September 23, 1996

Listen.

Listen.

You have to listen to what I got to tell you and promise not to tell anybody else. It’s a secret and no one else knows ’cept Tommy and he don’t know he knows and he probably thinks it was all a dream. I can’t tell anybody but I’ll tell you and you gotta promise not to tell, okay?

Listen! You have to promise. You gotta cross your heart and pinky swear okay?

Do you promise?

Okay, now listen ’cause like mom says, I’m not gonna tell you again. It happened…I don’t know when for sure. It wasn’t a super long time ago.

Mom had one of her spells. She gets them spells like the house is shaking and she can’t remember who anyone is anymore. She gets them every time she goes to the top cupboard that Tommy and I can’t reach. She says she has a headache but then she goes to that cupboard and then she gets so bad. Usually she tells us ahead of time she feels the pain come on and tells me and Tommy to go outside and play.

I don’t mind playing with Tommy. He’s a little pile of floppy hair three years younger than me. He’s small for his age and skinny and it makes me feel big to watch out for him. He came out real small and momma blamed the doctors but the neighbors blamed mom. I hear them talking through the open windows of their kitchens while Tommy and I play army soldiers under their porches.

But she forgot this time to tell us to leave, and she got to throwing things and singing songs about Jack from Tennessee, and Tommy and I ran out of there so fast we didn’t stop to see which way we was going.

You know our house is the little blue one with the broken fence. There are other houses nearby but it’s always real quiet, especially around dinnertime. If you go down the street it ends with the woods and our house ain’t far from where the road ends and Tommy and I went running to the end of the street. We went running and running and went into the woods.

Listen, ’cause here it gets important. I stopped to catch my breath for just a second and I lost Tommy in the trees. The leaves were changing colors but they weren’t on the ground yet so it was hard to see very far. I tried chasing after him and I kept yelling.

“Tommy! Tommy! Where are you Tommy!”

I kept yelling and running and I got a stitch in my side ’cause I couldn’t catch my breath. I was gonna turn back but then I almost stepped on her.

I didn’t mean to. I swear! But I didn’t see her and I looked down and I seen her face. She got dark hair all spread out every which way, like how I do when I lay down to sleep at night after my bath.

I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know what happened.

I know about princesses. The girls at school dress up like them at Halloween and Aunt Connie tells me all about them when she comes to visit, and sometimes she reads me books. Mommy says it’s all garbage, but the picture books show princesses with long hair and knights that come and rescue them on great big horses. Aunt Connie says princesses are very beautiful but very hard to find because they are Fairy Tale.

I thought she was a princess.

When I saw the lady’s face it was pretty. I thought she has to be a princess and that’s why she didn’t move.

Aunt Connie said that princesses get spells cast on them and they fall asleep for a hundred years and gotta be woke up by a kiss from their knight. So I thought she must be asleep and waiting for her knight to come kiss her. I looked down at her but I was too afraid to touch her because I didn’t want to mess up the spell she was under.

But then.

You gotta listen real careful. Real, real careful because it’s not my fault I promise and I can’t tell anyone ever again. When I looked down at her pretty dress with short sleeves and flowers all over it, it didn’t look right. It was dirty and it was torn up around the bottom. And she didn’t look like she was sleeping any more. Her arms were bent funny and she had dark rings on her wrists and her neck that looked kinda blue and purple. And she was really pale – even her lips and her cheeks and she looked like…she didn’t look like a princess is supposed to look.

My hands got real cold and it felt like a rock was stuck in my throat. I couldn’t yell for Tommy but I wanted to. I didn’t know where he was but I was so scared he wasn’t okay anymore. I started walking backwards away from the lady. I couldn’t look away.

Momma always talks about them rubberneckers whenever we pass by an accident on the highway and I think I was a rubbernecker when I saw that lady.

I tripped on a rock or a tree root and hurt my hands when I tried to catch myself. I tried to stand up and run away and I saw Tommy. He was crying against a tree and I crawled over to him. But then – but then that’s when I saw It.

