No Place to Die

by James L. Thane

  She dropped the skirt on the seat of the chair and did as she was told. McClain walked over to the side of the bed and stripped off his own clothes, watching her expression as he did. He was already hard and he forced himself into her with no preliminaries whatsoever. Beverly lay below him, gritting her teeth, but making no effort to resist as he thrust himself into her with a mounting intensity.

  As she felt McClain building to a climax, Beverly said a silent prayer to David, begging his understanding and forgiveness for what she was about to do. Then she reached up and grabbed McClain’s arms, digging her fingernails into his biceps. Arching her back slightly, she squeezed her thighs together and gave a small shudder. Then she quickly dropped her hands from his arms and let her legs go slack. Shaking her head, she began to cry. “No,” she said through the tears. “No.”

  McClain thrust himself into her twice more, then froze and moaned at his release. He held his position for a long minute, then withdrew and dropped down to Beverly’s side. She turned her face away from him, sobbing harder now.

  McClain lay beside her for a couple of minutes, listening to her cry. Then he reached over and took her by the chin, forcing her to look at him. “Well, what do you know about that?” he said. “What do you know about that?”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Richard Petrovich lived in a small, cheap apartment on the city’s south side, about two miles from the shop where he worked. The neighborhood was a mixture of residences and small businesses, and at least half of the signage in the area was in Spanish. Most of the people out on the street were Hispanic, and several homeless men were camped out with their shopping carts in a tiny park a block from the building where Petrovich lived.

  The apartment was above a small neighborhood grocery store that looked more like a miniature fortress. The few tiny windows were secured with thick iron bars, and a heavy wrought-iron gate protected the front door. As we pulled to a stop in front of the store, a tall, emaciated blonde stumbled out the door with an open beer in one hand and the balance of a six-pack dangling from the other. Paying no attention to us whatsoever, she wandered uncertainly down the middle of the street for half a block or so and then crossed into the yard of a tiny house on the other side of the street.

  Maggie and I watched her go into the house, then walked into the dimly lighted store. A heavyset clerk behind the counter took a brief look at our shields and IDs, then went into the back room and returned with the owner-manager. We showed him our search warrant for Petrovich’s apartment, and he led us out and around the side of the building to a rickety set of stairs. We followed him up to the second-floor landing, and he used one key to open the metal gate that guarded the apartment door and a second to open the door itself. Then he stood aside and gestured us in.

  The temperature outside was in the low eighties; inside the small apartment it had to be well over a hundred degrees. We quickly opened the windows and I turned on one small window air conditioner in the living room and another in the bedroom. Listening to them clatter to life, I sincerely doubted that they were up to the job.

  We began by making a brief tour through the place. In addition to the living room and bedroom, Petrovich’s living space consisted of a tiny kitchen and an even smaller bathroom. All the rooms appeared clean and tidy. A few magazines and newspapers were stacked neatly on a table in the living room, which also contained a well-worn couch and a matching easy chair. A small Panasonic television set rested on an aluminum stand opposite the chair. On top of the television set was a framed photo of the little girl whose picture I had seen in Petrovich’s wallet.

  The kitchen appliances and counters had been wiped down. A bowl, a glass, and a spoon had been washed and left in a dish drainer next to the sink. The bed had been made. The clothes that constituted Petrovich’s limited wardrobe had been folded and put away or hung in the closet. In the bathroom, the tub and the sink had been scrubbed clean, and a few toiletries were lined up neatly in the medicine cabinet above the sink. And Beverly Thompson was obviously not in residence.

  We spent an hour searching the sweltering apartment to no avail. Petrovich had created a small hiding place behind a baseboard in the bedroom, and in it I found a few photographs and papers that he apparently was attempting to protect in case a burglar targeted the apartment. I also found a small .22-caliber revolver. But the weapon that had been used in our killings was a nine-millimeter pistol, not a .22, and we found nothing that tied Petrovich in any way to any of our victims.

