The Fault Tree

by Louise Ure

  Nellis and Dupree moved down the block to Wanda Prentice’s rental duplex. A pot of bright red geraniums graced the porch at one entrance, balanced by a healthy fern at the second door. The tenants looked like good enough friends to share the porch swing that sat midway between the doors.

  A tall, thin man answered Dupree’s knock. He was in his thirties, with a mountain bike over his shoulder.

  “Oh! You surprised me! I was just going out.” He dropped the bike and rested it against his hip. He wore a helmet with purple flames on it, a skin-tight Lycra shirt, and black bicycle shorts.

  “Mr. Harmon?”

  “I’m Ted Harmon.”

  Dupree explained why they were there. “Have you been a tenant here long?” Maybe he remembered Gerald Pickett from down the block.

  “Almost five years. I’m an assistant in the Psychology Department at the U of A, and Mrs. Prentice has been a great landlady. I was so sorry to hear about her murder. Do you know what’s going to happen to the property?”

  “No, but you might want to check with her granddaughter, Priscilla Strout, or maybe Rocky Trillo at Wells Fargo. They should be able to tell you. Has the other tenant been here as long?”

  “Sandy? No she’s only been here a year. But she’s a welcome relief from the last one.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “There were a father and daughter over there. Really weird. The whole place done in white. Never said anything to you if you saw him coming in or out.”

  “McDougall? Was that the name?” Dupree had his connection now.

  “Yeah, pretty spooky with both him and Mrs. Prentice getting killed, huh? But there was something strange about that guy, I’ll tell you that.”

  “What about the daughter? Was she friendly?”

  “Maybe overfriendly. She’d come on like a real flirt when her father wasn’t around. Then like a nun when he was. And always wearing white.”

  “How about Beatrice McDougall and Mrs. Prentice? Did they ever spend any time together?” Right now, Beatrice McDougall was the most solid connection they had between the killings.

  “Not much. But I remember overhearing one conversation—I was waiting out on the porch to give Mrs. Prentice my rent check—and she said something to Beatrice about ‘all the treasures’ she’d gathered in her life. Something like, ‘Wishing won’t get you what you want. If you want something badly enough, you just have to take it. Make it happen. Nobody can stop you and nobody else can do it for you.’”

  Dupree thought that the storybook-reading, museum-volunteering Wanda Prentice he’d come to know had probably meant the “treasures” of a life well lived and a family that loved you. He wondered how Beatrice McDougall had taken it.

  Harmon shifted the bike back to his shoulder. “Is that it? I need to get to class.”

  “Do you remember a Gerald Pickett, used to live a couple of houses down that way?” Dupree pointed to the west.

  “Oh, yeah. Those were some real fireworks. It was probably just a puppy love thing, but McDougall reacted like the boy was trying to lead his daughter into prostitution. Kept calling him ‘a bad seed.’ Even threatened to call the cops on the kid.”

  Dupree thanked him and watched Harmon pedal away. Adjusting the seat belt, he turned to Nellis in the car. “So these kids knew both murder victims and may have had a grudge of some kind against both of them. Unless Randy Owner’s connection to both murder scenes pans out, or we get some concrete evidence against the pharmacist, I’d say these two are in it up to their eyeballs.”

  “And Beatrice is hardly a kidnap victim.”

  Chapter 69

  Unable to convince the florist that I really wanted a bouquet of sweet-smelling herbs and foliage, I wound up sending a wreath of mums and gladioli to the mortuary handling arrangements for Darren Toller’s funeral. Traditional flowers for the dead. But his death wasn’t traditional or typical or even acceptable. I railed against a God who thought this was part of his overall plan. There was nothing planned or accepted here. Nothing except my hubris and misplaced ego in thinking that I could help solve a crime.

  Juanita was napping on the couch when the doorbell rang.

  “I’ll get it. You stay still.”

  “We have a proposition for you,” Dupree said by way of greeting.

