A Bleak Prospect Read online

  A Bleak Prospect

  A Sam Jenkins Mystery

  Wayne Zurl

  Copyright © 2018 by Wayne Zurl

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review or scholarly journal.

  ISBN: 978-1-68046-634-8

  Melange Books, LLC

  White Bear Lake, MN 55110

  www.melange-books.com

  Smashwords Edition, License Notes

  * * *

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should go to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of the author.

  Names, characters, and incidents depicted in this book are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of the author or the publisher. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

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  Published in the United States of America.

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  Cover Design by Lynsee Lauritsen

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Thank You For Reading

  Author Mailing List

  Melange Mailing List

  About the Author

  Also by Wayne Zurl

  Sneak Peek

  Also Available from Melange Books

  For Bazzie

  * * *

  Don’t try to compute the hourly wage I get to write these books. When it’s all said and done, we should have enough for a meal at the Chinese buffet once a month.

  Acknowledgments

  I’d like to thank several people who assisted me in taking this from a working idea to a story good enough to be published. This is not an account of a true crime or composite story of actual crimes. It is, however, inspired by documented events that I have embellished and fictionalized. A BLEAK PROSPECT is a figment of my imagination for which I take all responsibility.

  * * *

  To my old friend, M. Albert Mendez, who spent his valuable time kicking around my theories, adding his own ideas and helping me muster up the enthusiasm to write this novel.

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  To my former partner, retired Suffolk County (NY) Police Detective Paul B. Thomas, who sent me numerous accounts of things that happened long after I retired. I used two of these actual events as vignettes to enhance this story and add authenticity to it.

  * * *

  And to a few other people who, for not so obvious reasons, should remain anonymous, but nonetheless contributed priceless information for me to make this piece of fiction look better than a true crime drama.

  * * *

  To a few people who have lent their names to characters I used in this book: My long-time friend Alfred W. Hahn Jr. whose name I’ve used for a recurring character.

  * * *

  To retired Nassau County (NY) Police Captain Michael J. Butler, my friend, former interdepartmental counterpart, former FBI counter-terrorism operations specialist and author of the popular Nick Brennan thrillers, for providing me with a name for a young FBI agent.

  * * *

  And, lastly, to my former high school classmate retired Officer John Hanshe, Nassau County (NY) Police Department, who allowed me to use his dad’s name for a character important to the story and Sam Jenkins’ flamboyant arrest procedure.

  * * *

  Thank you all.

  Chapter One

  Police officers who work in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains occasionally require equipment not often needed by cops in cities or semi-urban neighborhoods.

  Crime scene investigator Jackie Shuman and I were standing waist deep in the briskly moving waters of Crystal Creek wearing our police issue rubber waders.

  Deputy Medical Examiner Morris Rappaport, his assistant, Earl W. Ogle, four other police officers, and a partially controlled crowd of tourists stood on the bank as Jackie and I approached the fallen tree that snagged a very dead body as it floated downstream, adjacent to the Creekside RV Park in Prospect, Tennessee.

  “Go easy when you remove her from those branches, Sam,” Morris said. “If she’s been underwater for a few days, you might get surprised.”

  From the color of the corpse, it seemed like Morris was giving us sound advice. The once light-skinned female, now only partially clothed, looked roughly the color of a blue Italian plum.

  “Jackie, block the moving water with your body,” I said. “It’s forcing her into the tangle. I’ll see if I can free her arm from this branch.”

  “Times like these, I ask m’self why I didn’t volunteer fer the traffic division.”

  I understood his complaint but ignored it. “Okay, go slow, and pull the branch down while I lift the arm.”

  “Oh, Lord have mercy.”

  It took us almost ten minutes of finessing the body out of the gnarled branches of the dead sweet gum before we could float her to a spot clear of debris. Jackie’s partner, David Sparks, met us on dry land with an aluminum-framed rescue litter. Once we maneuvered the body and secured it onto the litter, we pushed, while Sergeant Stan Rose and Officer Junior Huskey pulled her onto the grassy shore.

  Several spectators appeared to be getting more curious and began inching their way closer to the action, craning their necks for a better look.

  “Junior,” I said, “Help Johnny keep the gawkers back.”

  “Glad to, boss.”

  Stanley covered the body with a yellow disposable blanket as the doctor set up his workspace.

