So lost, p.12
So Lost, page 12
His voice took on a tone of righteous anger as he spoke, and his jaw jutted out pridefully.
“Could you elaborate on that?” Faith asked.
“Certainly,” he said, pleased at a chance to tell someone else how unfairly he had been treated. “I was injured in a workplace accident this past December. I worked for the Parks and Recreation Department for the City of Houston. On December eighth, I fell from a tree in Bayou Park and fractured three vertebrae in my lower back. I also suffered a dislocated hip and a dislocated vertebra in my neck. Marvin Prescott was among the first responders who took me to the hospital. I want to mention that he performed his job as a paramedic in an exemplary fashion.”
He delivered this judgment with the air of a king bestowing a favor on a commoner, and Faith wondered if he was usually this pompous or if he thought it helped his case to seem dignified.
“They took me to Houston Regional, which wasn’t the nearest hospital but the one with whom they were contracted. I mentioned that to my lawyer, as well as my congressman. I find it reprehensible that our healthcare in this country should be managed by a greedy private sector with little oversight.”
“What happened after you reached the hospital?” Faith asked.
He took a deep breath and continued, “I was seen by Dr. Barbara Ames. As soon as I met her, I was immediately struck by the utter lack of sensitivity and compassion she showed. I understand that doctors see many patients in the course of their work, but that does not give them the right to treat a patient like a simple number. I was in great pain and great fear, and she showed no concern at all for my well-being, either mental or physical.”
“So you don’t feel you were provided adequate care?”
“Of course not,” he replied. “That was the nature of my legal complaint against Dr. Ames.”
He spoke with an imperious tone, but behind his grandiosity, Faith could still detect a hint of fear. “Why do you feel you lost the case?”
“That lawyer,” he said. His face twisted up, and for the first time, Faith saw a sign of real hate in his eyes. “That snake Hucksley. He lied about me. He lied about my medical history and claimed that I was attempting to defraud the insurance company.”
“What lies did he tell?” Michael asked.
Instead of answering, Hunt lifted his pant legs up, revealing pale, severely atrophied calves. “Look at these! Do these look fake to you?”
The injury was real. Very real. Certainly Hunt wasn’t lifting any bodies himself. If he didn’t continue to flick his eyes right and left between the two agents and Faith couldn’t detect the fear in his eyes, she would dismiss him as a suspect, but he was clearly guilty of something.
That brought Faith back to the thought that more than one person was working together to murder these victims. Hunt had experience as a funeral home director working with these cemeteries. He could have been the mastermind and had help with the legwork.
She wasn’t ready to commit to that suspicion yet, but she decided to pursue that line of questioning. “Mr. Hunt, you ran the Bellaire Funeral Home and Mortuary for…” she made a show of checking her notes, “…nineteen years. Is that correct?”
“Twenty-three,” he said. “I worked there for twenty-five, and after two years, I was basically running the place. Jack officially handed me the keys after six years, but I ran the show for years before that.”
“What made you decide to leave the funeral home and work for the Parks and Recreation Department?”
His eyes took on a faraway look, and Faith couldn’t tell if it was forced or not. “One can only see so much death, Special Agent.”
I wonder, she thought.
“You take a lot of pride in your work,” Michael said.
Hunt drew himself up as much as he could. “I do. The measure of a man is the amount of work he can accomplish, and I take a great deal of pride in the work I was able to accomplish.”
“It must have hurt you terribly when your injury prevented you from working.”
“Of course it hurt me!” Hunt exclaimed. “Look at me! Sitting around in a trailer, living off of government funds. That’s no life.” He shook his head. “No life at all.”
“I can only imagine how angry you must have felt toward William Hucksley and Dr. Ames,” Faith said. “What I don’t understand is why you were angry at Marvin Prescott.”
His lips turned down in a frown. “I don’t know if I’m angry at Marvin Prescott,” he said. “But he testified against me as a witness. He claimed that the nature of my injury was such that it was untreatable, and the results I wanted weren’t achievable.”
