No Place to Die (20 page)

At midmorning on Wednesday, a homeless man who was scavenging in a Dumpster behind a small strip mall discovered the body of an elderly man, wrapped in a canvas tarp. Thankfully, Bob Riggins had returned to work the previous day, and he and Chris Doyle were now working together again. The two of them caught the call, and when they dug the wallet out of the victim’s back pocket, Judge Walter Beckman was no longer a missing person. Riggins phoned the news to the lieutenant, and he in turn sent Maggie and me out to join them.

We got to the scene and found the body lying on what appeared to be a painter’s tarp next to a large green Dumpster. Bob was questioning the homeless man who’d made the gruesome recovery. The ME was engrossed in his initial examination of the body, and Chris Doyle was leaning his fat lazy ass against the fender of his car, watching the Crime Scene Response team sort through the trash from the Dumpster.

As we walked past Doyle, Maggie said, “Another hard day at the office, huh, Chris?”

Doyle slowly looked her up and down and then said, “Fuck you, McClinton. You still have no idea what being a
real
detective is all about, and there’s no way in hell I need to justify my work habits to a rookie like you.”

Maggie wisely ignored the jab, and we walked over to join Riggins. Doyle continued to lean against the car, his eyes focused tightly on Maggie’s butt as we
passed him. I asked Bob what he had, and he sighed. “Not much yet.”

Riggins introduced us to Devon Smith, the small black man who’d discovered the body. Smith stood nervously by a shopping cart that he or someone else had liberated from a Basha’s supermarket, and which apparently contained all of his earthly possessions. A garbage bag tied to the side of the cart appeared to be about half full of aluminum cans and plastic bottles. Although the temperature was now well up into the seventies, Smith was wearing a blue watch cap, jeans, and a jacket over what appeared to be two or three shirts. He was missing the majority of his teeth, but he appeared to be sane and sober.

Maggie and I acknowledged the introduction, and Riggins said, “Mr. Smith found the body about ninety minutes ago. He checks this Dumpster every other day or so, looking for recyclables. He was last here on Monday about this time, and the Dumpster was only about a quarter full. When he got here this morning, the thing was virtually full, and he found the body about in the middle of the trash. He banged on the back door of one of the shops and told them to call the police.”

Smith listened to Riggins’s summary and nodded his head. “I pulled that tarp open, ‘bout took ten years offa mah damn life. You never seen a man move so fast as me gettin’ outta that thing.”

Smith had nothing else to offer, and so we turned to the ME, Matt Welser, who estimated that Beckman had been dead for forty to sixty hours. “That’s only a rough guess, though,” he cautioned. “The fact that the body was wrapped tightly in that tarp, plus the fact that it’s been sitting in that Dumpster for some time at least, will raise hell with our effort to determine the precise time of death. But once we get him into the morgue, I’ll be able to pin it down a bit more closely for you.”

“Any thoughts on the cause of death yet?” I asked.

“No, not yet,” he replied. “There’s no obvious signs of any trauma—no gunshot wounds, stab wounds, blows to the head, or anything like that. So for the moment, at least, your guess is as good as mine.”

Welser signaled the ambulance attendants that they could go ahead and remove the body, and I walked over to Gary Barnett, the lead tech. Talking around the two sticks of gum that substituted for his Marlboros while he was working a crime scene, he said, “The old man who found the body had rearranged the garbage that was on top of it, but we’ve separated it out and sorted through it.

“We’ll be talking to the storekeepers once we’ve finished, but on the basis of what we’ve seen so far, it looks like all the garbage that was on top of the body went in starting yesterday morning. The stuff immediately under the body went in late Monday afternoon. So judging by that, it would appear that the body was put into the Dumpster sometime Monday evening.”

“That fits with what we’ve got so far,” Maggie sighed. “Beckman was last seen about eleven o’clock on Monday morning. We’re assuming that McClain grabbed him as he was leaving the ophthalmologist’s office, so he must’ve killed him sometime that afternoon or early evening, then dumped him here that night.”

