Wednesday, October 23, 1985

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 23, 1985

I 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 got up for some coffee. A few of the guys were hanging out by the locker room, either just coming on or getting ready to leave. I kept my distance. The officers like me well enough, I think, but I stopped getting invited to barbeques and beers after work when I got promoted.

“I tell ya, man, couple of years from now this thing’s gonna be one of those stories kids tell at sleepovers,” said Brown.

“Yeah,” said Johnson, “Like one of them, whatchamacallit?”

“Urban legends,” said Taylor.

“Yeah,” said Johnson. “It’s spooky.”

“You ever hear the one about the girl? You know, the hitchhiker girl on the old north county road,” said Sullivan.

“No,” said Johnson.

“If you drive out there alone at night, you might see her,” smirked Sullivan. “She’s real pretty. Gorgeous. And she stops cars and asks for a ride, see? And then she tries to get you to go into the woods with her and if you go you’ll get lost and then she disappears.”

“I don’t get it,” said Johnson.

“You know,” said Sullivan. “All those caves out there and shit. She tricks you into going out there at night, and you’ll probably fall in one and die.”

“And then she disappears?” asked Johnson.

“Yeah.”

“You mean like she’s a ghost?” asked Johnson.

“The way I always heard it, she was a flapper,” said Taylor. “And she was trying to get revenge on her gangster boyfriend who killed her. That’s why she only went after guys.”

“Gangsters, seriously?” scoffed Johnson.

“All that rye they used to make in Templeton had to get to speakeasies somehow,” said Taylor.

“Yeah,” said Sullivan. “I heard it that way once. She wants to trap him out there, right?”

“Are you sure you’re not talking about the witch?” asked Brown.

“Wait, is the flapper a witch or a ghost?” asked Johnson.

“No, the witch is a different story,” said Sullivan. “We used to tell that one at campouts all the time back in scouts.”

“I thought it was just like that, though,” said Brown. “There’s a witch that lives in the woods out there.”

“You mean by the county park?” interrupted Taylor.

“Yeah,” said Brown. “There’s a witch out there and she tries to lure you into the woods and then she steals your soul.”

“Ooh!” Johnson’s eyes comically widened, laughing. “Hey, speaking of scouts, you guys ever take anybody on a snipe hunt?”

“A cousin of mine pulled that on me once,” I said. They all stopped laughing.

 “Oh,” said Brown. “Hey, Sarge.”

“Any news?” asked Taylor.

“Waiting to hear back from DCI,” I said.

“That’d be good,” said Taylor.

“Well, Sarge, we’d better go sign in,” said Sullivan.

“Yeah,” said Johnson. “Me, too. See you, Sarge.”

“All right then,” I said.

X

Doc called shortly before five o’clock to say he’d finished the autopsy and released the body to the family. Funeral was set for Friday. The lab work had been sent off to Des Moines, but he’d called in a favor to have them rush it and hoped to hear something before the end of the week. His full report wouldn’t be ready until then, but he confirmed the throat wound as the cause of death. I thanked him and hung up.

The Department of Criminal Investigation still hadn’t called me back, so I tried a state patrolman I knew from the academy who’s stationed at the capitol. Their dispatch patched me through.

“Hey, Rick. I need to get through to DCI but nobody’s picking up the phone over there.”

“Yeah, good luck with that,” he said.

“Something up?”

“Naw. Just budget stuff. Hiring freeze is backing up the cases,” he said. “Heard you got a murder down your way?”

“Yeah,” I said. “A bad one.”

“How bad?”

I glanced down at the Polaroids spread out on my desk of Boyd’s white flesh floating in his living room. “Real bad.”

“Jeeze. Well, I feel for ya, buddy.”

“Don’t suppose you could call in a favor over there?” I asked. “I gotta be honest, I’m outta my depth with this.” 

“I would if I could, Carlson. I don’t know how much good it would do you, but I have a number for one of the extensions in the commissioner’s office. Might have more luck with that than the main line.”

I thanked him and tried the number. It worked in the sense that I got a human being on the other end, but their answer was “We can’t spare any field agents at this time.”

I thanked them, slumped back in my chair, and ran through my notes again.

No help. And I was coming up on forty-eight hours with no leads. That meant the odds of solving this case were about to take a big jump off a short cliff. I sat at my desk staring off at the spider plant that Sandy Mills had brought in to cheer the place up. It hadn’t.

“You don’t think this is one of those Sharon Tate, Son of Sam things, do ya, Sarge?”

I turned my head and saw Franklin standing there, holding his hat in his hands and eyeing me cautiously.

“Why do you say that?”

“I guess it’s just a feeling, you know? Like how he was strung up and bled like that and all.” I looked at him silently. He fumbled a little more with his hands before continuing. “Like with a hog, you know? Seems like maybe that was on purpose.”

“You watch too many movies, Franklin,” I said, looking at the piles of worthless paperwork on my desk. “But what do I know? Worth a shot, right?”

I got home after midnight. Exhausted but not sleepy. I didn’t feel like eating, but since I hadn’t had much besides coffee in the last fifteen hours, I figured I should. I poured a bowl of cereal and took it over to the couch. I looked down at the flakes floating up in the milk and thought about Sally Devore bawling against the walls of that trailer, her face covered in blood and brains and bone.

I put the bowl down and went to get the bottle of Johnny Walker from the kitchen. Sometime after that I went to sleep.