by Lois Duncan
Our out-of-town children always came for the holidays. This Christmas they made the trip reluctantly, and Kerry almost backed out. Not only was she worried about the effect their young aunt’s absence might have on her children, she was afraid for their lives.
“What if this maniac decides to shoot more of us?” she agonized. “Maybe it’s a vendetta and he’s out to kill us all!”
The “season to be jolly” was an emotional disaster. Kerry and Ken did come with Erin and Brittany, but the visit was soured by paranoia, and they insisted we keep the doors locked and the curtains drawn even in the daytime. When I walked down the hall, I could hear people sobbing in the bedrooms, and we all took turns running back and forth to the cemetery.
Kerry and her family left on the twenty-sixth, and on the following day Brett loaded up his Chevrolet van and took off for the East Coast. During the weeks preceding the holidays he had become increasingly bitter and despondent, furious at APD for their tepid investigation, and disgusted with Don and me for giving credence to a psychic. When the day finally came that he announced, “I’m bailing out of this nightmare,” I was filled with conflicting emotions of sorrow and envy. I would miss my son, but I wished I could “bail out” too.
Robin stayed on a couple of days longer to help circulate the flyers. We concentrated most of our efforts on the section of town referred to locally as “Little Vietnam.” As we drove down streets we had never had occasion to use before, we discovered a ghetto area that we hadn’t known existed, only blocks away from upper-middle-class neighborhoods. The sidewalks and buildings were covered with Oriental gang graffiti and messages in English read, Fuck the police! Die, Round-Eyes, Die! and Kill! Kill! Kill!
With two of us working together we were able to accomplish a lot in a comparatively short time. I drove the car, and Robin jumped in and out with the tape and the staple gun. We decided a good way to give the flyers maximum exposure would be to tape them on the sides of Dumpsters behind low-rent apartment complexes. My first indication that we were putting ourselves in danger came as Robin was opening her door to hop out with a flyer, and I noticed two Oriental men in a dented green Plymouth parked across from the Dumpster.
Something about the way they were staring at us made me nervous.
“Let’s skip this bin and get the one at the end,” I suggested.
Robin followed my gaze and nodded hasty agreement. I drove on down to the other end of the parking lot, and she got out of the car and taped the flyer to a trash bin. In a matter of seconds the men had pulled up beside us and were rolling down their windows.
Robin leapt back into the car, yelling, “Go, Mother, go!”
My reactions were slower than hers, and by the time I took in the fact that the men were cutting us off, the Plymouth was blocking the driveway and the man on the passenger’s side was getting out of the car. I hit the button to activate the automatic door locks and slammed my foot down on the accelerator, pressing it to the floor. The man made a grab for the door handle on Robin’s side, but couldn’t maintain a grip on it as our car jumped the curb and landed on the road with a jarring thud.
I drove down the street at top speed and then stopped at a stop sign.
“What are you doing!” Robin shrieked at me.
Glancing in the rearview window, I saw to my horror that the Plymouth was barreling down on us. Once again, I stomped on the gas pedal, and we hurtled through the intersection and took a sharp left onto Ridgecrest, a north-south street that ran through a residential neighborhood.
“Are they still there?” I gasped as we sped toward Central Avenue, the traffic-laden street that bisects downtown Albuquerque.
“They’ve dropped back,” Robin said with relief. “Why in God’s name did you switch on your turn signal?”
“I did it without thinking,” I said. “I always use the turn signal.”
“Daddy’s right, you shouldn’t be doing this,” said Robin. “You don’t have any street smarts. Promise you won’t put up any more flyers in that neighborhood!”
“I can’t promise that,” I said reasonably. “That’s where I want them.”
“At least, don’t do it alone! Take somebody with you! And don’t go between buildings or into single-entrance parking lots where you can get trapped. Did you see the look on their faces? Those men could have killed us!”
“That’s ridiculous,” I said. “They’re just creeps who like to scare women.”
“That’s probably exactly what Kait thought,” Robin said. “ ‘She did not think this could be as bad as it was,’ and she ‘felt no sense of any need to avoid or evade.’ ”
“She was trying to ‘evade’ the Camaro. That truck driver reported a high-speed chase.”
“You told me you accepted Betty’s reading!”
“I do, but it has to be interpreted,” I said. “It’s like doing a puzzle—the lesson for us is in learning how to put it together.”
“Where did you come up with that nugget of wisdom?”
“I don’t remember.” I had a strong feeling that I had made the statement before, but I had no recollection of when or where it had been.
After Robin returned to Florida, I continued to put up flyers, but I never again risked entering closed-in areas and was careful to pay attention to what was going on around me.
On New Year’s Eve I managed to stay awake past what had become my usual bedtime, and, at ten P.M. our time, I sat with Don in front of the television set and watched the golden ball descend into Times Square to mark the end of the most horrendous year of our lives.
“I was sure they would have arrested somebody by this time,” Don said with a sigh.
“They’re not going to make any arrests.”
“The case is still open,” he reminded me.
“That doesn’t mean it’s active.”
