Sticks and Stones

by Michael Hiebert

  “Seriously?”

  “Shh.”

  This time the shushing didn’t annoy Carry near on so much. She stood there watching him, the lock-pick case lying open on her outstretched palms.

  She heard a quiet thunk, and Jonathon pulled both tools from the dead bolt’s keyhole.

  “What now?” Carry asked.

  He shrugged. “What do you mean?”

  “What are you doing now?”

  “Nothin’, I’m done.” He took the case back from her, replaced the two tools he’d taken out, and clicked it closed. Sliding it into the back pocket of his dungarees, he gestured for Carry to open the door.

  Cautiously she turned the handle and pushed. And, even though she’d expected it to, when it opened it filled her with a sense of shock and not just a little awe. “I can’t believe that’s all it takes to break into our house!” she said. “Wait’ll I tell my mother.”

  “She’s a detective, Car. I think she knows locks are pickable.”

  “Yeah, but . . . pickable by a seventeen-year-old kid in, like, a minute? You’re a pizza delivery guy, for cripe’s sake.”

  He frowned. “I used to be a pizza delivery guy,” he corrected. “Now I’m just an out-of-work schmutz with a really groovy girlfriend.”

  She laughed. “You’re not a schmutz. You’re the nicest person I know. A good person, even if your hobbies verge on the dark side of the law. What did you mean, you used to break in to places for pranks?”

  “Um, stupid stuff, really. Broke into my school a few times, usually during spring or summer break. Got into my church after-hours. The pastor was mighty pissed at me, let me tell you. He was hollerin’ fire and brimstone like the devil was handin’ it out at a red-light special at Kmart.”

  “Not First Baptist?”

  “No, this was up in Mississip when I still lived with my parents. Jewel City Baptist. Nice little church, actually.”

  “Why did you break in to it?”

  “To get closer to Jesus.”

  Carry laughed. “Yeah, by breaking the law. That’ll do it.”

  “I didn’t break any of Jesus’ laws,” he said. “Nowhere in the Bible does it say a man can’t pick a Weiser dead bolt and two brass Baldwin door handle security locks.”

  Carry took his hand and led him inside.

  “So,” he asked. “Are you impressed?”

  She turned around beaming. “So impressed I reckon we should put the time we have alone before my mother comes home to good use.”

  “And how’s that?”

  “I reckon it involves some cuddling and some kissing.”

  CHAPTER 51

  Leah spent that night tossing and turning in bed. Remarkably, she didn’t walk out to the living room to see whether Dan was still awake. She hated interrupting his work, and, if she was completely honest with herself, she wouldn’t really like to interrupt his precious drinking. More and more, it was becoming a problem, well, at least to her. Mostly, she thought about it at night, like this, while trying to fall to sleep.

  How many bottles of bourbon he’d gone through since coming to her place, she didn’t know. She didn’t want to know. He was a big boy. He could make his own decisions. Unfortunately, it didn’t stop her from worrying about it. But it was far easier to deal with if she didn’t see him drinking. As her ma used to say, “Always easier not to look at the bear in the backyard than it is to confront it.”

  Dan’s bourbon was Leah’s bear. And she’d almost learned to ignore it. She figured acceptance would come eventually.

  But tonight Dan’s drinking wasn’t the only thing circling ’round her brain. The sudden revelation that the Stickman and the Cahaba River Strangler were possibly the same person dug away at her. She cleaved to the idea that they still could be separate people, even though the blood of one was found at the kill site of the other.

  They don’t fit. Everything about the two cases pointed at them being done by different people. Leah couldn’t see a single place where anything in the timeline supported the idea that the Strangler was the Stickman, other than the big gap in time while the Stickman murders stopped, during which all the Strangler murders happened. The most shocking things to Leah on Dan’s timeline were the facts that not only did the Strangler wait, sometimes an entire year or longer between killings, but he was also far more prolific than the Stickman.

  And clumsy.

