Final Edge

CHAPTER 14

Lucas Stonecoat’s morning hadn't been near so eventful as Meredyth's. Before he got the call from the squad car transporting her to the precinct, he had met with a retired investigator who had worked the Yolanda Sims case. Detective Maurice Remo was haunted by the case, still angry at how it was handled by the original investigating team. Remo had taken it over when it had first come downstairs to him in the Cold Room. At the time, Remo was in charge of the Cold Case files. Disgusted by what he found in the file-or rather what he failed to find-he had, in 1957, launched his own investigation. A young detective at the time, he was now in his early seventies.

Lucas had telephoned Remo on a hunch after seeing his name on a routing sheet, expecting to be told by whoever answered the phone that Remo was long dead. All the other detectives on the case had long since passed away. But Maurice Remo answered his own phone and was very much alive.

Lucas told Remo, "Your notes on the Yolanda Sims 1956 murder case are not in the file. I only stumbled on your name when I was leafing through the routing sheet."

"I started my own murder book on the case," Remo explained over the phone.

"We don't have any record of a second volume."

"No way you could have, Detective Stone-what is it?"

"Stonecoat, sir."

"I worked the case on my own time. My captain and everyone else was convinced it was a guy caught for a string of murders, but Sims's killing was never proven to be connected. Even so, I was told to let it be. We had several higher-profile cases in-house at the time I could devote my time to, you understand?"

"Missing and dead white people, you mean?" Lucas rocked in his chair, certain that the old man would slam his phone down at the remark as soon as it slipped from Lucas.

"Yeah, something like that." He was still on the line.

"So…you did what?" Lucas rocked forward, planting his elbows on his desk.

'Took my report on the case with me when I left."

"You took it home on your retirement?"

"I would take it out from time to time. Try to convince myself her killer was a guy who fried for seven other child killings around the same time. They called him the Dumpster Killer. Can you guess why?"

"Yeah, I can. So you have all your notes on the case-"

"— here to home, my kitchen cupboard."

"Really?"

"Damn thing's a constant reminder. Points a finger at me every damn day I open that cupboard. My albatross."

"Would you care to share this cursed bird with someone?" Lucas asked.

"You mean you? I've read about you in the papers from time to time. I understand you're the man who got the HPD to join the computer revolution, that you got all the Cold Cases on-line, and now they're shared by every precinct and jurisdiction in the state."

"In the country now, sir, and with the FBI's VICAP program."

"Excellent."

"May I come over there and have a look at your murder book on Yolanda Sims?" Lucas waited out a long pause.

"Misdemeanor to take HPD property and not return it."

"I think we can say a statute of limitations is at work here. So, can I come have a look? If it's good enough, we'll include it on the database."

Another long moment of silence. "Tell you what, Stonecoat. I'll come down to the precinct house."

"I could save you the trip."

Remo nearly shouted into the phone, "I don't have reason enough to get out much, so let me!"

"All right, sir. Suit yourself."

"Not much for this retirement life."

Three quarters of an hour later, Maurice stood at Lucas's desk, introducing himself, a murder book clutched to his chest.

Maurice's take on the Sims case proved unique, an absolute eye-opening departure from the original investigators. Like Lucas, he believed that all four of the suspects interviewed, being familiar with the neighborhood, would not have left the body where it had been dumped.

"Dead wrong they were," Remo repeatedly said, somehow looking relaxed in a rolling office chair. "If the creep who killed her didn't know the lay of the land," he calmly said, finally breaking with his chant, "then it stands to reason he was no more acquainted with Yolanda than he was her house and her address."

"That's been my thinking," agreed Lucas.

"You go down there, you look at the houses on these two streets, and you find they are like clones all of 'em. All right then, you have to know the area well to be on the right street. All the streets in that area begin with the same letter, Denton, Denby, Densmore, Denlow. So the guy is nervous, turns down Denby instead of Denton, pulls up before 1214-the right address on the wrong street-at three or four in the morning. He then quickly carries the girl's body from his car or van and dumps it on the doorstep, not out of any grief or concern for the child's remains or the family's closure, Detective Stonecoat, but out of malice, to get even with her uncle, who inadvertently brought this horrible tragedy down on his niece, but the man is so broken up, he can't accept this truth."

