Clawback (22 page)

“This is about what happened to Dan and Millie Frazier?” the owner, Martha Brown, asked in response to Cami's bogus insurance claim introduction.

Cami nodded. “A strange vehicle, a pickup, was supposedly spotted near the crime scene,” she explained. “I notice you have several security cameras aimed toward the street. It's possible one of them might have captured an image of the truck either coming or going.”

“I heard about the murders,” Martha said, “and I knew Millie well. If looking at my security footage will help catch the guy who did it, you're more than welcome. Come in and make yourself at home. The monitor's back in the office. You can work there if you like. Would you care for some coffee?”

“Thanks,” Cami said. “I'm fine.”

Within ten minutes of fast-forwarding through the footage, Cami located the first images of what turned out to be several pickup trucks. The one Cami thought most promising was one that had passed the B & B going southbound at 10:01 a.m. That would be time enough for the vehicle to have driven away from the Fraziers' place while Bob was still on the 911 call inside either the house or garage.

The image wasn't the best. The grainy views of the license plates left a lot to be desired, but Cami thought she saw at least two blurry passengers inside the vehicle.

After downloading the material into her own computer, Cami called Stuart.

“Hey,” he said when he answered. “Where'd you go? I thought you were going out for doughnuts or something. You've been gone a long time.”

Cami was gratified to hear that Stu had at least noticed she was gone.

“I've actually been tracking the landscape truck from the crime scene,” she said. “And I've gotten a bead on it.”

“Really? Where?”

“On security camera footage from the Apple Tree B & B on Jordan. I just sent you several clips. The resolution on this monitor is crap. I'm hoping you'll be able to enhance it.”

“I'll get right on it, and I'll institute some traffic cam searches, too. On your way back, though, do pick up some doughnuts.”

Someone with more people skills might have told her “Great work,” but compliments weren't part of Stuart Ramey's skill set, and Cami didn't fault him for it.

“Don't expect those doughnuts anytime soon,” she warned him. “I want to go through some earlier footage to see if I can find out when they arrived.”

As she finished the sentence, Cami realized that Stuart was long gone. The man may have been big on doughnuts, but he was useless when it came to hanging around for something he regarded as unnecessary chitchat.

H
omecide detective Dave Holman was in his car headed for Prescott for a routine briefing when the call came in. A private pilot had reported spotting what she thought were two bodies in a gravel pit north of the 303. The location was at the far south end of Yavapai County, but since it was outside any posted city limit, that made whatever it was his department's problem rather than anyone else's.

A single uniformed officer was on the scene when Dave arrived. “Looks like they were shot to shit, sir,” the young deputy said. His name was Williams. Since he worked in Yavapai county's southern sector and most likely lived there as well, he wasn't someone Dave had encountered before.

After looking at the two bodies, Dave had to concur. Both victims—one Hispanic and the other Anglo—had been shot once, center mass. The shooter had been dead-on.

“Did you call the ME?”

“Yes, sir,” Deputy Williams said. “He's on his way.”

“And the truck?”

“I took a look inside. There's some stuff in bags in the back of the crew cab. I wouldn't be surprised if these two don't turn out to be a couple of burglars who've come to grief.”

“Did you run the plates?”

“Came back to A.J. Landscaping, Peoria, Arizona. Registered to a guy named Alejandro Joaquín. So far it hasn't been reported missing or stolen.”

Dave's first instinct was to go straight to Alejandro and start asking questions, but for right now his job was to stay where he was until after the ME did his preliminary report.

“No missing persons reports?”

“Not so far.”

Walking around the bodies, Dave stopped next to the Hispanic guy, who had a handgun clutched in his fist.

“That doesn't fit,” Dave told Deputy Williams, who was shadowing the detective's every move.

“What doesn't fit?”

