No Place to Die

by James L. Thane

  “I don’t remember how exactly. He said, ‘Wait a minute,’ or something like that. I turned and he was right behind me, getting ready to grab me. That’s when I shot him. It was all I could do.”

  Williamson shook her head and began sobbing harder. The nurse squeezed her hand, promising that everything would be all right, and at that point the young doctor stepped in. “I’m sorry, Detective, but I think that’s all she can stand for the moment. I’m going to sedate her and you can talk to her again in the morning.”

  I nodded. “Okay, Doctor, but we’ll be posting a guard at her door and she won’t be able to leave until we’ve had a chance to talk with her further.”

  I walked back down to the emergency room and found Maggie racing through the lobby door. She was dressed in jeans and had thrown a blue blazer on over a white T-shirt. She’d not taken the time to apply any makeup, and her hair was a bit more tousled than usual. But as was almost always the case, she still somehow managed to be the most attractive woman in the room, even fresh out of bed at one forty-five in the morning.

  I caught her up, and just as I finished, a doctor in bloody scrubs emerged from the hall leading to the operating room. We identified ourselves, and I asked him how the patient was doing.

  “Better than expected, I would say,” the doctor sighed. “Fortunately, he was shot with a small-caliber gun that didn’t do nearly as much damage as a larger weapon would have done. Also, miraculously, neither of the bullets hit any major arteries or seriously damaged any vital organs. He’s sedated of course, and he’s going to hurt like hell for a while, but he should eventually make a full recovery.”

  “Can we at least take a look at him?” Maggie asked.

  “Not at the moment, Detective. As I say, he’s sedated and he’s not going to have anything to say for a while. You can see him in the morning.”

  Glancing at the nameplate on the guy’s left breast pocket, I said, “Look, Dr. Nauman, the man you’re treating in there has been identified as a suspect in six homicides and a kidnapping. The kidnapping victim is still missing, and obviously, time is of the essence here. We understand that we can’t talk to the man now, but we need to begin the process of establishing his identity immediately.

  “If this is our suspect, we’ll need to question him at the earliest opportunity. If he isn’t, then we’ve got to know that immediately too so that we’re not sitting here twiddling our thumbs while the real killer is still out there at large in the community.”

  Nauman nodded and said, “Okay, you can take a quick look, but that’s all I can allow at this point.”

  He led us through the door and down the hall to the recovery room. He pulled back a curtain to reveal a man lying on a bed, attached to a variety of monitors and to a drip line that was pumping some sort of clear solution into his system. The victim appeared to be in his early forties and in good physical shape, save of course for the two bullets he’d just taken in the gut.

  I guessed him to be about six feet and perhaps a hundred and ninety pounds. He had dark wavy hair that fell down across his forehead like a reverse comma and a fading tattoo on his arm that read SEMPER FI.

  I turned to Nauman and said, “Where are his clothes and personal effects?”

  “In there,” he answered, pointing to a large black plastic bag under the bed. “Everything’s there except for the T-shirt he was wearing. We had to cut it off, and we simply threw it away.”

  I retrieved the bag and carried it over to a chair at the foot of the bed. I opened the bag and found myself looking at a pile of bloody clothes. Lying on top of the clothes was a pair of glasses with dark brown frames.

  I asked Nauman for a pair of surgical gloves and another bag. I laid the glasses on top of the second bag and then pulled a pair of jeans out of the first. The front of the jeans was drenched in blood and I turned them around and retrieved a wallet from the back pocket. I dropped the jeans back into the bag and opened the wallet.

  According to the driver’s license, which had been issued two years earlier, the man lying on the bed behind me was Daniel Foster, a forty-two-year-old resident of Cave Creek. The photo on the license matched the guy in the bed, and so did the photo on the card behind the driver’s license that identified Foster as an employee of the hospital since October 18 of the previous year.

  I showed the ID to Nauman. “Do you know him?”

  The doctor shook his head. “No, but I know someone who will.”

