No Place to Die (9 page)

An hour later, we were standing outside of a Circle K convenience store as Dick Holmes, the evidence tech, dusted the area around the phone that was attached to the outside wall of the building. “I sure as hell hope you don’t have your expectations set too high here,” Holmes said. “You know I’m going to raise about forty different sets of prints from this phone, and the chances that we’ll be able to identify any of them are around one in a million.”

“We know that,” Maggie countered. “But even at those odds, it’s worth the effort.”

I poked Maggie’s arm with my elbow and directed her attention to a video camera that was mounted on a light pole in the parking lot and aimed at the front of the store. She looked up at the camera and said, “We couldn’t get that lucky, Sean. Keep your fingers crossed.”

Leaving Holmes to go about his business, we walked
into the store and asked to see the person in charge. A Middle Eastern man of indeterminate age was on duty behind the counter and indicated that he was the manager. We flashed our shields and asked him how long he kept the tapes from his video surveillance cameras.

“We keep them for a week,” he said, with no accent whatsoever. “Then we use them over again.”

“Great,” I replied. Pointing back at the camera outside, I said, “We’d like to see the tapes from that camera for last Thursday night.”

“Should I ask if you have a warrant?”

“No, you shouldn’t,” I replied. “You should just cooperate like a good citizen and volunteer the tapes. And you should probably also stop wasting so much time watching mindless cop shows on television.”

The guy shrugged. “Okay. Watch the counter for a minute. If a customer should accidentally wander in here, tell him I’ll be right back.”

With that, he locked the register, stepped out from behind the counter, and disappeared through a door at the back of the store. A couple of minutes later, he returned and handed me three videotapes. “These are the tapes from all three cameras from six
P.M.
last Thursday night to six
A.M.
on Friday morning. But I don’t know what you think you’re going to see on them. If I can trust my night manager—which I don’t—we sold about six hundred dollars’ worth of gas and miscellaneous crap that night, and nothing out of the ordinary happened at all.”

We wrote the manager a receipt and promised to see that the videos were returned when we finished with them. The guy handed them over and shot me a look, suggesting that he had little more confidence in that assurance than he apparently did in his night manager.

Back at the department, Maggie grabbed a cup of coffee. I dug a Coke out of the small refrigerator in my
office, and we settled into the conference room to look at the tapes, beginning with the one from the outside camera.

The call to the furniture store had been made at 8:32 on Thursday evening. A running clock was embedded in the videotape and I fast-forwarded to 8:25. We started watching the tape at regular speed, and just as the clock hit 8:31, a man in a battered cowboy hat walked directly under the camera’s position and stepped up to the phone. He was wearing jeans and a jacket with the collar turned up, but in the black-and-white video, it was impossible to determine the jacket’s color, which looked to be somewhere in the neighborhood between black and navy blue.

With his back to the camera, the guy picked up the receiver and plugged two coins into the phone. He dialed a number, then lifted the receiver to his left ear.

For the next two minutes and twelve seconds, Maggie and I stared intently at the screen, willing the man at the phone to turn, even slightly, so as to expose his face to the camera. Ninety seconds into the call, Maggie pounded a fist onto the table. “Come on, you asshole. Give us a look!”

Despite Maggie’s encouragement, the guy remained stock-still with his head down, looking in the direction of his feet. He then hung up the phone, pulled a handkerchief from the right-hand pocket of his jacket, and wiped down the receiver. Still using the handkerchief, he returned the receiver to the phone, then turned and walked away from the phone box, staring intently at the ground ahead of him.

Through it all, the guy never once looked in the direction of the camera to allow us even a partial glimpse of his face. The cowboy hat was pulled down low over his eyes, and as he walked away from the phone, we couldn’t even see his chin, let alone any other distinguishing features. Without much hope, Maggie and I
looked at the other two tapes, but neither of them allowed a view of the phone from inside the store, and so in the end all we knew was that our caller—and prospective killer—was a white male who appeared to be of average height. The bulky jacket he was wearing made it impossible to make an educated guess at his weight; we could tell only that the guy was not obese.

We ran the tape again, in slow motion this time, but saw nothing more than we had at regular speed. As I rewound the tape, Maggie shook her head and said, “Shit! Is this guy that good, or is he just fuckin’ lucky? We’ve got the bastard right there in front of our eyes, but he gives us absolutely nothing. He could be any one of a million guys.”

“I know, Maggs,” I sighed. “Jesus, you’d think we could catch one decent break in this goddamn case. But we’re not gonna get him from this.”

