Bogeyman Read Online Free PDF

of Divine Intervention

CHAPTER FIVE

    June 1996

    G ary Sweet opened the door of the “murder closet” and stepped inside. The small, windowless room in the basement of the Garland Police Department held the agency’s files for unsolved murders stacked in row after row, from floor to ceiling, in bankers’ boxes. Contained within each were the ghosts of justice interrupted, of nightmares without end, and of tears uncounted. Waiting for someone to care.
    The thirty-seven-year-old detective was on his lunch hour and had decided to spend it looking through the old files, mostly out of curiosity. It wasn’t as if he had nothing else to do. A satellite of Dallas, Garland was actually the tenth largest city in Texas, bigger than Amarillo. Working in the crimes against persons unit, which included felonies from harassment to murder, his caseload averaged sixty-five to seventy cases a month. Killers, thugs, robbers, and rapists did not take holidays so that he would have time to solve old homicide cases.
    Still, he was relatively new to detective work after serving nine years as a late-night patrolman and another two as a school resource officer, and cold cases fascinated him. Part of it was the challenge of putting the pieces together to find, arrest, and convict killers when the original investigators had failed. But more importantly, it troubled him that killers were living out their lives thinking they’d gotten away with murder while the families of the victims suffered without resolution.
    Tall and athletic with a soft Texas drawl, Sweet never intended to be a police officer, much less a detective. He was the son of a stay-at-home mom and a milk deliveryman who had worked for the same dairy for forty years. With two older sisters and one younger brother, his childhood was normal for a boy raised in a working-class neighborhood of Dallas; nothing in his upbringing would have predicted a future in law enforcement. He’d been very involved in high school sports, particularly football and basketball, and in martial arts. In fact, he’d once dreamed of being the world heavyweight champion in kickboxing, but that dream derailed at age 19 when he married his high school sweetheart, Julie Miller. He fought his last tournament two weeks following his wedding, but then the exigency of taking care of his wife and, two years after the wedding, their first daughter meant an end to his aspirations as a professional fighter.
    So Sweet got a job unloading railroad cars. It paid well and he had no other plans, but that changed in 1983 when he was laid off.
    Initially, he applied to join the Garland Police Department only to qualify for an unemployment check. However, his best friend was a cop and invited him to ride along on his patrol one evening, which was enough to at least interest him in the possibility of becoming an officer. So he signed up for the entrance exam.
    When he arrived to take the test and discovered there were three hundred other applicants for fifteen positions, he almost turned around and left. But he had nothing else to do, plus a wife and child to take care of, so he stayed and passed the written test, as well as the physical agility test the next day. Even then, it was several months before he learned he’d been accepted to the police academy, which he had to graduate from to work for the Garland Police Department.
    Sweet excelled at the academy, was hired by the Garland PD, and two years after starting as a night patrolman who loved the “late night action,” he was teaching self-defense courses to other officers. However, it was more than a paycheck and more than the adrenaline of battling criminals that convinced him he was meant to be a cop.
    In 1978, he’d become a Christian and started praying for guidance on what to do with his life. As he’d passed each test and then was accepted into the academy and finally hired, he’d come to believe that God’s plan was for him to work in law enforcement. He