Hunting the Five Point Killer

by C. M. Wendelboe

  Arn shuffled through the file until he came upon Butch’s field notes. He’d written the word “helpless” across the top. “Butch figured Joey died with no struggle,” Arn said as he thumbed through the incident report. “I’ve investigated deaths where victims got their throats slit. They thrash around like … well, a chicken with its head cut off.”

  “I’m no trained investigator,” Danny said, “but except that he’s damn near decapitated, it looks like Joey died a pretty easy death. Not like someone killed him in cold blood. More like cool blood—like the killer eased Joey into his death.”

  “You’re sharp.” Arn walked to the photos. “See that beer can just sitting on the side of the coffee table? If Joey had struggled with his attacker, it would have been spilled. And the coffee table would probably have been overturned.”

  “The killer must have sneaked up behind him?” Ana Maria asked. “No other way to kill him without a struggle.”

  Arn put his glasses on and held Butch’s hen scratching to the light. “Butch underlined ‘acquaintance’ and ‘date,’” Arn said, tapping the lotion in the picture. “He must have thought the killer wanted to give Joey a happy ending.”

  “Kind of sexist,” Ana Maria said. “Who says the killer was a guy?”

  Arn jotted that in big letters across the top of the wall. “Good point. No reason he wasn’t killed by a woman.”

  “I don’t know about you,” Danny said, “but looking at these pictures makes me feel a little queasy. I’m going to make some coffee.”

  He left, and Ana Maria scooted closer. She flipped through the second folder and laid out Butch’s field notes on Delbert Urban. “‘Same as Joey Bent,’ Butch wrote. ‘But different.’ What do you suppose he meant by that?”

  Delbert had been killed on the couch in his office at the Hobby Shop, his crimson Speedo pulled down the crack of his butt and failing to camouflage more blood than Arn had seen at a crime scene. The soaked couch cushions lay scattered across the floor, and the end table was smashed.

  “Rules out someone sneaking up when he was passed out. Delbert must have put up some fight. Looks like two cats that got into a fight in the back yard, crap scattered all over the room.” Ana Maria ran her finger over Butch’s notes. “The ‘same’ must mean that both men were killed when someone slit their throat.”

  “Or this.” Arn pointed out that the crime scene had been staged: the bodies moved so the first thing anyone saw inside the door was a gaping hole under their chins. “The killer staged it this way to shock anyone seeing it.”

  “Why?” Danny asked, munching on a cookie. He’d walked back into the room with a plate of sugar cookies and a carafe of coffee. “Just ’cause he’s a sicko.” He bowed to Ana Maria. “Or she’s a sicko.”

  “The killer had no history with his victims,” Arn explained. “If he had, he would have covered them after he killed them. Protect their dignity.”

  “Or it could be they were the same because of this.” Ana Maria pointed to the small five-point star badge pinned to Delbert’s bare chest, matching the one on the floor in the background of Joey’s house. “But what was different?”

  “Besides that bottle of Johnny Walker Black Label on the floor?” Danny dunked his cookie into his coffee cup. “Winston Churchill’s drink of choice.”

  Arn and Ana Maria looked sideways at him. “How you know that?” Arn asked.

  “Maybe in another life I got an education. Point is, besides drinking like old Winston, Delbert was as big as Winston was, by the looks of him.”

  Arn flipped through the papers until he found Delbert’s toxicology report. “Delbert tipped the truck scales at 262. And he had a blood alcohol of only .04—two drinks for someone as big as he was. Rules out a scenario that Delbert was killed after he passed out.”

  Arn scanned both victims’ particulars: Joey lived alone in a modest part of town, while Delbert had an upper scale place on Cheyenne’s north side. “So that’s why Delbert entertained at his shop: to keep it from his wife. You wouldn’t want your wife finding out.”

  “I’m not married,” Danny answered.

  “Were once?’ Ana Maria asked.

  “I was,” Danny said, “but we’re not prying.” He held Delbert’s file to the light. “What’s NAMBLA?”

