New River Blues (16 page)

‘Well done, O Mistress of the Brutality Squad! You mean we're now privy to the secrets of the Hen-Trax rolling stock?'

‘More than you ever wanted to know. This will show you the movements of the entire fleet for the last thirty days. Don't bog down in it. All I care about is the vehicle checked out to Roger Henderson. It went to Phoenix late Friday and stayed there till Monday morning, when it was involved in a collision on I-10, in the vicinity of Chandler.'

‘You want me to pick out that one vehicle and follow it—'

‘Wherever it takes you. Yes. As I understand it, this system will give us the date, time, and distance for each mile driven and every stop. But I expect it's going to report the locations in GPS points—'

‘And you want them translated into street addresses, right?'

‘If that's what they are. Or highway locations or . . . whatever.'

‘No problem. Google Earth is my friend.'

‘I expected no less. Are you pretty jammed up with those crime stats? How soon can you get on this?'

‘Never mind the dog work.' He waved crime stats into insignificance. ‘That's a whenever assignment, we fit it in. I take it you want this quick and quiet, right? Or you'd have asked the owner for the access code.'

Sarah smiled contentedly into the mottled face of the support-staff clown who was always so much shrewder than he looked. ‘You know, Tracy, sometimes you're a real comfort to have around.'

‘Madam,' Tracy stood up again and bowed from the waist, ‘Genius Geek's mandate is to serve the heroes. In return,' he clutched the paperwork she had handed him and snapped the rubber bands on his braces, ‘you sleuths keep Genius Geek from dying of boredom. Thank you, dear lady!' He charged out, dodging through the doorway around Jason Peete and Ray Menendez, who were walking in together.

‘Sarah.' Peete planted himself firmly on both feet, thrust his chin out and re-settled his collar. ‘We got a proposition.'

‘Which of course I'm impatient to hear. But first tell me,' she plucked a printed sheet off the top of a pile and held it up, ‘where did you get this?'

‘What? Oh, the inventory list? It was stapled to the inside of the door in the gun cupboard.'

‘The one in the den, where you said the top weapon's missing?'

‘Yes. I pried it loose ver-r-ry carefully and ran out to Kinko's and copied it, and snuck the original back.' He stroked the complex pattern of close-trimmed beard that now outlined his jaw and upper lip, and patted his soul patch. All the grooming time Jason Peete had recently saved himself by shaving his head had been redirected to his facial hair. ‘That Henderson's a systems man, give him that. The numbers on that list correspond to numbered racks in the cupboard. Make and model of each weapon, date of purchase, maintenance record . . . very impressive.'

‘And the one that's missing from the cupboard is a –' she looked at the list – ‘Remington 870?'

‘Exactly.'

‘Well,
that
should be a snap to trace,' she said, making a sour face. ‘Only eight or nine million of them around.'

‘Most popular firearm in its class. Yes.'

‘Swell. Chances are we won't find it anyway, of course. A killer with any savvy at all will bury it out in the desert someplace. But just in case we're dealing with a chucklehead, I presume you reported it?'

‘To NCIC. Sure.'

‘OK. And who's reviewing pawnshop reports here these days?'

‘Davies. I sent him the specs.' Peete stroked the corners of his mustache. ‘What does Henderson say about the gun?'

‘He didn't know it was gone. He doesn't know how long it's been missing. He can't remember when he used it last.'

‘Uh-huh. And I am the Queen of Romania.'

‘Right.' She drummed an absent-minded rhythm on her desk with a #2 pencil. ‘The more I see of Roger Henderson the better I like him. What I can't figure out is why he's so defensive—'

‘Well, why wouldn't he be, if—'

‘No, I mean of
his wife
. I asked if he knew about her affair, and he jumped all over me. “My wife,” he said, “did not have affairs.”'

‘What does he call it when his wife's in bed with another man?'

‘I never got to ask him that. What about the fingerprint work on that second victim, Ray? Why is that taking so long?'

‘I just turn 'em in, Sarah, I don't process 'em,' Menendez said reasonably.

