The old man crouched, stooped over in the middle of the van, and McClain waved the gun at him again. In a distinctly harsher voice, he said, “Lie down on the floor.”
Beckman shook his head in confusion. “What do you want?”
McClain slapped the old man sharply across the face. “Shut the fuck up and lie down.”
The judge did as instructed, slowly sinking to the floor of the van and lying on his back.
“Roll over,” McClain said.
Again, Beckman followed the order, and McClain squatted down, straddling Beckman’s back. He stuck the Glock in his pocket, reached under the passenger’s seat, and came out with a roll of duct tape. He unrolled a piece of the tape and tore it off. Then he roughly grabbed Beckman’s arms and taped them together behind his back.
McClain tore off another piece of the tape, leaned forward, and slapped it over the judge’s mouth. As the old man began struggling helplessly beneath him, McClain ripped off a third strip of tape, turned around, and bound Beckman’s ankles together. Then he got up off the old man’s back.
“You just lie still now for a while, Your Honor. We’re going for a little ride.”
McClain unfolded his painter’s tarp and draped it over the judge. Then he slipped into the driver’s seat and cranked the ignition. Less than three minutes after he had first walked up behind Beckman, McClain drove slowly and carefully out of the parking lot and turned west onto Thompson Peak Parkway. Two blocks later, he headed south down Scottsdale Road.
Chapter Twenty-Three
In the small interview room, Richard Petrovich smelled of a man who’d been working hard in the heat of the day—and of fear.
I took off the handcuffs and pointed him in the direction of a chair. He sat nervously, his brown eyes darting from Maggie to me and then back to Maggie again before finally focusing at a spot on the table between us. His nose looked as if it had been broken at some point and not reset quite properly, and his skin seemed exceptionally pale for someone who’d lived in Arizona all his life. But I chalked that up to the fact that the guy was doubtless scared shitless.
Unlike the interview rooms on the sets of most TV cop shows, there was no one-way mirror that would allow people to watch our exchange directly, but video cameras would capture the interview and send it to a recorder and a monitor in a control room nearby. The lieutenant, Pierce, and Chickris would be watching us there.
Maggie and I took chairs on the opposite side of the table and I began by identifying for the record the three of us present in the interview room. I noted the date and time and formally advised Petrovich that the interview was being recorded on audio and video.
He displayed no macho, tough-guy bravado; rather he looked genuinely scared and confused. I leaned forward in my chair and said, “Mr. Petrovich, we apologize for dragging you in here like this, but as I said, we’ve got a few questions for you.”
He nodded, saying nothing.
“Can you tell us how you spent last Wednesday night?” I asked.
He looked away, apparently thinking about it. Then he turned back to me. “I got home from work about six. I made myself some dinner and then watched television for a while. I went to bed a little after ten.”
“Can anybody verify that?” Maggie asked.
“No. I live alone, and I didn’t see or talk to anyone that night after I got home.”
“What did you watch on television?” I asked.
He shrugged. “I dunno. Nothing for very long, I guess. I was channel-flipping the way you do. I watched the Suns game for a while, but otherwise I was just bouncing around the channels until I got tired and went to bed.”
“How about Thursday night?” Maggie asked.
“About the same. The job leaves me pretty well exhausted, and by the end of the day, I don’t have energy enough to do anything besides go home and collapse in front of the tube. I’m trying to stay sober, and so I don’t go out to the bars. I sometimes go to a movie on the weekends, but except for that I stay pretty much to home. Why do you want to know what I was doing on Wednesday and Thursday nights?”
Ignoring the question, I leaned in closer and said, “How well did you know Karen Collins?”
Vigorously shaking his head, he said, “I don’t. I never heard the name before.”
“How about Beverly Thompson?” Maggie asked.
Again he shook his head. Then, looking completely astonished, he said, “Wait a minute! You mean the woman who’s been in the news—the one who was kidnapped?”
“Yeah,” Maggie said. “That woman.”
Petrovich jumped up out of the chair, looked at Maggie, and said, “Jesus Christ, you can’t be serious! You think I had something to do with that?”
“Didn’t you?” I asked.
“No! Absolutely not! No fucking way! Who the hell says I did?”
“Sit down, Mr. Petrovich,” I said.
Reluctantly, he took his chair again and clasped his hands together on the table in front of him. Trembling in anger or fear, or perhaps a combination of both, he said in a desperate voice, “Please, you’ve got to believe me. I was home all night both Wednesday and Thursday. I never heard either of those names, except for hearing the Thompson woman’s name on the news. And I had nothing to do with her going missing.”
“You did six years for robbery and attempted rape, is that right?” Maggie asked.
Petrovich nodded. In a distinctly less animated tone, he said, “Yes I did. And I paid the price.”
“How did that happen?” I asked.
He sighed heavily. Speaking slowly in a defeated voice, he said, “Seven years ago, I was a drunk and out of work because of it. I was out drinking one night and ran through what little money I had. I was stumbling home around midnight and I walked past this house. It was a hot night and I could see that a window on the side of the house was open.
