As children, Julie and her sister, Denise, had attended only the finest schools, had vacationed only in the trendiest locales, and had associated only with the “best” people. Denise, who was a year younger than Julie, bought into the program early on and had rapidly become the apple of her mother’s eye. Much to Elizabeth’s consternation, though, Julie had graduated from high school and then effectively opted out of her mother’s master plan.
Julie refused to attend Elizabeth’s alma mater, a fairly conservative private college in Connecticut, and insisted on putting some distance between herself and her mother, not to mention the cold, gray, gloomy winters of Minnesota. To her mother’s mortification, she enrolled at Arizona State in Tempe and graduated with a degree in business. Much more her father’s daughter than her mother’s, Julie then remained in Arizona and took a job with a bank in Phoenix.
She’d been working at the bank for little over a year when we met at a party thrown by a mutual friend. While it might not have been exactly love at first sight, it was something very close. Two years younger than I, Julie was bright, warm, and articulate, and she possessed a great sense of humor. We shared many of the same interests and held very similar political views. The fact that she was also one of the most beautiful women I’d ever met was simply an added bonus. After dating for five months we moved in together, and six weeks later, Julie took me home to Minnesota to meet her family.
Her mother was decidedly unimpressed.
Elizabeth had simply taken it for granted that her daughters would follow her example and marry someone in their own social and economic stratosphere. She vehemently refused to accept the possibility that Julie might “settle” for an unsophisticated, middle-class police detective. Julie’s father, on the other hand, had supported her decision to go to college in Arizona and took it as an article of faith that she was intelligent enough to make her own decisions when it came to matters of the heart. He was much more supportive of our relationship and welcomed me into his home.
The breach between Julie and her mother was completed at the end of our visit, when Julie informed her family that we would be married the following month—in Arizona in front of our own friends, rather than in Minnesota in front of Elizabeth’s. In the end, only Julie’s father had attended the ceremony and proudly gave his daughter away, while Elizabeth and Denise stubbornly remained at home.
Five years later, Elizabeth was still waiting for Julie to come to her senses, when a drunk driver who was still on the road despite two previous convictions for DUI ran a red light and smashed broadside into Julie’s Acura. The Acura’s airbags deployed, and amazingly, Julie had walked away from the crash with no apparent injuries, save for a slight bump on the head. But two days later she collapsed while at work and had never regained consciousness.
For the last eighteen months, she’d remained in what her doctors described as a persistent vegetative state with no cognitive brain function. She was able to breathe on her own, but otherwise was kept alive only by remaining attached to a feeding tube that pumped chemical nutrition and hydration into her stomach.
For the first few months after the accident, the doctors held out some small hope that Julie might eventually regain consciousness, but they warned that there was little hope that she could ever function effectively on her own again. For several critical minutes after she collapsed, her brain had been deprived of oxygen, and the damage done, the doctors argued, was irreparable.
My world completely shattered, I’d taken a leave of absence for three months and had spent virtually every waking moment at Julie’s bedside, willing her to regain consciousness. But hard as it was to admit it, I ultimately understood that this was not going to happen. And as a bedside witness to the indignity of what had become Julie’s “life,” I also knew that she would not want it to.
Shortly after we were married, Julie and I had gone to a lawyer and drawn up our wills. At the lawyer’s suggestion, we’d also made living wills, declaring that our deaths should not be postponed by artificial means in the event that either one of us should incur an incurable and irreversible injury, disease, or illness. We’d each also signed a power of attorney for health care, granting each other the authority to make these medical decisions in the event that we were unable to make them for ourselves.
Six months after Julie had been hospitalized, the doctors indicated that they no longer held out any hope that she would ever regain consciousness, and in the most difficult and heartbreaking decision of my life, I instructed them to honor her wishes and remove the feeding tube. Before they could do so, however, Elizabeth obtained a court order preventing it. She then filed a lawsuit attempting to set aside both Julie’s living will and the medical power of attorney that Julie had granted me.
While the legal case worked its way through the system, Julie was moved from the hospital to a long-term-care facility. Elizabeth bought a condo in Scottsdale and now spent several days a month in residence, meeting with her lawyers and devoting more time and attention to Julie than she had ever deigned to spare in the five years between our marriage and the accident.
My relationship with Elizabeth was barely civil and was conducted mostly through our respective lawyers. She tried as much as possible to avoid being at the nursing home when she thought that I might be there. When direct communication between us was unavoidable, we managed it mainly by leaving messages for each other on the answering machine that had been installed on the phone line in Julie’s room. My affection for Julie’s father notwithstanding, I very much regretted my decision to have offered her family the opportunity to be at her bedside when the feeding tube was to be removed.
I sat there for an hour or so, holding Julie’s hand, thinking about all of the things that I would have wanted to share with her at the end of the day, and inevitably giving free reign to the memories that so sweetly haunted my days and nights. Finally, at about three thirty, I got up from the chair, leaned over, and kissed Julie on the cheek. “I love you Jules,” I said quietly.
Then I gently laid her hand back at her side, slipped out of the room, and made my way home alone to our empty house.
