by Jan Burke
“Yes, it would have made it easier if the seat was back as far as it can go.”
“You said you didn’t see any scratches or bruises on him. What about blood? I mean, spatter or smears from his victims?”
“Nothing. Not on his hands, not on his arms, nothing in his hair.”
“Maybe he cleaned up,” Ethan said. “Took a shower or something.”
“There was a shower in the studio,” I said slowly, “but why would he shower and then put bloody clothes on? Unless you believe he drove in his boxers and put clean socks on later…”
Tadeo smiled. “That’s the funny part, isn’t it? A guy’s clothing is spattered, but he’s clean. He doesn’t have any other clothing with him.”
“And he’s supposedly driving around the mountains on a cold night wearing not much more than his birthday suit.”
“Right.”
“How long was the car in the ditch?” Ethan asked.
“The last person to drive down that private road before him got home at about ten-thirty. That guy would have noticed the car if it had been there then, because as he came down the main road he would have seen its headlights shining up at an angle through the trees. I found Mason Fletcher at a little after one in the morning.”
“Richard Fletcher was last seen alive — by anyone other than his daughter and his killer, anyway — at about six-thirty in the morning on May ninth,” I said. “And you found Mason almost eighteen hours later?”
“Yes.”
“So to believe he’s guilty, you must believe he had Jenny alive with him in his car while he drove around for almost eighteen hours, and that the whole time he was either wearing bloodstained clothes or drove around all but naked with her in the car.”
“Or that he had killed her already,” Ethan said.
“Why not leave her at the studio, then? He’s already left one body there.”
“That’s it,” Tadeo said. “And if he’s kept her alive so that he can kill her less than twenty-four hours later, you are hinting that he was up to worse things, that he’s really one very sick individual.”
“The prosecution didn’t suggest that he molested her.”
“They made him a child killer,” Ethan said. “He’s lucky to still be alive in prison.”
For all it might be true, it was the wrong thing to say. Tadeo sat brooding silently.
Dora caught my eye and made a little motion indicating that I should keep talking.
“I’m trying to figure out the timing. Let me imagine it two ways — innocent and guilty. If he’s innocent, someone gets control of him early that morning or late the previous night, before his stepfather is murdered — otherwise, Mason might have been able to come up with an alibi. A friend might have met him for breakfast, someone might have seen him go to the store. Anything. If the real killer or killers wanted to frame him, I don’t think they would have wanted to take chances on his whereabouts during the killing.”
“Right,” said Dora, encouraging me.
“He’s supposed to have gone up to the mountains to bury his little sister, and for several hours — during which law enforcement was actively looking for him — driven around. As we’ve said, he was either wearing blood-spattered clothing or nearly naked.”
“He was in a car, so most people would only be able to tell he was shirtless,” Ethan pointed out. “And with a two-hour head start, he could have stayed hidden in the mountains before the crimes in Las Piernas were discovered. Lots of private roads, even empty houses.”
“Okay, let’s say that’s the case. On a cold night in the mountains, he’s still hanging around for a long time. Many hours.”
“Spent the time getting drunk,” Ethan suggested.
“No,” Tadeo said. “The bottle supposedly came from his dad’s office, and it wasn’t empty.”
“If he had been drinking it slowly for more than twelve hours,” I said, “he wouldn’t have been close to dead from the amount of alcohol in his system.”
“He could have waited, drank most of it late in the day,” Ethan said.
“He wasn’t that drunk — it wasn’t the alcohol that almost killed him,” Tadeo said. “I think a lot of it was spilled on him and in the car. That wasn’t what was highest in his bloodstream.”
“How do you know?” I asked.
“I stopped by the hospital a few days later, talked to some of the ER folks.”
“He mixed it with pills, right?”
“Barbiturates,” Tadeo said. “A load of them. And that’s another funny thing. The barbiturates were mixed into the booze itself. But no one ever found the empty capsules.”
“So if he was opening the capsules and dumping the powder inside them into the booze, you should have seen them on the floor of the car.”
“If the scotch bottle hadn’t come from his dad’s place, I’d say not necessarily. And I suppose he could have buried his sister and then played chemist up in the woods. But that doesn’t seem likely to me. Makes more sense to be hidden in the car, I think.”
“Maybe he wasn’t being sensible,” Ethan argued.
“At his trial,” I said, “the prosecution said up front that he hadn’t arrived at the studio with a plan to kill his stepfather. They said he came there to argue with Richard Fletcher, but it was obvious that he didn’t bring a weapon, and they claimed he didn’t know his sister was there.”
“But it was first-degree murder?” Ethan asked.
“Yes. It’s complicated, but legally you don’t need to have the thought of killing someone in mind for a long time for it to be premeditated. If he had been in a fistfight with Richard and blindly grabbed the trophy and swung it, they might have brought a lesser charge. But Richard Fletcher was at his desk and struck repeatedly from behind, so he wasn’t able to defend himself, and he couldn’t have been threatening Mason.” I paused. “That’s if you believe Mason was there that day in the first place.”