  Juanita made space for the two detectives on the couch and I got four cold drinks from the refrigerator. “Here’s another good one,” Juanita said, reading the inscription under the cap of a berry-flavored Snapple. “‘Screeched is the longest one-syllable word in the English language.”

  The detectives were silent, as if her comment had the weight of an omen.

  “We know now that Darren Toller had nothing to do with Mrs. Prentice’s murder,” Dupree began.

  The words were lead in my chest. “Screeched” may be the longest word, but “fault” is the heaviest.

  “And that means that the real killer is still out there. He probably killed James McDougall, he’s tried to run you down twice, and he’s tried to kill Juanita, mistaking her for you,” Dupree continued.

  Nellis started to add something, but Dupree silenced him with, “We don’t know enough about him yet.”

  I waited.

  “We’d like him to try again.” Nellis this time. No pussyfooting around with this guy.

  I froze, like a small desert creature that scents a predator in the wind. “What do you mean?”

  “We’ve kept Juanita’s name out of the paper, so while the press knows there was an attack at this address, they don’t know her identity and they don’t know she’s still alive,” Nellis continued. “We want to tell them the attack was on you, but you’re doing well and you’re back home now.”

  “What good will that do?”

  “It’s going to alert this guy that he’s not out of the woods yet.”

  “How the hell does he think a blind woman can hurt him!” I knew how pitifully unable I was to have stopped the killings or to have identified him.

  “Maybe he doesn’t know you’re blind, Cadence,” Dupree said. “I mean, why else would he have kept coming back?”

  Had I so successfully hidden my handicap that I’d now put myself in jeopardy as well? Over the years of my sightlessness, I had forgotten that people expect the blind to be hesitant and risk averse in their movements. In the last eight years I had become so used to my home and work environments that I moved with the ease and confidence of a sighted person—a person with places to go and people to see. People to see. Huh. And he thought I’d seen him.

  “What do you want me to do?”

  Nellis again. “First of all, you and Juanita can’t be seen together. We don’t want him to realize there are two of you. Other than that, you just go about your normal life. Go to work if your injuries will let you. Walk the neighborhood if that’s what you usually do. We’ll have undercover cars posted outside and an officer here inside with you.”

  “You’d better give her some gauze bandages around the neck too,” Juanita said. “He knows he cut me.”

  They waited for my answer. “I’ll do it.” The fraternal twin of Fault is Responsibility.

  “What did you have planned for the week?” Nellis asked, like a secretary ready to clear my schedule.

  “I want to go to Mr. Toller’s funeral tomorrow. And if my leg feels good enough, I’ll go back to work on Tuesday.”

  “Okay. August, think we can get a mention of how well she’s doing in tomorrow’s morning paper?” Nellis asked.

  “That shouldn’t be a problem. And they can reference her as someone who was there the night Mrs. Prentice was killed, but I don’t want them going on about how important she is to the case. Don’t want him getting the idea that we’re protecting her. We want him thinking this will be as cool and comfortable as taking a dip on a hot July day.”

  I gulped.

  When I escorted them to the door, Dupree turned back to me at the last moment.

  “You’re doing the right thing, Caden
ce. This is the only way to make it stop.”

  I nodded. Now if only I could make my mental recriminations stop as well. But that would be like trying to call back an echo.

  Chapter 70

  He and Lolly had taken the farthest cabin away from the lobby at the tiny motel in Madera Canyon. Forty miles south of Tucson, the manager boasted that the bedroom was in the United States but the bathroom was in Mexico. Here they could be out of the hot white spotlight of the police search in Tucson and wait for things to die down before they hit the road.

  They’d been lucky to get a room. Madera Canyon was prime bird-watching territory and July was the best month to do it. He knew they’d have to leave soon; the credit card he’d stolen from a coworker’s wallet at Home Depot would be discovered any day now.

  Lolly was still asleep, stretched across three-quarters of the bed and snoring like a happy kitten. He kissed her on the forehead and snuck out of the room in search of coffee. In the lobby, he thumbed through a bird-watching pamphlet while he waited for the manager’s daughter to pour two to-go cups. Then he spotted the morning newspaper on the table by the checkout desk.

