Beneath Forbidden Ground (6 page)

“Actually, not directly in the fire, but close by.” Scallion recalled Murtaugh’s warnings about heat. He was hoping Marla wouldn’t completely discourage the effort without even looking.

She didn’t answer at first, continuing to gently rotate the instrument with her gloved hands. “I’m assuming that whatever we’re looking for will be inside?”

“Possibly. I suppose that’s for you to determine.” With their faces only a foot apart, he gave a disarmingly warm smile, then watched as she instantly broke eye-contact. He knew he wasn’t playing fair, but it was important he try and keep her interested enough to make an attempt. He did feel somewhat conspicuous about her reactions toward him, although at the same time he had to admit he rather enjoyed it—a guilty massage to his ego.

“We’ll have to dis-assemble it, which might be a trick in itself. It’ll be a delicate operation.”

“I’m sure it will be, Marla. Anything you can identify will be a big help to our case.”

She pulled her hands free and stood facing him. “I hope you’re not in a hurry for an answer. We’re really backed up.”

“Sure. I understand.” It was worth a stab. “How long, you think?”

“Two, maybe three weeks. Depends on what luck we have getting it broken down.” She looked thoughtfully at the harmonica, indicating she might welcome the challenge, as he had hoped. Strange and unusual cases such as this couldn’t hurt the resume—if successful.

Scallion thanked her for her time and efforts. “You know where to reach me if you find anything,” he said as he prepared to leave.

“Right. Cold Case. How’re you enjoying the change of scenery?”

“Good days and bad. I guess it’s a decent way to ease into retirement.”

“Oh, I think you’ve got a few more years left in you,” she said, with one last nervous laugh. She turned to one of her assistants. “Jonas, give Detective Scallion a reference number for the evidence he was kind enough to bring us.” Turning back, she gave Scallion a wry, “thanks for nothing” grin, but with a hint of mischief in her eyes.

He thanked her and headed for the door. She watched him as he exited the lab, not reaching for her glasses until the door was shut behind him.

6

By the time he had arrived back at his office, Scallion had come to the conclusion it made no sense to get further embroiled in the Becker case until, and if, Marla could come up with something. She was the only hope. Of course, that was just his opinion; Murtaugh might have his own.

His partner was on the phone when he reached his cubicle. Draping his coat over a hangar attached to the cubicle wall, Scallion folded his still solid frame into his chair, rolled up his sleeves, then spent a second entering the fact he had taken the harmonica for testing onto his p c. Everything had to be documented, no matter how obvious or trivial.

Murtaugh ended the call he was on, turning around to face Scallion. “How’d it go with Marla?” he asked. “She give you any hope?”

“Nope. But I wasn’t expecting any right off the bat. She said it’ll be awhile anyway. Crime marches on in the Bayou City, partner, so she’s got her hands full. What about your phone calls? Any luck?”

“Not really. I was only able to reach two witnesses. Another one, the disabled mechanic, recently died, I found out. Cirrhosis of the liver. Seems he drank his sorrows away at that bar, plus several others. The two I was able to get in touch with still swear it was Nuchols, but neither one actually saw him at the icehouse that day. Becker told them he was going outside to wait for the creep and his money, but they can’t verify he showed, except for the harmonica sounds.”

Scallion nodded, wiping the filmy residue of the Houston humidity from his forehead. “Say, Denny. What are your thoughts about putting this case aside until we hear back from the M. E.? I’d kinda like to look at those missing girls again, see if we can’t shake something out.”

“Fine by me. We’ve got a lot to pick from, but that’d be as good as any.”

“Let’s go into the conference room. I want to lay the map out again, see if anymore ideas hit us.” Scallion reached to the far end of his cubicle, grabbing a rolled-up poster leaning against the wall. Stopping for a cup of coffee from the department pot, he drained the last of it. Knowing it was proper protocol for the person who emptied the pot to re-fill it, he decided against taking the time, since it was close to noon. He joined Murtaugh in the rectangular conference/interrogation room down the hall from their small department.

