"Q" is for Quarry (19 page)

“You know the problem with you, Frankie?”

“What’s that, Lieutenant? I’m sure you’ll spell it out in great detail.”

“You may be righteous today, but back then you didn’t know enough to keep your big mouth shut.”

“Come on. What
is
this?”

“I told you. We have an unsolved homicide with circumstances similar to Cathy Lee’s.”

“Yeah, well, I can’t help you there. I don’t know jack about that. You want anything else, you can talk to my attorney.”

“And who’s that?”

“Haven’t hired one yet, but I’ll let you know. Where’s this horseshit coming from, or is that classified?”

“We got somebody willing to put the ju-ju on you.”

“Ju-ju, my ass. What have you got, some ex-con having lunch on my expense account? I didn’t kill the chick. You’re full of shit.”

“That’s not what our witness says. He says you bragged about it afterward.”

“You’re blowin’ smoke and you know it. You had anything on me, you’d’ve showed up with a warrant instead of this hokey song-and-dance routine.”

Dolan shook his head. “I don’t know, Frankie. I figure you had a hard-on for the girl and when she wouldn’t put out, you lost control of yourself.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” Frankie made a gesture like he was whacking off.

“Why don’t you own up to it? You could really help us out.

Show your heart’s in the right place now that you’ve turned over this new leaf.”

Frankie smiled, shaking his head in disbelief. “You think I’d be dumb enough to sit here and confess? To what? You got nothing on me. I don’t even know who the fuck you’re talking about.”

“I’m not here to hassle you.”

“Good, because I’m trying not to lose my cool. You want a urine sample, I’ll piss in a cup. You want to search the place, have at it. Whatever it is, just be quick about it. Otherwise we’re done. Pull the door shut behind you on your way out.” He slid the mask down over his eyes and turned his back to us.

“Well, that was unproductive,” I said when the two of us were back in the car again.

“I wanted you to have a look at him. It’s always best if you know the players firsthand. Besides, it’s good to let him sweat a bit, wondering what we have.”

“That won’t take long. We don’t have anything, do we?”

“No, but he doesn’t know that.”

Dolan was going to go back over to St. Terry’s as soon as he dropped me at the office, but when we pulled onto Caballeria Lane, we caught sight of Stacey sitting on the curb in front of my place, a brown paper bag at his feet. He wore his red knit watch cap, short-sleeve shirt, chinos, and shoes with no socks. His perforated plastic hospital bracelet still encircled his wrist. His arms were bone thin, his skin translucent, like the pale tissue overlay on a wedding invitation. Dolan parked two cars away. While we walked back to Stacey, Dolan took out a pack of cigarettes and his matches and paused to light up. He tossed the match aside and drew deeply, sucking smoke down as though he were using an asthma inhaler. “How’d you get here?”

Stacey shaded his eyes, looking sideways at him. “Called a cab. They do that. Pay ’em money, those guys’ll take you anyplace you want.”

“I didn’t think you’d be released until they ran more tests.”

Stacey waved that notion aside. “Hell with ’em. I got tired of waiting for the doc to pull a thumb out. I packed my things and took a hike. I don’t have time for nonsense. It won’t change anything. Meantime, I got a call from Mandel and he says come on out. He’s pulled the Jane Doe evidence and we can take a look. Speaking of which, what’d our friend Frankie have to say for himself?”

“Don’t change the subject. How’d the biopsy go?”

“Piece of cake. They’ve stuck me so often, it’s like a bug bite.”

“How soon do you get the results?”

Stacey’s hand was so small he managed to ease his bracelet off without breaking it. “Day or so. Who cares? We got work to do. Now give me a hand here. My age, you get down, you can’t get up again. Tell me about Frankie.”

“He’s completely innocent.”

“Of course. We should have known.”

Dolan extended a hand and pulled Stacey to his feet. He seemed to totter fleetingly and then he regained his balance. Dolan and I exchanged one of those looks, which Stacey caught.

“Quit that. I’m fine. I’m tired is all. I’ve been in bed too long.”

The Santa Teresa County Sheriff’s Department is located near Colgate off El Solano Road in the same general vicinity as the county dump. I guess land out there is cheap and there’s room to expand. Behind the building, I could see rows of black-and-whites, county cars, and assorted personal vehicles belonging to the Sheriff’s Department personnel. The one-story structure is a creamy beige and white stucco, with a series of arches across the front. The main jail is just across the road. We parked and went in the front entrance, letting Stacey lead the way. I could tell he missed working. Just the sight of the facility seemed to give him strength.

