Vengeance Road

by Rick Mofina

  “I’m so sorry. I tried to call you, Mom. I’m doing my best.”

  Jolene crying.

  Mary reaching out, aching to hold her.

  “Oh honey, that’s okay. You’re here. You’re safe.”

  Jolene shaking her head.

  “I’m not, Mom. I lost it. Help me find it.”

  “Find what, sweetheart?”

  “My locket. I can’t find my locket. Mom, I’m so scared!”

  “I’m right here.”

  Mary reaching out.

  To nothing.

  Screams pierce the night.

  Mary Peller sits bolt upright, her heart pounding.

  Cody is standing next to her bed in the soft light, wide-eyed.

  “I miss Mommy.”

  Mary takes her grandson into her arms, holding him tightly to keep both of them from falling off the earth.

  44

  The jet’s wing tipped slowly, giving Jack Gannon a spectacular view of Calgary, a city of one million nestled in the foothills of the Rockies.

  It was dusk.

  Once he landed, he rented a compact car then checked into the Radisson, near the airport, where he’d reserved a room.

  “We have a package and a message for you, Mr. Gannon,” the clerk said.

  It was a brown envelope thick with files, old clippings and yellowed typed notes. The message was from Ross Sawyer.

  Welcome to Alberta, Jack. Thought you’d like to read these over before we head out in the morning. My daughter will drop me off at your hotel at 8:00 a.m. as we discussed. I’ll be wearing a navy windbreaker. This old reporter is always ready to chase a good story. R.S.

  Gannon ordered a cheeseburger from room service and ate while working. Sawyer’s files included articles on the murder, isolated societies, psychology, and theories about the killer.

  In the morning Gannon didn’t recognize Sawyer in the lobby. With his thick white hair, rugged features and trim build, he looked like a man closer to sixty-five than eighty.

  They took the Trans-Canada Highway east, with Sawyer telling him about regional history during their two-hour drive.

  “Drive several more hours east into Saskatchewan and you’ll come to the spot where Sitting Bull led his people into exile after Little Big Horn.”

  They cut across gentle hills that soon flattened to the horizon for as far as Gannon could see.

  “I called Lorne Macdonald like you suggested,” Gannon said. “We’ll meet him at the detachment and he’ll take us out to the house.”

  RCMP sergeant Lorne Macdonald was dressed in jeans and a plaid shirt. He was an imposing man close to retirement who gave Gannon a crushing handshake. Brooks was a small prairie city known for agriculture, gas and oil, he told Gannon as they got into his unmarked Chev.

  “Beyond town there’s not much,” Macdonald said.

  The geography outside of Brooks was an eternal rolling treeless plain. After following a ribbon of paved highway with next to nothing in sight, Macdonald turned onto a dirt road to nowhere.

  “These are service roads for underground gas and oil operations,” Sawyer said.

  Macdonald had called the gas company that now controlled the land under “the old Rudd place.” The manager had OK’d a visit. Dust clouds rose behind them, as if taking them into another realm, another time, Gannon thought.

  It’s like this part of the world’s been forgotten.

  After twenty minutes the skeletal remains of a dilapidated ranch house came into view as Macdonald brought his car to a halt.

  Overgrown dry grass laid claim to the place now, left empty and neglected for decades.

  “Hold it,” Macdonald said as Gannon approached the yawning doorway. The Mountie tossed a couple of rocks that thudded into the empty house.

  “Might be coyotes.”

  An owl lifted off through the window.

  The place reeked of mouse and bird shit, wind buffeted against the loosened boards of the ramshackle walls. Gannon had a good idea of what had transpired here in 1937, but walking on the creaking floorboards, in the steps of a mass murderer, brought it all to life.

  As they went from room to room, Gannon envisioned the carnage.

  “After it happened, no one ever lived here again,” Sawyer said. “I think the mattresses and furniture were burned. People were spooked.”

  They entered the last bedroom, at the end of the hall.

