A Special Excerpt

By 10 p.m., Deputy Samantha Cody had spent two hours catching up on paper work. She hated it. Sitting on her butt, reading mundane reports, completing repetitious forms, was not her idea of police work. The only thing she hated more than doing the work was looking at stacks of it on her desk. She was never this far behind, but the past two months had been neither easy nor routine.

The arrest and trial of Richard Earl Garrett for the murder of three local children and his defense that “the devil made me do it” had turned the quiet desert community of Mercer’s Corner into a macabre carnival. Newspaper and TV reporters roamed the streets, sniffing for sensational stories. Visitors drove hundreds of miles just to say they had seen the town. A group of Satanic groupies had camped on the corner near the Sheriff’s Department everyday for a month. Locals were terrified. Thank God, the entire mess was about to end.

Garrett had already been convicted and tomorrow would be the final arguments in the penalty phase. Sentencing should soon follow, and then, maybe everybody would go back where they came from and life could return to normal. None to soon for Sam.

She had finished off a granola bar, two cups of coffee, and half of the paperwork when she heard the front door open. A voice echoed down the hall. “Hello? Anybody here?”

“Down here,” she called back. Footsteps approached and Nathan Klimek entered.

“How are you doing?” A broad smile erupted from his tanned, model-like face.

“What can I do for you, Mister Klimek?”

“I saw the lights on and your Jeep out front. I thought you might want to get some coffee or something.”

“I told you. No interviews.”

Nathan Klimek, star reporter for “Straight Story,” a supermarket checkout counter tabloid rag, had hounded her for three weeks for an interview. So had every other newspaper and TV reporter in town.

“Now that the trial is over, I hoped you had changed your mind.” He forked his fingers through his thick, light brown hair, sweeping it back from his forehead.

“The trial isn’t over. Or don’t you need sentencing to write your story? That’s right, I forgot. You make it up as you go along.”

“We stand behind every story we print.”

“Just not down wind.” Her brow wrinkled into a frown.

“You don’t like me very much do you?”

“Perceptive.”

“What did I do?” He gave her a look somewhere between shock and hurt. Practiced most likely, she thought.

“What did you do? Are you kidding? Look around. The chaos that has surrounded this trial.” She waved her hand toward the window. “You broke the story. You opened the door and let the flies in.”

“It’s news.”

“No, it’s not. Not your kind of news, anyway. It’s a tragedy. For the victims, the families, and this town. You made it an international event.”

“People are interested in child murders. Especially if Satanism is involved.”

“Satan, my ass. Garrett is a sicko that hacked up three innocent children. He isn’t possessed or the son of Satan or anything like that. He’s a child killer. Nothing more. But, your paper splashed his story from coast to coast and we have to bear the brunt of the morbid curiosity that followed.”

“But...”

The phone rang.

Sam waved him away and picked up the receiver. “Hello.” She listened for a moment. ”Where?” She exhaled loudly. “I’ll be right there.” She dropped the phone in its cradle and looked at Nathan. “You’ll have to excuse me. Duty calls.”

“What is it?”

“Nothing that would interest you. A traffic accident. But, if one of the drivers has three heads, I’ll call you.”

He laughed, shaking his head. She couldn’t prevent a half smile from raising one corner of her mouth.

He followed her out and she locked the door behind them.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said.

“I’m sure you will,” she said as she jumped into her Sheriff’s Department Jeep.

She fired up the engine and headed north through town, toward the freeway. The call had been from Sheriff Charlie Walker. A major accident, involving a gasoline truck, had occurred on I-40 East four miles west of town. She flipped on the roof-mounted flashing lights and accelerated down the on-ramp, merging onto I-40 West.

A mile from the accident site, she could see a red-orange ball of fire, which lit the night as if the sun had crashed into the desert. As she cut through the wide median, flames seemed to tower above her, licking at the low-hanging scattered clouds, painting their undersides orange. A thick plume of oily smoke churned skyward, obliterating the half moon, which peeked between the clouds, and cast the desert into an even deeper darkness, intensifying the glow of the blaze.

She eased across the eastbound lanes and parked off the roadway. Stepping from the Jeep, she took in the spectacle before her.

The smoldering gasoline truck had consumed most of its cargo and been reduced to a hissing metal carcass, which glowed a cherry red. The flames, though still leaping thirty feet in the air, diminished minute by minute. Two firemen wrestled with anaconda-like hoses and directed thick streams of water at the wreck, which sputtered in protest and released clouds of steam into the sky. The air was thick and rancid with the smell of burnt petroleum, like an old service station, its floor slicked with years of dripping oil pans. The entire scene looked like an Irwin Allen disaster movie.

An overturned Camaro had cut a 150-foot-long trench in the desert floor with its roof before coming to rest against a condo-sized boulder. A rusted station wagon, its right front wheel folded beneath its frame, hugged a droopy Catalpa Willow as if seeking protection much as a child pulls bed covers over its head to escape the troll that lurks in the shadowed corner of his room. A frazzled family of four huddled nearby. Sixty cars lined the freeway shoulder, their wide-eyed occupants coalesced in several groups, some talking, some staring silently, all hoping to see something gruesome no doubt.

She slipped on her leather jacket, stuffed her strawberry blonde ponytail beneath the collar, and tugged the zipper up to her chin to block the cold desert wind. She saw Charlie standing near one of the fire trucks, talking with Fire Chief Manny Orosco. She shoved her hands in her pockets and headed in their direction.

“Sam.” Charlie Walker nodded to her as she approached.

“Charlie. Manny. Jesus, what a mess. What happened?”

“Big rig crossed the median and hit a car head on and exploded. The Camaro,” he yanked his head toward the overturned car, “and the wagon over there got lucky.”

“How many killed?”

“Whoever is in the car under the rig for sure. Two kids in the Camaro and the driver of the rig were taken to the hospital.”

“The driver survived?” Sam looked at the molten mass, which continued to steam and spit, its heat puncturing the cold night air, warming her 200 feet away.

“Thrown from the cab. Or jumped. Found him about fifty yards from the wreck. Banged up pretty good. Unconscious. Smelled like a whiskey bottle.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Why don’t you get over to the hospital and see what you can find out from the kids and the driver, if he wakes up. I’ll see that the family in the station wagon are taken care of and be along in a few minutes. Not much more I can do here.”