“What results did you want?”
“What do you think?” he said, snarling at Michael. “I want to walk again! I want to stand on my own two feet!”
Tears streamed down his eyes, and Faith felt a moment of pity for him. She recalled the devastation she felt when Jethro Trammell temporarily paralyzed her. She had spiraled into a depression that had nearly cost her her job and her friendships. It might still have cost her her boyfriend. She couldn’t imagine what she would do if she hadn’t recovered.
How far would this proud, once strong man go?
“So you didn’t get the results you wanted,” Faith said, “in the hospital or in the courtroom. What did you do about it?”
His eyes grew shifty again. “What do you mean?”
She shrugged. “Well, you don’t seem like the kind of person to just let something like that happen to you. You must have wanted to do something to get back at the people who hurt you like this.”
“I didn’t kill them!” he exclaimed. He chuckled. “Even if I wanted to, what would I do? It’s not like I’m going to win a wrestling match.”
She leaned forward and rested her elbows on her knees. “No,” she said, “but maybe you had help.”
He blinked and looked between the two agents. “What are you suggesting, Special Agent?”
“Maybe you had help. You’re a smart guy, Jerry. You have to be to run a successful funeral home for over twenty years. You could come up with a plan, a good plan.”
“That’s right,” Michael said. “You know how cemeteries work. Maybe you had an inside man. Maybe you offered to pay them if they dug some holes for you and buried a few bags.”
Fear and anger washed over Hunt’s face in equal measure. The fear was genuine, but the anger was genuine as well. He was sincerely shocked at being accused of murder. “You have to be kidding me!” he shouted. “I didn’t murder anyone!”
“I’m not gonna lie,” Michael said, “you’re looking really good for those murders now.”
Hunt looked between the two agents and said, “Are you serious? You can’t be serious.”
Faith and Michael continued to stare silently at him. Turk got lazily to his feet, his tail switching slowly back and forth as he too kept his eyes on Hunt.
Hunt swallowed and said, “What do I need to do to prove to you that I’m not the one responsible?”
“Can you give us your whereabouts two nights ago?” Faith asked. “As well as Thursday the eleventh and Thursday the fourth?”
“I was here,” he said. “I did my shopping during the day on Thursday the eleventh, and then I came home. I can’t really do much outside.”
He was trying to play on their sympathy, but Faith didn’t buy it. She looked at his legs and said, “I believe that you struggle physically, Mr. Hunt, but your mind appears as sharp as ever. I’m sure you can find a way to do whatever you want to in life.”
“I didn’t kill them!” he insisted.
“Do you have anyone who can verify your whereabouts?”
“I…” He looked between the two of them fearfully. Finally, he took a deep breath and said, “Look, you guys are here about the murders, right?”
Faith nodded. “That’s right.”
“So you’re not investigating anything else?”
Faith and Michael shared a look. “If you have something to say, Mr. Hunt, start saying it,” Michael said. “Because like I said, you’re looking really good for at least conspiracy to commit murder.”
He leaned back in his wheelchair, and Faith could see him trembling. Finally, he said, “Look, I…” He tapped the arms of his chair and then finally sighed. “Okay. Look, my injury definitely exacerbated my condition, but that’s not why my legs are so skinny. Or rather, they’re a lot skinnier than they would be. I…” He took a deep breath. “I have ALS. I’ve been losing muscle mass little by little for the past eight years.”
Faith and Michael shared a look, this time of disappointment. “So you were attempting to defraud your insurance company.”
Hunt’s eyes flashed. “You don’t know what it’s like to have your entire life’s savings gone. These doctors, these insurance companies: all they do is take from people. They’re supposed to be here to help you, and they don’t, they just take, take, take. When I got ALS, my insurance company raised my rates by almost sixty percent. But you know what, Agent? I didn’t defraud them. Look at my medical records. Look at my insurance statements. I declared my disease. I did the right thing, the honest thing, all my life. When I got hurt, I expected them to do right by me like I did right by them for so long, and they didn’t. Do you know what they did? They refused to cover my medical care because they said that my injuries were due to a preexisting condition. I guess because my lower body was already atrophying, they didn’t think that having my back broken was reason enough to cover my hospital expenses.
