The .22 Caliber Homicides: Book 1 of the San Diego Police Homicide Detail featuring Jack Leslie

by William Barrons

  As they shook hands Leslie said, “Ronica, the Chief has kindly asked to see the shack I live in – ha ha! Ma-am, I only have such a pricy place because my late wife and my late parents and I went together to buy it. Then when my folks passed, their insurance paid it off. Please, I’d like to show you something my dad built. It was so surprising, that he had an undiscovered talent to design and build furniture.”

  Captain Noffsinger in particular was impressed with the bedroom furniture.

  “Jack, if you don’t get mad at me, I’d like to come up here some time and get the dimensions of this cabinetry and build one like it myself. I’ll use walnut; that’s my hobby, you know – making things of good old American Black walnut. Oh God, this design is so very, very clever. I love that partial canopy overhead with the lights. So smart!”

  “Captain, I didn’t know you had such a hobby. Do you have a good router and router table? I have them in storage; they were my dad’s and I have no use for them.”

  “Hell yes, I have such tools; lots of them! It’s a great hobby to take up Jack and I tell you, it helps you to wind down from the adrenaline rushes of our work. Keeps you more nearly on the straight and narrow, seems to me. I’m looking forward to retirement so I can work on walnut much more than I have. I think I’ll do it for money, too.”

  “Sir, I’ve thought we might sell this place and buy a house someday and then I would, as you say, have room for such a hobby.”

  “Hey Jack! You’ll enjoy living in a real house instead of cave dwelling like this.”

  “Possibly so sir; possibly so.”

  The Chief and the girls had already gone to the kitchen and had set down at the counter.

  “Jack,” Ronica said, “Charlene says – she insists I call her that – Charlene says she’d like an orange juice and what would you and the Captain like? How about a beer?”

  “Yes ma-am,” Noffsinger said. “What kind do you have?”

  “Jack keeps Miller Lite in his fridge. That’s okay?”

  “Sure is. I could sure use a beer right now. Jack, both of these girls are absolutely beautiful. Which one’re you gonna marry?” the Captain smiled.

  “Captain Noffsinger, most sincerely, I’d marry both of them in heartbeat except I’m pretty sure polygamy is against some law or another. Little Anne is going to be a Hollywood actress; movies and television, both. Maybe she’ll grace the stage as well.”

  “Charlene,” Ronica smiled, “Jack brought both Little Anne and me a dozen beautiful, beautiful roses each and she said, ‘Mother, if you don’t marry this man, by golly I will!’ So you see, just to protect my sweet, innocent little daughter, I just had to agree to marry the guy.”

  “Ronica dear, you know you could hardly do better. Both of you; you seem to be made for each other. I’m happy for you. When’s the wedding?” Chief Slumberjay asked.

  “Ma-am, we haven’t set a date yet, partly because of the case I’ve been working on,” Leslie answered. “But I assure you, you’ll be receiving invitation number one. I am so very extremely lucky to have her actually agree to marry me. You’ll recall of course that Lieutenant Dean interviewed her at your request.”

  “Oh yes indeed. And he gave a glowing report of how lucky you are, Jack. I’d say both of you are very lucky. Well Marty, you and I should be finishing our drinks and getting back to business. Leslie will have a busy day tomorrow and needs his rest.”

  After they finished their drinks, Leslie and Ronica accompanied the Chief and the Captain down to her car waiting at the curb.

  “Goodnight ma-am and Captain Noffsinger. I must say, I feel extremely honored by your visit,” Leslie said.

  “Sergeant Jack Leslie, you deserve much more. See you and your beautiful bride-to-be soon,” the Chief said and climbed in and drove away.

  “Jack! Come on back upstairs! You can have no idea how handsome you are on TV!” Ronica exclaimed. “That was so amazing, seeing you shoot that strap off Donald’s shoulder! Come on; the news is all about you.”

  Sure enough, one of the television channels was running a “news special” on the arrest of the suspect in the .22 caliber serial homicides. One camera zoomed in on the little Volvo wagon as though that was of great importance in the case. Leslie had been unaware that two cameras were filming him and McCoy during the confrontation at the mirrored wall. He admired the attire he had on at the time, the light tan suit, pale blue shirt and red striped tie.

