No Place to Die

by James L. Thane

  We thanked the woman and left. Forty-five minutes later, we were in an airport patrol car with a Sky Harbor security officer driving up and down the aisles of the West Economy parking lot. Twenty minutes after starting the search, we were looking at a blue Volvo. It had been backed into a parking space, and the rear of the car was shielded by the minivan parked immediately behind it. I got out of the patrol car and walked behind the Volvo. Its license plate was gone.

  I took it for granted that the person who’d taken the plate had been careful enough to wear gloves. Still, we stood guard over the car until a Crime Scene Response van arrived. The techs carefully dusted the area around the license-plate holder and raised a few fingerprints. We could only hope that at least a couple of them might belong to our killer.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Just before eight o’clock, Carl McClain locked the bedroom door again and went out through the kitchen and into the garage. He carefully backed the van out of the garage. Then he got out, closed the garage door, and locked it securely.

  Back in the van, he headed north. The night people were coming out now, and two young drug dealers stood brazenly on the corner, openly soliciting business. Half a block up the street a rail-thin hooker who was either drunk or high—or maybe both—waved halfheartedly at his passing van. Only a few blocks ahead, the lights of Chase Field, home to the Arizona Diamondbacks, shone brightly against the clear night sky.

  McClain cursed softly, even though there was no one else in the van to hear him. He’d forgotten that the damned rodeo was opening tonight, and he hoped that he could be done with the evening’s chore and back before the fuckin’ cowboys were finished for the night. He really didn’t want to have to fight the traffic that would be flooding out in every direction away from the park once the rodeo had ended.

  Seventeen years ago, when Carl McClain had accidentally made the mistake of his life, there had been no Arizona Diamondbacks and, of course, no Chase Field. Back then, the area immediately north of McClain’s new rental home was still in transition. Historically, the neighborhood had been Phoenix’s infamous skid row—home to the transients, alkies, druggies, dealers, hookers, and others, some of whom had been pressed farther south by the urban renewal that had produced the new Civic Plaza, the US Airways Arena, and ultimately, the ballpark.

  McClain had driven downtown that night more out of boredom than out of any truly pressing need. Amanda was pregnant for the second time and in absolutely no mood for sex. In consequence, McClain had been mildly horny, but nowhere near desperate. He was cruising down Second Street, a half-finished Budweiser clamped between his thighs, when he saw the two women standing on the corner. Mostly just for laughs, he pulled over and rolled down the window.

  The taller of the two women, a thin brunette with a nice rack, leaned into the car, letting McClain get a good look at her tits. In her best effort at a sultry voice, she said, “You lookin’ for a party, honey?”

  McClain pretended to think about it for a moment, then figured, what the hell, why not? He smiled at the woman. “Well, I don’t know, baby. What sorta party you offering?”

  The woman gave him a throaty laugh and laid her hand on his shoulder. “Anything you’d like, sugar. You’re the boss.”

  Again, McClain pretended to think about it. Then he touched the woman’s cheek. “How much for a blow job?”

  Holding his gaze, she said, “You look like a nice guy, honey. How ‘bout I give you the early bird-special price. Fifty dollars?”

  McClain sighed. “Fifty dollars sounds a bit steep, baby. But I think I could go forty.”

  Now the woman pretended to think about it, like maybe Donald Trump might drop out of the sky at any moment, ready and willing to pay the asking price. Finally she looked back to McClain. “Okay, sweetie, why don’t you show me the money?”

  McClain showed her the forty and she walked around the front of the car exaggerating the natural sway of her hips. She got in on the passenger’s side and said, “Why don’t you drive on down the street a couple of blocks, sugar, and I’ll show you a special place where we can park private like.”

  He dropped the car into gear and pulled slowly away from the curb, failing to notice that the second woman on the corner was jotting his license-plate number into a little green notebook.

