No Place to Die

by James L. Thane

  “I wouldn’t begin to pretend that I can understand the kind of pain you must be feeling, but if you do want to talk about it, or if there’s ever anything I can do to help somehow…”

  “Thanks, Maggie,” I sighed. “I do know that you care, and that means a lot to me.”

  Shaking my head, I said, “I just keep thinking about all the thousands of little things that would have made a difference. If the system hadn’t let that fuckin’ drunk back out on the road…If Julie hadn’t left work to run an errand…If she’d have left thirty seconds earlier or twenty seconds later…If the traffic had been heavier or lighter…

  “I’d give my life if I could just go back and change any one of those things. But I can’t. Nobody can. And unfortunately, at this point, there’s really nothing else that could be of any help.”

  The time and effort we put in on Sunday got us no closer to our killer than we’d been on Saturday night. At midmorning on Monday, I was sitting at my desk reviewing some notes from the Collins case when the phone rang. I answered it to find Tony Anderson from the crime lab on the other end of the line. We exchanged hellos, and he said, “You owe me a big one, Richardson. I’m about to make your day.”

  “God, I hope so,” I sighed. “I could sure as hell use some good news for a change. What’ve you got for me?”

  “We have a DNA match for hair samples that were taken from Beverly Thompson’s Lexus and from the chair in which Karen Collins was killed.”

  I dropped my feet from the desk to the floor and sat bolt upright in my chair. “Jesus, Tony, you’ve got to be kidding. I can’t believe we got that lucky. Who’s the match?”

  “His name is Richard Petrovich, a white male, now forty-two years of age. He submitted the sample while a guest of the state six years ago. I’m faxing you the results as we speak.”

  “Thanks, Tony. And you’re right—I do owe you a big one.”

  I hung up the phone and practically sprinted down the hall to the fax machine. For a minute or so I stood there, anxiously drumming my fingers on the table. After what seemed like an eternity, the machine began humming and Anderson’s fax spooled out into my hand. I took a quick glance and then ran back up the hall to Maggie’s office.

  “We’ve got the bastard,” I said. “Come on over. I’m running him now.”

  Maggie followed me back to my office. Too excited to sit, she stood behind me as I dropped into my chair and called up the state-prison records on my computer. Glancing at the fax. I typed Petrovich’s name and Social Security number into the appropriate spaces and hit ENTER.

  A moment later, the screen refreshed. Six and a half years ago Richard Petrovich had pled out on charges of burglary and attempted rape. Under the plea arrangement, he’d done six years in the Lewis complex of the state-prison system in Buckeye and had been released last September.

  According to the records, Petrovich had been assigned to report to the parole office in south Phoenix. I grabbed the phone and called the office. After waiting on hold for several minutes, I was finally connected to Petrovich’s parole officer, whose name was Nina Ellis.

  Ellis had a deep, no-nonsense voice and sounded like a woman that you didn’t want to screw around with. I asked her if Petrovich had reported as ordered. Apparently without even having to consult her records, Ellis said, “Yes he did, Detective, right on time. And he’s reported in on time as scheduled ever since. If the rest of my clients were as conscientious as Petrovich, this job would be a cakewalk. Why’re you asking?”

  “We just need to have a chat with him on a couple of matters. Do you know if he’s found a job?”

  “Yeah. The day he first reported he told me that he’d landed a job as a welder at a small manufacturing plant on East Buckeye Road. The owner is a righteous citizen named Fred Bourquin who’s hired a number of ex-cons and given them the chance at a fresh start. The guy rides them like a mother hen, both on and off the job, making sure they have the help they need and that they keep their noses clean. Please don’t tell me that Petrovich’s screwed up again.”

  “I can’t say for sure, Ms. Ellis, but we do need to talk to him.”