  Again and again on the screen they showed a close-up of his face. Especially did they show him close when he threatened to shatter McCoy’s knees. A TV reporter remarked, “Everyone in the crowd observing this, nearly buckled at the knees to hear Detective Sergeant Leslie’s thundering words.”

  “Honey, do you see what I mean?” Ronica asked.

  “Yes dear,” he said as he turned the set off. “I see that I’m ruined for the work I’ve so loved these years. In the detective business, it’s not good to have everyone in creation know who the devil you are on sight. As a result, the Chief wants me to take Lieutenant Dean’s place and then at the end of the year, jump into Captain Noffsinger’s job. I feel ruined.”

  “Ruined? But darling, don’t you feel good about getting promotions?”

  “Well, I’ve been careful not to babble this about, but I’ve always felt more comfortable working alone and being a Sergeant….well, I’m not such a leader as my bosses might think. Except, I’ve tried to lead by example. Anyhow sweetness, what’s done is done and there’s not anything I can do but accept things as they come up. I’ll get by, I suppose.”

  “You’re tired, Jack. You’ve been under a strain with these horrible homicides. You’ve made it safe for us so now Little Anne and I….well, we should get out of your hair – so to speak – and get on home. Okay darling?”

  “Well, I suppose that is the proper thing to do, considering her. But soon, we can set a date for our marriage. Poor Pat Dean, he was so looking forward to our wedding. His Carol….I’m so glad I didn’t have to be the one to tell her. Anyway, Dean will have an impressive funeral, just you wait and see. He was such a good man; a truly good, honest, caring Police Officer.”

  Leslie didn’t think it appropriate to mention the Lieutenant had become rusty and woefully incautious.

  Mother and daughter packed up their belongings and Leslie went with them to her – to their – car. He kissed them both goodbye and returned to the loneliness of his condo.

  Out of habit, he snacked on a handful of cheese crackers and finished his bottle of beer. He watched the entire news hour again, it being mostly about the McCoy homicides and the arrest of “the suspect”. Then he began organizing his thoughts for the questioning of McCoy. His sleep was much delayed that night, going over and over those questions.

  Saturday, September 20th, Leslie read the morning San Diego Union-Tribune to see much space devoted to the .22 caliber homicides. He arrived at Police Headquarters before 9 am. He had dressed somewhat casually in a corduroy tan sport coat, but still with dress shirt and tie.

  He delivered the McCoy purse to the Crime Lab, testifying that he had taken it from the suspect McCoy and had not touched a single thing inside, including folded papers that looked like documents. He asked for a complete report on the contents as soon as possible.

  “Sergeant Leslie,” the Crime Lab manager said, “did you know the suspect Donald McCoy is a eunuch?”

  “What’s that? A eunuch?”

  “That’s right. When he was given a physical last night – something we always have to do – he was found to have neither testicles nor a scrotum. He said his nuts were cut off about sixteen years ago. Ain’t that something?”

  “That is amazing news. From what I’ve heard – well that is most surprising. Thanks for letting me know.”

  Leslie was stunned. How could that be? Retired officer Eric Jansen had assured him that McCoy screwed Mary Annders nearly every night and she wildly responded! How could that be? That brought up even more questions to ask.

&
nbsp; Yeah, and Ronica had told him that McCoy never once had made any moves on her. That had been a real mystery to him – a mystery possibly just answered. She was so very attractive – every inch of her – how could it be that he was so very friendly and helpful to her but never indicated a sexual interest in her?

  He was told Lieutenant Dean’s body was in a mortuary; the coming funeral had to be with closed casket as his face had been much too disfigured for a mortician to make presentable.

  Surprisingly, Chief Slumberjay called him on his desk phone. “Jack, I’ve gotta tell you in secret, I’m going to have my husband use a metal detector down there at Brown Field, but secretly, at night. He’s had some experience with one. That gives you an idea how much I trust the Feds in this matter. We’ll soon see if the Mexican drug cartels have half the brains you have and you can be sure I’ll let you know the results as soon as I know.

