by Jan Burke
“I’m sorry you had to fear him.”
“Mostly I feared Evelyn, but yes, him as well. Suspecting a family member in this way is poisonous. It long ago deadened a part of me toward my son, and no mother should experience that, but plenty do. We tried to find a way, especially not long before he died. We were never again as close as we once were, though. Then late last year he suddenly became ill and died. Kidney failure. Evelyn is supposed to benefit from a large insurance policy, but my understanding is that the insurance company has some questions about his death.”
He glanced up to see Bear getting out of the car.
Frank held the journals toward her. “Would you be willing to make copies of these for me?”
She hesitated, then said, “You may take them with you.”
“I don’t—”
“I have a confession,” she said. “I was hoping you would be the one who responded today.”
He didn’t hide his confusion. “What?”
“I follow any news about the Bakersfield Police Department very closely. I read about the murder at the trailer park. That you were the one who didn’t take things at face value. I read about the indictment of Chief Cross—”
“Mrs. Sarton, please don’t think all that happened because of me. A seasoned homicide detective was kind enough to listen to a rookie. It was his case, not mine. As for the former chief, I shouldn’t even be talking about that, and he’s innocent until proven guilty. A case has been brought against him, and if that makes you happy, there are detectives and investigators from the state attorney general’s office who get that credit. A newspaper reporter found the tapes. It’s nothing to do with me, really. People have been working on this for longer than I’ve even been an officer. In fact, I should leave these here and ask a detective to come by and talk to you. If I take them, I have to check them into evidence, and . . . and—”
“Say no more. I understand that the cleanup of the department is still under way.” She sighed. “Well, it was worth a try, and you’ve listened to me longer than anyone else in the police department has. Thank you for that.”
It irritated him. He didn’t want to promise her he would be back, because she probably wouldn’t believe him. And who could blame her? But what more could he do?
He heard Bear knocking on the door. She went to answer it. He followed her. Bear was probably ready to make him run behind the squad car.
As he passed the boxes, and thought of the overfull garage, he found himself thinking of Jimmy Chao’s story. “Mrs. Sarton!”
She turned back to him.
“Have you gone through these boxes or looked through the ones in the garage?”
“No. I haven’t touched anything. I haven’t been in my own garage since the night I made Harold put that drum back. Not to make you think I’m another Miss Havisham, but little has changed in here since that day. When a person is missing, even if you know in your mind that most likely they are dead, your heart tells you to hope. It causes you to become superstitious, to want not to change anything, not to send any signal to the universe at large that you are leaving the missing one behind and moving on—one moment, Officer Bradshaw!”
This last was in response to much louder knocking, the type that says you don’t want things to escalate to the next level.
When she unlocked the last lock and opened the door, Frank spoke before Bear could say anything. “We need to check something in the garage.”
Bear stared at him for a moment, then said in the tone you use to calm a maniac, “All right—”
“The garage!” Mrs. Sarton said. “I . . . I—”
“You trust me,” Frank said, “or you don’t.”
She took a resolute breath. “Let me get the keys.”
She went back to the drawer beneath the telephone.
As they walked down the driveway, Bear signaled to him to let Mrs. Sarton get ahead of them, and when she was out of earshot, asked, “Mind filling me in? I don’t want to trouble you, you understand, but—”
So Frank summarized as quickly as he could.
“Okay, but why are we going into the garage?”
“When she surprised her son on Halloween, what if Harold wasn’t taking a fifty-five-gallon drum out? What if he was placing one in here instead?”
Bear shuddered, then said, “Might be another stinker. God, I hate summer.” He fished his keys out of his pocket and handed them to Frank. “Run to the car and get two pairs of gloves and the camera. You have your flashlight?”
“Yes!” Frank said, insulted.
“I assume nothing. You would benefit from the same philosophy.”
By the time Frank came back, Bear was working on a heavy padlock that was fastened through a hasp and staple, the second of two locks that secured the wooden carriage-style doors.
“The night you caught your son and daughter-in-law in here,” Bear asked Mrs. Sarton, “were they using flashlights or were the overhead lights on?”
“The overhead lights were on.”
“Hmm.” He kept concentrating on the lock. Just when Frank thought he should offer to run back to the car for the bolt cutters, the padlock made a satisfying click and released.
“I thought for sure I was going to break the key off in that thing,” Bear said. “All right. Nobody steps into the garage but me, understood?”
Frank and Mrs. Sarton nodded.
Bear pulled the doors open, and sunlight flooded into the packed garage. Stepping inside wasn’t really possible—there was about a foot of cleared space that allowed access to the light switch, but that was about it. Bear left the lights off. The sunlight allowed him to take lots of photos of the front of the garage without using a flash.
When he had satisfied himself that he had taken enough of them, he asked, “Which drum?”
There were three rows of black fifty-five-gallon drums near the front of the garage.
