Murder and Salutations - By Elizabeth Bright Page 0,100

CHAPTER 34 •

WHAT I WANT TO HEAR ARE HANDCUFFS

The light in the room was storm cloud gray, and ice glistened on the sidewalks below the municipal building. A bitter north wind beat the windows of the detective division of the Lubbock Police Department. The man from Philadelphia had not enjoyed his week on the high plains of West Texas. He had sat in the police car grimly staring at cotton fields rolling under black judgment-day skies. Goose hunting country, they said. It’s a fucking wasteland is what it is, he thought. You can see a pimple on a cat’s ass. He detested the bone-chilling cold but was warmed by a Lubbock Avalanche-Journal story open on the desk:

SUPER SLEUTH CALLED TO SHED LIGHT ON BIZARRE DISAPPEARANCE.

It was the front-page story that touted his arrival, followed by a second front-page story in the Avalanche-Journal that had made him something of the talk of the town.

INVESTIGATOR EXPECTS TO CRACK DUNN CASE.

Walter had confidently declared that Lubbock police would soon solve the case of Dunn’s disappearance. After spending one day studying the case, interviewing suspects, and talking to police, Walter promised that the “nasty and clever” killers’ eighteen months of gloating would soon come to an end. His analysis of the murder indicated that the killers were “smart” but made “mistakes.” They unknowingly revealed their patterns to him, leaving “trails, bits and pieces” that would be their undoing.

“Success will be based on two things,” he said. “A) The case merits success, and B) I don’t like losing a case. I have a bulldog mentality, and what I want to hear are handcuffs, and I want to do it right. . . . If I were the suspect, I wouldn’t feel comfortable. I wouldn’t buy any green bananas.”

Now at eight o’clock that morning in December 1992, Walter sat down with a police corporal, sergeant, and detective to discuss the Dunn case. The thin man looked fresh and energized in his blue suit, his blue eyes shining above the French tricolor pin on his lapel. Tal English, the tall, twenty-seven-year-old detective, had an aw-shucks manner that matched his sandy hair and cowboy boots; he and Walter had bonded working the case for months over the telephone. The older man had croaked, “Young man, we’re going to go into the jaws of hell and bring this case back out.” Corporal George White, distinguished-looking with gray in his dark hair, and Sergeant Randy McGuire, large and bald, sat stoically appraising the profiler. They all got along in an atmosphere of mutual respect, but the two veteran cops had not seen eye to eye with the “super sleuth” from the Vidocq Society in their previous meeting.

After the cops’ courteous Texas welcome, which Walter always appreciated, he got right to his point: They should immediately take the case to District Attorney Travis Ware and press for murder charges. Walter wanted the charges filed against Leisha Hamilton and her neighbor and lover Tim Smith, fiercely jealous of Scott, whom he believed was an accomplice.

Corporal White and Sergeant McGuire took a long look at the man from Philadelphia. The case had been a top priority for a year. Jim Dunn was a hometown boy, a hall-of-fame alumnus of local Texas Tech; his best friend was still his old college roommate W. R. Collier, president of the largest locally owned bank in Lubbock. There was great public interest in the gruesome disappearance of a prodigal son in a cloud of sex, blood, and duct tape, and the police had invested thousands of man-hours. Murders were relatively rare in the Texas city of 186,000 people, but they were reading about this one over coffee from Plainview to Dallas to Jacksonville, Florida. The police wanted nothing more than to solve it. They liked Walter, and he them—“they were all great guys”—but they just couldn’t see how a petite, charming twenty-eight-year-old woman had orchestrated a vast conspiracy of lies and cold-blooded murder.

Walter tried to convince them.

“This case is like shaking hands with smoke,” he said. “It’s a matter of you can see it, you can smell it and taste it, but it’s difficult to get your hands around it.”

Walter urged them to look at the crime scene, the killing room with blood halfway up the walls and splattered on the ceiling. They all agreed Scott Dunn had no doubt died in that room. The point of departure was that with no body and no weapon there was no case, according to the police. Without that foundation