Page 27 of The Girl from Devil’s Lake (Joanna Brady Mysteries #21)

Stephen had studied chemistry, all right, but he was also a problem solver, and he soon came up with a logical solution—chloroform, which also happened to be readily available.

He didn’t have to purchase anything from some chemical supply company, because the necessary ingredients for that were readily available at every corner store—acetone and bleach.

Mixing a batch of chloroform up at home wasn’t exactly rocket science, either.

All you needed to do was make sure you mixed the ingredients in the right proportions.

Once Stephen landed on chloroform as the answer, his next issue was figuring out a way to deploy it.

If he was driving, the stuff needed to be readily accessible, preferably under the driver’s seat.

That way, between the time a would-be passenger reached for the door handle and before he or she could settle into the passenger seat, he’d be able to have a chloroform-soaked cloth in his hand and ready to slap across his victim’s nose and mouth.

Eventually, while prowling the home goods section of the Western Auto Hardware Store in Upper Bisbee he found just the thing—a two-piece, air-tight plastic container that resembled Tupperware and was designed to hold a single sandwich.

With the lid closed properly nothing could leak out, and any piece of cloth left inside with a half-inch or so of his homemade chloroform mixture would remain ready for action for as long as necessary—for days on end if need be.

Once the real estate deal closed, Stephen was finally able to move most of his belongings into the garage and lock them away for safekeeping until the house itself was ready for occupancy.

Then, using the tiny bathroom in his motel room as a lab, he mixed up his first batch of chloroform.

After putting half an inch of that in the bottom of his sandwich container, he dropped a neatly folded handkerchief into the mix.

Once the lid was tightly affixed, he slipped the covered container under the Impala’s driver’s seat, making sure it was within easy reach.

When packing for his road trip, Stephen used the smallest piece of luggage he owned, but tucked in with his shaving kit, extra shoes, and clothing was a pint-size Mason jar holding the remains of that initial batch of chloroform.

That way, if he ended up needing a refill somewhere along the way, there’d be no need to mix up more.

On the morning of Saturday, July 3, 1976, Stephen, feeling fully prepared for all contingencies, was ready to head out. Yes, he would miss Bisbee’s Fourth of July celebration, but he was sure there’d be plenty of fun in store for him elsewhere.

He had lied to the desk clerk earlier when he’d told her about wanting to see the Grand Canyon.

Screw the Grand Canyon. What Stephen really wanted to do was to spend time exploring the beaches along the California coastline.

Several years had passed between his encounter with Reservoir Girl on what he now knew to be the San Carlos Apache Reservation, but he suspected that his best bet for a happy hunting ground would be some kind of Indian country.

After studying his new Rand McNally , he landed on the Papago Reservation.

It was due west of Tucson, but it occurred to Stephen that a jog along Highway 86 through the reservation wasn’t that far out of the way to his first planned destination, San Diego.

After donning a pair of gloves, he got underway.

At noontime, he stopped at a busy truck stop on the outskirts of Tucson.

He hoped that a possible victim might present herself there, but that didn’t happen.

After lunch, on his way back to the car, he noticed a towering mountain of thunderclouds rising up over the horizon to the south, so maybe the desk clerk was right, and rain really would show up in time to wash out Bisbee’s Fourth of July fireworks.

Once back in his Impala, he followed the freeway signs that took him first onto southbound I-19 and immediately thereafter onto Ajo Way and Highway 86.

Shortly after passing the Tucson city limits, the road narrowed to only two lanes peppered with one deep dip after another.

Two things struck him about that particular stretch of highway—the scarcity of traffic and the fact that there weren’t many residences along it, either.

Ten or so miles later, Stephen was sure he was going to come up empty, but then, a mile after passing something called the Three Points Trading Post, he hit the jackpot when he spotted a lone hitchhiker—an old man in raggedy clothing—standing on the shoulder of the road with his thumb extended.

A lousy bum wasn’t exactly what Stephen had had in mind, but sometimes you had to take what was offered.

With no approaching traffic visible in either direction, the old guy was just too good to pass up, and the gleeful voices in Stephen’s head chattered in enthusiastic agreement.

Stephen pulled over and stopped, dragging the sandwich container out from under the seat and placing it in his lap while he waited for his passenger to jog up to the car door and climb in.

It was hard to tell how old he was. His deeply wrinkled bronze skin suggested he was somewhere between sixty and eighty.

When he removed a grimy Stetson to wipe the sweat from his forehead onto an equally grimy shirtsleeve, his hair was gunmetal gray.

And the guy stank to high heaven in an almost lethal combination of old shoes, sweat, woodsmoke, and booze, with the emphasis on the latter.

“Where to?” Stephen asked.

The guy pulled a pint of clear booze out from under his shirt, took a long swig of whatever it was—vodka most likely—and gestured vaguely toward the west. “Sells,” he said. “That way.”