"The uncle was dealing drugs? This was because he owed somebody? What?"

"The killer wants to shock and dismay someone at that address. He wants to rub it in the uncle's face. And he gives not one thought to the child's siblings or parents."

"What was it, drugs? Numbers? Gang-related turf war?"

"None of the above."

"What was the beef with the uncle then?"

"Love."

"Lovers? They were lovers?"

"Love kills…we see it all the time."

"A highly personal motive then.'"

Remo stood and paced. "The little girl was used to get back at her uncle by the man he abandoned."

"So the guy's boyfriend killed her with no remorse?"

"None, not this mole."

"Does he have a name?" asked Lucas.

Remo rubbed the white stubble at his chin, not answering Lucas, slowly allowing the thread of his thoughts to unravel, like a magician unfolding a trick handkerchief. Lucas patiently awaited the old detective's sleight-of-hand. Remo continued to pace to the eye-level window that looked out on the sidewalk here in the basement offices of the Cold Case file room. Finally, he said, "An outbreak of child abduction-murders occurred that year, and at first I suspected that Yolanda's murder was only the first in this string of killings."

"First because?"

"First because he was sloppy and careless in Yolanda's case, and because it seemed he had a conscience, that he tried to do one right thing."

"Bring the kid's body back home," said Lucas.

"But he failed miserably to do so, and possibly was seen in the act and frightened off. After this, the others, he didn't take such chances with; he never brought another kid back to where he had abducted her from. Instead, he discarded them in city Dumpsters."

"You mean this guy who they called the Dumpster Killer, Paul Mick Ryan, electrocuted in…"

"Sixty-three."

"But you never really believed Yolanda's killing was related, despite prevailing winds?"

"No. Fact is, I got over the notion fairly quickly."

"Why not Ryan?"

"The Dumpster victims were not beaten to death, burned, or tortured; not a bruise on them except the single deadly black-and-blue throat where the stranglehold was so intense they lifted whole thumb and finger images off the victims' throats, all a match to Ryan's prints. Yolanda was not strangled to death."

"And there was no sexual molestation in the Ryan killings."

"Neither before nor after, none. Shrinks questioned Ryan and learned he could only get off sexually by strangling his young victims, primarily little girls, but two boys as well. He masturbated over the bodies after death, but never penetrated any of them."

Lucas considered the disparity between the victims of Ryan and the Sims girl. "Autopsy showed that Yolanda died of internal bleeding from the beating her killer inflicted on her, and she was sexually molested using a blunt alien instrument."

"Yolanda had been tortured horribly…made to suffer the pain and fires of hell."

"Cigarette burns, yes." Lucas pictured the photos he'd seen of her battered body.

"Whoever did her, he was vicious, and while the DA wanted to make out that Paul Ryan was vicious, I made the M.E. explain to me every bruise on his victims. Most of the bruising other than at the throats came from their time in the Dumpsters, the jostling and falling debris while the body was in the Dumpster and emptied out into a dump truck. The M.E. was clear on this; the head and body bruises came long after death."

"And Ryan, did he ever confess to Yolanda's murder?"

"All his victims were white. He swore he never killed the Sims girl. No DNA typing then, so no way to know for certain, but he went to the chair claiming he only did the seven white children found in city Dumpsters."

"How was he captured?"

"Captured on a tip by a gray-haired woman with insomnia, taking out her trash. The old lady was smart enough to get a license-plate number. The ID happened when she saw him discarding his last body, a little boy. When detectives showed up at his house, Ryan lost it at the door, said something to the effect, 'Why didn't you guys form a task force sooner to stop me? Why'd it take you so long? Why didn't you stop me sooner? I ought to sue your asses.'"

"He didn't know the gay uncle and had never worked the area, right?"

