Free Bogeyman by Steve Jackson

to be skeptical. He asked Sunnycalb about Mesquite Det. Mike Bradshaw’s complaint that sometimes during their telephone conversations he clammed up, or wouldn’t answer a question directly, or he’d start talking completely off the subject. But Sunnycalb had an explanation. The prison telephone he used didn’t allow for any privacy, and he had to be guarded in what he said if other inmates approached. “Snitches get stitches or end up in ditches” was not just a saying when living in a penitentiary setting.
    Once again, Sunnycalb’s reasoning made sense, and Sweet wondered why so many other officers thought that the informant couldn’t be trusted. He discovered that the main source of the aspersions was Det. Keith Grisham with the Plano Police Department, the agency involved in the Proctor case. So he called and reached the detective. Grisham was nearing retirement, but he said he’d be happy to help, including discussing Sunnycalb and the Proctor case.
    When they met, Grisham repeated what he’d been telling other law enforcement officers, including an FBI agent looking into a case in the Midwest. He stated flat out that Sunnycalb was a liar. He said that in 1998, he’d received a letter from Sunnycalb saying he had information about the three Dallas-area murders. So Grisham arranged for Sunnycalb to be transferred into a county jail in Ohio so that they could meet him without other prison inmates knowing. Then he and Det. Billy Meeks, also of the Plano Police Department and no relation to Christi Meeks, had flown to Ohio to interview him.
    “He didn’t tell me shit,” Grisham explained to Sweet. “I got my department’s approval and flew all the way up there and had to come back with nothing. He’s a flake, and I think he was just playing with us.” If Sweet wanted to waste his time listening to Sunnycalb, it was up to him.
    In spite of his feeling about Sunnycalb, Grisham was helpful. He told Sweet everything he could about the Proctor murder in case it would help. He even took Sweet to the dirt road in a wooded area near Plano where Christie Proctor’s body was found, and then to the field near Murphy, Texas, both of them in Collin County, where Roxann’s body had been dumped.
    Later, Sweet asked Sunnycalb about Grisham’s complaints about the interview in Ohio. The informant didn’t try to hide his annoyance. He said that when Grisham asked to interview him, he’d agreed on two conditions: He didn’t want to be videotaped, or for anything to be written down. “I said that I’d tell him everything I knew,” Sunnycalb explained. But worried about being identified as a snitch, he didn’t want anyone to have proof that he’d talked.
    Grisham agreed to the conditions, Sunnycalb said, and everything went well with the interview until the detective said he needed a smoke break. He and Meeks then left Sunnycalb alone in the interview room. But they didn’t realize that Sunnycalb was an electrician by trade, and when he saw the coaxial wires used for videotaping coming out of a speaker box in the corner, he knew he’d been betrayed. He got up, walked over to the speaker box and saw the small camera hidden inside. “After I saw the camera, I didn’t tell them shit,” he said to Sweet.
    Sweet was amused that the informant had just used the same description of his interview that Grisham had, only in a different context. Without revealing Sunnycalb’s version of what took place at the Ohio prison, he called Grisham and asked if he could view the videotape from the Ohio interview.
    Watching the tape was the first time Sweet saw what Sunnycalb looked like—a bald, portly man in his mid-forties who reminded the detective of Mr. Spacely on the old The Jetsons cartoon. Just as Sunnycalb had told him, the first part of the interview went off without a hitch. Then when the other detectives left the room, Sunnycalb noticed the speaker box, got up, walked up to the hidden camera and scowled. When the