Blindman's Bluff (9 page)

Two children followed: Gil seven months after the wedding and Grant two years later. The family was portrayed as cohesive, although Gil and Grant both had called Guy a “taskmaster.”

The financial road to billions hadn’t always been steady. There were dips and ditches and sometimes even trenches and foxholes. CEO Guy Kaffey nearly went out of business fifteen years ago due to a downturn in the real estate market, mismanagement, and embezzlement charges leveled at the president of the company and second in command, Mace Kaffey.

Decker sat up. As he underlined the sentence, he immediately thought of Milfred Connors, the accused account executive who was caught embezzling by Neptune Brady. Was there a connection between Connors and Mace Kaffey?

It appeared that the brothers were involved in litigation that lasted several years, and neither Mace nor Grant thought it important enough to mention. Maybe that was because things eventually
resolved. Mace remained in the business, but no longer sat on the board of directors. He was given a new title of executive VP of East Coast Operations, that sector eventually operated by Guy’s younger son, Grant. The rest of the summary dealt with the Greenridge Project, some analysts implying that it was Mace’s last shot to redeem himself with the company.

If that was the case, Mace seemed to be on shaky grounds. From the start, Greenridge was plagued with problems. The location demanded several dozen environmental impact reports that resulted in many changes of plans. Eventually the project found a design that was approved, but the delays and the added costs coupled with the downturn in the economy and funding deficits had swelled the original budget by a factor of five. There was a quote from the
Journal of News and Business
about the Greenridge Project:

If Mace went down with the Greenridge Project, what about Grant? Wasn’t he part of it as well? If there were problems, why would Mace be the goat and not Grant?

The last paragraph of the synopsis was “An Insider’s Look at Guy Kaffey” from PropertiesInc.com that was more about Guy the man than Guy the businessman. His friends spoke about Guy’s exuberance: his foes described him as a hothead. He was well known for his outbursts, and his moods could turn at a moment’s notice. Guy was described as bold and daring, but he was also detail oriented and meticulous.

Decker wondered how much of his outbursts had to do with his possible bipolar disorder. Did he sue his brother in a manic fit or was there just cause? Certainly it would seem that the charges were unjustified if Guy agreed to hire Mace back into the company.

Decker put Guy’s summary down and moved on to Mace. There
wasn’t anything too illuminating in the summary. Mace was a high school dropout. He worked for his brother. He moved out to sunny Cal with his wife, Carol, to work with Guy in Kaffey Industries. He had a son named Sean. Everything seemed to be hunky-dory with Mace until the embezzlement charges were leveled against him.

This time Lee Wang got specific. Mace Kaffey was accused of stealing five million dollars. Decker couldn’t help it; he whistled out loud. There weren’t any specifics on how the embezzling was done except to say that Guy got wind of the discrepancy during a routine inventory check and one thing led to another until he was forced to confront his brother. Mace vehemently denied the charges and even offered to hire a private detective to find out who the real culprit was. But Guy had his own sources.

The battle of the brothers lasted several years and during that time, the company’s stock plummeted. The charges and countercharges seemed equally matched until Guy prevailed. A month later, the case was settled. Guy retained the title of CEO, Gil Kaffey moved into the president spot, Grant was named in charge of East Coast operations, and Mace was shipped to upstate New York with a VP after his name.

Decker was confused. If Mace really was guilty of such blatant embezzlement, why would Guy retain him? Did Milfred Connors frame Mace for his theft? Or just as likely, did he take the fall for Mace’s stealing? Perhaps the two of them schemed together. And what happened to the money? Was it ever at least partially recovered?

He wrote notes in the margin and moved on to the next generation—Gil, thirty-two; Grant, thirty; and Sean, twenty-eight. Grant was the only married man; his wife was named Brynn and there was one child—a toddler boy. Gil was gay; Sean was still unmarried. All three boys had graduated from Wharton at the University of Pennsylvania. Gil and Grant were immediately sucked into Kaffey Industries, but Sean struck out on his own. He had just graduated from Harvard Law and was doing case law and business law at a small university in the Northeast.

Definitely the smart one, Decker thought.

The last bio had to do with Gilliam Kaffey née Jill Sultie. She grew up as trailer trash. Somewhere along the way, she blossomed from a bony adolescent into a beautiful woman and got a job as a Las Vegas showgirl when she was just eighteen. A year later, she was sporting a rock on her finger courtesy of her first husband, Renault Anderson, and buying her mother, Erlene, her very first house with a foundation instead of wheels.

For a while, it seemed as if Jill had found the golden goose and she was living on twenty-four-karat omelets. Then life came crashing down, mainly due to Renault’s philandering. The divorce was said to be amicable. She met Guy during a low period of her life. They clicked instantly, and like they say in the movies, the rest is history.

