Chapter 4

The Husband

It was close to six o’clock when Harvey pulled his old Rambler into the driveway. As he came through the door, he said hello to Kathy, who was huddled in front of the TV with a friend, and the first sign that anything was amiss came with her response.

“I don’t know, Dad, why, but there are ropes on all the beds and the rug is messed up in there,” she said. Her tone was nonchalant, her attention fixed to the tube.

Harvey went to look. Maybe it was a game. Something they had done to her room.

As he peered into Kathy’s room, he found ropes tied in half-hitch knots to the bedposts of her bed. Then he stepped down the hall to look in Karen’s room, where it was the same. Ropes tied to the bedposts. As he turned, his eyes caught a glimpse of the bathroom. He could see more rope had been oddly laced around the base of the toilet. The same piece of white clothesline reached up and had been looped over the hinge pins on the bathroom door.

Though a 12-year-old, Kathy was, Harvey knew, immature for her age, and he was not surprised that she was so casual about this. She was perplexed about it, but she quickly allowed the mystery to fade when her friend arrived. They were eager to watch TV. But Harvey’s heart was pumping faster now. He skipped Kenny’s room at the farther end of the house and headed for the master bedroom.

His eyes fell first on the ropes, and then on the bloodied sanitary napkin on the floor. Donna’s clothing was strewn on the floor. A pair of underpants, slit in half, stared at him. A single shoe had been left at the foot of the bed. Then his gaze locked on the empty holster that belonged to his Luger. There it lay in plain view on the bed. He could see that the gun had been cut off the holster. Someone had sliced through the leather to remove the weapon, which he didn’t immediately see.

All he knew was that he had to get Kathy and her girlfriend out of the house.

“Kathy,” he called, reentering the living room, “why don’t you go over to your girlfriend’s house. I’ll call you later.”

“Aw, Dad,” she whined. “Right in the middle …”

“I’ll explain later,” he said, stopping her. “Just please, do this for me. I’ll call you. Just …”

“Okay,” she said in a downturn. And in the time it takes two preteen girls to assemble and leave, they were gone.

Harvey waited patiently as they pulled on their overcoats and he watched as they walked to the street and headed away. Hurriedly he checked Kenny’s room. He noticed that his son’s guitar had been left on the bed. That was odd. Who would have taken it down? But there were no ropes, and no other sign of disturbance.

There was only one place left to check—the basement. It was exactly 5:59 P.M. when he telephoned the Missoula County Sheriff’s Department to report what he found down there.

As the setting sun cast its diminishing light through the maw of Hellgate Canyon, the house on Tremper Street would become surrounded by nearly every available police vehicle in the county. Every sheriff’s deputy on the force who wasn’t already on duty would be called in on overtime.

Among the first to arrive was County Attorney Robert L. “Dusty” Deschamps III, the chief law-enforcement officer of the county. Known universally as Dusty, a boyhood nickname that stuck, Deschamps had just filed for a second term in office. Though only twenty-nine years old, he had been hired for the job three years before, when he was a fresh graduate of the University of Montana Law School. For one thing, he was a Democrat. For another, he was the only applicant. Now, this evening, he was summoned to investigate a homicide whose degenerate ferocity was unprecedented in this part of the country.

Right behind him was Missoula County Sheriff John C. Moe. He too had filed for a second term on this very day as a Republican in a predominantly Democratic county. Sheriff Moe had won election to his first term after the county commissioners had asked him to run. A lawman first and a politician second, Moe actually had to ask what party affiliation he should assume. It was an easy decision, the commissioners advised him. The incumbent was a Democrat, so he would be a Republican.

After surveying the scene, Sheriff Moe had a few words to say to the Missoulian reporter, Steve Shirley. He said that without a doubt this crime ranked as one of the most vicious he had ever come across. Those words, coming from this white-haired authority figure, carried a lot of weight in Missoula. Moe was more than a elder townsman who wore the badge because someone had to run on the Republican ticket. Moe’s law-enforcement career spanned thirty years. He had been a member of the U.S. Border Patrol for seven years, had served in Naval intelligence, and, more significantly, had been an agent for the almighty Federal Bureau of Investigation. After nineteen years with the FBI, he had retired to Missoula.

