Products (154)

<!--?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?--> Chapter 1 <div class="element element-bodymatter element-container-single element-type-chapter element-with-heading" id="chapter-1"> <div class="heading heading-container-single heading-size-full heading-format-full heading-alignment-flexible heading-without-image"> <div class="heading-contents"> <div class="title-subtitle-block title-block-title-is-element-number"> <div class="element-number-block"> </div> <div class="title-block"> <h1 class="element-title case-mixed"><span class="element-number-term">Chapter</span> <span class="element-number-number">One</span></h1> </div> </div> </div> </div> <div class="text" id="chapter-1-text"> <h2 class="section-title subhead keep-with-next paragraph-follows case-mixed" id="subhead-1">Oh brother, what have you done</h2> <p class="first first-in-chapter first-full-width first-after-subhead first-with-first-letter-t"><span class="first-letter first-letter-t first-letter-without-punctuation">T</span>he smell of death rode on the wind. John Altar crested the hilltop and brought his horse to a stop. He&rsquo;d smelled it a ways off, but the breeze had all but stilled some time ago. The stink remained. He whistled low and the dog that had been his companion for a while, some kind of wolf half-breed, sat on its haunches close on his left. The fat gray clouds overhead threatened rain, and no wind stirred the thick expectant air, which was hot.</p> <p class="subsq">As he stared down the slope, he cut a hunk of tobacco from his plug, sliding it off the blade directly into his mouth. The leaf was hard and dry. It had been wrapped in a cloth in his saddlebag for a time. Spit washed over the scrap and the bitter flavor crept into his senses.</p> <p class="subsq">Below, at the bottom of the slope, a series of double tracks had been worn into the earth by scores of wagons over the years. Upon that trail were the remains of some homesteaders who had been on their way to what they&rsquo;d hoped to be a better life. Nothing moved down there, except the black flutter of buzzard&rsquo;s wings as they fought over bloated corpses. He couldn&rsquo;t tell how many settlers there had been, and by the butchery, he figured more scavengers than just the buzzards had visited this site.</p> <p class="subsq">Being that it was going on late summer, this seemed kind of late in the season for pioneers to be this far down the trail. Unless of course, they were Mormons. They wouldn&rsquo;t be going all the way to Oregon or California.</p> <p class="subsq"><em>Still don&rsquo;t see many Mormons moving west this time of year</em>, Altar thought, but there were always those late to the party. Seemed like most who&rsquo;d wanted to migrate had already done so, no matter how austere the conditions might be.</p> <p class="subsq">He had to wonder if he was going to find Bobby down there. He&rsquo;d been dogging his younger brother, and the collection of dirty, low-down, no-account Johnny Rebs Bobby had taken up with, for weeks. Could those ne&rsquo;er-do-wells be responsible for the carnage down below?</p> <p class="subsq">Could Bobby?</p> <p class="subsq">Or his brother might be among the dead.</p> <p class="subsq"><em>Only one way to find out</em>, he thought.</p> <p class="subsq">Altar steered his horse forward, despite the animal&rsquo;s reticence to approach the field of death. He reached out and patted the horse&rsquo;s neck in reassurance.</p> <p class="subsq">&ldquo;Easy, boy. I&rsquo;m not liking this any more than you do, but we got to go down there.&rdquo;</p> <p class="subsq">The inevitable dread of what he might find weighed as heavily on him as an anvil around his neck.</p> <p class="subsq">He yanked his blue handkerchief from his back pocket. Unfolding it, he rubbed the cloth on the horse&rsquo;s sweaty flesh and got it good and wet. The lather smelled strong, but it probably wouldn&rsquo;t help much gauged on the putrid odor lingering in the air from this distance.</p> <p class="subsq">He gave the chaw a grind with his molars to break it apart and moistened the results with spit. Then he spat some of the ground tobacco and juice onto the blue fabric and roughed it in hard. He fastened the cloth in place around his head, bandit style. He was hopeful, as the mixture of animal and tobacco odors made him wrinkle his nose, that the powerful smell would somehow mask the overwhelming stench of the charnel house below. But as he made his way closer, he knew it wasn&rsquo;t going to be much help.</p> <p class="subsq">The only sound was the buzzing of insects, the swish of his horse&rsquo;s tail, and the not-so-distant rumble of thunder.</p> <p class="subsq">A storm must be coming.</p> <p class="subsq">He looked at the dog. &ldquo;Stay.&rdquo;</p> <p class="subsq">The dog settled onto its belly and laid its head on crossed forelegs, ears ever alert.</p> <p class="subsq">Altar drew his Henry repeating rifle and laid it across his lap as his horse started forward with the slightest nudge from his knees. Nothing was moving on the horizon, no dust clouds. He wove his horse all the way down the incline through the scrub, all the while watching everywhere, alert for any movement or sound out of place.</p> <p class="subsq">Safe at the bottom of the slope, Altar studied the gruesome scene. The settlers had apparently taken no defensive posture, no circled wagons, no firearms strewn about, though those could&rsquo;ve been stolen to be sure. Not much of value remained after a massacre. The area was a wide-open expanse. They sure should have been able to see the attack coming. Why hadn&rsquo;t they at least circled their wagons?</p> <p class="subsq">But his gut spoke to him, and he suspected he knew what had happened here. God knows he&rsquo;d seen its like in the war. <em>Looks like they got bushwhacked</em>.</p> <p class="subsq"><em>Bobby, what have you done?