An Evil Mind--A Suspense Novel Read Free Page A

he became that he should look into his claims. He would have dismissed Phillips’s assertions if there had been a videotape of him killing Helen, but there was no such tape, and therefore it was possible Phillips was telling the truth.
    Who had murdered Laura Sumner?
    Was it a copycat? Helen’s murder had not been a high-profile case and not many people had followed it, so the likelihood of it being imitated was quite low. On the other hand, all it took was one lunatic with an itch to kill. The lunatic would have had no problem finding out how Helen had been killed because it had been described in detail in the newspapers.
    They say that the simplest answer is usually the correct one. In this case, the simplest theory was that there was no connection between Laura Sumner’s and Helen’s murders. For some reason Mark felt that this theory was wrong.
    Could Laura Sumner have been killed by the bastard that had murdered Helen? Mark supposed it was conceivable.
    He had hated Edward Phillips for so long that he found it very hard to believe anything the man said. However, he was willing to listen to Phillips and to investigate his claims. Call it curiosity.
    How did Phillips know what the killer had done to Laura Sumner? Had it been reported in the newspapers?
    Mark opened his laptop, typed “Laura Sumner stabbed in the chest cut open stomach” into the search box, and pressed the Enter button. The top search result was a story on the website of NBC’s Austin affiliate, which mentioned that Laura Sumner had two stab wounds in her chest and that her abdomen had been cut open.
    That night, before going to bed, Mark put a screwdriver in his jacket pocket: he was going to use it to remove the vent cover screws at Sam Curtis’s place tomorrow.
    He didn’t fall asleep until three in the morning, and he knew exactly what kept him awake: when Phillips received his sentence, Mark had regained a semblance of emotional balance, and now it was gone.
     

Chapter 3
     
    1
    On Monday, October 9, Mark called Glenn Baxley, the Assistant Warden of the Dallas County Jail, and asked him to confirm that Sam Curtis and Edward Phillips had shared a cell for a month last winter. Baxley said he would call back within an hour.
    After talking to the assistant warden, Mark ran the address of Eddie’s Mini Mart through the system and found that the convenience store had been robbed on April tenth of last year. The perpetrator had made off with nine hundred and ninety dollars. The case was still unsolved.
    The robber had worn a ski mask and carried a pistol. He had fired a shot at the ceiling of the store, and the bullet had been recovered. Mark was pleased to see that the images of the bullet’s rifling marks had been added to the ballistics database.
    He spent the next half hour studying the incident report for the armed robbery of the McDonald’s restaurant on Grand Avenue and Meadow Street that had occurred last night. When he was finished with the report, he began searching for information on Sam Curtis.
    Sam Curtis was thirty, two years younger than Edward Phillips. He had been booked into the Dallas County Jail for drunk driving and resisting arrest on December 16 of last year, five days after Helen’s murder. He was released on bail on January 13 of this year. At the end of January, Curtis accepted a plea bargain and was sentenced to time served.
    Curtis’s bail had been only three thousand dollars. A bondsman’s fee for posting it would have been about three hundred bucks. Why had it taken Curtis almost a month to come up with the money?
    At the time of his arrest last December Curtis resided at 4540 Spring Lane, Dallas. Mark punched Sam Curtis’s driver’s license number into the Department of Motor Vehicles’ database and scanned the information that appeared on the screen.
    Curtis didn’t live at 4540 Spring Lane, Dallas anymore. Last February he changed his address to 2111 Walnut Avenue, Arlington. Mark ran Curtis’s old