By now, Marvin knew we were looking for bodies as did the owner of the pasture, Oscar Smith, but word hadn’t gotten around to the general public. Sam had asked Oscar to sign a form giving us permission for the search so it wouldn’t require a warrant. Only a short time ago, Sam would have skipped this step but he had learned from bitter experience to dot all the I’s cross all the T’s.
We all parked alongside the entrance to the pasture. The forensic team left their equipment in the vehicles and wouldn’t transport it until Bertie sounded an alarm. We loaded onto the snowmobiles and headed toward the large cottonwood tree. The dog ranged from side to side but kept moving straight ahead at Barbara’s commands. The snowmobiles slowed to accommodate the pace of the handler and the working dog.
When we got closer to the tree, Bertie’s movements became animated. He lifted his head alertly and waded across the snow toward the clearing. His tail was curled into a tight kink. He dropped suddenly with a soft yelp and looked up at Barbara who immediately rewarded him with a treat from a bag she carried.
“Yes,” she said softly. She pulled a small spiral notebook from her pocket and looked all around.
One of the men on the forensic team walked over to Sam. “We would like to drive the Humvee over here if that won’t cause any legal complications. Tearing up the land, etcetera, etcetera. It will save us carrying a bunch of equipment.”
“There won’t be any legal complications, like trespassing, say, or tearing up his property. No warrant necessary because the owner has already given us signed permission. If the opening in the fence isn’t wide enough, I have a pair of wire cutters in my Suburban. But mind the dips. Drifts are going to fill bone-jarring inclines and make it look like you are on flat ground. I’ll lead the best way across the pasture with Keith’s snowmobile.” Sam’s eyes were hard, his voice terse. He looked at me, then stared at the ground. Dreading to see for himself what the dog claimed was there.
We were silent. I looked around at all the people gathered around this place in a spot that couldn’t by any stretch of the imagination be called woods. All of the trees and shrubs were along the edge of the creek. The land leading up to it was bare. I shivered. Digging for bodies on a dog’s say-so. It suddenly seemed like a macabre fantasy.
But there was that handkerchief. That was real. Tangible.
I moved closer to Barbara. She showed me a checklist. “In case I have to testify in court. I’ve learned the hard way.” There was a special emphasis on structural and technical details including wind speed and direction, soil composition, precipitation, and a detailed description of the surroundings. “Would you like me to mail you all the criteria involving cadaver dogs?”
Then the Humvee came roaring up—no trouble at all traversing the pasture. I could tell by the envious light in Keith’s eyes that he would soon be adding a new piece of equipment to our already formidable collection.
The men piled out and began setting out stakes which they encircled with crime scene tape.
“They are that sure of the dog,” I marveled. “That sure.” There was a dream-like quality to all this. And here were rank strangers, outsiders, sure they would find dead people on the basis of a dog’s ability to smell.
Once again I was swept with a sense of how little I knew and how much I had to learn. And even if we found two little boys buried here—the little boy in Franklin’s commonplace book—and possibly the remains of another little boy killed earlier, that would not help us find the Ghost Baby Killer.
Dead babies as innocent as the driven snow. Babies with rosebud mouths and blue-white icy limbs.
The men pulled out battery-powered snow blowers and quickly cleared the area indicated by Bertie. Then came the shovels and rakes and long-handled brushes to keep from damaging bones. It didn’t take more than twenty minutes of carefully removing the layers of soil before one of the men hollered “stop.”
Bones. Small ones. A child’s bones. I pressed my face against Keith’s chest.
Then another site. The second contained the same kind of evidence, but the bones were smaller. Both boys were naked. Sam knelt to examine the bodies after they were brought up from their graves.
“Broken necks,” he announced. Just like Franklin said in his book.
Keith and I watched gloomily, then turned to leave, but Bertie gave another of his odd-pitched whines and flopped down in a different spot about ten feet from the other two graves. Bewildered, my hands shook. We had found the two we were expecting.
