Vengeance Road

by Rick Mofina

  No one knew the truth about Clydell Rudd.

  Vida didn’t care. She put no stock in childish folklore. She wanted to be sure Eva and her kids were all right. That’s what you did out here, where living could be hard with men who couldn’t understand a woman’s heart.

  Vida took stock as the Rudds’ ranch house with its peeling paint came into view. Their battered green Dodge was there all right, but no clothes were pinned to the line.

  Odd.

  With five children, you could count on Eva and the girls doing a wash every day.

  Norris halted the truck, shut it off, got out and released a whistle that normally summoned the dogs.

  Nothing.

  The chickens seemed agitated, clucking up a storm in the coop. As Vida approached the house, the air felt wrong, like something had been taken. The front door was open, swaying and creaking, as if beckoning Vida to continue.

  Or warning her to turn right around and go home.

  “Eva?” Vida called. “Clydell?”

  No one responded.

  Three fat mice darted out of the house, over the threshold.

  “Anybody home?”

  Nothing.

  Passing through the door, Vida and Norris met a wave of foul air.

  “Whoa,” Norris said.

  As their eyes adjusted to the light, they moved through the small living room. Vida’s calls filled the quiet. Nothing seemed out of place but for the stillness. It was too quiet, as if all life in the house had stopped.

  Then they heard the humming.

  Vida and Norris exchanged a glance.

  As they approached the first bedroom, the humming grew louder. Norris pushed the door open wider and they saw the source of the sound.

  Vida’s scalp tingled.

  Norris felt the little hairs on the back of his neck stand up.

  Flies encased the two figures on the bed.

  Vida’s first thought was how they looked like macabre scarecrows hastily assembled by a lunatic.

  Reddish-brown matter laced their wide-eyed faces and upper bodies so that Vida could barely identify them as belonging to Clydell and Eva. Splatters and ribbons of blood cascaded down the wall above the headboard and streamed down the painting of the Rockies that Eva had treasured.

  “Jesus H. Christ!” Norris said the same way his father cursed.

  Vida covered her mouth with both hands in time to stifle a sob.

  Moving to the next bedroom, they found the three youngest girls in the same manner lying in their small beds. A little rag doll stared back wide-eyed from under the arm of one.

  Vida gasped as they moved down the hall to the littleloft with the bed where the thirteen-year-old boy, Deke, slept.

  It was empty.

  No bloodstains. Norris touched the sheets. They were cool and dry.

  “Deke!” he called, moving quickly to seize an iron poker.

  There was no response as they moved on to the last bedroom, the one used by the two older girls. The smell and the scene were the same. It was as if pails of red paint had been hurled in anger at the two young women and the walls surrounding their beds.

  “Look!” Norris pointed.

  One of them seemed higher in her bed, seemed to rise and fall as her body trembled. Norris spotted an extra arm, hand, another pair of eyes staring back.

  Someone was under her—alive!

  “It’s Deke!”

  The Rudds’ only son had survived by hiding under the corpse of his murdered sister.

  In the aftermath, it seemed that the world had descended on the Rudd place north of Brooks.

  First came members of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police arriving out of nearly every detachment from Calgary, some eighty miles west, and Medicine Hat, about the same distance east. A team from the Calgary Medical Examiner’s Office arrived, then forensic experts. Then came reporters from the big newspapers and radio stations in Calgary, Toronto, Vancouver, even the United States. And the wire-service syndicates sent correspondents. Their first reports brought the public, who drove in from Edmonton, Red Deer, Swift Current, Winnipeg, Montana, North Dakota and Minnesota.

  They had to see.

  7 Family Members Slaughtered

  Boy, 13, Survives by Hiding Under the Dead

  The press left within days of the funerals, which were even more heartwrenching because not a single relative of the Rudds, on Clydell or Eva’s side, attended.

  They had no other family.

