“Creepy coincidence,” Chris said.
“Too much of one,” she said.
She came to a note regarding her pa’s task force growing by three more detectives working out of Montgomery. Now there were twelve and, Leah knew, it was one of these twelve who had leaked the original holdback to the press, tellin’ ’em all about the stake with the Stickman drawing. Sometime, a day or two after Geneva Wade’s lifeless body was found, the killer—presumably Harry Stork—became an overnight sensation and earned himself the name of “Stickman.”
Then a thought struck her about this particular murder. She quickly went back to the description of the crime scene. “Wait a second,” she said aloud, more to herself than Chris.
“What?” Chris tried to read her face.
“Nothin’, I don’t think . . . Well, it just . . .” She paged through the rest of the file looking for any note regarding the weird change in MO between this victim and all the rest she’d read about so far. She didn’t find one. Maybe it wasn’t a big deal, but any change in suspect behavior should’ve been at least noted. She read the scene again, remaining just as puzzled.
“Are you goin’ to tell me?” Chris asked.
“It’s probably nothin’, it just seems weird that . . . well . . . the sixth victim wasn’t staked into the ground like the rest. Her body did have a stake through it, but it was found floating in Beemer’s Bog.”
“Oh my God,” Chris said. “Of all the places I don’t want to end up dead, Beemer’s Bog takes the prize. Have you driven up that way? The stench is . . .”
Leah skimmed through the report. “Never mind,” she said. “Says here that there was evidence that an animal pulled the stake free and dragged the body into the bog.” She looked up. “They found bite marks on the victim.”
“That’s horrible.”
Leah nodded and went back to the file, flipping ahead to the next victim. Victim seven.
“Okay, this is too much,” she said.
“What?” he asked.
“Victim seven, a man named Forrest Ingram, also worked at Grell. It’s . . . this is making my head hurt. Everything’s connected to everything. It’s impossible.”
“Obviously not impossible,” Chris said.
This seventh victim was the one Ethan had told her about, the one where the body turned up spiked into the cemetery grounds behind Reverend Stark’s Full Gospel Church. Full Gospel was a black church, and for a moment, Leah wondered if there was something to that. Only, Ingram had been white.
Just as Ethan had said, two separate witnesses reported a yellow car parked in front of the church around eight-thirty or nine, which was close to the time estimated by the ME. Like Ethan said, one witness managed to give police a partial on the plate.
The rest of the file was full of witness statements from Bell’s Tavern, most taken the following day. As Ethan had intimated, both Bishop and his 1968 Dodge Charger had been seen at the bar, Bishop drinking and playing pool from around seven o’clock until closing.
Authorities took photographs of Bishop’s car and showed them to the two witnesses. One was unsure of whether it matched the one she remembered seeing, but the other confirmed it looked very much like the car he’d passed outside of the church.
Across the room the fax machine sprang to life. Leah looked at Chris.
“That’s mine,” he said and got up to retrieve it.
Leah went on to victim eight, a twenty-nine-year-old man with the unfortunate name of Warrick Quackenbush whose body was found in Willet Park. Willet Park was huge and Leah wondered how long it actually took them to find Quakenbush’s body. Quackenbush worked at Searcy Hospital in Mount Vernon, one of the hospitals Leah’s pa had asterisked.
A single tire-tread mark discovered along the muddy back roads below the lake appeared to be again a match for Stanley Bishop’s Charger, but there wasn’t enough conclusive evidence for police to go on. A single tread mark could match many vehicle tires.
In fact, the one witness from the incident didn’t report seeing a vehicle at all. He stated that he was fishing in that far end of Willet lake when he saw Tommy Stork come out of the woods, crouch down in the water, and carefully wash off his upper arms and hands. He knew it was Tommy on account of he and Tommy once worked at the same construction site.
This prompted Tommy being picked up from where he lived with his pa and brought into the station for questioning. Tommy denied being anywhere close to Willet Lake during that time and went on to say he hadn’t even been near that part of town for probably a year, maybe more. He was quoted in the report as saying, “I ain’t fond of woods or lakes or nothin’ in nature. I just like to sit at home and watch television, which is what I was doin’ while the Stickman put that body amongst all them trees.”