Chapter Six
Four hours later, I climbed the stairs back up to my office in the Homicide Unit on the third floor of the police headquarters building on Washington Street in downtown Phoenix. The lieutenant’s door was standing open, and as I reached the reception area, he looked up from the report on his desk, put down his reading glasses, and waved me in.
The lieutenant, Russ Martin, was a twenty-two-year veteran of the force and had been head of the Homicide Unit for the last five years. His hair, which had once been as thick and dark as my own, was now thinning and flecked with gray. But six mornings a week, he began his day in the gym, and even at fifty-two he remained in excellent physical shape. He pointed me toward a chair in front of his desk, and I said, “What’s up?”
Toying with a pencil, he said, “Beverly Thompson’s picture hit the airwaves first thing this morning. So far we’ve had fourteen callers claiming to have seen her within the last twelve hours in locations from Tucson all the way up to Prescott. Patrolmen are following up on all the local reported sightings, and we’re coordinating with police and sheriff’s departments in the outlying areas. Doubtless, as the day progresses the number of calls will escalate, but we don’t have anything that looks solid yet.”
With the pencil, he tapped the report he’d been reading. “Ballistics says the bullets we got out of David Thompson match the slugs they recovered from the elderly woman that Pierce and Chickris drew last Friday. It looks like the same shooter did both her and Thompson.”
“Any obvious connection between the Thompsons and this other woman?”
“None that I know of,” he sighed. “But the report just landed on my desk ten minutes ago. Obviously the cases are related, though, and the four of you will need to work them together. You’re senior; I’d prefer that you take the lead.”
He paused for a moment, toying wi
th his glasses and staring at the photo of his wife and three kids that sat on the edge of the cluttered desk. Then he looked back to me. “That said, Sean, I’m sorry, but I’ve got to ask. Are you sure you’re up for this?”
I’d been waiting for the question for the last couple of months and was surprised only by the fact that it had taken him this long to ask it. Certainly it was a fair question, especially under the circumstances. The department was now confronted with a complex investigation that would inevitably attract a great deal of attention in the media, and his ass would be on the line much more so than mine. He needed to know—and had every right to demand—that his lead investigator would be tightly focused on the case and capable of performing effectively.
I certainly understood that if I were too distracted to give the case the time and attention it demanded, my record to date would be of absolutely no consequence. The lieutenant would have to assign the overall direction of the investigation to someone else. I waited a moment myself, then looked him in the eye and gave him what I hoped was an honest answer.
“Yeah, Lieutenant, I’m up for it. And I promise to let you know the second I feel that I’m not.”
“Okay then,” he said. “Doyle is back from vacation tomorrow, but Riggins won’t be back from his father’s funeral for another few days. So until Bob gets back you can use Doyle as well.”
I pretended to think about it for a moment, then said, “I don’t know, Lieutenant. Are you sure that’s necessary? Why don’t we see what McClinton, Pierce, Chickris, and I can do with this thing over the next few days? Then you could evaluate the situation, determine whether you think we need any additional help, and decide at that point who might be the best addition to the team based on where we are.”
The lieutenant shook his head. “Look, Sean. I know you have your issues with Doyle, and I’m not suggesting that I don’t understand where you’re coming from. But you need to set all that bullshit aside. Whether either of us likes it or not, Doyle is still assigned to this unit. Beyond that, you know damned good and well that you’re going to need all the manpower you can get on this thing. Certainly you can find some way to use him productively at least for the next few days. In the meantime, you need to get on it.”
The lieutenant gave me a copy of the ballistics report, and twenty minutes later, Maggie and I were holed up in the squad’s conference room with Elaine Pierce and Greg Chickris, the team that had caught the case of Alma Fletcher.
Chickris was the youngster of the unit. Tall and rail thin, he was a former college golfer who, in spite of the demands of the job and a young family, still somehow maintained a three handicap. Pierce was divorced, in her midforties with two teenage kids—a stocky bottle blonde who’d come into the Homicide Unit about six months after me. Her aggressive nature complemented her partner’s more laid-back personality, and the two of them had a very good record of clearing cases. I asked Elaine to bring Maggie and me up to speed on their case.
She flipped open the folder in front of her and without looking at it said, “The vic is Alma Fletcher, sixty-four, a retired third-grade teacher, married to Robert Fletcher, also sixty-four. He works for a small insurance agency in Glendale. He found his wife in the living room when he got home from work about six o’clock on Friday evening. She’d been shot twice—one in the head and one in the heart. Either one would have gotten the job done.
“The ME puts the time of death at about ten thirty that morning. The husband has a concrete alibi—he got to work at eight, and people put him there all day until he left at five. The two had been married for thirty-nine years, and all their friends say that the marriage was rock solid. We found no evidence of any discord, no financial problems, nothing to suggest that the husband might have had any reason to hire the job done. He’s clearly devastated, and we’ve ruled him out as a possible suspect.
“The victim was not sexually assaulted, and nothing was taken from the home. Neither the husband nor any of the woman’s friends could think of anyone who might have been even slightly angry with her, and so we haven’t been able to come up with anything that might even remotely resemble a motive. None of the neighbors saw anything unusual the morning of the killing—no strangers in the area, nobody selling magazines door-to-door, or any such thing.”
