Left for Dead (33 page)

“I hear that dog of yours is pretty smart,” she ventured.

Mark nodded. “Max is the best,” he agreed.

“He can tell if drugs are in a vehicle, right?” she said.

“Absolutely. As soon as he smells them, he alerts and lets me know.”

“What about if drugs were there and aren’t anymore?”

“Once we have the alert, it’s my job to locate the merchandise. There are times we know that a certain vehicle has been used in the drug trade even though the drugs aren’t actually present when we search it.”

“So there’s a residual scent.”

“You and I probably wouldn’t notice it, but Max does. Why? What’s this all about?”

“Since you’re not on duty, I’m wondering if you and Max could do me a favor. An unofficial favor.”

“Sure thing,” Mark said. “Whatever you need.”

“I’d like you to bring Max and follow me around to the back of the post office.”

Without further objection and leaving money on the counter to cover his tab, he followed her out of the restaurant. When they reached the back of the post office, she used her key to let Mark and his dog into the yard where the truck was parked. Issuing the command “find it,” Mark let the dog go. Max trotted around the whole expanse of yard, and absolutely nothing happened—not one thing.

“Try leading him over to the truck,” Patty suggested.

Mark obliged, but again, there was no reaction.

“I don’t know what you’re looking for,” he said, “but I don’t think it’s here.”

“Thanks, Mark,” Patty told him. “I appreciate the help.”

Patty’s heart was lighter as she watched them leave. Whatever Phil had been doing, he hadn’t been using the truck. That was a huge relief. After closing and resecuring the gate, she decided on a whim that she’d go back to the café and have some dinner.

6:30
P.M
., Monday, April 12
Nogales, Arizona

Sheriff Renteria went back to his office, sat behind his desk, considered
his options, and waited for a phone call.

He was faced with two entirely separate cases, only one of which was his to solve. He didn’t have to call Duane Lattimore and ask to review the Reyes crime scene photos because he remembered what he had seen there all too well. The scattered money; the drugs; the bullet casings; and something that had seemed more puzzling than important at the time—an empty flat-rate box from the United States Postal Service. Now that he had been to the Phil Tewksbury homicide scene, and now that he had seen those other flat-rate boxes, all of them stuffed full with plastic-wrapped containers of marijuana, he knew that the cases were related. Knew as in knew in his gut. What he was waiting for now was the fingerprint evidence.

Flat-rate boxes with fingerprints had been found at both crime scenes and in the course of the search warrant execution at the Reyes residence. The same prints had been found on the lug wrench at the scene of the shooting. Because of his connections inside the crime lab, Sheriff Renteria already knew that none of those prints belonged to either Jose or Teresa Reyes, and when the prints had been run through the Automated Fingerprint Identification System, there hadn’t been any hits.

Sheriff Renteria hoped that tonight all that would change. He had sent Detective Zambrano on a mission to the coroner’s office to pick up a set of prints from Phil Tewksbury’s body and take them to
Tucson. He was hoping that the prints, along with the stack of other evidence found in Phil Tewksbury’s truck—the head scarf, wig, and sunglasses—would seal the deal. As far as Renteria was concerned, the story seemed pretty straightforward. Phil shoots Jose Reyes; Christine bashes Phil’s head in; Christine gets shipped off to the funny farm; end of story; two cases closed. What he needed was to find solid leads that would link the two men.

When his phone rang, Renteria grabbed it during the first ring.

“Okay,” Zambrano said. “I’ve got Phil’s prints from the coroner, and I’m on my way to the crime lab.”

“Have you spoken to Lattimore about all this?”

“Yes. I figured we’d have to clue him on what we had on the Tewksbury case so we could get access to what he has on the Reyes shooting. But even though we may have identified Lattimore’s shooter, he’s not backing off his investigation.”

“He’s still going after Jose and Teresa for possible drug dealing?”

“Yup. He’s got that bit in his teeth, and he’s running with it. I suggested we get together at the department tomorrow morning around ten and figure out the next step. He’s not going to like it, but from where I’m standing, we’re all going to have to work together. Reyes and Tewksbury may be two separate cases on paper, but it’s looking more and more to me like they’re related.”

