Eileen had thought she’d get out and see more of Texarkana, maybe spend some time out around the lake with a picnic lunch.  Get some sun.  Meet a few folks.  But by early summer she was doing nothing but research, interviews when she could get someone to talk to her, and driving out to see where the murders had actually taken place.  Not that she’d find anything.  She just wanted to feel each location.  Each one gave her the creeps.  She felt good getting back into the Buick wagon after each excursion.

By the time Eileen was sending Perry the chapters on the second double murder she was feeling like the denizens of Texarkana had in 1946.  She felt a kinship with each of the victims that she never felt when writing stories for the Stockton Telegram-Dispatch.  After a day of reading, researching, and writing, Eileen found refuge in the Longhorn Saloon.  It helped get the murders out of her mind, dull the edge enough to be able to sleep back in her apartment at the Westridge.  She noted that what was once the town’s largest, nicest hotel was the Hotel Grim, long since shuttered and decaying, an eyesore.  Now the entire town seemed grim.  But of course that was just her perspective, based on the task at hand.

The second double murder happened on Sunday, April 14th, three weeks after the first, less than two months after the first attack.  

Police reports Eileen reviewed indicated that on Sunday, April 14th, a young man by the name of Paul Martin, aged 17 at the time, picked up Betty Jo Booker at 1:30 in the morning from the VFW Club located at West Fourth and Oak Street.  Betty had been playing saxophone in a band for a dance at the club.  Martin’s body was found by people passing by at 6:30 that same morning.  The body was found on the northern edge of North Park Road.  He had been shot four times.

Knowing that Betty Jo Booker had last been seen with him, police discovered that she had never made it home and sent out a search party.  They discovered her body almost two miles away from Martin’s.  She was lying behind a tree, fully clothed, shot twice.  The same gun was used to kill her as had killed Paul Martin.  It was also the same one from the first double murder.  Her saxophone was nowhere to be found.

Martin’s car was located a mile and a half from where his body had been discovered, three miles from that of Betty Jo, outside Spring Lake Park.  The keys were still in the ignition.  It was obvious both he and Betty Jo had put up a fight.

“That’s when ol’ Manuel T. Gonzaullas got involved.”Maybell recalled as she and Eileen shared a couple burgers at Fondo’s Cafe.   “We was in full blown crisis by then.”

“Gonzaullas was a captain in the Texas Rangers who come into town to head up the investigation.  They called him ‘The Lone Wolf’.  Said the most dangerous place to be was between him and a camera or microphone.”  Maybell was less than impressed by the efforts and acumen of Captain Gonzaullas.  “Said he wouldn’t leave town or retire from the Texas Rangers till the killer had been put behind bars or killed.  Turns out he quit to go out and work in Hollywood.  They paid him to be a crime consultant, but he could have been an actor, as pretty as he was.”

There would end up being several chapters of the book just on the exploits, overconfidence, charms and alarms of Captain Gonzaullas.  Back in Fort Stockton, Perry found those to be some of the most interesting chapters to read, though he feared lawsuits may be stirred as a result of some of the more salacious details that Eileen had included.

By the end of that summer, Eileen was working on the details of the fifth and final Texarkana murder.  She felt like the book was coming along well, encouraged by Perry’s positive comments and the fact that he continued to fund the project.  He’d told her he was making inquiries for the finished product.  She’d grown to like the town more and more, especially when viewed without the filter of murders that took place twenty five years earlier.  She’d met someone at the Longhorn Saloon she was seeing on a somewhat regular basis, a guy by the name of Cass Harrison.  He lived on the Arkansas side of town, but she didn’t hold that against him.

After the second double murder in mid-April of 1946, townsfolk stayed in their houses.  Stores sold out of ammunition and guns.  People were fearful of being out after dark.  A quiet terror had clinched a small town that had never had such fears before.  Rumors ran rampant. Speculation abounded.  But the reality was that authorities were no closer to finding the killer than they ever had been.  

