The Fault Tree

by Louise Ure

  I smiled. “That’s angel.”

  “Not in your case.”

  I knew when I was beat. I turned off the burner under the soup, called a cab, and followed her down the driveway to the street. A perfect example of the halt leading the blind.

  “I don’t think this is what the hospital had in mind when they released you,” I said when we arrived at police headquarters and shuffled toward her office. She ignored my comment and we headed to the DNA section rather than her Latent Print area.

  “Gene? Are you here?” Juanita called.

  He answered from a far corner on the left. “Jeez, Juanita. I thought I was seeing a ghost. Aren’t you supposed to be in the hospital?”

  “They said it was okay for me to get some exercise, so I thought I’d start with my mind.”

  “In that case, you’re going to love this,” he said. “We’ve got some new evidence on the McDougall case. They sent in gum and a wrapper from the crime scene. Your guys collected prints from the wrapper but haven’t run them yet. When I get a chance, I’ll check the gum for DNA.”

  “How far into it are you?”

  “We got the brand of gum—it’s Bazooka Bubblegum. That’s as far as I got. There are about fifty other pieces of evidence that came in first.”

  “Bazooka, that sounds like a kid’s brand. What have the cops said about that?” I asked.

  “They’re thinking we might have a kid, a teenager anyway, involved in this. But the gum could have belonged to the kidnap victim too. Or anybody just walking down the street. It was found near the sidewalk.”

  “Have you heard anything about that metal button from Juanita’s attack?” I asked. In my mind we were talking about the same crime and the same criminal for all three attacks.

  “Not my case,” Gene replied. “Mark’s working on the hair that was wrapped around the button, but just like all this other stuff, we won’t have DNA answers for another few days.”

  “Doesn’t stop me from checking it for prints,” Juanita suggested.

  “You think that’s appropriate? Investigating your own attack?” Gene asked.

  “Very.” Juanita turned back toward me and we retraced our steps to her office. It was a large room but too full to echo much. She shared the space with the new latent print specialist, the supposedly four-balled Brodie.

  I bumped into a stack of loose papers and string-tied envelopes when I tried to sit in the guest chair.

  “Sorry, let me get that.” Ah, that low-slung, shift-through-the-curves voice again, the one I’d heard out in my driveway with the police.

  “Hey, Brodie,” Juanita said.

  “Hey, yourself. You look like you should still be flat on your back.”

  “You always say the nicest things. I don’t think you’ve met my friend Cadence Moran.”

  “I was at your house the night Juanita was attacked. Uh, I don’t mean that was a great way to meet you…”

  We shared a four-handed shake. His were square hands, with short, strong fingers. A scattering of hair at the wrist. No callus on his third finger. Maybe he worked more with microscopes and computers than with pens and pencils. And no wedding ring.

  “Is Brodie a first name or last?” I asked, as if Juanita were no longer in the room.

  “The only name, really. My first initials are W.B., but I just go by Brodie.”

  “W.B. as in Warner Brothers?”

  “Won’t Bite.”

  I finally released his hands.

  “Hope you didn’t mind my retesting a few spots at Mrs. Prentice’s house, Brodie,” Juanita said.

  “Go for it.”

  “Good. Looks like work has been piling up in my absence.” Juanita flipped through the stack of papers. “Oh, here’s one I’d love to catch.”

  “Which one’s that?” Brodie asked.

  “The ignition finger.”

  “What’s that mean?” I said.

  Brodie replied for her. “They found a human finger in a stolen Mercedes. Belonged to the owner of the car. He had one of those new high-tech security systems installed, you know? Car won’t start without the owner’s fingerprint? So they cut off his finger to use on the ignition.”

  Yuck. “How’s the owner?”

  “Don’t know. Haven’t found the rest of him yet.”

  Juanita moved over to Brodie’s desk. “Here’s the button you found in the driveway.”

