Hunting the Five Point Killer

by C. M. Wendelboe

  “I’m listening,” Oblanski said.

  “If Gaylord had been practicing his … autoerotic routine for any length of time, the rope’s movement would have furrowed the wood.”

  Oblanski shook his head. “Now you’re rambling.”

  “Am I?” Arn said. “Someone took that mirror from the upstairs hallway and put it downstairs. Scattered porn on the floor like Gaylord was looking at it while he hung, probably after they killed Gaylord.”

  “Adelle would have said something about the mirror.”

  “Your own report states Adelle never went back in the house after she found Gaylord,” Arn got out. “And she turned everything over to the auction company. She would have no way of knowing about the mirror. If she was telling the truth.”

  Oblanski sat slapping a fist against his leg. “When we searched Gaylord’s house that night, we did find books by the likes of de Sade and von Sacher-Masoch in his man cave. Books sick bastards like that read. I don’t know—”

  “Look at this.” Arn winced when he ran his hand over where the rope had cut into the flesh of his neck. “Did you see rope marks on Gaylord’s neck that night?”

  “What stupid question is that? Of course I did. He was hanging by a rope.”

  “And did you ever see rope marks any other time you saw him at work?”

  Oblanski thought for a moment, and his face turned ashen. “Never.” He paced in the small space in front of Arn’s bed. “You might—just might—be right on this. But why would someone hang Gaylord? The little prick was never a threat to anyone.”

  “Johnny was convinced the Five Point Killer was linked to Butch’s murder. If Butch and Gaylord were working those cases together … ” Arn trailed off. Ana Maria refilled his glass with ice water and handed it to him.

  “If what you say is true, that Gaylord’s and Steve’s and Butch’s deaths are connected, there’s only one common denominator: the Five Point cases.” Oblanski turned to Ana Maria. “I’m due to go on television with you again tomorrow night. What are you going to say?”

  Ana Maria thought for a moment. “I’m going to speculate—on the air—that all cases are connected. That the killer returned to murder Johnny. And attack Arn.”

  “I’m not ready to try to connect Johnny’s murder with the Five Point cases.”

  “I’d wager your forensics tech found a footprint,” Arn said.

  “Found a print where?”

  “In Johnny’s room.”

  “We found a lot of footprints in Johnny’s room,” Oblanski said. “The trauma team was in there for twenty minutes. They left a lot of prints. Couldn’t be helped.”

  “The killer left a print that would be easy for you to find.”

  “You sound pretty sure of yourself,” Oblanski said.

  “This guy’s predictable. And consistent. At every crime scene, he’s left a distinct shoe print. The same print that was at Joey Bent’s was on Delbert Urban’s bare back. And our killer left it somewhere in Johnny’s room where it would be undisturbed. He wants to make sure it’s found.”

  “There was no … ” The color left Oblanski’s face and he sat in the chair. “There was a single shoe print on the far side of the room. Away from the bed, near the window. Not even close to where the trauma team worked on Johnny.” He stared at Arn. “This guy put that shoe print there just for us. Didn’t he?”

  Arn nodded. “He’s thumbing his nose at us. Taunting us.” He sipped more water. “Are your crime scene techs still at Gaylord’s old house?”

  “They’re just about to wrap it up.”

  “Get on the phone and tell them to specifically look for the same tread pattern as was on that one print in Johnny’s room. If the guy who attacked me left that same print—and I’m betting it’s the same guy—then it was Johnny’s killer who hung me tonight. And Steve and Gaylord’s killer, and probably the Five Point victims’ as well.

  Forty-Six

  After x-rays, Arn left the hospital the next morning AMA: Against Medical Advice. The ER doctor wanted to admit him for another day’s observation. “I got a house to renovate,” Arn told him, and he ordered a nurse’s aid to help dress. A very young nurse’s aide. But then, everyone looked young to Arn nowadays.

  On his insistence, the woman turned away while he slipped his trousers on. “You can turn back around now,” he said as he buckled his belt.

  “Shucks,” she said, handing him his wallet and car keys. “You mean I missed out on the male review?”

