04.Final Edge v5 (34 page)

"Yeah, we've heard all about the eyes, the teeth, the head, and all the other stuff this nutcase has been mailing you," agreed Frank. "It's no wonder you're having a bad day."

Meredyth fell silent, deciding it was her only defense.

"No reason to involve a precinct captain in all this...." Tony nudged Frank as he spoke.

"Huh? Nah, nah, no reason I can think of, no."

The two, Frank and Tony, began talking quietly to one another. "Stonecoat...isn't that the guy—"

"—yeah, the guy who broke the Mootry murder case."

"Broke that computer Internet assassination network?"

"Famous guy...Native Texan, right?"

"No, Native American...Cherokee, I think."

Meredyth shut them out, struggling now with puzzling questions alighting and seeping into her brain: How did Lauralie know I'd be at the courthouse? When did she begin to follow me? From what location? The condo, the precinct? Or had she slyly gotten the information from Candice, my soon-to-be- "fired" secretary, as no doubt Byron had?

Or worse still, had Lauralie somehow learned of Byron Priestly's connection to her, simply following him to the courthouse? And if she followed him to the courthouse, was Byron too in danger?

If so, Byron, needed a heads-up. She must notify him. "Can I get my cell phone back?" she asked Frank.

"What?"

"My purse, phone, and gun."

"Well, ma'am, ahhh, Doctor, sure... but since we're almost there—"

Tony finished for Frank. "Soon as we turn you over to this Detective Stonecoat."

"Heard a lot about him," said Frank. "Settle a bet for us. He's a Cherokee tracker, isn't he? Wasn't he a one-time Texas Ranger?"

"No, Lucas wasn't in the Rangers."

"But he was a vet, right? Nam?" asked Tony.

"And he's Choctaw or Chickasaw then, if he's not Cherokee."

"What's difference between a Chickasaw and a Cherokee?" asked Tony.

"Don't know," replied Frank. "Maybe the difference is their totems."

'Totems?"

"You know, spirit guides, all that. One tribe follows the fox, another the hawk, turtle, hare, squirrel." Frank pointed out a side street, and Tony turned down it.

"Squirrel?" Tony laughed. "No, no...it's all along family bloodlines who's in charge, who's the chief of one tribe, and who's the chief of another... family ties, so to speak. Not so different from tribes in Afghanistan or Africa or the mafia even."

"Sounds right, Frank, but totems are important too, I'll bet. What do you think, Dr. Sanger?"

"I think I want my phone."

CHAPTER 14

LUCAS STONECOAT’S MORNING hadn't been near so eventful as Meredyth's. Before he got the call from the squad car transporting her to the precinct, he had met with a retired investigator who had worked the Yolanda Sims case. Detective Maurice Remo was haunted by the case, still angry at how it was handled by the original investigating team. Remo had taken it over when it had first come downstairs to him in the Cold Room. At the time, Remo was in charge of the Cold Case files. Disgusted by what he found in the file—or rather what he failed to find—he had, in 1957, launched his own investigation. A young detective at the time, he was now in his early seventies.

Lucas had telephoned Remo on a hunch after seeing his name on a routing sheet, expecting to be told by whoever answered the phone that Remo was long dead. All the other detectives on the case had long since passed away. But Maurice Remo answered his own phone and was very much alive.

Lucas told Remo, "Your notes on the Yolanda Sims 1956 murder case are not in the file. I only stumbled on your name when I was leafing through the routing sheet."

"I started my own murder book on the case," Remo explained over the phone.

"We don't have any record of a second volume."

"No way you could have, Detective Stone—what is it?"

"Stonecoat, sir."

"I worked the case on my own time. My captain and everyone else was convinced it was a guy caught for a string of murders, but Sims's killing was never proven to be connected. Even so, I was told to let it be. We had several higher-profile cases in-house at the time I could devote my time to, you understand?"

"Missing and dead white people, you mean?" Lucas rocked in his chair, certain that the old man would slam his phone down at the remark as soon as it slipped from Lucas.

"Yeah, something like that." He was still on the line.

"So...you did what?" Lucas rocked forward, planting his elbows on his desk.