The crows returned before the team started excavating the third site.
They flapped in and settled silently on a branch of the cottonwood tree that had been Franklin Slocum’s home. His safe place. It was as though the crows wanted to bear witness to what we would find there. Secret messengers to the rest of Franklin’s kingdom. Prepared to take the word to all the other animals.
An owl hooted and a squirrel sat upright on a tree opposite the site. I was aware of other animals who seemed to appear out of nowhere, unafraid of the gathered humans.
Dorothy was statue-still. She knew. It was there on her face.
The third little corpse was taller than the other two. Remnants of clothes clung to the bones. No stripping of this one, as though he had been too repulsive for sexual assault, or too old—in puberty.
At the end of both legs were acutely deformed club feet. Feet belonging to a child who had been jeered at and bullied all of this life before he met this tragic end.
He wore mismatched shoes—one a ratty sneaker and the other a heavy scuffed hunting boot. Scrounged up from somewhere by a mother who just didn’t give a damn.
I moved closer to Sam. “Did Biddy do this? His own mother?”
“No. Whoever killed the other two killed Franklin but some things are different. He’s clothed, for one thing. And his skull was smashed in. But Biddy Slocum is responsible for his death. She’s the one who sent her child into the woods day after day and didn’t give a damn how hard it was for him. She’s the one who chased him out of his own home.”
***
We didn’t wait for the forensic team to tag the bodies and collect all the other evidence. I climbed into Sam’s Suburban. With his siren throbbing and the white snow throwing back reflections from his light bar he drove like a wild man toward the Slocums.
“Biddy Slocum, you are under arrest for fraud,” Sam said furiously the moment she answered the door.
“You’ve got no right,” She defiantly braced her wrist on her out-slung hip and lifted her chin. “No right at all.”
“Fraud and accessory to murder.” He whirled her around yanked her arms behind her but only managed to get the handcuffs on one wrist.
I moved toward her and kicked her legs out from under her and flipped her onto her stomach. She fought like a bobcat. She bucked and heaved and twisted but I dropped on top of her back and twisted her arm upward and anchored it with the second cuff.
“You have the right to remain silent,” Sam’s words were garbled and spoken through clenched teeth but he managed to get through the entire oath.
“Add resisting arrest to her charges.”
He yanked her outside and shoved her into the backseat of the Suburban and slammed down the steel mesh partition separating the rear from the front. We sped toward the jail and Sam dragged her into what passed as our interrogation room. It was anything but private and we were already planning an addition to the Regional Room to update this aspect of our facilities. In the meantime, anyone who wanted to could hear all the questions and answers. Sam simply locked the outside door to the office.
“Do you want me to take over, Sam?”
“No.”
We entered the room together. He switched on a recorder and told me to take a chair beside him.
“How long has this been going on?”
“What been going on?”
�
�You getting money for a kid you haven’t seen for God only knows how long?”
She fell silent.
“How long?” He slammed his fist down on the table.
A tear trickled down her cheek.
“One year? Two? Twelve?” Sam leaned forward, his palms flat to control the faint trembling but the tone of his voice betrayed his fury.
“About ten, I guess.”
“He’s dead. Your son is dead. We found his bones this morning?
“You can’t know it’s Franklin,” she said quickly.
“We know it was Franklin because the feet were deformed.”
There wasn’t a trace of surprise or shame on her face. No regret there either.
I stared, felt the color rise in my cheeks, then rose and walked out of the room. I stood with my back to the wall, my hands outstretched and braced against the wainscoting to steady my trembling knees. The bitch. The evil bitch. She doesn’t care. I blew my nose and went back into the room.
Trapped, Biddy looked down, then around, then stared at the ceiling. She swallowed hard.
“Tell us what happened.”
“Nothing happened.” Her mouth trembled. “He went across the pasture one morning like he’s done a hundred times before, only this time he never came back.”
