Hunting the Five Point Killer

by C. M. Wendelboe

  “This is pretty good,” Arn said after he’d blown on hot crust enough to sample it. “How’d you find time to cook between hanging drywall?”

  “The drywall was easy. Getting the water heater hooked up was the hard part.”

  “Great,” Arn said. “So we can take a shower tonight?”

  “Not together, if that’s what you’re hinting at.”

  “It isn’t.”

  “Good.” Danny carefully spread his napkin on his tattered sweatpants. “Who does Oblanski think shot Johnny?”

  “Frank Dull Knife.”

  “Indian down by the refinery?”

  “Do you know everyone who lives here?” Arn asked.

  “Unfortunately, I know him.” Danny filled their coffee cups and sat back down. “When I first blew into town years ago, I met Frank at a bar. He’s a Cheyenne from Lame Deer, up in Montana, and I’m Oglala Lakota, from South Dakota. We’re practically relatives, so I thought we had a lot in common. We had a few too many beers one night in a bar and Frank went nuts. He wanted to fight every white guy there, which I think we did.” Danny rubbed his misshapen nose. “After that night, my scrawny butt couldn’t take any more of his hospitality. Do you think he’s the shooter?”

  “I just don’t know, Danny. It would make things so easy if he were.” Arn finished his pot pie and tossed the paper plate in the trash. “I feel someone wants the spotlight dropped on those three officers. Tell me, you were here when the Five Point murders happened. Could one of the street people have been the killer?”

  “Anyone could have been,” Danny answered, dabbing at his mouth with a napkin, “as many street people as we get every summer. The newspapers could just as well have dubbed him the ghost killer. Not a single clue was left, if you believe the newspapers.”

  “Same thing with Johnny’s shooting.”

  “Then you better find this guy before he kills again.”

  “Just what I intend doing,” Arn said. “As soon as I get a good night’s sleep.”

  Twenty-Six

  I would have liked to use my blade on Johnny. Taking my time. Watching his reaction to dying slowly, his pain prolonged. But blades, though lethal, take time to make someone bleed out. I couldn’t chance someone walking by. Seeing me in his driveway plunging the blade in while he screamed and coughed blood over me. I had to kill him quickly. A part of me is furious that I reverted to my old self. Furious that I failed in fighting off the urges that lay dormant the last ten years. Another part of me is convinced I killed Johnny because he was spearheading the reopened investigation into the Butch Spangler death and the Five Point cases. He was allowing the investigation to re-open, so I had to kill him. It was the ultimate warning to drop the investigation. They’ll have to drop the cold cases now and work overtime finding Johnny’s killer.

  Or so I thought until tonight, when Ana Maria came on air from the hospital. There was no update on Chief White’s condition, she reported. She said an anonymous hospital employee had said it looked grim for Johnny. “But this changes nothing.” Ana Maria looked into the camera, and seemed to be looking at me. Challenging me. “We will continue investigating the killings of the three officers a decade ago and the Five Point Killer cases.”

  I slip my ski mask in my pocket. In case they wake up.

  I stop two blocks from Anderson’s house, the crunching snow under my tires louder in the frigid night air than I would have wanted.

  I step out and bundle my hoodie around my face, leaving my heavy coat in the car. Where I’m going, I don’t want to risk a bulky jacket scraping against anything.

  I walk through back yards of this neighborhood, the downed rotted fences making it easy to go from house to house. Only a few people brave enough to live in this part of town, with so many abandoned and run-down houses providing the homeless and bums off the railroad places to crash. And a place to rob or beat the unsuspecting passerby. But this late at night, the hobos have long ago succumbed to the booze they had for dinner.

  I reach the alley in back of Anderson’s house. Yesterday I walked by, figuring out the best way to get inside, and I avoid clumps of frozen snow as I make my way around the side where I wait at the corner of the house by the front door. I pause, listening. A dog barks the next block over, and in a cottonwood overhead an owl says hello. But no one stirs in the house.

