Читать книгу Trail of Blood - Wanda Evans - Страница 12
ОглавлениеTal English dreaded going to work Saturday morning. He would have to call Jim Dunn and bring him up to date. He hated to tell the worried father that bloodstains had been found in his son’s apartment. Perhaps he could wait until the test results came back from the DPS lab showing whether the stains were human blood. If they were, he would have to tell Dunn that he was probably right to be concerned about the safety of his son.
That morning English was barely settled at his desk when Sergeant Esparza buttonholed him. Esparza had already talked to the DPS chemist, Jim Thomas. The chemist had ascertained that the samples were human blood type O. Esparza was going to conduct Lumalight and Luminol tests at Leisha’s apartment to determine the amount of blood that had been splashed around and find out if any efforts had been made to wash it away.
Even if blood has been wiped off an area such as a wall or has been cleaned from a piece of carpet, baseboard or ceiling, Luminol is so sensitive that it will show if blood has ever been present. Reputedly, Luminol is sensitive to blood up to one part in five million. Therefore, diluted traces that may still be present will be revealed by Luminol. In fact Luminol responds best to older blood stains.
Thomas had agreed to help Esparza with the test. They were going to meet later that day to photograph the room where the blood had been found.
When Esparza left his office, English sat for a few moments thinking about the case. Then he reminded himself to make the telephone call he had been so filled with anxiety about. He had to find out if Scott Dunn’s blood type was O and the only way to do that was to call Jim Dunn.
Barbara Dunn answered the telephone and told English that Jim had gone into Philadelphia for a breakfast meeting, but would be at home a little later. Without thinking, English blurted out the news that blood had been found in Leisha’s apartment and the lab tests that showed it to be human blood.
In shock, Barbara could barely speak. She told English that she would have Jim call as soon as he got home. English berated himself for being so insensitive. He shouldn’t have told her about the blood. He could simply have asked her to have Jim call when he got home. He could have waited so that he himself could have broken the bad news to Jim Dunn. But there was a sense of urgency now, he consoled himself.
Because of it, English and White set out to discover everything they could about Scott Dunn’s disappearance. They decided they would go back to the Regency Apartments and canvass the neighbors.
Since they began during business hours, they received no answer to their knocking at most of the apartments. The few people at home said they hadn’t heard or seen anything unusual around 4B recently. White and English decided to resume the canvass later.
The two investigators wanted to know everything they could about Leisha Hamilton, so they next went to the restaurant where she was employed. The manager obligingly showed them Leisha’s work record, which confirmed Leisha’s statement that she was at work from 6:00 AM until 2:00 PM, on Thursday, May 16, the day she said Scott Dunn disappeared.
English and White returned to the police department to keep their appointment with Hamilton, who had agreed to come in that morning and sign a formal statement. A short time later, Leisha arrived, accompanied by a lanky, dark-haired young man whom she introduced as a friend, Burt Todd, a cook at the restaurant where she worked.
Again, English, George White and Leisha gathered in English’s office and once again, English read her Miranda rights and asked if she understood them. Leisha said she did.
“My full name is Leisha Gwen Hamilton and I am twenty-eight years old.” She gave them the name of her current employer and stated that her nearest relative was her father.
“I have known Scott Dunn since June 1990. We had been living at 5818 - 24th, Apartment B4, since March 4, 1991.”
The remainder of her statement essentially repeated the story she had first told Jim Dunn and later Tal English. She mentioned that Scott had stayed all night at Max Gianoli’s house Monday night and all day Tuesday, May 14, because he was sick. Tuesday was her day off. “I cleaned house and am sure the carpet under the couch had not been disturbed at that time.”
Leisha went into great detail about that Tuesday evening. She said Scott had called her from Max’s house and said he needed her to come and get him, because he was still sick. He also asked her to get him some medicine. “I went to the store and got the medicine; then I went to Max’s to get Scott. When I got there, I had to dress Scott, then when we got home, I had to undress him. We stayed home the rest of the night. Scott had a high fever and could hardly walk or talk. I asked him why he had waited so long to call me. He told me he was too sick to make it to the phone. He was so hot, he asked me to turn the air conditioning on. Then I did some ironing. He got hungry and wanted to eat. He didn’t want anything we had, so I went to the store and got him something.”
Leisha said she remembered exactly how much money she took from Scott’s wallet to get food—seven dollars—and he had eight dollars left in the wallet. “I brought home a dollar and some change and left it on the counter. Then I cooked a meal for him.”