Tommy told police his pa had been down in Mobile on business during that time, so Tommy’s alibi couldn’t be corroborated. When asked what “business” his pa was conducting, Tommy replied that he had no idea and that he and his pa didn’t talk all that much.
There were notes in the file about remembering to do background and medical checks on Tommy Stork, which, obviously, were done, as Leah had read them back when she first started going through all these folders.
With a big breath, she came to the last folder in the stack. Victim nine. The last person the original Stickman ever killed.
Lola Reid worked at Mercy Medical in Daphne, Alabama, and that was the last place she was ever seen until her body turned up in the woods around the bottom of Tucker Mountain, so far north it actually lay outside the boundaries of town.
The medical examiner found a bullet lodged in Lola Reid’s skull. That was the second round police managed to procure. Both slugs matched, both being fired from what forensics was now pretty certain was a Smith & Wesson model 10 chambered .38 Special caliber, a gun popular in World War II.
Leah found a quickly written statement dated two days after the police discovered Lola Reid’s body. It looked like Strident’s writing, and the statement was made by Leah’s pa. Fidgeting in her chair, Leah read on.
Her pa made it into the station first that day to find that sometime during the night, the window had been smashed with a brick and someone had come inside and made off with the entire stack of folders on her pa’s desk, which contained all the Stickman case files to date. Of course, they had more copies of everything, but they never found out who broke in or why they wanted the files. Lots of blood was collected from the scene due to the thief cutting himself on jagged glass while climbing in, but a match was never made. On the back was a note in her pa’s handwriting saying that the Storks’ blood type differed from that of the samples.
According to her pa’s notes, Leah could tell that, at this point, Tommy Stork was still pretty high up on his suspect list. That was until a witness named Betty-Lou Panders came forth the same day the station was robbed saying she’d seen a truck parked on the side of Tucker Mountain Road right around the time the ME said the body was dropped off in the woods. The vehicle she described was a red Ford F-250 with a white camper, and on the side of the camper, in big black letters, was the name STORK SANITATION AND WASTE REMOVAL with the slogan below it, OUR COMPETITORS CAN’T TOUCH OUR JOBS.
Well, there can’t be too many trucks in the world like that, Leah thought, remembering how Ethan had told her this was the evidence that clinched her pa’s decision about Harry Stork.
If that wasn’t enough, the next day another witness came forward, this time a woman named Andrea Reinhardt, basically parroting exactly what Panders had stated the day before. Reinhardt again described Harry Stork’s truck, right down to the make, model, business name, and slogan.
Harry Stork was then interviewed on June 19, 1974, and Leah’s pa posed the question in his notes as to the possibility of the witness from victim number eight mistaking Tommy for Harry. He further noted that, given the witness’s statement, he would’ve been looking at Tommy in side profile—the side without the scar.
; Leah flipped to the next page of notes and discovered something odd. On June 20, 1974, Noah Stork, Harry’s pa, reported a break-in. Someone had smashed his son Tommy’s bedroom window and entered the house. Strident arrived on the scene to find that nothing had been taken and questioned in his notes why Noah Stork had even called the police about the incident.
Four days later, on June 24, 1974, the judge issued police a warrant and Harry’s house was raided. They found a Smith & Wesson Model 10 revolver chambered .38 that forensics later confirmed as the Stickman murder weapon. What they didn’t find was Harry Stork.
The next day, Fowler declared a statewide manhunt for Stork. The task force had grown to over twenty cops by then, and they scoured every corner of Alabama, without uncovering a single sign of Stork anywhere.
Somehow, he’d just mysteriously disappeared, and from what Leah read, he’d stayed that way while an entire month rolled by.
Then, according to the reports, an anonymous tip led to the abandoned shotgun shack Harry was holed up in the night of July 22, 1974. Of course, Leah knew now it wasn’t an anonymous tip, but another letter delivered to her pa, only this one not written by the same person who wrote the other eight. At least that was forensics’ opinion on the matter.
