next photo. He was staring into Kitty’s face. He was trying to see some resemblance to the smiling girl of the newspaper photo. But this face wasn’t even human-looking anymore. The body had lain in the dump for two days and he knew from experience what that could mean.
It was blood-streaked, the eyes open, the corneas milky with death. Rigor had frozen her lips into a horrible grin, revealing her small teeth. The left part of her cheek had been pecked away, probably by the gulls that he had seen circling over the dump.
He set the photos down, running his hand over his eyes. Mobley had walked back to his desk and was sitting when Louis turned to face him.