“So Dwight’s car went missing?”
“Uh... yeah. And the system said he filed the report two days before the vehicle was stolen.”
“I don’t remember us logging that two days ago.” This whole thing got weirder the more I heard about it.
“No, it... uh... happened... uh... in seventy-two.”
There was a long silence. I wanted to laugh because that was the last thing I’d expected her to say. I also needed to ask about a dozen more questions. I tried to condense them into one.
“Tell me everything, without omitting any details.”
She stared into her coffee cup and I got the distinct impression she wasn’t happy to share this information with me, but I still wasn’t entirely certain why.
“I was looking through the Vanderhosen case file,” she began. My jaw clenched but I didn’t say anything. “I noticed that the getaway car was logged in a separate incident from two days earlier when Dwight Reginald reported it missing. Sir. Uh... so I went to ask him.”
“And what did Mr. Reginald say about his forty-eight-year-old missing car?” I found myself asking.
“He said he had definitely filed the report on the correct day and that he thought it must have been a computer error. I guess I’ll never know now.”
“Why not?”
“Surely the records are gone?”
I sighed and shook my head. “They’re in the record room. We have everything. Nothing decays or goes moldy in the dry desert air. Heck, we have police reports in there from the days of Wyatt Earp. Why would you think we’d have the Vanderhosen file and not the missing car report?”
She sighed and took a drink of her coffee before answering. “I don’t know. I guess because the Vanderhosen file is an unsolved murder?”
“Which brings me on to my next question. Why are you looking into this? Did Sean give it to you?”
She froze, and I knew Sean hadn’t been involved in any way. “No. I... uh... it was a slow night, so I wanted something to do.”
“And you decided to just take documents out of the record room? You’re not even a cop! You can’t just do things like that!”
She glared at me. “I knew you wouldn’t understand.” She slammed her drink down and stormed off upstairs.
I knew I should go after her but I suspected she would be easier to deal with after she’d gotten some shuteye. Coming off a twelve-hour night shift could do strange things to a person’s mood, especially since she wasn’t used to it. I drank her coffee then poured myself another one. Seemed a shame to waste it.
Before it got too hot, I decided to take Duke out for a walk.
“Here, boy!” I called out from the back door. He bounced over to me and I attached his leash to his collar. We left via the side gate that led to the driveway, so we didn’t disturb Avery. Duke was over-excitable when he knew he was getting a walk.
Heading down the street with Duke straining against his leash, I mulled over what Avery had said. She had pulled out the Vanderhosen case and was trying to work on it. That put me in a pretty huge moral dilemma. I needed to talk to Bob.
Duke wanted to go straight, but I steered him around the corner and toward the precinct.
Inside, Bob’s dog greeted Duke then returned to his cozy bed. Both animals knew one another and shared a mutual respect.
“Rick. Forget something?” Bob’s deep voice was reassuring. I shook my head.
“Can I talk to you about Avery, sir?” I asked him.
“Sure. Come sit at my desk. Knucklehead, go investigate what flavor donuts Tracy is serving across the street.” Mike left.
“She went into the record room last night and took out a case file,” I told him.
“Stole it?” Bob frowned.
“No, sir. She seems to be trying to solve it.”
Bob rolled his eyes. “But she’s not a detective. What case was it?”
“Vanderhosen.”
Bob was silent for a moment. Carefully weighing everything up. “It’s a pretty cold case.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Still, there’d be a lot of benefit to solving it. Might save us a good amount of money year-on-year if Mrs. Vanderhosen wasn’t calling us for every little thing. And there’s not much to go on.”
“Sir? Are you saying she can continue?”
“I don’t see why not.”
“But it’s a police matter. She just types up the reports. She’s had no training.”
“Son, the way I see it, you got an eighteen-year-old girl there who has a sharp and inquiring mind. Who’s to say she ain’t a cop?”
“She doesn’t have a badge or a gun...” I knew I was clutching at straws.
“What’s the difference between a cop and a regular guy, Rick? I’ll give you a clue, it ain’t a gun. Any fool can buy one of those.”
I was stumped.
“I’ll let you mull that one over. She can continue with what she’s doing. It’s probably a dead end, anyways.”
I left the precinct feeling wrong-footed. Avery was good at typing the reports. Maybe even too good. After all, if she’d finished the backlog, did we need her in the precinct? I ought to just pay her and send her on her way to Mesa or wherever she was trying to go. She was interfering in police work and I didn’t like it. Bob shouldn’t have taken her side.
What’s the difference between a regular guy and a cop?
Tons of things. A uniform. A paycheck from the police department. Having a duty to protect the regular guys from their own stupidity, even when they tried their hardest to kill each other or themselves...
I tried to remember what I’d been like when I’d first joined the department. Green as all hell. A little scared of criminals. They bothered me a lot less, now, but I’d still rather see them locked away than roaming the streets. I’d been unsure about a lot of things in life, but at eighteen, I’d known without a shadow of a doubt the only job for me was this one.
