Page 57 of The Girl from Devil's Lake
By Thursday of the second week, however, evidence of Xavier Delgado’s scratches had all but disappeared. So on this Friday morning, a still sleep-deprived Stephen Roper forced himself out of bed and got dressed, donning one of his bright pink shirts and his customary red-and-white hat. Today would be Señor Santa Claus’s first visit since Xavier Delgado’s murder, and Stephen was determined to put on a good face. The last thing he did before leaving home was pause long enough to check Marliss’s website. Had there been any new developments, she would surely have mentioned them, but there was nothing.
On that happy note, he went outside, fired up his truck, and headed off on his rounds, starting with the sandwich lady’s house. Señor Santa Claus left home convinced that, in spite of everything, this would be just another ordinary day at the Free Store.
Chapter 33
Bisbee, Arizona
Friday, December 8, 2023
On Friday morning, when Joanna staggered out ofbed and into the bathroom to shower, she’d had less than four hours of sleep. She had lain awake for hours, with her mind running a mile a minute. This was fast turning into the biggest case of her law enforcement career, but how the hell was she going to pull it off? In her years as sheriff, she had never felt the weight of that office as much as she did right now because this case involved so many people and carried so much heartbreak. How was it possible that Stephen Roper had spent decades masquerading as a normal human being while he was actually a murderous monster? And how could she and her department make sure that his reign of terror ended here and now without anyone else being hurt?
By the time she got to the kitchen, Sage and Dennis had already left to catch the school bus.
“I didn’t sleep very well last night,” she admitted as Butch handed her a cup of coffee.
“Oh really?” he returned. “Just so you know, neither did I. You tossed and turned so much that I was tempted to go sleep on the couch.”
“Sorry,” she murmured.
“Was it the case?”
Joanna nodded. The evening before and well out of the kids’ earshot, Joanna had told Butch everything that was going on, so at least he knew what she was up against.
“One way or another, the whole thing is going to come to a head today,” she told him. “Since Stephen Roper is someone who puts zero value on human life, I’m worried someone besides him will end up being hurt.”
“You may be worried about everyone else,” Butch said. “I’m worried about you.”
He offered to cook breakfast for her, but she declined. “I’ll stick to coffee and toast,” she said. “I’m not sure anything else would stay down.”
Finally, as she headed out the door, and just when it seemed things couldn’t get any worse, they did. In the garage, the right front tire on her Interceptor was flat as a pancake. Where she had managed to pick up that offending roofing nail was anybody’s guess. Naturally, Butch dropped everything and came out to change the tire for her, but by the time she left the house, she should already have been at the office. Then, when she reached the Justice Center, she had to drop the Interceptor off at the motor pool garage to have the flat fixed.
The shortest way to her office from the garage was through the public entrance, one she seldom used. One wall of the lobby was decorated with black-and-white photographs of Cochise County’s current and previous sheriffs. With a single exception, the others were male. In their official portraitlike photos, they all wore white Stetsons, and their facial expressions varied from serious to somber. Joanna’s photograph, on the other hand, and one her mother had begged her to change, featured a towheaded little girl with her hair in braids. She was wearing a Brownie uniform, beaming a toothless ear-to-ear grin, and dragging a wagon loaded with Girl Scout cookies.
Most of the time when Joanna saw that photo, standing in stark contrast to all the serious ones, she found it amusing. That Fridaymorning it wasn’t funny.Today that little girl is up against a deadly killer, Joanna thought to herself.Having a load of Thin Mints along for the ride isn’t going to do a bit of good.
Entering the building through the public entrance meant Joanna had to pass Kristin’s desk to reach her own. As she stepped into that secondary waiting room, Joanna was well aware that she was more than forty minutes late. Kristin had a phone to her ear. When she caught sight of Joanna, she gave her boss a scathing look and held up her hand in a traffic-stop gesture while saying into the phone, “She’s here now. If you don’t mind holding, Sheriff Brady will be right with you.” After pressing the hold button, she slammed the receiver back into its cradle.
“Who is it?” Joanna asked.
Instead of answering, Kristin went on the offensive. “What the hell did you do?” she demanded, holding up a handful of yellow message slips and passing them along to Joanna. “The phone has been ringing off the hook, and nobody’s bothering to go through the switchboard. Everyone in the universe seems to have your direct number.”
Joanna glanced at the topmost message. That call had come from someone named Ed Cox, in Fulton, Missouri. “Who’s this?” Joanna asked.
“Beats me,” Kristin replied tartly. “I guess you’ll have to call him back to find out.”
“And who’s on hold?”
“His name is Dan Hogan. I hadn’t gotten around to writing down his details when you came in. You’ll have to talk to him yourself if you want to find out.”
Once seated at her desk, Joanna paused long enough to put her purse in the bottom drawer before picking up the telephone receiver. “Sheriff Joanna Brady here,” she said. “To whom am I speaking?”
“Glad to meet you, Sheriff Brady. My name’s Daniel Hogan, but most people call me Dan. I’m a retired sheriff from Polk County, Minnesota. I started out there as a deputy, ran the investigationsteam for a while, and then served three terms as sheriff. Polk County’s pretty much off the beaten path. Not many homicides happen here, and the ones that do are usually cut-and-dried and end up being solved in short order. But we’ve got one unsolved on the books that happened just after I moved to investigations—a little kid named Brian Olson who disappeared from the Polk County Fair on August 19, 1961. His body was found three days later, floating in Arthur Lake. He’d been strangled.”
Joanna was taken aback to realize that the detective assigned to the case remembered the exact date of the crime more than sixty years later. And hearing him mention the commonalities with the cases Joanna already knew about was enough to take her breath away. A moment passed before she could respond. “Was he fully clothed?” she asked.
“Yes, he was still dressed in his Cub Scout uniform. Paulette Hansen, his den mother, had taken her troop of boys to the fair. Somehow Brian got separated from the group and simply vanished. Poor Paulette never got over it. She blamed herself for his death. When she committed suicide a number of years later, she left a note that was primarily a letter of apology to Brian’s folks.
“The thing is, as lead detective on that case, I never got over it, either. Even now that I’m retired, I make it a point to drop by the department each year on the first day of the fair to take a look at the file, although my eyes are getting so bad I don’t know how much longer I’ll be able to keep that up. Anyway, I’m enough of a pest about it that, as soon as your BOLO came in last night, Elmer Pollock, the current sheriff, gave me a call. He also gave me your phone number.”
