Death Song

by Michael McGarrity

  Matt appreciated the fact that Culley had shown no condescension about his scant knowledge of modern literature. He closed the notebook and stood. “That should do it for now, but I may need to speak with you again.”

  “I am at your disposal, Detective.” Culley rose and came around his desk. “It would be my pleasure to do whatever I can to help advance your inquiries. Whoever did these terrible, murderous acts must be brought to justice.”

  The word indeed was on the tip of Matt’s tongue. Instead he asked, “Do you have proof of your permanent resident status with you?”

  “Yes,” Culley replied. “Would you like to see it?”

  “Indeed I would,” Matt said, unable to resist the impulse.

  The computer repair and service company John Culley used was housed in a small adobe building at the back of an industrial lot tucked near the railroad tracks on Baca Street. A small sign on the outside of the building read “Roadrunner Computer Repair and Service.” Matt entered to find a man sitting at a large workbench in the middle of a room filled with monitors, keyboards, printers, laptops, and CPUs. He looked up, saw Matt, and got to his feet.

  “Are you Steve Griego?” Matt showed the man his police credentials.

  The man, who looked to be in his late thirties, nodded. “I am. Pardon the mess, but it’s always like this around here.”

  “You have a desktop computer belonging to John Culley.” Matt held out Culley’s signed consent. “I’ve come to pick it up.”

  Griego read the note and pointed to a desktop computer and assorted paraphernalia in a box on the floor near the door. “There it is. Please take it away and don’t bring it back. I’ve got no use for it.”

  “Is it intact?”

  “I haven’t cannibalized it if that’s what you mean.”

  “That’s what I mean. Culley told me the unit was completely worthless. When you powered it up, what did you find?”

  “Nothing. When it crashed, it took all the files and folders with it. I tried system restore and nothing happened. Tried it again, and the same thing—nada. The operating system and software is so outdated on the unit I told Culley he’d be smart to trash it and get something with greater capacity and speed.”

  “Did you run any diagnostics?”

  “Culley said not to bother, just to build him a new CPU. The old one is an off-the-shelf discounted model that was out-of-date the day he bought it. What do police want with Culley’s old computer?”

  “It’s a secret, so I can’t tell you,” Matt replied. “How would you rate Culley’s skills as a computer user?”

  Griego laughed. “At the bottom of the barrel along with ninety percent of all the people who own personal computers. He’s the kind of customer who would have his receptionist schedule a service call because the unit was running slow. I’d go out, run the disk cleanup and defragmenter utilities, and that would be it. It didn’t matter how many times I showed them how to do it themselves, they’d forget or just didn’t want to be bothered.”

  “So neither Culley nor Denise Riley was computer savvy.”

  “Not so far as I saw.”

  “Do you have any employees who may have serviced the Culley account?”

  “You’re kidding me, right?” Griego said with a hearty laugh.

  Griego’s likable personality made Matt smile. “I guess I must have been.” He picked up the box with Culley’s old computer and stood in the doorway. “Thanks for your time.”

  “No sweat. Remember to dispose of that CPU properly when you’re done with it. You can’t just throw it in the trash.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” Matt replied.

  The 4 P.M. meeting with lead investigators and supervisors called by Chief Kerney and Sheriff Hewitt started on time with all present and accounted for and no dillydallying. Kerney and Hewitt impressed Clayton with the way they asked questions, took suggestions, revised task force operations, established targeted goals, gave constructive criticism, and made sure Sheriff Salgado got full credit for putting the new plan in place. Just by watching the two top cops in action, Clayton learned a hell of a lot about the right way to organize a well-functioning major felony interagency task force. The effect on the men and women in the room was palpable. Everybody seemed re-energized, ready to dig in and start over again.