“I’m not sure,” she said shakily.
Bear stooped to read labels. “Most of these are formaldehyde.”
“Used to make particleboard furniture,” she said.
“You said Evelyn put a stack of boxes on top of the one Harold had moved,” Frank said. There were several drums that had boxes on top of them, but only one of those was in the front row. He pointed that one out. “This one?”
“I think so. I can’t really remember, but . . . I don’t remember Harold moving the boxes after she set them down. I’m sorry, I was focused more on Harold and Evelyn than I was on things in the garage.”
“Did you happen to notice if either of them wore gloves?”
She frowned in concentration. “No, I don’t think so. I’m sure I would have noticed anything so odd.”
Bear sent Frank a look. Frank said to Mrs. Sarton, “He’s going to open up the drum, and it could be pretty bad when he does. You sure you want to be out here?”
She nodded.
Without touching it any more than absolutely necessary, Bear used his gloved hands to move the stack of boxes to the ground, then tried to budge the drum away from the others. He couldn’t move it. So he stood blocking their view and opened the catch on the metal ring that sealed the drum. He opened the lid so that neither Frank nor Mrs. Sarton could see into it. He grimaced as a strong odor of formaldehyde filled the air, grimaced again at the contents, and put the lid down. “Everybody out,” he said.
Mrs. Sarton had a look of shock on her face. “What? What have you found? Is it Derek?” she asked in near hysteria. “Derek out here all these years?”
“No, it’s not him,” Bear said, “but we’re going to have to let the coroner and the detectives take it from here. I think we may have found his girlfriend. Know anything about that?”
She turned paler still and shook her head mutely.
Frank walked her back to the house. “Anyone you would like to cal
l to be here with you?” he asked.
She came out of her stunned state enough to stare at him.
She made him wonder if telepathy worked after all when she said, “My lawyer. I must call my lawyer.”
If he was the only member of the department who would be pleased that she would have legal representation, he could live with it. He couldn’t believe Mrs. Sarton was a murderer.
Not even after a second drum in the garage was shown to contain the well-preserved body of Derek Sarton.
• • •
Ike Tucker and John Mattson caught the case. Mrs. Sarton’s lawyer arrived shortly after they did. Since he wouldn’t make Mrs. Sarton available to them, they grilled Frank about everything she had said to him.
“You know she tried to say all this to you guys for years,” Frank said.
“Pointe,” they said in unison.
“He’s not the only person she tried to talk to.”
“No,” Mattson said, “but he’s territorial. He does just enough to be able to say he did what he was required to do.”
Tucker added, “Missing persons isn’t the right job for him, although I can’t say I know what is. I wouldn’t want the job myself. Most of the time, a missing adult, it’s someone who’s out banging his girlfriend in a no-tell motel and loses track of time. Wife calls in worried and everybody ends up embarrassed and mad at us.
“Or the missing person has good or bad reasons to want to disappear. Waste of our limited resources to go chasing after them, especially since it’s not a crime to be missing.
“Other than that, it’s a runaway teenager who is tired of hiding from Creepy Uncle Ernie. Or being hit by Dad. Or getting the younger kids off to school while Mom sleeps off last night’s bender.”
Frank shook his head. “So Pointe believed this man with no debts ran away from a marriage he had been in for forty-five years? A marriage with a tolerant—overly tolerant, some would say—wife who supported him in a luxurious lifestyle. Disappears after threatening to take back management of his company. Does that sound like it should have raised a question or two?”
“Pointe’s pulling the file for us, but he told us that in addition to the family members, he had three other witnesses who said the girlfriend told them it was in the works.”
“Anyone know anything about these three friends of Marlena Gray? Or where they are now?”
“We’ll be looking for them,” Mattson said. “Don’t try to teach your grandmother to suck eggs.”
“Sorry.”
“Yeah, well. In case I forgot to say it—nice work.”
Frank thanked him, but felt uneasy. If all of this led to Mrs. Sarton being convicted of murder, he was never going to think of it as nice work.
• • •
Frank and Bear were given the duty of helping to keep the scene secure. Other cars arrived to help and Frank and Bear ended up near the garage, making sure anyone who came close to it had business being there, and signed in and out. Bear told him to stay put and toured around the perimeter to check on the placement of other officers. He wanted to make sure no civilians or press got close enough to be a bother.
The crime lab took more photos, then started dusting for prints, finding some on the outside of the drums, some on the lids. Then they did the same with the light switch and the hasp on the garage lock. He watched them work with interest, listened in on their conversations while keeping an eye on things.
One asked him to go find a handcart, but the other told him to leave the rookie alone, that he was Brian Harriman’s kid and Bear would skin him alive if he left his post, especially since the place was crawling with reporters, who were a little too interested in Frank right now. So the guy used his radio to get another assistant to bring him what he needed.
