She had a hunch he was still drunk. She knew he’d worked into the wee hours of morning, but didn’t quite know how wee those were. He could be running on an hour’s sleep. That and the alcohol pissed her off. She needed him to be keen and sharp. Twice, she nearly broached the subject of his drinking, but thought better of it. It wasn’t a conversation for today. Today they all needed their focus on stopping the Stickman.
Leah had left twenty dollars on the counter along with a note to Caroline explaining that some important police work came up and Leah and Dan wouldn’t be able to join them for the Independence Day festivities.
They came to the bottom of Hunter Road but couldn’t get near the station. “Shit,” Leah said. “They’ve already got the parade route cordoned off.”
“Just park here,” Dan said, his words slightly slurred. “It’s not that far to walk.”
Leah gave him a sideways look before pulling to the edge of Hunter and throwing her Bonneville into PARK. “Sure you’re capable of walking?” Leah asked him snidely.
“What’s that s’posed to mean?”
“Nothin’,” Leah said, her lips forming a narrow line.
“No, you said somethin’. Now tell me what you meant.”
“It’s nothin’, Dan. Nothin’ at all.” Opening her door, she angled out of the vehicle. A second later, Dan did the same.
They were silent for most of the walk up Main Street. All the stores were closed but had their outsides decorated for today. Many American flags hung from doors or in windows. Red, white, and blue streamers dangled from the eaves of shops and even ran across Main Street, looping above their heads. Leah thought about the kids, hoping they’d have a good time without her.
When they were a half-dozen doors from the station, Dan broke the silence. He must’ve been thinking about her comment ever since they left the car.
“Don’t make it a competition,” he said.
“Don’t make what a competition?”
“You against the bottle.”
“Yeah, wouldn’t want that. I got a hunch I might come in last.”
He stopped, turning to her. “Leah.”
“Dan, this isn’t the time for this.”
“I have to drink, Leah.”
“Nobody has to drink, Dan.” She wanted to stop talking and get to the station. Part of her knew, of course, that the victim was probably already dead, but this could be the day they caught the killer dumping the body.
“I do have to,” Dan said. “When I don’t drink, the world’s way too crazy. I can’t stand the world. Drinking makes it tolerable and allows me to focus on one horrible thing at a time.” He paused and looked up at the sky for a second. “Drinking keeps the monsters from all charging through my head at me at once.”
She shook her head. “Okay, I have no idea what to say to that, but we’ve got a woman’s life on the line. That’s where we need to focus. Understand?”
He gave her a little nod and they continued on to the station. When they made it inside, the clock read ten minutes before eight.
Ethan was filling a mug at the coffee machine. “You guys made good time,” he said.
“Where’s Chris?” Leah asked.
“He’s comin’. I called him right after you. He should be here anytime.”
“It’s a zoo out there already with all the different sections of Main Street roped off. Luckily they hadn’t closed down Hunter yet,” Leah said.
The door opened and Chris came inside, his face dotted with sweat. “Sorry I took so long, guys, but it’s crazy out there. I had to park on Maple. It almost wasn’t even worth driving.”
“Don’t you live on Maple?” Ethan asked.
“Yeah. I drove down to Main Street and couldn’t get any farther.”
“Wow,” Leah said. “That’s quite the walk.”
“Yep,” Chris said. “And it’s already getting hot. Goin’ to be a scorcher today.”
“Where’s the letter?” Leah asked Ethan.
He picked up a piece of paper from her desk and handed it to her. “It’s a copy,” he said. “I didn’t touch the original at all. It’s in my office. I’ll courier it down to Mobile tomorrow so they can try and get whatever it is they get off of it.”
Leah looked at the paper. No surprises, it was exactly as Ethan described it. In black felt marker stood a drawing of a stickman with breasts and hair that came to tips on either side of her head. Two words lay below that: The Anikawa. And beneath that was the time: 12:00.
“I just hope we weren’t supposed to get this yesterday and the time means midnight last night,” Leah said.