“Young kids that was wantin’ to neck had to find safer places than their cars parked out in the middle of nowhere,” Maybell explained to Eileen.  “Them hormones was ragin’.”  Maybell spoke as if she had personal experience.  There was a bit of a twinkle in her eye.  Eileen felt like Maybell might have been quite a looker back in 1946, before kids, age, diet, and “Evening Ambrosia” by Clairol had turned her into someone completely different.

The next morning after meeting Maybell for dinner, Eileen awoke to Cass engaged in a full fledged pandiculation beside her.  It was just as well.  She’d been dreaming about the fifth murder.  She was going to drive the Buick out to the house where it took place for the very first time.  Probably the only time.  She’d already done the research, but wanted to see the place for herself.  “You can write about something all day long and never have a real feel for it,” she’d told Cass when he asked her why she was going out there.  “But when it’s right in front of you, you can feel the story.  That’s the best way I can explain it.”

He offered to go out with her.  “No.  I want to experience it just like she did.  Alone,” she told him.

“Then you ought to go out at night, when it’s pitch black and only the moon to help you find your way to help.”  There was no way she was going to get that committed to feeling the story.

Two and a half weeks after the second double murder, Virgil Starks, age 37 was sitting in the living room of the farmhouse he shared with his wife locateded about ten miles northeast of Texarkana.  The white frame home sat on five hundred acres of farmland off Highway 67 East.  The couple had finished dinner and were settling in for the night.  His back was sore from working in the fields all day, so Katie, his 36 year old wife, went to another room to get the heating pad for him.  Nobody felt safe venturing out after dark at this point, regardless of whatever line Texas Ranger Captain Gonzaullas was feeding the local press.  There was no reason though, to think people wouldn’t remain safe as long as they stayed in their homes.

Virgil, radio tuned in and ready to relax, was sitting in his chair reading his newspaper when he thought he heard something outside.  He got up to investigate.  That’s when two shots shattered the quiet of the evening.  And Virgil’s skull.

Katie came running into the room when she heard the breaking glass.  She came in just as Virgil collapsed back into the chair, dead.  When she realized her husband was dead, Katie ran to the old crank phone and tried to call the police.  After the second attempt to reach the authorities, Katie was shot twice in the face through the same window.  The first bullet struck in the cheek and exited just under her ear.  The second one shattered her lower jaw and actually became stuck under her tongue.  She slipped on her own blood and fell to the ground.

Getting up, Katie ran towards the bedroom where her husband kept a pistol for protection, but was blinded by the blood pouring into her eyes from her wounds.  Her hearing, however, had not been affected.  Katie heard the murderer trying to come in through the back door.  Confused, but running on adrenaline, she ran to the front door and ran out of the house as fast as she could.  Barefoot, covered in blood, her lower jaw destroyed, Katie ran down a dirt road over one hundred yards to get to her neighbor’s house.  Alarmed at the sight on his front porch when he opened the door, the neighbor fired a rifle into the air to alert other neighbors.  Soon another neighbor showed up and the two of them loaded Katie into the back seat of his car to get her to an emergency room as quickly as they could.  “Virgil’s dead,” she told them as she laid in the backseat.

In shock, still conscious, though losing a massive amount of blood, Katie reached into her shattered mouth and pulled out a gold tooth and handed it to one of the neighbors in the front seat as a reward for saving her life.

When Perry read those details in the chapters dealing with the fifth murder, he told Eileen that she had to have made up the details about Katie’s tooth.  “Damn sure didn’t,” Katie assured him in a long distance phone call.  “That woman was a total badass.”

Authorities quickly made their way to the Stark house.  “It was a river of blood,” one of the first policemen on the scene later said.  Inside the house, the heating pad that Katie had brought her husband before their lives were shattered had actually caught fire underneath him.  Police were able to put it out before the chair Virgil Starks was found in was consumed in flames and destroyed all evidence.  Police found footprints in the trail of Katie’s blood, indicating the murderer had followed her, hoping to finish what he’d started at the house.