She shook her head when she saw the final page left in the file. It was a statement from Thomas Kennedy Bradshaw taken by Ethan, of all people, claiming once again to be the Stickman. This was his third attempt at convincing the police he was guilty, and, for the third time, he was sent back home. Leah thought back to her interview with Bradshaw and wondered how innocent the man really was.
On the inside of the last folder, her pa had written: Where is the primary crime scene? Where is the slaughterhouse? Once again, Leah was reminded that her pa failed to ever find it and that he reckoned it was the key to everything.
She lifted the pen from her notepad and tapped it against her lips. Where would someone be able to kill ten people without being noticed? Was the “slaughterhouse,” as Leah’s pa so eloquently put it, the same now as it was fifteen years ago? If so, how did it remain hidden all these years? And then came the thought that had kept coming up every time her pa mentioned the Stickman’s abattoir in the files: How can I expect to ever find it if my daddy couldn’t do it? He was a far better cop than I can ever hope to be.
“You’re done?” asked Chris as Leah let the last folder fall closed, obscuring the question written on the inside.
“Yeah,” she said, relaxing in her chair. “Still have a lot to process, though, but I think I know the case pretty well.”
The phone rang. Leah went to answer it, but Chris beat her to it.
“Yeah, just a sec,” Chris said, after answering. He put the call on hold. “It’s for you,” he said to Leah.
“Who is it?” she asked. “Dan?” When she’d left, Dan was once again at home, sleeping off a hangover.
Chris shook his head. “Don’t think so.”
Leah lifted her receiver and hit the HOLD button. “Detective Leah Teal.”
“Leah! It’s Peter. Long time, no talk. How the hell are ya?”
Confusion fell over her. “I’m sorry. I . . . Peter who?”
“Strident. You know, I used to work with your pa?”
She brightened. “Now I remember. I only ever knew you as ‘Officer Peter’.” She laughed.
“Well, you were a kid back then. Your pa told me you became a cop about a few years after I left for Mobile. I trust things are going well?”
“You know,” Leah said. “Up and down. Never dull.”
“Yeah. I hear you’re at your armpits with alligators on this Stickman case.”
Leah paused, suspicion falling over her like a dark shadow. Where would Strident have heard that? And now that she thought about it—
“Officer Strident?” she asked.
“It’s actually ‘Lieutenant.’ I moved to Mobile for the promotion in seventy-five.”
“Oh, I’m sorry, ‘Lieutenant’ Strident.”
“And then I retired in eighty-six, so now I’m just ‘Strident,’ but please, Leah, call me Peter. It’s been three years since I’ve been ‘Officer’ or ‘Lieutenant,’ and I’m quite happy to be a homebody now. Now the honorifics just make me feel old. Well, I s’pose I am old, but it makes me feel even older.”
Leah gave a little laugh, but part of her was annoyed by the call. A throbbing pain came to the back of her head. She had a pretty good idea why Peter Strident was phoning out of the blue after all these years, but figured she might as well ask anyway. “So, may I ask what I did to warrant your call?”
Strident grew serious. “I’ll just be straight with you, Leah. Ethan called me. He’s a little concerned. He said you wanted the list of officers in on the ‘Stickman letters’.”
She suddenly realized what she should’ve figured out long before now. Strident was one of the ‘handful.’ Of course, he’d pretty much have to be. He worked directly with her pa. He probably even found some of the letters himself.
“I need to cover all my bases, Mr.—Peter. I’m sure you can see that, being the successful cop that you . . . were . . . there’s really—”
“He’s not giving you the list, Leah.”
She fell silent and felt a bit like an eight-year-old being sent to her room. “And why are you telling me this and not him?”
“Because he asked me if I would agree to be the spokesman for the group. Let’s meet for lunch, and you can ask me whatever it is you want to know.”
“What if my question is, what’re the names of the other people on the list?”
He laughed. “Well, that one I am not at liberty to answer. Anything else, though, probably won’t be a problem. When’s good for you? You free Friday around two? I’m up in Selma now, so it’s a bit of a drive.”
