No Place to Die (26 page)

Two hours after the newscast, I was back at the stakeout across from Mike Miller’s house when a pizza delivery guy pulled into Miller’s driveway. Brenda Perkins watched the car’s brake lights flash and said, “You don’t suppose he ordered enough for us too? It’s been a long time since lunch.”

Through a pair of night-vision binoculars, I watched the kid get out of his car and walk up to Mike’s front door, carrying an insulated bag. He rang the bell, and a minute or so later, Mike cracked open the door. He and the deliveryman stood in the doorway talking for another minute or so, and then finally Mike reached into his pocket, dug out a bill, handed it to the kid, and took the pizza from him.

Mike closed the door, and the kid walked back to his car and drove away. Two minutes later the cell phone rang. When I answered it, Mike said, “Sean? You’d better walk across the street and have a slice of pizza.”

Miller opened the door as I walked up the sidewalk and then led me into the kitchen. The pizza box was sitting open on the table. Next to the box were an envelope and a piece of notepaper. Miller gestured in the direction of the paper and said, “Take a look, but be careful how you handle it.”

I picked up the paper, holding it only by the top corner. The message was printed in block letters, and read,

BANG, YOU’RE DEAD!!!

I SAW YOUR LITTLE PERFORMANCE ON THE TUBE
TONIGHT, MIKE. EVEN AFTER ALL THESE YEARS, YOU’RE STILL PRETTY COCKY, AREN’T YOU? BUT YOU’RE NOT NEARLY AS SMART OR AS TOUGH AS YOU THINK YOU ARE. I COULD HAVE BEEN THE PIZZA DELIVERY GUY AND YOU’D BE ON THE WAY TO THE MORGUE RIGHT NOW. BUT I WANT YOU TO THINK ABOUT IT FOR A WHILE, MIKE. I’LL COME FOR YOU IN MY OWN GOOD TIME, AND WHEN I DO, YOU’LL ONLY WISH TO GOD THAT YOU COULD GET OFF AS EASILY AS ONE OF THOSE 70-YEAR-OLD WOMEN. SEE YOU THEN. MEANWHILE, ENJOY THE PIZZA. C.M.

I looked up at Mike and raised my eyebrows. “You know he could have been the pizza delivery guy.”

“No, he couldn’t,” Mike insisted, smiling. “Not unless he’s figured out a way to morph himself into the body of a pimply-faced, twenty-year-old kid.”

He reached behind his back and came out with a .38-caliber Smith and Wesson that he’d apparently been wearing under the T-shirt that was hanging out over his jeans. “Besides which,” he said, “when I opened the door with my left hand, I had this in my right, hanging at my side. If the guy would’ve come out of that bag with anything except a pizza, he’d have been dead without ever knowing what hit him.”

The receipt indicated that the pizza had come from a Domino’s a mile and a half from Mike’s house. The young woman at the counter told me that a man had walked into the store and ordered a large sausage and pepperoni pizza to be delivered to a friend. The man paid for the pizza, gave the woman Miller’s address, and handed her a note to go into the box along with the pizza.

“He told me he had lost a bet to his friend and was paying it off,” the woman explained.

The description she gave me of the man coincided with that provided by the receptionist at the Cadillac
dealership where Larry Cullen had worked: He was an “older man,” probably in his late forties or early fifties, with longish gray hair and a gray mustache. He was wearing a T-shirt and a pair of jeans. No, the woman said, she hadn’t seen the vehicle that the man was driving, but yes, she thought that she would recognize the man if she ever saw him again.

That same evening, the ninth of Beverly’s captivity, McClain walked through the bedroom door carrying a Domino’s pizza box. He dropped the box on the card table and looked at Beverly, who was sitting on the bed in her sweatpants and an Arizona Cardinals T-shirt, reading the Lawrence Block novel he’d bought her. Throwing up his hands defensively, he said, “I know, I know. I’m sorry about the fuckin’ pizza. But it’s been a long day, and I had to stop by the Domino’s place anyway.”

Beverly shrugged and set the book down on the nightstand. “It’s all right. I’ll survive.”

He gave her a quick look, then turned away. “Yeah, whatever. You want a beer?”

“Please.”

McClain turned and left the room without releasing Beverly from the cable, so she got up from the bed and walked over to her place at the table, dragging the cable behind her. She
would
survive the pizza, she knew, but she was increasingly sure of the fact that she would not survive Carl McClain.

He had definitely softened, but Beverly remained convinced that McClain had planned all along to kill her in the end. And try as she might, putting herself in
McClain’s place, she couldn’t see any way that he might change his mind, not if he had any hope of getting away with the murders he’d already committed.

