In The Bleak Midwinter: A Special Agent Constance Mandalay Novel

by M. R. Sellars

  “No problem,” she answered. “I’ll have it ready to go when you are.”

  Once Stella disappeared through the swinging doors at the back, Constance twisted a quarter turn on her stool and focused on Sheriff Carmichael. “She seems a little tense.”

  “Yeah,” he replied. “That’s ‘cause she knows who you are and why you’re here.”

  “I’m here to help.”

  “Like I told you, we’ve heard that before. Folks don’t get their hopes up anymore.”

  She glanced around again at the lack of visible cheer. “So... People don’t decorate for the holidays in Hulis?”

  “Not many,” he grunted. “Not for a few years now. Nobody wants to think about what Christmas brings to this town. Hell, my wife and I don’t even put up a tree anymore. Don’t know many folks around here that do.”

  “That’s kind of sad.”

  “It’s reality,” he countered.

  “That doesn’t make it any less sad. It’s as if the town itself is a victim too.”

  “It is,” he agreed. “That’s the difference between a small town like Hulis and a big city like Saint Louis. We’ve got a population of less than a thousand folks. What happens here is personal.”

  “As I understand it, so far none of the victims have been from Hulis though.” Constance gestured with her index finger to indicate the surrounding area. “In fact, they’ve all been unidentified according to the reports.”

  “True,” he replied. “But this is where they’re found, so that makes it personal, no matter who they are. You have to understand, Constance, people here aren’t afraid of being a victim of this killer. But they’re damned well on edge about this. Doesn’t exactly help our reputation, and the population is dwindling. This keeps up, Hulis could cease to exist.”

  A quiet interlude fell between them as she weighed the gravity of what he’d just said. On the surface it was merely a statement of fact, but beneath the words, stark emotion was grappling with the logic, and it was winning.

  The cafe doors leading to and from the kitchen swung open and Stella reappeared, plate in hand. A moment later she slid it in front of the sheriff, a waft of aromatic steam still rising from the pool of gravy welled in the center of the mashed potatoes that flanked an easily five-inch thick slab of glazed meatloaf.

  Once the waitress had disappeared again, Constance re-started the conversation. “So, what is it we need to talk about, Skip?”

  Sheriff Carmichael used his fork to carve a trench into the side of the mashed potato volcano on his plate then watched in silence as the gravy began to spill out. It flowed down the side and began spreading across the plate toward the meatloaf.

  Eventually, the weighty pause ended and he asked, “Exactly what did your file have to say about John Horace Colson?”

  She shrugged. “The pertinent details. He had a record ranging from petty larceny to aggravated battery. There was also a conviction for sexual assault on a minor. He did just under a year in the adult correctional institution at Gumbo Flats for the latter. And, of course, there was the abduction and rape of Merrie Callahan, and then his subsequent murder.”

  He finished chewing the hunk of the meatloaf he had stuffed into his mouth, then swallowed hard. After taking a sip of his coffee to wash it down, he repeated her words with a razor sharp edge of bitterness. “The abduction and rape of Merrie Callahan... Makes it sound like a made-for-TV movie from one of those damn cable channels.”

  “I’m sorry,” she replied. “I’m just answering your question. I didn’t mean to sound callous.”

  “I know, I know... Truth is, the story might as well be a movie. It sure as hell plays out like one... It just doesn’t have a very happy ending.” He nodded as he spoke, waving a hand and sighing in apology himself. After staring wordlessly at his plate, he finally laid the fork aside and combed his fingers through the snowy brush on his upper lip. When he finally started speaking again, there was a fire in his voice that seemed unquenchable.

  “Thirty-five years ago Merrie Callahan was ten years old,” he began. “She was a bright, freckle-faced kid, with a mop of chestnut hair and a personality too big to fit her body.