  “Seeing your condo and your fiancé last night was a great deal of fun. She is so very beautiful and sharp. Thanks for that. And it was a relief for a bit of time off from duties. Are you all set to question the .22 caliber homicidal maniac?”

  “Yes ma-am, I was up half the night thinking about the case and what sort of questions he might reasonably answer. Of course, his attorney might make him keep quiet. Then as usual, our understanding of what makes men do such unthinkable things will be diminished.”

  “Good. Marty’s gonna be behind the glass to take it in; to take it all in on behalf of Pat Dean. I’ll be informed by him of the results. Thanks again, handsome Jack!”

  He could almost see her smiling into the phone as she called him by that popular nickname. Leslie had become so accustomed to being called that, it seemed almost natural; it was who he was.

  Detective Sonia Tuason had returned from a visit to the Philippines and wasn’t due to report in as Leslie’s Team member until Monday, but showed up after hearing of the arrest of the .22 caliber killer on the news. She was anxious to witness the interrogation as well as the three male detectives on his Homicide Team Three.

  “Sergeant Leslie,” Sonia said, “I just can’t get over you shooting that strap off the suspect’s shoulder. That was some kinda shooting.”

  “Yes; well I’ve been practicing. Now Sonia, to fill you in,” Leslie said, “this Donald McCoy fellow I just found out is a eunuch. That is so very, very surprising. Anyway, we suspect him of killing four of his drug customers, an insurance company executive who was a friend of his former friend, then an old woman who he was the lover to – maybe he was – a security guard and most sadly, our Lieutenant Pat Dean. I’m hopefully going to find out what makes this man tick, while all of you watch behind the window with Captain Noffsinger.”

  “I hope McCoy is cooperative so’s we can learn something,” Noffsinger said. “This time we have chairs here so take your time with this guy. Maybe he’s nuts and maybe he’s just a real angry sort of fella.”

  Leslie stood behind the window with the others while two officers brought McCoy, dressed in jail house clothes, into the interrogation room, removed the shackles, the handcuffs and set him down on a chair at a table. The officers then stepped back but didn’t leave the room.

  Leslie strolled in as McCoy was graciously thanking them for being treated reasonably. He acted as though he was having a fine experience.

  “Good morning, Handsome Jack!” McCoy said with a big smile on his face. “It’s great to see you. Ha ha. I think it’s great to see anybody today. I sure thought you’d shoot me dead yesterday, Jack. Sure did. Instead of taking my life sir, you gave me life!”

  Leslie pulled a chair up to the table opposite the prisoner. He reminded himself that McCoy had an unusual charisma; that almost everyone immediately liked him. It would be good to be most cautious with such a character.

  “Mr. McCoy, I want you to be fully aware that you and every word spoken here are being recorded on those two television cameras,” Leslie said and pointed to them. “I’ve read you your rights and I’ll do it again now.”

  “Sure Jack, I know you have obligations legally,” McCoy said pleasantly.

  Leslie again read him his Miranda rights and again insisted he had a right to an attorney at State expense to defend him. He added that religious counsel was also available to him, if he desired it.

  “Sergeant Leslie, I am fully aware of my rights and I do hereby officially decline any kind of representation by any attorney for I wish not to impose any more expense on the taxpayers than absolutely necessary. Is that satisfactory to you, Jack?” he smiled.

  “That is a very serious decision, Mr. McCoy. I here and now advise you to ask for counsel. We have most serious murder charges against you.”

  “No sir, I don’t want any counsel. In court or out of court, I can defend myself just fine. Sergeant, you know I am guilty of eight murders and I know I am guilty of nine murders so why not just let me go ahead and tell you sir, what happened and why it happened.”

  “Very well Mr. McCoy, I understand you don’t wish to have counsel at this time. I want you to know, you can change your mind at any time and the court will provide you with legal counsel, I assure you.”

  “Good; it’s understood then. You might as well know where I came from; how I came to shoot to death nine people. Okay?” the pleasant man said.

  “Okay; go right on ahead,” Leslie told him.