  “This is where they found Deke, hiding under his dead sister,” Macdonald said. “I’ll tell you what my dad told me about this case a month or so before he died.”

  Gannon nodded.

  “Not all of this is in any file. And since everybody involved is now dead, it’s really a matter of history.” Macdonald said the case had haunted his father.

  “He had several theories about what happened. The Rudds were killed with an ax. The doors were never locked, so anyone could have entered easily. One theory was that a stranger, possibly a convict who’d escaped from Stony Mountain in Manitoba at the time, was responsible. The convict was looking for food or money and murdered the family.”

  The speculation was that young Deke survived because he slept in a loft and was missed.

  Deke Rudd was traumatized. Over several interviews, he said that after he’d gone from bed to bed and discovered his family dead, he’d hid in fear underneath one of his sisters.

  “It explained the blood trails, the blood on him and his clothing, and his condition,” Macdonald said.

  The murder weapon was never located. The suspected escaped convict was arrested in Quebec and it was determined that he’d never set foot in Alberta. The killer of the Rudd family had never been found.

  An unknown and disturbing element concerned the eldest Rudd sister, who, contrary to press reports, had survived in hospital for a few days before she died of her injuries. The Mounties kept her survival secret, hoping to obtain information from her that would help them find the killer. Half of her face had been severed from her skull. She was medicated and emerged periodically from her coma to give a hazy, piecemeal deathbed account.

  “My dad interviewed her and she revealed to him that Deke was not her brother, but her son,” Macdonald said.

  “What?” Gannon said. “And that was never made public?”

  “No,” Macdonald said. “She told my father that Clydell Rudd abused all of his girls, said the Bible gave him dominion over his women. Some of them had babies by him, but the babies, all girls, died and Clydell just buried them at night somewhere out on the land. Deke was the only boy.”

  “That’s incredible,” Gannon said.

  “Clydell Rudd was an evil, evil man,” Sawyer said.

  “He said he’d kill his daughter if she ever told anyone about the abuse and that she would burn in eternal flames,” Macdonald said. “She thought that young Deke had overheard her arguing with Clydell one day and learned the terrible truth about who and what he was.”

  Even at Deke’s age, he probably reasoned that his parentage was wrong. “That’s what my father figured,” Macdonald said. “The girl told my father that Deke had grown sullen and withdrawn. It gave her reason to believe that Deke had learned what most of his family knew.”

  “What was that?” Gannon asked.

  “That they lived with the devil.”

  Sawyer said that he’d researched the subject of incest and found that inbreeding was common in small, isolated communities and cultures.

  “In some cases, there was no impact on health, but in others, there were terrible health problems, including some theories that inbred offspring were susceptible to catastrophic psychiatric problems.”

  “Such as Jekyll-and-Hyde behavior?” Gannon asked.

  “Who knows for sure,” Sawyer said.

  “You said your father had several theories about what happened?” Gannon said to Macdonald.

  “My father’s second major theory in the Rudd massacre was that young Deke Rudd had murdered his entire family.”

  Gannon w
as stunned.

  “And,” Macdonald said, “given what he knew of the case, my father came to believe it was the most likely scenario.”

  The wind moaned through the gaps of the death house as Gannon absorbed the revelation and its impact on his story.

  This was the gene pool from which Karl Styebeck had emerged.

  45

  The day after Zachary Miller found the victim, her corpse lay under a tissue-paper sheet on a cold stainless-steel tray in the autopsy room of the district coroner’s office in Wichita.

  Detective Candace Rose looked upon her.

  For Rose, this woman was more than her first homicide. Judging from the little face in the locket, she was somebody’s mother.

  For a heartbeat, Rose thought of her own children.

  “Ready?”

  Coroner Russell Pratt and his assistant, Nancy Treggo, adjusted their aprons and surgical face shields as they prepared to begin the procedure.

  Rose and her partner, Lou Cheswick, were also gowned and protected with gloves, surgical masks and face shields.

