Eyes of the Predator: The Pickham County Murders (The Hunters)

by Glenn Trust

  Unaware of Henry’s attention, Lyn lifted her eyes from the napkin with Clay’s cell number printed carefully on it. She looked around the truck stop cafe. How would she know who to ask for a ride? Who would be safe, if anyone?

  Unable to focus on anything, the cafe and faces at the tables swirled around her in a kaleidoscope of movement and color, with no meaning and no point of reference. How would she find a ride? She had wanted to take Clay up on his offer, it was tempting, and she had almost found herself saying yes.

  But the need to see this through, whatever it was, burned inside her. After eighteen years of living in the hell created by her father, she couldn’t just take the first opportunity. It might be no better than what she had escaped. She had to do this or doubt herself the rest of her life. Besides, Daddy would be looking for her around Pickham County. She had to put more distance between them.

  After a while, she stood up and walked from the cafe into the truck stop store. She did not notice the large man who stood up from the booth across the room and walked at a distance behind her. He watched her ass as she walked.

  The big bosomed waitress, Marla, glanced up from her order pad. Just a fat pig, she thought. Looking at that young girl’s ass like he had any chance with her, or like he would know what to do with it if he got his hands on it. And she was just a child. Besides, he didn’t know what he was missing here, she thought, smoothing the tight dress over her thighs. His loss.

  Very conscious of the other truckers’ eyes following her, waitress Marla put the coffee pot down and walked over to a customer that had just sat at a table. The tight white skirt undulated over her round bottom as she walked. They were all watching. She knew it and her hips swayed more widely. The round bottom rolled wonderfully under the tight dress, to the delight of all the large men in the room.

  Coming to the table, she caressingly smoothed the back of her skirt over her bottom and smiled at her customer. “What can I get you, hon?” she asked. The truck driver returned the smile appreciatively.

  Henry was long gone and would have paid her no mind anyway. Henry had other plans.

  37. “Jesus, Mary and all the Saints”

  The gravel road to Tom Ridley’s house was blocked. Deputy George Mackey had to park the dusty, county issued pickup at the end of a long line of emergency vehicles. He made his way up the dirt road past four other county cars, two GBI investigative units, a crime scene processing unit also from the GBI, an ambulance and Timmy Farrin’s van from the radio station in Everett. Timmy was probably providing a feed to the Savannah news channels, or hoping to.

  The vehicles were all lined as far to the right as possible on the narrow dirt road. There were no flashing lights. That was all movie stuff. In real life, emergency lights were only used when necessary, as a warning to traffic, or to move people out of the way, or to alert the bad guy to stop. There was no traffic out here on this dusty road, just the humming of grasshoppers in the weeds along the side, and the bad guy, whoever he was, was long gone.

  Up ahead, closest to the scene, he saw a black Cadillac hearse from Morton’s Funeral Parlor. Two men, one short and one tall, in dark suits were leaning against it smoking. They seemed incongruously casual and unconcerned, as if they were waiting for the dinner bell at a Sunday church social after services.

  Just beyond the hearse, yellow tape marked repetitively, “Crime Scene Do Not Cross” was stretched across the road. The tape extended into the woods several yards on both sides, but went further on the right a good fifty feet or so.

  He came even with the two men leaning on the hearse.

  “How you boys doin?” he said, walking by.

  “Doin’ good, George. Yourself?” the tall one said

  “Had better days.” He reached for the yellow tape to lift it.

  “Yeah, well this one is bad. Pretty little girl. Bad.” The tall mortician shook his head and took a drag on his cigarette, leaning his head towards his younger, shorter companion he said something inaudible.

  George stepped under the tape and into the crime scene. The hearse driver’s words fading behind him, he couldn’t help but wonder what in the world would prompt a person to take up undertaking as a career. They gave him the creeps. The men were harmless in themselves, but their casual and unconcerned manner was somehow eerie and disconcerting. George was used to death and mayhem. Even out in the Georgia countryside, bad things happened—car wrecks, assaults, bar fights, and shootings. But when the police or ambulance or fire department arrived on the scene, they were busy trying to do something about it. The undertakers just stood there, smoking and waiting. Like they were picking up a package. Nothing special. Just picking up another package for delivery to a hole scratched in the sandy south Georgia soil.

