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

Grace nor Ben came home by nine on Tuesday night, as agreed, her parents notified the police. Because of the letdown the night before, headquarters was short-staffed, the desk sergeant made a report and said he would send a car to interview the parents—but somehow it never happened. A fight in the Deuce distracted the patrolmen on duty. As McGrath said sourly, “The right hand didn’t know what the left hand was doing.”

Ben Chapman, seventeen, varsity athlete, choir member, was the prime suspect. That certainty, borne of desperate policemen, wasn’t dimmed when Ben’s ’28 Buick was found parked outside the Arizona Citrus Growers warehouse on Jackson Street an hour later. But it was not to be. Two hours after Grace’s body was identified by her parents, Ben Chapman was found bludgeoned to death out in the county, inside an orange grove. Mexican farmworkers discovered him. He was beaten badly. Don guessed a baseball bat. His hands were tied behind his back with rope.

As in the prior cases, Grace had been viciously raped and strangled, her underwear taken. But the killer had more time with her: She was not only tied up with a rope, but also with barbed wire. Her body had multiple cigarette burns. Her bottom had been whipped with a belt or whip, hard enough to leave bruises and bloody welts.

The pathologist guessed she was first bound with rope, perhaps at the same time as her boyfriend. He was a well-built young man, so it raised the possibility the two had been forced to give in at gunpoint. Then the killer made Grace tie up Ben, and she was restrained by the killer. As always with victims, they held out hope: “This is only a robbery. He’ll let us go if we do what he asks.”

The fingerprint tech went over Ben’s car, and the latents were sent off to the FBI. Victoria took photos of both scenes.

Here the evidence petered out into our speculation. Did the killer take them both somewhere and force the boyfriend to watch as he tortured and raped Grace? Then what? Beat Ben to death before her eyes, finish her off, and leave her in University Park? Then dump his body outside the city limits? Quite a night’s work and plenty of risks of being discovered, but possible. Frenchy raised the possibility of two killers, one following the other, who drove Ben’s car. Then both could make a quick escape.

The heat came quickly, from the city commission, the chamber of commerce, the newspapers, and two sets of well-connected parents. It came from inside headquarters, too. Three members of the fifteen-man Hat Squad had daughters around the age of the strangler’s victims. Senior patrolmen and sergeants, too. And those weren’t shy about voicing frustration and recriminations.

On Thursday, a typed letter came, addressed to the Chief of Police Matlock:

The Phoenix Police can’t solve the greatest crime ever to hit our city. Doesn’t speak well for your new city hall and police headquarters building.

It’s me, you clowns. I’ll get your tiresome little hidden tricks out of the way: I take their knickers and stuffed toys. I use a sock to keep them quiet. I carve my brand in their backs. I used barbed wire on the latest girl.

Believe me now? I am HIM.

You thought you had me all figured out. So predictable, you flatfoots. But I nabbed two lovers this time and had my way with both of them. Took them to my lair, isn’t that what the reporters will call it?

Made him watch while I did things to her. Nice and slow. Made her watch while I did things to him while he cried and pleaded, then killed him. Then it was only us. I was naked and bloody. She was screaming and begging right to the end. Nobody could hear her. I delivered her body to the neighborhood like the morning newspaper.

Speaking of THAT…I’m sending a copy of this letter to the papers and radio stations.

I’ll kill again and you can’t stop me. It will be worse every time.

Given the specifics, this letter was definitely from the killer. The paper contained no fingerprints. Chief of Police Matlock succeeded in getting every news outlet to spike the letter. The one exception was the Los Angeles Examiner, owned by William Randolph Hearst. It printed the letter in full, headlined: FIEND OF PHOENIX SPEAKS!

We didn’t have time to deal with the reporters. This was the donkey work of being a detective. In addition to making another run at the neighbors around where Grace’s body was dumped, the farmworkers who found Ben, and family members, we spoke to everyone conceivably involved. Ticket girls, ushers, concession-stand workers, and the manager at the movie theater. Identified the last ones to see them alive and correlated these witnesses against the same for the previous victims.

Yet it produced no suspicious matches. People at the movies that night came forward, but they didn’t notice anything or anyone unusual. Again: Teachers and friends at Phoenix Union High were interviewed. We tried, unsuccessfully, to match the barbed wire that had been used to wrap around Grace Chambers’s wrists.

Tips came in by the scores, and we had to run each one down to its inevitable dead end. Then turn it over to another detective for another try. Four goofies and hopheads came forward to confess. None possessed the information we held back from the newspaper reports, but that still meant hours in the new interview room, plus printing them to compare against the existing evidence.

I took the letter to the chief apart sentence by sentence, word by word. “Talk to me, you bastard,” I said under my breath. The person who wrote this was either the killer or intimately knew him, was an accomplice. Very confident. “She was screaming and begging right to the end. Nobody could hear her.” That indicated an isolated location or a soundproofed room.

I made notes. What did we know? All the victims went to Phoenix Union, none to St. Mary’s or the