He paused, his eyes going distant, focused on something we couldn’t see—some scene preserved in memory like an insect in amber, perfect and terrible and impossible to forget.
“I was still a rookie in all the ways that counted when I got that call,” he continued, his voice dropping lower. “Grimm Island wasn’t exactly a hotbed of crime back then. Traffic stops, noise complaints, the occasional drunk and disorderly. Tommy and I had responded to one fatal car accident in all that time—teenager wrapped his truck around a tree on River Road. But that was clean compared to what was waiting at Turtle Point.”
He removed his glasses, cleaning them with the edge of his flannel shirt—a delaying tactic, giving himself time to find the words.
“They were arranged,” he said finally, his voice taking on the hollow quality of someone revisiting a nightmare that never quite faded, no matter how many years passed or how many miles separated him from Grimm Island. “Someone had taken the time after killing them to pose them in that embrace. But the scene—the actual scene before it got sanitized for the reports—told a different story entirely.”
He leaned back in his chair, and the springs creaked like old bones settling. His eyes went distant, focused on something we couldn’t see, some terrible tableau preserved in memory with the clarity of a photograph that wouldn’t yellow or fade no matter how desperately you wished it would.
“Pickering died first. Single shot to the back of the head, execution style. He was on his knees when it happened, about ten feet from his car.” Frank’s hands moved unconsciously, positioning invisible bodies in invisible sand. “The killer must have had a gun on both of them. Forced him down. Made Ruby watch. Then pulled the trigger.”
The afternoon sun slanting through the office window seemed too bright suddenly, too cheerful for what we were discussing. Outside, I could hear Jimmy helping the customer with paint colors—something about eggshell versus cream—and the normalcy of it felt obscene.
“Ruby ran,” Frank continued, and his voice had gone softer, almost reverent, as if he were honoring her final moments of defiance. “Made it maybe twenty feet toward the tree line before the killer caught her. The sand showed everything—where she’d been dragged back, where she’d fought. And God, she fought hard. The beating came first. We found blood on the sand where her face had hit, where ribs had cracked under someone’s fists or feet. Defensive wounds on her hands and arms where she’d tried to protect herself from blows that kept coming.”
Dottie had gone very still beside me, her medical examiner brain already cataloguing the violence, understanding exactly what Frank was describing in ways I hoped I never would.
“Three gunshots to the chest,” Frank said. “But here’s the thing that stayed with me, that still keeps me up some nights when I can’t stop thinking about it—even after the first two bullets hit, she was still trying to crawl away. The drag marks in the sand showed her fingers clawing at the ground, trying to pull herself toward the trees, toward anywhere that wasn’t there. And then the killer pushed her onto her back and shot her a third time point-blank.”
The silence that followed felt heavy as wet sand, pressing down on us with the weight of Ruby Bailey’s last terrified moments.
“Then someone moved them both,” Frank continued, his jaw working as if he were chewing on words too bitter to swallow. “Dragged Pickering’s body from near his car, dragged Ruby’s from where she’d fallen by the tree line, positioned them in that embrace like they were lovers sleeping peacefully. Made something beautiful out of something brutal. That’s what Tommy couldn’t get past—the deliberateness of it. The care someone took to arrange them just so, to create this tableau that told a story completely opposite from what had actually happened.
“Their clothes were neatly folded and placed on the back seat of Pickering’s car—his shirt on bottom, then his pants, then her dress, then her undergarments on top. Stacked like laundry fresh from the dryer. That’s not what happens when people are interrupted during sex. Clothes get tossed, scattered, left where they fall in the urgency of the moment. Someone took the time after they were dead to collect every piece of clothing, fold it carefully, stack it neatly. Making everything orderly except for the bodies themselves, except for the blood soaking into the sand, except for Ruby’s mutilated face.”
The office felt smaller suddenly, the air thicker, as if the past was pressing in on the present, demanding space it had been denied for too long.
“The tongue,” Dottie said quietly, and something in her voice told Frank she knew exactly what he was about to say, had seen it herself on the autopsy table all those years ago.
Frank nodded slowly. “Tommy thought it was symbolic—silencing her even in death. Making sure everyone knew this wasn’t just about murder. This was about punishment for speaking, for knowing, for saying something someone couldn’t allow to be said.”
“What about the footprints?” I asked, pulling us back to evidence, to things that might still matter decades later.
“Small ones. Women’s shoes, maybe a size six or seven. They go back and forth, like she was pacing, and then toward Pickering’s vehicle before eventually heading toward the road.” Frank’s hands clenched into fists on his desk. “Tommy thought whoever left those prints had come after the murders, not during. The prints were on top of the disturbed sand, on top of the drag marks. Someone came to see what had been done, or maybe to make sure it was done right. But Milton shut down any investigation into them. Said we didn’t have the budget for that kind of forensic work, that footprints in sand weren’t reliable evidence anyway. By the next morning, someone had been out there with a rake, smoothed over the entire area. Every print gone. Every piece of evidence that might have pointed somewhere uncomfortable just…erased.”
“And Milton’s official story?” I asked.
Frank’s jaw tightened. “Milton didn’t have a story—not one that made sense anyway. He let three different people confess over the next week. Three completely different versions of what happened, all of them knowing details that hadn’t been made public. Tommy thought Milton was feeding them information, coaching them through confessions so he could appear to be solving the case while actually making sure it stayed buried. All three recanted within days, claimed coercion. By then the evidence trail was so muddied that nobody knew what was real anymore. Which was exactly what Milton wanted. Just like any high-profile case with Milton, if there was money to be made on his end, then he found a way.”
“But you didn’t believe the discrepancies,” Dottie said.
“Tommy didn’t.” Frank’s voice carried shame and admiration in equal measure. “I went along with it—I went along with it because I had a mortgage and a wife and twin baby daughters. But Tommy kept digging even after Milton told him to stop. He documented everything—took photographs before Milton could confiscate them, made copies of evidence, tracked down witnesses and recorded their statements properly.”
“And Milton buried all of it,” I said.
“Everything that mattered. Tommy made copies of everything—three sets, because he wasn’t stupid and he’d learned by then that evidence had a way of disappearing when it pointed in directions Milton didn’t want to go. Photographs from the crime scene, witness statements, financial records someone at the church slipped him showing discrepancies in the building fund.”
“Where are those copies now?” Dottie asked.
“Safe. Not here—I’m not fool enough to keep something like that where it could be found. But I’ve got them.” Frank’s jaw tightened. “I can mail them to you. Everything Tommy documented, everything he couldn’t get anyone to listen to.”
“What did Tommy think happened?” I asked. “Who did he think killed them?”
“Tommy didn’t have answers, just questions that kept multiplying. Every time he found something, it led somewhere Milton wouldn’t let him follow. Elder Crenshaw’s name kept coming up—he’d been seen arguing with Ruby Bailey in the Piggly Wiggly parking lot about a week before she died. Public enough that people noticed, remembered. Tommy wanted to question him formally, but Milton shut it down. Said we couldn’t harass respected members of the community without solid evidence.”
Michael had mentioned seeing Crenshaw argue with his mother at their house, but a public confrontation at the Piggly Wiggly? That suggested the tension between them had been escalating, becoming less careful about who witnessed it.
“So Milton protected Crenshaw,” Dottie said.
