Free Bitter Blood by Jerry Bledsoe Page A

won’t help you in a homicide.”
    With more than twenty-seven years in the state police, Davidson already had more service than many retired officers. He knew he could get a nice pension. And he could envision himself enjoying a life where no outlaws or murderers intruded, chasing after nothing more elusive than lunker bass, sitting back employing his droll sense of humor in the service of tall tales, as his grandpa had done.
    Friends told him that he was crazy. He wouldn’t know what to do if he retired, they said. The first time a big murder broke, he’d be champing at the bit to find the killer. And as soon as he got to the house on Covered Bridge Road, saw the bodies of Delores and Janie, realized what a tough case this was apt to be, and felt the juices of challenge beginning to flow again, Davidson knew that his friends were right.
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    Some things were evident quickly. The decomposition of Delores’s body, the Sunday newspaper beneath it, the Bible nearby told Dan Davidson and the other officers that the murders had not taken place in recent hours and most likely occurred two days earlier, probably as Delores was returning from church. That meant a cold trail.
    The position of the body, the wounds, the keys near the door indicated that she had been taken by surprise from behind, hit with high-speed bullets, probably from close range. The angle of the wounds, the blood splatters on the entrance and garage doors said that she had been hit first in the back, again in the head as she was falling, most likely by somebody lying in wait behind one of the cars. The frame of her glasses was found twelve feet away, a lens thirteen feet beyond that. Bits of skull and flesh were scattered for thirty feet.
    Delores had been killed first, Davidson surmised. The bullet hole in the storm drain at the end of the house indicated that Janie had taken the first shot in the back as she was trying to get inside the kitchen door. In her left hand was a tissue filled with dog dung. Later, when Davidson learned that Delores and Janie always picked up the dog droppings from the yard, he concluded that Janie definitely had been outside when the killer accosted her. Either she was already dead when her mother arrived, or she was in the backyard, or returning inside, heard the shots that killed her mother, went to investigate, and surprised the killer, who might not have been aware of her presence.
    Whichever, it appeared certain that she had been chased through the house before receiving the fatal shot to the base of her skull. Blood drops on the kitchen floor just inside the door indicated that she paused there, probably trying to grab the telephone. She apparently had run around the counter in panic, through the kitchen, jumped a two-foot-high dog gate with bullet holes in her right lung, passed through the family room, and continued down the hallway, perhaps pausing again at the linen closet in an attempt to set off the alarm. She left another blood smear on the corner of her mother’s bedspread as she raced around it into the bedroom, only to find herself trapped in the French room. The angle of the killing shot indicated that she was crouching when the second bullet struck her. Unlike her mother’s death, hers came with terror.
    Guesses about the small bullet lodged in the window frame centered on a .223, used in military assault rifles. A grease smudge on Delores’s white chenille bedspread outlined the impression of such a weapon, laid there, no doubt, while the killer rummaged through the inexpensive contents of Delores’s jewelry box.
    Was robbery the motive for these brutal slayings? Steve Nobles, the Oldham County police chief, thought so. His department had answered several calls to the Lynch house in recent years, usually to investigate prowler reports from Delores, or because an alarm went off when nobody was home. In November 1977, somebody broke out a window and set off the alarm before fleeing. In September 1980, somebody