She said she also had gotten a thermometer at the store and when she got home she took Scott’s temperature. It was 102.6 degrees.
“Then I went to bed in my room and Scott slept in the living room on the couch because he didn’t want me to catch what he had.”
Her capacity for detail continued in her account of the following day, May 15. “I went to work. Scott stayed home and did not leave the house as far as I know. When I got home after work, he was lying on the couch, complaining of a sore throat. I fixed him some tea and he complained, because there was no sugar in it. So I put honey and lemon in it. I made some soup for him. Later, when he got hungry, I went to the store and got him some brown gravy to go with some hamburger meat so he could eat it. I also got him some medicine for his throat.
“Then I went back home, cooked up the hamburger meat and we ate. For a while, we sat around and watched TV and talked; then I took a shower and went to bed. I was lying in the bed when I heard Mike Roberts come over and I could hear them talking. Mike was still there when I went to sleep.”
Leisha said that when she woke up the next morning, Scott was in bed with her. She got up and got ready for work. According to Leisha, it was about 5:15 or 5:30 when she got ready to leave, and she woke Scott. He said that he didn’t need to get up, that Mike was coming to pick him up. Leisha left and went on to work.
“I got home from work about 2:30 PM,” her statement continued. “The front door was locked. I went into the bedroom and saw the afghan lying on the floor, where the pallet usually lay. It was spread out as if someone had made up a bed underneath it and the afghan was the bedspread. I could tell that there weren’t any sheets and stuff under it. I lifted up the end of the afghan where the feet would have been when we were in bed and saw that there was nothing under it. I saw that the sheets and pillows were gone and so was the waterbed liner.”
Leisha said that next, she went into the other bedroom, which she referred to as Scott’s bedroom, and saw that a basket of his clothes was gone. The box that his shoes were in was gone. All of his shoes were gone. She said she noticed that his belt was still there, though.
“I checked the box containing about fifty dollars worth of change that I kept in my closet and it was still there. I also checked the coffee can in the kitchen where I kept change and the change was still there.”
After that, Leisha said, she called Max at ProSound and asked him if Scott was at work. Max said he wasn’t. He said Mike had gone to the house that morning and had gotten no answer when he knocked at the door calling Scott’s name.
“I told Max about the stuff being gone. I made Max swear to me that Scott was not there. I thought that Scott had just packed his shit and left.”
At that point in her statement, Leisha’s memory became somewhat fuzzy. She didn’t remember what she had done after she talked to Max. She didn’t recall whether she went to her favorite club. All she remembered was going to bed Thursday night and getting up Friday morning. But her memory apparently cleared as she recited what happened after that.
“Friday, I went to work and came home. When I came home, the front door was open. I am very careful about locking the front door. I went on in the house and looked around to see if Scott was there. He wasn’t. I looked in the spare bedroom where the back door was and saw the wood had been kicked off and it was busted in. I looked around and saw the stuff for Scott’s radio controlled boat and the other clothes basket was gone. I had put the boat, my radio and all the money in the trunk of my car, so that if Scott came back, he could not get them and would have to come to me and explain what was going on.
“I called Max and asked him if he had seen or heard from Scott that day. I told him what had happened. I made him swear that he didn’t know what was going on. I talked to Mike and made him swear to me that he didn’t know what was going on.”
Then she went down to the office of the apartment complex and told the manager about the back door, because there was no way to secure it. The assistant manager told Leisha to call the police and make a report. She also told Leisha they would need an estimate and directed her to find the maintenance man and ask him to look at the door.
“I found him and he gave me an estimate and locked the door up.” Leisha said. “He was still there when the police arrived. I made the report.”
At this point Leisha seemed so eager to talk that English didn’t need to ask questions. It was as if she were reading from a script.
She continued. “On Monday, the twentieth, I went and got Scott’s car at his workplace. Max was talking about towing it. At first I didn’t go get the car, because I didn’t know I had the keys. I was cleaning the house on the twenty-eighth and noticed the carpet under the couch was missing.
“I have also noticed several times that things were moved around while I was gone. The ashtray was moved, the chairs were moved out from under the table and the table mats were moved. I thought that someone had been in my apartment, but it was just small stuff, so I wasn’t sure.
“This last Sunday I knew someone had been in my apartment because the key to Max’s apartment, a letter and a comic card from Dairy Queen were all missing. I thought Scott had been there, because he would recognize the red key to Max’s apartment.”
Leisha told the detectives she had called both of Scott’s parents a few times about the missing man. She said that she had not noticed the bloodstained carpet in the bedroom until English and White showed it to her.
