Manhunt. Volume 14, Number 1, February/March, 1966

His lights swung into Walker, catching the red-eyed rear of Deputy Millis’ cruiser. The driver’s door was open, and the beacon spun lazily, throwing a blue pattern on overhanging trees bare of leaves and tinged with a powder of light snow.

Cogan pulled in close, his eyes already sweeping the area until he saw Millis’ white face in the headlight glare. The deputy motioned to him from a clump of high bushes lining the sidewalk.

The girl looked about sixteen, perhaps a little older. She lay under the spindly branches of a bush, her legs drawn up under her as if she were trying to ward off the cold cutting through the policemen’s tan uniforms.

A light coat of snow was her only clothing, except for a shredded pink thing caught around her neck and tangled in her long black hair. She might have been sleeping but for the deep, dark gashes covering her thin frame, their redness softened into a rose color by the sifting snow.

Cogan nodded to his deputy, knelt beside the body, and slipped a practiced hand between the girl’s body and the limp arm that lay over it. A slight warmth.

“Been dead no more than fifteen, twenty minutes, I’d say,” Millis offered, flitting the beam of his flashlight around the spot where the body lay.

“Yeah.” Cogan listened to the deputy’s story about finding her and noted that Millis sounded frightened, although a casual observer would have put it down to the bitter dampness clawing at the young lawman. Cogan knew it was the fright of a cop who made a career of guarding a town like this, where an occasional wife-beating, perhaps a gas station hold-up once every few years, was about the limit of violence.

Millis handed him a purse. “Found this along with her clothes, most of ’em anyway.”

The Sheriff rose awkwardly to his feet and fetched a gray blanket from the trunk of his car. He whipped it open and draped it over the dead girl, then fished into the pocketbook while the ever-observant deputy poked his light to guide the way.

“Martha Eberly.”

“That’s her house over there,” Millis pointed to a gangling, turreted Victorian pile that sat two houses down on the other side of the deserted street.

“Fred, call the office and have Morgan call the barracks. Tell ’em... Hell! You know what to tell them.” He closed the pocketbook slowly. “They won’t show up for twenty minutes, so I guess I’d better go and tell her folks.”

“I’ll go if you want, Sheriff.” Millis was only twenty-four and single, but he could imagine what it was like to be sixty years old, and he felt what it must be like to have a sixteen-year-old daughter, dead.

“No. It’s OK.” He patted the deputy on the shoulder lightly, then wheeled to cross the street.

It was two in the morning before the State Police got through and packed their equipment away, their notebooks jammed with data and measurements, their patience frayed by the press of wide-eyed, questioning onlookers who stood around cold and silent, even after the local ambulance had whisked away the blanket-covered lump that once had been a girl.

Sheriff Cogan was physically tired, but his brain kept functioning. He knew he had to remain alert and in command. If he just stood back and let the state experts work it would become their case, and it had to remain his. The staties could only come in on request of local authority, and he’d be damned if he’d let them take this one out of his hands.

He didn’t even know the girl or her parents, but it had only been necessary to talk to the chalk-faced father and weeping mother for a few moments to know he couldn’t let go of the case. The killer had to be found by the man paid $6846 a year to prevent this sort of thing. And he had promised Mr. and Mrs. Eberly he would find the killer.

Deputy Millis still held his flashlight as he waved a listless arm at the dozen or so onlookers who wouldn’t let go of the tragedy. “All right, folks, all right! It’s all over. Whyn’t you all go home now?”

Without waiting for them to move, he slushed through the four inches of snow and joined his boss in the car, stamping snow off his black boots.

“I gotta hand it to you, Sheriff,” Millis said thoughtfully.

“What?”

“You said this was the first thing like this ever happened in this town since you’ve been sheriff, but you knew just what the State boys were doing, even corrected them once in awhile and showed them a thing or two they might of missed.”

Cogan let a half-smile light his tired face. “Got most of it from reading, the rest from listening.” He lit a small cigar and stared thoughtfully into the night. “You might as well grab a quick bite. I got a feeling things are going to be hectic.”

Millis clambered out of the car, bracing himself against the white-specked cold. He peered back at the Sheriff. “No sleep tonight for anybody, huh?”

“No. I’m going to stop at Chucks’ house and rouse him out of bed. It’s his day off, but we’re going to need the whole crew for the next few days. The state boys are setting up road blocks, but he’s had enough time to clear the county by now.”