A Rage To Kill And Other True Cases

South. Homan and DePalmo went there and found the shop closed. Marcia’s husband was at a loss to help the investigators until he remembered a letter that Marcia had written to him. “You know,” he said, “she talked about Lyons in that letter, and she said that she and Lyons would like to have a baby boy and name him ‘Beaufort Charles Lyons, Jr.’ ”
    While the name “Chuck Lyons” had sparked no information on the police computers, the name “Beaufort Charles Lyons” did. Homan and DePalmo found a man by that name who owned a classic 1962 black Lincoln, among other cars, and worked at a Seattle marina. The detective partners walked along the bobbing docks of the marina until they found Chuck Lyons’s boss.
    “Chuck was off over the three-day weekend, starting the 29th,” the man said. “But he came back to work on June 1st, and he’s been here regular ever since.” Lyons was not, however, working the present shift, so they asked that he call police headquarters when he appeared.
    When “Chuck” Lyons showed up for work, he called DePalmo immediately, his voice edgy, having gotten a message from the Homicide Unit. He clearly had no idea why they were calling him. When Benny DePalmo told him that Marcia was dead, he gasped, “Oh no!” and seemed to be stunned. He asked how she had died and, when he was told that she had been murdered, he said he would be in to talk to detectives right away.
    This was the fourth male who had been closely linked to Marcia Perkins—her ex-husband, Melvin, Melvin’s cousin—and now, Chuck Lyons. All of them sounded seriously upset and shocked. Chuck was as good as his word and walked into the fifth floor Homicide Unit within half an hour. To the trained eye of the detectives, he seemed to be barely fighting back tears.
    “I haven’t seen Marcia since about 9 P.M. on the Wednesday before Memorial Day,” he said softly. “I didn’t even try to call her over the weekend because she said she’d probably be going to Montana to see her sister. Then when I tried to call on Tuesday and Wednesday [June first and second], the phone just kept ringing on and on. I figured she was still in Montana or on the way back.”
    “You didn’t read about it in the paper?” Homan asked him.
    “Nope. Haven’t read the paper, or even caught the TV news, I guess. All this time, she’s been dead—I didn’t go to her funeral. I didn’t even know she was dead,” he said brokenly.
    They talked to Chuck Lyons about people in Marcia Perkins’s life. He said he knew Melvin Jones, but only as an acquaintance. He remembered, however, that Melvin had already picked up his stereo set by Wednesday night, May 26. He wouldn’t have been coming by to get it on the Friday before Memorial Day, since he didn’t have any other belongings at Marcia’s.
    Some homicide cases have too few suspects, and this one was floundering because there were so
many
suspects. Still another one surfaced when an attorney friend told Duane Homan that Marcia Perkins had been the object of another man’s obsession. Marcia worked at the University of Washington Hospital, and there had been a patient there who was convinced that he was having an affair with her. He talked on and on about Marcia. The patient, who was a prisoner at the Monroe Reformatory, was in the hospital because he’d been stabbed in the back in a prison fight. He was partially paralyzed.
    “He’s a little weird,” the lawyer said, “and this affair was all in his head, but I thought you ought to know.”
    It wasn’t out of the realm of possibilities that a man, slightly deranged, should have been in love with his beautiful nurse. Stalkers have hounded women literally to their deaths because of imagined romantic connections. Had the prisoner somehow found where Marcia lived and gone to her apartment, begged to be let in, and then turned violent when she offered him no more than a cup of coffee? It sounded plausible until Homan and DePalmo found that the prisoner had been back in the reformatory by the Memorial Day weekend, and every minute there was accounted for.
    Marcia’s sister, who had flown to Seattle for her funeral, had the most vital information. She told the detectives about her relationship with Melvin Jones. He had once been her boyfriend, and the three of them—herself, Melvin, and Marcia—had indeed lived together. “He used to call Marcia ‘Sister Dear,’ and I know he’d been coming around to see her,” she