  “Late on the afternoon of December twenty-second, Merrie’s mother picked her up from school. It was the last day before Christmas break. They were Catholic, so she went to the Immaculate Conception school over in Mais. That’s the next town west of here. Since there wasn’t any bus service, Elizabeth—that’d be her mother—would shuttle her back and forth. On the way home she stopped over at Norris’s Market, just up the street here, to do some last minute grocery shopping for their big Christmas Eve dinner.” He jerked his thumb back over his shoulder to indicate the direction.

  “As the story goes, Merrie’s little sister, Rebecca, was pitching a fit about wanting to see Santa Claus and give him her list,” he continued. “Just so happened, Norris’s was pretty much right next door to the Five-and-Dime. Back then we had a little more by way of population, including kids, so they always had a Santa Claus. Usually it was Elvis Babbs, the manager’s husband, but he’d come down sick that year so they hired themselves a replacement for that last week before Christmas. Anyway, Merrie, being the sweetheart she was, volunteered to take her sister next door so that her mother could finish the shopping in peace.”

  “And Colson was that Santa Claus,” Constance offered, nodding. “That was in the report.”

  “Yeah...” Carmichael grunted. “He was going by John Carter, which we found out later was apparently a known alias of his. How that sonofabitch got hired I don’t know. Of course, back then there wasn’t a sex offender registry, so I guess he just flew under the radar... Anyhow, about twenty minutes or so after Merrie took her sister next door, a clerk came rushing over to Norris’s looking for Elizabeth. Rebecca was standing in the middle of the dime store in hysterics, and all they could get out of her was that Merrie had taken Santa away, or some such. Of course, as we know, it was the other way around, but sometimes five-year-olds see the world differently than the rest of us.

  “At any rate, Merrie was nowhere to be found, and no one except Rebecca had seen a thing. Colson had supposedly gone on a break, but he never returned and couldn’t be found in the vicinity, so he instantly went to the top of the list of people we wanted to interview.”

  “‘We?’” Constance asked.

  “Yeah... ‘We.’ Thirty-five years ago I was a commissioned deputy in this very sheriff’s department,” he explained.

  “So, you didn’t just retire here,” Constance said. “You’re originally from Hulis.”

  He nodded.

  “That wasn’t in our files,” she puzzled aloud.

  “I told you we needed to talk.”

  “Obviously. Go on.”

  “Well, back then I was green. I’d been on the department for less than a year, and we’d never had anything like this happen in Hulis. If you had a kid go missing, you found ‘em at a friend’s house, or they were skipping school and just forgot to make sure they came home in time to not get caught. But I knew this was different almost right from the minute I arrived.

  “I was the first one on the scene. Both Sheriff Morton and I figured it was a nuisance call when it came in, but I rushed on over anyway. The minute Missus Babbs started filling me in I had a gut feeling that there was more to it. Then, I found the shoe.”

  “The shoe?”

  He nodded. “Colson apparently took Merrie out the back, through the stockroom. Since he parked his car behind the store in the employee area, that made it even easier for him to slip away unnoticed. When I was searching for her, I noticed some things that led me in that direction, and when I went out onto the back lot, I found one of her shoes. That’s when I knew for sure she’d been taken.

  “We set up road blocks and organized a search, of course. I think just about everyone living here at the time helped look for her. There were even some State Highway Patrol officers sent in. Tom—that was her dad—and Elizabeth were
basket cases, understandably, what with their little girl being stolen like that.” He shook his head and stared out the window for a moment before continuing. “I still remember my mom going over and staying at their place to help out with Rebecca, and just to make sure they had someone there.

  “Anyway, we searched the rest of that night, even through the snowstorm that was hitting us. We didn’t stop. The searching went on all day the next and into that night too. By then we’d found out about the alias and pulled a complete background check on Colson, so we knew about his record, including the sexual assault on a minor charge. I’m here to tell you that information didn’t do much for our spirits.”

  “I understand.”

