by Louise Ure
I’d done what I could to identify that car for the police, but what could I do to protect myself in the meantime? Should I move in with Juanita until I knew he’d been caught? Or, heaven forbid, move back in with my mother?
I didn’t think the licensing folks would take kindly to a blind person with a gun, but I could carry a knife. And Lucy, now that she had been reinforced, would make a good weapon.
I pulled the sheets up to my neck, then snuck one hand out to rest on the bedside telephone. I’d stay on guard until I heard the early morning sounds of traffic and conversation and coffeemakers. Then I’d do my best to fortify the house. String a bell across the windows and doors so that I would hear a surreptitious entry. Hide weapons in each room where I could find them if I needed them.
There would be no more sleep tonight.
Chapter 36
Dupree shoved away from the wall in the interrogation room and preceded Nellis out the door. It had been a long night, first with surveillance and now with questioning. He glanced at the clock; a new day was about to begin.
“What do you think?” he asked once the door to Priscilla Strout’s interview room had closed behind them.
“Guilty as sin.”
“Not if she’s got alibi witnesses that can place her in a bar with Randy Owner last Thursday night.”
“They’ll have to be some pretty damned good witnesses to convince me,” Nellis said.
They entered the small interview room where Randy Owner waited. Dupree shoved an empty chair away from the table with his foot, spun it around, and sat down with his arms folded across the back. He compared the mug shot to the man sitting across from him. Nothing had changed. Owner still had long sideburns and the tattoo of an empty-eyed skull on the left side of his neck.
The Miranda warning was on the table in front of him. Owner had willingly signed it, saying he didn’t know why the police had picked him up, but he had nothing to hide.
“Okay, Randy, let’s start with how you know Priscilla Strout.”
Randy shook his head. “I never saw her before tonight. I just met her there in the bar.”
“We’ve got a recording of her phone call to you, Randy.”
“I swear to you, I never saw her before in my life.” Sweat beaded his forehead.
“Priscilla Strout says you were with her, murdering her grandmother, last Thursday night.”
“What? The bitch is nuts! I haven’t killed anybody!”
“But you were with her last Thursday?” Dupree challenged him.
“No! I told you, I just met her.” Owner gulped and his eyes skittered left-right, on the hunt for a get-out-of-jail-free card.
“You’re not helping yourself here, Randy.” Dupree consulted the file again. “It says here you’ve got a black Toyota pickup. You have any other cars?”
“No, sir.”
No tan SUV or minivan, Dupree thought. That made Owner a less likely suspect. But the phone call from Priscilla Strout in the police station proved that they were in cahoots on something.
Dupree wasn’t going to release Owner until they’d had a chance to check his car. There might be bloodstains or fibers that could link Owner to the murder. Hell, there might even be a radiator leak. Rodriguez was off getting the warrant right now.
“Sit tight. We’ll let you know if we have any other questions.” And one of those questions was why Randy Owner wouldn’t admit to knowing Priscilla Strout. What did he have to hide?
Owner was chewing his cuticles down to blood as Dupree and Nellis left the room.
Chapter 37
“If you loved me, you’d do it,” Lolly said, catching her breath. She’d taken the bus out, but the walk from where it let her off had winded her. He hoped the bus driver wouldn’t remember her if the cops came asking.
“We can just leave. Today. You’ll never have to see him again.” He wrung the baseball cap between his hands, transmitting the urgency and anxiety to the cloth rather than to his voice.
Sunlight sat heavy and hot on his shoulders, and beads of sweat snailed down the back of his neck. He never thought he’d be talking about killing in the bright light of an Arizona noon. Hell, he never thought he’d be talking about killing at all.
“He’ll find us.” She hung her head, blond hair cascading across her cheeks, her eyes wet with tears. “He’ll never let me go. This is the only way.”
He knew she was right. He’d never stop hunting for her. He’d bring her back, no matter what it took. Especially when he found out why they’d run.
He had to die.
“Where is he now?”