  The hooker showed him where to park in an alley behind a small grocery store that had already closed for the night. Then she unrolled a condom onto his erection. He would have rated the blow job about a six on a scale of ten, and when the whore was found dead in the alley the next morning, it was the second hooker and her little green notebook that sent Carl McClain to prison for the rest of his natural life.

  Twenty minutes after leaving Beverly naked and sobbing on the bed behind him, McClain braked the van to a stop in the parking lot of a small strip mall on Glendale Avenue. Dodging traffic, he jogged over to a convenience store on the opposite side of the street.

  On the off chance that the convenience store might have video cameras that monitored the area in front of the store, he tugged his cowboy hat low over his forehead and trained his eyes on the ground ahead of him. He walked directly up to the pay phone hanging off the outside wall of the store, picked up the receiver, and deposited two coins.

  Hunched into the phone, he dialed the number of a high-end furniture store on North Scottsdale Road and asked for Jack Collins. A minute or so later, Collins came to the phone and assured McClain that he’d be at the store until closing and would be happy to show him bedroom suites in a variety of styles and price ranges. But McClain would have to be there by nine o’clock, when the front doors of the store would be locked.

  McClain thanked the man and promised to be there no later than eight forty-five. Then he hung up, careful to smudge any fingerprints that he might have left on the phone, and jogged back to the van. Ten minutes later, he pulled to a stop in a quiet residential neighborhood in west-central Phoenix.

  He waited for a car to pass, and then the street was clear. Leaving the cowboy hat in the van, McClain got out, locked the vehicle, and began walking west. Two blocks later, he turned a corner and walked another half block north. He paused long enough to pull on a pair of thin latex gloves, then walked up to the front door of the gray stucco house that belonged to Jack Collins and his wife, Karen.

  Both Collins and his wife were in their late fifties. Their two children were grown and gone, and after watching the couple on and off for the last two weeks, McClain knew that Karen would be at home alone while her husband pulled his one night shift of the week at the furniture store.

  McClain was wearing a jacket that he’d stolen from a Southwest Gas Company truck two weeks earlier. In his left hand he carried a clipboard that he’d also taken from the truck, and in the right pocket of the jacket was his Glock 26 pistol. On account of its compact size, the 26 was nicknamed the “Baby Glock,” but it would be more than sufficient for the task at hand.

  Standing on the front porch, McClain took a deep breath and pressed the doorbell. A minute or so later, the porch light came on and Karen Collins peered out through the small window in the door.

  Seventeen years earlier, she’d been a grade-school teacher—a plain, thin woman with short dark hair. Her figure was all angles and lines, and she had a particularly severe face dominated by a sharp, straight nose. McClain had speculated that her students probably called her Mrs. Hatchet Face, and the second she took her seat in the jury box, he knew that she’d vote guilty on all counts.

  Back then, she’d taken at least some care with her hair, clothes, and makeup, but at some point in their years apart, she’d obviously abandoned the effort. She was still rail thin, but her hair had gone completely gray, and she no longer made any effort to make herself look even remotely appealing. She stood on the other side of the door, dressed in a pair of jeans and an oversize T-shirt. A pair of reading glasses dangled from a cord around her neck.

  McClain smiled brightly, holding the clipboard away from his chest so
that Collins could see both the Southwest Gas logo and the name Dennis, which was stitched just below the logo. Holding the smile, he said through the door, “Gas company, ma’am. We’ve had a report of a leak in the neighborhood. May I talk to you for a moment?”

  Collins nodded, then unlocked the door and opened it a scant six inches. Leaning to her right, she looked out to McClain through the crack in the door and said, “Yes?”

  McClain threw his shoulder forward, slamming the door back into the woman’s face and knocking her down to the floor. She sat there in the small entryway, momentarily stunned and bleeding from her nose. Before she could gather her wits and let out a scream, McClain closed and bolted the door.

  Dropping the clipboard to the floor, he leaned over, grabbed Collins roughly by the hair, and stuck the pistol in her face. “Not a word, Karen,” he cautioned. “Not a single fuckin’ word.”

