The Fault Tree

by Louise Ure

  “Let me know as soon as you’re sure,” he cautioned Dupree.

  Forty-five minutes later, Dupree took Exit 48 and pulled his car off the road at the end of the exit ramp. Paul Wheeler was already there, the seven-point blue star on his county sheriff’s vehicle disguised by a thin layer of dust.

  “Let’s take the Explorer,” Wheeler said, thumping the door of his SUV. “It’s already dirty, and this road’s just going to add to it.” Dupree locked his car and joined the deputy.

  “What are the circumstances?” he asked as they angled southwest on Arivaca Road.

  “The Santa Cruz County coroner’s out there now. It looks like the woman has been there a couple of days. There’s not much left of her. Animals got to her. Buzzards. Insects. But the age is about right.”

  So was the timing. Beatrice McDougall had been missing for two days now. Dupree grimaced in the sunlight and pulled down the visor to cover his eyes.

  “This sounds like a banner year for you down here,” Dupree said.

  “Only if you consider two hundred or more dead border crossers to be something to brag about. But yeah, the numbers are up this year. The illegals head out into the desert—no water, no food—the only thing that’s important to them is getting across. But murders? That’s not so common.”

  It was clear that the illegals had more to fear than just the desert. Human coyotes to prey on them. Armed vigilantes who wanted to stop them. Robbers, thieves, border patrols, killers, and other devils.

  Twenty miles later they reached the outskirts of Arivaca, not much more than a ghost town itself, with only a hundred and fifty full-time residents, not including the cattle.

  At the junction of Pima and Santa Cruz counties, only spitting distance from the Mexican border, Wheeler turned back to the southeast as Ruby Road went from paved surface to gravel. There was no conversation. Each man traveled his own road of assumptions, hypotheses, and hopes as they approached the remains of the old mining town.

  Ruby, and the adjacent Pajarita Wilderness, were a scant four miles from the border. The route through the water-carved and wind-etched Sycamore Canyon had become the new highway for illegal aliens entering the United States. Maybe this young woman was one of those sad travelers who tried to brave the desert with too much hope and too little water. If so, that meant that Dupree still had a chance to find Beatrice McDougall alive.

  They pulled through the gate and onto the dirt road that was the main entrance into what remained of Ruby, Arizona.

  Dupree huffed a laugh. In his mind, he’d painted Ruby as a complete Western town, with wood-planked sidewalks and hitching rails for long-gone horses. Something like Old Tucson on the west side of town but without the gunfight reenactments and ice cream shops. Instead, Ruby was rubble.

  Fifteen or twenty tin-roofed, stucco-walled shacks dotted the land. The jailhouse was about the same size and shape as a four-horse trailer but with fewer windows, and the former infirmary was infirm in its own right: dry slatted-wood walls caving in on themselves. They passed an old outhouse, the wood so warped that the door no longer shut for privacy.

  The desert had all but reclaimed the land from the old miners. Tumbleweeds and cholla cactus graced the side streets like lazy pedestrians who no longer bothered to look in both directions before crossing.

  Wheeler turned left at the first fork past the main gate where the hard-packed dirt path was still clear.

  “They said she was found in the schoolhouse.” He pointed to an L-shaped building ahead of them.

  A Santa Cruz County sheriff’s vehicle and two green and white Border Patrol cars lined the narrow lane; the coroner’s station wagon was parked up against a creosote bush like a tethered horse. Wheeler pulled off the road and tucked the nose of the SUV against a scrub oak that looked as down on its luck as the town did.

  “Who found her?”

  “The guy who owns the land now. He wants to fix this place up, the next Disneyland.”

  Dupree rolled his eyes and turned full circle around him. A tourist attraction? What kind of tourist would think this was something he ought to pay to see? He shrugged and opened the car door, trading air-conditioned luxury for a hot-gust glimpse of hell. The coroner came through the empty schoolhouse doorway, pushing a gurney laden with a thin, lightweight body draped in black polyurethane.

  “What can you tell us, Doc?” Wheeler asked.