It came from the woods and stood over the princess.

At first I thought it might be her knight, but that rock in my throat got bigger and I seen Tommy is shaking and crying real bad but he’s being so quiet. I grabbed him and watched as It got down next to the princess.

I couldn’t see really good. I didn’t think it was a knight anymore because I thought knights wore armor, not camo pants and a big coat. I couldn’t see It’s face. It stood next to her and it got down next to her like I said. And then it reached out its hand to the princess.

That’s when I closed my eyes.

I don’t remember it real well after that but when I opened my eyes It was gone. I don’t know where It went. I don’t think It saw us.

When I looked back at Tommy, his eyes were big and he was sweating really bad even though it was windy and cold. I picked him up and carried him all the way home. I could feel his heart beating at first but he calmed down and was sleeping by the time we reached our broken fence.

I snuck us in through the back door with the broken lock that mom always says she’ll fix. I could hear mom’s music coming from down the hall but she had stopped singing.

I went upstairs to the bedroom me and Tommy share and took off his shoes and tucked him into bed. His forehead was still damp and his cheeks were red from the wind, but he didn’t wake up when I put the covers up under his chin.

I think he thinks it was all a dream. But I heard about them finding that girl’s body and I – I don’t think I saw her knight.

November 1, 2016 – 0900 hours

Melissa Walker disappeared on Saturday, September 12, 1996. Her body was found six days later, abandoned in the woods between Maple Street and Jones Road.

Twenty years later, retired Detective Linda Dellen sat in a room that didn’t look familiar to her anymore.

“Do you like this light?” asked one of the twenty-somethings who invaded her home library. Linda, known to most as Lee, had stopped calling it an office when she retired almost a decade prior.

“Let’s move this lamp over here, and adjust that shade,” the other one answered.

A light moved across the room and Lee blinked rapidly as her eyes caught the light from the naked bulb.

The twenty-somethings, one male and one female, talked in hushed musings as they continued to reposition Lee’s things around her.

This lamp will work here. Let’s move this chair over there. If we move those pictures closer together, can we fit the framed American flag in the shot?

The flag came from her brother’s time in the army. Lee had cringed when they moved it the first time. She braced herself for a second pawing.

Lee continued to watch as the two engaged in a complicated dance with large tri-pods and light stands and window coverings to finalize the stage they had turned her office into.

One thousand, two-hundred and fourteen cases. Twenty-three years worth. That was Lee’s career. It started in Detroit and settled in the small town of Juniper, eighty miles south of the current cabin she lived in. Over one thousand small, misdemeanor cases like drinking and driving, possession, simple assault during her time as a road trooper. As a detective, she’d investigated over one hundred armed robberies and home invasions, about two-hundred assaults of the physical and sexual kind, including shootings, and just under fourty homicides.

As a detective, she’d solved all her cases except for two. Impressive until you remember Juniper has a population in the low ten thousand and most of them weren’t very tricky. In fact, a lot of them involved minor repeat offenders.

Normally, in bars and at various social functions that Lee liked to avoid, when people hear you’re a detective or a former police, they want to know about the ones that got away. They assume the cold cases are the ones that keep you up at night or drive you to drink. Lee was used to getting asked about them, to the point where she had a perfected soliloquy memorized.

But of those one thousand two-hundred and fourteen cases and just under fifty homicides, Andrew Milliken and Jodi Kane were in Lee’s library to talk only about one. One that she had solved. The Melissa Walker case. And, presumably, how Lee felt now that Thomas Vasquez, the man, really a boy at the time, that she turned from suspect to defendant, could go free as early as next month.

“Okay, I think we are all set up. Sorry, for the wait and all the,” Andrew gestured around unsure of the right word. “Changes.” He had a baby face with messy hair and jeans that looked tighter than Lee would ever get used to men wearing.