Ethan considered this. “I hadn’t thought about that. But really, the whole point of the letters is that we get them. It’s part of this guy’s game. I’m sure he makes certain the letters will be discovered when he wants them discovered. Your pa even had some come to his front door with a loud knock. When he got to the door, whoever knocked had gone. All that remained was the letter on his porch.”
“What?” Leah asked. “When?”
Ethan nodded. “A few times it happened. All during the seventy-three to seventy-four murders.”
“You mean, I was at home?” Fear crept its way up Leah’s backbone, like a fishing spider inching its way up the trunk of a dark walnut tree.
“Likely in bed,” Ethan said. “The ones that went straight to Joe’s house were always at odd times when nobody was at the station.”
A thought struck Leah. “But ... today is a holiday. Nobody should have come in to work. You just happened to ... why, again?”
“Why what?”
“Why did you come in to work at half past seven this morning?”
Ethan scratched the back of his neck. “I ... um ... needed to call my guy.”
“Your guy?”
“You know ... the ‘bookie’ guy.”
“I thought you said you only call him from home?”
“Yeah . . . well ... that was a little lie. If I call from home, I might get in trouble. But nobody’s goin’ to say anythin’ about a call made from a cop shop.”
Leah shook her head exasperatedly. “Okay, for now, let’s just say I have no idea what you mean. My concern is that the killer apparently knew you were comin’ in early. He had to, or he wouldn’t have put the letter under the door.”
Ethan’s eyes narrowed. “Hadn’t thought of that.”
Leah looked to Dan. He wasn’t helping much. He looked like he wanted to go pass out somewhere. Damn him.
She turned back to Ethan. “Who knew you were comin’ in this morning?”
“Betty. Nobody else.”
“So what does your wife think about your new hobby?” Leah asked.
“She doesn’t know. Told her I was comin’ in to catch up on some paperwork. Which is kind of true. It involved papers.”
“She’s not stupid, you know.”
Ethan gave a tight-lipped smile. “I know.”
“So, who else knew? Somebody must’ve.”
“Nobody.”
Leah thought about this. It didn’t make sense, unless the killer didn’t know today was a holiday. But who wouldn’t realize it was the Fourth, especially if they came down Main Street and saw all the flags and streamers and all? Not only that, but unless that letter was dropped off really early, Main Street was likely closed off. That meant the killer had to walk to deliver the note. Seemed kind of sketchy to Leah. Too many ways something like that could go wrong and he could get caught.
“I don’t get it,” she finally said.
“Me neither.”
“Unless . . .” Leah said.
“Unless what?”
“Unless it was like I already said and the letter came yesterday and the twelve o’clock actually means midnight, not noon.”
Leah saw an epiphany go off like a Roman candle behind Ethan’s eyes. “For shit’s sake,” he said, finally. “That’s just—”
“No,” Chris said, cutting him off. “I stayed late last night. I was here u
ntil after six. There was no letter.”
“Are you sure?” Ethan asked.
Chris nodded. “I’d have seen it. I’m positive.”
“And if there was nobody here—” Leah started.
“He wouldn’t have left the note,” Ethan finished.
Everyone fell silent. Leah looked to Dan, wishing he would offer something. When he had the ball, he usually came close to scoring. But today he didn’t appear to have the ball at all. Resentment over his drinking festered inside Leah. She couldn’t believe he’d basically told her that if she gave him the ultimatum of choosing her or Jim Beam, Jim Beam would be the one he went home with.
The phones rang and everybody jumped. Chris was the only one seated at a desk, so he answered the call.
Leah took another look at the letter in her hand. Even she could tell it was written by the same person who wrote the last one. She didn’t need to wait for any “handwriting analysis.” The stickwoman was terribly drawn, her arms and legs all different lengths. Her head wasn’t nearly round. Whoever was behind the killings was not an artist.
She thought about the crime scenes, about the way the bodies were backward hog-tied and staked into the ground. It made her reassess the killer. He was an artist, after all, only his best work shone in the macabre settings he left behind.