Moe’s deputies fanned through the neighborhood, searching the backyards and the outer perimeter of the neighboring fields, going door to door, interviewing everyone who lived in the environs of West Riverside. The deputies asked basic questions of the residents. Were they all right? Had they seen any vehicles come or go? They were instructed by Moe not to disclose that there had been a murder. All they were allowed to say was that there had been a violent crime. Had anybody seen anything out of the ordinary?

Deschamps and Moe were joined by Ray Froelich, chief of detectives, and the three of them huddled under the floor joists, leaning against the cool steel of the lally column that held up the house, waiting for Lawrence Livingston, the funeral director who was also the coroner.

A detective descended the stairs. As he turned and came more directly under the bare-bulb lighting, they could see he was carrying something in his hand. He told them Sheriff’s Patrolman Weatherman had found it on a dirt road that runs along the base of the mountain, connecting eventually to Tamarack, a trailer village approximately one-half mile away. It was a light-brown surgical glove. On the back of it was the inscription: “amber + LARGE No. 366.” It appeared to be stained with blood.

Dangling there before their eyes, the object seemed to suddenly distill a hideous new knowledge that was even more difficult to bear than the sight of poor Mrs. Pounds, bent over, backside out, under the stairwell. Up to this point, they had been absorbed in the intense first canvas of the house, seeing what was there and making certain Harvey would stay upstairs, where he was on the phone to relatives, giving them the news. The surgical glove would lead them outside again, into the community, where somewhere they had to find the killer who had done this.

They could see the headline on the front page of tomorrow’s Missoulian: “West Riverside Woman Is Slain.” The story would conclude, they knew well enough, with the sobering statement that no arrests had been made. Only yesterday, in the Wednesday paper, displayed above a couple of Easter advertisements, was an update on the Siobhan McGuinness murder investigation, another recent unsolved case. City Police Chief Ray Roehl said that despite investigating thousands of leads and bits of information, the department had not added any significant information to the McGuinness file. Police still had no suspect. They had theories, which they hoped to bear out with FBI tests. In fact, yesterday’s headline played off the laboratory angle: “Policemen Hope Science Can Find Siobhan’s Killer.”

The murder of five-year-old Siobhan McGuinness still tore at the community’s heart. The Missoulian, attempting to restrain a vengeance-minded public, printed an editorial on February 13, a little more than a week after the girl was snatched from the sidewalk on Missoula’s North Side, an older part of town situated between the Clark Fork River and Interstate 90.

“It is important that people keep a grip on themselves,” the editors wrote. “It would be very wrong to allow a lynch mob atmosphere to form. The killer, loathsome as he is to all, is a sick person. By no means does that excuse what he did or render it less dreadful. But he IS sick, and it is important that we treat him with the humanity which he is too sick to give to others.” The advice to the community ended with an aside that appeared to be written for the benefit of Deschamps and Moe. “That hinges on catching him, of course,” it concluded.

Siobhan, pronounced “She-VON,” was last seen on February 5, 1974. Her mother, Bonnie Tarses, had last talked to her precocious and friendly daughter at six-thirty on that Tuesday evening. Siobhan as visiting with a friend a few blocks away, and her mother had called to tell her it was time to come home. A friend of Bonnie’s would escort Siobhan as far as Whittier School, and the girl would continue alone from there. It wouldn’t have struck anyone as out of the ordinary for Siobhan’s mother to expect her to walk the three blocks from Whittier alone after seven o’clock, which in early February was well after dark. There was no reason to think anything could happen to her in this safe community.

Home was at 501 North Second Street, but Siobhan never made it there. Her disappearance, reported by her mother after she failed to arrive home, led to a two-day manhunt. City police teamed up with the sheriff’s department. Everyone worked double shifts. The FBI joined in. State fish and game wardens were enlisted. Police teams canvased the North Side all night long. The following morning, approximately 130 volunteers gathered at Whittier School and made a daylight search of a wide area, checking outdoor sheds, abandoned cars, and the riverbanks. By noon, city police captain Richard Golden decided to send the volunteers home, telling them he would call them back if he needed them again.

Blood discovered on railroad tracks on the North Side that afternoon turned out to be from an animal. A bloodhound, which had sniffed two pieces of Siobhan’s clothing, couldn’t detect a trace of the girl after circling the schoolyard. The search intensified after police, during their house-to-house search, turned up a report of an attempted assault on another five-year-old girl in the same neighborhood earlier on the same day. A man had coaxed the girl into a shack and had tried to molest her. She escaped unharmed and was able to provide her parents and police with enough of a description to enable Steve McGuinness, the father of the missing girl who was also a bit of an artist, to make a sketch. The suspect was a man of medium build, about five foot eleven, between the ages of eighteen and twenty. He had red, curly hair.

