Murder Mountain by Stacy Dittrich

her. “How do I get a hold of the tapes covering the fifth through the ninth of last month?”
    “Well, I ain’t just gonna mail ’em to ya if that’s what yer thinkin’!” She laughed. “I kin’t see yer badge through the phone, so ya’ll just have to have the sheriff pick it up here and give it to ya.”
    I told her to expect someone from her local law enforcement to be there in the next day or two to pick it up, and I slammed the phone down. I knew I was rude to dear Annie, but she was such a moron, I couldn’t help it. I was worried. Judging by the way she sounded, she probably couldn’t find her own ass with both hands, let alone the tapes I was looking for. When I slammed the phone down, it actually rang in my hand; it was Dispatch. They gave me the phone number for the Chatham County Sheriff’s Department, which had jurisdiction in Ovapa.
    A woman, identifying herself as the dispatcher, answered the phone. I assumed that she was the only one, unlike our communications center’s seven dispatchers at a time, because I heard a television on in the background. I told her who I was and what I needed assistance with.
    She said, “Hang on a minute; I’ll grab Captain John for ya!”
    He must’ve been standing right next to her because it sounded like she just reached over and gave him the phone.
    “This is Captain John VanScoy, may I help ya?” He said, in a very deep, gruff voice.
    For what seemed like the twentieth time that day, I told him who I was and what I needed. I asked him that when whoever picked up the tapes, they would be sure to confirm that they were from the fifth through the ninth of last month.
    “The manager down there didn’t seem too bright,” I said, immediately regretting it, because with my luck, Annie was probably this guy’s sister or something.
    He actually laughed, “Oh, that’s just Annie. She’s been at that station since Jesus was a boy. She don’t mean no harm, but yer right, she ain’t the brightest, and she’s about as worthless as two screens in a submarine. I think they keep her around ’cause they feel sorry for the ol’ bat.”
    I chuckled a little at his response.
    He went on, “If ya don’t mind me askin’, what is it yer lookin’ for? Maybe I can help.”
    “I just got a missing person on a girl and I was looking to see if she might be on the tape, that’s all; no biggie.”
    “You got a name on this-here missing person?”
    “Yeah, it’s, uh, let me see here; Samantha Elizabeth Johnston.”
    The pause before VanScoy spoke again was just a beat and a half too long. When he did speak, the syrup was still in his voice, but the warmth was gone. “Okay, well, I’ll get the tape mailed up there to ya, but I gotta go right now. It’s been nice talkin’ to ya. It’s Gallagher, right?”
    “That’s right.”
    Before I could say anything more, he said, “Have a nice day,” and hung up on me.
    I figured that I was probably being paranoid, but it seemed to me that Captain VanScoy got less friendly, if that’s the term I’m looking for, when I told him Lizzie’s name. It was as if he went from being charming to being just smooth, and in a hurry to close things off. I knew there was an allegation of dirty cops in West Virginia, but I highly doubted that I’d just spoken to one on the telephone.
    I was more than ready for my day to end, so I finished typing up my interview with Larry Johnston and headed home.
    Over the next several days, I did nothing on the case but hit dead ends. The address that Matt Hensley told me that Bob took him to was one of many vacant houses on Fairfax Avenue. I’ll bet I made at least fifty phone calls to people I thought might know something, but none of them did. One of those calls was to Jarrod Lawhorn, who, of course, screamed in my ear that he told me he would call if he’d heard something, and hung up on me. I decided then that someday, whether its ten years down the road or next week, I would find the