Andrew sat in a chair borrowed from the kitchen, his face close to the lens of the camera on a tripod. A black, thick binder balanced on his lap as he tapped a pen against the middle metal ring. Behind him, Jodi had on large black headphones and looked sternly at the small screen sticking out of the camera. She pursed her lips for a few seconds as she poked and swiped the screen. Then her face relaxed and she nodded at Andrew with a smile.

“Let’s do a sound check. Can you please just say your name and spell it?”

“Linda Dellen, L-I-N-D-A D-E-L-L-E-N.”

Lee squinted and tried to adjust her eyes to the new light that shone on her.

“Alright, great, Ms. Dellen –“

“Oh, please don’t call me Ms. Dellen,” Lee said cutting him off.

“Sure – Sorry about that.”

“If you met my mother-in-law you would understand. Everybody just calls me Lee.

Unless they’re mad about something then they call me Linda,” Lee said trying hard to not look around the room. They had moved so many of her things and Lee struggled to not mentally put everything back where it was supposed to go.

“Sure thing Lee,” Andrew said. “We just need to keep checking your levels, why don’t you tell me what you had for breakfast.”

“For breakfast?”

“Yeah, I know it’s a weird question…I’m actually not sure why it’s the go-to ‘sound levels checking’ question, come to think of it.”

Lee thought about saying something ridiculous and overly stereotypical like, “Jack Daniels chased with bitter coffee.”

“I had some toast and coffee and a banana. Probably a couple cups of coffee. I think that’s about it,” Lee said out loud, deciding against the snark.

“Great,” Andrew responded. “How does everything look and sound?”

Jodi jerked her head up from the screen and smiled at Lee with a thumbs up.

“We are all set,” she said flexing one long, tan arm before resting it on the handle jutting out from the tripod.

“Okay, so,” Andrew started, still tapping the metal ring of the binder, now in a faster rhythm. “For starters, I want you to pretend Jodi isn’t here. When we talk, just look at me, not the camera and not Jodi, okay?”

Lee nodded trying to put away the unnatural feeling of it. She smoothed her hands over her jeans and wiggled just a bit to settle in. She tried to look away from Andrew’s fidgeting hand and to his face.

“Let’s just have a conversation, okay? Just you and me talking,” he said with a smile meant to be reassuring. “Sound good?”

Lee gave another nod and took a breath.

Andrew put the pen down, stopping the small “ting” the pen made against the metal. He flipped through a few pages and settled in his chair one last time, before folding his hands on top of the binder and doing what Lee thought of as his best impression of a Buddhist statue.

“So, let’s try starting this in a kind of unusual way,” he began. “Let’s kind of start at the end and then we’ll jump forward to September of ’96.”

Lee slowly nodded, not quite sure she followed the instruction.

“When was the last time you talked about Melissa Walker?”

Lee raised her eyebrows and looked up trying to remember the last time anyone had asked. Solved cases were usually quiet unless you were unlucky or corrupt or stupid.

Lee currently fell in the first category, though given the whole case was taken out of the “solved” file drawer due to a decades old laboratory debacle, there was a bit of stupidity at play as well.

“It’s probably going on a few decades since anyone brought up Melissa Walker’s death,” Lee answered. “Right after it happened, people would talk about it, they’d ask me questions at the restaurant or I’d run into Melissa’s mother and ask her how she was doing. But after a few years, maybe even less than that, people wanted to forget that something like that could happen in their town. And when Molly – that’s Melissa’s mom – moved out of town, I don’t really remember talking about it much after that.”

In towns like Juniper, places that are referred to as towns and not cities, people don’t die in unusual ways. Sure there’s murders, but the murders are of the domestic type. The bad meth deal type. The open and shut type.

There was the father that killed his alcoholic daughter with a shotgun and then called the police giving a full, matter-of-fact confession to the dispatcher. He talked about it as though he was describing last night’s game, not as though he had just sprayed buckshot into his only daughter’s brain.

