Daddy's Gone a Hunting

74

When Frank Ramsey and Nathan Klein drove into the Connelly property Wednesday evening, they learned that the detectives who had finished questioning Harry Simon were on their way to the site. I’d be rushing to get here, too, if I had been working a cold case that’s been around for over twenty-eight years, Frank thought.

Now officially a crime scene, the parking lot was already swarming with activity.

The cleanup crew had been ordered to stay, and Jose Fernandez, the young worker who had found the skeletal remains, was being questioned in a police mobile unit. His story was straightforward and backed up by his boss. “Last night, it was pretty dark when we set up the poles around the sinkhole. We couldn’t see into it and anyhow it had been a long day. This morning, Sal, the boss, decided that we’d worry about the sinkhole later because our job was to get rid of as much debris as possible.”

At that point, Jose decided to throw in a brief history of his interest in archeological finds. You never know if one of the detectives has a sister who is a principal in a school and could use a substitute teacher, he thought. He cited his master’s degree, then said, “So, I was curious to take a look. Sal told me to make it quick because he was driving me back to the garage. I jogged across the parking lot to the sinkhole and looked down and…”

Then he shrugged. The vivid memory of the curled-up skeleton with the long auburn hair sticking to the skull would haunt him for a long time to come.

Jose and everyone else in the cleanup crew were soon cleared as potential suspects. Their IDs were checked, their names, addresses, and phone numbers taken, and they were permitted to leave.

Frank and Nathan knew that they would not be part of the investigation that would follow the finding of the remains of Tracey Sloane. While, of course, there would be an autopsy, they had zero doubt that it was her. The investigation would be purely within the jurisdiction of the Manhattan district attorney’s office, where the case had remained cold for all these years. But they stayed until their own boss, Marshal Tim Fleming, arrived and conferred with them and the DA’s detectives.

At a grim conference in the police mobile unit, they all agreed that it was now appropriate to publicly release the fact that Jamie Gordon’s notebook had also been found in the wrecked van, and that the deceased vagrant Clyde Hotchkiss had admitted punching her, but not killing her.

The same thought was on all of their minds. Hotchkiss had been living on the streets for forty years. Was it possible that he had been hanging around the complex twenty-eight years ago, and, if so, could he be responsible for killing both Jamie and Tracey?

It was already a matter of record from the questioning of Jack Worth twenty-eight years ago that he had tried to give Tracey the necklace as a gift, but that she had refused him and had actually paid him for it months before she died. Jack had admitted then that he was hurt and disappointed. But he swore he had not killed her. And he was being brought in for questioning again now.

“So we have the plant manager who was working here when Tracey disappeared and who may have been insulted when she refused to let him give her a gift that cost eight dollars. We have a dead vagrant who admits that Jamie Gordon was in the van with him and who may very well have been hanging around here twenty-eight years ago. And we have a murderer who worked with Tracey and who can’t account for eighteen minutes the night she vanished,” one of the detectives said in summing up.

Frank Ramsey and Nathan Klein could have gone home then, but by silent agreement they waited and soberly watched as the sinkhole was photographed and searched for any clue that might determine if it was the actual location where Tracey died.

It was nearly 10 P.M. when, with searchlights illuminating the grim scene, the skeletal remains were carefully lifted onto the medical examiner’s stretcher.

Pieces of dark blue cloth that had once been slacks and the ivory-colored remnants of wool that had once been a sweater dropped onto the jagged base of the sinkhole as Tracey Sloane was moved from the place where she had been hidden for longer than she had lived.