Midnight Horror Show

SATURDAY, MAY 3, 1964“Well my little boils and ghouls, have you seen enough?” The rickety plywood stage in front of the screen creaked as he leant on the edge of a massive operating table. There was no moon that night at the drive-in, and with the projector now dark he was lit by only a few headlights from the first row. A smile spread over his face like a wound as he looked down at the group of us who’d pushed up as close as we could get.“Have you seen enough carnage?” He sneered.“No,” we said.“Have you seen enough suffering?” He demanded. His face was painted like a corpse, but his eyes, set deep in pools of black grease paint, were wild and crackling with life. He pounded his fists down on the table with every word like a revival preacher.“No,” we said.“Have you seen enough horror?” He teased. The blinking neon from the exit sign splashed blood red against the spider-web of scars running up the side of his face and the white shirt under his dusty black suit. He lock

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 23, 1985I had spent the rest of Tuesday and all of today checking through bank statements, business transactions, court records, and interviews with neighbors and associates for any thread of a possible motive. And I’d put all of our senior officers to the task of double-checking my work. We found nothing. Given the victim’s well-known wealth, robbery would have been a likely motive if the murder itself hadn’t been so bizarre. The Boyd’s house had been thoroughly checked for any signs of missing property anyway. There was none. Even the victim’s wallet, containing ninety-eight dollars in cash and two credit cards, was still in the back pocket of his pants. The violence of the murder and the way the body had been staged had me thinking it was some kind of thrill killing and that Boyd may have been chosen at random. I checked in with the sheriff’s office and State Patrol to see if the MO matched anything they’d seen. It hadn’t.Around the afternoon shift change, I g

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 25, 1985Watching the pallbearers carry Richard Boyd’s coffin to his grave reminded me uncomfortably of the five strong men who barely got his body down from his ceiling, and I wished I hadn’t come. I’d expected a big turnout and thought some new witness or maybe even a suspect might present themselves by showing up and acting strangely. No such luck.Reverend Fowler was saying something and everyone looked like they were listening, gazing earnestly at the glossy box as it was lowered into the ground with heavy white straps. The Reverend finished and people started drifting away. I thought I might follow them to make an appearance at the potluck at the Boyd house, but something caught my eye as I turned for my car. A quick blur moving a few yards away. The back of a head covered in a mess of black hair on top of a skinny frame that ducked into a bramble of dead trees at the edge of the cemetery.About ninety percent of this job is repeated, careful, diligent collecti

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 27, 1985I was supposed to be off today, but I woke up early anyway. It was chilly outside and the sky was clear. I picked up the two copies of the Press Citizen that lay on the sidewalk, carried one of them back to Mrs. Walshan’s door on the ground floor and tossed the other one into the passenger seat of my car before pulling out into the street. I reached for the radio to check in with Dispatch, but then thought better of it. The night we found Boyd, the chief had told me to leave my radio off so none of the busybodies with scanners would butt in. News of the case was no secret anymore, but I had a feeling there were more people listening in for any tidbits and I knew the chief didn’t want to broadcast how little progress had been made.I drove out to the Doughnut Land and picked up a dozen assorted and took them into the station. “Any news?” I asked Sandy.Her eyes answered first. “Sorry,” she said.“Well, I brought doughnuts anyway.”I opened the box to let he

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 29, 1985The morning was not kind.A pounding headache and sour beer cotton mouth with a whiskey belch chaser. I lay in bed for a couple or forty minutes staring at the dust motes wafting in front of the window and slowly rolling over the events of the previous day. None of it made any more sense than it had yesterday. The chief effectively closed the Boyd case and, as far as he was concerned, Peter Graham was officially the Department of Natural Resources’ problem.Both were good calls. Neither was satisfying, but they were still sound, responsible decisions. Laying there listening to my head ring, I tried to convince myself to stay in bed until this all blows over. That’s what the chief wanted me to do. Rest. Take care of myself. Get my head right. But whenever I closed my eyes, I saw that field and those shadows. I was off the map. I didn’t know if I was going crazy or the rest of the world was. But I do know Boyd wasn’t killed by some drifter, Graham wasn’t