Page 47 of The Girl from Devil's Lake
Driving back to the Justice Center, Joanna was still disappointed, but she was also grateful. Thanks to Dave Hollicker, she hadn’t made a legal blunder that might have allowed a child killer to walk free.
Joanna made two calls on her way back to the Justice Center. The first was to Arturo, telling him sorry, but the whole deal was off. The second was to Casey Ledford.
“Tell Dave he was one hundred percent correct, and that I’m sending him a big thank-you,” Joanna told her. “That whole warrantless search thing sounded like a good idea, but whatever evidence was found would have been thrown out as a violation of his constitutional rights, so I guess we’re getting nowhere fast.”
“Not entirely,” Casey told her. “I just got word that Stephen Roper does indeed have a Waste Management account. His garbage pickup is scheduled for Wednesday morning.”
“So tomorrow night you’ll have someone there to grab his trash the moment he hauls it out to the street?”
“Absolutely,” Casey replied. “My wiseass partner has already volunteered to do the job.”
At four that afternoon, Joanna went to the conference room for her previously scheduled press conference. It wasn’t well attended.None of the Tucson papers or TV stations bothered to send reporters or camera crews for a dead body in a flooded river sixty miles away. Roy Huggins, a reporter from theSierra Vista Daily, was on hand, however, and so was Marliss Shackleford. They were it.
Joanna’s comments were brief and to the point. “DNA results from the State Department of Public Safety have now confirmed the identity of the homicide victim found in the San Pedro River in St. David on Saturday afternoon. His name is Xavier Francisco Delgado, born in Naco, Sonora, on October 14, 2019. His mother’s name is Elena Maria Delgado, also of Naco, Sonora.
“The ME’s autopsy has ruled that the cause of death is asphyxia and his manner of death is homicide. Detectives from the Cochise County Sheriff’s Department are investigating. That’s all I have to say at this time.”
Before Joanna could make an exit, Marliss’s hand shot into the air. “How did the victim end up in the river?” she asked. “Did he just wash up from Mexico, or was he placed in the riverbed somewhere on this side of the border? Do you know where any of this happened?”
“We have yet to identify an actual crime scene,” Joanna replied.
“So you don’t actually know if he was murdered in Mexico or the US?”
“As I said, we have not established where the death occurred.”
“I understand his mother is...well, let’s just say on the colorful side and might have friends or associates who aren’t exactly on the up and up. Is it possible that she or one of her several boyfriends might be involved in Xavier’s death?”
Obviously Marliss had been nosing around enough to know exactly how Elena Delgado earned her living.
“At this point everyone’s a suspect,” Joanna said, even though that wasn’t true. As far as she was concerned, Elena had been ruled out as the perpetrator almost immediately.
“In other words,” Marliss said, “you and your people have made zero progress.”
“And I have no further comment at this time,” Joanna said. “Have a good day.”
With that, she turned on her heel and left the room. It was a good thing, too. If Marliss had asked one more question, Joanna might well have bitten her head off.
Chapter 23
Bisbee, Arizona
1977
Having grown up in a small town, Stephen settledinto life in Bisbee with no difficulty. Initially he was regarded as a “good catch” as far as single males were concerned, and people from both church and the school district tried to fix him up with available women. He made it plain to his would-be dates that he just wasn’t interested. Eventually, when people started listening to that new radio program calledA Prairie Home Companion, he was jokingly passed off as one of Garrison Keillor’s “Norwegian bachelor farmers.” That seemed to do the trick, and people finally got the message.
From the beginning Stephen maintained that he stood with one foot in Bisbee, Arizona, and one in Fertile, Minnesota, claiming that during the summers he would need to head home to help with the upkeep of the family farm. Eventually people got used to that idea, too, teasing him about his being less of a local and more of a snowbird. It didn’t matter what they called him, as long as they didn’t hassle him about being gone.
Of course the family farm story was entirely fictional. After leaving Fertile, he never once returned to his hometown for a visit, but claiming to go there gave him good cover. While people imagined he was in Minnesota staying with family or friends, he was actuallyon the road, doing his thing. And how could he afford all that traveling on a teacher’s salary? He couldn’t have, not on his own. But the truth is he had plenty of money.
The lady tellers at the First National Bank branch in Bisbee’s Bakerville neighborhood were the only people in town who really knew how much he was worth, but between the money his mother had left him and the continuing stream of investment income from Gramps’s holdings, Stephen’s financial situation was just fine and dandy, thank you very much.
For his travels Stephen favored the blue highways he found in the most recent edition of theRand McNally Road Atlas. He ordered the new edition every April so it would be in his hands by the middle of May. Those less traveled roadways led him to places where law enforcement was thin on the ground, making it easier for him to get away with murder.
His 1977 road trip netted him two kills. One was a teenager riding a bicycle on a farm road a few miles outside Fulton, Missouri, just before noon on a Saturday morning in June. He sideswiped her bike, knocking her to the ground. She was easy to overpower and didn’t put up much of a fight. When Stephen was done and went looking for a trophy, there was nothing to be found—no jewelry or barrettes—so he settled for one of her shoelaces. He called her Farm Girl. Afterward, he threw both her body and her bicycle into a nearby reservoir. Then, driving sedately, and without ever traveling through Fulton itself, he left both the scene and the area. By the time Lucianne Highsmith’s worried mother called the Callaway County Sheriff’s Department at four o’clock that afternoon to report her daughter missing, Stephen had already checked into a hotel room in Springfield, Illinois, four hours away. The body was found days later. No suspects in Lucianne’s homicide were ever identified.
After that, with the voices quieted for a while, Stephen took a few things off his bucket list. He drove up to Chicago and took in a Cubs game, then he traveled along the Great Lakes, including theUpper Peninsula in Michigan, and, finally, went east to Niagara Falls. He drove at a leisurely pace. After all he had the whole summer to spend. Eventually he made his way to New York City. No, he did not revisit Coney Island, but he stayed in town long enough to take in a couple Broadway shows—Jesus Christ SuperstarandMan of La Mancha.
Then he headed west again. Tired of being on the road, he made it as far as Gunnison, Colorado, where he rented a cabin on the Gunnison River and spent a relaxing month fishing (fishing always reminded him of the good times he had spent with Gramps) and reading through the shelfful of paperback books—mostly mysteries and westerns—that had been left behind by previous guests.
