“So the body was repositioned once he was dead.”
“Way it looks. Doc said the stake missed his heart but nipped the vena cava.”
“Meaning it took him a while to die… Understand that I don’t mean any disrespect here, but what facilities do you have for processing a crime scene?”
“State issues us kits. Back when I started, I got sent up to the capital for a couple of months, passed along what I could remember. Don Lee’s studied up some on his own. We did the best we could. But like I told you up front, we’re in over our heads here.”
“I went back through the manual, did it all by the numbers,” Don Lee told me. “Multiple photographs of the scene and the body. Bagged clothes and belongings, including a notebook-kind of a diary, I guess. Cellotaped a half-footprint I found at the edge of the carport. Took scrapings, blood samples.”
I looked at Bates. He shrugged. “What can I say? Me, I blundered into this. He’s meant for it.”
“Thing is,” Don Lee said, “I can go on scraping, photographing and logging stuff in till kingdom come, but I still just have a bunch of bags with labels on them. All potatoes, no meat.”
“Where’s the forensics kit now?”
“Back at the station.”
“You don’t usually send them through to State?”
“No usually to it,” Bates said. “Never had occasion to use one of the things before. Fact is, we weren’t even sure where we’d put them.”
“State said seal it, they’d pick it up when they got here.”
“No identification on the body, I’m assuming.”
Binaural nods.
“And when you canvassed, showing a photo, no one knew him, no one had seen him. Just another of America’s invisible men.”
Yep.
I’d finished my salad and sandwich and drunk three or four cups of coffee-Thelma kept creeping up and refilling. Altogether too fine a waitress. Don Lee’s toast was crumbs on a plate and four empty jam containers with tops skinned back. Clots of yolk and a pool of runny ketchup competed on the sheriff’s plate.
“What I have to ask is why you’re pursuing this at all. You’ve got a good town here. Clean, self-contained. Obviously this guy’s from outside, no one’s visible father, no visible mother’s son. Not a single city or PD I know, whatever size, would spend an hour on this. They’d write the report, skip it over the water into the files, move right along.”
“Well, they’d be used to it, of course. We’re not.” Bates looked to the door, where an attractive, thirtyish woman in gray suit and lacy off-white blouse stood looking back. “Tell me that’s not our State guy.”
“That’s not our State guy,” Don Lee said.
“You know damn well it is.”
As though to confirm, she strode towards us.
“We don’t trip over bodies too often ’round here,” Don Lee said.
“And when we do”-this from Bates-“they don’t usually have the mayor’s mail in their pocket.”
Chapter Six
Basically they don’t get any more missing.
It wasn’t a missing-persons case. In fact it was just about everything but a missing-persons case. Robbery, assault, murder. God knows what else. And that’s the way it got passed out to us: they don’t get any more missing.
The Captain himself took roll call that day. Gentlemen, he said. Officers. Has there been a misunderstanding? When I asked that you pool your efforts and give your collective best, I had expected that you would understand this was to the end of finding the suspect. Instead you seem collectively to have lost him.
There was laughter, uneasy laughter of a sort we all got used to over the next few months. Little by little the laughter subsided, till finally we sat stone silent through roll call No jokes, no catcalls, none of the endless badgering that marks men thrown together in close quarters and shaky pursuits. We sat, we listened, some of us taking notes, then rose, claimed cars, and went stolidly about our business.
It had begun long before that, of course, on a Saturday night almost two months before, when a scumbag by the name of Richards found his way into an apartment house off campus of Memphis State where ten students lived. Most of them were out on dates. The three that weren’t, he attacked. Tied them down with lamp wires and went from one to the other, back and forth. He’d come in with his member hard as a rock, one of them said, put it in her, and leave. Then after a while he’d come back. Never climaxed, or seemed to gain much pleasure from it. Lot of blood on it there at the end, one of the young women said. I kept wondering if it was my blood or someone else’s, what he’d done to the others.
Richards spent his childhood in a series of foster homes, a social worker called in as consultant told us later, often shut into a room and ignored, brought food when they remembered, other times beaten or abused. My heart bled.
Anyhow, although Richards had been a busy boy, with a string of store robberies, B amp;Es of various sorts, auto theft and assault, rape was something new for him. But, like a chicken-killing dog, he’d got the taste. And he liked it.
Over following weeks we got to know that campus well, spent more time there than its students did. Ants at a picnic and just about as inconspicuous. But the next time Richards struck, it was across town, at a dorm next to Samaritan Hospital where nurses in training lived. The hospital put them up free, they attended classes half a day and helped take care of patients the rest, and after a year or so they got certified as LPNs. Women with poor and no prospects came up from all over the South. Richards went in there on a Friday evening about nine o’clock. Of the fifteen residents, eight were on duty, helping cover the evening shift as nurses although legally they weren’t. Five more had gone out together for pizza and a movie. They’re the ones who called it in when they got back home around midnight and found Mary Elizabeth Walker (Mobile, Alabama) and Sue Ann Simmons (Tupelo, Mississippi) strapped to their beds with duct tape. There was so much tape, one of them said, they looked like mummies, or cocoons. Mary Elizabeth stared at the wall and wouldn’t respond when they spoke to her. Blood was running from both vagina and anus. Sue Simmons didn’t respond either. She was dead.
We got on to Richards the usual way, through an informer. This informer lived in the neighborhood, often wound up in some of the same diners, poolrooms and bars as Richards, and almost certainly carried some grudge against him. Once we had this, still with nothing but hearsay and suspicion to take to market, we bird-dogged Richards in solid shifts, staking out his apartment from unmarked cars. For two days nothing happened. We learned a lot: that he kept unpredictable hours, had no visitors, and thrived exclusively on carry-out hamburgers. On the third day, he disappeared.
We went in with a judge’s order on the fourth day and everything was just as it had been the times we’d gone in without, clothes scattered about, toiletries in place, bottle or two of prescription drugs in the bathroom, piles of mustard, salt and pepper packets on the kitchenette counter by a pool of loose change. He was gone, purely gone. Evaporated. Vanished. No one ever heard from or of him again.
That was the first one.
“A vigilante,” someone said at roll call.
“The position of this department,” the Captain said, “is that it’s an isolated incident. That is also your position.”
I’d have to pull records to check, and of course I can’t, but it seems maybe two, three months went by before the next one.
These shitheads were hitting mom-and-pop stores all over the city, pistol-whipping whoever was behind the counter, mom, pop or one of numerous kids, when they objected or proved too slow at scooping up money. The perps were easy to mark. There were always three. One never spoke. He lurked on the fringes, carried a steel baseball bat over his shoulder, and moved in only when the others had got the goods and left. Then he’d swing his bat, smashing hips, knees, wrists and ankles.