Rubbing his eyes, Decker checked the wall clock and realized he had been reading for over an hour. He got up and stretched, then peered through the glass walls of his office. He spotted Wang typing away on the computer and opened the door.

“Lee?” Wang looked up. “Do you have a moment?”

“Sure.”

Decker told him to come inside and have a seat. “I finished your synopses. The family history reads like a soap opera script.”

“Yeah, could you make up a name like Renault Anderson?”

“That’s one for the books. I have a couple of questions about Mace Kaffey. There are these allegations of embezzlement against him, and then all of a sudden, the lawsuit’s settled.”

“Yeah, weird, huh?”

“More than weird. There had to be a backstory. I’m wondering if the accusations were related to the embezzlement charges leveled against Milfred Connors.”

“Yeah, I thought about that, too. Maybe that’s why the lawsuit was settled. Maybe Connors framed Mace and when he was made, Guy dropped the suit.”

“But then why would Mace have been demoted if he were innocent? And if Mace wasn’t innocent, why would Guy keep his cheating brother in any aspect of the business?”

“Maybe that was part of the settlement.”

“But from talking to Mace and Grant, Mace is heavily involved in the multimillion-dollar Greenridge Project. Why would Guy keep him in something so costly, especially if he thought that Mace was embezzling?”

“Maybe it was Grant who was embezzling, Mace took the fall for him, and Guy put Mace back east to keep an eye on Grant.”

Decker frowned. “Sort of a convoluted theory, but I’m open to anything. The Greenridge Project sounds like a big boondoggle.” “You wrote Guy up as a hard-nosed business type. If something was flushing money down the toilet, I don’t think Guy would hesitate to pull the plug.”

“On Mace, for sure, but maybe not on Grant. Maybe the old man had a soft spot for his sons. I found a year-old interview with Mace’s son, Sean, on Kaffey Industries. Sean said a lot of things, but one particular thing stuck in my mind. Sean said and I quote, ‘My uncle has more than a soft spot for his sons. It’s actually a blind spot.’”

T
HEY STOOD TWENTY
abreast, police officers interspersed with volunteers trained in this tedious aspect of protocol. All of them had a whistle around their neck and held a map in their hands.

They were waiting for Wynona Pratt to give the signal—one long toot to begin and two short toots to stop. The detective had come down to the ranch several hours earlier to scope out Coyote Ranch. The vast acreage beyond the buildings and the riding corral was hard-packed terrain pocked with clumps of grasses, thorny briar, silver-leaf shrubs, purple sage, wild daisies, yellow dill weed, and chaparral, the land stretching out until it collided with the foothills. There the fauna climbed and joined forces with fragrant pines, eucalyptus, and stunted California oak, greening the mountainsides and shading the trails that cut through them.

Adjusting her sun hat, Wynona peered through UV-protected spectacles at the map in front of her. She had divided it into five sectors, and with a little luck they’d finish it today. She had dressed comfortably—cargo pants to hold extra items, a cotton T-shirt, and sneakers. Her fair skin necessitated that she slather on sunscreen,
and she hoped sun damage would be limited to freckles. She held her hand aloft, then brought it down with a snap along with a long, shrill whistle. The line walked forward in a unit, eyes on the ground in front of them. The list of what they were looking for was long and varied—footprints, tire tracks, drag marks, bits of clothing, popped buttons, bloodstains, food and food wrappers—any kind of evidence that pointed to human contact with nature.

The morning was cool but warming quickly. The sun was unmasked in a clear sky, reflective against the red stone. The air was filled with spring insects that had hatched with the heat—gnats, flies, bees, wasps. Crows cawed lazily as a hawk circled high above, looking for its breakfast.

The search of the first sector lasted just a little over two hours with meager results—a scattering of various fibers and metals including pop-tops and bottle caps. More numerous were horse prints and desiccated horse shit. A volunteer found a shoe impression that was clear enough to merit an alginate cast. The rest of the search was slim pickings. They moved on to sector two and by the time that space had been combed, the crew was hot and tired and needed sustenance. During the twenty-minute allotment they had for lunch break, Wynona called Marge.

“How’s it going inside?”

Marge said, “TMI.” Too much information. “Everywhere we turn, we have blood or tissue or a footprint or hair or a bullet casing.”

“If you have TMI, we’re suffering from TLI.”

“How far along are you?”

“We’re about to start with sector three. I’ll call you in a couple of hours.”

The group resumed their hunt at two in the afternoon. At 4:14, someone sounded two quick toots and the row of searchers lurched to a stop. The whistle blower was a young police officer in his twenties named Kyle Groger. He called Wynona over.

“Take a look at that area, Detective, about twenty feet from here.” He pointed to the spot. “It looks odd.”

