As with Edna, though, it was as if she had been murdered by a ghost.

Now the city fell into a panic. People started locking their doors and windows, calling us to report “suspicious” people walking down the streets—even though none of them turned out to be potential suspects. Neighborhoods demanded more streetlights. We put more officers in University Park, especially at night, both uniformed and plainclothes. Overtime wasn’t an issue. I was going on three or four hours of sleep a day.

Arizona was only a generation removed from the frontier, less than twenty years from statehood, so many people owned guns. More folks purchased them from gun shops and pawnbrokers, whether they knew how to use them or not. One woman in University Park fired her shotgun at a neighbor taking out the trash one night, sending him to the hospital with a few pellets of buckshot in his backside. The newspapers and radio played it up, while the city commissioners demanded an arrest.

But we had nothing but clues that led to dead ends.

* * *

Don was focused on pervs and peeping Toms, but I wasn’t sure. Muldoon interviewed all the teachers the two girls had, turning up nothing but squarejohns and proper matrons. Navarre, not surprisingly, rousted Negroes in Darktown. We spoke with every relative and friend of the two girls, then went back and did it again.

I started compiling lists of janitors and maintenance men at the high school; short-order cooks at nearby restaurants, especially the Nifty Nook right across the street; and workers at other nearby businesses. People who would see the coeds. Everyone willingly gave his name. Everyone wanted to help. Only two on my list had records, one for burglary and another for bootlegging. But the burglar angle interested me. Although this individual committed his crime twenty years ago and had an alibi for the nights of both murders, what about someone else? What if burglary was the gateway impulse that led to murder?

Then we faced the killer choosing University Park as his target. What was this geography to him? Maybe he lived there, or once did. I started compiling burglary reports in the neighborhood. The few arrests led to individuals who were still in prison. One incident stuck out: Back in November, a woman claimed that someone had been in her house while she slept. Nothing was taken but items were rearranged, and an unlocked

window was left open, all of which she noticed in the morning. The officer who took the report at the time noted skeptically, “Hysterical female, no evidence of forced entry.” The house was two blocks from Edna Sawyer’s.

I started wandering University Park at the hours when the girls would have been coming or going to school. I added interviews and names from postmen and dairymen, delivery drivers, plumbers, city garbagemen, Western Union messenger boys, and Central Arizona Light and Power crews.

Finally, I noticed that both crimes happened on nights with new moons. Maybe it mattered, maybe not, but Captain McGrath agreed we should go full-out on the next one, March 11th.

But the University Park Strangler had other plans.

Twenty

“I had never heard those details about the early murders in University Park,” Victoria said. “So, you thought I bossed you around, huh?”

“In the nicest possible way.”

We were lying in my bed, our legs entwined, listening to jazz on the radio. The room was dark.

“You can’t kick yourself for losing the diary and love notes,” she said. “You were thinking of me. That’s sweet.”

“Sweet won’t catch this killer,” I said. “What kills me…”

“Pun intended?”

“What slays me? Anyway, what frustrates me is that Carrie specifically mentioned Navarre in her diary. There’s a good chance the love letters were from him. But a second man is involved, too. Big Cat. She was afraid of him, and he probably wrote her the threatening letter. But I can’t go to McGrath now because I don’t know enough.”

“I know,” she said. “But there’s also a good chance the love letters weren’t from Frenchy.”

I raised an eyebrow. She slipped out of bed and walked to the window. The ambient light gave her body an enchanting glow.

“Is our friend in the Chevy out there?”

“No,” she said, slipping back in bed.

He hadn’t returned since I nearly caught him outside Victoria’s house.

She said, “I took the note we received in Prescott, which matched the love letters, and went to headquarters while the detective pool was empty. I pulled one of the case files Frenchy worked on. The writing doesn’t match.”

“Damn.”

“Another man is involved,” she said. “Carrie got around. She was living a double life. And she was making a hell of a lot more money than I did when I was her age. Maybe more than now.”

* * *

The next morning, I was still itching to get off first base. Evidence was gone. I felt no nearer to closing the case than a month ago. My other private eye business was dead. It was time to start eliminating suspects. I started at the beginning with Tom Albert, Carrie’s former boyfriend.

Tags: Jon Talton Mystery
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