  “Get your paws off that. There’s no way I’m letting you handle your own evidence.” Brodie moved back to his chair. A drawer opened and he unscrewed the lid of a jar. I pictured the rapid, silent twirl of carbon black powder across the raised design on the top of the button. Clear adhesive to lift the print. Then onto a card for microscopic comparison. “Shit. It’s a partial but not big enough or clear enough to go on. Maybe they’ll have better luck with the hair.”

  “Damn.” Juanita groaned as she shifted position in her chair.

  “C’mon, ladies,” Brodie said, “I’m taking you out to lunch. Juanita, you don’t look well enough to be here, and Cadence, you look like you could use a few pounds.”

  “I’m game, as long as lunch is a chocolate milk shake,” Juanita said.

  I stood up too quickly and listed to the right, coming chest to chest with Brodie.

  “Sorry.” I balanced myself with a hand on his shoulder. My fingers brushed past his cheek, then explored the rest of his face. His hair was loose and long, curling over his collar. Full beard and mustache trimmed close to the skin. A prominent but well-shaped nose. My hands traveled south to his collarbone. He would have looked good in suits, but I doubted that he wore them very often.

  “Sorry,” I repeated. “I should have asked first…”

  “Anytime.” Brodie placed himself between us and escorted us to his car. I had to move two heavy, fist-sized cameras with long lenses before I could sit down in the backseat.

  “Are you into photography?” I asked.

  “Yeah, black and white. I still do it the old-fashioned way. Never went digital.”

  Great. Fingerprints and photography. Leave it to me to get interested in a guy whose hobby and work I could never appreciate. We drove to Sonic and placed an order for two cheeseburgers and three shakes. Over the last bite of burger I asked if they’d had any luck with the nose and handprints from Mrs. Prentice’s front window.

  “No word back from DNA yet,” Brodie said. “But if we get a suspect, I can sure compare the handprints. The nose print is something else, but who knows? I got a conviction once, back in Colorado, with a lip print. Bank robber ran smack-dab into a glass door on his way out.”

  A metal button. A strand of hair. A nose print. That sounded like the ghost of a chance to me.

  Chapter 65

  “I told you we shouldn’t have counted on her,” Nellis said. “A fucking blind woman as a witness! Good God, what next? Rodeo clowns as security patrols?”

  He broke a pencil in half and threw it across the room. There were only two other detectives in the office midday on Saturday. No one said anything about the missile.

  “Maybe she didn’t get it all wrong,” Dupree said. “Maybe the antifreeze and the engine noise are right, but her imagination ran wild by the time she got to the grocery store parking lot. Thought he was following her everywhere.”

  “Well, she sure got the wrong car that time.” He flung a tissue-thin printout across the desk to Dupree. “Two things. We just got confirmation from a motel at the Grand Canyon. Toller and his son were there until yesterday at four P.M. They’d been there for three days. Paid cash, but the manager has the license number written down and Toller used his California driver’s license as ID when he checked in. No way he could have driven back by the time Juanita was hit or McDougall was killed.”

  “Could he have flown back?”

  “There’s no record of it.”

  Dupree scanned the information from the motel.

  “And Toller died ten minutes ago.”

  Dupree looked up. “Aw, sh
it.” The horror and injustice of killing an innocent man was going to stay with those two rookies for a long time. And having to tell Steven Toller was going to stay with Dupree. Should he have arranged things differently in the lobby? Not trusted two rookies with the sun at their backs? He should certainly have cleared the lobby of innocent bystanders before they surrounded Toller. Should he have taken a shooter’s stance himself and not approached the man? He probably wouldn’t be blamed for the man’s death, but he knew it was his fault.

  “Call Protective Services. I’ll go over and tell the boy.” He sighed. “What other leads do we still have open?”

  “I told you at the beginning of this that my money was on Priscilla Strout. Now that she’s gone missing and we can link Randy Owner’s work sites to both murder scenes, they’re still at the top of my list. And Stephanos is dirty too. He’d be looking at a twenty-year sentence if Wanda Prentice blew the whistle on him.”

