“It’s not that. It’s just that there’s . . . too much going on there. I need peace and quiet.”
Oh. Now I got it. Translation: your rebellious son really gets on my nerves, and I don’t want to be around him right now. This was understandable. Stephen got on my nerves too. In fact, if I managed to raise my firstborn without killing him, I’d be most surprised.
“Okay, Jenna, I understand. But if you change your mind, just let me know.”
Jenna had her own room, of course—the master suite—so it really didn’t make a difference whether she came or not. Even though I was the one who lived in Grove Landing full time, I’d chosen the end suite upstairs so I could be next to Kelly’s room.
“Sure. Thanks for understanding. And, Annie, I know you’re going to be working on that case. If it gets too tough for you, call me, okay?”
I promised I would.
As I hung up the phone my eyes were already drifting back to the file.
Soon I was reading how Edwin tackled Bill Bland and fought to knock the gun out of his hand. How his mother had run into the study as they were fighting. I couldn’t help shifting for a moment to Emily’s emotions as Edwin described running after Bland. How terrible for her to be left with the bodies of two men as Edwin disappeared into the dusk. How she must have despaired, having lost first a son the previous year, and now her husband. For all she knew at that moment, the second son would also be killed—or kill in revenge and end up in prison.
I looked back to the detective’s notes of Edwin’s story as he gunned his car in pursuit of Bland.
“I wasn’t completely aware of what I was doing,” Edwin admits. His mind seems to hover on some other plane as he drives around and around, searching vainly for Bill. He can’t even tell the detective how long he was gone. He does remember some of the places he looked—the offices of Tarell Plastics; Bill’s house; the apartment where his estranged wife, Susan, and his baby now live; parking lots. Edwin rushes from one location to another, not even stopping to tell a bewildered Susan why he’s come wild-eyed and banging on her door.
He doesn’t see one trace of Bill, not one hint of where the traitor could be.
At some point Edwin comes to his senses, remembering his mother at the house, the two bodies on the floor. Detectives will be there by now, asking questions. His mother will need him.
Edwin races back to his parents’ home only to be hit with another shock. In her stunned state, his mom has spent all that time tending to his dad’s body—and hasn’t called 911. What if Bill Bland has fled the town by now? Edwin runs to the phone to report the crime. “Hurry!” he pleads to the maddeningly calm voice on the other end. “You have to find him before it’s too late!”
Sergeant Delft’s report of Edwin’s first interview ended there.
I leaned my head back against my chair, staring at the high-beamed ceiling. Wondering about Edwin Tarell’s emotions as year after year passed and his father’s murderer remained free. Did he ever wish he’d found Bill Bland that night? That he’d killed the man himself?
Wouldn’t that thought cross my mind, if I were in his shoes?
I stood and stretched, trying to clear my head a little before turning to the next file. Perhaps that more technical one—Sergeant Delft’s report of the crime scene—wouldn’t whir my mental projector into such high gear. Arching my shoulders, I gazed out my office window, my thoughts drifting to Bill Bland. There were so many questions that needed answering before I could understand this man. Why had he shown up at the Tarell house that night in the first place? Why hadn’t he just skipped town without resorting to murder? What inherent personality weakness would push a seemingly nonviolent person over the edge like that?
Where had he gone when he fled the Tarell house?
And where on earth had he been for twenty years?
Friday, May 7
Chapter 3
The air in Sergeant Delft’s office seemed to hum with a low-charged electricity. I hesitated in the doorway, wondering at the sensation. Was it from my own nervousness in pursuing this case? For the second night in a row I hadn’t slept well. After reading the case files, I’d been plagued with disjointed dreams about the murders, playing in my head like worn-out film.
But no. What I sensed did not emanate from me. The charge in this room was an expectation. And it bristled from Sergeant Delft.
He invited me to sit down in a straight-backed wooden chair, then plunked his body with toned precision in a matching one behind his battered desk.
