The Cold Case of the Fallen Hiker

When Harry London, a retiring Knoxville Police Department Homicide Detective handed me the case file, he glanced at the name on the file and then frowned.

"I knew in my heart the husband killed his wife for the insurance money, but the corner ruled it an accidental death. Even after that ruling, I tried to prove the husband killed her, but I couldn't find any evidence that he did and I couldn't get the son of a bitch to confess. Her body was only partially there when they found the wife, so there wasn't any evidence that pointed to murder.

"I was sure it was murder. There were just too many things that didn't add up. It might not have been the husband, but that woman didn't fall off a cliff because she had a heart attack and slipped. I think she was pushed."

I told Harry I'd read the file and if I found anything suspicious, I'd give it to Rochelle to read. If she thought there was something there, we'd look into the case.

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If there was something there, I was pretty confident that Rochelle would find it. She's an author of murder mysteries based on real cases, and together we have a pretty good record of solving cases that have sat in the cold case files for years. She looks at a case like she writes her novels. Sometimes her theories don't match the current evidence but she's still right once we get all the evidence.

I also live with Rochelle. I used to be a detective in Nashville, and Rochelle sort of conned my captain into letting her work with me on a case. We ended up solving that case as well as figuring out that we fit together in other ways as well. Rochelle owned a house in Knoxville and after a few months of driving from Nashville to Knoxville every weekend, we decided it would be a lot easier if I just moved in with her.

It was pretty easy to get myself hired as a detective by the Knoxville Police Department. I had a good record of solving cases. Once I had the job, I moved to Knoxville and I've never looked back.

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After reading through the case file, Rochelle looked up at me and frowned.

"I think I agree with Harry. There are too many things that don't make sense and there's a motive for Vince Barlow to have killed his wife Maxine that practically screams murder."

I poured us each a glass of wine and took them to the coffee table in front of the couch where Rochelle was sitting.

"I think so too, but there's no evidence to prove Mrs. Barlow was murdered, much less any evidence the husband murdered her. The only thing that looked odd to the Coroner at the time was that he said it was pretty unusual for a woman of thirty-five to have a heart attack, not impossible, but pretty rare. He chalked that up to the digoxin in her tissue samples.

"Mr. Barlow told Harry his wife was a fan of holistic medicine and she'd been taking foxglove extract for some irregular heartbeat condition she thought she'd been having. The coroner said the concentration was too high for what most herbalists recommended, but maybe one dose hadn't stopped the irregular heartbeats so she took more.

"He wrote in his report that some people believe holistic medicines are like aspirin and keep taking them until they feel an effect. It usually doesn't kill them, but because foxglove extract contains digoxin it could cause her to have had a mild heart attack or temporary loss of blood flow to her brain due to the reduction in heart rate. Either might have caused her to fall off that cliff and hit her head on the way down. That's why he ruled it was an accidental death."

Rochelle frowned again.

"What do you think?"

"Well, the insurance policy Mr. Barlow had on Mrs. Barlow is a really good motive for him to have killed her. I've seen that on any number of cases. One spouse takes out an insurance policy on the other, and when the insured spouse dies, it's easy money. You don't usually have to pay any taxes on it either. The only problem is making sure you can't be blamed for the death. That's where almost all people who murder their spouses screw up. They get caught either killing the spouse or paying somebody else to do it.

"In this case though, Mr. Barlow had a really tight alibi. He and Maxine were going RV camping, but he told her he had to stay at home for the first three days because he was very close to closing some real estate deal. She went on and camped. What Mr. Barlow was really doing was spending three days with his secretary. What his videotapes of those three days apparently show prove that he spent the three days plugged into his secretary at a Holiday Inn.

"He was also very cooperative and volunteered to take a lie-detector test which he passed. That doesn't' mean he's innocent because there are some people who can pass a lie detector test even though they're guilty, just like there are people who fail a lie detector test even though they're innocent. That's why lie detector tests aren't allowed as evidence in court.

"Harry tried to break him, but he couldn't and since he had no evidence that Mr. Barlow killed his wife, he had to stop."

Rochelle thought for a few seconds, and then asked what we knew about Vince and Maxine Barlow.

"There's not much here about either of them except that he was a real estate agent and his wife liked being outdoors. Didn't Harry do any more investigation that that?"

"Probably not. You have to remember that Harry was one of just a few detectives at the time and he worked a lot of active cases. He'd never have had the time to do much in the way of background searches on anybody who wasn't a viable suspect."

Rochelle smiled.

"I have time, so that's what I'm going to do tomorrow."

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When I left for my desk the next morning, Rochelle and I had agreed upon a plan to attack the case. She'd scour the newspaper archives for information about the Barlows and I'd run both of them through NCIC and the Tennessee DMV.

NCIC didn't have anything on either one. The Tennessee DMV had a driver's license for them both, but Maxine's license didn't seem to be right.

Vincent Gene Barlow was born on February 10, 1956 in Knoxville and got his first driver's license in 1972. He'd renewed it several times since then though he'd changed addresses a few times. The address on the license in 1972 was 1906 Laurans Avenue. The address had changed in 1979 to 4526 Southside Road. That address had stayed the same until 1987 when he'd changed it to 2140 Cherokee Boulevard.

Maxine Barlow had gotten a Tennessee driver's license in 1984 and it appeared to be her first license. That struck me as odd because according to the date of birth on her license, she'd have been thirty-three when she got the license. Her address was the same as Mr. Barlow's, that being 4526 Southside Road.

The only reasons I could think of for her to have gotten a license that late in life were either she'd moved to Knoxville from out of state or she'd grown up in a place where it was cheaper to ride the bus or walk than buying a car.

If Harry had asked Mr. Barlow about that, he didn't write anything down, but I could understand why he wouldn't have asked. Working a current case means the detective has to work fast and working fast means developing a list of suspects and then questioning them on a priority basis. The intent is to find the criminal by letting him contradict himself based on the available evidence and eventually admit to the crime. Only when that fails will a detective begin to look for other suspects and any contributing factors.

In this case, Harry didn't really have a suspect because the coroner had already ruled Maxine's death to be an accident. After he couldn't get Mr. Barlow to confess, he had no valid reason to expend resources trying to solve a case that wasn't a case. He'd kept the file open though because there were still some unanswered questions about why Mrs. Barlow wasn't on a normal hiking trail and why Mr. Barlow hadn't reported her missing sooner than the next day.

What I was finding didn't answer those questions. It only caused me to think of some more.

Two things stood out to me about those last two addresses for Mr. Barlow. The first was that I'd been down Southside Road before and it ran along The Ijams Nature Center, the same area where Maxine's body had been found. I wondered why the Barlow's had decided to go camping there when the nature center was basically in their back yard. Harry had confirmed that their RV had been parked at the campsite for those three days, but it still seemed a little odd.

The second thing that seemed odd was the difference in the type of homes between Southside Road and Cherokee Boulevard and the timing of when Mr. Barlow changed address.

The homes on Southside Road are simple, single-family homes on fairly small lots. The homes on Cherokee Boulevard are the exact opposite. They're big homes on big lots and they cost a small fortune. Mr. Barlow had moved to that address in 1987, a year after his wife died and a year after he'd have collected eight hundred thousand dollars from her life insurance policy.

When I put all that together, I could see why Harry had been convinced Mr. Barlow had murdered his wife. The obvious theory was that Mr. Barlow had gone camping with her and knew which trail she was going to walk. He'd come back after three days with his secretary convinced his wife to walk to the top of a cliff, and when they were there, he pushed her over the edge. He'd waited until the next day to report her missing in order to give the scavengers time to cover up any evidence he might have left. Since her body wasn't found for two more days, it looked like that plan had worked.

Since I knew where Mr. Barlow lived now, I could drive out and talk to him, but I had nothing that might shake him up enough to tell me what really happened. I needed something to tie him to Maxine's death. I thought maybe the time of death would give me something to work with, so I re-read the coroner's report.

According to the coroner, the state of the body made determining a time of death difficult to do with any precision. His guess based upon the fly larvae he found was that she'd been dead for at least two days and possibly three. He couldn't estimate a time closer than that.

The only evidence I had that might put Mr. Barlow at Ijams Nature Center was the videotapes. Because of the content of the VHS tapes, I didn't want to sit at my desk and review them. Instead, I had the forensics lab convert the VHS tapes to DVDs and took them home to watch them there.

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When I walked in the door, Rochelle looked up from her laptop.

"It's not even noon yet. Did you find out something we need to be working on?"

I shook my head.

"No, it's something I need to do, but my desk wasn't the place to do it. I need to watch about eighteen hours of video."

Rochelle chuckled.

"You mean the porn tapes Mr. Barlow and his secretary made?"

I nodded.

"Yes. What I'm looking for is a gap in the time on the tapes that would have let Mr. Barlow leave the hotel, drive to the RV campsite, and then take his wife out to that cliff and push her off. I'm thinking it would have taken him almost four hours so it should be easy to find."

Well, it wasn't easy to find because Rochelle watched the tapes with me. She kept asking me to pause the video and then play it at normal speed.

The video had the date and time in the upper left corner of the frame, but that would have been easy to fake. I didn't think that three days was probably the only three days he'd spent with his secretary. All he'd have had to do was set the clock and calendar on the video camera to a date that matched his plan for the murder and then let the camera roll. I wasn't interested in the date, but I was interested in the time. That would be harder to fake since there would probably be sunlight in the hotel room even if the curtains on the window were closed.