  Careful to preserve any fingerprints that might be on the gun, I slipped it into an evidence bag. Then we locked up the apartment and returned the keys to the owner. Once back in the car, Maggie and I both pitched our jackets into the backseat and I cranked the AC to high. As the cool air rushed over us, I turned to Maggie and said, “Thoughts?”

  “Jesus, Sean, I don’t know,” she sighed. “The DNA match aside, this guy just doesn’t look or feel at all right to me. He gives every impression of being exactly as his parole officer described him.”

  “I know,” I agreed. “That’s my sense too. I think he was genuinely surprised when we asked him about Thompson and Collins. I’d swear he never heard of either woman except on the news, and on the basis of what we’ve seen so far, I’ll bet you a dinner at the Zinc Bistro that the lab guys are not going to find anything in his car, either.”

  “No bet,” she replied.

  Back at the department, I left Maggie in her office and walked down to the holding cell where we’d left Richard Petrovich. He eyed me warily as I entered the cell, and I told him to sit down. He sank onto a bench built into the back wall of the cell.

  “Okay, Mr. Petrovich,” I said. “The technicians are still going through your car, but I have no idea what’s going on with that. My partner and I have been through your apartment. We didn’t find anything there to tie you to our killings.”

  He looked up at me expectantly. “So as soon as they discover there’s nothing in my car, I can go?”

  I slowly shook my head. “No, I’m afraid you can’t. We didn’t see any evidence in your apartment linking you to Collins and Thompson, but we did find your hidey-hole. I’ve got your gun. It’s down in the trunk of my car. And as you pointed out this morning, that violates your parole.”

  Petrovich paled, then gave me a look of despair. “Jesus Christ, Detective, you saw that neighborhood. Would you live down there without a gun?”

  “No, probably not,” I admitted. “But then I’m not fresh out on parole.”

  Petrovich looked away, staring off into space, and the silence built for a long minute. Finally I said in a quiet voice, “Look, Mr. Petrovich, there’s two ways you can play this. You can demand a lawyer, and assuming that we don’t come up with anything in your car, a judge will probably rule that we can’t hold you on the DNA evidence alone. But if that’s the way you want to go, we’ll have to report the weapons violation to your parole officer and you’ll be on your way back to Lewis.”

  He looked down at the floor and began slowly shaking his head. “On the other hand,” I continued, “we might hold you as a material witness for a few days while we try to figure out what your DNA is doing at our crime scenes. If you went along with that and didn’t jump up and down asking for a lawyer to get you out right away…well, my car’s got a big trunk. There’s a lot of junk in it. You never know, your gun might accidentally get lost in there.”

  Petrovich looked back up at me and swallowed hard. Then, with a resigned look on his face, he nodded his head.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  A little after four o’clock, I called the duty officer and told him that I was taking a couple of hours of personal time. Then I locked up my desk and walked down the stairs and out the door into another beautiful late afternoon. The temperature stood somewhere in the midseventies and only a few scattered wisps of clouds were anywhere to be seen in a bright blue sky.

  It was exactly the sort of day that convinced thousands of visitors every year to
chuck their lives in the Midwest and relocate to the Valley of the Sun, and it struck me that it would have been a perfect evening to sit out in the backyard with Julie, sipping margaritas and cooking dinner on the grill while we talked through the events of the day. Instead, I got into the car and drove to north Scottsdale to be deposed by Philip Loiselle, the lawyer who was determined to prevent her from finally finding peace.

  The deposition was a part of his—and Elizabeth’s—ongoing effort to invalidate Julie’s living will and the medical power of attorney that she’d signed. They were attempting to establish that Julie had never really intended that the living will should be invoked under circumstances such as her current condition.