Wynona took off her sunglasses and stared at the ground, her eyes traveling forward until she saw what had caught Groger’s attention. From a distance, the patch was indistinguishable from the surrounding area. Same color ground, same types of foliage, same pebble-strewn earth. Yet it looked distinctly different.

First of all, the eight-by-eight plot of ground had sunk into the earth, lower than the surrounding terrain by about an inch or so. There were also two big boulders on top. The environs supported many big rocks, but two in such close proximity was a little odd. Also the foliage on the plot wasn’t faring well: around a dozen drooping sage plants, straw yellow grasses, and scattered daisies with limp petals. It could be that these particular plants had wilted in the heat except that the flora that surrounded the area was erect and hydrated.

She walked over to the spot and pulled up a sage plant. It gave way with relative ease, and the roots were soft and dried out. She dropped to a stoop and dipped a finger in the ground. The soil was compact, and not easy to dig into. It was then she noticed that the earth had been scored by hundreds of little lines running in all directions. She stared at them closely. It was as if someone was hitting the ground, tamping it down with a shovel over and over and over.

A homemade grave?

She stood up and searched for shoe or tire prints, but found nothing. She called Marge on her cell phone and asked her how it was going inside.

“Still slogging through the muck. What’s going on?”

“I think there’s something here that you should see.”

WHILE WAITING FOR
extra shovels and buckets, Marge assigned one of the CSI techs the official role of police photographer.

“Get all those little hash marks,” she told him.

The day had been long and fruitful…overly so. The evidence inside the main house included several types of shoe treads, a couple of bloody finger- and palmprints, a number of bullet casings, loose fabric
and hairs, and that wasn’t counting the blobs and streaks of blood and massive tissue spatter. The identification of what belonged to whom was to be sorted out later. Marge was happy to take a break from the charnel house, and Pratt’s call was a good excuse for a breather.

Oliver, on the other hand, was probably much happier working inside because it was air-conditioned. He said, “Summer is upon us.”

“You can go back inside. I can handle this.”

“Nah, I’ll stick around.” He wiped his forehead. “We can work inside all night as long as DWP doesn’t turn off the electricity.”

They were both looking at the caved-in spot. Marge said, “It’s disturbed ground. That’s a no-brainer.”

“Big grave for just one man,” Oliver said.

“So maybe it’s more than one man,” Marge said. “I think it was predug. If it was done spur of the moment, it would take too long to dig.”

“Unless it’s shallow.”

“We’re missing two guards. If they’re in there, it can’t be all that shallow. Plus someone took the time to put plants back in the soil. This was a planned thing, Scotty.”

“But not planned too far ahead. Otherwise someone might have spotted a big hole in the middle of the property.”

Marge said, “It’s really far from the main house.”

Oliver said, “I don’t know…maybe.”

“We’ll know soon enough.” Marge tented her eyes with her fingers and regarded the vast tract of land. Wynona’s search crew had scattered but was still in whistle-blowing reach. Most of them were sitting in the few tiny patches of shade available, roasting their butts while drinking tepid water and fanning themselves with their hands or sun hats. A flick of the wrist told her it was almost five. Sunset was around seven-thirty.

Oliver said, “Do you think we can dig this up in two and a half hours?”

“Depends what’s in there. If we find something, it’s a crime scene. Then who knows?” Marge took out her cell. “I think I’ll put in an order for lighting, just in case.”

Wynona walked over to them. She had taken off her sun hat, and her short blond hair was wet and matted. She took out a tube of sunscreen and started rubbing it into her cheeks. “How many people do you think you’ll need for the dig?”

“I could use maybe eight. Why? What do you need?”

“I still have a sector and a half left to comb. I probably won’t finish the last one, but if I get going now, I can finish the rest of sector four before twilight.”

“If I take six from your gang, how many would you have left?”

“Twelve with me. I can manage with that, but I’d like a few to be police officers.”

“How many cops do you have?”

“Eight.”

Marge said, “You take four, I’ll take four.”

“Sounds good.” Wynona stowed her sunscreen back in her cargo pants. After making the assignments, she said, “I’ll get started. Call me if you find something.” She tooted her whistle and her group stood up, wiping dust and dirt from their bottoms.

Just as the shovels and buckets arrived, Marge’s cell phone sprung to life. The boss was on the other end. He asked what was going on and after she explained the situation, Decker said he was coming down.

He said, “Take plenty of pictures of the area before you put spade to ground.”

“Already done,” Marge said. “Do you want to us to hold the digging until you get here?”

“No, start while you’ve got daylight. I’ve got to finish up something at the station house and it’s taking a while. But I’ll make it over.”

His voice sounded tense. Marge said, “Is Steel Strapp giving you a hard time?”

“I wish.”

“Yowzer, Pete! It must be bad. What’s going on?”

“I’ll fill you in later. It’s not bad, but it is complicated.”

