by Bruno Somerset

Created on: February 16, 2009

We should have flown to Memphis and rented a car, but Zeke, for all his world traveling, hated to fly, so we drove the seven hours to Bartlett, Tennessee. We were just east of Greenville, Texas when he brought up something that had been troubling me as well.

"Does the story about how Bobby Velasquez was killed ring true to you?" he asked.

Two years earlier, Bobby had been in the Army, stationed in Washington, DC. He went out for a run one night and was never seen again. The police found his wallet a few days later; the cash was gone, but his military ID and some credit cards were left, and it was covered with blood that they confirmed was his. They never found the body.

"It should, but it doesn't."

"That's how I felt. What bothers you about it?"

"The wallet is the main thing. I never took a wallet with me on a run when I was in the service, and still don't. I just took my keys, an ID, and maybe a few bucks just in case."

"That's the part that intrigued me, too," he said.

"And if he was wearing Army-issue PT shorts which, unless they've changed the design, have only a only a small pocket on the inside front, big enough for a key and an ID card, but not much else. He would have had to hold the wallet while he ran."

"Maybe that's why he got mugged."

"Most muggers don't hide the body if they kill someone, and definitely not so well that it's never found. But the wallet had no chance of not being found."

"And with his blood and plenty of other identification left in it."

"Yeah," I said. We drove on to the Arkansas border in silence, both of us mulling over what this could mean.

We pulled into Bartlett at around 3:30 in the afternoon. We timed it so we would arrive after kids got out of school, hoping we would find more neighbors at home. Fall was approaching, and unlike Texas, Tennessee truly had a fall; the leaves were just beginning to turn. In Texas it went from 100 degrees to freezing in about a week.

We found the address on Birch Street with no problem. It was an old house, built sometime in the 1930's, that had been converted into a four-plex. I loved old houses like this, and it made me want to leave my loft apartment and move to where homes had character. But now was not the time to be comparing the pluses and minuses of architectural styles.

The apartment building was much like the rest of the neighborhood, not exactly decaying, but certainly in decline, as if whatever progress was being made in the rest of the town had bypassed this area completely. We

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