She opened the door and barked, “Deputy!”
The time was 7:58 p.m.
THE BOBCAT whose gaze Gordon had encountered did not appear to have died peacefully. It was several seconds before Gordon could take his eyes off the animal and look around the room. What he saw was a bestiary of sorts. The head of an eight-point buck hung on one wall. A hawk, wings fully spread, was mounted on a stand. A three-foot-long rattlesnake, fully coiled, sat on a tabletop.
And Gordon flashed back to what Bob had said a week ago as they were leaving for Blue Moon Ranch:
“If you ever catch a fish you don’t want to release, bring it to John Armstrong and he’ll stuff it for you. He does a bit of taxidermy on the side, and his rates are very reasonable.”
After all the buildup, after risking jail for committing a burglary, Gordon had discovered not a dungeon, not a torture chamber, but a man’s home business. He felt unbearably foolish.
Exhaling, he looked around the room more carefully. There were two large tables, with what looked to be implements of the taxidermist’s trade neatly atop them. There were a couple of animal heads and a handsome Brown Trout on the wall at the left. It all seemed perfectly normal.
And then he saw, along the back wall, a curious object. It seemed to be a container of some sort, about six feet long, with a curved top, resting on three sets of legs and wheels about three feet off the ground. It looked like an elongated, covered barbecue.
Or a coffin, he thought.
Having come this far, he decided he might as well check it out. He walked carefully across the cluttered room, taking care not to bump into anything, and stood in front of the container. It had a gauge of some sort on the right side, was connected to a plug that was in an outlet on the wall, and had two handles on its curved lid. He put his hands on the two handles and held them there several seconds.
“It’s probably nothing,” he told himself before lifting up.
Lying on her back, looking up at him was a young woman, about 18 to 20 years old. She was naked and had a tan line on one of her fingers. She looked real, but not quite real, and it took Gordon several seconds to realize why. She had the same stylized look as the other animals in the room, and had obviously gone through the same process they had.
Acting on instinct and reflex, he slammed down the doors, making what seemed like a thunderous noise. At the same time, he grabbed his throat and bent over in an attempt to keep down his nausea. It worked, and after about a minute, he stood up and reached into his pants pocket for his phone.
“I wouldn’t do that, if I were you,” said a man’s voice behind him. “Now put your hands on top of your head and turn around slowly.”
He did as directed, and saw Armstrong, in uniform, pointing a gun at him. Behind Armstrong, the clock on the wall showed the time as 8:03 p.m.
ELIZABETH WAS TAKING ADVANTAGE of our rendezvous to pump me for more information about Gordon. She was doing it pleasantly enough, but my heart wasn’t really into it. I tried my best not to show it, but I was worried about him.
Finally, I tried a diversion.
“You realize,” I said, “that Gordon is really into basketball. He played it well himself, and he still goes to a lot of games. Any woman who’s serious about him is going to have to like basketball a lot — or at least learn to put up with it.”
She took a sip of wine and smiled.
“Not a problem, Sam. I haven’t told you — in fact, I haven’t told Gordon yet because I haven’t figured out how to bring it up properly — but I love basketball. I was Illinois all-state and went to the University of Iowa on a basketball scholarship. The game is in my blood.”
My head was spinning. Gordon has no idea what he’s getting himself into, and I hardly knew what to make of it myself. Out of nervousness, I looked at my watch.
“Do you have to go somewhere, Sam?”
“No, no. Sorry. I didn’t mean to be rude. It’s just that Gordon should be coming back pretty soon.”
“You don’t think he’s in any danger, do you?”
“I’m sure he’s fine,” I said with a straight face. My watch, when I had looked, showed the time as 8:04 p.m.
“THAT’S TIFFANY,” Armstrong said. “She’s just about ready now.”
“You, you had her stuffed,” Gordon said.