'Took my report on the case with me when I left."

"You took it home on your retirement?"

"I would take it out from time to time. Try to convince myself her killer was a guy who fried for seven other child killings around the same time. They called him the Dumpster Killer. Can you guess why?"

"Yeah, I can. So you have all your notes on the case—"

"—here to home, my kitchen cupboard."

"Really?"

"Damn thing's a constant reminder. Points a finger at me every damn day I open that cupboard. My albatross."

"Would you care to share this cursed bird with someone?" Lucas asked.

"You mean you? I've read about you in the papers from time to time. I understand you're the man who got the HPD to join the computer revolution, that you got all the Cold Cases on-line, and now they're shared by every precinct and jurisdiction in the state."

"In the country now, sir, and with the FBI's VICAP program."

"Excellent."

"May I come over there and have a look at your murder book on Yolanda Sims?" Lucas waited out a long pause.

"Misdemeanor to take HPD property and not return it."

"I think we can say a statute of limitations is at work here. So, can I come have a look? If it's good enough, we'll include it on the database."

Another long moment of silence. "Tell you what, Stonecoat. I'll come down to the precinct house."

"I could save you the trip."

Remo nearly shouted into the phone, "I don't have reason enough to get out much, so let me!"

"All right, sir. Suit yourself."

"Not much for this retirement life."

Three quarters of an hour later, Maurice stood at Lucas's desk, introducing himself, a murder book clutched to his chest.

Maurice's take on the Sims case proved unique, an absolute eye-opening departure from the original investigators. Like Lucas, he believed that all four of the suspects interviewed, being familiar with the neighborhood, would not have left the body where it had been dumped.

"Dead wrong they were," Remo repeatedly said, somehow looking relaxed in a rolling office chair. "If the creep who killed her didn't know the lay of the land," he calmly said, finally breaking with his chant, "then it stands to reason he was no more acquainted with Yolanda than he was her house and her address."

"That's been my thinking," agreed Lucas.

"You go down there, you look at the houses on these two streets, and you find they are like clones all of 'em. All right then, you have to know the area well to be on the right street. All the streets in that area begin with the same letter, Denton, Denby, Densmore, Denlow. So the guy is nervous, turns down Denby instead of Denton, pulls up before 1214—the right address on the wrong street—at three or four in the morning. He then quickly carries the girl's body from his car or van and dumps it on the doorstep, not out of any grief or concern for the child's remains or the family's closure, Detective Stonecoat, but out of malice, to get even with her uncle, who inadvertently brought this horrible tragedy down on his niece, but the man is so broken up, he can't accept this truth."

"The uncle was dealing drugs? This was because he owed somebody? What?"

"The killer wants to shock and dismay someone at that address. He wants to rub it in the uncle's face. And he gives not one thought to the child's siblings or parents."

"What was it, drugs? Numbers? Gang-related turf war?"

"None of the above."

"What was the beef with the uncle then?"

"Love."

"Lovers? They were lovers?"

"Love kills...we see it all the time."

"A highly personal motive then.'"

Remo stood and paced. "The little girl was used to get back at her uncle by the man he abandoned."

"So the guy's boyfriend killed her with no remorse?"

"None, not this mole."

"Does he have a name?" asked Lucas.

Remo rubbed the white stubble at his chin, not answering Lucas, slowly allowing the thread of his thoughts to unravel, like a magician unfolding a trick handkerchief. Lucas patiently awaited the old detective's sleight-of-hand. Remo continued to pace to the eye-level window that looked out on the sidewalk here in the basement offices of the Cold Case file room. Finally, he said, "An outbreak of child abduction-murders occurred that year, and at first I suspected that Yolanda's murder was only the first in this string of killings."

"First because?"

"First because he was sloppy and careless in Yolanda's case, and because it seemed he had a conscience, that he tried to do one right thing."

"Bring the kid's body back home," said Lucas.

"But he failed miserably to do so, and possibly was seen in the act and frightened off. After this, the others, he didn't take such chances with; he never brought another kid back to where he had abducted her from. Instead, he discarded them in city Dumpsters."