“So the prosecution said he discovered his little sister there, took her, drove around with her for a while, then killed her to keep her from talking?”
“Yes. Then, in remorse, later tried to kill himself with a lethal mixture of booze and pills.”
“I think he was set up,” Tadeo said angrily. “I knew it from the moment I opened that car door, and I’m never going to be able to live with myself if—”
He broke off and looked at his wife, a strange expression on his face.
“It’s true,” she said softly. “You’re a good man, Tadeo. And you won’t be able to live with yourself until you make this right.”
He frowned, then shook his head. “It’s probably not going to make a difference.”
“Who says that you only do the right thing if you’re going to win? Not the Tadeo I know. And if you were where that young man is now, it would make a difference to you.”
She kept talking to him in this vein, and eventually he agreed to talk to Frank. He also told me he would talk to Mark Baker at the Express before he spoke to any other member of the press. “And the brother, Caleb — can you ask him to call me again?” he said.
We told him we would.
As we left, Dora refused our thanks, saying we were the ones who had helped her. I didn’t think that was the case.
WE started the trip back.
“Are you sorry it won’t be your story?” Ethan asked, rearranging his pillows.
I thought about it for a moment and said, “A little, I suppose. Mostly not.”
But he had already fallen asleep, wasting my honesty.
He slept through the brief calls I made to Frank and Mark Baker, and the stop I made at the police department, where Frank met me in the parking garage. Memories of seeing Ethan in an ICU were far too new — neither of us wanted to wake him or leave him alone asleep, so we stood outside the car and spoke softly. I gave Frank a quick summary of what I had learned and told him how to contact Tadeo. He told me Reed had found a little tin container hidden in Sheila’s house. It held several small,
individually wrapped teeth.
“He nearly didn’t find them. She put them in a Yahtzee game. He only figured it out because the game was in her bedroom, and after imagining a few wild variations on Yahtzee, he decided she probably wasn’t the type to be playing any of them in bed.”
“Thank you for that image.”
We promised to catch up on other events of the day when we saw each other that evening.
I stopped to refill the Jeep’s nearly empty gas tank, then headed home.
I don’t know when Ethan woke up, but about three miles from the house I heard him say, “Did you know we’re being followed?”
Honesty made me admit I didn’t, but he was right.
CHAPTER 34
Monday, May 1
3:15 P.M.
LAS PIERNAS
“SO you don’t know how long you’ve been tailed?”
“I don’t think it’s been for very long. I think I would have noticed someone following me all the way from Redlands. I stopped off at the police department, and again to get gas.”
“You did?”
His disbelief over that gave me a moment to glance again in the mirror.
“Don’t let him see you checking the mirror,” he said, making me want to tell him that I wasn’t born yesterday, but why emphasize the obvious? And it’s hard to sound wise if you’re the one who didn’t notice the tail.
“He’s staying far enough back that I haven’t been able to get a good look at his plates — or at him,” he added. “He’s wearing a cap and shades. Driving a dark blue SUV. Not one of the giant ones, but high enough off the ground to see you from a few cars back.”
“I did figure out which car it is,” I said. He didn’t laugh, which made me think he was more worried than he was letting on.
I made a turn, traveling away from the house. “Don’t sit up,” I said to Ethan. “He may not know you’re in the car, and that might be helpful.”
“No problem. But the seat belt might be giving me away.”
I made another turn and glanced at Ethan. His face was pale and drawn. “Are you in pain? Don’t lie to me.”
“Let’s call it discomfort. I can handle it.”
The blue SUV appeared in traffic a few cars back. I thought over my options.
If I turned on to a more deserted street, I would either make him shy away or become more aggressive. If he was only trying to figure out where I lived, he might hang back a bit, but if he intended harm, it would be a bad choice. This was no time to give him the benefit of the doubt.
So I stayed with bigger roads. The SUV stayed with me. I had a full tank of gas but couldn’t keep this up much longer, or I’d end up driving Ethan to the ER.
Same with pulling any fancy moves through intersections — if I had been the only one in the car, I would have taken turns faster and blown a red light. I would have to try to lose the SUV with subtler moves, or lead him somewhere he definitely didn’t want to go.
I thought of going back to the police department, but that might only be a temporary solution, since I could have been followed from there. And I was afraid the issue might be forced before then.
I grabbed my purse and pushed it toward Ethan. “Take out my cell phone — it’s clipped to the side. Hold down the number two and it will dial Frank’s cell phone. Tell him what’s happening, and ask him if a patrol car could pull one of us over.”
“Pull one of us over! Why not him?”
“My first choice, of course, but I’ll take scaring him off any way we can.”
Frank had just answered when the SUV turned down a side street, disappearing from view.
“He’s gone,” I said.
Ethan still told Frank what was going on. He spoke to him while I made a few more unnecessary turns, making sure I hadn’t been handed off to a second tail.
“Frank says stay on the phone with him until we get home.”
So they talked, mostly about the visit to Tadeo, with occasional interruptions when Ethan relayed a question from Frank, mostly to ask if I was sure I didn’t have another shadow.
