Kiss of the She-Devil by M. William Phelps Read Free Book Online Page A

did everything possible to work it out with George—even against her better judgment of knowing that a “playa” hardly ever changes his style of play.
    “Did she say anything about the affair—any details?” Wundrach asked.
    “Well, she did. Gail told me she had even met the woman once at a hotel in Rochester Hills.”
    “Did Gail talk about the meeting?”
    “Yeah, yeah,” the woman explained. “Gail told me [George’s mistress] had claimed to be terminally ill and she wanted George to move to Florida to take care of her. Gail explained how the woman had looked her in the eyes and said, ‘You’ve had him for twenty-five years. Now it’s my turn!’”
    Wundrach realized this was something Donna Trapani had left out of her conversation with Alan Whitefield the previous night.
    “When was the last time you spoke to Gail?” Wundrach pressed.
    “We talked several times.... Um, a few weeks ago was the last time we really talked.”
    “What’d she say?”
    “She said, actually”—the woman thought about it a moment, hesitated, almost embarrassed for Gail to have to admit it, then continued—“. . . she and George were trying to work things out.”
     
     
    Surveillance on George Fulton and his residence by a detective from the sheriff ’s department started as George arrived home that morning at eleven thirty-eight. George pulled into his driveway on Talon Circle and drove into the garage, unaware that the OCSD was watching him, recording his every move. The neighborhood was a nice middle-class suburb, a cookie-cutter subdivision of new homes owned by good, wholesome, hardworking people, just a twenty-minute ride north of Pontiac. The Fulton house was a 5.4-mile drive from the library where Gail had been murdered, a straight shot north on M-24, then left onto West Clarkston Road, right onto Joslyn. No one disputed the fact that George Fulton worked hard and took care of his family materially and monetarily, giving them the finer things life could offer a middle-class family in suburban America.
    “Although my dad,” Emily commented, “made it clear to me that he was not paying for college.”
    It was George’s character and his behavior that had gotten him to this point and put his actions under a law enforcement microscope.
    The surveillance was based on the notion that George had failed to tell investigators he’d had an affair until after he must have figured out that his kids had let the proverbial “cad” out of the bag. Why would he hide that fact? If he had withheld one piece of vital information, the investigators wondered, what else was the guy holding onto?
    Cars came and went, in and out of the driveway. People, young and old, walked in and out of the Fulton house all morning long. One might guess friends were stopping by and comforting the family. By early afternoon, however, George was back on the road, and the undercover investigator watching him followed close behind as Gail’s husband took off from the house and traveled north on M-24 toward Broad Street and West Clarkston Road, heading in the direction of the lake.

11
    D R. R. ORTIZ-REYES was the deputy forensic pathologist with the Oakland County Medical Examiner’s Office on the day Gail Fulton’s body was brought in for autopsy. A doctor since 1976, Ortiz-Reyes had performed, he later estimated, somewhere in the neighborhood of over one thousand autopsies. The man knew his way around an autopsy suite—no doubt about it. Had Gail died of something other than those obvious gunshot wounds, Ortiz-Reyes would find it.
    The first thing Ortiz-Reyes did was to conduct an external exam of Gail’s nude body. Ortiz-Reyes noted several “abnormalities” as he found them. Then he got to work opening (his word) Gail’s body to see what, in fact, had caused her death. It would be unethical (not to mention unprofessional) to assume that the shots alone had killed Gail. There were cases, any medical examiner (ME) can say, that baffle