“Not stuffed, Gordon. That’s ancient history. Freeze-dried, according to all modern specifications. You get a better result that way. I don’t have much time to talk, but I want you where you can’t make any sudden move. Lie down on the floor, on your back, with your hands clasped behind your head.”
Gordon had no choice but to comply.
“I thought you were working tonight,” he said after assuming the totally defenseless position.
“I am, but I clocked out early for dinner. You see, I’ve told my neighbors that if they ever see someone suspicious around my house, they should immediately call me on my cell phone. One of them just did. You weren’t careful enough.”
“But the sheriff must be coming, then.”
Armstrong shook his head. “I told them to call me, not the sheriff. In a couple of minutes, when you’re bleeding out, I’ll go over and tell the neighbor that whoever it was must have gotten away, but thanks for calling me.”
“Bleeding out?”
“I haven’t had a chance to practice on a man yet, so in one way, it’s good you came around. I even have a freeze-dry container ready for you. It was going to be for Jessica, but she misbehaved. Bitch. The one thing I never wanted to do was leave an actual body that could be found.”
“You’re not serious?”
“Oh, I couldn’t be more serious. But I want to keep as much of you in good shape as possible, so I’ll be shooting you in the lower abdomen. It’ll take you a while to bleed to death, and it’ll hurt like hell, but at least I’ll be here to keep you company.”
Gordon started to tell Armstrong that the sheriff was onto him, but stopped himself. It might give Armstrong an advantage in terms of cleaning up evidence, and it wouldn’t help with the situation at hand. Gordon knew that he was looking death in the eye, and that the only consolation was that after killing him, Armstrong would soon be caught.
“How tall are you?” Armstrong asked.
“Six-four,” Gordon said in a puzzled voice.
“Hmm. The container’s only six feet long. I might have to cut your feet off to fit you in. But don’t worry. I’ll do it after you’re dead. I don’t want to hurt anyone unnecessarily.”
Between the sheer terror of the situation and the mindset of the killer, Gordon was in a state of shock. He could think of nothing to say.
“I’ve only got an hour for dinner, so we have to get a move on. I’ll give you 15 seconds to say a little prayer before I shoot. And don’t worry if you forget to pray for something. You’ll be conscious for a while before you go and can do add-ons.” He looked at his watch. “Starting … now!”
Gordon closed his eyes. A jumble of unrelated thoughts were running through his head. He knew he was about to die, and he couldn’t still his mind enough to let it happen peacefully.
The shot came sooner than expected, and he flinched. He was also angry, because he wanted to be looking Armstrong in the eye when he pulled the trigger. Perhaps it was the anger that kept him from realizing, for several seconds, that he had felt no pain and had heard a slight thump after the shot.
He opened his eyes and saw Chris Huntley, standing where Armstrong had been, a pistol in her hand.
He sat up and saw Armstrong lying on the floor, utterly motionless. The back of Armstrong’s head was turned slightly toward Gordon, and he could see a bullet hole at the base of Armstrong’s neck. He looked up at Chris.
“How …?”
“I found out from Sam that you were here, and then I heard on the police radio that Armstrong was in Alta Mira and clocking out for dinner. And since I had to talk to him anyway, I decided to come over and see if I could catch him having dinner at his house
.”
Gordon just looked at her.
“That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it. Instead, I found this, and, well …”
“Thank you,” Gordon said. “Thank you from the bottom of my heart. But, you must have come up behind him and had him dead to rights. Couldn’t you have just told him to drop the gun instead of shooting him?”
Chris set her pistol on a nearby table and looked back at Gordon.
“Silly me,” she said. “I didn’t think of that.”
Interlude: Thursday March 19, 1998
(From the Plateau Courier)
KYLE BURNETT, 18, all-state quarterback for the Alta Mira High School Eagles, pleaded no contest Tuesday in Plateau County Superior Court to a single misdemeanor count of statutory rape.
The unexpected plea brought an end to an investigation that has been the talk of the county since last November, when a cheerleader at the school alleged that he had gotten her drunk and raped her at a party.
