by Sue Grafton
“How much land does she have?”
“Twenty-three thousand acres.”
There was a silence while I tried to compute what she’d just said.
“You’re kidding.”
“I’m serious.”
“I had no idea.”
“Doesn’t matter for now because she’ll never sell. Great Granddaddy made her promise she’d keep it just as it is. The issue won’t get sticky until she goes.”
“Hasn’t she put the estate in some kind of trust?”
“Nope. Most of those old trusts were established in the thirties – people in the east who’d had wealth in the family for generation after generation. Out here, all we had were ranchers, down-to-earth types much more likely to form limited family partnerships. At any rate, nothing’s going to happen as long as she’s alive,” she said. “Meanwhile, if you change your mind about that drink just give me a call. You still have my number?”
“I better take it down again.”
Once I hung up, I had to sit down and pat my chest. I’d actually ended up entertaining a few warm feelings about her. If I didn’t watch myself, I was going to end up liking the woman and then where would I be?
On my way over to Stacey’s, I popped by the office to make sure all was in order. I opened a window briefly to let in a little fresh air and checked my machine for messages. I took care of a few routine matters and then locked up again. I left my car where it was and walked the five blocks to his house, arriving in advance of Con Dolan. Stacey’d left his front door open and his screen unlatched. I knocked on the frame. “Hey, Stacey? It’s me. Mind if I come in?”
He responded with a muffled “Make yourself at home.” I stepped inside and closed the screen door behind me. The floors were bare of carpeting, and the windows had no curtains or drapes, so my very presence seemed to set up an echo. I could smell coffee being brewed, but otherwise the place felt unoccupied. The room was stripped down, as though someone were moving in or out with the job only partially completed. The interior of the house couldn’t have been more than eight hundred square feet, most of which was visible from where I stood. The space was divided into living room, kitchen, a bedroom, and a bath, though the door to that was closed. The floor was linoleum, printed in a pattern of interconnected squares and rectangles, blue on gray with a line of mauve woven in at intervals. The woodwork was stained dark; the walls covered with yellowing paper. In places I could see tears that revealed the wall coverings from three lifetimes down; a small floral print covered by a layer of pinstripes I that, in turn, covered blowsy bouquets of faded cabbage roses.
Under the windows to my right, there was a mattress, neatly made up with blankets. A TV set rested on the bare floor nearby. To my left, there was an oak desk and a swivel chair. There was not much else. Six identical cardboard boxes had been stacked against the far wall. All were sealed with tape and each bore a hand-printed label that listed contents. A closet door stood open, and I could see that it had been emptied of everything except two hangers.
I tiptoed to the kitchen door and peered in at a small wooden table and four mismatched chairs. A Pyrex percolator sat on the stove, a low blue flame under it. The clear glass showed a brew as dark as bitter-sweet chocolate. The doors to all the kitchen cabinets stood open, and many shelves were bare. Stacey was obviously in the process of wrapping and packing glassware and dishes into assorted cardboard boxes. A heavy ream of plain newsprint lay on the counter, wide sheets that must have measured three feet by four. He was clearly dismantling his house, preparing his possessions for shipping to an unknown location.
“See anything you like, it’s yours. I got no use for this stuff,” Stacey said, suddenly behind me.
I turned. “How’s your back?”
Stacey made a face. “So-so. I’ve been sucking down Tylenol and that helps.”
“You’ve been busy. Are you moving?”
“Not exactly. Let’s say, I may be going away and wanted to be prepared.” Today his watch cap was navy blue. With his bleached brows and his long, weathered face, he looked like a farmer standing in a fallow field. He wore soft, stone-washed jeans, a pale blue sweatshirt, and tan sheepskin boots.
“You own this place?”
“Rent. I’ve been here for years.”
“You’re organized.”
“I’m getting there. I don’t want to leave a mess for someone else to clean up. Con’s the one who’ll come in.” The unspoken phrase after I’m dead hung in the air between us.