  “I can’t tell you for sure how long she’s been out here. Depends on how fast the coyotes got to her. I’ll have a better idea when I do the autopsy.”

  Dupree pulled the wallet-size photo of Beatrice McDougall from his shirt pocket and handed it to the coroner. “Can you tell if it’s my missing seventeen-year-old?”

  “Not now, I can’t. I’ll let you know.”

  “I’ve got a set of the prints we gathered at the girl’s house.”

  “Don’t know how much good that’s going to do.” He ducked his head at the small, sad package on the gurney. “Like I said. The animals…” He tucked the photo under the black bag and started to move off.

  Dupree held up his hand and the coroner stopped. He took the zipper in both hands and slowly pulled it down the front of the bag. She had a thin facial structure, but the features that would have made her face come alive were gone. Long, light brown hair. She wore a T-shirt, stained red in more places than it was white, and a flared light blue skirt with silver rickrack on it.

  Both the hair and skin looked a little darker than the photo of Beatrice, but it had been two years since that picture was taken. Age could have made a difference, or maybe it was a trick of light when the photo was taken. There was nothing here that would give him permission to say, “Don’t worry, it isn’t her.” And who would he tell, anyway? She had no family anymore. No father to wonder where she’d gone on that last, inauspicious Tuesday afternoon.

  “You find any kind of ID?”

  The coroner flipped a clear plastic bag with a yellow-stained note on top of the gurney. “We found this in a corner of the room. ‘Maria Consuelo Ibarra’ with an address in Bogotá, Colombia. But we don’t know if it was hers. It might not have anything to do with her at all.”

  “I’ll take that.” Wheeler tucked the evidence bag into his shirt pocket. “We’ll send an inquiry down to Colombia, but don’t hold your breath about getting anything back real soon.”

  They waited until the coroner’s van had negotiated a tight U-turn and passed through the main gate. Wheeler waved his thanks to the Santa Cruz County deputy who waited by the car and escorted Dupree to the Explorer.

  “I’ve never wanted a coroner to tell me he couldn’t confirm it was my victim before,” Dupree said as they got back in the car.

  “Oh, hell, I want him to confirm it,” Wheeler replied. “Cause if she’s not yours, she’s mine.”

  Chapter 58

  I listened to enough of the news to know that they hadn’t found Darren Toller and the Chevy Lumina that was chasing me. Frustrated, I shut off the TV and made myself an iced coffee. What I really wanted was to go sit in the backyard and let the late afternoon breezes play over me. Pretend that I could see the full moon rising. Listen to the rustle of my neighbor’s cottonwood tree. Now that’s a Double Fine Zone.

  But the backyard held too many quiet corners. Too much private access from the narrow alley. Too much footstep-cushioning dry grass in the yard.

  I took my drink to the kitchen table and called Dupree.

  “Detective Dupree’s desk.” I could almost smell Nellis’s cigarettes.

  “It’s Cadence Moran.”

  “Dupree isn’t here right now. Can I help you?” It was the first time that he hadn’t immediately dismissed me in a conversation.

  “You haven’t found Darren Toller’s car yet, have you?” I didn’t mean to sound accusatory; I just wanted an update.

  “No, not yet.”

  “If it’s leaking fluids as badly as I think it is, he’s either going to be buying lots of antifreeze or he’s going to h
ave to take it in for repair. Have you had your officers check repair shops?”

  There was a momentary silence. “They’ve been on the lookout for him everywhere.”

  Would it kill the guy to say, “Thanks, Cadence, we hadn’t thought of that”? Or even, “That’s a great idea but we’re already on it”?

  “The car’s old enough that he probably wouldn’t take it to a dealership,” I said. “More likely just a local repair shop.”

  “I’ll make sure they check them. Good night.”

  I was mentally congratulating myself for giving such good advice until I realized that the killer could just as easily bring the car into Walt’s for repair. And then what would I do? Hope he didn’t see me?

  I double-checked the placement of bells and cans and ice picks around the house before I made dinner.