The first tape started at 11:36 AM on Monday. That would be about the right time for Mr. Barlow to have driven their RV to the campsite, get it parked and hooked up, and then drive to the hotel. There were a few minutes of him in the hotel room setting up the camera so it pointed at the bed and then there was a pause.

At 12:04 PM, the camera started again, and Rochelle and I watched as the secretary stripped for Mr. Barlow. Evidently he was holding the camera then because the camera kept zooming on the secretary's breasts and hair covered mound. A few times, there was a man's hand fondling her breasts and then that hand stroking the blonde hair on her mound. There was another pause then.

Rochelle chuckled.

"This isn't their first time together."

I asked how she knew and Rochelle chuckled again.

"I wouldn't take off my clothes for a man unless I was pretty comfortable with him. That sure wouldn't be the first time I was alone with him. I wouldn't let any man squeeze my boobs and rub my crotch if it was our first time together either. He'd have to work up to that to get me in the mood. It looks like she was in the mood before she got there."

I grinned.

"As I remember, you didn't make me get you in the mood that first time."

"Well, that was different. I already knew you pretty well by then, and I'd decided I wanted to do it. Besides, you didn't just grab my boobs and poke a finger in me like he did. You were pretty gentle."

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When the camera started again, it was back where Mr. Barlow had originally put it. There were a couple adjustments to the focus and to what the camera was pointed at, but then everything was clear. What we were looking at then was the secretary spread-eagled on the bed and Mr. Barlow leaning over her with his mouth on her right breast and his fingers slowly slipping in and out through the hair on her mound. The timestamp on the tape was 1:06 PM.

That scene went on until 4:30 PM when there was another pause. The next time on the tape was 6:37 PM. It looked to me as if Mr. Barlow and his secretary had gone out to get dinner, and then started up again.

Now, Rochelle and I hadn't watched every minute of the video. We have the same video editing software that the Knoxville Police Department uses. It let me search for particular times and to fast forward through anything that didn't appear to be relevant to the case. Most of the video wasn't relative except to prove to me that Mr. Barlow definitely was into his secretary. He was into her mouth or between her open thighs any time she could manage to get his cock to stand up.

I fast-forwarded through most of it and that was kind of funny. It reminded me of a joke I'd heard a long time ago. The joke was that a porn movie played in fast-forward is like an industrial film with hair.

When we were done, I hadn't found any time lapses I figured were long enough for Mr. Barlow to have driven from the hotel to the RV, walked up a cliff with Maxine Barlow, then pushed her off and dive back to the hotel. There were gaps in the video, but most were about long enough for Mr. Barlow and his secretary to go out for something to eat. The only other time gaps long enough were at night from about 10:30 PM until 8:00 AM the next morning. I didn't figure it was possible for Mr. Barlow to drag his wife up on a cliff in the dark.

The only other possible time was after Mr. Barlow and the secretary apparently left the hotel. The last time on the third video was 11:30 AM on Wednesday. If it took Mr. Barlow an hour to get from the hotel to the RV, he'd have had time to walk Maxine up on top of that cliff, push her off the edge, and then go back to the RV.

After I shut off the computer, Rochelle said she'd thought of a reason why Mr. Barlow had videotaped all three days he and the secretary were in that hotel.

"Isn't it odd that he just happened to videotape them the whole time they were in that motel room, but he didn't videotape them doing anything else?"

I chuckled.

"Well, judging by the timestamps on the video, I don't think they had time to do much else."

Rochelle frowned.

"What I think is he videotaped them so he'd have an alibi and I think the secretary was in on the whole plot to kill Maxine. I mean, why would anybody in their right mind video what could be used as evidence if Maxine had decided to divorce him? For that matter, why would the secretary let herself be videotaped when completely naked and masturbating. In case you didn't notice, she wasn't exactly a super model and her boobs weren't big enough for her to be a porn star."

I shrugged.

"Who knows why people do some of the things they do? I agree with you about the reason for the videotapes because that makes sense with what I found out this morning.

"Mr. and Mrs. Barlow lived on Southside Road and the Ijams Nature Center was basically an extension of their back yard. There was no logical reason for them to go camping in the same nature center. All she'd have had to do to be with nature was go to her back yard and keep walking.

"Mr. Barlow changed the address on his driver's license a year after his wife died to Cherokee Boulevard. I haven't been to the address yet, but homes on Cherokee Boulevard back then started in the range of a quarter million and went up depending upon the size of the house and lot. That would have been about the right time for him to have collected the life insurance policy for Mrs. Barlow."

I asked Rochelle if she'd found anything in the newspaper archives about the Barlows. She said a little.

"I haven't gone back far enough for birth announcements, but I did find their wedding announcement. They were married on June 24 in 1977. Her maiden name was Maxine Hodges. He was a real estate agent and she worked for the admissions office for UT Knoxville."

"She married Mr. Barlow in 1977?"

Rochelle nodded.

I frowned.

"Well that's interesting because when I looked up Maxine Barlow in the Tennessee DMV records, she got her first license in 1984. I figured she'd moved to Knoxville from out of state and got the license when she married Mr. Barlow. I wonder why she waited so long. You say her maiden name was Hodges? I'll check out Maxine Hodges tomorrow. She must have waited that long for a reason. Maybe I can find out what that reason was."

We ate dinner an hour later and then Rochelle said she'd thought of something she wanted to see on the video. I asked her what time and she said to just start at the beginning.

After five minutes of the video, Rochelle clicked the key for "pause" and then looked at me.

"She's a lot younger than Mr. Barlow isn't she?"

I said I hadn't really watched the video because I was looking for the dates and times. Rochelle backed up the video a few frames and then pointed to Mr. Barlow.

"Look at him. He's not in very good shape for a man who's only..."

Rochelle picked up the file and looked at Harry's interrogation report.

"... only thirty. He's got a paunch and it looks like his hair is starting to thin. She looks more like maybe nineteen or twenty. There are no lines in her face and see how her tummy is still flat and her boobs aren't very big? Look at her butt and thighs. There's nothing there but tight muscle. She can't be much older than twenty."

Rochelle looked at Harry's report again and then frowned.

"Harry didn't write down her age."

"Well, she was a witness not a suspect."

Rochelle frowned again.

"Don't you think it's at least a little suspicious that his wife is thirty-five when she falls off a cliff and he's thirty and having an affair with a woman who's ten years younger than he is?"

I had to smile.

"It wouldn't be the first time some guy decided to trade in his wife for a newer model so it's not all that unusual, and it's not a crime to have a mistress. Harry just couldn't find any evidence to prove it was any more than that."

It always strikes me as weird that once in a while Rochelle asks me an obvious question that for some reason I haven't asked myself. This was one of those times.

"Rich, what happened to the secretary? Harry wrote down her name and what she told him about that time in the hotel, but he didn't follow up with her."

"Well, like I said before, Harry was one detective and he had current cases to solve. It had already been ruled an accidental death, so if he did anything on the case, he'd have had to do it on his own time.

"Now that you ask the question though, in light of the fact that Mr. Barlow went from a middle class house in a middle class neighborhood to a pretty wealthy neighborhood after he'd gotten eight hundred thousand from the insurance company, Diane does deserve a closer look. He'd really have had no reason to move to a nicer home since he wasn't home most of the time anyway."

Rochelle grinned.

"You check out Diane Ames tomorrow and I'll check my usual sources to see what I can find out about her.

"Right now though, since you're home and you made me watch all those video, you owe me. "

I figured I knew what was coming, but I played along.

"I didn't force you to watch the video. In fact, you kept stopping me so you could watch parts of it at regular speed. I don't see how I owe you for what you did yourself."

Rochelle smiled and pulled her top over her head.

"I got all hot and bothered by watching them. I need you to make me all cool and not bothered. Think you're up to that? Oh, I forgot, she got him up to that all by herself didn't she? Maybe I can too."

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Well, Rochelle succeeded in making my cock stand up three times before she gave up. The first two times were fantastic. Rochelle wanted to try the same things Mr. Barlow and his secretary had done on the video. It was pretty great taking Rochelle on her hands and knees, but better because her big breasts were easier to catch. Mr. Barlow had had some problems reaching the secretary's breasts because they didn't hang down much.

The second time, Rochelle wanted to be on top. That was really great too, especially when she leaned down and hung her swinging big breasts in my face. She loved it when I grabbed a nipple in my mouth and then pinched a little with my teeth.

Time number three, I was up for the race, but not so much for the finish. We were side by side which was good because that let me reach Rochelle's clit. For her it was about like always. She started holding her breath when her body stiffened and pushed against me, and then gasped for air while she rocked herself over my cock. It felt like I came a little after Rochelle did, but I don't think much came out.

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The next morning, I ran Maxine Hodges through NCIC and the Tennessee DMV. I didn't find anything about her on either database. Maybe it was possible that she really hadn't gotten a driver's license until she was thirty-three.

I then ran Diane Ames through NCIC and the Tennessee DMV. NCIC had nothing which was no great surprise. The DMV had a name, address, and age for her.

Diane was born Diane Ames on May 7, 1967 in Sevierville and got her first driver's license in 1983 at a Sevierville address. In July of 1987 she changed her name to Diane Ames Barlow and listed 2120 Cherokee Boulevard in Knoxville as her address.