  I take out the ring of try keys from my pocket, wrapped in a rag to keep them from rattling against each other. They’ll fit most old door locks, and many dead bolts manufactured in the last few years.

  I put one foot atop the rickety porch and slowly put weight down, testing. But Anderson has replaced much of the wood, and it takes my weight.

  At the door I stop and listen. I put my hand against the door. Even if I can’t hear someone walking around, I’ll be able to feel vibrations on the door. It remains as lifeless as a tombstone, and I unwrap my ring of keys. They have served me well in years past, and I know there’ll be one that fits this lock. I work my way around the ring—perhaps ten or twelve keys—slowly inserting each until …

  The lock clicks open. I pocket the ring, and listen a final time before cracking the door open. It creaks ever so slightly and I raise up on the knob, taking weight off the door, and open it wide enough to slip by. Inside, I close the door and stand against a wall, allowing my eyes to adjust to the darkness. And more importantly, waiting for my heart to slow. I fear nothing being inside this house. What I fear is that my excitement will override my instincts. And I will make a mistake.

  I breathe deeply, aware that the throbbing in my head is slowly lessening, and I start for the staircase. Off to one side a light glows, another room, perhaps a night light, and I turn to the staircase railing. I reach for it, then pull my hand back. Just one more opportunity to make noise. I know. I have experience.

  I step to one side of the stairs, knowing that more noise is possible if I put my weight in the unsupported center, and carefully put my weight down. Step by step I test each rung before I ascend another. When I reach the top floor, I once again pause. I feel my temples throb, my heart race, and I breathe deep as I look around the hallway.

  Three doorways open into the hallway, but there are no doors on any room. When I feel composed, I once again keep to one side of the hallway and inch down. I feel the floor beneath for any sign of it giving me away, and peek around the first door. Ana Maria. What the hell is she doing here? She sleeps on her side. Almost in a fetal position, like a child. But she is no child. She wants to find me. She wants to destroy me.

  I pull back, wondering what she’s doing in Anderson’s house. I become angry at myself. Back in the day, I would have never taken anything for granted. I would never have entered any of the victims’ houses without thoroughly checking. Everything. Including what cars were parked in the neighborhood. But it will never happen again. I will never again leave anything to chance. Ever.

  Ana Maria snorts and I freeze. When she settles back again, I debate what I should do with her. But I stick to the plan. I’d decided to visit Anderson and send him a message before learning she slept over. As much as I would like to see the terror in her eyes once again, I stay on plan and continue down the hallway.

  The next two rooms have been stripped of lath and plaster. Bare wires dangle from the walls. A light fixtures swings in the center of the rooms. I pass by on the way to the room at the end of the hall.

  The last room, like the other three, has no door and I look around the corner of the jamb. Anderson sleeps on his back. Even in the dark, his wispy blond hair is tussled and lies off to one side of his balding head. His feet stick out of the comforter, big, oversized feet, and I smile. What I wouldn’t give to tickle his foot. And when he awakened suddenly, carve another throat under the one he’s got. But I have an agenda. I really don’t want to hurt him. I want him off my case.

  I step inside his bedroom and listen intently. His br
eathing is deep, consistent, and I know he’s in deep sleep.

  I approach his bunk—a camping cot, really—and squat down five feet from it, studying him. Even at his age, he would be a handful, with his thick shoulders and arms, his heavy, muscular hands outside the covers. But I have to send a message, and I spot that message under his bunk.

  I crawl on my belly, spreading my arm out until I can grab his slippers. I carefully pick them off the floor and stand up. I look a last time at Anderson sleeping, almost regretting that all I want to do is send a message, and backtrack my way out of the old house.

  Twenty-Seven

  Danny’s drywall hammer slap-slap-slapping on fresh wallboard jolted Arn awake. He rubbed the sleepers out of his eyes, just as he’d done a thousand times as a boy in this same room over the carriage garage. He stared at the ceiling, remembering cowboy posters he’d collected and hung there: Gene Autry and John Wayne and Roy Rogers, heroes all to a young boy who just wanted to be like them. And wanted to be like his grandfather and great-grandfather who’d settled here when Cheyenne was a whistle stop for the Union Pacific.

