by Ralph Dennis
“This wouldn’t have happened if you’d caught the man who killed the other little girl.” The drink was getting to Jonas Moore and his speech was slurred.
“Jonas,” his wife said. “That doesn’t help.”
“But it’s true. It’s the Goddam truth and the Sheriff knows it.”
“All I can say is that we’re making progress.” Wilt got his coat buttoned and slapped the cap against his leg. “All I wish is …” He caught himself. What he’d almost said is that he wished all the mothers in the county would take care of their children so this wouldn’t happen. But he couldn’t say that. “All I wish is that she’s unharmed when we find her.”
“Why our child? Why Dana?”
He had no answer for her. All he could do was shake his head slowly. “I’ll call you as soon as I know something.”
“Find her, Sheriff,” Arlene said. “Please find her.”
He said he’d do all he could.
CHAPTER TEN
The night air was colder. The temperature had dropped five or ten degrees while they’d been in the Moore apartment.
Wilt settled into the seat on the passenger side of the cruiser. There was a sour taste in his mouth.
Joe started the engine and let it warm up. “I thought he was going to blow up all over her and you too.”
“You see the bruise? He’s already had his round with her. And me … I don’t think he wants any part of me the way I feel.”
“That was a cheap shot he threw at us,” Joe said.
“It comes with the job. What he really wanted to do was kick a few more lumps on her ass and he couldn’t, not in front of us. So, he tells us it’s our fault. That takes some of the pressure off him.”
“Sometimes I feel like I wouldn’t want your job,”
Wilt grinned. “And sometimes you do want it?”
“Not today.”
“What you want to be is a fair weather Sheriff.”
“You’re right, Wilt.”
Joe drove.
Wilt put his head back. He willed a darkness behind his eyelids. He didn’t get that. What he got was the face of Dana Moore on the twisted, tortured body of Cathy Dobbs. It was like a nightmare and he opened his eyes and tried to shake the image away.
It lingered. It was stubborn.
The Akers place still raised tobacco. The original allotment for leaf hadn’t been large enough to make it worth the owner’s time. But in Webster County, as in the rest of the state, there were allotments that got handed down in families. When the owner of the allotment was a widow, or an older person who didn’t want to farm, it was possible to purchase these allotments on a yearly basis. A still active farmer could put together twenty or thirty or forty acres of these leases. Such small farming wouldn’t make a man rich but it helped keep his books in the black.
The Akers family was a large one. Until around 1960, the farm had supported old Abner and three sons. But farming changed. In the late 1950s and the early 1960s, the sons married and moved away. Now Abner Akers lived alone in the big, main house that had been built to house a large family.
The smaller houses where the hired help had lived were rented now. It was Wilt’s guess that Bobby Turpin lived in one of these.
On the drive toward the main house, Wilt had decided to stop by and see Abner. It had been two or three years since he’d seen him. Beyond the main house, he saw one of the smaller places where smoke billowed from the chimney. And there was a yellow school bus parked there, next to a Ford pickup.
The front door of the smaller house opened and a young man stepped onto the porch the moment the cruiser braked next to the school bus. He wore jeans, a red N.C. State pullover and heavy work shoes. His face was weathered and blotchy and he was trying to grow a beard. The beard was whispy and hardly showed at all at a distance.
“Bobby Turpin?”
He nodded. “You must be the Sheriff. Mr. Garland called me.”
Wilt nodded toward the house. “Can we talk inside, out of the wind?”
“If you don’t wake the baby. You wake the baby and my wife’ll be on my back all night.”
“In that case, we can talk out here.” Wilt turned up his coat collar and shoved his hands deep in his pockets.
“Naw, come on it. It’s too cold out here.”
Inside, a roaring fire burned in the fireplace. An oil heater hummed on the other side of the room. There was a strong scent of pine. But, also, underneath that, the smell of diapers and urine.
“How old’s the baby?”
“Three months plus a few days. It sure changes a man’s life.”
“For the better?” Wilt smiled.
“I’ll have to wait and. see.”
“The reason we’re here …”
“I know.” A sober and sad look moved across Turpin’s homely face. He motioned them to chairs. “That’s a nice little girl.”
“Mind if I smoke?” Wilt asked.
“Go ahead.” Turpin moved around and stood with his back to the fireplace. “My wife’s against it, but she seems to be against anything with pleasure to it.”
Wilt laughed.
“You married, Sheriff?”
“Between wives.” Wilt got his smoke going and tossed the match into the fireplace.
“Dana’s a sweet little girl. Wasn’t no bigger than a minute. But for her age, she’s so ladylike. You know, she sits up straight, her knees together and her ankles crossed. It was like she’d been to one of those finishing schools, a place where they teach manners. She always got on the bus early and sat up front. That was because some of the kids got rowdy and she didn’t like it. So she sat near me.”
“You know Dana. You think she would get in a car with a stranger?”
“I doubt it.”
“You think of any circumstance where she might talk to a stranger?”
“Well, she might answer a question or give directions. But that’s just a guess.”
“Tell me about today.”
For Bobby, it had been like any other day. She’d boarded the bus early and she’d been just as quiet and ladylike as ever.
