Left for Dead ar-7

by J. A. Jance

  Patty knew Jose and Teresa Reyes because she knew most everyone in town, but she was far less concerned about them than she was about Phil and Christine Tewksbury.

  “What can I do for you, Annie?” Patty asked, trying to maintain her focus and move the process along. She needed to get the customers out of the way so she could think.

  “My cousin in Fargo asked me to send her eight pints of my prickly pear jelly,” Annie replied. “She wants to give a jar to each of the members of her bridge club. Flat rate is the way to go, right?”

  “Medium or large?” Patty asked.

  “I don’t know,” Annie said. “What do you think would hold eight pints of jelly?”

  “Large, most likely,” Patty said. “You’ll want to put in plenty of packing. You don’t want jars of sticky jelly knocking together and getting broken.”

  Patty had to scramble down off her stool to go over to her box bin. That morning, when she’d been helping Jess do the mail load-in before running Phil’s route, Patty had discovered that Phil had squirreled away a dozen of the large flat-rate boxes in the back of his truck. No doubt someone on the route had asked for them, but since Patty’s inventory of flat-rate boxes was getting dangerously low, she’d dragged the boxes back inside. If someone on the route needed them, they’d have to come to the post office and pick them up.

  “Since this is where Phil works, it seems to me as though someone would have the simple courtesy to come tell you what’s going on,” Annie complained. “It’s not fair to leave you in the dark like this.”

  That was Patty’s opinion as well. Another twenty minutes crawled by. Patty collected box rent. She made arrangements for several return-receipt-requested items that were being sent to the IRS. She sold a roll of Forever stamps. When the phone rang behind her, she leaped off the stool and raced to answer it. Eunice Carson, Deputy Carson’s mother, was on the line.

  “When I saw they had Jimmy outside Phil and Christine Tewksbury’s house directing traffic, I couldn’t stand it any longer,” Eunice said breathlessly. “I had to go check. You’re not going to believe it. He told me Phil is dead. When they dragged Christine out of the house, she was screaming like a banshee.”

  Patty was glad she wasn’t standing on her stool when she heard the news. For a moment the room seemed to spin around her. “Phil is dead?” she repeated. “You mean like a heart attack or something? I know he went to see his doctor a few weeks ago, but according to him, it was just a routine physical. I didn’t think there was anything seriously wrong with him.”

  “Definitely not a heart attack,” Eunice said. “She evidently beat the crap out of him with a baseball bat.”

  “She who?” Patty asked.

  “Christine,” Eunice responded. “Who do you think? According to Jimmy, when he got there late this morning, she was sitting in a chair in the living room next to that godforsaken Christmas tree. The bloody bat was right there with her the whole time. She didn’t even bother trying to hide it. I can hardly get my head around the idea that those kinds of things can happen right here in Patagonia.”

  “Hello,” Shelley Witherspoon called to Patty from out front. “Is anybody there?”

  “Thanks for the call,” Patty said. She put down the phone and returned to the window.

  As soon as Shelley saw Patty’s ashen face, her jaw dropped. “Patty, you look terrible. Are you all right?”

  “I’m not feeling well,” Patty Patton said. “You’ll have to forgive me. I’m afraid I won’t be able to help you today.”

  For the first time in her entire career with the United States Postal Service, Patty Patton put the CLOSED sign in place and shut the window for the day shortly after noon. Taking her keys, purse, and lunch bag, she went out the back way and locked the door behind her. Jess hadn’t returned from running the route, but he’d be able to leave the mail truck inside the building’s lockable chain-link fence and drop the keys in through the mail slot.

  One of the things Patty had always loved about her job was the commute-a two-block walk along the edge of a busy highway. Today it seemed to take forever, and once she got home, she didn’t stay. Instead, she got in her aging Camaro, one her mother had bought new back in the seventies, and drove out to Phil’s house.

