Eyes of the Predator: The Pickham County Murders (The Hunters)

by Glenn Trust

  Giving a last glance at the old house in the rear view mirror, he pulled from the yard onto the dirt road. Margaret walked out onto the porch as he left in a small cloud of dust and gave him a wave. He raised his hand in the mirror and headed down the road. He did not go far.

  Tom Ridley drove slowly. The engine sounds and spinning tires earlier in the predawn dark came to mind, and he thought he might see something to identify who had been on his road in the night. He did see something.

  A couple of hundred feet down the road, there were tire tracks that showed where the dirt had been dug up by a turning front tire as the driver had turned and backed and turned again in the soft dirt on the shoulder trying to reverse direction on the narrow road.

  Glancing off to his left, he saw something that pissed him off. Dammit. It hadn’t been George Mackey after all. Trash dumping along the dirt road had become a problem, and someone had done it again while he stood peeing in his yard that morning.

  There was a pile of something in the brush about ten feet off the road. “Sonsabitches,” he muttered. Dumping their garbage right here on his road. Ridley stopped his truck and walked into ankle high grass on the side of the road to retrieve the trash and toss it into the truck.

  “Sonsabitches”, he said again, for emphasis.

  He could see that the grass was still bent down where someone had walked carrying their damned garbage into the weeds. When he got to it, he saw that it was a blanket. Some kind of beige looking bed cover, like the one he and his wife had on their bed. He was going to pick it up and throw it in the back of the truck, but thought better. No telling what they dumped, and there could be a snake hiding under there. Good place for a snake. Snakes were overly common around here, and no one liked them. Tom was no exception. He lifted the edge of the blanket with the toe of his boot then quickly pulled his foot away.

  “Son of a bitch,” he said, kneeling down, letting the words come singly and distinctly this time.

  Gently, he lifted the blanket again. It was loosely wrapped around the bundle, but he had seen…something. Suspecting what it was, Tom, squatting beside the bundle, couldn’t help falling back into the weeds and grass as he reflexively backed away.

  Recovering himself, he lifted the bed covering slowly once more. A ghostly, pale foot with red painted toenails was visible. Beyond the foot could be seen the rest of a girl’s body. She was nude with bruises around her head and neck. The ones around her neck were deep purple with darker pinprick spots in them. Tom Ridley was no sheriff’s deputy, but he knew enough to know that the girl had been strangled. He was not a timid man and life on a farm had accustomed him to blood and dead things. Death was part of life…but this. This was different.

  Damn! Moving quickly, he let the blanket fall and ran to the truck. Backing at full speed, kicking up dirt and rocks, he made the couple of hundred feet back to his house in a few seconds. When he got there, his wife was on the porch, she’d heard the truck racing down the road.

  “Tom, what is it?” she said as he rushed into the house. “Tom!”

  He ran to the old red dial phone hanging on the wall and grabbed the receiver off the hook.

  “Son of a bitch,” was all he could say. “Son of a bitch and Goddammit.”

  34. Crime Wave

  “So what the hell’s going on in my county?” Sheriff Richard Klineman looked around the small circular table in his office at the two men and lone woman seated with him.

  “We were hoping you might shed some light on that for us Sheriff.” Bob Shaklee was calm. The GBI frequently dealt with local law enforcement officials, each with their own issues. Sheriffs were particularly noted for their agendas, and with all of them, the number one agenda item was reelection.

  Shaklee’s partner, Sharon Price, amplified Shaklee’s curt response to the sheriff’s bluster. “This is pretty unusual for Pickham County Sheriff. A murder like this might have local implications, you might say. It’s possible that you and your people might have better insight into that than we would.”

  “What do you mean? Local implications? What are you saying…the Klan? Is that what you think?” The sheriff’s face was red. “The Klan in Pickham County? Ridiculous, at least nowadays.”

  “We don’t think anything. We’re just asking, for the record. Black man brutally murdered outside a black A.M.E. Church. The question has to be asked.”