“Didn’t it occur to you that something might be wrong?”
“No. I told you. He did it a hundred times before. Slipped in and out of the house. Usually when I was off at work. Pilfered through the food.” Her voice lowered. “We never did get along. He was hard. Hard to get along with. Hard to raise.” She suddenly sobbed with self-pity. “You don’t know how hard it is to raise a kid like that. Retarded. Couldn’t walk. Couldn’t talk.”
I thought of the passages in the commonplace book where he mentioned interaction with Biddy. “You didn’t communicate at all?” I asked carefully.
“Oh, yeah, I did. But just me. No one else. He could make these noises. And write. Whole pages sometimes. Mostly demands. Wanting this or that. Better food. Clothes. Blankets. Like I was Madam Moneybags. It was always something. Longer pants. Larger socks. Bigger shoes. He was always after me about shoes.” She caught herself. Looked stricken. Then looked away and around. “I guess he could sort of write but the pages were mostly scribbles.”
Sam blinked. It was unlikely that “retarded” kids could write whole pages.
I recalled the calligraphy quality of the entries in his commonplace book. His lyrical poetry. His ideals. His love of nature. The soaring of his spirit every spring. His love of the moist earth. His sense of mystery. His affinity for the spiritual.
“Kids made fun of him. So did grownups. Especially ones who had normal kids. I’m telling you my life was a bitch. He never showed me an ounce of love. Not one bit.”
Beneath the table, my hands were clamped together between my knees to keep them from flying around this woman’s neck.
“The money,” Sam said. “Why did you keep on taking the money?”
“I figured I had it coming. It was owed me for putting up with that kid and not putting him in some kind of institution. Wasn’t all that much anyway.”
“When did you realize he was never coming back?”
She fell silent again. Then said, “I want a lawyer. A good one. And then I’m going to sue your ass. You’ve got no right to come crashing into my home and abusing me. Police abuse. That’s what this is.”
Sam yanked her to her feet and shoved her into the jail cell.
Chapter Twenty-five
I left for Topeka early the next morning with the handkerchief locked in a portable biometric safe accessible only through the fingerprint of my right index finger. Keith used it to carry drugs he would be using for emergency treatment of large animals he couldn’t bring back to hospital. It could store prints from other persons but even mine had been added only this morning. Either Dorothy or I would be in the car with the safe at all times. The commonplace book lay beside the safe in an evidence bag.
We were close to solving a crime that had haunted this county for years. Two little boys who had been raped and their necks broken. Another death that went unnoticed of a little crippled boy who had been abused and neglected all his life. If we hit a DNA match we could nail the killer. I wished there were some way to let the precious brave little boy know how much he was like his Western heroes. A manly man to the very end.
But his book was written before the Ghost Baby Killer terrorized the state. I had to shift my energy back to the crime that was under my jurisdiction. Find someone with a black soul.
I wasn’t aware of any old documents that might hold a clue. Sometimes family stories hinted about a son or nephew who kept them awake at night. Children who didn’t finish their education. Sudden withdrawals from bank accounts. Eight pound “premature” babies. Family members suddenly excluded from photos. Clues that were not included in law enforcement reports.
I picked up Dorothy at her house in town. She climbed into the car after stowing her carry-on bag in the hatch. She settled into the passenger seat. “Supposed to be getting a storm.”
“It’s not supposed to hit until afternoon. We’ll beat it there.”
“You have more faith in the weatherman than I do.”
Neither of us felt like talking and after catching the top of the hour of NPR, I switched off the radio. Normally I had it on every mile, switching from music to news and occasionally listening to audiobooks. But it was cold and I didn’t want to turn the volume up loud enough to compensate for the blast of the heater.
No noise. No weatherman constantly interrupting. No constant frantic announcement. No way of knowing I-70 was closing between Denver and Junction City. No warning of the cloud rolling toward us across the prairie.
