The World's Finest Mystery...

by Ed Gorman

  "I envy you," Amelia blurted. "I wanted my own elephant."

  He shook his head and looked sincerely regretful. "Sorry, I don't have one of those yet. You might not envy me if you could see me trying to pull a calf out of a water buffalo when it's freezing cold and the middle of the night."

  Yes, I would, Amelia thought.

  He cocked his handsome head at her, and she easily read the interest that showed in his beautiful dark eyes. "So what do you do?"

  "I'm a reporter," she told him, feeling like a fraud as she said it. "For American Times magazine."

  Later, she would decide she had never seen a human face shut down so fast. All of the good humor and warmth drained out of his expression. Briefly, there was a look of shock, then disappointment. And then he returned to the cold-looking man who had first opened the door and caught her smiling beside the homicide stories.

  He looked down at his desk, saying in clipped tones, "Would you like the Giraffe Room, the Zebra Suite, the Kangaroo Single, the Elk Double, the—"

  Astonished by the alteration in his behavior, she managed to reply, "A single will be fine," but what she wanted to say was What did I say? What happened? What's the matter?

  In fact, she opened her mouth to ask that very question but only got as far as "What—" when he ruthlessly interrupted her.

  "You get a full breakfast with your room and a tour of the animals."

  He shoved a reservation card over to her, and when she had finished filling it out, he pushed it aside without even looking at it and grabbed a key from a box on his desk. "I'll carry your bags."

  "You don't have to—"

  "It's my job."

  Without another word, he carried her luggage into one of the motel rooms, leaving Amelia to follow along behind. But when he unlocked the door and let her in, Amelia exclaimed with surprise and pleasure. There were beautifully rendered giraffes painted right onto the walls, a thatched-roof canopy over the double bed, a lovely quilt with images of giraffes printed into it, a grass cloth carpet, and many artifacts that looked straight out of Africa. It was charmingly, whimsically designed to look like a room in a safari lodge.

  "This is wonderful."

  "My niece designed the rooms. Let us know if you need anything," he said formally, and then he was gone, out the door with a firm click of the lock.

  Feeling offended and angry, Amelia changed into jeans, a long-sleeved shirt, socks, boots, jacket, and cap and hurried back outside, wanting to visit some animals before it got dark. As she headed toward the giraffe pasture, she saw Kopecki standing beside a beat-up, old white truck. She could have sworn that he saw her and then practically jumped into his vehicle and started it up and drove off as if a demon were chasing him.

  What was it, she wondered, about the word reporter that scared him? Most people didn't run like that unless they had something to hide. She felt a lump of disappointment in her chest as she trudged over to the giraffe pasture.

  It didn't take long for the sight of them to lift her spirits.

  She propped herself against the gray metal fence to stare.

  * * *

  "Excuse me? Are you the new guest? Ms. Blaney?"

  Amelia turned, frowning, to find a teenage girl standing close to the fence, her hands shoved down in her pants pockets. The tallest giraffe started slouching toward her, and several of the smaller giraffes pricked up their ears at the sound of her voice. When Amelia answered, "Yes," and remembered to erase her frown, the girl looked relieved. One of her hands emerged to offer itself to Amelia to shake.

  "Hi, I'm Sandy Rogers. Uncle Jim said I should show you around."

  Amelia heard the girl say her last name and had to work hard to keep from visibly reacting to it. Rogers? Wasn't that the name of the girl who was killed and the boy who killed her?

  "You want to see the 'roos first, or you want to start with the giraffes?"

  She looked about sixteen, Amelia thought. She had a fresh, pretty face and a sturdy little body that looked at home in the red flannel shirt, tight black jeans, and cowboy boots she wore. She had twisted her dark blond hair into a French braid, from which tendrils were escaping charmingly. Luckily, since Amelia couldn't find the right words to say, the tallest giraffe had reached them by then. He stood behind Sandy Rogers and bent his neck low, until his long-lashed, gentle face was cheek to jowl with her.

  "Hey, Malcolm," she murmured affectionately. She blew gently into his nostril, and he shook his head a bit and lifted one great hoof and set it back down again. "This is one great guy, but he doesn't like to be touched, do you, Mal? The giraffes don't much, but they're sweeties, and curious as hell." She looked into the great, black, liquid eye so close to her. "Aren't you, big guy?"

  Amelia stared at the two of them together— huge animal and petite girl— and felt such a painful longing that she brought her hands up and pressed them against her heart. She managed to say, "It looks as if Malcolm thinks we ought to start here. Kopecki's your uncle?"

  "Yeah. Okay, Malcolm, let's tell her all about you and the ladies. Correct me if I get anything wrong, okay, big guy?" By then, two of the shorter giraffes had also loped over. Sandy bent down and picked up a clear plastic bucket from the ground. Amelia saw that it contained sliced carrots and apples. Without waiting to be invited, she reached in and picked out a slice of carrot and offered it to Malcolm. An amazingly long gray tongue curled out of his mouth and twisted itself around the vegetable, lifting it gently out of her grasp.

