City of Dark Corners

“This came for you at headquarters.” He passed over an envelope. I could tell from the regimented stationery, if you’d apply such a genteel term as “stationery,” that this was from an inmate in the State Penitentiary at Florence. Hoping like hell it wasn’t from Ruth Judd, I opened it, relieved to find my jailhouse correspondent was Jack Hunter.

I arrested him for a holdup, and he was doing a fifteen-to-thirty-year bounce for intent to commit murder. Jack had escaped five times. I read:

Detective Gene,

Come see me. We can talk about the train girl, Carrie. It will be worth your time.

I stashed it. “Jack Hunter, can’t be important.”

“Ah, the escape artist.” McGrath smiled, but the expression didn’t last. “Don tells me you have a client who wants to find a missing girl, and she might be the one who fell from the Sunset Limited.”

“She didn’t fall from the Sunset,” I interrupted. “She was brutally murdered.”

He continued: “I won’t ask the client’s identity. But what have you found?”

I opened up the file, laid out the photos, and told him. It took fifteen minutes and several bites of my hamburger.

When I was through, he waited a good five minutes. Then he said, “You’ve been a busy boy. No wonder I gave the toughest homicide cases to you.”

“I appreciate that, Boss. But this is where you say ‘thanks’ and ‘we’ll take the investigation from here.’”

He shifted uncomfortably. I felt as if a nipper had wrapped around my wrists.

“What?” I said.

“It’s not that simple.” He pulled out a pipe and meticulously filled the bowl with tobacco, tamped it down with a silver pipe tool, and slowly lit it.

“Don has explained to you how the commissioners and the chamber of commerce don’t want Phoenix back in the national spotlight for another lurid murder. I don’t agree, but I have to take orders, same as everyone else.”

“What does that mean?”

Behind a haze of cherry-flavored tobacco, he said, “It means the case is classified as a suspicious death.”

“So that’s it?”

After a pause for another puff: “What if I authorized you to go to Prescott and do the death knock? I’ll put together a hundred dollars from petty cash. The girl’s parents deserve to know what happened.”

“I’d want that authorized in writing.”

“You don’t trust me?”

“I trust you, Boss. But I don’t trust the people who sign your paycheck. You have to take orders, same as everybody else, remember?”

“I’ll send over a letter this afternoon.”

“And what happens then?”

He looked at me like I was the stupid boy in class, repeating that the case was classified as a suspicious death.

I pushed back, trying to keep my voice calm and measured. I felt anything but that inside. “Cap, this girl was sawed apart elsewhere, and her body parts were dressed, dumped, and arranged, moved just inside the city limits. Her purse had money but no identification.” I neglected to mention that my business card was also in her purse.

I continued: “She was obviously murdered somewhere else and placed near the tracks. Now, maybe she fell in with the wrong people and this was a one-off. She and her family still deserve justice. You taught me that everybody matters. Or, we have a savage murderer on the loose, and he’ll kill again. He won’t give a damn what the chamber of commerce thinks.”

“It’s been more than two weeks since that happened,” he said.

“You know that doesn’t mean anything. The University Park Strangler only killed when new moons coincided with Catholic martyred saints’ dates. Thank God the chamber wasn’t so touchy then or we would have ignored that, too.”

He winced. “You know, crime has actually fallen during this Depression.”