Frank figured all of that meant Bear had parked him this far back from the road to keep him from being approached by the press, or getting into trouble in some other way.
Two hours later, Bear returned to him and said, “So, they checked all the other barrels, no more pickled remains.”
“Did you think there would be?”
“Always a possibility. We don’t know what we’re dealing with here yet.”
“You think Mrs. Sarton has dead bodies hidden all over the place?” Frank asked incredulously.
Bear scowled at him. “You ever hear of Nannie Doss?”
“No.”
“They caught her trying to kill husband number five. She murdered four of them, found several through lonely hearts ads. Also knocked off her own mother, her sister, a mother-in-law, a nephew, and her grandson.”
Frank recalled his dad’s advice and summoned his inner alien. He shook his head. Any spoken reply at this point would not help him.
“How about Belle Gunness?” Bear asked. “No? Belle Gunness killed two husbands and two of her own four children. She ran an ad for suitors and killed the men who showed up. Her place burned down, killing the remaining two children, and supposedly her, but the body didn’t match hers and its head was missing. They dug up her yard and found dozens of bodies.”
Frank said nothing.
“Amy Archer-Gilligan? Bertha Gifford?”
“No, sir.”
Bear laughed. “You may have grown up with cops, Frank, but you’re still green.”
“Yes, sir.”
Bear muttered to himself and started to walk off. After taking three strides, he turned around and said, “Women are capable of anything, wiseass. Anything.”
“I’ll remember that.”
“See that you do.”
Bear stood there for a moment, then said, “Let’s hear it.”
“First, if she’s guilty, why did she keep calling us? Why not just let the world forget all about Derek Sarton and his girlfriend?”
“Guilty conscience. Next?”
“If she’s got a guilty conscience, why not just confess?”
“Can’t quite make herself do it. Wants to be caught, but can’t turn herself in.”
“A stretch,” Frank said.
“Happens more often than you’d think. Besides, maybe she didn’t have a guilty conscience, but was putting a little insurance out there. Someone like you, who trusts little old ladies, would claim just what you did.”
“If she wanted to get away with it, why would she leave the bodies here?”
“She has control over this space.”
“Her son had keys to the garage.”
“Which she took away from him as fast as she could.”
“How does she spend the evening with a friend and manage to kill her husband and his girlfriend, haul the bodies from wherever they were, get them into the drums, seal them, and lock up the garage all before her son and his wife come back here with a truck?”
“We don’t know when he died, right?”
“Ask Mattson for the date he was last seen alive.”
Bear smiled, not pleasantly. “All right, I will.”
Frank thought things over while Bear found the detective. He was surprised, a moment later, when Mattson returned with Bear.
“So you want to know if we know when Sarton was last seen alive,” he said. “We know he was seen in Los Angeles by his son and daughter-in-law on Saturday, October 31, 1970, and Marlena Gray was last seen on that same day.”
“Thank you,” Frank said.
“You have more ideas about this case?” Mattson said.
He hesitated. He had half the department giving him a hard time. Bear was clearly ticked off at him for siding with Mrs. Sarton. And Mattson had already warned him about not trying to make recommendations to experts. And yet, on another case, Mattson had listened to him.
“Yes, I do,” he said.
“Let’s hear them.”
He glanced at Bear, then said, “If Mrs. Sarton has two sets
of keys to the garage, then she could have put the bodies in there. I don’t know how she could have physically managed that, but let’s say she’s stronger than she looks or had a pulley system set up that she has since dismantled.”
Bear made a growling sound, but Frank ignored him.
“If she only has the keys she gave to Bear,” he went on, “the keys she says she took from Harold, then she had no way to get into the garage before Harold arrived here that night.” He paused. “Did either victim have keys in their clothing?”
“Interestingly, the woman, who has not yet been positively identified as Marlena Gray, did not. Pointe’s notes say she never turned her apartment keys in, but the building manager said he had to rekey the lock whenever a tenant moved out, so he didn’t think much of it.”
“So someone else may have been in her apartment that day, gathering her most personal belongings to make the story about her leaving town with Derek seem more likely.”
“I thought the manager talked to her,” Bear said.
“On the phone?” Frank asked Mattson.
“Yes.”
“Big building, would he really know one woman’s voice from another?”
“You think Evelyn made that call?” Bear asked.
“I think it’s a possibility,” Frank said.
“She talked to friends,” Bear said.
“Either someone called Marlena and claimed Derek was sending someone along to help her run away from home with him, which might have been something she hoped for, or the friends are lying. Not sure about that one yet.” He turned to Mattson. “What about Derek’s keys?”
“The body of the man we have not yet positively identified as Derek Sarton was clothed, and after we fished him out of the drum, we discovered there were keys in his pockets. Keys for each of the two locks on the garage, and some others that look like they’re house keys and maybe keys to locks at his company. Car key is missing.”