  Chapter 59

  Dupree couldn’t leave it alone. After Paul Wheeler dropped him off at his car at Arivaca Junction, he followed I-19 south to Nogales instead of returning north to his desk in Tucson. He had to know if the girl in the ghost town was Beatrice McDougall.

  The Santa Cruz County coroner wanted to wait until the next morning to begin the autopsy. “I’ve got these two gentlemen to do first,” he said, combing his thinning black hair across his crown from ear to ear and patting it in place. “A knife fight over a woman they apparently both thought they were married to.”

  “They can wait.” Dupree nodded at the almost flattened polyurethane bag on the table.

  Paul Wheeler came in, accompanied by a gust of air from the pneumatic doors. “August, didn’t expect to see you again so soon.”

  “I have to know now,” Dupree said.

  Wheeler took in the tense situation, crossed the room to stand next to the coroner, and turned him around for a private conversation. Although his voice was soft, it carried clearly to Dupree by the door.

  “Can we do this favor for our friend from Pima County? If it isn’t his missing girl, he still has a chance to save her. And if it is her, he’s got to find the guy who did this.” The coroner, still not happy about anyone else setting his schedule, sighed, then nodded.

  “Gowns and gloves are over there”—Wheeler pointed at a cupboard on the far wall—“if you want to stay.”

  Dupree nodded his thanks, pulled a crinkly paper gown from the stack, and leaned against the wall, out of the way of the coroner and his work. He hated this part of the job. The stench of decaying human flesh clung to the back of his throat for days after an autopsy. And the matter-of-fact dissection of organs and tissues—the crack of the chest as it was opened, the buzz of saw blade against skull—made him question the life force inside us. Where was the soul in all this jumble of silvery red flesh and sinew? What exactly, among all these bones, muscles, and wet tissue, set us apart from other creatures?

  The coroner turned on the overhead microphone to add his verbal sound track to the drama. Time, weight, condition, coloration, gender, age, length—the easy part of forensics because it dealt only with facts, not with speculation about how or why. It didn’t answer who she was or why she was huddled against a cold iron stove in an abandoned schoolhouse in the middle of a desert ghost town.

  “Hand me one of those Ten Cards,” the coroner said, nodding toward a short stack of white fingerprint cards on a desk against the wall. Dupree did as he was told.

  “It looks like we’ve got enough tissue left on this one finger to get a print.” He turned the girl’s hand palm up and showed Dupree the intact ring finger on her left hand. The other fingertips had been lost to the desert. He inked a small roller and gently pressed it to her hand, then took the ring finger, as tenderly as a piano teacher showing a new student the right key, and placed the pad against the ninth box on the card. He handed the card to Dupree.

  “I’ll send it to our forensic team for analysis, but if you want to take a quick look, see if there’s some similarity to the prints of the girl you’re looking for…”

  Dupree retreated to the desk against the far wall and lined up the new print card and the one he’d brought from Tucson. Saws whirred across the room.

  “Does the person you’re looking for come from a poor family?” the coroner asked as he worked farther into the body.

  “I don’t think so. Maybe not rich, but paying the bills okay. Why?”

  “This one didn’t live well. The leg bones and rib cage show evidence of rickets.”

  Rickets. Poor nutrition. The photo of Beatrice McDougall did not look like a child with rickets. He breathed an unworthy sigh of relief. Maybe this was a girl from a poor neighborhood in Mexico or South America. Was she the Colombian Maria listed on the scrap of paper found at the school? Colombians could be this blond and light skinned.

  Beatrice McDougall’s prints were on the card on the left. They’d lifted the prints from her bedroom—the headboard, the hairbrush, her homework notebook—and had a complete set of all ten fingers. Using a magnifying glass, he peered at the ninth box of both cards. This wasn’t his specialty, but he knew what to look for. The coroner waited at the autopsy table behind him.

  “The relative size of the prints is the same,” Dupree said, moving the magnifying glass from the card on the left to the card on the right. “Both have a radial loop…”

  He stopped and looked up at the coroner. “But the similarity ends there. The bifurcations and ridges don’t look at all similar to me.”