Even that type of case was rare.

More than anything, Juniper Police Department, the local sheriff, and the Michigan State Police post dealt with drug houses, suicides, drunk driving, recreational marijuana use, and domestic violence.

Melissa Walker was the tenth real homicide Lee investigated. The third so-called “stone cold whodunit.” A case that on first blush gave no indication of who did it. No witnesses, no weapon at the scene. Nobody had apparent blood on their hands and it took some time for any real leads to develop.

“What about appeals?” Andrew asked.

“Sure,” Lee said, tilting her head a bit. “Yeah, he filed a few appeals over the years. I’d call and check in on those, but for the most part that all was beyond my paycheck and there wasn’t anything for me to do. So I wouldn’t say those were conversations about the case, for the most part.”

Then the phone calls started coming in.

The first one was from Jeff Kent, current elected Prosecuting Attorney of Juniper County.

We might let him go, Lee. You need to prepare yourself for that.

Kent was always a condescending asshole in Lee’s opinion. She didn’t like him back when he was just a stringy Assistant Prosecutor, sweating and shaking while he gave an opening statement.

“Tell me about how you found out about this latest appeal, and to the best that you can, just, like brief us on what the issue is. Why is Thomas Vasquez looking at the possibility of having his life without possibility of parole sentence overturned?” Andrew asked furrowing his brow, but keeping his head perfectly still.

Lee took a deep breath and tried to not release a sarcastic laugh. Incompetence, she thought, Incompetence and laziness and a desire by the universe to fuck with her and her retirement. That’s why a murderer might go free.

She went with a diplomatic response instead.

“Prosecuting Attorney Jeff Kent gave me a call a few weeks ago,” Lee started trying to not let her face show how little she really thought of Jeff Kent. “He told me that a case that wasn’t one of mine, had won on appeal. That case had alleged, and the court agreed, that between 1995 and 1997 people at the lab that we used for a vast majority of our cases had completely mishandled evidence.” Lee took a breath, still reeling from the absurdity of it all.

She looked down and shook her head, somewhat lost in the magnitude of it. Over three hundred cases had to be re-opened and analyzed all because one guy didn’t like using gloves, would drop things without recording it, and ate his lunch in the lab. How one person could be such a fuckup was beyond Lee’s comprehension.

“DNA was still a relatively new methodology at the time, and as careful as you have to be today, you really had to be even more particular back then. I honestly don’t know all of the specifics, but the lab, especially one employee, was doing a lot wrong. And a lot of cases got affected. Including Melissa Walker’s case. And a judge threw out DNA evidence, which this case had, in a large number of our cases from ’95 to ’97. And in most of those cases, including this one, the judge granted a new trial to the defendant. So now the prosecutor needs to decide if the case should be retried and is winnable, or if he wants to, essentially, let the defendant go.”

We might let him go, Lee. You need to prepare yourself for that.

Lee paused and realized she’d been leaning forward while she talked. It was a habit she had when explaining things. She so wanted people to understand and agree with her that at times she would lean forward as if to pull them in and take them by the hand while she explained.

“And do you think it should be re-tried?”

“Absolutely,” Lee said without hesitation. “There’s no question. To me, the DNA was good evidence to have, but it was just one piece, the rest of it all fits in there. Take it away and it all still points to Thomas Vasquez.”

Andrew looked at Lee not betraying any inner thoughts he had about the case, of which he had many. But this wasn’t his first documentary film, not even his first true crime documentary. He knew it was better to not show any of his cards.

“And before we get to all those pieces, Lee, why don’t you tell me a little about yourself.”

“Ah sure,” Lee said trying to switch gears from the abrupt transition. “I’m originally from here, from Kalkaska. That’s about a half hour from Traverse City, which is about the only thing around these parts that people recognize. It’s also about an hour away from Juniper – which is where I was a trooper during the Melissa Walker case. I was originally in Detroit as a road officer for MSP – that’s Michigan State Police – from 1980 to ’84. Then I was in Juniper from ’84 to 2003. I was a detective for the last twelve years. So I was on the job for 23 years.”