  It was probably not fair to judge them that way. It was just their way of dealing with a bad situation. Still, it gave him the creeps.

  Timmy Farrin called to him as he walked over to where Sheriff Klineman and Ronnie Kupman were standing.

  “George, they won’t let me past the tape. How about letting me know what’s happening. I got all the TV stations in Savannah waiting for some word. They got their people on the way, but right now, I’m it. Be something if we could scoop them and get the story out before they get here. Put Pickham County on the map.”

  George looked at him and shrugged, “Timmy, you know I can’t do that,” and then added more loudly for the sheriff’s benefit, “All statements have to come from the sheriff’s office or the GBI.” It was a deliberately clumsy and blatantly insincere statement, intended more to annoy the sheriff than ingratiate himself with him.

  He stepped over to the sheriff and Kupman.

  “What’s up, boss?”

  The sheriff’s gaze held a look of resigned displeasure. They both knew he didn’t like George. Right now, he was a necessary inconvenience. Ronnie was convinced that George could add something to the investigation. The GBI agent, Shaklee had echoed the sentiment, and for the moment, Sheriff Klineman would solicit assistance from any source. There was an election at stake. To answer the question he had shouted rhetorically back at the office, two murders in one day in Pickham County was ‘a fucking crime wave’. If they thought George could help, so be it.

  George knew everyone. He had lived there all his life. Still, being sheriff and having George as a deputy was like fishing with worms. The fishing could be good, but every now and then, you had to reach in the can and grab another slimy worm to bait the hook. For the sheriff, dealing with George was like reaching into the worm can. He liked being sheriff, but he still had to touch the worms every now and then.

  As George walked up, Klineman stated firmly, “All statements will come from the sheriff’s office, not the GBI. Are you clear on that Deputy?”

  “Sure. Absolutely Sheriff.” George thought about spitting tobacco juice near the sheriff’s feet, but this was a crime scene, and he didn’t want to contaminate it. Still…

  Ronnie Kupman stepped in quickly. “Come on, George. Want you to take a look at things.” He led George away.

  Kupman was different. He genuinely liked George, although he wished George would clean up his act and his boots some, and play the game with the sheriff and citizens a bit more politically. He saw no reason why the common sense of good old police work by good old boys couldn’t be combined with an appreciation for advancements in police technology and procedure. He also acknowledged that times had changed, for permanent. The old days and ways were gone. He accepted that as progress. He knew that George had a difficult time with the change. He also knew that that was why George would likely never be more than a road deputy. But, they needed road deputies, and George was a good one. To Kupman’s mind, George’s common sense methods and modern law enforcement practice were not mutually exclusive, although he recognized that in George’s case they were often mutually antagonistic.

  “Follow me, George. Got a bad one here,” Ronnie Kupman took a drag on his cigarette as if to take a bad taste out of h
is mouth. “Over here.”

  He led George across and off the right shoulder of the dirt road and into the brush. George followed exactly in Ronnie’s footsteps. He didn’t know what was there and didn’t want to destroy any evidence that might be lying in the dusty weeds.

  They walked beside a patch of grass and weeds that were beaten down as if something had been dragged over them. Ronnie stopped, knelt and pulled the sheet back that had been placed over the girl’s body while the investigation continued. George came up even with him.

  “Jesus.”

  “Yep. Jesus, Mary and all the saints. Not pretty.”

  Squatting a couple of feet from the nude body of the young girl, George eyed the scene from different perspectives. On the other side of the body, about ten feet away, a crime scene technician was bent over slowly looking through the grass and weeds. A bedspread was on the ground next to him, and another technician was using a tweezers to pluck fibers and other minute items of interest and place them in plastic bags. Bob Shaklee, the GBI man from the night before, was standing beside the crime scene techs. He nodded at George who nodded back before returning his eyes to the body.