“I didn’t sue Dr. Ames because I wanted to defraud her. I sued her because I’m now almost one million dollars in debt. Money I don’t have. I wasn’t going to get rich off of that judgment. I was going to be able to die in peace and not leave my children in debt because of me.
“But I didn’t kill her. I didn’t kill any of them. At the end of the day, it’s the insurance companies who are evil. I’d kill all of them before I went after a dime-store lawyer and a doctor.”
He fell silent, and a moment later, Faith said, “The problem, Hunt, is that you’ve now confirmed for me that you have motive. You’re desperate. You tried to win some money from Dr. Ames just to survive your medical debt, and thanks to Hucksley’s legal skill and Prescott’s testimony, you didn’t win that money. You have motive and you have experience with cemeteries. It’s obvious in your expression that you’re angry, and it’s obvious that you’re afraid.”
“I’m afraid because I don’t want to go to jail for fraud,” he said. “I don’t think I defrauded anyone, and I don’t want to go to prison.”
Technically speaking, he had attempted to defraud the court by filing a false malpractice claim to try to recover money to pay a debt, but Faith wasn’t here to pursue a fraud case. His attempt had failed, and Dr. Ames was no longer around to suffer from the effects of a malpractice case.
But she couldn’t take his word for it that he hadn’t killed anyone. He had motive and know-how. He needed an alibi or they would at least have to bring him in for questioning.
“Wait!” Hunt said, eyes flying open. “Gertie saw me! My neighbor! She sits on her porch sometimes at night. Two nights ago, she was out smoking a cigar on her porch, and I came out to talk to her a moment. She lives in the house to the left. Talk to her. She can confirm I was home after eleven at night!”
Faith looked at Michael, who stood and said, “Will Gertie be home right now?”
“Should be,” Hunt replied. “She doesn’t go out anymore. She’s old now, eighty or thereabouts. She’ll tell you I was here two nights ago.”
“I’ll be right back, in that case,” Michael said. “Special Agent Bold and K9 Unit Turk will hang tight with you.”
He left and Hunt turned to Faith. “You think I’m an asshole, don’t you?”
“We’ll see,” Faith said.
He chuckled bitterly. “I’m not your guy, Special Agent. If I was, I would never have done that shit with the bell and the recording device.”
Faith leaned forward. “I never mentioned anything about a bell or a recording device.”
“It’s all over the news,” he said. “That last murder, the lawyer, some residents saw the cops pull out a bell and a tape recorder. You can call the news stations if you don’t believe me.”
Faith swore silently. Of course the media would show up and throw a wrench into an investigation. Never mind that this could spook their killer and send him into hiding. Never mind that if he did kill again, he might change his MO and make it more difficult for them to find him. No, as long as it pulled viewers to their channel, who cares?
“I would just bury them,” he said, “and not in a cemetery. For Christ’s sake, it’s only a matter of time before he gets caught. Either a night watchman will find him or a passerby will see him, or he’ll get caught on camera, or you guys will find evidence. It’s too risky. If I were him, I would bury them somewhere far out on public land, and I would spend more time covering the grave to make sure it’s not visible.”
“You’ve put a lot of thought into this,” Faith said.
“Oh yeah,” he agreed, nodding. “I’ve thought about killing them all the time. Not the guys who are actually dead, but the insurance guys? Yeah, I’ve thought about it. Haven’t you ever thought about it? You’ve never been hurt by someone badly enough that you wanted to see them dead by your own hands?”
Faith thought of Trammell, laughing as she screamed under his knife. She thought of the Copycat Killer, out there somewhere torturing others the way she was tortured. She didn’t come out and agree with him, but privately, she understood. She definitely understood.