  Sheriff Carmichael drew in a deep breath and then puffed his cheeks in a drawn out sigh. “There was no such thing as an Amber Alert, but we got the word out to all the agencies, including yours. And then there was the media. They jumped all over it too. Next day was Christmas Eve,” he said. “We figured by that point Colson had probably gone across the state line into Iowa, or maybe even east into Illinois, so APB’s went out in every direction. But we kept lookin’ around here anyway. We weren’t about to give up. Of course, we still couldn’t find a thing. Not a trace of either of them. So...later that afternoon I went home and caught a nap. I had a regular shift coming up and I’d been running on next to no sleep. That evening I headed in for my regular overnight duty shift. Next mornin’ is when I found her.”

  “How?”

  “Luck, I guess,” he replied. “I’d just been sittin’ there in the office and twiddlin’ my thumbs the whole damn night. Soon as my shift ended, I figured I’d go out and cruise. You know, have another look even if I was just covering old ground. I was out for an hour...maybe a bit more...and everything just started to catch up with me. It was pushin’ five A.M., so I decided to go on home and hit the sack. I was out on the west side of town. Turned a corner to loop around the block and there she was. Standin’ in the middle of the road.”

  He paused and Constance could see the fresh pain of an old memory creasing his face. He started to speak again, but his voice cracked, so he cleared his throat and took a sip of his coffee before finishing the story.

  “At first I just thought I was seeing things,” he offered. “You know…that the lack of sleep was causing me to hallucinate or something… But… I wasn’t. It was her. She was covered in blood. Didn’t find out till later that wasn’t all of it hers. She was wearing her school uniform, or what was left of it. It was torn...just ripped up by that sick bastard. But I guess she’d put it back on after...well...you know.

  “There was a good eight inches of snow on the ground, with even bigger drifts, what with that blizzard having blown through. Temp was in the twenties... But there she was, torn clothes, one shoe, and just standing there in the middle of the road, starin’ off into space. She wasn’t even shivering.” He hesitated momentarily as the vivid recollection welled inside him, gathering pressure before escaping via his tortured voice. “The ungodly things that bastard had done to that sweet little girl...cigarette burns...cuts...bruises...and... I... I... I just can’t even... I...”

  “It’s okay,” Constance soothed. “I understand.”

  “No,” he whispered, shaking his head. “It’s not okay. And unless you’ve seen it...I mean really seen it...then you don’t understand.”

  “You’re correct,” she replied. “I don’t, really.” There was no reason to argue.

  “Long as I live... I just...” Sheriff Carmichael stopped and blew out a heavy sigh. “Anyway...I wrapped her up in a blanket and called it in. She never said a word the whole time. Just sat there in my cruiser and stared out the window. They hustled her off to the hospital over in Mais while we started searching the neighborhood looking for Colson. About two hours later we found what was left of ‘im in the basement of a vacant house. It was a few blocks from where I found Merrie. It had been checked the day before. Or it was supposed to have been—nobody was sure—but if it was, where they were prior to that is still a mystery.

  “At any rate, he was dead, of course. He’d been hacked up good with an axe. It was layin’ right there next to him, along with an empty bourbon bottle. Axe handle had small, bloody handprints all over it, and the fingerprints we pulled matched Merrie. Then, like I said, we found out that a good bit of the blood on her was his. She never told us what happened... I don’t honestly believe she even remembers. But the coroner’s report showed his blood alcohol was through the roof, so with the evidence at hand, the assumption was that he got liquored up, passed out, then Merrie found the axe and did what she thought she needed to do in order to escape.”

  “Quite the feat for a ten-year-old girl,” Constance mused aloud.

  “You know what they say about fear,” he replied. “It’s the great motivator.”

  “True. And it does sound like a logical conclusion under the circumstances,” she offered. “So, what happened after that? The file had notes to the effect that Merrie is currently institutionalized?”

  The sheriff shook his head and answered. “She never really recovered. For the longest time she was almost catatonic. She was well into her teens before she showed any improvement at all, but even then it was like she was mentally frozen in time. Stuck at ten years old forever. A little girl in a grown up body. Tom and Elizabeth took care of her even as they got older, but about ten years ago they were both killed in a head on collision out on the two lane. Merrie couldn’t take care of herself, so she pretty much lives at the retirement home. Between her inheritance and the good hearts of folks here in town, it’s covered.”