Well, that answered Rochelle's question about what happened to Diane. She'd married Mr. Barlow and they'd moved to the Cherokee Boulevard address.

All that information did was add some credence to Harry's theory that Mr. Barlow had killed his wife. He did it for the insurance money and so he could marry his secretary. Rochelle had been pretty close on her estimate of Diane's age. She was just nineteen when Mrs. Barlow died and twenty when she changed the name on her license.

I was starting to believe Harry's theory too, and I was also beginning to believe that Diane Ames was in on the plot. It's not uncommon for a man or a wife to cheat with another person and after the divorce to marry that other person. It's not very common for a widow or widower to marry again a year after their spouse dies even though the affair might have been pretty serious. Some of his potential real estate customers probably took a dim view of that.

Diane would surely have known that Maxine had died because Harry had interviewed both her and Mr. Barlow. If she hadn't been part of the murder, she'd probably have stepped back for a new look at her relationship with Mr. Barlow. Instead, she'd married him.

Something about that theory had been bothering me though. In my career, I'd investigated a lot of murders, and almost always there's some tidbit of information that will lead me to the killer.

In this case, there didn't seem to be any. Harry hadn't found out anything about Mr. Barlow other than that he was a successful real estate agent who'd had an affair with another woman. Harry had tried to get Mr. Barlow to confess to the murder, but he hadn't.

The secretary had admitted to the affair and so had Mr. Barlow. The video tape, except for the time between when Mr. Barlow had left the hotel with Diane and when he'd have gotten back to the RV, were a very strong alibi. That the coroner of the time had ruled Maxine's death to be an accident further exonerated Mr. Barlow.

The gap in time between Mr. Barlow leaving the hotel and his reporting his wife missing the next day didn't seem plausible. RV campsites are generally full of people, and if Mr. Barlow had been seen walking off into the woods with his wife, somebody would have seen them. Harry had talked to several of the other campers in the RV park at the time. None of them said they saw Mr. Barlow at the RV except for when he came back a little after lunch that Wednesday. Several of them had seen Mrs. Barlow walk into the park along a hiking trail that morning, but hadn't seen her come back.

Out of frustration more than any hope of finding out anything, I took the file down to Ron Blake, our Coroner. What I wanted to know is if he agreed with the other Coroner's findings.

Ron looked at the autopsy report for a good five minutes and then looked up at me.

"Well, the woman's head wound wasn't caused by anything man made. The edges of the skull fracture are too irregular so it probably was a rock of some type and she hit it or it hit her with a lot of force. She hit more then one rock too. The cracks in her skull stop where they meet another set of cracks. There are also multiple scrapes and scratches on her arms and legs and torso that would be indicative of her tumbling over and over and hitting sharp rocks on her way down the cliff.

"As far as a heart attack causing her to fall, it's a little iffy in my opinion. I don't think he was necessarily wrong, but I'd have done a little more investigation before making that the cause of her falling. Women do have heart attacks, but they're pretty rare in younger women."

I asked Ron what he'd have looked at.

He said he'd have looked for any sign that she'd been injected with digoxin.

"The concentration of digoxin in her blood was pretty high for a woman of her size. That doesn't mean that the digoxin didn't cause her to have a heart attack, but I'm not seeing enough damage to her heart to blame that. If the time of death is correct, her heart had been in the open air for at least a day, so the color could just be drying of the tissue instead of damage from lack of blood. Of course, her heart had also been damaged by animal predation, so I can't say it wasn't either.

"What's a little confusing is that to get enough digoxin in her system to cause a heart attack, she'd have had to take it that morning. The half-life of digoxin in the human body is about thirty-six hours, so if she took it the day before, it would be mostly eliminated through her urine. That's probably why the coroner ruled her time of death to be that Wednesday.

"The other thing that's a little sketchy is that the concentration in her blood was high, but wouldn't necessarily cause her to have a heart attack. Some doctors still prescribe digitalis, the commercial drug version of digoxin, for irregular heartbeat, but the dose can be difficult to establish. There's a pretty narrow dosage window between regulating heartbeat and killing the patient. Most doctors would administer the first dose while the patient is in a hospital because some people react more strongly than others. Maybe she was just very susceptible to the effects of the digoxin and didn't know it because she was self-medicating.

"Commercial digitalis wasn't available in 1986, but you could buy foxglove powder or extract -- the foxglove plant is the original source of digoxin - from any number of herbalist practitioners. You still can, but they always put on the label that you're not supposed to eat it so they don't get sued. The potency isn't controlled like the later commercial drug, so you never really know what you're getting. The concentration depends upon the concentration of digoxin in the plants.

"She either ate a lot, or somebody injected her with a refined version. I've never heard of that happening before, but it's a possibility I might have checked. Of course, her legs and arms were pretty badly chewed up, so it would have been pretty hard to find a needle puncture.

"Maybe he looked and couldn't find anything. I'd have put that in my notes, but he didn't so I can't be sure if he did or didn't. What I think probably happened is he had other cases to work and after seeing her head wound, he started looking for what caused her to fall and found what he thought was heart damage. When the tests of her tissue samples came back, he'd found a reason for the heart damage and stopped looking.

"Speaking of stopping an autopsy, I need to get back to Miss Bodine over there. According to the police report, she was a prostitute who was found stabbed to death in an alley. It's gonna take me a while. I can see several wounds that look like knife wounds, but she weighed in at almost three hundred pounds. It would have taken one hell of a long knife to get through all that fat and it's gonna take me a long time to dissect each stab wound to find what actually killed her.

"Makes me wonder sometimes. I mean, what man would ever go looking for a really fat prostitute? You'd have to have a cock a foot long to get anywhere with her. Maybe she gave really good blowjobs. I guess her tits might turn on some men. They're the size of soccer balls."

I thanked Ron and went back to my desk. I'd spent most of the day checking out what little information Rochelle and I had so far and it had gotten me nowhere except that Mr. Barlow apparently liked his women young and tight and had been playing around with Diane.

I closed up shop and went home to find out if Rochelle had had any better luck than I had.

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Rochelle had come up with some information on both Maxine and Diane. She was adding that information to a timeline she'd started, and after she finished writing, she showed me what she'd found.

"I started looking at Diane first, but I couldn't find anything more other than she married Mr. Barlow a year after Maxine died. I found their wedding announcement. She was only twenty at the time. That means she was just nineteen when she and Mr. Barlow spent those three days in a hotel room together. It seems a little unusual that a nineteen year old girl would know as much about sex as the videos show, but like I said before, that wasn't their first time together. Maybe he taught her what he liked.

"Anyway, when I hit a dead end there, I started looking for Maxine under her maiden name of Hodges. What I found is interesting. Hodges wasn't her maiden name. Her maiden name was Riley. She became Maxine Hodges when she married one of her college professors, Dr. Malcomb Hodges, on June 20 of 1971. Maxine was majoring in Wildlife and Fisheries Science and Dr. Hodges taught classes in zoology.

"I'll bet that's how they met. She was taking his class and they fell in love. It sort of fits that that's how they met given her interest in nature and what she was studying. The only thing that's weird is that when they married, she was twenty and he was thirty-one. That's a pretty big age gap. According to the wedding announcement, they were going to live in Maplehurst Apartments close to the UT campus.

"It didn't last though. I found a divorce decree for when he divorced her in 1974. The reason for the divorce was infidelity. What's really interesting is that the man she was cheating with was a UT college freshman named Vincent Barlow."

"The same Vincent Barlow?"

Rochelle nodded.

"Yes, he was a freshman in college studying marketing. I don't know how they met, but it's the same Vincent that she married in 1977. By then though, he wasn't in college. I found a 1976 article about a real estate company that said he was a new agent. What it looks like to me is that they met, started the affair, and then Vincent quit school and got a real estate license so he'd have an income. Didn't you say that he'd moved to that house on Southside in 1976?"

When I said yes, Rochelle grinned.

"I'll bet he bought the house so Maxine could move in with him. According to the divorce decree, Maxine didn't get anything from Dr. Hodges except for her car and whatever she had before she married him. The judge denied her request for alimony because she'd caused the divorce. She probably had a job, but she'd have had to move unless she could make the rent on the apartment. Maybe she just moved in with Vincent and they didn't get married until 1977."

I nodded.

"All that makes sense, but it doesn't help us find out if Maxine's death was an accident or if she was murdered."

Rochelle thought for few minutes.

"Well, maybe it does. What if Maxine found out about her husband's affair? She knew how the court system works and how it tends to favor the party who's injured. Maybe she threatened Vincent with divorce and taking everything he had if he didn't stop seeing Diane? Maybe he killed her to keep that from happening."

I shook my head.

"Harry had statements from several people at the RV park who confirmed that Mrs. Barlow walked out into the woods on Wednesday morning by herself and that Mr. Barlow didn't get back to their RV until sometime after lunch. They never saw him leave the RV until the next morning."

Rochelle frowned and then grinned.

"Well, maybe that's because Mr. Barlow didn't kill Maxine. Maybe Diane did. She wanted Mr. Barlow, but Maxine was in the way and was threatening to take everything Mr. Barlow had. It was Diane who walked Maxine up to that cliff and pushed her off."

Part of the value Rochelle adds to our team is the ability to turn a bunch of conflicting evidence into a logical theory for a case. She'll then start trying to prove that theory is right. I'm the pessimist of our team. My role is to develop my own theory and try to prove it right while trying to prove Rochelle's theory wrong.