Leisha Hamilton’s statement was typed up afterwards and she signed it and dated it—June 8, 1991.
Next White asked Leisha if she would take a polygraph test and she agreed. An appointment was set for her to come in the following week. As she prepared to leave, Leisha told the detectives that Tim Smith continued to bother her and was leaving notes on her car and on her apartment door.
All the time Leisha had been talking, Burt Todd had sat quietly listening. But now as Leisha and he prepared to leave, English asked Todd if he would be willing to answer some questions for them. Todd agreed and stayed.
Todd told them that he was twenty-two years old and that he lived east of Lubbock, in a small community of weekend homes, along with some permanent residents. He said that he first met Leisha Hamilton when she went to work at the restaurant where he worked.
“A strange guy named Tim would hang around while Leisha was there,” Todd said, “but Leisha was living with a different guy named Scott. Then one day Leisha came to work and said Scott had moved out.”
“Right after that, I asked Leisha if she would go to a party with me.” Pressed for the exact date, Todd thought it was on either the thirteenth or the twentieth of May. Although he wasn’t sure of the date, he was certain it was after Leisha told him Scott had left. The party was at the home of one of his friends. Leisha drove over in the yellow Camaro that belonged to Scott. After the party, Leisha said that her taillights were out and asked Burt to follow her to her apartment. They got to her apartment about three or four o’clock in the morning. Todd and Leisha crashed on the couch in the living room. Todd said he had never seen Scott.
After Leisha and Todd had left, English remained at the conference table, feeling tired and frustrated. Nothing in either statement provided any new leads to the whereabouts of Scott Dunn—or Scott Dunn’s body. They felt Todd had only repeated what Leisha had told him, the same things she had told the detectives. The only new item of interest was Todd’s report that he had spent the night with Leisha soon after Scott’s disappearance. If Todd was sure it was a Monday, and he seemed to be, and if he was sure it was after Leisha told him Scott had left, then it would most likely have been Monday, May 20, five days after Scott’s disappearance, the day she had gone to Scott’s workplace and picked up his Camaro, Yellow Thunder.
English shook his head. Even in his line of work, people sometimes amazed him. Leisha’s live-in boyfriend disappeared on a Thursday while she was at work. That night, according to her first conversation with Jim Dunn, another boyfriend, Tim Smith, had spent the night with her. Then on Monday, four days later, she had gone out with yet a third man, who had spent the night with her. What kind of relationship had Leisha Hamilton and Scott Dunn had, anyway? And did it have anything to do with Scott’s disappearance? Whatever had happened in that small bedroom almost a month earlier, English’s gut feeling was that it had been bloody and heinous.
While English and White were questioning Leisha Hamilton and Burt Todd, Sgt. Tomas Esparza and Cpl. Lewis drove to Hamilton’s apartment, where they met Jim Thomas. Thomas made an initial examination of the scene and made a sketch of the area, noting traces of blood around the edge of the cut carpet in the north bedroom and on the carpet padding. He also noted some blood on the concrete underneath the padding. Thomas did some preliminary tests on the blood on the baseboard and the concrete slab, which showed positive for blood. He made note of numerous small droplets on one wall of the bedroom and on the ceiling above these spots. One small stain was on the windowsill, but it tested negative in a presumptive test for blood.
After he had finished examining the bedroom, Thomas tested several stains in the living room area to see if there was any blood, but everything in that room tested negative. There were no stains worth testing in the bathroom—nothing that, to Thomas’s trained eye, indicated the presence of blood.
While Thomas was examining the scene, Lewis took some photographs of the carpeted area, even though he had photographed the scene the previous day. On this day he took all the regular photographs they needed and then he would take laser photos, because once they sprayed the walls with the liquid Luminol the stains would deteriorate and wash from their original consistency and position. He also had to make sure he had collected all the blood samples that would be needed, because the Luminol would destroy any chance of determining the blood type or DNA.
When Lewis had finished photographing the area, the detectives covered the windows with black plastic, plunging the room into total darkness. Lewis loaded a camera with 1600-speed black-and-white film and mounted it on a tripod, so he could leave the shutter open for the laser photos. The laser was a portable high intensity light that could be directed along the area the investigators wanted to search. They would wear special goggles to see what the light source was revealing. When they were ready to turn out the lights and direct the laser toward the stains, the light would cause the stains to glow and the fast shutter speed would be able to capture whatever was on the walls, ceiling and floor of the room. The shutter would be left open for about ten seconds, then Lewis would close it and move on to the next frame.