  There were half a dozen cop cars in evidence, including one she recognized as being Jimmy Carson’s squad car. Traffic cones had been set up, creating a temporary DO NOT CROSS barrier that Patty made no effort to enter. She parked her car well away from the cones. Before exiting the car, she grabbed a pack of cigarettes and a lighter out of her glove box. Yes, Patty was a smoker, but she didn’t want to be tempted into creating a smoking room outside the back door of her post office. So the cigarettes stayed in the car and the car stayed safely at home when she was working. This afternoon all bets were off.

  Wearing an orange traffic jacket, Jimmy stood in the middle of the small side road that led to the Tewksburys’ house, doing nothing while he waited to direct nonexistent traffic. “Hey, Ms. Patton,” he said when he saw her. “Sorry.”

  What does that mean? Patty wondered. Is he sorry to see me; sorry Phil’s dead; sorry he didn’t come back to give me the news?

  “Your mom called,” Patty said.

  Jimmy nodded. “I thought she would.”

  No doubt Jimmy had been instructed to keep his mouth shut, but Patty Patton had known him all his life, and she didn’t hesitate to play that card. “Is it true Phil is dead?”

  Jimmy nodded. “Yes, he is. The body’s already on its way to the morgue.”

  “What’s going on in there, then?” she asked, blowing smoke in the air and nodding in the direction of the house. Most of the activity seemed to center around the free-standing garage a short distance away from the Tewksburys’ kitchen door.

  “Crime scene investigation.”

  When Eunice had told Patty that Christine was responsible, Patty had assumed the deadly assault had played out inside the house. “You mean it happened inside the garage?” she asked.

  Deputy Carson sighed before he answered. “I shouldn’t be talking to you like this, Mrs. Patton, but yes, it happened inside the garage, and Christine has been taken into custody. When I came by this morning to check on Phil, the way you asked me, I rang the door and nobody answered. Since it was a welfare check, I let myself in, and there she was, sitting in the living room. I asked her if she knew where her husband was. There was a bat sitting on the floor next to her chair. She picked it up and told me to get out. So I did.

  “But on the way out, I decided to check the garage. I looked in the window and saw the tarp there on the floor with a pair of feet sticking out from under it. The door was locked, so I broke it open to check on Phil. He was already dead as a doornail, with his head bashed in. I immediately called for backup. When we went back into the house, Christine was sitting there, still holding the bat. I guess I’m damned lucky that she didn’t use it on me.”

  “I don’t believe it,” Patty declared.

  “I’m sorry,” Jimmy said. “Phil really is dead. He must have been dead for a couple of hours before I found him.”

  But Patty was looking at the distance between the back door to Phil’s house and the stand-alone garage. “I mean I don’t believe Christine did it,” she said. “According to Phil, she hasn’t set foot outside the house in years. He claimed she was agoraphobic-that the very idea of leaving the house caused panic attacks.”

  “I’d call it a rage attack, not a panic attack,” Jimmy observed. “She went off again a little while later when Sheriff Renteria showed up with the chief detective. One of the crime scene guys told me that the bat has something on it that looks like bits of blood and hair. They’ll have to examine it before they know for sure if what’s there belongs to Phil. Christine must’ve been ashamed, because she even covered the poor guy with a dropcloth before she finished him off.”

  Patty was sure this was Jimmy’s first homicide ever. He was visibly excited and talking way too much. She also
doubted that anything she said to him would be given much credence. “I want to talk to whoever is in charge of the investigation,” she said.

  “That’ll be Detective Zambrano,” Jimmy agreed. “But you’ll have to wait until he’s done in there.”

  “All right,” she said. “I’ll wait.”

  Finished with one cigarette, Patty lit another, then retreated to the Camaro and leaned against the back of the trunk to wait. Minutes later, a blue SUV-a fancy one Patty didn’t remember seeing before-pulled up to the barrier. When a tall blond woman got out and started toward the house, Jimmy rushed forward to head her off.

  “Sorry,” he said. “It’s a crime scene. You can’t go there.”

  “My name is Ali Reynolds. I’m looking for Sheriff Renteria. Someone has broken into the home of one of his deputies. I’m here to report it.”