  Constance cocked an eyebrow. “What about her sister?”

  “Nobody’s seen or heard from Rebecca for a long time. Coming up on a decade I guess.” He gave his head a shake that exuded sadness in the very motion. “Merrie had become Tom and Elizabeth’s world, and I think Rebecca ended up resenting her for that. She’d been off to college and was living her life in Omaha before the accident anyway. She visited quite a bit. She came back for the funeral and then hung around long enough to dissolve the estate.” He shrugged. “Then she set up a trust fund for Merrie, took her half of the inheritance and left. She was back a few times after that, but each time it was shorter and farther between. Eventually, she just stopped showing up. Shoulda been something in your file about it. All of ‘em that came before ya’ tried to track her down but never had any luck.”

  “Unfortunately for us, if someone really wants to disappear and they stay out of trouble, it’s easier than most people think,” Constance said.

  “That’s a fact,” Sheriff Carmichael agreed.

  He looked down at the plate of food in front of him. A visible, dull skin had formed on the surface of the rapidly cooling gravy, and the inviting gloss the butter had given the bright green peas was all but melted into oblivion. It didn’t matter. His appetite had disappeared thirty seconds into the story anyway.

  He pushed the plate aside, then reached for the napkin dispenser only to discover that he’d been clenching one of the folded paper rectangles in his fist the whole time he’d been recounting the thirty-five-year-old horror. He carefully wiped his mouth, then brushed out his mustache with his fingertips as he tossed the crumpled napkin aside.

  “So, tell me,” he began, turning his emotionally spent gaze toward Constance. “Now that you’ve heard all that, do you still feel it’s absolutely necessary to talk to Merrie?”

  Constance nodded shallowly and returned a grim expression. “I’m afraid so. I realize it must be hard, so I can just go myself, if you’d prefer.”

  “No, no... I’ll be going out to visit her anyway. I always do. Besides, she’s probably expecting us. Bringing her a new visitor on the twenty-second seems to have become a twisted little tradition where you Feds are concerned.”

  “Sorry.”

  He shrugged off the apology. “She’s not big on strangers either, but she’ll be okay with you if she sees us together and I int
roduce ya’.” He reached up and massaged a spot above his eyebrow with the side of a crooked index finger. “All right then. Let me go ahead and collect that piece of pie and run it back to Clovis, and make a couple of calls, then I’ll take you over there.”

  CHAPTER 10

  CONSTANCE stood on the sidewalk in front of the sheriff’s office while he went inside, the collar of her long coat turned up against the breeze. The temperature was hovering in the upper 20’s, but the occasional gusts that surged along the street made it feel much colder. If the sun was out it might not be so bad, but a heavy blanket of gray clouds formed a low ceiling overhead, casting the small town of Hulis in a visible dullness that served to enhance the dark funk that already permeated it to the core.

  Her cell phone speaker trilled as she held it pressed against her ear with a leather gloved hand. After the fifth ring a recorded male voice announced without identification or ceremony, “Leave a message.”

  Constance rolled her eyes as a sharp tone followed, then began speaking. “Drew, this is Mandalay. Hey, I know it’s the holidays and all, but I got handed the ‘Christmas Butcher’ case and I’m up here in northern Missouri. I just finished a really interesting conversation with Sheriff Carmichael. Apparently our file on this whole situation is incomplete... Actually, that’s an understatement...but...anyway, since you were the last agent assigned, I wanted to run a couple of things past you. Do me a favor and give me a call back on my cell when you get this. Okay? Thanks.”

  She stabbed off the device, then punched in a speed dial code using her ungloved hand, which she then promptly shoved back into her pocket once the requisite task was complete and nimbleness of digits was no longer required. Tilting her head to the side, she tucked the cell beneath a cascade of brown hair and pressed it to her ear once again. On the second ring a gruff but far more familiar voice issued from the speaker.

  “Homicide. Detective Storm...” the voice said.