Blogtober 2023
The man emerged from the shadows with the mad confidence and utter certainty that only the highly inebriated can muster, but both investigators noticed his clear eyes and sharp voice, neither of which were consistent with a morning spent inside a whiskey bottle.
“What do you know?” Clarkton asked.
“Virgil saw it in the woods first,” he said. “He thought it might be a cougar or even a bear, but the second time he saw it, it flew away.”
“An owl?” Murphy said.
“He said it looked more like an insect than a bird,” the man said, his eyes bulging behind his dirty mass of hair.
“Are you saying this thing killed Tippen?” Clarkton asked, his voice weighted with the skepticism of a thousand police interviews.
“Virgil wasn’t the first,” he said, “just the latest. The woods aren’t safe! We have to warn the hunters to stay out of the woods!”
He staggered toward the pair, and Clarkton surmised that the man wasn’t intoxicated but suffering from paranoid delusions. He had faced this situation countless times in St. Louis, so he said, “We will, we will. Let’s sit down and talk about a plan.”
“More people are going to die, can’t you see?” he shouted.
Crash! One of the drunks at the end of the bar picked up one of his empty bottles and smashed it over the wild man’s head.
“Dammit, Carl, I told you to knock off that goddamn crazy talk!”
And that’s how the fight started.
Photo credit Adobe Stock #66004770
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