  To Shuman and Sparks, I said, “Get your stakes out, and cordon off the area.” To Stan Rose, “I think you three can move that herd back toward the parking area. Let’s give Mo and Earl a little privacy.”

  “Piece o’ cake,” Stanley said.

  All three went about their business.

  I stood over the body as Morris and Earl attempted to gain a little preliminary information and prepare her for a trip to the morgue and her post-mortem examination.

  “Jesus Christ,” I said, “I count twenty-three stab wounds to the torso alone.”

  “Look at the bruises across the carotid arteries,” Mo said. “Strangled. That either killed her or rendered her unconscious. I’m only guessing about these wounds, but I think the killer wanted to get air out of the stomach and lungs, so she’d sink.”

  “Cold and crafty bastard. Only it didn’t work. This is a pretty shallow body of
water to think she’d make it down to Davy Jones’ locker.”

  Morris nodded. “After the autopsy I should know if there was any forcible sex.”

  “That leather miniskirt and one remaining knee-high boot might indicate she worked in the sex trade.” I shrugged. “Or she just liked to look the part.”

  “I’ll let you know what I find, Samilah. But offhand, I’ll bet you’ve just joined the lucky investigators looking for the Riverside Strangler.”

  I shook my head and blew out a large volume of air. “Just what we need in beautiful downtown Prospect.”

  Earl zipped up the black vinyl body bag.

  Morris looked up at me but spoke to the corpse. “Welcome to the peaceful side of the Smokies, young lady.”

  For almost two years, detectives from the Blount County Sheriff’s Office have been looking for a serial killer the media tagged The Riverside Strangler. So far, seven bodies were found in publicly accessed rivers and streams—all in county patrolled areas, but off the beaten path. These victims were young prostitutes, two male and five female, who posted their services with an on-line classified advertising site. Each had been sexually violated and murdered. Some were strangled manually, as it appeared with our current victim and others with a ligature. All were stabbed multiple times, usually, but not always, post-mortem. On four occasions, cheap, but sharp kitchen knives were recovered somewhere near the spot where investigators determined the body was dumped into the water.

  All the knives could be easily purchased in most of the discount stores in most of the communities of the state. So far, no fingerprints were found, and no other trace evidence of the killer had been discovered. In essence, the killer sanitized the crime scenes and the victims before disappearing.

  Our murdered woman, found in Crystal Creek by a vacationing RV owner taking his son fishing, bore all outward appearances of victim number eight. The last previous body showed up a hundred yards east of a boat-launching ramp along Topside Road in the town of Louisville, only eighteen miles from Prospect.

  With luck, we’d get a fingerprint match and identify our victim. From there, we’d backtrack and conduct a complete background investigation on her. My operations aide, honorary Detective John Gallagher, excelled at this type of job.

  Jane Doe number 118, the name Morris Rappaport gave the murdered girl, began her journey to the morgue to patiently await her autopsy. I stripped off my waders and used a cleverly conceived wire device to hang them upside down to dry from the raised tailgate of Jackie Shuman’s Ford Explorer.

  I walked over to where Stan and Junior were assisting PO Johnny Rutledge contain a crowd of almost thirty onlookers who preferred to gape at the scene than go about their business as some of the nine million tourists who visit the Great Smoky Mountains annually should do.

  “Stanley,” I said, “have you got your large scale map handy?”

  “In the car, bwana.” He pointed to the crowd. “What do you want to do with the huddled masses here?”

  “I’ll call the county duty officer and get a couple of deputies to hang around and keep them back while the ETs do their thing. As soon as they get here, I’ll need people to find every spot where someone could have easily accessed the creek and dumped the body.”

  “Might be a lot of work,” he suggested.

  “Soon as we check the map, we’ll know how much.”

  “I’ll call Bettye and see how many 9-1-1 calls we’re getting. You might have to pull in a couple of off-duty guys and send Junior and Johnny back on patrol.”

  “Okay, call her while I touch base with the D.O. I’ll ask him to round up a bunch of auxiliaries, too. We’ll send one of our guys out to supervise each group of them and start checking the spots along the creek. If we can’t turn up something, I’ll call Sevier County to check their end of Crystal Creek.”

  “We need a bigger department.”

  “Back in New York, the squad dick would call in an eight-man homicide team and a sergeant to do the dirty work.”

  “Yeah, but we’re not in the big departments anymore.”

  Stanley had worked for LAPD before following his homesick wife back to Tennessee and landing a job with Prospect PD.

