Sticks and Stones Read online

  “We don’t always make good decisions, Leah. We aren’t perfect.”

  She let out a fake laugh. “No, you definitely aren’t goddamn perfect. Don’t worry, I know you wasn’t the one making the orders. It’s Montgomery who’s goin’ to get a piece of me. If he ever comes in.”

  Chris smiled. “He’s probably ’fraid to.”

  “Don’t smile. There ain’t nothin’ funny. A woman is dead, possibly because of dumb decisions made by this department.”

  Chris sipped his coffee. “Sure is hot outside,” he said absently.

  Leah just slinked down in her chair. “I should’ve been goddamn called.”

  CHAPTER 2

  It wasn’t long after Leah stopped being angry at Chris that the phone started going crazy.

  Leah took the first call, from a woman who said she lived in Cloverdale and wanted to know if she should lock herself and her family in her house until the Stickman was caught. Leah did her best to console her, but the call kind of blindsided her. In hindsight, she should have expected it. And the twenty-five or so other ones that had come through since. Alvin was a small town. The Stickman was big news fifteen years ago. Folks were panicked then, and Leah certainly should have realized they’d panic now.

  “No, I don’t think there is any reason to be too concerned,” she told the woman. “But yeah, I understand how you feel. No, right now we only have an isolated instance. We don’t know for sure what we’re looking at yet. No, I don’t reckon it’s the same Stickman. Yes, I am well aware that Harry Stork is dead. Well aware.”

  Two phone lines came into the station, and there were times when Leah and Chris had them both on hold while they tried to settle down. Near on every call went almost exactly the same way. That was until around twenty after nine. Then the real calls started coming in. Calls from the newspapers, radio stations, and the television news programs. Some from as far north as Huntsville. Everybody wanted an official statement about last night’s murder. Is this really the return of the Stickman? Did Joe Fowler—my very own Pa . . . could he possibly have killed the wrong guy?

  “That’s it,” Leah said to Chris after fumbling through a conversation with Nick Danger, a newsman from WAFF News, channel forty-eight out of Huntsville. Danger asked a lot of the same questions Leah had been asking herself. Why have the murders started up again? Why a fifteen-year absence? Who really is the Stickman? Of course, Leah had no answers. Her official statement was that she’d “release an official statement soon.”

  “Soon, as in hours? Days? Weeks?” Danger asked.

  “I don’t know right now.”

  “Well, people want to know what’s happening.”

  “I realize that,” Leah said. “We’re being inundated with calls. Right now, we really don’t know much more than you people do from reading the paper.”

  “Folks aren’t goin’ to find that very comforting.”

  “I’m afraid that’s the way it is. I’m sorry, there’s really nothing I can do other than tell you what you already know.”

  Danger eventually got off the phone. Reluctantly.

  “What’s it?” Chris asked. Both HOLD buttons were flashing.

  “I can’t do this anymore, Chris. You’ve gotta handle the calls. I need to read over the file you gave me from the murder last night. I need—I just have to stop talkin’ to people. I’m goin’ to lose it.”

  “So you expect me to take all the calls?”

  “You know, it’s kind of a little like justice after what you guys pulled last night.”

  “I thought we were past that,” Chris said.

  “Handle the calls and you’ll be headin’ a long way to getting there.”

  Chris’s shoulders heaved while he let out a big sigh. “Fine.”

  Leah took the folder he’d given her and rolled her chair over to the coffee table. It probably wasn’t as comfortable as sitting at her desk, but it was a few feet farther away from the phone. That counted for a lot.

  She started going through the folder’s contents, first looking at the sketches Chris had made of the scene and comparing them to the Polaroids. She could see where Abilene Williams’s body had been found, staked into the soft dirt beneath a particularly large cypress tree about six feet from the edge of Leland Swamp. Unlike in the Examiner, these photos showed all the gory details. Leah’s stomach clenched. The phones continued to ring as Chris answered one line, only to have to put it on hold to answer another. She tried to block him out, but between the telephones ringing and the gruesome photos and the nagging thought that her pa might’ve killed the wrong guy, Leah was having a hard time holding things together.