Justin Delft was a broad-shouldered man who reminded me of a Marine drill sergeant, right down to the crew cut hair and permanent frown. According to Detective Chetterling, Delft prided himself on his long record of success with the Shasta County Sheriff’s Department. For over thirty years his life and identity had been his work. Only one thing marred his career: his failure to capture Bill Bland. Now, seven months before his retirement, he’d been given a final chance. Serendipity had raised her captivating head in the form of a nationally televised show that had brought many criminals to justice.
Apprehension thrummed through me as I took my seat. For all my reading the previous day, I felt no closer to understanding Bill Bland. I fervently hoped my interviews, starting with Sergeant Delft, would provide answers to my nagging questions. Delft’s obvious anticipation only heightened the stakes. Twenty years of this man’s frustration. Not to mention twenty years of deprived justice for the Tarells and Sharon Dessinger. And the success of the American Fugitive show now rested on one thing: my fugitive update of Bill Bland.
“You read the files?” Sergeant Delft sat stiff spined, his gaze piercing.
“Yes. It took me most of yesterday.” I opened my notebook. “I made notes here to ask you about. As I mentioned when you gave me the files, I need to understand everything I can about Bill Bland so I can age him accurately.”
“Yes. Understood. Fire away.”
“Okay.” For a moment I wondered where to begin. “First, the crime scene. I went over everything you found, but I’d like to hear your overall . . . feeling about it.”
“It was trashed, that’s how I felt about it. Mrs. Tarell and her son couldn’t have done a better job of messing it up if they’d tried.” Delft narrowed his eyes at the wall behind me, as if reliving the moment. “The bodies had been moved. The murder weapon was gone. ’Course that wasn’t their fault. Mrs. Tarell, in her shock, had felt compelled to straighten the room. People do that sometimes, you know, executing what control of the situation they can find. A form of self-preservation. She’d covered her husband with a throw blanket from the couch—not his head, but the rest of his body, like he was merely sleeping. Denial, you understand. She’d cleaned up her own vomit. She was even cleaning up blood when we arrived.”
I winced. “What specifically had she straightened?”
“Things Edwin had thrown. Worse, the chair where Bill Bland sat. Edwin and Bill crashed into it when they fought. I asked Mrs. Tarell to put it back the way she’d found it. She’d also reset the pillows on the couch where Mr. Dessinger had been.”
“And the blood?”
“All the blood spray from Peter Dessinger was intact. I’m sure you read that in the notes—how it was on the back of the couch and on the floor behind the couch, extending out quite a few feet. This was all consistent with Edwin’s account of where Bill Bland stood when he pulled the trigger. We determined this by following the trajectory of the bullet. But Mrs. Tarell saw to her husband before covering him with the blanket. As I recall, some of his blood seeped onto it, so we included the blanket with the items we took from the room as evidence. Before covering him she’d wiped the blood from his chest, rearranged his shirt. We had a time pulling her away from the body.”
“And—” I consulted my notes—“as best you can figure it was about forty minutes before Edwin came back and called 911?”
“Yes. I remember these details like it was yesterday. The meeting started at eight o’clock. Within ten minutes De
ssinger and Tarell were dead. Approximately five minutes after that, Edwin ran out. The call came in at 8:57 P.M.”
“I’m really surprised Emily Tarell didn’t call 911 in all that time.”
Delft raised his shoulder. “Well, no doubt it was a terrible mistake. Who knows, we might have caught Bland if that many minutes hadn’t been wasted. But all Mrs. Tarell could do at the time was cope. If you’d seen her, you’d understand. She was completely beside herself. She’d lost a son, you know, a little over a year before that. Now her husband was dead, and her only other son was likely either to kill or be killed. That house is five miles outside of Redding—which is why it’s in our jurisdiction rather than the police—but we were there within minutes of Edwin’s call.”
Defensiveness edged the sergeant’s final comment. Clearly, he did not doubt he and his men had done all they could, under the circumstances.
I nodded. “You mentioned the gun. A . . .” I tried to remember the make. It was the same type my sister owned, only bigger. I knew very little of guns, although after my experience with The Face, I’d vowed to learn to shoot someday.