“That’s what it looks like to us,” Barnett agreed. “If we find any reason to think otherwise, I’ll let you know.”

We spent the next couple of hours interviewing the staffs of the stores leasing space in the strip mall where the Dumpster was located, but we learned nothing that was of any help. Only one of the stores stayed open as late as eight o’clock, and no one reported seeing or hearing any abnormal activity in the alley two nights earlier. None of the people we interviewed recognized the photo of Carl McClain, save for having
seen it on the news, and none of them remembered seeing a black van in the neighborhood on the night in question.

The alley behind the strip mall butted up against a residential area, and an eight-foot-high cinder-block wall separated the commercial area from the houses. In an effort to cover all the bases, we interviewed the residents who lived immediately on the other side of the wall, but none of them was able to be of any help either. By three o’clock in the afternoon, we were back in the office, no closer to finding Carl McClain than we’d been first thing in the morning.

While serving on the jury that had convicted Carl McClain, Larry Cullen had made his living selling Chevys. In the seventeen years since, he’d graduated to Cadillacs, and he was now the assistant sales manager at a dealership located in the giant luxury-auto mall on North Scottsdale Road, out near the 101.

Cullen had been more than a little unnerved when detectives Pierce and Chickris dropped by the dealership on Tuesday to tell him that McClain had apparently killed two of the other jurors who’d voted to convict him and that he might have Cullen in his sights as well. The detectives suggested that Cullen think about taking a short vacation. But what with a huge new mortgage, plus the fact that he was paying alimony to two ex-wives, Cullen could hardly afford to take his scheduled one and a half days a week off, let alone think about going on any damn vacation.

He’d asked Pierce and Chickris if the police couldn’t
provide him with some sort of protection until they managed to corral McClain, but the detectives explained that, regrettably, that wouldn’t be possible. They urged Cullen to be alert to anyone who might be taking an undue interest in his activities, told him to be careful about opening his door to strangers, and wished him good luck.

At two o’clock on Wednesday afternoon, Cullen was sitting at his desk at the dealership, thinking about Carl McClain, when the receptionist buzzed his phone and told him that a customer was asking to see him. Cullen slipped into his sport coat and walked out to the showroom floor. The receptionist pointed him at a tall, well-built man who was examining the sticker in the window of an Escalade.

The customer was wearing sunglasses and a blue blazer over a polo shirt and a pair of gray slacks. A thin mustache echoed the color of his longish gray hair, and Cullen judged the guy to be somewhere in his late forties or early fifties. As Cullen approached, the man turned and extended his hand.

“Mr. Cullen, how are you, sir?”

Cullen couldn’t place the guy, but flashed him a well-practiced smile and shook his hand.

“You don’t remember me, do you?” the man asked.

“I’m sorry, I don’t,” Cullen admitted. “Your face is very familiar, though. I know that we’ve met.”

“Don’t worry about it,” the man said, waving it off. “It’s been a while, and I know that in your position you must meet scores of new people all the time. Believe me, I could never remember them all. I’m Dave Lewis. You sold me a Buick four years ago, back when you were still working at the place down on Camelback Road.”

“Of course,” Cullen said brightly. “I remember now. How are you, Dave?”

“Fine,” the man replied. “But I’m in the market for a new car, and I was thinking about moving up to an
STS. I heard that you were up here now, and so I thought I’d come in and see what sort of a deal you might be able to make me.”

“Great,” Cullen replied, positively beaming. “I really appreciate your thinking of me, Dave. Will you be trading in the Buick?”

The prospect shook his head. “No, Larry, I won’t. My youngest daughter is off at college now and she’s moving out of the dorm and into an apartment. I’m passing the Buick along to her, which is why I’m in the market. I was hoping maybe you could give me a test drive and then we could talk some numbers.”

“I’d love to,” Cullen insisted. He pointed to a car immediately outside of the showroom window. “Why don’t we take that black one right there? You can put it through its paces and see what you think.”

“That’d be great, Larry,” the customer said, nodding.

