“A partial what?”
“Footprint. On one of the rocks. Here, see?” I picked up one of the Polaroids from me and Dewey’s forensics table.
My mother took it from me and examined it. “Looks like it could match the ones Chris and Ethan found near the body.” She set the photo on top of the Tupperware container. “I’ll take this, too.”
Her tone was still very curt, and I felt real bad. I examined the hardwood in my floor and tried to think of what to say. Finally, I decided on: “I’m real sorry, Mom.”
“I know,” she said, giving me a little hug. “I really do. You just—you’re too impetuous for your own good.”
I nodded, my face pulled into her chest. I didn’t know what impetuous meant, but I figured, rather than asking, I’d just look it up in my dictionary once we were done talking about it.
CHAPTER 45
Leah and Dan arrived at the station just after half past nine. Dan had brought a few folders from the Strangler case with him, deciding—on Leah’s behest—to try and actually work during the day, sober. She noticed as they walked to the station door that he hadn’t brought much with him. Expectations obviously weren’t high.
She knew Chris had beaten her in because they walked past his car parked on the street. That meant two things. First, coffee would already be made. And second, she could get him to deal with the courier for the blood sample instead of doing it herself. Anytime she could delegate work to Chris was good.
The strawberry smell of the sweetshrubs in front of the station’s window almost made Leah forget about the dead woman from three days ago. Almost, but not quite. The body of Samantha Hughes penetrated on that spike still haunted Leah and probably would for a long time to come. Her sleep wouldn’t be the same for a while, and nothing she thought of while awake managed to fully replace Samantha Hughes in her mind. Of course, Dan didn’t help by continuously telling her “not to take things so personally.”
She couldn’t help it. It was the way she was pieced together, just like her pa: He had been assembled the exact same way. Ethan once told her that, at times, it was actually a little scary.
“What’s that you got there?” Chris asked, nodding to the Tupperware container Leah had in her hand as she and Dan entered the station. At least Abe had been smart enough to store it in a plastic container. She was still angry at him for going through the files and, even worse, visiting the crime scene. He had, however, potentially given her the best lead on the case so far. That was if the sample turned out to belong to the Stickman. That was a big “if.” For all she knew, it probably belonged to a black bear.
“It’s a blood sample,” Leah answered.
“From?”
“The crime scene you and Ethan decided to investigate without my help. Looks like you missed somethin’ after all.”
Chris looked confused. “Where was the sample?”
“Outside your perimeter,” Leah said and glanced to Dan.
“When did you find it?” Chris asked.
“I didn’t. My boy and his friend did.” Chris started to ask another question, but Leah stopped him by holding up her palm. “Don’t even ask,” she said. “It’s a long story and not a happy one, far as I’m concerned. They also claim that there’s evidence the wheelbarrow you reported as being parked where the path narrowed actually was pushed onto the edge of where the woods broke by going through the bushes and thickets alongside the trail.”
“We’d have seen that if it was true. We’d have seen the wheelbarrow track on the moor.”
“Accordin’ to Abe, the wheelbarrow was left in a thicket of blackberry bushes and then the body must’ve been carried to where you found it.”
“We didn’t see footprints indicating that.”
“The boys did. At least a partial. Here, take a look.”
She handed him the Polaroid shot and Chris squinted at it. “Kind of looks like a boot print.”
Leah passed him the photo Chris had taken from that same scene. “What do you think?”
Slowly, he nodded. “Have to admit, could be the same boot.”
“Looks to me like the killer made his way to where the body was dumped by steppin’ on rocks.”
“Okay, then,” Chris said. “Answer me this: Why would the killer go to the bother of pushing through prickles and thorns and tearing himself apart only to still have to carry the victim the last part of the way instead of just parking the wheelbarrow where we said it was parked? The path only went on another fifty yards or so. Maybe not even that. It wasn’t like the victim was all that heavy.”
