Blood of Others (23 page)

“Las Vegas?”
Ann repeated, staring at Reed.
“You have to go to Las Vegas tonight?”

They had just finished eating Ann’s
homemade tacos.

“No. Sacramento tonight. After
I’m done there, I’ll fly to Las Vegas.”

Reed began clearing their dinner
dishes. He had gotten home early enough for his family to eat together, which
didn’t happen often.

“Dad’s going to prison,” Zach said
just as their doorbell chimed. “I’ll get it!”

“Prison?” Ann said.

“Folsom.”

“Folsom?” She kept an eye on Zach
at the door down the hallway while loading dishes into the dishwasher. “Why are
you going there?”

“To interview Donnie Ray Ball.
Remember him? The detective who was convicted of robbing banks in the Bay Area.
I wrote about him. Then I’ll go directly to Las Vegas for another part of the
story.”

“This is all for the bride murder
story?”

“Yes.” He passed her a plate.

“Dad!” Zach called from the door.
“Somebody’s here for you!”

It was a woman from the rental
company, delivering Reed’s car. A blue mid-size Chrysler. Reed signed the
agreement on her clipboard, accepted the keys. She got into a waiting company
van. Zach loved Reed’s shiny rental.

“Awesome, Dad. Can we go for a
little ride?”

“Sorry, son. We don’t have time
right now.”

Ann was tidying the kitchen,
shutting cupboard doors a bit harder than necessary.

“Dad, remember last time you went
to a prison, I think it was San Quentin, you went to their store where they
sell stuff and got me the wooden stage coach a bad guy made?”

“Sure.”

“Can you see if they have
anything like that at Folsom?”

“Zach, no!” Ann interjected.
“That was a long time ago.
Before ‘you-know-what’ happened.
Dad won’t
have time for gifts. Go brush your teeth.”

When they were alone Reed said,
“Ann, Brader is sending me. It’s not like I have a choice.”

“You could always quit. Write
your books.”

“Ann.”

“Tom, please don’t get him
anything from Folsom. Or whoever you’re going to see in Las Vegas. Nothing. Not
after everything he’s been through.”

“Sure, I understand.”

The cutlery jingled when she shut
the dishwasher door. She stared into his eyes. “Tom. I’m sorry. It just worries
me whenever you throw yourself into stories like this.”

“I know. But it’s my job, Ann.
It’s what I do.”

“Will you be back in time for my
banquet?”

“Banquet?”

She tapped the laminated calendar
affixed to the refrigerator with flowered magnets. He saw the notation in her
handwriting for the annual Bay Area women’s business event. It was in a few
days.

“I should be back in time.”

“That would be nice.”

“Ann.”

“Are you packed?”

It could have been worse with
Ann, Reed figured as the Chrysler glided across the Bay Bridge and beyond the
Bay Area, eating up the asphalt of Interstate 80 to the capital, Pink Floyd
pumping from the sound system.

It helped that he had eventually
obtained a very detailed list of materials the contractors had used in
renovating their house. That had pleased Ann, ending his banishment to the sofa
bed in his office. But the doctors still couldn’t unravel the mystery of Zach’s
illness. They needed more time for more tests.

Reed mulled over the real reason
he had to leave town. Brader, the misguided fool, was still hot for a
“contextual bride murder feature” on why cops go bad. He demanded Reed request
an interview with Donnie Ray Ball in Folsom. Reed made the request and Ball had
agreed. Then Reed had told Brader that in addition to the prison interview, he
had discovered that the answer to how bad cop Donnie Ray Ball went bad was in
Las Vegas. Donnie had family there that no one had discovered,
“and,”
Reed had told Brader,
“I think they have a story to tell.”

Brader had approved the trip.

But Las Vegas was a lie. Reed
blinked at the muted TV of his second-floor room at a Motel 6 in southeast
Sacramento. It was true that he needed to go to Las Vegas. But it had nothing
to do with his early morning prison interview with Donnie Ray Ball. It was
about the bigger story. Iris Wood’s murder. Reed believed he had a solid lead
on her killer.

They call it New Folsom because
it was built next to the original. California State Prison, Sacramento, as it
is officially known, sits on some 1,200 acres in the eastern portion of
Sacramento County within the city of Folsom in an area called Represa.

Donnie Ray Ball, a muscular
red-haired Irish American, who had robbed thirty banks, was among the nearly
3,000 inmates housed at Folsom in a Level IV, maximum security facility. These
days the former detective was surviving on C Yard. He met Reed in a visitor’s
room, dressed in prison-issue jeans, T-shirt, shoes. During the one-hour
interview he revealed little, insisting that Reed report “how it was drugs, all
drugs, that made me mess up bad.” That had to be made clear in the story
because Ball’s first parole hearing was approaching. When the interview ended,
Ball asked Reed to consider collaborating on a screenplay, about a bad
detective.