“Con told me they were trying new drugs.” Stacey shrugged. “Clinical trials. An experimental cocktail designed for people with nothing left to lose. Percentages aren’t good, but I figure, what the hell, it might help someone else. Some survive. That’s what the bell curve’s all about. I just think it’s foolish to assume I’m one.”
Con Dolan knocked at the front door and then let himself in, appearing half a second later in the kitchen doorway. He carried a brown paper grocery bag in one hand and a smaller white bag in the other. “What are you two up to?”
Stacey put his hands in his pockets and shrugged casually. “We’re talking about running away together. She’s arguing for San Francisco so we can cross the Golden Gate Bridge. I’m holding out for Vegas and topless dancing girls. We were just about to toss a coin when you came in.” Stacey moved toward the stove, talking to me over his shoulder. “You want coffee? I’m out of milk.”
“Black suits me fine.”
“Con?”
Dolan held up a white sack spotted with grease. “Doughnuts.”
“Good dang deal,” Stacey said. “We’ll retire to the parlor and figure out what’s what.”
Con took his two bags into the living room while Stacey produced a tower of nested Styrofoam cups and poured coffee in three. He returned to the counter and picked up the pile of newsprint and a marker pen. “Grab those paper towels, if you would. I’m out of napkins and the only kind I’ve seen are those economy packs. Four hundred at a crack. It’s ridiculous. While you’re at it, you can nab that sealing tape.”
I picked up the roll of tape and my coffee cup, while Dolan returned to grab two of the kitchen chairs. Then he came back and picked up the two remaining cups of coffee, which he placed on the desktop in the living room. He reached into the larger of the two bags and hauled out three wide black three-hole binders. “I went over to the copy shop and made us each one. Murder books,” he said, and passed them out. I flashed on my early days in elementary school. The only part of it I’d loved was buying school supplies: binder, lined paper, the pen-and-pencil sets. Stacey taped two sheets of blank newsprint to the wall, then unfolded a map of California and taped it to the wall as well. There was: something of the natural teacher in his manner. Both Dolan and I helped ourselves to doughnuts and then pulled up chairs. Stacey said, “I’ll take the lead here unless someone objects.”
Con said, “Quit being coy and get on with it.”
“Okay then. Let’s tally what we know. That’ll show us where the gaps are. For now, you probably think we have a lot more gaps than we have facts in between, but let’s see what we’ve got.” He uncapped the black marker and wrote the name “Victim” at the top of one sheet and “Killer” at the top of the next. “We’ll start with Jane Doe.”
I pulled a fresh pack of index cards from my shoulder bag, tore off the cellophane, and started taking notes.
Chapter 5
*
He printed rapidly and neatly, condensing the information in the file as we talked our way through. “What do we have first?” He lifted his marker and looked at us. Like any good instructor, he was going to I make sure we supplied most of the answers.
Dolan said, “She’s white. Age somewhere between twelve and eighteen.”
“Right. So that means a date of birth somewhere between 1951 and 1957.” Stacey made the requisite note near the top of the paper.
“What about the estimated date of death ?” I asked.
I thought
Dolan would consult the autopsy report, but he seemed to know it by heart. “Dr. Weisenburgh says the body’d been there anywhere from one to five days, so that’d be sometime between July 29 and August 2. He’s retired now, but I had him go back over this and he remembered the girl.”
“All right.” Stacey wrote the DOD on the paper under Jane Doe’s date of birth. He went on writing, this time dictating to himself. Rapidly, we went through the basics: height, weight, eyes, hair color.
Dolan said, “Report says blond, though it was probably a dye job. There was some suggestion of dark roots.”
I said, “She had buckteeth and lots of fillings, but no orthodontic work.”
Stacey’s mouth pulled down. “Maybe we should stop and have a chat about that.”
Dolan shook his head. “They didn’t do braces much when I was growing up. My family was big –thirteen kids – and we all had crooked teeth. Look here. Bottoms buckled up, but these top guys are good.” He turned to me. “You have braces as a kid?”
“Nope.”
“Nor did I,” Stacey said. “Well. I’m glad we got that out of the way. So what’s that tell us, the buckteeth?”
