Page 81 of The Girl from Devil's Lake
“Because I didn’t want to go through all that hoopla. I’m a private kind of person.”
“Is that why you killed Marliss Shackleford? Was she intruding on your privacy?”
“She’s the one who let me know you were on to me,” he admitted finally. “With her out of the way, I thought I might still be able to get away.”
“Well,” Joanna remarked as she began gathering the evidence bags and loading them back into the box. “You were certainly wrong about that, so what are you planning on telling your attorney when he gets here?”
“What do you think I’m going to tell him?” Roper snarled. “I’m going to say, ‘You’re fired.’”
Chapter 46
Bisbee, Arizona
Saturday, December 9, 2023
When Joanna left the interview room, she wantednothing more than to go home and take a shower. After spending three and a half hours locked in a room reeking of evil personified, she felt completely depleted. She was stunned by the callous disregard Stephen Roper had exhibited toward his victims. His chilling lack of empathy combined with his mentioning having voices inside his head might be indicative of mental illness of some kind, but as far as she was concerned, even if Stephen Roper was crazy as a bedbug, that didn’t give him a get-out-of-jail-free card, not on her watch.
It wasn’t yet nine o’clock in the morning, but she felt exhausted. She was tempted to go home and crawl back into bed, but that wasn’t an option. Instead she returned the banker’s box to its proper location in the evidence room and headed for her office.
Since it was Saturday, the place was relatively deserted. Feeling the need to get away from Roper’s all-encompassing darkness, she walked past Kristin’s empty desk and through her own office without even pausing. Letting herself out through her private entrance, she spent the next half hour pacing the parking lot under a bright blue sky while breathing in the brisk December air. Eventually she began to feel better.
Listening to the gut-wrenching confession had cleared six homicides, including one that had never been regarded as a homicide in the first place. But all those other evidence bags in the banker’s box meant that there was still more work to do—starting with that stack of as-yet-unreturned calls. Rolling up her mental shirtsleeves, she prepared to make that first phone call, but one from Butch came in first.
“Where’d you go at o-dark-thirty?” he asked. “Who’s dead?”
That was what middle-of-the-night phone calls usually meant in Joanna’s life—a homicide had most likely occurred or maybe a serious-injury automobile accident.
“Roper was demanding to see me because he wanted to confess.”
“Confess?” Butch repeated. “I thought you said he had an attorney coming.”
“He did and probably still does, but he changed his mind about talking. It was a three-and-a-half-hour ordeal of sitting with someone who, to my way of thinking, is the devil himself. He talked about murdering people as casually as you might mention running into someone at the store, and he did so without a shred of remorse. I’ve met a few killers in my time, but Stephen Roper is an absolute monster.”
“Are you okay?”
“I am now. Well, better, maybe. I took myself outside for a walk. Now I’m back in the office. By my count, that meeting with him cleared six cases, but there are still more unsolved ones than there are solved.”
“So you’ll be working today?”
“Seems like.”
“Me, too,” he said.
Off the phone, Joanna reached for the stack of messages. The topmost one was from Robert Moody, the sheriff of Elko County, Nevada. He had given Kristin both a work number and a cell phone number. Since this was Saturday, Joanna tried that one first.
“Sheriff Moody,” he answered.
“This is Sheriff Joanna Brady returning your call. I’m sorry I couldn’t get back to you sooner,” she added, “but yesterday was a pretty hectic day around here.”
“No problem,” Moody said. “That happens. About your BOLO, though. We’ve got a cold case from 1981 that fits your criteria—manual strangulation, no sign of sexual assault, disposal in a body of water, and something missing from the deceased.”
“Tell me,” Joanna urged.
“Name was Janice Jensen. Her daddy, Arthur Jensen, was sheriff at the time she disappeared. She was eighteen years old. She had just graduated from high school and was working nights at the bowling alley here in town before heading off to the University of Nevada in Las Vegas in the fall. The family lived on a ranch a ways out of town. When her parents woke up in the morning and discovered she hadn’t come home, they went looking. Found her car broken down on the highway a couple miles from home. There was no sign of a struggle in the car. She just vanished. A week later her body was found dumped in a dry creek bed about thirty miles from here.”
“You seem to know a lot about it,” Joanna observed. “Were you part of the original investigation?”
“Me?” Sheriff Moody replied with a laugh. “Hell no, I was only in kindergarten at the time, but since her daddy was sheriff, you’d better believe this case is still open. When your BOLO came through, our cold case guy was all over it. We both spent all day yesterday reading through the file.”
