He thought a second and replied, “Sam was the guy who seemed the least upset by the death. He wanted to get the interview over with so that he didn’t miss work. He thought the murder might be connected to some girl that Otto was screwing, but he couldn’t name anyone.”
He continued, “Will was a guy I’d given a warning ticket to a few weeks earlier. He’s a rich kid who drives a BMW at about twice the legal speed limit. He has a Massachusetts driver’s license and car tag. I told him he needed to go down to Flagstaff and get an Arizona license and tag if he was living and working here. Anyway, that morning, he was all red-eyed from crying. I understand that he and Otto were good buddies, but I thought he was the most likely of the three roommates to be connected to the crime. He’s a rich New England brat that might not have gotten the girl he wanted and then killed his buddy over it, like that Kennedy relative.”
Craig Callison didn’t seem to pay much attention to the details of cases in the news. He also didn’t pay much more attention to cases he was investigating. I asked, “And what about Billy Blackstone?”
Callison smiled for the first time. He said, “Yes I remember him. He was the little turd that had marijuana stashed in his dresser. The creep talked like one of those garbage mouth characters on MTV. Little Billy Blackstone pleaded with me not to bust him, and I let him flush the stuff down the john in return for telling me everything he knew about the crime. It was less than an ounce, just a misdemeanor. Unfortunately, he didn’t know shit. My guess is that it was a tourist who killed Otto, unless it was that rich kid Will.”
“So you found no good leads or a definite suspect?” I said.
“Hell man, do you know how may tourists pass through here. If Sam was correct about the murder being connected to a woman, it could be her husband who killed him. These tourists move on quickly and there are thousands of couples that pass through every day. No one could even give me a first name of any recent hottie, so I had nowhere to look.”
“Craig, tell me about the condition of the door lock,” I asked.
There was surprise in Craig Callison’s eyes. He hadn’t thought about the door. He replied, “The door was open when I got there. I didn’t see anything strange about it.”
“It has a pneumatic closing device. It closes and locks automatically unless it’s propped open.” I watched his face as I mentioned the lock. He was surprised.
“I think there was a chair holding it open. I don’t know anything about the door.”
“The medical examiner said that she thought that the hammer hitting Jim Otto’s skull would be about as loud as a hard hit by a hammer on a piece of wood. Yet, no one heard it. Did you ask why?” I said.
Callison was embarrassed in front of his boss. He was pissed again. He said, “I guess they were all drunk or high on drugs.”
I changed the subject to relieve some of the tension. “Craig, please tell me everything you remember about your investigation of Margo Jordan.”
Callison explained, “I was on duty when I got another call from Amy Ziegler. She told me they had found a woman dead in a room at the Maswik Lodge. I drove to the room and found a middle-aged woman dressed in her nightgown who had died several hours earlier. The body was under the sheet and a blanket and resting on its side. The deceased woman appeared to have fallen asleep and never awakened. There was no sign of trauma, defensive wounds, or forced entry. Christ man, the lady just died of natural causes, not from some sinister nerve toxin.”
He was probably correct, but she certainly looked like the other women. I asked, “Who else was present at Mrs. Jordan’s room during your investigation?”
“There was a Hispanic maid named Maria something or other, two young guys from maintenance who had cut the chain on the door, and Amy Ziegler.”
“Craig, did you take fingerprints at either the Maswik Lodge room or Jim Otto’s room?” I asked.
“No. There’s no point in taking fingerprints in natural death, and the crime scene crew was too busy to come up from Flagstaff for Jim Otto’s death.”
Craig Callison was lying. While the county’s technicians couldn’t take fingerprints from every crime scene, they would always find time to process a homicide scene. Not printing Margo Jordan’s room was logical, but skipping fingerprints at Jim Otto’s room was not. Next to me I could feel Doug Redman squirming. He knew that Callison was lying.
I asked, as if I hadn’t noticed the falsehood in his previous statement, “What were the names of the guys from maintenance who were present?”
Craig Callison’s face was turning red again. “Hell Mike, I don’t know. They were just young men who opened the door when the maid couldn’t get in. There’s probably a record of who was working the Maswik that day. One was English and one was black.”