The day after Siobhan disappeared, an unidentified woman who claimed to be a psychic telephoned the police department. She said she had a vision of a child in a culvert. The following day, on Thursday afternoon at approximately three forty-five, that vision was no longer the stuff of some other dimension. Vern Berezay, assistant county roads supervisor, spotted something as he drove along the county road that hugs the interstate near the Turah exit, approximately ten miles east of Missoula. As he approached, in the snow by a culvert, he could see it better. It was the facedown body of a child. It was Siobhan McGuinness, still clothed in her blue jeans and purple corduroy coat.

A heavy snow that morning had covered a trail of blood from the roadside to the culvert. By the time Dusty Deschamps arrived at the grim scene, an army of detectives had plowed their way through the snow, searching for clues, puzzling over this telltale trail of blood. Deschamps was horrified at the city police department’s approach. There, hunkered down in the blood-splattered snow, was a detective, churning it up with his hands, sifting for anything that was there. He and the others had waded into the snow cover, contaminating the crime scene, which Deschamps knew should have been cordoned off, handled with the utmost care. But it was too late. The trail of blood was now intermingled with dozens of detectives’ footprints. The investigation would have to rely almost completely now on the physical remains of the body.

While it was officially a city case, Deschamps took charge, deciding to send the body to Great Falls, where Montana’s only forensic pathologist at the time, Dr. John Pfaff, would perform an autopsy. The girl’s body was removed from the scene, fully clothed just as she had been found, and bagged and loaded into the baggage berth of a Greyhound bus. Deschamps drove to Great Falls himself to watch the autopsy. It was his decision to ship the body the 168 miles to Dr. Pfaff’s lab, instead of having it done by a local pathologist, who probably would have done the work right at the funeral home. There were real questions about cause of death. Siobhan had been stabbed in the chest and also hit on the head. The trail of blood left unanswered the question of time of death. And then there was the question of sexual assault.

The headline atop the front page of the Missoulian the day after she was found read: “Missing Child Is Dead.” The story reported that City Police Detective Herb Woolsey surmised that the trail of blood in the snow, plus the absence of footprints, suggested that the body had been put in the culvert and then dragged out by dogs. There was no sign that the dogs had mauled or otherwise disturbed the body, the detective added.

Berezay, who had found the body, also told police he had driven past the Turah exit on the previous Tuesday night, and remembered seeing a car parked there. It was an older-model Cadillac, vintage 1958 to 1960, and it was green, bearing New York license plates and missing a left rear fender skirt. He also gave a description of the driver—a middle-aged white man wearing dark clothing and a baseball cap. Berezay had reported this to the police the following morning, a Wednesday. His report was taken down, catalogued, and scheduled for systematic checkout, along with dozens of other leads and tips that were swamping the city police and sheriff’s deputies in the early hours of the search. A master list of all leads was started, but soon abandoned as the number of entries began to stretch out across three pages, with two columns on each page.

By Thursday night, after Siobhan’s body had been found, Berezay’s report of the man and the Cadillac had suddenly become very significant. Police conducted a block-by-block grid search of Missoula on Thursday night, but no green Cadillac turned up, and city police chief Ray Roehl was not optimistic that the car would be found two days after Siobhan’s disappearance—especially now that the body had been discovered.

And the curly redhead that city police had been looking for turned himself in on Friday night, but he was not linked to the McGuinness case. The fifteen-year-old was booked on the molestation charge, but a week later he would take a polygraph test that would eliminate him as a suspect in the slaying of Siobhan.

By Saturday, County Attorney Deschamps knew the child had died as a result of two stab wounds to the chest. The autopsy revealed that she had also received two blows to the head of sufficient force to produce unconsciousness, and that she had been sexually assaulted. The two blows Siobhan had received on the head were on the very top of her skull, suggesting they were delivered as she struggled with a captor who towered over her.

While the stab wounds had been fatal, death was not quick. Dr. Pfaff hadn’t yet determined the time of death with any degree of accuracy, but eventually he would conclude that Siobhan had lived a minimum of eight hours and a maximum of twelve hours after she had been attacked.