“I don’t know how in the hell I could have been so stupid, except for the fact that I was drunk. But I figured I might find a few bucks so that I could go back to the bar and do some more drinking. Anyway, I pulled the screen off and climbed in the window. A woman was in bed and I woke her up. She jumped out of bed and started screaming. I went after her and grabbed her.”
Shaking his head, he continued, “I wasn’t trying to rape her. I just wanted to shut her up so that I could get back out the window and get away. But we were tussling and her nightgown got torn partway off. The noise woke up the woman’s sister and brother-in-law, who were sleeping down the hall. He ran in and pulled me off of her. Then he punched my lights out and called the cops.”
Petrovich paused for a few seconds, then looked at us earnestly and said, “I’m not a violent man, not even when I was drunk. Up until that night, my closest brush with the law was a couple of traffic tickets. I terrified that poor woman. I shamed myself and lost my family as a result. But I took my medicine and promised myself that I’d never touch a drink again. Since I got out of Lewis, I’ve been straight down the line.”
“Do you own a gun, Mr. Petrovich?” Maggie asked.
“No, of course not! That would violate my parole.”
“And you don’t know Beverly Thompson?” I said.
“No.”
“You were never in her car?”
“No!”
“You don’t know Karen Collins?”
“No!”
“You were never in her home?”
“No!”
“Well, then, Mr. Petrovich,” Maggie said, “how do you account for the fact that hair taken from Ms. Thompson’s car and from Ms. Collins’s home matches up to your DNA?”
Looking totally confused, he shook his head. “I can’t…It doesn’t…I was never there!”
His eyes finally settled on mine, and I said, “Six years ago, while you were at Lewis, you were required to submit a DNA sample for the state’s criminal database?”
“Yes.”
I threw up my hands. “Well, our forensics team found hair samples at both crime sc
enes. And when the lab analyzed them and checked them against the database, they matched up to the sample you gave.”
Petrovich’s eyes widened, and for a moment he looked like a man who’d just received the shock of his life. Then he began vigorously shaking his head again. In an anguished voice, he said, “No way. It’s got to be some sort of mistake. Please…I wasn’t there. I don’t know anything about either woman.”
He held my eyes with his, as if begging me to believe his denials. I gave him a few seconds, then leaned across the table and sighed. “Look, Mr. Petrovich. This isn’t a stupid television program you’re in here. We’re not going to play some lame good cop/bad cop routine with you, and I’m not going to go ballistic and beat the hell out of you to make you tell us what you know. The truth is that we don’t need to do any of that crap. We’ve got you dead to rights with the DNA evidence, and believe me when I say that you’ll be a lot better off cooperating with us, rather than giving us these bullshit answers that plainly contradict the evidence.”
I closed the distance between us and said in a quiet voice, “You can still help yourself here, Richard. At least tell us what you did with Beverly Thompson. If she’s still alive and if you help us save her, you can go a long way toward saving yourself. But if you stonewall us here, you’re gonna to go down hard.
“Right now your car’s in our garage and our technicians will be going through it with a fine-tooth comb. While they’re doing that, my partner and I will be searching every square inch of your apartment. And if there’s anything in your car or in your apartment to connect you to either of these women—and I do mean anything—we’re going to find it. And by then it’ll be way too late for you to do yourself any good. You need to believe me when I say that things will go a lot easier for you if you’re straight with us now.”
“But I am being straight with you,” he pleaded. “I didn’t do anything.”
We kept at it for another twenty minutes or so, but Petrovich continued to insist that he did not know either Beverly Thompson or Karen Collins, or Alma Fletcher for that matter. He continued to claim that he was home at the time Thompson was kidnapped and again when Collins was shot. He told us that he’d been at work the morning that Fletcher was shot. That alibi we would check, of course, but the DNA evidence had not put Petrovich at the scene of Fletcher’s murder. The only thing tying that crime to the other two was the ballistics evidence.
I left the interview room feeling totally conflicted. There was no question about the fact that the physical evidence put Petrovich at two of our three crime scenes. But the guy had seemed genuinely confused by our questions and by the DNA evidence against him. He had also appeared sincere in protesting his innocence. Either he was an outstanding actor or something was totally out of whack here. We put him in a holding cell and went to search his apartment for the weapon that had been used in the three killings and for any other evidence that might tie him to any of the victims.
Chapter Twenty-Four
McClain appeared to be in an excellent mood when he got back to the house a little after one o’clock. Beverly listened as he unlocked the door, then watched as it swung open into the bedroom. He was carrying two large McDonald’s bags, and Beverly could smell the burgers and fries from across the room. Behind him, she could see the backpack sitting on the floor out in the hall.
Since climbing down from the chair in the shower twenty-six hours earlier, Beverly had been trying to focus as tightly as she could on even the smallest details of her surroundings. When McClain went out this morning, the backpack had been laying on its side. Now it was standing up, resting on its bottom end. She assumed, then, that he must have taken the backpack with him and set it back on the floor before unlocking the door.
Without being obvious about it, she tried to look carefully at the outside of the door, looking again for some sign that it either was or was not wired with explosives.
She reasoned that if McClain was telling the truth, the device would not be so obvious as to alert any unsuspecting person who might try to open the door. It would have to be concealed, probably above the door, where someone entering the room would be least likely to notice it. When she had watched him walk out through the door this morning, Beverly had spotted what looked like a metal ring attached to the door only an inch or so down from the top.