  The Polaroids felt familiar after having listened to her pa talk about the crime scenes for so long. Many times, she listened from her room as he and Peter Strident spoke either in person or over the phone. Her pa always kept his voice low, almost in a whisper, but Leah had good ears and heard pretty near every word.

  So she wasn’t surprised at the grotesque way Abilene’s body was wrenched backward and held up with the wooden stave. The top of the stake was mushroomed. Even in the soft earth of the swampy edge, whoever killed her used something heavy to hammer it in. Maybe a rock. Maybe a sledgehammer. Leah looked closer at the Polaroid. The stake hadn’t been driven into the dirt at all. The ground was probably too soft to hold the body up. Instead, the killer had hammered it into one of the gnarled roots of the cypress tree.

  No wonder its top had been so mushroomed.

  Just like the murders from fifteen years ago, there wasn’t near on enough blood for the body to have been killed at the scene. She was shot somewhere else, a primary crime scene. What her pa used to refer to as “the slaughterhouse.” It was the one piece of evidence he had so wanted to find and the one that wound up eluding him. According to his notes, finding the primary scene was the key to unlocking everything.

  Leah wondered if that was still true and, if it was, how would she be able to find it when even her pa failed to? This part of the Stickman case reminded Leah of her last big case—one involving another serial killer. Only that one came to be known as the Maniac Tailor case on account of the way the killer stitched up the victim’s eyes.

  A shiver pulsed through her veins, like the feeling you got when you touched an electric fence. She was glad the Tailor case was behind her. Only, did anything ever really get left behind? For some reason, she could never put anything fully into the past. There were always parts dragged along behind her, like a heavy chain that only grew heavier and longer as new cases came up.

  That chain added an intensity and a focus to her work that became sharper as time went by.

  She went back to the report.

  Chris noted that along with the blood, pieces of her skull and other internal parts were missing, as well. Leah remembered what he said about her dropping her son off at school. That’s when she’d gone missing, eight-thirty in the morning. The killer had lots of time to hog-tie and shoot her before bringing Abilene to that swamp.

  In some ways, that made Leah feel a mite better about last night. Odds were, nobody could have found her alive, because she probably hadn’t been alive when the letter was left at the door. But they still would’ve had a better chance of catching the son of a bitch.

  Leah wondered how the killer had brought Abilene’s body into the swamp area. It was surrounded by twisted cypress and strangler fig that fell hard against a dark and dense wood of birch and poplar. There was no way to drive in. The body would’ve had to have been carried, or brought in on a dolly or something like that.

  She found more of Chris’s notes explaining that there was a trail that opened near where they’d found the body. He’d figured that was the way the killer came in. The trail ran for five country blocks until finally leading out to one of the old logging roads still accessing parts of the forest. Chris walked the trail back to the road. Near the site, for about a block or so, it was narrow and he guessed the killer had carried Abilene through that part. But after
that, it widened and Chris found a fresh wheel track running along it. In the photos it looked almost sunk into the moist, brown ground that was littered with pebbles and bits of broken stumps. Immediately, Leah suspected the same thing Chris had: The killer threw Abilene in a wheelbarrow after taking her out of his vehicle and wheeled her until the path became too narrow, then carried her the rest of the way, leaving the wheelbarrow behind to be fetched on his way back.

  Chris and Ethan hadn’t made out any tire tracks on the side of the logging road. The gravel and dirt had been too hard-packed, so there was no guess as to what sort of vehicle the killer drove. Of course, depending on the size of the wheelbarrow, it could even be tossed into a trunk if the trunk was left open and tied down with bungees.

  They did find boot prints. Not on the trail, but in the mud around Abilene’s body. To Leah, the sole cast looked like some kind of hiking boot or maybe even a combat boot. They certainly weren’t galoshes or anything like that.

  Chris hung up the phone. For once, it had stopped ringing. “Oh my God!” he said. “Do you hear that? It’s the sound of silence.” He smiled.

