Even more impressive, Dallas, his former home and police department, with which he had parted on very bad terms, had put in a request for his help after all these years. Dallas PD had refused to pay him compensation for the injuries he'd sustained when he and Wallace Lafayette Jackson-both off duty at the time-had given chase after a young Hispanic-black hellion who had been terrorizing the city with a robbery spree growing increasingly violent. They'd expected the robbery spree to escalate to murder at any time. Jackson had been driving, and when they cornered Elzono, Jackson's car careened into the suspect's car, the impact setting Jackson's car ablaze. Jackson was shot and slumped over at the wheel as Lucas leaped from the fiery vehicle, returning fire under a hail of bullets from Elzono. Lucas killed the young man, later made into a saint of the neighborhood, Hector "Malcolm X" Elzono, who, after seeing the movie and reading the book, had proclaimed himself, "The reincarnation of Malcolm, returned from Hell, ready to set this world on fire, man!"
All bullshit, as Elzono's interpretation of X and his Muslim teachings was as perverted as the teachings of A1 Quaeda.
Jackson, hit in the chest, was enveloped in smoke and flame and burned alive while Lucas fought to pull him free of the inferno, Elzono still shooting and laughing at the sight. Finally, Lucas's aim sent Elzono to his grave, and with Elzono shot dead, Lucas tried even more desperately to pull the trapped Jackson from the flames. Lucas burned his hands, arms, cheek, and neck in the failed attempt. He had also been hit by bullets, and had suffered head and internal injuries in the crash. Lucas would spend almost a year in rehabilitation while fighting for compensation from the Dallas department.
Dallas's Internal Affairs jumped on the alcohol content in Lucas's system, and that in the seared body of Jackson as well. Following policy, the department denied benefits to either man, and Lucas wound up suing for both himself and for Jackson's family. He won his case only after years of struggle and condemnation on both sides. Lucas had had to start over in Houston, but not as a detective. He'd had to prove himself over again, starting from the bottom rung as a new recruit, and even after beating these odds and overcoming his physical problems, still Houston PD, remembering Dallas, placed him on desk duty here in the Cold Room. However, Lucas had not let the desk ride him. He pursued cold cases with the vengeance and tenacity of any competent detective pursuing a murder, disregarding the negatives, and as a result, he spent as much time on the streets, tracking criminals, as any detective on the force. His aggressiveness had earned him the respect of others, commendations, and a gold shield-reinstatement as a murder cop, a detective. He had made the best of it, and now he ran the place, having solved more cold cases than anyone in the history of the room, surpassing even the fabled Detective Maurice Remo, who had run the CC room for thirty years, retiring as Lucas had come on.
Given his bad history with Dallas, he understood why HPD brass had placed him on unsolved cases. They wanted to keep him off the streets, and they fully expected little of him beyond keeping the records tidy. The idiots had no idea how Maurice Remo and other good CC cops operated. After the grueling hours on the phone, running down people who were often in geriatric care or even dead, a Cold Case cop had to commit to a theory like a Jack Bull terrier sinks his teeth into it, and this meant hitting the pavement, ringing doorbells, interviewing, cinching a lead, following up, locking on, arrest, and interrogation-the entire gamut of the hunt.
The brass hadn't expected the Indian Cold Case worker to know anything about computers either, but again they were wrong. COMIT was a program he instituted with the help of able others. Even the FBI were now modeling their unsolved backlog storage program on the COMIT model.
Lucas thumbed open the old dusty file that had caught his attention: a skimpy murder book on a young girl named Yolanda Sims, just turned nine years of age, the picture of an angel in 1956-the year of her death. She had been found with a scarf tied tightly around her neck, and the assumption of death by manual strangulation after being tortured, beaten, and raped by some fiend had been dismissed by the pathology report made out by a Dr. Wisniewski, who signed off as Wiz. The strangulation with the scarf came after death by internal hemorrhaging from the beatings about the head and abdomen. The odds of her killer being found alive today were slim at best, but the girl remained un avenged, and the eyes in her photo struck Lucas to the core, asking, "If the monster is alive, he has enjoyed fifty years of life that should have been mine. So what're you going to do about it?"
The odd features of the crime itself posited few clues. She had sawdust in her natty hair and over her nude body. Aside from a closed adult fist, a carpet layer's nail-filled wood stripping had been used in beating her. She had cigar-sized, round bums on her legs and arms from a large soldering iron-said Wiz. She had been brutalized with what the coroner thought a screwdriver, and finally she had bled to death of internal wounds. The girl's body was left on a doorstep of a home in the southwest comer of the Jacinto City area, at the exact house number as hers but one block over from her house. The geography, the buildings, the neighborhood must be all entirely different now, and most certainly relatives, friends, neighbors-all different, older, moved on, and moved out. Nearly fifty years had come and gone. What hope of ever solving this little girl's murder now?
Still, something about the deep pools that were the black girl's eyes, the cut of her dimples, her pigtails, the simple cloth dress, the smile in the life photo comparing so starkly with the empty eyes and down-turned lips of the death photo. It all spoke to Lucas, pleading with him to take the next step. "What is the next step?" he asked him-self. Talk to her parents? Was either alive? Talk to her brother, her sister, her uncles and aunts? Some of them were younger than she was when the crime was committed; they'd be in their forties and fifties now. What could they possibly know that might help? Would any family member care to go there with Lucas as guide? Besides, hadn't the original investigative team asked all the pertinent questions of all the pertinent family members? Perhaps not. Lucas's reputation for uncovering blunders piled upon blunders in earlier cold cases had earned him recognition and kudos from most, but it never endeared him to the cops his investigating had revealed as bungling. In other cases, it wasn't so much the errors of investigators as the era of ignorance of such scientific breakthroughs as criminal profiling, technological advances, and DNA fingerprinting.
Law enforcement had learned a great deal about child abduction and murder since '56, such as the fact that only 20 percent of child abductions fell under the umbrella of stranger abductions, that the other 80 percent were abductions by someone known to have had at least some passing acquaintance with the victim. The Ward Weavers of the world came to mind, those who wooed their victims with promises and gifts and a place to stay the night, a place to light up on weed, a place to hide from their own threatening home life.
The 1956 police reports proved sketchy as Lucas's eyes scanned over the aged paper and the old script. There was a record of the detectives having talked to the parents, but a reading between the lines spoke of a bigoted-or at least jaded-police force that had written them off as shiftless niggers whose lifestyle had brought the tragedy down around young Yolanda's head. Unofficially, the dead child's parents were at very least negligent, having allowed a live- in uncle to send the nine-year-old out after dark for cigarettes and coffee. She made it back with the grocery bag, and was allowed to play out back of the house as a reward. The child then disappeared from their backyard, skirted by an alleyway, and she was returned later, dumped on the doorstep of a home a block over. The numbers on the two homes corresponding as they did-1214 Denton- Yolanda's home-to 1214 Denby Street-home of startled neighbors who'd discovered Yolanda's body and called police-nagged at Lucas, tugging like a fish on a line. He pictured the startled neighbors trying to explain to a desk sergeant over the phone what lay on their front steps, this before the days of 911 emergency dialing.