The Fault Tree

by Louise Ure

  “They didn’t give her name or address; she should be fine. How’d the reporters find out about her, anyway?”

  “Dumb luck,” Dupree said. “Richardson gave a press conference and said we’d be interviewing all potential witnesses. You know, the standard line. But there have been a couple of reporters hanging out in the lobby and the parking lot ever since.” He returned to his perusal of Wanda Prentice’s credit card bills.

  “Hey, I remember where I heard Wanda Prentice’s name before,” Nellis said. “I never saw her show, but when I was a little kid and I’d ask for one more story at bedtime, my dad would always say, ‘Who do you think I am, Wanda Prentice?’ I thought it was just one of those lines you heard and repeated, you know? Like ‘What am I, chopped liver?’ You getting anything from those bills?”

  “Nothing out of line. Groceries, utilities, newspaper subscription, pharmacy. Let’s see what her bank records have to say.” He grabbed his coat and followed Nellis to the elevator.

  The Wells Fargo at Grant and Richey was the bank branch identified on Wanda Prentice’s checks. The detectives took the dead woman’s ATM card, checkbook, and most recent statement with them.

  There wasn’t a stick’s worth of shade in the parking lot, so Dupree backed the car into an available space on the east side of the lot. That way, the front seats wouldn’t be in the direct line of sun fire.

  “I recognize her,” the assistant manager, Rocky Trillo, said when Dupree showed him Wanda Prentice’s photo. “She’s a nice lady. Refuses to use the ATMs or the drive-thru window. She always comes to the counter.”

  He escorted the detectives to a desk with a computer terminal and entered Wanda Prentice’s account information. As usual, Dupree began a quick sketch as the banker looked up the data. A square face, easy grin. He couldn’t capture the brightness of the banker’s blue eyes with a pencil, so he indicated their gleam with a refractive-looking square drawn onto the iris, like Brenda Starr always had in the old comics.

  The banker turned the monitor toward the detectives. “See? She withdraws fifty dollars in cash every week. And her balance in savings hasn’t changed. She’s still got a little over a hundred thousand in that account. I can’t tell you how many times I tried to get her into CDs or bonds, rather than have that money sit there earning a measly three percent interest.”

  Dupree raised his eyebrows in his partner’s direction. They both knew of crimes that had been committed for a lot less than a hundred grand. “Is there any unusual activity in the last six months or so?”

  The banker’s chair squeaked as he turned back to the computer. “Nothing on the savings. And nothing I can see in checking, either. Her rents come in every month. No significant changes in her utilities or credit card payments.”

  “What kind of rents are you talking about?” Nellis asked.

  “She has some rental property across town. A duplex, I think she told me.”

  “Can you get us that address?”

  “Sure.” He typed in the codes that would reveal the checks deposited to the account.

  “Two tenants, Harmon and Garafulo. Here’s the address.” He jotted the names and an east side address on a piece of bank stationery and handed it to Nellis.

  “What else can you tell us about her? Did she have a safety-deposit box?”

  “No safety-deposit box, but I see here that she changed her contact information a year ago. She used to list Phyllis Prentice as her next of kin. Now it’s shown as Priscilla Strout.”

  Of course, she’d changed it when Priscilla’s mother died. Would the promotion to next of kin have been enough to give Priscilla Strout ideas about getting her hands on all that cash?

  “They may know already,” Trillo continued, “since her murder has been in the papers and all. But have you talked to anybody at the Desert Museum?”

  “Why?” Dupree knew about the twenty-some-acre museum west of town, but they hadn’t found any literature or paperwork about it in Wanda Prentice’s house.

  “She was a volunteer docent out there. It was just about the only thing she talked about. The raptor cage was her specialty.”

  Chapter 16

  I still “see” everything. It’s not easy to forget twenty-three years of colors and perspective. When I hear a bird or feel a breeze, I still see that feathered red wing or the hillside covered in new-grass green. I even see the letters I used to know, when my fingers scroll across Braille dots.