  She sighed heavily. “Well, I don’t know what this might be about, Detective, but I’ve seen a lot of scumbags come and go through this office, and I’ve gotten to be a pretty good judge of character. Petrovich is a guy who screwed up and made a stupid mistake. But he pled to it and by all accounts was a model prisoner. He did his time, and I’ve rarely known an ex-con to work hard as he has to put his life back in order.

  “I’ve seen him every two weeks since his release, and at least as of last Friday, he’s stayed clean and sober. His employer is very happy with him, and by all appearances, he’s a model ex-con. I’d be very surprised to hear that he’d gone off the rails.”

  “Well, I don’t know that he has, Ms. Ellis. As I said, for the moment we simply want to talk to the guy.”

  Ellis gave me Petrovich’s home and work addresses, and Maggie and I hurried down the hall to the lieutenant’s office, where we found him on the phone. He took one look at the expressions on our faces and said, “I’ll have to get back to you on that, Rusty.”

  He hung up the phone, looked from Maggie to me, and said, “What?”

  I gave him the news and he thought about it for a moment. “You’re assuming that Petrovich will be at work?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “And I think that the best approach would be to go in relatively low key. This place employs a number of ex-cons, and so they’re probably accustomed to periodic visits from the police. If we go in full bore, we may well start a riot. But if we do it quietly, Maggie and I can probably waltz right in, grab Petrovich, and get him out of there without turning it into a major incident.”

  Martin nodded. “Okay. But take enough backup to surround the place and make sure he has absolutely no chance to escape.”

  The place where Petrovich worked was in a light industrial area in the southeast corner of the city. While the uniforms and the Crime Scene Response team waited in the parking lot of a Jack in the Box a quarter of a mile away, Maggie and I made a reconnaissance loop around the block where the shop was located.

  It was a stand-alone operation doing business in a white cinder-block building that desperately needed a fresh coat of paint. The place was surrounded by a tall chain-link fence that was topped by concertina wire, and the lot outside of the building was littered with refuse. Off to one side of the yard, a number of pallets stood sealed in plastic and stacked ten or twelve feet high. There was no way of telling if the pallets held raw materials or finished product.

  The other side of the yard was apparently the employee parking lot, and half a dozen aging vehicles were lined up haphazardly, butting up against a driveway that led to a garage door on the north side of the building. There was no black van among them. A door marked OFFICE in faded red letters stood squarely in the middle of the building, facing the street.

  I turned the corner and drove down the street along the east side of the building. About ten feet of space separated the shop from the fence behind it. Most of the space was filled with junk that looked like it might have been abandoned and left rusting there for years. As was the case in front, all of the windows in the building were open, and as I drove slowly down the street, the whine of a high-pressure drill and the loud rapid thudding of an air hammer assaulted our ears.

  After circling the block, we drove back up the street and rejoined the uniforms and the techs. I propped a legal pad on the hood of my car and drew a rough sketch of the building. Looking to Jon Beers, the ranking patrolman, I said, “Unless he tries to go over the fence, the only way out is through the open gate in front of the place. You can put a couple of guys along the fence at the rear of the building to make sure he doesn’t try to get out the back. Then you and the other two guys can take the front. Maggie and I will drive right up to the office door and bring him out that way.”

  Beers nodded and we took a couple of minutes to check our equi
pment. Everybody took one last good look at Petrovich’s mug shot. Then Maggie and I got into my Chevy and led the uniforms back down the street while the techs waited for our call.

  Beers dropped two of his men at the fence at the back of the building. Then I drove up to the front of the building, pulled into the yard, and stopped in front of the office door. Beers pulled his squad across the entrance, effectively sealing the gate, then he and the other two members of his squad got out and took up their positions. Maggie and I waited a moment at the door, then opened it and walked into the building.

  The door opened into a small, cluttered office. Two metal desks had been pushed together, facing each other in the center of the room, and at one of them a heavy bleached blonde sat smoking a cigarette and sorting through what looked like a stack of invoices.