  At the tail end of the meeting, Sheriff Hewitt brought the team up to speed on the Lincoln County murder investigation. With significantly less resources and far fewer personnel than the Santa Fe S.O., Lincoln County deputies had pieced together a complete accounting of Riley’s week on and off the job, identified all the persons Riley had come into contact with during his time in Lincoln County, and made substantial headway on Riley’s background check. Information from the air force, including several former commanding officers, Riley’s ex-wife, some old high school mates, and one surviving uncle who resided in an assisted living facility in Dayton, Ohio, seemed to prove that Tim Riley had been exactly whom he professed to be.

  After Hewitt finished, Salgado passed out a synopsis of Riley’s known personal history that included updated information. He had entered the air force at the age of eighteen, after graduating from high school. He rose to the rank of master sergeant E-8 and served twenty years and two months before retiring. His service record showed overseas postings to England, Japan, Germany, and Kuwait, where he was stationed during Gulf War One. His last duty assignment was at Holloman Air Force Base adjacent to White Sands Missile Range near the city of Alamogordo, less than an hour’s drive from Lincoln County.

  Riley was the father of one child, an eighteen-year-old son named Brian, whereabouts currently unknown, who had stayed with Tim and Denise for a time last summer. While in Santa Fe, Brian worked for a month as a busboy in a downtown restaurant before being fired for tardiness. A National Crime Information Center criminal records check showed no wants and warrants and no arrest record for the boy.

  Tim Riley had moved to Santa Fe soon after his retirement and applied for a deputy sheriff vacancy with the Santa Fe Sheriff’s Office. Because of his extensive experience as a noncommissioned military police officer and criminal investigator, he was hired and sent to the New Mexico Law Enforcement Academy to complete an accelerated police officer certification course. Upon his return to the S.O., he was assigned to the patrol division, where he remained until he resigned to accept the Lincoln County job.

  A year after arriving in Santa Fe, Riley married Denise Louise Roybal in a civil ceremony performed by a county magistrate. Financial records showed that the couple had lived within their means and neither were deeply in debt nor had unusually large unexplained monetary assets. Riley’s vasectomy had been verified by autopsy, and there was no evidence of surgery to reverse the procedure.

  Riley had divorced Eunice, his first wife, ten years ago. Eunice, currently living in North Carolina, had been interviewed by the local police. According to their report, she was employed as a veterinarian’s assistant at a small animal clinic and had a live-in boyfriend named Ernest Arnett who worked as an independent electrical contractor. Interviews with the woman’s employer, neighbors, and friends verified that she’d been in North Carolina during the time of the two homicides.

  When told of Tim Riley’s murder, Eunice was unable to think of any person who had reason to kill him. However, since she’d had little contact with him for over eight years, she had no idea who Riley’s current friends or enemies might be.

  When asked about her son, she stated she had no knowledge of Brian’s whereabouts, noting that the boy had left home soon after turning eighteen because of a personality conflict with her boyfriend. She expressed surprise on being told of Brian’s visit to Santa Fe, saying she had not known about it and stating he and Tim had not been close since the divorce. According to the interviewing officer, she showed little sorrow about her ex-husband’s death.

  Kerney and Hewitt ended the meeting with four priority goals established: find Brian Riley as quickly as possible and determine
if he was to be treated as a suspect; identify the unknown person Denise Riley had been secretly seeing; delve deeply into Denise’s past, particularly those years when she was living away from Santa Fe; and complete the gathering of saliva samples for DNA comparison testing.

  Outside the conference room, Clayton gave Paul Mielke the scoop on Matt Chacon’s conversation with Denise’s employer and the tale of the office desktop computer that had crashed the day after her murder.

  “Detective Chacon secured the computer,” Clayton noted, “and will let us know if he finds anything.”

  “Do we know if Riley’s son is a computer whiz?”

  “That’s a good question,” Clayton replied. “We should ask the North Carolina authorities to check it out.”

  “I’ll give them a call,” Mielke said as he walked away.

  A few minutes later Paul Hewitt caught up with Clayton in his borrowed office. “We’ve got to find Brian Riley,” he said from the doorway.

  “I heard you and Chief Kerney loud and clear on that, Sheriff. I’m on it.”

  “How are you on it, Sergeant?”