"None of his victims were dumped anywhere near the Sims murder site. And try as they might to make correlations, they could not find any real connection, no."

"And you suspected someone connected to the uncle."

"Yeah, there was one guy stuck in my craw, the uncle's boyfriend."

"He got a name?"

"Gay Uncle Bobbie and his lover, Lyle Eaton, had a nasty breakup that same evening of the abduction. There'd been a scene, a car chase in which Eaton caught up to Uncle Bob where he was holed up."

"At Yolanda's house?"

"Using it for a hideout. Eaton got violent, breaking a window, beating on the door. A squad car was called out to the address to evict Eaton from the front porch."

"Any arrests?"

"Should have been, but no, and so no paper trail."

"How'd you learn about the fight? Interviews?"

"Yeah, the hard way. He was waving a crowbar when the cops cooled him down and sent him off. Had there been an arrest report, maybe so many years would not have gone by before anyone learned the truth, years during which Ryan appealed and awaited execution for the Dumpster deaths."

"And no subsequent confrontations at that address between the men?"

"I know. It sounds fishy, doesn't it?" Remo asked.

"I agree, doesn't sound like a typical breakup, either gay or straight. Most relationship breakups happen over a series of engagements, retreats, and further battles."

"Only one encounter after Uncle Bobbie moves out on a seven-year 'marriage' to Eaton, and it's without a word, according to Bobbie Sims. Then suddenly the man's niece disappears, is killed in horrific fashion, and suddenly poof- Eaton disappears from the city immediately after being cleared by virtue of a questionable alibi. Then a year goes by before I catch the case when the file sorta fell into my possession, and I confirm that Eaton laid carpets as well as tile, as well as doing odd jobs as a carpenter, and that he conveyed his own tools to the job sites in his cream-colored van. People spotted a white van sitting at the end of the street that night. You ever look at a beige van under orange street lamps? It's white!"

"Hoffman and Blake got none of these connections?"

"These were my leads, uncovered years later when no one wanted to hear the truth or be proven incompetent. I was a rookie in charge of filing down here in the dungeon. I prove I'm right, I also prove they're nincompoops, and they had seniority big-time in those days."

"You ever get the chance to interview Eaton?"

"Once. He choked on a weak alibi that ought to've been proven a lie. Eaton's grandparents also swore to Hoffman and Blake-and years later to me-that he was with them that night, all night, playing board games and watching Gun smoke and Ed Sullivan. Soon after, Lyle and his van left the area, reportedly for a work site in Amarillo."

"That's bordering on leaving the state."

"Fact is, he didn't go to Amarillo. He went to Seattle, Washington. And valuable potential evidence, like the damned van, his carpet strips, likely under someone's carpet somewhere by then, his soldering iron, and other tools used to assault the girl, all gone. There's no statute of limitation on murder, but there sure can be on contaminated evidence."

Lucas squinted, thinking in pictures, trying to get a fix on what had happened, and how it had been allowed to play out as it did. Sure, it was 1956 and investigators had no fingerprint evidence in the case, and DNA was nonexistent, but they had the same findings from the coroner as Remo had. The difference seemed to be a sadly prevailing attitude taken toward the case, that other, higher-priority cases took precedence, and worse still, that Yolanda and her parents had somehow brought the tragedy down around themselves and so must accept it-almost as if it were an act of God. An inexcusable excuse, Lucas thought of the deceased detectives as his admiration for Remo increased.

"So you think Eaton found a nearby isolated place to park, never leaving the unfamiliar neighborhood, attacking her in the van and-"

"— and dumping her body on the wrong doorstep in his haste to get the hell out of the area, yes."

Lucas recalled the details of the puncture marks all over Yolanda's body. The words of the autopsy report flashed through his mind: "sawdust in victim's hair and body; unusual puncture wounds over body, determined as marks consistent with beating from wood carpet stripping; cigar- sized, round burns on legs and arms consistent with cigar or possibly a soldering iron as wounds are clean of ash debris. Foreign object used in sexual battery consistent with marks made by a Phillips-head screwdriver…"

"And this guy Eaton, you're convinced he doesn't know the neighborhood?"

