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Thursday, October 31, 1985
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Midnight Horror Show Saturday, November 2, 1985
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 2, 1985When I opened my eyes, I was lying in a hospital bed. A nurse I didn’t recognize cheerfully read me a list of injuries I’d racked up, including a nice set of third-degree burns on both legs as it happens, and added in a ‘You’re lucky to be alive’ for good measure.“James?” I barked, and winced. Smoke inhalation. “What about James?”“The young man you saved?” she said. “He’s stabilized, but I’m afraid he’s in a coma.”“I need to see him!”“You need to rest,” she said. “The doctor is doing everything he can. He’s in good hands.”“Skoger,” I remembered. “I need the chief. Get me a phone! I need to—”“We were asked to phone the station as soon as you woke up,” she said. “I had one of the other nurses do that while we’ve been talking. I’m sure they’ll send someone over to check up on you, but they also told us to tell you that ‘all suspects are in custody’. Does that sound right?”“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, it does.”The nurse left and told me to get some sle
Midnight Horror Show Sunday, November 3, 1985
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 3, 1985Around eight o’clockthe nurse came back and she had the chief with her. She checked a few things and then left us alone.“How are you doing, Dave?” he asked.“Honestly?” I said. “I have to say I’ve been better.”Chief Hayes’s mustache curled up in a smile. He pulled a chair over to the bed and sat down. “This was bad business all around. No two ways about it,” he said. “But it’s over. You put an end to it. You’re alive, and that boy’s alive because of you.”“The nurse said he was in a coma,” I said.“He was,” said the chief. “He came out sometime last night.”“I need to see him,” I said. I tried to sit up, but the pain convinced me to lay back.“You will,” he said. “Just not for a while. They airlifted him to Iowa City. University Hospitals’ got specialists. Kid’s got pieces of that rifle slug embedded in his heart, and they aren’t equipped for that kind of thing around here.”“What about Roberts?”“What about him?” asked the chief.“Did you ge
Midnight Horror Show Saturday, November 9, 1985
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 9, 1985I was releasedafter a few more days in the hospital. The sky was clear and the sun was high. The Caprice had been totaled, but Mills had dropped off a marked patrol car for me to use. My chest hurt when I got in, but I set my jaw and turned the key. Then I headed straight for the Skoger place.It was deserted. Some yellow tape across the door of the house and the barn, but otherwise it was like it had been before. I ducked the tape line and went inside. I don’t know what I expected to find in there, but I didn’t see it. In the daylight, it was just an old abandoned house.Outside, the sun shown bright and it made the yellow ironwood leaves shimmer when the breeze came through. I made my way down to the tree line and fought to keep my breathing steady. A few yards into the woods and it got easier. Nothing looked like it did that night. The shadows were watered down and the trees were just trees. I walked deeper in, trying to retrace my steps, but it w
Midnight Horror Show Tuesday, December 17, 1985
TUESDAY, DECEMBER 17, 1985The full confessionmade by John Skoger, a.k.a Paul Clements from Rockford, Illinois, was enough to satisfy the prosecutor, so Chief Hayes gave the official order to close the books on the case. I’d healed up, mostly, and gone back to work. A couple of guys held up the Fairway grocery store and then the Hardees, and Mills and I spent the first part of December tracking them down. When we got the cuffs on them, it felt like things had more or less gotten back to normal. So, on a quiet Tuesday, I gathered up all my notes and files on the Boyd case and the missing person’s pictures I’d taken from the old files and took them back over to City Hall.Those Skogers, or whoever they were, were nuts. That had to be all there was to it. However they pulled it off, and for whatever reason, everything that happened on that stage was all part of some kind of sick plan to murder James in front of a crowd, and they’d failed. Like Franklin had said, one of those Manso
Midnight Horror Show Saturday, May 3, 1964
SATURDAY, MAY 3, 1964“Well my littleboils 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
Midnight Horror Show Tuesday, October 22, 1985
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 22, 1985A searing white flashof sound burned my dream away. In an instant, nothing remained but shadows and dread and shame. I’d swatted at my clock radio out of instinct, but the noise didn’t stop. As my brain struggled to catch up, I crawled over to the edge of the bed and read 4:21 a.m. in radium painted numbers. The dark of my room felt darker than it should, and there was a smell in the air I didn’t like. I picked up the telephone receiver from the edge of the nightstand.“Dave,” a familiar voice on the other end said gently. “We need you at 19 Halverson as soon as you can.”I looked at the clock again, and rubbed at the gunk that had settled in the corners of my eyes. “Okay, Chief.”“Leave your radio off ... It’s a bad one, Dave.”The line went dead and I hung up the receiver. I stumbled over to the shower in the dark and dunked my head under running water for a minute and then ran a comb through my hair and dug around for a clean looking
Midnight Horror Show Wednesday, October 23, 1985
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
Midnight Horror Show Thursday, October 24, 1985
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 24, 1985My clock radiosnapped to life at dawn, and I regretted my dinner selection immediately. I took a cold shower and resisted the temptation to add a little hair of the dog to the coffee and toast with peanut butter I made myself eat before leaving. I ran into Mrs. Walshans, the landlady, on my way out. She looked worried, and told me she heard shouting from my upstairs apartment in the middle of the night.I smiled as best I could that early. “Bad dreams, I guess.”Innovative Foods Incorporated bought out Boyd’s Quality Meats close to fifteen years ago. They kept on all the workers who wanted to stay, but never seemed to really expand and bring new jobs in the way that they’d promised. Still, IFI remained the steadiest employer in Mahigan County and they’d stayed when the other factories had left.The stench from outside the plant had long ago melted into the background of the town. On windy days, I’ve heard you can smell it as far as Keosauqua, but th
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