by Jance, J. A.
In other words, this was a budgetary issue that had nothing to do with the real world of justice, crime, or punishment.
“So here’s what I’m thinking,” Jackman continued. “I want you to stand down, Detective Morris. Take the rest of the day off. Get some sleep. In other words, no more damned overtime! And before you start writing checks on all this accumulated OT, you might want to think twice. Once your unit members get their butts back on the job, you can take it out in comp time. Fair enough?”
It wasn’t fair, but this was a rhetorical question that came with an obligatory answer. Right or wrong had nothing to do with it. “Yes, sir,” Gil said.
“Very well then,” Jackman said. “Do us all a favor and head home.”
Still steaming, Detective Gilbert Morris did exactly that.
39
Salton City, California
In the old days, Ali had sped around on L.A. area freeways with wild abandon. Today, as she made her way north to the ten and then east toward Salton City, she was glad to have the rental’s GPS giving her play-by-play directions. It was early enough on a holiday morning that people weren’t yet creating their own day-off rush hour traffic jams. The only downside was that she did much of the three-hour-plus drive heading straight into the rising sun—a blinding rising sun.
Not sure what kind of food she would find available in Salton City, Ali stopped off in Palm Springs for close to an hour to have breakfast and take on a load of coffee. By the time she turned onto Heron Ridge Drive, it was verging on nine thirty. Heron Ridge Drive was far longer than she expected, winding north along the edge of the Salton Sea. The name had a grand sound to it. The reality was nothing short of grim. Yes, there were clusters of motor homes parked here and there, but most of the few permanent structures looked as though they weren’t long for the world.
At least, that seemed to be the case until Ali caught sight of the Blaylock place, which looked more like a fortress than a house. The windows and doors of the structure were covered with closed roll-down shutters—metal roll-down shutters. It occurred to Ali that although they weren’t exactly aesthetically pleasing, they were probably downright impervious. A silver sedan of some kind was parked in the driveway. Other than that, the place looked deserted. Abandoned. It didn’t seem likely that anyone would be inside the structure with all the shutters rolled down and buttoned up. Too dark. Too hot. Too claustrophobic.
Ali drove past once. Then she turned around in another driveway about half a mile farther on. As she drove past the Blaylock driveway a second time, she was startled to see a beefy woman standing in the middle of the street with her hands planted on her hips. When Ali started to drive past, the woman flagged her down.
Ali pulled up next to her, stopped, and rolled down her window.
“Can I help you?” the woman asked.
“I was looking for the Blaylocks,” Ali lied. “Mark and Ermina.”
“That’s their place over there,” the woman said, pointing toward the roll-down shutter marvel. “Nobody’s home. I saw her leave first thing this morning. She was all alone in that big old Lincoln of hers. I don’t know where Mark is. His car is here, which usually means that he’s here too, but I can’t imagine he’d be inside the house with all those shutters down all the way. One thing for sure, he wasn’t in the Lincoln with that battle-axe of his when she left. Who are you?”
The woman went from volunteering information to demanding it in one easy segue.
Ali didn’t want to make the mistake of impersonating a police officer. With all the Blaylocks’ burgeoning financial difficulties, it wasn’t too much of a stretch to pretend to be the minion of a circling creditor. And the way the woman referred to Ermina implied there was no love lost between this frowsy neighbor in her faded tracksuit and Ermina Blaylock.
“It’s actually about her Lincoln,” Ali said confidentially. “There’s a lien on it. I’m doing some scouting for the repo company.”
“You mean to tell me Miss High and Mighty is about to lose that fancy car of hers?” the woman said with a wide-faced grin. “Don’t that just beat all! And it would serve her right too. Care for a cup of coffee? I just made a new pot.”
Ali could hardly believe her luck. She held out her hand. “Coffee would be nice,” she said. “My name is Ali Reynolds, by the way.”
“Like that old baseball player from Oklahoma?”
“No,” Ali said. “I’m Ali with one L not two. And you?”