  He pocketed the car keys. “Where’d these come from?”

  “Some little old dude with a ponytail dropped them off this morning. He said, ‘Tell Arn I pedaled as fast as I could.’ Said he left your car in the parking garage.”

  “Thanks,” Arn said.

  “And that TV lady left a note.” The nurse’s aide handed Arn a handwritten note from Ana Maria. Arn—call me when you’re released and I’ll come pick you up.

  Arn pocketed the note. Ana Maria didn’t need him interrupting her day.

  He stopped at the nurses’ station to check out, and the charge nurse gave him two bottles of water and a prescription for salve to smear on the rope burns encircling his neck. “And we found this in your pants pocket.” She handed him his revolver, cylinder open, with one hand, Ziploc containing the five rounds in her other. Anyplace else, a nurse would have freaked out finding a gun in a patient’s pocket. But here in Wyoming, he was just one of many who came into the ER armed.

  He rode the elevator with a mother and two screaming twin girls grating on his nerves. He dearly wished for the voice to scream back at the brats, but was rescued when the elevator stopped. Mother and urchins scrambled out, leaving Arn to ride the rest of the way down to the parking garage alone. And in quiet.

  Icy wind blew hard pellets of snow sideways into him as he exited, and he turned his collar up while he marched around looking for where Danny had parked his rental. He spotted the car between a Ford Focus and Chevy Volt, two subcompacts that nearly hid the torture device the insurance company had given him. He tried opening the driver’s door, but the guy who’d parked next to him allowed him to open the door only about eight inches, and he went around to the passenger side. He performed his entry ritual, folding himself in and struggling to move behind the wheel. A passing doctor and nurse stopped and watched the entertainment, chuckling to themselves until Arn finally dropped into the driver’s seat.

  Danny had left a note stuck on the steering wheel with a Band Aid: This car sucks!!! I called the body shop and your Oldsmobile won’t be done for two days. Pedal fast!!!

  Arn slowly drove out of the parking lot. With his bruised neck muscles stretched taut from fighting the hanging last night, he had to turn his whole body to check for side traffic. By the time he’d crossed the bridge over the Union Pacific depot, he felt as if he’d just finished a hard workout. From what he remembered of workouts.

  He turned onto 5th Street, marveling that the city had designated this the South Side Historical District. A historic district with homes in disrepair, others abandoned, most much smaller than his mother’s house. He remembered his father coming home from a tough day kicking the shit out of bad guys, sitting inhaling the swill he bought by the case, getting pie-eyed. “I wish we could move to the south side,” he’d told Arn, who was sitting at his father’s feet waiting for the order to fetch another beer. “The railroad built most of those houses for workers. Engineers. Conductors. We’re going to get us one of those homes,” he’d promised. “I just want to move out of Nigger Town,” he said. “I hate it here.” But Arn’s father hadn’t moved out of their part of town, mostly populated with blacks and Mexicans, railroad workers on their own when it came to finding a place to live. And as long as they lived within walking distant of the bar, his dad never would.

  Arn pulled to the curb in front of Gaylord’s old house and parked behind Pi
eter’s Audi. Pieter was teetering on a ladder in front of a bay window, wielding a hammer like he was born to it as he tacked plywood over a broken window frame. When he spotted Arn, he backed down the ladder, taking off his work gloves as he walked to Arn’s car. He bent to help Arn out of his rental, but Arn slapped Pieter’s hand away. “I was hanged, not had my legs broken,” he grunted. “I can get out by my lonesome.”

  “I heard about that,” Pieter said.

  “How?”

  “The police called and wanted me to come down last night after you were attacked.” Pieter forced a smile. “You want something to warm you up?”

  “Like hot buttered rum?”

  “Like coffee. I got a thermos inside.”

  “I’m not sure I want to go back in your house again.”

  “Understood.”

  “But I can take a cup. As long as it’s not hospital coffee.”

  “God forbid.”