Removing the rubber band wrapped around the poster, he laid the map flat on the large table, anchoring the curled edges with his cup, his wallet, and a couple of ashtrays left in the room. The map showed the entirety of Harris County, plus a small portion of neighboring counties. A series of color-coded lines cris-crossed the map, drawn almost ten years earlier when the investigation of the mysterious disappearance of four young women was at full steam. Blue lines represented the routes the women would have traveled from their homes or apartments to their job locations—at least for the three that had jobs. Green lines indicated the paths they, or their vehicles, would have traveled from work or home to where their cars were found. Finally, red lines connected the locations representing where the vehicles were discovered, each empty of any personal belongings.

Penciled-in next to each vehicle location was the name of the women who had vanished into thin air: Freda Juarez; Tammy Crews; Betty Lynn Thomas; and Laura French. No bodies were ever found. Nation-wide searches had yielded nothing except several false identifications. The most puzzling and frustrating part of the case was the fact that absolutely nothing tied the girls, or their pasts, together. Countless interviews with family members and co-workers yielded no clues as to why they might be anywhere near where their cars were found. Three of them: Juarez; Thomas; and French had left work that day without mentioning any appointments, dates, or meetings. The fourth, Tammy Crews, was unemployed, as far as any family members knew. She was the youngest daughter of a prominent Houston civil attorney, estranged from her family in every way except for a stream of income her mother secretly funneled to her to keep up the rent on an apartment in the trendy Rice Village area.

The case was worked diligently for over a year, spurred-on by Crew’s powerful father. He was a man of influence, and in spite of his luke-warm feelings for his daughter, he insisted on every possible lead being checked, then re-checked. He died of a heart attack almost a year to the day after Tammy’s disappearance. The case gradually eased to the back burner, not entirely due to the man’s passing, but mostly because the investigation was going nowhere.

Murtaugh read through the thick file covering the case he had brought into the room, while Scallion stared intently at the map. “You know,” he said, looking up from his reading, “it was easy to see why some folks wanted to tie this in to the I-45 murders. They were still fresh in everybody’s memory.”

“Yeah, I suppose. But if you think about it, the cars in this case were found nowhere near I-45. Plus, these women didn’t exactly fit the mold of the ones along the interstate. I mean, as far as their backgrounds went.”

“Were you involved in any of those cases?” Murtaugh asked.

“Only after I moved to Harris County in the early eighties. I was still working in Chambers County in the seventies, when the first bodies were discovered. I guess I got involved in six, maybe seven after I moved over here. How ‘bout you?”

“I worked around ten or so, mostly helping out with local guys in the communities where they happened.” Murtaugh took a second to peer through the window. “That was a miserable time. And you know, for a long time, no one knew just how bad it really was.”

Scallion let his mind drift back to the crimes Murtaugh referred to, a series of murders, rapes, and missing young women unparalleled in Texas history. They were tabbed as the I- 45 murders because they occurred along or near the stretch of interstate highway starting just north of Galveston, and passing through Houston, a distance of some fifty miles. The crimes took place over two decades, beginning in 1971, then finally dwindled when similar events occurring in the late eighties seemed to be unrelated. The victim count was never actually known, since there were certainly women whose disappearances were not reported. Some were prostitutes, shadowy figures while alive, then swallowed up by the evil that stalked them. But overall, the numbers were thought to be in the dozens.

At first, with the rapes and murders spread among several municipalities, the various jurisdictions investigated only those in their area. So if a serial killer was at work, it was an unknown fact, since no one bothered to share notes. Finally, in the eighties, when it began to grow obvious there was a regional problem, a task force was formed to coordinate the many different crimes and disappearances. The result was the unsettling conclusion there were several serial killers at work, rather than one. Very few arrests were actually made, and few cases solved.

It wasn’t until the late nineties, when network shows such as
20/20
, and
Dateline
began putting a spotlight on the Houston area crimes that the rest of the country was made aware of the scope of the so-called “Killing Fields”.

Scallion shook the thoughts of the past from his brain, concentrating again on the well-worn map. He repeated out-loud what little information was known. “The only common thing existing between the women was the fact they were all reported missing within a span of a few days; the Juarez girl almost a week later, since she had no family or close friends to notice her absence. But other than that...”

Murtaugh stood and leaned over the map. He placed four photographs he had pulled from the file flat on the poster. “One other thing,” he said, “They were all attractive women, at least according to these pictures.”

