I spent the rest of that afternoon carefully reading through Langdon’s notes. There was no doubt left in my mind about his ability as an investigator. He had been absolutely thorough—good instincts and a totally professional job. Included were summaries of all the standard police procedural steps he had followed. He had highlighted the questions that he believed needed to be more completely answered. He had talked to all the people that I had wanted to meet. Somehow, he had wangled from her doctor the exact date Vickie had been given a prescription for birth control pills—that, in and of itself was impressive. Doctors are generally pretty by the book. All of his interviews were concisely abbreviated to highlight anything he believed might be cogent. He had asterisked the things about the case that still bothered him. If he thought something was particularly important or needed additional attention, he had used bold type. As I finished going through his transcribed notes for a third time, I realized that I had made my own three pages of notations around the time line and the connections. All of my questions were underlined in red ink.
I knew that, somehow, we needed to talk with Eddie Ralston. The only interview that Stuart Langdon had done with Ralston had been close to hostile. He had learned nothing from the guy. Maybe that partly explained the angry reaction from the cop when we mentioned Ralston’s name at lunch. That was the weakness in his investigation, and he knew it. I agreed with his own assessment that perhaps Mia stood the best chance of getting Eddie to open up honestly. She would have to arrange to visit him in jail.
I wanted to meet the stepbrother, Terry. Stuart Langdon had called the guy a walking hard on with an attitude—sounded just like his dad. I wanted to satisfy myself that there could not be another member of the Bullock family who was as big a prick as Ted.
Aside from the determination as to the exact time and cause of death, some of Langdon’s conclusions and those of the forensic people had to be just good guesses because the body had not been found right away and there had been some physical deterioration of the corpse and the scene. The forensic piece regarding evidence of sexual activity sometime in the five to eight hours before her demise was interesting. Langdon had been correct. No one, in any report that he had been given, had used the word rape. If the sex had been consensual, what did that tell us? I would follow up on that information if I could. There was never any suggestion that Vickie had been killed where she had been found. All parties agreed that she was dead for a short time before she had been dumped there. I needed a clearer definition of “short time”. Langdon had said that this was not a fresh puppy, and he’d been right about that too. I didn’t want to see the crime scene photos. I’d seen enough of those things to last me a lifetime.
Joe Holiday—Boy Hero