Authors: Robert W. Walker
She went for the elevator, feeling Max's eyes on her, curious or sympathetic, most likely both. She also wondered at the creeping inchworm of doubt that suggested that Max or Stu or any number of people she saw on a daily basis in the building could have had something to do with frightening the hell out of her and Byron the previous night. Foolish thought, she reasoned, but when the elevator door opened, she had to smile at four people exiting the building who smiled back, all long-term tenants save one, the newest face in the building, a petite but buxom young girl in jogging suit, her Jack Bull terrier straining at his leash as they exited the elevator.
"Morning."
"Morning."
"Morning."
"Morning."
They all sounded genuine; they all looked harmless enough. They all also had heard something about police and a coroner's van having descended on their condo homes. She could only imagine the buzz at the next owners association meeting.
How much did her neighbors know? How much had Max already revealed to the people living in the building? Who was that new girl? What'd she do for a living? Wasn't there some association rule about dogs in the building when she had bought into her condo? What had happened with that?
The elevator doors closed on Meredyth, and she found herself alone with all the dizzying bombardment of questions and the whirring vibration of the cab ascending to her floor. "Who's wanting to make me fear my own neighbors?" she asked aloud.
She arrived at her floor, glad to exit the confining cab and briskly walked to her door. But she was stopped on seeing a note tucked beneath the knocker. It made her pause.
"Likely just a concerned neighbor," she told herself. She stepped up to the door and snatched the note open.
It was from Byron. A note of apology. Said he'd been back to look in on her. Felt panicked at being unable to reach her by phone. Tried her parents' house in Clover Leaf. When that failed, tried driving out to Lake Madera to the ranch house getaway, but car threw a gasket. Repair took hours. Returned here by cab, knocked knuckles raw. Gave up. Again sorry for rude behavior in having abandoned her when she most needed him. Signed By.
"Fuck you, Byron," she replied, pushed the door open, and stepped into her home.
The message light on the phone blinked so rapidly it seemed to be screaming at her. Byron, no doubt.
As she changed, she thought of how best to break it off with him. What she really wanted to break off, however, would get her jail time.
ONCE AT HIS Precinct 31 basement office, Lucas Stonecoat found his wide oak desk as cluttered as ever with pending caseload work—Houston criminal cases gone unsolved for generations, known as cold cases. Cold casework had become Lucas's expertise, as he had spearheaded tracking the backlog for a decade now. When he had first come on as a Cold Case detective, he'd found the basement offices here a cluttered library filled with dust- laden files and boxes bulging with the murder books on people whose often violent and mysterious deaths had gone unanswered and untangled. Confronted by whole walls from floor to ceiling filled with files Lucas had transferred to computer disks. The old files themselves were in the process of being destroyed, most already at the city dump incinerators, but one murder file had intrigued Lucas, had in effect called out to him, and so he had set it aside, saving it from destruction. Its uploaded counterpart on the computer screen didn't have the same aura of spirit surrounding the hard file and the actual crime-scene photos, only three of which could be transferred to the database, that number having been agreed upon by those in charge in order to save on memory.
Lucas had stockpiled hundreds of murder-scene photos dating as far back as the 1890's with the intention of creating a publishable book with comments on each photo from a forensic photographer—Perelli, a forensic shrink— Meredyth, and a murder cop—himself. But the project had bogged down as all of them were kept so busy in their respective fields, and while Lucas himself dealt with overseeing the enormous task of transferring hard files to disk. While he had a crack team of men and women under his direction who worked independently and well without a lot of supervision, the Cold Room created its own steady stream of work-related headaches.
Lucas had been assigned the Cold Room files from the moment he had walked into Precinct 31, and he had made the task his own, coordinating with every precinct in the city to create a database of Cold Cases for use across the city, the state, and the nation. While the COMIT program had limitations, he had had the files cross-referenced with Detective Jana North's Missing Persons division. She had unsolved cases dating back to the 1920's. She'd admired what he had done with the Cold Case murder bonks, and now she was coordinating MP files in other jurisdictions with her own, modeling the COMIT in her area of expertise. Other cities, across the state and the nation, had begun to fashion similar programs after the Houston model, and as a result, Lucas had often been called away to assist in developing those programs. Even the FBI had taken an interest in COMIT, giving Lucas an opportunity to visit Washington, D.C., and to meet such luminaries as the Director of the FBI and forensic guru Dr. Jessica Coran.
