In the hope that I could work a trade with the cops—give them some needed information and get them to pass a message to the paper—I walked over to the squad car and tapped the deputy on the arm.
I knew some of the sheriff’s older people, but not this one, a young deputy with one of those bristle brush mustaches they seem to issue with badges and guns these days. “Hey, pal, I know who that was under the stage and what he flew off in.”
The deputy looked up with an annoyed expression from the microphone he had been talking into. “Step back, mister. I’m busy right here. If you’ve got a statement, wait by the car, and as soon as we’ve got some help someone will take it.”
“But I can identify…”
He swung his legs out of the car. “Back, buddy. I’m not too busy to arrest you for interfering with an officer. You’ll have a chance to tell your story.”
The story. We had to do something quick about that. The paper’s first copy deadline was less than ninety minutes away.
I walked back to Diana and Kirk, who was looking like a shipwreck survivor.
“Did you get through to the paper before the bus hit the phones?”
He still had the severed phone receiver in his hand. He looked at it and said, “I talked to Mr. Grace and told him there was a big story here? He put me on to Doralee, and I just had time to tell her that fliere had been some sort of sex crime and that the crowd was starting to panic when…” He waved the useless receiver.
“Jesus,” I said to Diana, “they must be going nuts down there. What about the TV people? Are they going live from her…?”
Diana shook her head. “I saw them arrive… both came in station wagons, not remote vans. I guess they were just taping.”
“Well, we’ve got to find a phone or someway to call in,” I said.
Liz had come down from the stairs and tugged at my arm, pointing up the hill at the farmhouse. “How about there?”
The three of us trudged up the hill and as we approached the house, one of Turg’s uniformed guards came out on the rickety porch. He was carrying a double-barreled shotgun.
“Stop right there, folks.”
“We’re reporters,” I said. “We’ve got to use the phone.”
“Or you’re after the gate receipts,” he said. “Use the pay phones down by the entrance.”
“They got knocked out,” I said. “Listen, let me in. Turg’s my friend, and I know he would say it was all right.”
“May-be, but Mr. Turg’s my boss, and I know he said don’t let anybody near this house without his personal say-so. You better get.”
“Turg got hurt. He’s down by the stage.” I started toward the porch, reaching toward my back pocket for my wallet and press pass. The guard raised the shotgun to a point over my head and pulled one of the triggers. The blast left my ears ringing and my resolve shaken. I led the way back down the hill with as much dignity as I could summon up.
We returned to my car and looked out over the road leading to the farm. It was bumper-to-bumper, and we could see some cars already had run into the ditch trying to slip past the inching line. It was obvious that there was no quick way out. In the distance, probably on the interstate, we could hear approaching sirens, which meant the mess on the county road was going to get a lot worse when they tried to get through to Turg’s.
“Now what?” Liz asked.
“Maybe there’s a back way out,” Diana offered. “I looked on the county highway map in the office before we came out here, and I think I remember another road connecting with this one about a mile farther down. It ought to get us back towards town.”
I thought about that for a moment. “I don’t know. Lots of these country roads just dead end at the last farm. Then we’d be worse off. What we need most is a working phone and a quick way into town. The interstate is only a mile or so from here and maybe we’d do better heading for it and trying to hitch a ride.”
We finally decided to split up; Diana and Kirk trying the back roads in his car, and Liz and I setting off across the fields toward the interstate.
I shouldered the camera bag and we hunkered under a barbed wire fence into a fairly level field. It was dark, but there was some moonlight and the footing was good.
“Did you get good photos?” I asked Liz as we trudged along.
“With that light, who knows,” she said. “I’m pretty sure the shots of the singer on the stage will be good, but I’m not sure I want to give them to Swift even if we get to town on time. He’ll probably headline them something like ‘Rock Star Gets Down to Bare Essentials.’”
Little did we know.
“Did you talk to her at all?” I asked. “She looked hysterical.”
“Mad as hell, but not hysterical,” Liz said. “That’s a pretty tough lady. She told me she figured on playing Shiu for the flowers and limo rides and all and put him off with a promise of some fun after the concert—when the band was planning to take off right after their last set.
“But she said he kept getting more and more insistent in the little dressing room on the bus and when she went out to check on her first number, she came back to find him taking his pants off. She told him no way and said Shiu got hot and said no bimbo was going to prick tease him and went for her costume. He got her stripped before she could whack him in the crotch with a knee and run for the stage.”
“No rape?”
Liz stopped and looked at me. “I don’t know if anything else happened, but it for damn sure was assault and attempted rape. What do you think—there has to be a baby born for it to be rape?”
“No, I didn’t mean that. I just wondered if it was physically possible in this case.” The picture of a mouse trying to mount a giraffe had flashed through my mind. But I could see Liz was angry. “Hey, don’t get me wrong—I think the little bastard ought to go to jail for tonight’s performance.”
“That’s right, Bob. And this didn’t have anything to do with sex. He was trying to humiliate her… hurt her physically… and no matter what kind of games she was into with him, it doesn’t justify what he did.”
We walked in silence for a while. Then I suddenly remembered the earlier call from Phlager. It wasn’t the most propitious time to bring it up, but what would be. I told Liz what he had said.
“Oh, God, that means they’re giving up.”
“No, Liz. That just means they’re opening it up to people who may have seen something and didn’t know what it was. Tips from the public break a lot of cases, and it could be the difference in this one.”
“I hope so. But it’s been so long. Bob, do you think he’s alive?”
“Liz, I don’t think he is dead. I admit we haven’t had any good news, but we haven’t had any bad news either since that night, and I’m simply not going to give up hope.”
We had reached the edge of the first field and had to climb a stone wall to get into the next. It was an entirely different story—recently plowed and with rolling terrain that made it hard to keep walking a straight line in the dark. Stumbling over furrows, sinking into freshly turned dirt and tripping over clods and rocks, we struggled along saying little.
I knew we were headed right because we could still hear sirens ahead of us and, from time to time, see a faint glow that should have been traffic moving on the interstate. Then we came to a dense clump of trees, which we should have tried to circle, but I felt we ought to keep moving on a straight course.
What we couldn’t see in the grove were the low-hanging limbs that made movement slow, dangerous, and disorienting. Liz hit her head on a branch within minutes as we entered the trees, and I tripped several times—once going full length on the ground over deadfalls. I looked at my watch and realized it had been forty minutes since we left Turg’s.