  Vida Selkirk wanted to take Deke into her home but they couldn’t afford to raise him. The law made him a ward of Alberta’s social services, which set out to find him a home. In the time after the tragedy, caseworkers got Deke counseling and helped him to help the Mounties investigating the case.

  “All I remember was noises and shadows. Then it got all quiet. I got up and went to each bed. I shook everybody, tried to wake them before I knew they were all dead. My mother, my sisters. I got scared. The dogs run off. I was alone. I was the only one left. I thought whoever done it was coming for me. So I hid under my sister and played dead until somebody come to help.”

  The investigators held the theory that the killer overlooked Deke because the boy slept in the loft, which could be easily missed in the dark.

  They showed him pictures of the escaped killer from Stony Mountain, who was still at large. Deke could not identify him.

  “It was dark.”

  The first reports on the death toll were wrong.

  While Deke was the only survivor, not every member of his family died that night. Tilley Rudd, his oldest sister, thought dead, was found to be alive when help came. She was taken to the hospital in Calgary where she slipped in and out of a coma before she died of her injuries.

  Given the circumstances and publicity of the case, many people wanted to give Deke a home. Ultimately, quickly and with no publicity, he was adopted by an American pastor and his wife living in Brooks at the time.

  “Hello, Deke, my name is Gabriel Styebeck,” the pastor said.

  He was a tall man with a beard like Abraham Lincoln’s and a face so stern he looked to be hurting when he smiled.

  “This is my wife, Adolpha. We’ll be your new mother and father.”

  Adolpha nodded and cupped Deke’s face in her hands.

  They were ice cold, like those of his dead sisters.

  A few months after the Styebecks adopted Deke, they moved to Texas, near Lufkin. They sent Deke to a special bible school, where male instructors would hit him with a yardstick when he failed to learn Scripture. He wanted to drop out and fight in the war, like some of the older boys in town, but it never happened.

  After he graduated from high school, Deke moved out on his own and got a job with the state of Texas as a corrections officer in Huntsville. It was the perfect job for him, for he would secretly scrutinize the case of every inmate he encountered, vigilant for any chance, however remote, that he might find the one who’d murdered his family.

  Like his father, Deke kept to himself and was a bachelor for several years until he couldn’t live with the loneliness anymore. So one night he got up the nerve to go to a summer social near Trinity. There he saw a young lady standing against the wall. He smiled at her, told her she was pretty and asked her to dance.

  Her name was Belva Denker.

  They began dating.

  Belva was a schoolteacher. Her father, a farmer, had been killed when his tractor rolled on top of him. And her mother had passed away two years later. Belva taught elementary school and lived alone in a room downtown where she dreamed of having a family.

  Deke wanted a family, too. Like Belva, he felt alone and they made each other happy. He was the only man who’d asked her to dance, the only man who’d ever smiled at her and told her she was pretty.

  Deke told her how he was orphaned at the age of thirteen after a stranger had come into his family’s home and murdered his father, mother and five sisters. The killer had never been found. Deke told her about his secret search fo
r the killer.

  Belva believed in his cause but never realized its intensity until he took her swimming and she saw the words tattooed across his back.

  “And I will execute great vengeance upon them with furious rebukes,” she read aloud.

  “It’s from Ezekiel,” he said.

  Belva traced her fingertips over the words. Awestruck, she regarded Deke Styebeck as a warrior against all the bad in this world. Her hero.

  A year after they met, they were married.

  After several years, Belva gave birth to their first child, a son.

  Karl Styebeck.

  Two years later, during a difficult delivery that nearly killed her, Belva gave birth to a second son.

  Orion Styebeck.

  They lived a quiet life on a farm in a wooded, secluded tract outside of Huntsville.

  During that time, Deke was promoted to a post on the prison’s execution team where he took great pride, some said pleasure, in escorting men to their deaths….

  “Excuse me, Mr. Styebeck? You can see Alice now,” the nurse said.

  “Will she be okay?”

  “She’s groggy, but she’ll be fine. Her heart rate is normal and all of her vital signs are normal.”

