Free To Hatred Turned by Ken Englade Page B

burner, he felt, because all three of the principals involved in the case had a reason for shooting Rozanne; certainly Gailiunas and Joy had more motive than Larry. While no one knew what the investigation might turn up about the lovers’ relationship, it was not a concern to the detective. Motive was definitely there, but he intuited that in this case “method” and “opportunity” were going to be more important to solving it.
    “Opportunity” was going to be easy enough to check. Once Larry, Joy, and Gailiunas explained to them where they had been during the crucial hours, it would be easy enough to verify. The last person except the killer believed to have seen Rozanne before the shooting was the instructor at the ice-skating rink, who reported that Little Peter left with his mother at about two-thirty. The call to the fire department’s emergency switchboard was logged in at 6:33, so that left a four-hour gap when nothing was known of her activities. Whatever she had been doing that afternoon, she apparently did it at home because Little Peter did not say they had gone anywhere once they returned to Loganwood Drive.
    “Method,” McGowan knew, was far and away going to be the most difficult issue to pin down, the one that was going to consume most of the investigator’s efforts. The Richardson Police Department tended to take violent crime very seriously indeed and when an incident of the type that involved Rozanne occurred, it was department policy to throw every available person on the job until either the case was solved or every possible lead had been checked. In this situation, McGowan had seven investigators under his command and he felt he was going to need them all.
    The first task, he told them at a hastily called conference, was to try to determine where the rope came from. The other was to try to trace the ammunition back to a specific pistol, which was not unlike trying to find a male Texan who did not own a pair of boots.
    One by one, the three main characters in the drama filed into McGowan’s office and gave him their alibis.
    Gailiunas told the detective he had been at a clinic and then in his office on the afternoon of October 4, and he gave McGowan the name of another physician who could verify it.
    Larry said he was in his apartment or with his sister Karen.
    Joy, a quiet, seemingly shy blonde with an admirable ability to put others at ease, said she had been with her parents at a cottage they owned on a nearby lake.
    McGowan was not surprised when their stories checked out. Nor was he astonished when each of the three agreed to take a polygraph and when the results revealed that they were not being deceptive in response to the questions asked of them.
    In addition to answering the detective’s questions, Larry repeated to McGowan his belief that Rozanne’s murder was a contract job.
    McGowan waved his hand in dismissal. “You’ve been watching too many movies,” McGowan told him.
    As a result of the lack of progress, the detective was left just about where he figured he would be: up a blind alley until, and if, solid detection could break the case open.
    For three months, his investigators fanned out through Richardson and the surrounding communities, as well as into Dallas itself, talking to anyone they felt might have the slightest connection to the incident. Over the weeks, they questioned more than a thousand people. And when they were through, they had no more idea of who had killed Rozanne than they did on the night of the attack.
    For McGowan, it was a depressing turn of events. He had never been faced with such a perplexing situation; despite the thousands of man hours and an incalculable amount of money spent investigating the murder of Rozanne Gailiunas, neither he nor the investigators under him had come up with a single solid lead.
    After the turn of the year, when all possibilities had been exhausted and every potential lead run down, the investigative task force was