Everyone Dies (14 page)

“How about earlier this week?”

“Same thing, and I’ve been here for five straight days.”

Ramona got the shift-change times from the blonde and asked for the manager. The woman pointed at a small building outside the fence next to a staging area where idling shuttle buses were parked. Inside, Ramona reassured two unhappy customers that they wouldn’t have to wait much longer, and met with the manager, a Hispanic male with nervous black eyes, a slightly crooked nose, and a mouth twisted in annoyance. His name, Leon Villa, was embroidered beneath a company patch sewn above the pocket of his short-sleeved shirt.

“Are you going to tell me what’s going on?” Villa asked, staring at Ramona’s shield. “The other policeman told me nothing. Is somebody dead?”

“No one’s dead,” Ramona replied. “I need to talk to the booth attendants who worked the afternoon and late-night shifts during the last eight days.”

“They’re not here.”

“Of course not,” Ramona said, wondering whether Villa was rattled by the presence of cops or a bit dimwitted. “Do you have their names, addresses, and phone numbers?”

Villa nodded, paged through a three-ring binder, and read off the information as Ramona wrote it down.

Back at the crime scene, the techs, their faces partially hidden behind surgical masks, were working on the inside of the car. A rancid, maggoty odor wafted out of the vehicle. The dog had been removed from the driver’s seat, bundled in a dark green garbage bag, and left on the pavement. There was no sign of blood on the seat or the floor mat.

Detective Roth handed her the blank envelope from the dashboard of Kaplan’s car and the note it contained. Both were protected by clear plastic sleeves. The note read:

KERNEY THE DOG DOESN’T COUNT STILL TWO TO GO CAN YOU GUESS WHO DIES BEFORE YOU?

“Who’s Kerney?” Roth asked.

“My chief.”

“No shit? What do you know about that? Bet he’s got to be sweating a bit.”

Ramona nodded as she studied the note. “This type looks identical to the message that was tacked to the chief’s front door.”

“It looks like a common font,” Roth said.

“How can you be sure?”

“I do the monthly newsletter for my kid’s soccer league,” Roth said, looking at it again. “In fact, I use this typeface all the time. It’s called Arial Narrow.”

“Did the techs lift any prints?”

“Not from the note or envelope,” Roth replied. “But there are lots of partials from the car.”

“I need to have the carcass examined.”

“Sure thing. We use a vet here in town who does a good job with animal forensics. I’ll have it dropped off after we finish up with the inspection at the lab. But from first look, Fido was probably left outside for a couple of days after he was killed. The techs found some dirt and pine needles matted in the dried blood on his fur.”

“That’s good to know,” Ramona said. “A trace evidence analysis might give us a general idea where the perp stashed the dog. Can you arrange to have the vehicle towed to Santa Fe? I don’t think Kaplan will want to drive it home. Not until it’s fumigated at least.”

“You got it,” Roth said, giving her the once-over for the second time.

Ramona smiled tightly in response, left Roth in the hot sun, went to her unit, cranked up the air conditioning, and started calling the off-duty attendants on her cell phone.

She hit pay dirt on the second call. Yesterday afternoon, a man driving a van had entered the lot only to drive out after a few minutes. As a precaution, the attendant had written down the van’s license plate number on the lot ticket.

Ramona made an appointment to interview the attendant, hung up, and went immediately to the manager’s office to search for the ticket. Wearing gloves, she went through the date and time stamped tickets until she found it. She slipped it into an envelope, and called in the license number from her unit. The plate had been stolen three weeks ago from a car in Socorro, eighty miles south of Albuquerque.

“We’re almost done here,” Roth said with a big smile, as he slid into the passenger seat next to her. “Want to grab some lunch?”

“Not today.”

“You don’t take meal breaks?”

“I’ve got work to do,” Ramona said, hoping Roth would take the hint and go away.

“We still don’t know how the perp got in the car.”

“I’m working on it, Detective,” Ramona said flatly.

Roth got the message and shrugged. “Hey, let me know how it turns out.” He handed Ramona his card. “The vet’s name is on the back. I’ll have our lab get a report up to you by tomorrow.”