  Nauman led us through the labyrinth of hospital hallways until we arrived at the custodial department. The supervisor on duty identified Foster’s picture and confirmed that he’d been working for the hospital since a month before Carl McClain was released from Lewis.

  According to his time card, Foster had clocked out at midnight, and the supervisor speculated that, like Williamson, he had simply been headed to his car in the employee’s parking area of the garage. “Dan’s a helluva nice guy,” the supervisor insisted. “He’d never hurt a flea. Is this woman fuckin’ nuts or what?”

  Maggie and I turned the shooting over to a team of night-shift detectives and left the hospital a little after three. We were both still wired, and neither of us was going to be getting back to sleep any time soon, so we decided to get some breakfast. I followed her to a Denny’s a few blocks from the hospital, and we slid into a booth at the back of the nearly empty restaurant.

  A waitress who seemed far too chipper for that hour of the morning brought a cup of coffee for Maggie and a large orange juice for me. As the young woman walked back toward the kitchen, Maggie gave me a look of mock amazement.

  “You’re drinking something that might actually be good for you? What the hell happened—did the Coca-Cola Company go out of business overnight?”

  “Jesus, I hope not,” I countered. “I can’t begin to imagine how horrible the withdrawal pains would be.”

  She shot me a look, then blew across the top of her cup and took a tentative sip of the steaming coffee. Setting the cup back down on the table, she said, “So, can you believe this shit tonight? This woman guns down some poor schmuck just because she thinks he looks like McClain?”

  “I don’t know, Maggs,” I sighed. “The guy does vaguely resemble the sketches we’ve been circulating, and I can imagine that the poor woman was terrified. She had to be scared to death just at the thought that McClain might be out there somewhere gunning for her. And then to see somebody who looked like him following her through that empty garage…”

  “I suppose,” she conceded. “God, I just hope that the rest of the people on the list don’t get that trigger-happy. It’ll look like the friggin’ O.K. Corral around here.”

  I took a sip of the orange juice, set the glass back down on the table, and shook my head. “For a few minutes there tonight, I actually thought that we might have our hands on this bastard.”

  “Me too,” she sighed. “It would have been nice to have a hold of the cocksucker, in a world of pain, but still conscious enough to tell us about Thompson.”

  “Yeah, shit. Speaking of poor women…”

  I drained a third of my orange juice, then said, “I know it makes no rational sense, but for some reason, that’s the part of all this that angers me the most. I mean the guy’s shot and killed six innocent people, and yet the thing that’s got me the most pissed off is that he’s holding Thompson out there somewhere and we can’t fuckin’ find her.”

  Maggie let out a long sigh. “Well, yeah, I hope that he’s holding her out there somewhere and that we can still get to her in time. But you know as well as I do there’s an excellent chance that Thompson’s already dead and buried out in the freakin’ desert someplace where we’ll never find her.”

  The waitress served our breakfasts and we ate in silence for a few minutes as the tension of the last couple of hours slowly dissipated. Maggie pushed some scrambled eggs around on her plate and then, without looking up at me, she said, “While I was walking out to my car tonight, I bumped into Elaine. She said th
at Riggins had just taken Doyle to the hospital.”

  I put my fork down, leaned back in the booth, and sighed. “I thought you’d left before all of that happened.”

  “And you weren’t going to say anything about it?”

  “Not at the moment. I figured it could wait until morning.”

  She nodded and pushed her eggs around some more. “The fat prick really called me Little Miss Affirmative Action?”

  “The hell with him, Maggs. The guy’s a cretin. Don’t give it another thought.”

  She nodded. “I understand that wasn’t all he said…”

  “No, it wasn’t,” I sighed. “But again, don’t worry about it. Nobody pays any attention to anything that moron says.”

  Finally she looked up to meet my eyes. “You don’t have to defend me, you know.”

