The Dead of Night

by Jean Rabe

  Racial segregation was banned in public schools, the cost of a first-class stamp still sat at three cents, and the federal debt was a paltry two hundred and seventy billion. The New York Giants won the World Series. Detroit got another Stanley Cup. Best Picture was From Here to Eternity. Oren thought that movie had been as boring as staring at clothes dryer lint. J.R.R. Tolkien published The Fellowship of the Ring. And locally Albert Kleber published the one hundred year History of the St. Meinrad Archabbey. The abbey was still in operation, one of Spencer County’s crown jewels. Lionel Barrymore died.

  In 1953 Joseph Stalin died; Moscow announced that it exploded a hydrogen bomb; Charlie Chaplin was labeled a Communist and left the U.S.; first-class postage was three cents; the Yankees topped the Dodgers in the World Series; Montreal claimed the Stanley Cup; a horse named Dark Star won the Kentucky Derby; and Ernest Hemingway won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for The Old Man and the Sea. Oren loved that book and had read it several times.

  “And now I am The Old Man,” he said, rubbing the back of his neck. He was getting stiff from sitting in one position so long. “An old man with a better boat than Hemmingway gave his character.”

  Cecil B. DeMille’s The Greatest Show on Earth took home the Best Picture Oscar; Sir Winston Churchill was handed the Nobel Prize for Literature; Lucille Ball gave birth to Desi Arnaz Jr; Playboy appeared on newsstands with a nude Marilyn Monroe on the cover; Queen Mary died—and so did three nine-year-old boys, drowned in the Ohio River near Rockport.

  “Rescue crews from Owensboro and Rockport searched for three boys still missing after their raft broke apart on a windy Halloween,” Oren read. “The boys had just finished supper and on a dare from a classmate tried to recreate Abraham Lincoln’s cast off on a raft from a point near the bluff. The fourth grade was studying Abraham Lincoln’s time in Spencer County. A searcher found an Abe Lincoln-style hat and a pillowcase with candy in it tangled in fallen branches near the remains of a raft. The searcher said the boys must have gone trick-or-treating first. A spokesman for one of the search teams said the raft broke apart and spilled the boys into the river. It had been a heavily-overcast night, and though temperatures were unseasonably warm, the river would have been cold, the spokesman said. It was unknown if the boys were good swimmers.”

  That must have been the incident Oren’s dad remembered—about a missing nine-year-old boy. Except it had been three of them, not one. And they weren’t exactly missing.

  “Maybe your dead boy was never missing,” Oren’s dad had said. “You’re not missing if nobody’s looking for you.”

  Or gave up looking for you because they thought the river took you under.

  Oren sat back in the chair. The drownings, the newspaper article, might not be connected to the bones on the bluff. But the age of the boys fit, and the year fit—at least within the parameters Doc Natty presented. The bones might not belong to one of those three. They might be from another boy entirely—one from Kentucky or Arizona, one that hadn’t been listed as drowned, one that might be named through dental records or flagged in another agency’s computer.

  But the age fit, and the year could fit.

  Oren pulled out a notebook and recorded the three boys’ names.

  Edgar Killian.

  Neal Huffman.

  Rory Martin.

  He read a follow-up article from the next week. One body had been recovered, Edgar Killian, found by a woman walking her dog along the bank. The boy had his father’s Brownie on a strap around his neck, apparently intending to document their raft trip. Funerals for all three were scheduled. Two burials would be empty caskets.

  That article went on to quote one of the Spencer County deputies who’d been involved in the recovery. “Drownings in Indiana are unfortunate and continue to happen every year. Nearly half of the victims are children and teenagers. They don’t understand all the dangers attached to water. It’s up to parents and the community to teach young people to respect the water, especially our river.”

  “Maybe your dead boy was never missing.” The words played through Oren’s mind. “You’re not missing if nobody’s looking for you.”

  He crossed Edgar Killian’s name off his list.

  That left Neal Huffman and Rory Martin.

  Oren would have a sit-down with Piper when she got back from Jasper.