I sure as hell hadn’t been arrogant enough to think I could investigate a cold case from five decades ago.
Had I?
I had never really worked on a case that anyone would think of as career-defining. All I’d ever dealt with was missing wallets and disputes that had turned a little sour.
I had to ask myself a very hard question. Was I jealous of Avery? Had her can-do attitude irritated me? Night after night, I’d sat at my desk with nothing better to do than play solitaire on my computer. It had never occurred to me to go to the record room, pull out a file and look through the evidence.
Yet, she’d done exactly that. When I’d put the Vanderhosen case on her desk, it had been to impress upon her how badly she’d messed up. I hadn’t expected her to try to solve the case.
Instead of being jealous, I ought to be impressed as all hell because that girl had smarts in ways that challenged me. The fact she’d never finished high school was a travesty.
The way I saw it, I had two choices. I could either continue to feel threatened by her, or I could team up with her, help her work on this case, and who knew? Maybe we’d even solve it.
I circled back around the town and headed home. Duke was joyful to be outside and moving and I didn’t blame him, but all I wanted was a cold beer to make my thoughts stop swirling so damn fast.
Chapter 14
Avery
After a few hours of sleep, I was awake again and thinking about the case. Rick had said there would be a record of Dwight’s report on the missing car. I needed to see that.
But later. First, I needed to go downstairs and talk to Rick. We hadn’t exactly ended the day on a high note.
Oh boy, I hoped I wasn’t in trouble.
I found him out on the deck, watching the day go by.
“I’m sorry.”
It took me a minute to realize my ears were hearing his voice, not the other way around.
“Wait... you’re sorry? I came down to say I was sorry.” I didn’t understand.
“I’m sorry I made you feel like you
couldn’t talk to me about this case. I’ve squared it with Bob. He said you can continue.”
“Oh, well now I have the Sheriff’s permission...” I teased, purposely leaving the sentence hanging in the air. “But seriously, I didn’t mean to get so snappy. I guess I was tired and also scared.”
“Scared? How?” He looked around as if there might be a ghost haunting the sun-drenched deck.
“Scared of being told to stop. I’ve never wanted to do anything as much as I want to find Mr. Vanderhosen’s killer. She was eighteen when her husband was killed. Eighteen. My age. She’s spent her whole life scared of her own shadow. Someone needs to bring the killer to justice.”
Rick nodded, but he didn’t sound quite as fired-up as I was.
“You know, there is one small issue with all of this,” he said. “This case is almost fifty years old. The killer could be anywhere. He might be in... China. Or Fiji.”
“Do you work on all your cases with this much glass-half-fullness?” I asked him.
“Optimism? Heh, I don’t know. It’s been a long time since I’ve had anything to be optimistic about. But listen, if you like, I’ll help you look into things with this case.”
“Thanks.” I smiled. I didn’t want to be at odds with him. Especially after we just slept together. That would be pretty awkward.
When we started our shift, I wanted to go right to the record room and find that police report about the missing car. What actually happened was the phone rang. And rang. And rang. Three more missing dogs. We went out to investigate all of them.
“That’s three more houses where the air con isn’t working,” I told Rick. “Do you believe me yet that it might be connected to the disappearances?”
“It’s a coincidence, I can’t say anything beyond that,” he replied. “Plenty of things are coincidence. I’m only interested in the ones where one thing caused the other. That’s a connection.”
I sighed. Maybe he was right and this was just the weirdest coincidence ever. Or maybe he was wrong and somehow the dogs were being stolen through the HVAC system or something? If only I could figure out how the two things were connected.
It was two in the morning by the time I finally had a chance to go to the record room. The filing system daunted me, so I had to go get Rick.
“Do you have a moment? I’d like to check out that missing car report,” I told him.
“Sure.” He got up and led the way back to the record room. Inside, he went straight away to the correct place and pulled out a thin file.
“Reginald. 1972.” It seemed so unassuming. I opened the file. The date stared at me like a bad date. The database was right. Dwight had filed the report two days earlier.
“Why would he report his car missing two days before it was stolen?” I asked Rick.
“Honestly? There’s no good reason for that.” Rick shrugged. “But you’ll find out people do all kinds of strange things and it’s not usually anything suspicious.”
“How on Earth do you get anything done?” I wondered.
“What d’you mean?”
By the time he asked the question, I had regretted speaking out loud and didn’t want to explain myself.
“Uh... okay, so don’t take this the wrong way, but you explain away a lot of stuff that might be important.”
He shrugged. “It comes with experience.”
“But if you just keep ignoring facts, how can you find out about them? This guy reported his car missing two days before it got stolen. How could he know that?”
Rick took the file out of my hands and skimmed through the papers.
“Here’s what I want you to do,” he said when he’d finished looking. “Get a sheet of paper and make a note of the anomalies. You’ll also want to talk to Shawna and Judy Robinson.”
“I couldn’t get an address for Judy. Any ideas?” Now he was on board, it was actually pretty helpful to have Rick’s assistance and to be able to ask him about stuff.