“She got on at …?”
“Roughly three o’clock.”
“And she got off …?”
“It takes about fifteen minutes to run the route from the school to Dana’s stop. In fact, I usually check the time at that stop. It tells me if I’m running late.”
“And today?”
“It was three-fourteen.”
Wilt took a final draw from the Chesterfield and stepped forward to toss the butt into the fireplace. “You see any cars parked near the stop?”
“No.”
“You see any cars behind the bus that might have been trailing you?”
Bobby shook his head. “I’d have noticed. You see, by state law, cars have to stop when a bus stops. So I check behind myself all the time. It’s got so it’s reflex now.”
“Dana the only child leaves the bus at that stop?”
“Yes.”
“Today, when she left the bus, did she look around like she expected her mother to meet her?”
“Her mother never met her. Never.”
That fit the image Wilt had of Arlene Moore. Too wrapped up in her own life to pay the time or the attention to the safety of her child. “You pull off right away?”
“Usually I do. Today I had to go back and quiet a couple of kids who were acting up. That took some time.”
“You pass Dana down the road?”
“She was about halfway to the entrance road that went to Tall Pines. When she heard the bus, she turned and waved.”
“You see any cars on the Tall Pines road?”
“No. No car.” Turpin’s face changed. It went frozen, thoughtful. “That was one thing.”
“What?”
“A man with a dog.”
“On the entrance road?”
“No, in the field between the highway and the complex.”
“What kind of dog?”
/> “It was more a puppy than a dog.”
“You know the breed?”
“I couldn’t tell. I don’t know dogs that well and this was a puppy.”
“White, brown, black, spotted …?”
“More white than anything else.”
“What was your impression of the man?”
“It was at a distance. I couldn’t see that much of him. He wore a tan coat. It might have been a raincoat.”
Raincoat? That reminded Wilt of the man Gus Triffon had described. “A short raincoat? Or the usual length?”
“I think it was short.”
“Old man or young man?”
“I wasn’t close enough …”
“I understand that. But think. How did he move? Like a young man or an old man?”
“The way he moved, I’d say young.”
“Why?”
“Well, he had this stick and he was throwing it for the puppy. It was the way he swung his arm. It was easy and smooth, not jerky. And when he bent over to take the stick, it was easy and smooth. Like the way he threw the stick.”
Wilt looked at Joe.
“It could fit,” Joe said.
There was a loud squawl from a nearby room. It was breathless, nonstop shrieking. A woman’s voice rode above the baby’s cry. “Bobby, you see what you’ve done? I told you. You can’t say I didn’t tell you.”
Wilt stopped at the fireplace and rubbed his hands in front of the flames. “Tell her it was my fault, Bobby.”
Bobby Turpin shook his head, not at the suggestion but at the trouble he was in. “You can bet I will. Let her raise hell with the Sheriff and see what that gets her.”
Joe backed down the road until he was beyond the Ford pickup and the school bus. He turned and they passed the Akers house. A cluster of chickens watched them from a shelter under the back steps.
“Our boy, whoever he is, probably changes his approach each time. What works one time will get him caught the next time.”
“If the man in the field with the puppy is our man,” Joe said.
“I wonder if anybody on West Oak and 12th saw a man with a puppy. That would spoil my guess.”
“We should have gone along on that door-to-door with the city cops. I trust those boys as far as I can throw a police car.”
“Slipshod work?” Wilt nodded. “It trickles from the top and Amos is at the top.”
“The man with the puppy?”
“According to Bobby, there wasn’t anybody else on the road. No cars on the entrance road to the Tall Pines complex.” The heater air was changing. The raw chill eased. Wilt touched the vent and felt the warm air. “It’s a good ploy.” He checked himself. “No, it’s a rotten trick. What kid can resist a puppy?”
“Even when the kid’s been warned not to talk to strangers?”
“A puppy’s not a stranger.”
“Rotten and sleazy,” Joe said. He drove for a mile or two in silence. “What say I drop you at the Station and pick up Floyd? That’s what you want, isn’t it? A door-to-door at Tall Pines to see if anybody else saw the man with the puppy?”
“I don’t know what I’m doing around here. You’ve got it all figured.”
“You’re around to crack the whip,” Joe said.
“Some whip.” But he relaxed now that that decision had been made. “Take along the composite Gus Triffon helped us with and show it around.”
“I’ve got a glove box stuffed with them.”
“Ask about strange cars around the complex today.”
“Like a red and white Thunderbird? That’s the second question.”
Wilt leaned forward, eyes closed, and let the warm air blow across his face. “Write if you find work.”
“Where’ll you be?”
“At the office. I’ll set up the search. After that, I’ll be at my desk. All night if I have to.”
“Put out the cot. Staying awake all night won’t help us find the girl.”
“I’m not sure I can sleep. I’ve got this bad feeling that when we find Dana Moore, it’ll be just like the little Dobbs child.”
“That hopeless, Wilt?”
“It’s the grim horrors.”