  But some images are frozen forever at the time I last saw them. Kevin’s face, for example, will always have that just-under-thirty boyish grin and no gray hair. I don’t think of him with the sadness of losing a child in his eyes.

  New friends, if they become good enough friends, let me see their faces with my fingers. Juanita is one of those friends. I had asked to see what she looked like now, so many years after the scrawny, doe-eyed Juanita I remembered from high school.

  “Oh, I’m a real bombshell now,” she laughed. “Bazooms out to here, sexiest damn thing you ever saw.”

  My fingers had tap-danced over her forehead and across her cheekbones. You could read the blend of black and Latino heritage in her face. She was almost as tall as me and had a strong nose, pronounced cheekbones, and a generous mouth. Her hair was as short as mine, and she tucked it behind her ears.

  She came by on Saturday morning, just two hours after the call from my mother, and I told her about the scream and the car on the night Wanda Prentice was killed.

  “I know. I called Rich Nellis’s partner, August Dupree, last night after I dropped you off. Were you able to help them with anything?”

  “Nothing much.” I explained about the almost hit-and-run, the antifreeze, and the out-of-tune engine.

  “You should have told me about the accident, Cade.”

  “I didn’t think it was much more than my own stupid mistake.” One in a list of hundreds that I could read like prayer beads if I got started.

  “I told August I’d take another look at the crime scene,” she said. “See if maybe there’s something we didn’t spot the first time. Want to go down to the lab with me? I need to go over their findings and photos, see what else we might try.”

  “Sure.” My ribs were still sore and my palms scabbed with gravelly scratches, but I thought I’d be better off moving than having my muscles lock up with the pain. I grabbed a lightweight vest in case the forensics lab had the thermostat set as icy cold as my mother’s house.

  “You look like shit,” Juanita offered as I groaned into the passenger seat.

  “I feel like shit too.” Based on her reaction and that of the detectives, I knew that my aches and pains had blossomed into living color.

  “I’ve got a good one for you,” Juanita said, fastening her seat belt. Juanita took great pleasure in relaying the unintentional puns and bad grammar she spotted on signs and ads.

  “Slow Children at Play.”

  “Huh?”

  “Yep. Now there’s a road sign just crying out for punctuation. And I got this great list of animal groups.”

  “Animal groups?”

  “You know. Like a pride of lions. A gaggle of geese.”

  “A murder of crows.”

  “Yep. But how about a smack of jellyfish? Or a shrewdness of apes? A rumba of rattlesnakes?”

  I silently disagreed with the rattlesnake description as she continued the list. It would definitely have been a cha-cha of rattlesnakes.

  The Crime Lab was in the Police Department headquarters on South Stone, the same place I’d gone with Nellis last night. We reached her office without incident, which is unusual for Juanita’s automotive skills. She’s a graduate of the “point it and punch it” school of driving.

  We took the elevator to the second floor, then used a card key to get into the Crime Lab in the south wing. I was glad I’d brought the vest. I followed her through the maze of desks and work areas like a rat on the trail of aged cheddar.

  “Gene? I knew I’d find you here on a weekend,” J
uanita said to someone at the far end of the building.

  Almost two dozen criminalists worked at the lab, some on computer forensics or latent prints or DNA, others on chemical analysis and bullet comparisons. I’d met Gene Howard before; he was one of the DNA specialists.

  “I’ve got so much shit to do for upcoming trials that I could be in here every weekend and still not make a dent,” he said. “Remember that bank robbery on Prince Road? Guy dropped a Kleenex at the scene and it’s got great DNA, but it’s not from the guy they’re holding.”

  “Not good news for us, but it’s good for somebody. You remember Cadence, don’t you?” Howard allowed as how he recognized me.

  “Where have we got the stuff from the Prentice murder case?” Juanita asked.

  “Prentice? Brodie’s got them. But he said there’s no clear prints so far.”

  “Can’t hurt to look again, huh?”

  “Course not.” I heard the disapproval in his voice. I didn’t know who this Brodie was, but Gene Howard clearly thought he didn’t need to have his work checked.