“Well, I appreciate the effort,” Leah said. “But I’ll be ‘straight with you,’ Peter. I really don’t like the way Ethan’s gone around his responsibilities by just having you call me.”
“I reckon he thought it was a way to appease your request without pissin’ anyone off.”
Leah thought about this. Why was she angry about Strident calling her? She wasn’t exactly sure. It just seemed to reek of cowardice from Ethan. “Okay, well, I guess I’ll take what I can get. Friday at two works fine for me.”
“Where would you like to meet? Vera’s still operatin’? That’s where your pa and I always went.”
The mention of her pa caused a strange emotion to stir inside her. She decided the best word to describe how she felt was anxious. Peter Strident linked back to her pa in a way few people or things did.
“Yep,” she said. “Vera’s is still there. And their burgers are better than ever, I’d say.”
“Okay, then it’s a date,” Strident said. “See you at two on Friday. Have a good Fourth.”
Leah had almost forgotten tomorrow was the Fourth of July. So many things were crowding for space in her head, that one sort of got pushed to the back. “You, too,” she said, and hung up the phone, letting her mind meander back to the last time she’d been in Vera’s Old West Grill going on six months ago.
The very first time she ever laid eyes on Detective Dan Truitt.
CHAPTER 30
When I woke up, my mother had already left for work, Dan was still snoring on the sofa, and Carry was nowhere to be seen. I decided it was safe enough to chance finishing up going through my ma’s folders. I’d read most of it already. There were just a couple of files I skipped over on account of I hadn’t heard her ever talk about what was written on the tabs, so I reckoned they weren’t that important to the case. Other than that, I had the newest file from the murder goin’ on three weeks ago still to read.
I decided to read the two from the stack I let slip by on my way through. I figured they would be pretty quick and easy.
Except, now, one had me kind of confused.
According to the files, someone named Thomas Kennedy Bradshaw actually told police that he wa
s the Stickman. Now, I know I’m only thirteen and all, but why in all the sky would someone admit to something like that unless it was true? They would only end up going to jail for a crime they didn’t commit. Who would want that? To me, jail was a horrible thing. You couldn’t go out on bike rides or catch frogs in the pond or anything. You just read all day or made license plates or something. I didn’t really know much about jail, just that you spent most of your time behind bars in a little room while you sat around wearing stripey shirts.
So, I figured if Harry Stork turned out not to be the Stickman, then it had to be Thomas Kennedy Bradshaw. Probably, Mr. Bradshaw was so eaten up by guilt of what he done that he wanted police to throw him in jail so he could stop killing folk.
In fact, he tried to tell them he was the one murdering everybody three completely separate times. And not once did they do anything to him. He was just sent home. Well, one time it seemed they sent him to the hospital.
The other file I hadn’t read yet was near the bottom and all about someone named Stanley Bishop. From the reports, Stanley Bishop lived in Alvin and had no criminal record when my grandpa and Officer Strident interviewed him on April 5, 1974. Originally that day, they went to his house, but he wasn’t home. A neighbor told them he was at work, so they went there. It was a construction site of some kind, and they found him on the roof nailing up tar paper.
This was right after they found victim number seven behind Reverend Starks’s church in the little cemetery. I read the statement by Reverend Starks. He said he didn’t see nothing and appeared very upset about the news. I bet he was, too. I knew Reverend Starks well and I really liked his church. I even talked my mother and Carry into going there with me once, even though it was a black church. They have much better singers and stuff than First Baptist, where we usually go. First Baptist is run by Reverend Matthew and his wife. I like them, too, but I really like Reverend Starks. It kind of upset me to read that the Stickman upset him.
Anyway, once Stanley Bishop came down off that roof, police interviewed him and asked him where he was at the time the body was dumped the night before. He claimed he was at some place called Bell’s Tavern. There wasn’t much else for them to ask him so, after taking a couple of Polaroids of his car—which was a pretty neat-looking car—my grandpa and Officer Strident interviewed some witnesses from the pub. Two of them were actually back there already that afternoon. Another one, the barmaid from the night before, they found at home. In my grandpa’s notes, he says he believed they had woken her from sleep when they knocked on the door.
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