“From the bullets we could tell it was a four-inch Smith & Wesson thirty-eight special. Common weapon, easy to buy and learn to use.”
“Did Bland get it legally?”
“Apparently not.”
I thought about that. How would a man like Bill Bland know where to buy an illegal handgun? “Did anyone else around him, like the Tarells or the Dessingers or other friends, own a gun like that? Maybe he stole it?”
“Not that we know about. And we did pursue it. But in the end we didn’t make it a priority to look for the source of the weapon. We had to spend all our manpower—and then some—looking for Bland himself.”
I made a note. “Okay. I need to turn now to Bill Bland. Mostly I need to understand why he did this. I’m confused on numerous points. First, it seems to me from Edwin’s statesments that Bland came to the Tarells’ house knowing he would kill. He was carrying the gun, and he certainly didn’t hesitate to whip it out the minute he confessed to the embezzlement.”
Sergeant Delft leaned forward, placing his forearms on the desk. “Actually no. I don’t think he went to that meeting knowing he would kill. He did go with plans to kill if, in his criminal eyes, it became necessary. His ‘plan of necessity,’ as we could call it, also included withdrawing all the stolen money from the bank account before the meeting—in case he had to flee. And apparently figuring out an escape route.”
I considered this.“Then what made the murders necessary?”
“You said it yourself. He shot those two men right after he was confronted with his embezzlement.”
“But why? If he thought he was about to be caught for stealing, why didn’t he run before the meeting?”
A slow exhale seeped from Delft’s throat. “That, Ms. Kingston, is the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question. To understand the answer, you must understand Bill Bland’s mind. And when you understand Bill Bland’s mind, you will see what a truly chilling foe we are up against.”
A frisson nibbled my shoulders. “I’m listening.”
Delft leaned back in his chair. “On the surface, Bill Bland was a quiet, mild-mannered number cruncher. But underneath that persona lay a combination of weaknesses that would break him apart and prove fatal. Like a double fault line.”
What had Edwin said? The man my father hired was not the man I came to know. “Edwin referred to him as a control freak.”
“Right. Edwin can tell you more about that. I assume you’ll be talking to him again.”
“Oh yes. I plan to interview him next.”
“Good. Talk to Bill’s ex-wife too. Her contact information is in the files. Susan and Edwin were the ones who saw the other side of Bland. Yes, he was calm and quiet, but only as long as he was in control. When he felt pushed, stressed, when he felt control slipping away, it would so upset him that he would change. He would do anything to regain control of the situation. Where he would typically plan things out well, he could become impulsive, make stupid choices. Where he was typically mild mannered and predictable, he would become angry and unpredictable. As Susan said to me, ‘It’s like Bill was two different people.’”
Two different people. The thought made me uneasy. I wrote down the words and circled them.
“Another thing you might remember from the files, Bland had one hobby—reading. Remember what he read?”
“Yes. Murder mysteries.”
He nodded. “Exclusively. Bland owned every Agatha Christie ever printed. And many of the well-known and not-so-well-known mystery novelists since then. Susan told us Bland would read every night after work for about an hour, no matter what time he got home. And the folks at Tarell Plastics worked late. On weekends he might read a complete novel. Mysteries were the one thing he’d consistently spend his money on. No library books for him; he wanted to own ’em. When we went through his house, I was amazed. They were lined up, shelf after shelf, alphabetized by author. Then even the ones by the same author were in order according to title.”
I wrote in my notebook. “So you think he was gathering data as he read? About murder and detective work?”
Sergeant Delft shrugged. “I think he read for pleasure. But you’re right—all that information sifted into his brain. So when he found himself in potential trouble, he turned to what he’d been steeping himself in all along: how to commit a murder and vanish into thin air.”
I bit my lip, thinking. “So back to my question. Why didn’t he run before the meeting?”