Superior Court Judge Susan Jackson split the difference at sentencing. She rejected the prosecution’s plea to require Burnett to register as a sex offender, saying it was too severe a penalty for a first-time offender in a disputed case.
But she also rejected defense attorney Owen Waterman’s appeal for no jail time for Burnett. He was sentenced to 30 days at the county prison farm, to be served on weekends, and placed on probation for three years.
Judge Jackson also scheduled a hearing for Burnett in Family Court on April 6 to determine the amount of child support he will be required to pay.
On the courthouse steps following the hearing, Burnett’s father, Lance Burnett, angrily denounced the proceeding.
“This case was a witch hunt, a farce, and a travesty of justice,” he said, ignoring the attempts of his son’s attorney to quiet him. “There’s been an abuse of power here, and the sheriff and district attorney will pay for it at the polls in June.”
Asked how the district attorney would pay at the polls in June when Deputy DA Diane Brinkley is running unopposed for the top spot, Burnett said, “There’s still plenty of time to get a write-in campaign going.”
Brinkley, who handled the case from the beginning of the investigation to its conclusion, saw matters otherwise.
“Mr. Burnett is very fortunate to have gotten off as easily as he did,” she said. “From the beginning of the investigation, he lied about having sex with the victim, despite strong evidence. Only when she found she was pregnant, and DNA tests proved he was the father, did he change his story and claim he and she had consensual sex after school several days earlier.
“What’s more,” she continued, “he stood by that blatant lie, even though she had been at cheerleader practice until 5 p.m. that day and had been driven straight home by another member of the cheerleading squad.
“I don’t know which is worse — what he did, or his non-stop lying about it. The only reason he didn’t face felony charges was because of the victim’s desire to get the matter behind her and move on.”
The case first came to the attention of local authorities following a Nov. 1 party at the home of a prominent local resident, where numerous members of the football team were present. Reports have indicated that no adults were in the home at the time.
The girl who made the charge said that Burnett had urged liquor on her and given her several unusually strong drinks, which she didn’t realize, due to her lack of experience with alcohol, were as strong as they were.
At one point, she passed out and was carried to a bedroom, where she claimed Burnett later came in and raped her.
The story made the rounds of the local rumor mill for nearly two weeks before the sheriff’s office served a warrant on the home where the party was held and confiscated a video camera. The video has not been made public, and will not be under terms of the plea agreement, but reports from reliable sources indicate it corroborated at least part of the girl’s story.
Because the girl was 17 at the time of the incident, any sex act with her, consensual or not, would qualify as statutory rape under California law. The law is rarely invoked in cases of consensual sex involving a teenager.
Following the seizure of the video, Alta Mira Head Football Coach Lloyd Geiser dismissed Burnett and a 17-year-old wide receiver from the team just before Alta Mira’s playoff game against Aspen Valley Nov. 14. The coach declined to comment on the Courier’s question as to whether he had seen the video.
Deputy DA Brinkley said the full investigation showed the juvenile wide receiver had been guilty of “very poor judgment,” but that there was insufficient evidence to prosecute him for any crime.
Burnett will report to the prison farm to begin serving his term next Friday, March 27. By checking in Friday afternoons and leaving after dinner Sunday, he will get credit for three days served each weekend and should complete his sentence the last weekend of May, just in time for his graduation from Alta Mira High Friday June 5.
Epilogue: Tuesday June 2, 1998
“I GRANT YOU IT WAS A LAME CHARGE under the circumstances,” Diane Brinkley said to Gordon, “but I’ll defend it as making the best of a bad situation. The victim was reluctant to testify and the evidence for forcible rape lacked a smoking gun. On statutory rape, we had Burnett dead to rights, and it got the case on the public record. That was something, at least.”
They were sitting on the courthouse steps a bit after eight o’clock. The high temperature had been 88, and the sun, in a cloudless sky, was dropping closer to the tops of the mountains to the west. Cars were beginning to pull up to the courthouse for the traditional counting of votes in the local election.