The detectives who were privy to the details in Dr. Pfaff’s report dreaded to think that the little girl may not have been moved by dogs at all, but may have crawled into the culvert for protection and then back out again to be by the road where someone might find her. It was within the realm of speculation, for by the time someone did find Siobhan, she was a frozen corpse.

The echo of that tragedy was not missed here in the basement on Tremper Street, and Deschamps knew the Missoulian could not report this latest murder without introducing matter of factly in the patchwork of the story that it was the second murder to have occurred in the span of two months. It wouldn’t help that the little girl’s body was found in the same general vicinity of this second murder, just ten miles east of the Pounds’ home. By tomorrow morning, the community’s jumbled feelings of horror, sadness, and pity would again be electrified by this new atrocity.

The body of Donna Pounds was not moved for hours. One of the deputies who was initially assigned to door-to-door interviews, Sheriff’s Deputy Harry Northey, was now searching for and collecting evidence in the house, focusing on the four bedrooms. He collected the lengths of rope that had been tied to the bedposts in the master bedroom, and in the two girls’ bedrooms. In one of the girls’ bedrooms, there were rope ties on only three of the bed corners. Northey collected the bedding from Donna’s and Harvey’s bedroom and combed the rooms clean. It was after 2 A.M. by the time he was finished. Harvey was gone. Deschamps had left. Donna was still down in the basement.

Moe and his chief detective were left in possession of the corpse of a middle-aged, overweight woman, a single .22-caliber bullet retrieved from the corner of the master bedroom, a single rubber glove, sections of ordinary clothesline, a knife from the family’s kitchen, a bloodied sanitary napkin, and a single pubic hair found near a large bloodstain on the couple’s bedsheet. They theorized that Donna was killed sometime between 1:00 P.M. and 3:30 P.M.

Sheriff Moe began to assimilate the evidence before him, and to keep the lid on as much as possible. He made it abundantly clear what his deputies could say about this one.

“Number one, how many shots were fired into the back of the head. If you were asked,” he said, “she was shot. I mean if anybody asked, she was shot. Not how many shots, where she was shot, or anything else.

“And definitely not the placement of the gun. The placement of the gun can be the breaking point of the case. You can have a million suspects, and all of a sudden you have somebody confessing. And you ask, ‘Where did you leave the gun?’ That could be the critical issue in a confession.”

As he left the scene, only Sheriff Moe knew he already had a suspect in mind: the husband.

The next day, the Missoulian carried a six-paragraph story about the Pounds murder. It was a fact-filled account, with only one interpretive statement from Dusty Deschamps. He noted that the slaying appeared to have occurred under bizarre circumstances. On Easter Sunday, the headline writers at the Missoulian were a little more suggestive of the problem at hand: “Lawmen Have Theory, But Killer Still Free.” The story documented the West Riverside neighborhood’s fears, quoting residents who said they were loading their guns and keeping them handy. Some were changing their door locks. They nervously speculated to reporter Steve Shirley about whether the killer would revisit West Riverside. Sheriff Moe was on the record, too, saying that there was no reason to believe that the Pounds murder was in any way connected to the slaying of Siobhan McGuinness. But the word on Tremper Street was otherwise. No one who knew Harvey Pounds had any reason to suspect him of such a diabolical crime. There had to be another explanation, and the collective imagination of the anxious neighborhood residents found it soon enough.

During the first few days after the murder, a rumor linking the two killings to a satanic cult swept West Riverside. In no time, it had found its way downtown. What had been viewed by local law enforcement as a classic kidnap–murder case, likely the work of a child molestor, the McGuinness case was now construed by an agonized public as Phase I of a diabolical satanic triad. Whoever the killer was, he had to kill a virgin, a Christian, and a betrayer. It had to be in that order. Supposedly Donna Pounds, a devout Christian, was sacrificed by this devil-worshipping psychopath who was satisfying Phase II. Supposedly a book had been found in a trash can behind the house, detailing the ritual by which she had been murdered. Some contributors to the rumor mill claimed that the ropes found in the house stood for Salem witch-trial nooses. A devil sign of some sort was said to have been painted on a wall in the basement with Donna’s own blood, and similar signs were said to have been cut into her body. Somebody told somebody that parts of her body were found in Pattee Canyon, a picturesque recreation area south of Missoula.