  “North American Man/Boy Love Association,” Ana Maria said. “Bunch of sick bastards that like young boys. Pedophiles. I did a special on them some years ago in Denver. The local chapter president came on sweeter than honey until I told him I was with the news. Then he clammed up so tight you couldn’t drive a stickpin up his keister with a jackhammer. Needless to say, I didn’t shake his hand.” She finished her fourth cookie, and Arn marveled that she still maintained her figure even though she ate like a horse. “Looks like ol’ Delbert liked little boys.”

  Arn leaned back in the folding chair. He straightened his leg out and rubbed it, grateful it wasn’t broken. Then again, he thought, the guy with the tire billy could have broken it if he’d wished to. “Maybe that’s how the killer got close, by posing as a boy?” Arn looked at Danny. “What do you weigh, 110? 115?”

  Danny hitched up his jeans, which had slid down what passed as his hips. “This morning, 117. And I know what you’re saying. Someone my size could have passed as a boy.”

  “Or a woman could, as Ana Maria pointed out.”

  Danny walked to the wall. “That’s odd.”

  “What’s odd?”

  “That.” Danny traced a faint footprint left in blood on Delbert’s nude back. Arn put his glasses back on and bent to the photo. He’d seen that same footprint in the last couple days. Somewhere. Or maybe because a hundred people in Cheyenne might wear that same tread pattern.

  He shut his eyes, imagining how the scene looked during the crime, something he’d often done when he was investigating the very worst of human nature. He envisioned Delbert and his killer drinking. Perhaps Delbert had impressed the other with his expensive taste in whisky. They may have agreed to have sex: Delbert was partially nude, and a condom lay on the floor beside the couch in anticipation. Perhaps Delbert drank a little too much—the killer slipped behind him. But when he started the death slice, Delbert came alive. They fought. The killer wrestled him to the floor, stepping on his back. Just like Butch had speculated.

  Arn tilted the lamp to the photos and squinted through his reading glasses. “There!” He pointed to a tiled spot outside Joey’s front door. “There’s that same shoe print. I think.” He motioned to Ana Maria. “You don’t need glasses like us old farts. Come see if those tread patterns are close?”

  Ana Maria stood next to Arn and leaned close to the photos. “They’re the same. Not conclusive enough for court, but they’re the same pattern.”

  “But we already know the same person killed them both,” Danny said. “He left his calling card: that five-point star badge.”

  “Then where’s the other shoe prints?”

  “What prints?” Danny asked.

  Ana Maria’s head swiveled between photos. “You’re right. There are no other prints.”

  “That’s just my point.” Arn grabbed a cookie and dunked it into his coffee. A chunk broke off and bobbed like a miniature life preserver. “As much blood as there is at both crime scenes, there should have been a trail of bloody shoe prints all the way out the door. But there’s only that single print in each photo.”

  “I don’t get it.” Ana Maria grabbed the initial reports from both murders and scanned them. “Butch mentioned it was the same tread pattern. So?”

  “Whoever killed these victims put the print there on purpose,” Arn said. “He wanted a single shoe print to be found. There’s no other explanation for the killer not to have left a bloody trail.”

  “So what did he do?” Danny asked. “Get beamed out of there? Climb the walls like a fly so he wouldn’t touch the floor? He had to have laid
down more tracks.”

  “I don’t know,” Arn said. “I’m going to have to study on that.”

  “What’s bugged me as I was studying the old newspaper clippings,” Ana Maria said, tapping the photos with her pen, “is why were there only two Five Point victims?”

  “That’s easy.” Danny beamed. “Delbert frightened him.”

  “How you come to that conclusion?” Arn asked.

  Danny nodded to the photo with a piece of cookie. “It looks to me like the killer had it easy with Joey Bent. But when he went to kill Delbert, he was too big for his attacker to handle, and it was Katy bar the door. A real knock-down-drag-out fight.” Danny punched the air. He feinted a jab and nearly fell down before Arn caught him. “I think Delbert scarred him so badly he called it quits. Or moved out of the area.”

  Arn clamped a hand on Danny’s stooping shoulders. “You would have made a good detective if you weren’t a wanted man.”

