by JF Freedman
“Marlon Perdue here, John,” the detective said. “I’ve got preliminary results of the cause of death for the body we took from Rancho San Gennaro.”
“What do you have?” the sheriff asked warily.
“Dr. Atchison found a bullet in the corpse,” Perdue told his boss. “This victim was shot to death.”
Atchison managed to lift a partial thumb print. It was sent to the state’s regional Department of Justice forensic lab in Goleta. Within an hour, the cause of Maria Estrada’s disappearance had been solved.
7
SPRAWLED OUT ON HER sofa, Kate, exhausted from a long day’s work, watched the youthful woman newscaster on the Channel 3 evening news. The reporter was in front of the county courthouse, a popular venue for television stand-ups. Behind her, reporters from other stations, some from as far away as Los Angeles and San Diego, were talking into their stations’ cameras. Sunlight shone on the façade of the massive, Spanish-style courthouse; the report had been recorded earlier that day.
Sophia, busy with her homework at the kitchen table, looked up when she heard the reporter say “Maria Estrada.” She turned away from her laptop and sat next to her mother.
A photograph of Maria from last year’s high school yearbook came up on the TV screen. “…The missing girl was last seen eating lunch after school at a local taco stand,” the reporter spoke into the camera.
The shot changed from the picture of Maria, a frozen smile on her face, to overhead helicopter footage of sheriff’s investigators at the crime site. The camera zoomed in to the remains being placed into the body bag and followed the ambulance as it began driving away.
“Anyone with information about this case is urged to contact the county sheriff’s department,” the reporter said into the camera. An 800 number came up on the screen. Then the number faded out, and the reporter announced, “With us is Santa Barbara County sheriff John Griffin.”
The camera widened to include the sheriff, a thin, middle-aged man in a western-cut business suit. “What can you tell us so far?” the reporter asked him. “Have you developed any leads? Are there any suspects?”
Griffin shook his head. “No one we wish to reveal at this time. We have some possible leads,” he added with a deliberate vagueness. “When we have more substantial information, we will let the public know.”
Meaning you don’t have squat, Kate thought. The police don’t go trolling their 800 number unless the cupboard is bare.
“There’s speculation this killing may be drug-related,” the announcer continued, gamely fishing for an angle.
“That’s a possibility,” Griffin replied, stubbornly noncommittal. “We’re looking into it, along with other scenarios. Which is ail I have to say for now.” He walked out of the shot. The announcer turned to face the camera again. “That’s it from here,” she chirped. “Back to you in the studio, Arlene.”
Kate hit the “off” button on her remote. “Did you know this girl?” she asked Sophia.
“Yes,” Sophia answered, her eyes still on the blank screen. “I mean, I knew who she was. We didn’t move in the same circles. She was more…” She hesitated.
“More what?” Kate asked with curiosity.
“Sociable,” Sophia said charitably. “She wasn’t into academics. We didn’t have any classes together.”
Sophia’s description of Maria confirmed the rumors circulating around the courthouse—the dead girl screwed around. Her behavior would further complicate the sheriff’s investigation; any man she had known might be a suspect. And there was the possible drug connection, which had to be taken seriously. Maria was related to Hector Torres, an activist in the Latino community who had been in the drug trade, years ago. He had supposedly gone straight, but you never knew. There was also the possibility the killer might be someone Maria had encountered the day she was killed; a transient who could be a thousand miles away by now.
This was going to be a hot case—that was a given. A high school girl with possible drug connections is murdered and the decomposed body is discovered on the property of one of the county’s most distinguished families. All the elements for tabloid sensationalism.
Sophia got up. “I have this essay due tomorrow.” She shuddered. “God, this is so horrible, mom! This girl was in my class. We breathed the same air.”
Kate stood and hugged her. “I know.” She pulled her daughter tighter. “I know, honey.”
They held on to each other for a moment, then Sophia went back into the kitchen and hunched over her computer again. Kate looked after her. That murdered girl could so easily have been my daughter, she thought with a mother’s gut-wrenching fearfulness.