Her stomach clenched. If she kept thinking about the condition of the victims, she would get sick. Already, it rose in her throat. She placed the letter back on her desk and let her attention drift to Chris, still on the phone.
“Slow down,” he was saying, calmly, in an obvious attempt to calm down the person on the other end. “Yes, ma’am. I’m listening. It’s just hard on account of your talking too fast and too loud. Yes, I realize you’re a mite upset.”
Ethan mouthed to Leah the words, “Missing person.” But Leah had already figured that out. “Goddamn it!” she snapped under her breath.
“Okay, Mrs. Hughes, thank you. Yes, I have everything written down. I will. As soon as I can. Yes, Mrs. Hughes. Try not to worry, okay? We’ll do our best to find her. All right. No, that’s fine. Bye, now.”
Chris hung up the phone and looked to Leah. “I thought she was never goin’ to let me off that phone.”
“When did she go missing?”
“Who?”
“The victim. That was a missing person call, was it not?”
“Yeah, but . . . it doesn’t automatically mean it’s linked to the Stickman.”
“Be an awful coincidence if it wasn’t,” Dan said, crossing his arms, his eyes still bloodshot.
“Thought you’d fallen asleep standin’,” Leah said.
“I was just listenin’,” Dan said. “How long ago did whatever her name is go missin’?”
“Samantha Hughes. She went missing last night around eight, after attending a workshop about mechanics.”
“Mechanics?” Dan asked. “What kind of mechanics?”
“Does that really matter?” Leah asked.
“I’m assuming car mechanics,” Chris said, consulting his notes. “I was talking to her mother-in-law, Virginia Hughes. She said Samantha was a mechanic, but currently unemployed. Anyway, she called the company that did the workshop this morning and was told that Samantha had picked up her name badge and lanyard so, they reckoned, she attended the workshop. It let out just before eight. Virginia drove around looking for her this morning and spotted Samantha’s Audi parked on Sweetwater Drive just a block away from where the workshop was held.”
“So somehow the killer managed to grab her between the workshop and her car,” Dan said. “If it was only a block, that’s quite a feat. Almost like he was waiting for her. One of us should check the car, see if there’s evidence of her having gotten back to it. Maybe he was waiting in her backseat, or grabbed her while she was trying to unlock it.”
“I don’t think that’s at the top of our task list,” Leah said. “We’ve been given a deadline. Every minute we stay here talkin’ about everything is one less minute we could be searching for her and her killer.”
Dan gave her a look she didn’t like at all.
“Shit, it’s already quarter past eight. We gotta get movin’.”
“We need a plan before we do anythin’,” Dan said.
“I agree with Dan,” Ethan said.
Leah let out an exasperated breath. “Okay, what’s the plan? I really want to get started on this. I’ve got a lot of river to scour.”
“Hey,” Ethan said. “Try to remember it’s not just you. There’s me and Chris, too. We’re a team. Christ, you even have Dan here.”
“Sorta,” Leah said solemnly, casting a glance Dan’s way.
“Just stop,” Dan told her. “Please? I’m here. I’m one hundred percent functional.”
“Sure you are. I’d rather have a dog hunting with me today, I reckon.” She didn’t want to pick a fight, so she left it there.
Dan didn’t leave it quite so easily. “Who do you think you are? Queen Detective of Planet Earth? We’re all here to hunt down your guy. We all want to save this Samantha Hughes woman. The public is countin’ on us working together. You don’t seem to have any idea what that means. You think it’s all about you.”
She swung around fast, this time unable to contain her anger at Dan. “That’s because it is all about me. I’m the one everybody expects to fix everything. It’s me they expect to find their little girls and bring them back home alive. I’m the one who gets called to chase down the boogeyman who’s been pestering them. And when hookers and junkies go disappearing from the streets, it’s me they think about. It’s all me. And goddamn it . . .” Her voice started breaking into tears.
The three men just looked at her, none with any idea what to do.
