Free Bogeyman by Steve Jackson Page A

detectives returned, Sunnycalb didn’t tell Grisham and Meeks that he knew he’d been lied to; he just sat sullenly and hardly spoke the rest of the meeting.
    Once again, Sunnycalb’s version of events was accurate, but it had torched his credibility with law enforcement. In the years since his falling out with Grisham, Sunnycalb said, he’d been trying to let law enforcement agencies know about Penton’s claims. But no one had responded to his letters and calls until he contacted Diane Teft in Fort Worth. And then, only Sweet had stuck with him.
    Still, if Sweet was going to make a case against Penton, he needed a lot more than the word of a pedophile like Jeffrey Sunnycalb. He was going to have to find other witnesses and evidence to corroborate what the informant had to say.
    Sweet knew it was going to be a long, hard road. A lot of time had passed; witnesses disappeared, and memories dimmed; evidence that might have existed in the mid- to late-1980s was likely to have been lost or destroyed. Not only that, but whatever he did, he would have to do in his spare time. His caseload of current crimes wasn’t going anywhere, and he couldn’t drop them for murders that had happened so long ago that only their families and maybe a few old-timer cops remembered. Still, if he wouldn’t answer the call to bring these cases to a close for the families and for the victims, who would?

CHAPTER NINE

    A few days later …

    W alking down the stairs to the murder closet, Sweet pulled the Reyes case file boxes from the shelves. He knew the first time he’d looked in the boxes that the contents were a disorganized mess. He loaded them into his car and drove to the small town where he and his family lived in a quiet, middle-class neighborhood of brick homes, many of them owned by cops and firefighters.
    In his living room, Sweet turned the boxes over and dumped them on the floor. Out of curiosity, his wife, Julie, began looking through some of the photographs and came across one of a clump of dark hair with a little girl’s hair clasp still attached. It was a horrible reminder of what had happened to the child, and she had to walk away.
    It was a photograph that got to Sweet: an image of little Roxann sharing a kiss with her father as they played on the living room floor of their home. He couldn’t help but put himself and his three daughters into that photograph and choked up. The case had become personal.
    Sweet set the photograph of Roxann and her father aside and looked down at the jumbled piles of paper that represented the Roxann Reyes homicide investigation as it had been left by the detective originally assigned to the case. He had tried talking to the now-retired detective, but he wasn’t interested in helping and didn’t have much to say. He’d just given up and dumped it all in the two boxes to be stored in the murder closet.
    Getting down on his hands and knees, Sweet picked up a sheet of paper, read it, and placed it on a clear spot on the carpet. In that manner, he scanned every single note, receipt, and telephone message, every photograph and sketch. Then, he organized them. Items that at least seemed important to him—such as statements from several people, including Penton’s sister, taken by the Columbus Police Department, and a car title for a gray, four-door Datsun sedan—he placed in separate files according to subject matter; they would go into one of the boxes. The items that didn’t make sense to him he filed and consigned to the second box, unless, and until, they became relevant.
    Sometimes it was difficult to tell which box some bit of information belonged in. For instance, when he read the offense report for the Roxann Reyes case, a potential witness by the name of Wanda Huggins who lived in the same apartment complex was mentioned. She’d told police that she’d seen a man matching the description given by Roxann’s friend, Julia Diaz, wandering through the complex. She said that when she