No Place to Die (15 page)

Even though it was still only February, and even though it was still only ten o’clock in the morning, the temperature was already in the high seventies. And even though he’d only walked a block and a half,
McClain was sweating like hell in his gas-company jacket. Jesus, he thought, wiping the perspiration off his brow. Maybe there is something to this global warming bullshit after all.

Yesterday he’d called the law offices of Kutsunis, Trumbull, and Roe only to learn that Mr. Roe was on vacation this week. “Lucky guy,” McClain had observed. “Did he get to go someplace exotic?”

Roe’s secretary laughed. “Not this time,” she volunteered. “He’s just taking some time at home to relax. Did you want to leave a message?”

“No, thank you, ma’am,” McClain responded politely. “It’s a minor matter. I’ll try him again next week.”

At nine fifteen this morning, McClain had called the Roe home from a pay phone and asked for Mrs. Roe. Mr. Roe interrupted his vacation long enough to answer the phone and explain that his wife was out for the morning and that she’d be back by the middle of the afternoon. Again, McClain declined the offer to leave a message, and at five after ten, clipboard in hand, he punched Roe’s doorbell.

Roe answered the door almost immediately, and McClain explained that a gas leak had been reported in the neighborhood. Had Mr. Roe smelled any gas?

“No, I haven’t,” Roe responded.

McClain made a note on the clipboard. “I’m really sorry to bother you, sir, but could I take a quick look at your furnace and water heater?”

“I suppose so,” Roe said.

McClain stepped into the foyer of the expensive home, and Roe closed the door behind him. Then he turned and said, “This way.”

McClain knew that Roe had abandoned the prosecutor’s office two years after his trial for the more lucrative rewards of private practice, and looking around the house, it seemed clear that the move had paid off. The place had obviously been decorated by a professional,
and everything—the furniture and all the accessories—fit perfectly together. The artwork was contemporary and looked expensive, although McClain realized that he didn’t know shit about art.

He did know that Harold Roe was now somewhere in his fifties, but it looked like the guy had aged twenty-five years rather than only seventeen. He was thick around the middle and had lost most of his hair. He wore aviator-type glasses with thick bifocal lenses, and he shuffled ahead of McClain like an old man. As they passed Roe’s home study, Roe looked over his shoulder to McClain and said, “The utility room is right down here.”

Roe turned back to face ahead, and McClain grabbed him by the shirt collar with his left hand. Dropping the clipboard, he pulled the Glock from his jacket pocket and jammed it up against Roe’s neck. “Oh, that’s all right, Harold,” he said. “In here will do just fine.”

He pushed the lawyer into the study and practically threw him into a large easy chair that faced a mahogany desk. “What the hell?” Roe blustered.

McClain brushed a pile of papers and a couple of framed photos off the corner of the desk onto the floor. Then he perched on the desk and faced the older man. “Well, Harold,” he said, “it looks like you’ve done well by yourself.”

Roe sat trembling in the chair, but made a game effort to pretend that he wasn’t intimidated. “Who the hell are you?” he asked. “And what do you think you’re doing?”

“I’m the Spirit of Christmas Past,” McClain said, smiling. “And I have a score to settle with you.”

“What score? What the hell are you talking about?”

McClain leaned forward, invading the lawyer’s personal space. “I’m Carl McClain, you fat prick.”

Roe seemed genuinely surprised. Shaking his head,
he said, “McClain? My God, I never would have recognized you.”

“Yeah,” McClain laughed, leaning back again. “I’m hearing that a lot these days.”

“And you want to settle a score with me? Why?”

Now McClain was surprised. “Why do you think, you stupid fuck? You sent me to prison for life for a crime I didn’t do!”

Roe came half out of the chair, then sat down quickly again when McClain gestured at him with the gun. “Jesus, McClain, I was just doing my job! And it’s not like there wasn’t any evidence against you. You admitted to being with the woman. The semen that was found in her matched your blood type. A jury found you guilty, and the judge agreed with them. It’s not like it was all my fault!”

