Tuesday, October 22, 1985

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 22, 1985

A searing white flash of sound burned my dream away. In an instant, nothing remained but shadows and dread and shame. I’d swatted at my clock radio out of instinct, but the noise didn’t stop. As my brain struggled to catch up, I crawled over to the edge of the bed and read 4:21 a.m. in radium painted numbers. The dark of my room felt darker than it should, and there was a smell in the air I didn’t like. I picked up the telephone receiver from the edge of the nightstand.

“Dave,” a familiar voice on the other end said gently. “We need you at 19 Halverson as soon as you can.”

I looked at the clock again, and rubbed at the gunk that had settled in the corners of my eyes. “Okay, Chief.”

“Leave your radio off . . . It’s a bad one, Dave.”

The line went dead and I hung up the receiver. I stumbled over to the shower in the dark and dunked my head under running water for a minute and then ran a comb through my hair and dug around for a clean looking shirt and pair of pants. I eased my shoulder rig on, holstered my .38, and then finished getting dressed before I headed out.

I carried my shoes with me down the stairs and put them on when I made it to the porch. My landlady lived on the ground floor of the house and I didn’t want to wake her if I could help it. I slid into my car, an unmarked ’78 Caprice, and reached for the radio to call in before I remembered the chief’s instructions.

With a little coaxing, the Caprice started and I eased it into the street. The car had been new when I was assigned as the head of the Investigative Unit, a storied and illustrious law enforcement team that, to date, had been a one man operation since the chief created it that same year. Wisps of fog snaked off the pavement as I made my way towards Black Hawk Road. The sun wouldn’t be up for a couple of hours.

The Amoco station sign flickered to life as I drove past, casting long shadows across the parking lot of the Sirloin Stockade. The streets were deserted; shift change at the IFI meat processing plant wouldn’t be for another two hours. Around then, you’d see a few more cars headed to the plant, but not as many driving away. After a night of turning livestock into groceries, most of those guys stopped off at the Rail Spike Tap for an hour or two before heading home. Place is a dump, but it’s cheap and right by the plant. My first week in town, I went in there early to serve a bench warrant to the owner. First thing I saw was one fella face down on the floor and another guy, covered in blood up to his armpits, standing over him. I drew my weapon immediately and told him to put his hands on his head. He could barely do it without falling over. The rest of the bar’s early morning patrons had a good laugh, and that’s when I noticed none of them had bothered to wash up after clocking out either. “Welcome to Dubois,” they said.

Dubois. Rhymes with “noise.” French settlers named it, I guess, but they’re long gone so we say it like Americans. We’re about an hour and a half south of Iowa City, about that far north of Keokuk and the county seat of Mahigan County. The schools are pretty good and there’s just enough crime to keep me employed. I do my best with what there is. I pull weeds when I find them, but most days I’m just a scarecrow.

At the light, I could see a train slithering along, opposite the river. The turn signal kept time as the rail cars rolled along. I let myself watch a second or two after the light changed, then made a left at the courthouse, drove up the hill, and onto Halverson. The houses on this street are all big and built back when the rail traffic was heavy. Nineteen was easy to spot, a huge Queen Anne flashing blue and red like a neon sign from the lights of two patrol cars out front. I parked on the street and saw the chief standing on the porch, waiting. I popped the trunk, got my evidence kit and camera bag, and then headed up to the house.

“Dave,” he said, with his usual short nod of greeting. “Go in and take a look. We’ll talk after.”

The door was open. I took a quick look at the lock and door jamb, no obvious signs of forced entry, and walked into the foyer. Floral wallpaper—a little old fashioned but in keeping with the looks of the outside of the place. Waxed wooden floors with spiral mats made out of knotted rags. Clean, no footprints or tracked-in leaves or mud. Family pictures in frames lining the wall up the staircase. Lights off upstairs and in the room to the right. I could see through an open door straight ahead into the kitchen, where the lights were on and a female officer stood with her back to me. I could hear sobs and clinking china from behind her and the KMCD weather report from the room to the left. My eyes followed the sound.

Different but equally old-fashioned wallpaper. Thick mottled brown carpet that reminded me of the coconut frosting on a German chocolate cake. Oval doily-covered coffee table, a big plush sofa with a quilt folded over the back on one side, and two less comfortable-looking but clearly expensive chairs on the other. A well-worn brown leather La-Z-Boy positioned with the best view of the large oak TV cabinet, which was turned on, playing the local morning news at a respectable volume. In the middle of the room was a nude male corpse.