Under the laser light, the investigators could see some streaking on the walls, as if someone had tried to wash the walls. The light also revealed a set of fingerprints on the wall, only a few inches above the baseboard. No ridged detail could be seen, so the prints were useless to the investigators. Nevertheless, Lewis took photographs of them.
When the laser photography process was completed, Jim Thomas began to spray the wall with Luminol. Again, the room was in total darkness and the camera was on a tripod, using the same film speed and shutter speed. The three men stared in wonder at the sight before them. Their excitement at what they saw was short-lived, however, tempered by the sobering realization that it indicated that someone had been horribly wounded—had probably died—in this room.
“The whole room lit up,” Esparza told English later. “It was unbelievable. It looked like there had been a bloodbath in that room. I mean, it was on the ceiling; it was on the walls; it was in the carpeting, on the doorknobs, everywhere.”
The photographs had the appearance of an impressionist painting, done in velvet black and starshine white. The amount of blood on the walls was difficult to determine, but every swipe of the soapy cloth that had been used in attempting to clean the walls was visible—wide swaths of brilliant white, overlapping each other on a canvas of inky black. Bloody, soapy stains were visible up to a height of about five feet or more and extended horizontally for an equal distance along each wall.
Looking at the photographs the following morning, English and White agreed that the scene pointed to a murder—but they had no body and no suspect. Police statistics indicate that those closest to a murder victim usually have the strongest motive, means and opportunity to commit the crime. At this point, Leisha Hamilton topped their list of suspects. They could see already that the relationship between Scott and Leisha was anything but smooth. Leisha had at least two other boyfriends. Who knew how many more men she had relationships with? There was also the information from Scott’s father that Scott had said he was engaged to another girl, who was in college in Mississippi. English made a mental note to get in touch with the Registrar’s office at the college and see if he could locate the girl. Although the co-ed might not be enrolled in summer school, the university should have a home address and telephone number for her.
The relationship between Scott and Leisha was complicated. Though the detectives concluded that it probably was filled with tension, possibly jealousy and anger, they could see no motive for Leisha to kill Scott. What did she have to gain by killing him? She certainly wouldn’t be living alone if he left her, unless she chose to do so. Men were lined up at her door, apparently just waiting for her to let them in. One of those men, according to Leisha, was Tim Smith.
“Maybe we’d better go talk to Smith,” English suggested.
White nodded. “I’ll drive.”
At the apartment complex, White parked in front of Number 229, where they had been told Tim Smith lived. They knocked on the door and there was no answer. English peered in through a small window and saw that the apartment was empty. An assistant manager told them that Tim had moved to Apartment 107 in the same complex. The new apartment was a two-bedroom unit. “Tim said he needed more room. He intended to provide a place for Leisha Hamilton and her daughter to live,” the manager said.
This was the first the detectives had heard about Leisha’s having a daughter. They exchanged puzzled glances.
At Apartment 107, Tim Smith invited the detectives into the small living room. English explained to Smith that they were looking for Scott Dunn, talking to people who knew the missing man, and they wanted to ask Smith some questions. Smith nodded—rather reluctantly, English thought. While they were talking, English noticed a roll of gray duct tape lying on its side on a bookshelf. English experienced a quick surge of adrenaline. This could be their first solid clue to what happened to Scott Dunn! He said nothing at the time, intending to ask Smith about it before they left.
“Mind if we search your apartment?” White asked.
Smith hesitated, glanced around the room, then wandered from room to room, as if he were making sure there was nothing to be found. Finally, he nodded to White. “Okay. Look around.”
White offered him the Consent-to-Search form and Smith signed it. English still didn’t mention the tape. Only the three of them were in the apartment. It would be safe where it was.
In one of the bedrooms, White found a cardboard moving box that still had a few items in it. It had been sealed with gray duct tape. White knelt and pulled off a piece. “I’m going to take this tape. See what the lab guys make of it.”
“Did you notice the duct tape in the living room?” English asked.
White glanced up and shook his head.
“It’s on the shelf.”
“No!”
English grinned. “Right out in plain sight.”
“Let’s take a look.” White got to his feet and the two men went back into the living room. English glanced at the bookshelf. The tape was no longer there. English gave Smith a steady, smoldering look. “We need that tape.”
“What tape? I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Smith said.
“I saw some tape up there, on that shelf. It was lying flat, on the sticky side. You moved that tape. There’s nobody else here.”
Without a word, Smith walked over to the shelf, took some books from the shelf below the one where English had seen the roll of duct tape, pulled the tape out and handed it to English.