  Klineman turned his head incredulously towards the fourth person at the table, Chief Deputy Ronnie Kupman. He knew that Kupman was not necessarily his ally in any confrontation. In fact, he was only appointed the Chief Deputy in order to avoid a mutiny from the rest of the department. They revered him for his courage and forthrightness during a career spanning over thirty years. But ally or not, the sheriff knew that Kupman was an honest man and would respond truthfully to such a ridiculous question. Kupman returned the Sheriff’s gaze knowing that the Sheriff was waiting for him to speak to the situation. He sat quietly for a moment, appearing to be considering the possibility of Klan involvement, which made Klineman even more agitated. Finally he spoke.

  “I would say,” he began deliberately, “that Klan involvement is very unlikely. That’s not to say that there might not be a few old throwbacks still living in the last century. But we would know about their activities. Pickham has a pretty small population and something like that would be hard to keep quiet.”

  Klineman turned back towards the two GBI investigators with a look of vindication on his face. The GBI knew, of course, that Klan involvement was a very remote possibility. They, along with the FBI and a number of other agencies from other states worked very hard to track the activities of all terrorist organizations, and the Ku Klux Klan was still ranked near the top of the list of organizations under scrutiny, even in the age of Homeland Security, and the threat of terrorism from offshore.

  It would have been difficult indeed for a cell to be operating in Pickham County without their knowledge. As Price had pointed out, the question had to be asked because of the circumstances. Judging by his red-faced indignation, the only one at the table who wasn’t really sure of the answer was the sheriff.

  “Okay,” Shaklee continued quietly. “Klan involvement is unlikely.”

  “Nonexistent,” Klineman interrupted abruptly.

  “We’ll go with extremely unlikely,” Shaklee said and continued before the sheriff could interrupt again. “So here in Pickham County, we have a real whodunit murder. I assume you want us to handle the lead in the investigation Sheriff?”

  “Of course. Not that our boys can’t do it…”

  “No need to explain. We don’t claim turf Sheriff. Your deputies are well trained and professional; we know that. The GBI has access to resources that many local jurisdictions lack, along with a certain expertise in these matters. Happy to support your department with the additional resources available to us.” He paused to allow the sheriff an opportunity to comment on the expertise of his deputies. Klineman merely shifted uncomfortably in his seat staring at his hands clasped together on the table surface. Shaklee continued, “Happy to do it, and of course, your department can take as much of the credit as you like. Let’s just solve the murder.”

  “That’s what I need…we need. The citizens of Pickham County should know that we are diligently pursuing the investigation in this tragic murder of an innocent black man. I want all of the additional resources you can gather set loose on this case. And I would appreciate no further mention of the Klan.”

  Klineman made no mention that the citizens needed to know about their diligent investigation because next year was an election year. He didn’t have to.

  Shaklee couldn’t help the small smile that flitted across his face. It always came down to that. Like many Georgia counties, Pickham had a significant black voting population. It was bad enough for the Sheriff that an elderly black man had been murdered, but if it was discovered that there had been Klan involvement or even rumored, Richard Klineman would be a one term sheriff.

&nbs
p; Seeing the smile, Klineman turned to his Chief Deputy for support. “Right, Chief Deputy?”

  Kupman took his time responding as usual to the sheriff’s question and did so with his usual neutral, objectivity, merely stating the facts. “We must solve this murder, right.”

  Klineman stared at him as if he were from Mars. The two GBI agents were barely able to contain their laughter.

  A beeping tone sounded on the desk phone. The Sheriff reached for it and a moment later, his face blanched. “What? Repeat that.” Turning the phone to the side, he motioned at Kupman. “Turn your radio on.”

  Seeing the look on the sheriff’s face, Kupman was already moving his hand to the radio on his belt. They heard the call being repeated to county and state trooper units in the area.

  “…body of a white female on Ridley Road, half a mile off of Mason Road. Units responding advise.”

  The two day shift sheriff’s units working immediately cleared on the call followed by a bevy of troopers from fifty miles around.

