“I see. When did you last see your son, Mr. Walters?”
“Friday night. He had a date and he left the house about eight o’clock.”
Mr. Walters paused. For the first time, a flicker of doubt intruded on his self-confidence.
“Is there something wrong? Is he hurt?”
They never imagine the worst. They never ask you if he is dead. They just prod a little, not really wanting to know.
“Who was your son out with?”
“His girlfriend, Elaine Murray. They were going to a movie. He often comes in late and we don’t hear him. I thought he might be sleeping late. He always closes the door to his room when he is sleeping, so I didn’t know if he was in or out. Then I checked his bed and it hadn’t been slept in.”
Mrs. Walters stopped talking. Somewhere during the speech her hand had entwined with her husband’s and they had moved closer together.
“Why did you call the police? It’s less than a day since he went out.”
Mr. Walters looked relieved.
“I told Carla we should have waited,” he said. Carla Walters turned toward her husband. She was beginning to think that he had been right. That she had overreacted.
“I…Maybe I was foolish. But I called the Murrays and Elaine hadn’t come home either.”
“I see,” Shindler said. Now came the hard part. The part that he had been putting off. He tried to think of a diplomatic way of phrasing it. There was none.
“I’m afraid that I have some very bad news for you.”
He could picture what they were going through. It was the same vertigo that he had felt years ago when he sat with his family in their living room and a balding detective with tired eyes told them that Abe was dead. He had felt himself spinning then as the Walters must be spinning now.
Shindler laid the autopsy report on Marcus’s desk and pulled up a chair. The Homicide Bureau of the Portsmouth Police Department was no different than any of the other detective divisions. It was a large, antiseptic room filled with old wooden desks at which sat poorly dressed men of varying shapes, ages and sizes. The only thing that they had in common was their cynicism.
“It’s all in there. I had a chat with Beauchamp and he said he thinks that there must have been at least two people with two different weapons.”
Shindler picked up the report. The autopsy had been performed by Dr. Francis R. Beauchamp, the County Medical Examiner. He had found multiple stab wounds to the body, a skull fracture and other abrasions involving portions of the body, all of which indicated that some type of severe altercation had occurred. There was blood on the body and stab and puncture wounds and there were abrasions and bruises around the scrotum. The head injury was a depressed skull fracture made from behind by some type of blunt instrument. The stab wounds were generally about one-half inch in length and about a quarter or an eighth inch in width. Some of them were three to three and one-half inches deep, penetrating to the diaphragm. A total of twenty puncture wounds were found. Death was due to internal bleeding into the left chest cavity as one of the puncture wounds had passed through the lung.
“Beauchamp thinks that the wounds that did the damage were made by a sharp-bladed instrument. He thinks Walters was standing upright and that the killer approached from the front and left side to have made the death wound.”
“What about the damage to the head?”
“After. It was inflicted when he was down.”
“You mean they beat him like that after he was dead?”
Marcus nodded.
“What kind of animals are we dealing with, Harvey?”
“The worst kind, Roy. You see that sentence about the depressed fracture. Beauchamp explained that to me. There are two types of fracture, a linear fracture, in which the skull is simply split or cracked, and a depressed fracture in which the skull is physically driven into the brain, just like splitting a melon. Those boys did a lot of extra work on Walters and none of it was necessary. They must have known that he was dead, but they struck him on the head in several places. There was a prominent injury above the left ear where the wound gaped so wide that you could see the brain through the wound and another where the skull was so badly smashed that his brain actually spilled through the wound.”
Marcus was speaking in low, clipped tones. Shindler was thinking of the boy’s head, the way he had seen it in the car. All that done after he was dead. Then lifting him and putting him in the car.
“Have they found the girl yet?” he asked quietly.
Marcus shook his head.
“That park is nine square miles and it’s all timber and brush. There are hundreds of ravines and culverts in there that are overgrown with vegetation. If she’s dead and they’ve hidden her in the park, we might never find her.”
The phone rang. Shindler answered it. He was grateful for the distraction. It was the secretary at the front desk.
“There’s a Mr. Shultz calling with information about the Walters murder. Should I put him through?”
There had been the usual number of nut calls that the police get on any publicized homicide, but Shindler was not passing over any possible leads.
“Put him through, Margie.”
There was a click and a man said “Hello.”
“Mr. Shultz? I’m Detective Roy Shindler. I understand you have some information on the murder of Richie Walters?”
“I’m not certain it will help, but my wife told me to call. We went to dinner Friday night at a restaurant just off of Monroe Boulevard. We finished very late. About eleven thirty we were walking to our car, which we had parked on Monroe, when we saw two cars racing each other. I noticed one, because it was very fancy. I think they said customed or customized. The other one, I’m not sure about. I really didn’t pay much attention to it.
“This morning I read in the papers about that murder in the park. The car I saw sounds like the one they described in the paper. If I could see it, I could tell for sure.”
“We can send an officer out to drive you downtown, if that’s all right.”
“Sure. But I’m not finished. There was something else. The red car-the one I remember-it made the other car crash.”
“It made it crash?”
“Yes. I don’t know what happened, because we looked away and they were several blocks away when we heard it. But we heard a crash and the other car-the dark one-was spun around in our direction. I guess the car wasn’t damaged too bad, because it drove away in a little bit.”
“Well, thank you, Mr. Shultz. That is important information. I’ll send an officer out to see you and to take a statement. Thanks, again.”
Giannini had called them down to the lab fifteen minutes after Mr. Shultz’s call. They had found something at the scene and he wanted them to see it.
“First, the small stuff. We found no prints in or on the car. The car had been wiped pretty thoroughly. We found a man’s sock under the car when we moved it and another man’s sock near the area where the dirt road enters the meadow. There were some fibers that we have matched with the socks that were found under the windshield wipers. It’s my guess that the killer used the socks like gloves and wiped the prints off of the car.”
“Is there any way of tracing a person through the socks?”
“Oh, we know where the socks came from. Walters was barefoot. I already had someone check with the family. They’re his socks.”
Giannini glanced down at a sheet of paper he was holding.
“Next, it looks like the motive wasn’t robbery. There was thirty dollars in his wallet and twenty in the purse. There was also an expensive camera in the back seat.”
“You said that you had something important for us,” Shindler prodded.
“Right.”
Giannini walked over to a filing cabinet and rummaged in one of the steel drawers.
“One of my men came across this stuff in some bushes near the base of the hill that leads down from the meadow to the paved road.”