Trail of Blood. Wanda Evans
Telling Barbara proved to be as hard as Jim had anticipated it would be. “Why didn’t you tell me right away?” she asked. As he had guessed, she wanted to catch the next plane to Lubbock.
He shook his head. “No. He’s twenty-four years old. He can come and go as he pleases. We can’t be sure yet that anything has happened to him. Besides, even if we went to Lubbock, what could we do there? We don’t know most of Scott’s new friends. We could embarrass him if he’s just gone away for a short period and wants to be alone.”
The question haunted them for another week. Was there some way they could locate Scott if they went to Lubbock? Could they find Scott if they searched long enough and hard enough? Jim was in a state of agitation when Leisha called again the following Sunday night.
She had no word about Scott, but she was full of other kinds of news. “Tim is following me around. He’s making me nervous,” she said. She thought he was weird and she was beginning to be afraid of him.
“I thought he stayed with you the night Scott disappeared.” Jim said.
There was a long pause before she responded. “No—I didn’t tell you he spent the night at the apartment that night, I told you he stayed with me the next night. I don’t remember anything that happened the night of the sixteenth. That was the night after I found out Scott was gone.”
This contradicted her earlier story, but Jim let her words pass unchallenged. “How well do you know Tim Smith?”
Again silence filled the line. Then she said, “Oh, I see him around all the time. I don’t know him all that well. He makes me nervous.”
Funny, she didn’t sound nervous, he thought. “Then why would you let him spend the night?”
That got her attention. The irritation he’d heard in her voice the day he’d called her at work returned. “I don’t know. I just needed some company, that’s all. But now I can’t get rid of him.”
Jim decided to prod her. “Was there any trouble between Tim and Scott?”
Again, a long pause before she answered. “Well, they didn’t much like each other.”
Didn’t much like each other. That wasn’t a likely description, if Tim was interested in Leisha and thought Scott was in his way.
“Was there any real trouble between them?” Jim persisted.
“They didn’t fight, if that’s what you’re asking,” she said.
“Did Tim ever go to your apartment?”
“Once or twice. One time, I loaned him the keys to the apartment, so he could wait for a FedEx package. I guess he could’ve had the key copied.”
At her words, another suspicion insinuated itself into Jim’s mind, and he wondered if she had planted it deliberately. Was she hinting that her friend, Tim, might have done something to Scott? Why would she do that, unless she knew something had happened to Scott? What was she hoping to accomplish by telling Jim all these things?
After ending the call, Jim sat at his desk, pondering his son’s fate. For days, he had been haunting the telephone, hoping against hope that it would ring and he would hear Scott’s voice: “Hey, Dad! You’ll never guess where I am!”
It hadn’t happened and he was beginning to think it never would. It was time to call the police and report Scott missing. He picked up the phone again and called the Lubbock Police Department to file a missing persons report.
It was Sunday night and it was also the Memorial Day weekend. He knew there would be few detectives on duty, but Jim couldn’t wait any longer. He had to find out the truth.
The officer who answered introduced himself as Corporal Jimmy Brazell. “Are you a relative of Scott Dunn’s?” Brazell asked.
“Yes. I’m his father.”
“Do you think your son has come to some harm?”
The question stirred the fear in Jim’s soul. Why would the policeman immediately focus on such a thing? Did he know about an accident of some kind? Or worse? For the first time, Jim had to voice his deepest fears. “Yes. My son has been missing for several days. He’s never disappeared like this before. I think it’s highly possible that he’s been hurt, kidnapped or in accident. I’m afraid his life might be in danger.”
Brazell explained what the police routine would be. “When we get a report like this, Mr. Dunn, whoever takes the information gives it to someone in the records department, who puts it in the computer. From there, it is sent to the Crimes Against Persons Section, where it will be assigned to an investigator.”
Corporal Brazell paused for a few seconds, then cleared his throat. “With this being a holiday weekend and not an emergency, chances are, it won’t get assigned until Tuesday morning.”
“A missing person isn’t an emergency?” Jim exploded.
“I have to be honest, Mr. Dunn. At most police departments, including the LPD, when the subject of a missing persons report is an adult, it doesn’t become a high priority for investigators unless there’s strong suspicion that harm has come to the missing individual. Don’t worry though. In most missing persons cases involving an adult, there’s nothing for the family or the police to be concerned about. Most of the time, the missing person turns up within a few hours or a few days, safe and maybe a little red-faced. Chances are, this will be true in your son’s case. I would be willing to bet that by Tuesday morning, your son will have turned up, alive and well, after an unscheduled vacation.”
“That doesn’t sound like my son,” Jim insisted. Deep down, though, he hoped and prayed Brazell was right and the growing dread in his heart was only a parent’s irrational fear.
Detective Tal English, a tall, amiable native of Lubbock whose slow, deliberate speech, mild blue eyes and deferential attitude contrasted sharply with a quick mind and intuitive reasoning, was twenty-seven years old and had been a detective assigned to the Crimes Against Persons Department for about a year. That department is divided into two divisions, robbery and sex crimes, but the investigators in each division work on other crimes against persons as well. English was assigned to the robbery detail, partnered with a veteran LPD detective, Corporal George White.
English didn’t even know that Scott Dunn had been reported missing when he reported to work on the Tuesday after Memorial Day. He parked his car in the City of Lubbock lot across the street from the square beige and brown building that housed the Lubbock police department, as well as the city’s Municipal Court and Lubbock Power, Light and Water and covered the entire block between Texas Avenue and Avenue J. English walked just down the hall from his minuscule office, grabbed a cup of coffee from the department coffee pot and had just sat down at his desk, when his telephone rang.
He picked up the phone to hear Jim Dunn, wanting to know what the police had done about finding his son, Scott, over the weekend. English admitted that he didn’t know what Jim was talking about. “The missing persons report has not yet made it to my desk.” Jim gave the detective the same information he had given Brazell on Friday night—how unlikely it would be for his son to go off for this length of time and not tell anyone where he was. According to Dunn, Scott’s boss had fired him. Dunn also told English what Scott’s roommate Leisha Hamilton had said about someone breaking into Scott’s apartment the day after he turned up missing.
English tried to reassure the anxious father that, most likely, Scott was all right and would eventually