Sheriff Moe was aware of the rumors, and he knew, too, that Harvey Pounds was an avid proselytizer against satanism. On a local Christian radio show, his fundamentalist, God-fearing ministry sermonized on the question: Was Satan marshaling his forces for the inevitable confrontation? But Sheriff Moe was not going to believe that some murdering madman following the precepts of a black cult had singled out Harvey’s wife because of his radio program.

Still, the public-relations aspect of the case—aimed primarily at defusing the cult theory—was a problem. And Harvey and his church were making things harder, not easier. Perhaps the most ardent contributors to the escalating rumors were the members of Missoula’s Christian fundamentalist community, who lumped all forms of the occult, even astrology, in with the powers of darkness. At the Christian Book Store downtown, best-selling books warned of the dangers of the occult, tying America’s rising interest in the subject to the apocalyptic prophesies of the Book of Revelation. In some local churches, the congregations were educated on the subject by films such as Satan on the Loose, which portrayed scenes of devil worshippers dancing in hypnotic trances that built to a final fusion, a demonic frenzy. The fundamentalists also campaigned against the discussion of psychic phenomena in high school classrooms, and were especially opposed to an English class being taught at Sentinel High School that dealt with literature of the occult. The threat was real, as they saw it. And, indeed, Americans as a whole definitely showed a new popular interest in satanism. The subject was enjoying a resurgence not seen since post-Civil War days.

To the sheriff’s department, Harvey was just one more part of the problem. He supposedly was spreading the word about witchcraft involvement in Donna’s death. Detectives heard that he described the ropes as being laid out in the form of a peace symbol, which they knew to be untrue. The restraint ropes had been tied to the bedsprings. When Donna was found in the basement, the rope ties on her legs were distinguishable by small, cut tails, suggesting that they had been cut from the bed ropes. There was no other symbolism here. No peace symbol. The ropes were just one practical aspect of a homicidal frenzy.

Harvey’s alibi was another problem. No one could corroborate his statement that he was at Yandt’s, the clothing store on North Higgins where he worked, all day. He said he had gone upstairs at lunchtime to what was a makeshift mezzanine. There, he said, for a period of about forty-five minutes at midday, he ate his lunch. Nobody in the store could verify where he had been during his lunch break. As far as Sheriff Moe was concerned, three quarters of an hour was enough time for him to have driven home, killed his wife, and returned to the store.

But Harvey had a still bigger problem. The decision to pursue him as the number-one suspect was made after it was learned that the Poundses were having marital difficulties. Authorities were not going so far as to label it an affair, but Harvey, they discovered, was zeroing in on another married woman. She was a member of Harvey’s self-styled congregation.

Sheriff’s deputies interviewed the woman at her home, and they treaded carefully. She already had experienced enough tragedy in her life. Only two years before, her sixteen-year-old son had committed a brutal murder. He was a student at Hellgate High School and a strapping body culturist who worked out regularly with weights. One night, after refusing a babysitter’s command that he go to bed, he flew into a rage and attacked her with the metal rod of his barbell set. He beat her mercilessly about the head, so vigorously that her blood washed through the carpet and the carpet padding and into the plywood subfloor.

By interviewing the supposed other woman, the deputies were trying to establish a connection to Harvey. Because of his religious beliefs, Harvey couldn’t have divorced Donna. But deputies never really made much progress. In the final analysis, all they had was conjecture.

Harvey’s behavior as a prime suspect in the murder of his wife also baffled Sheriff Moe and his detectives. It seemed out of sync. For one, he wasn’t particularly emotional about the consequences he faced, or, for that matter, about the sudden void in his life. He showed concern, but not once did he seem the slightest distraught. Sheriff Moe and Dusty Deschamps expected to see more anguish. In fact, Harvey was so together about matters at hand that he even assisted in the investigation, becoming initially an irritant, then ultimately casting even more suspicion on himself.

In the days following the event, Harvey was finding things in the yard and calling the sheriff’s department or coming in to hand over new evidence. The most startling new information he turned up was a second bullet, which he said he found lodged in a dictionary on a bookshelf in one of the daughter’s bedrooms. How could they have missed it? The dictionary, Moe and Deschamps and Deputy Northey knew for sure, was found lying on its side on top of other books. Its binding was to the wall, Out of sight, but the face of its pages was in clear view, and so was the obvious bullet-entry mark. No, they couldn’t have missed it.