He had a plan; she was sure of that. And realistically, he couldn’t have that much time left in which to complete it. If in fact he had killed Harold Roe, Walter Beckman, and a couple of jurors, in addition to killing David and abducting her, the police certainly would have made the connection by now. They had to know whom they were looking for, and no matter the change in McClain’s appearance, he could not expect to stay ahead of them for all that much longer.

She’d played the waiting game as long as she possibly could. If she was going to capitalize on whatever small advantage she might have created for herself, she would have to move at the next opportunity.

McClain returned with a couple of beers and the roll of paper towels. He seemed lost in his thoughts, practically oblivious to Beverly, and they ate the pizza in silence. Finally, he pushed his plate away and waited for a couple of minutes while Beverly finished eating. She wiped her mouth and laid her “napkin” on the table. McClain said, “I have to go out for a while. We’re out of beer, but there is a little of that Pinot Grigio left. Would you like it?”

“Yes, please,” she replied.

McClain picked up the dirty dishes and the pizza box and went out to the kitchen. He returned a minute later with a glass and the last quarter bottle of wine. He set them on the table and looked briefly at Beverly. “I’ll be back in a couple of hours.”

Saying nothing more, he turned and left, locking the bedroom door behind him.

Beverly poured a couple of drops of wine into the glass. Ten minutes later, when she was sure that McClain
was gone, she got up from the table, walked into the bathroom, and poured the rest of the wine down the drain.

She dropped the wine bottle into the wastebasket next to the sink. Then, for a long couple of minutes, she stood staring into the eyes of a woman she barely recognized, who was staring back at her from the dirty mirror above the sink.

Her hair was a tangled mess. Devoid of makeup, and having now spent well over a week indoors, her face was pale and gaunt. Beverly had no way of knowing how much weight she might have lost over the last several days, but it was clearly showing. She slowly shook her head at the image in the mirror, then lowered her eyes and looked away. She turned to leave the bathroom, then stopped and turned back to look at the plunger that was standing on the floor next to the toilet.

The plunger looked as if it was at least as old as the house itself. The suction cup at the business end might once have been red, but was now faded to a mottled pink. Most of the paint had flaked off the cracked wooden handle, which was about twenty inches long. She picked up the plunger and carefully examined the crack. It was roughly five inches in length, starting about two inches from the bottom of the handle and rising diagonally from the outer edge to the middle of the handle.

Beverly tried to test the crack by bending the handle, but it would only give a little. She picked the wine bottle out of the wastebasket and set it on its side on the floor. Then she laid the plunger across the bottle and anchored the top of the handle to the floor with her left foot.

Grabbing the sink with both hands to brace herself, she stepped on the other end of the plunger with her right foot, gently at first, then gradually increasing the pressure. The wood made a small cracking sound as
the fissure in the handle slowly spread from one side to the other. An instant before the break was complete, Beverly eased the pressure, stepped back, and retrieved the plunger.

The top of the handle was now attached only very tenuously to the bottom. The slightest pressure would complete the break, leaving about eighteen inches of the top of the handle tapering down to a jagged point.

Satisfied, Beverly nodded to herself and set the plunger back beside the toilet, turning the crack so that it faced away from the door. Then she picked up the wine bottle, dropped it back into the wastebasket, and returned to her novel.

It was the middle of Friday morning when Mike Miller called. “I just got off the phone with Jason Barnes. I assume you want me to give him the same basic interview I gave Davis?”

I put down the Coke I was drinking for breakfast and said, “Who in the hell is Jason Barnes?”

“The reporter from
New Times
. Didn’t you tell him to call me?”

“No, I’ve never heard of the guy, Mike.”

“Well, he called here fifteen minutes ago. Said he’d seen the piece on Channel 12 last night and could he do an interview to cover the topic in greater depth than the TV people could do? I told him sure. He’s supposed to be here at four this afternoon.”

“Well again, I never heard of him. I suppose it’s possible that he did see the interview and decided to follow up, which is fine if it will help flush McClain out of
his hole. Let me call the paper and double-check the guy.”

Fifteen minutes later, I called Mike back.

“I told you I’d never heard of Jason Barnes? Well, the editor of
New Times
never heard of him either.”

“No shit?”

“No shit. So what else did ‘Jason Barnes’ have to say?”

“Nothing more than what I told you before.”

I asked Mike if he had the guy’s number on his caller ID. He read off the number and I promised to get back to him. Thirty minutes later, he answered his phone again and I said, “The number goes back to a pay phone in the Civic Plaza. I think your old buddy Carl McClain wants to come have a chat with you this afternoon.”