Cullen excused himself long enough to get the keys and a set of dealer plates, then led the guy outside and put him in the driver’s seat. Cullen walked around, took the passenger’s seat, and spent a few minutes running through the basic features of the STS. Then he said, “Why don’t we take her out and see how she feels?”

The prospect started the car and eased it through the lot and out onto Scottsdale Road. “If it’s okay with you, Larry,” he said, “why don’t we take it down the 101 a bit and then make a loop back?”

“That’d be fine,” Cullen assured him.

A half mile north of the dealership, the customer turned east onto the 101 and merged into traffic at eighty miles per hour. He complimented the Caddy’s acceleration and handling, and Cullen reiterated his earlier observation that the STS was a great road car. He also reminded the prospect that, regrettably, the city of Scottsdale had installed photo radar equipment along this section of the 101 that would trap anyone
going more than ten miles an hour over the posted 65 mph speed limit.

The man sighed heavily and backed off to just under seventy-five, muttering about the approach of the total police state in which no one would ever be able to enjoy a moment of privacy again.

“Amen to that.” Cullen nodded sympathetically.

The customer took the Pima Road exit and headed south, apparently looking for a through street that would take him back in the general direction of the dealership. Traffic on Pima was relatively light, and a half mile south of the freeway, the customer turned right onto a side street that had been cut in for a future subdivision.

“Oops, I’m sorry, Dave,” Cullen said, “but this street doesn’t go through.”

“So it doesn’t,” the prospect conceded. “I’ll just turn around up here and head on back.”

A block later, the street dead-ended in front of a large saguaro cactus, and the customer swung the Caddy into a broad turn, heading east again. Twenty yards back up the street, he pulled in behind a gray Ford Taurus that somebody’d left parked out here in the middle of nowhere. Two hundred yards away, traffic moved up and down Pima Road, and overhead a small corporate jet descended in the direction of Scottsdale Airport. Otherwise, the two cars were surrounded by a small patch of desert that was a year away from being Scottsdale’s latest exclusive gated community.

“Is something wrong, Dave?” Cullen asked, suddenly concerned.

“No, not at all, Larry,” the prospect assured him. “In fact, everything’s just about perfect.” The man reached into the left pocket of his blazer and came out with a small pistol.

“What the hell is this?” Cullen blustered. “Are you planning to steal this car?”

“You should be so lucky, Larry,” the man laughed.

As Cullen watched, his heart suddenly pounding, the “customer” slowly peeled off his mustache and lifted away the hairpiece he was wearing.

“What the fuck?” Cullen blustered, no longer the eager-beaver salesman.

“What sort of a bullshit artist are you, Larry?” the man asked, as though disappointed. “You never sold me any fuckin’ Buick.”

“McClain?” Cullen asked tentatively, praying desperately that it wasn’t.

“Right you are, Larry,” McClain said, smiling.

Cullen flung open the door of the Caddy and swung his legs out to the ground—as if he thought he could outrun a nine-millimeter bullet. McClain fired once, popping the salesman in the back of the head.

Cullen slumped to the ground outside of the car, and McClain got out and checked to make sure that he was dead. Using a handkerchief, he carefully wiped down all of the surfaces that he’d touched on the Caddy. Then he gently closed the passenger’s-side door, walked ahead to his Taurus, and drove away, leaving Larry Cullen alone in the desert behind him.

Two cyclists discovered Larry Cullen’s body baking in the desert sun beside the STS at four thirty that afternoon. Given that the victim was found within the Scottsdale city limits, the initial investigation fell to the Scottsdale PD. Only when they announced the identity of the victim later that evening did we realize that Carl McClain had apparently settled up with another of the jurors who had sent him to prison.

As the lead investigator for our team, I acted as the liaison with Scottsdale. Their lab sent over the bullet that the ME had recovered from Cullen’s body, and our techs quickly confirmed that the slug had been fired from the same weapon used to kill the other victims
that we were attributing to Carl McClain. Otherwise, McClain had left the Scottsdale detectives no more evidence to work with than he’d left us.

