The Sun Down Motel

“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 to another page in her notebook. “Personally, I think the tire puncture is a coincidence. If he didn’t get her on the side of the road, and he didn’t get her at the grocery store, then that leaves one place.” She pointed to an X on the map. “Cathy’s work. He got her when she got into her car.”

Alma sipped her coffee. She seemed to be getting into it now. “It’s a theory, sure. But so far you aren’t telling me anything I don’t already know, or anything I can’t look up at work.”

“Victoria Lee,” Viv said, ignoring her and flipping to yet another page, pulling out another hand-drawn map. “She was eighteen. The article said she’d had ‘numerous boyfriends.’ That means everyone thought she was a slut, right?”

Alma pressed her lips together and said nothing.

“It does,” Viv said. “Victoria had an on-again, off-again boyfriend. They fought all the time. She fought with her parents, her teachers. She had a brother who ran away from home and never came back.” That was almost all she knew about Victoria. There had been considerably less coverage of her in the newspapers next to pretty, upstanding young mother Cathy. After all, Victoria’s killer had been arrested. And next to Cathy, Victoria was a girl who deserved it.

“August of 1981,” Alma said, breaking into Viv’s thoughts. “I remember that day well.”

Viv looked up at her and nodded. “Victoria liked to go jogging. She left home here”—an X on the map—“and went to the jogging trail here.” Another X. “She didn’t come home. Her parents didn’t report it until late the next afternoon. They said that Victoria went out a lot without telling them. They figured she found some of her friends.”

“We spun our wheels for a while,” Alma admitted. “The parents were so certain she’d been out partying the night before. So we started there, questioning all her friends, trying to figure out what party she was at. It was a full day before we realized the parents just assumed, and Victoria wasn’t at a party at all. We had to backtrack to the last time anyone had seen her, which was heading to the jogging trail.”

Viv leaned forward. None of this was in the newspapers, none. “The article said they used tracking dogs.”

“We did. We gave them a shirt of hers, and we found her. She was twenty feet off the jogging trail, in the bushes.” Alma blinked and looked away, her hands squeezing her coffee cup. “The coroner said she’d been dead almost the whole time. She got to that jogging trail and he just killed her right away and dumped her. And she just lay there while everyone screwed around.”

They were silent for a minute.

“Was it really her boyfriend?” Viv asked.

“Sure,” Alma said. “They’d had a big fight. She nagged him a lot, and he called her a bitch. There were a dozen witnesses. Then Victoria went home and fought with her parents, too. The boyfriend, Charlie, had no alibi. He said he went home after their fight, but his mother said he came home an hour later than he claimed he did. Plenty of time to kill Victoria. He couldn’t say where he was. He eventually tried to claim he’d spent that hour with another girl, but he couldn’t produce the actual girl or give her name. The whole thing stunk, and he was convicted.” She frowned. “Why are you interested in Victoria? It isn’t like Cathy. It’s solved.”

Viv tapped her fingers on her notebook. She couldn’t say, really. The papers had portrayed it as an open-and-shut case. But it was those words Jenny had said: Don’t go on the jogging trail. Words of wisdom from one girl to another. Like it could happen again.

“They were so close together,” she said to Alma. “Cathy in December of 1980, Victoria in August of 1981. Two girls murdered in Fell in under a year. Maybe it wasn’t the boyfriend.”

This earned her a smile—kind, but still condescending. “Honey, the police and the courts decide that. They did their job already.”