Dumping Grounds (Joshua Stokes Mysteries Book 1)

Dumping Grounds

Dumping Grounds

Lila Beckham

Lila Beckham

Copyright © May 2013 Susan C Beck

All rights reserved.

ISBN-10: 1490367209

ISBN-13: 978-1490367200

DEDICATION

In Memory of Harold, Herman, & George, My Three Daddy's

Prologue

Emma Marie Carr was young, but she had had her fill of lies and disappointment. She knew how quickly childhood hopes could be squashed.

They were as easily squashed as a cockroach skittering across the floor of her ramshackle dwelling.

Her beloved family had once again fallen apart. Happiness and faithfulness, simple words, but their true meaning was an illusion that faded as she matured.

Emma had seen the end of the rainbow. It had shone brilliant and colorful in her backyard one rainy afternoon as the sun peeked through the clouds and the rain slacked to a mist. There was no pot of gold waiting there. The rainbow had ended at the outdoor toilet.

Instead of a pot of gold, there was a hole in the ground surrounded by four walls, a filthy stinking hole full of piss and shit and maggots, not gold.

So far, finishing high school has been Emma’s greatest achievement and she was proud of herself, although her parents did not acknowledge the event as anything special. They were too involved with their lives to pay attention to hers.

Graduating meant she was no longer a child. She did not need other people to make her happy. She was a grownup; she could do as she pleased.

She had even gotten herself a tattoo to symbolize her graduation to adulthood. It was a small one, and she had kept it hidden from everyone, but it was a decision she had made entirely on her own.

Her mother and father’s divorce was final. Her father seemed happy as he collected his belongings from their house, even though her mother screamed, hollered and cursed at him the entire time he was there. The next day, they heard that he had gone off to Louisiana with the green-eyed Cajun woman he was seeing.

The divorce had left her mother bitter and wallowing in self-pity. She refused to take any responsibility for the breakup. What was worse, her mother, Pearl Stringer Carr, had gone back to drinking and lord knew what else.

Nowadays, Pearl spent most of her time in a honkytonk or at the new all night waffle house, chasing after men she thought were attracted to her. Good men did not want a drunk. They wanted a good woman with whom to share their good life. Emma had tried to tell her mother that, but Pearl just got mad and tried to smack her.

Emma knew her mother felt unwanted and unattractive since the divorce. She also knew that her mama did not realize how pretty she really was. If she would only straighten her life up, she could find another man to love her, probably, one that would even be faithful. However, Emma was tired of trying to rationalize her parent’s actions. She was tired of trying to look out for them, her brother, and sister too. She was grown now; it was time for her to start looking out for herself.

There was no way Emma could have known that her first expedition into adulthood would end as it did, nor that she would lie prone in a fetal position and cry for her mother to swaddle her in her arms just once more before she died…

Joshua Eugene Stokes is the Sheriff of Mobile County, and has been the last twenty years. He has endured years of servitude and sacrifice for his county; nothing has deterred him from his chosen profession.

In the 1950’s, he handled what the moonshine peddlers and rumrunners threw at him. He also managed to keep peace in his county through years of civil unrest and integration, preceding the Vietnam War.

In the 1960s, he helped squash the Ku Klux Klan’s vigilantism in his county. As, he hung on tight and rolled with the rolling tide during Rock and Rolls British Invasion, when Love-ins and Hippy Communes sprung to life all over the country.

Even all the commotion and bad publicity of Charlie Manson’s groupie being arrested in his county for her role in the murders of eight-month pregnant actor Sharon Tate, and the La Bianca family out in California ever gave him cause to question his profession.

He even managed to cope with a brief period of devil worshiping and grave robbing spawned in the early 70s, which he felt was a direct result of everything else young folks were experiencing at the time.

However, nothing in Joshua’s thirty years as a civil servant had prepared him for the current events taking place in his county.

Joshua Stokes loved his country and the great State of Alabama more than any other place in the world.