"I think after talking to her, Harry didn't think a girl that young was capable of murder. That's why he didn't dig any deeper. Do you have any proof that she was?"

Rochelle never takes offense at my challenge to her theories. It's her author's mind. She knows that she'll make up several theories for a case just like she makes up several theories for her murder mysteries. Most of those theories she discards as either not plausible or not provable. She also knows that at some point, our theories will be the same and then we'll solve the case.

"No, I don't, but if there is something I'll find it, just not tonight. How about a pizza at Anatolie's for dinner?"

}|{

Rochelle had printed a copy of the divorce decree for Maxine and Dr. Hodges. I took it to my desk the next morning because I didn't know anything about Dr. Hodges. I'd investigated a murder case years before where an ex was really mad that his wife had divorced him, and he ended up killing her. When I questioned him, he admitted that he'd killed her, and he told me that his ex-wife was an idiot for divorcing him.

"She had the world by the ass on a downhill pull. She had anything she wanted. It wasn't my fault that she didn't like my cock in her. She said it was too thick. That pissed me off. I'm what I am and I never had that problem with any other woman. They all loved my big cock. Yeah, I fucked around some and she didn't like that either even though she's the bitch that caused me to do that. I killed her to teach her a lesson. If she didn't like my big cock, I wasn't gonna let her have a little cock either."

Well, that case was the opposite of Maxine's case, but there was still the possibility that if Dr. Hodges had hated Maxine enough to divorce her, he also hated her enough to kill her. I wanted to find out more about what caused the divorce and what happened afterwards.

To do that, I called the law office of Johnston William Hawkes, the attorney who represented Maxine during the divorce. I knew the attorney representing Dr. Hodges would claim attorney client privilege and he'd have been right to do so. I called Maxine's attorney instead. He'd probably make the same claim, but since Maxine was dead, he could tell me about the case without violating privilege.

When I called him and told him what I wanted, he did what I'd expected.

"Yes, Detective Owens, I vaguely remember that case, but I'm sure you know I can't divulge any of the details."

"Well, that would be true if Mrs. Hodges was still alive, but unfortunately, she isn't. What I'm doing is investigating her death to determine if it was accidental as the coroner ruled or if it was in reality a carefully planned murder. Whatever you can tell me might help me make that decision."

Johnston didn't say anything for almost a minute, but when he spoke again he seemed to be agreeable.

"Detective Owens, I'm looking at my file from that case, but I don't know how much help I can give you. It was basically an uncontested divorce. Mrs. Hodges didn't ask for anything and neither did Dr. Hodges. His attorney wrote the marriage dissolution agreement. I reviewed it and then explained it to Mrs. Hodges. She accepted it as written because Dr. Hodges agreed to pay her legal fees and any court costs."

Well that was frustrating. I'd hoped that there'd been at least some animosity between them. It sounded to me like they were both happy to be rid of each other.

"Do you have any knowledge of what happened to them after the divorce?"

"No, not really. After the hour it took in court, she thanked me and then walked off. I never saw her again. At the time, she was working in the admissions office of UT Knoxville. I assume she just kept working there.

"The only thing I know about Dr. Hodges came from his attorney when we had lunch after the hearing. He told me that Dr. Hodges was going to resign from his position at UT Knoxville at the end of the semester and move to another college. I don't know if he did or not."

I thanked Johnston and then hung up my desk phone. That had gotten me nowhere other than maybe to take Dr. Hodges off my potential suspect list.

I called the personnel office at UT Knoxville, identified myself, and then asked if they had any records of a Dr. Malcomb Hodges who taught there in 1971. The girl said she wasn't allowed to give out any information about current teaching staff without a court order. I'd expected that, so I rephrased my question.

"Ma'am, all I want to know is if Dr. Hodges is still teaching at UT Knoxville. Surely you can tell me that."

I heard her speak, but it sounded like she had her hand covering the handset. A few seconds later I heard the clicks of a computer keyboard and then she gave me an answer.

"Sir, Dr. Hodges is no longer employed by UT Knoxville. He left after the spring semester in 1974."

I asked her if she knew where he went, and then heard more clicks from a keyboard.

"What our records show is that he took a teaching and research position at UT Chattanooga. Sir, that's all I can tell you."

I said she'd told me what I wanted to now and thanked her.

}|{

So, Dr. Hodges had been more than willing to divorce Maxine and he'd left UT Knoxville right after that. It sounded to me as if he'd crossed that part of his life off and started over in a new college with a new job.

I could understand that. When my ex divorced me, it was hell for the first couple years. I'd drive by someplace and remember that place was where we'd had dinner once or where we'd had a picnic in the park. I didn't move away from Nashville because of that, but it made it take longer to get over the fact that I'd lost a woman I thought loved me.

It didn't seem productive to continue to investigate Dr. Hodges, even if he was still alive. There was a very good chance he wasn't because he'd be eighty-five by now.

I did call the personnel office at UT Chattanooga and asked if he was still a professor there. After the usual runaround any personnel office gives you, the guy finally told me Dr. Hodges wasn't listed on the UT Chattanooga faculty after the spring semester of 1994. He said he couldn't give me any more about Dr. Hodges because UT considered anything except dates of employment to be personal and confidential. I'd have to get a court order to see any more of Dr. Hodges' file.

I called Rochelle then and asked if she'd found out anything more. She said she might have but she'd have to show it to me. I went home for lunch so we could compare notes.

}|{

What Rochelle had found was some more information about Diane and that information tended to implicate her rather than exonerate her. Rochelle was grinning when she told me.

"Remember that I said if Diane was tied up in this, I'd find it? Well, I think I did.

"Diane and Mr. Barlow go back further than that affair. Diane's mother and father were in their forties when Diane was born, and they had no other children. Diane's father owned the real estate agency where Mr. Barlow started working after he dropped out of college. Her mother worked as the secretary for the same agency.

"When Diane was fifteen, her father had a heart attack and died. Her mother sold the real estate agency to Mr. Barlow. She stayed on as his secretary until 1982 when she was killed in a car accident. Diane was seventeen at the time and a senior in high school. She moved in with her aunt and uncle in Knoxville. The summer she turned eighteen, she started working for Mr. Barlow at his real estate agency.

"I think Diane and Mr. Barlow had known each other since he started working for her father but he didn't do anything with her because she was underage. What I think happened is he liked her and once she turned eighteen, he hired her to be his secretary. At some point after that, they became lovers. It's pretty common that women tend to look for men who are a lot like their fathers. It's not a big leap from a woman finding another man who's like her father to having sex with him.

"If you look at the timeline, you'll see that Mr. Barlow started the affair with Diane sometime after he hired her in 1984. That means they were together for almost a year before Mrs. Barlow fell off that cliff."

I asked how that helped us determine if Maxine had been murdered. Rochelle smiled.

"We've been trying to figure out if Mr. Barlow had time to kill his wife, and so far, the answer has been he couldn't have. That's because we know what he was doing for those three days and the afternoon of the third day. What we don't know is what time Diane left the hotel room and we don't know what she did after she left. The last video stopped at 11:30. We're assuming they both left a little after that and probably had lunch. What if Diane drove to the RV park, found out which trail Maxine took, found her and then walked her up to that cliff and pushed her off?"

I shook my head.

"That's a big stretch from what we do know. How would Diane know which trail Maxine took? She didn't write that in her note. The note just said she was going to walk a trail. Even if Diane made a lucky guess and found Maxine, that cliff is half a mile from the nearest trail. How would she have made Maxine walk there?"

Rochelle shook her head then.

"You're right. It's not impossible, but I could never write that into a novel. I think she had to know what happened though, even if she wasn't directly involved. I'll think about that some more.

"So, did you find out anything this morning?"

I took the notebook from my breast pocket.

"I had this thought that maybe Dr. Hodges killed her. I've seen that happen before. It's the ex thinking that if he can't have her nobody can have her. If he killed her he waited a long time to do it, but it was something I could check.

"I called the attorney that represented Maxine in her divorce from Dr. Hodges. What he told me pretty much took Dr. Hodges off my potential suspect list.

"Maxine didn't get anything out of the divorce because she didn't ask for anything. The only thing she really got was Dr. Hodges paid her attorney's fees and all the court costs. She didn't ask him for that. He volunteered.

"After the divorce, he resigned from UT Knoxville and took a teaching and research position at UT Chattanooga. He left there in 1994 and apparently left no forwarding address. All that makes me think that both Dr. Hodges and Maxine just wanted to be rid of each other.

"The only thing remotely useful that I was able to find is that Maxine was working for the admissions office at UT. I figure that's how she met Mr. Barlow."

Rochelle closed her laptop then.

"I guess we're screwed then, aren't we?"

"I haven't given up yet. So far I have two of my criteria for arresting a suspect. I have a motive -- the insurance money, and I have an opportunity even though it's a pretty small opportunity. I also have sort of a method, that being that Maxine fell to her death off a cliff. I just don't have anything to tie the opportunity and method to anybody."

Rochelle didn't say anything for a while, but then she looked up and frowned.

"You said he had an opportunity, but that opportunity was small. What if it was eight or ten hours?"

"Well that would be better, but I don't see how that could happen."

Rochelle smiled then.

"It could happen. What if Maxine came back to the RV that afternoon and was there when Mr. Barlow got back from the hotel? He didn't report her missing until the next morning. That means he had all night to take her up on that cliff and push her off. He might not have had ten hours if he waited until dark, but he'd still have had plenty of time."

