by Louise Ure
“It wasn’t just the tequila,” he said. “With a whole bottle of painkillers like that, she would have been real woozy.”
I pictured her there in the bathroom, the air filled with hot moisture from the almost full tub. She would have coughed and swallowed to keep the pills and liquor down, then removed the brace and sling from her left arm and lifted one leg over the rim of the tub.
Maybe she got dizzy. Maybe she got brave. I pictured the slow-motion sequence as she lost her balance, and then, with a crack like thunder, hit her head on the edge of the old enameled tub.
I found her on the bathroom floor. Glass shards from the broken tequila bottle stuck out of her forearms and chest like badges of honor in an army of despair.
And I had been thinking about focus groups for a new deodorant.
There is a legend in Tucson, and probably in most of the desert Southwest, about La Llorona, “The Wailing Woman.” In a rage of selfishness and jealousy, La Llorona kills her children, hacks their bodies into pieces, and throws them in the river. God punishes her by making her haunt the riverbanks until her children’s bodies are recovered.
In many ways I had done that same haunting for the last seven years. I was The Mourner. The Ruer. The Regretter. The Wailing Woman who just wanted to put things back the way they used to be.
My hand remained on the cradled phone. I wished that Amy could be whole again. And I wished that Sharon Hamishfender—the real Sharon—were still alive.
21
The sky was already slate gray to the east when I pulled up in front of Strike’s house, but it was a riot of orange and purple to the west. I had never been to his house before and sat listening to the click of the cooling engine as I took it all in.
Strike rented the entry gatehouse to an estate farther up the hill. He said the rent was reasonable because the homeowners liked having someone with a gun permit live at the driveway entrance.
It was a tiny house made of smooth, worn river rocks and was tucked into the southern slope of a hill in the Tucson Mountains, west of the city. It was maybe twenty by twenty feet and looked smaller than the attached garage at its side. I’ll bet that sealed the deal on his choice of rentals—a happy home for his precious Shelby.
His backyard neighbors were giant saguaros, their arms frozen upright as if they were in the middle of a game of Simon Says.
Enrique had already arrived, and Strike opened three beers for us while I checked out the interior. It was only one room, with a stone fireplace along the far wall, an old rocking chair, and an L-shaped banquette that was covered with cushions. Either that banquette pulled out to make a bed or Strike was sleeping with his feet tucked up on a couch that looked smaller than a twin-size mattress. The kitchen was fit into a triangular space at the back of the room, and the door to the bathroom was opposite the drop-leaf kitchen table. It smelled sweet, like the feathery leaves of some herb I’d never cooked with before.
“So, what did you want to meet about?” I asked.
Strike and Enrique exchanged glances, then Enrique took the lead. “We want to start surveillance on Red Blanken.”
“Did you find out something new?”
“No, but we think it’s possible he was Amy’s attacker, and we want to be careful.”
What did we know about Red Blanken? A history of sexual crimes, a deformity of the hand, access to a black truck, and a snake knife. “Does he seem a more likely suspect to you than Cates?”
Strike took over. “Cates is in jail; we don’t have to worry about him. And I told you at the beginning of this that I didn’t think Cates was Amy’s rapist. It was just a coincidence that you met him, and it got you thinking about it.”
I wasn’t sure that I didn’t have to worry about Cates. The memory of that black SUV ramming my Jeep was still fresh in my mind.
“Meeting Blanken is just as much of a coincidence, isn’t it?” I asked. “In a period of two months I meet two men who could have been Amy’s attacker? What are the odds of that happening?” I was beginning to question my own sanity.
“I’ve been thinking about that,” Strike said. “And it’s not that unusual. Until you were assigned to Cates’s case, you pretty much had a set routine, went to the same stores, saw the same people at the office. And all that work was on civil cases, so you weren’t coming across a lot of people with a criminal history of sexual assaults.”
“That we know of.” I almost smiled at the thought of the cherubic CEO of Azchemco as a sexual predator.