  “He’s busy.”

  “Then I’ll wait.”

  “Okay,” Jimmy said, motioning toward Patty. “You and everybody else.”

  39

  1:30 P.M., Monday, April 12

  Tucson, Arizona

  Al Gutierrez didn’t know when he’d ever had a better day off. At the Border Patrol headquarters in Tucson, he and Detective Rush bypassed Sergeant Dobbs’s office and went directly upstairs. That was the location of the massive library where miles of temporary checkpoint security videos were transferred onto permanent DVDs and cataloged by date and location. Within twenty minutes, Al and Detective Rush were in a viewing room with one of the library techs, scanning through the videos recorded the previous Friday afternoon at the Three Points checkpoint.

  One vehicle after another passed without eliciting any interest. Most of the drivers and passengers were clearly Tohono O’odham, going and coming from one of the villages on the reservation, or elderly RV-driving snowbirds heading north after wintering in Arizona. Some were clearly ranch vehicles, a few of them pulling livestock trailers with and without livestock.

  “Wait,” Ariel Rush said. “Go back. Let’s take a closer look at that white van.”

  Al was pretty sure Detective Rush was quite capable of running the video monitor on her own, but Homeland Security rules meant that only a properly qualified technician was allowed to handle the DVDs and the controls.

  “Can you freeze those frames and expand them?” she asked the tech once the white van reappeared on the screen. “If possible, I want to get a look at the driver and the passenger as well as the license plates. And what’s the logo on the side?”

  Because the resolution was high enough to capture license plate information, the images offered a good deal of other information. The faces of both the driver and passenger were clearly visible. They were ordinary-looking guys who were waved through, traveling westbound, without any question. The logo on the driver’s door was easy to decipher: RUG RUNNERS OF SCOTTSDALE.

  A quick Google search on Ariel’s laptop showed lots of sites about runner rugs for hallways and entryways but no firm of that name anywhere in the country. A quick check of the license plate revealed that it had been stolen from a Lincoln Town Car parked in a long-term lot at Sky Harbor Airport sometime during the preceding week.

  On Friday afternoon the van with the switched-out plate had driven through the checkpoint westbound at 3:58 and returned eastbound at 5:02. On the second trip, the van was examined by a drug-sniffing dog before it was waved through.

  “If you’re driving westbound on Highway 86, how far could you go in half an hour?” Detective Rush asked.

  Al shrugged. “Not far,” he said. “You’d have to push it to get from there as far as Sells and back in that amount of time. There are a few ranch houses out that way in between, and some smaller Indian villages, but I can’t think of many places where someone would be buying an upscale rug. Most of the people I’ve met on the reservation are more likely to do their shopping at Home Depot or Target or Wal-Mart than they are in some arty kind of shop in Scottsdale.”

  “That sounds like racial profiling to me,” Ariel said.

  “It’s more like reality profiling,” Al said. “Those people don’t have buckets of cash hanging around.”

  They left the library with the requested images safely stored on Detective Rush’s computer.

  “Where to now?” Al asked.

  “Physicians Medical Center,” Rush said. “I want to see if we can keep Rose’s family from going public. We’ve got a potential survivor of a serial killer. I want to keep Rose Ventana alive.”

  Once outside the building, Detective Rush was back on her phone. “Okay,” she said to one of her cohorts in Phoenix, “I think I may have a line on the vehicle in the Chico Hernandez homicide. We need to check security tapes of all businesses in the area where the body was found. We’re looking for a white panel van. There’s a Rug Runner logo on it-at least there was on Friday, but I’m thinking it may be one of those magnetic signs that can be changed out in a minute. So look for a white van with any kind of logo; or no logo, for that matter. The plates that were on it were stolen, so the license number isn’t going to help us much, but I want you to put both the plate number and the sign information out on a BOLO. Right this minute those are the only tentative pieces we have on this puzzle, and we just might get lucky.”

  By the time she finished the call, they were back in Detective Rush’s patrol car and headed for the hospital.

  “Thanks,” Al said.

  “For what?”