  Five of his final nine attempts at strangling resulted in the victims getting away and, up until then, his record was spotless. What was going on in the end that made him a less effective killer? And why did he go back to being the Stickman? Was it because he was having so much trouble as the Strangler?

  None of it made any sense. Leah tried her best to push it from her sleepy head.

  Problem was, as soon as she did that, something else just replaced it. This time it happened to be the issue of Caroline’s Jonathon. Apparently Caroline left her house key in her bedroom and went out to the movies without it. So, when they came back, she’d found herself locked out of the house. But that hadn’t stopped her from getting in. Oh no. Apparently, super-sweetie Jonathon had made lock-picking a hobby.

  “Isn’t that cool?” Caroline had asked Leah after telling her the whole story. “He has a lock-picking kit and everything. He was through our door in less than a minute.”

  “The dead bolt?” Leah had asked.

  “Yeah. Less than a minute.”

  Leah’s daughter must’ve read Leah’s thoughts on her face, because she tried to spin it into something good. “He doesn’t break in to houses or nothin’ like that. Just his school a couple of times. Oh, and his church. But he said that was to get closer to God.”

  Closer to God, all right. Closer to the clink, Leah thought as she lay staring at her ceiling. Maybe it was just because she was a cop, but Leah hadn’t ever heard of a normal person knowing how to pick a dead bolt in less than a minute. Not unless you counted some of the “normal” ones she’d met on the inside. Turning over, hoping to find a position conducive to sleeping, Leah considered that something like this “lock-picking hobby” was inevitable. She should have seen it coming. Jonathon was too perfect. Him with his “yes, ma’am’s and holding open of doors and treating her daughter with nothing but the utmost respect—well, she should’ve seen it. The boy was obviously covering for something. Guilt? Something from his past? Or was he hiding something? Could Caroline’s boyfriend possibly have some ulterior motive for falling into her life?

  “Oh Leah,” she whispered to herself, “you’re ridiculous. So he picked your dead bolt. One picked lock doesn’t make him a drug dealer.”

  But she couldn’t shake the feeling that lock-picking was like the gateway drug to bigger and better things. And then she chided herself for even having thoughts like that at all. That boy hadn’t done one damn thing to deserve her changing her mind on him.

  So she did her best to push that one away, too. With a big breath, she tried to relax. But she couldn’t. And it wasn’t really thoughts of Jonathon she had to blame. If she was honest, being worried about Jonathon was a scapegoat and she knew it. The real tension was all about this Stickman/Strangler stuff.

  And Tommy Stork.

  Could Tommy really be both killers? Or even one?

  Granted, the man didn’t come off as the tightest bolt in the toolbox, but somehow, in Leah’s mind, that made him less likely to be the Stickman. Just like Dan had written at the bottom of the timeline, the Stickman was organized. Smart.

  But not the Strangler.

  Yet, the Strangler dates matched up exactly with Tommy Stork’s moving to Birmingham. And why Birmingham? His pa said he’d been going up there often before moving and he hadn’t the slightest clue why. The only thing he’d given Leah about it was that he didn’t suspect it involved a girl on account of Tommy wasn’t really one for girls. Or something like that.

  Well, if it wasn’t a girl, what was it? She remembered what she had told Dan about bringing Tommy in. They would wa
it until tomorrow, after hearing whether or not the blood was a match with Harry Stork. Leah made a mental note to put the reason for his move on her list of questions.

  And that was all she had. A whole lot of questions.

  Shouldn’t she feel much closer to breaking the case by now? It had been almost a month since the first of the new Stickman murders. How many more people would have to die before she started piecing things together? How many more could she live with? And that was the biggest problem she had with the Stickman/Strangler epiphany—that it didn’t bring her any closer to solving the damn thing. All it did was raise more questions.

  She was getting damn sick of all the endless questions.

  For once in her life, she actually felt as though she knew exactly what her pa had gone through while on the 1973/’74 Stickman case. At the time, she hadn’t really understood the lost look he’d come home with or those times when he’d sit on the sofa with the television on and just sort of “go away.” Almost as though he was actually having problems getting back, wandering through thoughts and questions.