  Twenty-Eight

  The ping of the elevator outside the hospital waiting room woke Arn from a light nap. He sat up and looked about before standing and stretching. He’d stopped at the nurses’ station this morning to ask about Johnny: he was still in an induced coma, but his vitals were improving.

  He walked to Johnny’s room to talk with the officer sitting in the hallway. Arn remembered such duty, and figured the officer must have pissed off someone to draw the boring assignment of sitting outside the room. “I don’t know how the chief’s doing,” the officer said, clutching the latest edition of Guns and Ammo magazine. “Only thing they told me is to keep everyone out except hospital personnel.”

  Arn returned to dozing in the waiting room when an angry voice rose from the nurses’ station. A woman was yelling at two nurses, their blue scrubs barely visible as they cowered behind the safety of the counter separating them from the crazy woman. “This is bullshit!” the woman screamed. “I demand to see Chief White!”

  The charge nurse walked around the counter and laid her hand on the woman’s fleshy arm. She jerked away. “I’m Adelle Dawes, bitch. Dr. Dawes’ wife. I pay your wages.”

  “Then you’re the person I need to talk to about a raise.” The nurse’s lip rose slightly in a Mona Lisa smile before she became serious again. “And you still can’t go into his room.”

  One of the nurses caught Arn’s attention, the panicked look on her face asking for his help as if he still wore a badge.

  “Are you Adelle Dawes?” Arn asked, sliding between her and the nurse like a boxing referee. He recognized the name of Gaylord’s ex-wife, who’d married Dr. Dawes after Gaylord’s death. “I’m a friend of Johnny’s too. Can we sit for a moment?”

  Adelle glared at the floor nurse before stomping past Arn into the empty waiting room. The nurse mouthed a “thank you” just before he turned and followed Adelle. He walked to the coffee pot and grabbed a Styrofoam cup. “Would you like a cup?”

  “Is it as crappy as all other hospital coffee?” she asked as she wiggled and struggled to fit between the arms of the chair.

  “It is.”

  “Then count me out.”

  “Can’t blame you.” Arn counted himself out on the crappy coffee as well and sat in a chair opposite her. He told her what the nurse had said of Johnny’s improving condition, and how only hospital personnel were allowed at his bedside. “Are you a friend of Johnny’s?”

  “He was friends with my brother, Steve DeBoer.” Adelle took off her coat and tossed it on a chair.

  Arn sat quiet, like he often did, waiting for someone to tell him things. All sorts of things. Which Adelle did.

  “Johnny always treated Steve well,” Adelle volunteered.

  “It must have been hard, losing a husband and brother the same year.”

  Adelle laughed. “The husband was no great loss. He did pretty much whatever he wanted to do.” She flipped open a silver cigarette case and stuck a Virginia Slim into her mouth, then spied the No Smoking sign and stuffed the cigarette case back in her purse. “You’re that retired cop the station brought in to find Butch Spangler’s killer.”

  “I am.”

  “And to come up with a connection between Gaylord and Steve and Butch.” She laughed again. “That Villarreal woman’s come up with some doozies to boost her ratings, but this has got to take the cake.”

  “You don’t see a connection between all three officers’ deaths?”

  Adelle leaned forward for effect, and Arn backed away. Something about vodka breath at ten in the morning. “I watched Johnny on TV claiming that the Five Point Killer could be the link between them. That would leave Gaylord out. The little piss ant couldn’t find elephant tracks in the snow, no better investigator than he was. If it wasn’t for my brother, Gaylord would have been working animal control.”

  “But he must have known as much as Butch about the cases, them being partners.”

  “Only because Steve ordered Butch to take Gaylord under his wing. He would swagger through the front door every night, bragging. ‘We’re so close to catching the killer,’ he’d say. ‘By this time next week we’ll have an arrest.’ Big shot. But in reality, Butch was close. Gaylord was just along for the ride.”

  Arn reached around the chair and grabbed his bag.

  “What’s that?”

  “My briefcase,” he answered digging for papers.

  “Looks like a purse.”

  Arn took out a notebook and flipped pages to notes he took about Gaylord’s death. “The initial report says you found Gaylord the evening he died.”