McClain shook his head. “Oh, Harold, for chrissake, I’m not blaming you all by yourself. I know that you aren’t the only one who’s guilty here, and the other people involved are paying the price as well. It’s just that this morning it’s your turn.”

“But this is insane,” Roe pleaded. “The state admitted its mistake, McClain. You’re a free man.”

“Yeah, Harold, but you know what they say in the old song. ‘Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose.’ My wife is long gone, and my daughter along with her. Once I was arrested, my wife aborted my other kid. My mamma died while I was in the can, so I’ve got no family to welcome me back. And on top of all that, I’ve lost what should have been the seventeen most productive years of my life. So what the hell do you expect me to do, Harold—shake hands all around and say, ‘Hey, that’s all right, guys. We all make mistakes’?”

“No, of course not,” Roe protested. “I expect you to be good and pissed. Christ, I sure as hell would be. But
it
was
a mistake. Nobody deliberately tried to frame you for something you didn’t do.”

McClain slammed his fist onto the desk. “Bullshit, Harold! None of you cared whether you had the right guy or not. The cops simply wanted to clear the goddamn case. The judge was anxious to get me off his docket as fast as he could so he could get back to the fuckin’ golf course. You wanted another notch on your belt for sending a cold-blooded killer away for life, and those mindless assholes on the jury just nodded their heads and swallowed all the crap you fed them. And the attorney that the county so generously provided for me was so goddamn young and green that she didn’t have the slightest idea what to do about it all. Shit, by the time you were done, you had
her
convinced I was guilty.”

Roe sunk back into the chair and McClain shook his head. In a much softer voice, he continued, “I told you pricks that you had the wrong man, Harold. I told you that I didn’t do it. But none of you gave a shit. I was a convenient scapegoat—somebody you could pin the rap on. And none of you could spare the time to make sure that I really was guilty. I didn’t get the chance to watch you preen on the TV at the end of the trial, but I read what you said in the paper the next day. You were pretty full of yourself, Harold.”

Roe twisted in the chair, sweating and begging now. “But I thought I’d done a good job. I thought I’d sent a guilty man to jail. You can’t believe how awful I felt when I read that you really were innocent. And besides,” he pleaded, “all I did was present the evidence that the police had gathered in the case. If you’re going to be angry with someone, you should be angry with them.”

“Oh, don’t worry about that,” McClain assured him. “The cops will pay as well. But you didn’t just ‘present’ the evidence, Harold. You jammed it down the jury’s
throat, and you
enjoyed
doing it. For that week, you were a star, Harold. And don’t tell me you weren’t getting off on it—remember, I was there every goddamn day.”

“I do remember,” Roe said, starting to tear up. “And I am sorry. But killing me won’t bring back your family or give you back the time that you lost.”

“No, you’re right about that, Harold,” McClain conceded. “But at least I’ll have the satisfaction of knowing that the people who took those things away from me have paid the price for doing it.”

McClain raised the pistol, and Roe began to sob in earnest. “Please, Mr. McClain. Please don’t to this.”

McClain let him cry for a minute, then shook his head. “Jesus Christ, Harold,” he said disgustedly. “Don’t be such a pussy. At least take it like a man.”

Roe looked up at him. “Please,” he said again through the tears. “Please.”

“Oh, fuck it,” McClain said, raising the Glock.

He shot Roe through the left eye and then, just for good measure, put a bullet in his heart as well. The shots caused the lawyer’s body to jerk, and then he slumped forward in the chair. McClain slipped the pistol into the right pocket of his jacket. From the left pocket he pulled a small Ziploc bag with a few of Richard Petrovich’s hairs in it—the last of the three bags that he’d collected.

McClain had never known a guy with that much body hair—Christ, the guy shed like an Old English sheepdog. McClain had carefully collected the hair from Petrovich’s bed one day while his host was at work.

He opened the bag and shook the hairs out over Roe’s body. It was a lousy way to repay the guy for his hospitality, but McClain figured that Petrovich wouldn’t suffer all that much as a result. He assumed that the cops would match the hair up to Petrovich
and that they’d hassle him for a while, long enough at least for Petrovich to be a convenient distraction while McClain attended to business. But sooner or later, they’d finally figure out what was really happening and turn Petrovich loose. McClain only hoped that it would be later rather than sooner.