  Continuing to grip the woman by the hair, McClain pulled her to her feet. Still dazed from the blow from the door, Collins nearly toppled over, but McClain held her steady and she slowly got her bearings back. As she did, she began to whimper.

  For a moment, McClain toyed with the idea of dragging her off into the bedroom and making his revenge even more complete. But he decided that the woman was simply too unappealing and that it would be unwise to deviate from the plan. As much as he would have liked to prolong the woman’s punishment, in this case, short and sweet was best.

  He pulled her into the living room and dropped her into a large upholstered chair. A reading lamp cast a bright light over the chair, and on a table beside the chair a John Grisham novel lay open next to an empty coffee cup. Collins started to cry and McClain squeezed into the chair, facing her and straddling her lap.

  “Please,” she said, sobbing, “I’ll do anything you want. I have money I can give you. Just please don’t hurt me.”

  McClain leaned forward, his face scant inches away from the woman’s. “You’ll do anything I want? You’ll give me money? Well, shit, I’m sorry to say that it’s a little late for that, Karen. You fucked me over good, and now you’ve got to pay the price, along with everybody else who helped you do it.”

  “What do you mean?” she pleaded. “In what way did I harm you?”

  McClain leaned back, letting the woman get a better look at him. After a moment he said, “You voted to convict me of first-degree murder, Karen. And of some other assorted bullshit charges that the prosecutor threw into the mix.”

  Her tears gave way to the shock of recognition. “McClain?” she said.

  “In the flesh, you bitch…Glad to see me? Anything you wanted to say to me?”

  Collins began crying again. In a low halting voice, she whispered, “I’m sorry…I saw the news…Please, I’m really very sorry.”

  McClain pulled a small plastic bag from his pocket. He opened the bag and shook it, allowing the contents to fall from the bag onto Collins’s T-shirt and onto the chair. Then he pushed himself off the woman’s lap and stared down at her. She looked up to meet his eyes, crying harder now. “Please, Mr. McClain,” she said again. “Please…”

  He held her eyes for another few seconds, then shook his head. “Too fuckin’ bad, lady, but ‘sorry’ just doesn’t cut it.”

  He shot her in the heart at close range, and she crumpled into the chair. The last sound that Karen Collins would ever make was a small, quiet gasp that somehow still sounded surprised, even though she’d seen it coming.

  Chapter Sixteen

  On television, when a police detective is assigned to a murder investigation, he always seems to have the luxury of working that case and only that case until it’s resolved. But of course, on television the average detective can always clear even the most complicated homicide in no more than sixty minutes tops, with time out for twenty-seven minutes worth of commercials. Thus, even during an abnormally busy week, his caseload will likely never turn into a backlog.

  Unfortunately, out here in the real world we’re a bit slower than that. And adding insult to injury, the citizens are seldom courteous enough to wait for the police to resolve one homicide before some inconsiderate jerk goes out and commits another one. So, even though Maggie and I were devoting virtually all of our waking hours to the Thompson murder and kidnapping, we were nevertheless back in the on-deck circle when a citizen named Jack Collins came home from work on Thursday night and found his wife shot to death.

  Collins called 911. Dispatch alerted the Homicide Unit, and the sergeant rousted Maggie and me. We got to the crime scene a little after ten thirty to find the husband in a state of shock and his wife dead in the living room.

  After taking a preliminary look at the victim, the ME suggested that the woman had probably been shot sometime within the last couple of hours and that she had died instantly. Inevitably, though, he refused to be held to that observation until he had completed the autopsy and had received the results of the various tests he would run.

  A check of the house indicated no signs of forced entry. Either a door or a window had been left unlocked or Karen Collins had opened the door to her killer. But then, of course, we couldn’t yet rule out the possibility that the killer might have had his own key.