  He called Sergeant Bettye Lambert, while I spoke to the Sheriff’s duty officer, Lieutenant Ollie McClurg.

  Assuming our killer wouldn’t tote a dead victim on his back through a thicket or take a scantily dressed hooker for a hike through the brambles looking for a secluded spot to get romantic, our wisest move was to search out a piece of shoreline accessible by vehicle.

  An hour after Stan and I made our phone calls, I had four Prospect cops dressed for woods work and a dozen auxiliary deputies willing to tag along and perhaps get their boots dirty.

  I sent out four four-man teams to eleven access points used by fishermen and kayakers.

  I left the evidence technicians to finish processing the scene and returned to the PD to wait for their reports, photos and diagrams, the autopsy results and any clues the search teams might turn up—or not.

  My big priority was identifying the victim. If her fingerprints were in the system, our job would be easy. If not, I’d need a forensics artist to sketch a facial likeness to post in the newspapers and on TV news broadcasts.

  Chapter Two

  Days later, I walked from my office to the lobby of Prospect PD and tossed the folders holding the crime scene reports and photos and the autopsy results on John Gallagher’s desk.

  “Not a damn thing in these of any help.”

  John put aside a stack of field interrogation cards and looked up. “Nothing?”

  “Nothing. No one found the spot where she was dumped into the water. No knife. No tire tracks. No footprints. No nothing. And who the hell knows if she had a car? Morris says she was strangled manually, and there were bruises representing the killer’s hands. Immediately after the girl passed out, but still wasn’t dead, the killer—he or she—started the knife work. The killer even skinned off her fingertips. There’s something there, but nothing that can be used to find her in AFIS. The best he could guess is that she’s between eighteen and twenty-three years old and had relatively lousy teeth.

  Bettye Lambert dropped a pair of reading glasses onto her desktop and gave me her undivided attention.

  “He cut off her finger pads? That’s horrible,” Bettye said.

  I nodded. “But from a killer’s viewpoint, smart.”

  “Stone cold,” John said. “This guy either studied how to screw up a crime scene, or he’s—”

  I stopped him shorter than a pigmy who began smoking at an early age. “Don’t say it, John. I’ve been thinking that all morning.” I shook my head, considering the potential. “I know it’s a possibility. A cop. And not just any cop, but someone well-schooled in criminal investigations. Someone who could keep us from finding the basics that would allow us to start a decent investigation.”

  “You gonna tap into the sheriff’s task force and get any of the particulars they learned from the previous murders?” John asked.

  “I have no choice. I hate to get involved with those people, especially since Ryan Leary is running the show.”

  Bettye saw a lull in the conversation and jumped in. “I’ll call the UT forensics lab and get an appointment with their artist. I suppose I can just email him the pictures of the body to get him started.”

  “Good. I’ll call the papers and TV stations and get their commitments to print or show the sketch.”

  “Whaddaya want me to do, Boss?” John asked.

  “Accompany me to the sheriff’s office. There are only a few people over there I can deal with. If my head explodes while I’m talking with one of his management types, I want you to bring my body back to Prospect.”

  “You’re asking a lot, Boss. I’m only getting clerk-typist pay.”

  “John, stop bitchin’ about how much money you make.”

  “Hard to forget how much I earned as a detective back in New York.”

  �
��If you don’t stop reminding me about our New York salaries, I’m gonna grab your checkbook and chop it into little pieces.”

  “Careful, Boss. Your ears are turning red. I think your blood pressure is on the rise.”

  “When I retired, almost twenty years ago, you Irish weasel, I was making as much as I get today. So, John, I feel your pain.”

  “Sammy, I’ve seen your paycheck,” Bettye said. “Just how much is your pension?”

  “You’ll have to marry me to find out.”

  “I’ll bet it’s more than my salary.” She showed me a smile that could have lit up a coal mine. “Would it put me into a higher bracket if we filed jointly?”

  “Can it, Goldilocks. You’re getting as bad as this loony Irishman.”

  “Be nice to us, Sam Jenkins. We’re your closest allies.”

  “Pfui.”

  The artist who worked at the world famous University of Tennessee Forensics Laboratory, home of the fabled ‘Body Farm’, prepared an excellent rendering of what he thought our Jane Doe might have looked like in life. The sketch gave readers of the local newspapers and viewers of the Knoxville TV stations something more socially acceptable to look at. The death photos taken by Jackie Shuman would have revolted them.