by John Dibble
Her father laughed and said, “I’ll let the cook know. Can’t wait to see you, Honey.”
“Love you Dad. Mom too. See you tomorrow,” M.J. said.
She drove her personal car, a four-year-old midnight blue Ford Mustang, to Anacostia Station the next morning and cleaned up some pending paperwork. At noon, she said goodbye to Jake and headed home to see her parents.
It was about four and a half hours to Ronceverte, a small town tucked into a valley in the Appalachians in West Virginia. Most of the drive would be on Interstates, with the last few miles on a two-lane road that snaked through the mountains. It was a beautiful, cloudless day and she was enjoying the power and handling of her Mustang.
She crossed the Shenandoah River about an hour after leaving Anacostia and got her first glimpse of the Blue Ridge Mountains. She immediately felt herself start to relax, thinking less about work and more about where she was headed.
Her parents, Walt and Ginny Powers, were in their early sixties. Walt was not her birth father, who had been killed in a head-on with a drunk driver out on U.S. 219 when she was six months old. He had supported her and her mother working in the management office of one of the coal mines. After he died, her mother took a job as a waitress in the coffee shop at the Greenbrier Resort in White Sulphur Springs, which was about thirty minutes away from Ronceverte. On the days that her mother was working, M.J.’s maternal grandmother, who lived about a mile down the road, took care of her.
As part of her duties in the coffee shop, her mother took care of a room off the kitchen where breakfast and lunch were served to visiting tradesmen and law enforcement officers. One day at breakfast, she saw a tall West Virginia state trooper at the table. Her mother always said that she fell in love with Walt the minute she set eyes on him. Walt would always smile and say that he just liked her because she served such great breakfasts.
They got married about a year later and Walt legally adopted M.J., whose given name was Martha Jean, although she had insisted on being referred to by her initials since age six. When she was in second grade, Walt transferred to the State Police Bureau of Criminal Investigation. She remembered asking him why he didn’t wear the trooper hat that she liked anymore and didn’t drive the car with the flashing lights on the top. Her father had told her that he still had the hat, but his new job required that he dress like other folks and drive a regular car so the bad guys couldn’t figure out who he was. She liked that.
She had always been a runner. In grade school, she would challenge the boys to footraces, which she usually won. Her middle school had a cross-country team that she joined without hesitation and in high school her team competed in all of the state and regional meets, where M.J. always finished in the top three slots. During her senior year, the cross-country coach from West Virginia University in Morgantown stopped by the house to ask if she would be interested in going to school there and joining the team. With the encouragement of her parents, she applied and was accepted.
She majored in criminology and applied herself to her studies while spending all of her spare time training and competing in cross-country. Her team was consistently ranked nationally in the top ten by the NCAA and she won several personal awards during her junior and senior years.
She tried to get home to Ronceverte whenever she could, but her schedule made that difficult, except for holidays. However, her father seemed to find reasons to regularly visit Morgantown on “official business” and they would always have lunch or dinner together. She would tell him about case studies in her criminology courses and he would tell her as much as he could about investigations he was handling. They loved each other’s company and loved talking shop.
During her senior year, they would often talk about what she wanted to do after college. Law enforcement, of course, but where and what was the question. He discouraged her from joining a state or local agency. “Too much bullshit stuff,” he would say. She thought about the FBI, but it required two years of job experience before applying and she didn’t want to wait that long. Then, one day, there was a job fair at the university for majors in criminology and forensics. She went and looked at the materials from several federal police agencies.
She stopped at the desk for the United States Park Police. She didn’t know much about it, except the horse-mounted police she had seen on her high school field trip to Washington. The brochure said they were the oldest police force in the United States and covered all of the national monuments and parks. She was interested and filled out an application form. About a week later, she received a phone call asking if she could come to Washington and take an exam and a physical fitness test. She went and passed both.
She called her father to ask what he thought about her joining the Park Police. In typical fashion, he said, “I don’t know much about them, but they’re cops, right? If it seems right for you, go ahead with it. If nothing else, you’ll get some training and experience. If you don’t like it, you can always use that to transfer to another federal agency.”
After she graduated from college, she went back to Washington for an interview with a panel of Park Police officers. She was told that she had been accepted and, after being sworn in, attended a one-week orientation in Washington before transferring to the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Glynco, Georgia. After eighteen weeks there, she came back to D.C. for more training. Her parents came to her graduation ceremony and her father, while trying to appear stoically unaffected, wound up having to dab some tears from his eyes.
That was almost six years ago. Since then, she had done foot patrol duty on the National Mall, cruiser patrols on the GW and participated in all of the security details manned by the Park Police. She took the detective exam after three years on the force and, after passing it, was transferred to the Criminal Investigations Branch as an investigator. Two years later, she was made a detective.
