Читать книгу Betrayal In Blood - Michael Benson - Страница 31

CHAPTER 24

Car Trouble

In the early-morning hours of July 14, 2003, Cassidy Green, her heart pounding, drove the getaway car south toward West Bloomfield. But the going was not easy. She’d gathered up her nerves and had her earlier navigation troubles under control, but now the Monte Carlo was misbehaving.

As Cassidy would put it later, the car had been cranky in general, but now it was behaving downright sick. There were electrical problems. The battery was going dead and power was dwindling. Cassidy lost the ability to turn the headlights up to bright. They got the car home, but barely.

Cyril put his bloody T-shirt, jeans, and the down-filled leather jacket he had been wearing in a bag. He then asked his friends Emily Gibbs (pseudonym) and Vinny Bennett (pseudonym) if he could borrow their car. They said okay, and Cassidy and Cyril got into the friends’ car. Cyril brought the rifle and the bag of bloody clothes with him.

They drove south, away from West Bloomfield, and into the rural area known to the residents as the Township of Bloomfield—“township” to distinguish it from the village, where the population was dense, comparatively.

The first item to be chucked was the shirt with the dragon on it—the disposal of the bloody T-shirt defies explanation. Cassidy could have disposed of the shirt anywhere. Police were not chasing her. No one was following her.

The shirt could have been stuffed in a Dumpster, buried in a shallow grave in any secluded area, thrown into any of the many wooded areas in the township. Cassidy could have simply tied the dragon shirt inside a plastic bag and thrown it into a garbage can anyplace away from the crime scene.

If Cassidy had chosen to do any of those, Cyril Winebrenner’s bloody shirt probably would never have been seen again. Instead, she dumped the shirt on property belonging to a man named James Green. It was no coincidence that Cassidy and James had the same last name. James Green was Cassidy’s uncle.

Cassidy and Cyril drove down Stetson Road and pulled the car over to the shoulder of the road. One of them got out and walked into the woods a bit, leaving the shirt hanging from a tree limb alongside a path in the underbrush, which was mowed regularly. All in all, it was a lousy hiding place. But if ever there was a couple prone to bad decision-making, it was Cyril and Cassidy in the hours and days following Tabatha’s murder.

After getting rid of the shirt, they cruised to Wesley Road, where the leather jacket was hurled into a drainage tunnel. The final piece of clothing, the jeans, was chucked into the bushes along a stretch of Silvernail Road, which ran parallel to Stetson Road.

They then drove to a gas station to put gas in Emily and Vinny’s car. They pulled into a roadside bar and grill for a drink. It was the sort of place where most of the men in there would be wearing red-plaid hunting garb in a couple of months, whether they’d been hunting that day or not. And many of them had a cigarette lit all the time. The bar was typical of those in that neck of the woods. It was an area where the smoking-ban laws hadn’t really taken effect. In big cities across New York State, it was illegal to smoke in a public place, even a bar, and the sidewalks outside establishments were often filled with folks having a smoke before quaffing their next pint of lager. In the rural areas, like Bloomfield, the law was in effect but often wasn’t enforced. As Cassy and Cyril had their drinks, several people at the bar smoked cigarettes, and ashtrays were welcomingly in place for them.

The couple’s nerves were shot. They must have been jumpy as they smoked and drank, struggling to get a handle on it so they wouldn’t attract attention. After the drink, Cassy drove Cyril to his car, which was parked on Clay Street. He took the rifle and put it in his car. According to Cassidy, she never saw the rifle again, at least not as a free woman.