The job meant something different to everyone. For some it meant tradition. A legacy of cop-parent to cop-child. For others it meant making a difference. And to a few it meant driving fast and getting in fights. To Lee, it was always about becoming a detective. About solving the greatest puzzles that people create for themselves and for others. That’s what crime really is, she thought, one great big puzzle.

Lee looked back at the journalist and exhaled a small laugh as she said, “What else do you want to know about?”

“Where did you go to school?”

“You mean like college or high school?”

“Whatever is the highest level of education you’ve achieved.”

“I went to Wayne State for a couple years,” she said. “My mom really wanted me to go to college, maybe become a teacher or doctor or something. She really didn’t want me to be a police. But after a couple years, it was the only thing that really felt right, you know?”

“Yeah,” Andrew said laughing, “I mean I had to tell my parents I wanted to be a documentary filmmaker, so I get what you’re saying.” He grinned at Lee, a hint of desperation for a connection in his eyes. Lee relaxed a bit and smiled back.

Andrew paused while he scratched his neck and turned his binder to the first few pages. Lee wondered if she had somehow managed to over share within the first five minutes of the interview.

“Great. Great. Okay good. Well, then I guess let’s really get started here. Umm…da-da-da,” he was scatting nonsense words trying to collect his thoughts. “Do you want to look over any police reports or anything before we get started?”

“I think I’m okay,” Lee said. She’d been reading through the police reports since she heard the case was reopened. She’d gone back to the station – a place she hadn’t been to in years – to get copies of police reports and lab results and everything else they had. She added them to her own box of notes and miscellaneous papers she’d kept from the case, setting aside the duplicates after comparing what she had from what was at the police station. She was looking for something, anything to suggest she’d gotten it wrong twenty years ago.

“I guess…well let’s just start at the beginning. September 12, 1996, that was when Melissa was reported missing, right?” He finally looked up and stared out through black plastic frames. Lee’s granddaughter said the word “hipster” a few times. Lee finally realized that was probably the best word to describe Andrew.

“Right. Well, not quite. Her mother realized she was missing late that night when she didn’t come home - Melissa always came home at night, even from dates, by 11:00pm. So by 11:30 her mother later told me she’d started getting worried. But she didn’t call us until about 9:00am the next morning. Most of the time, we don’t get involved in a missing person until they are actually declared missing.”

“You know, normally, this wouldn’t even raise a flag – a young girl doesn’t come home at night after supposedly going out on a date…it’s just not an issue,” Lee looked down at her hands and started wiggling her fingers.

Andrew scooted and stretched in his chair. His abrupt fidgeting made Lee twitchy. But when Lee spoke, he remained absolutely still. He was like a windup toy.

“So you didn’t go see her, Mrs. Walker, at that point then?”

“No… no I did. I’d heard about it when I first got in that morning. I’d had something of a history with Molly when I was still on the road. Her husband was a mean drunk and we’d get calls out there a few times a month.”

Lee remembered Melissa Walker. Seven years old, wearing a large t-shirt converted into a nightgown, sitting on a tattered couch, her thumb in her mouth. Her big doe eyes glued to a static-filled black and white television. Her body curled so tight on the couch she just looked like just a head and a t-shirt.

“So I’d come to know Melissa and Molly though that, and when I heard Molly was worried about Melissa, I figured I would go.”

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Title: Small Town, Saturday Night

Genre: Crime/Fiction

Age Range: 18-plus

Word Count: Excerpt: 4,148 Novel Word Count: 85,000

Author Name: Cheyna Roth

Why Your Project is a Good Fit: Podcasts and Netflix have saturated the market for true crime documentaries, particularly cases where it isn’t clear if the person serving time is the culprit. It’s natural that books should find a place in this market and fill the desire for this world.