When Harvey stated that he had made love to his wife the night before she was killed, he not only canceled the validity of any semen typing that could have been performed, he made himself look more the liar, and Sheriff Moe decided to ask him if he would submit to a polygraph test. True to character, Harvey readily agreed.

The geopolitical ground-zero of Missoula County is the courthouse, located only a block away from Higgins Avenue, the main business drag. It is an impressive turn-of-the-century, Neoclassical structure, anchored on a massive granite layment and crowned with a period favorite, the Italianate bell tower. It genuinely measures up in physical presence to the spiritual stature it presumes. And its muraled terracotta walls, like those in all places of human activity, serve as ready backboards for all the tidbits of news or gossip of the day: There had been statements made about satanic involvement in the Pounds case, and these had been repeated by law enforcement. The echoes off the courthouse walls told it so.

Sheriff Moe was getting tired of all the loose talk, and when he was ready to move with an arrest warrant, he sent one of his deputies to see the county attorney.

When Phil Nobis walked in, Dusty Deschamps knew what was coming. The sheriff had been leveraging heavy pressure on him for days now.

Nobis sat down in the antique oak chair in front of the matching antique desk where Deschamps sat, elbows at rest in front of him, ready.

Then Nobis began to beg.

“Just give me a warrant, Dusty. I can get a confession. Please give me a warrant.”

The frustration hung in the air. Both men wanted the case to proceed toward a solution, but the distance between these two country lawmen was far greater than the span across Deschamps’s massive desk.

“Look, Dusty …”

Deschamps was half-listening. His mind was weighing the other possibility. The other suspect. While the sheriff’s department had made little of it so far, the canvassing of the West Riverside neighborhood on the night of the murder had turned up some interesting observations. While one woman said she saw Harvey’s Rambler in the driveway sometime during the afternoon, she wasn’t really sure when. But a next-door neighbor was certain that she saw Wayne Nance, a neighborhood boy, in the Pounds’s backyard that day. Then another neighbor reported that she saw someone who fit Nance’s general description in the West Riverside vicinity on that afternoon. Yet another neighbor witnessed a man walking away from the Pounds’s house on the day of the murder, carrying a black bag as he walked in a southwesterly direction through the field beyond the house—toward Tamarack Trailer Park, where Wayne Nance lived.

To the neighbors, none of this was unusual. To Sheriff Moe, it was equally hard to believe that an eighteen-year-old high school senior could be capable of a crime of this scale. Besides, Wayne knew the family and was a friend of the son, Kenny, from the time when the Nances and the Poundses were next-door neighbors at Tamarack. When it was revealed that Wayne actually knew where Harvey hid his Luger, knew how to operate it, and had actually fired the weapon once on a lark with Kenny, Sheriff Moe was still unconvinced. What possible motive would Wayne have had?

But Deschamps, who had grown up and lived all his life on the outskirts of East Missoula, where his family had settled four generations ago to farm the land on both sides of the river, knew something else about Wayne. Eleven years older than Wayne, he had preceded Wayne in the same schools and, as a boy, banged around in the same flat by the river, and clambered up the same ravines that lead to the ridge tops. He had a sister in Wayne’s class at Sentinel, and because the West Riverside kids who start school together at Bonner Elementary are the same kids who graduate together from Sentinel High, there is little room for anonymity. He knew that Wayne had a reputation as a strange kid. He had heard stories.

“I kinda think it’s possibly Nance, Phil,” he finally answered.

But Nobis didn’t relent.

“Look, Dusty, if you will simply give me a warrant, I know once I arrest Harvey, I can get him to confess. I know I can solve this case,” he pleaded once more.

“Phil, I mean, the next-door neighbor saw him in the yard,” Deschamps replied. “I know Ray [Chief of Detectives Froelich] found the guy who kinda looks like Wayne, the guy collecting the scrap, who, I agree, bears some resemblance. And I know Ray thinks the woman saw this guy, not Nance. Maybe that’s so. But someone else out there saw someone who sure fit Nance’s description, who was in the general vicinity. Someone else saw the guy with the black bag. Plus the kid had been in the house, knew where the gun was, had fired it. Plus he wasn’t where he was supposed to be. In school.”

He could see Nobis’s disappointment.

“I can’t give you a warrant. Not at this time. The trouble, Phil, is there’s no clear suspect here.”

Wayne’s alibi was that he had stayed home from school that day to work on a class project. It was true. He had skipped school. They knew that much. The next step was a search warrant.