To the left, in the tiny lobby, was a counter with a glass partition, probably bulletproof, though it was impossible to tell. The civilian clerk, a woman, looked up when we came in. Stacey said, “We’re here to see Sergeant Detective Joe Mandel.”

She pushed a clipboard across the counter. “He said he’d be right out.”

All three of us signed in and she gave us each a visitor’s badge, which we fastened onto our shirts. There were three chairs available, but we elected to stand. Through the locked glass door, I could already see someone approaching from the far end of the corridor. He pushed the door open from his side and let us in. There were the usual introductions and a round of handshakes. From the flicker in his eyes, I could tell he recognized me from our meeting in his kitchen, but if he thought it odd, he never let on. He knew Stacey well, but I gathered he hadn’t seen Dolan for many years. They exchanged pleasantries as he held the door open and let us into the corridor.

We turned left and followed him down a long hallway, a dogrun of beige carpeting and beige walls, with offices opening up on either side. Joe introduced us to Sergeant Steve Rhineberger, in the Sheriff’s forensics unit. He unlocked a door and showed us into a room that looked like a tract-housing kitchen without the stove. There were counters on three sides and some sort of ventilation apparatus at the rear. A large battered-looking brown paper bag sat on the table in the center of the room.

Sergeant Rhineberger opened a lower cabinet door, tore off a length of white paper from a wide roll inside, and took out a pair of disposable latex gloves. “I asked the coroner’s office to send over the mandible and maxilla. I thought you might want to look at those, too.”

He placed the sheet of protective paper on the table, pulled on the gloves, and then broke the seal on the evidence bag. He removed the folded tarp and various articles of clothing, which he spread on the paper. Mandel removed a handful of disposable gloves from the cardboard dispenser on the counter. He passed a pair to Stacey, a pair to Dolan, and a pair to me. The guys had been chatting about department business, but we all fell into a respectful silence. Eighteen years after the violence of her death, there was only the crackle of white paper and the snap of gloves.

It was strange to look at items I’d only seen before in faded photographs. The shirt and daisy-print pants had been cut from the body and the garments seemed sprawling and misshapenlaid out across the tabletop. The fabric was soiled and moist, as though permeated with damp sand. The bloodstains resembled nothing so much as smudges of rust. Her sandals were leather, decorated with brass buckles linked with leather bands. A narrow thong would have separated her big toe from the remaining toes on each foot. The sandals looked new except for faint stains on the sole where her heel and the ball of her bare foot had left indelible marks.

Rhineberger opened a container and removed Jane Doe’s upper and lower jawbones. Her teeth showed extensive dental work, sixteen to eighteen amalgam fillings. When he set the maxilla on the mandible, matching the grooves and worn surfaces where they met, we could see the extent of her overbite and the crooked eyetooth on the left. “Can’t believe nobody recognized her by the description of the teeth. Charlie says it was all probably done a year or two before she died. You can see the wisdom teeth haven’t erupted yet. He says she probably wasn’t eighteen.” He placed the bones back in the container, leaving the lid off.

Her personal effects scarcely covered the tabletop. This was all that was left of her, the entire sum. I experienced a sense of puzzlement that any life could be reduced to such humble remnants. Surely, she’d expected far more from the world—love, marriage, children, perhaps—at the very least a valued presence among her friends and family. Her remains were buried now in a grave without a headstone, its location marked by lot number in the cemetery ledger. In spite of that, she seemed curiously real, given the sparse data we had. I’d seen the black-and-white photograph of her where she lay on the August-dry grass, her face obscured by the angle of her body and the intervening shrubs. Her midriff, a portion of her forearm, and a section of her calf were all that were visible from the camera’s perspective, her flesh swollen, mottled by decomposition as though bruised.

