“Was anything missing from the body?” Joanna asked.
“Yes,” Hogan replied without hesitation. “As a matter of fact, his Wolf pin. It was brand-new. His den leader, Mrs. Hansen, had just awarded it to him a week or so before he disappeared. It was one of those little clasp things that you have to squeeze like hell to get it on or off. So who’s your guy, Sheriff Brady, and to your knowledge has he ever been anywhere near Fertile, Minnesota?”
“His name is Stephen Roper,” Joanna answered quietly. “I believe he was born in Fertile.”
There was a sharp intake of breath on the other end of the line, followed by a fit of coughing, as though someone had swallowed wrong. “Not him,” Dan Hogan croaked at last, once he could speak again. “Are you frigging kidding me?”
“Wait,” Joanna said. “You actually knew him?”
“Hell yes, I knew him,” Dan replied. “I knew the moment I laid eyes on that kid that there was something wrong with him. I tried to tell the detectives on the case that I thought he had something to do with it, but I was a newbie deputy at the time, and no one gave my opinion the time of day.”
Joanna was confused. “What case?” she asked. “I thought you just told me you were the lead detective.”
“Not Brian Olson’s death, Stephen Roper’s grandmother’s—his step-grandmother, actually. Lucille Johansen Hawkins was Orson Hawkins’s second wife. Fell down the front steps of her house and busted open her head on a concrete walkway. Steve, that’s what we all called him back then, was the one who called it in, and I was the first officer to arrive on the scene. There was just something off about him. When he ran into the house to call for help, he splashed right through her blood and left a trail of bloody footprints from the front door to the wall phone in the kitchen. Most kids wouldn’t have stepped in a pool of blood like that for all the tea in China.”
“So his grandmother was murdered?” Joanna asked.
“I thought so, but Henry Fransen, the detective on the case, along with a lot of other people thought Orson Hawkins, Lucille’s husband and Steve’s grandfather, had knocked her off in order to lay hands on her life insurance. Lucille’s daddy, Mitch Johansen, was the insurance agent here in town. When his three daughters were born he bought a $100,000 twenty-pay life policy on each of them. Two of the daughters took off for parts unknown as soon as they turned eighteen. Lucille hung around.
“She was an odd duck. All she wanted to be was a farmer. Shewore work boots and overalls when most of the other women in town wouldn’t have set foot out of the house in a pair of pants. When she and Orson got hitched, a few rumors flew here and there that he had married her for her money, and once she was dead, that sprinkle of rumors turned into a downpour. After all, back then, $100,000 wasn’t something to sneeze at. But Orson had an airtight alibi for the whole day she died. Eventually the coroner ruled her death as accidental, and that was it.”
Joanna was listening, but she was also thinking of her list of possible similarities. “Was anything missing from Lucille’s body?” she asked when Dan Hogan paused to take a breath.
“You damned well better bet there was,” he replied heatedly. “Her gold band wedding ring. When Orson Hawkins found out it was missing, he came down to the sheriff’s office and raised all kinds of hell. Came right out and accused me of taking it off her finger before the ambulance ever got there, but I didn’t, I swear. I never even saw the damned thing.”
Joanna took a breath as well. “I believe, Mr. Hogan,” she said at last, “after all these years it may be time to change Lucille’s manner of death from accidental to homicide. You’ve just described Stephen Roper’s signature. He kills his victims and then takes something from them. He stole Lucille’s wedding ring the same way he took Brian Olson’s Wolf pin.”
“Really?” Dan asked, as though he still couldn’t quite believe what he was hearing.
“Really.”
“But he couldn’t have been more than ten or eleven at the time. That’s why Detective Fransen laughed at me when I suggested Steve might have had something to do it. ‘Impossible,’ he told me. ‘Why, Steve’s nothing but a snot-nosed kid.’”
“He may well have been a snot-nosed kid,” Joanna agreed, “but I’m willing to bet he was also a snot-nosed killer.”
“But how did he do it?”
“Who knows,” Joanna replied. “The only way we’ll ever find outfor sure is if he gives us a full confession, and I’m not counting on that. In the meantime, if you could get back in touch with your current sheriff...” She paused, embarrassed that the name had fallen out of her head.
“Sheriff Pollock,” Dan Hogan supplied. “Claude Pollock.”
“Thank you. If you’d get back to Sheriff Pollock and ask him to send me whatever he can copy from those two files, I’ll be incredibly grateful. I’m pretty sure our email and/or fax information is on the BOLO.”
“Ya, sure, you betcha,” Dan Hogan said. “I’ll be on it like flies on crap the minute we’re off the phone.”
When the call ended, Joanna retrieved her purse, grabbed up the fistful of missed call messages, and headed for Kristin’s desk. The secretary tried to add three more messages to Joanna’s mix on her way past, but Joanna shook her head.
“Take all these straight to the bullpen,” Joanna told her, handing over the others. “Every one of them needs to be returned ASAP. They’re about cases that may or may not be related to Xavier Delgado’s homicide. I want the investigations team returning those calls, but I’m also going to need boots on the ground—lots of them. Call in all the deputies. If they’re off duty or if it’s somebody’s day off? Too bad. Call them in anyway. Tell them to drop what they’re doing and get their butts to Bisbee.”
“Where are you going?” Kristin asked.
“To have a chat with the county attorney.”
“When will you be back?”
“No idea.”
Joanna left the building the same way she’d entered, only this time she didn’t give the little girl with her wagonload of Girl Scout Cookies a second glance, because the older version of that little girl was on a mission now, and Stephen Roper was about to go down.