To him, it was still the South of “Magnolias and Moonlight,” depicted in novels he had read and in play’s he attended at the Saenger Theater with his mother.

He was born and raised in Mobile County; grew up hunting and fishing the deltas and swamplands of the lowlying region along the Gulf of Mexico.

Joshua knew the area like the back of his hand and he knew most of the people, by sight, if not by name. These were his people, his friends, neighbors, and kinfolks.

However, the girl lying naked and mutilated along the new interstate highway was one he could not recognize. She was nameless; worse than that, the girl was headless!

Hers was the fourth headless, nude, mutilated body found in the last four months along local roadways.

Moreover, due to the lack of evidence, it appeared the only hope he had to identify this girl, was a small, but unique rose tattoo. Would it be enough?

1

A rose tattoo

Early March 1976

Mobile Co, AL

Leroy Johnson stood frozen, his face a combination of utter disgust and disbelief, as he tried to comprehend what he saw lying in the tall grass.

Leroy could not take his eyes from the body.

Johnson had worked for Alabama’s Road and Bridge Department for 36 years, and in those 36 years, he had seen many things that common folk did not. He had found things too; things, such as money, jewels, and drugs, underwear and used condoms. One time, he even found an abandoned three-year-old child wandering along Highway 45 in Kushla, north of Eight Mile Bluff.

Working in the country as he did, Leroy had witnessed many mangled and flattened out critters along the roadways of Alabama, but nothing like this. This was the first time Leroy ever found a dead body.

Leroy could tell it was a woman, because of her feminine shape and appearance. She was a young woman by the looks of her.

Of course, he really could not be sure of her age because her most identifying feature was missing.

The woman’s head was gone, completely severed from her body.

Leroy stood there staring, trying to understand what had happened to this young white woman. In complete terror, he began to back away.

“Oh Lawdy,” he whispered, backing away, trying to step in the same tracks he had walked coming into the thick grass to take a leak.

“Lawd, please guide old Leroy’s feets. I don’t need no mo' troubles,” Leroy closed his eyes to stop the vision, but it would not go away.

Her left breast was gone, cut clean from her body. Her right breast partially removed. Leroy’s old eyes took it all in. The bite marks on her body and the smudged writing on her wrist. Then there was a red and black rosebud tattooed on her stomach below her bellybutton.

Her privates were cut up, same as her breasts. It looked as if someone had cut her down there too or maybe even, something worse.

Leroy did not want to think about the something worse or consider what else they might have done to her. Even though he had backed far enough away that he could not see the corpse clearly, he could still see the wounds on the woman’s body; they were seared into his mind.

Leroy intended to ease back out of the tall grass and pretend he never saw her, but after backing ten to fifteen feet away, he thought he saw her arm rise up.

Leroy freaked, tripped over his own feet and fell flat on his back. He began screaming and hollering for help. At first, he could not believe the hoarse screaming he heard was coming from his own throat.

Leroy’s head began to spin and his voice echoed through the bayou becoming fainter and then louder. Leroy’s old heart, felt it would explode!

Dense patchy fog hung low over the Tensaw River Delta of South Alabama, blanketing the Bayous of La Batre, Dauphine, and Grand Bay. The fog made it harder for Sheriff’s officers and other officials to see as they steadily eased their way into swamplands alongside the new would be interstate highway. It was nearly complete, except for finishing a few exit ramps, which was what Leroy Johnson was working on when he discovered the body.

The historic older route was now going to be called the “Scenic Route.” It snaked its way leisurely along South Mississippi’s picturesque coastline.

There were grand hotels with the finest chefs from around the world. Golfing, day cruises, fine dining, and beaches where folks could swim and sunbathe. Tourists could enjoy all of this, and in addition to the finest seafood in the world and all with an ocean view, they now had gamming within the Broadwater Beach Resort. The “Poor Man’s Riviera” was what folks called Biloxi.

The new road would connect Mobile to New Orleans, bypassing smaller towns and cities along Highway 90.

Many of Mississippi’s politicians were furious and had tried to maneuver the new route farther south, believing the newer highway would divert tourists straight into Louisiana.