When we reached the house, a patrol car was parked out front.
“Don’t worry,” Ethan said. “Frank made sure it wasn’t Officer Fletcher.”
“I don’t want to become paranoid about everyone in that family,” I said, not entirely sure that it wasn’t too late to prevent that from happening.
I recognized the officer as Mike Sorenson, a longtime friend of Frank’s, and felt the last of my fear easing.
“Dude,” Ethan said into the phone, “he’s so old.”
I heard Frank laughing.
“Ethan,” I said, “he’ll be able to protect us from anything short of an act of God.”
We said good-bye to Frank and hello to Mike. Ethan was perfectly polite to him, perhaps because when Mike helped him into the house, he got a better chance to see that the man is built like a steel vault. Ethan took a painkiller and headed for bed.
Mike told me he was going to stick around for a while, if I didn’t mind.
I didn’t, because even knowing that sooner or later he would have to return to regular duties, it was a relief to have him there. The dogs, friendly as they were, were also protective, and would undoubtedly hear anyone trying to approach the house.
I kept trying to figure out why anyone would want to follow me. Who could it be? Sheila’s killer? But if the killer was worried that I had told the Las Piernas police something about him, reading the Express would have let him know I hadn’t seen the person who ran off. And the person who ran off might not, after all, have been the killer. It would be too late to come after me now to shut me up, anyway — I had already talked to the police that night, and the public knew it.
To prevent me from testifying later? Testifying to what? The risk of being caught while coming after me would be greater than any threat I could pose in a courtroom.
It didn’t seem likely to me that whoever followed me was the killer. I thought about the other stories I had been working on lately and couldn’t come up with anything that would merit that sort of effort, unless it was the story about missing children and custodial kidnappings. I thought about what had appeared in the paper so far, but couldn’t see how anything in that story would result in my being followed. What had I done that would make anyone that nervous?
If I had been followed from the police department today, how could the person in the SUV know I would be there or at the gas station?
No matter how hard I thought about it, I couldn’t see what threat I represented to anyone at this point. The only person I had upset lately was the kid at the dentist’s office, Bobby Smith, and he wasn’t the type to stalk with intent to harm.
This could easily be in connection with something less recent than Sheila Dolson’s murder, I decided. I had made enemies over the years.
I looked in on Ethan, who was already asleep again. Altair had taken up his post next to him but watched me with his big brown eyes. The dog’s closeness to Ethan would last until Frank came home. Cody, ensconced at the foot of the bed, allowed this much sharing of Ethan. The big cat was jealous of any affection given to Deke and Dunk, but even Cody had been won over by Altair.
It suddenly occurred to me that someone who wanted Altair might have been in that SUV. It would fit perfectly — a vehicle for carrying search dogs. Did the SUV driver know I was married to a cop? If so, maybe he had simply waited until I came by police headquarters.
I don’t show up at the department very often, but it wouldn’t be hard to learn that I was married to Frank. Suppose the driver was planning to follow him home? A stupid move, because Frank was unlikely to miss seeing a tail. I hoped. Although I have encountered some major-league meanies over the years, he has more violent enemies than I do.
If Frank was the person the driver of the SUV intended to follow home, my stopping by the department must have seemed to be a great stroke of luck.
Altair sighed and lowered his head to his forepaws. I
knelt next to him and scratched his ears, winning another sigh, this one of satisfaction.
I worried that even with the company of Cody and the other dogs, he might be bored — SAR dogs are often trained several times a week, in what are extended play sessions as far as the dogs are concerned. I didn’t know what Sheila’s routine had been, but Altair didn’t get to his level of proficiency without work on the part of his handlers.
At least we knew another skilled handler, someone I could trust completely — Ben had promised to come by to work with him tomorrow. I suspected that would cheer the dog up a little.
Ben had been surprised that Altair had so quickly and strongly attached himself to Frank and Ethan. “Usually a dog will attach himself more quickly to a human of the same sex as his previous handler. He’s worked with me and other men on the team, but he’s been living in female-only households. Makes me wonder what was going on with Sheila and the dog.”
“She seemed to me to have a mean streak, but you sound as if you think she might have abused him.”
He hesitated. “I certainly won’t make a horrible accusation like that without more facts. He’s not shying away from you, right?”
“Right.”
I thought back over that conversation now, and about Anna’s attempt to get me to hand him over to her. I wondered if the Fletchers would lay claim to him somehow, produce a will saying Sheila had left him to them. Or say that he now belonged to the family even if she hadn’t left a will.
How badly might someone want him? Enough to steal him?
We might not be Altair’s final home, but damned if I was going to let him be stolen. I’d have to talk to Ben about who drove what on the Las Piernas SAR team.
CHAPTER 35
Monday, May 1
10:15 P.M.
HOME OF GILES FLETCHER
LAS PIERNAS
“SO soon?” Roy asked.
“I’m afraid so,” Giles said sympathetically. Roy had been agitated for the last hour or so. Giles congratulated himself again for excluding Nelson from this meeting. The two of them would have worked each other into a ridiculous state of anxiety.