Later while waiting for his
flight at Sacramento International, Reed opened his laptop to transcribe the
tape and begin writing the feature. At one point in the interview, Ball, who
was a county homicide detective before he turned bank robber, was confident a
real cop did not stop Iris Wood at Stern Grove. “It’s all too messy. Sure, I
was usually stoned when I did my crimes, but this murder is calculated,
planned. A cop would know about trace, about unit logs for unmarked cars. No
way was that a real cop. The guy was posing, because how else is he going to
stop a woman alone at night?”

Reed had written
nearly half of his story on
Donnie Ray Ball by the time his jet connection, crammed with high rollers from
Portland, landed in Las Vegas at McCarran International Airport.

It was scorching in the lot where
he picked up his rental, a Neon. The illicit element of the trip to Nevada
underscored its urgency. Before driving off, Reed let the air conditioner do
its work as he stripped off his damp shirt, pulled on a fresh one, then punched
a local number on his cell phone.

“Hello,” a woman answered.

“Mrs. Purcell? Carla’s mother?”
Reed turned the A/C fan down.

“Yes.”

“Hi, it’s Tom Reed from San
Francisco.”

“Oh yes.”

“I just arrived. I’m at the
airport. I’d like to drop by now, if this is a good time?”

“Now is fine, Mr. Reed. I’ll give
you directions.”

Reed began unfolding his crisp
new map of Las Vegas, snapped off the cap from his pen, and traced a route to
the new suburb where Mrs. Purcell had promised to tell him of her daughter’s
murder.

Pulling from the lot, he switched
on the radio and heard Johnny Cash singing “Ring of Fire” as he drove the
streets of Las Vegas, reflecting on what he knew about Carla Purcell’s case.

She had been a
thirty-four-year-old woman who lived alone in a quiet apartment building. She
had worked at a day care looking after the young children of mostly single
mothers employed as showgirls, dealers, waitresses, and bartenders. A year ago,
after attending an evening community meeting, she never made it home. Six days
later, her compact car was discovered at the western edge of Las Vegas at a
strip mall storage site that had single-garage-size units. Her car was empty.
Her body was found in a church nearby, according to what Reed picked up from
reports in the
Review-Journal.

Reed had learned from Roland
Snell in Arizona that the Phoenix homicide detective on his daughter’s case had
let slip that the FBI and Las Vegas Metro police had considered the Purcell
file in Nevada as having a possible link to the Phoenix murder.

Reed located and contacted
Carla’s mother, Darlene Purcell, a short time ago. Yes, she confirmed, Las
Vegas homicide detectives had told her recently that they were optimistic about
a potential lead on her daughter’s case out of Phoenix, which Reed suspected
stemmed from San Francisco. She agreed to meet Reed, to trade information.

The guard at the booth of the
gated community where Darlene Purcell lived was expecting Reed. He checked his
ID, then cleared Reed’s entrance with a polite salute and directions to her
home. It was a picture-perfect bungalow, shaded by desert fan palms. Darlene
Purcell was in her late sixties, a white-haired, obese woman with a waxen face
and a breathing condition. She wore a tent dress, walked with a cane, and used
a wheeled oxygen tank with a slender clear hose affixed to her nostrils, as if
she were a hospital patient. A colorful budgie in an ornate cage in the kitchen
chirped a greeting from its swing.

“I see Lulu’s happy you’re here.
Thank you for coming, Mr. Reed.” She tottered into her cozy living room,
inviting Reed to sit in a large cushioned chair.

“Thank you for seeing me,” Reed
said.

She positioned herself over the
sofa, lowered herself, sighing as she sank into it. “Have you talked to Hank
Fiero? He’s the detective on my girl’s case.”

“No, ma’am. At this point --”

“Call me Darlene, Tom.”

“No Darlene, not yet.”

“Well now, seeing how you came
all this way, how can I help you?”

Talking to her, Reed was amazed
at her warmth toward him. He noticed silver- and gold-framed photographs of
Carla on the TV stand shelf, next to ceramic figurines on doilies and a picture
of a young soldier, Carla’s father. He had died in Vietnam when Carla was
little. She’d had no other relatives.

“My girl found out early on she
couldn’t have kids, Tom. Never really had a boyfriend. Carla had a little
speech impediment. She was very quiet. For a few years she considered becoming
a nun. She was a churchgoer. Worked cleaning hotel rooms on the strip. Then she
got the job at the day care. The kids there meant everything to her. So did her
volunteer work.”