“What’s next on your agenda?” the sheriff asked.

“I had hoped to get Patty Patton’s interview out of the way tonight,” Zambrano said, “but by the time I get back from Tucson, it’ll probably be too late. I’d rather interview Patty at home than at the post office. Once news gets out about what happened to Phil, that place is going to be like Grand Central Station. For right now I’m planning on interviewing her as soon as we get the Lattimore meeting out of the way.”

“You can only do what you can do,” Sheriff Renteria said. He didn’t add the words “with the least amount of overtime possible,” but he could have. “When you do get around to interviewing Patty, be gentle with her. She’s taking Phil’s death pretty hard.”

“That’s not surprising,” Zambrano said. “They worked together for twenty years. That’s longer than I’ve been married.”

“What’s the situation on obtaining those additional search warrants?”

“We’re hoping to have the warrants for the phone and bank records by noon tomorrow. On the other hand, there’s a chance they’ll come through tonight. I’ve got a deputy out chasing a judge.”

“Good.

Renteria wondered if a search of Phil Tewksbury’s phone records was where they’d find some meaningful connections between Phil and Jose Reyes. So far, the only thing they knew for sure was that Phil had delivered the mail to Jose and Teresa’s home.

It pained Sheriff Renteria to think that both Phil and Jose, two supposedly fine, upstanding men, had somehow been enticed into the deadly easy-money world of illicit drugs. And that was only part of the sheriff’s worry. That old saw about one bad apple kept running through his mind. He wondered how many other people, ones who were also considered pillars of their Santa Cruz County communities, would also be implicated before the two investigations came to an end.

For a time after Zambrano hung up, Renteria remained at his desk, staring at the photo of Midge that still sat on the credenza on the far side of his office. That picture was a particular favorite of his, taken during Midge’s senior year in high school. He kept it there as a reminder not only of their own marriage but also as a reminder of what marriage was all about. That brought him right back to Phil and Christine Tewksbury.

Unfortunately, the sheriff knew a good deal about the tragedy that had wrecked Phil and Christine’s lives. A deputy back then, Renteria had been one of the responding officers summoned by Phil’s frantic 911 call the night of the accident. Phil had been charging through the underbrush along the shoulder of the road, desperately searching for some trace of his missing daughter, who, he claimed, had been asleep in the backseat. At first, when there was no sign at all of the girl, there had been some concern that maybe Phil was mistaken, that injuries from the accident had left him confused, making the distraught father think his daughter had been with him when she really wasn’t.

Everyone but Phil himself had pretty well given up searching for Cassidy when the tow truck arrived on the scene. The driver had asked several of the people gathered there—deputies and onlookers—to line up on the passenger side of the vehicle and see if they could manhandle it back onto its wheels. Renteria had been one of the six
or seven men who turned their shoulders to the task. When they succeeded on the third try, that was where they found the lifeless body, pinned flat beneath the wreckage.

The end of Cassidy Tewksbury’s short life marked the beginning of her parents’ never-ending tragedy. In the days between Christmas and New Year’s, Deputy Renteria had been in and out of their house several times, filling out necessary paperwork and gathering information for his written reports. What still haunted him about those long-ago events were the contrasts he had seen everywhere he looked.

The house had been gaily decorated in anticipation of Christmas. A lovely artificial tree, surrounded by a stack of brightly wrapped gifts, stood in front of the living room window. A collection of handblown crystal angels stood atop the wooden mantel on the fireplace, and three hand-decorated but empty stockings hung there, waiting for Christmas morning.

Wild with grief, Christine’s starkly pale, tearstained face had been completely at odds with the colorful holiday decor. Phil had answered the questions with terse replies that bristled with grim self-recrimination. At the time Manuel Renteria already knew that many marriages weren’t strong enough to withstand the death of a child, and he had wondered if Phil and Christine’s relationship would ever recover.