  “Yeah, Maggie, I do. You’re my partner and I have your back, just as I know that you have mine. That said, I understand perfectly well that you don’t need my help or anyone else’s defending yourself against a clown like Chris Doyle. In that matchup, he’s the one who needs all the help he can get. And if it makes you feel any better, I wasn’t defending you tonight. I was defending myself.”

  For a long moment, she said nothing more. Then she gave the slightest of smiles. “Jesus, I’ll bet that felt good, even in spite of all the shit you’re gonna be in. God only knows how many times I’ve wanted to do it myself.”

  “Yeah, maybe. But as you say, there will be a price to pay…”

  She nodded, saying nothing more. Finally, after another couple of minutes had passed, she pushed her plate away and said, “So, on an entirely different subject, how are you doing otherwise—aside from all this shit, I mean. You’ve been pretty quiet the last couple of days.”

  I pushed my own plate away, balled up my napkin, and dropped it on the table. “I know,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  She shook her head sympathetically. “Jesus, Sean, you don’t have to be sorry. I know you’re going through hell. I just was wondering if anything else had gone wrong.”

  I turned away for a moment, then looked back to her. “Yes…No…Shit, I don’t know, Maggie. My lawyer called yesterday morning. We have a trial date in April.”

  Her face softened. “I’m sorry, Sean. I really am. I guess I just don’t know what to say.”

  I shook my head and gave her a weak smile. “Thanks, Maggs, but there’s really nothing to be said. I have such horribly mixed emotions about it all that I don’t know what to say or think myself. Telling the doctors to remove Julie’s feeding tube was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do in my life. But then having to spend the last ten months fighting to let her go…I know that I have to do this, and I know that it’s what Julie would have wanted me to do. But it’s so incredibly hard.”

  “I understand, and again I’m so sorry, Sean. I wish there was something I could do or say that would help…”

  “I know you do. And I hope you know that I really do appreciate the thought, Maggs. Unfortunately, as I’ve said before, there’s just not much that anybody can do.”

  We paid the check and walked back out into the parking lot. The temperature had dropped into the high thirties, and Maggie crossed her arms, hugging herself to stay warm. I walked her to her car and waited as she unlocked the door. We stood quietly for a moment watching the traffic pass by on the street. Then Maggie brought her eyes back to mine.

  “I wish I could have known her.”

  “Me too, Maggs. You would have liked each other.”

  She nodded, and then, saying nothing more, she squeezed my arm and got into the car. I watched as she drove out of the parking lot, then got into my own car and headed home.

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  “So, how would you like to be a staked goat?”

  It was nine o’clock Thursday morning. After getting three hours’ sleep, I was sitting in Mike Miller’s kitchen, drinking a bottle of water. Across the table, Mike took a sip of coffee, set down his mug, and said, “What did you have in mind?”

  “We’re getting absolutely nowhere trying to flush this bastard out,” I sighed. “We’ve had his name and his picture out there for two days now, and we’ve had no credible sightings of the guy. Meanwhile, he continues to waltz around the Valley, picking off his victims one by one while we sit here with our collective thumb up our ass.

  “To hear the receptionist tell it, McClain had absolutely no problem conning Larry Cullen into walking happily out of the Cadillac dealership with him yesterday, even though we’d warned Cullen that McClain was coming. Clearly he’s disguised his appearance somehow, which means that almost certainly he’s not going to get recognized off the pictures we’ve put out there.”

  “No, probably not,” Miller agreed. “So where do I fit in?”

  I took another sip of the water. “Look, Mike, given the people McClain has targeted so far, you’ve got to figure that your name is on his list. I mean, if he’s going to go after the jurors who voted to send him to prison, then sure as hell he’s not going to ignore the lead detective who developed the evidence that convinced those jurors.”

  “You wouldn’t think so,” he admitted.

  “So, knowing that he’s almost certainly going to be coming after you sooner or later, I was thinking maybe we could accelerate the process a bit, which might give us a chance to nail him.”

  “And you’d do this how?”