I called Dick Holmes and told him that he needn’t bother sorting through and trying to identify the prints he’d gotten from the phone. Maggie and I then decided to chase down a couple of leads that had come in on the tip line. We were walking down the hall, headed for the stairs, when Chris Doyle sauntered out of the conference room with a cup of coffee in one hand and a half-eaten sandwich in the other. He grinned at Maggie and pointed his sandwich in the direction of her T-shirt. “Used to a terrific band,” he said. “But the last CD was a pale imitation of their earlier work.”

Maggie shook her head. “Let me guess, Doyle. The music critic for
Rolling Stone
just died and Jann Wenner was so desperate that he gave
you
the job?”

Doyle laughed. “Believe me, sweetheart, he could do a helluva lot worse.” Turning to me, he said, “Where are you whiz kids off to?”

“We’re checking out a couple of tips from the hotline,” I replied. “How are your interviews coming?”

Doyle took a bite out of the sandwich. Trying to talk around the food in his mouth, he said, “I’m still talking to Collins’s friends and neighbors, but none of them knows a fuckin’ thing. I’m just spinning my wheels.”

“Well, stay on it,” I said. “This case is going to break somewhere, and you never know who’s going to have the key piece of information that will finally send us in the right direction.”

“Oh, don’t worry about me,” he replied sarcastically. “Once I’ve finished my lunch, I’ll be back out there giving this case a hundred and twenty percent of my time and effort, just like always.”

Turning to go, he pointed back at Maggie’s chest. “The T-shirt looks great on you, babe. And if you’d like to come over and listen to my record collection some night, just say the word.”

Maggie rolled her eyes and gave her best impression of a sweet smile. “Your
record
collection? Jesus, Chris, thanks for the offer, but I’d hate to have to ask you to take your hand off your little tiny dick long enough to crank the handle on the Victrola.”

Neither of the tips that Maggie and I were chasing panned out, and at the end of the day we were still no closer to finding our killer than we’d been twelve hours earlier. Unfortunately, none of the other members of the team had enjoyed any better luck than we had, and a little after seven
P.M.,
Maggie and I called it a day, hoping that a good night’s sleep might leave us in better shape to get at it again in the morning.

Once home after visiting Julie, I sorted through the mail and changed into a sweatshirt and jeans. Then I poured a couple fingers of Jameson into an old-fashioned glass and went out to the patio that opened off the kitchen and living room. I dropped into a chair and dragged another around to face me. Propping my
feet up in the second chair, I took a large sip of the whiskey.

Although the temperature had dropped into the middle fifties, it had been another gorgeous day with bright blue skies and the daytime temperature reaching into the middle seventies. However, as was so often the case lately, my mood contrasted sharply with the beautiful weather. It struck me—not for the first time—that these days I probably would have been much more at home psychologically in some dingy northern city where the snow, the cold, and the gray gloomy skies would better match my spirit.

From my days as a rookie cop I’d been dismayed by the violence that people so casually inflict on each other, and the responsibilities of the job had always weighed heavily on me. But they’d felt especially burdensome during the last few months when I’d been without Julie’s presence to serve as a counterbalancing force.

On my third day as a member of the department, I’d been the first patrolman to respond to the homicide of a nineteen-year-old woman named Maria Gonzalez, who’d been bound, gagged, raped, and then knifed to death in the tiny apartment she had shared with her mother and her younger sister. The sister, Rosalita, was twelve. She’d discovered the crime when she came home from school, and called 911, screaming and crying into the phone. I’d been on the scene only long enough to survey the situation and call for backup, when the mother arrived home from work and walked in on the tragedy.

Even though I was eight inches taller and at least sixty pounds heavier than Mrs. Gonzalez, I could barely restrain her as she attempted to reach her daughter. Desperate to safeguard whatever evidence might remain in the bedroom where the assault had occurred,
I wrestled her away from the door. She struggled tenaciously against me, scratching, biting, and kicking, all the while pleading desperately with God to undo the catastrophe, until finally the paramedics arrived and gave her an injection that mercifully put her to sleep.

Two days later, homicide detectives arrested the twenty-five-year-old son of a woman who lived across the hall from the victim, and charged him with the crime. The man had been out on parole for three months, and had two prior convictions, one for burglary and another for statutory rape. He’d used a condom in the assault in an apparent effort to avoid leaving any seminal fluids at the scene that might assist the investigators in identifying him. But then, inexplicably, he’d left two bloody fingerprints on the bedroom doorframe that left no doubt as to his identity.

The experience had changed my life. I’d joined the force fresh out of college because I couldn’t afford to go directly to law school. My plan was to work hard, save some money, perhaps take a few night-school law courses, and then ultimately go back to school and complete the degree. But I’d been awed by the tenacity, skill, and reverence with which the lead detective had worked the Gonzalez case. Watching him, I understood, in a way that my academy courses had never conveyed, the critical importance—the sanctity even—of the work that he did.