If that happened, it would cut the economical throats of the smaller cities of Biloxi, Gulfport, and Pascagoula.

The highway 90 route could not be widened, historic homes and businesses sat along the north of it. The Gulf of Mexico was within a 100 feet south of it. Therefore, to make it agreeable to everyone, the committee settled on a route a few miles north of the older historic highway.

The searchers were looking for evidence left behind by whoever dumped the mutilated body of the young woman there. They were also searching for the remainder of the headless corpse.

Just across the Mississippi State Line from where the body was dumped, was the notorious Ala-Miss Club. It had already developed a seedy reputation in the few short years it had been in operation.

The club was a hangout for rough and tumble motorcycle riders and big-rig truckers that frequented the area. Weekends, the club drew large crowds of local honkytonker’s from both South Alabama, and Southern Mississippi, in addition to the folks traveling through looking for a place to cool their heels and wet their gullets.

Joshua Stokes dropped the microphone onto the seat of his patrol car and said, “Well, Cookie, I reckon we better start looking outside the county again.” A check of missing person reports in the county failed to provide any clues to the identity of the dead woman. Currently, no young women had been reported as missing.

“It appears we’ve become a dumping ground for a perverted killer,” the sheriff grumbled as he lit a cigarette and took a long draw. “At least this one has a tattoo, whereas the others had nothing. It may help identify her.”

“Yes, Sir, it’s different,” Elias Cook agreed. “I’ve never seen a tattoo of black rose like that before, have you?” Before Joshua could respond, he added, “If he didn’t want her identified, he could a carved it off like he did her titties. He’s a sick son of a bitch to do that to em’. They’re probably begging him to kill em, before he’s through carving em up like that.”

“Probably,” Joshua responded.

“No telling what they go through from the looks of all those bite marks,” the deputy shook his head while reaching into his back pocket for a comb.

Joshua Stokes watched as his deputy meticulously combed his hair. He slicked it back on the sides and then flipped the back into a ducktail. The Brylcreem in his hair, gleamed in the sunlight that had burned off the early morning fog and was bearing down on them.

Stokes thought his deputy vain, but to him, it seemed most youngsters were like that nowadays. He hoped he had not been the same when he was the deputy’s age.

“Yeah, Cookie, he’s a sick bastard for sure, but he’s a smart one too. It’s hard to identify a body with missing parts and even harder without a head. The head we found along here last year don’t match any of the bodies we’ve found so far; it was male according to the coroner.”

“There may be other heads along through here, Sheriff. A head is much harder to spot than a body is.

The gators and other scavengers in this swamp would tote a head off pretty quick, it being small,” the deputy speculated.

“That’s true,” replied the sheriff, not really wanting to discover if there were.

The sheriff was only a year away from retirement. The fewer cases he left open the better. To retire at 50, while he would still be young enough to enjoy it, was Joshua’s goal.

Joshua had already accepted there were several cases he would never solve. The headless female body from March of 1970 was one of them.

The body surfaced near Earlville, along the Escatawpa River, north of Mobile during the investigation of Willie Stringer’s disappearance.

They never found the head to the body, but they found Willie. Autry Reston, the husband of one of Willie’s girlfriends, had murdered him and then hid the body behind his house in Moffettville, west of Wilmer.

Along about that same time, a motor grader operator operating a grader near Dickson’s Corner, south of Mobile, found a badly decomposed head alongside a dirt road off Highway 90. The severe decomposition made identification impossible, and speculation at the time was that the motor grader might have unearthed an old grave, but that was six years ago. This has been going on a long time, he suddenly thought to himself, too damn long.

“I’ve been at this job for thirty years, Deputy Cook, and it never fails to surprise me at what some human beings are capable of” Joshua said quietly.

He would never forget how Willie’s insect infested, bullet-riddled body looked when he lifted the car hood off him out back of Autry’s house.