Less than a mile or so ahead, Stephen saw a sign indicating a side road leading off to the right and switched on his turn signal.

“Need to take a leak,” he explained.

“Fine with me,” the old guy muttered, downing another mouthful of booze.

Half a mile in on a narrow dirt road, another one came into view, this one turning off to the left.

A hand-painted sign at the intersection announced the presence of a shooting range, and not an upscale one by any means.

Beyond that, the road they were following got much worse, turning into a rugged dirt track far more appropriate for a four-wheel-drive Jeep than a sedan.

A hundred yards or so beyond the shooting range turnoff, they came to a place where a wide, sandy wash crossed the road.

Worried that the Impala might get stuck, Stephen stopped just short of the edge.

When he got out of the car, he didn’t bother bringing along the sandwich box. The guy was so drunk that using chloroform wasn’t even necessary. Stephen simply opened the passenger door, hauled him out onto the ground, and strangled him then and there, right next to his idling car.

After the deed was done, Stephen stood staring down at his victim.

Although the guy was probably dirt poor, the threadbare belt that strung through the loops of his aging Levi’s was fastened with what appeared to be a solid silver buckle with some sort of maze design carved into it.

Realizing this would be a good way to remember him, Stephen retrieved a pocketknife from his shaving kit and used that to collect the belt buckle for his cigar box.

Then he dragged the body of Maze Man into the wash.

Pulling that much dead weight through hot, deep sand wasn’t easy.

After no more than twenty yards, Stephen gave up.

He dropped the load in the sand and left Maze Man lying there on his back with his sightless eyes staring up at the sun.

Back in the Impala, Stephen discovered that the road was too narrow for him to turn around, forcing him to drive in reverse until he reached the turnoff to the shooting range.

Fortunately, he didn’t encounter another soul, coming or going.

Both exhausted and jubilant, Stephen got back on Highway 86, speeding along in air-conditioned comfort.

Less than four hours into his road trip, he already had what he wanted.

After that long forced hiatus, he wasn’t done, either.

Three days later, in downtown LA, he picked off an older model prostitute plying her wares outside a sleazy strip joint.

After yanking off one of her dangly pierced earrings, he hoisted her into a nearby dumpster.

He called her Alley Girl, although using the term girl was something of a misnomer.

On Monday, July 7, 1976, the decomposing body of a white female was found in a garbage dumpster at a construction site in downtown LA.

She was fully clothed. Her ears were pierced.

One earring was present while the other had been torn from her earlobe.

Her manner of death was ruled to be homicide; cause of death was asphyxia due to manual strangulation.

The victim was never identified. The case remained unsolved.

Meanwhile, hundreds of miles away from Arizona, Stephen Roper was totally unaware that summer monsoon season hadn’t bothered waiting around for Bisbee’s Fourth of July fireworks celebration before making an appearance.

On the afternoon of July third, a powerful storm had marched up from Baja California, drenching the Sonoran Desert with almost four inches of pounding rain in a matter of hours and turning bone-dry washes and riverbeds into raging floods.

That included the offshoot of Brawley Wash where Stephen had left Maze Man.

Two days later and forty miles away, a body was spotted washed up on the banks of the Santa Cruz River in Pinal County.

The victim was eventually identified as fifty-four-year-old Richard Romero of Sells, Arizona, last seen alive around noon on Saturday, July third, at the Three Points Trading Post, in Three Points, Arizona.

At first authorities thought Mr. Romero to be the victim of an accidental drowning; however, when his autopsy revealed a broken hyoid bone, the cause of death was ruled to be asphyxia due to manual strangulation and the manner of death homicide.

It was assumed that Mr. Romero had been murdered somewhere near Three Points and the body subsequently dumped into Brawley Wash, which, filled with floodwater from a fierce monsoon, eventually carried it into the Santa Cruz.

While removing the victim’s clothing, the coroner noted that the victim’s belt had been cut to remove whatever belt buckle he’d been wearing, one later described by Mr. Romero’s grieving relatives as the Man in the Maze.

The homicide was briefly investigated by detectives from both Pima and Pinal counties and by Law and Order officers from the Tribal Police in Sells, but the case quickly went cold for all of them.

As for Stephen Roper? Those two deaths in one week were enough to satisfy his bloodlust for a while and to silence his yammering voices as well.

Although he wore gloves the whole time, the remainder of his trip was uneventful.

When he got back to Bisbee, three weeks later, he spent some time gathering up the household goods that he’d need once the house was ready—linens, dishes, pots and pans—storing all those in the garage until the contractor was done with the finishing touches on the house, which happened a week before the beginning of teacher orientation.

By the first day of school at Bisbee High, Stephen Roper was ready to be Mr. Roper again, and he began, as he always did, by scaring the piddle out of his new students with his standard first-day-of-school, my-way-or-the-highway speech. That one worked every time.