Peak Road - A Short Thriller (Jon Stanton Mysteries Book 10) (5 page)

10

I let Mickey sleep for several hours. After driving back toward Las Vegas, I found the town of Baxter about forty-five minutes away. At the movie theater, I bought a ticket to some science fiction movie, the only movie playing, and bought popcorn and a drink. The theater was dark and smelled stale. No one else was there, which was fine because that allowed me to think.

I thought, of all things, about Hanny and Julie, and I wondered what they were doing right now.
Probably running around on the beach after dinner.
The thought of her gave me something I hadn’t felt in a long while: butterflies.

I got a text from Mickey, saying he was up, and I left the theater and drove back to Peak Road. On the drive back through the thick woods, I stopped at the tollbooth, and a man stepped out and looked into my car. He had greasy hair that came down to his shoulders and a name tag that said Roger.

“You headed back in?” Roger asked.

“I am.”

“Ain’t talked to you and your friend. Where you guys from?”

“We’re just here helping out on something.”

“Them killings, ain’t it?”

I nodded. “Yeah.”

“Damn sad. I knew the Noels. Good family. They moved here ’bout five years ago and fit right in. Just a damn shame the Lord would do somethin’ like that.”

“It is.” I paused. “How long have you lived here?”

He smiled. “My parents were born in the hospital in Baxter, and so was I. Don’t see no reason to go nowhere else. People is the same everywhere.”

“They certainly are.”

“Well,” he said, tapping the roof of the car, “don’t forget about the curfew, and have yourself a safe stay.”

“What curfew?”

“The booth. We close up at nine. No one in or out.”

“No one can come in or out of the town after nine?”

“No cars can. This is the only road in.” He walked back to the booth.

The room Mickey got was on the first floor, and he was lying on the bed watching television. He turned it off when I came in.

I sat in a chair by the window. “Did you know this town doesn’t let any cars in or out after nine?”

“I did. It’s actually illegal to do something like that, but I think the sheriff and mayor were the ones that instituted it. Why?”

“Just seems like an odd quirk. I’m sure there’s people in the town that work elsewhere. What do they do if they have to work late?”

He shrugged and rose from the bed. “I don’t know. Maybe the locals know another way in.” He stretched his back. “I’d like to go visit the sheriff and look at the murder book for the Noels.”

“I thought you’d already have it.”

“No.”

“No one from the Bureau made one?”

“There’s no one from the Bureau here, Jon. It’s just us. Kyle let me know about this as a courtesy, but he didn’t send anybody out. Said the feds had no business getting involved unless they were invited, and we weren’t invited. It’s a bullshit excuse. He didn’t want to waste the manpower when Las Vegas Metro is a couple hours away. He wants them to take care of it.”

“Are they going to?”

“Far as I know, the sheriff hasn’t requested any help.”

I looked out the window. “She thinks she and her one deputy can handle this?”

“Appears so. How’d you know she only has one deputy?”

“I went and visited her. Not exactly the friendliest encounter.”

“Well, friendly or not, she’s got all the evidence. I’ll drive.”

When Mickey parked in front of the sheriff’s office, I turned to him and said, “We have somebody to visit tonight.”

“Who?”

“I met a girl who told me what the people here think about these killings. She says her mother would have more information.”

“What kind of information?”

“She says it’s a real werewolf, not a man. And that her mother has seen it.”

He didn’t say anything for a second. “Well, what else are they gonna think? It’s easier to explain it that way than one of their own doing this.”

“I don’t believe in ghosts and goblins, Mickey. I think few people in this town are going to open up to us, and this girl has offered to. We need to take her up on it.”

He shrugged. “Couldn’t hurt.”

We got out of the car and went inside. Kristen behind the desk had her coat on and was holding her purse.

“Sheriff here?” Mickey asked.

She sighed. “Hold on.”

This time, she called back on the phone, and Sheriff Briggs came out a second later.

“Sheriff, I’m Mickey Parsons. I’m a special agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

“Yeah, I figured. I met Hawaii Five-0 here already.”

“Yeah,” he said, glancing at me, “well, we need a moment of your time.”

“Where’s your badge?” the sheriff said.

I was surprised Mickey had lied. He wouldn’t have been allowed to keep his badge after he retired, unless it was a special retirement badge. But I had heard that like local law enforcement retirees, the retired agents often obtained replicas. I was expecting him to pull one out when he said, “Can we talk in your office, please?”