While this novel fits in with traditional crime books, it expands that world to take the reader deeper into the criminal justice process. All transcripts, police reports, and dialogue are grounded in reality and based, in part, on my prior experience as a prosecuting attorney. In our current society, people are no longer satisfied with just police procedurals. They want to pull back the curtain and hold the documents in their hands and scour the police reports for leads that may have been overlooked. This novel allows the reader to do exactly that.

Small Town, Saturday Night should fit well with several of your agents. For example, given his interest in crime, Scott Miller may appreciate this unique take on the genre. But agents like Alexa Stark, looking for a literary debut “with a unique voice and perspective,” or Amanda Annis who loves, “narratives that take me into a world I would not know otherwise” may also be interested.

Synopsis: Twenty years ago Melissa Walker was found strangled to death in Juniper. Lead detective Linda “Lee” Dellen was confident when eighteen-year-old Thomas Vasquez was sent away for her murder. But after the DNA evidence is thrown out, Lee is forced to consider the one question no officer wants to ask, “Did I get it wrong?”

Told through interviews with a documentary film crew and materials taken from the police files, the reader is immersed in the death and investigation of Melissa Walker. As the interview goes on, Lee starts to dig through her own records and a small hint that she missed twenty years ago could mean that the real killer went free, and one of her own is to blame.

Although not shown in the above excerpt, police reports, court transcripts, and evidence logs are presented along with the crew’s interview with Lee. They contain clues to what went wrong with the investigation and reward repeat readings.

Target Audience: Adults of both genders. Fans of Making a Murderer, Serial, and The Keepers. Readers who enjoy books like Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl and Liane Moriarty’s Big Little Lies that use a unique narrative structure.

Your Bio: I’m a traveling Michigander who has been telling stories since I could talk. I thought my fascination with crime and justice meant I was supposed to be a prosecuting attorney. I’ve been working in courts since high school, first as a volunteer in a clerk’s office where I would sneak out to watch trials. Later, during law school, I worked for judges and the local prosecutor’s office. After I graduated, I became an assistant prosecuting attorney for a small county in Michigan. Unfortunately, I found that the day to day of the job wasn’t for me.

I loved being around police officers and crime, but the job took a toll on me. I realized I wasn’t going to be happy with it as my career. I went back to school and got a master’s in journalism.

I wrote about my experience in the criminal justice system in a feature for Broadly. That article was chosen by Longreads as one of the “Top Five Longreads of the Week.”

I got a full time job with Michigan Public Radio. After only two weeks on the job I was covering the 2016 presidential election. While my job now focuses on politics and the state legislature, I’ve never lost my fascination with crime. That led me to write this novel – a compilation of my old life and my new life.

Platform: I appear regularly as a guest on multiple public radio programs throughout Michigan including WKAR’s Current State, WDET’s Weekend Edition and Michigan Radio’s Stateside. I broadcast daily on NPR station newscasts across Michigan. I’m also a guest lecturer at Aquinas College.

Education: Master’s in Journalism from Michigan State University (2015), Juris Doctor from Michigan State University (2013), Bachelor of Arts in English with a minor in Writing from Aquinas College (2010).

Experience: I’m a former Assistant Prosecuting Attorney. I handled numerous criminal offenses including misdemeanors and felonies. Currently, I’m a reporter for Michigan Public Radio. I’ve been published in Broadly, Bustle, and on NPR newscasts. I've worked on award-winning documentary films, progressing from researcher to assistant producer.

Personality/Writing Style: Quirky and offbeat or grounded in reality, depending on the story. I like to experiment with narrative structure, create lived-in worlds, and write in a voice that lets the reader hear the character in their head.

Likes/Hobbies: Occasional backpacker and avid daydreamer. I enjoy exploring new places, reading, photography, and eating Nutella straight out of the jar.

Hometown: Lansing, Michigan

Age: 28