Chasing the Boogeyman

by Richard Chizmar

  An accounting instructor from Harford Community College broke down in tears while telling a veteran 911 operator that she’d just heard a woman’s scream coming from the field behind her house.

  A man claimed his back gate was left open during the night; an angry woman complained that her porch light had been vandalized; a nine-year-old girl called to say her corgi named Elvis was missing from her family’s fenced-in backyard.

  And Detective Harper and his task force members investigated each and every phone call.

  8

  Two days before Thanksgiving, Channel 13 broke into a 7:30 p.m. rerun of M*A*S*H with news that, just minutes earlier, a man had walked into the Harford County Sheriff’s Department and confessed to the recent murders of four young Edgewood girls.

  The news team didn’t have a photo of the man or his name, but according to their reporter at the sheriff’s office, he appeared to be in his midthirties, tall and solidly built, with short dark hair and a mustache.

  That night, the entire town—including my parents and me—went to sleep, hoping and praying that the nightmare was finally over.

  Unfortunately, our optimism was short-lived.

  The next morning, it was widely reported that the man’s confession had been a hoax—he’d actually been in a Pennsylvania prison serving time for a breaking-and-entering conviction when the first two girls had been killed. The unidentified man was currently in police custody, now undergoing a psychiatric examination.

  9

  I was sitting at the dining room table the morning after Thanksgiving, still dressed in my robe and pajamas, feeling fat and sleepy and reading the newspaper when Carly barged in.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked. “How did you get in my house?”

  She settled into a chair across from me. “Your mom let me in.”

  “I didn’t hear the doorbell.”

  “That’s because I didn’t ring it. Your mom was outside sweeping the sidewalk.”

  “I think I liked it better when you and my mom didn’t know each other.”

  She smiled. “That woman’s a saint.”

  I couldn’t argue with that. “So why are you here?”

  “I have something to show you,” she said, leaning over and pulling a manila folder out of the side pocket of the oversized Lois Lane purse she’d recently started carrying. She opened the folder and slid four glossy photographs across the table.

  “What’s this?” I asked, yawning.

  “What does it look like?”

  I took a closer look. “It looks like you took pictures of the memorials people left behind for the girls. That’s kind of creepy.”

  “Not me. One of our staff photographers.”

  “Okay,” I said. “So what?”

  “Look again.” She gestured at the photos. “They’re in order. Notice anything interesting?”

  I studied the first photo for a long time. I was about to tell her I had no flipping idea what she was talking about, when I spotted it—in the lower right corner of the photograph.

  I immediately moved on to the second photo. It took a little longer this time, but eventually I found it—in the upper left-hand corner this time.

  “Holy shit,” I said, looking up at her.

  “Pretty cool, huh?”

  The 7-Eleven on Edgewood Road (Photo courtesy of the author)

  Local news crew interviewing Cassidy Burch’s friend Lindsey Pollard (Photo courtesy of The Baltimore Sun)

  eleven Memorials

  “The image was crudely drawn, but crystal clear in its depiction…”

  1

  I gathered the photographs into a neat pile. “You figured all this out by yourself?”

  “Is that so hard to believe?” Carly asked, giving me that fussy look of hers. “Wow. You think I need a brilliant man at my side like you or Robert Neville, don’t you?”

  “Umm, no. I was just wondering if anyone else at the newspaper spotted it. Like maybe the photographer.”

  “Oh,” she said, relaxing. “No one knows. Just you.”

  “And it was all right there this whole time.” I sighed. “You realize we have to tell Detective Harper, don’t you?”

  She frowned. “I was afraid you’d say that.”

  “You want to do the honors or me?”

  “And let you get all the credit?” she said. “Heh, no thanks. I’ll make the call.”

  2

  While Carly phoned Detective Harper from the extension in the kitchen, I spread the four photographs out on the dining room table and re-examined them.

  They were full-color eight-by-tens—crisp and in focus—and slick to the touch. The first photo had been taken in the Gallaghers’ front yard not long after Natasha’s funeral. Once the red ribbon someone had tied around the Gallagher’s oak tree disappeared, it didn’t take long before it was replaced with something a little more elaborate. Someone—most likely a girlfriend—had written FOREVER IN OUR HEARTS, NATASHA in the middle of a large poster board and drawn a big red heart around it. Several small photographs of Natasha had been glued or taped along each side of the heart. The remaining white space on the poster was covered with dozens of handwritten messages—RIP! I MISS YOU! I’LL LOVE YOU FOREVER! YOU’LL NEVER BE FORGOTTEN—along with a handful of drawings (hearts, praying hands, birds, rainbows, and sad faces with tears dripping from the eyes). The poster had been nailed or stapled to the base of the tree. Directly above it a large wooden cross, covered with flowers, hung from a nail. Beneath the display, spread out on the lawn, was a small army of colorful stuffed bears and giraffes, elephants and dinosaurs, as well as a staggered row of small glass vases holding withered bouquets of cut flowers and the remnants of nearly a dozen candles.