“Florence Haywood,” the woman said. “Most people call me Flossie. Just pull right in and park in the driveway. Jimmy went off to play keno at the casino. He won’t be back for hours.”
All her life Ali had marveled at her mother’s ability to know everything that went on in town and outside it. From Edie Larson’s station behind the lunch counter at the Sugarloaf Café, she managed to keep her finger on the pulse of everything that went on in and around the Verde Valley. At the police academy down in Peoria, Ali had sat through several classes on the ins and outs of conducting interrogations, but nothing she had been taught there could hold a candle to what she had learned at her mother’s knee.
Ali knew at once that Flossie was golden. She was nosy, she was lonely, and she hated Ermina Blaylock’s guts. From Ali’s point of view, that was definitely a win-win-win situation.
40
Grass Valley, California
Chief Jackman had ordered Gil to go home for the day in no uncertain terms. When Gil did so, he left his city-owned Crown Vic in the departmental parking lot and headed home in his bedraggled five-year-old Camry, which had been sitting forlorn and abandoned in the city parking lot since Gil been called out to the Herrera brothers crime scene on Friday afternoon.
On the way, Gil drove past Target. A few blocks beyond that, he made up his mind. Pulling a quick U-turn, he went back and parked in front of the store. He wasn’t sure how much room was left on his Visa card, but he was about to find out.
Pushing a shopping cart, Gil marched through the homemaking aisles on the first genuine shopping spree of his entire life. He bought a set of dishes—four place settings of all blue dishes because blue was his favorite color and a set of silverware for four, stainless not silver of course. He picked up a set of twelve glasses—four each of three different sizes. He bought a toaster— $29.95—a dish drainer, a nonstick set of fry pans, a couple of spatulas, and a laundry basket. He bought two bath towels, two hand towels, and two washcloths as well as a new shower curtain to replace the moldy one with several missing rivets that currently hung in his bathroom.
Gil bought himself a new set of plain white sheets, a fitted sheet and a flat one that came with a pair of matching pillowcases. Then, just for good measure, he bought one of those bed-in-a-bag things that came with a blue plaid comforter and a couple of decorative pillows. At least from now on his damned AeroBed would look like a real bed. He also bought a four-drawer dresser that came in a box, some assembly required.
When he got to the checkout stand, he held back on the dresser just in case he ran out of room on his credit card. Fortunately, the charge went through without a hitch. Now, thank God and Visa, the time for Gil Morris to keep his clothing in one of Linda’s discarded suitcases was finally a thing of the past.
He was alone now. It was high time he started living his own alone life.
Leaving Target, just for good measure and just because he could, Gil made two more stops on the way home. He went to the grocery store and replenished his supply of bread, cereal, milk, and cleaning supplies. Then he stopped by the liquor store and picked up a box of fifty Antonio y Cleopatra cigars. He was determined that the next time he had to show up at a crime scene, he would be the one handing out the smokes.
Before Linda took off, one of the things that had always mystified Gil about the woman was that whenever she was pissed at him, she turned into a housecleaning demon. In the past Gil had dreaded those cleaning marathons because he understood that the cleaner the house got, the more trouble he was
usually in.
That Monday morning Gilbert Morris finally started to understand it. Huffing on one of the previously prohibited cigars and using his old cracked dinner plate as an ashtray, Gil went to work. He swept; he mopped; he dusted; he scrubbed. He decided that once he paid off his credit card purchases, he was going to buy himself a new television set, maybe even a baby flat-screen. He had seen some of those on sale at Target too and was surprised by how little they cost.
He unwrapped the dishes as well as the glasses and the silverware and ran them all through the dishwasher. He put his dirty clothes into the laundry basket along with his dirty sheets. He threw away his musty bath towel, the dead shower curtain, and his ragged, much-used sheets. He knew that Linda would never have considered putting new sheets and pillowcases on the bed without laundering them first, but Linda had taken the washer and dryer. Gil would be damned if he’d go to the laundromat and spend good money washing and drying brand-new sheets and pillowcases. He would sleep on them as is.