We followed the sheriff back to her desk and sat down across from her. The cluttered office had only a small window, which looked out onto the parking lot. A motivational poster with a kitten hung on the far wall.

“I’m actually retired,” Mickey said. “I was the original special agent on the Werewolf killings twenty years ago. I worked with another Sheriff Briggs then. Your father.”

She leaned back in the seat. “That so?”

He nodded. “And I seem to remember something about his oldest child who had just gotten a driver’s license for the first time while I was out here. I thought it was his son, but I guess he was referring to you. Your father was stressed about that.”

She grinned. “Yeah, he hated the fact that I could drive. Thought I’d go racing up the streets and crash into somebody. We get few accidents here, so I don’t know why he would think that.”

“You were his oldest child. Only a parent could understand something like that.”

She swiveled slowly in her chair, going one way a few inches then the other. “I’m guessing you’re here because of the Noels.”

“Why didn’t you call the Bureau for help?”

“Because you guys did so much last time?”

I watched Mickey to see if that stung, but he didn’t show any reaction.

“I did all I could last time. So did your father. We worked night and day, but there just wasn’t anything there. Forensics wasn’t what it is now, and for how brutal the killings were, the killer left little evidence behind.”

She sighed. “I know. My daddy always said that was the case that kept him up at night. He told me he knew it’d happen again. That someone that could do somethin’ like that wouldn’t just stop.”

“Is your father still around?”

“He passed three years ago.” She looked at me then back at Mickey. “I put in a request for help from Las Vegas Metro, if that’s what you’re wondering. They said they’d get back to me, and it’s been four days. I haven’t heard anything. They’ll probably get around to sending someone up here eventually.”

Mickey hesitated for a moment, keeping eye contact with her. He maintained his relaxed and open posture, showing her he had nothing to hide and was trustworthy.

“We’d love to take a look at what you have and see if we can help. The two people that know this case best were your father and me. If you don’t want the help, tell me now—and we’ll leave.”

She stared at him. A moment of silence passed between the three of us. I stared at the scar on her hand and couldn’t tell what it was from, whether it was a burn or a laceration. She gave me a look and angled the scar away from me.

“No, I want your help,” she said. “I’ll have Kristen give you what we have so far. The funeral was last week, and I ain’t diggin’ up those bodies, just so you know.”

“I wouldn’t expect it,” he said. “Thank you.”

“Save your thanks. I don’t think you’re gonna like what you see.”

11

The sheriff gathered everything her department had on the Noels’ case: one large murder book, along with keys to the home, which I had asked for. Mickey looked through it at the station, then we took the book and left. Since there was nowhere else to eat, we went to the diner.

It seemed that once darkness had fallen, the people in the diner had simply moved to the bar across the street. We nearly had the place to ourselves. Jennifer was gone, and only the cook and one server remained. Mickey ordered toast and coffee.

He began going through the murder book in silence, and as a courtesy, I let him.  The case was his, regardless of whether or not he still wore a badge. So I read articles in the
New York Times
and the
Honolulu Star
. I texted Jon Junior to see how he was—he responded much more reliably to text than a phone call—and he texted back that he was good. I told him I missed him, and he said he missed me, too, and that he wanted to come out to Honolulu for the summer.

After half an hour, Mickey closed the book. He sat in silence for a moment then pushed it over to me. “It’s the same. Identical in almost every respect. The forensic tech was a borrow from the Baxter PD and was decent, but not great. They did find some fibers on Mrs. Noels, enough that it indicates she was smothered with something. Didn’t die from it but had something over her face and mouth while he tried to rape her. Neither one of the other two families had that.”

I sat looking at the murder book.

“You’re not going to read it?” he said.

“I’m going to read it tonight. Somewhere else.” I checked the clock on my phone. “You coming to Jennifer’s with me?”

He nodded, sipping his coffee. “Chasing werewolf stories wasn’t exactly how I pictured my retirement.”

“Better than shuffleboard.”

Jennifer’s home was a one-story rambler in a neighborhood without a single fence. When the town was built, they probably knew nothing would really happen there and hadn’t seen the need for precautions like fences. After the original killings, I bet at least some people put up fences, along with alarms on doors and windows if they could afford them.