  The door to the shop was closed, and the office must have been heavily insulated. The racket of the industrial equipment, which was so loud outside of the building, was considerably muffled in here. The blonde was wearing an Arizona Cardinals T-shirt and a pair of faded blue jeans. She looked up at our entrance and said in a raspy voice, “Can I help you?”

  Maggie and I walked over to the woman’s desk and gave her a look at our shields and IDs. “Phoenix PD, ma’am,” I said. “We need to have a word with Richard Petrovich.”

  The woman seemed unfazed by the request, as if it were a fairly routine experience. She set her cigarette down in an ashtray next to a bottle of Mountain Dew, got up from the desk, and said, “Wait just a minute. I’ll get Fred.”

  Maggie touched the woman on the arm and said, “No, ma’am. Please just take us back into the shop and show us where we can find Mr. Petrovich.”

  For a moment, the blonde hesitated. Then she looked from Maggie to me, sighed, and said, “Follow me.”

  She led us out into the shop, closing the office door behind us. I counted five men working at various tasks, one of whom was a welder. He had his mask down over his face and his torch in his hand and was kneeling in front of the project he was working on. As we stepped through the door, everyone except the welder stopped working and turned to stare at us.

  Every man in the place looked like a hardened con. All of them sported what appeared to be jailhouse tats, and several of them wore earrings. Out here the temperature was at least twenty degrees hotter than it had been in the office, and the uniform of the day consisted of ripped jeans and muscle shirts. Most of the men were perspiring, and the testosterone level in the room was doubtless somewhere off the scale.

  While the welder remained oblivious, four sets of decidedly hostile eyes followed our approach across the floor. Most of them were focused tightly on Maggie, mentally undressing her without even attempting to disguise their interest. Then a sixth man appeared from the far corner of the shop, older, heavier, and obviously the boss. Wiping his hands on a red rag, he interrupted our progress halfway across the floor and said, “Help you?”

  The welder finally realized that something unusual was under way. He turned off his torch, set it on the floor beside him, and raised his mask. I showed my hands to the heavyset man and said, “Mr. Bourquin?”

  He nodded his head. Maggie pointed in the direction of the welder and said, “No problem, sir. We just need to have a few words with Mr. Petrovich here.”

  Yielding no ground, Bourquin said, “About what?”

  “About nothing that’s any concern of yours,” I replied. “We’re not here to cause problems for you or for anyone else, but we do need to talk with Mr. Petrovich out front. Please step out of the way, sir.”

  Bourquin glared at me for a long moment, then stepped aside, saying nothing more. While Maggie kept an eye on him and on the other four men, who had gathered behind him, I stepped over to Petrovich.

  He was easily the smallest man in the room, perhaps five-eight and a hundred and fifty pounds. His dark hair was plastered to the top and sides of his head, and he stood holding the welding helmet at his side with a mixture of what seemed to be confusion and fear written all over his face. I touched him lightly on the arm and said, “Mr. Petrovich, would you please step out front with us?”

  He nodded and together we walked across the room. Suddenly remembering the welding helmet, he handed it to his boss. Bourquin took it, nodded at him, and said, “Let me know if you need anything, Richard.”

  Maggie led us through the office and out into the yard, closing the office door behind us. We took Petrovich over to the car and I told him to assume the position. He did so, and I patted him down, finding nothing in his pockets other than a set of keys, some loose change, and a worn, thin wallet that held a driver’s license, a Social Security card, a yellowed snapshot of a small girl, and twenty-seven dollars. “He’s clean,” I said.

  Turning back to Petrovich, I said, “Okay, Mr. Petrovich, we have some questions for you downtown.” I read him his rights, and then, nodding in the direction of the uniforms, I said, “Let’s not make this any harder on each other than we have to.”

  He shook his head. “I’m not gonna resist, but I haven’t done anything. Why do you wanna talk to me?”

  “That can wait until we get downtown,” I replied. Gesturing in the direction of the parked vehicles, I said, “Does one of these belong to you?”