This was a question that had lingered in Leah’s mind last night while she tossed in her bed trying to get to sleep. She didn’t have an answer. “I don’t know,” she said, finally. “I honestly have no idea why he didn’t, but I plan to find out.”
With a big breath, Leah produced the blood sample and placed it on Chris’s desk. “Here’s something else neither of you saw that night.”
Chris opened the container and looked at the big red splotch on the leaf. “There’s no way we missed something this big,” he said. “It wasn’t there when we investigated the scene.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. Still worth checkin’ out.” She looked back at Dan, who had stopped by the doorway to look over the timeline Leah had pinned to the wall. It was the first time she’d seen him take an interest in it. “At any rate,” Leah continued speaking to Chris, “I reckon it’s worth followin’ up on. Can you make sure it’s couriered down to Mobile as soon as possible?”
Chris nodded. “I can do that.” He hesitated and then asked, “How did your boy know where the crime scene was?”
Leah paused, considering her answer, and decided just to go with the truth. When she had told Dan, he’d pissed her off by almost looking impressed. “He read the stack of files I took home with me.”
“Wow,” Chris said. “Make you proud?”
“What?” Leah asked, taken aback by his question. “Impressed that my son and his friend have about the same size brains as a dead possum on the road?”
“I don’t know,” Chris said. “Seems awfully resourceful to me.”
“That’s what I said,” muttered Dan, who was still looking at Leah’s timeline on the wall.
“Don’t start,” Leah said. “Either of you. Just get the courier here, pronto.”
“Do you have a mug shot or a photo of Harry Stork handy?” Dan asked Leah. “Or even one of Tommy, although I think Harry’s more appropriate.”
“Of course I do. One sec.” She dragged the stack of file folders to the edge of her desk and began flipping through the pages in the top two, remembering all the “STORK” information had been up there. Finding Harry’s file, she pulled out the first page with the Xerox photo and handed it to Dan while Chris telephoned the courier saying they had something that needed to be delivered to Mobile today.
He laid it on her desk facing him—so it was upside down to Leah—and, one at a time, took four composites out and laid them beside the small face shot of Harry. He finally decided on one and, after flipping Harry Stork’s photo and the composite police drawing toward Leah, said, “What do you think? Close?”
Leah examined the two. There did seem to be similarities, although not enough to make her leap to the conclusion that they were the same man. “Your composite looks older,” she said. “The hair’s different. And the jawline and cheekbones aren’t really the same. The eyes, though. I’ll give you those.”
“He would be older. This composite was made from a description of the Cahaba River Strangler the night before Christmas in 1982. That’s eight years after the original Stickman murders.”
“What’s your point? Stork’s dead.”
“I know. Just . . . I’ve been standing here lookin’ at your timeline and can’t help but see that it nearly corresponds perfectly with the Strangler. Five years after Harry Stork’s shot, the Strangler begins his string of murders up in Birmingham, not even a month after you’ve got Tommy Stork mo
vin’ up there.”
“But Tommy Stork came back to Alvin at the beginning of this year. You’ve had a Strangler victim since then, haven’t you?”
“No, that’s just the thing. We’re overdue a victim. Meanwhile, this new Stickman comes into play. Just seems a little . . . I dunno. Gives me one of them feelings like electricity skittering on the surface of my skin.” He turned to Chris. “Do me a solid? That sample’s pretty big. When you courier it to Mobile, can you also send a piece up to my HQ in Birmingham?”
“Certainly.”
“I think that’s a bit of a reach, don’t you?” Leah asked.
“You’re allowed to think anything you want,” Dan said. “I play my hunches. Besides, it fits your timeline almost perfectly.”
Leah smiled, as this was one thing the two of them had in common. She also liked the fact that it was the middle of morning and Dan was not only awake, but his eyes weren’t even bloodshot.
And he’d made a hunch based on her timeline.
Then the full impact of his hunch hit her. If Dan’s hunch turned out to be right, not only would that make the Stickman and the Strangler the same person, by looking at the timeline there really was only one person he could be.
And that person was Tommy Stork.