Even more impressive, Dallas, his former home and police department, with which he had parted on very bad terms, had put in a request for his help after all these years. Dallas PD had refused to pay him compensation for the injuries he'd sustained when he and Wallace Lafayette Jackson—both off duty at the time—had given chase after a young Hispanic-black hellion who had been terrorizing the city with a robbery spree growing increasingly violent. They'd expected the robbery spree to escalate to murder at any time. Jackson had been driving, and when they cornered Elzono, Jackson's car careened into the suspect's car, the impact setting Jackson's car ablaze. Jackson was shot and slumped over at the wheel as Lucas leaped from the fiery vehicle, returning fire under a hail of bullets from Elzono. Lucas killed the young man, later made into a saint of the neighborhood, Hector "Malcolm X" Elzono, who, after seeing the movie and reading the book, had proclaimed himself, "The reincarnation of Malcolm, returned from Hell, ready to set this world on fire, man!"
All bullshit, as Elzono's interpretation of X and his Muslim teachings was as perverted as the teachings of A1 Quaeda.
Jackson, hit in the chest, was enveloped in smoke and flame and burned alive while Lucas fought to pull him free of the inferno, Elzono still shooting and laughing at the sight. Finally, Lucas's aim sent Elzono to his grave, and with Elzono shot dead, Lucas tried even more desperately to pull the trapped Jackson from the flames. Lucas burned his hands, arms, cheek, and neck in the failed attempt. He had also been hit by bullets, and had suffered head and internal injuries in the crash. Lucas would spend almost a year in rehabilitation while fighting for compensation from the Dallas department.
Dallas's Internal Affairs jumped on the alcohol content in Lucas's system, and that in the seared body of Jackson as well. Following policy, the department denied benefits to either man, and Lucas wound up suing for both himself and for Jackson's family. He won his case only after years of struggle and condemnation on both sides. Lucas had had to start over in Houston, but not as a detective. He'd had to prove himself over again, starting from the bottom rung as a new recruit, and even after beating these odds and overcoming his physical problems, still Houston PD, remembering Dallas, placed him on desk duty here in the Cold Room. However, Lucas had not let the desk ride him. He pursued cold cases with the vengeance and tenacity of any competent detective pursuing a murder, disregarding the negatives, and as a result, he spent as much time on the streets, tracking criminals, as any detective on the force. His aggressiveness had earned him the respect of others, commendations, and a gold shield—reinstatement as a murder cop, a detective. He had made the best of it, and now he ran the place, having solved more cold cases than anyone in the history of the room, surpassing even the fabled Detective Maurice Remo, who had run the CC room for thirty years, retiring as Lucas had come on.
Given his bad history with Dallas, he understood why HPD brass had placed him on unsolved cases. They wanted to keep him off the streets, and they fully expected little of him beyond keeping the records tidy. The idiots had no idea how Maurice Remo and other good CC cops operated. After the grueling hours on the phone, running down people who were often in geriatric care or even dead, a Cold Case cop had to commit to a theory like a Jack Bull terrier sinks his teeth into it, and this meant hitting the pavement, ringing doorbells, interviewing, cinching a lead, following up, locking on, arrest, and interrogation—the entire gamut of the hunt.
The brass hadn't expected the Indian Cold Case worker to know anything about computers either, but again they were wrong. COMIT was a program he instituted with the help of able others. Even the FBI were now modeling their unsolved backlog storage program on the COMIT model.
