Negative Data
1969
A
fter finishing their morning’s investigative work at the fire tower, Sheriff Ed Jackson and Deputy Joe Purdue escorted Chase’s widow, Pearl, and his parents, Patti Love and Sam, to see him lying on a steel table under a sheet in a chilled lab at the clinic, which served as a morgue. To say good-bye. But it was too cold for any mother; unbearable for any wife. Both women had to be helped from the room.
Back at the sheriff’s office, Joe said, “Well, that was as bad as it gets . . .”
“Yeah. Don’t know how anybody gets through it.”
“Sam didn’t say a word. He never was a talker, but this’ll do him in.”
Saltwater marsh, some say, can eat a cement block for breakfast, and not even the sheriff’s bunker-style office could keep it at bay. Watermarks, outlined with salt cr