Marge checked her watch. “It’s getting close to Sabbath, Pete. If
we don’t find anything, it’s not worth missing Friday night dinner. I’ll call if I need you.”

“Thanks for the offer, but this case is too big for me to take time off. Maybe God could rest after six days, but we mere mortals just aren’t that talented.”

MARGE’S CALL COULDN’T
have happened at a worse time.

Although Decker disliked being late for Friday night dinner, usually when it happened, Rina insisted on waiting for him. But tonight Rina had invited several couples, so Decker gave her the go-ahead-without-me speech, knowing in his heart of hearts that the Coyote Ranch dig was going to last into the night.

But the dig wasn’t the only thing on his mind.

His mother always told him that it was impolite to stare, but in this case, it didn’t make a difference. So Decker studied the man sitting across his desk, taking in his well-manicured appearance.

Brett Harriman was nicely appointed. He wore an unstructured natural linen jacket over a blue button-down and designer jeans. His sandals showed off his manicured toes, which matched his manicured hands. His hair was dark and shaggy, his face long and lean. He wore dark shades that not only covered his eyes but most of his eyebrows. The only giveaway to his visual impairment was a slight swinging of his head that helped his ears zero in on sound stereoscopically.

Decker tapped his pen on his desktop. “First of all, Mr. Harriman, I want to thank you for coming in and sharing your information with me.”

“It’s Brett and no thanks are necessary. It’s my obligation. If people didn’t do jury duty, I wouldn’t have a job.” A few seconds ticked by. “Well, that’s not true. When you’re fluent in as many languages as I am, there’s always work.”

“How many languages would that be?”

“A lot. Mostly the romance and Anglo-Saxon languages.”

“How’d you learn them?”

Harriman shrugged. “Some I studied, some I picked up on tapes. Finnish and Hungarian I learned with intense tutoring. Also I travel a lot. The only way to really learn a language is to hear and speak it.” Another pause. “Are you asking me these questions to size me up, to get rapport, or because you’re interested in me as a person?”

“Probably all three,” Decker said.

“I’m not a nutcase. I’ve been with the courts for almost five years.”

“How’d you come to work for the courts?”

“Another personal question?” Harriman gave Decker a white-toothed smile as he tilted his head to the right. “Aren’t you trying to solve a murder?”

“Murder
s
, actually. How’d you come to work for the courts?”

“A friend of mine who works downtown told me that the courts were hiring witness translators. Mostly for Spanish but other languages, too. I applied and that was that.”

“They weren’t bothered by your blindness?”

Harriman grinned. “I wore tinted glasses. I don’t think they knew until later. Besides, they would never fire me. I help their federally mandated numbers in hiring the handicapped. I’m also damn good at my job!”

“Where were you working before the courts?”

“I was a patient translator for six different hospitals. The job was getting a little monotonous. How many times can you translate ‘take two of these pills for regular bowel movements’?” The pause was awkward. “It was more than that. It was hard day after day delivering bad news.”

“That’s miserable.”

“Depressing as hell. Lucky for me I never had to look at the eyes of a patient who just got the news. I sure as hell heard it in the voice. And it didn’t take me long to learn if the doctor was feeding bullshit, letting the patient or the families cling to hope when I could tell by the nuances in his voice that Tia Anabel was a goner.”

Decker said, “There’s a police detective in the Netherlands. He’s blind. They use him to decipher accents and voices—like terrorists.
He can tell the origin of the speaker even if he or she is speaking fluent and unaccented Dutch.”

“Nobody speaks unaccented anything.” Harriman rocked his head to the other side “There are always giveaways if you know what to listen for.”

“Could you ever see?”

“I still can see. You see with your brain, not with your eyes. But there was a time I was sighted. I was five when I lost my sight from a rhabdomyosarcoma—bilateral tumors.” He tapped his foot on the floor. “Are you interested in what I told you or do you still think that it’s worthless?”

“You’re confusing worthlessness with a healthy dose of skepticism. I’m very interested in what you’ve told me, Mr. Harriman. If you don’t mind, let’s go over it again.”

The blind man gave an exasperated sigh. “It’s Brett, and I told you everything I know. The story’s not going to change.”

“But maybe my perception will. Please?”

He waited a few moments, then he said, “I was standing around the waiting area of the courtrooms eating a power bar. Two Hispanic guys were talking about the Coyote Ranch murders. One of the guys was from Mexico, the other from El Salvador. They kept on calling the victim Mr. Café because Kaffey is coffee in Spanish. Then they segued into talking about a guy named José Pinon who had gone missing and that the boss was looking for him in Mexico. Are you writing this down
again?
I can hear your pen scratching.”

Decker said. “Just squaring what I wrote the first time against what you’re saying now. You said then that the Mexican was doing most of the talking.”