Questions swirled around my brain as I looked at the paper in front of me in the roadside Easy-Stop. On a personal level I was wondering whether this hangover was going to subside before I reached Graywolf. I was doing a mental back-count on the number of drinks that Higgins and Spivot had bought me at McKellan's last night. At first I thought it was four, but then, in tune with a heaving feeling in my stomach and a spiking of pain in my head I remembered the three successive rounds of Jose Cuervo. I cringed and wished the waitress would stop by my booth, refill my water and coffee, and bring the pancakes I ordered almost twenty minutes ago.
Seriously, where was that waitress? Second question. The small cafe only had three other patrons, truck drivers by the look of them, and they all seemed to be enjoying their meals, despite arriving after me. My stomach cringed again and I looked over to the sign for the men's room and debated whether venturing in there would be better or worse for my hangover.
I shook my head lightly, trying to get myself to focus again on the paper in front of me. This particular issue of the New Haven County Journal was the source of all of my non-digestion related questions. I had already been briefed on the situation, but I wanted to get a local perspective. Small town papers are notorious for reporting rumors and hearsay, the kind that a federal case file often leaves out. Higgins would say that they leave it out for good reason, local rumors can easily become witch hunts if acted too intently upon, but I wanted to know what Graywolf's biases were, and familiarize myself as much as I could with the mindset of the town before I arrived.
St. Andrew Murder; Police Investigation Stalled After 7 Days
The article's headline was plastered across the font page of the newspaper in large bolded font, and the article beneath it took up half the entire front page, accompanied by a photo printed across the other.
"Here you go hun!" Said the voice of the waitress from behind me. I have to admit it startled me a bit. Hangovers tend to make me a little jumpier than usual. Probably the reason that I try not to drink so much these days. She walked around me, carrying a plate of pancakes and a pot of coffee that looked blacker than brand new car tires.
"Oh! thank you!" I exclaimed, in that tone of voice people use when they're caught off guard in a situation where they weren't expecting to have to talk. She smiled and placed the plate down in front of me to the right of my newspaper, filled up my coffee and asked me if I would be needing anything else. I told her that I wouldn't, forgetting that I wanted my water refilled as well. Oh well, I thought, it would have been probably be another 20 minutes before I'd see that glass of water anyway.
I looked back to the paper as I forced down the thick, blueberry pancakes and coffee despite my stomach's first inclinations to expel everything already inside it. It was her picture next to the article. Jessica Sweeton, 20 year old daughter of Reverend Mark Sweeton and his wife Tanya, in this picture she was smiling, beautiful, and living. It was a high school graduation photo. The caption below the picture read "The body of 20 year old Sweeton was found early last Monday morning on the St. Andrew’s football field by campus security." The article itself went on to lambast the local Sheriff's department for not making any arrests yet, despite questioning Jessica's boyfriend and several other members of the community. It was clear that whoever had written this piece believed the Saint Andrew University's football team should be questioned more thoroughly. The author cited the fact that Jessica's boyfriend is teammates with one Martavious Jones, who, along with two former team members, had been implicated in a sexual assault case in 2014. Other than that though, the article merely recapped already widely known details of the murder, that Jessica had been found wrapped in a tarp with a knife wound in her chest, and that no witnesses could be found to explain how the body had been brought to the center of the football field. What it didn't mention, was that the knife used to kill Jessica had been found still planted in her chest, and there had been no public mention of any of the autopsy results. That was one of my biggest questions. Why had none of the media or local press ever mentioned the fact that the coroner found evidence that Jessica had also been raped? I knew people from small towns like Graywolf are often much more conservative, but I felt that not reporting a fact like this goes beyond that somehow. Could it be because her father was a pastor? Or maybe the Sheriff's department had some other reason for keeping that fact under wraps. Either way I wanted to know. I made a mental note of the author of the newspaper article, Sandra Clark-Duncan. Her article made sure to mention the previous sexual assault convictions of the football players, and I thought that it could be because she knows something about the case the rest of the media doesn't, or simply that she, like the rest of the citizens of Graywolf, is looking for someone to blame.
I folded up the paper, finished my pancakes and coffee, and left twenty dollars on the table as I got up and walked out of the cafe. The dirt parking lot was fairly large, obviously to accommodate any transport truckers stopping in for a bite or to sleep. I zipped up my brown bomber jacket, climbed into my car and began driving.
The Easy Stop was roughly a half hour drive outside of Graywolf, at the edge of New Haven county, which would mean that I was due to arrive at the Sherriff’s office at about 7:30 am. I was unsure how strong any media presence would be around the station itself, so arriving early was my way of avoiding the possibility of a scrum or scene of any kind. I had also made sure to procure an all black unmarked town car from the regional field office. I wanted to stay as low profile as I could going into this investigation. In small towns like Graywolf, gossip gets around fast, and the presence of a RCMP special investigator was sure to cause a stir in a town already desperate for new information on Jessica’s murder case. It’d be the kind of gossip that could potentially lead the guilty party to skip town (if they were even still in Graywolf at all) or to simply lay low, cover their tracks, or concoct an alibi. Showing up to a media scrum in full uniform and police cruiser could also potentially intimidate any potential witnesses, and encourage crackpots to come forward and lead me on a wild goose chase all over the county. That was my thought process anyway, the way I was justifying my decision for discretion. The real reason I was going to arrive as unannounced, and incognito as possible was that working in the background, and digging in the shadowy recesses of the world was where I was at my most comfortable as an investigator. 11 years working undercover makes you comfortable with secrecy.
That’s where I’ve done my best work, undercover, poking around in the dark when people aren’t looking. I’ve observed people at their weakest points, I’ve seen how people try and dance around a truth they don’t know you know. I’ve seen what makes a killer kill and I’ve seen how that changes a man. It’s something in the eyes. Not so much the pupils or the corneas, but something in the way a killer’s eyes move. It’s too fast. They move their gaze fast, and hold too long on you, trying to see if you’ll hold back. It’s a trait I’ve noticed on gang enforcers countless times. It’s a hardness, or sadness, or something I can’t quite place and it’s a trait I’d be on the lookout for when I reached Graywolf. I didn’t really know the people, I didn’t really know the town, but I knew that look and it was a look I was determined to find.
As I drove I looked over at the case file in the passenger seat. I had pinned Jessica’s picture on the front of the file to remind myself of the person that was gone. Some investigators like to divorce themselves as much as they can from the victim and their family. But for me, I needed to make this personal in some way. Jessica’s face was the first from Graywolf I’d ever seen, and her life was what I was going to be diving into. I was going to need to uncover everything about the life that went along with the face in that picture. I was going to find things I was sure she didn’t want anyone else to know, things people in her life might still not want to know about. If I was going to upturn Jessica’s privacy, her family’s privacy, their entire lives, I needed to put a face to that. I needed Jessica to be as much a part of my investigation as any other witness. Because chances are she knew the person who killed her, she could pick them out of any line up, she’d contradict any alibi they came up with, and probably prove they did it if she could talk to me right now. My resolve, as I drove past the sign welcoming me to Graywolf, was to listen.
***