  “I was born in Memphis, Tennessee. Your Crime Lab people have my shoulder bag, I’d suppose, and in it they’ll find my birth certificate. It’ll show my mother as Donna McCoy and my name as Donald McCoy with no mention of a father because she was uncertain who she could name. She was a call girl; that is, she was a very pretty whore but she was a good mother to me for my first fifteen years and then she disappeared. Vanished. Gone, Jack gone.

  “By the way, I’ve since merely put an ‘Mc’ in front of my mother’s and my names, on my birth certificate where it had an ‘N’ for no middle name and it’s been a magical change. It was so easy to do.”

  “So Mr. Coy, that means you’re not the real McCoy.”

  “Ha ha Jack; you got me on that one. Sharp. Very sharp. Anyway, my mom knew whoring was sort of dangerous but she had always been picky about who she went to bed with. The Memphis Police were completely indifferent. When I reported her missing they cared not at all about finding what happened to my darling mother. They made no effort to find out what happened to my mother because they considered her to be unworthy of bothering about. That sir, is an unforgettable fact.”

  “Mr. Coy, what has that to do with….?”

  “Maybe it doesn’t mean much to others but damn it all, it meant more than a little to me since she was truly a good mother and provided well for me, considering the way she earned a living. She never hid the fact from me of her profession, as she called it, and she never seemed ashamed of it and neither was I ever ashamed of her. She was a good mother.

  “Anyway Jack, what I did as a result was drop out of high school – which is not to say I stopped learning, for I never have stopped. I got a job with a pig farmer a little south of Memphis. He had a large operation there with at least four hundred hogs on hand at all times. It was an unbelievably stinky place but everybody working there got used to it.

  “Woodrow Peck wasn’t a bad boss, I suppose. Of course he was called ‘Woodie’ or ‘Woodie Wood Pecker’ or ‘Wooden Pecker Head’ by most guys. He was in his early forties and about that time he married a sixteen-year-old girl named Pam who never passed an hour without thinking of sex. She was about my age but she wasn’t very pretty, just awful sexy and I found out she was screwing the other two guys who worked there.

  “They called her Pammy Pecker of course and said every guy should stick his peg in Pam, and so on. Well, we had a bunkhouse and she soon started crawling into my bed during the night, same as she did with the other two young workers who lived there.

  “This went on for about three years, her crawling in with me once in a while and even other times too, like in the corn field o
r the barn when her husband was away. If there’d been twenty employees, she’d probably have screwed them all, she was such a….what do you call them?”

  “A nymphomaniac?” Leslie offered.

  “Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Woodie Pecker’s wife Pam sure as hell was one helluva nymphomaniac,” Coy smiled again.

  “Well Jack, when I had just passed eighteen years of age, her husband it seems finally caught on to what was happening while he was away or sleeping. But I didn’t know he knew. One fine night old Woodie Pecker asked me to go out to the barn with him; says he has a birthday surprise for me. He shares a bottle of champagne with me. I’d never had any of that before. But what he did was, he put something in my glass that made me pass out.

  “When I woke up Jack, I was not feeling good – so help me, this is the truth – I felt a sort of smarting in my crotch. My pants were off and laying to one side. I looked down and saw myself awful bloody. I instantly knew he had castrated me as we did all the time to most of the male pigs to make them grow fast and think of nothing but eating.”

  “That’s how you knew he was aware of his wife’s infidelity, then?”

  “Exactly Jack, exactly. I was out I suppose for several hours. I thought he would have gone to his house, you know, to go to sleep because it was getting late. Instead, I found he had gone to the pig house and laid down, passed out drunk on a bale of hay. He always carried a shoulder bag and I knew he had a target-shooting gun in it. I simply took the gun from his bag and happened with the first shot to hit him in an eye and immediately thought of an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, as my mother had long before read to me.

  “So I emptied the gun into his eyes and teeth. I looked through the bag and found – amazingly – I found four thousand one hundred twenty dollars in it! I’d never dreamed of seeing so much money.”

  “So, did you take the money?”

  “Absolutely, Jack. Absolutely.” McCoy smiled.

  “So then you ran away?”