“Asleep. That’s how I got out of the house.” Her lips weren’t quivering anymore. She stood straight and wide-eyed.
He knew he had to match her courage. Prove that his love was as strong and deep as what she’d shown.
He stuffed two pillowcases with underwear, T-shirts, and jeans and threw a denim jacket over his shoulder. They wouldn’t be coming back here.
An hour later, Lolly was tapping her foot to an unheard song on the drive across town. The house was still and quiet when they arrived, the curtains pulled shut across the front window. There was a low hum nearby from a neighbor’s window air conditioner. It was early afternoon; the guy should be sound asleep.
“It’s for us,” Lolly said, handing him her keys. Her voice was low, more breath than volume. She wrapped her arms around his neck and opened her mouth to a deep kiss.
“You wait here.” He put a finger to his lips and then to hers, and got out of the car. He didn’t need the house key; the door was unlocked. He pushed it open and stepped inside. The living room was dark as a theater. A faucet dripped in the kitchen.
He crept down the hall to the closed door at the end and turned the knob.
Strong, steady snores from the bed. He took three steps forward, willing the man to wake up, to face him, to understand why he was going to die. It was time to make all those “bad seed” predictions come true.
He took a deep breath, unsnapped the buck knife from its sheath at his waist, and pulled the blade sharp and hard across the man’s throat. At the last moment, the old man had opened his eyes, wide with fright but no recognition of the avenging angel in front of him.
He jumped back to avoid the spray of blood, then waited until the gurgling was over before he turned back toward the door.
He had to do something to make sure the cops didn’t immediately think of Lolly as the killer. What would throw them off?
He went into the bathroom and wiped the knife on the towel that hung, still wet, from the shower door. He could smash the man’s bones, upend heavy furniture, and make sure the murder looked like the work of a man. Would that be enough?
No, wait. He found his way into the kitchen and tore off a paper towel to mask his prints. Then, with a fury he thought he’d already expended, he yanked ice cubes, cookies, cornmeal, and flour from the cupboards and refrigerator and dashed them across the floor.
There was no reason for the cops to tie Lolly to Mrs. Prentice’s death, so they wouldn’t automatically think this one had anything to do with her either. It would be the work of the same crazed burglar who attacked Mrs. Prentice.
He jammed the paper towel into his pocket. Dry mouthed, he grabbed a handful of chewing gum packages from a bowl on the coffee table on his way out. He spit out the gum in his mouth, opened the new pack, and tried to still his shaking hands as he approached Lolly in the van.
“Is it over?” Her eyes were bright with excitement.
“Yes.” He held out a handful of the Bible Gum packages he’d taken from the house.
“Thanks.” She ignored the Bible card inside the pack and dropped the cellophane onto the sidewalk beside the car.
He wasn’t sure if she meant thanks for the gum or for the murder.
“We’ve still got one more person to take care of,” Lolly reminded him.
Chapter 38
Dupree pushed his spine against the desk chair and leaned ba
ck into the cool rush of air from the fan. He’d been at it for only a few hours, but the words were blurring in front of him; he had to restore his concentration. He thumbed through the stack of interview sheets on the desk.
What was he missing? They’d canvassed the area for four days, checked all traffic stops or parking tickets in the neighborhood that night, tracked down known burglars and home invasion specialists and followed up on their alibis.
The phone tips hadn’t been any help at all, but they all had to be verified too. Hundreds of them. The killer is hiding out in a cave, one caller said. As if there weren’t a thousand caves in southern Arizona, including the massive Kartchner Caverns that could have hidden a hundred fugitives.
Crime scene techs had been all over Randy Owner’s truck but hadn’t found any link to Wanda Prentice or Cadence Moran’s hit-and-run. They’d had to release Owner, but Dupree cautioned him not to leave town. They still had to check out Priscilla Strout’s other alibi witnesses to prove that Randy Owner was with her that night.
