by A W Hartoin
Dwayne and Amy were confused. Carrie wasn’t. She nodded and said, “They fought about that.”
“What?” Dwayne asked.
“I was never totally sure, but I think Dad might’ve taken pictures at the crime scene.”
By the time Carrie got done recounting her parents arguments about destroying something that was “sick”, I was convinced Des had done what he’d done during the war. He documented and his wife wasn’t thrilled. She didn’t want “that” in the house in case the kids saw it. As a kid that did see some horrible things that her father had documented, Mary was right on the money. Once you see that, you can’t unsee it.
But Des was more careful than Dad. Carrie remembered seeing him carry a hefty lockbox out of sight a few times right after the murder. She found it tucked away under shoeboxes in the back of her parents’ closet. Since she was a nosy teen with an axe to grind, Carrie tried to pick the lock but didn’t get inside.
“I can’t believe you did that,” said Amy.
“Are you? Really?” Carrie laughed. “I figured at the very least Dad had some dirty magazines in there. He’d grounded me again and I thought maybe those would give me some leverage.”
“That’s disgusting.”
She shrugged. “Desperate times. Plus, I was curious about the murder. Everybody was. It was pretty hush hush.”
“You wanted to see what had been done to that poor nun?”
“It’s hard to believe, but I did,” said Carrie. “It didn’t seem real somehow. How could something like that happened right here in St. Seb?”
“It’s like how people slow down to look at an accident,” said Lefty. “They want a glimpse.”
Amy wrinkled her nose and leaned into her husband. Dwayne had gotten quiet and was looking down at all the mushroom pictures. I watched him, but decided to let him stew on whatever he was thinking.
“What happened to that lockbox?” I asked.
“I wish I knew,” said Carrie. “I thought we’d find it after Dad died, but I looked and it wasn’t there. Dwayne?”
Dwayne fiddled with the buttons on his grandpa sweater and didn’t answer. Unless I missed my guess the stewing was about to boil over.
Amy took his hand. “Honey, what is it? Did you see those pictures?”
He shook his head. “No. I didn’t know…I didn’t have any idea that Dad would’ve done that. What color was that lockbox?”
“Did you throw that thing away?” Carrie asked. “I will kill you.”
“Carrie!” exclaimed Dwayne.
Color flooded Carrie’s cheeks. “Green. Kind of a military shade and it had a little padlock on it.”
“I saw it.”
“When?” Amy asked.
“1974 at Christmas.”
We waited, but Dwayne was having a rough time. Sweat broke out on his temples and he had to take off a sweater.
“Lefty said that you think the nun might’ve been killed by a serial killer,” he said finally.
“There’s reason to believe that.” I couldn’t imagine where he was going. St. Seb didn’t have murders. Maggie was the only one and she was only dumped there. “Is there a particular reason why you remember seeing that lockbox when you did?”
There was a very good reason and my fingers started itching to call Spidermonkey back. Dwayne came home from college at Christmas in 1974. When he pulled up in the driveway, his dad and a man were coming out of the front door. The man wasn’t much older than Dwayne and wore a wide-collared suit with an ascot and had hair over his collar. Dwayne didn’t recognize him and he was way too young and hip to be a friend of his father’s.
Des handed the man a green lockbox and they shook hands. Dwayne heard the young man say, “Thank you, Mr. Shipley. This is really going to help. You won’t regret it.” Des said, “You’re welcome” and they parted. Dwayne and the man passed each other on the walkway to the house and said hello.
When Dwayne asked who the man was, Des said it was just a reporter who wanted to talk about the war. Dwayne asked if he gave him some pictures and Des said he did.
“Oh, my God,” said Carrie. “A reporter has the pictures.”
“I feel sick,” said Dwayne.
“Why?” I asked.
Amy squeezed Dwayne’s hand. “Was it that reporter?”
Dwayne nodded and Amy put her hand over her mouth. Lefty, too, had lost his normally jolly expression and muttered, “Son of a bitch.”