“Did the techs give you anything?” Maggie asked.
“Nada,” Greg sighed. “At least not yet. They found no prints that didn’t seem to belong there, but they did get some hair and fibers, and if we come up with a suspect maybe we can match them up to him. Of course it’s also possible that the guy’s had a prior conviction, in which case we may already have his DNA.”
“We should get so lucky,” Pierce and I said, almost in unison.
Arizona had begun collecting DNA samples from convicted sex offenders in 1993. Gradually, the list of those required to give samples had been expanded, and since January 2004, everyone convicted of a felony in the state had been required to submit a sample. Thus, DNA collected at a crime scene could be compared to the samples on file in the state’s database or in CODIS, the FBI’s database of DNA samples collected from criminals nationwide.
As Greg suggested, it was possible that our killer was a prior offender and that he might have been required to submit a DNA sample. Unfortunately, in the normal course of things it would still be several days before the tests would be completed and we’d have an answer one way or the other. In the meantime, we’d have to pursue the investigation using more traditional techniques.
Looking to Elaine, I said, “Do we know how Fletcher’s killer got in?”
“We’re assuming that she let him in. There was no sign of a forced entry, so we figure that he rang the front doorbell. She answered it, and he backed her into the living room and shot her.”
“Did anyone report seeing an unfamiliar vehicle in the neighborhood that morning?” Maggie asked. “In particular, did anyone notice a black van?”
Greg shook his head. “Naturally, we asked about strange vehicles, but no one indicated that they saw one.”
“Still, you’ll want to go back and ask them again,” I suggested. “We believe that last night the guy was driving a black van that looks like it might belong to a tradesman of some sort. Maybe one of Fletcher’s neighbors saw it but didn’t realize the significance. If so, there’s at least a chance that we can get a better description.”
“Sure,” Elaine agreed.
“In the meantime,” I said, “we need to dig into this woman’s life and see where it intersects with either David or Beverly Thompson. So far, we don’t know which of the Thompsons was the killer’s real target. Was he after her and the husband blundered into it, or was it the other way around? I’m assuming the killer didn’t simply pick these people at random. There must be some connection that ties Fletcher to one or possibly both of the Thompsons.”
“How do you want to carve it up?” Greg asked.
“You guys go at it from Fletcher’s side; Maggie and I will go at it from the Thompsons’. Assuming that they weren’t related in some way by blood or marriage, the most obvious question is, was Fletcher a client of Beverly Thompson’s or perhaps a patient of David Thompson’s? There’s gotta be a link there somewhere. Let’s find it.”
Greg rose to get out of his chair, but I waved him back down. “There’s one other thing,” I sighed. “Chris Doyle is back from vacation tomorrow. The lieutenant’s going to assign him to work with us until Bob gets back from his father’s funeral.”
Maggie rolled her eyes. “Oh, that’ll be a big fuckin’ help. Even if Doyle is back in the building tomorrow, he’ll still be on vacation, and the lieutenant knows that as well as all the rest of us. The time we’ll have to spend babysitting that asshole is time that we could be spending doing something productive.”
Pierce and Chickris understood Maggie’s history with Doyle almost as well as I did, and none of us was going to dispute her observation. Unfortunately, though, the lieutenant had left us little choice in th
e matter. I shrugged and said, “Sorry. But whatever the case, that’s the situation we’re in. So obviously the best thing for all concerned would be for us to get out there, find our killer, and rescue Beverly Thompson before the close of business today. Then we won’t have to worry about Doyle.”
While Elaine and Greg went off to reinterview Alma Fletcher’s husband and friends, Maggie and I decided to start with the staff at David Thompson’s office. Maggie said that she wanted to hit the john before we left, and I nodded my acknowledgment. Five minutes later, she returned and said, “Are you ready to roll?”
“Yeah. Who’s going to drive?”
“To Scottsdale—at this time of the day? Are you fuckin’ kidding? You drive.”
I could’ve pulled rank and insisted that she do it, but I enjoyed driving and found it oddly therapeutic, even in the congestion of the Valley’s traffic, and especially on a day as beautiful as this. As we walked out of the station into the dry desert air, the temperature stood somewhere in the high sixties and a brilliant sun punctuated the cobalt sky. Slipping on my sunglasses, it struck me that it was an altogether far-too-perfect day for the task that lay ahead of us.
My department ride was a Chevy Impala, two years newer and a lot more reliable than Maggie’s. As the engine sprung to life, so did Angie Stone, singing “Love Junkie” on the CD changer I’d surreptitiously installed in the trunk.
“Hey! Not bad for a middle-aged cracker,” Maggie laughed, cranking up the volume.
“Fuck you, Maggs,” I responded as I pulled out of the lot and accelerated onto Seventh Avenue.
Chapter Seven
Beverly Thompson came slowly awake again a little after nine o’clock, Thursday morning, still a bit groggy from the aftereffects of the chloroform. For the briefest moment she thought that she was waking from a horrible nightmare, but then she flashed again on the image of David slumping to the floor of the garage. In the same instant, she felt a sharp twinge of pain between her thighs, and she realized that the nightmare had been all too real.
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