I had been asking so many questions that Callison had hardly touched his 16-ounce sirloin. I finished off the last bite of my much smaller steak. I asked Callison, “How long have you worked at the Grand Canyon office, Craig?”
His expression revealed that he was insulted by the question. Callison replied, “Bout a year. Before that I was a police officer in Ft. Worth for eight years.”
I said with a smile, “Traffic cop?”
He glared at me and started eating his steak without making a reply. I knew I’d hit the mark. This officer knew next to nothing about criminal investigations. Doug Redman tried to make conversation during the rest of our meal. I paid the check and sat at the table drinking coffee after Craig and Doug left. I could see Doug gesturing and yelling at Craig as they got into his Explorer. Craig Callison had embarrassed the Grand Canyon office in front of the manager of the Sedona office. I suspected that Craig Callison would be back on traffic duty by this afternoon.
I called Chad Archer in Sedona to add to the list of suspects he was researching. “Hi Chad, I have another very sensitive request.”
He responded jovially, “Are you going to get us both into trouble partner?”
“Maybe. I want you to do a full record search on Coconino County Deputy Sheriff Craig Callison. I don’t want anyone in Flagstaff or especially here at the Grand Canyon to know anything about it.”
“You could certainly get us into hot water with our colleagues up there, but it should be fun to figure out how to do it without leaving a trace. Do you care to share the reason for your curiosity about Deputy Callison?”
“I just had lunch with Deputy Callison,” I said. “He lied to me several times about the cases he’s been investigating. He told me that the crime scene technicians were too busy to run fingerprints and research the evidence at the Jim Otto murder crime scene.”
Chad responded, “That’s bullshit.”
“He also told me that he discovered that one of Otto’s roommates, Billy Blackstone, had marijuana in his room. It was less than an ounce, and Callison made Billy flush it down the toilet.”
“Was that suspicious?” Chad said.
“These dorm rooms don’t have private baths. You’d have to go down the hall to a busy shared bath carrying the stuff. Also, Alan Markley found a similar amount of weed still in Billy’s dresser drawer. It could be true, and Billy just replenished his supply, but the story didn’t ring true to me. Craig Callison has been here about a year. Previously he was with the Fort Worth Police Department. His work on these cases is very sloppy; maybe too sloppy to be an accident.”
CHAPTER 18
I decided to drive to El Tovar and see if I could check in. On the way I called my administrative assistant Rose Rios to see if she had any messages for me at the Sedona office. Rose answered and wisecracked, “How’s your vacation at El Tovar going?”
I said with a smile, “Rose, you know I’m working myself to exhaustion. Yesterday, I had to hike for miles just to see the probable crime scenes.”
After taking some phone numbers for calls I needed to return, I asked, “Rose, I need you to check something for me. I want to know if Will Blake, that’s William Randolph Collins Blake III of Boston, has receive
d any tickets while he’s been in Arizona. He drives a BMW Z3 Roadster.”
“That’s easy, I can check while you’re on the phone.”
Rose was a master of her computer terminal and knew how to retrieve all sorts of information. I continued, “Rose, I also want you to track down the current location of a thirty pound sandstone rock that killed a German lady named Helga Günter. She died two weeks ago here at the Grand Canyon. I think the rock will be at the Flagstaff office. I want it checked for possible prints and DNA evidence at the State Crime Lab in Phoenix.”
She replied, “Will do boss.”
I continued, “You can probably track down the memory chip from a digital camera that belonged to Peggy Marshall. She died in a fall from the Rim Trail on Wednesday. The camera is probably smashed, but we might still be able to develop the photos stored in memory. If you can find it, have prints delivered to me at El Tovar. You can have someone e-mail the digital images to the Grand Canyon office and ask them to print them and deliver them.”
“Will do. I have a friend who works up there who’d be glad to print them for you. Boss, there have been no driving or parking citations issued to Will Blake in the past year here. He has a clean record in Arizona, however he has six tickets and a suspended driver’s license in Massachusetts.”
