Page 49 of M for Murder

You do not have feelings for Joel Hickok.

You hate the very ground he walks on.

He is a stupid, ill-mannered jerk and it would suit you fine if you never laid eyes on him again.

Done with her pep talk, Rebecca tried to focus her attention on the case. She went over the reports she had read that morning, trying to think if there was anything that she could have missed. The one thing that still didn’t add up was why the killer hadn’t restarted the alphabet from the letter I. Despite Hickok’s theory that the victim was already accounted for, Rebecca wasn’t so sure he was right. Surely the main intention of the Alphabet Killer was to kill twenty-six students. If the copycat killer didn’t start from where Rodney Boone had left off, then there would only ever be twenty-five deaths accounted for.

Maybe the answers they needed weren’t in the files on the current murders. Perhaps instead they should be rereading the files on the original crimes that had been committed by Boone himself.

Rebecca knew that the files were back at the police precinct Hickok and Sutton had gone through them all themselves. Not believing Boone to be responsible for the current murders, they had only taken the necessary background information. Maybe they had missed something.

Finishing her drink, she hurried back to the precinct, eager to pull the files on Boone. When Vic returned five minutes after her, smelling strongly of Jill’s flowery perfume, she had already retrieved the files from records and had them sitting in a pile on the desk.

Vic looked at her questioningly. ‘What’s all this?’

‘Files on the Alphabet Killings,’ Rebecca told him, not bothering to look up.

Vic hung up his jacket and came over to the desk. ‘There were only a couple of files here when we went to lunch. Now there’s more than double that. What’s going on, Angell?’

‘I pulled out the files on Boone and the original victims.’

Vic narrowed his eyes. ‘Why?’

‘Come on, Vic. You know as well as I do that we’ve been through all of the evidence with a fine-tooth comb. Maybe we need to go back over the original files.’

‘I thought our FBI buddies had already done that.’

‘They did, but only briefly. They might have missed something.’ Vic nodded. Rebecca watched him deliberating, hoping he would agree with her decision.

‘Well… I guess it wouldn’t hurt,’ he said eventually.

She smiled, relieved. ‘My thoughts exactly.’

‘This is your idea, though,’ he warned. ‘So you get to do most of the reading, okay?’

‘Okay, that’s fine.’

Rebecca passed him a couple of the files before turning back to the one she had in front of her. Opening the top page, she started to read the murder report on Boone’s first victim, Danielle Adams.

18

WYEFIELD, CALIFORNIA. FEBRUARY 1968

H elen White had tried to kill herself on a Tuesday. It was easy to remember the date, because the particular Tuesday she had chosen had been Rodney’s twelfth birthday; he often wondered if she had picked it for that reason or whether it had just been a bizarre coincidence.

Being a Tuesday, he and Clifford had been at school and, despite it being his birthday, the day hadn’t been unlike any other. His mother, as usual, had spent the day at home with his youngest brother, entertaining her various men friends.

Rodney had wised up enough over the last year and a half to know what went on behind her closed bedroom door and, although he didn’t like it, he knew better than to say anything. As long as he did his chores, his mother tended to ignore him, and he had grown to understand that it was better to be ignored than to endure more of the physical abuse he had suffered in the months that had followed his father’s death.

He remembered clearly how he and Clifford had walked home from school and how he had been quaking in his shoes because his teacher had given him a report card with a succession of Fs. The marks had come as a huge disappointment to him. He had worked so hard, both in class and at home, having decided that he wanted to go to college after school and train to become a professor like his daddy had been.

His disappointment was nothing compared to the fear he felt as he neared the house. He had promised his mother that he would improve his grades and dreaded what she would do when she saw the report card.

Of course, he was worrying unnecessarily, for his mother never got to see the report card. When they entered the house, they found her slumped face down on the bedroom carpet, her cut wrists creating puddles of red on the dull grey carpet, and a blood-covered kitchen knife at her feet.

Clifford had started screaming and, in a daze, Rodney ran to the phone to call for an ambulance. He could hear the sound of crying in the background as his shaking fingers dialled the number and he tried to calm Clifford, telling him to go and check that their brother was okay.

The ambulance came, followed by two police cars, and the officers remained long after Helen White had been taken to hospital, asking a hundred questions and confusing Rodney, who was feeling alone and scared, worrying about what was happening to his mother and what was going to happen to him and his brothers.