As Eileen sat in the Buick and looked at the scene, chills ran up and down her spine and the hair on her arms stood straight up on end.  She cranked the ignition on the straight-8 and made her way back to town, passing the exact spots where roadblocks on Highway 67 had been set up to try to catch the killer that night.  The Buick Super Estate traveled just as freely back to town as the killer had.

Among the more important pieces of evidence left at the scene were two flashlights used by the killer.  While neither yielded any fingerprint evidence, it was discovered that the two flashlights were of a brand new variety only recently offered for sale in Texarkana in that particular color.  Only one hundred of them had been sold.  The Texarkana Gazette used color printing for the very first time in order to try to gain leads for the police by sharing that information, along with a picture of the flashlights.

Back in town, Eileen soon learned that there were enough discrepancies between this latest case and the others that authorities thought they may not be related.  The Starks were attacked in their home, not in a car.  They were married and well into their thirties, not lovestruck young people seeking privacy for pleasure.  Perhaps more importantly, the shell casings found at the scene did not match those at the other murder scenes.  Some of the authorities surmised that the latest killing may have been the work of a copycat killer who had a grudge to settle against the Starks and simply followed the same style of violence to cover his tracks.  Mrs. Starks, as well as friends and neighbors disputed this possibility, saying the couple had no enemies at all, much less someone who would attempt to murder them both in their own home.

“And that’s where it ends?”  Cass was incredulous that the story just stopped with the fifth murder and a brutal attempted murder.  

“The rest is all just denouement,” Eileen told him.  She could tell he had no idea what ‘denouement’ was.  “They never caught him.  The rest of the story is just winding up the details.  There is no happy ending.”

“Well that’s just bullshit!”

“Imagine how the people of Texarkana felt.  No closure.  No arrest.  No trial.  Things just eventually returning to whatever the new normal was, but never having their questions answered.”  Eileen didn’t leave him feeling very good as she got out of bed and covered herself up with the sheer robe that was hanging on the back of the door.

“I prefer to see you naked.”

“I prefer to talk on the phone at least partially clothed.  I have to call Perry, back in Fort Stockton.”  Eileen was matter of fact about it.  He understood, although there was always just a tinge of jealousy whenever she talked to or about Perry Silverman.  He could never really explain it, nor did he ever try.  “I’ll be naked when I come back,” she said.

She didn’t bother to close the door to the bedroom. There was never anything in the conversations she had with Perry that required privacy.  

“I’m wrapping things up here.  Maybe just a few more days.  I’ve got everything I need to finish the last couple chapters at home.”  There was silence on her end as Perry replied.

Cass hadn’t intended to listen to the call, but it was close enough that he couldn’t help it.  The news that Eileen intended to leave soon was new to him.  He was caught off guard.  He knew that day would come, but figured there’d have been a little advanced warning.  The relationship had never really been defined, but he hadn’t expected it to just come to an abrupt end.  He thought it might be going somewhere, he just wasn’t sure where.

“You’ve sold the book?” He heard her say in the other room.  “Incredible.  I want to hear all about the details as soon as I get back.  But one thing, I don’t want my name on it.  I want to use a pen name.  A pseudonym.  I have my reasons.  It’ll sell better if people think a man wrote it, anyway.  Nobody believes a woman doing an investigative book.”

The surprises just kept coming for poor Cass laying naked in the sheets of the one bedroom apartment at the Westridge.

“Parker McHale,” Eileen said into the phone.  “Yeah, that’s the name I want on the book.  Parker after my dad.  McHale after Evelyn.  From the Empire State Building.”

There were so many things to discuss when she got back into bed that the fact they were both naked didn’t really matter.  Well, not for a while, anyway.