Juanita McCoy ushered Louis Watson and Cindy Rebeck, the two veteran sheriff’s detectives who had been assigned to head up the murder investigation, into her living room. They sat across from her as she slowly leafed through some eight-by-ten photos of Maria Estrada.
“I’ve never seen this girl,” Juanita told them, after she carefully looked at the pictures. She handed them back to Rebeck. “I’m sorry.” She sighed. “That poor child. Her family must be going through hell.”
Rebeck, a tall, leggy blonde wearing a short skirt, a light cotton blouse, and low heels better suited for desk-jockeying than fieldwork, slid the pictures into a manila folder. She understood the old lady’s tenderhearted attitude toward the victim’s family, but she personally could never indulge in sympathy—she had a job to do, emotions got in the way.
“The security gate at the road-head?” she said. “That leads to the section of your property where the body was found? Do you keep it locked?” They had noticed the gate on the drive up.
Juanita nodded. “Yes, we do. We have concerns about theft, and vandalism. The original family homestead at the end of that road contains artifacts that are valuable and sentimental to our family. You don’t want people coming onto your property that you don’t know about,” she said proprietarily.
“How many people normally come and go to that area?” Watson, a beefy man in his forties, asked.
“Only my foreman and his wife have unlimited access. They’re my only full-time employees; everyone else who works on the ranch is seasonal, and they don’t use that road.”
Watson and Rebeck had already interviewed the Mortons. They didn’t know anything, and they had solid alibis for the time frame when the girl had gone missing.
“Although if anybody wanted to get onto the ranch, they wouldn’t find it very hard,” Juanita continued. “The property is big, and remote. And there are ways to skirt around the gate,” she added. “But the gate does help—some deterrent is better than none.”
Watson made some notes. “You didn’t see any suspicious activity for the days prior to the body being found?” he asked.
“No. It’s usually quiet out here.” Juanita bowed her head. “What a tragedy for her family,” she said again.
Watson felt bad for Mrs. McCoy. This body had been discovered on her ranch, so now she was being dragged into the muck, even though the forensic detectives were almost positive that the murder had not been committed where the remains had been discovered. The preliminary investigation indicated that the girl had been killed somewhere else, then brought there. This was a remote location; a good place to dump a body you didn’t want found. If the ranch foreman hadn’t been out there surveying the property, the vultures and flies would have picked the corpse clean before it was discovered, and then it might never have been found. Regardless of where the girl had been killed, however, the body had turned up here. Mrs. McCoy was going to be in the limelight. Not something to wish on an older woman, particularly one of her stature in the community.
Juanita walked the detectives outside, shielding her eyes against the high midday sun. “I hope you catch the killer soon,” she said. “I don’t like all these people tramping around out here.”
“So do we,” Watson answered tightly. “And we’ll do our best to keep our incursions to a minimum. But we do have a mur
der to solve.”
“I understand,” Juanita answered. She went back inside, after promising to call them if she thought of anything that might be helpful.
“It’s so pretty out here,” Rebeck commented, looking past the barn to the pasture. “The authentic old Santa Barbara.”
Watson, oblivious to the beauty around him, said darkly, “This is going to be a bitch.”
“Tell me about it,” Rebeck answered, her partner’s morose objectivity bringing her down to earth with a thud. “We’d better come up with somebody who saw this chiquita the day she disappeared. She was a social butterfly, there have to be witnesses.”
The detectives walked to their department-issue Crown Victoria. Watson slid in behind the wheel. He turned the ignition, but didn’t put the car in gear. “There’s one thing that doesn’t compute.”
“What?” Rebeck asked, as she fastened her seat belt.
“The gate on the road that leads there. If I’m trying to dump a body, I’m going to look for a place that’s more accessible.”
Rebeck nodded thoughtfully. “Maybe it wasn’t locked that day. I’ll bet they don’t check on it that often.”