  “That one,” he replied, pointing at an aging Chrysler sedan.

  I held his key ring out in front of him. “These are the keys?”

  “Yeah. The round one is the ignition.”

  “All right. We’ll take good care of it. But what now I need is for you to put your hands behind your back.”

  He did as instructed, and I cuffed him and put him into the backseat of the Chevy. Then Maggie and I got into the car and I backed out into the yard. A patrolman pulled the squad away from the exit and as I reached it, I rolled down the window and handed Petrovich’s keys to Jon Beers. “It’s the green beater Chrysler,” I said. “Have the techs load it up and get it over to the garage.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  After taking the weekend off to watch his daughter play in a softball tournament, Carl McClain was back on the job at midmorning on Monday with five days left to wrap up his business in Phoenix. A few minutes after ten, he watched Judge Walter Beckman leave his condominium and head north up Seventy-sixth Street.

  McClain assumed that Beckman was leading him back to the country club again, and thus was surprised when only a couple of minutes later, the judge signaled a right turn into a complex of medical offices just off of Thompson Peak Parkway. McClain made the turn behind him and watched as Beckman carefully parked the Buick in a spot at the back of one of the buildings. The old man locked the car and then shuffled off toward the rear entrance of the building.

  McClain slowly drove a circuit around the perimeter of the complex. While the parking lot on the south side of the buildings was virtually full, only a handful of cars were parked on the east side near Beckman’s Buick. McClain pulled into the spot on the left of the judge’s car and shut off the van’s ignition.

  Hunching down in the seat, he used the large rearview mirrors on both sides of the van to scan the building behind him. It looked like the blinds were closed on virtually all of the windows on this side of the building, shielding the offices against the glare and the heat of the midmorning sun.

  Patience is a virtue, McClain thought, smiling to himself.

  He cranked down the windows on the driver’s and passenger’s doors in the hope of getting some air to circulate through the van while he waited. Then he slipped on a lightweight blue nylon jacket and retrieved the Baby Glock from its hidey-hole under the dash. He checked the gun and slipped it into the pocket of the jacket. He then adjusted the rearview mirror on the driver’s side so that it was focused on the door leading out of the building, and settled in to wait.

  Over the next hour, five more cars parked in the rear lot and their occupants disappeared into the building. Finally, the door to the building opened and McClain watched Beckman come out and make his wa
y slowly in the direction of the Buick. McClain waited until the old man was about twenty feet away, then opened the door and got out of the van.

  He walked around behind the van, letting Beckman squeeze in between the van and the driver’s side of the Buick. Once the judge was effectively corralled there, McClain slipped in behind him and said, “Excuse me, sir?”

  The old man turned back to look at him. McClain slipped the Glock out of his jacket pocket, holding it low so that no one but the two of them could see it. The judge’s eyes widened and in a quiet voice, McClain said, “Don’t do anything stupid, buddy. Just do exactly what I tell you to do, and you’ll be home safe and sound in time for lunch.”

  Beckman reached toward his hip pocket, apparently going for his wallet. “I’m sorry. I only have a few dollars on me,” he said in a frightened voice.

  “Don’t worry about that for now,” McClain responded.

  With his left hand, McClain reached out and slid back the side door of the van. Gesturing with the pistol, he said, “Get in.”

  The old man, clearly confused, took a tentative step in the direction of the van, then paused, apparently pondering the high step up into the vehicle.

  “That’s right, sir,” McClain said, patiently.

  He transferred the gun to his left hand. With his right hand, he reached out, took the judge’s elbow, and guided him into the van. “Up we go, Your Honor.”

  As the judge disappeared into the van, McClain took a quick look around and saw no one else in the parking lot. He scanned the windows in the building behind him, but the blinds in virtually all of the windows remained closed, and he saw no one looking out. He stepped up into the van behind Beckman and slid the door shut.