  “For treating me like I have a brain.”

  “You have a brain, all right,” Detective Rush said. “And it’s because of your taking the initiative that we have a chance of solving this case.”

  “Sergeant Dobbs isn’t wild about any of his people taking the initiative.”

  “That’s his problem,” Detective Rush said. “One of his problems,” she added. “And before we’re finished, he may have several more.”

  “Sweet,” Al Gutierrez said as he buckled his seat belt. “It doesn’t get any better than that.”

  40

  2:30 P.M., Monday, April 12

  Patagonia, Arizona

  Settling in to wait, Ali studied the silent woman who stood next to an old red Camaro. From the pile of cigarette butts at her feet, she had obviously been here for some time, watching the police activity.

  “Friend of yours?” Ali asked, nodding toward the house across the street, where most of the activity seemed to center around a detached one-car garage.

  “Yes,” the woman said. “Name’s Phil Tewksbury. He was a coworker. Hell of a nice guy.”

  “I’m sorry,” Ali murmured.

  “Me, too. And who are you?” the woman asked. “Don’t think I’ve seen you around these parts before.”

  “My name is Ali Reynolds. I’m from Sedona. Jose Reyes is a friend of mine. I came down to help after I heard what happened to him. He’s in Physicians Medical Center, and now so is his wife. She had her baby.”

  “I’m Patty Patton,” the woman said. “I run the post office. So what’d Teresa have, a boy or a girl?”

  “A boy. Carmine’s a few weeks early, but he’s fine, and so is his mother.”

  “How about Jose?”

  “Better,” Ali said. “At least he’s out of the ICU. That’s a big improvement.”

  “Tough for Teresa, though,” Patty said. “New baby. Sick husband. I overheard you say something about a break-in. Not their house, I hope.”

  “It was their house. And it’s not just a break-in. Someone went to a lot of trouble to mess up everything within reach.”

  “Jerks,” Patty said. “When it’s time to put together a cleanup crew, you let me know. I’ll put up an announcement on the bulletin board at the post office.”

  Ali smiled inwardly to realize that she had stumbled into a place where the post office was still more important than Facebook.

  A man in a law enforcement uniform emerged from the garage. As soon as he put a white Stetson on his head and headed for one of the parked cars, Ali figured he was
most likely Sheriff Renteria. Leaving Patty Patton behind, Ali hurried to catch up with him. “Excuse me,” she said. “Sheriff Renteria?”

  He stopped, turned, and removed the hat. “Yes?” he said. “What can I do for you?”

  “My name is Ali Reynolds,” she said. “I’m a friend of Jose Reyes. Are you aware that someone broke into their house?”

  “You’ll have to forgive me,” he said. “We’ve been a little busy around here today. I am aware of the break-in. Since there were no injuries, I determined that it wasn’t urgent. I’ve only now been able to spare a deputy long enough to send one out there. He’s probably there by now.”

  “It is urgent,” Ali objected. “What’s going to happen to the family? Jose is seriously injured. Teresa just underwent a C-section. They’ll be coming home with three kids, including a new baby, to a house that is virtually uninhabitable.”

  “Unfortunate, of course,” Renteria said. “And I and my department will do everything in our power to find the people responsible and bring them to justice.”

  “Sure you will,” Ali said. “And will the people doing the investigating be the same people you’ve forbidden to visit Jose’s hospital room?”

  Sheriff Renteria looked pained. “I’m not sure where you’re getting your information, but you’re right. I did issue an order telling my people, sworn officers and civilians both, to stay away from PMC. This is a part of the country where dealing with Mexican drug cartels is a way of life. I have a very small department. I warned my people to stay away because I didn’t want to put them at risk. For people like that, groups of cops can be an inviting target. We’re already struggling to fill shifts and answer calls when we’re just one officer down. If we ended up losing a couple more, it would be devastating.”

  “But not supporting an injured officer-”

  “I’m sorry you disagree with my take on the situation,” Sheriff Renteria said, “but you’re evidently not from around here. I doubt you understand.”