‘Why don't you ask, though? They should be done by now.'

‘I can do that, I guess.' He dialed a number and sat through six rings. While Menendez waited, Jason Peete said, ‘About my proposition?'

‘Oh . . . yeah, what?'

‘Ray's got a ton of reports to write up about yesterday, but I'm done – my only report was that weapons list.'

‘They don't answer,' Menendez said. ‘I'll go see about it.' He got up reluctantly and trudged away.

‘So what I'm saying,' Peete said, ‘is why don't you let me take the autopsies so he can get caught up with his record-keeping?'

‘Um . . . you sure you have the time, you can give it all day?'

‘You bet.'

‘Well . . . OK, I guess. You need to get going pretty soon, then, don't you?'

‘Right now.' He got up. ‘I'm outa here.'

‘OK. Thanks, Jason.' As he walked away, looking pleased with himself, she began twitching with suspicion. Why was Jason Peete, the most self-involved man in the squad, making helpful suggestions all of a sudden? On the other hand, what advantage could anybody possibly hope to gain from standing all day on a cold travertine floor, watching a forensic specialist dig shotgun pellets out of corpses?

Well, it's done now, live with it.
As Peete left the floor, she watched Menendez stop in the break room to pour himself a coffee, and began twitching with impatience. Her annoyance brought back a memory of the anger-management techniques she'd had to learn to get through the year after her divorce, and she found herself grinning inanely at the memory of once trying to explain the Zen-like exercises to Will Dietz. ‘But I found an even simpler thing that usually works for me,' she told him. ‘I pick out some dumb piece of dog work and do it as well as it can possibly be done.'

Putting on his jacket, getting ready to go to work, Dietz burst out laughing – a rare thing for him. ‘God, Sarah, maybe you could find a spot on a chain gang somewhere, huh? Break up all those rocks for everybody, manage the hell out of that anger.' He was still chuckling as he went out the door muttering, ‘Anger management, Jesus.'

She thought of him now as she dug out a brown cardboard folder and set up the Henderson case file. It was typical dog work, incredibly boring, invariably frustrating where the pieces didn't mesh, and she felt herself growing calm as she worked. What could go wrong while you were swamped in a task so mundane?

Her own notes were tidy enough, but fragmentary – yesterday had taken many unexpected turns. She finished transcribing her handwritten notes, printed a paper copy.

This was when you loved your computer. Sarah had not been a detective in the typewriter era, but some of the old reports gave her an idea of how cumbersome this part of the job used to be.
Carbons and white-out, argh.
Ollie's report was in her stack somewhere. She dug it out and read it as she attached it to hers. It was an unedited transcription off his digital recorder, obviously, and he had copied it off just as it happened.

Yvonne's memory had modified a little, by the time Ollie got there. She woke up, she said, because the phone was ringing. ‘I sat up in bed and said, “Mike, the phone is ringing.” But when I reached out to shake him he wasn't in the bed. Then I heard him talking, saying, “Yeah, I heard it, I already called the cops.” And then I heard somebody yell something in the house across the street.'

‘A scream after both the shots?' Ollie had asked her.

‘I guess,' Yvonne said. ‘I never heard any shots so it must have been after both. And all the dogs kept barking and barking. I said to Mike, “I'm going to lose my mind if they don't stop barking.”'

‘You always say you'll lose your mind,' Ortman said. ‘I wonder if it was somebody in one of the other houses that yelled.'

‘No. It came from across the street, at Henderson's.'

‘You were still half asleep.'

‘Have it your way,' Yvonne said, ‘you always do. But I know what I heard with my own ears.'

After that, it was all about the neighborhood, how ‘this kind of stuff' just never happened here. They were all such nice people. ‘We get along swell,' Ortman said. ‘Play golf and tennis, the usual stuff.'

Carrying his report, Sarah got up and wandered the section until she found Ollie Greenaway leaning against the door-jamb in Leo Tobin's workspace, deep in a discussion of the current season's university basketball team.

