“Well, you said you had something interesting for me.” Alma glanced at her watch. “I’m due on shift in forty-five minutes, and if I’m not mistaken, so are you.”
Viv put her shoulders back. She was wearing a floral blouse tonight, and she’d put on a yellow sweater over it. She’d considered wearing darker colors to make herself look more serious, but she liked the yellow better. “I wanted to talk to you about something. Something I think that could help you.”
“Okay,” Alma said politely, accepting a cup of coffee from the waitress and stirring some sugar into it.
“It’s about Cathy Caldwell and Victoria Lee.”
Alma went very still.
Viv opened her folder. “Well, it isn’t only about them. It’s—just listen, okay?”
“Vivian.” Alma’s voice was almost gentle. “I’m only the night-shift duty officer. I don’t work murder cases.”
“Just listen,” Viv said again, and there must have been something urgent in her voice, something that was almost alarming, because Alma closed her mouth and nodded.
“Cathy Caldwell was killed in December 1980,” Viv said. “She was twenty-one. She worked as a receptionist at a dental office. She was married and had a six-month-old son. Her husband was deployed in the military.”
She knew all of these things. She recited them like they were the facts of her own life. Alma nodded. “I remember it.”
“She went to work one day and left her son with a babysitter. She called the babysitter at five o’clock and said she was picking up groceries on the way home, that she’d be fifteen minutes late. At six thirty, the babysitter called her mother, asking what she should do because Cathy wasn’t home yet. The mother said she should wait another hour, then call the police. So at seven thirty, the babysitter called the police.” She looked at Alma, then continued. “The police searched for her for three days. They found her body under an overpass. She was naked and had been stabbed in the side of the neck three times. The stabs were deep. They think he was trying to get her artery. Which he did.”
“Vivian, honey,” Alma said. “Maybe you shouldn’t—”
“Just listen.” She had to get this out. It had been boiling in her mind for days as she scribbled thoughts into her notebook. Alma quieted and Viv pulled a hand-drawn map from her file folder.
“The article said that Cathy’s usual grocery store was this one here.” She pointed to a spot on the map, halfway between the X marked with Cathy’s work and the X marked with Cathy’s home. “No one saw her there that night. Her car was found just out of town, parked at the mall, so there was a theory she went shopping instead. But that wasn’t like Cathy at all. And you see, it makes sense. Because he dumped her at the overpass, here”—she indicated another X—“and then he drove her car to the mall, which was ten minutes away. Just because her car was there doesn’t mean she was ever there.”
“I get it,” Alma said. “You’ve been playing amateur detective.”
The words stung. Playing amateur detective. It didn’t feel like that. “I’m getting to a point,” Viv said, but Alma kept talking.
“We get people like this sometimes,” Alma said. “They call in to the station with their theories. Especially when it comes to Cathy. People don’t like that it wasn’t solved. They feel like her killer is out there somewhere.”
“That’s because he is,” Viv said.
Alma shook her head. “I didn’t work that case, but I was on the force when it happened. We all got briefed. The leads were all followed.”
Viv was losing Alma, she could tell. “Just hear me out this one time,” she said. “Just until you have to go on shift. Then you’ll never hear from me again.”
Alma sighed. “I hope I hear from you again, because I like you,” she said. “You seem like a bright girl. All right, I’ll drink my coffee and listen. Carry on.”
Viv took a breath. “There was a theory about Cathy. They found that one of her tires had a repaired puncture in it. So he could have punctured her tire, then taken her when he pulled over to help her. But the article said they couldn’t determine when the puncture repair was done.” She flipped a page to another set of neatly written notes. “I used the Fell yellow pages and called every auto repair shop. They all said they had no record of fixing Cathy’s tire. But it was two years ago now, so it’s possible she came in and the record is long gone.”
There was silence, and Viv looked up to see Alma looking at her. “You called auto repair shops,” Alma said. It wasn’t spoken as a question.
Viv shrugged like it was no big deal. She wasn’t about to admit that she’d been hung up on three times. “I just asked a few questions. The other thing is that if Cathy was stabbed in the neck she would have lost a lot of blood. Like, gallons. And the articles didn’t say there were gallons of blood under the overpass.”
Alma’s eyebrows went up. “So you surmise that she was killed elsewhere.”
“I looked up the weather records,” Viv said, ignoring Alma’s dry tone. “There was a thunderstorm with heavy rain the day after Cathy disappeared. So he could have killed her outside somewhere, and the rain washed the blood away.” She ran a hand through her newly short hair. “If you were going to kill someone with a lot of blood, where would you do it? Not the overpass, for sure. There are cars going by there. My guess is the creek.” She pointed to the creek on her map, the bank two hundred yards from the overpass. “None of the articles say if they checked the creek. Or if Cathy had mud on her. I bet that’s in the police records, though. If Cathy was muddy.”
“You looked up weather records, too?”
“Sure,” Viv said. “They’re right there in the library.” She flipped