We spent the next four hours placing an elaborate net around Mike Miller’s home. If McClain did show up at Miller’s front door, he’d find a note apologizing for the fact that Mike had been called away at the last minute, and asking “Jason Barnes” to call him and reschedule the interview. When McClain left the house, eight unmarked vehicles would be ready to trail him wherever he might lead us, alternating in and out of the surveillance.

A little after three, Mike taped the note to his front door, walked across the street, and joined Maggie, me, and two members of the Special Assignments Unit in the stakeout house. I introduced Mike to Maggie and the others, and he spent the next forty-five minutes regaling Maggie with exaggerated tales of my early days in the Homicide Unit. But by three fifty, everyone had fallen silent and the tension in the room was thick enough to cut with the proverbial knife.

At two minutes before four, a gray Ford Taurus came rolling up the street and pulled into Mike’s driveway. I read the plate number through my binoculars and
Maggie relayed it and the car’s description to the team outside.

The man who got out of the car looked to be somewhere in his late thirties, tall and well muscled with medium-length blond hair. He was dressed casually in a pair of tan slacks and a blue oxford shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. He wore a pair of hornrimmed glasses and was carrying a briefcase that looked like it should have belonged to a lawyer on his way to court.

Listening to the earphone connected to her radio, Maggie said quietly, “The plate on the car actually belongs on a two-year-old Ford Explorer registered in the name of Janelle Beck of Scottsdale.”

Without looking away from the window, I said, “Get somebody to Beck’s address right now. Find out where the hell she and her Explorer are.”

Maggie moved to the back of the room, dug out her cell phone, called Greg Chickris, and relayed the instructions.

The man across the street looked nothing like the images of Carl McClain that we’d been circulating in the media. He might have been the guy that Maggie and I had watched on the video from the convenience store, but it was impossible to tell. As we watched him walk up to Mike’s door, Brenda Perkins snapped off a number of pictures, using a good telephoto lens. The guy picked the note off the door and stood on the porch for a minute or two, reading the note and shaking his head.

Through the binoculars, “Jason Barnes” gave a very good impression of someone who’d just been seriously inconvenienced. Then he took a look at his watch, shook his head again, and set his briefcase down on the porch. He opened the briefcase, came out with a pen, and stepped up to the door. Holding the paper against the door, he wrote something beneath Mike’s note. Then
he taped the note to the door again, returned the pen to his briefcase, walked back to his car, and drove away.

“He’s moving,” Maggie said into her radio. “Heading west on Evans.”

The surveillance-team leader said, “Copy that. We’re on him.”

Our objective was to keep a net around the subject car with vehicles ahead of it, behind it, and running parallel on the streets on either side of it. While the team fell into place, I walked across the street and retrieved the note. The man, who we all hoped was Carl McClain, had written at the bottom of Mike’s message, “Sorry I missed you, Detective. I’ll call this evening to try to reschedule.” He’d signed the note “J. Barnes.”

While Mike went back home, Maggie and I joined the pursuit, leaving the stakeout team in place in the house across the street from Mike’s, just to be on the safe side. The driver of the Taurus appeared to be in no particular hurry and did nothing, even inadvertently, that might have made it difficult for us to tail him. Maggie and I rode silently in the wake of the surveillance team, listening to the chatter on the radio.

The Taurus led us generally south and west. Twenty minutes after leaving Mike’s, it pulled into the parking lot of an AJ’s grocery store. One of the pursuit vehicles pulled in behind the Taurus, while the others took up positions around the strip mall in which the store was located, ready to resume the chase. Over the radio, one of the surveillance detectives said, “He’s out of the car and headed toward the market. Janie and I are on him.”

“Stick close,” I warned. “Don’t let him go into the goddamn john and come out disguised as somebody else. And be sure that he’s not dropping the Taurus and picking up another ride.”

In response, Al Harris, the surveillance-team leader
said, “Don’t worry, the bastard won’t get away from us that easily.”

We listened as Harris deployed a couple of men to watch the back exits from the store and then moved a couple of people into place to monitor the main entrances in the front. One of the two detectives who had followed the target into the store said quietly into her radio, “He’s at the meat counter at the back of the store, looking at steaks.”

With McClain safely out of sight of the Taurus, Harris ordered one of his team to approach the car and tag it with a radio transponder that would enable us to track the car even if we lost sight of it. A minute later, the job was done, and the detectives in the store reported that McClain had picked out a couple of steaks and was now talking to the manager of the liquor department, apparently asking about a bottle of wine.

We listened as McClain made his way through the produce section, selecting a couple of baking potatoes and a bunch of carrots. “Steaks, wine, and carrots?” Maggie complained. “Who the fuck is this guy, Wolfgang Puck?”