  Leah looked back at the photocopy of the Polaroid. “You got Mobile working on these boot prints?” she asked him.

  “Yep. That’s why you don’t have the original Polaroid. It went down with all the other evidence we found. Not that there was much.”

  Leah found another Xerox of a Polaroid. “This a fingerprint?” she asked, squinting at it. The fact that it was a black and white copy made it hard to tell.

  “We’re not really sure. It looked like it might be, so we thought we’d give it a shot. If it is, it’s only a partial.”

  “Better than nothin’.”

  The phones rang again. Leah gave Chris a sympathetic smile. “Just think how much character this is building,” she said.

  “Yeah, I could do without character.” He picked up the phone. “Alvin Police. This is Officer Chris Jackson.”

  Leah rolled her chair back to her desk so she could get her empty coffee cup. She was just about to roll it back to where she’d set up camp when Chris held the receiver away from his mouth and said, “Hey, it’s Jacqueline Powers from the Examiner. She wants to speak to you.”

  Biting her lower lip, Leah looked past Chris to the framed newspaper page hanging on the wall. It was the front page of section two, where the Alvin Examiner always ran their “Spotlight on Success” article on Sundays. Each week, they picked some resident of Alvin and did an interview with them. The people were typically blue-collar workers and their stories usually revolved around what they did for work. A week and a half ago, Jacqueline Powers interviewed Leah, and Ethan had been so proud he immediately framed it. Ironically, much of the article was Leah talking about her pa. She’d even mentioned his success at finally solving the Stickman case. Ms. Powers thought that must have been his crowning achievement. Thinking about that now brought Leah a sigh. She hoped it would turn out to be a crown and not a jester hat.

  Most of the article consisted of anecdotal bits. Jacqueline asked Leah how she managed to juggle the busy life of a cop with raising kids, to which Leah had responded that most of her time wasn’t spent solving cases but going through files and doing data entry. Jacqueline laughed at this. But the reality was, in a small town like Alvin, there was a lot of downtime.

  Then Ms. Powers asked about holidays, saying she knew at least one officer had to be assigned to work during things like the upcoming Fourth of July celebration.

  Leah responded the truth, that usually those jobs fell to her, which meant for a long day spent without her family. She usually checked in to the station around eight and found herself back there after the festivities had mostly wound down, twelve to fourteen hours later.

  It made for a very long workday.

  As she responded, Leah felt a flip in her stomach because she knew her kids didn’t like her being gone on special days. She hoped like heck Chris would actually be slotted for the Fourth. For once, she’d like to spend a holiday actually relaxing. Of course, she said none of that to Jacqueline Powers. Instead, Leah told her about how supportive and great her children were.

  After that, thankfully, Powers’s questions went back to things like police procedure and different cases Leah had worked on. Of course, she asked about the Cornstalk Killer and the more recent Maniac Tailor case. Like her pa before her, Leah hated the names the press liked to paste on things without thinking. The “case of the Maniac Tailor” bordered on ridiculousness.

  But in the end, the published article not only put Leah and her pa in a very nice light, but it also did a good job of showcasing the entire Alvin Police Department. Now Leah felt like she owed Jacqueline Powers and felt obligated to talk to her.

  “I’ll take it,” Leah said, resignedly. Lifting her phone’s receiver, she took the call off of HOLD. “Hi, Jacqueline. It’s Leah. How are you today? What do you think of this weather? Hot, hey? I’ve noticed a wind’s picked up, though.”

  Right away, Leah knew Powers had no intention of talking about the weather. She got straight to the point. “Leah, I need you to answer some questions about last night’s murder. Turns out the article we ran this morning scooped everybody else and now my phone’s ringing off the hook for more details. I don’t know what to tell anyone—”

  Leah cut her off. “Your phones are ringing? You ain’t heard ringing till you’ve come down here. It’s nuts.”

  “Well, I guess my first question is, when will we get an official statement from your department?”

  Leah let out a breath. “I really don’t know. When we’ve got somethin’ to state. Right now, we don’t know any more than you do.”