  Pieter had installed a new door lock and screwed the hinges tight. As Arn stepped inside, he realized the night had been kind to the old house. In the daylight, it was positively depressing. Gaylord’s house had deteriorated since the pictures taken after his death investigation. The plaster walls were cracked and crumbling over wallpaper blistered by moisture. The ceiling drooped in some places enough that Arn had to duck to walk through, and the floor heaved with the settling foundation.

  Pieter caught him staring at the basement door. “I decided to nail that shut. And I boarded up the windows in the back. Try as I might, I can’t seem to keep the bums out. But this”—he pointed to Arn’s neck—“is the final straw. I have to make sure no one gets in again. Like your friend.”

  “Friend?”

  “Ana Maria. When I came here this morning to work on it, she was taking pictures in the basement.”

  “You’d think she was a reporter or something,” Arn said.

  “All I needed was for her to fall down those rickety steps and hurt herself. The one thing I don’t have is homeowner’s insurance on this dump.”

  “I take it you put the run on her?”

  Pieter smiled. “Not that I wouldn’t have minded spending time with her, but I just can’t risk anyone else getting hurt here.” He sat in the dirty three-legged chair Arn had noticed last night and motioned to a lawn chair, working his feet around in tight circles. “Sit. My hamstrings are a little tight from being up on that ladder.”

  Arn eased himself down, feeling far older than his fifty-five years. Pieter handed him a cup of coffee in a Roadrunner mug, and he wrapped his hands around it. “I don’t much feel like the Roadrunner this morning. More like the Coyote.”

  Pieter cupped his own mug, the steam clouding his frowning face. “When the police woke me last night and told me to come down here, I knew something bad happened.” He shook his head. “I knew I shouldn’t have let you come here at night. I was afraid those bums—”

  “It wasn’t any bum,” Arn rasped. He sipped slowly, the hot coffee feeling good sliding down his throat. “The guy who attacked me didn’t … smell like a street person.” But then Danny didn’t smell bad, Arn thought.

  “What did he smell like?”

  “Old Spice.” Of all the things Arn remembered as his life was fading fast on the end of that rope, it was his attacker’s overpowering cologne. “The man wore more cologne than a person ought to. Not like any street person working the corners around here. Besides”—he motioned to the trash on the floor—“he knew this place. Maybe that’s his wine bottles or his chip bags. All I know is he was familiar enough to make it down the steps—in pitch black darkness, with no light. And making no noise.”

  Pieter nodded in agreement. “I’m sure you’re right. Did you get a look at him?”

  “It was too dark. I dropped my flashlight and got just enough of a look to see he was wearing a mask. Turns out it was a surgical mask.”

  Pieter uncapped the thermos bottle and refilled Arn’s cup. “Someone connected to the hospital, perhaps?”

  Arn gingerly rubbed the scab forming on his neck. “I don’t know. I just have no idea.”

  “The police fingerprinted the place to death last night. Photographed and cast a shoe print outside.”

  “Shoe print?”

  “Outside the house,” Pieter said. “Ned Oblanski was pretty excited about it. The evidence technician showed him the plaster cast.”

  “All I know is the guy who attacked me was strong enough to choke me out. Lift me off the floor and slip that rope around my neck. If Danny hadn’t come along, I would have been toast.”

  “Who’s Danny?”

  “Just some guy helping me remodel my house.” Arn didn’t feel like discussing the homeless man he’d befriended.

  Pieter walked the room, stomping occasionally to keep circulation in his legs. “If your attacker wasn’t a bum, who you figure it to be?”

  “The same person who murdered Gaylord.”

  “But he died ten years ago of an accidental hanging.”

  Arn explained his suspicions about Gaylord and the absence of gouge marks where there should have been deep ones if Gaylord hung regularly. “I’m convinced his death was staged.”

  Pieter topped his own cup off and capped the bottle. “And you still think this ties in with Dad’s murder?”

  “More than ever,” Arn answered. “Whatever your dad knew about the Five Point killings, Gaylord knew. I’m convinced whoever silenced your dad silenced Gaylord. And Steve as well.”