"He'd only been in the Houston area for six months. Here's my take on it, if you'd care to hear it," replied Remo.

Lucas drew him a cup of coffee from the nearby urn. "Lay it out for me. Detective."

"All right. It's like this. A jilted Lyle Eaton drives down there in his white work van to Uncle Bobbie's neighborhood and is jilted again by his lover. He then goes away but not far. He cruises the alleyway and parks behind the house, hatching a scheme when he sees Yolanda playing on the back porch."

Lucas sipped at his coffee. "I follow you. Go on."

"Fact is, Lyle Eaton was lying in wait to have it out again with Bobbie, but Bobbie didn't come out that night, only Yolanda did-sent to the store to get Uncle Bobbie's smokes! Then voila, she returns safely home. Eaton watches her come and go but does nothing at this point. Then he sees her come out a second time, this time rewarded with an extra hour's playtime on the backyard grass, inside the fence. It's at this point that Eaton-having watched this trivial drama play out from the confines of his van-decides to make Bobbie pay through his niece. He exits the van and charms her right out of her backyard and into his van. Promises, I'm sure."

"This is unbelievable, that no one put this together at the time."

"By the time it got to me, leads were cold. Still, I went out and talked to the family, tracing the original steps Hoffman and Blake had taken, a pair of real Sherlocks. When I talked to Yolanda's father, out comes the story of Bobbie and Lyle on the doorstep, ready to kill one another. The old man claimed he told the investigating team all about it, but that they didn't think it relevant."

"They accepted the alibi at face value?"

"Part of it, sure. Any rate, the catfight never got into their reports. Me, on the other hand, I became instantly curious, and I pursued it, but years later now both Bobbie and his boyfriend are long gone. Bobbie was overseas, had enlisted in the Army. I had to put out a call for information on Lyle Eaton, and word on the street was that he had moved to Seattle, but my contacts up there came up blank."

"And in the meantime the Dumpster Killer was an easy fill-in-the-blank for Hoffman and Blake."

"With the captain and the DA on their asses, you bet. The departmental push was on to clear the case by getting Ryan to cop to the killing. They tried to push it down his throat, but he wouldn't budge."

"Is Eaton in the system? Does he have a record?"

"Petty stuff, but yeah, prints, mug shot, all of it. But he seems to have disappeared in the great void out there. Likely somebody killed him or he died of an overdose or a dirty needle someplace and is buried in a potter's field God knows where. Like I said, his trail went dead in Seattle. A blind alley."

"Seattle's a big seaport. You ever think he may've joined the merchant marines? Shipped out for Singapore or Malaysia?"

"I considered it. Tough in those days to nail a man working a seaman's job. No cooperation, I can tell you. He could've gone that route, sure. But he never surfaced again."

"I'll put it in the system we're interested in talking to the guy. See what I can find out," said Lucas.

'Targeting Seattle?"

"The system is nationwide now, Detective. I can simultaneously request a cross-reference and a download on any information on a Lyle Eaton anywhere in the States, Europe with Interpol, Britain's Scotland Yard, Japan, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, even Russia nowadays."

"Imagine that. Russia and us cooperating on police matters."

"But of course."

"Just remarkable how far police science and communications have come. My hat's off to you."

"Let's see if we can get lucky." With a few key strokes, Lucas put the request into VICAP-the FBI's violent- criminal-apprehension program, and the WCW-the World Crime Watch program. "We'll let these requests percolate. See what comes of 'em."

"Amazing. Still, it's a hell of a long shot."

"Least we can do for Yolanda Sims after all these years is to take the shot."

"Right you are." Maurice Remo smiled at this, nodding. "Good show. Detective Stonecoat. Keep me posted on any results. Sure would like to go to my grave knowing what became of that scum…."