  “I’ll check out the pharmacist’s alibi. You keep looking for Strout and Owner,” Dupree said, shrugging into his coat. Beatrice McDougall, Randy Owner, and Priscilla Strout. All three now loose in the wind.

  And the only way to tell if they were victims or villains was to find them.

  John Stephanos lived with his girlfriend and her twelve-year old daughter in a second-story red brick apartment off Broadway. The concrete staircase and walkway that led to the apartment shook with each of Dupree’s steps.

  The woman at the door had a thin rodent face, dun-colored hair, and skin pulled tight across her cheekbones.

  “Ellen Dray?” Dupree explained his mission. “John Stephanos says you can prove where he was two Thursdays ago. During the evening hours.”

  She’d been expecting his visit, and it showed. She answered without hesitation. “He was with Amanda—that’s my daughter—and me. It was Amanda’s birthday and we took her to the movies and then out to dinner.”

  “Do you have any proof of that? Ticket stubs? Receipt from the restaurant?”

  “Even better.” She crossed the room to the Formica counter that separated the kitchen from the dining nook and picked up a small camera. “It takes videos. I filmed us outside the movie theater and when she was blowing out the candles at the restaurant.”

  Dupree screened the footage on the tiny display. Stephanos leaned in close to kiss Amanda’s cheek in the first clip. In the second, you could read “Happy 12th Amanda” across the cake in blue icing.

  And there was a time and date stamp in the bottom corner of the screen. Damn.

  “What’s that other shot at the end?”

  “What? Oh, that’s Amanda in front of the house. I wanted to get her new birthday outfit.”

  Dupree looked back at the screen. Amanda’s new birthday clothes included jeans riding so low on her hips that she looked ready to step out of them.

  “Whose car is that behind her?” He could just make out a light-colored, boxy shape.

  “That’s mine. It’s a Honda.”

  And that would have given John Stephanos access to a tan or light-colored SUV or minivan like the one that twice ran down Cadence Moran. If only that time/date stamp didn’t prove he was somewhere else at the time.

  He wrote out a receipt and told her he’d need to take the camera with him. The crime scene techs could tell him if there was a way to alter the date or time code on the screen.

  He called Nellis from the car. “Get a judge. We need to pick up a 2001 tan Honda Odyssey from Ellen Dray.” He read off her address. “Get it tested for front-end damage from a hit-and-run. And Rich? Check for an antifreeze leak too.”

  He hung up then tried his daughter’s number one more time, wishing there was some way he could change the time/date stamp on his own life.

  Chapter 66

  In my sighted days, my friendships were like the roots of a saguaro: widespread and superficial. For the cactus, it meant a wide anchor in sandy soil and the best chance at finding rainwater. For me, staying close to the surface meant that I didn’t have to expose myself to the shame of my mother’s alcoholism and my father’s departure on the day I was born.

  Now my friendships were fewer but deeper. Juanita and Kevin formed the nucleus of my social world. I rarely let in newcomers. W. B. Brodie might become an exception.

  He’d escorted us into the house and, after asking my permission, answered the phone in the kitchen when it rang. It was Nellis.

  “I’m sorry, but we’ve determined that Darren Toller, the man in the Chevy Lumina, was not the man we’re looking for.”

  I’d been afraid of hearing that ever since Juanita said he didn’t smell like the man who attacked her. “Are you sure? I mean, odors can get washed off, or they’re not even noticed in all the smells of a hospital.”

  “We’re sure. He and his son were in Nogales when Mrs. Prentice was killed, and they were at the Grand Canyon the afternoon Ms. Greene was attacked.”

  “But…if he wasn’t the man you were looking for, how did he get shot?”

  Nellis cleared his throat. “It…ah…was a mistake. The officers thought he was going for a gun…resisting arrest.”

  Of course he was resisting arrest; he hadn’t done anything! “Will you let him go as soon as he’s better?”

  “Mr. Toller died this morning.”

  I wrapped my arms around the Fault Tree.

  Chapter 67

  “Hikers found it early this morning.” Dupree stood at the side of the twisting two-lane road that led to Mount Lemmon and peered down through the blackened trees to the shell of an Econoline van at the bottom of the ravine.

