Cruel Doubt Read Online Free PDF Page B

that she knew who he was.
    As soon as she did, he squeezed her hand and started to cry. For minutes, he just stood there, bending over her, and crying as if he’d never stop.
    * * *
    Lewis Young, resident agent of the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation based in the town of Washington, got to the house at nine A . M . A big man, about six two, he was good-looking in the understated way that capable plainclothes investigators often were. He’d been with the State Bureau of Investigation for fourteen years. The SBI was a North Carolina version of the FBI, called in to help local police with major crimes.
    Mitchell Norton, the Beaufort County district attorney, had called Young as soon as he’d heard about the murder. This one looked too big to be left solely in the hands of the Washington police.
    Of all the SBI’s resident agents, Young was one of the very few—in fact, he knew of no other—to have graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. From his superiors, he’d always received the highest possible ratings for thoroughness, intelligence, and ability to get along with both colleagues and the public.
    Such was his reputation that even if the murder had occurred hundreds of miles away, Young might have been called to assist with the investigation—he was much in demand for difficult cases—but by geographical fluke, the crime had occurred in his own territory, and thus he was at the scene within hours.
    Even before entering the house, Young could tell he’d have problems. In the backyard, blood-soaked sheets hung from a small outboard motorboat. Young winced. This was a crime scene. The scene of a
murder
. At a crime scene, you were supposed to preserve the evidence, not drape it all over a boat.
    As he approached the back entrance to the house, Young noticed the slashed screen and the shattered window, the edge of the window being about ten to twelve inches from the edge of the door. He noted also that what looked to be small panes of glass in the door itself, several of which would have given much easier access to the doorknob, had not been broken.
    The thought occurred to him that, if one were intending to break into a house, it would have been far easier to crack an eight-by-ten-inch piece of single-pane glass that gave easy access to the lock on the inner knob below than to smash a large Thermopane, double-thick window, in a place from which it would be difficult, if not impossible, to reach the inner knob in order to unlock the door.
    From his first look, in other words, Lewis Young, with all his experience and expertise, thought the evidence suggested not an actual forced entry, but rather that someone had tried to
stage
a scene that looked like a break-in.
    To Young, it seemed at least a strong possibility that someone had smashed the glass and slashed the screen as an afterthought—on the way out.
    As John Taylor had, Young noted that there was little, if any, evidence of theft. And like Taylor, Lewis Young quickly concluded that whoever had come through that door—and however he, or they, had gained entrance—had come with killing, not stealing, in mind.
    Young considered the possibility that the killer, or killers, had entered through the front door. But a quick check with the first officers and emergency medical personnel at the scene confirmed that the front door had been locked when they arrived. Thus, it seemed a near-certainty to Young that the back door had been the point of entrance and exit.
    * * *
    John Taylor, before leaving the scene for the day, conducted a small personal experiment to test Young’s hypothesis that the shattered window had not provided the killer or killers with access to the inside of the house.
    Even discounting the added concern that, in darkness, groping toward the doorknob from the small hole in the double-paned glass meant risking a cut from one of the shards protruding from the edges,