  “I see. Do you think this is the same Stickman that was killin’ folk fifteen years ago?”

  Leah’s head was shaking even though Powers couldn’t see it. “I don’t—no, I don’t think it is. But it could be. I can’t really give you an opinion on that at the moment. Again, we really don’t—”

  “Leah?” Powers asked, cutting her off this time.

  “Yeah.”

  “Can we talk, like, off the record?”

  “Um, sure. What’s up?”

  “You guys have to give the public something, or you’re goin’ to have hysteria on your hands. Everybody’s thinking the worst. Like it’s goin’ to be a streak of killin’s like before.”

  “There is no evidence to support that.”

  “The public doesn’t care about evidence. They care about you telling them that they’re goin’ to be safe. If you can’t, things will get out of control. Even if you have to lie, tell folk they’re goin’ to be safe. Do you understand what I’m sayin’ here?”

  “Yeah, I think I do. Point taken. I’ll try to put a statement together.”

  “Good. In the meantime, do you honestly think this is not the same Stickman as before? Still off the record, of course.”

  Leah thought this over while her eyes scanned her “Spotlight on Success” article. She got to the part where Powers referred to the case as her pa’s “crowning achievement,” and she knew the answer to the question. “Yes,” she said. “I honestly think this is not the same man. Harry Stork was the Stickman, and Harry Stork is dead. My pa killed the boogeyman. I’ll issue a statement before the end of the day.”

  Jacqueline Powers thanked her and Leah hung up the phone. Even if you have to lie, tell folk they’re goin’ to be safe. The words still rang in her ears.

  Ethan finally decided to show up. He came in quietly (which wasn’t hard with all the telephones ringing), opening the door slowly. Not that it mattered; Leah’s desk sat eight feet from the door. She’d spotted Ethan through the window as he walked past on the sidewalk. At least he was earlier than his usual 11 A.M.: The clock had just clicked past nine-twenty-five.

  Without so much as a “good morning” or even a “hello,” Ethan marched straight past Leah and Chris and unlocked his office door. Leah thought she’d never seen a man move so fast while still give t
he semblance of walking. His office door clicked quietly closed behind him before she heard the strain of his desk chair and the annoying and unique squeak it made as he sat back in it, probably letting go of a deep breath he hadn’t known he’d been holding.

  Leah realized Chris was probably right: Ethan really was scared about what she was going to do. And well he should be, she thought. Ethan was in a bit of a tight squeeze. He couldn’t very well fire her, not because she wasn’t in the right for what she was about to do (she knew she was on pretty firm ground with this one), and not just because she was one of the only three people in all of Alvin trained to be a police officer. The big reason she felt so secure in her job was on account of Ethan and Leah’s daddy being such good friends while her pa was alive. So close, they were almost like blood. You don’t fire blood. You get mighty pissed off at it sometimes, and may say things you later regret, but blood is blood. At the end of the day, you go home happy, and you’ve always managed to say your piece and clear your chest.

  Leah’s anger about what happened last night had all but dissipated while she had been performing the job of inputting data, but seeing Ethan strut right past her without saying a word brought the irritation right back like a wet slap in the face. Pulling one of her blond bangs down over her face, she let go and felt it spring back into place. Her time to act had come. She had a piece or two to say and some chest clearing to do.

  But first things first. She stood and brought her empty mug to the coffee machine, which Chris had so nicely just brewed. Since this morning, he’d been on his best behavior, even doing data entry alongside her instead of crossword puzzles. In fact, since they finished their talk, both his boots had remained on the floor instead of up on his desk.

  Carrying her mug of fresh coffee with her, Leah started for Ethan’s door.

  Chris hung up the phone. “Oh, I’m about to hear some cussing and screaming, aren’t I?” he asked.

  Leah stopped and looked back. “No, you’re about to hear someone get blamed for somethin’ they did wrong. I realize people make mistakes all the time, but some mistakes you can’t come back from. Like this one. We have a dead woman on our hands who very well might still be alive if that one little mistake hadn’t been made.”