Page 5 of No Surrender
“Whew.” Vic exchanged a glance with his partner. “That was…not fun.”
“Need a ride home?” Ross gave him a worried once-over.
“I think I’ll be okay. I don’t want to leave the bike here.”
Ross looked skeptical but didn’t argue. “Alright. See you tomorrow—so we can do this all over again,” Ross replied, bumping Vic’s shoulder.
To Vic’s dismay, he found a familiar face loitering near where he’d parked his dark blue Hayabusa. “What are you doing here, Walt?” Vic asked with resignation. “Go home. I’m not giving you an interview or an exclusive.”
Walt held up his hands in a gesture of surrender. “Hear me out.”
Vic rolled his eyes. “Walt—”
“Hey, didn’t I give you the tip about the truck that was used in the electronics heist? Panned out, didn’t it?”
“Yeah, but—”
“And didn’t I drop the hint that Jimmy Reno might be running the illegal poker club?”
“I get it,” Vic replied, not entirely as annoyed as he tried to come across. As reporters went, Walt Baker was a decent sort. He fed Vic and Simon useful tips, knew which questions not to ask, and never edited video clips to be misleading. Vic knew the department needed some goodwill with the press, so he helped Walt out whenever he could without compromising his investigations.
“What do you want to know? No guarantee I can tell you, with the trial coming up.”
“Is the Slitter Myrtle Beach’s only serial killer?”
Walt’s question caught Vic off-guard. It wasn’t at all what he expected, and he was glad there was no camera because Vic suspected he gaped like a fish for a moment. “What?”
“People come and go like the tide in a place like this,” Walt said. “Tourists. Drifters. Seasonal help. Locals expect them to leave, and no one asks where they went or if they got there alive. When they disappear, no one notices because they weren’tfromhere, didn’t have anyone looking for them. So how do you know the Slitter is the only one who preyed on them?”
We don’t.Vic wasn’t about to say that out loud, but Walt seemed to read the answer in Vic’s eyes.Dammit.
“No one ever asked that question before, did they?”
Vic hated being caught flatfooted, no matter how much the question disturbed him. “We have enough work without inventing cases,” he snapped. “Do you have proof? If not, you’ve just got a pretty theory.”
“I have names of people who went missing over a year’s time in 1982,” Walt replied.
“Did they actually go ‘missing’ or just move on? Hard to tell in a place like this.”
“My sources say they went missing. As in people who wanted to find them, couldn’t.”
“Sometimes people have reasons to disappear,” Vic countered, intrigued but skeptical. “Good reasons.”
Walt shook his head. “Not according to the people who missed them. Including my aunt.”
That got Vic’s attention. “What?”
“Her best friend came here to work a summer job in 1982 and vanished. She was close to her family, wasn’t the type to run off with a boy, didn’t have debts. But she was a waitress—summer help—and no one took the missing person report seriously,” Walt said. “It’s much too long ago to think we’d find her alive, but I think she and the others deserve closure. I’ve been digging into it, trying to find possible killers.”
Vic’s head swam with the implications. He knew that police were as subject to unconscious bias as anyone else. If the officers in charge back then had fixed opinions about seasonal help and were dismissive of reports because they thought they knew best, Vic could imagine incidents being overlooked and dismissed.
“What do you want?” Vic asked. Walt had positioned himself between Vic and his motorcycle. While he didn’t like being ambushed, he still thought of Walt as one of the “good guys.”
“Answers. Acknowledgment. And maybe a consideration to change procedures that prematurely write people off because of what they do for a living.”
That last comment made Vic wince. “Okay. Give me names, and I’ll run reports. Serial killers are bad news. Do you have any intel on whether the perp is still alive? The ones you’re digging into?”
He did the math in his head. If the killer was older than a teen in 1982, they’d be in their sixties now or older. Very possibly still alive. Juries often didn’t like having an elderly person dragged into court for long-ago misdeeds, but opposition melted if the crimes were heinous enough.