  Elizabeth, who’d barely spoken to Julie in five years, and who’d certainly never discussed these sorts of matters with her, had testified in a deposition of her own that her daughter had always been a fighter and that she would never willingly surrender her life, even under the most extreme circumstances. She insisted, on the basis of her own religious faith, that it would be morally wrong for the doctors to terminate Julie’s life. And contrary to the testimony of Julie’s doctors, she insisted that as long as Julie remained alive there was always the chance, no matter how slight, that she might regain consciousness and perhaps even go on to lead a normal life.

  Julie’s father had remained aloof from the debate. On the one hand, he respected Julie’s wishes and her right to make her own decisions. On the other, he couldn’t imagine the prospect of watching his daughter die, even though in every meaningful sense of the word, she already had. He came out to Arizona occasionally, grieving for a day or two at Julie’s bedside, and then retreated to Minneapolis, neither actively supporting nor opposing his wife’s activities.

  His pain and confusion mirrored my own, and I understood and identified with his heartache instinctively. He adored Julie. He had loved and supported her at every turn, and he too had been devastated by her loss. In life or death, Julie had always been his daughter, whereas in Elizabeth’s case, and for whatever reason, Julie had become another cause.

  Over the course of an hour and a half, guided by my own lawyer, Steve Nelson, I testified as patiently as possible. I swore again that Julie was of sound mind and that she had clearly understood what she was doing when she signed her living will and the medical power of attorney. I described in great detail how active she had been, both physically and intellectually, and I repeated the details of several conversations in which she had clearly insisted that she would rather be allowed to die than be forced to live with an injury or an illness that would leave her physically or mentally incapacitated. I testified that, her mother’s religious faith notwithstanding, Julie had long ago stopped attending church and had abandoned any belief in God or in a life after this one.

  The ordeal left me totally drained and completely depressed. Living every day with the loss of Julie and of the life we’d had together was almost more than I could bear. But having to share so many of our most personal moments for the benefit of her mother and the legal process was inexplicably painful. It seemed a violation of Julie’s privacy, and I found little consolation in the fact that I had no choice in the matter if I was going to fulfill the trust that she had placed in me.

  I left the lawyer’s office, made my way to the freeway, and drove slowly back to the department, fighting the rush-hour traffic all the way. As a partial compensation, though, Mother Nature provided a spectacular sunset to help offset the frustration of the drive.

  As the sun slipped from the sky, the McDowell range stood out in sharp relief to the east, the mountains a deep purple in the advancing dusk. Above me, the sky faded slowly from a cobalt blue to a pale gray. To the west a bank of clouds gradually dissolved from a light pink to a brighter orange and then to a blazing crimson before finally draining out to a gunmetal gray and then disappearing altogether as the darkness descended over the Valley.

  Back at the office, I devoted a couple of hours to catching up on my paperwork, and that accomplished, I drove over to the nursing home. Thankfully, my mother-in-law had left no messages for me on the answering machine.

  I kissed Julie hello and dropped into the chair next to her bed. The nurses had washed and brushed her hair, and dressed her in what had been her favorite pale blue pajamas. She looked for all the world as if she were just sleeping peacefully in our own bedroom, waiting for me to get home at the end of my shift so that she could draw me gently into her arms and exorcise the demons of another horrible day.

  I found it impossibly hard to accept the fact that she would never be able to do so again, and as I took her hand, the pain of losing her nearly overwhelmed me yet again. Exhausted, I hunched forward and said quietly, “I’m lost, Jules, and I miss you so much. I’ve got some asshole out here shooting people right and left. I’ve got a woman missing and probably dead, and I can’t figure out what more I could or should be doing to catch the bastard and stop him. And it’s killing me that I can’t at least have the comfort of talking my troubles through with you.”

  Sighing, I sat back in the chair and mentally replayed the events of the day, trying to imagine what we might have done differently—what we might have done better. I wanted to believe that Richard Petrovich was our killer and that by arresting him we had brought an end to the string of shootings. But I also knew that if he was the killer, we now had virtually no hope of finding Beverly Thompson alive. If Petrovich wasn’t willing to trade her location for a chance at making things easier on himself, then almost certainly he had already killed her and disposed of the body.