  “Let me take a look at that,” the coroner said, stripping off his gloves. He bent low over the cards. After a few moments of comparison he confirmed it. “Congratulations. We have a dead girl here, but you still have a shot at saving a live one out there somewhere.”

  Chapter 60

  The phone blasted me from sleep at midnight. I grappled with the Kleenex box and narrowly missed slicing my wrist with the bedside knife before I answered it.

  “Hello?”

  No response.

  I fumbled the receiver back into the cradle, turned over, and pulled the sheet up to my chin. I had almost settled my breathing when it rang again.

  “Hello? Who’s there?”

  Nothing but silence on the line. Or was there someone there? I tried to distinguish between empty air and living, breathing air, and my panic rose.

  Was he checking to make sure I was home? That I was alone? Or was this a misdialed number from some still-daylight time zone? Someone who didn’t trust his English enough to say, “So sorry to bother you, I must have a wrong number”?

  I hung up. “You’re being stupid,” I told myself aloud. “Making something out of nothing.” I got up to go to the bathroom.

  Splashing cold water on my face, I took deep breaths to slow my heart rate. I had this house wired with noisemakers and weapons in every room. No way someone was going to get inside without my hearing him. And no way that a wrong number should spook me like this.

  I hefted the ice pick I’d left in the bathroom as a handy weapon and crossed the hall, heading back to bed.

  I stopped, frozen by the rhythmic squeak of the rocking chair in my bedroom. Had I brushed by it as I went into the bathroom and set it rocking? Or was the killer now only five feet away from me, relishing my horror?

  Seconds stretched into lifetimes as I waited—breath frozen in my throat, ice pick held ready—for the chair to stop moving. How long does it take for a rocking chair’s motion to cease? Not as long as the feeling of icy terror that gripped me.

  I lunged toward the chair and stabbed down with the ice pick. The attack was met with empty air and a soft pfft as the cushion exploded in a feather storm.

  Chapter 61

  Dupree slammed the phone back in its cradle. Nothing. It was Friday already, almost two full days since they put out the APB on Darren Toller and the California plate number they got from Cadence Moran, but the car was nowhere to be found. And now he was looking at the driver for both kidnapping and murder. Attempted murder too, if you added the attacks on Juanita Greene and Cadence Moran to the list of crimes.
/>
  He scratched his scalp through wiry hair. Damn.

  Nellis was across the room with a telephone held to each ear, coordinating a search of the rental units and car repair shops in the area. Every police car in the city had Toller’s mug shot clipped to the dashboard. Officers stopped at real estate offices, grocery stores, pharmacies, and repair shops in every neighborhood from Catalina to the Benson Highway. Pima County sheriff’s officers searched the neighborhoods and highways outside the city for the Chevy Lumina with the California plate. No one had seen Darren Toller.

  The phone tips for both Toller and Beatrice McDougall continued to flood in. Sightings were claimed from the Four Corners area to Mexico. Dupree and the task force members had roped in as many volunteers and police officers from the administrative and traffic divisions as they could to handle the calls. It would take months to sort out whether any of them were solid leads.

  Nellis kept insisting that the pharmacist, John Stephanos, was just as viable a suspect as Toller, but they hadn’t found a way to tie him to McDougall yet. McDougall didn’t take any prescription drugs, and, unless he’d paid cash, he had never shopped at that Best Aid store.

  The only good news, if you could call it good news, was confirmation that the girl in Ruby was not Beatrice McDougall. A microscopic comparison of a cross section of that girl’s hair to the hair in Beatrice’s brush at home showed an entirely different appearance. Both hair samples were straight and the same thickness, but they differed widely in the pattern of pigment in the cortex. Paul Wheeler said the Santa Cruz County forensic team would do a DNA comparison, but he thought it was safe to say that the body was not that of the missing seventeen-year-old.

  Dupree turned his attention back to the stack of papers on the desk. They’d had no luck with the neighborhood canvass at the McDougall murder scene. One neighbor thought he had seen Beatrice in a tan minivan down the block from her father’s house the day before the murder, but no one remembered seeing a car on the day McDougall was killed.