Free Suspicion of Vengeance by Barbara Parker Page B

any progress was being made.
    The team doubled their efforts. They were all going on four to six hours of sleep a night, Ron Kemp on even less. Every pawnshop within a hundred-mile radius was contacted. Officers leaned on informants. Every lead was pursued. They combed through records of similar crimes in the area. Burglaries, loitering and prowling, knife assaults. Sheriff Carr could be heard yelling in his office.
    All fingerprints found in the house were being run through data banks. None had been found on the clock, sliding-glass door frame, or the shower door. The ME had found no skin under Amber Dodson's fingernails. The small white particles found on the carpet and back porch had been identified as crushed coquina rock, commonly found at construction sites.
    Gary Dodson allowed the police to examine his financial records. There was no life insurance on his wife and only ten thousand dollars' worth of equity in the house. Dodson had moved out and planned to sell it.
    Whitney McGrath referred all requests for interviews to his attorneys, who insisted he had no further information.

    Tuesday, February 14

    Eight days after the murder, Detective Kemp was told that a woman waiting in the lobby had information on the Dodson case.
    Dorothy Chastain had just returned from the birth of a grandchild in Atlanta and had found Kemp's card among the mail her neighbors had collected. She lived at 2205 White Heron Way, across the street from the Dodsons.
    The morning of the murder, Mrs. Chastain was sitting at the living room window waiting for the friend who would drive her to the airport in West Palm Beach. Around ten o'clock, Mrs. Chastain saw a young man walk furtively—Kemp wrote the word in his notebook—around the hedge on the west side of the Dodsons' house, then go into the backyard. Kemp's notes describe the man as "white, 20-30 y.o.a., med. ht/wt, very long br. hair, clean shaven. Boots, blue denim jacket."
    Over the past week the investigation team had listed 173 men who had been arrested for burglary, loitering and prowling, or knife assaults in the county within the past three years, who were not currently incarcerated. Kemp had put twenty men at the top of the list and sent detectives to talk to them. Mrs. Chastain's information narrowed the possibilities.
    One of the men on the list was Kenneth Ray Clark, a twenty-two-year-old day laborer whose last known address was a trailer park off Cove Road, south of town. Two things grabbed Kemp's attention. First, Clark had been arrested three months previously for an attempted burglary of a residence a quarter mile from White Heron Way. Seeing police, he'd tossed a Baggie containing five grams of marijuana. Clark had bonded out on all charges, and the case was set for trial.
    The more compelling fact was that on the booking form Clark had listed his employer as "JWM Co." Kemp showed his photograph at the River Pines construction trailer, where the supervisor told him that Clark and a friend of his, Glen Hopwood, had been let go about three months before for selling marijuana on the job.
    In addition to the more recent charges, Clark's priors included a juvenile burglary, a couple of DUIs, a resisting without violence, and an arrest two years ago that Kemp noted with interest: an aggravated assault with a knife. Clark had been put on probation.
    Mrs. Chastain was asked to wait while Kemp and his partner assembled a photo display. She picked out one of the six but wanted to see him in person to be absolutely sure.

    "Stop. The Department of Justice has put out advisories, don't do this, but the police continue to do it. The photograph she ID'd was Kenny Ray Clark, no?"
    "Of course."
    "And the other five were a refrigerator, a fire hydrant, a nun, a cowboy, and a German shepherd. Then they brought him to the station on a pretext and put him in a lineup. None of the other five in the lineup was in the photo display. Of course she would pick him out."
    "She said she was