When the Devil Doesn't Show: A Mystery (26 page)

Gil stopped for a second, but then opened the door and walked out.

*   *   *

Gil stood in the hallway holding his two boxes of fake evidence and looked at Joe.

“We need to let Gonzales go,” Joe said. “He was just doing what any of us would have done when threatened by a beaten man tied to a chair. It was clearly self-defense.”

When Gil didn’t react, Joe sighed and said, “Fine, I will go put the word out to patrol to be on the lookout for the Honda Civic Johnny Rivera borrowed.” Joe took the boxes from Gil, who went back into the room with Gonzales.

“Tell me how you met Hoffman,” Gil said, sitting down.

“I just want to make sure that nothing I tell you will come back on me…”

Gil stood up and started to walk out the door. His hand was on the knob when Gonzales said behind him, “Okay, okay. Just tell the lawyers that I am helping you.”

“How did you meet Hoffman?” Gil asked again, sitting down.

“It was just like you said,” Gonzales said, wiping his nose. “I went over to Johnny’s place, you know, just to hang out.” The pitch of his voice was a little too high, which probably meant “hang out” was code for something illegal, such as buying drugs. “I was just sitting on a couch when this guy comes out from the back room and says his name is Ty. We have some beers and I say how I need some cash. Ty says he knows of this ripe house where the man just has money laying around. He said it would be a quick in-and-out. So we get in Johnny’s car. On the way, Ty says we need a fourth person, so we pick up Lupe at her place.”

“Johnny was Lupe’s dealer, so that’s how he met her and Ty?” Gil asked.

“Yeah,” Gonzales said. “I guess. So we pull up to this big-ass house and Ty grabs this baseball bat that Johnny kept in the backseat. He goes right up to the door, turns the knob like he knew it would be open, and yells, ‘I’m home.’ This guy comes out in his bathrobe and Ty just swings at his head with the bat. And then there’s blood everywhere, and he drags the guy over to this chair in the dining room and just starts tying him up with duct tape then cutting on him with a box cutter. I’m freaking out, and I want to get the hell out of there—”

“Hold on, there was one guy at the house, not two?” Gil asked, knowing that the house Gonzales was talking about had to be Price and Jacobson’s.

“Nah, just the one guy,” Gonzales said.

“What day was this?”

“I dunno,” he said. “The first day.”

“On December nineteenth?” Gil asked. “And where was this house?”

“In Tesuque.”

That meant that the first house hit wasn’t Price and Jacobson’s. It was Mazer’s.

“What happened next?”

“Ty was like ‘This is my house. Make yourself at home.’ Then he turns a TV on and sits on the couch and starts watching a game. We drank the guy’s wine and had some leftovers. I passed out. I don’t think Ty slept at all. Next thing, it was morning and Ty says we have another job to do.”

“What happened to the man in the chair?”

“I don’t know. The chair was still there in the dining room, but he was gone. I didn’t see him. I just followed the guys outside.”

“What happened next?”

“Ty gets in the man’s SUV and hands this paper to Johnny and tells him we’re going to the house owned by these gay guys because they’ll have better stuff than most people.”

“What was on the paper?”

“It was a list of names and, like, their addresses and what kind of stuff they had.” Gil nodded. So it was Mazer who had given the home invasion crew his co-workers’ addresses. But given the circumstances, he’d probably thought he had little choice. “What else can you tell me about the list?” Gil asked.

“It was a printout, like from a computer,” Gonzales said. “There was, I think, like, five names on it.”

“Five names? Do you remember any of them?” The crew had already hit three houses on the list, not including Mazer’s. They had to find out where the other residences were in case Hoffman and Escobar decided to keep at it.

“No. I didn’t really see it. I just remember Ty saying that doing five houses was good, that it was enough to have some fun and not so much that we’d get caught.”

“What happened when you got to the next house?”

“The same thing,” he said. “Ty goes and busts down the door and ties the guys up.”

“What did you do?”

“Nothing, really,” he said. “We just hung around and watched TV and, you know, I took a nap and Lupe and Johnny were playing pool. They had a really nice Xbox.”

“What happened to Johnny?” Gil asked.

