The Shadow of Death by Philip E. Ginsburg

Author:Philip E. Ginsburg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2018-08-03T16:00:00+00:00

It was a little like panning for gold. You sifted through huge volumes of ordinary stuff, all the people who had seen something, anything, around the Moores’ house or in the vicinity of Tidd’s Corner on April 15, and in the end you had a few little nuggets left, rough stories that might bear the promise of something more interesting.

There had been a remarkable flow of activity around the house that day. The man getting water for his car, the blue van, the man urinating in the woods. These and a dozen more had been tracked down and eliminated. When it was all done, the man with the blue knapsack remained. And so did the joggers.

Someone had mentioned them during the door-to-door canvassing around Tidd’s Corner in the days after the murder. “Did you see anything unusual that day?” they would ask, and one woman said, No, nothing real unusual, but there were two guys jogging.

One of them had a “messed-up face,” she said, and the other was wearing a T-shirt with some writing on it. “Messed-up?”

“You know,” she said, “kind of bad-looking. Something wrong with it.” She couldn’t say anything more about it. She hadn’t wanted to stare. And she had no idea what it said on the T-shirt. It was sometime between nine and ten in the morning.

It took three weeks, what with all the other leads to check out, but other sightings accumulated. A jogger had been seen by a woman hanging out her wash in Gageville, the village next to Saxtons River, around 11:00 A.M. A man working in his yard nearby had seen someone fitting the same description, but at 4:00 P.M. And there was a piece of luck. He remembered the T-shirt, the man said. He had served in the Philippines during World War II, remembered MacArthur landing in Leyte. That’s what was written on the T-shirt, he said. MacArthur? No, USS Leyte Gulf, he replied. A Navy ship, definitely.

It took several days of chasing down leads, but they finally identified the man in the T-shirt. His uncle, Barney Allen, lived less than a mile from Tidd’s Corner. Sure, Allen said, his nephew was in the Navy. He was stationed in the Philippines. Just went out there. Got that T-shirt as soon as they told him his assignment, real proud of it. Do you remember the date? they asked. I can figure it out, he said. He looked at a calendar. Jeffrey—that was his name, Jeffrey Miller—went back on April 18. That was three days after Lynda Moore was killed.

Does he have a friend who has something wrong with his face? the detectives asked.

“Oh, sure, you must mean his brother, Stanley,” Allen replied. “He was burned when he was a kid. Chemistry set blew up in his face. Been having operations ever since.”

In the next few days the detectives interviewed Allen about the Millers, trying to reconstruct their movements on the day of Lynda Moore’s death. It took several days of following one lead on to another before a timetable of Jeffrey Miller’s movements on April 15 began to emerge.

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