By this time English’s heart was almost pumping out of his chest. Staring at Tim Smith, English felt was involved in Scott Dunn’s murder. Why else would he have hidden the tape?
After marking the duct tape as evidence, English and White asked Tim Smith for permission to search his car. Smith signed the Consent-to-Search form for his car, but the detectives found nothing that connected the car to Scott. Nevertheless, English asked Tim to accompany the detectives to the police department for questioning and he agreed. They also took several items from the apartment—a few towels, a pair of boots that appeared to have a stain of some kind on the soles, some old rags and T-shirts. All were grimy and soiled. English harbored a small hope that these items might have been used the night Scott disappeared. The detectives were not too optimistic, however, because they were investigating an event that had happened more than three weeks earlier. There had been more than enough time to dispose of any bloodstained clothing or cloths that might have been used to clean up Scott Dunn’s blood.
After English read Tim Smith the Miranda warning, the interview went on for hours. Smith’s response to every question seemed to the detectives to take forever, as if he were deliberating, figuring out an acceptable answer. When he did respond, he was hesitant and evasive, failing to give a direct answer to any question.
Smith denied over and over again that he knew anything about Scott Dunn’s disappearance. He admitted, however, that he had been pursuing Leisha. He said they had been involved for several weeks, but now she was telling him their affair was over. He went on to say he couldn’t accept that.
“I love her and I want her back,” he insisted.
English asked Smith if he would be willing to take a polygraph examination and Smith agreed. At that point, without taking a formal statement, the detectives allowed Smith to leave, advising him that they would schedule a polygraph and let him know the date and time.
A weary English felt a faint whispering gnawing at the back of his mind as Smith left. He was all but certain this man walking the streets knew and probably had been part of what had happened to Scott Dunn.
Monday morning, when Jim Dunn called to see if the detectives had made any progress over the weekend, English told him the investigation was gaining momentum and that other detectives would be working with him. “George White will do the legwork necessary to trace Scott’s movements and his relationships during the last weeks before he disappeared. At the same time Detectives Walt Crimmins and Billy Hudgeons will re-canvass the neighborhood around the Regency Apartments and follow up on any leads they unearth.”
Missing person cases, English knew, grow colder with each passing day. English worried that too much time had passed already for detectives to find anyone who might remember a crucial detail. Nevertheless, the effort had to be made.
Leisha Hamilton came to police headquarters to take her polygraph examination that day. The examiner, Kenneth Ackors, explained that it was an evidentiary polygraph, given not because she was a suspect, but to determine if she had any knowledge that would help the police find out what had happened to Scott Dunn. An evidentiary polygraph examination differs from what the police call a specific issue polygraph in that the examiner asks more general questions of the witness. Leisha assured Ackors she understood. Ackors did not ask Leisha Hamilton point blank, “Did you kill Scott Dunn?” Instead, he asked questions such as “Do you know for sure the last time anyone saw Scott Dunn? Do you know for sure where Scott is now? Do you know for sure whether anyone has hurt Scott Dunn or caused him pain? Do you know for sure when the carpet was cut from under the couch?”
Thereafter Leisha always vowed that she passed the polygraph test, although she admitted to reporters later that her answer had appeared deceptive on one question: whether or not she knew where Scott Dunn was now.
After the examination, Leisha gave English some of the notes that Tim Smith had written her. After she left, he read the letters with a mixture of elation and sadness. Elation, because the letters strengthened Tim’s motive for harming Scott. Sadness, because they revealed an insecure, lonely man who was obsessively in love with a woman who obviously was playing cruel games with him. Leisha apparently wanted relationships with both men. The resulting triangle was constructed on explosive elements—Smith’s avowed love, a convenient living arrangement for Leisha and Scott and sexual control for Leisha Hamilton. Smith’s letters indicated he was willing to go to great lengths to make it possible to be with her. The letters showed Smith had a powerful motive for wanting Scott Dunn removed from the triangle.
Leisha had indicated to English that she had begun seeing Tim around the time of Scott’s disappearance, but the letters told another story. Some of the notes were undated, but one was a long letter dated almost three weeks before Scott’s disappearance. It implied that Tim and Leisha were involved in an ongoing affair. From Tim’s words, English formed an impression of a naive young man who had fallen in love with an experienced woman who knew how to manipulate men and enjoyed it.
