A/N: For those of you who care more for action than words, I'm afraid this chapter is chock full of information. There may be some hidden gems for those who like to read between the lines, however.

More specific details in the author's notes at end = don't read them until afterwards.

Chapter 75: The Secret History of Synonyms

"Define Synonym: A word having almost the same meaning as another.
In biology; two names applied to a single species or family."

Monday, July 21st
9:30 am

Rosco dropped heavily into the seat behind his desk and rubbed his eyes, feeling like an old, worn out, hound dog. This 'doing the right thing' business was getting the best of him. Life had been so much easier, he lamented, when all he had to think about was chasing the Duke boys and tricking them into letting him slap the cuffs on them.

He opened his desk drawer and took out the pictures which he had cast amidst the assorted rubber bands and pens, and lay them down in front of him. Their faces smiled up at him, and once more he racked his brain, trying to remember a time when he might have seen either of the two women. He came up empty.

If I'd been a better sheriff, maybe...

He used to be a dang good lawman, that is until he sold out his soul to Boss. It had been easier not to fight him as he bought up the town and took control, and after the sheriff's pension was stricken from the county budget, putting an extra nickel or two in his pocket had seemed like a good idea. Besides, it had made life just a little bit less boring. Over the last year, however, he'd found himself thinking more and more of his own past - of the old days when Butch Harris had been sheriff of Hazzard, and he'd been proud to wear the badge of deputy.

He was the youngest child of three; his older brother, Frankie, died before he was born, and Lulu was only four when he'd surprised his parents. His father had been short tempered, insensitive, and more than a little scary growing up, and he'd run Stephens County, Georgia, with an iron fist. He'd had little use for useless people, and even less for moonshiners, until he walked in front of a train in 1946 and put an end to himself. Momma never talked much about the past, and he'd learned from an early age that asking her what his brother had been like brought her more pain than he could understand.

He dragged his hands through his hair and shook his head. Today wasn't the day for those memories. His brother was worm food over sixty years since, and Momma was already in her nineties. Soon, it would just be himself and Lulu.

He heard steps coming down the hallway and took a deep breath, focusing back on the task at hand as his ex-deputy opened the door.

"Shut it behind you," he told him, noting Enos' skeptical, worried glance before he turned to close it. Maybe I should've called him dipstick, Rosco thought to himself, take the edge off the situation. He didn't have the strength to be light-hearted, though, not today. The poor boy was going to have enough on his mind soon, and it seemed wrong to joke about it.

"What's going on, Sheriff?" he asked, taking a seat across from him and giving him that old, trademark smile that still didn't quite match up with his eyes.

Rosco picked up the two pictures and lay them in front of Enos. "You don't recognize either of these girls, do you?"

Enos took a cursory glance. "Don't think so," he said. "You hunting for a girlfriend?"

"No dipstick, I ain't huntin' for a girlfriend," he shot back, and then wished he hadn't. Enos was just trying to lighten his mood. "Sorry, I ain't in the mood for joshin', Enos."

"Sorry, sheriff." Enos picked up the pictures and studied them with a critical eye. "This one," he waved the one on the right, "doesn't look familiar at all." He laid it down and concentrated on the other. "I think I might have seen this girl around before," he said, "but I don't know who she is, and it's been a long time if at all. Who are they?"

"I didn't know them, either, but Agent Stewart came by asking about them the day they arrested Darcy," he said. "The blonde on the left is Addie May Sutton and the brunette one is Patricia Miller. They were part of Ms. Mabel's Mobile Madames."

Enos frowned. "Well, that probably explains why I wouldn't know them. Better off asking Bo and Luke."

"Yeah, well...I already showed them," he admitted. "They didn't know anything but their first names, and you better not breathe a word about them being missing outside of this office." He glared at Enos, who looked confused. "Fact is, I ain't even supposed to be showing you these, but you already told me that the GBI showed you the pictures they found with Darcy."

Enos blanched like he'd seen a ghost. "Rosco," he said, slowly, "these ain't the pictures Agent Wilburn showed me. Those were of Darcy's house and...these girls weren't in the pictures I saw. What's this about?"

"Dang it! Now, I've done stepped in it, I guess. I..I'm sorry, I can't tell you, Enos. It's official police business."

Anger flashed in Enos' eyes as he stood up and leaned across the desk. "If this has something to do with Darcy, Rosco, it is my business!"

Rosco, unused to outbursts from the formerly mild-mannered Enos, rolled his chair back a foot. "Enos, I'm sorry," he pleaded, looking up at him. "I really am, but if the GBI found out I was showing evidence off to everyone, it could jeopardize their case. This ain't my investigation, and you're...well, you're a civilian now."