“Now, all of a sudden, you’re going to the county jail; you’re attending lineups at the police station. You’re being exposed to more possibilities than you were before.” Strike closed the curtain behind the banquette. The night air was cooling considerably.
“And you think Blanken might really be the one?”
“He fits the pattern,” Enrique said. “He started with misdemeanor sexual crimes, and he’s worked his way up. Nothing we’ve heard rules him out. And I don’t like the fact that he and Amy went to school together. Maybe after Amy’s attack he worked all the way up to murder. Maybe he did Lydia Chavez, too.”
“Do we know where he was the night Lydia died?”
“I’ll check and see if he was doing time,” Enrique said. “We can’t do much more than that. But we can set up a surveillance to watch him. Maybe we’ll catch him in the middle of something, maybe we won’t. But at least we’ll know where he is.”
They worked out a schedule between them, and Enrique agreed to take the first shift.
“There’s something else, Calla,” Enrique said as I started to get up. “It may be nothing, but we want you to be alert. Be prepared.”
I sat back down. “For what?”
“Maybe we’ve been looking in the wrong direction.” Enrique drew a black leather belt out of the paper bag he’d hidden behind his chair. The buckle was gold, not silver, but it showed the fanned rays of a sun across the top half.
“Where did you get this? Whose is it?”
“It belongs to a friend of mine, but Strike’s the one who noticed the similarity,” Enrique said. “And I have to agree with him, it’s possible.”
“What’s possible?”
He folded the paper bag flat and rested the belt on top of it. “It’s a highway patrolman’s gear. Their badge is based on the Arizona state flag.” I visualized that flag design. Liberty blue on the bottom half, thirteen rays of a setting sun on top in red and gold, and a copper star in the center.
Strike nodded in agreement. “They don’t usually come in silver, but I found some on the Highway Patrol Association’s Web site.”
“Amy would have trusted a highway patrolman, wouldn’t she? She would have let her guard down.” I dropped the patrolman’s belt into my purse.
Calla, good news,” Jessica began, barging into my office the next day without knocking. I looked up from a stack of focus group questionnaires and marked my place with a yellow Post-it note.
“I could use some.”
“The Rondo jury came back in. They’ve awarded him seven and a half million.” She beamed as if the money was all coming her way. “Drury is sending over champagne.”
“Uh-huh.” My thoughts were still deep in the subject of Cates’s potential jurors. I had put Mr. Rondo’s case out of my mind for the last two weeks. It felt like getting a compliment on a dress I’d long ago given to Goodwill. “I guess getting rid of Marshall was a good idea after all. Who wound up being jury foreperson?”
Jessica checked the sheet in her hand. “Harmon. The teacher in seat six.” Not unusual. Teachers and scientists often fall into power positions on juries. I hadn’t thought the teacher would side with Rondo, but at least he hadn’t done him any harm.
“Do they want to do any posttrial interviews?”
“She didn’t mention it. I’ll check with her this afternoon. My guess is no. She’ll take the win and not ask too many questions about why it worked.”
My phone rang as Jessica turned back toward
to her office.
“It’s Enrique. I’ve got Blanken’s dates of incarceration. It looks like he was in prison on that home invasion charge when Christie Parstac and Mary Katherine Carruthers were attacked.”
I jotted the dates down in the margin of the questionnaire I’d been working on.
“Hmmm. What do we know about him after he got out?” I was thinking about the attacks on Amy and Miranda, and about the murder of Lydia Chavez.
“We’ve got nothing on him since then. Don’t know where he was.”
I thanked him and hung up, then heaved a sigh and threw my pen across the room. I wasn’t finding anything to prove that either Cates or Blanken was the author of these attacks. And now I had the disturbing similarity between Amy’s description and a highway patrolman’s belt. I groaned in frustration.