  That was exactly how she felt now. Only Leah’s pa had gone through it for a year and a half. For her, it hadn’t even been a whole month. Oh, Christ, she thought. If this goes on even another month, well—if it did, she had no idea what she’d do. It was almost enough to make her rethink her career, and that was saying something.

  Her pa had concluded it all came down to Harry Stork. And from every possible perspective she had tried looking at it, she found every indication that her pa had been wrong. Now, for her, it was all pointing at Harry’s brother, Tommy. That scared part of her. Tommy was too close to Harry. What if she made the same mistake her pa did? What if she arrested the wrong man? Would anyone ever figure it out? Would it maybe happen in another fifteen years when the Stickman started killing folk again?

  And why hadn’t her pa stayed with his suspicion that Tommy Stork was the Stickman? She saw it in the reports. They even interviewed him twice. What had made her pa change his mind and move his suspicions to Harry? Of course, her pa wouldn’t have the—in Leah’s mind—quite damning entries in the timeline that almost perfectly flanked Tommy’s potential career change to the Strangler.

  But still, her pa’s suspicions had rested on Tommy, if for even a moment. That made Leah feel a bit more confident about hers settling there now. She did wonder, though, what exactly made her pa start focusing on Harry.

  Was it the statements of the two women who had been paid off to say Harry’s truck was at the murder scene? And who had paid them off? She had to admit, Dan was spot-on in telling her that any details the eyewitness might have known fifteen years ago would be blurred with the passage of time, but surely she’d have remembered if the man had a big scar running across his face, wouldn’t she? Tommy Stork wasn’t a face you forgot too soon after meeting him.

  No, Leah was quite certain Betty-Lou Panders would’ve mentioned the scar had it been Tommy. So where did that leave them? If Tommy Stork was the Stickman and the Strangler, who would be paying off witnesses to fabricate evidence against Harry Stork so he would take the fall for his brother?

  Leah pushed all that away and, of course, something else tumbled into its place. This time, the image of Samantha Hughes, victim number eleven. It was a picture that had been popping into Leah’s head off and on for the past six days, since she’d found her staked, topless body twisted backward on that wooden stake.

  This case should have been solved before now. Samantha Hughes shouldn’t have died. And the only person to point the finger at for not having the Stickman in custody was Leah.

  She shook her head. If it did turn out to be Tommy Stork, then . . . then she’d had ample time to arrest him. She remembered the boots he brought her that she’d photographed. When she got back to the station that day, she’d compared them to the Polaroids taken at the Abilene Williams scene. They hadn’t matched. But did that really mean anything? What if Tommy Stork had left one more pair of boots in his closet or wherever the hell he was rummaging that day he came out with the ones he showed to her?

  And he had lied about the gun. She was practically certain. The only reason to lie is if you’re guilty. At least, that was true in Leah’s experience.

  She lay there well on to two in the morning, posing questions in her brain that had no answers. Why did six of the original nine victims work in the medical industry? Why did Harry Stork have contracts with the hospitals that four of them worked at? And, here was a big one, why did the other two work at Grell Memorial? That was another one of those huge coincidences Leah hated. There was no contract in place between Stork Sanitation and Grell Memorial.

  Then, of course, there was the issue of the gun, the Stickman’s Smith & Wesson Model 10 chambered .38 caliber. The two slugs the ME pulled out of the victims’ skulls matched with it perfectly. If Harry Stork wasn’t the Stickman, what the hell was that gun doing in his house? And why did Harry go into hiding for a month after Leah’s pa searched his place? Only guilty people run and hide. Unless they think they’re being framed. Then innocent people might be driven to hiding.

  She second-thought herself for what felt like the millionth time today. Maybe her pa did get it right. Maybe back then Harry Stork was the Stickman. She could certainly see why her pa would be led to think so, especially if he had the two statements apparently coming from two independent witnesses. Tire tracks at one or two of the scenes even matched Harry’s work truck. But, of course, there were lots of trucks in Alvin. Not only that, but the tracks could’ve been made a day or two earlier. Still . . .

