Malice by Robert Cote

hate apple. Have any OJ?” she asked sheepishly.
    He rolled his eyes and left again.
    Sam wrenched the desk drawer open. Inside were two folders. The first was marked Derek Thomas. But the second one she hadn’t expected. It nearly sucked all the air out of her lungs. On it was a single name: McMurphy.
    She slid the McMurphy folder out. Her hands trembled as she peeled back the tan flap. She leafed through the pages. The pages didn’t make a whole lot of sense to her. It looked like a crime-scene breakdown. There was a date too: November 1965.
     
    We found most of the victims by the dining room table in an advanced state of decomposition. Judging by the odor and the stiffness of the bodies, they had been there for at least a week. Flies and cockroaches everywhere. Appears that the perpetrator assaulted the victims from behind with a three-foot wood chopping axe as they were seated at the table. In three cases, the victims were decapitated. Thomas McMurphy was found on the ground, pinned to the floor by an axe blow which appears to have severed the sternum and punctured the right lung. The victims all appear to be members of the McMurphy family. Upstairs, in one of the bedrooms we found the remains of James McMurphy. The man appeared to have died from a single self–inflicted gunshot wound through the mouth ...
    Sheriff Donald Townsend
    Millingham Police Dept.
     
    Sam’s jaw fell open. Rumors had circulated for years that something awful had happened to the McMurphys. But the thought that the family’s bright and shining star, James, had hacked them to pieces seemed unbelievable. He had been some kind of businessman, she remembered, with a hand in construction, bunch of buildings in Millingham, including her school. He was reputed to have brought their fledgling town into the twentieth century.
    Then something else caught her eye. Below the Sheriff’s crime-scene statement were two handwritten notations, penciled in almost as afterthoughts. The first read:
     
    Surely there will be pressure from the highest levels to keep this quiet.
     
    But it was the second that made the flesh on her arms tighten:
     
    The lacerations to James McMurphy’s arms, chest and face seem, in my opinion, inconsistent with suicide: See Medical Examiner’s report. Note: could there have been someone else in the house that night?
     
    She was thinking about her mother and the details of her death when she heard footsteps rapidly ascending the stairs. Alex was on his way back from the kitchen. Samantha shuffled the pages back into place and shoved the file into the drawer. She closed it and jammed the key in the lock. It wouldn’t turn though. In her panic she had closed the drawer on part of the folder, and it was blocking the locking mechanism. Alex was nearly there. Heart pounding, Sam yanked the drawer open, pushed the file in properly, and then locked it. She dropped the key in the coffee cup and swore. The key landed on top of the elastic bands, not underneath as she had found it. She was about to fix it when Alex appeared, out of breath and looking sour.
    “Apple’s all we have.”
    She smiled politely, hoping he wouldn’t notice the sweat on her brow. Did she look as pale as she felt?
    “You okay?” he asked, concern in his voice.
    “I’m not sure,” she said, grimacing. She had been famished when she’d sent Alex off to get her something to eat from the kitchen, but now, after all this, the only thing on her mind was phoning Lysander and telling him what she’d found. Bizarre lacerations. Questionable suicides. It was an almost preposterous theory, wasn’t it? The possibility that there was some connection between her mother’s death and James McMurphy’s nearly fifty years before. But what if? There had been a reference in the police report to McMurphy’s autopsy. They would need a copy of that. If for nothing else than to rule it out completely.
    An image of her mother’s face appeared just then. Her features were