“Hick asshole,” Harry muttered.
We put Barlow in our Unpleasant Memories file and headed to the local state police post. Luckily, we knew our contact here, Arn Norlin, a pro with twenty-plus years in grade. We called ahead with an outline of what we wanted to talk about. He was ready fifteen minutes later.
Arn looked like a Viking who’d traded the horned helmet for a trooper’s Stetson. He had a ruddy face, strong Nordic nose, wide forehead, eyes of diluted blue. His hands were thick and hard, like he’d rowed between Denmark and Iceland. Those same hands painted the most expressive watercolor seascapes I’d ever seen and I was honored to have one of Arn’s works in my living room.
“We have part of a file. I think the cold-case folks look at it now and then, scratch their heads, move on to more fertile ground. I’d love to say we’ve got it front-burnered, but…”
“Manpower,” I said.
“Every politician talks about putting more feet on the beat, but come budget time, we’re hidden in the basement like a crazy aunt.”
“Part of a file, you said?”
He shot me a look over tortoiseshell reading glasses. “Pieces disappeared. Misplaced, supposedly.”
“When?”
“In the hands of the county folks. Barlow didn’t tell you, I take it.”
“A slight omission,” Harry said.
Arn leaned back in his chair, laced his fingers behind his head. “I had hopes for a solve on the county side, kept out of it. It was a Pettigrew case.”
“Pettigrew?” I said.
“Ben Pettigrew. A young guy, only on the county force a couple years. Pettigrew was a hot dog, the good kind, bright, curious. It was his first gut-wrencher case, knifeplay, torture. Pettigrew took the case to heart. Went at it with hammer and tongs.”
“Good for him,” Harry said.
“First thing Pettigrew did was grid the whole area. He was crawling on the ground, pushing through sticker bushes. You see the microwave tower near the scene?”
I nodded.
“Pettigrew climbed the damn thing to get a better lay of the land. He saw where a car had been hidden away and also felt someone had been laying in the weeds at the base of the tower.”
“Barlow mentioned Pettigrew moved to Montgomery.”
“Got recruited by the city cops up there. Good for a bright, hard-charging guy like Pettigrew to get on with a big-city force. Good for Montgomery to have a guy like that. Bad for the county.”
“Because it lost a hotshot?”
“Bet you money if he’d stayed, he’d have nailed the killer by now. That boy was a pit bull.”
“Wish Pettigrew was still around,” Harry said. “We couldn’t get squat from Barlow. The guy treated us like we had airborne syphilis.”
Arn picked up a couple of paper clips, linking and unlinking them.
“I don’t know what happened there. Barlow used to be a pretty decent cop. A few years back, he suddenly got old and cranky. It was like someone he loved died and he never came back from it. But I didn’t catch news of anything like that.”
“Years back?” Harry asked. “Like four?”
Arn dropped the clips to the deskpad and brushed them aside. “That’d be about right. Maybe a bit less. How’d you know?”
“It’s a time span we’re hearing more and more.”
Montgomery Police Department detective Benjamin T. Pettigrew leaned back in his chair and set tooled alligator boots on the meeting room table.
“It was grim,” Pettigrew said. “The victim was crumpled inside the little hunter’s shack, over two dozen knife wounds.”
Even at a steady twenty miles per hour above the limit it had been a two-hour trip to Montgomery, and one we probably didn’t need to make. But between the lost files and the burned-out shack and Arn Norlin’s description of Pettigrew, we felt it best to cover all bases. And face time beat the hell out of phone calls.
“Fingers broken?” I asked.
He wiggled the appropriate digits. Pettigrew was in his late twenties, sandy hair and a light complexion. He wore a threadbare cotton jacket over jeans, a beaded leather belt. He looked relaxed but his eyes were fully engaged.
“Arn Norlin says you scoped out the scene down to individual blades of grass,” Harry said.
“Norlin exaggerates. I did what little I could.”
“You really climbed the microwave tower?”
“Wanted to get a bird’s-eye view of the field and woods. I did find something interesting at the base of the tower. The grass and weeds had been crushed down. I found blood on the grass, bagged it for Forensics. It DNA’d out as Frederika Holtkamp’s blood. The victim.”
“A teacher was what Barlow said.”
“Special education, taught retarded and autistic kids. Retired. Seemed to be getting on all right, real nice house, good car. She had more money than most retired teachers I’ve seen. But we never found out much more. We don’t even know where or how she got taken. It was so slick it was scary.”
“You mentioned blood around the tower. But the shack was a football field’s distance away. How you figure her blood got there?”
“I thought maybe she’d broke loose from the perp, ran to the tower scattering blood from her wounds. But Forensics said it wasn’t spatter, but soaking. Like a bloody rag left on the weeds. Or clothes.”
“The perp rested there, maybe,” Harry suggested. “Soaked with blood.”
Pettigrew sat forward, picked up a pencil and tumbled it through his fingers.
“I grew up hunting with my daddy and uncle. Deer, wild hogs, anything. Got OK at tracking. A lot of it’s looking for subtle indicators.”
“Talk subtle to me,” Harry said.
“I was up in the tower, fifty, sixty feet. It was half past eight in the morning. Ms. Holtkamp had been found an hour earlier by two old farmers out squirreling before chores. Sunlight was at a sharp angle and dew hadn’t cooked off yet. I saw several trails in the weeds, the dew knocked off, the tiniest shift in color. A camera wouldn’t pick it up. The trails met at the base of the tower.”
“Arn said you found evidence of a vehicle.”
“Definite tire impressions in the grass, busted-off branches probably used to cover the vehicle.” He paused. “There was one thing about the car that never made sense to me.”
Harry said, “That being?”
“Tire impressions where it had been driven back into the trees, fifty, sixty feet off the road. There was another set where it backed out. The tread picked up dirt, got faint where the vehicle pulled onto the road, but still discernible. Then the tracks stopped dead.”
“Vanished?” Harry said, narrowing an eye.
“Like the car pulled onto the asphalt and disappeared. Never figured it out. Sucked into a Martian spaceship?”
He chuckled at the example, but I could see it still bugged him.
“Your take on the whole scene?” I asked.
Pettigrew put his arms on the table and leaned forward. He spoke near a whisper.
“You guys are the PSIT down in Mobile, right? The guys that get the crazies?”
“It’s a part-time gig,” I said. “Like twice a year.”
“Ever do any conjectures that get a bit out of the box?”
I nodded. “Even when we’re wrong it’s the right way to think. Everything’s a possibility.”
Pettigrew lowered his voice. “My conjecture: The perp brought the victim to the shack, made his kill. He wandered from the scene to the tower-tired? High on something and disoriented? I’ll never know. But someone else