  My eyes moved to the lower right-hand corner of the poster, focusing on a small image sandwiched between a heart broken in two by a jagged crack running down the center and a sad face with an exaggerated frown. The image was crudely drawn, but crystal clear in its depiction: a miniature hopscotch grid. Inside each of the squares was the number three.

  I swallowed and moved on to the second photograph: the Kacey Robinson shrine that’d been erected near the base of the sliding board at the Cedar Drive playground. Instead of one large poster, Kacey’s memorial was comprised of three smaller homemade signs. I stared at the rectangular sign in the middle. Upper left-hand corner. Right below a photo of Kacey Robinson riding a bicycle with no hands and a big smile on her face, someone had drawn a small replica, maybe four inches high, of the sign found hanging on the telephone pole outside of the Robinson house. HAVE YOU SEEN THIS DOG? was crammed into the space at the top of the sign and CALL 4444 was scrawled along the bottom. In between was a cartoony image of a dog with a big, toothy grin on its face.

  My heart still beating a mile a minute, I picked up the third photograph: another front-yard memorial, this one for Madeline Wilcox. Mounds of flowers, several small crosses, and two unopened packs of Marlboro cigarettes lay in the grass in front of a poster-sized photograph of Madeline. She was wearing a yellow sundress and flip-flops, sitting on the hood of a classic car, looking happy and carefree. The poster was at least three-by-five feet, and was attached to a long wooden stake that had been pounded into the ground. A cluster of heart-shaped balloons floated in the breeze above Madeline’s head. I stared at the car’s front bumper, inches from Madeline’s right foot, where the killer had used a strip of clear tape to affix five shiny pennies to the surface of the poster.

  Before I could change my mind, I moved on to the last photograph. At the time the picture had been taken, Cassidy Burch’s memorial was in its infant stages. Just a handful of homemade signs and sympathy cards attached to the wrought-iron fence posts surrounding the cemetery, as well as some balloons and a single, lonely candle. I’d recently seen video footage on the news, and the shrine had more than quadrupled in size. At the bottom of the largest sympathy card, below the signature of the person who’d left it, the killer had drawn a fat pumpkin with a cr
ooked grin—and six triangular eyes. It looked obscene.

  “He’s picking us up in fifteen minutes,” Carly said over my shoulder—and I nearly screamed.

  3

  You two are unbelievable, you know that?”

  Detective Harper shook his head and looked up from the photographs with a mixture of disbelief and admiration. At least, that’s what I hoped the expression on his face meant. It was hard to tell—he might’ve just been pissed off again.

  We were parked outside of the Boys and Girls Club at Cedar Drive, just a few minutes away from my parents’ house. Being a gentleman—not to mention a big fat chicken these days when it came to Detective Harper—I’d volunteered to take the back seat and offered the front to Carly, a decision she may’ve been regretting right about now.

  “Aren’t you even a little bit impressed?” Carly asked quietly.

  He looked at her. Slowly nodded his head. “Yeah. I am.”

  “But…?”

  “But… we’ve already known about the drawings and the pennies for a couple of weeks now.”

  “You have not!” I blurted out, and immediately regretted it.

  The detective swiveled in his seat. “Excuse me?”

  “Sorry,” I said, lowering my eyes. “I didn’t mean to yell. I’m just… surprised.”

  “Well, you shouldn’t be. And you—” He was talking to Carly again. “You know you can’t write about this. And neither one of you can say a word about it to anyone.”

  “I know that,” she said, pouting.

  “And the Hardy Boy in the back seat… he knows it too?”

  I nodded, not trusting myself to speak.

  “You mind if I take these with me?” Harper held up the photographs.

  “Help yourself,” Carly said. “But can I ask you a question?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Have you been staking out the memorials? In case he comes back?”

  Harper thought about it for a moment before answering. “Every night for the past two weeks.”

  “All four of them?”

  He paused again before answering. “Yes.”

  “And?”

  “And nothing I can share with you.”

  “C’mon,” she said, her tone surprising me. “Me and Joe Hardy back there—”

  “Hey!” I said, sitting up again.

  “We haven’t given you a single reason to doubt us. Not before and not now. We called you today, didn’t we? We didn’t have to do that. We could’ve—”

  “Okay, okay…” He put up his hands in surrender, and then seemed to make up his mind. He exhaled for several seconds before saying: “Look—this all remains confidential, okay?”

  “Of course,” she said.

  He glanced at the back seat.

  “Yes, of course,” I repeated.

  “We only started full-time surveillance on the memorials a couple weeks ago because that’s when we first discovered what he was doing. That’s our fault. We should’ve picked up on it earlier. If the public knew, they’d run us out of town, and I wouldn’t blame them.”

  He shifted heavily in his seat. “But even before we figured it out, we had officers keeping an eye on them. Pretty much from day one we made sure to do regular drive-bys.”

  “Did you see anything?” Carly asked. I looked at her from the back seat, and for the first time it occurred to me that she just might really win that Pulitzer one day.

  “We saw enough to ask family and friends and certain members of the media for any photographs or video they might’ve taken during the vigils that were held at the memorials. Lots of different faces in those crowds. We’re still analyzing everything that came in.”

  “That’s smart,” she said.

