I reached behind the seat of my father with a hand that did not feel like mine. My fingers closed around a cold metal can, an old coffee tin, the kind with a blue lid, rusted along the rim. I pulled it into the light of the dome lamp and pried it open. Inside, wrapped in a sandwich bag, was a green spiral notebook, soft with age. On the cover, in the blocky handwriting of my father, were two words. Mile Marker. I turned to the first page, and my breath caught in my throat. It was a list of eleven names.
The first name was Marcy Dellinger, nineteen, of Clovis, New Mexico. March 1989. Beside it, my father had written the plate number of a pickup truck, the make of the truck, the color, and a single sentence. “Saw him take her. Called it in. Nobody listened.” Under each of the other names were dates, mile markers, and sometimes a tiny sketch of a roadside, a billboard, a truck stop. The last entry was only two years old. A girl of twenty, last seen at a rest area outside Vega. My father had written her name and then underlined the plate twice.
I called out on the CB for Night Owl, and he came back after a few seconds, his voice gone soft. “You found it,” he said. I asked who he really was. He told me his name was Harold Pruett, and that he had been driving a rig for fifty one years, and that he and Big Ed had talked every night on Channel 19 since 1991 without ever meeting. “I am eighty two,” he said. “I live in a trailer behind the truck stop in Tucumcari. If you want to see the man who kept this secret with your daddy, come on out.”
A man can be silent for thirty seven years and still speak, if he leaves behind a daughter who knows how to listen.
I drove to Tucumcari the next morning, two hours and ten minutes, and I found Harold sitting on a lawn chair in front of a silver trailer with a thermos between his boots. He was thin and sunburned, with hands like old leather gloves. He stood up when he saw me and took off his cap. “You have his chin,” he said. We sat in the shade and he told me what my father never could. How he had called the state police from the truck stop in Tucumcari the night of the abduction. How a deputy named Leland Crowe came to our house two days later.
The name was on the third page of the funeral sign in book, written in tidy blue ink. Leland Crowe, Sheriff, Retired. He had shaken my hand at the cemetery and told me my father was a good man. He had stood at the back of the church in a gray suit, seventy one years old, with a Stetson in his hand. Harold looked at the notebook on my knee. “Your daddy kept this for thirty seven years,” he said. “He was too frightened for you to use it. He told me, Harold, when I am gone, make her do the right thing.”
I did not drive home. I drove to Amarillo, to the office of the Texas Rangers on Taylor Street, and I asked for the cold case unit. A sergeant named Rosa Medina met me in a conference room with a cup of bad coffee. She was a broad shouldered woman with a quiet voice. She read the notebook all the way through, page by page, with a pencil between her fingers. When she reached the end, she closed it softly and put her hand on top, the way a person covers a sleeping child. “Mrs. Peralta,” she said, “your father just handed me eleven families.”
It took six weeks. The Rangers matched the plate in the notebook to a truck registered to Leland Crowe in 1989. They found the original report that my father had phoned in, still in a cardboard box in the basement of the state police in Santa Fe, with the stamp showing it had never been assigned. They obtained a warrant for the property of Crowe, a ranch of three hundred acres north of Tucumcari, and a team came with ground radar and dogs. By the end of the first week they had found the remains of four young women.
They arrested him in the kitchen of the ranch house at six in the morning. He sat at the table in his undershirt with a cup of coffee going cold in front of him, and when the officers read the charge, he did not argue. He said only, “I wondered which of them it would be.” He asked for his glasses. Rosa told me afterward that he had asked, in the car, whether Big Ed was really dead. When she said yes, he nodded slowly. “That man was the only person I was ever afraid of,” he said.
In the winter, I stood in a courtroom in Santa Fe beside eleven families. I met the mother of Marcy Dellinger, a small woman of eighty with a white braid and a cane, who took my hand in both of hers and could not speak. She held it for a long time. The judge read the names aloud, all eleven, one at a time, and after each name, someone in the gallery whispered, “Present.” Crowe received eleven consecutive life sentences. When the gavel fell, no one cheered. We sat there together, in silence, like people at the end of a long drive.
The first night after the verdict, I drove to the yard and climbed up into the cab of my father. I turned the key to accessory and flipped on the CB. The static rolled in like a tide. I picked up the mic and pressed the button, and my voice shook. “Night Owl, this is the girl of Big Ed. Are you out there?” A long pause. Then, warm and crackling: “Good evening, Little Ed. I am right here. And your daddy is listening, too.” I leaned back in the seat and closed my eyes.
