Chapter 13
1967 on
Steve Roper’s first year of teaching school atFertile-Beltrami High wasn’t as easy as he thought it would be. Andrew Donner may have been the principal of a small-town high school, but he was no pushover, and he required lesson plans from each of his teachers every Monday morning, no exceptions. As a beginning teacher, Steve’s lesson plans underwent extra scrutiny. He was scrupulous about doing them, but once again, the voices in his head provided some invaluable advice—cheat!
Both his chemistry classes and his English ones used the same textbooks year after year, so that first year, when he did his lesson planning, he did so with a sheet of carbon paper placed under every page. That meant that every year, all he had to do was copy what he had written the first time around. He did the same thing for years thereafter, and Mr. Donner never caught on.
Steve’s classes were made up of juniors and seniors—kids who were only five or six years younger than he was. Since many of them were also jackasses, he was afraid they’d end up eating him alive. He decided that the best way to handle the situation was to nip it in the bud and strike terror into the hearts of his students on the first day of school. That strategy worked like a charm. By starting out fierce and staying that way, the troublesome students heheard other teachers complaining about in the teachers’ lounge weren’t a problem for him.
On the first day of school each year, he marched into the room, slammed his books on his desk, and then delivered the same speech to every class. It was something that could have come straight out of Grandma Lucille’s playbook.
“Hello, I am Mr. Roper. For your information, I am not ‘Hey, Teach,’ and I’m not ‘Hey, you,’ either. You will address me as Mr. Roper or Sir. You are all upperclassmen. At this point, some of you may be under the mistaken impression that you’re smart and that you know it all. I’m here to tell you that you know NOTHING! I expect you to come to my class with your minds open and your mouths shut. If I assign homework, I expect it to be done and turned in on time. All homework will be graded, and F’s for incomplete homework will count every bit as much as F’s on tests.
“I’m not here to win any popularity contests. In fact, I expect the opposite outcome, but I promise you this. You may walk away from this school hating my guts, but you’ll be a hell of a lot smarter than you are today.”
End of speech. If Mr. Donner had ever learned that Mr. Roper used a curse word in class on the first day of school each year, he would have had been appalled, but none of Steve’s students dared spill the beans. Besides, when subsequent standardized testing showed a distinct upswing for students in Mr. Roper’s classes, no one had cause for complaint.
By 1969 the Vietnam War was in full swing. Toward the end of that school year, Steve’s draft number came up. He was a killer, true, but he killed people for the fun of it and because he liked doing so. The idea of having to kill someone because he’d been ordered to do so by someone else didn’t have the same appeal. However, with no reason to request a deferment, Steve Roper went to his physical fully expecting to be called up. That’s when the doctor discovered that he had a previously undiagnosed heart murmur, one that made him4F—unfit for military service. Needless to say, his personal Greek chorus of voices was thrilled with that news, and so was Steve.
That summer of 1970 he rewarded himself with a road trip to New York City. He timed his travel so he’d be in time for Coney Island’s historic fireworks display on the Fourth of July. He suspected, rightfully so, that parents with their eyes focused on the sky would be far less vigilant than they should have been. In this instance he spotted a little blond girl, probably five or so, sound asleep on a nearby park bench. When he picked her up and carried her away, she snuggled comfortably into his chest without even stirring.
By the time the fireworks display ended, Steve was miles away with his prize safely stowed in the trunk of his brand-new Camaro. He drove well into New Jersey before stopping the car in the middle of a bridge on a sparsely traveled highway. He had never heard of the Rahway River before, but that’s what the sign on the bridge said it was.
He knew the little girl had been awake during part of the drive because he had heard her crying, but by the time he opened the trunk she was asleep again. Then Steve donned his gloves and did what had to be done. The abject terror on her face as he squeezed the life out of her and the magic moment when the light disappeared from her eyes were all the reward he needed. Then he tossed her lifeless body over the rail and into the water below, but not before removing one of the red, white, and blue barrettes she had worn in her hair.
Steve never knew Coney Island Girl’s name. Once her parents realized she was missing, all hell must have broken loose, and the story was probably all over the news, but Steve never heard a peep about it. By the time the sun came up the next morning, he was well on his way home—out of New Jersey and a long way across Pennsylvania. He made it home to Fertile without any complications.
That one successful excursion was enough to shut his voices up for the remainder of the summer, and that was fine with him. He’d made a good job of it and was ready to take it easy.
The fact that a little girl named Deborah Miller had gone missing during the Fourth of July Fireworks display on Coney Island was indeed big news in New York City. The Miller family, Deborah and her parents, Donald and Charlotte Miller of Boston, Massachusetts, had been in NYC visiting relatives over the Fourth of July weekend. After Deborah’s disappearance, her anguished parents were on every news channel and in every newspaper begging for her safe return. Weeks later, a fisherman in New Jersey found the fully clothed but badly decomposed body of a young girl along the banks of the Rahway River. She was identified by comparing the clothing found on the remains with photos taken of Deborah earlier that day on various rides in Coney Island.
No suspects in her homicide were ever identified.
Chapter 14
Bisbee, Arizona
Wednesday, November 29, 2023
Joanna was on her way to work Wednesday morningwhen a call came in from Jenny.
“Hey,” Joanna said. “If you’re off shift, shouldn’t you be sleeping?”
“I’m headed to bed shortly,” Jenny answered, “but I wanted to give you a heads-up. I’m pretty sure one of my traffic stops from last night will end up on the news.”
Joanna’s heart went to her throat. As far as putting cops in danger, domestic violence calls come in first, but ordinary traffic stops run a close second, and middle-of-the-night traffic stops can be the worst.
“What happened?”
“Rick and I were patrolling Highway 86 between the Tucson city limits and the reservation boundary west of Three Points. About one thirty in the morning, we were headed back toward town when this Toyota Tundra Dual Cab pickup came barreling off Valencia Road and turned left in front of us without stopping or even slowing down at the stop sign. As the vehicle roared past us heading westbound, I could see it was a female driver, and it’s a miracle she didn’t hit us. I pulled a U-ie, lit up my lights, and went after her. She was all over the road, but finally, three or four miles later, she pulled over.
“I got out of my unit and approached the vehicle on the driver’s side. Because she’d taken so long to pull over, Rick got out, too, andapproached from the passenger side. When I got there, the window was still rolled up, but I could see the woman inside was staring straight ahead and sipping away on a can of Coors. I tapped on the window, and finally she rolled it down.
“‘What seems to be the problem, Officer?’ she wanted to know.”
“Drinking and driving for one thing,” Joanna put in.
“‘License and registration,’ I told her,” Jenny continued.