“I didn’t do it, though,” he said. “I’m already in bad shape. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life in prison.”
“But you said you have a plan to get away with it,” Faith reminded him.
“Well,” he said, “everyone has a plan. You guys catch ’em anyway.”
Faith had to admit he had a point.
Michael returned then. Faith met his eyes and knew right away that Hunt had his alibi. Michael held out his hand and Hunt took it. “Mr. Hunt, thank you for your time. I apologize for the mistake.”
“Gertie cleared me, did she?”
“She did,” Michael admitted, “and your next-door neighbor on the right, Tommy, has a picture of you clipping his lawn ornament with your golf cart on the fourth after midnight.”
Hunt laughed, his fear gone now that the danger of incarceration was past. “Yeah, I was a little drunk that night.” His smile faded. “So you’re not coming after me for the insurance?”
“It wasn’t insurance fraud,” Michael said. “You did try to defraud the court, but that’s outside of our wheelhouse. I would count your blessings that you lost and live quietly from now on.”
Hunt chuckled. “Well, I’ll live. I can’t promise any more than that.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Faith walked a circuit around the parking lot of their hotel. There were a few hours of daylight left, but the case was at a dead end. They had no leads. The suspects they had who had a solid connection to the victims had alibis or were otherwise incapable of committing these murders. Looking through the rest of Hucksley’s files had yielded no other possibilities.
So, they decided to return to the hotel and regroup. Neither had slept the night before, and Michael was making up for that at the moment.
So, she walked. Turk walked with her, glancing up at her occasionally to make sure she was all right. Faith felt a rush of gratitude for his companionship and reached down to scratch behind his ear for a second.
Turk huffed, a sound she recognized as encouragement, and she smiled briefly. “I know, boy. I know we’ll get him. We always do. I just wish it could be easy sometimes.”
Turk barked in agreement, and Faith scratched him one more time before turning back to the case.
Their initial hypothesis, that the killer was targeting medical professionals, had fallen through. Hucksley was a lawyer. Their second hypothesis, that the three were connected tangentially, had yielded no results either.
There had to be a connection. These weren’t random killings. It wasn’t unheard of for serial killers to choose their victims at random. The Son of Sam had chosen his victims randomly. The Beltway Snipers had picked random people. The Vampire of the Twin Cities Terminal had chosen his victims arbitrarily. It was possible, but she couldn’t believe that there was no connection in this case.
The Son of Sam and the Beltway Snipers had shot their victims from a distance. It was cold, impersonal. Those people weren’t people to them, they were targets. The Vampire had killed people he felt were rude. He would wait until he came across someone he felt was selfish and then kill them and stage their bodies to make the point that people were too focused on themselves and not others. His killings were theatrical, but they were quick. He poisoned them, and within a minute, they were gone.
This killer was burying people alive and taunting them as they slowly suffocated to death. He was giving them false hope and playing his message on a loop so that his voice was the last one they heard, even disguised as it was. He wasn’t just killing random people. He wanted his victims to suffer.
Then again, the Demon of Morgan County had a nearly identical MO. He would kidnap women he saw as whores and drop them in an abandoned well, which he would prep by sanding down the last fifteen feet so they could almost reach the top but lose hope at the last moment. The only difference was that he would taunt them personally and not via recording.
His victims were just as random as the Vampire’s. He would dispense his warped version of judgment, and to him, no doubt, the victims weren’t random, but to a reasoning, thinking human, they were.
So what was this killer’s criteria? People taking advantage of the vulnerable? That definitely tracked with Hucksley. He was an ambulance-chaser, and ambulance-chasers were oftentimes little more than con men.
Dr. Ames made sense too. ER bills were often crippling to lower-income patients, and ER doctors could often be impersonal since they saw thousands of patients. It might seem to someone that Dr. Ames didn’t really care about their health and that William Hucksley was only trying to con them. It was a stretch, but it was possible.
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