I shook my head again.

"Harry interviewed a bunch of people who where there in that RV park. None of them saw her come back to the RV."

"Well, maybe it was dark enough that nobody saw her."

"How would we prove that?"

Rochelle smiled.

"We need to take a trip out to that RV park and that cliff."

}|{

Well, that RV park turned out to be gone. We could tell there'd been something there, but other than what looked like it might have been the foundation for a small office, there was nothing there except for trees and a whole bunch of kudzu that had overgrown anything it could grow on, over, or up. There didn't appear to be any trails that originated from there either, but if there had been, they'd pretty much been reclaimed by Nature.

Rochelle looked at that mess and frowned.

"There's no way to tell, is there?"

"Not from what I'm seeing. It looks like the place just shut down and the owner left it to the trees and kudzu vines. If there was ever a trail that started here, we'd never find it."

Rochelle had been looking at a map of the area and looked up then.

"I don't think it would have had to be an actual trail. According to this map, where we are is only about a tenth of a mile from where Maxine's body was found. It wouldn't take more than a few minutes to walk her up to that cliff and push her over."

"Don't you think she'd have been suspicious about what was going on and tried to fight back? Wouldn't you?"

Rochelle pursed her lips.

"Maybe. It would depend upon who was taking me and if I trusted them or not. Maybe the killer had a gun and said he'd kill her if she didn't do what he said."

Rochelle thought for a few more seconds and then frowned.

"If she was drugged enough to walk but not enough to fight back, she might not have had a choice. The coroner's report said she had digi something in her system. Would that have caused her to lose control over what she was doing?"

I said I didn't know but that Ron could probably tell me.

}|{

The next morning I walked down to see Ron. He was sitting at his desk and grinned when I walked into his office.

"Sorry, Rich, but my fat woman is in the cooler so you can't drool over her big tits. Turns out, that knife blade was almost ten inches long. It was narrow and sort of slipped between her ribs and into her heart so I'm thinking it was a fillet knife.

"All I have on my table today is some guy who got himself shot in front of an after-hours club at five in the morning. They have the killer and his gun. They just need me to fish out the bullet so they can match it to the gun.

"So, what do you need this time?"

I asked Ron if digoxin could cause a person to still be able to walk but not fight back. He stroked his chin.

"Depending upon how much she ingested and the time that elapsed after she did, digoxin could cause her to lose partial control of her body. She'd have felt like shit after a couple hours, probably with one hell of a headache, vomiting, and her heart would have been slowed down so much she'd have felt tired and maybe dizzy. Some people who OD on digoxin experience blurred vision too. Picture how you'd feel with a really bad hangover. The cause isn't the same, but some of the symptoms are. What would you feel like doing? She'd probably have been able to walk, but she wouldn't have wanted to."

I sat down in Ron's visitor chair and frowned.

"None of this makes any sense. I went out to where the RV was parked and it's only about a tenth of a mile to the cliff where she was found. She could have walked that in less than five minutes. That cliff is only about half a mile from the nearest trail, and she could have walked that in a little over fifteen. If she'd started to feel sick, she could have just walked back to the RV before she started feeling really bad. Am I missing something here, or was the coroner just wrong in thinking the digoxin caused her to fall off that cliff?"

Ron leaned back in his chair.

"I don't like saying that a colleague made a mistake because I wasn't there. What I can say is that with the technology available at the time, any lab could have made a mistake and identified digoxin in her blood. All they had back then was some pretty sophisticated chemistry and the color of the result.

"There's also the problem that people tend to find what they expect to find. The coroner knew the woman practiced holistic medicine, and foxglove, the source of digoxin, was one of the main players in holistic medicine. If the coroner only asked the lab to test for digoxin, it's possible that the lab misidentified what was in the woman's system.

"Digoxin is a cardiac glycoside and there are a bunch of related compounds that only differ slightly in chemistry. A lot of plants produce them as a defense against predators. Oleander is one. Monarch butterflies don't produce them, but they store them after the caterpillar eats milkweed leaves. Cane toads make a similar chemical that's pretty toxic. The most common related compound is estradiol, the main female hormone that regulates a woman's menstrual and estrus cycles, so the woman would have had that in her system. Depending upon the test method and the skill of the technician, any one of those compounds could be misinterpreted as digoxin."

I shook my head.

"No wonder Harry couldn't solve this case. He did ask the coroner to save the woman's blood and tissue samples indefinitely. If you still have them, would it be possible to run the test again?"

Ron nodded.

"Yes, if we still have them. Our mass spectrometer has reference overlays for thousands of different compounds. It'll be just a matter of getting the graphical output from the sample and then having the computer compare the output to the same output for the reference samples. The computer program might take a while, but I'll be about ninety-nine percent confidant of the results."

I gave Ron the case number and then went back to my desk. All I could do now was wait.

}|{

Rochelle hadn't waited though. She'd been busy looking up what she could find about Dr. Hodges. When I asked her why since it wasn't likely he'd been involved, she shrugged.

"I didn't have anything else to do and it was information we might find at least interesting. It is interesting.

"Dr. Hodges didn't just move to UT Chattanooga to teach. He taught zoology there, but he also got a Federal grant to study cane toads in Florida. Cane toads are native to Central and South America and they control insect populations that affect the crops there. They were introduced into Puerto Rico to control the insects in the sugar cane fields and it worked, so they were introduced to Florida.

"The cane toads didn't do much in Florida except multiply and take food from native wildlife because they had no natural predators in Florida. Other animals won't eat them because they excrete a poison on their skin. It's strong enough to kill a dog if the dog eats one. Florida declared them to be an environmental disaster. Dr. Hodges was studying them in an attempt to find a way to kill them without harming the local wildlife.

"Anyway, he wrote a book about his study. I found it on Amazon and it'll be here tomorrow."

I smiled because Ron had told me cane toads secreted a substance that could have been misidentified as digoxin. Maybe Dr. Hodges was our killer after all. I wondered if Rochelle had the same idea.

"And this is going to help us how?"

Rochelle dashed my theory in about five seconds.

"Well, Dr. Hodges can't be our killer since he was already dead when Maxine died. I found a news article about him and his obituary. He killed himself in 1984 by taking an overdose of sleeping pills. At least maybe I'll be able to get some insight into his personality through his writing. He doesn't sound like a very exciting man. He also was probably messed up in the head if he killed himself.

"Maybe that's why Maxine had the affair. She wanted some excitement in her life. Maybe Dr. Hodges was exciting when he was her college professor, but didn't turn out to be very exciting once they were married.

"College professors have to publish regularly in order to keep the Federal Grant money coming in. If he was like the professors I know, he spent most of his time doing research and then writing up that research for the professional magazines. If he was doing that, he probably wasn't doing much with Maxine. Maxine had the affair so Dr. Hodges would divorce her. She married Mr. Barlow and thought she was set for life.

"Then, Maxine found out about Diane and was getting ready to divorce Mr. Barlow. She already knew how the civil court system works, and I'm sure that at her age she wouldn't have settled for nothing this time. She was running out of time to have kids and a lot of men get married to start a family. She'd have asked for alimony and at least half of what they owned so she'd have some security in case she didn't find another husband. If Mr. Barlow knew about an impending divorce, he might have killed her to avoid losing everything he'd worked so hard to get. Diane was just icing on the cake."

That made more sense to me than Diane being the killer. Maxine had already been married to one man who put his work ahead of her. If she'd found out she'd made a mistake with Mr. Barlow, she might have decided to divorce him. He'd just beaten her to the punch with the life insurance policy he took out on her a little over a year prior to her death. By killing her, he'd have made sure she wasn't going to divorce him and cost him his money. If he managed to get away with it, he'd also have ended up eight hundred thousand richer.

}|{

There's a unique malady that affects police detectives. I call it "case blindness." It happens when a detective has a suspect but not a lot of evidence, and needs to get that suspect into custody. That's why you'll see on reality TV where detectives put in thirty-six or more hours on a case without taking a break. They're so involved in the case they sort of forget about everything else including the need to eat and sleep.

Since I met Rochelle, I've found that the same thing affects writers as well. They'll get started on a plot and then get stuck by something. When that happens, they'll spend hours upon hours trying to think their way out of the corner they've written themselves into and then more hours writing what they've figured out.

Both Rochelle and I were experiencing that same thing. We had a suspect in Mr. Barlow and all the evidence, both real and logical, pointed to him as the killer. We were both trying to figure out how to link him with the murder, but over the past several days, nothing seemed to work.

It doesn't happen often, but when it does, we don't stay up and try to think. Instead, we go to bed and then toss and turn half the night trying to think. As a result, sex is pretty much out of the question. We've tried having sex to get the case off our minds, but it never works.

I'm not sure what time Rochelle finally fell asleep, but I know if was after 3:00 AM because that's the last time I remember looking at the clock radio beside our bed and she was still awake then.

}|{

It was good that that morning was a Saturday because we could both sleep in. It was bad that that morning was a Saturday because we'd be going through he same thing until Monday morning when we could maybe get some more information.

The only highlight of that weekend was when Amazon delivered the book Rochelle had ordered.

After she unwrapped it, she opened the front cover and then sucked in her breath. I asked her what was wrong. She pushed the book in front of me and pointed to the title and publishing information.

There, under everything else was "Dedicated to Maxine."