  To all outward appearances, Jack Collins was truly shocked and devastated by his wife’s murder. But sadly, all too often in cases like this, the grieving spouse turned out to be the one who had pulled the trigger. The victim had been killed in her own home, and by his own admission, her husband had been present in the home shortly thereafter. It was certainly possible that he might have been present in the house at the time.

  For me this was always one of the most difficult and painful parts of a homicide investigation. But as much as I hated doing it, I had no choice.

  The patrolman who first responded to the call had isolated Jack Collins in the kitchen. Maggie and I found him there, sitting at the kitchen table, staring blankly at a bowl of apples and ripe bananas. The room was small, but intelligently designed to make the best use of the available space. A loaf of bread sat on a wire rack next to the oven, and the faint, yeasty aroma of freshly baked bread lingered in the air.

  Collins was still dressed in the suit and tie he’d apparently worn to work, although he’d taken off his glasses and set them on the table in front of him. He looked to be somewhere in his late fifties or early sixties and was carrying twenty or twenty-five pounds of excess weight, most of which had settled around his waist. He’d obviously been crying, and as we took chairs on either side of him, he raised his head and met my eyes with a look of total despair.

  We introduced ourselves, and I said sympathetically, “Mr. Collins, please know that we are truly sorry for your loss and that we hate to intrude on you at a time like this. But we’re anxious to move as quickly as we possibly can to find the person who committed this terrible crime, and we have some questions that we need to ask.”

  Collins nodded his understanding, and I said, “When was the last time you saw your wife, sir?”

  He swallowed hard. “This noon. We had lunch together here in the kitchen before I went to work.”

  “Did you speak to Mrs. Collins after that?” Maggie asked.

  “Yes. She called me around five o’clock to see how my day was going. We talked for a couple of minutes—just small talk is all. Then I called her about eight thirty to tell her that I might be late getting home. A customer had called to say that he’d be coming in at the last minute before we closed. But then he didn’t show. I waited until a few minutes after nine and then came home. I got here about nine thirty and found Karen.”

  Collins teared up and began crying again. I waited a few moments, then asked, “Who was the customer?”

  “I don’t know. He called the store and asked for me personally. He said that he was looking for bedroom furniture and that a friend of his had recommended me. He didn’t give me his name or his friend’s name. I told him I’d be there until nine, and he promised to be there no later than a quarter to.”

 
; “You didn’t recognize the voice as someone you knew or someone you might have talked to before?”

  “No. All I can tell you was that he sounded like a young man and like a legitimate customer. Nothing in his voice or in what he said suggested that he might have been handing me a line of some sort.”

  He paused for a moment, swiped at his eyes with a handkerchief, and said, “Are you thinking that the man who called me might be the son of a bitch who did this?”

  “I don’t know, Mr. Collins,” I replied. “But it is a suspicious circumstance. A man you don’t know calls to make sure that you’re at the store and that you’re going to be there at least until nine. Then your wife is shot within an hour of the call and the man never shows up at the store. It’s certainly possible that he was somehow involved in your wife’s death, so obviously if there’s anything at all you can remember about the conversation, we’ll want to know about it.”

  He nodded, and Maggie said, “When you last talked to your wife, Mr. Collins, how was her mood? Did she seem worried or angry or upset in any way?”

  “No, she was fine. She told me that she was relaxing with her book and that she wouldn’t expect to see me until I got here.”

  “Nothing struck you as being out of the ordinary?” she said. “Even in retrospect?”

  “No, not at all. She seemed perfectly normal.”

  “Can you think of anyone who might have been angry with Mrs. Collins?” I asked.

  Collins shook his head. “No. Sitting here, I’ve been racking my brain trying to imagine who might have done this. There’s absolutely no one.”

  “Have you or your wife received any threatening letters or phone calls?”

  “No—at least I haven’t. And certainly Karen would have told me if she had.”

  “Would your wife have opened the door to a stranger at this time of night, Mr. Collins?” Maggie asked.