“Well, I’d say most kids with a severe overbite have already seen an orthodontist by the time they’re ten,” Dolan said. “My niece has three kids, so I know they start early-sometimes do the work in two or three stages. If this gal was going to have braces, she should’ve been in ‘em by the time she died.”
“Maybe her family didn’t have the money,” I suggested.
“That could be. Anything else?”
“Cavities like that, you’re talking poor diet, too. Candy. Soda pop. Junk food,” Dolan said, with a quick look at me. And then to Stacey, “Not to sound like a snoot, but kids from your basic middle-to upper-class families usually don’t have rotten teeth like that.”
I said, “Think about the toothaches.”
Stacey said, “She did get’ em fixed. Matter of fact, the forensic odontist thinks all the fillings went in about the same time, probably in the year or two before she died.”
I said, “That must have cost a bundle.”
“Think of all the novocaine shots,” Dolan said. “You’d have to sit there for hours with that drill screaming in your head.”
“Knock it off. You’re making my palms sweat. I’m phobic about dentists in case you haven’t heard. Look at this,” I said, showing him my palms.
Stacey frowned. “They ever circulate a chart of her amalgam fillings?”
Dolan said, “Not that I know. I’ve got a copy in here. Might come in handy if we think we got a match. We do have the maxilla and mandible.”
I looked over at him. “Her jaws? After eighteen years?”
“We have all ten fingers, too.”
Stacey made a note on the paper. “Let’s see if we can get the coroner’s office to run another set of prints. Maybe we’ll get a hit through NCIC.”
“I can’t believe she’ll show up, given her age at the time of death,” Dolan said.
“Unless she got arrested for shoplifting or prostitution,” I said, ever the optimist.
“Problem is, if she got arrested as a juvenile, her records would be sealed and probably purged by now,” he said.
I raised a hand. “You were talking about why she was never recognized; suppose she was from out of state, some place back East? I get the impression the news story didn’t get nationwide attention.”
“Story probably didn’t rate a mention beyond the county line,” Dolan said.
“Let’s move on to her clothes. Any ideas there?” Stacey asked.
I said, “I thought it was interesting her pants were homemade. If you add that to the issue of poor dental hygiene, it sounds like low income.”
Stacey said, “Not necessarily. If her mom made her the clothes, it’d suggest a certain level of caring and concern.”
“Well, yeah. There is that. Those flowered pants were distinct. Dark blue daisies with a red dot on a white background. Someone might remember the fabric.”
Dolan said, “I’d like to go back and look at that statement the minimart clerk made about the hippie girl who came in. What’s the woman’s name, Roxanne Faught? We ought to track her down again and see if she has anything to add.”
Stacey said, “I talked to her twice, but you’re welcome to try. Is that store still open?”
“As far as I know. It was closed for a while, so it might have changed hands. You want me to take a drive up there?” Dolan asked.
“Let me do that. I can go this afternoon,” I said.
“Good. Meanwhile, what else? What about sizes?”
We spent several minutes working through those details. This time Dolan flipped back through the pages, looking for the list of clothing booked into property. “Here we go. Shoe size-7lh. Panty size-medium. Bra size was 38A.”
I said, “That means she’s got a fairly large torso, but a small cup size. Barrel-chested. Girls like that tend to look top-heavy, even if they’re thin.”
Dolan turned a page. “Says here her ears were pierced. ‘Through the left earlobe is a gold-colored wire of a “horseshoe” configuration. Through the right earlobe a gold-colored wire with a bent clip in its lower end.’ People might remember that, too.”
Stacey added that to the list and then said, “Is that it?”
I raised my hand. “She wore nail polish. Silver.”
“Got it. Anything else?”
“Not that I remember.”
Dolan got to his feet. “In that case, if you’ll excuse me. I gotta have me a smoke.”