“The gun. When the guy fell backwards, he would have been deadweight—two hundred and fifty pounds of deadweight. He would have hit hard and bounced on the hard gravel. The gun would have flown out of his hands. I'm guessing this will turn out to be our murder weapon, but neither one of these guys pulled the trigger.”

Dave scanned the area for tracks and found none. He peered into the truck and agreed that the loot he saw there was probably property stolen from someone else. It took the ME an hour and a half to arrive on the scene from the morgue in Prescott. By then it was late morning and hot as hell. It was only a matter of minutes after that before Dave searched the victims' pockets and found their respective IDs—Alberto Joaquín and Jeffrey Hawkins. He handed them over to Deputy Williams and let him run them.

Williams returned with the names. “Ex-cons,” he said, “both out on parole.”

“No surprises there,” Dave said. “And I'm guessing Alejandro and Alberto are some kind of close relations. Ever done a next of kin notification before, Deputy Williams?”

“No, sir.”

“Well, you're about to.”

A
li was a little out of sorts at having to accompany her parents over to Cottonwood to get them settled in. She had called the office expecting to talk to Cami and had been surprised when Stuart answered.

“Where's Cami?” she asked.

“Beats me. Getting doughnuts, I think.”

“And B.?”

“Locked in his office,” Stuart said. “Some big crisis in Switzerland. He's been on the phone for more than an hour.”

When a call to Cami's phone went straight to voice mail, Ali gave up. She knew full well that anything out of the ordinary was likely to make the wheels come off Stuart's bus, and she didn't want to send her parents into the lion's den without having Cami there to run interference.

She was on her way to Cottonwood when Cami called her back. “Sorry I missed your call,” Cami said breathlessly, “but I think I found it.”

“Found what?”

“The landscaping truck from the crime scene. Stuart was in one of his moods. Once I looked at the phone tracker video, I knew I had a solid time frame to work with. All I had to do was locate usable security footage.”

“And did you?”

“Yes, I just sent some to Stu and asked him to try enhancing it. Now I'm looking for the same truck in earlier footage to see if I can nail down an arrival time. I was talking to him when your call came in. What do you need?”

“Way to go, Cami!” Ali exclaimed. “As for what I thought I needed? Forget it. What I need now is for you to keep on doing exactly what you're doing.”

When Ali's parents climbed out of Edie's Buick, they were back to squabbling. “He spent the whole trip backseat driving,” Edie complained, “and I'm not driving him back home, either. We're going to rent a car and he can drive his own darned self.”

“We can't afford for me to rent a car,” Bob objected.

“Believe me,” Edie huffed. “We can't afford not to.”

“Besides,” Bob said, “I don't have my wallet or my licence.”

“Come on, you two,” Ali said. “Quit bickering.”

She had intended to tell them about Cami's call, but knowing they'd both be all over Stu and peppering him with dozens of questions, she said nothing. Instead, she escorted them into the building, shuffled them past Stu's closed door, and led them into the office she occasionally used. It took time to set up their respective workstations. She put her father at the desk in front of a computer, helped him log on, and showed him the print routine. Then she located the directory in which Stuart had collected a vast amount of information on Jason McKinzie. Most of it was out there in public, but Ali knew that some of it came from Stu's backdoor methods and that eventually the results of the search would need to go away.

“I think it'll be easier for the two of you to sort all of this if you're doing it with paper copies,” Ali explained. “Dad, your job is to go through each of these files and print whatever's applicable.”

“What do you mean, ‘applicable'?”

“Scan through all the links. Some of them may be ones where the search turned up one person named Jason and another named McKinzie. Delete all of those. Meanwhile, Mom will do the sorting. Once we're done with this material, it'll most likely end up in the shredder.”

“But why go to all this trouble?” Bob asked. “Isn't there some kind of computer program that can sort all this stuff?”

“Computers are good at seeing what's there,” Ali said. “I'm hoping the two of you will be smart enough to figure out what isn't.”

“Yes,” Edie chimed in. “She said we're supposed to look for something that doesn't fit.”

