City of Dark Corners by Jon Talton (novels to read .txt) 📗

always in the bed next to her pillow.” She fussed around the room. “He’s gone!”

The killer took trophies.

* * *

Almost a month later, on Saturday, February 9th, he killed again. Dorothy Jameson was raped and strangled in a Spanish-colonial revival house on Taylor Street, a quarter mile from the first killing. She was an only child who lived with her grandmother, who was hard of hearing. The woman didn’t discover her body until the morning when Dorothy, usually an early riser, wasn’t already up.

Some elements of the crime were identical: The sock in her mouth, nightgown pulled up, and bedding folded. He came in by an unlocked bedroom window. The second victim was a redhead, although not a natural one. Dorothy had small firm breasts and delicate, “cute girl” features like Edna Sawyer. She had the same cross carved into the small of her back.

But the evidence revealed some differences, too.

He took more care and time with the assault. The girl’s wrists were tied with rope to the headboard. The rope strands were cut to exact lengths and brought by the killer, as was the sock. Perhaps the gash he received in the first attack made him want to restrain the victim. Had he spied on the house to know the grandmother was nearly deaf, thus giving him more time for the attack? Her legs were raised and knees bent with her feet on the mattress, as if he arranged her that way after the rape. This time he didn’t have to worry about being overheard by parents and siblings.

Dorothy had a cat that slept with her. Her grandmother said she always kept her door partly open so the animal could come and go. But Dorothy’s door was closed and the cat was hiding under a chair in the living room. The killer somehow immobilized the girl, or she was a hard sleeper, then shooed away the cat and shut the door. This was the second victim whose family didn’t own a dog. Did the killer know this in advance? Of course he did. He reconnoitered his targets.

Unlike the first scene, where the ground below the window was covered with grass, the Jamieson home had a flower bed. We were able to get a clean cast of a footprint, a tennis shoe or sneaker, size eleven. Don guesstimated that the wearer was a well-built man, at least a hundred-eighty pounds.

When I went through the bedroom with Dorothy’s grandmother, a pair of the girl’s knickers was missing. So was a stuffed animal, a puppy with a red ribbon around his neck. I also went carefully through the girl’s diary, but it gave no clue that she was afraid, being stalked, or had enemies.

The postmortem was similar to the first victim. Genital bruising and bleeding, slow strangulation by a man with strong hands. It was possible she was raped and then killed. But the doc’s comment, once again, about the penetration occurring along with choking her to death stayed with me. “Maybe it’s the only way he can maintain arousal and orgasm,” he said. “Characteristic of a lust murder.”

Dorothy was another straight-A student at Phoenix Union High, a clarinet player in the band, member of the pep club, popular. She was sixteen, a year behind Edna Sawyer. Interviews with her friends indicated that she didn’t know Edna, didn’t have a boyfriend. She was hoping to attend the University of Arizona.

Once again, detectives talked to neighbors, who saw and heard nothing. They hadn’t seen any peeping Toms, and the police call logs backed that up. Another roundup of potential suspects went nowhere, either because of alibis or the most promising ones failing to break under heavy interrogation. One whacky who was familiar to us came in to confess. But he didn’t know even the basics of the crime, especially the parts we held back from the press: taking trophies, the penknife cross, and tying her hands with ropes. I sent telegrams to Tucson, Los Angeles, San Diego, and El Paso, asking if they had anything similar. Nothing close came back.

As for the rope lengths and sock, they could have been purchased anywhere. The shoeprint matched a Converse, but that was available in at least a dozen or more stores. Fingerprints from the second house produced no suspects, although they did match the ones from the windowsill of the first murder. It was the same killer, not a copycat.

As with Edna, though, it was as if she had been murdered by a ghost.

Now the city fell into a panic. People started locking their doors and windows, calling us to report “suspicious” people walking down the streets—even though none of them turned out to be potential suspects. Neighborhoods demanded more streetlights. We put more officers in University Park, especially at night, both uniformed and plainclothes. Overtime wasn’t an issue. I was going on three or four hours of sleep a day.

Arizona was only a generation removed from the frontier, less than twenty years from statehood, so many people owned guns. More folks purchased them from gun shops and pawnbrokers, whether they knew how to use them or not. One woman in University Park fired her shotgun at a neighbor taking out the trash one night, sending him to the hospital with a few pellets of buckshot in his backside. The newspapers and radio played it up, while the city commissioners demanded an arrest.

But we had nothing but clues that led to dead ends.

* * *

Don was focused on pervs and peeping Toms, but I wasn’t sure. Muldoon interviewed all the teachers the two girls had, turning up nothing but squarejohns and proper matrons. Navarre, not surprisingly, rousted Negroes in Darktown. We spoke with every relative and friend of the two girls, then went back and did it again.

I started compiling lists of janitors and maintenance men at the high school; short-order cooks at nearby restaurants, especially the Nifty Nook right across the street; and workers at other nearby businesses. People who would see the coeds.