Enos stormed across the room and yanked open the top drawer of the filing cabinet. By the time Rosco realized what he was looking for, he had already slammed the badge down on the desk. "Deputize me, then," he told him. "I ain't gonna be left out of the loop!"

"Now Enos, you ain't ready-"

"Those pictures I saw?" said Enos, cutting him off. "They were all of Daisy, Rosco. Dozens of them, from years before this all started all the way up to when she broke me out. He was stalking her. Wilburn said he was about to follow us to Atlanta when they caught him. He had a-" He stopped short and shut his mouth.

"A what?"

"Doesn't matter," he said, shaking his head. "Now, you're telling me that these other girls Darcy had pictures of are missing?" Rosco could see the thinly veiled rage mixed with fear in his eyes. "Look, sheriff," he said, rubbing at the tension in his shoulder, "I know I ain't in shape for it no more, but I'm better than Cletus."

"You know that ain't what I'm worried about, Enos." He didn't want to have this conversation; didn't want to bring up the guy's state of mind, but... "It's just, you've been through a lot. Hell, I don't know how you can stand to walk through the door of this place anymore. You oughta just...take it easy for a while."

"Don't coddle me," Enos snapped. "If you're gonna sit there and lecture me about my mental health, you know dang well that it ain't gonna get better sitting out at the farm and wondering what the GBI is playing at. You don't have to tell anyone about letting me back on, Rosco. You don't even have to pay me, and you can kick me out just as soon as Darcy's put away."

Rosco couldn't help his soft huff of amusement. "You and that girl of yours have a lot in common," he said, dryly. "Ask her sometime how she came to be a deputy, again." Shaking his head, he picked up the badge, rubbing a streak from the bright metal with his thumb, and thinking over Enos' words. He hadn't expected to have Daisy thrown into the mix with these unknown girls. If it hadn't been for that, he wouldn't even be considering the man's request. The poor guy looked like he needed a stiff drink and a soft bed.

He turned his attention back to Enos, who he knew wouldn't take 'no' for an answer, and handed him the badge. "You can't tell Boss about it," he cautioned. "He'd have a fit. And, if I let you back on, you have one job. Research. That means the records room with the spiders." He held up his hand to ward off Enos' complaint. "It's not punishment, dipstick. The GBI needs any information we can dredge up on these girls. The last time Addie was seen was in '82 and Patricia in '84, but we can't find missing persons reports for either of them. Mabel says her girls come and go so often that, if they disappear, they just assume they went back home, and prostitutes aren't in the habit of filing police reports. We need to know where they were from, where they might have gone, and anything else we can dig up. Neither of them were in the state's criminal database, and only Addie had a drivers license, but the address she used was from an orphanage over in Hatchape County so they didn't keep tabs on her."

"Possum on a gum bush..." Enos looked gobsmacked, and Rosco didn't blame him.

"Those GBI fellers are coming up here this afternoon." Rosco told him. "I need you to stay and hear what they have to say." He wasn't sure Enos was quite understanding the gravity of the situation, and it wasn't his place to tell him.

He nodded, his mind elsewhere. "Sure thing, Sheriff." With a sigh, he got up and walked to the door.

"Enos."

"Yeah, Sheriff?" He paused in the doorway, not turning.

"I'm glad you're back. Sorry, it ain't under better circumstances."

Enos turned the lights on and looked around. The room was in shambles with boxes stacked taller than himself and loose papers strewn across the floor. Memories tugged at him of the last time he was here, chained to Daisy while she dragged him across the dark room and up the fire escape. He had tried to convince her to let him go back to his cell, and he thought she probably had some smart-aleck reply for that. Little did he know of the adventures that awaited him.

Now, there was a different sort of urgency. He had little idea of what was going on with Darcy and these missing girls, but his mind began weaving stories with the facts that Rosco had inadvertently spilled. Before him was a haystack, and he was looking for two little needles. He knelt down and began picking up the papers.

3:30 pm

The clock was busted and, without a window, time passed by almost unnoticed by Enos. He had gone through the birth, death, and marriage records first and managed to find the birth certificate of Addie May Sutton. Finding nothing more of use, he turned his attention to the scores of other county documents, court records, and traffic violations.

In the wake of his search, he had stacked and labeled over a dozen file boxes, which now sat against the far wall in a slightly less precarious fashion than before. Unfortunately, those had been the easy folders to hunt through, owing to the fact that he had been the one to do the filing in the first place. It had taken him an hour to work through Cletus' ambiguous filing system during his time at the LAPD, and he had only come up with a jaywalking citation for Addie from 1981. He still had no information on Patricia.