“What reporter?” Carrie asked.
“The one that disappeared.”
Crap on a cracker.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
SNOWPLOWS ARE SLOW and wide. Every turn we made, another snowplow. St. Sebastian was serious about clearing the roads. I guess that tournament really was important, but the snow kept coming down, so I didn’t see it happening. Plus, it was freezing. Even blasting the heater couldn’t combat the cold and Moe jumped into my lap and did a spin on Carrie’s yearbook, trying to find the most comfortable spot, which happened to be pressing against my coffee-filled bladder. That was extra awesome when Fats drove up on sidewalks full-tilt and bounced us around like popcorn kernels in a Whirley-Pop.
“Stop that. I’m going to pee myself,” I said as I held onto Moe and the oh-shit handle above the door for dear life.
“You could’ve used the bathroom at Dwayne and Amy’s,” said Fats.
“I didn’t have to go then.”
“Well, you’re out of luck now.”
“Thanks, Mom,” I said.
Fats smiled, her eyes crinkling behind her mirrored Wayfarers. “That was mom-like. I’m going to rock this parent thing.”
“Not if you don’t start eating.”
She whipped off the sunglasses. “What do you mean?”
“You’re growing a human. That takes food.”
“I’m giving her food. I ate a croissant and Irene’s casserole. That had to be a thousand calories.”
“How many did you work off after?” I asked, tapping her Fitbit.
She grimaced and put the glasses back on. “Call Spidermonkey. That new body is news.”
“Fine, but you need to go on a real pregnancy diet.”
Fats yanked the wheel to the left and we passed a snowplow blind, scaring the crap out of me and poor Moe started shivering.
“I’ll tell Tiny.” It just slipped out and Fats slammed on the brakes. Thank goodness for seatbelts or I would’ve cracked my head open. Moe would’ve been a curly-tailed pancake.
“Tell him what?”
“That you’re not taking care of yourself,” I said, rubbing the painful stripe left against my chest.
“I am.”
“Fats, you’re not Pink the Impaler now. You’re Mom. It’s a totally different gig.”
“I don’t want it to be,” she said after a moment.
“Bummer,” I said. “Can we go? It’s freezing.”
“This baby’s going to change my life,” said Fats.
That was somewhere between a question and a statement, so I let it lie, and instead said, “We don’t know that we have another body.”
She snorted and hit the gas, dodging into traffic, if you could really call it that. We were going twelve miles an hour and there were exactly three cars on the road. “Where do you think that guy went? The Bahamas?”
“I don’t need any more bodies.”
“Bummer.”
“Fine,” I said. “I’ll call.”
Spidermonkey didn’t answer, but Loretta did, sounding just as harassed as before if not more.
“Do you have any information on the flu vaccine?” she asked.
“Er…like what?”
“Did the flu shot cause an outbreak a couple of years ago?” Loretta asked.
I sighed. We’d heard all about this so-called theory at the time. One woman with the flu told me all about it in the ER, angrily blaming the shot for how ill she was. Had she actually gotten the flu shot, you ask? No, but it was still somebody’s fault. “The CDC never said
that happened.”
“Thank you. I just…I’m losing my mind. I don’t care if there is hurricane force winds, I have got to get out of here.”
“Don’t do that,” I said. “It can’t last forever.”
“Minutes are like hours in conspiracy-theory hell. My grandson just accused me of eating a peanut butter cup,” said Loretta.
“Did you?”
“Yes, I did and I’ll do it again. He’s not allergic to anything. Nothing. Four years old and calling me out. I’ll find myself a hickory switch and I will beat that little—”
“I think you’ve gone to the bad place, Loretta,” I said. “Can we talk murder?”
“You’d think that would be worse, but it’s not. What have you got?”
“Two things and they’re big.”
“How big?”
“A new murder.” I told Loretta about the strong possibility that Des documented the scene and then gave the pictures to a reporter named Kenneth Young in 1974. Young was a grad student studying journalism at Mizzou. During the summer before he disappeared he worked at the Sentinel with Barney Scheer as an intern. He was in St. Seb during the 1974 Christmas break for a few days and was last seen in town at a gas station.