We sat there, staring at the screen like a couple of zombies, making no move to touch each other, while the crowds in New York screamed and kissed and blew horns in frenzied celebration.
A commonplace occurrence proved to be the catalyst that jerked me out of my lethargy. On January 4 the band on my Timex broke. I went out and bought a new band, and when I got back with it, the watch had mysteriously vanished.
I’m one of those people who always have to know what time it is, and I owned two other watches—a dress watch that had been my mother’s and a funky hologram watch I’d bought at a magic store. They were both keeping perfect time at the bottom of my jewelry box, but when I put them on, they immediately stopped working.
I was trying to decide whether or not to invest in a new Timex when I remembered the watch of Kait’s that I’d taken to Betty Muench. I got out Kait’s purse and emptied it onto my bed, and the watch tumbled out of a side pocket. As I was strapping it onto my wrist, I noticed that among the other contents of the purse there was a Weekly Planner with a page for phone numbers. Kait’s regular phone directory had been in her desk, and I had handed it over to the police along with her correspondence, so I hadn’t had access to the numbers of any of her friends. Now, as I scanned the list of phone numbers, I began to feel excited. There were people here who might know things about Kait that we didn’t. For six long months we’d left everything up to the police. Maybe it was time to do some investigating on our own.
The first person I attempted to call was Susan Smith, but the number Kait had for her was disconnected. I recalled Kait’s saying that Susan sold snow cones in front of Pier One Imports, so I checked with the people there to see if they had seen her. The manager told me that, soon after Kait’s death, Susan applied for a job there, worked for several weeks, and abruptly stopped coming in. They couldn’t get hold of her, because her phone was no longer in service, and when one of her co-workers drove over to the house on Nineteenth Street to check to make sure she was all right, she found it deserted. As luck would have it, however, Susan’s boyfriend had recently returned some merchandise and, in the course of applying for a refund, had given his addres
s.
I wrote to Susan and addressed the letter in care of the boyfriend. Several days later she phoned me and agreed to come over.
Susan was an open-faced girl with a touching air of vulnerability, and it was obvious she had been deeply affected by Kait’s death. She apologized for not having attended the funeral, and displayed a scar on her arm, explaining that at the time of the service she had been at the hospital being treated for a dog bite.
“I’ll never forget that night as long as I live,” she said. “That’s why I moved, I couldn’t stand the memories in that house. Kait was planning to spend the night with me, and then changed her mind. I keep asking myself if there was any way I could have kept her there. If I’d done that she might be alive today.”
“Why did she decide to leave?” I asked.
“She told me she had to study, but that wasn’t the real reason. She was worried about where Dung was and what he was doing. She kept making me call the apartment to see if he was home yet.”
“Did she tell you what she was so worried about?”
“She just said they’d had a big fight. That wasn’t anything new, because they fought all the time, but I’d never seen Kait in the state she was in that night. She kept bursting into tears for no reason, and there at the end she was having me call the apartment every five minutes.”
“Why didn’t she call herself?” I asked.
“She didn’t want to talk to Dung. She just wanted to know where he was. She said if he answered I should act like I’d gotten a wrong number.”
“When was the last time you called?”
“It was right before she left.”
“You mean like ten-forty?”
“Yes, somewhere around that time.”
“And you still didn’t get any answer?”
Susan shook her head.
“That seems odd,” I commented. “The friends Dung was out with that night supposedly dropped him back at the apartment at ten. Did he know where you lived?”
“He might have if he saw my map.”
I’d forgotten the hand-drawn map that had been found in Kait’s car.
“Do you think you could make me a copy of that map?” I asked her.
“Sure,” Susan said obligingly.
I got her a pencil and some paper, and she outlined a route going west on Lomas, with a Wendy’s hamburger restaurant shown as a landmark for a right turn north onto Nineteenth Street. The location of Susan’s house was marked with an X.
I took the map and studied it a moment.
“So when Kait left your house, she had to go back the way she came. She didn’t have a choice, because the end of your street was blocked off.”
“Actually, she did try to get out that way,” said Susan. “I wondered at the time why she did that. She turned north instead of south on Nineteenth and then realized she couldn’t get through, so she had to turn around and go back the other way.”
“Did you give her the map that morning?”
“No, it was early in the week,” Susan said. “We’d been planning to get together then for dinner and a movie, but Kait had to work overtime, so that blew our plans. We finally decided she’d just stop over for a while on Sunday.”
When she got up to leave, she thanked me for asking her over.
“It’s good to know somebody is finally doing something,” she told me.
The next of Kait’s friends I called was Laura, the girl Kait had planned to room with after Dung moved out.
“Kait got really pissed at Dung on Saturday,” Laura remembered. “She’d invited my boyfriend and me to come over to watch videos, but as soon as we got there, Dung took off. He didn’t come back all evening, and Kait was furious. She said he was always doing that. He’d leave around ten or eleven and he wouldn’t come back till dawn.”
“Where did he go?”
“Kait didn’t know,” Laura said. “All he’d say was he was going out to see friends. At first she was worried that he might be playing around, but I told her if he’d wanted to do that he wouldn’t have moved in with her.”