Linda had left the toilet bowl brush behind, but no toilet bowl cleaner. Fortunately he had picked up some of that at the grocery store. He didn’t want his toilet bowel to resemble the ones he had seen in Richard Lowensdale’s house. It took several tries and lots of scrubbing before, to his immense satisfaction, the stubborn stains finally disappeared.
He cleaned the bathroom sink until it gleamed and did the same thing to the porcelain sink in the kitchen. By then the dishwasher had run through its cycle. With the dishes still almost too hot to handle, Gil took them out and arranged them in the cupboard the way that suited him best, with the plates on the upper shelf and the glasses and cups on the lower one. This was his kitchen now; Gil would do things his way, not Linda’s way.
The relatively mindless work of cleaning and scrubbing allowed plenty of time for thinking. Maybe that was what Linda had always known—the link between cleaning and thinking.
Gil let his mind wander back through the intricacies of those two somehow intertwined cases—Richard Lowensdale’s murder and Brenda Riley’s apparent suicide. Some of the puzzle pieces didn’t make sense. For one thing, a luminol test of the shoes from the Scotts Flat Reservoir showed no sign of blood spatter of any kind. The booties might have accounted for that. Still, with as much blood as Gil had found on the scene, it surprised him that there were no traces at all. And for shoes that had evidently walked through the woods, the soles had been pristinely clean, with no dirt or gravel caught in the tread.
Since John Connor had handled the purse, Gil had been obliged to take a set of elimination fingerprints on the boy, but he was relatively sure that his manner of questioning John had left the kid—a good kid, evidently—plenty of wiggle room. There had been no questions about John’s friends in the interview, and no mention of them in Gil’s written report either. There was no reason to suspect that John and his friends were in any way responsible for what had happened to Brenda.
What mystified Gil most, however, were the contents of the purse, all of which he had carefully inventoried. It was the usual women’s purse junk—a compact, several tubes of lipsticks, all the same color, two packages of new tissues as well as a loose collection of old ones, a change purse along with some loose change, a package of dental floss, some aspirin, several pens, a tampon container, and a wallet. The wallet contained four twenty-dollar bills, one credit card in Brenda’s mother’s name, and three crumbling photos—one of a man and a woman and a twenty-fifth wedding anniversary cake, and two high school senior photos of two women who looked very much alike. From the hairstyles Gil estimated that the photos were most likely of Brenda herself and maybe a female relative. A sister, maybe?
But what didn’t fit in with all that was the bloodied thumb. Why had Brenda taken it along to begin with? Without the thumb, it seemed likely that she would have gotten away with killing Richard Lowensdale. After all, as far as Gil had been able to discover, there was no physical evidence linking Brenda to the crime.
So what was the point of taking that one piece of incriminating evidence with her? Yes, killers often collected trophies, but collecting trophies and then committing suicide seemed illogical. After all, if Brenda was going to kill herself, why would she torture her poor mother by leaving behind the unmistakable message that her beloved daughter was also a murderer? That made no sense.
And then there was the purse itself. Gilbert was hardly a connoisseur of such things, but he knew that purses—even cheap ones—weren’t free. Why would Brenda have decided to wreck hers? To Gil’s unpracticed eye, the soft leather purse seemed expensive, but it was wrecked now. Because of the bloodied thumb, it now stank to the high heavens.
While returning all the separate inventoried items to the evidence box, Gil had picked up the tampon holder. On a whim, he pulled it open. Yes, there were two paper-wrapped tampons inside the plastic container, but there was also something else. A key of some kind, a key that could have been to a locker, perhaps, or maybe even a desk.
Gil had planned on taking the key to the crime lab later in the day to see if Mona and her crime techs could track down where it came from or what it opened. That, of course, was before Chief Jackman had sent Gil home, so chasing after the key was something that would have to wait for another day.
When it came time to tackle the dresser, Gil opened the box, fished out the directions, and determined what tools he would need—a Phillips screwdriver and an Allen wrench. With those in mind, Gil headed for the garage.