</em></p> <p class="subsq">As he neared, the reek grew worse, and he could practically taste it. Lots of distended green-blue bottle flies buzzed nearby.</p> <p class="subsq">He dismounted at the end of the carnage and looped his reins around a broken fragment of wagon wheel jutting from a groove in the dirt. The horse snorted and bucked at the pervasive odor of nearby death. Altar patted the animal once more and scanned the horizon again.</p> <p class="subsq">Nothing yet, besides the approaching clouds every bit as bloated at the feasting flies. His ever-alert dog was still quiet up on the ridge.</p> <p class="subsq">The clouds, and the flashes of lightning, were the only things that looked threatening. He pulled his slicker from his saddle and unrolled it. The heat was stifling, but he put it on anyway.</p> <p class="subsq">Prairie schooners, mostly covered, had been overturned, their canvas torn, and the cargo, what wasn&rsquo;t worth taking, was strewn across the trail. Oxen had been killed; and in a couple of instances, steaks had been cut from their flesh. There was even a dead dog. A horse or two had been killed, which was unusual, but he suspected most of the quality animals had been stolen.</p> <p class="subsq">A smattering of rough arrows, fletched with feathers he didn&rsquo;t immediately recognize, were prominent on some of the dead animals. Men lay dead, too, the tops of their blond heads shorn to the bone, and their soft bellies torn open.</p> <p class="subsq">He came across an old woman&rsquo;s body. She lay on her back with her skirts up around her head. She&rsquo;d also been scalped, and her lady parts had apparently been mauled, probably by some wild critter. They were only doing what any hungry critter would do, and he couldn&rsquo;t really fault them for that. Might as well get mad at the clouds for raining.</p> <p class="subsq"><em>But it wasn&rsquo;t no animal that hiked her skirt up like that</em>, Altar thought. <em>That was done by a two-legged kind of varmint.</em></p> <p class="subsq">A baby lay under her. It was dead too, but from what he couldn&rsquo;t tell.</p> <p class="subsq">These were among the worst killings he&rsquo;d ever seen, but he couldn&rsquo;t really hold no ill will with the animals.</p> <p class="subsq">A fat raindrop splattered on the back of his hand, and then another. It wasn&rsquo;t until the moisture brought his mind round back to the present that he realized he was gripping his Henry so hard his scarred knuckles were white. The skies unleashed a torrent of rain as he stood and stared at the butchery that lay before him. Even the cold rain didn&rsquo;t divert his attention from the slaughter.</p> <p class="subsq">He reckoned no amount of water would wipe away the stain of this massacre from the earth. At least nothing short of the forty-days and forty-nights rain that his momma read to him and Bobby about from the Bible. He stowed his rifle back in its saddle boot and covered the Henry with his blanket, even though some blue sky was already visible over the hills to the west. He turned back to the trail and set his teeth. He had a grisly task ahead of him.</p> <p class="subsq"><em>Oh, Bobby</em>, he thought, <em>were you a part of this? Am I gonna find you?</em></p> <p class="subsq">Would it be better if his brother were among the dead, rather than having participated in this slaughter?</p> <p class="subsq">Perhaps so.</p> <p class="subsq">But on to the task&mdash;time to bury the dead.</p> <div class="ornamental-break"> <div class="ornamental-break-block ornamental-break-aspect-wide"> <div class="ornamental-break-size-container ornamental-break-width-281"> <img alt="" class="ornamental-break-image" src="images/break-dinkus-palatino-screen.svg"> </div> </div> <p class="ornamental-break-as-text">* * *</p> </div> <p class="first first-in-section first-full-width">He hadn&rsquo;t stopped for anything but water until the sun was about set, then he cobbled together a fire halfway to the top of the rise, upwind from the dead. The material for burying them all had been almost conveniently close thanks to the nearby rocky expanse, but any appetite he&rsquo;d worked up was long gone. He settled for some pan coffee and hardtack soaked some in the dark liquid.</p> <p class="subsq">All of the dead looked to be pilgrims. At least none had been his brother, nor had any of the others appeared to be the ne&rsquo;er-do-wells he&rsquo;d heard Bobby was now running with. While that was a relief, it also made him ask what the hell had happened to his brother. The boy he once knew would never have participated in anything like this. What had happened to him in the war?</p> <p class="subsq">The war.</p> <p class="subsq">The damn war&hellip; So many lives ruined.</p> <p class="subsq">Altar had served with the Union, and Bobby had gone with the South.</p> <p class="subsq">The brutal conflict between the states had divided his family and how many others?</p> <p class="subsq">He fished the oilcloth-wrapped locket from his saddlebag. He cradled the bundle in his hand for a long moment, and then opened it. The orange-red flames flickered in the reflection on the small metal oval. He thumbed it open and gazed at the shadowed picture within, not really seeing her likeness as much as some remembrance, though those had faded, like the picture, to near nothing.</p> <p class="subsq">How many times had he opened this same locket in the field?</p> <p class="subsq">When he fought in Missouri or out west, after some battle or skirmish, when his thoughts were dark with death and dying, he&rsquo;d found comfort by opening it. At one time, memories of her had driven some of the horror from his mind. Though the time apparently had driven memories of him from her mind as well. She&rsquo;d married someone else while he was away fighting.</p> <p class="subsq">Married some farmer with a hundred head of dairy cattle or some such. Why couldn&rsquo;t those images fade with time, as was the case with his memory of his love?