Will Blake would not have been able to get an Arizona driver’s license with that suspension in Massachusetts, and Deputy Craig Callison should have discovered that little problem when he stopped Will Blake for speeding. I wondered again if the guy was just incompetent of if there was something more sinister going on.
I thanked Rose and drove to the hotel. I parked in the lot at the Bright Angel Lodge and carried my bag with me as I walked along the Rim. It was a beautiful afternoon. The temperature was about 70 and the sky was clear over the South Rim. I could see the storm clouds forming over the North Rim across the Canyon. There were hundreds of tourists enjoying the view, but the crowd was much smaller than would be here tomorrow. A Saturday in June was bound to be very busy.
At El Tovar, a young lady named Kristen assisted me in checking into a second floor room. I didn’t recognize any of the three young desk clerks on duty. Something tugged at the back of my mind. I’d spoken with Jason McKinney on Wednesday when I first inquired about a room, however when I interviewed Jason, he’d indicated that he worked from 10:00 at night until 5:00 in the morning.
I asked Kristen, “Do you know a guy named Jason McKinney?”
She smiled warmly, “Oh yes. He’s the hunk from Australia. I wish I knew him better. Do you know him?”
“We’ve met. He seems like a nice young man. When is he on duty?”
“Unless he’s traded off with someone, he should be at work about 10:00 this evening. He’s probably asleep now,” she said.
I nodded and took my key. As I was turning away Kristen said, “Mr. Damson, there was a package left for you. Would you like it now.”
It was a thick brown envelope with the return address of the Park Superintendent. I waited until I was in my room to open it. Superintendent Harmon had provided duplicate copies of the information that he’d e-mailed to Chad. It was an alphabetical listing of all the Fred Harvey Company employees and the hours worked each week for the past six months. I hoped the list would narrow the hundreds of potential suspects. It was too much paper to do much with by hand. Chad could sort it easily on the computer. I might have a target list by morning.
In addition, the package contained drawings of each floor of the Colter House, with the name’s of the current occupants listed for each room. I was most interested in the Colter House employees because of the death of Jim Otto. Someone who was unfamiliar with the Colter House wouldn’t have known in which room and in which bed to find Jim Otto, but his murderer knew exactly where the young man would be sleeping. The third item in the stack was a list of all the former occupants of the room where Jim Otto had been murdered. I did not recognize any of the names.
This was the slow grunt work of investigation, but I wanted to get started. I didn’t have the patience to just wait for Chad to produce his list tomorrow. I spread out the papers on the bed, pulling the days that Helga Günter, Rachel Stein, Mary Jane Corliss, and Peggy Marshall had died. I also pulled the murder dates for Jim Otto and Margo Jordan, but since they both had died sometime during the middle of the night, I didn’t expect their times of death to eliminate many potential suspects.
If these deaths were the work of a serial killer, the victims had to come to the murderer’s attention in some manner. That was why I had focused on employees who have regular contact with the public, especially waiters. My plan was to manually check the people that I’d interviewed the previous day.
I started with Billy Blackstone, the pothead extreme sports roommate. He normally worked breakfast and lunch. Helga Günter and Mary Jane Corliss had died at sunset. The death of Helga Günter was especially important because it would eliminate anyone who worked the dinner shift. She died deep in the Canyon. It was not a murder that could be committed during a fifteen-minute break from the job. Billy had worked the breakfast service the mornings that Peggy Marshall and Rachel Stein had died near dawn. Billy had not been working dinner shifts when Helga Günter and Mary Jane Corliss had died near sunset. He was certainly going to be high on the suspect list. Since breakfast service at El Tovar started well after the 5:00 sunrise in May and June here in Arizona, the breakfast shifts only indicated that Billy was up and getting ready for work. They didn’t provide an alibi.
Will Blake, the wealthy Bostonian roommate, normally worked lunch and dinner. The records indicated that he’d been at work when Mary Jane Corliss had died, but he’d had the day off and claimed that he went to Flagstaff the day that Helga Günter died. He was available for three of the four deaths. Will Blake was slightly lower on the list than his roommate Billy. How did he avoid that ticket for speeding when he had no valid driver’s license? Did he have some contact with Jim Otto’s girlfriend who was also from Boston?