So far they’d tracked down three stores that made regular deliveries to Wanda Prentice’s house: the pharmacy where she’d had a fight, a grocery store, and a sandwich shop. They weren’t done with the list, but right now none of the delivery guys looked promising. Unless maybe that pharmacist had used a delivery as cover to get into her house and kill her.
Nellis said his money was still on Priscilla Strout. Maybe she got tired of waiting around for her inheritance. Maybe she got one of the guys she was sleeping with to kill Wanda Prentice.
Dupree rose and walked to the window overlooking the St. Augustine Cathedral to the north. The sun on the chalk-white domes and towers threw blinding glints of light back at him. The only new information was that Wanda Prentice had kept money in a coffee canister, and that canister was missing. It was looking more like a burglary gone bad.
Sergeant Richardson had left another stack of baby boomers’ outraged e-mails on his desk to spur him on.
Nellis had put in a request yesterday for information about the license plate that Cadence Moran had phoned in, and now Dupree spread out the faxes that had arrived from California. Nellis had tried four possible combinations. Juanita Greene had been pretty sure about the beginning of the plate, 5MSU, so he’d started with that and tried adding 088, 033, 038, and 083. That last one wasn’t an assigned number, so the California DMV had faxed them the details on only three cars.
“Any luck?” Nellis asked, setting a greasy bag of churros and pan de huevo on the desk. Sweet breakfast treats for instant energy.
“Nothing from the phone tips.” Dupree uncrumpled the top of the paper bag and gestured to the faxes in invitation. “But take a look at the responses we got to your license inquiry. I got the local cops to pay a visit to these three. This one”—he picked up the top fax with sugar-crusted fingers—“zero three three, belongs to a ’66 Mustang owned by an employee of the Department of Justice in Fresno. Zero three eight is on a dark green Subaru up north in Smith River, California, and the car’s still there. But this one could be interesting.”
He licked two fingers and handed Nellis the last fax. “Zero eight eight. A 2000 tan Chevy Lumina, owned by a Darren H. Toller, twenty-seven, of San Diego,” Nellis read.
“And Juanita says the plate is on a Lumina. It matches.”
“Does he have a record?”
Dupree shook his head. “He’s either clean or he’s smart.”
“Let’s check in with Ramona,” Nellis said, crumpling the bag to preserve the last two churros. “She left a message that she’s found something interesting on the pharmacist.”
The Forensic Accounting squad was on the same floor as the Homicide detail but all the way across the building. Dupree spotted Ramona Fuentes in the corner, her fingers flying across the keypad on an old adding machine.
“You still use that old thing?”
“My fingers know it best. And it prints out whatever I’m adding so I can double-check myself.” She wore rimless glasses that magnified her eyes. Dupree would have sketched her as a goldfish.
“Here. Let me show you what I’ve got. Overcharging is the least of this guy’s crimes.” She fanned a deck of prescription receipts across the desk. “First, he’s not telling any of these patients that there are generic equivalents for the drugs they’ve been prescribed. Then, he doesn’t include any coverage by a patient’s secondary insurance carrier. So when the patient shows up, she finds out her prescription’s going to cost a hundred and thirty bucks, and that Medicare will only cover thirty of that. That’s what your murder victim discovered.”
She tapped a stack of insurance forms. “Then he goes ahead and rebills both Medicare and the secondary carrier.”
“So he’s made money off the patient for the higher-priced drug and then been repaid—sometimes twice—by the insurance companies,” Dupree said.
“Could this just be ignorance?” Nellis asked. “Maybe the guy doesn’t know how to do the paperwork.”
She shook her head. “It doesn’t look like it. They get it wrong about a third of the time. And Stephanos has approved every one of the transactions.”
“Is there any pattern to it?” Nellis asked.
“The victims all seem to be seniors, but I don’t know what else they have in common. It includes all kinds of medication: painkillers, sleeping aids, cancer drugs, cholesterol drugs. Maybe they only pulled the scam on customers who looked like they were well enough off that they wouldn’t notice if their medical bills went up from twenty to a hundred and twenty bucks.”