As usual, before leaving for the day, McClain had set out Beverly’s breakfast—the same meal of orange juice and cereal that he’d served her every morning of her captivity. This morning, she’d asked him if he’d please leave her the box of cereal as well. He was often gone all day, she explained, and the one bowl of cereal was not enough to keep her from getting very hungry by the middle of the afternoon. Couldn’t he at least allow her the opportunity to have a bowl of dry cereal to tide her over if she needed it?
McClain decided that he could. He went out to the kitchen, returned with the box of Kellogg’s Low Fat Granola, and set it on the card table. “Bon appetit!” he said, smiling. “Enjoy your day, darling.”
Once he’d gone, Beverly drank the juice and ate the cereal. Then she rinsed off the bowl and spoon in the bathroom sink and set them on the card table to dry in the air.
Up until this morning, she’d spent the bulk of the daytime hours sitting on the bed, leaning up against the wall opposite the door, because this was the most comfortable position she had found. But after finishing breakfast, she moved the card table and the two chairs closer to the door, near the foot of the bed. She sat down in a chair facing the door, poured another cup or so of cereal into the bowl, and settled in to wait.
When she finally heard McClain’s key in the door, she spooned some of the dry cereal into her mouth and began chewing it slowly. He walked through the door to find her apparently eating the cereal for lunch. From this new vantage point, she could see that what she’d thought was a metal ring near the top of the door was actually a hook that had been screwed into the door.
She looked immediately back to McClain, who closed the door behind him and then slipped the key ring into the right front pocket of his jeans. He stood for a moment just inside the room, watching Beverly chew her cereal. Stating the obvious, he said, “You moved the furniture?”
Beverly set her spoon down in the bowl. “Do you mind?” she asked in a quiet voice. “It’s just that where you had it before, it was right between the bed and the bathroom. Every time I walked back and forth to the bathroom, I kept getting the cable tangled up in the table and chairs. So I moved them.”
He looked at her for a long moment as if trying to gauge the honesty of her response. Beverly returned the look with what she hoped he’d read as an expression of supplication on her face. Then he gave a small shrug. “Fine by me, princess. Anything to make you more comfortable.” He set the McDonald’s bags on the table between them and said, “Let’s eat.”
McClain took the chair on the opposite side of the table and pulled two medium Diet Cokes and a pile of paper napkins out of the first bag. From the second, he produced two Quarter Pounders with Cheese and two large fries. He set one of each in front of her. “I know you’re probably getting tired of the junk food,” he said. “Believe me, so am I. I’ll bet I’ve gained five pounds eating this shit over the last few days. But tonight I’ll cook at home—something reasonably healthy like a salad and some chicken or something.”
“Thank you,” she replied.
As McClain dove into his food, Beverly slowly ate a couple of fries and then unwrapped the burger. She was hungry, and even the lukewarm fast food tasted good. McClain swallowed a bite of the hamburger and said, “I had a very good day at the office, in case you’re interested. Things are suddenly coming together very well.”
Beverly paused, a French fry halfway to her mouth. Carefully, she set it down on the hamburger wrapper in front of her. Looking up at McClain, she said, “Can’t you please tell me what this is all about? What do you mean when you say that things are coming together? And what’s my part in all of this? Why
are you holding me here?”
Toying with a French fry of his own, McClain said, “Your role is evolving, Beverly. For the moment, your part in this little drama is to keep me entertained while I attend to some other pressing business. But I promise that you have a much more important role ahead of you, and I won’t keep you in the dark much longer. I can tell you, though, that I met an old friend of yours today. I’m sure that if he were able, he’d want to send along his regards.”
Shaking her head, she said, “What old friend? Who?”
He laughed. “Nobody you have to worry about now, sweetheart. Just finish your lunch.”
McClain ate his burger and polished off the last of his fries. Then he sat back and slowly sipped at his Coke while he watched Beverly finish her lunch. She ate the last of her fries, wiped her mouth with a paper napkin, and took a drink of the Coke. She set the paper cup back on the table and McClain said, “Stand up, Beverly.”
For a long moment, she looked down at the center of the table. Then she swallowed hard and stood up, backing a couple of feet away from her chair. He looked at her for a couple of seconds, then said, “Take off your blouse.”
Saying nothing, she slowly unbuttoned the blouse and set it over the back of the chair in front of her.
“Now your bra,” he said.
She did as instructed, laying the bra over the blouse. Nearly a minute passed as McClain stared at her, looking from her eyes to her breasts and finally back to her eyes again. Holding her eyes with his, he picked up the cup and took a long sip of Coke. Then he gestured with the cup in the direction of her skirt.
Again, Beverly swallowed hard. Looking away from him toward the door, she released the clasp of her belt and unbuttoned the wraparound skirt. Reluctantly, she drew the skirt away and held it at her side.
McClain had torn off her panties the first night, and thus she now stood before him completely naked. Again, he stared at her body. Then he said quietly, “Go lie down on the bed, Beverly.”
No Place to Die Page 12