Page 80 of The Girl from Devil's Lake
“That little bitch,” Roper muttered. “Who knew she had a switchblade hidden in her damned boot? She cut the hell out of my arm. Bled like crazy!”
“So when we test the dried blood found on the hinge inside the knife, is some of it going to come back to you?” Joanna asked.
“Probably,” Roper said.
“Do you even know her name?”
“Who cares about her name? I called her Turtle River Girl, because that’s where I left her,” he said, “in the Turtle River.”
“Unfortunately for you,” Joanna said, “she wasn’t quite in the river, but her name was Amanda Hudson and she came from Devil’s Lake. She was twenty-one years old when you murdered her, but she’s also the reason we’re here today. When you shoved her head into the riverbank, you left your palm print on her glasses.”
Once again Joanna was gratified to see that Stephen Roper seemed astonished.
“I always wore gloves,” he blurted.
“Not that time,” Joanna responded, “and not when you drink Diet Coke, either. Ever hear about Trash DNA? This time we’re talking about a trash palm print, one we lifted from a soda can found in your trash. When we ran it through AFIS, it matched one found on Amanda’s glasses. It had been sitting in AFIS for decades, just waiting to take you down.”
“Crap!” Roper said.
And that’s how it went, in a marathon that started at 5 a.m. and lasted for the next three and a half hours. When Joanna brought out Michael Young’s evidence bag, Roper referred to him as Bandanna Boy. When she produced the one holding Inez Johnson’s squash blossom necklace, Roper reflexively covered the back of his handcuffed hand with the free one.
“I called her Reservoir Girl,” he said. “She bit me.”
“Bit you?” Joanna echoed.
“Damn right, she bit the hell out of the back of my hand,” he said. “The scar’s still there.”
Joanna wanted to say,Good for her, but not wanting to break the flow she refrained.
Roper acknowledged that the earrings and bits of jewelry and the class rings, too, most likely belonged to prostitutes, but he couldn’t recall where they were from or when he’d killed them. He also allowed as how the X’s in the margins of theRand McNallyhighway map in one of the bags belonged to unnamed prostitutes, ones who weren’t wearing jewelry. Ditto for the bags containing individual shoelaces. He acknowledged those belonged to kids and most of them elicited zero reaction, but not the last one.
“And this,” she said, laying out the one she suspected was from the most recent killing in front of him, “is no doubt the one missing from Xavier Delgado’s high-topped sneaker. It looks like the end of the shoelace has been dipped in ink. How come?”
“So I could tell the boys from the girls,” Roper replied with an indifferent shrug. “Boys’ laces got dipped. Girls’ didn’t.”
“But he’s where you screwed up, isn’t he?”
Roper said nothing.
“I have to give you credit,” Joanna allowed. “There are several reasons you got away with this for so long. For starters, no one believed that an eleven-year-old was capable of murder when you killed Lucille Hawkins. And leaving your victims in water of some kind usually took care of most physical evidence. So did wearing gloves. With the sole exception of the palm print in North Dakota, you usually left nothing behind.
“In addition your victims were almost always unknown to you. Stranger-on-stranger homicides are the most difficult ones to solve. The problem is, you knew Xavier Delgado, if not by name, at least by sight. And here’s the proof—the missing shoelace from Xavier’s high-topped sneakers, the very ones the kids from the migrant camp said he was admiring the last time they saw him.”
“All right,” he agreed sullenly. “The voices got to me.”
“Excuse me?” Joanna asked.
“You know, the voices inside my head. They were screaming for blood and I gave in and let them have it. I never should have.”
“Voices?” Joanna repeated.
“That’s what I said, isn’t it?” Roper asked irritably.
“Are the voices the reason you were shopping for an attorney who specializes in insanity pleas?”
“Probably.”
“So why are you confessing to me, then?” she asked.