“Ask him to rush it,” Ramona said.

“Anything for a fellow officer.”

“Thanks, Detective.”

Ramona left Roth and went to meet up with Officer Neal and Norm Kaplan. When she’d secured Potter’s keys into evidence, only one car key had been on the ring. She was betting Kaplan would tell her that, just like any other couple, both men carried keys to each other’s cars. The perp must have taken it after shooting Potter.

Which meant that from the start everything the perp had done had been carefully thought out. She wondered if Kaplan was the next target. It wasn’t far-fetched to think so. But why, was the unanswered question. And what did the perp have planned for the dog’s severed head?

She switched the radio frequency to the secure channel, keyed the microphone, asked for Lieutenant Molina by his call sign, and brought him up to date when he answered.

At state police headquarters, just a bit further down Cerrillos Road from Kerney’s office, State Police Officer Russell Thorpe was pumped. After several hours of intensive, detailed questioning, Jack and Irene Burke’s description of the man in the blue van had yielded a good sketch of the subject. Thorpe asked the couple to look at mug shots, which they willingly agreed to do, and left them with a technician to scroll through the department’s computerized data files.

At the lab, he checked to see if the tests had been completed on the bullets removed from Kerney’s horse, and got more good news: the rifling of the spent. 38-caliber rounds matched a dented, partially flattened bullet that had been retrieved earlier in the morning near the Potter homicide scene. Forensic evidence now conclusively tied both cases together. Thorpe took the stairs two steps at a time and asked to see Chief Baca.

Ushered quickly into Andy’s office by the receptionist, Thorpe stood in front of the desk, handed over the artist’s sketch of the suspect, and gave the chief his news, dampening an almost overwhelming eagerness to blurt it out. Although he was hardly a seasoned veteran, he had no intention of looking like a bonehead rookie in front of Baca.

Andy smiled when Thorpe finished his report. “This is good,” he said. “Things are starting to come together. One of Chief Kerney’s detectives phoned in a sighting of the blue van at a parking lot near the Albuquerque airport, with plates stolen out of Socorro County. The driver left a decapitated dog in a vehicle belonging to Potter’s lover.”

Russell felt stupidly out of the loop. “Sir?” he asked, hoping that would be enough of a hint to get some clarification from the chief.

“I’m sorry,” Andy said. “Let me bring you up to speed. The dog was Potter’s lost mixed-breed collie, and it was left with another threatening note to Kerney. At this point we don’t know if the perp has targeted Potter’s lover as his next victim or is just playing mind games with Chief Kerney. An APB went out on the van thirty minutes ago.”

Thorpe nodded.

“Make a copy of the sketch, leave the original with my secretary, get down to Albuquerque, and hook up with Detective Pino. She’s about to meet with a witness. See if that person can confirm that our perp drove that van. I’ll have Santa Fe PD dispatch let Pino know you’re on the way.”

“I’ve got the Burkes looking at mug shots,” Thorpe said.

“I’ll put an agent with them,” Andy replied. “Call me as soon as you know something one way or the other.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And when you get back, report to Santa Fe Police headquarters. You’re on this case until further notice.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“You’ve earned the assignment, Thorpe,” Andy said, hesitating as he reached for the phone. “When Kerney was my chief deputy, he told me you had the makings of a good officer, and he was right.”

Ramona Pino waited for Thorpe’s arrival at a small city park near a technical college, within easy driving distance of the Albuquerque airport. Except for a busy one-way street that bordered the park and funneled traffic from the downtown core of the city, it was a pretty spot with big shade trees and a thick carpet of grass.

Norm Kaplan had freaked over the news that the dead dog was a Border collie. Kaplan had given the dog to Potter as an anniversary present. After calming the man down, Ramona had asked who knew about his flight home. Kaplan swore he’d told only Sal Molina, Potter’s secretary, and the woman who managed his antique store. A call to the store manager revealed that some unnamed officer had phoned yesterday to confirm Kaplan’s flight information.

Ramona checked in with Sal Molina, who validated her suspicion that the call was bogus. But how did the perp know which parking lot Kaplan had used? Maybe he’d just cruised all of them until he found Kaplan’s car. There weren’t that many, so it would have taken only a couple of hours at most to make the rounds.