  But despite the DNA evidence, my gut told me that Petrovich was not the guy, and absent the DNA, we had absolutely no evidence against him and not even a hint of a motive. Why in the hell would he have decided to target Fletcher, Collins, and the Thompsons? We still had no connection among any of the victims and no connection between any of them and Richard Petrovich. It was possible that one would still surface, but for the life of me I couldn’t imagine what it might be.

  If Petrovich was not the guy, the bad news, of course, was that the killings might continue. The good news, if there was any, was that Beverly Thompson might still be alive somewhere. But if so, where? And what more could we be doing to find her? If Petrovich wasn’t the guy, who was? And what more could we be doing to stop him?

  After an hour of wrestling with the various permutations of the problem, I kissed Julie good night and headed home. In the kitchen I stripped off my coat and tie and draped them over the back of a chair. I spent a couple of minutes at the counter, sorting through the day’s mail while I tried to decide what to do about dinner. I really wasn’t at all hungry, but I hadn’t eaten anything since lunch and knew that I needed to get something into my system.

  I opened the refrigerator door and scanned the contents. The most appealing thing staring back at me was a take-home box containing some leftover tortellini that I’d started at Tutti Santi the night before Beverly Thompson was kidnapped. I put it in a bowl and gave it a minute and a half in the microwave—just enough to take the chill off—and ate it standing at the counter.

  Not quite ready to surrender to bed, I wandered into the living room and poured three fingers of Jameson into a heavy old-fashioned glass. Then I put Lil’ Debbie & Blue Plate Special into the CD player, slipped on my headphones, and stretched out on the couch, balancing the whiskey on my chest. By the time Lil’ Debbie was halfway through “Stormy Monday,” I’d already fallen fast asleep thinking about Julie, about Beverly Thompson, and about the random accidents and inexplicable injustices that constituted life early in the twenty-first century.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  True to his word, Carl McClain spent the late afternoon in the kitchen. After forcing himself on Beverly, he lay beside her for fifteen or twenty minutes, puzzling over what had just transpired and listening to her sob. Finally, he touched her lightly on the hip. Then he got up from the bed, gathered up his clothes, and walked out of the room, closing the door
behind him.

  Beverly lay there, weeping softly for another few minutes, until her despair was trumped by the compulsion to scrub her body clean of McClain’s touch. With the cable trailing behind her, she made her way to the bathroom. She closed the door as far as the cable would permit, then used the toilet and stepped into the shower.

  As always, the water temperature was only a little north of lukewarm, but at least the pressure was reasonably decent. Beverly let the water course over her body, then picked the bar of cheap soap out of its plastic container. She scrubbed herself vigorously and stood under the showerhead, rinsing herself until the water turned cold.

  She shut off the water, and a second later she heard a light tap on the bathroom door. She peered around the shower curtain to see McClain dressed in a fresh pair of jeans and a new T-shirt. He stepped tentatively through the door, looking as though he might be somehow embarrassed, and held out a clean bath towel. “Here,” he said.

  Beverly reached a hand out from behind the curtain and took the towel. As she did, McClain pointed back at the bed. “I left you one of my shirts. Your blouse and bra are in the washing machine. You can wear the shirt until they’re dry. It’s clean,” he added.

  Beverly nodded slightly. “Thank you.”

  McClain returned the nod and then backed out of the room, pulling the door closed behind him again, as far as the cable would allow. Beverly stared at the door for a few seconds, then dropped the shower curtain back into place and began drying herself. Suddenly she found herself weeping again, grateful for the simple relief of something as basic as a freshly laundered towel. Catching herself, she pounded a fist into her thigh. “Stop it,” she whispered. “Do not let him do this to you.”

  She finished drying herself and spread the towel out over the shower rod to dry. Back in the bedroom, she slipped into the blue long-sleeve shirt that McClain had left on the bed and buttoned it up. It was way too large for her, but she was thankful for that as well.