PART I COLD CASE #5
Smartboards like this are mostly used at schools and universities, but I found it perfect for my job.
I did my thinking with it: filing key facts, maps and photos for each case, plus notes on persons of interest and the like.
It automatically saved everything to the cloud. I had a second whiteboard in my Winnebago, so I could access all this information wherever I went.
Usually, I had three or four active cases on the go at any given time and the board showed that now: the industrial espionage matter concerning the Saudis (while I’d stopped the Cartright assassination, there was still more work to do there); a standard cheating-husband case; and a skip trace for a bail absconder from Pensacola that I was helping Linc Lewis with.
And there at the bottom of the list, where it had stubbornly remained for the last seven years: the LaToya Martyn case.
I tapped on that last entry.
The screen expanded, filling with seven years’ worth of notes, maps, drawings and photographs from my investigation into LaToya’s disappearance.
I tapped on a sub-file in the margin labelled: historic similarities.
A new window opened.
It looked like this:
YEAR
VICTIMS
LOCATION TAKEN
INVESTIGATOR
1877
Four former slaves (female)
Carlotta Stone
Other 3 names unknown
Reported missing: December 15, 1877
NEVER FOUND
Tallahassee, Florida
Union Captain George C. McShane
Reported missing: December 31, 1877
NEVER FOUND
1905
Four prostitutes (female)
HILDA RAYE
MARLA FRAKES
HEATHER BARNES
CYNTHIA ROGAN
Reported missing: April 15, 1905 NEVER FOUND
Houston, Texas
Detective Henry Foster, Texas Rangers
Reported missing: May 5, 1905 NEVER FOUND
1930
Four prostitutes (female)
SHONDA MORRIS
MARLENE BAYNES
MAYBELLE LIONS
SHAWNA BELLE
Reported missing: April 20, 1930 NEVER FOUND
New Orleans, Orleans Parish, Louisiana
Deputies John David Shore & Raymond Barnard, New Orleans Sheriff Dept
Reported missing: May 10, 1930 NEVER FOUND
1958
Four prostitutes (female)
MARSHA WILLIAMS
HATTIE WILLIAMS
SHONA LITTINS
WILHEMINA JONES
Reported missing: April 15, 1958 NEVER FOUND
Shreveport, Bossier Parish, Louisiana
Constable Scott Manclark, Shreveport Police Dept
Reported missing: May 2, 1958 NEVER FOUND
1988
Four prostitutes (female)
GRACE MITCHELL
JASMINE JOHNSON
NAVINA NIXON
JOSEPHINE O’HARE
Reported missing: April 10, 1988 NEVER FOUND
Dallas, Texas
Private detective Bill Brewster
Arrest warrant issued for possession of child pornography, September 1, 1993
Reported missing: September 6, 1993 NEVER FOUND
2018
Four prostitutes (female)
LATOYA MARTYN
OLYMPIA COLE
RENATA LONG
NIA CARTER
Reported missing: September 10, 2018
Houston, Texas
1. Private detective Art Hillerman (for Nia Carter’s family)
Reported missing: October 11, 2018
Note: Hillerman’s body parts found.
2. Me
Not missing yet.
With all the information laid out in front of me on my whiteboard, I could see patterns.
Two patterns became obvious immediately.
First, starting in 1877, approximately every 25 or 30 years, a group of four female prostitutes would be reported missing.
None would ever be seen again.
And second, shortly after the women went missing, the policemen, sheriff’s deputies or private detectives who were investigating their disappearances would go missing, too, never to be seen again.
The person investigating each disappearance had also disappeared themselves.
All of them except me.
Patterns. Repetitive systems. Anomalies.
According to Dr Lucy, ‘Autism Spectrum Disorder Level 1 with elements of Level 2’ is broadly similar to what doctors used to call Asperger’s Syndrome.
Standard symptoms include:
Difficulty initiating and maintaining social interactions.
Check.
Lack of understanding of social conventions.
Check.
For instance, I struggle with hugging. I find the act strange but I know people like doing it.
Millie-Mae hugged me very tightly after I fought Leroy Hertzenberger.
I wasn’t quite sure how to hug her back.
As she threw her arms around me and sobbed into my chest with relief, I kind of put my arms around her and patted her stiffly on the back while I stared at the wall behind her.
On her wall was a framed print of Monet’s Water Lilies and Japanese Bridge.
(I like that painting. The reflections on the pond’s surface are very well depicted, which is particularly hard to do with a paintbrush. As Millie-Mae cried, I found myself analysing the brushstrokes.)