Willie Stringer’s murder was one of the most hate-fueled murders Joshua had ever witnessed. However, the murder of Willie’s wife Lacey, committed by the same man, was the most senseless. It was just plain pitiful and he wanted no more like it in his lifetime.

Willie’s body must have had fifty bullet holes in it, and Lacey, he reckoned he would never forget how angelic she looked sitting there, dead, in Hannah’s car.

Hannah was Willie’s sister. She and Lacey were searching for the absentee Willie when Reston ambushed them at the river and tried to kill them both.

Willie Stringer was a scoundrel, a womanizer who loved to drink and party. He was always fooling around with married women. He would disappear several days at a time, somewhere doing something he ought not be doing.

“Sheriff,” Deputy Cook said interrupting his thoughts, “With all these big rigs a running through here day and night, I’ve got to believe the perpetrator of these here murders has got to be one of them truckers.”

“Yeah, you’re probably right, Cookie. I don’t think it’s a local. At least it would surprise me if it was, but you never can tell. Whoever is killing them, is probably picking them up over in Florida or Mississippi, having his way with them and then dumping the bodies here.

There’s no telling about the heads, they could be anywhere between Florida and California.”

“Sheriff, the rose tattoo on the dead girl, you reckon we’ll have any luck tracing it down. A black rosebud with tinges of red around the edges has to be different,” Deputy Cook said, watching the coroner’s team moving the body bag onto a stretcher.

“Maybe we will, because it is different,” the sheriff replied, but he wished he did not have to worry about solving murders. He would much rather be sitting on a creek bank, a fishing pole in his hand; not having to identify someone’s wife, daughter, or mother.

He really disliked his job sometimes, but he knew it was what he was meant to do.

“I reckon I’m just getting too damn old for this shit,” he muttered, for about the fourth time that day.

“You’re not any older than my daddy is Sheriff. That ain’t old at all,” the deputy assured him.

Sheriff Stokes reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. He lit one, leaned back against his patrol car, and inhaled deeply. He released it slowly, watching the smoke float away.

“You heard anymore about those murders over the county line, Sheriff,” John Metcalf asked as he walked up to the sheriff’s cruiser.

John Metcalf was the new crime scene investigator for the county, a title that had began just for him.

“Naw, I haven’t heard anything, but I figured you’d hear about those Mississippi murders before I did. You running in the same circles as those fellers you went to that fancy college with, up there in Jackson.”

“No Sir, haven’t heard anything about it in a couple of weeks; but then again, I haven’t been home to see the folks. That is usually when I catch up with the gossip and the goings on around there.” John Metcalf was born and reared just over the Mississippi State Line, in George County, but he had attended primary and middle school in Mobile County, then high school over there.

Metcalf stood a moment waiting on the sheriff to say something or ask him a question, but the sheriff was just standing there smoking and staring out across the highway to the sagebrush-filled fields on the other side. Metcalf turned and took several steps toward his vehicle.

“It’s strange they’re killing men over there in Mississippi, and women here in Alabama, all killed in about the same fashion.” Stokes said idly.

“It’s really strange if you ask me,” Metcalf replied, walking back toward the sheriff’s car. He spoke humbly, saying, “Sheriff Stokes, it was just a regular college. It was not anything fancy. I wanted to be a Crime Scene Investigator. It was the only college offering classes in crime scene investigation.

I have to say though,” Metcalf grimaced, “None of the schooling I did prepared me for what I have to see and investigate out here in the real world.

Bloody, gory pictures and a few weeks at a body farm do not compare to this, at all,” the investigator exclaimed.

“Well, I’m sure we’ll hear something soon enough” the Sheriff said, taking another long draw off his cigarette, again, taking his time and releasing it slowly, as if he hated to get back to the job at hand.

“Yep, too soon I’m sure” Metcalf replied, gathering up his gear and looking as if he did not know which way to turn next.

“Looks as if you are dreading this as much as I am,” Sheriff Stokes said, dropping the cigarette butt to the ground. He stepped on it, mashed it down, and then twisted it into the earth with the toe of his boot.