</p> <p class="subsq">That thought brought him back around to the massacre. He hadn&rsquo;t found anything that led him to believe the wagon train had been herding any livestock, other than a few oxen. That was strange. Most of the wagon trains he&rsquo;d known had at least a hundred head of cattle or sheep with them.</p> <p class="subsq">He replaced the locket in his saddlebag and went to sleep with his freshly oiled rifle next him and his revolver tucked partially under the saddle upon which he laid his head.</p> <p class="subsq">The wind shifted in the night, and he awoke with the death stench heavy in his nose and mouth. He rose and hiked up to the top of the hill. The sun&rsquo;s rays were breaking over the hilltops in the east, but the bottom of the slope was still obscured in darkness.</p> <p class="subsq"><em>A shadow for the dead</em>, he thought. <em>Just as well</em>.</p> <p class="subsq">The dog loped up to him and sat, its tongue lolling out. Altar stood there and let the rays reach him, warming him against the chills of the past night. When he turned to go back to his makeshift camp, he gazed again at the ruins below, now basked in radiant sunlight.</p> <p class="subsq">The way he read the signs<span class="strikethrough">,</span> these homesteaders had died with their killers most likely hiding among them. And not like they were overrun by Indians or butchered by marauding men on horseback. Even though scavengers had been at the bodies, they hadn&rsquo;t done enough harm to make it look any different than it was. It didn&rsquo;t seem as if these people had time to even panic, let alone run, just die.</p> <p class="subsq">And what about the smattering of random arrows?</p> <p class="subsq">Indians?</p> <p class="subsq">Some of the folks had been scalped, but the arrows in some of the animals hadn&rsquo;t been what killed them. The feathered shafts weren&rsquo;t driven in deep. It was more like they were stabbed in by hand, not shot from a bow. No, this hadn&rsquo;t been the work of Indians, although measures had been taken to make it look that way. All the tracks of the living he&rsquo;d found had been wearing boots, nary a moccasin among them. And the horses that had rode off were all shod. He&rsquo;d never known an Indian to ride a shoed horse.</p> <p class="subsq">Altar knew what had really happened. And he had a real good idea of who was responsible. It made him sick to his stomach. He reckoned these pilgrims had been killed by the men he&rsquo;d been tracking, and they&rsquo;d tried to make it look like savages had done it.</p> <p class="subsq">The men he&rsquo;d been trailing&hellip; The men his brother had joined up with after being released from the prisoner of war camp in Chicago. Up until now, he&rsquo;d only thought of them as outlaws, stealing and the like, not murderers. The tactics were like what he&rsquo;d seen the guerillas in Missouri use during the war, infiltrate and destroy from within.</p> <p class="subsq">As he stared at the debris a while longer, the way the wagons had been overturned seemed more suited to men doing it deliberately as opposed to panicked animals. The battleground didn&rsquo;t look like any Indian attack he&rsquo;d seen in his years in the army. But it sure did look like how the Confederate guerillas had burned some communities to the ground in and around Missouri. And the people killed.</p> <p class="subsq">&ldquo;These folks got bushwhacked,&rdquo; he said aloud. The dog looked up at him. Altar nodded as if the animal understood.</p> <p class="subsq">&ldquo;A damn shame,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;But there&rsquo;s something eviler if men make it look like someone else done it, getting people all riled up at the wrong folks.&rdquo; He started down the incline, back to his fire and bedroll.</p> <p class="subsq">&ldquo;If we hadn&rsquo;t of happened along, Dog,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;whenever this here got discovered the Indians would&rsquo;ve been blamed. And people would&rsquo;ve been happy to believe it.&rdquo;</p> <p class="subsq">He shook his head as he kicked dirt onto the coals.</p> <p class="subsq">&ldquo;Talking to a damn dog, guess I been on my own too long.&rdquo; He grinned. &ldquo;But it ain&rsquo;t like them homesteaders been talking much.&rdquo;</p> <p class="subsq">He looked in the direction the tracks led off. It didn&rsquo;t seem right that no one was doing nothing about these people.</p> <p class="subsq">Hell, once he left here, would anyone even know?</p> <p class="subsq">Altar sighed and placed the blanket and saddle onto his horse&rsquo;s back. The nagging question remained in his gut like solid stone.</p> <p class="subsq">Had Bobby been a part of this?</p> <p class="subsq">When Altar had begun this journey, he&rsquo;d just been looking to bring his brother back home to their farm in Missouri while their mother was still alive. But now, he didn&rsquo;t know what to think. The little brother he knew before the war would never have been involved in anything like this, but the war did strange things to people. Still, he didn&rsquo;t want to think it had turned Bobby into the kind of man that could do what he&rsquo;d seen these last two days.</p> <p class="subsq">He took his hat off and wiped his brow with his shirt sleeve and looked at the dog.</p> <p class="subsq">&ldquo;Mama always said I looked for trouble, even when it wasn&rsquo;t none of mine to begin with.&rdquo; He twisted in his saddle and looked back at the site of the carnage. &ldquo;I know it would kill her, for certain, if she thought Bobby was involved in some way. So would his hanging for it.&rdquo;</p> <p class="subsq">A grim smile suddenly overtook him as he mounted his horse.</p> <p class="subsq"><em>There I go talking to that mutt again</em>, he thought.</p> <p class="subsq">But as he rode away, his mother&rsquo;s reproachful voice kept echoing in his mind: <em>Go find your brother, John. Bring him back to me before I die.</em></p> <p class="subsq"><em>I&rsquo;ll do my best, Mama</em>, he thought.</p> <p class="subsq">Altar pulled his reins over and set off after the tracks of the killers, including his little brother.</p> </div> </div>