CHAPTER 46
On Friday, Leah met with Officer Peter Strident for lunch at Vera’s Old West Grill. She showed up exactly at two, as they had discussed. When she walked in, despite not having seen him since she was a teenager, she immediately knew the man sitting by himself against the window was Strident. She remembered his translucent blue eyes, the eyes her pa always said looked like they belonged to an arctic wolf.
Walking across the restaurant floor, Leah approached the man in the light blue button-down shirt and white pants. “Mr. Strident?” she asked.
He looked up and his mouth broke into a smile. Standing, he gave her a small hug. “Leah, it’s been so long. Please, call me Peter.” He broke their embrace to take a look at her. “You went and grew up. Last time I saw you, you were just a kid.”
“Yeah,” she said, “I reckon I was still seventeen or eighteen.” She laughed. “Got teenagers of my own now. It’s a whole different world.”
“That’s right,” Strident said, “you’ve got a daughter and a son, yes? Here, have a seat.” He gestured to the other chair at the table. Leah and he sat down at the same time. She wondered how long he’d been there. The waitress had already filled the goblets with ice water and a menu lay in front of each of them.
“Yeah, my boy’s thirteen now, and my daughter’s sixteen.”
“Wow, where does the time go?” Strident asked, shaking his head. “And it’s Abe and . . . um . . . Christine?”
“Caroline,” Leah corrected.
Strident pointed to her. “Right. Now I remember. You came on the force when your daddy left, right? In seventy-eight? I kept in contact with him over the years.” He frowned. “Well, until he passed. That was, what? Summer of eighty-two?”
Leah took the white napkin from the table and spread it out on her lap, taking the opportunity to look down while her emotions dashed across her face. She gave a little nod. “That’s right.”
“He was a good man,” Strident said, looking out the window, where two girls were riding bicycles. Across the street, a man whose name Leah couldn’t remember was sweeping up the sidewalk in front of Raven Lee’s Pizzeria, the restaurant owned by the grandfather of Caroline’s boyfriend. Alvin had three pizza places, and they all clustered right around this area. Leah figured the town had to have one of the highest pizza-per-capita percentages in the country. Strident went on talking. “Ethan tells me you’re a lot like him. Must mean you’re a good cop.”
Again, Leah felt herself slightly blush. “I don’t know. Sometimes I reckon his shoes were a little too big for mine to fill.”
“If you didn’t have doubts about yourself, you wouldn’t be good. Your daddy used to question every decision he ever made. Drove me nuts.”
“Really?” Leah knew, of course, what Ethan told her about her pa, how he took everything personally like she did, but Leah had never really fully believed what Ethan said. She figured it was always just part of his “give ’em hell, Tiger” speeches. While she was growing up, her pa had simply been the strongest man in her world. She never questioned his decisions and never thought to wonder whether he did or not. It never crossed her mind that there was any chance of him making a mistake.
Leah’s pa retired from the Alvin Police, claiming it was time to face facts. The cancer wasn’t going away, and neither was the worsening arthritis in his gun hand. “It’s a shame people just sort of wear out,” he had told her during that time over tea. “We go from being powerful to being just . . . insignificant.”
He winced when he tried to lift his teacup to his lips. Setting it back down, he decided to use his other hand. Leah squeezed the hand left on the table. “You’ll never be insignificant,” she said and smiled sadly.
Her pa’s eyebrows shot up. “No, not to you. Christ, if only you ran the world.” Lowering his voice to a whisper, he had added, “It would be a much nicer place.” With a sigh, he had crossed his legs and continued. “But, unfortunately, you don’t run the world and we need to deal with problems like arthritis and cancer.”
Thinking back on it now made Leah wonder if those were really the reasons he left the Alvin Police Force. He worked his last day within six months of shooting Harry Stork. How much of her pa’s retirement came from the pain of cancer and arthritis, and how much of it came from second-thinking himself into a guilty conscience?
His “crowning achievement.” The death of Harry Stork.