  Rose was no stranger to the aftermath of death: bodies entwined with the twisted metal of car wrecks; bloated weeks after drowning; burned beyond recognition; people reduced to brain and viscera splattered on living-room floors and bedroom walls.

  And the worst of them all: babies, the corpses of babies. The little ones who never had a chance.

  That was what she’d seen as a street cop and it forged what she knew: that death, the great equalizer, was now her formidable foe.

  Rose braced to look upon her Jane Doe.

  This was her first homicide case but not her first autopsy.

  She was acquainted with the room’s chill, familiar overpowering smells of ammonia and formaldehyde. The victim had already been washed, weighed, measured, photographed and x-rayed.

  “Go ahead,” Pratt nodded to Treggo, who slowly drew back the sheet.

  Rose’s nostrils flared, her breathing quickened.

  She stared at what was on the table: an act that had obliterated the barrier between what was human and what was depraved. For, this woman had not been murdered. She had been destroyed.

  The mutilation had rendered her face unrecognizable.

  Treggo removed the brown paper bags around the victim’s hands, and fingernail scrapings were collected before taking fingerprints. Pratt inspected the arms, wrists and hands for any signs of defensive wounds. Pratt and Treggo were meticulous.

  Then they moved on to the internal examination.

  Pratt made the primary Y incision as he proceeded.

  As they worked, Pratt spoke aloud for the overhead microphone recording the process, pausing occasionally to consult a plastic-covered clipboard. At times, when Pratt exchanged observations with Treggo, Rose heard terms like subclavian, femoral, clavical and femur.

  They were nearly finished and reviewing aspects when Treggo’s brow wrinkled. She concentrated on the woman’s forehead.

  “Wait, Russ.”

  Treggo spotted something amid the network of abrasions that laced the victim’s flesh, something she’d missed. A jumbled line of letters below the hairline had been carved into her skin.

  A white-gloved finger pointed to the word they spelled.

  “See that?”

  Pratt and Treggo invited Rose and Cheswick to move closer and Rose read the word.

  GUILTY.

  After finishing, Rose and Cheswick deposited their gowns, gloves and masks in the trash. They got some fresh air then joined Pratt in his corner office of the Sedgwick County Regional Forensic Science Center.

  It was spacious and neat with a number of thriving ferns and a pleasant scent of potting soil and coffee. Rose detected a hint of cologne as Pratt typed at his computer keyboard finishing his preliminary report.

  His printer hummed then he passed copies to the detectives.

  “Let’s go through it,” Pratt said. “You have a white female. Five feet five inches. Approximately twenty to thirty years of age. One hundred twenty pounds. Brown hair, blue eyes. No confirmed identity.”

  “We have this.” Rose presented a color page of an enlarged clear photo of the locket. “She was clutching this locket in her left hand.”

  “So noted,” Pratt said. “And Nancy’s taking care of the prints for you.”

  “Thanks.” Rose opened her notebook. “We’ll run those through AFIS.”

  “And,” Pratt said, “I’ve got a forensic odontologist coming in. He’ll help prepare a dental chart for a comparison.”

  “DNA?” Rose asked.

  “We’ll start a kit for the DNA database, but it’ll take three or four weeks before they process our submission. The fingerprint database might be faster for identification.”

  “What can you say about cause, time and location?”

  “Indications are that the decedent died where she was found, within thirty-six to forty-eight hours prior to discovery.”

  “And the cause?”

  “As for cause, the decedent suffered tremendous blunt-force trauma to the entire body and head, something consistent with a heavy metal tool such as a pickax. In my estimation the dece—” Pratt stopped, removed his glasses. “In my estimation, this woman suffered approximately sixty to seventy blows, half of them piercing her body. It would have caused massive hemorrhaging that would have been fatal.”

  The silence that followed Pratt’s assessment may have been a moment of respect, but it allowed Rose to catch up with her note-taking before Pratt continued.