Obsessive attention to detail.
Check.
When I discover something new or interesting, I study it deeply. For example, when I learned that DNA testing could be helpful in my investigations—paternity tests, mainly—I set about reading university-level textbooks on the subject. Same with computer hacking.
And, lastly:
People with ASD 1/2 are prone to exhibit repetitive behaviours.
Really big check.
This is very true for me.
Although I would dispute the use of the word repetitive.
I prefer reliable.
I like eating lunch every day at the Hooters off Kirby Drive because the menu rarely changes (sometimes the waffle fries switch to curly fries which is okay as they’re basically the same thing), the food is well cooked and it doesn’t sit badly on my stomach.
It’s reliable.
Same with my Winnebago. Reliable.
I have difficulty changing my routines—like that time at Whataburger—but I still try.
Having said all that, I like to think that my obsessive tendencies make me a better-than-average private detective.
I see patterns and systems, and also disturbances in those -systems: anomalies.
This is how you find missing people, solve crimes and predict an escalation from harmless crush to dangerous stalker.
I delve deeply into a case, obsessively deeply, until I find a -pattern or an anomaly.
As I’d done with LaToya Martyn’s case.
That was how I’d found the pattern of the investigators also going missing.
There were, however, anomalies within the anomalies.
For instance, in most of the cases, the investigators went missing quite soon after beginning their searches.
But in the 1988 case, when four prostitutes went missing from Dallas, their investigator—a Black former US Army vet named Bill Brewster—searched for them for five whole years until he vanished in 1993 after a warrant had been issued for his arrest for possession of child pornography.
This was a big anomaly.
I’d looked up Brewster. When he’d been in the Army, he’d been a detective in the CID—the Criminal Investigation Division—and he’d been a damned fine one, a real stickler.
After being honourably discharged in 1986 at the age of 36, he’d become a private investigator and he’d been a damned fine one of those, too.
The child porn warrant reeked of bullshit.
Yet still he’d vanished.
Another anomaly was in my case, that of LaToya Martyn and her fellow sex workers from 2018.
In my case, two investigators had worked on it.
Me and another private investigator from Houston named Arthur Hillerman.
I knew Art Hillerman.
He’d been my examiner when I’d got my private investigator’s licence. In fact, after I got my licence, he took me under his wing and became a mentor to me. Taught me everything he knew.
He was a good man and a very good investigator. Originally from Plano, he’d been a private detective his entire working life and just loved it. He was known for wearing bolo ties and a Stetson.
He’d been hired by the family of one of the other missing women, Nia Carter.
Art had gone missing within a few months of taking the case. This was consistent with the general pattern.
Oddly, however, whoever had taken Art had done something that until then had been unprecedented in all the other cases.
Art’s abductors had sent parts of his body to the family that had hired him.
A gaudy little plastic gold trophy labelled ‘world’s best -private eye’ had been left on the doorstep of the Carters’ home . . .
. . . with two human eyeballs stuffed in it and a note that read ‘matthew 18:9’.
A DNA analysis would reveal that the eyeballs belonged to Art Hillerman, although where the rest of him was, no-one knew.
I looked up the Bible reference.
Matthew chapter 18, verse 9 states: ‘If your eye causes you to sin, gouge it out.’
This led, of course, to the final anomaly of the 2018 case.
Me.
I hadn’t disappeared yet.
I found this to be, at the same time, both encouraging and troubling.
Encouraging: because, hey, I didn’t want to vanish.
But it was also troubling because, in my heart of hearts, I wondered if I was still around because I’d failed on the case, because I wasn’t good enough.
Since I hadn’t found LaToya—and whoever had taken her—I had avoided an untimely vanishing.
But now, thanks to the discovery of the baby in the doll in the Acheron River near Victorville, LaToya Martyn was back on my radar.
Yet I wondered: if I started searching for her again, would I soon go missing, too?
I stared at my digital whiteboard for a long moment.
It’s not that I wasn’t afraid.
I’m autistic but I’m not stupid.
I didn’t want to have my eyeballs ripped from my face and mailed to LaToya Martyn’s family.
I just don’t like unresolved things and the unfinished nature of the case bugged me immensely. I also thought of LaToya Martyn’s parents: if I found her, they might finally have some closure.
I blinked out of my trance and stood up.
Then I said goodbye to Heidi and headed for the Lake Charles morgue over in Louisiana.
After seven years, I was back on the case.