“Yeah. That should’ve meant something.” But it hadn’t, so far.

There were, in fact, two clues. Unfortunately, they were clues which led to an impossible number of scenarios. First, the vehicle belonging to Laura French, a 1989 Honda Civic, was found in the parking lot of a local hardware store in Waller, Texas, slightly more than forty miles from Houston. Like the three other abandoned cars, it had been discovered early in the morning, left during the night by unknown parties. Investigators had recorded the fact that an oil change sticker in an upper corner of the windshield indicated a recent lube job. Contacting the quick- change shop listed on the sticker, they verified French had visited the shop during her lunch hour the day before her car was found. The shop manager also stated that standard procedure was to list on the sticker when the next change was due – 3,000 miles later in her case, since her driving was mostly confined to the city.

Simple math proved that when she brought the car in for servicing, the odometer read 34,550 miles, since the figure 37,550 was shown on the sticker. When the Civic was recovered, the odometer read 34,599. The car had been driven a total of forty-nine miles from the oil-change shop to it’s final destination. Allowing two miles from the shop to the insurance agency she worked for on the northwestern edge of Houston, then thirty miles to Waller, that left roughly seventeen miles unaccounted for. Everyone who had worked the cases, which now included Scallion and Murtaugh, was convinced those missing miles held the answer. But from the hardware store in Waller, there were an infinite number of locations within seventeen miles. A needle in a haystack seemed simple by comparison.

The other evidence was the presence of dried mud on the floorboard of each car on the driver’s side. Plenty of samples were obtained, and the makeup of the soil easily identified. The kicker was that the soil type identified was prevalent throughout the region—there was nothing unique about any of the samples.

Scallion breathed a frustrated sigh, settling into a chair. “There has to be an answer. Somebody, somewhere knows something.”

“I know this has been voiced before,” Murtaugh said, “but maybe there is no connection. The cars weren’t all found the same morning, and they were spread over a thirty mile distance. Could just be coincidence.”

Scallion thought about it, as he had several times since joining the case, then shook his head. “I can’t buy that, Denny. Call it instinct, if you want, but something ties these girls together.”

His partner didn’t answer right away. Returning the photos to the file, he asked, “So whatta you think? Go back to the families again, see if their memories have improved over ten years?”

Scallion could tell from the man’s tone he wasn’t too excited about that prospect, and neither was he. But it was the only logical step. There were definitely other cases they could address; never a shortage in that category. The missing girls, however, pulled at him. Maybe it was because he had a daughter whose age would match theirs if they hadn’t met whatever fate had befallen them. He and Marti would need what people now called “closure”, and their families deserved no less.

“Sounds good to me,” he said. “Why don’t we split ‘em up? I’ll take the Crews and Juarez contacts, and you the other two.”

The matter settled, the two cold case detectives prepared to face the muggy conditions, ready to scrape around the edges of old memories.

7

Arturo Juarez had immigrated legally to the U. S. in late 1991, several months following his sister’s disappearance. The two had aspirations of operating a restaurant together, providing Houstonians a taste of their native Panama. Freda was the oldest in her family, so she had come first to test the waters, managing to find work in one of the many Tex-Mex restaurants in the area. She sent money home whenever she could, and called at least every other week to let her parents know she was okay.

It was a call they received from the restaurant manager that had changed everything. She had been missing from work for two days, and then her worn-out Nissan Sentra was found in the parking lot of an abandoned plant in Brookshire, nearly fifty miles away. Pulling her family’s phone number from her file, the manager’s main interest was in knowing if they had heard from her, and would she be returning to her job. Fearing the worst, Arturo and his father obtained temporary visas, allowing them to travel to Houston, hoping to find some trace of the girl. They were stunned and disheartened upon their arrival in Texas when informed that Freda’s disappearance was now being investigated along with three other similar cases of young women vanishing; their vehicles also discovered scattered west of the huge city. The Harris County Sheriff’s office had already begun taking apart her small apartment for clues, and talking to her co-workers. The two men could only listen helplessly, as the detectives handling the case went over what little evidence they had, before beginning to interrogate the confused Juarez family members about anything she might have mentioned to them.