At first the only thing most people noticed was that Christine stopped coming out of the house. No one else seemed to be going inside it. Phil emerged. He went to work; he went to the store and did the shopping; but there was no sign of his wife. As time went on, people noticed the bedraggled Christmas tree and began speculating about how long it would be until it went away. All these years later, the forlorn tree stood there still, decorated but only partially lit.

Manuel Renteria realized that in all the intervening years, he had never laid eyes on Christine Tewksbury, not even once, not until today, when he and Deputy Carson and Detective Zambrano had knocked on Phil and Christine’s door and let themselves into the house. It had been like stepping into a time capsule. Nothing in the room had changed—not the tree, not the presents, not the dusty crystal angels on the mantel, not the hanging Christmas stockings, and not the furniture, either. The room hadn’t changed, but Christine had.

Back then Renteria remembered her as a well-built woman, a little
old to have a daughter as young as Cassidy, but attractive and fit. There was nothing attractive or fit about the enraged woman they found lurking in the Tewksbury living room today. Christine was little more than a gaunt, snaggletoothed hag. A shapeless shift that appeared to be several sizes too big now swamped her sallow body. Long gray hair, lank and greasy, hung past her waist. She was missing several teeth. Sitting in a filthy recliner, she had a clear view of an old-fashioned television console, but the set wasn’t turned on. Next to the recliner stood a grimy TV tray with what looked like the remains of a half-eaten dish of oatmeal.

That was something that took Sheriff Renteria’s breath away. Christine Tewksbury had slaughtered her husband, then she had gone back inside and calmly eaten her breakfast. That was beyond cold-blooded.

The three men had entered the room in single file but without drawing their weapons.

“What are you doing here?” Christine demanded.

“We’re here to talk to you about what happened to your husband,” Renteria said.

“No,” Christine insisted. “No one is supposed to come here when Phil isn’t home. Come back when he’s here.”

“You know we can’t do that,” the sheriff said. “Phil is dead.”

Christine’s response to that was one of immediate rage. “No!” she shrieked, half rising out of her chair. “That’s a lie! Phil’s at work!”

On the way to the house, Renteria had anticipated finding Christine a wheelchair-bound invalid. Deputy Carson had warned them in advance about the bat, and it was a good thing. Reaching down to pick it up, Christine had exploded out of the recliner like a crazed jack-in-the box. While she screamed and brandished the weapon, it had taken all three officers and two shots from Detective Zambrano’s Taser to subdue her enough to put her in cuffs.

Ultimately, they managed to wrestle her out of the house and into the back of a patrol car, where she continued to scream and pound her head against the window as she was driven away.

Once she was gone, Sheriff Renteria had spent hours at the house and in the garage, following his crime scene techs as they photographed the scene and searched for evidence. Renteria gave the guys
full credit. They had found two tiny and almost invisible screw holes in the outside of the door frame on the garage door. The holes had been plugged with a dollop of toothpaste that was crusty on the outside and still semi-soft on the inside.

From the distinct straight lines visible on both of Phil Tewksbury’s legs, they had deduced that Christine must have used something—most likely a string or a wire—to trip him. So far, they had found no evidence of string, wire, or wire screws in the house or in the trash. Tomorrow the sheriff planned to have his officers perform a grid search of the entire property to see if Christine had disposed of the evidence by tossing it into the yard.

In other words, what had happened was obvious, but as he stared at Midge’s smiling face in the photo, what Manuel Renteria still wanted to know was why. After all those years of being cared for by her husband, why had Christine Tewksbury suddenly snapped? What was it that had driven her over the edge and into a murderous rage?

If, as Patty Patton claimed, Christine hadn’t set foot outside the house in years, why had she done so now, not once but twice—once to lay the trap with the trip wire and once to do the actual killing? Why kill her husband in the garage when she could just as easily have attacked him in the house—when he was asleep in bed, for instance? If she’d been intent on murder, wouldn’t it have been easier to do the deed inside the house? Why go to all that trouble of setting the trap outside? Was it to deflect suspicion?

More than that, why do it at all? And then, almost as though Midge had spoken aloud, Sheriff Renteria had his answer. He immediately picked up his phone and called Detective Zambrano again.

“Whenever you see Patty, ask her about Phil’s private life.”