“Anything’s possible,” Watson agreed glumly. He lightly banged on the steering wheel. “We’d better get lucky with a witness or we’re going to be up shit’s creek.”
8
RIVA GARRISON, STEPPING OUT of the shower, glanced over at her husband, Luke, who was trimming his goatee with a battery-powered trimmer. “The gray’s beginning to overtake the brown, big boy,” she observed acutely, if not kindly. “You’re starting to look like Willie Nelson.”
“I’m not braiding my hair, if that’s the direction you’re pushing this conversation,” he replied. “It isn’t nearly long enough. And there aren’t that many gray ones, comparatively.” He squinted into the steamed-up mirror. “I’d say no more than ten percent.”
It was six-thirty in the morning. Luke had already been out for his run. Now he stood naked in front of the mirror, a cup of coffee on the sink, peering at his foggy image.
Riva wrapped her own long, luxuriant, mink-brown hair in a towel and began drying off with another. “And aren’t you about due for your annual eye exam?” she asked.
He rolled his eyes in mock-exasperation. “When did you start channeling Don Rickles?”
“Just stating the facts, counselor.” She sat on the toilet lid and began drying off her legs. She nudged his bare tush with her toes. “Man turns fifty, it’s like he becomes someone else. What is that?” she teased.
Three months ago, Luke had celebrated his fiftieth birthday. Riva had thrown a balls-out party for him. Everything was done up perfectly: she had a big tent erected in the backyard, where a caterer grilled New York steaks, baby back ribs, and Maine lobsters for two hundred of Luke’s friends. Jack Daniel’s, Johnnie Walker Black, and Veuve Clicquot were the house-pours. She also imported a killer blues band from L.A. It was a great bash: to quote John Lennon and Paul McCartney, “Everybody had a good time.” Nobody thought about the flip side of that verse, “Everybody had a hard year.”
Except Luke, who woke up the next morning with a raging hangover and the first gray hair in his beard. Since then, his goatee had become increasingly pewter in appearance. It was still mostly brown, but the tide was turning.
Not that he gave much of a shit; he wasn’t a vain man. But it reminded him that life didn’t go on forever. He had two young children and a wonderful wife. He wanted to hang around with them for a long time to come. The gray in his beard, the reading glasses he had started using a couple of years ago, the daily five-mile run that used to take thirty-eight minutes and now took forty-two; all signposts of this mortal coil we struggle through.
Well, that was a bit overreaching, he thought as he finished his beard-trimming and lathered shaving gel onto the rest of his face. No Hamlet he. To be was the only way for him, it always had been; or not was never an option.
That didn’t mean he had to like the creeping grayness. Although a bit of distinction was a plus in the courtroom. If your hair grows to your shoulders, your goatee looks like it belongs on the face of a ’50s tenor sax player, and you often don’t wear a tie into court, you have to be a damn good, if not near-great barrister, to pull it off; and like the legendary Gerry Spence, who he saw occasionally around town and also famously didn’t wear a tie, Luke was a great lawyer. Juries loved him, as did his clients.
It had been some journey, he thought, as he carefully shaved around his goatee, getting to the midcentury mark. Youngest District Attorney in the state at age thirty-four, gone from office (voluntarily, but under a cloud) before age forty, virtually retired by age forty-three, then a new life working the other side of the aisle as a criminal-defense lawyer by age forty-five. A real roller-coaster of a ride. A wonderful wife, two healthy and bright children, work that he enjoyed (at least some of the time). Life was good. Knock on wood.
Even with gray hairs and less-than-perfect vision to live with.
He answered Riva’s jibe through the mirror. “He becomes a fifty-year-old man, no more, no less,” he stated, only the slightest bit testy. “You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to figure that out.”
“And…?” Dry now, she threw her towels into a hamper.
“And nothing. It’s just a fact. A fact of life.”
“And a benchmark.”