Now he was working through a mountain of loose papers and folders from the last fifty years, which had been dropped, spilled, and thrown haphazardly together into dog-eared, mouse infested, cardboard boxes. They stank of old rodent urine, and some had been chewed past readability. Beyond exhausted and not caring about organization anymore, Enos sat in the middle of the pile, scanning papers and tossing them back into the empty boxes. He found nothing more than a couple of items of personal interest; the paperwork for when he was first sworn in as a deputy, and the official police report of his father's death. He was too tired to read the notes Sheriff Harris had stapled to the form, so he'd put it aside for later.

The papers ran together, one after another, and he almost tossed the court record from the Sheridan Orphans Home into the box before he realized what it was. It gave little information beyond her full name and date of birth, but as he stared at the orphan application for Patricia Mae Miller, a growing suspicion that he had dismissed earlier as paranoia from lack of sleep settled like a dead weight on his chest.

6:45 pm

Enos glanced again at his watch, which read only three minutes past the last time he'd checked it. He was working himself up, and he knew it, but there was nothing left to do but wait. In the last hour and a half since dragging his tired and aching body out of the records room, he had made fresh coffee, caught up on the current filing, cleaned the men's bathroom, oiled all the locks and hinges, and stapled the new wanted posters onto the bulletin board. Now he was polishing the floor, in a manner of speaking.

"Enos, if you're gonna pace back and forth until they get here, go do it downstairs!" griped Rosco. "You're making me antsier than a bed bug on cleaning day."

He stopped in the middle of the floor, glancing up at the him. "I'm sorry, sheriff," he said. "What time did you say they were coming?"

"It oughta be any-" The door opening cut him off as Agents Wilburn and Stewart stepped inside.

Enos felt a cold nervousness sweep through him, not because of their presence, but because of their reason for coming. He crossed the room to them and shook hands, followed closely by Rosco who looked just about as serious as Enos had ever seen him.

Wilburn studied Enos with a sharp eye and a mild frown of disapproval. "Sheriff Coltrane called and told me about you coming back as deputy to help out," he said. "I can't say I think it's a great idea, but I understand where you're coming from. I'd probably ask to do the same if I was in your shoes." He turned towards Rosco. "Is there a good place we can sit and lay everything out?"

"Uh, uh well...there's a table up there," he said, pointing up the stairs. "I reckon that'll be the best place."

They scooted the table out from the corner and pulled up chairs around it. As they sat down, Agent Stewart opened his briefcase and took out a couple of folders. Enos thought they looked a mite too thin to hold much information and hoped they had more than that.

"Enos," Wilburn began, "why don't you tell us what you already know so we don't spend time rehashing it."

Enos cleared his throat and sat up straighter, trying to gather his thoughts. "Well, I'm afraid I don't know much," he admitted. "Not in the way of facts, anyhow. I've seen the pictures you showed me at the hospital of Darcy's house and the ones he'd taken of Daisy and Dixie and the articles he clipped...and the box in the back of his car." He saw Rosco's brow knit in confusion, and continued quickly, "Rosco showed me the pictures of the two girls you were looking for, and said you'd found them in Darcy's things. He said neither of them were reported missing, and I didn't find any reports on either of them in our records so far that would point to anywhere else they would go. Sir, their names-"

"What's this box?" Rosco interrupted him. "I ain't heard nothing about that 'till now."

Wilburn grabbed the stack of Polaroids he had set down earlier and thumbed through them until he found one which he handed to Rosco.

The sheriff studied it, blankly, and looked back up at the three of them. "I guess I've just been a small town sheriff for too long," he said, shaking his head. "I'm not understanding what I'm looking at."

Enos' looked away as his mind conjured up the memory of it. While it was true that the box's contents might look like a collection of unrelated odds and ends to many people; the coil of rope, Ketamine, and black leather case in it marked "Nova XR-5000" left little to his own imagination.

"Tim, do you have the content list from that?" Wilburn addressed his partner, who shuffled through papers in the top folder.

"Yeah, right here."

Time seemed to flow in slow motion as Enos listened to Agent Stewart read it off. He closed his eyes and rested his head in his hands, trying to keep Daisy out of his mind.