Dwayne, Amy, and Lefty remembered the disappearance, but it wasn’t a big story at the time. Young was from Iowa and it was assumed something happened on his drive home for Christmas, most likely an accident. Dwayne knew Young was the man he’d seen talking to his father, but only because the new police chief, Melanie Gates, showed up to interview Des, and Dwayne was fascinated by a female police chief, not an everyday occurrence in the seventies. He knew his parents were upset by the disappearance, but he thought they were overreacting. His father’s revolver had come back out and Mary was checking the doors again. By the time Dwayne came back for Easter, he’d forgotten all about it.
“So what got him thinking about it?” Loretta asked.
“Tank Tancredi covered the disappearance again after I found Janet Lee Fine’s body and bike in the lake bed. Two disappearances linked to St. Sebastian is unusual and there isn’t a whole lot to report around here. Tank’s story got people talking, but nothing came of it,” I said. “What’s Spidermonkey doing?”
“Hold on.” Loretta had a conversation with her husband and came back with some news. “He’s working on identifying some donors from Maggie’s notebook. That nun you have with you is a sweetheart. I hope this isn’t too hard on her.”
“It probably is, but there’s nothing I can do about that now,” I said. “Anything on that yet?”
“He says he’s got a back door. Whatever that means. But we do have something for you on that reporter,” said Loretta.
“Young? Already?”
“No, the other one. Barney Scheer.”
Loretta’s news wasn’t exactly helpful, but it was illuminating. Barney, like Woody and Des, served in the war, signing up immediately after Pearl Harbor. He was a Marine in the Pacific, serving with Chief Woody Lucas in the same platoon. They were drinking buddies after the war, but Barney seemed to have gotten it together after his kids were born. Unlike Woody and Des, the two veterans stayed close and Barney gave the eulogy at Woody’s funeral.
“Woody must’ve asked his old friend to back off and he did,” I said.
“Not a very good reporter,” said Loretta. “But a loyal friend, I suppose.”
That didn’t rub me the right way. Des and Woody were super close, but Maggie’s murder killed their connection. Why didn’t it kill Barney and Woody’s? Did being comrades in arms mean so much that Barney would ignore his profession and his conscience to help Woody? Why would Woody need help at all?
“We have to rule out Woody Lucas,” I said. “It seems he went through a lot of trouble to keep Maggie’s murder quiet.”
“We’re already looking,” said Loretta. “He didn’t own a green truck. We know that already.”
“That’s good, but something’s definitely going on.”
Fats took a hard turn into the Sentinel parking lot and we slid ten feet nearly hitting a telephone pole.
“I’m at the Sentinel,” I said. “I’ll see what I can dig up.”
“Wait a minute,” said Loretta. “Now this is going to help.”
I smiled. “I’m all ears.”
Fats parked and took Moe from me, raising an eyebrow. “Hurry up. She’s a frozen pup.”
Loretta’s information was good. Spidermonkey had outsourced to an up-and-comer in the hacking world and the kid was a whiz at gathering deleted texts. Once he heard cops were hiding something, he was all up in it and came back with the current chief, Will Gates, being a big, fat liar.
There was flooding periodically. That got confirmed. But the new guy, like me, thought it was odd that the cops wouldn’t have taken steps to protect their files and evidence. It turned out, in the late eighties, shelving had been purchased after a record flood and it was noted that it was to keep records off the floor in case of the river coming over its banks again, which it did two more times.
“So they were flooded and records were lost?” I asked.
“Our guy doesn’t think so. That flood was minor compared with the ones that came after. The water made it to the police station, but the water was only a couple of inches deep. The shelving they bought was to keep everything up a minimum of two feet, so those other floods shouldn’t have touched the files and evidence.”
I tried to remember what the flood stories I’d read had said about depth, but I couldn’t. “There was the burst pipes. That can ruin everything.”