  “Ramona Pino is en route to the restaurant where the boy worked to see if she can scout up some information. Two SFPD detectives are making the rounds of juvie hangouts in the city to locate anyone who knows him or where he is. I’ve got a deputy calling the North Carolina high school authorities and Tim Riley’s ex-wife to get a list of classmates he might have stayed in touch with. We’re also putting the word out to snitches on the street.”

  “Very good,” Hewitt said. “I’m heading home to Lincoln County. I want daily updates from you, Sergeant.”

  “I’ll route them through Chief Kerney and Sheriff Salgado,” Clayton replied.

  Hewitt nodded. “You’re going to make a first-rate police chief someday.”

  “Thanks for the compliment, Sheriff, but that’s a long way off, if ever.”

  “You never know,” Hewitt said as he waved good-bye.

  The downtown restaurant where Brian Riley had briefly worked as a busboy catered to patrons who could easily afford a two-hundred-dollar bottle of wine to complement their perfectly plated, expensive gourmet meals. Except for Chief Kerney, who’d inherited some megabucks from an old family friend, Ramona Pino thought it highly unlikely that any member of the Santa Fe Police Department had ever eaten at the establishment.

  The swanky restaurant, according to several old-timers on the force, stood on the site of the long-gone downtown bus depot, which had housed a small diner renowned for serving the best green-chili cheeseburgers in town. Back in those days, uniformed officers assigned to Plaza foot patrol almost always chowed down at the diner, which had a varied menu, good food, and reasonable prices.

  But that was then, and the new Santa Fe was now a vastly different place. Since the transformation of the bus depot into a world-class restaurant, just about everything else in the downtown part of the city had also changed. Plaza businesses that catered to locals had vanished, replaced by stores and eateries that served the tourist trade. The price of a nice dinner in a fancy Santa Fe restaurant to celebrate a special occasion was now way beyond the means of the average citizen, which definitely included the men and women sworn to protect and serve.

  Many officers, including those who had working spouses, were holding down part-time second jobs. A growing number couldn’t afford to live in Santa Fe and were now commuting from the boomtown city of Rio Rancho that sprawled along the Rio Grande west of Albuquerque. The joke going around the department was that when a major disaster hit the city, FEMA would probably lumber into Santa Fe faster than the officers who lived out of town could arrive.

  Inside the restaurant, the hostess area at the top of the stairs was unoccupied. Servers were setting up a long row of tables for what appeared to be a large dinner party. At the bar in the back of the room, a bartender was polishing glassware and talking to a man who wore a chef’s coat with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows.

  Ramona approached, identified herself, and asked to speak to the manager, owner, or whoever was in charge. The man in the chef’s coat told her the manager, Pearce Byers, was in the back. He went through the kitchen double doors to get him.

  While Ramona waited, the bartender, a strapping six-footer with a leering smile on his pretty-boy face, gave Ramona the once-over. The guy looked to be the bad-boy type who preyed on women and lived off them when he could.

  Ramona stared him down.

  Pearce Byers came out of the kitchen and advanced quickly on Ramona. Dressed in a linen shirt and wool slacks, he had a scowl on his face that pinched his eyebrows together. “What can I do for you, Officer?” he asked.

  “I’m Detective Sergeant Pino,” Ramona said as she handed him her business card, “and I need a few minutes of your time.”

  Byers glanced at the card and stuck it in his shirt pocket. “Certainly. A few minutes. Sorry to be so rushed, but I have a party of twenty arriving any time now and a number of early pre-concert bookings for the piano recital at the Lensic Performing Arts Center.”

  Ramona surveyed the dining room. All was ready for the alleged onslaught and there wasn’t a customer in sight. “I need to talk to anyone on your staff who might be able to put me in touch with Brian Riley. He worked as a busboy here last summer.”

  Byers looked thoughtful. “The name doesn’t ring a bell.”

  “He was here for a very short period of time,” Ramona said. “No more than a month. I was told he was fired for tardiness.”