Had Linda made off with her husband’s bright red rolling tool chest or if she had emptied it, there would have been all-out war. With two cars in the garage there had been barely enough room for both vehicles to park side by side. That had left the tool chest virtually inaccessible and had rendered the workbench under the window completely useless. Rather than a haven, the garage had become a passageway, good only for coming and going.
With Linda and the kids gone, Gil could have worked in the garage, but he hadn’t. What had once been Linda’s parking place was still stacked with a collection of stuff—items both loose and in boxes—that she had intended to take to Goodwill right up until she ran out of time. Other than that sad stack of discards, however, the garage was discouragingly neat—exhibiting the kind of cleanliness born of omission rather than effort, disuse rather than use.
As Gil opened the top drawer to retrieve his Phillips screwdriver, he had a sudden realization. Unlike Richard Lowensdale’s house, the victim’s garage had been clean—absolutely clean, utterly clean, with no trash on the floor and nothing out of place. For someone as messy as Richard, that could only mean that other than parking his car there, he never used it.
There had been no tools lying loose on his workbench, as in none at all—not a single one. Yes, there had been the smell of oil, but it was old oil, ancient oil. Still, Gil remembered clearly that there had been what appeared to be a whole case of motor oil—yellow plastic bottles of motor oil—on a shelf over that workbench. Why?
It seemed inconceivable that someone who left trash lying three inches deep on his living room floor and who dumped garbage down the stairs into his basement rather than hauling it out to the street would turn out to be a shade tree mechanic who did his own periodic automotive maintenance on the side. If Richard Lowensdale couldn’t be bothered with scrubbing out his filthy toilet, he sure as hell wasn’t going to change his own oil.
With his heart beating hard in his chest, Gil left the Phillips screwdriver untouched in the drawer. On the surface this seemed like only the vaguest of hunches. It was hardly likely that Richard Lowensdale would have left anything of real value hiding in plain sight in his unlocked garage, but maybe he had. Gil was certain that the killer had searched for something all over the house without ever once venturing into that garage.
Chief Jackman’s dressing down still echoed in Gil’s consciousness. There was no way he was going to call in one of the uniformed officers to go check out his lead. If he was wrong and it came to nothing, then no one w
ould be the wiser. If that happened, Gil would come straight home and finish assembling his dresser.
If he was right, though, and if there was something to be found in Richard Lowensdale’s garage, Gil would see where that clue led him.
On the clock or off it, Detective Gilbert Morris was going back to work.
41
Salton City, California
On Sunday Mina sat at the kitchen table, drinking coffee, thinking about her life and listening to Mark’s booze-fueled snores, which echoed from the bedroom and filled the whole cabin. She had no idea what time he had come home. She had awakened only when he finally came into the bedroom and crawled into bed beside her. That’s when she had gotten up, gone outside, lit the fire in his precious barbecue grill, and burned up everything she had brought home from Grass Valley—the surgical booties, the blood-spattered clothing, and the Time Capsule. It was gone. By now the ashes should be almost cool enough to dump them out and bury in the beach’s fine loose sand.
She sat at the remains of their once-grand dining room table. In the past the table had graced the immense dining room in their home in La Jolla. Polished to a high gloss and with all its leaves extended, the table with its inlaid mother-of-pearl trim had easily accommodated a dozen guests under a magnificent chandelier. Now, without the leaves, it was hardly larger than a card table. It sat in this grim excuse for a kitchen with its once-fine finish marred by scars left behind by the occasional cup of hot coffee or even a cigarette burn or two.
Mina had always hated the cabin. When she and Mark had lived in La Jolla, she’d never wanted to join him on his monthly outings to this desolate place. It was too rustic, too remote, too much like the childhood home she remembered from long ago. She had always been happy to let Mark go off on his weekends of “roughing it,” because Mina knew too much about real roughing it. She didn’t need to pretend. Besides, between having some time alone in the luxury of her water-view La Jolla home or making do in the gritty rusticity of the Salton City cabin, there had been no contest, not for her now and certainly not back then when there had been a choice in the matter.