Chapter Fourteen:
Jeff Acheson ran a red light in downtown Toledo, and a cop saw him do it. Another cop saw the paperwork and recognized the name. He gave us a call and a Toledo address, and Henry was sent to question Acheson.
He returned just as Bradley was chewing me out for being late to work, and there was no victory in his face.
“Not our man,” Henry said as he eased himself onto the corner of Bradley’s desk. Bradley scowled.
“How come?” I asked, glad for the diversion.
“He’s working nights, making pizzas. I checked with his boss. Acheson was working when Whittier was killed and when Rafferty got it.”
I frowned. “You’re positive?”
“Hey, the guy showed me his payroll records. Acheson was at work, no doubt about it.”
“Couldn’t he have gotten someone to cover for him?”
“No way, Jo. It’s a small shop. His boss would’ve noticed if he had cut out.”
Bradley rubbed his jaw. “Scratch Acheson.”
“Well,” I said brightly, “no one ever thought Jeff did it anyway.”
Bradley didn’t appreciate the good cheer. “It would be highly commendable if someone would find the son of a bitch who did do it.”
I killed my smile. “What about Chip Greathouse?” I offered.
“Oh, Jo, ” Henry protested, genuinely dismayed.
“Jocks can kill, too,” I persisted.
“But what’s the point? The man’s the star of the football team. His future is guaranteed. He could have his pick of the girls.”
“He couldn’t have Peggy Rafferty,” I reminded him.
“So one girl turns him down. Big deal.”
“Maybe it was a big deal.”
Bradley cleared his throat. We had been ignoring him. It wasn’t polite to ignore the boss. So we obediently shut up and turned back to him with something less than devout attention.
“Berger checked into Greathouse’s alibi about a party the night Whitter was killed,” Bradley said. “The boy was there, all right, but no one remembers exactly when.”
“Too bad,” Henry said.
“Not surprising,” I admitted. “It’s been more than a month.”
“No need to remind me,” Bradley said pointedly.
I shrank into my chair. “He still could have done it,” I said in a small voice.
“Darryl Harrington still could have done it,” Henry mimicked.
“He’s practically locked up!” I objected.
Bradley rubbed his jaw again. He must have scraped it while shaving. “Practically, yes. But are we sure he couldn’t have slipped out?”
I stared at him. “You gotta be joking. That man’s off in Never-Never Land.”
“But could he get away?”
I thought back to the night Peggy Rafferty was killed. I had called the Veterans Administration hospital, just to be sure, and I had been connected to a night supervisor. And what had I said? “I asked if Harrington was still a patient, and the nurse said yes.”
“But did you ask anyone to check on Harrington right then? Did anyone see if he was still in his room?”
I squirmed. “I didn’t ask. I just assumed someone would do it.”
“He couldn’t have done Rafferty, Sarge,” Henry said. “No way.”
“Make sure of it.”
Henry glanced nervously at the clock.
“In the morning, Henry.”
Henry smiled.
I flipped through the pages of my notebook. There wasn’t one decent lead in it. “Mike Edwards was high on Harrington because he’s a disturbed vet. Can we check military records on these other guys?”
Bradley raised an eyebrow. “Which guys?”
I shrugged. “All of ’em.”
Henry smirked. “No use checking on the likes of Dan O’Brien and Frank Pierce. Those kids never saw the inside of a boot camp.”
“But maybe they tried,” Bradley said thoughtfully. “Maybe they didn’t make it.”
“Or maybe they’re in ROTC on campus,” I added.
“All right,” Bradley agreed, “I’ll hassle the military in the morning. Berger can get the ROTC records.”
Henry had been searching for an idea to throw into the pot and brightened as he got one. “Gun clubs?”
Bradley frowned. “I thought you’d gone that route.”
“I checked sales and official records, but I didn’t get into private deals between gun freaks.”
“You didn’t happen to check your own collection, did you?” I asked sourly.
“I know where my H&K went,” Henry said stiffly. “It was a legal sale.”
“So who’d you sell it to?”
“Now, now, children,” Bradley interrupted, “let’s keep it friendly.”
“It was just a thought,” I muttered. Henry was blushing.
“Keep after the gun, Henry,” Bradley ordered. Then he turned to me. “And just what were you planning to do this evening to further the cause?”
It was my turn to blush. I had nothing definite in mind.
“How about the families?” Henry put in wickedly.
I groaned.
“What about the families?” Bradley asked.
“We sort of took the Raffertys’ word for it that they didn’t know any Whittiers, but did we go back to the Whittiers and ask them about the Raffertys?”
Bradley nodded. “Good point. Maybe there’s a relative or a mutual friend at work here. Someone who knew the girls through the families rather than the campus.”
“Could be a local,” I offered. “Someone who resents college kids.”
“I don’t know,” Henry said slowly. “That might work for Whittier. She lived in a neighborhood where there were a few townspeople left, but Rafferty was in a student housing project. All her neighbors were students, too.”