  The girl appeared to be young, although the blood on her face and torso made it difficult to see. The blood seemed to come from slicing wounds on her face and body.

  Ronnie squatted next to George taking a drag on his cigarette, exhaling slowly and deliberately as if the smoke would somehow change the scene before them as it cleared.

  “Lot of surface blood,” he said, inhaling deeply from the butt hanging from the side of his mouth.

  “Yeah.” George rocked back and forth with his forearms draped over his knees. “You shouldn’t be smoking around the body, Ronnie,” he added without taking his eyes off the body.

  “Yeah, I know. Couldn’t help myself.” He quickly stubbed the cigarette out on the pack of smokes and shoved the butt inside the pack.

  “Lot of surface blood. Messy, but the wounds aren’t deep enough to kill. The son of a bitch wanted to hurt her. Probably took his time with each cut. Cause the most pain.” George looked down at the dirt between his boots and shook his head. “Fucking animal.”

  “Yep.”

  There was nothing more to say as they took it all in. Squatting on their haunches in the Georgia dust and weeds alongside a dirt road, they contemplated what must have been the horror of the girl’s last hours.

  Sheriff Klineman came up behind them. There was something vaguely annoying about seeing them squatting in the dust like a couple of old dirt farmers talking about the rain and crops. Of course, that was the life they had both come from. Backcountry, Georgia dirt farmers. The sheriff’s department had been one of the few ways out of that life, although George still clung to his roots a lot more than Ronnie did. He shook his head at the site of the two squatting dirt farmers wearing the uniforms of deputies.

  “So what do you think?”

  George looked up. Ronnie stood up.

  “Well,” George said slowly rising, “she’s dead.”

  The sheriff’s face reddened. The look on Kupman’s face was a warning to play nice, so George added nonchalantly, “Took her a long time to get that way. She was cut to cause pain, not to kill her.”

  “Yep, that’s what the GBI said, too,” Ronnie Kupman added to direct the sheriff further away from George’s comment. He shot George a look that said, ‘knock it the fuck off, Deputy’!

  George smiled and shrugged as if to say okay, okay. Ronnie was always worried about what the sheriff was going to say or do.

  “So, have they determined the cause of death?” George asked inclining his head towards the GBI looking for evidence on the other side of the body.

  “Not yet, officially,” the sheriff replied, eyeing George for some sign of insubordination.

  “There are some ligature marks…bruises… on her neck,” Ronnie added, again to distract the sheriff and lead George onto safer ground.

  “I know what ligature marks are, Chief Deputy,” the sheriff shot back impatiently.

  “Right, probably strangulation. Won’t know for sure until the autopsy is done.”

  “Yeah,” George said softly, looking down at the girl’s body. “He took his time with that too. Choked her slow.”

  “How in the world can you make that determination standing here?” The sheriff said with disdain.

  George just looked at the girl. He was focused now. “He wanted to hurt her. Wouldn’t have wanted her to die too quick.”

  Ignoring the scorn on the sheriff’s face, he stepped carefully around to the other side of the body staying in areas where the crime scene techs and GBI had already searched for evidence.

  “Hey, Bob.”

  Shaklee approached. “Hey, George. How you doin’ today?” They stood side by side looking down at the body.

  “Ok I guess. Better’n her, for sure.”

  “Yeah, for sure.” Bob Shaklee replied somberly.

  Shaklee had only met George the night before at the scene of the Sims murder, but he had already developed an appreciation for the deputy’s commonsense abilities.

  “Guess you’ll be checking motels around for a missing bedspread like that one.”

  Bob smiled, “Yeah we’re on it. That part is simple. Any ideas?”

  George looked down at the girl and asked, “What’s that? There on her head just under the hairline.”