“Shawna might know. She’s in the nursing home up at Why Not.”
“Why not what?” I didn’t follow.
“Why Not.” He didn’t elaborate.
“But why not what?”
“Not what. Why Not.”
This made no sense at all.
“Is this a quiz show game? I haven’t seen it.”
He chuckled like he knew the secret to something that I didn’t. “It’s another small town. Like Snake Eye.”
“Ohhh. Of course, it is.” Out in the sticks, some places had pretty crazy names.
“We can’t visit her during the night shift, what else might we do?”
I thought for a moment about how we could talk to Shawna. “Telephone?”
“Bingo. It’s too late right now, but we could do it tomorrow.”
“And in the meantime?”
“Don’t get too caught up in this case. Remember, this is a side project that has been unsolved for a long time. Our real work is in the here and now.”
Oh. Yeah. That was right. Annoying, but right.
“I have reports to type up, don’t I?” I didn’t roll my eyes because the job wasn’t too awful and I was still very grateful that he’d found this for me, and that he was keeping me off the streets. But I really wanted to work on the cold case.
“And I want you to use that same eye for detail and look through the missing dog reports.”
I nodded, and felt bad that I didn’t want to help these people with their lost pets. I went to my desk and organized all the reports in front of me, reading through them carefully and making notes in a separate notebook. When I looked at them all at the same time, I noticed two things right away.
Chapter 15
Rick
I was doing some follow-up on an arrest I’d made two months ago, getting some information ready to send to the DA, when Avery approached my desk. She looked like a kid who had finished the extra credit assignment and needed the teacher to check it.
“Shoot,” I told her.
“All the dog cases have a couple things in common. First, they all happened at night. Second, every house has broken air con.”
“What does that tell you?” I still wasn’t sure where she was going with the air conditioning angle. It wasn’t like the dogs had been squeezed out through the fan vents.
“The houses might have gotten warm?” she hazarded. “Maybe the dogs went outside because they were too hot in the house and then someone took them?”
I leaned forward and waved to the empty chair she stood next to. She sat down in it and pulled it up to my desk.
“Okay, the houses might have gotten warm from broken air con, that’s a fair assumption. But look at the second fact you wrote down. The dogs went missing at night. Is it hot at night?”
“Sometimes. It can be crazy hot. We didn’t have air con and it was awful.”
“You were in the city. The concrete and asphalt hold onto the heat and keep everything warm overnight. Out in the desert, it can get pretty cold at night, especially at this time of year.”
“So... the dogs wouldn’t be too hot and looking to get outside?”
“Not really. Try again.”
She visibly deflated. I felt for her, but only a little, because this was a very small lesson in what it was like to be a cop. If she wanted to solve crimes, she would have to develop a thicker skin.
I caught my thoughts mid-stream. The idea of working alongside her for years to come was exciting, but not as compelling as another vision of the future, which followed on from that. I wanted her to be my wife. To be the mother of my children.
But she was so young. Barely an adult. How could she know what she wanted for the rest of her life? And I wouldn’t settle for anything less. Marriage, for me, was for life. Just like my parents’ marriage.
I realized she was waiting for me to say something relevant to the dog case.
“If you think the air conditioning is a significant clue, find out what’s similar about them. Do all the houses have th
e same brand of air conditioner? Did they have it built into the house? Do they get it serviced at the same time of year? I think it’s a dead end, but it’s also our only lead.”
“I’ll get onto it.” She nodded like she’d been given something very serious to do, and she went back to Sean’s desk where she opened her internet browser.
“What are you doing?” I frowned.
“Street view! It’ll show what the air con looks like and I can see right away if they’re the same type.”
Street view... she was investigating the crime with street view. It seemed ridiculous on the one hand but then again this whole line of inquiry seemed silly, so maybe it fit.
Avery
I knew my idea about air conditioning was a little unusual but it was the only common thread I saw in all the cases, aside from the time of day the crimes had taken place. I had been surprised when Rick, instead of staying with me while I talked him through my thoughts, had completely zoned out at one point. Rude! I looked at the houses on street view and immediately saw a problem with my first theory, that maybe the dogs had been taken through HVAC ducts. Some of the houses had those air conditioners with the circular big fans on the outside wall and others had the long rectangle types.
I did a search online for air con repair companies. There was only one that served Snake Eye. That had to be significant! The same company had repaired all the machines. I wrote down the details and added it to my case notes, feeling like a real detective.
In the space of a week, I’d gone from clinging onto life by my fingernails to doing something meaningful, around people who didn’t yell at me or throw things at me or scare me at all.
I loved being here.
A pang of worry hit me when I realized my job wasn’t permanent. It wasn’t even official. I was investigating things, sure, but I was just here to type up reports for the real cops. And it didn’t seem likely that they’d need another cop anytime soon. This place seemed like exactly the sort of town where the only way to get a job was dead man’s shoes.
Not literally. That would be gross.
Stay All Night: Arizona Law 2 (Arizona Heat Book 6) Page 9