  “No defensive wounds were evident. Markings on her wrists and remnants of duct tape suggest she was bound. We should have more on stomach contents, toxicology and other analysis later.”

  Rose looked out Pratt’s large window toward the University of Kansas School of Medicine before releasing a flood of questions.

  “Why the overkill? What am I supposed to make of his message? Guilty. Who is guilty? And guilty of what?”

  “I’m not a profiler,” Pratt said, “nor an expert in criminal psychosis. But I would think it all has to do with his fantasy, or maybe diminished mental capacity. Perhaps he’s under the influence. The savagery and the ritualistic display could mean he’s on a mission and the message is his signature. Or perhaps I’m completely wrong. What do you think, Lou?”

  Cheswick had said little because beneath the surface he was seething at the violation. Furious at the arrogance, the indignity of this killer.

  “Don’t worry about the hows and whys, they’ll only divert you,” Cheswick said. “We find out who she is, how she got there. We work the case and we hunt the animal down. Because this guy’s out of control. He’s right off the chart. I’m sure as hell he’s done this before and I will bet you my pension that he’ll do it again.”

  46

  That afternoon, Rose and Cheswick joined grim-faced detectives at the City Building downtown for the first case-status meeting.

  Investigators from several agencies settled into high-backed chairs at a large table in a sixth-floor meeting room of Wichita’s Homicide Section.

  Rose cleared her throat.

  “We have the ritualistic mutilation murder of an unidentified white female discovered yesterday by boys playing at Clear Ridge Crossing. You all have copies of the coroner’s preliminary report.”

  Rose typed a few commands into a laptop keyboard and an aerial image of Clear Ridge Crossing surfaced on the big screen reaching down from the ceiling at one end of the room.

  “I’ll summarize the case. Could someone dim the lights, please?”

  Rose clicked through large, crisp photographs of the massive new subdivision, the crime scene, the victim and pictures taken by the coroner.

  Profanity rippled around the table.

  “Identification is a challenge,” she said. “We’ve obtained her fingerprints and run them through AFIS. So far we’ve got nothing. They’ve had technical problems with their mainframe and will run them again.”

  Questions came to her
from the dimmed light.

  “What about clothing? A wallet, shoes, jacket?” a detective asked.

  “Nothing like that was recovered.”

  “Time of death?” he asked.

  “It’s estimated she was murdered at the scene thirty-six to forty-eight hours before Zachary Miller found her. We’re hopeful we can also obtain a dental chart for comparison.”

  “Was she sexually assaulted?” another detective asked.

  “No.”

  “What about traces of alcohol, controlled substances or medication? Any impairment?” someone asked.

  “Toxicology results are still coming.”

  “Says here the injuries are consistent with a pickax?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Art,” Rose said to the Wichita detective who’d led the team that canvased contractors and workers on the site. “Anything come up with the canvas?”

  “No, ma’am. Nothing specific.”

  “Anybody see or hear anything that might help us?”

  “Nope. The job site has a lot of traffic from builders, suppliers, workers, subcontractors. Lots of trucks coming and going from all over. And it’s easily accessible to the Kansas Turnpike. Some folks said out-of-state long-haul truckers will arrive at all hours and park overnight in that area waiting to be offloaded in the a.m.”

  “What about in that particular area and the scene?” another detective asked. “Did CSI get casts from tires, or footwear?”

  “They did, and we’ll use them for comparison,” Rose said.

  “Start a second canvas,” the Captain said. “And let’s get a list of all suppliers. Use it to build a pool of everyone who ever had access to that site. We’ll cross-reference vehicles to the tire casts, get employee lists linked to the vehicles, and driving and criminal records. That’s one avenue.”

  “We’ll also run it against the registered-offender database,” Cheswick said. “Our guy could’ve somehow got off on his act.”

  “What about DNA?” asked an investigator.

  “The coroner has started a kit and will work with you to submit it to CODIS,” Rose said. “And we’d like some help checking all missing-person cases in Kansas and beyond, see if Jane Doe fits with any.”