“What sort of volunteer work?”

“With her church’s
anti-death-penalty group.”

“That was not in the
Review-Journal.”

“Fiero asked me and the church to
keep quiet about that, keep it out of the papers.”

“Why?”

“In case her murder was connected
to her volunteer work to abolish Nevada’s death penalty. She was part of some
research the church helped with on a specific case.

“Which case?”

“Chad Kyle Snow.”

Reed was familiar with it. “He
was exonerated.”

“He was on death row, always said
he was innocent. Carla’s group took up his case; then the DNA proved he didn’t
do it.”

“I remember.”

“That was about two years back,
maybe longer. She used to go with the group up to Ely, go to the prison. They
prayed for him.”

“You think it was connected to
her murder, Darlene?”

“I don’t know what to think.”

“Police ever say much on that
possibility?”

“Not really.”

“Anything else you can tell me?”

“Well, Carla was pretty good on
her computer. The detectives looked at it, but they told me it wasn’t working
all that good. She never mentioned that to me. I guess it worked well enough
for her.”

“What do you mean?”

“She used it to go on-line about
death penalty stuff and she also told me it was a good way to not worry about
her speech and sort of meet new people.”

“She had on-line friends.”

“Lots.”

“She ever go meet any of them
face-to-face?”

“No. She was so shy about her
speech. Very private. In some ways I think she, I won’t say
liked,
but
preferred
living alone. That way at least she did not have to face people stumbling over
her words. But I think she ached to have a family.”

“Darlene, this could be hard, but
it might help my research. Did the police or the coroner ever tell you details
of her death?”

Tears welled in her eyes. She
closed them and nodded. “Hank Fiero told me never to tell anyone this, said
they needed it to catch him. Tom, please don’t print it until then. Promise me
you won’t.”

Reed promised.

“You know she was found in the
church, but it was never published about how she was found.” She paused to
breathe. “He laid her in the arms of a statue, a full-sized copy of
Michelangelo’s
Pieta.
“Oh Lord, I still have dreams about holding her in
my arms when she was my baby girl.”

Reed moved near her and patted
her knee as Lulu chirped from the kitchen.

After several moments, Darlene
collected herself. “I’ve got some reports the police gave me for insurance,
Tom. Her death certificate, the Clark County coroner’s report, and some other
things I kept from her apartment and things they released to me. You’re welcome
to see them.”

She directed Reed to an empty
room filled with boxes of clothing, books, kitchenware. All were simply marked,
CARLA and another folder with documents and a note from Detective Hank Fiero,
Las Vegas Metropolitan Police. Actually there were several files, thick with
standard letter-size sheets as if they had been professionally copied.

Darlene: I’ve talked to powers
that be and decided to copy and give to you things of Carla’s we can release,
or no longer need. Hank.

Reed sat on the floor and went
through everything, flipping first through the files from the police. They
looked rather innocuous, stuff about abolishing the death penalty, prayers,
poems, her own collected papers, letters, notes. Several files, almost as thick
as the Las Vegas yellow pages.

“Anything there like your case in
San Francisco, Tom?” Darlene was leaning on her cane at the doorway. She was
wearing a robe. Reed had not realized night had fallen. It was late.

“I lost track of time.” Reed
looked at his watch. “I am sorry. I better go. I have to get a room and catch
an early morning plane.”

“Tom, take whatever you need with
you. Take a good look at it in California, then send it back to me. I trust you
with it.”

“Thank you. For everything.
Reading some of her letters here, I can understand she was a very loving
person.”

“I think she had something
special. She always believed in forgiveness. I think she even forgave God for
making it so she couldn’t have kids. But I’ll never forgive Him for making the
man who took her from me. I hope they find him, Tom, so he can pay for what he
did to my girl.”

Reed checked into a Holiday Inn,
ordered a club sandwich from room service, and studied the massive paper file.
He supported his back with pillows, with the file folder on his chest. He began
reading every document. He battled exhaustion from a day that began in Folsom
Prison and ended in Las Vegas with Carla Purcell’s innermost thoughts running
through his mind. Sleep swept over him as he gripped a page that had no
detective or date stamp from the LVMP. Maybe it got in the file by mistake? Or
was overlooked. Or misplaced? Reed yawned. His eyes closed. Man he was wiped
out. He tried to concentrate on the page. It had anti-death-penalty stuff on
one side. She appeared to be using recycled paper, because on the other side
there appeared to be Carla’s printout of an old e-mail exchange she had saved
from a lonely heart she met on a chat room.

Dear CP:

I just have to know, if you
found the right man, could you forgive him the sins of his past life?