"You mean this guy who they called the Dumpster Killer, Paul Mick Ryan, electrocuted in..."

"Sixty-three."

"But you never really believed Yolanda's killing was related, despite prevailing winds?"

"No. Fact is, I got over the notion fairly quickly."

"Why not Ryan?"

"The Dumpster victims were not beaten to death, burned, or tortured; not a bruise on them except the single deadly black-and-blue throat where the stranglehold was so intense they lifted whole thumb and finger images off the victims' throats, all a match to Ryan's prints. Yolanda was not strangled to death."

"And there was no sexual molestation in the Ryan killings."

"Neither before nor after, none. Shrinks questioned Ryan and learned he could only get off sexually by strangling his young victims, primarily little girls, but two boys as well. He masturbated over the bodies after death, but never penetrated any of them."

Lucas considered the disparity between the victims of Ryan and the Sims girl. "Autopsy showed that Yolanda died of internal bleeding from the beating her killer inflicted on her, and she was sexually molested using a blunt alien instrument."

"Yolanda had been tortured horribly...made to suffer the pain and fires of hell."

"Cigarette burns, yes." Lucas pictured the photos he'd seen of her battered body.

"Whoever did her, he was vicious, and while the DA wanted to make out that Paul Ryan was vicious, I made the M.E. explain to me every bruise on his victims. Most of the bruising other than at the throats came from their time in the Dumpsters, the jostling and falling debris while the body was in the Dumpster and emptied out into a dump truck. The M.E. was clear on this; the head and body bruises came long after death."

"And Ryan, did he ever confess to Yolanda's murder?"

"All his victims were white. He swore he never killed the Sims girl. No DNA typing then, so no way to know for certain, but he went to the chair claiming he only did the seven white children found in city Dumpsters."

"How was he captured?"

"Captured on a tip by a gray-haired woman with insomnia, taking out her trash. The old lady was smart enough to get a license-plate number. The ID happened when she saw him discarding his last body, a little boy. When detectives showed up at his house, Ryan lost it at the door, said something to the effect, 'Why didn't you guys form a task force sooner to stop me? Why'd it take you so long? Why didn't you stop me sooner? I ought to sue your asses.'"

"He didn't know the gay uncle and had never worked the area, right?"

"None of his victims were dumped anywhere near the Sims murder site. And try as they might to make correlations, they could not find any real connection, no."

"And you suspected someone connected to the uncle."

"Yeah, there was one guy stuck in my craw, the uncle's boyfriend."

"He got a name?"

"Gay Uncle Bobbie and his lover, Lyle Eaton, had a nasty breakup that same evening of the abduction. There'd been a scene, a car chase in which Eaton caught up to Uncle Bob where he was holed up."

"At Yolanda's house?"

"Using it for a hideout. Eaton got violent, breaking a window, beating on the door. A squad car was called out to the address to evict Eaton from the front porch."

"Any arrests?"

"Should have been, but no, and so no paper trail."

"How'd you learn about the fight? Interviews?"

"Yeah, the hard way. He was waving a crowbar when the cops cooled him down and sent him off. Had there been an arrest report, maybe so many years would not have gone by before anyone learned the truth, years during which Ryan appealed and awaited execution for the Dumpster deaths."

"And no subsequent confrontations at that address between the men?"

"I know. It sounds fishy, doesn't it?" Remo asked.

"I agree, doesn't sound like a typical breakup, either gay or straight. Most relationship breakups happen over a series of engagements, retreats, and further battles."

"Only one encounter after Uncle Bobbie moves out on a seven-year 'marriage' to Eaton, and it's without a word, according to Bobbie Sims. Then suddenly the man's niece disappears, is killed in horrific fashion, and suddenly poof-— Eaton disappears from the city immediately after being cleared by virtue of a questionable alibi. Then a year goes by before I catch the case when the file sorta fell into my possession, and I confirm that Eaton laid carpets as well as tile, as well as doing odd jobs as a carpenter, and that he conveyed his own tools to the job sites in his cream-colored van. People spotted a white van sitting at the end of the street that night. You ever look at a beige van under orange street lamps? It's white!"

"Hoffman and Blake got none of these connections?"