What if it was Cates? All I could do was my job, as if his trial was any other case. Evaluate strategies and witness credibility; identify the most negative juror profiles to avoid; prepare voir dire questionnaires. Part of my brain still functioned like a researcher—weighing, evaluating, deciding, recommending. But another part of me was in turmoil, wondering if I was helping my sister’s rapist escape again.
I retrieved my pen from where it had landed against the far wall and returned to my questionnaires. We had done more focus groups for Cates, this time trying to pinpoint the case-specific elements that would help us pick a favorable jury. I’d already learned that women were more likely to convict because of the vicious rape and assault involved, but they were also more likely to be positively swayed by Cates’s good looks.
Hispanic jurors couldn’t be ruled out just because the victim was Hispanic, but potential jurors with higher education seemed to identify with Cates whether they were Hispanic or Caucasian.
I usually loved this part of trial research—ferreting out any hidden attitudes or background elements that would help complete the jigsaw puzzle picture of the best, or worst, jurors in a case. But this time my heart wasn’t in it. I couldn’t separate my distrust of Cates from the research. Presumption of innocence, my ass.
22
Less than three weeks till Cates’s trial date now, and we were preparing to do the mock trial. Normally we used these simulated trials to test possible strategies or fine-tune opening and closing arguments. But this time we wanted to get a read on much more, like the State’s circumstantial evidence and Hector Salsipuedes’s credibility as a witness.
We had set up the focus group room to look as much like a real courtroom as possible, with a raised judge’s bench and separate tables for the defense and the prosecution. A low bar separated the mock jurors from the well of our sham courtroom. One of the lawyers in Merchant’s firm had volunteered for the role of the judge in our simulation. McCullough was going to play the part of lead counsel for the defense.
Originally, Gideon Merchant wanted to handle the defense role as he would in the real trial, saying it could help him hone his opening and closing arguments. I finally managed to convince him to play the part of his opponent, a lawyer from the Pima County attorney’s office. We always had the most experienced attorney take the role of opposing counsel in trial simulations. That way you make sure you’re trying out the strongest possible version the other side could hit you with. It had served us well in trial preparations in the past.
Cates couldn’t be in the room, since he was still in jail, but the boyfriend of one of the paralegals from McCullough’s office volunteered to sit in instead. He had the same athletic build and sandy hair that Cates did. And we could still show the jurors a videotape of Cates to get more specific reactions to him.
Our “judge” swore in the “jurors,” and Merchant and McCullough gave their opening statements. The argument from the prosecution side was simple: We’ve got the evidence that proves Raymond Cates killed Lydia Chavez. The defense focused on the possibility of mistaken identity and coincidence. “He was eighty miles away having a beer with an old friend,” McCullough said.
Merchant began his parade of witnesses for the prosecution. Of course, we didn’t really have the sheriff’s deputy who had written the parking ticket or their ballistics expert or the bartender from the Blue Moon up on the stand. But we knew roughly what their testimony would be from their written statements, so we used actors and friends in their roles.
McCullough asked questions on cross-examination, just as if it were a real trial. He didn’t have any questions for the pseudodeputy who testified about writing Cates a parking ticket. I didn’t know how they planned to finesse that one. To me, it was the most damaging evidence the prosecution had.
Then it was time for the defense presentation. McCullough questioned Marjorie Ballast about the tire tread, cat hair, and ballistic evidence. Several jurors were taking notes.
One of McCullough’s final witnesses was Hector Salsipuedes, who confirmed that he’d been with Cates eighty miles away at the approximate time of the murder.
We had to assume that the prosecution would find out about Salsipuedes’s new truck, so Merchant questioned him about the vehicle. Although Salsipuedes said that it was just a loan and he was paying George Cates back, he stammered and flushed throughout the cross-examination.
Trying to be objective, I thought it had gone reasonably well for the defense. Except for Cates’s license plate number on the parking ticket, the State’s evidence was not compelling, and several jurors had reacted positively to the notion of mistaken identity. The two lawyers had played their parts well and gave stirring and specific closing arguments.
