Bogeyman by Steve Jackson Page A

detective said she’d arranged to speak to Sunnycalb by telephone the next morning and wanted to know if someone from the Garland Police Department wanted to be present. Sweet immediately said he would and thanked her for calling. As soon as his supervisor, Lt. Mitch Bates, returned from lunch, Sweet asked for permission to pursue the lead.
    “Shoot, yeah,” Bates replied. “In fact, I’ll go with you.”
    The next day, Sweet, Bates, and Det. Charles Rene left early for the forty-mile drive to Forth Worth. A tall, slender officer with sandy blond hair, Bates was smart and a good family man; they were friends and had worked the night shift together and as school resource officers. Rene was a tall, athletic, black officer from Lake Charles, Louisiana, and a devout Christian. Sweet had been one of his training officers, and they often worked together on cases. Two years earlier, a few months after the Tammy Lopez call, Sweet had introduced then-rookie detective Rene to the murder closet and the Reyes case. So now he’d suggested that Rene accompany them to Fort Worth.
    On the way, the three officers agreed that because Sweet was the most familiar with the details of the case, he would do the talking for the Garland contingent. After getting Bates’ go-ahead, Sweet had gone down to the murder closet and brought the Reyes case files up to his desk. He’d then spent several hours familiarizing himself with the details of the case, particularly the information about Penton.
    Arriving at the Fort Worth Police Department, the three Garland officers were met by Teft, an older detective nearing retirement age who worked in the sex crimes unit. She led them to her desk, where they were discussing their respective cases when the telephone rang. On the other end of the line was Jeffrey Sunnycalb calling collect from the Ohio prison.
    The inmate’s time on the telephone was limited to ten minutes, so Teft quickly asked a few follow-up questions about her case and then turned the telephone over to Sweet. He dove right in, asking Sunnycalb if Penton discussed any details about the Reyes case.
    Providing details that only the killer and those who investigated the crime should know was the first test of an informant’s reliability. Sunnycalb got Sweet’s attention when he said that Penton told him he’d abducted Roxann from a field behind an apartment complex in Garland. Of course, that had been reported in the media and could have been seen by Sunnycalb or Penton, but it was an obscure detail repeated thirteen years after the incident. Sweet felt his heart start to beat a bit faster.
    Then Sunnycalb claimed that his cellmate boasted about keeping the little girl in his van for three days, repeatedly raping her, before he strangled her. After that, Penton told him that he threw her body over a fence into a wooded field near rural Murphy, Texas.
    Again, Sunnycalb’s information was accurate and noteworthy. Although there were only skeletal remains, the cause of death was “assumed” to be strangulation or asphyxiation because there was no evidence of gun, knife, or blunt trauma wounds. The inmate’s knowledge about the location of the body was even more interesting; the tiny burg of Murphy wasn’t exactly the sort of name someone would draw out of a hat. The informant had even added a detail to what was known; Roxann’s skeletal remains weren’t found for a year after she disappeared, so there was no evidence remaining of sexual assault, but it had been assumed.
    “Did he say what she was wearing?” Sweet asked.
    “A purple top and pink shorts,” Sunnycalb responded.
    Sweet was careful not to react too much. He didn’t want the informant reading his response and adjusting his story accordingly. But the detective was excited; the description of Roxann’s clothing was withheld from the media, but Sunnycalb was spot on.
    Sunnycalb said that Penton also bragged about abducting and murdering Christie Proctor and Christi Meeks.