While she waited, she spoke to the pathologist who’d examined Potter’s body. The entry and exit wounds weren’t aligned, and the exit wound was larger and more irregularly shaped, which was due to the bullet hitting the sternum. The path of the slug through Potter’s body could mean the killer was smaller in height than his victim, but the pathologist wasn’t about to bet on it.

Thorpe arrived, and while Pino looked over the sketch and the information about the blue GMC van, he caught her up on the forensic results from the examination of the bullets.

Ramona stifled any reaction. Under different circumstances, she would’ve been pleased to know she’d found an important piece of evidence that tied the perp to two crimes. But the news paled in comparison to yesterday’s screw-ups.

“Do we have a make on the gun?” she asked. The number of rifling grooves in a barrel and the direction of their internal twists could sometimes be used to pinpoint the manufacturer.

“Nothing definite,” Thorpe replied, “although it could possibly be a. 38-caliber Taurus with a four-inch barrel. Who’s our witness?”

“His name is Mark Cullum, age twenty-two, originally from Clovis. He attends the technical school in the mornings and works afternoons at the parking lot. He’s expecting us.”

Cullum’s apartment was a first-floor boxy affair on a hillside street across from the park. A tall, pleasant-looking youth wearing jeans and a short-sleeved shirt with the tails out opened the door before Ramona had a chance to knock. He identified himself as Cullum, and asked the officers inside.

The front room was done up in pure college-student decor. An empty beer keg had been turned into an end table, a dart board was nailed to a wall, pine boards and bricks served as a bookcase, and a bicycle leaned against the side of a second-hand couch covered with a cheap throw. The place smelled of sweaty socks and Chinese take-out.

They stood in the center of the room. Thorpe pulled the sketch off his clipboard and handed it to Cullum, who looked at it, shook his head, and handed it back. “That’s not the fella I saw,” he said. “Not at all.”

“What are the differences?” Thorpe asked.

“He had real short hair and a mustache, a real droopy one. And he was wearing aviator sunglasses.”

“What about the nose, the chin, the shape of his head?” Ramona asked, taking the sketch from Thorpe and holding it up in front of Cullum’s face.

“Maybe they’re the same, but don’t bank on it because of me.”

“Did he have any scars or distinguishing marks?”

“None that I remember.”

“What color hair did he have?” Thorpe asked.

“Black, like his mustache. He had a real good tan, like he’d been outdoors a lot, or he was dark-skinned. Other than that, I didn’t notice much about him.”

“Did you get a look inside the van?” Thorpe asked.

“I didn’t pay it any mind.”

“What did you notice about the vehicle?” Thorpe asked.

“It had a dinged-up front bumper and side window curtains. I think it was either blue or black. It was a GMC, that’s for sure.”

“Did he say anything when he left the lot?” Ramona asked.

“Yeah. I said something like ‘that was mighty quick,’ and he said that he needed to get something out of his wife’s car.”

“Did you watch where he went while he was on the lot?” Ramona asked.

“Nope. The shuttle had just brought in a load of customers, so I was humping it.”

“Was he an Anglo, Hispanic, or Native American?” Thorpe asked.

“Anglo, I think.”

“You’re not sure?” Thorpe asked.

“Not really.”

“Did he speak with an accent?” Russell had asked the Burkes the same question.

“Well, not an accent exactly. He sounded kind of country.”

“Meaning?” Thorpe asked.

“You know, a twang, a drawl, kind of a nasal tone.”

Russell nodded. Cullum’s answer matched what the Burkes had told him. But that seemed to be the only similarity. Thorpe mulled it over.

“What made you write down the plate number?” Ramona asked.

Cullum shrugged. “We had a car broken into a couple months back, on my shift. My boss acted like it was all my fault, so now I’m extra careful.”

They wound up the interview with a few more questions, thanked Cullum, and left the apartment.

“What do you think?” Thorpe asked as they waited for a break in traffic to cross the street. Motorists speeding by slowed down at the sight of Russell in his distinctive black state police uniform.