I took out my camera, the SLR not the Polaroid, and took a few shots of the scene before stepping inside the room. The body was completely nude and hung upside down by its feet from a rope secured to a hook in the ceiling that had a fancy plaster medallion around it and probably used to support a chandelier. The same rope hung down to loop around each of the victim’s wrists, holding the arms in place at his sides as if he were standing normally, casually upside down. The body belonged to an older man, maybe sixty or thereabouts, slightly overweight. Face was familiar, but I couldn’t place it. The throat had been cut, deeply and completely across from right below one ear to the other. The skin was very pale, stiff to the touch. I crouched down and took a look at the carpet under the spot where the body hung. It was clean and undisturbed, except for a circular impression maybe a foot in diameter. As I stood up, I could see a neat pile of folded clothes in the seat of the recliner. I snapped some pictures and did a quick look around at the furniture. Nothing else out of place.

“That’s Richard Boyd.”

I turned around and saw Chief Hayes and Bill Franklin, one of our officers, standing right outside the room. “Boyd’s Quality Meats Boyd?” I asked. The chief nodded. Boyd’s had been one of the largest meat packing companies in this part of the state until he sold out to Innovative Foods Incorporated in the early seventies and retired. He never ran for any office in town, but kept his fingers in wherever they’d fit. Lion’s Club. Dubois High Boosters. He sponsored pancake breakfasts on Veteran’s Day. Bought little league uniforms. He was hardly a Rockefeller, but Boyd was probably the wealthiest man in the county.

“Who was first on the scene?” I asked.

Franklin piped up. “I was,” he said. “Mrs. Boyd woke up and noticed her husband wasn’t in bed and came downstairs. She saw . . . this.” Franklin’s eyes flitted away from mine to the body. “She called the station. She used the old number, not 911. I guess with it being new and, well the circumstances . . . Anyway, it took a while for dispatch to connect and by the time I got here she was too distressed to talk. I radioed in and the chief took over.”

“Did anything get moved or touched?” I asked him. Franklin was pretty good, but this house wasn’t what the State Division of Criminal Investigation would call a “secure crime scene” and I had a hunch we’d be calling Des Moines for their help sooner or later.

“When I got here, I heard Mrs. Boyd screaming and crying. The door was unlocked so I went in to make sure she was okay and then I checked the house to secure it. Everything was clear and nothing—well, nothing besides this—looked out of the ordinary. When I saw this . . . No, I didn’t touch anything.”

“Has Mrs. Boyd said anything?” I asked.

“Mary,” said the chief. “No. She’s obviously suffered a tremendous shock. Officer Malone has been sitting with her in the other room. Mary and my Sarah have been friends since they were girls. I’ve sent for a car to pick her up and bring her here. I thought it might help, but I’d rather Sarah not see any of this. I’ve called for Doc Gurns and for as many officers as we can spare. I’d like to get the body to pathology as soon as he signs off. ”

I nodded. “Franklin can help me finish in here while we wait.”

I handed Franklin the Polaroid and had him follow me around the scene to take more pictures. The Polaroids aren’t as detailed as what I can get with my other camera, but they develop right away and I like to have them for reference. I double-checked the spots I’d looked at when I first walked in and jotted down some notes. After that, we took a look around the rest of the house. Other than the bed, sheets and blanket disturbed on one side only, the house was neat and tidy.

We came downstairs just as Doc Gurns came in. The Mahigan County Medical Examiner always seemed like an ostentatious title for the plump gray-haired country doctor, but at times like this, he wore it naturally. He gave me a half-smile and then went into the living room. Franklin and I followed and watched as Doc calmly approached the body. He took a small flashlight out of his breast pocket and looked at the eyes, mouth, and ears, then at the wound across the neck. He pinched the skin at the wrist, the shoulder, the hip, and the upper thigh.

“Well,” he said. “He’s dead.”

“Thanks, Doc.”

“You get pictures of all this?”

I nodded.

“Go get some guys and a ladder,” he said to Franklin.

“Anything else you’d care to add at this time?” I asked.

Doc eyed the body. “I suspect foul play.”

“Thanks, Doc.”

“Sorry,” he smiled weakly. “I’ll want to wait until after I do a full autopsy of course,” he said turning back to the body, “but I’d tentatively estimate time of death at six to eight hours ago.I don’t see any defensive wounds on the body, but there’s a general lack of discoloration so it’s hard to say for certain.”

Franklin came back in with a step ladder, three other officers, and two paramedics with a stretcher. Doc moved out of the way and scratched a few notes into a little notebook.

The chief returned while the men worked at lowering the body. “What are we looking at, Dave?” he asked quietly.

“Estimated time of death around midnight. No forced entry. No signs of struggle, which suggests that the victim was either subdued quickly or caught off guard by someone he knew. Rope against the victim’s bare ankles suggests that the clothes were removed before he was tied up. Victim was then elevated and suspended from the ceiling. Laceration to the victim’s throat seems the likely cause of death, but I’ll leave that up to Doc.”