He stared at her through the frosted glass. “What is the point of this?” he asked, now a bit…petulant? Not a nice emotion.
She kissed him between the shoulder blades. “There is no point. I’m teasing you, is all. Can’t a wife tease her husband?”
“Not before seven in the morning.”
“When else do we have time to ourselves?” she asked.
As if on cue, a high, shrill child’s voice clamored: “Mommy!”
“Not for the rest of today, obviously,” Luke answered.
Riva threw on a robe. “I’ll be right down,” she called back equally loudly to their son. “And don’t yell, you’ll wake up your sister.”
Luke laughed. He put down his razor and reached into the shower to turn on the spigots.
“Are you having breakfast with us this morning?” Riva asked as he stepped in.
He shook his head. “I have a client coming in early.”
“What about dinner? You haven’t been home to eat with the kids once this week.”
He nodded—he was a notorious workaholic, but he was getting better. He didn’t want to be an absentee father, like his own had been before he had abandoned the family, when Luke was still a kid. “I’ll try. I’ll definitely be home before bedtime,” he promised.
“Mrs. McCoy, how are you?”
Juanita was in Luke’s reception area, sitting erect and still like a bird on a wire. It was a few minutes before eight; she was his first appointment.
“I hope you don’t mind that I came early,” she said as she got up. “I was awake and I had nothing to do, so I just drove in.”
“Of course not.”
“Your associate was nice enough to get me some coffee,” Juanita said, looking over at Margo Howells, Luke’s stalwart paralegal and all-around girl Friday.
“Good.” Luke smiled to himself. He liked that Juanita had called Margo his “associate,” rather than “secretary.” She was an old lady chronologically, but she was modern in the world.
He ushered Juanita into his office. “Hold everything,” he instructed Margo, as he closed the door.
“To answer your question, I’m all right, personally,” Juanita told him as she sat down. She carefully placed her coffee cup on the edge of his desk. “Distracted.”
“I can imagine,” he replied sympathetically, sitting down opposite her. “That must have been quite a shock, a murdered girl found on your property.”
“It was,” she agreed. “Horrible. That poor girl. And her mother.” She shuddered. “Outliving a child is a parent’s worst nightmare.”
“I hope I never kno
w.” An older parent, Luke was over forty when the first one was born. A compartment in a far recess of his brain was reserved for worrying about them. Most of the time the drawer was closed, so that he didn’t feel anxious about them consciously, but he knew it was always there. “So,” he said, positioning a legal pad on his knee, “how can I help you today?”
“I need some legal advice.”
Luke sat back, perplexed and a bit disturbed. When Mrs. McCoy had called and said she had an issue to discuss with him, he had cleared his calendar to fit her in right away. But there had been an unsettling itch as he wrote her name on his schedule. McCoy and Dixon, her late husband’s law firm, handled her legal affairs. Why was she coming to him? Was she in some kind of trouble she didn’t want them to know about? Was there a criminal issue with that murdered girl? Henry’s firm didn’t do criminal work.
“Two police detectives came by yesterday,” Juanita said. “They were trying to find out how that girl wound up on the ranch, who might have put her there, was there anything I knew that could help them.” She hesitated for a moment, then spoke again. “I told them I didn’t know, which I don’t,” she said emphatically. “But there was one thing I didn’t tell them, because I didn’t remember it at the time. But now, thinking back, I realize I didn’t fully answer a question they asked me.”
All right, Luke thought. Here’s the reason she came to a criminal-defense lawyer. “Which was?” he prompted.
She adjusted her position on the chair. “They asked how many people have access to that section of the ranch. And they also mentioned the security gate on the road that leads to it. I explained who comes and goes—hardly anyone—and then they moved on to other questions.”
She fidgeted some more; he picked up on it. Something was stuck in her craw, and she was having a hard time coughing it up. “What I didn’t tell them,” she said, “because I simply forgot, was that there had been someone at the ranch, about the same time the girl disappeared.” She shifted around in her chair yet again.