  She might find a lead through the State Police.

  But he doubted it would be more interesting than this one.

  18

  Eighteen

  “There’s a website keyed to our state.” The State Police officer looked a lot like Oren, big, quite a bit of age to him, immaculately dressed. “It’s called—”

  “Missing in dot org.” Piper took the seat closest to his desk. “Missing and unsolved dot com is another one. Been over every pixel of both of them. Been through a lot of websites, actually. And like I mentioned, we’ve sent our preliminary coroner’s report to Arizona, Kentucky, and—”

  “I have a copy.”

  She’d also brought print copies, which she handed over—just in case he didn’t have everything.

  “NAMUS is a good one,” he said.

  Piper cocked her head. That was one she hadn’t tried.

  “National Missing and Unidentified Persons System.” He wrapped a meaty hand around a mug of coffee and took a long drink. “You’ve been Spencer County Sheriff, what—”

  “Four months, three days,” she glanced at the clock on the wall; it was 10:40 a.m., “ten hours and forty… forty-one minutes.”

  “I read about you, back in January, catching a serial killer, one week on the job.” He took another drink of coffee. “I know your dad. He was sheriff a lot of years. How’s he doing?”

  “Cancer free again.” Piper crossed her arms. She didn’t come here to talk about her lack of experience.

  “Good.” He drained the coffee and pushed the mug aside. He looked down at a sheet of paper. “MP, a sheriff only a few months, let me give you a little perspective. I printed this out yesterday after you called. The missing person tally for NAMUS this year,” he waved the piece of paper, “was six hundred and sixty-one thousand. A lot of people reported missing, right? Well, six hundred and fifty-nine thousand of those reports were canceled. People came back, were found, dead or alive, but most were never really missing. About two thousand remain unsolved. Sometimes people go missing ‘cause they don’t want to be found.”

  Piper started to say something, but he kept going.

  “At any given time, there are about ninety thousand people estimated as missing in the US. Each day? About twenty-three hundred are reported missing. In Indiana right now—” He looked at his paper again. “A little more than a thousand people are listed as missing. That’s five hundred and thirty-three adults and four hundred and ninety-six children. You’ve got an old missing persons case, but not the oldest-unsolved. I read about a four-year-old, Marjorie West, last seen picking a bouquet of flowers in a field near where a Mother’s Day picnic was going on. That was in—”

  “April, 1938,” Piper supplied. “There’s an older one, twenty-five years before that, Ambrose Bierce, a journalist in his seventies who went missing in Mexico while covering a story. I said I’ve been digging through the Internet.”

  He leaned back in the chair and gave her a small smile. “Paul’s daughter is all grown up and is the Spencer County Sheriff. I like your dad. I like you. I really want to help you. But there is nothing in any of our files—and we have most of it on computer now—that matches your bones. In fact, I dug through some national law enforcement sites you might not know about and came up with nothing. Oh, stuff is close, and I printed those close ones out for you.” He stretched an arm out and grabbed a thin manila folder, tossed it on the front of his desk where she could reach it. “Those are close. A couple of ten year olds, a couple of eight year olds, an eleven year old, a twelve year old, and a nine-year-old girl in case your coroner ruled wrong on the sex. A few more that might fit. All from
the Midwest, except the girl. She’s from Florida. But the years don’t match your sixty to sixty-five range. Oldest case in that folder goes back to 1960. The eleven year old. But that’s close. Spitting distance. A mix of races in that folder. You say Caucasian, right handed. Those files don’t list right or left. But they’re worth you taking a looksee at.”

  He shifted in his seat and stared at a picture on the wall. Piper suspected he was looking at something far removed from his office. “Missing kids? Ninety-nine percent of kids who go missing today come home alive. The recovery rate is amazing, in part because of social media. Amber alerts, Facebook, Twitter, what-have-you. Pictures of the missing kids are bounced across the country. But if the kids have been abducted? Not simply missing? More than half come home, the rest are killed—and a lot of those stay open cases.”