Lucas thumbed open the old dusty file that had caught his attention: a skimpy murder book on a young girl named Yolanda Sims, just turned nine years of age, the picture of an angel in 1956—the year of her death. She had been found with a scarf tied tightly around her neck, and the assumption of death by manual strangulation after being tortured, beaten, and raped by some fiend had been dismissed by the pathology report made out by a Dr. Wisniewski, who signed off as Wiz. The strangulation with the scarf came after death by internal hemorrhaging from the beatings about the head and abdomen. The odds of her killer being found alive today were slim at best, but the girl remained un avenged, and the eyes in her photo struck Lucas to the core, asking, "If the monster is alive, he has enjoyed fifty years of life that should have been mine. So what're you going to do about it?"
The odd features of the crime itself posited few clues. She had sawdust in her natty hair and over her nude body. Aside from a closed adult fist, a carpet layer's nail-filled wood stripping had been used in beating her. She had cigar-sized, round bums on her legs and arms from a large soldering iron—said Wiz. She had been brutalized with what the coroner thought a screwdriver, and finally she had bled to death of internal wounds. The girl's body was left on a doorstep of a home in the southwest comer of the Jacinto City area, at the exact house number as hers but one block over from her house. The geography, the buildings, the neighborhood must be all entirely different now, and most certainly relatives, friends, neighbors—all different, older, moved on, and moved out. Nearly fifty years had come and gone. What hope of ever solving this little girl's murder now?
Still, something about the deep pools that were the black girl's eyes, the cut of her dimples, her pigtails, the simple cloth dress, the smile in the life photo comparing so starkly with the empty eyes and down-turned lips of the death photo. It all spoke to Lucas, pleading with him to take the next step. "What is the next step?" he asked him-self. Talk to her parents? Was either alive? Talk to her brother, her sister, her uncles and aunts? Some of them were younger than she was when the crime was committed; they'd be in their forties and fifties now. What could they possibly know that might help? Would any family member care to go there with Lucas as guide? Besides, hadn't the original investigative team asked all the pertinent questions of all the pertinent family members? Perhaps not. Lucas's reputation for uncovering blunders piled upon blunders in earlier cold cases had earned him recognition and kudos from most, but it never endeared him to the cops his investigating had revealed as bungling. In other cases, it wasn't so much the errors of investigators as the era of ignorance of such scientific breakthroughs as criminal profiling, technological advances, and DNA fingerprinting.
Law enforcement had learned a great deal about child abduction and murder since '56, such as the fact that only 20 percent of child abductions fell under the umbrella of stranger abductions, that the other 80 percent were abductions by someone known to have had at least some passing acquaintance with the victim. The Ward Weavers of the world came to mind, those who wooed their victims with promises and gifts and a place to stay the night, a place to light up on weed, a place to hide from their own threatening home life.
The 1956 police reports proved sketchy as Lucas's eyes scanned over the aged paper and the old script. There was a record of the detectives having talked to the parents, but a reading between the lines spoke of a bigoted—or at least jaded—police force that had written them off as shiftless niggers whose lifestyle had brought the tragedy down around young Yolanda's head. Unofficially, the dead child's parents were at very least negligent, having allowed a live- in uncle to send the nine-year-old out after dark for cigarettes and coffee. She made it back with the grocery bag, and was allowed to play out back of the house as a reward. The child then disappeared from their backyard, skirted by an alleyway, and she was returned later, dumped on the doorstep of a home a block over. The numbers on the two homes corresponding as they did—1214 Denton— Yolanda's home—to 1214 Denby Street—home of startled neighbors who'd discovered Yolanda's body and called police—nagged at Lucas, tugging like a fish on a line. He pictured the startled neighbors trying to explain to a desk sergeant over the phone what lay on their front steps, this before the days of 911 emergency dialing.
One of the original detectives felt the killer had confused the two addresses on his return. If this were true, then the killer couldn't have been a long-time resident of the neighborhood, like the girl's uncle, who had a record of burglaries, or the neighborhood dirty old man, or the pair of teens brought in for questioning. In fact, Yolanda's killer might be a total stranger to the area, and so not likely known in the area. Somebody would notice a stranger in a close-knit community, or someone new to the block, but how close-knit was this area in 1956? Was there a welcome wagon lady in the area who might know of anyone recently moved in, and if so, was she still alive for questioning? Not likely on both counts.