They shook hands and were about to part when the old man looked around the newly refurbished Cold Room with a calculating eye at its many computers and lack of hard files and boxes. Walls had been knocked out, space utilization improved along with the heating and cooling system; along with newly installed lighting, a bathroom had been installed, and the confining stacks of metal shelving once creating tight dark aisles were all gone.

"Sure is a changed place, Stonecoat. Not the dust-bucket I used to work in. Count yourself lucky."

'Trust me, I know. All the changes came after my arrival. It was a damned dusty dungeon."

Remo turned to leave, but turned back and asked, "Why does this girl's case interest you so much, Detective? She's long in her grave, family has all died off for the most part or moved away. Most likely her killer is dead, so what purpose does it serve you to spend time on her case?"

"I suppose for the same reason as you pursued her case so many years ago. I suppose because of her eyes, the way they look out at you, the way they speak to you."

He shook Lucas's hand again, his eyes holding Lucas in place. Lucas said, "I want to thank you for coming down here and helping me out, Detective."

"Been a long time since anyone's called me Detective, son. I miss that."

The phone rang, and Lucas begged off, taking a call from an unfamiliar cop named Frank who told him a garbled story about Meredyth Sanger's being held in the back of his squad car for brandishing a gun down at the courthouse.

"Is she all right? Is she there with you now, Officer?" Lucas asked, shaken.

"Right here behind the cage, yes. We just took off the cuffs, but we'll hold onto the gun until we can release her into your custody, Detective, as a courtesy, cop to cop."

"Thanks. Frank is it?"

"Frank Lupo with the Two-five."

"Put her on, will you, Frank?"

'Tony, he wants to talk to her, okay?" Lucas heard the cop ask his partner. After a bit of rattling to get the receiver back to Meredyth, she came on.

Lucas, it's me."

"Mere, what the hell's going on?"

"Shut up and listen to me. She was there, Lucas, at the courthouse, in the archives, shadowing me."

"Are you all right? Were you hurt?"

"I'm fine, just shaken up… emotionally."

"Are you sure it was Lauralie Blodgett?"

"Yes, I saw her in the crowd afterwards, when they arrested me. She was enjoying every second of my humiliation, Lucas, every second of it. I tell you, it was her. She must've been stalking me the whole time."

"Did she follow you there from here?"

"How should I know? But Lucas, Byron was there at the courthouse too. He'd run me down and-"

"Byron Priestly?"

"— and maybe she's been following him! If that's true, then we've got an obligation to warn Byron."

"Calm down. How far away are you?"

"What about Byron?"

"Fuck Byron! How far are you?"

"Five, six minutes."

"Have Lupo and Tony pull into the underground lot, and I'll meet you there."

Lucas hung up, and Maurice Remo still stood beside him, listening in. "I sure miss the action," the old man said. 'Trust me, young man, never retire. Get yourself killed in the line of duty before you end up a sad old bastard like me with nothing to do all day but watch CNN, reruns, and soap operas. A hundred and thirty-two channels with nothing on…a channel devoted to flower arrangements, you believe that?"

"Maurice, Detective Remo, I'll keep you apprised of any new developments in the Sims case, I promise you, but I gotta rush right now."

"And what about this weird-ass case I read about in the papers, about this killer posting body parts in the mail to a detective and a shrink here at the Three-one? You know any-thing about that? Sounds like a case to sink your teeth into."

"It does indeed. Anything you want to know about it, I'd be happy to share with you what little I know, but right now I have to meet someone. Thanks again for coming down, and please leave your murder book on Yolanda right there on my desk, okay?"

"Sure… sure."

Lucas rushed out for the parking garage. Behind him, he heard the old man shout, "If ever you need to confer on another case, if ever you want forty-six years experience on the job as a murder policeman, you don't hesitate to call, Stonecoat, you hear?"

"Will do!" he shouted back down the corridor before disappearing from the old man's sight. Something about Remo reminded Lucas of his grandfather. He liked Maurice, and he trusted the old man's experience and tried and true instincts.

He raced for the parking garage.