  “I’m thinking I could put a bug in the ear of a sympathetic reporter, maybe like Ellie Davis over at Channel 12, who might have a few questions for the cop who put Carl McClain in the pen in the first place. You know, where is he now? How does he feel about McClain and his rampage? That sort of crap. You could make some disparaging remarks about McClain’s manhood—call him a sick chickenshit who only attacks defenseless old women or whatever. I’m hoping that McClain would see it, or at least read about it, and maybe he’d get all pissed off and decide to deal with you sooner rather than later.

  “It’s apparent that the guy spends at least some time scouting his victims—he knows their patterns, when they’re likely to be at home alone, and so on. I’m figuring that you could stay close to home for a while. We’d put a very loose net around you, and hope that McClain would walk right into it.”

  “So you spot some guy casing my house, figure that it must be McClain in whatever disguise he’s using to escape being spotted, and grab him up?”

  “Well, it’s not quite that simple,” I sighed. “What complicates things is Beverly Thompson. Her body hasn’t turned up yet, and so there’s some small chance that she’s still alive and that McClain is holding her somewhere. We don’t want to snatch McClain—or worse, kill him in a shootout if he resists arrest—before we have a chance to find her. So what I’d hope to do is to spot McClain scouting you and then tail him back to wherever he’s holding Thompson.”

  Mike nodded. “You realize, of course, that even if you should get lucky enough to spot him, and even if he should lead you back to wherever he’s hiding out, and even if he is holding the woman there, your chances of getting her out alive are still pretty damn slim. Once this asshole realizes that you’ve got him bottled up, he might very well kill her and himself rather than go back to the pen for the rest of his life. At the very least, he’ll try to use her as a negotiating tool.”

  “I know,” I said. “And we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it. But for the moment, I don’t have any better ideas. Do you?”

  “No, not really,” he said, shaking his head. “And I’m certainly game for my end of it. I’d much rather have the bastard coming after me now, when I’m expecting it, as opposed to waiting indefinitely, wondering when he’s going to show up. I assume you’ve run this grand scheme by your lieutenant?”

  “Actually, no I haven’t,” I admitted. “I didn’t want to take it to him until I’d had a chance to talk to you about it first.”

  Mike drained the last of his coffee and set the mug back on the table. “Well, go see wha
t the man has to say, then let me know. And,” he said, smiling, “you’d also better pray that McClain doesn’t somehow get to me before you can get your troops into place.”

  Back downtown, I followed Maggie’s advice and slipped up the rear stairs to the third floor, avoiding the lieutenant’s office and trying to postpone for at least a few more minutes the inevitable conversation about my confrontation with Chris Doyle. On my desk, I found a message, asking me to call Tony Anderson over at the crime lab. I got him on the phone, and he said, “You’ll find this interesting.”

  “Oh? What’ve you got?”

  “Richard Petrovich apparently got out of jail long enough on Tuesday to visit the scene of Harold Roe’s murder.”

  “Say what?”

  “The Crime Scene Response team brought back hairs from the chair where Roe was sitting that match up to Petrovich’s.”

  “But, Jesus, Tony. We both know that he wasn’t there. What the hell is going on here?”

  “Well,” he sighed, “we both know that Petrovich wasn’t there, but his hair definitely was. My best guess is that McClain somehow collected some of Petrovich’s hair and planted it in Roe’s chair as a diversion, knowing it would go back to Petrovich and hoping to send you off on a wild-goose chase.”

  I hung up the phone and, no longer able to delay the inevitable, walked down the hall to the lieutenant’s office, ready to face the music. I found him polishing his reading glasses. He looked up for a moment, waved me in, and directed me to a chair in front of his desk. Before I could open my mouth, he went back to polishing the glasses.

  “I don’t know if you heard or not,” he said, “but Doyle slipped in the conference room last night, fell against the table, and broke his nose.

  “The stupid shit thought he might try to make something out of it, like maybe suing the department for not properly mopping the floor or some damn thing, but I told him not even to think about it. I also told him to take a week off and give some serious thought to the question of how long he really wanted to remain a member of the Homicide Unit.”