<div style="max-width: 94%; margin: 3% auto;"> <span ><img src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0301/3604/1571/files/231029_SM_2e-1.jpg?v=1725759318" alt="test" /></span><hr /> <span ><img src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0301/3604/1571/files/231029_SM_2e-30.jpg?v=1725759318" alt="test" /></span><hr /> <span ><img src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0301/3604/1571/files/231029_SM_2e-31.jpg?v=1725759318" alt="test" /></span><hr /> <span ><img src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0301/3604/1571/files/231029_SM_2e-34.jpg?v=1725759318" alt="test" /></span><hr /> <span ><img src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0301/3604/1571/files/231029_SM_2e-35.jpg?v=1725759318" alt="test" /></span><hr /> <span ><img src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0301/3604/1571/files/231029_SM_2e-40.jpg?v=1725759318" alt="test" /></span><hr /> <span ><img src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0301/3604/1571/files/231029_SM_2e-41.jpg?v=1725759318" alt="test" /></span> </div>

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <title>Untitled</title> <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"/> <style> /* ePub CSS */ h1 {padding-top: 15%;} .indent {text-indent: 5%;} .center {text-align: center;} .right {text-align: right;} .margin {margin: 0 5%;} .margin-indent {margin: 0 5%; text-indent: 5%;} .bigmargin {margin: 0 5% 0 10%;} .bigmargin-indent {margin: 0 5% 0 10%; text-indent: 5%;} .hugemargin {margin: 0 5% 0 15%;} .hugemargin-indent {margin: 0 5% 0 15%; text-indent: 5%;} img {max-width: 94%;} body {margin: 0 3%; text-align: justify;} .spacer {padding-bottom: 1em;} </style> </head> <body> <h1 class="center" id="c2">CHAPTER ONE</h1> <div class="spacer"></div> <div class="spacer"></div> <div>Specialist 4 Dwayne Morton woke with a snort and looked around him. The small office he sat in was no different than when he had drifted off. His clipboard still lay at his elbow, the security log attached to it awaiting his next entry. His last simply noted the departure of the civilian cleaning crew at 4:00 AM, or 0400 hours military time. He was relieved that the duty sergeant had not discovered him during his inadvertent nap. Glancing up at the large clock hung on the wall, Dwayne saw that it was now 0517 hours. There remained almost three hours in his shift, a fact that did little to lift his spirits.</div> <div class="indent">“Army sucks,” he whispered with feeling. This was not supposed to have been his assignment—he had just completed a week’s tour of midnight to eight shifts, and by rights, should have been rotated to the much coveted day duty. But, as usual, the army, or more accurately, his first sergeant, had screwed everything up for him when Danny Boyle came down with appendicitis.</div> <div class="indent"><i>It wasn’t his fault that Danny’s appendix burst</i>, he thought, and there were plenty of other MPs to choose from in their company. It was just that Dwayne was having a little trouble with the company runs lately, was falling behind during PT sessions. Top was a fitness fanatic—the old fart had to be forty, and he still ran five miles a day—who does that?</div> <div class="indent">Glancing down at his waistline, Dwayne had to acknowledge that he had readjusted his duty belt twice since arriving in-country six months before—the damn beer and pastry diet here in Deutschland was kicking his ass and he had been no lightweight to begin with.</div> <div class="indent">Standing, he stretched and yawned widely, then snatched up his flashlight. Standard Operating Procedure on site security stated that foot patrols of the parking lot and office complex should occur hourly, though not at regular intervals, in order to avoid establishing a predictable pattern. Sleeping on duty was punishable by Article 15 regulations and could result in loss of pay or demotion.</div> <div class="indent">Slapping on the iconic white helmet liner with MP printed in black on the front, Dwayne threw open the door and staggered out into the parking lot. His last check had been almost an hour and a half before. He expected the duty sergeant to be rounding the corner any moment, as he always checked the sentries at least twice a night and Dwayne had not seen him since shortly after coming on duty.</div> <div class="indent">Noticing that one of the sodium lamps that lit the parking lot had burned out, Dwayne made a mental note to log the observation and complete a work order to have the bulb replaced. Satisfied with the lot, Dwayne turned to his left and began to walk toward the three story office building that overlooked it. Then he saw the car, a Volkswagen Jetta, parked in front of the entrance, and his steps faltered in surprise. The lot had been empty earlier, he was sure of it.</div> <div class="indent">Was it possible that one of the German cleaning crew had forgotten something in the building and come back for it? Had they driven past him as he slept? <i>But it could have happened while he was making his last rounds</i>, he thought, <i>desperate for a preferable alternative</i>.</div> <div class="indent">This was one of the faults in the procedure—he couldn’t be in two places at once. Each time he was inside checking the offices he was away from the lot. Of course, he was supposed to check the lot each time he returned, but he had exited the building from the rear after his last inspection and come back to his office from the other side and hadn’t bothered. For Christ’s sake he wasn’t supposed to be on nights anyway!