17
JAKE RUNYON
Before he drove to Deer Run to talk to Jenny Noakes’s aunt, he wanted more information on the homicide. He spent the better part of an hour in the Fort Bragg library, going through microfiche files of the Advocate-News and the North Bay region’s largest newspaper, the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, for the latter half of 1989. Both carried news reports about the slaying, neither very long, and there was one brief followup in the Press Democrat. That was all.
The search produced one useful fact: the investigating officer for the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Department had been Lieutenant Clyde Van Horn.
There was no listing for Van Horn in the local or county phone directories. So Runyon made his next stop the sheriff’s substation, a short distance from the library. The young officer on the desk didn’t know a Lieutenant Van Horn, but an older deputy on duty did. Van Horn was no longer with the department. Retired five or six years ago. Bought a place somewhere down the coast-Little River, the deputy thought it was.
Little River was about fifteen miles south of Fort Bragg, just beyond the quaint tourist-trap village of Mendocino. Runyon drove down there, stopped in at a grocery store and then a cafe. The waitress in the cafe knew Van Horn; he and his wife came in for breakfast now and then. She was pretty sure they lived on Crescent Drive, a few miles south off the coast highway.
Crescent Drive: short road that bellied out along the bluffs overlooking the ocean and dead-ended after a tenth of a mile. Half a dozen houses and cottages were strung along the oceanside. The first one he tried was deserted. A woman at the second told him the Van Horns lived in the last house before the dead end.
It was a small cottage built at the edge of the bluff above a rocky whitewater cove. Fenced garden in front, a lawn spotted with animal sculptures along the north flank. The Land Rover parked in the driveway told Runyon someone was home. The someone turned out to be Clyde Van Horn.
Van Horn was seventy or so, big, healthy-looking, and willing to talk. They sat in a living room that had two walls made of glass to take advantage of the ocean and whitewater views.
“Sure, I remember the Jenny Noakes case,” Van Horn said. “You always remember the ones that go cold on you.”
“She was strangled, is that right?”
“That was the coroner’s opinion. Damage to the hyoid bone was consistent with manual strangulation.”
“Sexually assaulted?”
“Undetermined. Three months in a shallow grave in the mountains, animals digging up and carting off pieces-there wasn’t a whole lot left for analysis. No DNA procedures back then, not in a county like this one.”
“Where was the body discovered?”
“Heavily wooded area about a mile outside Deer Run. Close to the road. County road crew was doing repairs and one of the workers went into the woods to take a leak and spotted the grave.”
“East or west of Deer Run?”
“East. Why?”
“Curiosity. Turn up any suspects?”
“Her ex-husband seemed like a good bet-her aunt said there was bad blood between them-but he was working in an oil field in Texas when she disappeared. A couple of other possibles, but no physical evidence to lay the crime on either one.”
“You recall their names?”
Van Horn thought about it. “One was a transient, young guy fresh out of the army. Potter, Cotter, something like that. Seen in the vicinity of the general store in Harmony where Jenny Noakes worked and was last seen. But he didn’t have a rap sheet and his military record was clean, so we had to let him go.”
“The other one?”
“Man named Jackson, worked as a handyman in the area. He had a thing for Jenny Noakes, kept trying to date her. She wouldn’t have anything to do with him. They had an argument in a local tavern a couple of days before she disappeared. My money was on him, but like I said, there wasn’t any way we could prove a case against him.”
“Was she in a relationship at the time?”
“More than one, off and on. She wasn’t exactly chaste. Liked men, liked a good time.”
“One of the men Lloyd Henderson, owned a hunting cabin in the mountains east of Harmony?”
Van Horn had a habit of cocking his head to one side when he was thinking; he did it again now. “Henderson… sure. Doctor or something from some place down in Sonoma County.”
“Dentist. Los Alegres.”
“Yeah, that’s right. Lloyd Henderson. Didn’t you say the case you’re investigating involves two men named Henderson?”
“Lloyd’s sons.”
“What, then? You think there’s a connection between him and what happened to Jenny Noakes?”
“Maybe not with her murder, but Henderson knew her pretty well.” Runyon related what Mona Crandall had told him about Jenny Noakes’s surprise visit and pregnancy claim. “It wasn’t long afterward that she disappeared, if Mrs. Crandall’s memory is accurate.”
“Interesting,” Van Horn said. “I don’t remember Henderson saying anything about any of that when I talked to him.”
“You questioned him? Did he admit knowing Jenny Noakes?”
“Had to admit it. They were seen together in Deer Run.”
“To having an affair with her?”
“He wouldn’t go that far. Just acquaintances, he said. But that’s what any married man would say under the circumstances. ’Specially if he knocked her up.”
“But you didn’t consider him a suspect?”
“No cause to. Spotless record, well-respected in his community. Everybody we talked to, including Jenny’s aunt, said their relationship was casual, no trouble, no friction between them. If we’d known about the affair and pregnancy, we’d have leaned on him some. But the coroner couldn’t be certain if she was or wasn’t, as badly torn up and decomposed as the remains were.” Van Horn cocked his head again. “You must’ve talked to Henderson. What’d he have to say for himself?”
Runyon said, “He’s been dead five years.”
“Five years? Then what could he or Jenny Noakes’s murder have to do with his sons being stalked now?”
“No clear idea yet. But the first thing the perp did was dig up Henderson’s ashes and pour acid on them.”
“Man. So the real target was Henderson and his sons are, what, substitutes? Because of Jenny Noakes? That seems like a stretch after twenty years. Why would anybody wait that long to go on a rampage against the family?”
Runyon tilted a hand sideways. “I may be way off base here,” he admitted, “but it’s the only angle I have to work on.”
“Well, suppose you’re right and there is some sort of connection. Who could he be, this phantom stalker?”
“The perp’s in his twenties-that’s been established. Jenny Noakes had a son, Tucker, seven years old when she died. He’d be twenty-seven now.”
“Sure, I remember the kid,” Van Horn said. “Took his mother’s death pretty hard. But I still think you’re reaching. If it’s the son all screwed up with hate and wanting revenge, why pick Henderson as the guilty party instead of one of the others I told you about? And why wait so long?”
“Recently uncovered some kind of proof, maybe.”
“Such as what? Where? How?”
Runyon tilted his hand again. “What happened to Tucker after his mother’s death?”