  Adelle took out her cigarette case again. This time, she stuck a cigarette into her mouth. She aimed her shaking hand, holding a diamond-studded lighter, to it. She drew a deep breath and looked in the direction of the nurses’ station. Daring them. Blowing smoke rings their way. “When I came home from shopping, that damned fool Gaylord was in the basement. In that room he called his man cave.” She laughed nervously. “Except there were no men ever came around. Only Butch’s little kid now and again. Or Steve when he needed to ask Gaylord something. But yeah, I found him swinging. Butter smeared all over his little bitty cajones. Eyes bulging out like he was still looking at those porn mags. A connection with Butch and Steve? That Villarreal woman is really nuts this time.”

  A tall, fit man entered the room, the graying around his temples setting off his nearly black hair. He seemed to glide as he walked, lithe, sure of himself. He glared at Adelle, who hurriedly snubbed her cigarette out in a coffee cup. “This is my husband,” she said quickly. “Doctor Jefferson Dawes.” She tailed out “doctor” so that Arn knew he was in the company of royalty. “What are you doing here?” she asked him.

  “I’m a doctor. Doctors frequent hospitals. Especially when their damned nurse claims she can’t read my orders and I have to come here and tell her in person.”

  Adelle looped her arm through his. “Jeff is in demand as an orthopedic surgeon.”

  “I doubt Mr. Anderson is interested in my life history,” Jefferson said.

  He was turning to leave when Adelle stopped him. “Lunch?”

  “I can’t,” he answered. “I’ve got to prep for that marathon.”

  “Then what time should we have dinner?”

  “Don’t wait for me. I’ll be late checking on a patient here.”

  She looked after him walking down the hallway, as if expecting his return. “We usually have dinner,” she volunteered. She shook out another cigarette. It dangled out the side of her mouth making her look like a drunken sailor about to order another Singapore Sling. When she turned back to Arn, her faraway look was replaced by one of desperation. “We have a good marriage,” she blurted out. “You and that Villarreal woman remember that in your reports to the public. Jefferson has never had an affair.”

  Pieter Spangler appeared, walking down the hall alongside a young nurse in blue scrubs. He saw Arn in the
doorway of the waiting room and waved. Adelle stiffened. She jabbed her cigarette in his direction. Ash fell on the carpeting, and she ground it in with her shoe. “That kid … you watch out for him. He’s creepy.”

  “He can’t be too creepy with that good-looking lady on his arm.” And creepy people don’t rise to become one of the region’s top architects, Arn thought.

  “He hung around with Gaylord. A kid!” Adelle’s voice was loud enough that nurses at the nurses’ station looked her way. “And he bought our old house after I moved out. What sicko would want to buy a house where a man hung himself?”

  Pieter stopped when he saw Adelle staggering toward the elevator. He bent and whispered something to the nurse beside him before they continued to the waiting room. Adelle dropped her cigarette into a Styrofoam cup and brushed past Pieter without acknowledging him.

  Pieter looked at Adelle as she waddled into the elevator. “Adelle doesn’t like me much,” he told Arn.

  “She’s got bad memories of you spending time with Gaylord, by the sounds of it.”

  “I spent time with all dad’s fellow officers.” Pieter turned up his nose at Adelle’s still-smoldering cigarette in the coffee cup. “As I recall, Adelle never had any use for Gaylord when they were married. No, what she’s mad about is that I bought that ratty old house of theirs for a song.”

  The elevator dinged and Pieter jumped, perhaps expecting Adelle to return. “Excuse my manners. Let me introduce my fiancée, Meander Wells. Meander, this is Arn Anderson.”

  “Pieter says you were a friend of his father’s,” Meander said, offering her hand.

  “A long time ago,” Arn answered.

  “After Gaylord died,” Pieter said, as if needing to clarify Adelle’s hatred, “she boarded up the house and moved in with Dr. Dawes. It was the very week after Gaylord’s death. She let the house go to seed, and I picked it up for taxes. That’s why she’s got it in for me. She thought it was worth a lot more because it was in that historic part of town south of the tracks the railroad used to own. Fact was, no one wanted a house where a hanging took place. Even if it was in a historic district.”