“It’s out here on top of the filing cabinet where you left it an hour ago.”
“Dammit…” he muttered.
There was a short hiss, and then Clovis’s voice rattled from the tinny box again. “Want me to bring it in to you?”
“What time is it?” he asked, a mildly absent quality to his voice as he circumvented the original question.
“Eleven-thirty,” she replied. “I swear, Skip, you need a watch.”
“Why? You’ve got one.”
“Skip…”
The sheriff sighed, then smoothed his bushy mustache before turning his attention back to Constance. “You have lunch yet, Special Agent Mandalay?”
“No, actually… And you can call me Constance, by the way.”
“Skip? You want me to bring you your cup?” Clovis’s voice came over the speaker again.
He depressed the button. “No, hon… Thanks anyway. I think I’m gonna take the Fed over to That Place. You want me to bring you back anything?”
The intercom crackled. “I brought lunch today, but I sure could go for a piece of pie… Oh…but I really shouldn’t.”
“Coconut cream like usual?” he asked.
“I really shouldn’t,” she replied.
“Coconut cream it is,” he grunted.
“That Place?” Constance asked when he was finished.
“It’s the diner across the street,” he replied as he rolled back, then pushed up from his chair and ambled over to a bentwood coat rack in the corner, stopping for a moment to hitch up his belt before pulling down his jacket.
“Does it have a name?” she asked as she stood.
“Yeah, That Place.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah,” he said with a nod. “Come on, I’ll buy you lunch and see if I can get you up to speed on all this.”
“What about the card?”
“What about it?”
“May I see it?”
The sheriff hefted his jacket back onto a hook then walked back to the desk. “Exactly the same as all the others,” he grunted, shuffling through the papers and extracting a manila envelope labeled EVIDENCE, along with a few scribbles of information such as the date and time. Handing it to her he added, “Got it bagged for you; not that you’ll find anything. Your lab geeks never do.”
“That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. Eventually the killer will slip up.” She added a paraphrased retort, “ They always do.”
“Yeah. Good luck with that.”
“You seem a little jaded,” Constance said, reaching into her pocket and withdrawing a pair of surgical gloves.
“Like I said, seven murders, seven years, five Feds, square one,” he replied. “And now I’m staring at number eight in about three days time. You’ll have to excuse me if I sound less than hopeful regarding an outcome at this point.”
“I understand,” she replied, unwrapping the string closure and then carefully emptying the contents out into her gloved hand.
The Christmas card was nothing particularly unique. Printed on inexpensive stock, the front of it was a detailed color rendering of a serene, somewhat darkened living room. A fireplace dominated the center of the picture, with a bulging, bright red, gift-laden stocking hanging from the mantle. A pair of black boots attached to telltale red-suited legs were dangling down from the flue and into the dormant fireplace.
In the foreground was a small plate, upon it resting a half-eaten cookie and what appeared to have once been a full glass of milk, now mostly empty. Adjacent to it was a note written in a child’s hand that said, “For Santa, Marry Crismis. Luv Susie.”
Above it all, gracing the top of the scene, were the words ‘Twas The Night Before… printed in an embossed, bold script.
Inside the card was blank. On the back was only the simple logo of a generic greeting card manufacturer that had long since gone out of business according to the case file.
Constance turned the card over in her hands, looking at the back, at the blank inside, and finally lingering over the artistically depicted tableau on the front. Sheriff Carmichael watched her silently for several minutes.
Eventually, he cleared his throat and muttered, “Exact same damn card every year, stuffed right through the mail slot… Always on December twenty-second. No envelope, no prints, no DNA, no hair, no fiber, no nothing… Didn’t make the connection until the second year.” He paused for a second then spat, “Anyway… Every Christmas we find a man’s body…or I guess I should say pieces of one. They pretty much add up to a whole, except for…”
As the sheriff’s voice trailed off, Constance verbally filled in the blank. “The external genitalia.”
Out of reflex he nodded assent while he spoke. “Yeah. Always missing.”
“Just like John Horace Colson,” she breathed.
“Except Colson happened thirty-five years ago, and there’s no question who killed him…and why.”
“I know.”
“Yeah. You read the file,” he replied. “Then you also know we find the victim in the exact same spot Colson was found.”
“I do.”
“After number two, we started watchin’ the place. Full on, around the clock, starting the week before Christmas every damn year. This year’ll be the fourth where I’ve sat out there myself. Nobody in, nobody out, but on Christmas morning, the body is always there.”
“That was in the file too.”
“Good. Then maybe you can explain that one, because I sure as hell can’t.” He paused, then brought the present thread of the conversation back full circle. “You know, right around Thanksgiving every year I start wondering if the sonofabitch has finally run out of cards so that maybe this nightmare can stop. Then one shows up. Maybe this will be the last one…but I really doubt it.”
“Do you just wonder, or is that one of your uncanny observations?” she asked, turning to look at him.
He shook his head. “More like a Christmas wish. It’s the same one everybody in Hulis makes. Been a lot of wishbones snapped on it, believe me.”
Looking back to the card in her hands, she dropped her voice to just above a whisper. “Everybody in Hulis except for one, apparently.”
“No,” he told her. “This isn’t someone from around here. This is an outsider.”
“That’s just one theory.”
“Yeah, but it’s the theory I’m sticking with.”
“Why?”
“Because it makes me too damn sick to think otherwise.”
Constance slid the card back into the evidence envelope and secured the flap shut with the closure string.
As she peeled off the surgical gloves, in a matter-of-fact tone she remarked, “You know I have to talk to her.”
“I assume you mean…” he allowed the name to go unspoken.
“Merrie Callahan, yes.”
The sheriff sighed heavily, then reached up beneath the rim of his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose as he hung his head and shook it slightly. “Do you really think that’s necessary? You said you read the file.”
“Yes, it is, and yes, I did.”
“Well? There should have been interviews in there from the other four Feds.”