Whoever the guy was, five minutes later he’d made his way through the checkout line, paying cash for his purchases, and was back in his car, again heading south and west. Again the surveillance team took up their positions around him, now aided by the radio transponder that pinpointed his position exactly.

Just after five o’clock, the Taurus drove past Chase Field, heading south down Seventh Street into one of the city’s seedier neighborhoods. The transponder tracked the car as it turned west onto Grant, then south onto Montezuma, and finally west again onto Tonto. At five seventeen, the Taurus pulled into the driveway of a small house on the north side of Tonto. The driver got out of the car, manually raised the door of the attached garage, and drove the car into the garage. He
then got out of the Taurus, pulled the door back down again, and disappeared from view.

The surveillance team radioed the address and I pulled over to the side of the street three blocks away. I called Elaine Pierce, who was standing by in the office, and gave her the address. “Get me everything on the house ASAP, Elaine—the owner, the phone number, current tenant if it’s not the owner, when they moved in, when they got utilities—everything.”

She promised that she would, and the surveillance team began closing up around the house.

By then, we had a little less than an hour of daylight left. One of the surveillance vans took up a position half a block away from the subject house, enabling the team inside the van to watch both the garage and the front door of the house. We circled the rest of the wagons on a two-block perimeter out of sight of the house and set up a command post in a truck disguised as a U-Haul moving van.

Before moving into the command post, Maggie and I drove slowly by the house. It was a small, nondescript, one-story residence built of tan concrete block with a red tile roof. Like the rest of the neighborhood, it had clearly seen better days. The tiles on the roof had faded; some were cracked, and a few were missing altogether. The yard had been sadly neglected and consisted mostly of weeds, litter, and a couple of pathetic-looking bushes.

Like many of the other homes along the street, the house was surrounded by a chain-link fence, and all the windows were protected by iron burglar bars. Looking north, you could see the lights of the Civic Plaza, Chase Field, and the US Airways Arena. But here, only eight or nine blocks away, we were in another world altogether, especially with the darkness closing in.

We parked behind the command truck, tapped on the door, and were greeted by Al Harris, dressed in
what I thought of as his combat outfit. Fifteen minutes later, my cell phone buzzed. I answered the call, and Elaine said, “The house belongs to a Walter Kovick of Tempe. He rents it out, and the current tenant is a guy named Alan Fischer. Fischer moved in three months ago, paying a security deposit and the first month’s rent with a check drawn on a Wells Fargo bank account.

“Fischer paid the second and third month’s rent with a check from the same account, and all of the checks cleared. Power, water, and cable are in Fischer’s name. Neither the landlord nor the utilities have a previous address for him. I’m trying to raise someone from Wells Fargo who can tell me how long the checking account’s been open, but I’m having trouble getting through to anyone this late in the day.

“Chickie says that Janelle Beck is a department head at Nordstrom’s. At the moment, she’s in Seattle for a meeting, and her Explorer is supposed to be parked someplace at the airport. Meanwhile, the lieutenant is wearing a path in the tile pacing back and forth between his office and mine. Call him and let him know what’s going on.”

I thanked her and told her to keep digging into Alan Fischer. I also told her to have a patrolman gather up Kovick, the landlord, and bring him to the command truck. Then I disconnected, called the lieutenant, and brought him up to date.

“What’s your plan?” he asked.

“So far, it’s looking increasingly like this is our guy,” I told him. “We’ll keep trying to find out if ‘Alan Fischer’ has any history prior to three months ago when he rented the house and which is just after McClain got out of Lewis. But we know that he showed up at Miller’s door and that he’s not Jason Barnes from
New Times
as he claimed to be. We know that he’s driving a car with a stolen plate, and we also know that the plate was taken from a car left at the airport, just like the one on the van
that McClain was driving when he snatched Beverly Thompson.

“Now that it’s getting dark, we’ll tighten the net around the house and make sure there’s no way he can get out, even on foot, without us seeing him. Let’s get a warrant for the house immediately. The next time he leaves, we’ll let the team follow him away and keep tabs on him. Then we’ll go into the house and see if he’s holding Beverly Thompson in there.”

“You don’t want to go in right away?”

“No,” I replied, shaking my head, even though he obviously couldn’t see me. “There’s really no point. He’s not going to hurt anybody else as long as he’s in the house, and it’ll be a lot easier to grab him in his car away from the place. It’ll also be safer for Thompson, on the off chance that she is still alive. We don’t want him barricading himself in there and using her for a hostage. And if he hasn’t got her in the house, maybe he’ll lead us to her.”

“Okay,” he sighed. “Keep me updated on a regular basis.”