So no sex, and no boat ride, and no pressure-free time with Jenna this Sunday. Nor had there been on many others since the serial rapes turned life in Santa Rita upside down.
I was getting out of bed when Jenna rolled over onto her back, opened the eye nearest me, yawned, then stretched provocatively. When I didn’t respond, she said, “Not this morning, huh?”
“Not this morning. Much as I’d like to.”
She didn’t try to change my mind. Understanding and supportive, as always. I loved her for that and a hundred other things. There is no such thing as a perfect marriage, but ours was about as close to one as you can get. I never tired of looking at her, talking to her, being with her. She excited me as much now as she had the first time I’d set eyes on her, at a Breast Cancer Awareness fund-raiser in Fresno when I was a lieutenant on the FPD. She’d been active then, as she was now, in foundation and charity work and recently divorced from her lazy, good-for-nothing first husband. I was between lady friends, not that it would have mattered if I’d been there with a date instead of my sister and her husband. Instant rapport between us that night. I asked her to marry me on our fourth date; she said yes on our fifth. A fund-raiser is the last place you’d expect two people to meet and fall in love, but the unconventionality made it all the more special.
The only problem we’d had in our nine years together was Jenna’s unwillingness to have children. A painful miscarriage during the bad first marriage and the chances of again not being able to carry a baby to term, and concerns about birth defects (one of her brothers had been born with cerebral palsy), were her stated reasons.
I was all for adopting a child, even though it was likely to be a long and time-consuming process. Before the string of assaults began, I thought I had her talked into it, but then she’d backed away again. Too many demands on my time, she’d said, and on hers because of the charity work she was committed to, to pursue an adoption now. But I had the feeling there was more to it than that. That maybe she simply didn’t want the responsibility of motherhood…
She got out of bed, tugging the nightie down, and reached for her robe. “You go ahead and shower first. I’ll start breakfast.”
“Just toast and coffee for me. Not much appetite this morning.”
“A couple of eggs, too. You need the protein.”
I took my shower, and while I was dressing, my cell phone buzzed. Evan Pendergast. Family law attorney, city councilman, and supporter of Mayor Delahunt. Not even nine o’clock, and the pressure was starting again already. He and Councilwoman Aretha Young wanted a meeting “at my earliest convenience.” He suggested ten in my office. I could have hurried and gotten down there by then, but I was in no mood to be obliging; I told him eleven was the soonest I could manage it. My relations with the city council were a little shaky now. Pendergast and Young, like Delahunt, were all too eager to place the blame for lack of results directly on my shoulders. Dale Hitchens, owner of the feed mill, and the other three council members were still in my corner, but that could change if we didn’t catch a break soon.
Jenna had breakfast ready when I went into the kitchen. Alongside my plate of eggs and toast was the front section of the Riverton Sentinel, the county’s only daily. “You’re in there,” she said, “along with the mayor. Page two.”
No surprise in that. A reporter and photographer from the Sentinel had been the first of the media wolves to show up yesterday, interviewing Delahunt and me among others. An account of the Torrey homicide filled the lower third of the front page, headlined SANTA RITA RAPE SUSPECT MURDERED; I didn’t read it. The photos accompanying the story’s continuation on page two were unflattering. Christ. The one of me resembled a mug shot.
“There’s an editorial, too,” Jenna said. “How long will Santa Rita’s reign of terror continue, et cetera. Don’t bother reading it.”
“I didn’t intend to.”
“Or Delahunt’s usual intimations of police ineptitude. It’ll just make you mad.”
“Political grandstanding disguised as bureaucratic outrage—he’s good at that. Results soon or heads will roll, meaning mine.”
“That’s about it. I heard you on the phone. Was it Delahunt who called?”
“No. Evan Pendergast.” I told her about the eleven o’clock meeting with him and Aretha Young. “More pressure coming up.”
“Delahunt had a hand in stirring them up, I’ll bet.”
“Sure.” I tapped the newsprint. “So did what’s in here.”