“Fair enough,” Bob said. “We'll do our best.”

F
or Cami's next round of fast-forwarding, she started at midnight. At 7:33 a.m., she caught a break—several of them, in fact. For some reason, the northbound camera caught a clear view of the license plate, one that would take only a minimal amount of enhancing. And there was a logo of some kind on the driver's side door, one that had been invisible when the vehicle was traveling the other direction. And this time, there were clearly three passengers inside the truck rather than only two. So who was the third passenger—the one who was missing? Dan Frazier, maybe?

Seconds later, after loading the images and shipping them off to Stuart, Cami called him on the phone.

“I just sent you the first enhancement,” he said, “the one of the license plate. I haven't had time to run it, and I'm still waiting for my doughnuts.”

“I just sent you some additional footage,” Cami said. “There's a logo of some kind on the driver's side door of the pickup. It's probably the name of the landscaping company.”

“I suppose this means you want me to enhance this, too, even though we already have the license?”

“That's right,” Cami said. “This time focus on the logo and on the passengers. I'm hoping for something we can send through your facial rec program.”

“Faces of the killers?” Stuart asked.

Cami could tell from the sudden excitement in Stuart's voice that his black mood had lifted and that, for now, those missing doughnuts were forgotten.

“We can always hope,” she said.

“On it,” he said. “I'll get right back to you.”

“So did that help?” Mrs. Brown asked as Cami took her leave.

“I hope so,” Cami said. “But let me ask you something. Has anyone else come by asking about security camera footage?”

Martha shook her head. “No,” she said. “You're the first.”

“I probably won't be the last,” Cami told her.

She was barely back inside her Prius when her iPad dinged with an arriving e-mail and an attached photo. The message on the e-mail said, “Running facial rec now.” When Cami opened the photo, she saw a crystal-clear image of the truck with the stenciled words
A.J. LANDSCAPING, PEORIA, ARIZONA
legible in sharp relief on the driver's side door.

Inside the crew cab, three male faces were visible through the clear glass of the truck's untinted windows. The passenger in the front seat leaned against the window with his eyes closed. He was either asleep or unconscious.

Cami's iPad dinged again. Stuart's subject line told the story: “Front seat passenger, Dan Frazier.” The accompanying photo was one of a graying man in his early sixties. The shot had been taken at some black tie event where Dan Frazier had been wearing a tuxedo.

The next e-mail ding brought a message with a different subject line and two attachments, this one for “Alberto Joaquín, driver.” The photo was a mug shot and a second attachment was the man's rap sheet along with a summarizing notation from Stuart: “Did six years for grand theft auto. Released on parole six months ago.”

The subject line for e-mail number three said: “Jeffrey Hawkins, backseat passenger.” Again the attachments contained a mug shot and a rap sheet. Stuart's note added: “Served nine years for second degree murder. Released on good behavior five months ago.”

Cami's heart pounded with excitement. She had her phone in hand and was ready to punch Ali's number when it rang with Stu's name in the window.

“What?” she said.

“Remember that plate you asked me to run a little while ago?” Stu asked.

“What about it?”

“I just heard on the scanner. A vehicle with a plate matching that number is now involved in an active homicide investigation somewhere north of Sun City. The Yavapai County Sheriff's Department has officers at the scene.”

“Whoa,” Cami breathed. “I need to tell Ali.”

“Don't bother,” Stu said. “She's in talking with B. right now. I'll tell her for both of us.”

K
nowing what her parents were doing would most likely amount to little more than busywork, Ali felt somewhat guilty. Still, they both seemed happy to be doing something constructive. Leaving them to it, she went looking for B. and found him in his office, on the phone, and making arrangements for an afternoon overseas flight.

“What's going on?”

Raising a finger to indicate she should wait, he motioned her into a chair. “Big security breach in Zurich,” he said, mouthing the words, then added into the phone, “Right. I'll hold.”