“Ty was going kind of crazy,” he said. “It was bad … worse than before. Ty—we were just sitting there, and he gets up and starts cutting on the gay guys, but not like before, with the other guy. He’s cutting one guy’s junk, and there’s all this blood and screaming.” Gonzales shifted in his chair, then crossed his arms over each other in an act of self-comfort. “I just had never seen anybody do anything like that. And Johnny—he couldn’t take it. He said he was leaving, and Ty hits him from behind, drags him to a back room, and ties him to the ceiling.”

“What did Ty do to Johnny?”

“I can’t—he made us cut on him … not for any reason; just to make a point,” he said. “Johnny—he and I were tight…” His eyes started to tear up, his face lined in grief.

Gil interrupted, asking, “What happened next?” He couldn’t let Gonzales dwell on his friend. He needed to hear the rest of the story. Gonzales didn’t answer right way, wiping a tear out of his eye. “What happened next?” Gil asked again, more firmly, less caring.

“Ty went back out into the living room,” Gonzales said, after a moment. “Seconds later, I hear two shots. And I realize he’s shot the gay guys. Then Ty comes back in the bedroom, takes a bottle of vodka, and dumps it on Johnny and lights him on fire. He’s on fire in front of me—holy shit, his screams … and that smell.” Gonzales stopped, shaking his head, tears in his eyes. “But then the fire went out, and Johnny was still alive and just kind of moaning. So Ty goes out to the garage and comes back with gasoline and lights him on fire again. He went up so fast, and then the ceiling caught fire, so we booked it out of there.”

“Where’d you go?”

“Back to the first house.”

“You went back to the house in Tesuque?”

“Yeah,” he said. “We kind of just hung out there all week. Last time I saw Ty, he was still there.”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

December 24

Lucy had already had her turn in front of the judge, and was watching the other women in her cell block take their turns, when a corrections officer came over to her and said, “Your bail has been posted.”

“Really?” she said. “By whom?” But the corrections officer said he didn’t know. He led her out of her cell and over to the locker where she had stored her clothes and purse. As she got changed, she wondered who her savior was. Most likely Tommy, since she had been pretty clear with Joe that she didn’t want any help. She tied her shoes and headed toward the front of the building, collecting her court appearance paperwork along the way. She went through the heavy metal door and into the glass-and-tile lobby.

And there was Nathan.

*   *   *

Joe was waiting for Gil when he left the interview room. With him was Kristen. Before Gil could thank her for her help, Joe started ranting.

“Those bastards held Brian Mazer for a week,” Joe said, pacing the hallway. “Jesus. That guy will need more than surgery. I’m thinking sessions twice a week with a shrink. We saw what Hoffman did to Price and Jacobson, and he had them for only a day.”

“The best thing we can do for Mazer is find Hoffman,” Gil said.

“Yep,” Joe said. “So I ran down Mazer’s car, thinking that was what Hoffman was driving, since when we saw him he sure as hell wasn’t in no Honda Civic.”

“Let me guess, it’s a dark SUV,” Gil said.

“Yup. A black Lexus RX, and I am embarrassed as hell that I couldn’t remember that. You’d think a Lexus would stick in my mind more.”

“We saw it for only a second.”

Joe continued, “I called the officer we put in front of the house, but he says no one has come in or out. We should send an unmarked unit over to replace him. If Hoffman happens to drive by, I don’t want him to get spooked by a police car.”

“Good idea,” Gil said. “But we really need to know if Hoffman is there or long gone.”

“I say we activate SWAT and let them figure out if he’s there or not,” Joe said as he stopped pacing for the moment.

“Is the Lexus in the driveway?” Kristen said, speaking up for the first time. “Or the Civic?”

“Uh … I’m not sure. Good question,” Joe said. “Let me call the officer who’s been in front of the house.” A minute later, Joe hung up, saying, “Okay, the thing is, the officer can’t see the house from the road. It’s another one of those long driveways like at Price and Jacobson’s house.”

“So, he’s really just watching the front of the property,” Kristen said. She turned to Gil. “We don’t know what’s going on up at the house. I can take my car and go relieve the guy out front. Then I can just go take a walk to go see if the Lexus is even there.”

Joe muttered, “That’s not going to happen.”

She ignored him. “We have to know if Hoffman is in there before SWAT goes in. If they go in and he’s not home we’ve just blown our chance to get him.” SWAT, by necessity, was not known for their stealth. They made a lot of noise when they went into a house, and they left behind a lot of boot prints, broken doors, tire tracks, and shell casings when they cleared out. Hoffman would take off as soon as he saw someone had been there.