I picked up the plastic bag that contained a lock of her hair, which looked clean and silky, a muted shade of blond. A second plastic bag held two delicate earrings, simple loops of gold wire. The only remaining evidence of the murder itself was the length of thin cable, encased in white plastic, with which her wrists had been bound. The tarp was made of a medium-weight canvas, the seams stitched in red, with metal grommets inserted at regular intervals. It looked like standard-issue—a painter’s drop cloth, or a cover used to shield a cord of firewood from rain. In one corner, there was a red speck that looked like a ladybug or a spot of blood, but on closer inspection I realized it was simply a small square of red stitches, where the thread had been secured at the end of the row. From these few tokens, we were hoping to reconstruct not only her identity but that of her killer. How could she be so compelling that eighteen years later the five of us would assemble like this in her behalf?

Belatedly, I tuned into the conversation. Stacey was laying out our progress to date. Apparently, Mandel had gone back and reviewed the file himself. Like Stacey and Dolan, who’d actually discovered the body, he’d been involved from the first. He was saying, “Too bad Crouse is gone. There aren’t many of us left.”

Dolan said, “What happened to Crouse?”

“He sold his house and moved his family to Oregon. Now he’s chief of police in some little podunk town up there. Last I heard he was bored to tears, but he can’t afford to come back with housing prices here. Keith Baldwin and Oscar Wallen are both retired and Mel Galloway’s dead. Nonetheless, it’s nice to have a chance to revisit this case. You have to think after all these years, we might shake something loose.”

Stacey said, “What’s your take on it? You see anything we missed?”

Mandel thought about that briefly. “I guess the only thing I’d be curious about is this Iona Mathis, the gal Frankie Miracle was married to. She might know something if you can track her down. I hear she came back and sat through the trial with him. She damn near married the guy again she felt so sorry for him.”

Stacey made a pained face. “I don’t get the appeal. I can’t even manage to get married once, and I’m a law-abiding citizen. You have an address on her?”

“No, but I can get you one.”

Dolan dropped me off at the office before he took Stacey home. Stacey’s energy was flagging and, in truth, mine was, too. As I unlocked the door, I noticed a Mercedes station wagon parked in the narrow driveway that separated my bungalow from the next in line. The woman in the driver’s seat was working on a piece of needlepoint, the roll of canvas resting awkwardly against the steering wheel. She looked up at me and waved, then set her canvas on the seat beside her. She got out of the car, reached into the rear seat, and pulled out a shopping bag, saying, “I was beginning to think I’d missed you.”

I waited while she locked the car door and headed in my direction. She looked familiar, but I couldn’t remember how I knew her. I placed her in her early sixties, trim, attractive, nicely dressed in a lightweight red wool suit. Her hair was medium length, tinted a deep auburn shade and brushed loosely off her face.

I hesitated on the threshold, still scrambling through my bag of memories, trying to connect a name to the face. Who was this? A neighbor? A former client? “Are you waiting for me?”

She smiled, showing a row of square even teeth. Before she managed to say another word, I felt a silvery note of fear pluck at the base of my spine, like a sandcrab picking its way erratically across guitar strings. She held out her hand. “I’m your aunt Susanna.”

I shook hands with her, trying to compute the term “aunt.” I knew the meaning but couldn’t for the life of me figure out what to do with it.

“Tasha’s mother,” she added. “I hope I didn’t catch you at bad time. She did tell you I’d stop by, didn’t she? How embarrassing for me if she forgot.”

“Sure. Of course. Sorry I drew a blank, but I was thinking of something else. Come on in and have a seat. You want coffee? I was just about to put a pot on for myself.”

She followed me through the front door and into the inner office. “Thank you. I’d like that.” She set down her shopping bag and took a seat in the client chair across the desk. Her eyes were hazel like mine. The air around her was scented with cologne. The fragrance suggested citrus—grapefruit, perhaps—very fresh and light.

“How do you take it?”

“I’m not fussy. Black’s fine.”

“It’ll take me a minute.”

“I’m in no hurry,” she said.

I excused myself and went through the outer office and into the kitchen, where I leaned against the counter and tried to catch my breath. I’d been faking composure since the moment she’d announced herself. This was my aunt, my mother’s sister. I was acquainted with Tasha and Liza, the oldest and youngest of Susanna’s three daughters. The third girl, Pam, I’d heard about but never met. My introduction to the family had been thoroughly disconcerting as I’d known nothing of their existence. A fluke in an investigation three years previously had turned them up like a nest of spiders in the pocket of an old overcoat. In the absence of my parents and Aunt Gin, Susanna had to be one of my closest living relatives.