“All right. It comes down to this.” Delft cupped his jaw with one hand.“We know that Edwin Tarell went into Bland’s office around noon that day to tell him about the meeting at eight o’clock. Now this was highly unusual for Bland, being summoned to his boss’s house like that. He probably figured something was up. We also know that around three hours later he went to the bank and withdrew all the stolen money remaining in the account. This was unfortunate for Don Tarell. If Don had gone to the police first, that account could have been frozen.
“So it’s clear that Bland was prepared to flee with the money, if he had to. But you see, Bland didn’t know for certain what the meeting was about. He’d already lost his wife and baby son. If he was caught stealing, he’d also lose his job and career. And he’d end up in jail. In light of all that, if he was caught, there was little to keep him from fleeing. But what if he hadn’t been caught? Disappearing would only raise questions, and most likely ensure that he would be found out. Plus, if he ran, he’d never get to see his son for visitations—an important thing to Bland. He wasn’t going to throw what was left of his life away and take up a life on the run unless absolutely certain he had no other choice. So what does he do? He comes to the meeting with money stashed in his car, just in case. With a gun. Just in case. Then once he discovered he was caught and had no way out, he acted on the option he’d already made possible: he pulled the gun.”
“Why not just run at that point?”
Delft lifted a hand. “How far would he get—the front door? If not Don Tarell or Peter Dessinger, Edwin surely would have chased him down.”
Of course he would. I rubbed a thumb back and forth over my pen. How could Bill Bland have such a complete lack of conscience? “Edwin saved his own life, didn’t he? And his mother’s.”
“No doubt. Bland would have killed them all to escape. That was his most crucial need—time. In fact, time is the other main reason he didn’t skip town before the meeting, because then he’d only have had a couple hours to run. But think about four dead bodies in a house at night. No one’s going to miss them until the next day, when the three men fail to show for work. That would give Bland over twelve hours to run. And you can get quite a distance in that time.”
Clammy fingers traced the back of my neck. Bill Bland was willing to kill four people just to make an escape. This was the man whose head I needed to crawl inside. The man whose skin I needed to feel on my face
. How and when would he smile? Grimace? What wrinkles would move when he did? I shifted in my chair. The more I got to know of this man, the more of a monster he became.
Why had I gotten myself into this?
I looked back to Sergeant Delft. “I studied that one blowup photo of him in the files—”
“You’re aware that the driver’s license photo of him was more recent?”
“Yes. I’ll probably use that for my update.Anyway, studying his face, I saw what looked like arrogance.”
“Oh, sure. How can you not be arrogant when the world is all about you?”
The comment hit home. There lay the key to Bill Bland: everything was about him. Regardless of the cost to others.
I wrote down the words, then stared at the floor. How in the world could a person fall to such coldness? “But he loved his wife, right? He was a good father?”
Delft shrugged. “Define ‘good.’ He didn’t run around on his wife, as far as we know. Provided for them well. But he had that driving need to control, and that surfaced again and again.”
I shook my head. “It’s just hard to picture that normal-looking face being capable of such a horrific act.”
“Oh, but that’s the danger of living in this world, isn’t it, Ms. Kingston?” Delft’s eyes locked with mine. “I’ll tell you something. A few months ago I watched a Larry King show about Gary Ridgway, that Green River serial killer up in Washington. They know he killed at least forty-eight women. Prostitutes, most of them. ‘Why?’ a detective asked him. Answer: ‘Because I didn’t want to pay for sex. And I was having trouble with my wife.’” Delft lifted both hands. “That was it. Because he wanted free sex, forty-eight people had to die.”
The thought made me shiver. “Gary Ridgway was a family man too, wasn’t he?”
“Sure. A loving husband and father. No one would have guessed, least of all his family. No one. Even the detectives said Ridgway was quiet, polite, hardly ever cussed. The kind of guy you’d sit down with at a bar and have a friendly conversation.” Delft leaned forward, both hands flattened against his desk. “People want to think evil looks monstrous, Ms. Kingston. It doesn’t. Evil is the guy next door.”
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