They approached the city limits. The fields, the woods gradually giving way to the first haze of lights and a sprinkling of houses that straddled the line where the city and the county merged. The way it was going, Wilt thought, in his own time he would see all this vanish and the concrete and the asphalt take over.
“I feel so helpless,” Joe said.
Jerked back to now. Not fifteen years from now. He would quarter the county and parcel it out to four cruisers. Walk every inch of it, he’d tell them. And when the search teams left, he’d talk to Susie. Could she put in overtime? Could she stay at the switchboard and free a man for the hunt? He thought she would. And later, waiting for the reports to come in, he would set up the camp bed and try to get a couple of hours of rest. Not sleep. Rest.
At the Station, Joe waited in the cruiser until Wilt sent Floyd to join him. Susie volunteered to stay on before he could ask her.
“Isn’t it terrible about that poor little girl?” was all that Susie said.
Within five minutes, Wilt stood at his office window, the one that overlooked the back parking lot, and watched the cruisers pull away until only one remained, Car #1, his cruiser.
The windows shook and rattled in their casements. At the back of the lot, backlighted by a glare from the downtown buildings, he watched the old oak tree. Its upper branches writhed and twisted in the strong evening wind.
The autopsy report on Cathy Dobbs was still centered on his blotter. When he sat at his desk, he pushed the report aside. He didn’t want to read it. Not now. Not ever.
Susie brought him a coffee.
Wilt sat and stared at the wall clock.
By nine, he’d heard nothing from Joe Croft at Tall Pines. That meant the interviews had produced nothing worth reporting. The four search teams called in at the half hour, giving their locations and what territory had been combed. It was going, for them, smooth as it was supposed to, but there was no sign of Dana Moore.
His stomach growled at him. He didn’t want to leave his office for a burger. A burger wasn’t worth the trouble. What he really wanted was a plate of chopped barbecue from the Open Pit. That and a bowl of cole slaw and about a dozen hush puppies. And sloshed over the pork, some of the special vinegar sauce the Open Pit made. And black coffee until it ran out of his ears. And lemon chess pie, home baked and offered in a generous wedge.
Nothing else he could do. He opened the office closet and pushed the folded camp cot aside until he found the box he thought of as his survival kit. He’d packed a one burner hot plate and a selection of canned soups. And, at the back of the box, a couple of tubes of saltines he’d double-wrapped in plastic.
With no special interest, he chose the Manhattan Clam Chowder. Within minutes the soup was simmering, about ready to be eaten.
Just as he reached for the sauce pan, Susie buzzed him. “It’s Joe.”
Wilt switched off the burner. He carried the pan to his desk and placed it on the blotter before he lifted the receiver. “Yeah, Joe?”
“I think you’d better get over here.”
Wilt lifted a spoonful of the soup and blew across it. “You find someone who …?”
“It’s not that. It’s a ransom note.”
“The hell you say.”
“It’s what the note says, Wilt.”
“I’ll be there fast as I can. You put Floyd on the road now so he can handle the Station.”
“He just left.”
“And stop reading my mind.”
After he broke the connection, he got down three spoons of the Clam Chowder before he burned his tongue. He left the pan on the desk.
His stomach rumbled at him as he rushed down the back steps to the parking lot. It seemed to be saying more, more. On the drive, he smoked two cigarettes in an attempt to dull the edge. It didn’t work.
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In desperation, he stopped at a closed gas station that had an outside snack area and bought a Milky Way and peanut brittle bar.
Then he was down to pennies and the machine didn’t give credit.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The note was on the kitchen table in the Moore apartment. It was pegged down at the top and bottom by oversized salt and pepper shakers.
On the way through the living room, Wilt had his look at Jonas and Arlene Moore. There were no new bruises he could see on Arlene. And the anger had been replaced by a desperate hope. For them, the note meant there was still a chance Dana was alive.
“I’d bet against any prints being on it,” Joe said, lowering his voice so the Moore, who remained in the living room, wouldn’t hear their conversation. “So far, the only people who have handled it are the Moore.”
“Fingerprints are overrated.” Wilt leaned over the note. It was block printed on a rough square of brown paper. The paper had the texture and thickness of a segment from a grocery bag.
If you want to see your girl again get $5,000 dollars and wait for phone call. Don’t call the police.
“You think it’s real?” Joe asked.
Only Five thousand dollars? It didn’t seem to Wilt like much of a ransom demand. And why was there a demand this time and not before? It didn’t add up.
“I don’t think we have any choice,” Wilt said. “We’ve got to act like we believe it is. How was it delivered?”
Joe shrugged. “They’re not sure. Mrs. Moore says she happened to pass through the living room and saw it stuck between the bottom of the door and the doorframe.”
“While you and Floyd were in the area?”
“I guess so.” Joe shook his head. “Hell, we were busy. We were hardly outside more than a minute at the time.”
“Damn.”
“I’m not making excuses. This whole place is rented. There must be a couple of hundred living here and they’re coming and going at all hours. It’s hard to tell who belongs here and who doesn’t.”
“The disappearance of Dana. It make the evening news yet?”
“I think it made the news on two of the TV channels and there have been news flashes on the radio stations.”
“You make a guess where they got their information?”