M.J. left the Interstate and began the drive through the mountains toward Ronceverte. There were occasional small houses, many with yards littered with automobiles, trucks and boats resting on cinder blocks, anxiously awaiting repairs that would probably never come. At some of the junctions, there were small convenience stores with ancient gas pumps out front. This was the West Virginia landscape that she had known as a child and it had changed very little. In some ways, it was comforting to know that it still existed in sharp contrast to the urban existence that now defined her world.
She turned up the gravel road that led to her parent’s house, a white 1920s bungalow with three second-floor dormers and an open porch across the entire front. Her parents were sitting on the porch and came down the steps when she pulled up. Her father, a towering figure at six feet four inches, came forward and wrapped his arms around her. “About time you got here,” he said, releasing his hug so that M.J. could embrace her mother. “Don’t you pay him any mind,” her mother said, “we’re just glad you got here safely.”
M.J. retrieved her suitcase from the back seat of her car and the three of them walked up to the house. The living room had a pleasant and familiar smell that evoked a jumble of memories for M.J. Her mother was shorter than she was and had graying hair cut to shoulder length. She plucked an apron from one of the chairs, put it on and said, “You just freshen up and go sit with your father on the porch while I start dinner.”
M.J. walked up the narrow stairs to the second floor and took her bag into her bedroom, which was virtually unchanged from her high school days. The corner bookcase held all of her cross-country trophies and medals, and there were two posters still attached to the walls, one for the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta and another for the rock group Nirvana. She smiled as she looked around the room and touched the comforter on her bed, which had been made by her grandmother when M.J. was still in grade school.
She splashed some water on her face, took a file folder out of the side pocket of her suitcase and headed for the porch.
Her father was sitting in one of the two rocking chairs and had placed an
open beer for each of them on the table in between. M.J. handed him the file folder.
“This is a case I need to talk to you about,” she said.
He opened the folder and looked at the crime scene picture of the two boys’ bodies. It took a moment for the reality to register, much as it had for M.J. that morning at Difficult Run.
“M.J., this is horrendous!” he exclaimed. “For God’s sake don’t let your mother see this!”
He paged through the file, reading M.J.’s reports of the Medical Examiner’s findings, Zerk’s forensic investigation, and the interviews she and Jake had conducted. When he finished, she told him about the figure Doc had seen a year before and the daily runs she was doing to look for a suspect.
“Honey,” he said, “I’ve seen a lot of murder scenes and people killed in a lot of ways, but nothing like this. I investigated a couple of lynchings in the southern part of the state, but that’s the closest thing to these boys’ murders.”
“Dad, it’s frustrating me that there are no leads,” she said.
He thought for a moment then said, “Well, I guess you’ve already figured out that the crucial thing here is the way they were murdered. That tells a lot about the person you’re looking for. I don’t think you’re going to find a motive. This was somebody really sick and you may see their work in the future, but then again you may not. I think you’re right to run in the park. You run every day anyway, and that’s the best place to spot the killer.”
“Thanks, Dad,” she said.
Her mother appeared at the door and said, “Dinner’s ready if you two sleuths are finished.”
As they got up to go inside her father handed the file back to her and said, “Now you go put that away before we eat.”
The fried chicken was as good—actually better—than M.J. remembered. She heaped mashed potatoes and fresh corn on her plate to go with it.
“Honey, have you been eating enough?” her mother asked, watching her devour the meal and take a second helping.
“Yeah, Mom. I just don’t get food this good,” she replied.
They talked about happenings in Ronceverte and her mother seemed to provide a lot of information about M.J.’s classmates who had gotten married, were pregnant or already had children. M.J. knew this was a thinly-disguised suggestion that she should be considering the same thing.
“How is your friend Jake?” her father interjected. M.J. had brought him home one weekend to meet her parents.
“He’s OK,” she said. “We’re still dating and of course we work together.”
“He seems like a very nice boy,” her mother said.
“He is,” M.J. responded and tried to change the subject. “Are a lot more people out of work here?” she asked.
“It sure looks that way,” her father replied. “Of course, there’s not as many people living here as there used to be. I know some of the stores downtown are having a real tough time.”
They ate in silence for a while. M.J. was stuffed, but her mother started clearing the table and said, “I made a fresh apple pie and you father picked up some ice cream. Want some?”
“Sure,” M.J. said, knowing that it would push her over the edge. It was only seven o’clock and she was already feeling sleepy.
M.J. got up early the next morning and put on her running clothes. She headed up the steep hill behind her parents’ house, the same hill she had run as a child. There was a trail along the ridge that lead to the town of Ronceverte and she increased her pace. She missed having Lola running next to her but did not miss the added weight of her gun belt.
She came down off the ridge and followed the trail to Main Street, passing Rudy’s Corner Grill where she had worked as a waitress on weekends in high school. The town only had a population of 1,500 and M.J. knew most of its residents. She passed several people who waved and yelled out her name or “Good to have you back!” She had run this same route every day growing up and she enjoyed the familiarity.
She cut over to Edgar Avenue, which ran parallel to the railroad tracks. A long freight train hauling coal was moving slowly through the town and M.J. instinctively tried to outrace it, just as she used to do as a girl.