  “Yeah, we saw that. Looks like he hit her with some object. Left a mark and broke the skin.”

  “Mind if I get a little closer?”

  Shaklee nodded him forward. Good old boy or not, George knew his way around a crime scene.

  George squatted again, this time near the girl’s head. He took a pen from his shirt pocket and carefully, gently separated some strands of bloody hair covering a mark on the girl’s head. He studied the mark for a minute, and then took a small pad from the same frayed shirt pocket and began making notations on the pad.

  Sheriff Klineman watched. He hated having George here. He resented the way the GBI treated George with a respectful familiarity, as if he were one of them. George was a redneck, pure and simple. He was the perfect caricature of the country lawman. A throwback, he gave the rest a bad name. In the sheriff’s mind, George was an impediment and an embarrassment. The GBI were highly trained professionals, but they seemed actually to like George and his rough ways. He couldn’t understand that.

  Sheriff Klineman resented George, he resented the GBI, he resented anything that might get in the way of his reelection, and most of all, he resented two murders in twelve hours in his county, casting doubts on his law enforcement leadership and possibly putting the election in jeopardy. Yes, he especially resented that.

  Bob Shaklee and Ronnie watched George also. Ronnie stepped over next to Bob as George stood up and showed them his notepad.

  “I know this isn’t professional or even legal evidence, but I don’t think she was hit with an object.” George turned the pad towards the two lawmen.

  “See this here, I kind of drew out the marks from that place on her head. There’s kind of a rectangle with a sort of faint oval inside and these curved marks coming out of the oval. Wasn’t an object. The asshole beat her with his fist. That’s the imprint from a ring.”

  Bob and Ronnie studied the sketch on the rumpled notepad for a minute and looked at each other. George was right. It was definitely the imprint of a ring on the hand that had beat her and then killed the young woman.

  “Kind of looks like a longhorn design doesn’t it?” Ronnie looked over at Bob Shaklee. “You know, Texas Longhorn.”

  “Yep, it does,” Bob said. “This is important, George.”

  Ronnie smiled at George, “Good job, Mackey.”

  “There’s something else,” George was focused and not interested in Ronnie’s platitudes.

  “What’s that?”

  “Bob, you remember at the scene last night? The knife wound?”

  “Yeah,” Shaklee regarded the deputy thro
ugh narrowed eyes. He thought he knew where this was going and knew the sheriff’s reaction would be interesting.

  “Well, that wound was designed to kill, but also to cause maximum pain.”

  “I agree.” Shaklee let him speak.

  “The wounds on the girl were not intended to kill.”

  “Right,” Sheriff Klineman stated in firm agreement.

  “But,” George paused, “the wounds on the girl were designed to cause maximum pain, like the knife wound in Mr. Sims. That’s the common denominator. Both murders were committed by the same sadistic bastard. At least that’s how I would work it for now.”

  “What!” The sheriff’s exclamation gurgled and sputtered out in disbelief. “You’re saying we have a serial killer in Pickham County. My God, are you insane!” He looked at Ronnie Kupman, “And you said we needed him here. You must be insane as well. Do you know what would happen if people thought we had our own county slasher? Our own Ted Bundy right here in Pickham.”

  George shrugged. “That’s how I see it. But don’t worry; I doubt he’s still in Pickham County.”

  “Sheriff, I have to say that we agree with the deputy’s theory,” GBI Agent Shaklee stated quietly, but firmly. “I assure you that the serial killer aspect will not be discussed in public, but it is an important part of our working theory in the investigation.”

  Klineman turned and strode briskly from the body, not being all that careful about where he stepped. “Jesus,” he muttered pushing through the brush.

  “Where do we go from here?” Ronnie asked Shaklee.

  “I’ll get a technician to get some good photographs of the ring imprint during the autopsy so we can use it as evidence when we find the bastard.” He looked around the scene. “Be a couple of more hours here at least, then we’ll start digging into it. I suggest we meet up with you and the sheriff say about six o’clock at his office.