  Mount Lemmon had always been a haven for Tucsonans: both a cool respite from the summer heat and an Arizona child’s first chance to see snow. But the road wasn’t traveled as much now, since wildfires had raced through the canyons claiming the homes, the vacation chalets, and thousands of acres of pristine wilderness a couple of years back. There was rebuilding going on, but Mount Lemmon had lost much of the natural beauty that had attracted the day travelers.

  “Need a refill?” Nellis handed him a tall Styrofoam cup of coffee. “What makes you think this car has anything to do with the Prentice and McDougall murders?”

  “For the moment, it’s just a guess. But the van hasn’t been down there long, and based on the burn pattern, it looks like it was torched on purpose. And under the seat it’s got one of those magnetic signs that says it’s a Home Depot delivery service car. Didn’t that witness at the second hit-and-run say that she thought there was a sign on the door? Lucky thing the guy didn’t know how to set a good fire. Not much of it burned.”

  “Have the crime scene guys found anything yet?” Three highway patrolmen were taping off a wide area of the hillside around the vehicle and four members of the forensic team were already collecting evidence from the van.

  Dupree shook his head. “Looks like they wiped it clean. But there’s a metal can in the back that looks like the coffee canister Priscilla Strout described. I’ll tell you what, when we get the van to the garage, I’m for damn sure going to check the suspension for a squeak and see if it’s leaking antifreeze.”

  Unlike Nellis, he still believed that Cadence Moran had given them good information about the car that roared away from the Prentice house on the night of the murder.

  “The plates don’t match an Econoline van,” Nellis said, ending a phone call to the MVD. “But the VIN comes back to a guy named Pickett. Gerald Pickett.”

  “What do we know about him?” Maybe they were finally on to something concrete that would lead to the killer. Something other than a sound or a smell.

  “Not much. Nineteen years old. A Tucson address, no tickets, no wants and warrants.” He paused. “Well, maybe we know one thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “If he’s our guy and he finds out the witness is still alive, he’ll come after her again. He’s that pigheaded.”

  “He wouldn’t worry so much if he knew she was blind,” Dupree said.

  “I
’m not going to tell him if you don’t.”

  Chapter 68

  Gerald Pickett’s driver’s license listed an address on one of those stop-and-start-again residential side streets on the east side of town.

  “We know this place,” Nellis said, shifting into park.

  “The same block, anyway. Wanda Prentice’s rental property, right? What were the renters’ names?”

  “Two units. Harmon and Garafulo,” Nellis said after consulting his notes. He nodded at a freshly painted white house down the block.

  “So maybe this is the link to Wanda Prentice. But where does McDougall fit in?”

  The Pickett house was two doors down from the address shown as Wanda Prentice’s rental duplex. A rusted sedan, shrouded by a car cover as dry and brittle as a tamale husk, was up on blocks in the driveway. Weeds grew through the cracked sidewalk and a summer’s worth of blown debris decorated the chain-link fence to the west of the property.

  Nellis thumped three times on the screen door.

  “I’m coming! Hold your horses.” A voice rough with cigarettes and Whataburgers, and a face to match. She had a beer in one hand and a remote control in the other. Gray haired, gray skinned, with T-shirt-clad breasts swinging freely near her waist. “Whatta ya want?”

  “Tucson Police Department. We’re looking for Gerald Pickett.”

  “Ha-ha.” An exaggerated cartoon bray. “That’s the funniest thing I’ve ever heard.” Beer sloshed down her T-shirt. “Mr. Goody Two-shoes himself.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Gerry hasn’t lived here since he was sixteen. Got himself ‘emancipated,’ you know. Went to court and everything. He said we were a bad influence on him—his own family, can you imagine that?” She took another swig of beer, but the laughter continued through the foam.

  “Where does your son live now?”

  “Hell, I don’t know and I don’t care. But if you see him, you tell him I was asking about him, right? Tell him I said, ‘Look who the cops are asking for now!’”