  “My chief deputy says a cold case like this could take some time.” She picked up the folder, but did not open it.

  “Could. Sometimes bones, with dentals, you could get a match right off. You might not ever solve yours. Especially if the parents were poor and didn’t take the kid to a dentist. No dental records, that’s possible. Don’t beat yourself up over this one. Put it on a side burner, work it on and off.”

  Piper couldn’t do that, the bones were festering. “I appreciate this.” She indicated the folder. “But I really wanted to chat about motives. Sure, I could poke around on the Internet, the state database, about motives. But I learn more talking to people.” That was true. She learned much more as an MP by talking to her drill sergeant than she ever got from reading the manuals. “Our coroner, and a forensic anthropologist, say the boy was murdered.”

  He nodded. “Killed sixty to sixty-five years ago is the guess, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So your doer is dead, too.”

  But that didn’t mean she couldn’t find justice. Put a name to the boy, find out what happened. The mystery coupled with Mark the Shark was keeping her Fort Campbell thoughts at bay.

  “I want to talk motive. What motivates someone to kill a kid?” As an MP with the Screaming Eagles she’d covered some domestic disturbances off base, husband and wife spats, but nothing that had involved children.

  “Murder’s always ugly,” he said. “Murder of a child. That goes beyond ugly. A few years back I read about a South Carolina man, a young father, who’d led police to the bodies of his five kids. In Georgia, I read about another father who intentionally left his son to die in a hot SUV, had strapped him in the back seat for the whole time he was at work, Googled how long it took kids to die in hot cars. In Utah, a woman who kept giving birth during a ten-year stretch strangled her newborns. Hid the bodies in a garage in plastic totes.” He picked up his coffee mug and regarded it a moment, put it back down. “I look at the FBI reports that come along with the state newsletters. More than four hundred kids are killed yearly by their parents. Most of the kids are under five, and most die of injuries from beatings. Fathers are more likely to kill, whether by beating or shooting. The average age of the father is thirty, and they tend to plan the murder in advance, sometimes kill the entire family. Excuse my sexism, Sheriff Blackwell, but violence is a male pursuit.”

  “I won’t disagree.”

  “When mothers kill, those kids are usually babies, not even a year old. Postpartum depression, mental illness, stress they can’t cope with. The mothers tend to be young, early twenties.”

  “Why? I want to know why someone would kill a nine-year-old boy. You’re a criminologist. That’s why I wanted to talk to you. I appreciate these missing children reports you’ve given me, truly, but I’m looking for a why. I want to understand this.”

  “Funny. I’ve been trying to understand violence against kids for decades.” He steepled his fingers. “People who kill children are shuffled into five categories, for the most part. A parent who has some sort of a psychotic break. The killing isn’t something they would do if their mind was right. They could be an altruist, killing because they don’t want the child to grow up without them—and they’re not going to be in the picture because of divorce, or because they’re going away to prison, for example. Then you have the nutcase who kills kids for revenge against a spouse or boyfriend or girlfriend. The significant other has the kids or does something to piss the doer off. The murdered kids are the revenge—makes the target of the hate suffer.”

  Piper probably could have gotten this stuff from a book or the Internet, but it likely would have taken her longer to ferret it out than it did to drive the forty-six minutes to this office.

  “Sometimes the kids aren’t wanted, are inconvenient, getting in the way of the life a parent wants. Maybe the kids cost too much—doctors, clothes, babysitter—and suffocating them with a pillow is better for the budget.” He took a deep breath. “Sometimes it is an accident. The parent neglected the kid, looked away, or was reckless, honestly didn’t mean to take a life. And sometimes a parent kills for some of those reasons stirred together in a sick, mental pot. There are scattered incidents of kids killing other kids. In the nineties there was a three-year-old killed by two ten-year-olds in England. They stoned him and left his unconscious body on train tracks to hide their crime. I read about a case in the US where a little boy wanted to see the neighbor girl’s puppy. She said no, so he got his dad’s gun and shot her. Those cases are rare. Kids are better people than adults, don’t do the real evil shit. I got three kids, all grown and away. And they got kids. No matter how many cases and statistics I’ve studied, I’ve never been able to wholly wrap my head around child murder.”