</div> <div class="indent">Switching on the flashlight, he shined it at the windows, the beam revealing an interior empty of occupants. That was a relief, at least. He gave each of the vehicle’s four doors a tug, finding each locked in its turn, preventing him from getting inside and finding the registration. If he could only discover the owner and give them a call, maybe he could get the damned car out of there before it was discovered by his supervisor. He kicked a tire with his spit-shined jump boots. “Goddamnit,” he muttered.</div> <div class="indent">Walking to the rear of the VW, he played the light across the registration plate. It was German alright. Wedging the flashlight between his elbow and his body, he pulled out pen and pad with his free hand to jot the number down.</div> <div class="indent">Headlamp beams swept across the small lot, accompanied by the familiar grind of a jeep’s engine. When they came to rest on Dwayne, the vehicle raced across the asphalt, skidding to a halt just feet from the MP, and transfixing him in their illumination.</div> <div class="indent">“Whose fucking vehicle is that, specialist?” Duty sergeant Calvin Auster demanded, leaping from the jeep. He was hardly older than Dwayne, no more than twenty-eight, but every inch the lifer, his uniform immaculate, his leather polished and gleaming. Having enlisted to escape the Brooklyn ghetto of Bedford-Stuyvesant, it was his firm intent to never return there. Black and lean, he glared at the chubby specialist as if he had placed the car there himself in order to thwart the sergeant.</div> <div class="indent">“I just found it, sarge,” Dwayne began, hastily coming up with a plausible chain of events. “It was here when I came out of the office building.”</div> <div class="indent">“And when was that?”</div> <div class="indent">“Just now—I finished making my rounds in there and found it here with no one around. I was writing down the registration number to call it in,” he lied, holding out his notepad as proof of his honorable intentions.</div> <div class="indent">Sergeant Auster looked unimpressed. Glancing at his watch, he snapped, “In less than an hour personnel will begin to arrive here, specialist, and in less than an hour I want this fuckin’ piece of civilian shit towed out of here and impounded. Is that clear?”</div> <div class="indent">Dwayne nodded, “Yes, sergeant.”</div> <div class="indent">“I will not have some goddamn colonel climbing up my ass today because you let some German loser ditch his car in our lot, do you hear me, Specialist Morton?”</div> <div class="indent">“Loud and clear, sarge,” Dwayne responded.</div> <div class="indent">The irate sergeant turned on his heels and began to climb back into his jeep. As he fired up the engine once more, he stared at the VW for a moment, then said, “Have dispatch run that vehicle thoroughly before you remove it, specialist. HQ’s been warning everybody to be extra cautious since that German officer got whacked in Hamburg a few weeks ago.”</div> <div class="indent">Dwayne nodded, though it was not entirely clear to him what he was expected to do—tow the car, or not?</div> <div class="indent">The sergeant began to reverse at the same high rate of speed he had arrived, then slammed on the brakes once more. He studied the VW in silence as if something was troubling him. “Get on the radio and request a bomb-sniffing K-9, Morton,” Auster said quietly. “Tell them I said so. You stay here and keep everybody out of the parking lot until it’s been swept.”</div> <div class="indent">“Not let anybody get to their offices, sarge?” Dwayne asked. He could already picture the ass-reaming every officer that showed up was going to give him. “Not even officers?”</div> <div class="indent">“You heard me correctly, specialist,” the sergeant snapped, then added in a softer tone, “I’ll be back as soon as I finish up doing spot checks—twenty minutes, or so. I’ll be back long before the brass arrives in any case, so don’t worry, I’ll handle the heat.”</div> <div class="indent">Dwayne was both relieved and grateful.</div> <div class="indent">The sergeant sped off in the direction of the Staff Duty NCO’s office.</div> <div class="indent">With a sigh, Dwayne removed his portable radio from its belt holder and called in the request to dispatch, placing heavy emphasis that the order came from Sergeant Auster. After only a very few minutes he was told that the K-9 officer and his dog would be enroute shortly, and that he was to hold the fort in the meantime.</div> <div class="indent">“Wilco,” he replied, fishing a package of cigarettes from his cargo pocket and firing up a smoke. He could see that his hands were shaking a little. Taking a deep draw to settle his nerves, he plopped his wide rump onto the trunk lid of the Jetta. He was not surprised to hear the springs groan a little at his formidable burden, but the loud click that followed was puzzling.</div> <div class="indent">Rising and turning, Dwayne was only in time to witness the fireball erupting from the car and engulfing him like a blowtorch, the explosion blowing out every window of the office building. Like a flaming comet, he traveled some fifty yards to land smoking and smoldering outside the same door he had stepped through only minutes before, his leather boots the only bit of clothing left intact, his body charred black, his face burned away. He had only two and a half hours left in his shift.</div> <div class="spacer"></div> <div class="center">#</div> <div class="spacer"></div> <div class="spacer"></div> <div class="spacer"></div> </body> </html>