  Chief Deputy Kupman was out the door running through the building to the lot where his county unit was parked. The two GBI agents were right behind.

  Sheriff Klineman grabbed his sport jacket off the hook on the back of his office door and stumbled hurriedly through the outer office, checking his belt to make sure he was wearing a sidearm and shouting apoplectically, at no one in particular. “Do we have a fucking crime wave going on in this county? Someone tell me what the fuck is going on!”

  The office staff clerks, secretaries, and jailers, mostly born-again Baptists, Methodists, and Pentecostals, outwardly professed shock at the sheriff’s sudden and uncharacteristic blasphemy. Inwardly, they were laughing their asses off.

  35. Awakening George

  The insect buzz-humming in his ear was incessant and maddening. It seemed to fill his head from the inside out. He ignored it for a while, or tried to, but the insect was persistent, fading away in the distance for a moment and then swooping close around his head. The swooping hum grew louder and more annoying until it pried him from the beer-induced sleep he had sunk into after leaving the house porch.

  He forced his eyes open, or at least one squinting eye. Even in the dim, heavily draped room, the morning light was too strong. Brow furrowed, he squinted harder and tried opening the other eye. It seemed that he could feel the iris cranking slowly shut around the pupil to keep the painful light out. Shit.

  Lying on his back, slowly gaining consciousness, George stared through slitted lids at the spotted ceiling. He put his arm over his face and waited for the pain to subside. The insect suddenly shouted at him. He reached over and swatted the cell phone vibrating loudly on the nightstand.

  Below his apartment window a crazed maniac shouted, "Get the hell outta the way. I'll run your scrawny ass over!"

  Felton Tobin accelerated the riding mower, bellowing at one of the scrawny, feral cats that hung around his yard. Old Fel hated the cats, but tolerated their existence, as they were adept at hunting the field mice and other varmints that found their way into his yard from the surrounding fields and woods. It was a great satisfaction for him to see one of the cats stalking some unseen prey in the mixture of grass and weeds that made up his yard. Even better, if there was some struggling little creature hanging from the feline's mouth as it trotted across the yard, he'd give a whoop.

  “Got the little fucker!" he would shout triumphantly.

  If he was sitting in one of the old kitchen chairs on the bare wood porch, he'd raise his beer can in salute to the cat. George knew this because he had sat there many an evening with his own beer raised in salute to one of the felines.

  The insect buzzed at him again. This time he reached from the bed to the floor and retrieved it. Squinting at the number, he recognized Ronnie Kupman’s personal cell phone.

  “Hello.”

  “George? That you?”

  “What’s up, Ronnie?” George yawned loudly. Dragging himself from the bed, he walked into the front room of the apartment and stepped out onto the small second story porch in his underwear. The sun was high, but Fel was still mowing so it couldn’t be too late. “What time is it, Ronnie?”

  “Not quite ten, George.”

  “Ronnie, I’ve only been asleep a couple hours. Can’t this wait?”

  “You gotta come in, George.”

  “No way, Ronnie, I’ve been up all night,” he said. “Who called in sick?” He yawned again.

  George walked back inside squinting and scratching. The Sam Brown belt was draped over a kitchen chair. Dusty boots tumbled on their sides beside the chair, grayish white socks thrown over them.

  The Chief Deputy took a deep breath. George could be a good deputy…sometimes. Other times he was, well, he was from another time, the epitome of the redneck deputy. George presented just the kind of image that Sheriff Klineman was trying to end. Still, he had a way of being around when things happened, in the right place, or maybe the wrong place, at the right time. In any event, it didn’t matter now. This was some serious shit, and George was coming in.

  “George, put your boots on and come in. Now.”

  “Aw, Ronnie,” he rubbed one cold foot against the other.

  “Now, George.” He paused and added, “There was another killing.”

  George stopped in his tracks and closed his eyes as the image of Mrs. Sims pointed at him over the body of her dead husband.

  “What? What happened?”

  “We don’t know.”

  “Where?”

  “Out on Tom Ridley’s road.”