“Do you think he learned his lesson?” Gordon finally said.
“Not at all. I really wanted him to have to register as a sex offender, so that would at least be on the record while he’s in college. But Waterman refused to do a plea bargain with that provision or with jail time. We finally agreed that he would plead, and we would leave those issues for the judge to decide. I won one and lost one, and the one I lost was the one I really wanted. You never know what the judge is going to do.”
“I grew up with one in the house.”
“We knew Alicia was pregnant by the end of December, but it took more than two months to get a plea. Waterman tried to suppress the video and the DNA test and lost in both cases. Plus, I had to deal with the grand jury investigation into Armstrong’s shooting. That took a long time.”
“Thank you for not calling me as a witness.”
“It was touch and go for a while. There was one grand juror who really wanted to indict you for burglary, and who was all over me for not prosecuting you. Finally, when he went on one of his rants, another juror turned to him and said, ‘Let it go, Larry. The man was a friend of Bob’s and he meant well, and no one got hurt.’ I could see the other jurors were nodding, so I called for a vote, and it was 10-2 not to indict you.”
“And Chris got a clean bill of health.”
“Not only that — a commendation for bravery. Her race against Howard is going to be pretty close, and if she wins, it’ll probably be because she shot Armstrong. When they found the other two bodies in the small room off the basement, the general sentiment was gratitude that she saved the county the cost of a trial or the embarrassment of a lynching.”
“So it’s over?”
“For us. It’ll never be over for the families of Armstrong’s victims. And it’ll probably never be over for Alicia.”
FOR AS LONG AS ANYONE CAN REMEMBER, it has been the custom in Plateau County for candidates and their supporters to come to the basement of the courthouse on election night. A large blackboard had been set up in a corner with local races printed on it. Chris and Howard were running for sheriff; a woman named Cummings was facing a man named Scribner for Boyd Winnett’s supervisorial seat, and Diane Brinkley and one of the two female county supervisors were running unopposed.
At 8:30, a courier from the Elections Department came into the cafeteria and handed a
folded sheet of paper to a fortyish woman standing by the blackboard. The woman opened the paper and began writing numbers after the names on the board. The first result was:
Honig: 523
Huntley: 479
Nearly everyone in the room applauded.
“That looks good for Chris,” Diane said. “These are the absentee ballots, and they tend to be older, more conservative voters. I figured if Chris could hold him to 55 percent or less on the absentees, she’d have a real good shot. He got 52 percent.”
“I don’t see her around,” Gordon said.
“She’s waiting upstairs. She won’t be coming down until either all the votes are counted or the result is clear.”
“Then will you excuse me for a while? I see some familiar faces, and I’d like to say hello.”
Diane smiled and nodded. Gordon saw Howard on the other side of the cafeteria and decided to start with him. He was standing with two older deputies and a half-dozen friends. He spotted Gordon walking up and extended his hand.
“Gordon. Long time, no see.”
“I could say the same.”
Howard looked around the room, taking it all in.
“Soak it up,” he said to Gordon. “You may be witnessing the end of an era.”
“You mean …?”
“In the Sheriff’s Department if Huntley wins, for sure. But I’m thinking of this,” he waved his hand around the rooms.
“I’m sorry.”
“Next month at budget hearings, the Elections Department is asking for new computers that will let them put election results on the internet. You won’t have to leave the comfort of your home to find out what’s happening, and no one will be coming to the courthouse anymore.”
“That would be too bad.”
“You really think so? I mean, I do, but I’m a dinosaur. I’ve been coming to the courthouse for election night for 40 years. The first time was in 1958, when I was 16. Plateau County voted Democrat for governor and senator that year. This year, it’ll go Republican. Stick around 40 years, it could go the other way again. But the community will be broken up on election night.”
The Daughters Of Alta Mira (Quill Gordon Mystery Book 4) Page 27