No Place to Die (14 page)

McClain picked up the backpack and walked out through the kitchen feeling decidedly out of sorts. Today, for the first time, he’d actually found himself feeling some sympathy for the woman. And flashing back to the resigned, defeated look on her face as he’d handed her the clean towel in the shower, he even experienced a small twinge of guilt about the way in which he was treating her.

Thinking about it, he was pissed off—both at her and at himself. So she came while he was screwing her this afternoon. So what?

It was a normal human reaction, and he’d expected that it would probably happen at some point. Every woman he’d ever been with had always insisted that he was great in bed and that he had a huge dick. Sooner or later, Beverly was bound to get off, whether she liked it or not.

Obviously, she hadn’t liked it. She’d been upset with
herself when it had finally happened, and that he could understand. He knew that he probably wasn’t her favorite person in the world right at the moment. What he could not understand, though, was his own reaction to the fact that it had happened. He’d felt a tenderness for her that led him to wonder whether he was being entirely fair to the woman. Suddenly he’s doing her laundry and cooking her a goddamn dinner like he’d invited her over for a fucking
date
or something. She’d even gotten him talking to her about Tiffani, for chrissake.

What the hell was he thinking? The woman had conspired to screw him over. She’d help cost him both Tiffani and Amanda, not to mention seventeen years of his fuckin’ life.

Shaking his head at the thought of it, he opened the door from the kitchen and stepped out into the garage. Once he’d dealt with the judge, he decided, he’d take the bitch back to bed and show her something about sympathy.

McClain flipped on the light in the garage, then unlocked the garage door and lifted it open. It was another beautiful night in the desert, the air crisp and clean, and he inhaled a deep breath. God, it felt good to be free.

He checked to make sure that no one was loitering about, watching him, then opened the door to the van and climbed in. “Hey, Your Honor,” he said. “I hope you didn’t mind waiting. I had a little lady who needed my attention more than you did. Anyhow, it’s better that we do our business together now, rather than out in the broad daylight.”

His arrival produced no reaction from the judge, who lay completely still under the painter’s tarp. McClain waited for a moment, expecting Beckman to
shift his position at least slightly, but the tarp didn’t move even an inch in any direction.

McClain got out of the driver’s seat and squeezed his way into the back of the van. Squatting down, he picked up a corner of the tarp to see Beckman’s lifeless eyes staring back at him vacantly. “Oh, shit, Judge!” he protested. “What the fuck did you go and do to me now?”

He pulled the tarp down farther and checked Beckman for a pulse, knowing that he wasn’t going to find one. Had the old bastard not been able to breathe with the duct tape over his mouth? Did the shock of being grabbed cause him to have a heart attack? Had the afternoon heat been too intense in the close confines of the garage and the van?

Shaking his head in disappointment, McClain concluded that whatever it was really didn’t much matter at this point. He certainly wasn’t sorry that the old man was dead, but he very much regretted having missed the opportunity to talk with him before he died. McClain had wanted Beckman to know why he was going to die and who was going to do it to him. He hoped that the old goat had suffered like hell before it happened.

Working in the cramped quarters of the van, McClain rolled the judge’s body up in the tarp and secured it with duct tape. Then he backed the van out of the garage, locked the garage behind him, and headed west.

He drove a couple of miles before finding the sort of place he was looking for, then pulled into an alley behind a row of darkened buildings. Halfway down the alley, he stopped next to a large Dumpster with its lid hanging open. He got out of the van and checked to make sure that there was no one else around. Then, moving as quickly as he could, he slid open the side door of the van and pulled the judge’s body out.

The old man probably didn’t weigh even a hundred and fifty pounds. In one fluid motion, McClain hoisted the package up to his shoulder and pitched it into the Dumpster. Then he got back into the van and drove carefully back home to deal with Beverly Thompson.

On Tuesday morning, Tony Anderson called to report that the crime lab had taken an inordinate amount of hair, fibers, and other physical evidence out of Richard Petrovich’s Chrysler.

“I’ve never seen a car that filthy,” he complained. “I’ll bet the damned thing literally hadn’t been washed or vacuumed in a year. We’ve probably taken samples from half the population of the greater metro area out of that car. Unfortunately, though, so far we’ve got nothing that matches up to any of your victims. I’m sorry, Sean. I’ll fax over the preliminary report.”

I thanked him and hung up the phone. Frankly, I wasn’t surprised by the news, but it left us in a very difficult position. Maggie and I both agreed that Petrovich just didn’t feel at all right for the crimes we were investigating, and we had absolutely nothing to tie him to any of them, save for the DNA evidence that put him in Beverly Thompson’s Lexus and in Karen Collins’s home. But if he wasn’t the guy, how in the hell did his hair get there?