“So it’s a local who picks girls at random,” I said stubbornly.
“There’s the Farmhouse,” Bradley added. “Whittier was last seen at the Farmhouse. Maybe she went home with one of the bartenders. Most of them are local.”
“Oh, hell, there’s Tony’s, too,” I said in exasperation. The list of possibilities was getting longer and longer.
“Okay,” Bradley said. “Henry checks the veterans hospital and the gun clubs. Berger gets ROTC and the neighborhoods. Mulhaney can handle the bars. Jo gets the families.” He sighed. “I get the military.”
“It’s only fair, Sarge,” Henry said. “You outrank us.”
Bradley glared.
Henry smiled and shuffled out. It was past his quitting time. I hung back for a second.
“You got Al Dexter on your list for the feds?” I asked.
“I got ’em all, Jo. Why?”
“No good reason,” I said hastily. “I’d just like to know if he was in the service.”
“Ask him.”
“I’d rather not.”
“Ask Hyatt.”
I blushed. “I don’t want to use him, Brad.”
Bradley gave me a long, hard look. “That’s not using him.”
“It is to me.”
“Shit,” Bradley growled, and slammed some folders around. “All right, Dexter’s on the list. I’ll check him out. And Hyatt.”
“Dave’s in the clear. You said so yourself.”
“So I’ll check him again. Now get outta here!”
Sometimes, I thought irritably, Bradley acted as though we were still sleeping together.
* * *
Darryl Harrington never left the veterans hospital the night Peggy Rafferty died. Three different administrators told Henry quite forcefully that it would have been impossible for Harrington to slip into town, murder Rafferty and get back to the hospital undetected. And though they didn’t elaborate on Harrington’s condition, I knew from Dave that he was in no shape to plan and get away with a murder. Dave had driven to the hospital over the weekend and had found Harrington sittting in a corner of his room, hugging himself and silently rocking back and forth. Dave had triedf for half an hour to break through the wall Harrington had built around himself, but had gotten nothing in return but a blank stare. I had a very depressed man to soothe that night.
Henry also tracked down the president of the one gun club in town and learned of a couple of interesting gun deals, but neither panned out. Henry took to hanging out at the VFW and American Legion after work, but managed only to irritate his wife by coming home late and a little drunk.
Berger made great strides in police-community relations by taking his effervescent personality to the streets. He found several old men who lived in tired old houses wedged in between student projects and who were bitter enough to blow a couple of students away, but Berger doubted that they were capable of the rape half of the rapes and murders. The young townspeople he met generally lived off the university and its students, and didn’t seem inclined to eliminate the very people who fed them. There were a few mouthy ones who had less than kind things to say about students, but Berger didn’t think any of them had the guts to blow a woman’s brains out. Being a disagreeable sort himself, Berger was usually quite accurate at gauging the nastiness of others, so I took his word for it when he said none of the neighbors he interviewed was our man.
The ROTC records turned up one interesting name. Neither Dan O’Brien nor Frank Pierce had ever been enrolled, but Chip Greathouse had spent one year in the program. He had dropped out as a sophomore because football was demanding so much of his time. That didn’t necessarily illustrate the personality quirk I was looking for — a sharpshooter gone mad — but it did prove that Greathouse had more than a nodding acquaintance with things military.
Of course, that didn’t mean he knew how to handle a gun or where to get his hands on one.
Mulhaney struck out at the bars. The waitress at the Farmhouse who had served Michelle Whittier had done a lot of gossiping after the murders, and the bartenders were more than a little wary of talking to Mulhaney. They knew all too well that the last time Michelle had been seen alive, she had been sitting in their bar, and they were very, very careful about answering Mulhaney’s questions. They also had pretty good alibis for the nights of the murders.
Tony’s was useless. The bartenders there knew about Michelle because of the publicity about her death, but none remembered her as a customer. Peggy Rafferty was also just a name in the news. One young bartender thought he might have shared a class with her back when they were freshmen and were stuck in the same introductory lecture courses designed for a hundred students or more, but he wasn’t even sure of that. Mulhaney took his name, but he wasn’t enthusiastic about it.
I had a long, frustrating conversation with the Whittiers over the phone. There were blistering tirades from Michelle’s father because we hadn’t caught the son of a bitch yet, punctuated by her mother’s more civilized but just as frantic attempts to think of some connection to the Raffertys. She would break down and sob pitifully, then her husband would grab the phone and melt the line with his personal evaluation of police in general and me in particular. I tried to look at it objectively, telling myself that I’d feel the same way if it had been my daughter, but that only reminded me of Elizabeth, and then I lost all sympathy for the man who was calling me the kind of names I usually heard only when hauling drunks into the tank. My hand was trembling when I hung up, and I still had no fresh leads.
Christmas break arrived, and the students went home.
Kathleen M. Fraze 
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