  “Thank you.” Styebeck embraced the positive news.

  He’d use it to prepare for the battle of his life.

  28

  Jolene Peller’s silver cell phone sat in front of Anthony Sloan.

  Its fading power light pulsed like a telltale heart.

  FBI special agent Ron Garvin and New York State investigator Mike Brent faced Sloan across the polished table in a brightly lit meeting room of the FBI’s new Las Vegas Field Office, near Martin Luther King Boulevard. The building’s air-conditioning system hummed.

  Sloan was sweating.

  “Where’s Jolene Peller?” Brent asked.

  “I told you, I’ve never heard of her.”

  “When are you going to tell us the truth?” Brent asked.

  “What about you? You show up at my hotel, flash your badges, ask me to come here to help you on some urgent matter,” Sloan said. “I cooperate fully. Let you look through my things. But for the last hour you refuse to tell me what this is really about.”

  “You know what this is about, Tony,” Brent said.

  “The phone?”

  “You see,” Garvin said, “with that kind of phone, when it’s on and roaming, we can pretty much get a location, which led us to you.”

  “How did you get the phone?” Brent asked.

  “I told you, I picked it up somewhere by mistake. It’s identical to mine.”

  “Identical?” Garvin placed a slimmer black phone on the table in front of Sloan. “That’s your phone, Tony. No resemblance.”

  Brent’s forefinger jabbed the silver phone.

  “Jolene Peller is the owner of this phone. She’s a single mother, from Buffalo, New York, and she’s missing. Her disappearance is tied to a homicide in Buffalo. You’re a mechanic from Illinois, in Las Vegas, making calls with a missing woman’s phone and lying to us.”

  Sloan swallowed.

  “You hear that, Mike?” Garvin said. “I think Tony’s sphincter just tightened.”

  “Where’s Jolene Peller?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Brent put Jolene’s picture in front of Sloan, who shook his head.

  “I swear, I don’t know who you’re talking about.”

  “Why did you call Karl Styebeck’s home?”

  “Who’s he?”

  Brent put Styebeck’s picture in front of Sloan.

  “This phone’s been used to call Karl Styebeck’s home in Buffalo. How do you know him?” Brent asked.

  “Never saw him before in my life. Never heard of him.”

  Brent nodded and considered another avenue to the truth.

  He paged through his notes and a file folder of documents the FBI had faxed him before he and Esko flew to Nevada on a bumpy late-night flight out of Buffalo via Detroit.

  “Bet you consider yourself a successful man, respected in the community,” Brent said.

  Sloan didn’t answer.

  “Started as a mechanic, now you own a six-bay shop in, where is it again?” Brent asked.

  “Naperville,” Garvin answered.

  “Naperville. Worked hard to build your business up from nothing, I bet. You come to Vegas this week to meet some buddies and to have a good time. You make some calls, a couple of 900 numbers.” Brent scanned a page. “We got all the calls here.”

  Sloan was silent.

  “Your wife’s a teacher. Your daughter’s a Girl Guide. Son’s in Little League. You help coach his team, you said on the ride over.”

  “Sounds like you’re living a nice life there, Tony,” Garvin said.

  “But that little ditty about what happens in Vegas staying in Vegas,” Brent said, “ain’t true for everybody. Now I want you to give it some thought. Try to envision how it’s going to play with your wife, your kids, your business when it gets out in Happyville that the FBI has charged you—”

  “Charged me? With what? Using a lost phone?”

  “When the FBI charges you with obstruction of justice and it gets in the Happyville Times that Tony Sloan got himself mixed up with this missing single mom in Buffalo.”

  Brent slid Jolene Peller’s picture closer to Sloan. Next came Bernice Hogan’s college ID.

  “And tied to this woman who was murdered. Horribly murdered.”

  Next came crime-scene photos of Bernice’s body in the shallow grave.