“It could, but he doesn’t think it did,” said Loretta.
Fats got out and went around the truck to pull me out into the icy air and pushed me toward the Sentinel’s door. I dropped the yearbook and it went fluttering away in the wind. Fats pounced on it before it slid into some slush created by an excess of salt and scowled at me as I tried to hear Loretta over the wind and crunching of the snow.
Our new guy decided the best way to know what the cops were up to was to see what they told their spouses and, it turned out, those burst pipes picked a great day to do their thing. Deputy Dallas Mosbach was on duty when it happened and that guy was pretty flipping dedicated to duty. A little too much, in my opinion. His wife went into labor with their first child and, instead of going to the hospital post haste, Dallas stayed in the basement of the police station to “save the files”. That’s right. Files over labor. His wife’s sister had to take her to the hospital when the contractions got five minutes apart and he wasn’t there for another two hours until his wife started threatening him saying, “Nobody cares about those old ass cases. If you don’t get over here, I’ll divorce you and take the Camaro.”
Old ass cases.
I don’t know if it was the threat to the Camaro or what, but he left saying, “The guys will get the rest” as if his wife cared at that point.
We stumbled into the reception area of the Sentinel and Tank sprang to his feet from behind the desk. “Thank God. I was about to call Will. I thought you had an accident.”
“I’m about to. Bathroom?” I ran to the bathroom and told Loretta I’d call back when I had something.
When I came out, the whole area smelled delicious and Fats was eating a huge, drippy sandwich. Her Fitbit was on the desk and Moe was next to it with a bowl of meat all to herself.
“That smells amazing,” I said as I began to drool.
“My wife’s Italian beef,” said Tank. “It cannot be beat. Want some?”
“Do you really have to ask?”
He laughed and served me up a sandwich. I had to tell Aaron about this recipe. He would love it and then pump it up to the stratosphere.
Tank waited patiently until we got half our sandwiches down before sliding a copy of his story across the desk. Actually, it was a series on missing persons in Missouri and how investigations had changed over time. Kenneth Young’s case was used as an example and it was a sad one.
What D
wayne and Amy had told me was true. Young was in town doing something at the Sentinel that wasn’t specified, other than research. I think we knew what that was. Maggie’s murder. He said goodbye to Barney Scheer, gassed up his car, and was never seen again.
When he didn’t turn up at his parent’s house in Iowa, they reported him missing, but it took a while for the investigation to even start. The police said he ran off with a girl or was partying. They weren’t concerned, but when he missed both Christmas and New Year’s, they got busy. It was another week before enquiries were made in St. Seb. A few people were interviewed, but Barney didn’t report any particulars on the interviews. There was no mention of Desmond or his pictures, and Maggie’s murder certainly wasn’t brought up.
“Do you have the original stories?” I asked.
“On your favorite,” said Tank.
I groaned. “Microfiche?”
He made a shooting motion at me. “Do you want to go down and look at them?”
Want is putting it strong.
“I guess I better.”
Tank picked up Carrie’s yearbook. “Why do you have this?”
“I thought I might take a look later and see if there are any other pictures of Stott that might help us know who he was friends with,” I said.
“We can do that right now.” Tank looked at the index in the back. “Nope. Bertram Stott. One page.”
“He might be somewhere in the background.”
“Grasping at straws, aren’t we?” Fats asked.
“You never know,” I said.
Tank set the yearbook down. “Bedtime reading for you.”
“It’s not like I’ll be sleeping.”
“Miss Elizabeth having fun with you?” Tank asked.
I wrinkled my nose. “You have no idea.”
Fats picked a stray piece of beef off her paper plate and said, “Mercy has all the luck.”
“If that’s luck, it’s all bad,” I said.
Fats and Tank disputed my definition of luck, since I’d gotten Maggie’s financial insights out of it, but I wasn’t persuaded. Those eyeballs didn’t give me anything but an all-over exhausted ache.