“How much so far?” Dupree said.
“About thirty thousand for the one month I’ve looked at. But that’s not the worst of it. I checked with the lab. The blood pressure pills Wanda Prentice was charged a hundred and thirty bucks for were generics.”
“So what’s he doing with all those branded drugs he kept?” Dupree asked.
Chapter 39
Lolly had wanted to go back inside.
“I need to pack some things.”
“It’s too dangerous. We’ll buy whatever you need.”
“With what? Our good looks?” she sneered.
She was right. His last paycheck and the nineteen dollars from the Prentice house hadn’t gone far.
He drove to the Tucson Mall on Broadway. The stolen plates weren’t enough protection. He couldn’t take the chance someone had seen the van. They needed a new car.
Massive parking lots were tucked at odd angles around the mall. A thousand vehicles shimmered in the July heat. There were enough stores and movie theaters here to guarantee that the car wouldn’t be missed for a while.
The van threatened to stall as they idled down the rows looking for a likely target. The engine had overheated when he’d swapped license plates earlier, and he’d had to walk back to a gas station for a gallon of antifreeze for the radiator. He’d be happy to get rid of the old van and move on to something more reliable.
“How about this one?” Lolly pointed to a tiny Mini Cooper with all the windows left open.
“Too flashy. Too small.”
They kept prowling. At the end of a long row on the south side of the shopping center they found the perfect vehicle: a small pickup truck with a hard plastic cover over the bed. The windows had been cracked open—a good sign that the owner expected to be at the mall until the temperatures made the truck too hot to get into. Maybe a store employee. Perfect.
He put the van in park, opened the driver’s door, and told Lolly to slide over. She had driven the van before and would do fine as long as she was just following the other car through light city traffic.
“We’ll head north toward Mount Lemmon,” he told her, easing into the front seat of the Mitsubishi. It was a little smaller than he would have liked, but it was an anonymous car, and if it was just the two of them traveling, it would do. He unbraided two plastic-coated wires under the dash, just like his brother had taught him to do, and sparked the engine to life.
“F
ollow me. And Lolly? Don’t do anything to make the cops curious.”
“Kill the engine,” he said after Lolly had angled the car into position.
She switched the motor off and got out of the van to join him. Less than forty miles north of Tucson, the air was cooler at this elevation and he breathed in the sweet mountain air.
He used his shirttail to wipe every hard surface inside and outside the van—steering wheel, mirrors, seat adjustment, glove box, visors, dashboard, and door handles.
Together they moved all their belongings into the back of the new pickup truck. They’d stopped once on the Mount Lemmon highway to get a gallon container of gas. He splashed the liquid over the front and rear seats, then wiped down the gas can before he threw it down the hillside.
Reaching into the van, he moved the gearshift to neutral with a gloved hand and let the car roll forward till its front tires touched the sandy edge of the cliff. He ignited a matchbook that was three-quarters full and tossed it into the driver’s seat. The gasoline-soaked fabric ignited with a whoosh.
Stepping back as the flames grew higher, he leaned all his weight against the back bumper. The van inched forward, hesitating at the sandy lip for a moment before it plummeted down the mountainside. It seemed like a lifetime before it came to rest among the burned, skeletal branches of what had once been a grove of old evergreens. The car’s tan contours began to blacken in the crackling flames until it looked at home in the already burned wasteland.
“Just one more thing to take care of, then we’re out of here.”
Chapter 40
I couldn’t afford many more days without making some money, so Tuesday morning I limped down the street to the shop. After two too-close calls with that car, and a sleepless night full of unknown sounds, I made sure not to step into the street if I heard an engine anywhere nearby. Probably paranoia on my part, but I wasn’t taking any chances. When the street held only the riotous sound of cicadas, I swung my leg around in a stiff arc in hopes of keeping the stitches in place and stepped out into the street. There was a gooey dampness in the gauze over my knee by the time I reached Walt’s front door.