The receptionist at the auto dealership described the customer who’d driven away with Cullen as a well-dressed middle-aged man with gray hair and a thin mustache. Otherwise, she remembered nothing about him and had paid no attention to him once Cullen had come out to the showroom floor to take the man in hand. The Scottsdale crime-scene techs dusted the car and collected a number of fingerprints. But they reported that most of the area around the driver’s seat had been wiped down, and so we assumed that none of the remaining prints would confirm that McClain had actually been in the vehicle.

Counting Beverly Thompson, McClain’s list of victims had now grown to seven, and we were no closer to catching the guy than we’d been the night that Robert Fletcher arrived home from work and discovered his wife’s body. Using every departmental resource we could spare, we continued to track down all of the reported McClain sightings that had been pouring in from all over the Valley ever since we released his prison mug shot. But none of the reports had panned out.

Given all of that, the mood was decidedly somber when Maggie, Elaine, Greg, and I met with the lieutenant, Riggins, and Doyle in the conference room at eight o’clock that night. Maggie had copied our list of McClain’s potential targets onto an erasable board, and as she drew a black line through Larry Cullen’s name, we were left with nine jurors, four witnesses, and the two police detectives—Mike Miller and Ed Quigly—who were still alive.

We’d still been unable to locate three of the jurors and one of the witnesses, all of whom had disappeared from the local records. Those names were circled on
Maggie’s list, and we hoped that if we couldn’t find them, McClain couldn’t either. Also on the list were the names of Amanda and Richard Randolph. Maggie had put a question mark after each of their names, given that we weren’t certain whether McClain intended to target them or not.

We were all frustrated as hell, and the lieutenant was feeling even more heat from the brass and the politicos higher up the food chain. But as a practical matter we were, for the moment at least, powerless. We knew with some certainty who our killer was and we assumed that we understood his motive. Richard Petrovich had worked with the sketch artist to update McClain’s photo, and we’d plastered both McClain’s most recent photo and the new sketches all over the newspapers and the airwaves. The local Silent Witness program had offered a generous reward for information leading to McClain’s arrest. But until someone actually spotted the guy and gave us a chance to grab him, there was little or nothing more that we could do.

The meeting broke up a little after nine. The lieutenant, Maggie, and Chickris all drifted back to their respective offices, leaving Elaine, Riggins, Doyle, and me in the conference room. While the three of them were finishing their coffees, I continued to contemplate the list Maggie had written on the whiteboard, hoping that some inspiration might magically jump out at me.

Standing next to me, Doyle saw me staring at the list and said, “You know, Richardson, if you’d had a
real
partner when all this shit hit the fan, instead of being saddled with Little Miss Affirmative Action, you might not still be sitting here with your thumb up your ass and this McClain guy running circles around you.”

I was simply too damned tired and frustrated to argue with the stupid shit, but I turned, looked up at him, and said, “What—you mean a real partner like
you, maybe? Christ, Doyle, if you were responsible for this case, we still wouldn’t have the slightest damn clue what was going on here, and probably never would. As for McClinton—hell, she’s only been in the squad for seven months and already she’s four times the homicide detective you ever were or ever will be.”

“Well, naturally you would say that,” he sneered. “Tell me, Richardson—are you even gonna wait for them to take your old lady off life support before you take a shot at McClinton? Or are you banging her already?”

I was out of the chair before I could even stop to think, and an instant later my right fist smashed into Doyle’s face. He dropped to the floor, hemorrhaging blood from his nose. After a couple of moments, he shook his head as if trying to clear the cobwebs and stammered, “What the fuck?”

I stepped over him, still seething, and said, “Listen, you contemptible son of a bitch. If you
ever
say anything like that to me again, I’ll beat you within an inch of your worthless fuckin’ life. And if you’re man enough to want to do anything about this, we can go down to the parking lot right now.”

Stunned, Chickris, Pierce, and Riggins stood frozen in place, looking back and forth from Doyle to me and back to Doyle again. Doyle made no effort to get up off the floor, and finally Elaine moved over, took me gently by the elbow, and guided me out of the room. “It’d probably be a good idea for you to go on home now, Sean,” she said. “Riggins, Chickie, and I will clean up the mess.”