“Not everybody’s blaming you. Did you see Ted Lowenstein’s editorial on the Clarion website?”
“No. Not yet.”
“He’s still firmly on your side. Denounces rushes to judgment by elected officials and takes a few more shots at the mayor. He dislikes Delahunt even more than we do.”
“Did he put in a plea for witnesses? He told me he would.”
“He did. An impassioned one citing civic and moral duty. Want me to get the laptop?”
“No, I’ll read what he has to say later. I’d better get down to the station, see if there are any new developments and check the night-shift reports before I go up against Pendergast and Young.”
“If anything important happened, you’d have been notified.”
“I know. Still. I need to keep on top of things.”
“Eat your eggs before you leave, if they’re not already cold.”
They were, a little, but I ate them anyway. The toast, too, washed down with a quick cup of coffee. At the door Jenna kissed me hard, held on to me for a few seconds in a tight embrace. My rock. If I didn’t have her, the constant strain would have taken an even greater toll on me by now.
ROBERT ORTIZ
Jack Spivey and his son were playing catch in their front yard when I drove up. Or rather the boy was pitching and the man catching. A lanky youngster, Timmy Spivey had a nice, easy windup and a smooth delivery for a ten-year-old. A pitcher on his Little League team, I thought, and probably a good one.
They stopped throwing and Spivey scowled at me as I approached. “You again. What now?”
“Suppose we talk alone, Mr. Spivey.”
“What about?”
“Alone, please.”
He said, “Shit,” under his breath, then to his son, “Timmy, go on inside. You can pitch some more after he leaves.”
The boy nodded, gave me a narrow-eyed look, and went into the house.
Spivey removed his catcher’s mitt, threw it to the ground. He was a big man, heavyset, with a beer belly and beady little eyes half-hidden in pouches of flesh. “Well?” he said.
“I have more questions about your whereabouts on Friday night.”
“What questions? I went bowling, like I told you.”
“I spoke to two of your teammates this morning. The league you bowl in is an early one, play beginning at seven and ending at approximately nine thirty.”
“So?”
“You left immediately after the last game and were not seen again that night. According to your wife, you didn’t return home until after she went to bed at eleven o’clock. Where were you between nine thirty and midnight?”
“That’s my business.”
“Martin Torrey was killed during those hours.”
“Chrissake. You trying to say I went to Echo Park?”
“Did you?”
“No!”
“Then where did you go?”
“What’ll you do if I don’t tell you, arrest me?”
I would not, and he knew it. “Do you have something to hide, Mr. Spivey?”
“Not me. I just don’t like cops prying into my private life when there’s no call for it.”
“There’s a call for it. The investigation of a major felony—”
“Felony, hell. A piece of crap flushed down the sewer so it don’t cause any more stink.”
“A human being murdered in cold blood.”
“Jesus Christ. He was a lousy rapist. He raped my wife right here in my house, in my own goddamn bed
!”
“There’s no excuse for murder in the eyes of the law.” Or for blasphemy on the Sabbath, I thought, but didn’t say.
“How many times I have to tell you I didn’t do it? You got no reason to keep hassling me.”
“I am not hassling you. I’m asking for your cooperation in a homicide investigation. Tell me where you went and what you did after you left Santa Rita Lanes, and if your answer proves satisfactory, I won’t bother you again.”
He thrust his jaw out and said belligerently, “No. It’s none of your business, Ortiz, or anybody else’s but mine. Now suppose you get off my property and leave me the hell alone.”
“For the time being. If necessary, I’ll be back.”
“You do and I’ll get a lawyer and sue you and the goddamn city for harassment.”
I left him without responding to the threat, which I took to be nothing more than bluster. The man was obviously hiding something, but was it connected to the Torrey slaying? Was he a murderer, or simply a contentious fool?