Rochelle looked at me.

"He still loved her, didn't he?"

"Looks like it to me, but if he did, why didn't he put up a fight over the divorce?"

Rochelle frowned.

"Maybe I'll find that out when I read his book. I wrote a novel sort of along those lines once when I was just starting out. It was when I thought I was going to be a romance writer. The guy loved the woman so much that when she told him she was leaving him, he let her go so she could be happy again. It even made me cry and the publisher loved it. It was the only romance novel I wrote that he liked though. That's why I switched to murder mysteries."

}|{

After half an hour, Rochelle closed the book.

"I'm starting to get a headache from reading this."

I smiled.

"I take it you're not finding out much about Dr. Hodges?"

"No, I'm finding out a lot about him. I'm just tired of trying to sound out all the names of toads and plants and bugs and everything else written in Latin and then reading further to figure out what he's talking about.

"What I'm pretty sure of is that Dr. Hodges was pretty much dedicated to his job. It's the way he writes.

"Most of his writing sounds like a college textbook. It's dull and without even a tiny bit of speculation or humor. When he makes a discovery about something, like when he compared the modern cane toad to a fossil specimen from Columbia and found them to be identical, his writing changes. He goes from being a college professor to sounding like what he figured out is really exciting to him.

"He does the same when he's describing the life cycle of a cane toad. He changes from those typical intellectual multi-syllable words to short words.

"To me, what that means is he was totally involved in his research until he'd reached a conclusion of some sort. Then he writes like you talk when you've solved a case.

"It's no wonder Maxine wanted out of the marriage. I can't imagine living with a man who could only talk about his work. She must have felt like she was just an afterthought in his life, just a footnote that he wrote down and then forgot about.

"I don't think he forgot about her though. He wouldn't have dedicated his book to her if he had. I think he just didn't know how to show her that he loved her. I've seen that in some of my old college professors. Their brains don't work like most people. They're always thinking about their work and everything else sort of runs on autopilot in the background.

"I had one professor whose thing was the Oxfordian Theory of Shakespeare Authorship. He taught my classical literature class and he knew his stuff, but his lectures would put you to sleep until when he started lecturing about Shakespeare. With Shakespeare, he launched into a series of lectures describing how Shakespeare's writing is really the writing of a group of other authors.

"When he got started on Shakespeare, his lectures were animated with a lot of hand waving and the look on his face was one of real excitement. I know one other professor who said that's all Dr. Winston ever thought about.

"He was supposedly so occupied with that theory that... well, I never witnessed it, but some of the male students did. He'd go to the restroom and pee in a trashcan thinking he was standing in front of a urinal. His brain found the right room. It just didn't find the right place in the room because he was thinking about something else.

"I could believe that was true because he always wore the same tan suit, and there were stains in the crotch of the pants. Evidently his brain didn't tell him to shake once he finished or to have his suit cleaned once in a while. It was kind of funny and kind of sad at the same time."

Rochelle sighed.

"I guess we're no closer than we were before, are we?"

"Well, if Dr. Hodges was still alive, I'd say he might have had the same motive I talked about before. If he loved her, he wouldn't have wanted her to be with another man. Since he died before Maxine, that pretty much eliminates him as a suspect.

"When I talked to Ron this morning, he said if Maxine had taken enough digoxin to cause her to fall off that cliff, she probably wouldn't have been walking a trail in the first place. Then he said it was possible that the lab that tested her tissue samples might have made a mistake. He said there are a lot of compounds that are very similar to digoxin and that the technology at the time depended upon the technician's skill to determine what a compound really is.

"He's looking for the samples from Maxine's autopsy and if he finds them, he'll send them for testing again. It might not tell us anything, but it's something we can try."

}|{

We spent the rest of the weekend trying to forget about the case but we weren't successful. On Sunday, I used the rough location in Harry's report and Google Earth to find an approximate GPS location for the cliff. Once I had that, Rochelle and I drove out to Ijam Nature Center and walk the trail closest to where Maxine fell to her death. When the GPS unit said we were close, we were standing in front of a sign that read, "Danger Do Not Enter" and with one of those stick figures falling off a cliff. It looked to me as if somebody had been keeping the trail clear in spite of the sign.

When Rochelle and I walked around the sign and followed the trail, it led to the edge of a cliff. I cautiously looked down over the edge and saw a bunch of broken rocks that jutted up from the face of the cliff. Maxine had fallen of this cliff and those jutting rocks were what had killed her.

I wondered how long that trail to the cliff had been there, so we walked back to the main building and asked the park ranger. She shook her head.

"I don't know for sure. All I know is it was there in 1985 because my Girl Scout Troop hiked up there once. The Girl Scout Leader wouldn't let us walk up to the cliff because she said a man had slipped and fallen there a few years before that.

"I didn't start working here until 2000, but the trail sign was up then. In training, they told us the trail had been closed since 1988 because a woman fell to her death there the year before. The city was afraid if someone else fell off that cliff, the city would be sued. The sign didn't stop people from walking up there, but at least the city can say the people were warned."

While I was talking with the park ranger, Rochelle had been looking at a brochure about the nature center. She asked the park ranger where the trail we'd been walking ended up. The park ranger turned to a big map on the wall behind her and pointed to an opening in the trees.

"It ends here, just off Seveirville Pike. At one time, or so I'm told, there was an RV campsite there and some of the campers started the trail from there. It closed up in 1990 when gas prices went through the roof. People couldn't afford to drive their RVs and the campground didn't survive the summer. You can still see the foundation of the office from the end of the trail, but that's about all that's left."

I thanked the ranger and then Rochelle and I walked back to our car. After we drove out of the parking lot, Rochelle asked, "Are you thinking what I'm thinking?"

"Well, if you're thinking that Maxine took that same trail and then walked up to the cliff and fell off, I'm thinking the same thing. She wouldn't have had to fight her way through the trees and brush because the short trail to the cliff was already there."

Rochelle grinned.

"And if somebody knew she was going there, they could have pushed her off the cliff."

"Yes, but the big question is still who. My bet is still on Mr. Barlow, but there's not even a tiny shred of actual evidence that ties him to her falling. It's the same with Diane. Either one or both of them could have killed her that way, but they both have alibis that would be really hard to break in court. Dr. Hodges maybe had a motive, but he was dead before Maxine fell off the cliff, so he couldn't have pushed her off. Ron said it wasn't likely that Maxine would have wanted to walk that far if she'd taken too much digoxin, so that leaves us with the same two possibilities we started with. Either Maxine just walked up to that cliff and fell over, or somebody as yet unknown pushed her.

"Harry talked to several people who knew the Barlows and none of them knew of anybody they were having a problem with. I don't know where else to look."

}|{

By Sunday night, Rochelle and I had resigned ourselves to the reality that we probably weren't going to solve this case. On Monday morning when I got to my desk, that changed.

There was a voice message on my desk phone to call Ron. I made the call and he said I needed to come down to his office. When I got there, he was smiling.

"Rich, I had a tech look for your samples and she found them. By Saturday morning the blood sample was thawed so I sent it to Forensics for testing. I got the test results this morning.

"The original samples were sent to the TBI lab in Chattanooga because we didn't have a way to test them back then. As you already know, those tests said her blood and tissue samples contained digoxin at high concentrations.

"We did the second test here with our mass spectrometer and what our results show is that it wasn't digoxin. It was just the normal estradiol every woman of her age has in her blood. I thought it odd that the TBI lab would have made such an error because estradiol is pretty easy to detect since it's so common.

"When a lab makes a mistake like that, it can put everything that lab does open to question, including some cases I've ruled cause of death for. I called the TBI forensics lab and asked them if they had a list of cases a technician by the name of Roberta Hodges had done the testing for. I wanted so see if I needed to check any of my past cases.

"The lab manager told me --"

I cut Ron off.

"What did you say her name was?"

"Roberta Hodges. Why?"

"That's the last name of a man my victim was once married to. What did they have to say about her?"

Ron handed me a page of paper.

"They sent me a list of cases and this short bio. She didn't work on any cases for this office except for yours. Odd that she'd have made such a simple mistake. She has a master's degree in organic chemistry. She should have been able to do that test with her eyes closed.

"It's also odd that she even did the testing. She was the lab supervisor when the lab got the test request and the samples. Lab supervisors exist to manage the workload of their staff and to manage budgets. Any lab supervisor would hand off a test request to a technician."

I asked Ron if he had a phone number for her but he shook his head.

"She retired in 2011. The forwarding address she gave is in Chattanooga. It's on the bio I gave you."

As I've said before, I don't believe in coincidences. As soon as I got back to my desk, I called Rochelle and asked her to find out a much about Roberta Hodges as she could. I also said she might be living in Chattanooga now.

As soon as I hung up, I looked in the Tennessee DMV database for her name.

Roberta Hodges had renewed her driver's license in 2020 and was still using the last name of Hodges so apparently she was still single. The address didn't match the address Ron had given me, but people change addresses all the time. If Rochelle confirmed what I was thinking, I intended to drive to Chattanooga to talk to her and I'd check both places.

I printed off the DMV records and then went home to see if Rochelle had managed to find out anything about Roberta.

Rochelle grinned when I walked in the door.

"Found her, and you won't believe what I found.

"I found her birth announcement. She was born in Chattanooga and Roberta is Dr. Hodges little sister. He was ten when she was born."

"Well that explains why they have the same last name. Anything else?"