Just after eleven thirty, Maggie and I climbed the stairs back up to the Homicide Unit to find the lieutenant waiting for us. We collected Pierce and Chickris and adjourned to the conference room, where we brought them up to date with respect to the morning’s developments.

“I don’t know what role, if any, Petrovich is playing in all of this,” I said. “But clearly the guy we need to be looking for is Carl McClain. And obviously, we need to warn all the other people who were involved in his arrest and conviction that they may be in danger as well.”

“Okay,” Martin agreed. “Issue a crime-information bulletin on McClain, noting that he may be driving a black van, license plate unknown, and that he should be considered armed and dangerous. Get his last prison mug shot and we’ll release it to the media, asking anyone who may have seen him to come forward. Then start tracking the son of a bitch.”

Turning to Elaine and Greg, he said, “You two get into the records. Get names and addresses for the judge, the rest of the jurors, and anybody else who was involved in the case. Then let them know what’s going on.”

Chickris nodded. “Of course the first thing they’re
gonna do is demand police protection. What do we tell ’em?”

Martin shook his head. “Unfortunately, there’s just no way. We have no idea how many people this jerk might actually be targeting, but even if there are only twenty people or so directly connected with McClain’s trial, that still gives him about twenty potential targets. We know from what he’s done already that he may well strike at any time of the day or night, and to put even a loose net around that many people twenty-four-seven would require more bodies than we can possibly manage.

“Tell people to be careful; tell them not to open their doors to strangers, and tell them to let us know immediately if anyone seems to be paying them undue attention. But for the moment, we can’t offer anyone around-the-clock bodyguards.”

The meeting broke up and Maggie called Dispatch to issue the CIB while I phoned the Department of Corrections and told them to pull McClain’s complete file. I asked Maggie to start checking with the local utilities to see if McClain had recently applied for new electric, gas, water, phone, or cable service, while I went over to the DOC offices on Jefferson Street.

Thirty minutes later, I was back at my desk looking at a copy of Carl McClain’s prison records. He’d done just under seventeen years by the time the mistake was discovered, and at least according to the file, he’d kept his nose clean. Through the years, he’d worked in the prison library, in the kitchen, and in the shop, which is where he’d met Richard Petrovich. He’d apparently stayed clear of the prison gangs and had been written up for only a few minor infractions of the prison rules. In all that time, the only visitor he’d ever had was his mother, and according to the file, she had died two years ago.

The file said that on arriving at the prison, McClain had been five feet eleven inches tall and had weighed two hundred and sixty-five pounds. The most recent photo in the file was seven months old and showed a man with wavy dark hair and a prominent nose, wearing a pair of glasses that looked as if they might once have belonged to Buddy Holly. In the picture, he was still a little pudgy, although it didn’t look like the head and shoulders belonged on a guy who weighed two sixty-five.

I walked the photo down the stairs and gave it to the sergeant in charge of media relations. He promised to get it out in a hurry. “Make sure they tell people not to approach him,” I cautioned. “Tell them just to find the nearest phone and call nine-one-one.”

Back upstairs, I walked over to Maggie’s office. “Anything?” I asked.

“No phone, and no cable,” she replied. “I’m still working on the other.”

I nodded, crossed the hall to my own office, and grabbed the phone book. Mike Miller was still listed, and apparently still in the same house he’d owned when we were partnered together. I dialed the number and listened to it ring on the other end. I was just about to hang up when Miller answered, sounding as if he was out of breath.

“Mike? Sean Richardson. Did I catch you at a bad time?”

“Sean? Jesus. It’s been a while,” he replied. “And no, you didn’t catch me at a bad time, I was just out in the garage puttering around. What’s up?”

“I’ve got a problem and I need to talk to you about it. Can I come out?”

“Sure. What sorta problem you got?”

“Let me tell you when I get there. I’ll see you in about thirty minutes if that’s okay.”

“That’s fine,” he said. “You still drinkin’ ten Cokes a day?”

“Probably not quite that many,” I laughed.