  “What? Tom Ridley killed someone?” George sat down in the kitchen chair and reached down for his boots, the phone against his ear, crooked in his neck.

  “No, no. Not Tom. Tom found the body. Some girl. Haven’t ID’ed her yet, but you were working the beat last night, and the sheriff wants you in, immediately. You got it? Right now, George.”

  “I hear you, Ronnie. Be there soon.”

  “And George, start thinking about anything you might have seen last night. We don’t have much on this one. Nothing really. Anything you have is gonna be more than we have now. Oh yea, one more thing, the GBI is here. They’re gonna take lead on this case too, so try to look like a sheriff’s deputy, please.” Ronnie hung up and George started pulling his boots off again so that he could put his pants on.

  Ronnie Kupman knew, and George knew, that Ronnie had saved his job a couple of times when the sheriff would have let George go as a throwaway to the past.

  Ronnie Kupman also knew that, while George might be a throwback to a different era in police work, he was not a throwaway. He was a natural hunter. He knew where to be when the bad guy showed up. He was sloppy in his personal demeanor, some thought slovenly and lazy, but he was a good deputy. Who knows, in a big city like Atlanta, he might have been a great detective. Probably not though, George was one of those who did not fit in. Scruffy and unkempt, he didn’t know how to fit in, and funny thing was, he didn’t even know that he didn’t fit in.

  Still, they could use his help now. Ronnie looked across the small dirt road to the covered bundle in the brush. His face twitched at the grisly pictures that flashed across his mind. Bad. Real bad. He wondered what the animal that had done this looked like.

  With slightly shaky hands, he lit a cigarette and looked down at his boots in the dust. He was surprised to see a little smudge of blood from the girl’s body on the side of his right boot. He scraped the boot in the dirt trying to scrub the blood off.

  He inhaled deeply and looked across the road again. An animal did this. They needed a hunter. They needed George right now.

  36. Other Plans

  Henry watched the two young men tramp out of the truck stop cafe. One, the younger one, stopped as if he were going to come back, but the girl at the booth just looked down at the slip of paper he had given her. She wouldn’t look up at him. After a moment, the young man followed his brother to their truck.

  Such a tender scene. Henry gav
e a grunt of disgust. He sat at the booth watching the girl and playing with his coffee cup. Glancing down at his watch, he smiled. He didn’t have to be in Chattanooga until tomorrow. Plenty of time. More than enough time. He held his coffee cup up and caught the waitress’ attention, waving the cup at her.

  The waitress got a hard look on her face and walked over with the coffee pot. She didn’t like people waving cups at her. It was about as rude as pointing a finger or whispering. She sloshed coffee into Henry’s cup, deliberately careless.

  “Hey!” the big man said. “Try to get some in the cup, girl.” Henry grabbed some napkins out of the dispenser on the table and sopped up the spilled coffee.

  “Hey, yourself,” the waitress replied, looking down at him, a hand on a hip and raised eye brows, like a mother eyeing a misbehaving child. “Where’d you learn your manners?”

  “Same place you learned to pour coffee, I guess,” Henry said looking up from the wet napkins on the table. He noticed the name tag on her chest, ‘Marla’. He also noticed the full bosom underneath the tag. He could just make out the bra beneath the tight, white fabric of her synthetic waitress dress. At that point, he smiled up at her, but his eyes stayed on her breasts.

  Marla shook her head and walked off. Truck drivers, she thought. What a bunch of pigs. Aware that Henry was staring at her ass as she walked, she threw a little more sway into her stride. Let the fat pig try to get that out of his mind tonight, jacking off in the cab of his truck.

  Henry watched her go. In fact, he was looking at Marla’s ass. A little plump, but he wouldn’t kick her out of bed. She wasn’t really his type though, mouthy with lots of attitude. He liked them more…subdued.

  Henry turned his thoughts from the temporary distraction of Marla’s tits and ass back to the young girl at the table across the room. Nope, Marla was definitely not his type. Henry had something else on his mind.