“And no signs of a robbery, nothing missing?”

“Just the blood,” I said.

Doc grunted and smiled tightly.

“Victim is what two hundred forty, two hundred fifty pounds? Hanging upside down like this would force all the blood in his body towards the head and torso. How much blood would that be, Doc?”

“Hmm. Depends how hydrated he was, diet, few other things. Five and a half, six liters give or take,” he said.

“Cutting clear across the throat, this room should look like a slaughterhouse. But it’s spotless.” I wondered out loud.

The paramedics groaned loudly as they each took one of the body’s shoulders and pushed upwards. Franklin teetered on the top of the ladder as he hoisted both of the body’s legs in a one-armed bear hug and fiddled with the knotted rope with his free hand. Two of the other officers tried to help by pulling up on the corpse’s hips while the other one held the ladder. After a half minute of grunts, groans, and curses, Franklin managed to get the legs unhooked and the rest of the men narrowly caught the dead weight. Doc Gurns, Chief Hayes, and I watched silently as they loaded the body onto the stretcher, covered it, and wheeled it out.

The chief closed his eyes and pushed his glasses up off the bridge of his nose, and started rubbing it with his thumb and forefinger. “Sarah is here. I let her in through the back door so she could see to Mary,” he said. “Give them a few minutes before you go in.” He straightened and addressed Doc. “I don’t think I need to tell you this is a priority.”

“I’m following the ambulance so I can start right away. I’ll need to send samples to the lab in Des Moines so it may be a few days before I can give you a full report. I’ll call the station as soon as I have something. ”

The chief nodded and turned to me. “Did you have anything else on your plate for today?”

“Nothing that can’t wait,” I said. “Break in at Lyles’ Auto Body night before last. That can sit a few days.”

“Good,” he said. “The men are taking statements from the neighbors. I want a special briefing with all available officers this afternoon. I asked Sandy to have the conference room ready for one o’clock, but if you get a lead to follow, you follow it.” Chief Hayes’ eyes had started to go a couple of years ago, but he still saw me notice how low his shoulders had sunk. He straightened up and tightened his jaw as he turned to head outside. “I need your best on this, Dave.”

X

“Can I offer you a cup of coffee, officer?”

Mary Boyd looked like a tiny bird of a woman. She was wrapped tightly in a pink flannel bath robe and her short silver-gray hair was permed into tight curls. Her eyes were bloodshot and the remains of tears still clung to the deep wrinkles around her mouth.

“Please, Mrs. Boyd. Thank you,” I said, hovering by the square antique table where Sarah Hayes, the chief’s wife, sat.

“Mary,” Sarah said gently. “Let me get that.”

Mary shuffled over to the cabinet and took out a cup, ignoring her, then filled it at the coffee maker and carried the cup and the pot back to the table with focused determination.

“Mrs. Boyd, my name is Detective Sergeant David Carlson,” I said as gently as I could manage. “I need to ask you some questions about what happened.”

“Oh,” she said. “Do you need cream or—”

“No, thank you,” I said, taking the cup and lowering myself into a chair at the table. I cast a quick look over at Sarah.

“Mary . . . ” Sarah coaxed. “Detective Carlson needs—”

“I . . . ” Mary said, half-choking on the sound before her face crumpled into quiet sobs. The three of us sat like that in the stillness of the kitchen for several minutes. Shafts of weak sunlight coming through the window reflected off dust particles passing through the air like ghosts.

Mary Boyd cried softly into the sleeves of her robe as Sarah gently stroked her back. The sun rose a little higher, and I saw her breathing even out. She raised her head, reaching for a paper napkin from a pile on the table to dab at her eyes.

“I’m ready,” she said.

I listened and asked questions for about half an hour. Mary had locked up the house and gone to bed around ten thirty, leaving her husband downstairs in front of the TV. She had been sound asleep and didn’t hear anything unusual, although she wore earplugs as was her habit.

“Dick snored to beat the band,” she said, wiping a fresh tear away. She woke up around three and saw that Richard had never come to bed. Then she came down to wake him. She said she wasn’t sure how long it was before she called the police, but she remembered the front door being closed when she came down the stairs and, as far as she could tell, nothing else was out of the ordinary.

No memories of any strange people near the house or in the neighborhood. Nothing different about Richard’s behavior during the previous days. No valuables in the house to speak of besides a safe with some cash and Mary’s jewelry, both of which were undisturbed. No ideas of anyone who would want to hurt him.

That last line of questioning tipped her over the edge of what she could handle in one morning, so I thanked her for the coffee, even though I hadn’t gotten around to drinking it, and left my card. Sarah told me she was going to take her over to their place, and I said I thought that was a good idea.