“Well, I think I got one around here someplace. I’ll try to find it while I’m waiting for you.”

Mike Miller was a tough detective from the old school who could have come straight out of Jack Webb’s
Dragnet
. I was twenty-nine when we were first partnered together; he was fifty-five and in the middle of his second divorce. We’d been teamed together for a year when he finally took his pension and went to work as a consultant for a home-security company.

I pulled into the driveway of his home in northeast Phoenix and found him in his garage, waxing the red ’65 Mustang convertible that he’d spent years restoring in his spare time. The last time I’d seen the car, it hadn’t amounted to much more than a mass of loose parts scattered around the garage. Now it sat on the tiled garage floor, gleaming no doubt even brighter than it had the day it was first driven off the showroom floor more than forty years ago.

Mike had weathered well. At sixty-two, he still looked to be in pretty good shape, save for the slight paunch he was developing. Never one to ape the latest styles, he’d always worn his hair in a brush cut, not much longer that it had been when he was a young marine. The hair was completely gray now, and he stood quietly, wiping his hands on a shop rag, as I stepped into the garage and walked slowly around the Mustang. “Beautiful,” I said, smiling.

His pride in the car and in the job he’d done with it was written all over his face. Sticking out his hand, he said, “Thanks, Sean. It’s good to see you. How the hell are you?”

His grip was as strong as ever, and once I’d extracted
my hand, I shrugged and said, “Good, Mike. And you?”

“Great. So how’s the job treating you?”

“Well, actually, Mike, that’s what I needed to talk to you about.”

He nodded. “Okay, why don’t we take ourselves out of this heat and into the air-conditioned kitchen?”

He led me into the house, punching the button to close the garage door as he did. The house, like the garage, was spotless and everything was in its proper place, even down to the salt and pepper shakers that were aligned precisely in the middle of the kitchen table. Mike had always been a bit compulsive in that regard, and thus far three wives had tried but failed to live up to his standards of cleanliness and organization. He offered me a chair at the table and said, “I assume that you probably don’t want a beer at this point in your day?”

“You’d assume wrong,” I said. “I’d love one. But I’d better just have a glass of water instead.”

Opening the refrigerator door, he said, “I actually do have a Coke.”

“Great. A Coke then, please.”

He came out of the refrigerator with a Coke and a Bud Light. He dropped a few ice cubes into a glass, handed me the glass and the Coke, and saluted me with the beer. “Old times.”

“Old times,” I agreed.

I poured some Coke into the glass and we each took a long swallow of our drinks. Then Mike put down his glass and said, “So what’s the problem?”

I looked at him across the table. “The problem is Carl McClain.”

He sighed heavily. “Oh, shit.”

A few seconds passed while he contemplated his beer. Then he looked up to meet my eyes. “Don’t tell
me that somebody’s decided to open an investigation to see how we fucked up the case?”

“No, that’s not it at all, Mike, although in reality that might be more welcome news. Unfortunately, it looks like McClain has decided to settle scores with the people who sent him to the pen. So far, two of the jurors from his trial have turned up shot to death. The woman who was his PD has been kidnapped, and her husband was killed in the process.”

“You’re shitting me,” he said. “The dumb fuck gets out of jail a free man and goes on a rampage that’s going to put him right back in there?”

“Looks like it.”

He stared off out the window for a minute, then shook his head and took a long pull on the Bud.

“Tell me about the case,” I said.

“You seen the paperwork?”

“No, I haven’t dug it out yet. I only just discovered what was happening a couple of hours ago, and I wanted to talk to you first. I figured I’d get a lot better sense of the situation hearing it directly from you.”

Miller nodded. He took a moment to collect his thoughts, then said, “The victim was a pross named Gloria Kelly—twenty-three, as I recall. She’d been strangled with a piece of clothesline rope and dumped in an alley immediately after giving somebody a blow job. A grocery store owner discovered the body when he came to open up the next morning. Kelly was still wearing the clothesline, and the ME figured she’d been dead for five to eight hours by then. Ed Quigly and I caught the case—Jesus, there’s a guy I haven’t thought of in a long time.”