I was thinking about all of this when the phone rang again and the receptionist announced that Jack Collins was downstairs asking to see me. I put on my suit coat, went down to meet him, and escorted him back up to my office. He dropped into my visitor’s chair
looking like he hadn’t slept in a month. “How are you doing, Mr. Collins?” I asked.

He shook his head sadly. “I don’t really know, Detective Richardson. I’m still basically in a state of shock. The medical examiner has released Karen’s body, and her funeral is tomorrow morning. But between your investigation and the preparations for the funeral, it’s like I haven’t had any time to begin grieving yet.”

“Again, I’m sorry, sir,” I said. “I know how difficult this must be. What can I do for you this morning?”

“Well,” he replied, “the reason I’m here is because on the night of the murder you asked me about a woman named Alma Fletcher.”

“Yes, sir?”

He shifted in the chair a bit. “Well, as I said that night, the name meant nothing to me. I didn’t think I’d ever heard it before.”

Leaning forward, I said, “And now?”

“Well, I’ve been going through some of Karen’s stuff, looking for photos and things like that to display at the visitation and the funeral? This morning I was looking at one of her old scrapbooks and found a newspaper clipping that she’d saved.”

I nodded my encouragement and he continued. “Seventeen years ago, Karen served as a juror in a murder trial. The clipping was about the trial, and the article quoted the jury foreman—or forewoman, I guess it would be. Her name was Alma Fletcher.”

Collins reached into the pocket of his shirt and came out with a yellowed news clipping. Scarcely able to contain my surprise, I took it from him, carefully unfolded it, and quickly read the story. Fletcher and Collins had served together on a jury that had convicted a defendant named Carl McClain on a charge of first-degree murder.

According to the article, McClain had been charged with the strangulation death of a prostitute named
Gloria Kelly. The presiding judge was someone named Walter Beckman and the prosecuting attorney was Harold Roe. Interestingly, the lead detective in the case was Mike Miller, a longtime veteran of the department who’d been my first partner when I joined the Homicide Unit, nine years after the trial. As Collins indicated, the jury forewoman had been Alma Fletcher. And McClain’s court-appointed public defender had been a woman named Beverly Deschamps.

With Collins still sitting in my visitor’s chair, I grabbed the phone and called Beverly Thompson’s office. Her administrative assistant confirmed the fact that prior to Beverly’s marriage to David Thompson, her last name had been Deschamps.

I thanked the woman, hung up, and called Tom Meagher, an assistant county attorney and my occasional opponent on the tennis courts. Thankfully, he was at his desk and he answered the phone on the second ring.

“Tom?” I said. “It’s Sean. Seventeen years ago your office convicted a guy named Carl McClain of first-degree murder.”

“Yes, we did,” he replied. “And three months ago we turned him loose.”

“Why in God’s name did you do that? The guy was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole.”

“Yes, he was,” Meagher sighed. “Then, inconvenient as it was for all concerned, especially for Mr. McClain, it turned out that he was innocent.”

“And we know this how?”

“DNA evidence,” he replied. “Plus, the real killer confessed. The victim was a hooker, and McClain was with her just before she was killed. There was semen in the body that matched his blood type, and of course back then, they couldn’t get any more precise than that. McClain apparently changed his story a couple of times and was not a very effective witness on his own
behalf. As a result of all of that, he got himself convicted and sent to Lewis for the rest of his life.

“That was the end of the story. Except that four months ago the common-law wife of the victim’s former pimp ratted her husband out for the killing. Initially he denied it of course, but a DNA test proved that the semen from the vic was his, not McClain’s. He finally gave it up and admitted that he’d killed the woman because she’d been holding back money on him.”

“And what became of McClain?”

“I haven’t the slightest idea,” Tom replied. “The state apologized profusely and let him go. He’s a free man, and we had no right to keep tabs on him. I imagine that by now he’s probably out shopping for a lawyer so that he can sue the hell out of us. What’s your interest in all of this anyhow?”

“My interest is that, within the last two weeks, two of the jurors at McClain’s trial have been shot to death. The attorney who defended him has been abducted and her husband was killed as well.”

“You’ve gotta be kidding,” Meagher exclaimed. “This is the Thompson case?”

“Yeah. After she graduated law school, Thompson spent two and a half years in the PD’s office. One of her clients was Carl McClain.”