  “Oh, yes,” Byers said, touching his finger to his lips. “I tend to forget the problem children we hire who slip through our screening process. As I recall, we took a chance on him because his father was a police officer. But he wasn’t fired for tardiness; he was canned for coming to work stoned.”

  “On drugs or alcohol?”

  “Does it really matter?” Byers answered. “But to answer your question, not only did he show up stoned, but he was caught smoking pot on breaks behind the building with an apprentice cook. We fired them both.”

  “Who was the cook?” Ramona asked.

  “Randy Velarde. He was enrolled in the culinary arts program at the community college.”

  “I need to see Velarde’s employment application. Riley’s also.”

  Byers looked past Ramona toward a large group of people who’d arrived at the hostess area. “Can’t this wait until later?”

  “No, it can’t,” Ramona answered.

  Byers sighed in frustration, called one of the servers over, asked him to seat the waiting party, and told Ramona he’d be right back with the employment applications.

  The pretty-boy bartender, who’d been listening with great interest, leaned over the bar. “If you can’t find Randy at home, he may be in class at the community college.”

  “Do you know that for a fact?” Ramona asked.

  Pretty Boy nodded. “When I ran into him a month or so ago, he said he was working days as a grocery store stocker and taking classes at night and one morning on his days off.”

  “Did he say what store he was working at?”

  “No.”

  “Thanks,” Ramona said.

  Pretty Boy didn’t answer right away. He was distracted by a very attractive woman with long brown hair who hurried up the stairs and joined the just-seated party. He gave the woman a thorough once-over before returning his attention to Ramona.

  “Yeah, no problem.”

  “Do you know where I can find Brian Riley?”

  “Nope, that I don’t know,” Pretty Boy said as he went to the end of the bar to take drink orders from a couple with Palm Springs tans.

  Byers returned with the employment applications, slapped the papers on the bar in front of Ramona, and hurried away to greet arriving customers at the hostess area. Ramona copied down the information she needed and made her way to the kitchen, where she asked the executive chef and several of her assistants about Randy Velarde’s work in the kitchen. They characterized him a
s moody, inconsistent, and a pothead. The one cook who vaguely remembered Brian Riley put him in the same category.

  Byers came bursting through the double doors just as Ramona was writing down names and phone numbers.

  “You can’t be in here,” he sputtered angrily. “This is unacceptable.”

  “I’m done,” Ramona said with a smile.

  “Next time, come back after we’re closed.”

  Ramona closed her notebook. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  Tranquilo Casitas, Space 39 was the address Randy Velarde had listed on his job application. It was a run-down trailer park on Agua Fria Street just inside the city limits, located between a sand-and-gravel operation and a small subdivision of “starter homes” on tiny lots. Hardly a tranquil place to live, it was a well-known trouble spot. Patrol officers were frequently called to the location to quell domestic disputes, break up gang fights, and investigate break-ins and burglaries that were usually drug-related.

  On the way to the trailer park, Ramona ran a check on Randy Velarde. He had a clean sheet, but given the fact that he’d been fired for smoking marijuana on the job, Ramona doubted that Velarde was an upstanding citizen.

  She pulled into Tranquilo Casitas and bumped her way down a paved asphalt lane that had so many potholes it resembled a bombed-out Baghdad roadway. All of the mobile homes in the park were older single-wides, and many were in disrepair. Some had plastic sheeting on the roof held in place by automobile tires. Others had broken windows covered with scrap plywood. A few were missing the skirting used to hide the concrete blocks that elevated the trailers off the ground.

  The single-wide at space 39 was no better or worse than all the rest. On one side of the trailer jutted a half-finished covered porch made of plywood. Scrap lumber and construction trash littered the area. The hulk of an old Japanese subcompact pickup truck sat in the mud ruts of the parking space. Ramona climbed three rickety wooden steps that rose to the plywood front porch, and with her badge case open to display her shield and police ID, she knocked on the door. A young teenage girl, no more than five-one and a hundred pounds, opened up. She had an infant riding on her hip. The distinctive smell of grass wafted out the door.