  “Christ!” Sloan looked away. “This is some mistake. I’ve never been to Buffalo in my life! I don’t know this woman.”

  “Then tell us how you got her phone!”

  Sloan held back.

  “How did you get Jolene Peller’s phone?”

  “I took it.”

  “From Jolene?”

  “No. No one. It was just left and I took it.”

  “Where? When?”

  “At a truck stop, just before I flew here. I was driving to O’Hare. I needed gas and filled up before I parked at the airport.”

  Brent took notes.

  “After I filled up and paid, I went to the head and there it was. Someone had left the phone on the shelf over the sinks. Must’ve forgotten it.”

  Sloan gazed down at it on the table.

  “No one was around. I picked it up and was going to the office to turn it in when I got a stupid idea. Why not keep it and have some fun? So I did. On an impulse I brought it with me to Vegas. Turned it on, made some calls. I was going to leave it in the john at McCarran. I don’t know anything about those people you’re talking about. That’s the truth, I swear.”

  “Be more specific about the truck stop,” Brent said.

  “It was the Thousand Mile Truck Stop, where I-294 meets the Ike, near the turnpike by the North Avenue West Lake area.”

  “Did you see Jolene Peller or Karl Styebeck at the truck stop?”

  “No. How would I know if I did? I don’t know these people.”

  “Did you pay for your gas with your credit card?” Brent asked.

  “Yes.”

  Garvin slid a pad and pen to Sloan.

  “Write down everything—dates, times, credit-card number. Give us a full statement about how you obtained the phone and used it,” Garvin said.

  A large two-way mirror filled the wall at the end of the room. It was connected to an unseen darkened office. Inside, FBI special agent Reba Jensen worked at a computer checking information arising from Sloan’s interview. New York state investigator Roxanne Esko worked alongside her, talking softly on a telephone and making notes.

  When Sloan completed his statement, Brent and Garvin joined them in the office. The two men talked over the phone to FBI agents who were on-site in Illinois at Sloan’s auto shop and to those en route to the Thousand Mile Truck Stop. Brent and Garvin also talked with police back in New York State.

  During the next three hour
s the team of investigators corroborated Sloan’s account. And they confirmed that for the period of time between Bernice Hogan’s disappearance and leading up to her murder, Sloan was in Naperville.

  He was driven back to his Las Vegas hotel without being charged.

  In Chicago, FBI agents set out to intensify their investigation on the Illinois truck stop to determine if Jolene Peller or Karl Styebeck had been there, or find out who may have left her cell phone in the men’s washroom.

  At 11:45 p.m. that night, a twin-engine MD-80 lifted off from Las Vegas bound for Chicago with a connection to Buffalo. Once the jet leveled, Brent fell asleep while Esko switched on her laptop.

  She spent a long time staring at a picture of Bernice Hogan and thinking about the horror they’d found near Ellicott Creek. She was meticulous as she updated Jolene Peller’s file, reminding herself to check with ViCAP. When she’d finished, she went back to the phone.

  How had Jolene’s phone surfaced in a Chicago truck stop? Who called Styebeck? Were they going to find the corpse of another young woman?

  Esko was exhausted.

  She put her work away and stared out beyond the starboard wing.

  29

  Jack Gannon needed a job.

  It was the only way he could break the Styebeck story.

  But the woman who answered his third call of the day to Kirk Tatum, assistant managing editor for the New York Daily News, didn’t care.

  “Yes, he’s got your messages from this morning, Mr. Gannon.”

  “I can freelance a major exclusive on the unsolved murder of a nursing student. I have inside information. The story will have national interest.”

  “So you told us. One moment.” Gannon heard a keyboard clicking above the newsroom clamor. “Kirk sent something, here it is. He said he was sorry about your situation at the Sentinel. A damn shame, he wrote here.”

  “He knows about that?”

  “Apparently. He also said that he can’t accept your freelance offer. His budget’s tight and he has no openings for reporters as these are tough times for newspapers.”