Within days of the killer’s arrest, I’d abandoned any thoughts of law school and had set my sights on joining the Homicide Unit. I realized, certainly, that there could never be justice for Maria Gonzalez or for her mother and sister. But I also understood more clearly than ever before the fact that someone had to fight for them and for others like them. Someone had to make the effort, however vain it might be, to bring the scales back closer to even.

That was my job now, as it had been for the last
seven years. During that time, I’d worked scores of cases, and friends—often well-meaning but at other times just morbidly curious—asked how anyone could do it. In particular, they wondered how I could avoid being slowly but inevitably consumed by the depravity and the brutality that were central to my every working day.

There was, really, no way to respond. I could try to describe the satisfaction I took in clearing a case. I could talk earnestly about the importance of getting a killer off the streets before he could claim another victim. I could respond glibly that it was a nasty job but that somebody had to do it. But I could never begin to explain the hold that Maria Gonzalez still exercised over me.

Twelve years after the fact, the memory of that afternoon haunts me still. Late at night, deep in my dreams, I see her lying there on the bed in that pitiful apartment, so horribly abused. My heart breaks again as I listen to her mother, sobbing and begging God to bring her daughter back.

I feel Mrs. Gonzalez’s indescribable pain even more sharply now than I did on that terrible day so many years ago. But then, I now understand something myself about the futility of attempting to bargain with God.

Carl McClain spent most of the weekend away from the house, and for that, at least, Beverly was grateful. She was also thankful for the fact that the frequency and intensity of his sexual assaults had diminished, at least for the time being.

After viciously raping her three times within hours of her abduction, McClain had taken her only once or twice a night in the time since. And after the first night, he had not been nearly as brutal with her. As a result, the physical damage she suffered as a result of the attacks had declined somewhat.

The psychological damage was another matter altogether.

Save for her outburst during the pizza “dinner” on the second evening, Beverly had spent the first three and a half days of her ordeal in a virtual stupor. The shock of the abduction, her confinement, and the repeated sexual assaults was exceeded only by the trauma of having watched David die so violently in front of her. And the sudden onslaught of these horrors had literally overwhelmed her, shutting down her senses as though some psychological circuit breaker was protectively tripping switches in a desperate effort to head off a total emotional and intellectual meltdown.

She finally hit rock bottom around midmorning on Sunday. McClain left the house a little before eight, telling her that he would be gone until late that evening. The next thing Beverly knew, it was ten thirty. She returned to consciousness to find herself naked and shivering on the bed, even though the temperature in the house had to be somewhere in the midseventies. She realized that she hadn’t been asleep exactly. Rather, she’d been drifting in a state of suspended animation, her eyes open, staring blankly at the door that McClain had closed and locked behind him two and a half hours earlier.

The hopelessness of her situation was suddenly too great to bear, and she burst into tears. Weeping uncontrollably, she crawled across the bed and found her skirt, which had wound up on the floor beside the bed. She pulled the narrow leather belt out of the loops and let the skirt fall back to the floor.

Dragging the cable behind her, she grabbed one of the folding chairs from the card table, carried it into the bathroom, and set it in the shower stall. In her mind’s eye, again she saw David falling to the floor of the garage as if in slow motion.

Shaking and a bit unsteady, she climbed up onto the chair and fed the belt through the buckle, creating a small loop. She tied the end of the belt around the shower-curtain rod and said a silent, desperate prayer that both the belt and the rod would be strong enough. She cinched the knot tight and spread the loop in the belt as wide as it would go. Then she forced the loop over her head and leaned forward slightly, taking the slack out of the loop.

Crying harder now, she thought of her mother and father. And one last time, she thought of David. Beverly did not believe in God or in Heaven, and she had no vain hope of seeing David again in a glorious afterlife of some sort. But she did believe in hell—of this she could offer witness. And death would be a blessed release from its dreadful grip.

She wrapped her hands around the shower rod and pulled herself up, raising her knees and lifting her weight off of the chair. A wave of relief, totally unbidden and completely unexpected, suddenly swept through her. “I love you, David,” she said aloud.

She lowered her right leg, preparing to kick the chair away. But then, as suddenly as the wave of calm had materialized, it receded, only to be followed by a sense of rage and anger that Beverly had never before experienced.

She closed her eyes and swallowed hard. For a few more seconds, she clung to the rod. Then, reluctantly, she set her feet back down on the chair and slowly let her legs take her weight again. “I love you, David,” she whispered.