  It was the lead story in the local section. The same picture they’d used before, when she was leaving the police station. Head tucked down, holding on to the arm of the cop beside her.

  He hadn’t managed to kill her at all.

  He tucked the paper under his arm and took the coffee with shaking hands.

  He’d breathed easy last night for the first time in two weeks, comfortable in the knowledge that nothing could lead the police to them. And he’d dared to imagine a life with Lolly, safe and happy forever. Maybe a sweet little cabin like here at the motel, with pine trees and gurgling streams. They would learn to identify all the birds that showed up at the feeder: the elegant trogon, sulphur-bellied flycatchers, and painted redstarts.

  He kissed Lolly awake and showed her the paper. “It’s time to get out of town.”

  “Finish what you start,” she reminded him, taking the cup of coffee. “That’s what you always say. We can’t leave until we finish it.”

  Chapter 71

  Dupree had worn a dark charcoal suit today, knowing that he’d be attending Darren Toller’s funeral. But he hadn’t counted on the heat rearing its fiery head so early. Maybe he could leave the suit jacket in the car. Or, more likely, wear it when he arrived at the funeral, then take it off after the service began.

  In the meantime, he had to get a handle on this Gerald Pickett. They’d been by the address shown on his driver’s license, but it was now rented to a Susan Smith, who said she’d been there for six months and had never heard of him. Calls to TEP and the Water Department showed no electrical or water hookups under his name, and Qwest had no phone service for him.

  Nellis was running a credit check and had a call into the personnel department at Home Depot, but so far nothing had turned up.

  If Pickett was still in town, he was invisible. And if he was gone, who was driving his van? Dupree wasn’t going to pin all his hopes on this guy, but the results were in from testing the pharmacist’s girlfriend’s minivan and that lead wasn’t going anywhere. No hit-and-run damage and no fluid leaks.

  Dupree shrugged into his suit jacket, picked up the copy of Pickett’s driver’s license photo, and stopped at Nellis’s desk.

  “Get this out to every cruiser in the city.”

  Chapter 72

  Books Greene had come by my house before dawn to get his sister, and he swore he’d stay with Juanita at their mother’s house. I wished she could stay with me, but I was also glad that at least one person would be out of harm’s way.

  Brodie picked me up at ten-thirty for Darren Toller’s funeral. The coroner had released Toller’s body to his family after the autopsy, and Dupree said Toller’s mother was flying in from Florida. She’d decided to bury him in Tucson because they didn’t have any kind of family plot of their own and because Toller had chosen Tucson as the place he wanted to live.

  I knew his son would be there too, but didn’t know about anybody else. Toller hadn’t exactly had time to settle down and make friends in this town.

  “Can you see any cops following us?” I asked Brodie.

  “There’s a small truck back there with two people in it. That’s probably them. I didn’t notice anybody else.”

  “That doesn’t sound like any kind of unmarked cop car I’ve ever heard of.”

  “Probably what makes it such a good idea for surveillance.”

  We found a space right in front of the Saguaro Shadows Mortuary and entered the sparsely filled funeral home. Only a few hushed conversations to one side and a crying baby in the front of the room.

  Brodie found two seats for us in the back, too close to a man who used beer mouthwash and a woman wearing a flagon’s worth of lavender-scented perfume. Maybe people from Toller’s apartment house. More likely just professional funeralgoers who had found a cool, reflective place to sit during a hot summer day.

  The room gradually quieted, and a panting, heavyset man strode to the podium, shuffled his papers, and tapped twice on the microphone.

  “Darren H. Toller was a good family man who will be missed by many,” he intoned, then continued with the kind of Christian platitudes that made you wish you were a Buddhist.

  The speaker—a local pastor or maybe someone from the funeral home—noted that Toller’s young son was in the room and wished him the strength to grow and mature the way his father would have wanted him to. A woman at the front of the room continued to sob. Toller’s mother? His ex-wife? I adjusted the gauze and tape over my nonexistent neck wound.