  “I’m glad you approve.”

  She actually giggled then. “So I’m guessing some kind of pattern started to emerge? Repeat visitors? Familiar faces that kept showing up?”

  “You’d be surprised,” he said, nodding. “Some folks visited or drove by pretty much every single day. We kept a record of those people.”

  Uh-oh. My face started to get warm.

  “Usually they were relatives or friends, people we’d already talked to who had rock-solid alibis.”

  My hands were sweating.

  “But every once in a while, someone interesting came along.”

  My stomach did a somersault.

  “Someone whose behavior we found unusual or even downright odd.”

  “Odd how?” Carly asked.

  “You name it, we saw it. Hysterical bouts of crying. Angry outbursts. Excessive praying. A handful of folks even took souvenirs along with them when they left. Stuffed animals. Photographs.”

  I tried to swallow, but my mouth was too dry.

  “When that happened, we usually ran a background check and sometimes even assigned a surveillance unit to keep eyes on them, just to see if any other… odd behavior came up.”

  Shit. Ten more seconds of this and I was going to throw up.

  “I’m sorry,” Carly said suddenly. “I just got paged. I need to call the paper.”

  Thank God, thank God, thank God. God bless her precious pager!

  Detective Harper started the engine and pulled out of the parking lot. A few minutes later, as we swung into my parents’ driveway, I glanced at the rearview mirror and saw that he was staring at me. Before I could look away, he gave me a wink.

  Carly Albright chasing a story for The Aegis (Photo courtesy of Brooklyn Ewing)

  twelve Shotgun Summer

  “It was him.”

  1

  Ever since meeting with Detective Harper a week earlier, something had been bothering me. It’d taken a couple days to get over that sly wink in the rearview mirror and the notion that the police knew all about my frequent drive-bys of the memorials, not to mention, most likely, the victims’ houses, too. I obviously wasn’t nearly as clever as I thought I was.

  And then there was the photograph tucked away inside an envelope in the back of my desk drawer.

  I’d found it several months ago in a patch of trampled grass at the base of the tree where Natasha Gallagher’s friends and family had erected her memorial. A four-by-four-inch color image of Natasha eating steamed crabs at a poolside picnic table; the photo was faded and wrinkled from exposure to the weather. There was a partial footprint on the back of it and a tiny ragged tear along the top left corner from where it had been stapled or thumbtacked to the poster board. I figured the wind must’ve blown it free. The September evening I’d stumbled upon it, I’d looked around to make sure no one was watching, and then I’d bent down, pretending to tie my shoe, palmed it, and slipped it into the back pocket of my shorts as I walked away. As Detective Harper noted, odd behavior, to be sure. I didn’t understand why I’d stolen the photograph back then, and I didn’t understand it any better now. All I knew was that Harper or one of his officers had witnessed the whole damn thing.

  But still, that wasn’t what was bothering me. Embarrassment’s temporary. I’ve learned that the hard way over the years. It was something else—something important—skating just below the surface of my consciousness, trying its damnedest to break free and make itself known, but thus far unable to.

  It was driving me crazy.

  I’d even tried an old trick taught to me by an upper-level journalism professor I’d greatly disliked but had begrudgingly come to respect by the end of his class. He’d suggested that, in order to recall important facts or story lines that had somehow slipped away, a writer should make a list of anything and everything—no matter how trivial—that had filled his most recent days.

  My list looked something like this:

  Thanksgiving

  Kara

  Mom

  Dad

  Carly

  Detective Harper

  Memorials

  Boogeyman

  Sliding board

  Photographs

  Cedar Drive

  Basketball

  Lib
rary

  Post office

  Shopping

  Printer

  Magazine

  Story

  Rejection

  Bank

  Pizza Hut

  Stephen King

  Movie theater

  Carol’s Used Bookstore

  Oil change

  Snow flurries

  Cemetery

  Boys and Girls Club

  I’d thought about adding skydiving, drag racing, and white water rafting just to make my life appear a little more interesting, but decided against it. Not that it mattered. Regardless of how many times I pored over it, the list didn’t work, and I was back to square one.

  2

  I woke up late on the morning of Tuesday, December 6, shrugged on my ratty old brown robe and slippers, and went right to work on a story I’d started the night before. It wasn’t a particularly good one, but I liked the main characters quite a bit, and thought it had potential if I nailed the follow-up drafts. The title was “Shotgun Summer,” and it followed the exploits of a pair of teenage runaway sweethearts who found themselves mixed up with a gang of violent bank robbers. The boy wanted to get as far away as possible from the bad guys and never look back, but his sixteen-year-old girlfriend had other ideas. She’d gotten a taste of easy money and bloodshed, and discovered that she liked it. I was probably at about the halfway point of the story when I wrote this scene:

  Just outside of Toledo, they pulled over at a Phillips 66 to gas up the van. While Jeremy and Trudy walked around back to use the restrooms, Hank went in alone and paid the cashier for thirty bucks of unleaded, plus sodas, cigarettes, and that morning’s edition of the Plain Dealer. The lady behind the register never looked up from the magazine she was reading.