  But the dark side of those men had frightened Arn growing up as well. His great-grandfather had been arrested and narrowly escaped a hangman’s noose for rustling cattle west of town. His grandfather had shot and killed a man on the steps of this very house when the man demanded money from a poker game. Which his grandfather had cheated in.

  And his own dad. His father had so wanted to carry on the family tradition of lawlessness, but somehow fell into a position as a policeman for the city. The brutality he could never exert over the people he arrested spilled into his home life. And onto his only son, who’d found solace in this room from a father who beat him for small infractions of the household rules.

  As miserable as those days had been, Arn never had to contend with Danny’s hammering at six in the morning. He sat up on the edge of the cot and looked out into the hallway. When he’d jumped on Danny last night about hanging a door, the old man had stood with his hands on his hips. “What you want me to do? Just tell me. Lay floor tile or pull wires or texture drywall, ’cause I only got so many hours in a day.” It was great to be home again.

  Arn grabbed his jeans from a nail sticking out of the wall and slowly, painfully, put one leg in at a time. Between working on the house and fighting with the man in the park, he felt every muscle like he was back competing on the rodeo circuit. Danny had found him a foam camping pad—the pad fairy, he claimed—which helped Arn’s aches some. Still, resisting a midlife crisis didn’t extend to sleeping on cots. His next check from the television station, he told himself, would go to buy a bed. Make that three beds: for him, for Danny, and for Ana Maria.

  Arn unplugged his cell from the wall and called the hospital, but there was no change in Johnny’s condition. “Who shot you, old friend,” Arn said aloud as he used the chair to help stand. His leg still throbbed from the beating in the park. He’d iced it to ease the swelling after he’d gotten back from the ER the other night. Still, it took him a moment to catch his breath before reaching under the cot for his slippers.

  “Shouldn’t you at least zip up before you parade around in morning wood?” Ana Maria walked by his door, toothbrush in her smiling mouth, exaggerating a once-over of Arn’s open trousers. He turned his back to the hallway and zipped up. He looked a final time for his slippers under the cot before tiptoeing around drywall dust that seemed to float on the floor.

  He tested the bare steps for exposed nails as he picked his way downstairs. A board creaked under his weight loud enough he thought it would give way, and he moved to the side to cling to the rickety railing for support.

  In the living room downstairs, Danny squatted over a box of drywall nails. His arm was poised to swing his hammer again when he saw Arn, and he put it in the nail bucket. “Ana Maria and I have been starving to death waiting for you to wake up.”

  “Sorry,” Arn said, crow-stepping over drywall dust. “I guess I was more beat than I thought.”

  “If you hadn’t been sleepwalking, you might have woke up a little refreshed.”

  “I don’t sleepwalk.”

  “Hell you don’t,” Danny said. “I heard you upstairs when I was sleeping.”

  “I sleepwalked once.” Arn drew in a deep breath. “But it wasn’t last night. What smells so good?”

  “Flapjacks. They’ve been warming in the oven for an hour.”

  “Toaster oven?”

  “No, a regular oven.”

  “Don’t tell me: the stove fairy?”

  “You’re catching on.” Danny smiled. “It was delivered early this morning.”

  Arn followed him into the kitchen. Ana Maria poured coffee and dished flapjacks on their plates.

  “You see my slippers?” he asked Danny.

  “They’re a little big for me,” the old man replied. “Besides, they’re a little threadbare.”

  “Well, someone took them,” Arn said.

  Danny grabbed the butter and syrup and sat across the card table from Arn. “No, it means you’re getting forgetful like the rest of us.”

  “Let me know when you find them,” Arn said. “They’re like old friends to me.”

  “I would, “Danny said, “but I’m taking a break.”