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <title>Untitled</title> <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"/> <style> /* ePub CSS */ h1 {padding-top: 15%;} .indent {text-indent: 5%;} .center {text-align: center;} .right {text-align: right;} .margin {margin: 0 5%;} .margin-indent {margin: 0 5%; text-indent: 5%;} .bigmargin {margin: 0 5% 0 10%;} .bigmargin-indent {margin: 0 5% 0 10%; text-indent: 5%;} .hugemargin {margin: 0 5% 0 15%;} .hugemargin-indent {margin: 0 5% 0 15%; text-indent: 5%;} img {max-width: 94%;} body {margin: 0 3%; text-align: justify;} .spacer {padding-bottom: 1em;} .letter {font-family: monospace;} li {padding-bottom: 1em;} </style> </head> <body> <h1 class="center" id="c3">Chapter One—THE DISCOVERY</h1> <div class="spacer"></div> <div>On January 13, 1995, the world, consumed by the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman, eagerly awaited the results of a hearing that would determine if evidence challenging Detective Mark Fuhrman’s credibility would be admitted in the O.J. Simpson trial.</div> <div class="indent">As I made my way along the winding roads leading to Fort Smith, Arkansas, I listened as the local radio station announced how prosecutors believed that O.J. dropped a glove as he attempted to sneak back to his mansion the night of the Simpson and Goldman murders. Judge Lance Ito was also expected to rule whether O.J. Simpson’s former wife would be required to appear in court.</div> <div class="indent">The unspeakable events surrounding the murders proved to be sensational, dark, and shocking. It was the perfect storm for a true crime addict. And I was hooked. At 21-years-old, I was already deep into my obsession. My fascination with murder mysteries gave me an adrenaline rush. The fix of the “who,” “what,” “when,” and “where” kept me reading every true crime novel I could get my hands on.</div> <div class="indent">On this particular day, as my obsession kept me tuned in to the radio for the O.J. Simpson case, another announcement caught my attention. A body had been found in the Ozark National Forest and authorities were on the scene. They suspected the body could be that of 19-year-old Melissa Witt.</div> <div class="indent">As my Nissan Altima crept along the two-lane highway of U.S. 71 that was at the time the main route between Fayetteville and Fort Smith, Arkansas, I gazed into the Boston Mountains and watched dark clouds roll in.</div> <div class="indent">At the same time, a chill settled in across the Ozarks. The clouds opened up and unleashed torrents of furious rain on a remote and lonely crime scene. As it turns out, roughly 56 miles away in the Ozark National Forest, a beautiful landscape of trees and mountains had been hiding a terrible secret.</div> <div class="indent">On January 13, 1995 at 9:40am, about 15 miles north of Ozark, two animal trappers stumbled upon what they believed could be a mannequin lying face down in the woods about 30 feet off the main road. The two men, avid outdoorsmen, had walked this very path the day before. There had been nothing there.</div> <div class="indent">As they approached the strange figure lying in the woods, it became clear that what they found was something much more sinister. After 45 long days, the remote Forest Service Road 1551 in the Ozark National Forest had finally unearthed the unthinkable: the decomposing nude body of a young, white female.</div> <div class="indent">Frantic, the pair immediately called the Franklin County Sheriff’s Department. Upon receiving the news, Sheriff Kenneth Ross contacted Detective Sergeant Chris Boyd with the Fort Smith Police Department Major Crimes Unit.</div> <div class="indent">Over 20 years later, as I sat down to interview the now former Detective Boyd for a documentary I was producing on the Melissa Witt case, he could still vividly recall that cold and rainy morning.</div> <div class="indent">“At the time, the police department was in the Sebastian County Courthouse and I distinctly recall walking through the basement to get to my office in the Detective Division. That’s when I received a phone call from Sheriff Ross.”</div> <div class="indent">As the retired detective described the phone call, his expression turned serious and somber. I’d seen this look before. It was the expression of a man haunted by the unsolved murder of an innocent young woman.</div> <div class="indent">“Sheriff Ross told me on that call that he thought he had found the body of Melissa Witt. And knowing him as I did at the time, I figured he was probably right. I had him describe to me what he was seeing and what the body looked like. Once he gave me the description… well, I knew I had to rally the troops at that point. We needed crime scene techs and detectives at that scene immediately.”</div> <div class="indent">As the former detective described the events that unfolded the morning of Friday, January 13, 1995, my own memories flooded back. When I close my eyes, I can still feel the icy chill in the air. I remember arriving in Fort Smith that morning, and as I stepped out of my car, the rain came down in heavy thuds, hard and fast, soaking my clothes as I ran across the parking lot. Another memory of me complaining to my coworkers about the miserable weather conditions on that day also replayed in my mind: “Why did this beautiful day take a drastic turn for the worst?” My words unknowingly foreshadowed events that would haunt me almost two decades later.</div> <div class="indent">As the former lead detective on the Melissa Witt murder investigation, Jay C. Rider entered the room, I nervously stood to greet him. As we shook hands, Rider asked if Melissa and I had been friends, an assumption others often make to describe my passion for finding justice for a girl I never knew.</div> <div class="indent">“No sir. I never knew her. We had mutual friends, but we never met.” Rider eyed me skeptically, nodded, and said, “I guess that makes two of us.”</div> <div class="indent">“Tell me about January 13, 1995,” I said. “The day you found Melissa Witt’s body.”</div> <div class="indent">Rider described the day as normal, even for a Friday the 13th. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a superstitious guy. It was a normal day. It started off sunny—a perfect day. I decided to get some work done around the office. When the phone call came in from Sheriff Ross, as you can imagine, all hell broke loose. We all headed out to that crime scene. We feared the worst… that this body was Melissa Witt.”