At lunchtime, I volunteered to make a trip to the nearest market and pick up the makings for sandwiches, but they’d apparently gotten wind of my peanut-butter-and-pickle fetish and voted to go out for Chinese. We took Con’s car and made the crosstown trip to the Great Wall, with its pagoda facade and a gilded statue of the Buddha sitting over the front door. In the parking lot, I waited while Stacey and Con tucked their guns in the trunk of Con’s car. The three of us went in.
The interior walls were painted the requisite Chinese red with red Naugahyde banquettes and round white paper lanterns strung like moons around the perimeter. Stacey didn’t have much appetite, but Con seemed more than willing to make up for it. I was starving as usual. We ordered pot stickers and spring rolls, which we dunked in that pale Chinese mustard that cleans out your sinuses. We moved on to Moo Shu Pork, Kung Pao Chicken, and Beef with Orange Peel along with a dome of white rice. Con and I drank beer. Stacey had iced tea.
While we ate, the guys speculated about the killer, a matter in which I deferred to them: I have no formal training in homicide investigation, though I’ve encountered a few bodies in the course of my career. Given the nature of the murder, they theorized that the perpetrator was most likely male, in part because women tend to be repelled by close-contact blood-and-gore killings. In addition, the multiple stab wounds suggested a brutality more commonly associated with men.
“Hey, these days, women can be brutes,” Con said.
“Yeah, but I can’t see a woman hefting that body into the car trunk and hauling it out again. A hundred twenty-five pounds is a lot of dead weight.”
“As it were,” Dolan said. “You think this was planned?”
“If it was, you’d think he’d’ve worked out a plan for disposing of the body. This guy was in a hurry, at least enough of one that he didn’t stop to dig a grave.” He was making notes on a napkin and the pen made occasional rips in the paper while the ink tended to spread.
Con opened his packet of chopsticks and pried the two wooden sections apart, rubbing one on the other to smooth away any tiny wooden hairs. He doused both his chicken and his beef with enough soy sauce to form a shallow brown lake in which his rice grains swam like minnows. “I’m surprised he didn’t pick a dump site more remote.”
“That stretch of road looks isolated if you don’t know any better. No houses in sight. He probably didn’t have a clue about the quarry
traffic running up and back.”
“I’m with you on that. Forensics says the wire he used to bind her wrists was torn off something else so he must have grabbed whatever came to hand. Guy was making shit up as he went along.” I watched as Dolan formed a pincer with his chopsticks and tried picking up a chunk of chicken, which he couldn’t get as far as his mouth.
“Question is, did he target that girl in particular, or was he trolling for a victim and it was just her bad luck?”
Con said, “I think it was a fishing expedition. He might’ve tried five or six gals and finally one said yes.” He shifted to a scooping technique, using his chopsticks like a little shelf onto which he pushed the bite of chicken. ‘He got the hunk as far as his lower lip. Nope. I saw him shake his head. “I don’t think we’re dealing serial. This feels like a one-off.” He tried again, this time lunging, his lips extended like an anteater’s as he lifted his chopsticks. He captured a snippet of orange peel before the rest fell back onto his plate.
I grabbed a fork from the next table and handed it to him. Stacey made a doodle on the napkin, which by now was completely tattered. “Hang on. Let’s back up a second. Agewise, it seems to me like she’s bound to be closer to the high end – sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, and up, instead of the twelve, thirteen end of the spread. Young girl like that, somebody’s going to report she’s gone, regardless of whether she leaves voluntarily or stomps out in a huff. You’re a parent, you might shrug and not think too much about it, but when she doesn’t come home, you’re going to worry. You call around and find out her friends haven’t seen her either and you’re going to call the cops. If she’s twenty and disappears, it might not raise any flags at all.”
“Right. She could’ve had a history of taking off. This might have been one more in a long string of disappearances.”
Dolan pushed his plate aside. “As long as we’re making wild-ass guesses, here’s another one. I don’t think she’s local. Killer didn’t get into any facial mutilation so he must not’ve been worried someone would know who she was. He didn’t know how long she’d be lying there. Suppose she’s found the same day and they run a description of her in the paper? She’s local, somebody’s going to add two plus two and figure it out fast.”