“We can just send the officer in front of the house—” Joe started to say, but Kristen interrupted.

“He’s in uniform. If Hoffman sees him, he’ll run. I’m already in street clothes. If Hoffman sees me, I’ll wave and pretend to be a neighbor.” She turned to look at Gil. “I know exactly what kind of suspect we are dealing with.”

He knew why she was stressing her last point. When a police officer got shot on the job, a department would spend countless hours determining if there was a precipitating event or one avoidable reason it happened. In the majority of cases, it came down to one simple thing: officers get shot when they don’t know what they are walking into. Gil could prep the officer sitting in front of the house, telling him about Hoffman and giving him a rundown of the crimes Hoffman had committed, but the truth was Kristen knew better than anyone—better than Gil himself—what Hoffman was capable of. She had seen it as the first arriving officer at the Martin house.

Gil thought for another second before saying, “Our priority has to be finding Hoffman, so Kristen, you can go over there. But you will wear a vest at all times and take every precaution, do you understand?” She nodded. Gil said, “Grab some paper and a pen and come with me.”

Kristen followed Gil into the interview room.

“George,” Gil said. “Officer Valdez here has some paper, and she’ll help you draw a map of the outside of the house in Tesuque. Show her where there are any outside buildings or trees. Then draw a floor plan of the house.” The floor plan would be for SWAT, while the map of the outside would be for Kristen. And they’d print out another map for her, from Google Earth, for comparison, just to be safe.

Gil went back out to where Joe was waiting, looking annoyed.

“Listen,” Gil said to him. “I know you want to be the one going out there and gathering intel. You hate waiting here, but we have to figure out the other two names on that list Mazer gave Hoffman, because if Hoffman isn’t at the house…”

“… He might be at someone else’s house duct-taping them to a chair,” Joe said. “I get it.” There had been seventeen employees in the Primary Structural Biosystems department before Hoffman started his spree. Minus his four victims so far, that made thirteen employees who could possibly be the last two names on the list Mazer had given Hoffman. Joe and Gil had asked patrol cars from the various county and city districts to their keep an eye on those thirteen people, but there was no guarantee how that had panned out. Hoffman might be outside his next victim’s house right now.

Gil looked at his watch. “Mazer will be out of surgery in a few more hours. We can ask him then who else was on the list he gave Hoffman.”

“And when we get into Mazer’s house, we can check his print job history and reprint it,” Joe said.

“That’s good,” Gil said. “It will most likely take Kristen half an hour or so to go over to the house and check about the car. Then we call SWAT.”

“It’ll be at least an hour or hour and a half until we can get in there,” Joe said. He started to pace. They had to find Hoffman.

“What if we call Natalie Martin?” Gil said. “Maybe she can tell us why, out of seventeen co-workers, Mazer put her name on that list.”

*   *   *

Natalie Martin’s phone went to voice mail, so Gil left a message. He was starting to catch Joe’s nervous energy while they waited for Kristen’s call. He left Joe to his pacing in the hallway and went back into the interview room with Gonzales.

“We need to talk about the blood on your shirt,” Gil said. “So what happened?”

“I dunno, I just finally decided to get out of there.”

“What made you decide that?”

“Ty had let Lupe go home to see her family, but he wouldn’t let me leave,” he said. “That made me nervous, like maybe he’s not letting me leave because he wants to kill me. I just made a plan to get to the front door, open it, and get the hell out.”

“What went wrong?”

“The guy from the chair started screaming.”

“He wanted you to take him with you?”

“No, he starts screaming at the top of his lungs for Ty to come.”

“He was yelling for Ty to come and stop you?”

“Yeah,” Gonzales said. “I went for the front door, but Ty came running out with the baseball bat, so I tried to get to the back door, and the guy in the chair, he tackled me.”

“He wasn’t tied to the chair?”

“No. Ty had let him go a while before. He grabbed at me, and he had the gun in his hand and we fought for it.”

“
He
had the gun? Not Ty?”

“No,
he
had it. I grabbed it from him, and Ty swung the bat at me, and I took a shot, but I must have missed and hit the guy instead. I didn’t see what happened. I got to the back door and I just hauled ass. Even when I hit the snow, I just kept going.”