We parked on the street then crossed the lawn up to the door. I knocked and waited a few seconds before knocking again. Jennifer answered and smiled at me.

“Come in,” she said.

“This is Mickey.”

“Hi,” she said.

She led us into the living room where the furniture was covered with transparent plastic. A velvet painting of Elvis Presley hung on the wall, so large the frame nearly blocked the window. I knew I’d seen something similar but didn’t remember where.

“My mom should be out in a sec.”

We sat down on the sofa, and Jennifer sat across from us on a futon. She lit a cigarette and watched us.

“You don’t look like a cop,” she said to me. “You look like a beach bum.”

I grinned. “I guess I’m both.”

Her mother came out, wearing a thick sweater though it wasn’t cold. Without offering to shake hands, she sat down, took a cigarette out of Jennifer’s pack, and lit it. She took a pull and let the smoke out through her nostrils, just as I’d seen Jennifer do.

“Thank you for speaking with us,” I said, realizing I didn’t know Jennifer’s last name or her mother’s first name.

“Jennifer said I should. Don’t mean I’m gonna,” the woman said.

“Did she tell you who we were?”

“Cops. Same as the rest.”

“The rest?”

“Cops and reporters. One reporter came out some years ago and said he was writin’ a book ’bout the killings and would I talk to him. I said hell no, I wouldn’t talk to him. I don’t want my name in some book with that sick son of a bitch still out there. He said the man was probably dead ’cause it’d been so long, but it turned out I was right.”

“Your name’s not going anywhere. I don’t even know your name, and I’m fine keeping it that way. I just want to know what you saw. Jennifer thinks you may have seen something that could help us.”

She blew out a puff of smoke. “Yeah, I seen somethin’ all right.”

“What?”

She thought for a moment. “I was drivin’ to the store late one night. This was ’bout five or six years ago. Jennifer was sick, and I needed to pick her up some Tylenol. To get to the grocery store, you go up this little path through the trees and around. That’s the fastest way. So I did that.” She paused, playing with her cigarette. “It was dark even though the moon was out. I was goin’ through, and I seen somethin’ movin’ off to the side. Thought it was an animal or somethin’. Then my lights hit it. It weren’t no animal.”

I leaned forward, my elbows on my knees. “What was it?”

“It looked like a man but had fur. Brown-and-black fur. It was down on one knee and had a dead animal in its hands. A rabbit, I think. The rabbit had its throat bitten out. He dropped the rabbit and looked up at me… and I seen them eyes. I’ll never forget ’em. The eyes looked like a man’s eyes, but it weren’t a man. And they were so angry… just so angry.”

She seemed to zone out for a moment, then she blinked a few times and was back. She tapped her ashes onto a small plate on the coffee table. “Anyway, I hit the gas and flew past. I don’t think it followed me. But I ain’t never taken that path again. I go only on the roads now.”

Jennifer was staring down at the coffee table, a glazed-over look on her face.

“Could it have been a man wearing a suit?” I asked.

She shook her head. “It had blood on its mouth from the rabbit. Eatin’ it raw. I’m tellin’ you, it weren’t no man.”

“Have you ever seen it again?” Mickey asked.

She shook her head. “No. And I don’t want to, neither. I’ll tell you one thing though: they showed the photos in the newspaper of the Noels. Of Danny Noel, anyway. Looked the same as that rabbit.”

I glanced at Mickey, whose eyes were fixed on the woman telling the story.

Jennifer said, “I heard stories, too. People in school would talk about it. Couple of boys went hunting up there at the gorge, and they said they saw it, too.”

“Which boys?”

“Travis and Trent Erby. Travis lives in Vegas now, but Trent is still here. He lives with his parents.”

I made a mental note of the name, since I didn’t want to write anything down in front of them. “Can you think of anything else that could help us? Anyone we should talk to?”

Jennifer shook her head. “Most folks aren’t gonna talk to you about it.”

I took out my card, the one the sheriff had handed back, and put it on the coffee table. “If you think of anything, let us know. And thanks for speaking to us. I promise it stays in this room.”

Jennifer’s mother rose and said, “You ain’t gonna find it. And them families is dead. Ain’t nothin’ gonna bring them back. Revenge or justice, whatever, don’t do nothing for the dead.”

“No,” Mickey said, rising as well. “But maybe it does for the living.”