  Juanita must have sensed the same thing. “Brodie won’t mind. And I don’t really think I’ll find anything either. I’m just doing a favor for one of the cops.”

  I followed Howard across the room, running my hand along a bank of filing cabinets that seemed to stretch as far as the Great Wall of China. He stopped and opened a drawer at waist level. There was a metal-on-metal complaint as he finger-flipped through the hanging folders.

  “Here it is. See for yourself.”

  Juanita and I, with Howard in tow, retreated to a wide table in the center of the room.

  “What did I tell you?” he said. “Brodie tested the door handle, the door itself, everything in the kitchen…” His voice trailed off.

  “Nothing?”

  “The only clear prints belong to the victim.”

  “What about the blood?” Juanita asked.

  “We haven’t run DNA yet, but it’s all O positive, just like the victim.”

  When Howard went back to his office, Juanita began her inspection. “Let’s see if there’s any latent print magic we can work here.” She slapped down crime scene photographs like a desperate game of solitaire, then proceeded to “uh-huh” and “hmmm” through what I thought must be the fingerprint analysis they’d done.

  Funny that her work was to find evidence that you often couldn’t see. At least I could listen to a fan belt or a misfiring engine for a clue. She couldn’t count on even that sense.

  “Brodie did a good job,” she said a few minutes later. “There’s powder all over the place. Doesn’t look like there’s anything to be found.”

  “Tell me about the room. About the house. What’s on the floor or in the front yard? Are there curtains?” I needed to see the place she’d been killed.

  “I’ll do you one better. Let’s go back and both of us see the house for ourselves.”

  Did I really want to go to Wanda Prentice’s house? To take in that blended smell of coppery blood and day-old meatloaf? To know that a sweet woman who used to read to children and who called out to a stranger in passing also used a lilac-scented perfume and left a ring in her bathtub? I knew that I had to, even though it wouldn’t make up for letting her die that night. Would she be alive now if I’d phoned the police after the car screeched away?

  Juanita phoned Detective Dupree. He said he’d send an officer to the house with the key. We drove back to Mrs. Prentice’s house, arriving before the patrolman did. I found the opening in the shallow brick wall and tapped up the front walk.

  “What’s it look like?” I asked.

  “Red brick. The screen door has some ornamental wrought-iron design on it. Heavy curtains in the front window. They’re open about an inch and—”

  “So someone could have looked in. Checked to see if she was home. Maybe asleep on the couch.”

  “It’s got bushes and mulch under the window. So, no footprints. Yeah, I suppose somebody could have looked in. Brodie didn’t dust here.”

  “She’s got rosebushes here, right?” They had a particularly strong scent. “If somebody was going to get close enough to look in the window without getting scratched, he’d have to lean way over. And that means he had to brace himself on something.”

  Juanita retreated to the car to get her testing kit, then unscrewed the lid to one of her powders. I waited in silence while she dusted.

  “Oh, my, yes.”

  “What is it?”

  “There are prints there, all right, but not fingerprints. More like parentheses marks where somebody cupped his hands around his eyes to look in. And an oily spot right in the middle. Probably where his nose made contact with the window.”

  “How can you know that it wasn’t some curious neighbor looking in after the murder?”

  “We can’t tell when prints were left. That’s why you dust everything. If we ever catch the guy, we can compare the edges of his hands to these prints. Just as distinctive as fingerprints. And I’ll take a sample from this smudge too. See if our DNA folks can get anything from it.”

  She continued to test other likely spots around the window. “We don’t know how far he had to lean over, but based on the height of that nose print, I’d say he’s at least five ten. That’ll help.”

  A car pulled to the curb behind us. “Ready to go inside?” she asked.

  The patrolman must have been a friend. He asked about Juanita’s brother Chance and said they’d have to plan to get together. She laughed and agreed.

  Juanita positioned me in the doorway and said, “Keep your back against the wood and step sideways.” There must have been blood or fingerprint powder there that she wanted me to avoid. I sidled into the house.