The next morning Eileen got up early and showered, leaving Cass still asleep in bed.  She ventured out to the kitchen to make breakfast only to find a lack of nearly everything a decent breakfast might require.  She grabbed her car keys and headed to the Buick for a quick trip to the Winn-Dixie for supplies.  

About the same time she was cranking up the Super Estate and pulling out of the parking lot of the Westridge Apartments, three blocks away on North Kenwood Road, Merle Windthorpe was driving his red ’49 REO SpeedWagon pickup full of farm supplies when he noticed a hornet the size of his thumb flying around the cab of his truck.  Deathly afraid of the stinging insect because he was highly allergic, Merle was making every effort to slap the beast out the window and not fully paying attention to the road in front of him.

Though Eileen had the right-of-way and Merle had the stop sign, fifty feet before the intersection the hornet stung him on his neck, just behind his ear.  His foot never hit the brake.  The pointed front end of the REO hit the Buick at thirty-five miles an hour.    The big Buick was reduced to a pile of toothpicks and mangled metal.  The impact caused Merle to become airborne, exiting the cab of the REO through the windshield and becoming a bloody human hood ornament.  Somehow Eileen walked away.  Merle was not as lucky.  

First responders didn’t think the injuries he sustained in the impact would have caused his death.  But then, they hadn’t seen the way his neck had swollen up from the hornet sting and caused him to suffocate.  The last thing he saw was the look on Eileen’s face.  For her part, Eileen was surprised at how calmly she took the whole thing in stride.  For as far back as she could remember she’d been close to death, in one form or another.  It had lost the ability to have the same effect it had on the unindoctrinated.

Three days later, she was at the Ralph Pool Used Car lot.  “Give me the biggest thing you have on the lot.  Something that will withstand a truck hitting it dead on,” she told Ralph.

“Gotta be a Caddy.  A ’59 would be your best bet.”  Ralph was matter-of-fact in his advice, though it was apparent he may have been under the influence of doundrins, even as early in the day as it was. He walked Eileen over to the 1959 Sedan DeVille parked near the office. ”This Gotham Gold sedan would be just about perfect. One owner. Low miles. Seats have been covered in plastic since the first owner. The 390 cubic inch V-8 will pass anything but a gas station, but you’ll be travelin’ safe and in style.”

A Cadillac. In ‘Gotham’ Gold. Sometimes reality is more ironic than anything a writer can make up, she thought to herself. “I’ll take it.”  Eileen chuckled to herself.  “Hope the roof on it is strong, as well.”

Writing up the easiest sale he’d made all week, Ralph noted the Greenlease badge on the back of the car as he was getting the license plate number for the paperwork.  “Sold new at Greenlease Cadillac up in Tulsa.  That takes me back.”

Eileen wasn’t really interested in small talk, or whatever memories Ralph may have been mulling over in his mind.  But then he muttered, “You know they killed the poor boy as soon as they kidnapped him,” and that perked her ears up instantly. She questioned Ralph about the Greenlease kidnapping while he finished the forms.

Eileen signed the paperwork, wrote a check for the ’59 Sedan DeVille, and headed back to the apartment.  Her things were already packed.  It didn’t take her long to fill up the trunk and back seat of the huge yellow beast.  She sat down at the chrome and formica dinette in the kitchen of the apartment and wrote a postcard to Perry Silverman back in Fort Stockton.  “Change in plans.  Heading to St. Jo, Missouri.  Be home by Thanksgiving, Christmas at the latest.  More details to follow, Eileen.”  Then she crossed out ‘Eileen’ and wrote ‘Parker McHale’.

She was still sitting at the table when Cass walked in through the door that had been left open.  He’d seen the Cadillac and everything Eileen owned loaded into it when he pulled up.  He hoped that maybe she’d changed her mind, but wanted to catch her to say goodbye, if she hadn’t.

“I’m headed to Missouri.  Might be a few weeks.  Maybe a month, month and half, I don’t know.  You’re welcome to come along.”