The county pathologist’s report, when it came in tomorrow or Tuesday, might help decide how strongly to pursue Spivey. If it narrowed down the time of death to before eleven Friday night, Spivey was not the shooter; an hour and a half was too narrow a window of time. He might still have had a hand in it, however; more than one individual could be involved. If Torrey had been killed later than ten thirty, and Spivey continued to refuse to divulge his whereabouts, he would be a definite suspect.
I had assigned Karl Simms to interrogate Arthur Pappas and his partner, George Medlock, and Susan Sinclair to do likewise with Eileen Jordan and Courtney Reeves’s mother. Their preliminary reports virtually eliminated all four from suspicion. Pappas and Medlock had spent Friday evening at an LGBT event in Riverton and supplied the names of several individuals who could corroborate this. Miss Jordan had been so badly traumatized by her ordeal she could barely function, in Susan’s opinion, and Mrs. Reeves satisfactorily accounted for her whereabouts.
Al Bennett was at his desk, just back from interrogating Nicholas Dexter, when I arrived at the station. “Dexter doesn’t have an alibi for Friday night,” he said. “Home alone watching TV while his wife was at the Cineplex with Mrs. Torrey. But he was Torrey’s only friend in Santa Rita, got him his job at Soderholm, claimed all along that he was innocent of the rapes … well, you know that. Plus his wife talked him into putting up fifteen hundred of Torrey’s bail money, and he was bitching about how now he’d never get any of it back. No motive for homicide that I can see.”
Nor could I. Dexter was a weak-willed complainer dominated by his wife, not at all the type to plan and carry out a premeditated homicide. She might have been able to manipulate him into the shooting if she hated Torrey enough for the damage he’d done to her sister, but her belief in Torrey’s innocence had seemed genuine, and she had been instrumental in the Torreys’ move to Santa Rita. Nor did the abandoned Camry, the riverbank in Echo Park, the postmortem arrangement of the body, fit with a family-related homicide.
Chief Kells was in his office. Al had already reported to him; I went in and did the same.
“Jack Spivey is hiding something, no question of that,” I said. “Whether the time gap has anything to do with the homicide depends on the autopsy results. If it turns out Torrey was killed sometime after nine o’clock, I’ll put more pressure on Spivey.”
“We’ll know fairly soon. I got hold of Ed Braverman—at his home, not the lab. County doesn’t have enough money to keep the pathology department open six days, let alone seven, even to work on priority cases. I told him it was urgent we have the time of death narrowed down ASAP. He said he’ll try to give us a preliminary report tomorrow, but that it’ll probably be Tuesday before the autopsy’s done. Usual backlog excuse.”
“It shouldn’t take him more than a few minutes to dig out one of the bullets. Just knowing the caliber will be a help.”
“I told him that, too,” Griff said. “Same answer. Preliminary report tomorrow … maybe.”
“We’ll have Joe Bloom’s report on the Camry in the morning, but I don’t expect it will tell us much.”
“Neither do I. Even if he finds clear latents belonging to somebody other than Torrey and his family, which is doubtful, it wouldn’t help us much. No way to tell how long they’d been in the vehicle.”
When I left Griff, I detoured into the property room, picked up the evidence bags containing the contents of Martin Torrey’s pockets and the Camry’s glove compartment, and took them into my office. I am not fond of writing reports, though I’ve been told I do them well and thoroughly, and once more sifting through what little evidence we had accumulated was a way of postponing the task. I did not expect to learn anything new.
But when I spread the pocket items on my desk—wallet with fourteen dollars in fives and ones and a photograph of Liane Torrey but no credit cards, forty-five cents in change, key ring, pocketknife—and studied them, there was a nudging at the back of my mind. Something seemed wrong somehow, different.
It was not the absence of Torrey’s cell phone. The perp must have taken it, probably because it contained voice mail messages that could be recovered even if erased. There was no way to trace calls made or received on the phone because those owned by both Torrey and his wife were prepaid Walmart throwaways. We could subpoena their landline records, but those would not tell us anything; even if Torrey had communicated with the perp on his home phone, the chances of it being on the day or night of the murder were virtually nil.