  "Believe it or not, giraffes have only seven vertebras in their neck, just like us, but their blood pressure is twice as high as ours—"

  While the girl talked, telling facts Amelia already knew— facts she felt she had been born knowing— Amelia continued to feed the giraffes until the carrots were gone.

  "Want to see the 'roos now?" asked Sandy.

  "Oh, yes." As they walked together toward the big kangaroo pen, she asked the girl, "How'd your uncle get wild animal training?" She couldn't think of a single vet school that offered it.

  "Oh, he just makes it up as he goes along," was the airy reply. "He calls it the school of oh-hell-what-do-we-do-now veterinary medicine." She giggled, and Amelia found herself laughing, too. It was sympathetic laughter on her part, because she well knew that while some wild animal species might resemble domestic ones in some ways, on the inside a zebra was not a horse, and a gnu was not a cow. And animals as odd as giraffes and kangaroos had special needs that no amount of training in cats and dogs could teach a young vet.

  They entered the 'roo pen, with Sandy telling her, "A group of kangaroos is called a mob. Adult males are called boomers." Amelia smiled to herself, remembering the joke in vet school: If an adult male kangaroo is a boomer, does that make a young male kangaroo a baby boomer?

  A young joey hopped over and stuck its dainty, fingered paws into Amelia's hands to steal the slices of apple she had hidden there. She stroked the soft back and remembered that this was what it felt like to be happy.

  * * *

  By the time she returned to her room, a bright half-moon was rising. Amelia heard a donkey braying in the barn, answered by the trumpeting of an elk, sounding for all the world like an elephant.

  She turned on all of the lights and was, for a few more moments, content. She knew she still had to drive out for dinner, in a rural setting with no streetlights. But that's what headlights were for, Amelia figured, to cut a reassuring path for her after dark.

  * * *

  As there were no telephones in the motel rooms, she went searching for a pay phone, which she found in the unlocked office. She was relieved to find Jim Kopecki gone, so that she had his office to herself again.

  The first thing she did was to check the names of the survivors of Brenda Rogers. She read that Brenda had left her parents, Alfred and Betty Kopecki, a twelve-year-old brother, James, and an infant daughter, Sandra Gay. This time, the obituary was a shock. Amelia had half expected Sandy to be related to the victim and her uncle to be dista
ntly connected. Instead, it was as close as it could be: Sandy was the daughter of the victim and the killer. Dr. Jim Kopecki was the victim's brother.

  Amelia wanted to give him credit for providing a home for his niece, but what kind of home could it be for her with such a nasty uncle?

  She walked over to the pay phone to do her next duty.

  Amelia felt naive and nervous, calling her boss long-distance. Three times, she coughed and cleared her throat. When he picked up the receiver and barked, "Hale," into it, Amelia blurted out the whole story— of an old murder and of a killer returning to a ghost town— almost in a single breath. It was proof of Dan Hale's quick mind, she thought later, that he didn't have to ask her to slow down or to repeat herself.

  "Do it," he said.

  That was it, and he hung up. No advice. No caveats. Nothing but "Do it." She only wished that she wanted to! He had hung up too fast even to hear her say, "Thanks, Dan."

  But Dr. Jim Kopecki did hear her, having walked in the front door at just that moment. He nodded at her curtly, a look of distaste on his face, transforming him, in Amelia's eyes, from a handsome man to an ugly one. He crossed to his desk without a word to her.

  Appalled by his behavior, Amelia lost her own natural sense of courtesy. "Don't you think it's cruel," she asked him, "to keep those articles up there? Aren't they constant reminders to your niece of what her father did to her mother?"

  He looked up, his face thunderous. In a voice as cold as the winter winds that blew across her grandparents' farm, he said, "I wondered when you were going to get around to asking your first question. Here's your answer: sleep in our bed, eat our food, pet our animals, pay your bill, and leave my niece and me alone."

  Stunned, she could only stare back at him.

  "Got it?" he asked her.

  Amelia's reply was to walk out the door with as much dignity as she could summon. In truth, she was shaking. The man was nuts, clearly. He was a crazy man, with a farm full of wild animals and one young girl, all totally dependent on him. And all those articles pinned to the wall? They looked like vengeance to Amelia. They looked like a constant reminder: remember, remember. And just what was this vengeful, unpredictable man planning to do, now that his sister's killer was coming home? And how would it all affect that sweet girl?

  Amelia wasn't hungry anymore.

  She returned to her room, locked her door, and remained there throughout a mostly sleepless night, until the light of the morning.

  * * *

  Thursday, September 18

  When she saw that it was Sandy fixing breakfast in the cookhouse and not the lunatic uncle, Amelia decided it was safe to eat there. Within a few minutes, she was delighted with her decision. The home-cooked buffet included scrambled eggs, sausage, biscuits, whipped butter, local jelly and honey, cinnamon rolls, cereal, coffee, and juice. None of the farm's other guests was present, so she ate alone while gazing at the camels and zebras lining up to eat at their troughs.