We were on the east side of Hays when I saw a dark movement close to the ground coming toward us from the southwest. It was there before I could think.
“A ground blizzard,” I hollered to Dorothy. “We won’t be able to see our hands in front of our face. I’ve got to get off the road while I can still see.”
A ground blizzard is the most terrifying weather hazard on the prairie. Ordinary blizzards were falling snow mixed with high wind. Ground blizzards were high winds that picked up dry snow already on the ground, mixed it with dirt and debris and created a lethal mud, coating anything in its path.
My windshield was plastered immediately. The wipers smeared the grayish paste. I steered toward what I thought was the ditch. Then I heard a sickening crunch.
“Oh, no. Oh, Jesus Christ. I’ve hit something.” I switched off the engine. My stomach lurched.
“I just pray it wasn’t another car.” Dorothy’s voice shook.
I splayed my fingers across my face. “Oh, no. Oh, no” I reached for my hooded parka and began bundling up. “Stay here. I’ll check.”
Dorothy eyes were filled with worry but she didn’t argue.
“I have a rope in back. I’ll fasten it on the glide under the backseat. It’s easy to lose direction in this and then get hit by another car. You stay put. Under no circumstances are you to leave this car.”
She nodded.
I unfastened my seat belt and climbed over the console to retrieve a coil of thin commercial grade paracord from the box of survival gear I stowed in the hatch. Although most drivers in Western Kansas packed an emergency car kit for winter travel, mine went far beyond the basic gear of a flashlight, batteries, blanket, snacks, water, gloves, boots, and a first-aid kit. I also carried jumper cables, tire chains, road flares, crime-scene equipment, and a substantial amount of medical supplies.
I secured the cord and then fastened the opposite end around my waist. I looped the excess over my shoulder and slid back into the driver’s seat. The vicious southwest wind was against me. I pushed the door open just far enough for me to ease out. I didn’t want to take a chance on the
wind ripping it off its hinges. I felt around for the running board before I risked putting my full weight on my right foot. Sure of a solid connection I lowered my left foot to the ground and let go of the window post. It took all my strength to slam the door shut and anchor the narrow polypropylene rope.
I felt my way along the fender until I came to my front bumper, then I blindly reached for the large shape in front of my Tahoe. I eased along the side, knowing now it was another vehicle. A small one.
My heart pounded. Oh, no. Oh, no.
A smooth place. Glass. I pounded against it. I couldn’t see inside. “Are you hurt?” I yelled.
A voice called out but I couldn’t understand the words.
“Are you all right?” My eyes stung but goggles wouldn’t have helped me see.
I made a blade of the side of my hand and squeegeed down the glass, clearing enough mud to make out a figure slumped over the steering wheel holding his head between the palm of his hands.
I rapped at the windshield and the man inside roused.
“Are you hurt?”
He mumbled. His words trailed off.
We had to get both vehicles off the highway. The risk of someone slamming into both of us was too great. With ground blizzards people had no choice but to stop. The problem was that all too often they stopped in the middle of their lane because they couldn’t see to steer off to the side. I was worried about emergency vehicles who would try to drive anyway. Ambulances and firetrucks or even a tow truck sent to move a disabled police car off the road.
“My head,” he repeated, more distinctly this time.
I froze at the familiar voice.
Dr. Ferguson. In his little green Volkswagen. I rapped at the window again. “Start your car,” I commanded. “You have to get off the road.”
He eased back from the steering wheel and straightened his neck as he twisted his head from side to side. He reached for a rag lying next to him and pressed it against the wound on his head.
Then he rolled down his window about a half inch so he could hear better. Through the murky interior I could see that he was not wearing a seat belt. Manufacturers hadn’t required them in cars this old. There was a spiderweb crack in the windshield in front of the steering wheel and I knew it had come from him flying forward. I shuddered. I had to get help for him as soon as it was safe to drive.
Fractured Families Page 24
