“Yes. That somehow a switch was made and he was released. Maybe the man who went to the chair wanted these receipts in his pocket when he died because he was trying to tell us something.”

“Where would he have gotten them?”

“Perhaps during the transport from Mecklenburg to Richmond, which would have been an ideal time to pull something,” Wesley replied. “Maybe two men were transported, Waddell and someone else.”

“You’re suggesting they stopped for food?”

“Guards aren’t supposed to stop for anything while transporting a death row inmate. But if some conspiracy were involved, anything could have happened. Maybe they stopped and got take-out food, and it was during this interval that Waddell was freed. Then the other inmate was taken onto Richmond and put in Waddell’s cell. Think about it. How would any of the guards or anybody else at Spring Street have any way of knowing the inmate brought in wasn’t Waddell?”

“He might say he wasn’t, but that doesn’t mean that anyone would have listened.”

“I suspect they wouldn’t have listened.”

“What about Waddell’s mother?”

I asked. “Supposedly, she had a contact visit with him hours before the execution. Certainly, she would know B the inmate she saw was not her son.”

“We need to verify that the contact visit occurred .But whether it did or didn’t, it would have been to Mrs. Waddell’s benefit to go along with any scheme. I don’t imagine she wanted her son to die.”

“Then you’re convinced that the wrong man was executed, “I said reluctantly, for there were few theories, at the moment, that I more wanted to disprove.

His answer was to open the envelope containing Robyn Naismith’s photographs and slide out a thick stack of color prints that would continue to shock me no matter how many times I looked at them. He slowly shuffled through the pictorial history of her terrible death.

Then he said, “When we consider the three homicides tha thave just occurred, Waddell doesn’t profile right.”

“What are you saying, Benton? That after ten years in prison his personality changed?”

“All I can say to you is that I’ve heard of organized killers decompensating, flying apart. They begin to make mistakes. Bundy, for example. Toward the end he became frenzied. But what you generally don’t see is a disorganized individual swinging the other way, the psychotic person becoming methodical, rational becoming organized.”

When Wesley alluded to the Bundys and Son of Sams in the world, he did so theoretically, impersonally, as if his analyses and theories were formulated from secondary sources. He did not brag. He did not name-drop or assume the role of one who knew these criminal personally. His demeanor, therefore, was deliberately misleading.