DEAD CONNECTION : a novel by Charlie Price

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THE DEPUTY

Deputy Gates was over twenty years with the Sierra County Sheriff ’s Department out of Riverton, California. He was familiar with sorrow. His wife was long gone, a casualty of his earlier love affair with gambling. His son was dead, two years this coming August, from a speedball overdose the summer before he was going to be the starting middle linebacker on the high school football team. A mistake, Gates hoped . . . an accident, he prayed.
      Shortly after his wife left, Gates resigned from the Sheriff ’s Department and began an even faster slide downhill. Spending nearly every night in casinos, he bet away his house and the rest of his savings. He borrowed until he wiped out his pension, and then was arrested during an altercation with a loan broker. A trip to his own jail embarrassed him enough to start an ongoing recovery process with Twelve-Step meetings.
      Now, years later, he sat in his car at Whiskeytown Lake in the foothills west of Riverton, California. The area was at the end of the Central Valley, dry and hot as a griddle through the summers, even though it was surrounded by mountains. Thankfully, it was winter now, and the temperature, fifty-five degrees, made the November day comfortable.
      Sitting, quiet, thinking, Gates saw quail families combing through the manzanita. Saw a jack raise its ears as it hesitated to leave its crumple of boulders and chance open ground.
      He wondered why he had stayed with investigating. Morbid curiosity? A bitter upbringing that led to foolish notions of power and justice? A uniform that extended playing cowboy into adulthood? He knew he backslid into the job as a sheriff ’s investigator after his son’s death. But not even the domestic violence, the senseless vandalism, the unsolved crimes, and the occasional gore could drive him to civilian work.
      He smelled the diesel of a tour bus in the parking lot behind him and heard the faint rumbling as its engine idled. For the hundredth time that week, he thought about the missing Parker girl.
      On a rainy evening, October 17, Nikki Parker had left the school gym when cheerleading practice was over, about 6:00. She said good-bye to the woman faculty advisor and to her teammates, who were discussing which four girls made the sturdiest pyramid bottom for a football game stunt. She was always second from the top, so she didn’t care what they decided.
      Investigators assume that she left the gym and walked downhill toward the parking lot, where she had put her car that morning. The car still sat there the following day, and there was no evidence that she had reached it.
      Police surmised that someone she knew had offered her a ride in the evening rain, and she got in with them and disappeared off the face of the earth. The high school grounds were grid-searched by hundreds of law enforcement personnel and volunteers. Not a trace. A list of her closer acquaintances was made, anyone she might have accepted a ride from, and all were interviewed and alibis checked. All school administrative, teaching, maintenance, food service, and transportation employees were interviewed and checked. No one could find an eyewitness to her activity once she left the gym.
      The police suspect list was topped by her ex-boyfriend, Rudy, a nineteen-year-old who had dropped out of her high school a year before. He had given up his senior year to travel and work on the cars in his uncle’s racing team.
      Some said that, after he got back last summer, he ganged up with the town’s main conduit for Southern California skag, a small group of bright, disaffected kids from wealthy families who could afford to ride Harleys and have “Dragoons” embroidered on the back of their lambskin jackets. Some said they were his boyhood friends, but that he wasn’t really running with them. At any rate, he didn’t have an alibi for the 6:00 to 7:00 time slot that day. Nikki’s girlfriends thought he was really handsome and sometimes really mean, and that she probably would have gotten into a car with him.
      Rudy’s statement stank with bravado. “You know what you were doing two days ago, 6:00 to 7:00? Somebody says they know that, they probably did whatever you’re asking about. I’m busy. I’m doing things all the time. I was with friends doing something. That’s all I got. You know what else? I loved that girl. Anybody hurt her, I’d kill them myself, no shit. Give me a few days. I’ll figure out what I was doing.”
      Next on the police favorites list was a young man named John Turner, who was Nikki’s private tennis coach and trainer. He was seen as a marginal citizen who made his money by supplying a variety of needs for his all-female clientele. He was tan, facile, and few men who met him trusted him. Many of Nikki’s friends, however, thought he was a “hottie.”
      Nikki’s parents paid for the court lessons and the training. They had no idea about the man’s character or how much time their daughter actually spent with him. “She has her own car, you know. She’s away from home several hours a day and that’s the way it is with all the girls now,” her mother had told the investigating officer. Everyone thought she would get in a car with him if he invited her.
      Turner was glib. “Of course I know Nikki, but I haven’t set eyes on her since her lesson last week. She didn’t show up for this week’s,” he told the investigating officer. “I don’t have one bit of useful information for you and my next lesson is in fifteen minutes, so if you’re through . . . ?”

      The third candidate was an overweight school bus driver with a comb-over who should have been right in that area at the same time Nikki exited the front of the gymnasium building. The man, Buell Nostrum, had no criminal record, but word around the school was that he took a strong interest in pretty girls, trying to engage them in conversation, reaching to help them down the bus steps. Administrators were aware of Nostrum’s interest but no formal complaint had been filed by either students or parents, and no administrative action had been taken. His supervisor suspected him of fudging time cards and stealing tools occasionally from the vehicle maintenance barn but could never marshal the hard evidence necessary to fire him.
      Nostrum’s story was that he didn’t even know the girl. Possibly true because she never took the bus and he never drove for school sports functions. Police weren’t able to confirm whether or not he attended games where he would have seen her cheerlead. He denied it and his wife corroborated. He said he had been doing errands that night and had gone the opposite direction out of the maintenance yard where he routinely parked.
      “I didn’t go out front at all. I was headed to that big Shopko out on Lake Boulevard. That’s why I was late getting home, and you can ask my wife.”
      Police did. And she confirmed it. A search of the house turned up shopping bags from that market but no recent receipts to confirm dates of purchase.
      At the end of October, investigators were left with a missing person, three possible suspects, and not a shred of viable evidence indicating what had actually happened. The parents could afford a $50,000 reward, and the community raised an additional $25,000 to go on top of it. The community organized bloodhound searches of every park and forest area within reason. Ponds and rivers were dragged, and scuba divers went deep into the two local lakes.
      Over two thousand man-hours and nobody found a thing.

PEARL OF THE CEMETERY »

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