“Was there anything else that hit you as strange?” I asked her.
“Well,” Laura said hesitantly, “there was this really weird thing about some car wrecks.”
“I know about those,” I said.
“You do?” She seemed relieved. “I hated to be the one to tell you when all those articles in the newspapers made Kait out to be so perfect. She was clean-cut—she wouldn’t even smoke a cigarette—but she was really into excitement, and she wanted to know all about how the wrecks were set up. By the time they got back from L.A., she knew everything about them. She’d even met the Vietnamese lawyer who arranged them.”
“Did she explain how the insurance scam worked?”
“She didn’t name names, but the bottom line was that this lawyer would hire people to rent cars and take out a lot of insurance on them. Then they’d use the rented cars to intentionally run into other cars, and the people in those cars would sue the rental companies for all kinds of fake injuries.”
“I can’t picture Kait wrecking a car,” I said.
“She didn’t.” Laura was obviously surprised by the suggestion. “Dung was the one who wrecked the cars.”
“I know Dung staged one wreck—”
“I understand that Dung staged all of them,” Laura said.
“But Detective Gallegos told Don he had an accident report that showed Kait was driving!”
“Then maybe they switched seats after the wreck,” Laura suggested. “That would have kept Dung from having so many accidents on his record. As far as I know, though, all Kait did was let Dung use her credit card. That’s how he talked her into going to California with him; he couldn’t rent a car without showing a major credit card.”
“Were Dung’s friends doing this too?”
“I think An Le was. Kait told me he went to Orange County every week. She said that he’d fly there and stay just one day and come back.”
“He was there in March when Kait and Dung went out there,” I said. “Don made the plane reservations for all three of them through Sandia’s travel agent. But when I picked them up at the airport, An wasn’t with them. Kait said he turned in his ticket and drove back instead.” As I thought back on that conversation, something else occurred to me. “One of Dung’s other friends, Tuan, was out there too. Kait was surprised when he turned up. She told me he flew first class and went back the next morning. She thought that was crazy. She said, ‘He didn’t even stay long enough to go to Disneyland!’ ”
After Laura left, I remained seated at the kitchen table, staring at the pad on which I’d been jotting down notes, trying to sort out the many odd pieces of information. The thing that had made it seem impossible for Kait’s killing to have been premeditated was that we had thought we were the only ones who knew where she was that night. Now, though, it seemed that a map had been around for days, available to anyone who looked in her purse. And Kait’s actions that night seemed peculiar. Why had she been so frantic to know where Dung was? One possible answer was that she regretted their fight, but if that were the case, why hadn’t she wanted to talk to him?
There was a second possibility that made more sense to me. Kait might have been worried that Dung was out searching for her. Betty’s reading had said: “She will have known that night of one who will be looking for her, and that one will have others looking for her. There’s a suggestion of a kind of setup.” If Kait had been afraid that Dung and his friends would intercept her on Lomas, it would explain why she had attempted to leave by another route.
And what did Dung do every night between ten P.M. and dawn? I was struggling to come up with an answer to that when Robin called.
“Those are prime hours for prostitution,” she suggested.
That struck me as absurd.
“Why would any man go to a prostitute when he’s living with his girlfriend?”
“That’s not what I meant,” said Robin. “I mea
nt maybe Dung is one. How was he able to live for seven months without working? He was getting money somewhere, and we know now that it wasn’t from a sister in California. He’s small and cute, a type perverts seem to be attracted to. If Dung was working as a prostitute and Kait found out about it, she would have been horrified. And she wouldn’t have confided in anybody, she’d have been too ashamed.”
I found the idea revolting, but I agreed to look into it.
For years I had taught for the journalism department at the University of New Mexico. Many of my former students now worked for local newspapers, and one, Mike Gallagher, was an investigative reporter for the Albuquerque Journal and had just completed a series of articles on prostitution.
I called Mike and asked him if Dung’s name had come up in the course of his investigation.
“Not in connection with prostitution,” he told me. “I have heard from several sources that the guy is a drug dealer.”
When Don got home, I filled him in on my discoveries. He was shocked, not only by the news of Dung’s alleged drug dealing, but by the fact that the police either weren’t aware of it or didn’t consider it important enough to tell us about.
“They’re not playing straight with us about those phone numbers either,” I said. “No matter what Steve Gallegos says, I don’t think he’s bothered to check them out. Sergeant Lowe didn’t even know they existed, and every time I call down there to inquire about them I’m given the run-around.”
“I’ll go down to the police station tomorrow and demand some answers,” Don said. “And I want them to show me that accident report on Kait.”
But by the following morning that confrontation seemed unnecessary, for somewhere between midnight and dawn, we were awakened by a phone call.
It was Sergeant Lowe, and her voice was charged with excitement.
“We’ve just arrested three men from Martineztown for your daughter’s murder,” she said. “I’m very proud of Steve! He’s found the Camaro, and we have an eyewitness to the shooting. Mrs. Arquette, I think we’ve got an airtight case!”