What was it that seemed different, then? I had never seen any of these items before they were removed from the body at the crime scene…
Yes, I had. The keys on the key ring. When Al Bennett and I had gone to the Torrey home with the search warrants three weeks ago, Torrey had been annoyed enough to hand me the ring instead of unlocking the Camry himself. My memory is good, and I was certain it had contained four keys that day. Now there were only two.
I picked up the ring and examined each. One was for the Camry, clearly labeled with Toyota’s logo. The other was most likely his house key.
What had happened to the other two?
One must have been for the Soderholm Brewery delivery van he’d driven, I thought, and he had turned it in when he was fired. And the fourth?
I closed my eyes in an attempt to visualize it. Ordinary silver key, but with one distinctive difference: a small red dot on the round upper portion, just above the hole for ring or chain. I had not paid enough attention to the dot to recall if it was part of the key or had been applied in some way. The dot seemed to rule out a safe-deposit box, and the key had been nothing like the one I carried for Sofia’s and mine at the Merchant’s Bank. For a padlock? Possibly, though there had been none of any size on the premises. For the rear door of the house? Also possible, but the front-door key was bronze colored and the silver one had been slightly smaller, and there seemed little reason for Torrey to have removed a back-door key from the ring. If in fact it was Torrey who had removed it.
What did the key with the red dot unlock, then? And what had happened to it?
HOLLY DEXTER
Liane looked better this morning, not as pale and with the spark of life in her eyes again. I thought she ought to stay in bed, but, no, she insisted on getting up.
While she was toweling off after her shower, I told her about Allan Zacks’s visit and how concerned he was and that he might be coming over again today. I thought it might perk her up. It didn’t seem to, much, but maybe it did, because she put on a blouse and skirt instead of her robe and then ran a comb through her hair. She has nice hair, thick and auburn, much nicer than my mousy brown. She never has to fuss with it to get it to look decent, either, the way I do with mine. The short pixie cut is perfect for the shape of her face, too.
I used to envy Liane when we were growing up. Prettier than me, never ill at ease around guys, always getting lots of attention and about twice as many dates as I ever did. Good-looking guys, too, mo
st of them more attractive than Marty. Why she married him instead of Tom Christian or Conner Troy, both handsome jocks, I’ll never know. No accounting for taste, I suppose. Look who I married. Not that Nick didn’t catch your eye when he was young, but in a sort of ordinary way. He wasn’t even the best pick of my small litter, as far as looks and personality go.
But he talked a good fight back then in Ohio, big plans about someday owning a ranch out here in California and raising horses and cattle. I guess he was sincere at the time, only things sure didn’t work out that way. The “good job” on a ranch near Santa Rita a friend had told him about was anything but, just long hours and hard work, and it didn’t take him long to decide being a rancher wasn’t what he wanted after all. Wouldn’t you know that of half a dozen other jobs, the only one that lasted was driving a brewery truck. Still, he’s a better husband than Marty ever was. Never done anything weird or bad or caused me any real grief. So I guess I’m the lucky sister after all.
Well, anyhow.
Liane wasn’t hungry, but I made her eat a few bites of oatmeal and toast to keep her strength up. I tried to make conversation at the table, to keep her mind off what had happened to Marty, but she didn’t seem to feel like talking.
The doorbell rang while we were eating and I went to answer it, thinking it might be Allan. But, no, it was some TV person with a microphone, a cameraman, and a request for a brief interview with “the grieving widow.” I made short work of him, saying, “Mrs. Torrey has nothing to say to the media,” before I shut the door in his face.
After I washed the dishes and made Liane’s bed, we sat in the living room. She didn’t want to talk then, either. The quiet got to me after a while and I suggested turning on the TV, but she said she preferred it quiet. But she didn’t seem to be brooding or lost inside herself the way she’d been yesterday, which was a relief.
“You really don’t have to stay here with me, Holly,” she said then. “I’ll be all right.”
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