Leah couldn’t get Jacqueline Powers’s phrase from her Examiner article out of her head.
Her pa’s “crowning achievement” was quickly boiling down to shooting an otherwise innocent man dead for not dropping an unloaded gun. Had her pa already known this? Was that why he continued taking Stickman case files home for years after his retirement?
Even though Leah knew it was an act of self-defense, it still came with a massive stain being spilled over the incident. Why hadn’t her pa gone for one of Stork’s legs? His report claimed he’d been trying for Stork’s gun arm, but even that didn’t really ring true for Leah when she read it. Her pa was a good shot. Stork was only twenty feet away.
Her brain fought as she put the mental picture together. From what she’d read in the reports about that night, there really couldn’t be any question. Whether it happened subconsciously or on purpose, her pa had gone for a kill shot.
Leah thought she might be sick.
“You okay?” Strident asked. He had opened his menu and started looking it over while Leah had been running through her thoughts.
“Yeah,” Leah said, swallowing hard. “Just ... I dunno.” She decided to change the subject away from her pa. “So, you left Alvin to take a promotion in Mobile? That must’ve been nice.”
Picking up his water glass, Strident took a drink just as she asked her question. He nodded while swallowing and setting the glass back on the table. “Yeah,” he said finally. “But don’t let them fool you. Lieutenant ain’t cushier than detective. It’s a lot of work. That’s why I went for early retirement six years later. I’d had enough.”
“That when you moved up to Selma?”
Another nod. “Yep. It’s nice there. Kind of like Alvin, only maybe three times the size. But still, you can get that ‘country feeling’ if you want to. You know what I mean? Living in Mobile was nuts. I’m not cut out to be city folk. I’ve really missed Alvin since I’ve been gone.” He looked around the room, likely for a waitress. Only two other tables had people at them. One table already had their food; the other had sat down just after Leah came in. “Who do you have to shoot around here to get some service?” Strident asked with a smile and, for a moment, Leah fell into those blue eyes. She had to exert effort to pull her gaze away. She knew now what her pa had meant.
If S
trident noticed, he didn’t let on. “Walden still work with you?” he asked. His eyes fell back to the menu in his hands.
It took Leah a moment to even remember the cop Strident was talking about. Otis Walden had replaced Strident when he left in ’75. Walden came to Alvin to retire after spending a lot of years working as a sergeant out of Montgomery. But when Strident moved to Mobile hot on the heels of Leah’s pa quitting and handing the reins to her in 1975, there was an empty hole to be filled and nobody available to fill it. Somehow, Ethan managed to coerce Otis Walden not only to come out of retirement to join the Alvin Police, but also to be demoted to officer. There was no way Walden made the same money here as he’d been given in Montgomery.
Walden had explained why he’d taken the position to Leah the first week they worked together. He’d said, “I was in retirement for two months. They were the worst two months of my life. And I’ve had to put up with convicts, drunks, druggies, liars, cheaters, killers, you name it. None of them compare to the hell that is retirement. When there’s nothin’ left to do, your mind just sort of ripens and gets ready to fall from the tree. Well, hell, I’d rather be even a beat cop again than have that happen.” Leah liked Otis Walden. He was old and quirky.
Two years later, Walden had tried retirement again when Chris became available to replace him.
“No, he left shortly after I came on board,” Leah said, answering his question. “Haven’t heard a word from him since. Hope he and his family are well.”
Strident grinned. “Me too. He was too old to play cops and robbers when I left for Mobile. He was quite the guy. Weirdest sense of humor I’ve ever encountered in a man. Did you ever hear the pig story?”
Her eyes held his for an instant, and she saw what her father had meant all them years ago when he told her, “Strident’s eyes are incredible. Makes him good at interrogations. When he looks at you, it’s almost like he’s looking straight through you.” Leah felt the effect now, and although his hair and the age spots on his face and hands betrayed all the years that had gone by since she’d last seen him, his eyes were as clear and bright as she ever remembered them back when she was only seventeen.
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