  “I can see Dad and Gaylord being murdered, but Steve?” Pieter set the thermos on the floor and paced again. “I stopped by Steve’s that Friday before I went with the basketball team to Casper. His wife had divorced him the previous year, and I stop by to try to cheer him up. He had a six-pack chilling in the wings, and he’d just polished off another. I can definitely see him passing out and falling asleep with a smoke in his hand.”

  Arn stood slowly, painfully, and he wasn’t sure what had beaten him worse, the guy last night or that inhuman rental car. “When you stopped by Steve’s that afternoon, where was his recliner?”

  Pieter shrugged. “In his living room, I guess.”

  “I mean, where exactly?”

  Pieter looked to the ceiling for a long moment before answering. “Where it always was. Parked right in front of his TV. He was a lot like Dad—he watched a lot of television while he kept Budweiser in business. If I’d come home from the game that night, maybe checked on Steve … ”

  “But the team got snowed in at Casper,” Arn said.

  “The longest day of my life,” Pieter said, “hanging with a bunch of immature kids in that motel room. Praying the interstate would reopen so we could get home before I strangled one of them. If I could just have gotten home and checked on Steve … ” His voice trailed off.

  “Nothing you could have done. Just like nothing you could have done about my attack last night.”

  “Except to steer you to Frank Dull Knife.”

  Arn turned his collar up and slipped his gloves on. “Your dad dropped the burglary charge against Frank a week before he was killed. And Frank broke it off with your mother after your dad’s murder. And you still think Frank had a reason to kill Butch? Or is it just that you hate him?”

  “Hate’s a strong word.” Pieter kicked the neck of the broken wine bottle. “But what would you feel if he was screwing your mom, and caused your dad to … drink like he did?”

  “I’d hate the man, too,” Arn said. He headed for the door and the warmth of the Clown Car.

  Forty-Seven

  Oblanski called Arn on the way over to Frank Dull Knife’s shop. “We picked up Jefferson Dawes a few minutes ago. Want to sit in on the interrogation?”

  “Picked him up for what?”

  “Johnny’s murder.” Oblanski outlined in a few words why: Jefferson knew Cheyenne Regional wel
l, including the maintenance door devoid of surveillance cameras. And he would have known what angles the cameras were capable of recording. “He had access to caps and masks. And he’s got a closet full of lab coats.”

  Arn rubbed his forehead, trying to get a handle on what Oblanski just told him. “Tell me you have more than that.”

  “We do,” Oblanski said. “You were right—the crime scene techs found a footprint right outside Gaylord’s house last night that was identical to the one in Johnny’s room. It was the same tread pattern as we found on Delbert Urban’s back.” He paused. “And the same shoe print as the one I overlooked outside the house the night Gaylord hung to death.” He went on to explain that Captain Moore had reviewed the hospital tapes, and one camera picked up Jefferson walking past Johnny’s room ten minutes before he was murdered.”

  Arn had thought about Jefferson as he lay in his hospital bed last night: his wife running off with that science teacher sounded sketchy, as did his statement that Gaylord invited him to his house to warn him away from Adelle. What if Jefferson hadn’t taken Gaylord’s advice? What if he’d wanted Adelle enough to kill for her? Worse, Arn realized, what if he was looking for multiple killers for the officers? Then there was the Old Spice he was certain he’d smelled the night he and Ana Maria were attacked.

  “We served a search warrant on Jefferson’s car and found a pair of Nikes with what looks like the same tread pattern,” Oblanski concluded. “We’re having it compared with the others.”

  “Why did you search his car?”

  “We received an anonymous tip that the shoes were in his Caddy,” Oblanski said.

  Perhaps, Arn thought, the anonymous tip came from the only other person who knew that Jefferson was the killer. Someone who would be pissed at their husband’s activities now with younger women. “Better get someone over to interview Adelle,” he said. Pain shot down his neck as he turned in the seat to check for traffic. “She told me that the night Gaylord died, she was to meet Jefferson for some heavy-duty lovemaking, but he was a no show. When you interview him, ask him to verify where he was that night.”