Leah spoke again, much quieter, her voice choked with tears. “Look,” she said. “I’m sorry. It’s this case . . . it’s gettin’ to me. Dredging up memories of my pa, and I feel like if I can’t prove he shot the right guy, then . . . well . . .”
Dan wrapped his arms around her, the smell of bourbon almost bringing the bile up her throat again. “Hey,” he said quietly. “Just let it all go. You are way too tightly wound. You won’t be any help to anybody if you can’t pull out of this.”
“I think I know now why you drink,” she said with a smile, the tears still in her eyes and voice.
“Okay,” Ethan said. “We all have to work together. So, push any emotional baggage off the carousel for now. You can always go back to that on your own time.”
“Well,” Leah said. “I s’pose it’s best if we break up the search area and each of us take a different piece.” She thought about the Anikawa, a river that cut straight across Alvin and kept going, wending and winding its way through steppes and grasslands all the way to the Mississip. “We need to confine our search to the part of the river that’s only in Alvin. We don’t even really have time to properly search that, let alone any other parts, but given that all the victims up to this point showed up in our town, I think we’re pretty safe assuming this one will, too.”
“Seems reasonable,” Dan said. “So, how do we break up the river so we can search every square mile before noon?”
“That’s impossible,” Chris said.
Leah leveled her gaze at him. “Today it has to be possible.”
“We really need a plan, people,” Ethan said. “And time is a tickin’.”
They managed to concoct a strategy. Each of them assigned themselves different parts of the Anikawa. Leah took the eastern third of the river that led past Skeeter Swamp and Mr. Garner’s ranch, despite the memories she had from that area while investigating the Cornstalk Killer case. Ethan took the central region, where the river ran side by side with Bullfrog Creek. Chris took the western end of the river where it ran out of Alvin and splashed and rolled its way through the ranch lands. Dan would cover the overlapping spots between everyone else’s areas.
“The river is high right now,” Leah said. “And it’s fast. If there’s a body th
rown in it somewhere, it probably got taken down the current a ways.”
“It’s not in the MO for the Stickman to leave the body in the river,” Dan said. “He always spikes his victims to the ground, doesn’t he?”
Leah shook her head. “One of the victims was found floating in Beemer’s Bog, but evidence showed she was probably dragged there by a coyote.”
Dan gave her a puzzled look. “That’s good. A changeup in the MO would be strange. Wouldn’t settle well with me. That’s why I don’t think we’re going to find anybody actually in the river today.”
“We really need more cops,” Leah said. “But Satsuma’s about the closest place we’ll find any.”
“Yeah,” Dan said. “There’s no time. Don’t worry, we can handle it.”
It made Leah happy to actually hear something positive come out of Dan’s mouth this morning.
“Okay, I think we’re ready,” Ethan said. “And remember, folks, no cowboys. Anything suspicious and you radio for backup, you hear?”
“Of course,” said Leah. She kept glancing to the clock, wanting to get this search underway. Her little breakdown earlier had revitalized her and galvanized her drive to find the killer.
She and Dan left the station first, walking down Main Street back toward Leah’s car.
“You stink,” she told Dan.
“Thanks.”
“No, I’m serious. You smell like my uncle Theodore used to smell. It’s gross.”
“I’ve never heard you mention your uncle Theodore before.”
“I don’t think of him a lot. He’s an alcoholic.” She looked at Dan and added, “Too.”
“I see. Well, like I said before, Leah. Don’t make it a competition.”
She knew. It would be a losing battle and, for now, she’d just let it go.
But not forever.
And as they walked beneath an American flag rippling and tossing in the light wind, the thought crystallized in her mind that soon would come a time when she’d have to decide whether or not she wanted to engage in that war.
CHAPTER 34
Leah started searching, entering the forest that hugged the northern bank of the Anikawa. She followed one of the many trails made throughout time by animals and hikers. She knew the woods were a good third of a mile from the river’s edge. The soil—a mixture of dirt and mulch—was still moist from all the rain, and Leah’s boots sank into it with each slow step.
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