Outside, the property line had been traced with yellow tape to help secure the scene. A small crowd had started to gather in the neighbors lawns. KMCD’s news van pulled up and Chief Hayes made a beeline to intercept them before they got too close. I saw Franklin standing next to his patrol car and, more importantly, saw the paper cup carrier perched on the roof with a single remaining coffee left.

I walked over to Franklin and gestured hopefully at the cup.

“Help yourself. One of the guys brought those in when they came to canvas the neighborhood.”

I took the cup and inhaled the steam coming off it. Doughnut Land. Second best cup of coffee in the county. The owner gives it to cops for free so they’ll hang around a lot. He says he likes the security, but I always figured he had a dry sense of humor. A couple of long sips brought me back to life. I looked out at the crowd and tried to get my thoughts into shape.

No forced entry. No mess. No struggle.

Most of the people hanging around looked to be in the process of being interviewed by one of the officers or were repeating their stories to their neighbors. Lots of concerned faces peering over each other for a look at the house or through the windows.

No pulleys or ladders or anything else that might have made hoisting two hundred pounds of deadweight any easier.

Scanning the faces of the neighbors, one stuck out in sharp relief. Younger than most of them for a start, late teens or early twenties. Chalk pale with a mess of black hair sticking out at all angles. Not a popular look for guys around here, but some of the rougher girls do styles like that—teased out and stuck into place with a can’s worth of hairspray. Tall and skinny, wearing an old blue satin tuxedo jacket over a t-shirt with black jeans. He leaned against a tree, watching the scene from behind big black aviator type sunglasses.

No blood.

“Who’s that?” I asked.

“Who, MTV?” said Franklin.

When I nodded, he got out his interview book and flipped through a few pages. “James West. Nineteen years old. 113 Elm. That’s a couple of blocks away. He was part of the crowd that started to show up so we took a statement.”

“Did he say why he was over here this time of morning?”

“Taking a walk and saw the lights. Said he was taking one last night, too.”

“Did he see anything?”

“Just what everybody else did—thick fog, like from a movie.”

“What do you mean ‘just what everybody else did’?”

“All the neighbors I talked to that were up late and looked outside say they saw the streets filled with heavy fog. We got some of it up by my place, too. Weird stuff. Can’t remember the last time it got that thick.”

“Anything else?”

“Yeah.” Franklin leaned over to show me his notes, flipping through a few pages as he spoke. “A car. Big one, maybe a truck. Black or dark-colored. Really loud engine. Woke up half the neighborhood a little after midnight. Dispatch was getting complaints like that until about one o’clock, but we didn’t find anybody. Figured it was kids racing.”

“Could’ve been.”

I went over to check in with the other officers and to try and talk to this James West myself, but by the time I got there the crowd had grown and he’d slipped away. Clouds were drifting in and I smelled rain on the air. I stood in the middle of the street and stared at the house while I finished the coffee.

X

Dubois isn’t Dodge City, but it’s not Mayberry either. We’re a little shy of thirty-thousand residents and most of what we see here is what we call “property crime”. Thefts and burglaries. Plenty of vandalism. Trespassing. We get a fair amount of dope cases, not near as much as Davenport or Iowa City, but it’s been growing each year. The “violent crime” that shows up on our annual reports, and puts our per capita rate higher than Des Moines, is almost entirely bar fights, domestic cases, and the handful of times each year drunk driving turns into manslaughter.

Up until today, the worst I’d seen here was three years ago when Morty Wilcox had it out with his common law wife, Sally Devore. He had started drinking sometime that afternoon and had made it home in time to catch Sally coming off her second shift at the Flying J. They slapped each other around for a while until Sally decided enough was enough and started to gather some of her things to leave and take their four-year-old daughter, Sherry, with her. Morty begged her not to go. Then he demanded it. And then he got his 12-gauge out from under their bed to make his point. Sally and Sherry were in the doorway when he tripped over the coffee table and accidentally pulled the trigger on his way down.

When I arrived on scene, what was left of Sherry was in her mother’s arms or on the walls behind her. Sally sitting there sobbing, staring at Morty, who had put the barrel in his mouth and painted the back wall and ceiling.

When I looked into that trailer, I saw the horror and the stupidity and the tragedy of what had happened. But I also saw the inevitability of it. No matter how rich the soil is, crops will fail if they’re not looked after. Impulsive actions, desperation, selfishness. Those all make sense to me. Those are motives I can wrap my head around, and I can see where they lead. What I can’t see is what could possibly lead to hanging from your ceiling naked.

Back at the station, I called Des Moines, but whoever answered the phone at DCI told me to call back later. So, I did. That time I got to leave a message.