At the end of town, she cut back to the trail along the ridge and then along it to her parents’ house. When she arrived, her father was sitting on the front porch with a cup of coffee. She gave him a kiss on the forehead and sat down.
“How have you been feeling, Dad?” she asked. “You look like you’ve put on a little weight. Are you getting enough exercise?”
“I actually feel pretty good,” he said. “Since I retired I probably haven’t been getting as much exercise as I should, but I walk into town once or twice a week. It’s your mother’s cooking that’s made me put on some weight.”
M.J. smiled. “Just because she cooks it doesn’t mean you have to eat it all,” she said.
“I know, I know,” he replied, patting his stomach.
M.J. gave him another kiss and went to the kitchen where her mother was cooking bacon and eggs. She hugged her and poured some coffee for herself.
“Mom, don’t cook a lot of that for me. I’m not much of a breakfast eater,” she said.
“Whatever you don’t eat, I’m sure your father will be glad to finish,” she replied cheerfully.
“I know,” M.J. said, “but he needs to cut back on his eating and get some exercise, too. I just told him so.”
“That’s what I tell him all the time, but it doesn’t seem to make any difference,” her mother replied.
“Speaking of which, how have you been feeling, Mom?” M.J. asked.
“Oh, I really feel fine,” her mother replied. “My legs get a little achy sometimes, but that’s from all the years I spent on my feet waitressing. Other than that, no complaints.”
M.J. stepped back and looked at her mother. “Well, you look great, Mom,” she said.
“Aren’t you sweet,” her mother said and gave her a hug. “Now go tell your father it’s time to eat.”
Over breakfast, M.J. told them about the people she had seen on her run.
“You were such a fixture with your daily runs I’ll bet some of them thought they were in a time warp,” her father said, laughing.
“Why don’t you and I go downtown a little later and do some shopping,” her mother said to M.J.
“That would be great,” M.J. replied. “Dad, I brought a couple of movies for us to watch this afternoon, if you’re up for it.”
“You know me. I’m always up for a movie,” he said, dishing the last of the scrambled eggs onto his plate.
That evening, M.J.’s mother made meatloaf. It was delicious and M.J. once again ate enough to make her sleepy. She was only able to join in a game of Scrabble until about nine o’clock. “I’m going to have to leave you two to duke it out. I need to get going fairly early tomorrow,” she said.
“That’s OK, Honey,” her mother said. “I think you probably can use the sleep anyway.”
M.J. got up the next morning and had coffee on the porch with her parents. Her father carried her bag out to her car.
“I know that case you’re working on is frustrating as hell,” he said, “but trust your instincts and you’ll be OK. Yours have always been good and that’s what will help you solve it.”
She gave him a hug. “Thanks, Dad,” she said.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
M.J. WAS STILL FRUSTRATED with the lack of progress in the murder cases, but the weekend with her parents had helped to put things more in perspective. She found herself lessening the intensity, if not the frequency, of her surveillance of people in the park.
There seemed little else that she could do but wait for a break of some sort. Thus far, none of the public appeals for information had produced anything at all. The parents of the murdered boys had called M.J. several times to see if any progress had been made in the investigation. In early June, David Marsten called to say that the families and some friends had put together a reward of $10,000
for information leading to the arrest of the killer or killers. M.J. explained that it would be difficult to obtain any federal reward money, but that she would try. In the interim, she said, the families’ offer would be added to the public information on the case. A small article about the reward appeared in the Metro section of the Washington Post and similar stories were published in the community newspapers.
It was now mid-June, more than two months since the murders had occurred, and still nothing. M.J. continued to run in the park every day and to walk Difficult Run at night.
She was beginning to wonder if her daily runs had a chance of producing any usable information when she saw something that caught her attention. It was late in the day and she was just getting ready to turn off the Old Carriage Road onto the Swamp Trail to pick up Lola when she saw a solitary figure running ahead of her. He was about six feet tall with a shaven head and massive shoulders and biceps that stretched the material of his gray T-shirt to the limit. He was wearing running shorts and M.J. could see that he was in very good shape. She decided to follow him.
He was running, not jogging, but M.J. still had to slow her usual pace so she didn’t overtake him. She stayed back about a hundred yards to keep from being noticed, but he never looked behind him.
At the Ridge Trail, he started up the steep slope without noticeably reducing his speed. M.J. followed, still keeping her distance. He disappeared over the hill on the trail, and she slowed to make sure she didn’t accidentally catch up to him.
When she reached the crest of the hill, he had almost reached the bottom of the trail where it intersected with Difficult Run. M.J. was about to start running again, when he suddenly stopped at the juncture of the trails. She stopped and stepped behind a tree.
He was near the spot where the boys had been murdered. He slowly surveyed the area from right to left but never looked in the direction where M.J. was hiding. Then something strange happened. He bowed his head and his huge shoulders began to shake. It took M.J. a moment to realize that he was sobbing.