Rochelle grinned again.

"There's a lot more. Apparently the Hodges family was quite the thing in Chattanooga. Her father was a high school math and chemistry teacher and her mother taught high school Latin, French, and Spanish. There were a lot of kids who had them as teachers, and they were working on their third generation of kids when they retired.

"I found an article about the retirement party the high school had for them. It included a bio for both of them as well as what happened to their two kids. Malcomb Hodges got his Ph. D. in Zoology like we already knew. Roberta got a master's in organic chemistry and went to work for the TBI forensics lab in Chattanooga.

"That has to be the same Roberta Hodges, doesn't it?"

"Yes, and I need to have a talk with her tomorrow."

}|{

The next morning I stopped by my desk and called the Chief of Police in Chattanooga to tell him I was coming and why. We've developed a relationship over the years but it's not polite to go snooping in another department's back yard without telling them why and what you're looking for. He said he was glad to hear from me and offered any help I needed.

By nine, I was on the road, and I pulled into Chattanooga at about eleven. When I checked the address Ron had given me, the woman who answered the door was about forty and too young to be Roberta. I asked her if she knew of a Roberta Hodges and she said no. I apologized for interrupting her day and drove to the address on Roberta's last driver's license.

The woman who answered the door was the woman on Roberta's driver's license picture. I asked if she was Roberta Hodges and she said she was. I started telling her the story I'd hoped would get her to give me enough information to arrest her, starting by introducing myself.

"I'm detective Richard Owens of the Knoxville Police Department. The reason I'm here is I'm working the case of an older professor of Zoology at UT Knoxville who seems to have disappeared about six months ago. I've talked to all the current professors in the department and they didn't know much about him. Apparently he kept to himself most of the time and didn't have any friends. Two of the retired professors I talked to said that at one time, this professor did seem to be friends with a Dr. Malcomb Hodges. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find that professor and I can't find Dr. Hodges either.

"I was able to come up with a name for his sister. That name is Roberta Hodges and I'm hoping you are the same Roberta Hodges. All I need from you is where I can find Dr. Hodges."

The woman had been frowning at me the whole time, but as soon as I'd said "Dr. Malcomb Hodges", that frown got deeper.

"Detective, I am Dr. Hodges sister, but you aren't going to find him. He's dead. His ex-wife killed him."

I hoped my look of shock looked genuine.

"Dead... I mean I know he was getting up there in age, but I thought surely he'd still be alive. When did he die?"

Roberta was still frowning.

"You'd better come inside before my neighbors notice us standing out here."

}|{

Her living room looked like the furniture had been there for at least since before WWII. It had that look anyway. Everything that wasn't upholstered in some floral pattern looked like real wood and had carved wood accents. The flowered rug on the floor was so old it was showing wear spots in front of the chair and couch. Evidently Roberta didn't move the furniture very often.

Once we sat down, I asked Roberta again when Dr. Hodges died. She sounded mad when she answered.

"He died on June 20, 1983, ten years after that harlot forced him to divorce her."

I was still trying my best to play like I was flabbergasted.

"If she wanted the divorce, why did she kill him?"

Roberta shook her head.

"She didn't actually shoot or stab him but she might as well have. She told him she was having an affair with another man. Malcomb didn't have any choice but to divorce her. It hurt his career, but not as much as if he'd let her keep doing it. That would have made him the laughingstock of his department.

"He moved back to Chattanooga after the divorce and started teaching and doing research. I'd bought a house by then, so he moved in with me and we lived together."

For the first time, I saw her show an emotion other than pure hatred. She wiped a tear from her right eye.

"I watched my brother go from a man hurt by the woman he loved to a man who decided life wasn't worth living. I tried to get him to go to a psychiatrist but he said he had to finish his research and write his book. He did get both finished in 1978. After that, Malcomb didn't seem to care about anything. He still taught and did a little research, but he was just going through the motions.

"Our parents both died that year and we inherited their house. I thought that if we moved back here, it would be like before, but it just made him worse. One night that June he took a whole bottle of sleeping pills. I found him in bed the next morning. He didn't leave a note or anything, but I knew why he did it. It was that harlot Maxine. He never got over her. She killed him just the same as if she'd stabbed a knife through his heart."

I had to be careful here so I didn't warn her what was coming.

"Well, I didn't know any of this. Do you know what happened to this woman?"

Roberta smiled.

"Yes I do. She fell off a cliff because she took too much digoxin. It served her right after what she did to Malcomb."

I flipped a couple pages of my notebook.

"You know it's odd that you would say that. I know about Dr. Hodges divorce and about Maxine, but the coroner's report said Maxine had a heart attack and that caused her to fall. What leads you to think she'd taken too much digoxin, whatever that is?"

For the first time, Roberta's face showed a little concern and instead of snapping back at me with her answer, she waited almost a full minute.

"I know because I was working at the TBI forensics lab and I did the testing on her blood and tissue samples. She had enough digoxin in her system to kill her if she hadn't fallen off that cliff. Digoxin slows down your heart rate. It wouldn't surprise me if she fainted and fell off the cliff."

I pushed a little harder then.

"I've worked a lot with our lab technicians in Knoxville and they're not allowed to do any work on any case involving someone they know personally. How is it that you got assigned to do the testing? Didn't your supervisor see the name on the request? I saw the request and her name was plainly typed as Maxine Hodges Barlow. I'd think he'd have at least asked you if you were related since you both shared the name of Hodges."

Roberta smiled then.

"I was the lab supervisor so I assigned it to myself. I wanted to see how that whore died."

I frowned then.

"Miss Hodges, there's one other thing that has me concerned about you. I've seen the test request and there was no mention of what caused Mrs. Barlow's death. It was only a request to test her blood and tissue samples for any abnormal chemicals present. How is it that you know that she fell off a cliff?

Her answer was that she'd read it in the newspaper. I was pretty certain that such a simple crime wouldn't have found its way to a Chattanooga newspaper.

I thought I had enough for an arrest so I thanked her for her time and then left. I don't go anywhere though. I just parked my car in her drive so she couldn't get out and then called the Chattanooga police chief. Once the two officers arrested her and took her to holding, I drove to the station to continue our conversation.

That conversation lasted three hours, and not once did Roberta show any sign of remorse that Maxine had died. In fact, she seemed to smile anytime I mentioned it.

An hour after that conversation, I had my arrest warrant and had two officers from the Knoxville Police Department on the way to take her back to Knoxville.

}|{

When I got home, Rochelle asked me what happened. I had to smile.

"If it hadn't been for the fact that she did the testing of Maxine's tissue and blood samples, she'd have gotten away with murder.

"What happened is what you said after you read the book dedication. Dr. Hodges loved Maxine and he kept loving her after the divorce. He moved back to Chattanooga to get away from her and he moved in with his sister, Roberta. It didn't help him. According to Roberta he suffered from depression anytime he wasn't teaching or working on his cane toad project. Once the book was finished all he had was teaching.

"Their parents both died then and that was pretty much the final straw. He killed himself because he missed Maxine. That doesn't seem like a very good reason, but like you said, he wasn't a normal man.

"Roberta isn't a normal woman either. She never married because she was taking care of Dr. Hodges. If you ask me, I think she looked up to him as more of a father than a brother. I got that feeling when she talked about him.

"When Dr. Hodges died, Roberta knew it was because of Maxine and she decided to make things right, or at least what she thought would be right. That would be by killing Maxine. It only took her two months to figure out how.

"She hired a private investigator to find out where Maxine went every day and it was that private investigator who told Roberta about the Barlow camping trips. Apparently they went RV camping every weekend. Harry didn't know that, but I don't suppose Mr. Barlow volunteered that information because of what he was doing with Diane during those camping trips.

"That same private detective also followed Maxine to a health food store. The next day, Roberta went to the store and said she was a close friend of Maxine's and that Maxine told her if she wanted to feel great, she should take the same herbal supplements. Roberta asked the clerk if she remembered what Maxine usually bought and the clerk did. Roberta walked out of the store with a sack full of stuff. One box in that sack was foxglove powder. That's how Roberta came up with the idea of blaming digoxin.

"The next Sunday, Roberta drove to the RV park and watched until Maxine started up that trail. She waited a few minutes and then started following her. She caught up with Maxine when Maxine was standing in front of the sign we saw.

"Roberta told Maxine she was new to the area and asked Maxine why the sign was there. Maxine said there was a cliff at the end and a couple people had fallen to their deaths. Roberta asked Maxine if she'd show her. When Maxine said she was too afraid, Roberta pulled out a butcher knife she had in her purse and forced Maxine to the edge of the cliff and then pushed her off.

"She told me all that like she was describing the process of making a cake. She even smiled when she told me she pushed Maxine off the cliff. She said she leaned over and watched Maxine bounce off the rocks before she landed at the bottom."

"I asked her if she thought Dr. Hodges would think she'd done the right thing. She just sneered at me.

"She made my brother kill himself so I killed her. I just wish it had taken longer for her to die. It took my brother ten years. She should have had to suffer like he did, but she was dead after only a few minutes."

Rochelle said it sounded like Roberta was crazy and she'd probably plea insanity in order to not be convicted of murder. I shook my head.

"The DA won't let her get away with that for one reason. Roberta worked for the TBI forensics lab in Chattanooga and she knew that the coroner in Knoxville usually sent any samples he needed tested to the TBI lab in Chattanooga. She was expecting a request involving Maxine's death and since she was the lab supervisor, all requests went through her.