"Three six foot coils of 3/8" nylon, four-strand rope; one pair black leather flight gloves, size large; roll of duct tape, Nova XR-5000 stun gun with five cartridges, one 10mL vial of 100mg/mL Ketamine, and four #5cc tranquilizer darts with pressure syringe." He lay the paper back down, and Enos didn't need to look up to know Rosco still wasn't fully understanding. "The Ketamine you might not have heard of, sheriff," Stewart continued, "but Deputy Strate probably has, having worked in Los Angeles. It's street name is Special K, but it's used mostly in veterinary and pediatric anesthesia and in behavioral emergencies in psychiatric hospitals. At higher dosages, it can drop a grown man in less than a minute. The effects last for about thirty minutes, and the person has little or no memory of what happened to them during that time."

"So the box-"

"It's a rape kit, Rosco," said Enos, softly. "We used to have a problem back in LA with guys giving girls Ketamine at raves. They'd wake up in a park or alley somewhere and have no idea what had happened or even remember being assaulted." He looked up at the sheriff. "He was coming after Daisy."

"The problem with that statement," said Stewart, "is that it's only speculation. As much as the four of us understand that Daisy was probably his end game, there's nothing we can prove from the pictures we found in that secret basement room except that he was watching her and, unfortunately, there's no law against that. There's also nothing illegal about owning any of those items in the box. Ketamine isn't a controlled substance. Even if used illegally, its one of the safest anesthetics available. It creates a hallucinogenic effect similar to the psychedelic PCP, but without the aggression or the risk of suffocation and cardiac arrest."

"We checked his story on it," added Wilburn, "and it's all by the book. He told a local veterinarian that he was going to be hiking the Pima Canyon Trail in Arizona and the guy sold it to him for the tranquilizer darts in case of a mountain lion attack."

Enos felt his heart speed up and his palms start to sweat. "What are you saying?" he asked, staring at each of the agents in turn, not letting his mind believe what he knew he was hearing. "I thought he had been arraigned on attempted murder. You fellas sound like you don't have him down for squat!"

He saw the look Wilburn and Stewart shot each other and felt the sting of tears burn his eyes. He jumped up, knocking over his chair, and walked over the bulletin board so they couldn't see his face.

"We arraigned him prematurely on two counts of capital murder, Enos," said Wilburn. "We were hoping we'd find more evidence, or at least one of the girls' bodies between then and now. We tore up that airfield from one end to the other and brought out cadaver dogs to search the areas surrounding it and his house, and came up with nothing. All we have are the two pictures Rosco showed you and a handful of nudes of the two girls. Despite our gut feeling as police officers that the girls are dead, we don't have any evidence that a crime was committed."

Enos stormed back to the table. "What about all the evidence he planted out at Hickory Ridge!?" he shouted. "He dug up his own ding-dang brother! Ya'll sure weren't hurting for evidence when you strung me up!"

"Listen here, Strate!" Wilburn shot back, pointing his finger at him. "You think you're the only one who wants to see Darcy Kincaid rot in prison? I've lost more sleep than my old body needs to, worrying that a serial murderer is going to walk right out of our hands. But there's nothing I can do without a body. You, of all people, ought to know that." He took a deep, calming breath and shook his head. "I'm sorry, I know this is personal to you, but at this point, it's irrelevant. Tomorrow is the last day we can hold him and, after that, the judge has to dismiss the murder charges. The only other thing we've got him for is tampering with evidence for putting his blood into the barrel of your flashlight. That's only a misdemeanor, since he didn't make the original call framing you for murder, and his lawyer will deal him down to probation and time served. We can't get him on grave robbing because your lawyer did his job a little too well in convincing the state that the bones couldn't be properly identified."

"So, you're telling me," said Enos, carefully, "that, unless you find a dead girl between now and tomorrow, Darcy is gonna walk!?"

"I'm truly sorry, Mr. Strate," said Agent Stewart. "Sometimes justice really is blind."

Enos wasn't sure whether to laugh or scream. "Unbelievable." He turned and left, slamming the station door open hard enough to break the glass.

A/N: Special thanks to my psych nurse husband for the details on Ketamine.

Also... first, there were no laws against "stalking" until Robert John Bardo shot Rebecca Schaeffer, an actress he had been stalking, to death in 1989. By 1993, 49 states had adopted anti-stalking laws. No such luck for the GBI against Darcy in 1986.
Second, apparently faking your death in Georgia isn't a crime - it's what you do to fake it. The only charge available to bring against Darcy would have been tampering with evidence. As I understand it, in Georgia, this crime is only a felony if it is perpetrated against another person in the act of committing a felony (you put their fingerprints on a gun you killed someone with, etc.). If it is perpetrated against yourself (faking your death by putting your own blood on a "murder" weapon) it is a misdemeanor in the state of Georgia. I kid you not.