Sarah stopped rudely close to Greenaway and stood there, counting the stripes in his tie. He pointedly ignored her while the two men hurled a few more stats at each other. Ollie finally, reluctantly, turned toward Sarah, raised his eyebrows and asked, ‘Something on your mind, Pilgrim?'

She held up his report. ‘Why didn't Mrs Ortman like Mrs Henderson?'

‘Whoa. Did I say that? I don't think so.'

‘You didn't say much of anything. How come? Usually you dig right into people. Why couldn't you get the Ortmans to open up?'

‘None of my interviews went very well yesterday, tell you the truth. Have you read the rest of them?'

‘No.'

‘When you do you'll see what I mean. Life is just a little slice of heaven in El Encanto Estates. Nobody has a bad word to say about anybody.'

‘How about a good word?'

‘Some, but they don't add up to much. The Hendersons are civic-minded. Eloise did things that make a difference. That's the big whoop in El Encanto, making a difference. And getting along. I think there must be a cheeriness clause written into the mortgage.'

‘Oh, they're just protecting the value of their real estate. But there's always a snake in the cupboard somewhere. Were the women consistently more negative about Mrs Henderson than the men?'

‘No. Well, maybe a little. One woman did say you couldn't have her on your committee, she was so unpredictable. She'd be all over you with plans one meeting, then the next one she wouldn't even show up.'

‘Unpredictable,' Tobin said. ‘God, I hope we're not going to start shooting people over that, my whole family could be wiped out. Why don't you both sit down?' He slid an extra chair into the space in front of his desk. ‘Save me a crick in the neck.'

Sarah sat, absent-mindedly, on the edge of a chair. ‘Didn't they even gossip about money?'

‘Oh, sure. Henderson's a big mover and shaker. He's done several jobs in urban renewal. That everlasting Rio Nuevo thing. Turning old warehouses into loft apartments. Loft has become a holy word downtown, did you know that? Affordable housing, not so much. Although somebody said Hen-Trax is building a tract of reasonably priced bungalows out south-east.'

‘Any trouble with it?'

‘Not that I heard. Henderson makes buckets of money, everybody says so. “Wish I had his cash flow,” I heard that more than once.'

‘But these days,' Sarah was making notes in the margins of his notes, ‘I keep reading stories about the housing bubble bursting, some big credit crunch.'

‘Oh, he might be a little squeezed right now, all the builders are. But the Rio Nuevo projects have tax-increment financing, they're not going away.'

‘Still . . . wasn't the Mrs inclined to be pretty spendy?'

‘Big time. Beautiful clothes, big parties. But she had plenty of her own money, you know, she was a Della Maggio. You shouldn't leave your mouth open like that, Sarah, you'll catch flies.'

‘Mrs Henderson was a Della Maggio? Of the department store Della Maggios?'

‘And hotels and ranches. That was Mrs Henderson's grandfather, Vincente. The two sons got into banking and insurance, and kept getting richer. Mrs Henderson's dad was Fabian.'

‘The Ortmans fed you all this local history?'

‘Most of what I just told you I already knew. The Della Maggios are founding fathers. Some say the Sam Hughes neighborhood should have been the Vincente Della Maggio neighborhood, but it was too long for the sign and kept getting misspelled.'

‘That first generation of merchants had it good,' Tobin said. ‘There was a lot less competition and they had very few rules. Vincente Della Maggio made a ton of money in this town back when money was really worth something.'

‘And Roger Henderson gets all of it, right?' Sarah said. ‘Now that his wife is dead and the construction trades are, as you say, squeezed?'

‘Oh, I assume so.' Ollie met Sarah's curious eyes and grew thoughtful. ‘Might be good to find out, though, huh?'

Sarah said, ‘Will you go to work on that?' She turned to Tobin, the wise old man of the section. ‘We should be able to get a grand jury subpoena that will get us access to his bank accounts, shouldn't we?'

‘Oh, yeah. You get a fair amount of circumstantial, you can get into the bank accounts all right. Accountants are going to stonewall you but you can compel them to testify once you've built your case.'