  "Heaven," she said gratefully to Sandy when she carried her own dishes back into the kitchen. "Thank you so much."

  "You're welcome. Sleep well?"

  "Great," Amelia lied. The girl seemed so friendly that Amelia could only suppose the crazy uncle hadn't yet poisoned his niece's mind against her. "You do all this work and go to school, too?"

  "Only 'cause I love it."

  And your uncle forces you to, Amelia suspected. How can I get you to tell me the truth about what goes on around here and about what these years have been like for you? There wasn't an opportunity, because the girl was pulling off her apron and hurrying to grab a backpack from the floor.

  "See ya!" she called gaily.

  Too gaily, Amelia thought, for a girl facing a week in which a father she did not know was getting out of prison and returning to the town— only a few miles away— where he had made her a veritable, if not literal, orphan.

  Amelia's heart ached for her.

  And suddenly, she had all the desire she needed in order to pursue her story. Maybe by publicizing this child's plight, she could liberate her from the monomaniacal control of the vicious uncle.

  * * *

  Overnight, the weather had changed into Indian summer.

  Amelia put away her jacket and donned a short-sleeved white silk blouse and summer-weight gray wool slacks with gray silk socks and black loafers. She wished it were shorts, a T-shirt, sandals, and a baseball cap, like Sandy had been wearing when she hurried off to school.

  In her rented car, with the air conditioning on, Amelia drove back into Wichita, where she spent the rest of the morning in the main library. She found out that years of a depressed economy had emptied Spale. Between the lines, she intuited that the incomprehensible murder of their brightest girl by their brightest boy had wounded Spale to its heart, perhaps dealing the final blow. What an interesting town it once had been, she thought, with its amazing system of tunnels and underground shops.

  While she was at the computer, she researched the status of imported wild animal species. When she located no condemnatory information about Jim Kopecki's farm, she didn't know whether to feel disappointed or relieved. She settled on relieved, but only for the sake of the animals, she told herself.

  She avoided the local newspaper, acting on a competitive instinct she didn't know she had. Maybe they'd be helpful, but maybe they'd want to keep the story for themselves.

  She did, however, place a call to the federal penitentiary where Thomas Rogers was incarcerated to find out exactly when he was due to arrive back in Spale.

  "Should be there by now," was the clipped reply.

  She attempted to hold the prison officer on the phone by asking, "What kind of prisoner was he?"

  "Model," was the answer, followed by a string of accolades that made Rogers sound more like the honor student he used to be than the murderer he was. "Perfect record. Early release. Earned three college degrees. BA, MFA, PhD. Created convict tutoring program. Taught prison classes in reading and math, plus led a creative writing class. Started a prayer/meditation group. Anything else you want to know?" Amelia said no, but she was thinking, Yeah, where's the eagle scout badge?

  Feeling as cynical as a veteran, world-weary journalist, she got back into her rental car and drove to Spale. All the way, she felt fueled by righteous fury aimed at the man she was planning to interview.

  "Don't you dare try to give me any of that born-again crap," she fumed aloud, as if speaking to Thomas Rogers himself. "I've met the daughter you betrayed so horribly!"

  * * *

  Amelia had not realized how many other journalists might also consider the return of a murderer to a ghost town to be a juicy story. When she got within sight of Spale, she saw that it was, in one of the clichés she was trained to avoid, a media circus.

  As it turned out, there was only one thing missing among the television vans and the other rental cars: Tom Rogers, the ex-convict himself.

  "He arrived," a writer from Newsweek told her, leaning against her car. "That we know, because we saw him dropped off at that building." He pointed to a falling-down storefront on the former Main Street. "But he must have sneaked out the back. Maybe he had another car waiting. I don't know. We've been in there, and there's nobody there. We're packing up and going home. He'll surface again someplace. But who the hell cares now? It's not a story now. Killers walking the streets of cities are a dime a dozen. But one of them living alone in his own private town full of ghosts? That was going to be good, damn it. You find any decent place to eat around here?"

  She didn't tell him about the Serengeti Bed and Breakfast.

  And she didn't tell him where Thomas Rogers probably was, either, although Amelia was pretty sure she knew: in the old forgotten tunnels, beneath the town. Where he had dumped his young wife's body. And where he now had a perfect place to hide for the rest of his life, if that's what he wanted to do.

  Amelia was regretfully willing to give him what he wanted, because there was no way she was going into th
e darkness underneath the ground in order to search for a man who had already killed at least one woman.

  No way.

  "No," she said to her boss, back at the pay phone in the Serengeti office. "I'm sorry, Dan, but I won't do it. It would be stupid and dangerous for me to go down there alone."

  She was surprised at how calm she felt saying that, almost as if she was relieved that she was about to be fired. Finally, she could admit to herself and to the rest of the world that she had never been meant to be a journalist. She didn't have a clue what she was going to be once she was out of a job and a salary, but now she knew that reporting wasn't it.