</div> <div class="indent">News reports of the crime scene describe a lonely, remote logging road near Turner Bend just north of Ozark. I knew the location of Melissa’s body would reveal details about her killer.</div> <div class="indent">“Can you tell me more about the location?” I asked.</div> <div class="indent">“It was a logging road. More or less a single lane road, rough terrain, off the main gravel area. The road was mainly accessed by loggers clearing and cutting the national forest,” Rider explained. “Trappers, hunters, campers and sometimes local kids looking to party used that road. Believe it or not, the logging road ended—like a cul de sac—so it was a dead end. A remote, hopeless dead end.”</div> <div class="indent">“What else do you remember about that day?” I asked.</div> <div class="indent">“I will never forget that day,” Rider said. “We started working the crime scene and the temperature dropped drastically. It started to rain—hard rain—rain that was actually coming in sideways. The wind was blowing hard and it was miserable. None of us had jackets or anything else because it had started off as such a perfect day. I remember finding a raincoat in my car and trying to find a warmer shirt or something to change into so I could stay warm.”</div> <div class="indent">Rider’s description of that fateful morning closely paralleled my own memories. But now it seemed that what we had witnessed was so much more than just a rainstorm. Instead, maybe we experienced the heavens releasing an unrelenting stream of tears for a girl we never knew.</div> <div class="indent">The medical examiner’s report revealed that the official cause of death was “asphyxiation by strangulation.” Leaves and soil found in Melissa’s airway indicated she had been strangled face down and she had inhaled debris from the forest floor as she fought for her life.</div> <div class="indent">Laboratory testing on the debris found in Melissa’s airway gave investigators an important clue: the debris was native to the Ozark National Forest. This told investigators that she had been killed at or near the location where her body was discovered. The medical examiner’s report also yielded another important clue: Melissa had non-fatal trauma on the side of her head that was believed to have been caused by a blow or a fall.</div> <div class="indent">Armed with this information, investigators began to put together a profile of Melissa Witt’s killer. Two scenarios emerged: The killer was either a local or someone who frequented the area from out of state to hunt, hike, camp, or fish. Melissa’s body could have been disposed of in many places but her killer chose this remote location. An area so isolated that if you had never been there before, it would be almost impossible to find.</div> <div class="indent">A more detailed examination of the crime scene shocked investigators. Indentations behind a large headstone-like rock positioned between two small trees revealed that her body had initially been hidden there.</div> <div class="indent">According to police records, Melissa had visible marks where someone, presumably the killer, had grabbed hold of her in order to drag her decomposing body closer to the road.</div> <div class="indent">“It would have been a gruesome task,” Jay C. Rider said flatly. “Think about it. Melissa’s body had been out in the elements for 45 days and was in advanced stages of decomposition. There was small animal activity on the body and the scene was… it was brutal. Whoever moved that body did it so it could be found more easily. Maybe so her mama could give her a proper burial. Regardless, the task was gruesome and we are still trying to figure out who moved her body and why.”</div> <div class="indent">A strange phone call made to police a day or two prior to the discovery of Melissa’s body may have provided a different clue. The caller left a voice message at the Fort Smith Major Crimes unit one evening. On the recording, a lady with a thick Southern accent could be heard saying, “Go ahead and tell them what you found.” Then there was a younger male voice, also with a thick Southern accent who was reported saying, “No, I can’t,” and then the phone disconnected. Did the young man who was part of the mysterious phone call discover Melissa’s body in the woods and move it from behind the rock so she could be found? Was he scared he could be blamed for the murder? Sadly, we may never know. Despite extensive efforts to identify the people responsible for that phone call, their identities remain a mystery.</div> <div class="indent">Determined to learn more about the psychology of this type of killer and crime, I obsessively began to research homicidal strangulation. I discovered that in a high percentage of cases, the offender and the victim are related or in a romantic relationship. Seventy-five percent of strangulation victims are females, with the most frequent motives being rape, sexual jealousy, or personal rivalry. Research also suggests that females are predominantly the victims in homicidal strangulation because they are more likely to be the targets of sexual assaults.</div> <div class="indent">Could this be why her body was found nude? Was she sexually assaulted? Unfortunately, we may never know for certain. According to the medical examiner’s report, it was impossible to determine if she had been raped.</div> <div class="indent">I kept researching. I found that a high percentage of female victims in homicidal strangulation are murdered due to a quarrel in their relationship and/or due to unrehearsed violence applied by bare hands to put the victim at a physical disadvantage and render the victim incapable of resisting. In 86% of the strangulation cases the victim was found at the scene of the killing. In 22% of these cases, the victim was found outdoors. In 17% of these cases, the offender stole something from the victim. In 14% of these cases, the victim was first hit with a blunt instrument.