Free Never Let Them See You Cry by Edna Buchanan Page B

air-conditioning duct, altered and taped.
    Six minutes after the shooting, Jerry Russell’s telephone-equipped pickup truck smashed into a pole eight blocks from the crime scene. He was slumped unconscious over the steering wheel, bleeding from a bullet wound. The single high-velocity .22-Magnum bullet Lance had managed to squeeze off from the derringer moments before his death had caught Jerry square in the chest.
    A ski mask lay on the seat beside him. On the floorboard, a set of Smith and Wesson handcuffs and empty bank money wrappers in one-thousand- and five-thousand-dollar denominations. Detectives speculated that Russell intended to make the murder look like a drug killing. In the back of the pickup was a bloodied blue ten-speed bicycle, owned by his teenage daughter. Critically wounded, Russell told police he had been shot while taking a walk.
    Police asked Kathi if she knew Russell. She said she did. The Kateses drove her that night to make a formal statement at Metro police headquarters.
    â€œI know who killed Lance,” she told the couple. “It was Jerry Russell.”
    She told police she had met Russell on a flight three years earlier. A parttime contractor, he soon began to build a house across the street. She invited him over. She admitted an affair while separated from her husband, but swore that since the reconciliation her relationship with Russell had continued “on a friendship basis only.”
    â€œHow did Jerry Russell feel about you?” a detective asked.
    â€œHe loves me. My friends and his friends tell me, ‘He is absolutely crazy about you. And this is just killing him. It’s absolutely destroying him.’” She repeated their conversation over lunch after he fixed her friend’s telephone.
RUSSELL: Well, what are your plans for a divorce?
    KATHI: No plans. I have no plans for a divorce.
    RUSSELL: Well, is money that important to you?
    KATHI: I’m not so sure that money is the issue.
    RUSSELL: Money has to be the issue. You can’t, the way you’re talking—the way you felt about him when you were separated, you just can’t … A person doesn’t change their feelings…
    KATHI: Well, he’s my husband and, yes, I can change my feelings.
    RUSSELL: I still find it very hard to believe the two of you can make anything out of your life. I fully believe money is the only thing keeping you there.
    She said they talked by telephone again that night around 9:15 or 9:30. Two hours later Russell was lurking in the shadows outside the house. Kathi denied knowing her husband was about to be murdered. Calm and cool, according to police, she said she and Sloat, her husband’s associate, watched the eleven o’clock news on the giant-screen television Lance had bought her for Christmas. They saw the headlights from Lance’s new Mercedes station wagon—then they heard the gunfire.
    Harold Russell was asleep at his daughter’s Cape Cod home when the telephone rang at 1:18 A.M . His son, on his way to surgery, said, “I’ve been shot.” Before boarding the next flight to Miami, his father and sister learned the shooting involved a man named Anderson.
    During the flight it occurred to the father that Anderson was the name of the woman he had met at Thanksgiving. “It’s so insane and unbelievable,” he said later. “So many crazy things are happening. I hate guns. I’ve always hated guns.”
    Lance’s mother was bitter. “When I heard those three terrible words, ‘Lance is dead,’ I could not accept it,” Erika Anderson said. “It is too horrible. I would have preferred that Lance be killed in a plane crash.”
    Homicide detectives with a search warrant took 78 spent cartridges, more than ISO rounds of ammunition, scissors, fibers, thread, two rolls of duct tape and photographs from Jerry Russell’s home. They also found papers in a white envelope marked KATHI and