Oliver Cavanaugh, the middle-aged man who waited on Peggy Marshall at her last meal, always worked the lunch and evening shifts because of his seniority. He had an alibi for both the time of death for both Helga Günter and Mary Jane Corliss. In addition, since he lived down in Williams, he was much less likely to know how to find the bed in which Jim Otto was sleeping the night of his death. I dropped him to the bottom of the list.
Sam Gilbert, the Mormon weight lifter roommate, jumped to the top of my list when I found he worked the breakfast and lunch shift on the date of each of the deaths. He had no alibis, and I was still very skeptical of his claim to have slept through the death of Jim Otto. Sam was the only sober guy in the room. If he were really the straight arrow that he pretended to be, why would he lie about hearing something the night of Jim Otto’s murder? I was also suspicious of his motives for moving down to Phantom Ranch, and I still had no explanation for his premature return from the Ukraine before his normal Mormon mission was over. Did he get into serious trouble there? Were there unexplained deaths of middle-aged, dark-haired, blue-eyed women there? I had met a couple of men who were senior agents for Interpol during a recent case in Santa Fe. Maybe one of them could find out something about Sam Gilbert’s reasons for leaving the Ukraine early. The time difference made it difficult to contact an Interpol friend until tomorrow. Sam Gilbert had opportunity, but did he have motive? I needed to find out. Sam went to the top of my list.
I had interviewed one person who wasn’t a waiter at El Tovar, but who had a lot of contact with the public. Jason McKinney was the young Australian who spoke with Peggy Marshall on her final morning. He worked a shift that made him available for the sunset deaths of Helga Günter and Mary Jane Corliss but not for the deaths of Peggy Marshall and Rachel Stein who died slightly before he got off work at 5:00 AM. In addition, the records indicated that he was working the night Jim Otto was murdered. That was the only death that was unquestionably a murder in the group. I put the personable young
Australian near the bottom of the list. He would have known where Jim Otto was sleeping, and he had substantial public contact and might have met other victims besides Peggy Marshall. Because Jason seemed to have alibis for several of the deaths, I put him low on my list.
There was no clear evidence that the death of Margo Jordan in her room at the Maswik Lodge was connected to the other crimes. I didn’t include her death in my suspect analysis. However, I did note that no one on my list had an alibi for her death since Jason McKinney, who normally worked all night, was off the night Margo Jordan had died.
I sat back in my chair and pondered how to proceed. I called Amy Ziegler to ask for her help in getting some additional information from the managers of El Tovar.
Amy answered in a serious tone, “Senior Ranger Ziegler, how may I help you?”
“Hi Amy. This is Mike with another request for help. You’ll soon get tired of me.”
Her voice was pleasant. “Not at all Mike. I’ll help any way I can.”
“I need some more information from the El Tovar records. If these deaths are serial killings, I need to determine how these women came to the attention of the murderer. The women were here at the Grand Canyon for very short periods before they died. I’d like to see anything that the Fred Harvey Company has that would let me trace their movements. For example, we know that Peggy Marshall had dinner at the El Tovar Dining Room and signed to charge it to her hotel room. Did the other women also have a meal there? Did they shop at the same gift shop using a credit card? Really, I’m looking for any records of their movements once they arrived.”
“You’ll have it by tomorrow morning,” she said.
While we were talking, I’d looked across the room at the door and noticed something. A foot above the doorknob was the same type of night chain used in the room at the Maswik Lodge where Margo Jordan had died. After the call, I decided to try an experiment. I took a thread from the small sewing kit provided by the hotel. I looped it through the brass fixture on the door into which the chain is put to lock the door for the night. I then looped the thread around the head of the chain. I discovered that by carefully pulling the thread, I could engage the chain lock and then pull the thread out before completely closing the door. Even though I did it from inside the room, I’d proven that it was possible to leave a room and lock the chain before closing the door completely. I didn’t know if it had happened, but it could have.
The Murders at El Tovar Page 10