Free No Way Home by Andrew Coburn

ever discourage man from violence, Mrs. Jackson, for it’s the easiest reaction. If we could commit murder by simply willing it, people would be falling dead all over the world, which would be depopulated within a year.”
    “Goodness, I’d better not argue with a professional policeman,” she said and idly rumpled her husband’s hair, exposing the bald spot. “But I can tell you one thing right here and now, Lieutenant. Matthew MacGregor’s not your man.”
    Bakinowski’s eyes strayed in their deep sockets. “How do you know that?”
    She smiled. “A woman knows.”
    • • •
    Sitting at his desk, James Morgan perused an old report, one he knew almost word for word, and after all these years the words still gnawed at him. The victim was a twenty-three-year-old woman whose marriage had eviscerated her emotionally and spiritually. Morgan knew this because his predecessor, Chief Carr, had found her diary hidden in a box of sanitary napkins, the only place her husband might not have looked. The diary was confiscated for evidence but no longer existed, destroyed perhaps when the old chief was cleaning out his desk. Morgan slipped the report back into its dog-eared and discolored folder. The typewritten name on the tab was Rayball.
    The year he had become a policeman was the year Eunice Rayball died under questionable circumstances. The morning Papa reported her missing he said he didn’t want her back, good riddance to her, and ranted about infidelities, which were figments of his mind, rabid with jealousy from the day he married her. Morgan and Eugene Avery, wearing rubbers over their police shoes, found her facedown in a foot of murky swamp water, where she had lain three nights and three days no more than fifty yards from the house.
    Everybody suspected foul play, but nobody could prove it. Chief Carr, questioning Papa relentlessly, got nowhere and called in the top investigator from the district attorney’s office to take over the interrogation. The investigator, a former federal agent, sat on a corner of Chief Carr’s desk and activated a tape recorder. Papa sat righteous and close-mouthed in a wooden chair.
    “Said she was goin’ for a walk, that’s all I know.”
    “Good God, Mr. Rayball, at that hour of the night?”
    “She wanted the air.”
    “And you say your sons were asleep at the time.”
    “The young one might not be mine.”
    “I’ve met him, Mr. Rayball. The little tyke certainly looks like you.”
    “That don’t mean nothin’. Some of my jism might’ve got mixed in with the other fella’s.”
    “It doesn’t work that way.”
    “I know how it works.”
    “What did you think when your wife didn’t come back?”
    “Figured she met somebody on the road.”
    “But she didn’t go onto the road. She went into the swamp.”
    “How was I to know that?”
    “Give me the names of some of these other fellows.”
    “I don’t know no names. She was too careful for that.”
    “Look at me, Mr. Rayball. Look at me closely and listen. It’s been pretty well established you were the only man in her life.”
    “I know better.”
    “Why are you smiling, Mr. Rayball? Is this a game to you?”
    “It ain’t
nothin’
to me.”
    An hour later they let him go and watched him strut arrogantly out of the chief’s office. The investigator, with a grimace, switched off the tape recorder. “The guy stands five-foot-five and talks six-foot-eight.”
    Chief Carr said, “He’s not a whole dollar.”
    “One thing’s for sure, he’s got a twisted thing about women.”
    “No bruises on the body except what you’d expect from a fall,” Chief Carr said, mostly to himself.
    The investigator shot a look at Morgan, who stood obediently near the door with his cap in his hand. “What are your thoughts, Officer?”
    “He killed her,” Morgan said without hesitation.
    Chief Carr settled in deeper behind his desk. “We all know that, Jimmy.”
    The reluctant ruling, convincing no one, was that