  The coppery smell was there all right, and the smell of feces. Mrs. Prentice must have soiled herself in her fright or at the moment she lost her life. The house was still, as dead as its former occupant.

  “Let’s start in the kitchen,” Juanita said, guiding me into the next room.

  “What does it look like?”

  “Café curtains on the window over the sink. It’s a pattern with orange blossoms. The kitchen table is behind you, round, covered with a yellow tablecloth. Four chairs, all with arms, but one of them is knocked over. This whole place looks like it’d be right at home in 1965.”

  “Back at the lab, did you say something about ice cube trays?”

  “Yeah, it looks like the burglars searched the cabinets and the refrigerator, maybe thinking she had prescription meds or money stashed there. They’ve spilled stuff all over.”

  My next footstep crunched into something that felt like cornflakes.

  “Tell me everything you see.” The mingled odors of fresh coffee beans, olive oil, and vanilla painted a partial olfactory picture, but I needed to see all of it.

  “The report said they pulled almost everything out of the freezer. Bacon, ice cube trays, those little pearl onions, spinach. Dumped it all in the sink. They’ve taken all those to the lab in case there were prints on them. The cupboards and floor are still in pretty bad shape, though. There’s cornmeal, flour, coffee, bran flakes, and a cereal box on the floor. It looks like she kept the cornmeal and flour in these plastic containers.”

  Something was missing. “What did she keep her coffee in? A bag? A can?”

  “I don’t see anything. Maybe it’s in the garbage.” She pulled open a cupboard door, rummaged around, then closed the door again. “Let me check the evidence list. Nope. Not there either.”

  “Maybe Mrs. Prentice really was hiding money, and that’s where she kept it.”

  It didn’t seem logical that an elderly woman in a middle-class neighborhood would have piles of cash or jewelry buried in the groceries, but I couldn’t imagine any other reason to trash a kitchen like this and not touch the rest of the house.

  “Either that or she buys one hell of a blend,” Juanita said.

  Chapter 17

  The Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum was mo
re of a zoo and botanical garden than it was a traditional museum. Nestled against the saguaro-studded slopes of the Tucson Mountains, it covered twenty-one acres of land west of Gates Pass, with over two miles of walking paths where visitors could come eye to eye with tarantulas, kit foxes, and red-tailed hawks.

  Dupree’s favorite part was still Prairie Dog Town, a patch of sandy soil surrounded by a waist-high wall and studded with a warren of small holes the prairie dogs dug for concealment. It looked like a life-size version of a Whack-A-Mole game, with the bright-eyed rodents popping up and ducking down in alternating waves of curiosity and fear.

  It took them almost a half hour to get across town, through Gates Pass, and across the valley floor to the museum. Dupree had to circle the lot twice—he wasn’t about to park in a fire lane—before he found a free space. He shook his head, marveling at the endurance of tourists who insisted on coming to the museum during the hottest part of the day. Most of the animals inside had the good sense to stay hidden from the sun. Why couldn’t the visitors do the same?

  “We were so sad to hear about Wanda,” the elderly man at the ticket window said. “She was like family to us.”

  “Is there anyone here that she was especially close to?” Dupree asked. They hadn’t found any neighbors she spent much time with, and Priscilla seemed to be the only family member. Calls to Channel 9’s KGUN TV station had only turned up an intern who was willing to compile a tape of the old Wanda’s Story Hour programs for their review.

  “You should talk to Marjorie Lamar. She usually works with the raptors, like Wanda did, but I think she’s doing hummingbirds and butterflies today. We’re shorthanded. Why don’t you wait in the gift shop and I’ll see if we can track her down.” He motioned the detectives through the turnstile and to the left.

  Nellis browsed the gift shop’s selection of prickly pear marmalade and jalapeño jelly while Dupree looked at the silver and turquoise jewelry. At one point Dupree almost laughed, watching an eight-year-old boy who thought he’d disguised the theft of a rock and mineral collection under his T-shirt. The flat display box was the size of a hardback book and gave the child the look of an armor-plated warrior.