“Jesus Christ, Sean, I don’t know what to say. McClain was clearly innocent of the hooker’s murder, and he’d never been charged with any other crime. Obviously, we had no cause to hang on to him or to track his movements once he left Lewis.”

“I know that, Tom,” I replied. “And I’m certainly not blaming you guys. But it looks like McClain may be looking to settle scores for the time he lost.”

“Jesus,” he said again.

I thanked Collins for coming in and hustled him back downstairs. Then I sprinted back up to the third floor
and found Maggie coming out of the women’s john. I grabbed her by the hand and said, “Come with me.”

“What the hell’s going on?” she asked as I hurried her down the hall.

“We’ve got the wrong guy, Maggie. It’s not Petrovich. It’s somebody named Carl McClain.”

“Tell me,” she said, picking up her pace to match mine.

The door to the lieutenant’s office was standing open, but the lights were off and he was nowhere in evidence. Turning to his secretary, I said, “Where is he?”

“In a meeting with the chief,” she answered. “He should be back in about an hour.”

“Make sure he is,” I insisted. “Interrupt him if you have to, and I don’t care if he is with the chief. Tell him we’ll be back in an hour or less and that we have to see him about the Thompson case immediately. Get Pierce and Chickris in here too.”

“Okay,” she said. “I’ll tell him.”

I headed Maggie in the direction of the stairs, and as we made our way over to the county jail, I described my conversations with Jack Collins and Tom Meagher. Fifteen minutes later, a guard brought Richard Petrovich into an interview room. He dropped into a chair and I said, “Carl McClain.”

Petrovich shrugged. “What about him?”

“You tell me.”

Again he shrugged. “We were in Lewis together—we both worked in the shop for a while. McClain was in for murder. Like most everybody else in the joint, of course, he claimed that he was innocent. Only in his case, it turned out that he really was. Some other guy confessed to doing the murder and they turned Carl loose.”

“Have you seen him since?”

“Yeah. When he got out he spent a few days sleeping on my couch while he was looking for a place to stay.”

“When was the last time you saw him?”

Petrovich scratched his head. “Jesus, I dunno…Probably the end of November or early December. He rented a house somewhere and left my place. He said he’d stay in touch, but I haven’t seen or heard from him since.”

“Did he have a job?” Maggie asked.

“Not that I know of. But I don’t think he was looking for one. He said he had some money coming to him and that he wouldn’t be needing to work for a while.”

I nodded. “Do you know where the money was coming from?”

“No, he didn’t tell me.”

“Did he say where the house he rented was?” Maggie asked.

Petrovich shook his head. “No. He just said that once he was settled, we should get together so that he could repay me for my hospitality.”

“Did he talk at all about his plans?” I asked. “If he wasn’t looking for work, what did he intend to do with his time?”

Again, he shook his head. “He didn’t say. He was really pissed about the fact that he’d spent seventeen years in the can for something he didn’t do. He said he was going to get a lawyer and sue everybody in sight. I told him that’s what I’d sure as hell do.”

“Yeah, I suppose,” Maggie said. “You’re sure you haven’t seen or heard anything of him since?”

“I told you, no.”

“McClain didn’t come out of Lewis itching to get back at the people who put him there and ask you to help him?” she asked.

“No,” he insisted. “Like I said, he told me he was going to sue the bastards for millions, but he didn’t say he was going to be sharing it. Besides, what the hell help could I give him? I’m a welder, not a fuckin’ lawyer.”

“Well, then, Mr. Petrovich,” I said, “we’ve got a
problem, because two of the people who put McClain in Lewis are dead. Another one is missing, and your hair was found at two of the three crime scenes.”

Petrovich’s eyes widened. “That’s what this is about? The Thompson woman and the others you were asking me about—they’re tied in with Carl?”

“Not anymore, they’re not,” I replied, “except for maybe Thompson.”

“Well, Jesus,” he said, agitated. “I sure as hell didn’t have nothin’ to do with any of that. Like I said, the guy bunked with me for a couple of nights and I haven’t seen or talked to him since. I have no damn idea where he is or what he might be doing. And whatever it is, I sure as hell haven’t been helping him.”

“But you see our problem, Mr. Petrovich,” Maggie said. “You and McClain are pals in the joint and he looks you up the first thing he gets out. You give him a place to stay and tell him what a raw deal he got. Then the next thing you know, the people who sent him to the pen start turning up dead and we’re finding your hair at the crime scenes. What are we supposed to think?”

Petrovich slumped in his chair and a tear welled up in his eye. “I don’t know, Detective,” he said, plaintively. “I don’t fuckin’ know. But I swear to God, I didn’t have anything to do with any of it.”