“Dear Leisha,” the note began. “I’m sorry to have to say this, but I’m tired of being made to look like a dumbass fool!…You sleep with him,” the letter continued, “which makes me feel you are cheating on me, while I remain faithful to you. I am not going to cheat on you, but…
“You seem to think this is some kind of waiting game. Well, the waiting is over for me because I am fed up with being made out to look like some stupid idiot born yesterday. I love you, but if you turn your back on me, then I will do my best to stay away from you and leave you to do whatever in hell it is you want to do. I will walk out of your life and plan on staying out of it for good. My heart cannot take any more indecision from you.
“…It is either me or him, I hope you don’t make the wrong decision, but if you do, you do, and you most likely will. I will somehow have to deal with it in the best manner I know how. I love you more than you may ever know, but I will stay away if it kills me, if that is the decision you make. There are no more excuses. We can work things out.
“I have a lot of friends who can help me if I need them to because I have done a lot for them and you could say they owe me. A place for you and your daughter to stay is no problem. You don’t have to stay where you are! The time to change your life for the better is NOW! Please hear me! I love you very much and there is nothing I wouldn’t do to make your life better and more fulfilled. You are my Sunshine. You make me want to live life to the fullest. You are very beautiful to me. I don’t care if you don’t believe me, because it is true! This decision will change our lives for the better or the worse. Please make the right one! Love, Tim.
“P.S. I don’t mean to sound like an ass about this but it is just time to take our emotions off this insane roller coaster ride and stabilize our feelings about one another. I realize I probably love you more than you love me, but if he wasn’t around, I know that you would love me as much as I love you…You have five days counting today and Thursday to decide what to do. I am thru playing games! I love you too much to continue dangling on the edge of hope. I need to know, one way or the other. Love, Tim.”
As English held the letter, his mind raced. Even though the lovesick man had given her an ultimatum—choose between Scott and himself—Leisha had refused to do so. So though Leisha made no choice, Tim continued to declare his love for her.
English put the letter down and picked up a card, which apparently had accompanied flowers. It carried a Mother’s Day greeting. It simply said, “The Woman I Love! Please accept my apology.” It was signed, “Tim.”
Another undated note on a green 3x5 card read: “Dear Green Eyes. I will always love you…If you would just accept God into your heart, you would change. I know it would work between us if we would trust each other. I don’t hold it against you whatever you did with Burt. You are very special to me and I hope I get another chance to show you that I can trust you and stay off your back. With the greatest love. Tim (Superman)”
English turned this card over in his fingers, pondering. It must have been written after Scott’s disappearance, because Burt Todd had indicated that he and Leisha had not begun seeing each other until after May 16. How many other men were there in Leisha Hamilton’s life?
As the relationship deteriorated, the tone of the notes changed dramatically. An undated card read: “Don’t worry. There won’t be anymore flowers from me. You have turned into something ugly since I met you. You are letting things turn you into an ugly Bitch. It is very unfortunate, because you are, or were, a very beautiful woman at one time. I wish you would change back into that woman I know you can be. Don’t throw everything away…I still love you. Tim.”
English picked up a pink card, undated, that continued in the same vein: “Don’t worry, there won’t be anymore notes, calls or anything else. These are my last words to you. I can’t believe you would think evil of me because you know me better than that. You owe me an apology when this is all over with. A big apology. I still love you and I don’t know why. I should be extremely angry with you for the way you have been thinking.”
This must be a recent card, English concluded, written when Tim Smith found out that Leisha had been telling people she thought he had “done something to Scott.”
A card dated June 8, English noted, said, “Goodbye, Green Eyes. You broke my heart in two and don’t care. I gave you all my love, my heart, and my soul, yet you threw it all away. I have loved you beyond words. We need each other, yet you don’t see it. I wanted you to be the Yellow Rose of Texas for me, but you would not. I bought you a rose the other day, but you were gone. All they had today was a yellow carnation. As you have thrown my love away in your heart anyways, I want you to trash the carnation to symbolize your disgust of my love for you.”
The last card, also dated June 8, reinforced the sense that Tim Smith was filled with despair over the deterioration of his relationship with Leisha. “It’s ironic,” Tim wrote, “you seem to hate the one who loves you the most. All I ever wanted was to do things with you, be with you, and spend as much time with you as I could. And for this, you despise me?”
English sat, hunched over his desk, fingering the small collection of vari-colored cards, wishing he had pushed Tim Smith a little harder when he had the opportunity. He consoled himself with the thought that Tim was scheduled to come in for a polygraph test in a few days and he would be able to question him further. Maybe then Smith would tell the investigators what had happened to Scott Dunn.