  There was no accusation in the speaker’s voice, but my ears were ringing with self-condemnation.

  Brodie and I followed a slow procession of cars to the old Evergreen Cemetery on Oracle. I hung at the back of the small crowd of mourners, but after a few minutes I patted Brodie on the arm and moved back into the forest of headstones and mausoleums on the other side of the drive. I heard the high-pitched whine of machinery start up nearby and pictured the cemetery maintenance crew, wielding weed whackers like gasoline-powered dental floss between the headstones.

  Most of the markers were plaques set into the grass, creating shallow indentations that caught my feet. I tapped around me—nine o’clock, twelve o’clock, three o’clock—and stepped carefully so as not to tread across someone’s grave. When I found a row of upright, waist-high headstones, I trailed my fingers across the gritty marble to read the names and dates. Beloved husband and father. With the angels now. Gone but not forgotten.

  Darren Toller’s should have said Killed Because Some Pig-Headed Blind Woman Thought She Knew What She Was Doing.

  I heard a rustle of plastic and the rasp of a rake over dirt and gravel. “Sorry,” I said. In my reverie I had almost walked right into the maintenance man.

  “Huh.” I must have interrupted his daydream as well. I heard the swish of his corduroy pants and smelled something sweet and rotten on his breath. I moved back toward the crowd of mourners. The raking sound followed me.

  When I found the cherub on the headstone that had been my starting point, I moved three feet ahead and rejoined Brodie.

  Brodie handed me a wadded tissue. “I hate to go to funerals on beautiful days,” he whispered. I nodded, but my thoughts were still with the maintenance man whose foul air I could smell behind me. Why had he joined Toller’s family and small group of mourners at graveside?

  Chapter 73

  He and Lolly had followed the car, first from the woman’s house, then from the mortuary. Once he saw them park at the cemetery, he got out of the car, told Lolly to stay low in the seat, and grabbed a black plastic garbage bag and a rake that someone had left leaning against a marble headstone. He thought he would blend in better as a groundskeeper than as a mourner who’d risk having someone in that small crowd ask how he knew the deceased. His khaki shirt and corduroy pants looked enough like a uniform that he thought he could pull it of
f. He just wished those real maintenance men, with the cemetery logo over the breast pocket of their dark green shirts, weren’t so close by. When they started looking at him with suspicion, he dropped the rake and bag behind a stone bench and joined the gathering at the open grave.

  It was so funny it almost made him laugh. He’d read all about Darren Toller in the newspaper. How the cops thought he had something to do with Mrs. Prentice and Mr. McDougall’s deaths. He was getting blamed for everything. And then they shot him by mistake. That was a good lesson too. That’s exactly what the cops would do to him and Lolly if they ever found them. Shoot first and ask questions later.

  But that wasn’t the best part. Getting this close to the witness, Cadence Moran, made the whole trip worthwhile. She was using that cane for a reason: she was blind. How could that be? A blind woman couldn’t drive. Maybe he’d blinded her during the attack. No, she’d been using the cane earlier.

  Hell, it didn’t matter. Either way, she couldn’t tell the cops a thing. He had nothing to worry about after all. And he’d gone to all this trouble to stop her.

  They could walk away. Never think of this so-called witness again. They’d have to leave Tucson, sure, but that had been the plan anyway. A life together, just the two of them, without deceit and hiding and lying all the time.

  A bubble of laughter rose in his throat and he covered it with a burp. The woman turned her head and sniffed the air like a bloodhound.

  Could he really rest easy? The police had called her a witness. Blind or not, maybe she did know something.

  The only way to know for sure was to ask her.

  Chapter 74

  Dupree waited well behind the Toller family with Officers Garnet and Phipps, who were on administrative leave until the shooting had been investigated. Dupree had not pointed them out to Toller’s mother, Mrs. Bolivar. Better she didn’t know. Although if she filed the expected lawsuit against the city, she’d know their names and faces soon enough.