  Leah noticed that every time she thought about there being even the slightest chance of her pa getting the right guy, it seemed to bloom in her chest like wisteria. She wanted him to have gotten it right, so badly it was affecting her ability to properly weigh all the evidence. No matter how much it hurt or how uncomfortable it made her, she had to force herself to be less biased. Everything counted on her ability to reason properly. And with a fifteen-year ghost of her father hovering around behind her, she couldn’t reason properly at all.

  She decided there and then that it didn’t matter whether her pa shot a guilty man or an innocent one. What mattered was that she arrested the right man this time around.

  Her mind went over the timeline in her memory. The first Stickman murder had happened just over three weeks after Sally-Anne Stork took her own life. From her pa’s notes, Leah knew he thought this was what precipitated Harry’s mental health to snap, changing him from a man suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and possibly some level of schizophrenia into a serial killer. It was part of her pa’s justification, as she had come to refer to it, that Stork was the murderer.

  But Noah had told Leah it was Tommy who’d found his ma’s body, not Harry. Certainly this was reinforcement for her suspicion that Tommy might be behind it all. And, although she hadn’t ever met Harry Stork, from the reports and the discussions with his pa, Leah was pretty certain Harry wasn’t near on as messed up as Tommy. You could tell Tommy wasn’t quite right just by talking to him. Of course, you could tell the exact same thing about Thomas Kennedy Bradshaw, a potential suspect Leah hadn’t quite let go of yet.

  What was it with Bradshaw? Why did she continue to place him on her list of prime suspects?

  The worst part of this case was all the damn coincidences. It must’ve pissed off Leah’s pa to no end, on account of Leah knew exactly her pa’s stance on coincidences because she had adopted the same notion: There were none. Just like the ocean tides being pulled out by the moon and then released to roll back into shore, effect always followed cause. Everything happened for a reason. Everything meant something.

  Ethan always told Leah to go with her gut, and her gut was telling her that she’d botched this investigation from the beginning. The “dirty cop” theory was ridiculous. She could see that now. Would she look back on her “Tommy Stork Timeline” in a few days and think the same way about it? Then there was the list of su
spects she’d gotten from the Grell Memorial Psychiatric Hospital, nine of which had absolutely no contact info. Could the man claiming to Duck that he was the Stickman be one of those nine?

  Leah had brought that list with her everywhere she went, and when she had time, she pulled it out and studied it. Every time she did, something went off in the back of her brain. A beacon or a flare or something. There was something to the list she was missing. She could feel it.

  It was the same feeling she had with the video tape on her last big case, the one that ended up tagged as the Maniac Tailor case. The feeling like she was looking right at something and, at the same time, missing it completely.

  Currently, the list of thirty-nine names lay folded on Leah’s bedside table. Sitting up in her bed, the pillow pushed into her lower back, she reached over and pulled the chain on her bedside lamp. Its yellow light glowed in the early morning darkness. Her clock radio read 2:30. From the living room, she heard a glass clink and assumed Dan was getting a refill. She decided she’d done enough soul-searching about Dan’s drinking tonight and unfolded the list of names.

  What was it about this list? She went over every name and none of them rang any bells. She had never heard of any of these people before. So, where was this feeling coming from?

  She wondered whether Tommy Stork had ever been in Grell and concluded that she wouldn’t be surprised if he had. Of course, his name wasn’t on the list, but it would link him to two of the victims on the Stickman timeline. She decided that was a question best kept for either him or Noah next time she saw them. In fact, another interview with Noah might not be a bad idea. She had some new questions since the last time she’d sat down with him. One being the incorporation of his son Harry’s company. Why was it in Noah’s name?

  Harry Stork.

  The Stickman.

  The Strangler.

  Tommy Stork.

  Only Harry Stork had a record. A juvie record, but a record just the same. And what was it Dan had said? Something about being on the inside for a year changing a man. But, Leah wondered, does it change him enough to go from small B&Es to serial killing? That’s a pretty big change.