Unlike a real trial, we split the jurors into three groups to deliberate. It wasn’t a verdict prediction we wanted from this mock trial, it was a glimpse of the thought processes that got them there. With three groups we had three chances of hearing different points of view.
I listened in on their discussions. One group particularly liked the mystery boss Chavez was meeting as another possible suspect. Maybe it was too many years of Perry Mason reruns where the person who’s mentioned once in the first third of the show and never seen again winds up being the killer.
We had no plans to put Cates on the stand in the real trial, but I still wanted to get a sense of how the jury would react to him sitting there next to McCullough at the defense table. So we showed them a tape of Cates sitting at a glossy wooden desk, answering questions from an unseen interviewer about his family, his background, and his favorite foods.
Not unexpectedly, many of the jurors felt comfortable with him—he was nice looking and well dressed, but not in a flashy way. As a rule, jurors are more positively disposed toward good-looking defendants than unattractive ones, except in larceny trials, where good looks work against you.
Two jurors mentioned Cates’s trait of tossing his hair back, one of them saying he looked like a pop star preening onstage. We’d have to counsel him not to do that during the real trial.
Hector Salsipuedes was our Achilles’ heel. Most of the jurors either didn’t like him or didn’t believe him. They were suspicious about the new truck, and Hector’s shifty responses to the prosecution’s questions didn’t help.
I wasn’t sure if he was salvageable. His defensiveness on the stand would be hard to disguise, and if we did too good a job in coaching him and his delivery became flat and rehearsed, it would definitely look like he was lying.
After meeting him at Cates’s house and wondering if he was the mystery driver who harassed me on the way home from Alphabet City, I already had my doubts about him. It’s hard to push for improving testimony you think may be false.
By the end of the discussion it was clear that Salsipuedes’s poor performance and the incontrovertible evidence of the parking ticket was too much to overcome. All fifteen mock jurors decided Cates was guilty. I looked over at Strike to make sure my Cheshire-cat grin wasn’t showing and gave the jurors a silent round of applause.
I had a gut feeling that Cates was guilty of this and other crimes. Maybe the real jury would take care of al
l my qualms—all those little voices that said he might not be the one.
I’ve always been afraid of drowning. I know that’s a strange phobia when you live in the desert, but there it is. And the fear got worse when I was eighteen and a palm reader at the county fair told me that I would die underwater. So monsoon season always left me kind of shaky.
The first of the summer monsoon rains hit while we were conducting the trial simulation. When I reached the front door of the research facility, thunder boomed like faraway cannon fire, and flat-bottomed black clouds covered the sky. Monsoon rains never really slaked the desert’s thirst; an hour from now the streets would have forgotten the taste of that sweet liqueur. But for now the streets ran full from gutter to gutter.
I waded barefoot across the parking lot to the Jeep and inched open the door, hoping that the surge of water wouldn’t reach the interior of the car. I scooted in and slammed the door against the fast-moving current at my feet. The engine compartment was still dry, and the starter only ground a few seconds before catching. I’d have to be careful with the brakes; they wouldn’t last long in this new urban river.
I waved good-bye to Strike, and we both pulled out of the parking lot, heading north from downtown. My thoughts were miles away, back with the Cates mock jury and their deliberations, or I would have seen it sooner. Just ahead of me the underpass at Stone and Sixth avenues had flooded with the runoff from the storm. It happened often during monsoon season, and if I hadn’t been preoccupied, I could have avoided it. But the deep underpass was now a swirling brown death trap, and I was in the middle of it.
I hit the brakes but felt no mechanical reaction from the car. My tires lost contact with the pavement, and the Jeep slammed into the angry overflow.
Pedestrians on the overpass gestured with both arms as if to warn the Jeep away. The marker on the side of the underpass showed the water at eight feet at its deepest level. It sloshed at the top of the wheel wells now and was climbing.
I lunged against the driver’s door, but the current was stronger than my panic and the door stayed shut. I was trapped. Water began to wash across the hood.