  “So the person who killed the boy on the bluff—”

  “Was likely his father, who certainly wouldn’t have reported him missing, was in the neighborhood of thirty years old, and so would be dead or in a nursing home.” He stood and extended a hand, signaling the meeting was over. Piper stood and shook it. “Your cold case might stay frosty forever, Sheriff Blackwell. Not only do you have a missing person case—where the kid was probably never reported missing—you have a murder case. A cold one. You might never get an identity. Or justice for your victim.”

  “But I might,” Piper said. “I just might.”

  “I like you, Sheriff Blackwell. Give my regards to your dad.”

  She’d wanted to add a topic—email and hacking—but she’d take that up with the Geek. She checked her phone as she slid into her loaned Hyundai and saw Sylvia D had left a message that Ezekiel Whitman would be in at four. Nothing yet from Diego on the Celica. A message from Nang, asking about dinner tonight. She smiled and replied: Frozen pizza, my place, 6:30. Was she enjoying his company too much?

  There was another message:

  You don’t listen

  Still chasing the cheddar?

  going 2 the state police?

  That’s not backing off, bitch

  Don’t expect 2 suck air much longer

  19

  Nineteen

  Piper was on 62 when Sylvia D radioed.

  “Sheriff Blackwell, where are you?”

  “A few miles past Dale.” The time read 11:44, and she was thinking about stopping down the road at a little café in Chrisney to look at the threatening email again.

  “Then you’re real near Gentryville.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Better get over there, Sheriff. JJ just called. Just. Like a half-minute ago. She’s at the Mailbox Mauler’s place. Gretchen has a gun, and JJ’s looking for backup. You shouldn’t’ve let Gretchen out of jail the other day.”

  “She made bail.” The words came out flat. Piper remembered that Sylvia D had criticized her at the old fart’s club for having Gretchen arrested. The tune had changed apparently.

  Piper called JJ on the cell, not wanting the chatter over the radio.

  “Five minutes,” Piper told JJ. “I’ll be there in five.” She resisted the notion to call for additional backup. The department’s two women could more than handle Gretchen. She didn’t need one of her men shooting the crazy
octogenarian.

  “Excuse my sexism, Sheriff Blackwell,” the State Police officer had said, “but violence is a male pursuit.”

  “Unless you’re an old woman with a vendetta against mailboxes,” Piper muttered.

  Gretchen’s place was on a blacktop road where the houses were spaced far apart, the yards each covering an acre or a little more. On the approach she saw three mailboxes on their sides, posts broken. One of the yards had a new post, but hadn’t yet put on a box. The destruction was from Gretchen’s latest spree. A few houses later Piper spotted two more postal fatalities, a stout middle-aged man at one of the busted posts waving frantically to get her to stop. He was holding a mailbox that had been bent to resemble a Chinese fortune cookie.

  She rolled down the window and pulled over. He had a t-shirt with a big wolf on it stretched tight across his middle. His face was pale, sweat beaded up on it, his hair straggly and hanging to his jawline. He looked ill.

  “Damned old woman. Second time this year. Look at the box? I’m gonna have to replace all of this again. Again! Can’t you keep her locked up? I’m home sick with the flu and I gotta deal with this crap. And why? Just ‘cause the mailman accidentally put my package on her stoop yesterday. This is her retaliation! Somebody misdelivers something and she goes on the warpath. She should take it out on the post office not me.” He slammed the mailbox down and kicked it. “Hell, I ain’t gonna replace this. I’m gonna leave it this way and mow around it and get a P.O. Box. Then she can’t ram my property again.” He coughed and waved dismissively, turned and headed toward his house, kicking the mailbox one more time.

  Piper cruised farther and saw JJ standing by her Ford, which was parked off the side of the road across from Gretchen’s. Piper edged in behind her.

  “This is nuts,” JJ said as Piper got out. “I will so not miss this effin’ backwater county.”