"She waited until she got the request from the Knoxville coroner and supposedly did the test herself. I don't believe that part of her story. What I think is she knew Maxine took foxglove powder and that foxglove powder is a source of digoxin. She just waited a few days and then wrote a report stating that Maxine had a high level of digoxin in her blood. She knew that would give the coroner a reason for Maxine to fall off the cliff.

"I'm going to have Ron ask the lab in Chattanooga if they still have any raw test results, but I doubt they do. It doesn't matter anyway. The fact that Roberta actively looked for the test request and then assigned it to herself rather than to a technician shows that she was of sound enough mind to cover up the murder."

"So what will happen to her? She's got to be over seventy by now."

"She's seventy-five. I talked to the DA about that, and he wants to prosecute. She'll sit in a holding cell tonight and tomorrow I'll give her and her lawyer a choice. She can either write out a confession and plead guilty to second degree murder, or she can stand trial for the first-degree murder of Maxine Barlow. It really doesn't matter which at this point. She'll get what amounts to life in prison for either. It'll be minimum security, but it'll still be prison."

Rochelle sighed.

"Just when I think I've heard it all, something like this comes along. I mean, if I had a brother I'd love him, but I wouldn't kill for him. That's just not normal."

I nodded.

"No, it isn't, but like you said about Dr. Hodges, Roberta isn't normal either, or at least she didn't seem very normal to me. I think she knows that pushing Maxine off that cliff was wrong, but in her mind it was justified because of what she blamed Maxine for doing to Dr. Hodges.

"Roberta is a very intelligent woman. What I think is that some very intelligent people are that way because they've developed the parts of their brain that lets them do the job they do. The problem they have is the part of their brain that controls emotions and what's right and what's wrong hasn't really developed much since they were kids.

"That's basically what Roberta did. To her, logically, Maxine had to die to pay for what she'd done to Dr. Hodges. The fact that it was illegal and immoral to take another life never occurred to her. Killing Maxine was just something that had to be done to set things right again. She just did what she'd do in any chemistry analysis. She did what was needed to get the result she was looking for. To her, it was like when you add something to one of your novels to make the story seem real. You don't think about if it's right or wrong to add it, you just do because it makes logical sense to you and will do the same to a reader."

Rochelle grinned.

"Well you're pretty smart. Now that this is over, think you could figure out a way to set me right again. I've been feeling really not right for the last couple days."

}|{

Well, I did tease Rochelle a little by asking if she meant she wanted to go out for dinner. She smiled and said that would be nice, but it wasn't what she was talking about.

I frowned and said I wasn't sure what she meant.

Rochelle grinned and pulled up her tank top and then her bra cups.

"See how flat my nipples are? They don't feel right, not right at all, and..."

Rochelle unzipped her shorts and let them fall to her knees, then rolled the thong panty down her hips and thighs.

"... I don't feel right here either. It's like everything has gone to sleep on me and I need it to wake up."

"You don't want dinner first?"

"Dinner can wait. I can't."

Well, like I said before, detectives and mystery writers both suffer from case blindness. I spent half an hour going over the details of how to get Rochelle's nipples to stand up and how to get her hair-fringed lips all warm, soft, swollen, and wet. I also spent that half-hour trying to keep Rochelle from taking me far enough that I'd need some recharge time. What that woman can do with her soft, slender fingers and her warm, wet mouth and tongue would test any man's ability to hold out. I did manage to hold on though until Rochelle straddled me, draped her big breasts in my face, and then eased my cock inside her.

I pretty much let Rochelle drive that first time, though when I could tell she was getting close, I helped a little. Well, I didn't help because she needed help. I had to help her so she came at about the same time I did. Gently pinching her nipples between my teeth and one fingertip on her swollen clit seemed to work quite well.

When Rochelle stopped jerking her hips up and down over my cock and then mashed her heavy breasts into my chest, she nibbled my ear.

"I'm starting to feel right again, but I think I need more work before I'm all better."

Well, it wasn't really work, but... well let's just say I didn't need anything to help me sleep that night. I think it must have been the second time that did it. Once in a while, Rochelle gets creative. I thought it was great when she turned around and impaled herself on my cock after she'd jacked it hard again. It was great when she leaned back with her back on my chest. It was great when she pulled my right hand down to her mound and my left hand to her nipples.

I couldn't do much besides just lie there under her, but Rochelle didn't need me to do much. She just kept arching her back and then relaxing, arching her back and relaxing. I wasn't inside her very deep, that my cock slipping back and forth quickly had me trying to hold out again. Thankfully, she didn't need much by then. Just a few minutes of pinching her nipples and rubbing her clit put us both over the edge.

}|{

Roberta opted to confess to second-degree murder and she got twenty-five years in the minimum-security section of the Debra K. Johnson Rehabilitation Center in Nashville. Because of her age and assuming she doesn't get into any problems in prison, she'll be eligible for parole in 2030. She'll be eighty by then, so I imagine she'll get parole if she's still alive. If she makes it to 2030, she'll still have to meet with a parole officer on a weekly basis so she'll still be in what amounts to prison. She'll just be staying in her home instead of behind bars.

}|{

I'm looking for our next case. Harry's files still have a bunch left. Most people don't know that the average rate of solving murder cases is about fifty percent. That's because what they see on TV and the Internet are the cases that are solved. Most of those unsolved cases are gang related, even the cases dating back to WWII. Those will probably never be solved. Either the killers and anybody else who knows something about the case are already dead as a result of one gang taking revenge on another gang, or because they were caught and sentenced to prison for some other crime.

There are several cases though that make the headlines for a day or so but then disappear from view because of the lack of evidence or witnesses. Those are the cases that can sometimes be solved by a fresh set of eyes and the use of modern technology.

One such case caught my eye when I was looking through Harry's files.

On January 1, 1997, Miss Deborah Chastaine, age thirty-five, was found dead in the kitchen of her home in the suburb of Arminda. The cause of her death was a gunshot delivered to the upper right side of her head. During autopsy, one bullet was recovered from inside her skull just below her left ear. It was severely damaged as it was pure lead and therefore very soft. There were extensive powder burns around the bullet entrance indicating the gunshot was delivered with the gun barrel either touching her head or at least very close.

She was found by a Knoxville patrol officer responding to an anonymous 911 call. The caller just stated that he thought he heard a gunshot at about midnight that morning. Every New Year's Eve, most police departments receive that same type of call. Almost always, the call ends up being just some half-drunk partygoers shooting off a few fireworks. The patrol officer drove to the address thinking he'd probably find at least a couple people with hangovers from a New Year's Eve party.

Instead, he found Miss Chastaine lying on her face on her kitchen floor in a pool of blood. The patrol officer backed out of the house and called for a detective and the Coroner, then taped off the area.

The detective who handled the investigation, Harry London, didn't have much to go on. The house showed no signs of forced entry. The house was on a private drive off Legg Lane and was surrounded by trees. There were half a dozen other houses around, but when Harry canvassed the area, none of the residents said they'd seen anybody drive up the lane and they hadn't heard a gunshot.

The coroner's autopsy report also didn't yield much. The recovered bullet had mushroomed pretty badly on impact with the woman's skull. There were some traces of rifling still left though they were just faint impressions in the edges of the mushroomed tip. As a result of the expansion of the small bullet when it entered the woman's skull, it was difficult to determine the caliber of the weapon. The best the firearm's technician could do was measure what remained of the base of the bullet. He determined the diameter of the bullet would have been about 0.31 inches. He found no known cartridges with bullets of that diameter.

The powder burn on the woman's skull was also different than any the coroner had seen before. It wasn't the typical arrangement of burned spots typical of close-range powder stippling. It also didn't exhibit any impression from a gun barrel that is typical when the shot is delivered by holding the barrel against the victim's head. It was a definite circular pattern and the burning was severe enough the woman's hair and scalp looked as if they'd been burned away.

There was no weapon found at the crime scene which along with the apparent angle of the bullet through her head indicated the woman's death was not self-inflicted. The coroner ruled it as a murder by gunshot.

Time of death was questionable. The coroner ruled the time of death to be between one and seven days before Miss Chastaine's body was found. The reason for the large time spread was that the propane furnace had been turned off so the interior of the house was basically the same temperature as the outside air.

That temperature had ranged between a high of 40F and a low of 28F over the week before the body was found. The blood pool also had not completely dried and normally that would indicate time of death to be only a few hours before the body was found. The coroner attributed that to the high humidity caused by some heavy rain during that same time period and the lack of heat in the house that would have dried the air had the furnace been in operation.

The coroner's crime scene techs had dusted most of the house for fingerprints, all they found were Miss Chastaine's fingerprints.

Harry's investigation determined that Miss Chastaine was an outside salesperson for a medical equipment supply company in Knoxville. Her job was to call on the hospitals, doctors, dentists, and veterinarians in the area to sell them medical equipment sold by the company. When he questioned her supervisor and co-workers they all said she was a successful saleswoman who got along well with everybody. They didn't know of anyone who would want to hurt her, but said she kept her professional life separate from her personal life. They'd never known her to say anything about anything other than a professional relationship with any of her co-workers or with any of her clients.

After three months of talking to people and getting nowhere, Harry decided he wasn't going to find anything more, so he filed the case in his cold case file.

I think Rochelle will find the case right up her alley, so I'll copy the file and take it home for her.