</div> <div class="indent">A cold chill went down my spine. Did Melissa know her killer?</div> <div class="indent">I compared these facts to what I had learned about her gruesome murder:</div> <div class="spacer"></div> <ol><li>According to the autopsy report, Melissa was hit in the head with a blunt instrument.</li> <li>She was found strangled, outdoors, and naked—her clothing and personal belongings had been taken from her.</li> <li>The remote location was familiar to her killer. Authorities believe he had been there before.</li> </ol> <div class="spacer"></div> <div class="indent">I began to look even closer at events that had unfolded on the day Melissa disappeared. From all reports, the day started off routinely. She spent the first part of the morning with her mother, Mary Ann Witt. The honor student headed to Westark Community College next. After that, she went to lunch with a friend and then off to her job as a dental assistant.</div> <div class="indent">Before she left that morning, Melissa had a minor disagreement with her mother. She had asked to borrow money, and Mary Ann, in an effort to teach her daughter money management, had told her no.</div> <div class="indent">Before Mary Ann left for work that morning, she left a note for Melissa reminding her she would be bowling with her league that evening and offering to buy her a hamburger. She signed the note, “Love, Mom.”</div> <div class="indent">At five o’clock that night, after clocking out at her dental assistant job, Melissa discovered that her 1995 Mitsubishi Mirage wouldn’t start. After a few tries, she gave up and waited with a coworker until a local businessman, later dubbed the Good Samaritan, gave her car a jump.</div> <div class="indent">Police reports detail how Melissa’s dome light was left on by mistake, draining the car battery. Investigators tracked down the Good Samaritan and interviewed him multiple times before ultimately clearing him in the teenager’s disappearance and murder.</div> <div class="indent">“People ask about the Good Samaritan all the time because those events leading up to Melissa’s abduction seem suspicious,” Rider said. “The Good Samaritan does seem suspicious, until you realize how many times he was questioned. He was cleared of any suspicion in Melissa’s murder.”</div> <div class="indent">We know that, once Melissa’s car started, she went home to change out of her uniform. Those clothes were found crumpled on her bedroom floor. Mary Ann was able to determine that her daughter had then donned a white V-neck sweater and blue jeans.</div> <div class="indent">Melissa must have seen her mom’s note, because authorities believe she headed to Bowling World, arriving between 6:30pm and 7:00pm. She parked in the northwest corner of the lot, but never made it inside. There were no cameras to record the events that unfolded in the parking lot that night. Witnesses would later tell police they heard a woman screaming, “Help me!”</div> <div class="indent">Two decades later, as I pored over police files and news footage, my heart broke to learn that Mary Ann was haunted by the note she left for Melissa that fateful Thursday. In one interview she is quoted as saying, “I try not to think about how our lives would be different if I had not invited Melissa to Bowling World that night. There is no use thinking about it. I know she is gone. But my heart…. You know, as a mom… I sometimes wonder what if I had done something differently.”</div> <div class="indent">At approximately 7:45pm, Melissa’s car keys were found in the parking lot and were turned in to the front desk of Bowling World. No one noticed the splatters of blood that were slowly drying on the metal keys.</div> <div class="indent">Since Melissa never entered the bowling alley that night, her mother simply thought she had decided to go out with friends instead. Mary Ann went home expecting to see her daughter later that evening. Hours passed and Thursday slowly turned into Friday.</div> <div class="indent">At nine o’clock on Friday morning, Mary Ann reported Melissa as a missing person. By Saturday, Melissa’s friends and family were passing out flyers, blanketing the River Valley with over 6,000 pleas for help in finding the missing teenager.</div> <div class="indent">I lived in Northwest Arkansas at the time, and remember seeing the story of Melissa’s disappearance light up news channels. Her picture seemed to be everywhere. Curious, I reached out to my friends in the River Valley. It turns out they knew her. Their voices trembled as they shared their worst fears with me:</div> <div class="indent">“Melissa would not just disappear like this.”</div> <div class="indent">“Where could she be? This is not like Melissa at all.”</div> <div class="indent">“I hope she’s okay. I am scared she’s been hurt.”</div> <div class="indent">Christmas passed and the new year rang in but there was still no Melissa Witt.</div> <div class="indent">For more than a month, I, like the rest of the community, sat on the edge of my seat questioning what had happened to the beautiful All American Girl. None of us expected the story to turn into what it did.</div> <div class="indent">A quote by the late Michelle McNamara, in her book <i>I’ll be Gone in the Dark: One Woman’s Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer</i>, resonates with me. She wrote, “He loses his power when we know his face.” These words sum up the rationale behind the countless hours I’ve spent investigating the Melissa Witt case. I want to see his face.</div> <div class="indent">For over two decades the identity of Melissa’s killer has been hidden among the dense trees and thorny undergrowth rooted deeply in the uneven ground of a remote mountaintop in the Ozark National Forest. I envision him, a shadow-like figure, dark and dreadful, his confidence anchored in the predictability of a murder case slowly growing cold.</div> <div class="spacer"></div> <div class="spacer"></div> </body> </html>