  Arn looked approvingly around the kitchen. “You’ve done a lot this week.”

  “Question,” Ana Maria said as she dribbled syrup on pancakes. “If you can do all this, how come you’re not out making serious bucks?”

  “Like work a steady job? With a contractor?” Danny held up his hands like he was giving up. “I’m better than any contractor.”

  “Then start your own handyman business,” Ana Maria said.

  “I got no time for that,” Danny said. “I’m too busy right here. Besides, we’re not prying, remember? And since this is a Saturday, I’d like to watch football.”

  “Then do it.”

  “I can’t,” Danny said between bites of pancake. “Those tightwads two houses down don’t even subscribe to ESPN.”

  “The one you’re stealing service from,” Arn reminded him.

  “I prefer to think that we’re just using service that they pay the cable company for anyway. Besides, I’m taking a breather and helping you with those cases you got tacked up on the wall.”

  “I told you to stay out of there.” Arn had ordered Danny to stay out of the sewing room, where he had written on the fresh drywall with a Sharpie, perfect for organizing his thoughts.

  “I needed my toolbox I left in there,” Danny explained. “Excuse the hell out of me if I glanced at your precious wall while I was there.”

  “I got nothing else to do this morning either,” Ana Maria said.

  “What, did I adopt you two?” Arn tossed his paper plate in the trash and grabbed his coffee cup. “Let’s go.”

  He led them down the hallway to the sewing room. “The Situation Room,” as Danny had started calling it. Arn pulled aside the sheet hung across the doorway and led them in. Even though he had already seen the pictures—seen them and had nightmares about them—the photos cried out in all their gruesomeness, some black and white, others in murderous color.

  Ana Maria stopped at the doorway. She swayed and caught herself on the door jamb. “You don’t have to come in here, you know,” Arn said.

  She steadied herself before overturning a plastic milk crate. She took in deep breaths and sat in front of the wall. “If I’m going to help solve this, I need to man up.”

  Arn gestured to a new door waiting to be hung that Danny had propped against one wall. “Grab some saw horses we can lay this door on.”

  Arn waited until Danny left the room before sitting beside Ana Maria. “I never heard you come in last night. I told you to wake me up.”

  “You were sleeping as soundly as that policeman assigned to watch me.”

/>   “The officer was sleeping?” Arn fumbled to open his cell phone. “That’s bullshit. Oblanski’s going to have to replace—”

  Ana Maria rested her hand on his arm. “It’s all right. Don’t you remember what it was like to be a young officer? Full of piss and vinegar and wanting to be in on all the action you heard come across the radio? Not parked in a television station lot waiting to follow some reporter home, only to sit for hours watching a dark house. If it happens again, then you can report the guy.”

  Arn hesitated a moment before closing his phone. “If it happens again—”

  “You’ll be the first I tell.”

  Danny returned with folding sawhorses and helped Arn place the door across the sawhorses as a makeshift table. He ran his hand over the surface. “I’m a reluctant participant in messing up this nice door.”

  “If I do,” Arn said, “I’ll buy another.”

  He handed Ana Maria the manila folders. “You up to this? First look-see of crime scene photos can be nasty if you’re not used to it.”

  Ana Maria nodded. “Just let’s take a look.”

  Arn spread the Five Point case files across the door. His eyes darted from Joey Bent’s file to the photos on the wall.

  Danny leaned over Arn’s shoulder. “Joey and this Delbert Urban were sure cut to pieces. The papers didn’t do them justice back then.”

  Both victims had their throats slit. Joey sat slumped in his chair wearing no pants. Blood had dripped down onto his bare legs, and his ear-to-ear slice seemed to smile at the camera as he still clutched a bottle of lotion.

  “Remember I mentioned I got into a bar fight along with Frank?” Danny said. “He cut hell out of two cowboys before the bartender waylaid him with a tire billy.”

  “You saying he might have done this?” Ana Maria asked.

  “All I’m saying is, Frank loved his blade,” Danny answered.