He paused for another sip of beer, apparently thinking about his old partner, then continued. “Vice told us that Kelly was in the stable of a pimp named Charlie Woolsey—a white guy who had a string of seven or
eight girls that he was running. We rousted Woolsey, who told us that the vic had been working the previous night with another girl, whose street name was Bambi.

“I forget what her real name was—not that it matters—but we found her. She told us that Kelly had gone off with a trick a little after ten the night before, and that was the last she saw of her.

“Anyhow, the girls had a system where they wrote down the license numbers of each other’s johns. The idea was that if a party started to get rough, the girl could warn the guy that her friend had copied down his number. Bambi gave us the plate number of Kelly’s last customer and it ran back to Carl McClain’s five-year-old Pontiac.

“We got a warrant for the Pontiac and found McClain at work. His first story was that he was nowhere near downtown that night—that he’d just gone out for a ride. He claimed that he’d stopped in a biker bar somewhere on Cave Creek Road for a drink. But he couldn’t remember the name of the bar and he said he didn’t see anybody that he knew in there anyway.

“We tossed the car of course, and we found one of Kelly’s earrings. She was wearing one when the body was found; the other had rolled under the front seat of McClain’s Pontiac.”

I nodded, saying nothing, drinking my Coke and letting Mike tell the tale his own way. He drained the beer and got another one out of the refrigerator. He popped the top, threw the cap in the garbage can under the sink, and sat back down at the table. Without breaking stride in his story, he continued.

“We hauled him in and gave him what passed for the third degree back in those days. His second story was that he
had
been with Kelly. He said he hadn’t been straight with us at first because he didn’t want to get dragged into a murder investigation. Even more
important, he didn’t want his old lady to find out that he’d been with a hooker—he said she’d of cut his balls off.

“He admitted that he paid Kelly forty bucks for a blow job, and claimed that she’d put a rubber on him before she did it. When it was over, he said, he pitched the rubber out the window into the alley. Then he took Kelly back to the corner where he picked her up. He claimed that everything was copacetic. Kelly told him to be sure and come again. He said he would. He said that when they got back to the corner, Bambi was nowhere in sight. Afterward, he said, he drove straight home and went to bed.

“Naturally, we checked the alley, and we found about ten used rubbers. Apparently both Kelly and Bambi took johns down there on a regular basis. It was possible that Kelly might have used one of the rubbers on McClain, but who could tell?”

“Sure,” I agreed.

“McClain gave us a blood sample. He was a type A secretor and so was the guy who’d left the semen in Kelly’s throat. In addition, McClain’s blood had an enzyme profile that matched only about ten percent of the adult male population. The semen had the same profile. Of course back then, we couldn’t do anything more sophisticated than that—we didn’t have any of this DNA and CSI shit that makes the job so easy for you kids today.”

“In your fuckin’ dreams,” I snorted.

He laughed at that and went on. “Anyhow, we got a warrant for McClain’s house, looking to see maybe did he have any clothesline lying around somewhere. And would you believe that when we got to the place we found his old lady hanging out the wash on the clothesline in the backyard?”

“No shit?”

“No shit,” he answered, taking another hit on the
beer. “And there’s about ten more feet of it coiled up in his storage shed.

“Of course, clothesline being clothesline, we couldn’t make a solid match between the rope around the hooker’s neck and the stuff that was strung across McClain’s backyard. All we could tell was that the piece that had been used in the murder looked to be about the same age as McClain’s.

“Anyhow, by the end of the day McClain had admitted to being on the scene at about the time Kelly was killed. He admitted to having oral sex with her, and the semen in her throat matched up to his blood type. We had her earring in his Pontiac. We had the testimony of the second pross, and then, of course, there was the clothesline.

“Taken separately, none of the pieces would have been enough to hang him for it, but all of it together was enough—especially considering that his PD was completely wet behind the ears. Harold Roe was the prosecutor and he steamrollered the poor girl—and McClain along with her, of course. The jury came back with murder in the first. The judge gave him life, and then it turns out that he didn’t do it.”

As tactfully as I could, I said, “There was no reason after to think that the conviction might have been a mistake?”