To Die For (18 page)

Outside the interview room, his heart in his throat, Greco half-ran down the hallway to the report-writing room. The Riverside County Sheriff's homicide detective was still sitting there.

“Hey,” Greco said.

“What's up?” the detective asked.

“What's the name of your victim?”

“Our victim? Her name was, um, Dora, let me look,” the detective said, looking at the paperwork. “Here it is. Dora Beebe.”

It was like cymbals crashing in Greco's head. His heart was pounding so hard, he could hardly speak.

“OK,” he said evenly. “We have your suspect in custody.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 16, 1994, 9:15 P.M.

He was wondering when the killer was going to hit their side of town. Detective Chris Antoniadas, stocky but nimble enough to step lightly through the crime scene, had been expecting someone to get whacked in his part of town. If this killer was targeting the elderly, Sun City was an obvious choice. It was one of several cities built around the country just for retirees. Just as Canyon Lake was built around a man-made lake, the homes in Sun City were literally built around a golf course. But unlike Canyon Lake, there were no walls, no guards to check visitors and no on-site police sub-station. Most of the homes had no-maintenance lawns of decorative rock and all of the homes were one-story to allow ease of mobility among residents using canes, walkers and wheelchairs. The community service center offered shuffleboard, lawn bowling and card groups as well as an array of service clubs. It was a well-stocked pond for a killer targeting the elderly.

Antoniadas had been a cop for fifteen years, the last nine as a homicide investigator for the Riverside County Sheriff's Department. His curly dark hair flecked with gray, he was 100 percent Greek and proud of it, speaking nothing but Greek until he was 5 years old, when his parents sent him off to school. He'd lost his accent a long time ago, but he loved good, authentic Greek food and still celebrated Easter the old-fashioned way—by slaughtering a lamb and cooking it in the backyard on a spit. The neighbors had called the cops on him once because they thought he was cooking someone's dog.

He had been a street kid, had run with a tough crowd and got into a lot of trouble before joining the Marines. They straightened him out in a hurry. When he got out, a friend encouraged him to join him in law enforcement, so he applied and got a job. At about the same time, one of his friends asked to borrow $5,000 to start a copy business and Antoniadas agreed. Then he begged Antoniadas to be his business partner, but Antoniadas argued with him. How the hell are you gonna make any money turning out three-cent copies? His friend found other partners and they started Kinko's. Antoniadas still goes to visit his buddy at his million-dollar penthouse office overlooking the ocean. He teases Antoniadas: “How the hell am I gonna make money turning out three-cent copies?” But Antoniadas doesn't regret his choice of staying with police work.

From 1988 on, he worked out of the Lake Elsinore station, which had jurisdiction over roughly 1,000 square miles, including unincorporated county areas and cities like Sun City that didn't have their own police departments. The region was sparsely populated, but it led the county in violent homicides. There were murders, and then there were ugly murders. Biker gangs cutting people's fingers off before killing them. A mental case stabbing his mother so many times, he ended up hacking her head off. For some reason, dirt bags came to Lake Elsinore to kill people. He thought it was partly that and partly the meth.

The things he'd seen had changed him. The last thing that had shocked him was seeing his partner shot to death. He was assigned to investigate the case. When he went to the autopsy and saw his partner laid out on the metal gurney with the holes cut into it and a tray underneath to catch the spillover, he joked, “I always wondered what he looked like from the inside out.” Black humor relieves stress. What was he supposed to do, sit there and blubber?

He was the kind who worked a case until he ran himself into the ground. Most of the time, he just worked, all day, all night, for days on end, barely coming home to sleep. His wife didn't like it, but that was her problem. The effect it had on his health was an annoyance. At 42, he was too young for his heart to be giving him problems. He was out on a surveillance for his undercover unit one time with his partner, waiting for a guy to come out of a bar. They knew the suspect carried a sawed-off shotgun in his car. When the guy came out, Antoniadas stepped on the gas and at the same time, a local reporter and his photographer, also in a car, had found out where Antoniadas was and inadvertently blocked his way. Alerted to the trap, the suspect got his gun and started shooting. Antoniadas' partner got shot, Antoniadas had to shoot and wound the suspect. As it turns out, they all got a ride to the hospital. Antoniadas hadn't been shot, but the strain on his heart caused him to go into tachycardia—his heart was beating 200 times a minute and got stuck there. The doctor told him to slow down. Antoniadas didn't know how.

Antoniadas had investigated more than 100 homicides and this scene was one of the worst. Looking around Dora's house, Antoniadas saw the obvious signs of age: the walker, the cane and the calendar marked up with doctors' appointments. On the first walk-through, he assumed the victim was old because every single person who lived in that area was aged—and she was the companion of Louis Dormand, the elderly gentleman friend who discovered her body. It wasn't until after they found her ID that they checked her date of birth. Dora was 87.

There had been very few murders in Sun City; Antoniadas found that the suspects in the cases he investigated around there were sons, grandsons, nephews or other relatives killing their parents or grandparents for an inheritance. Sometimes the victim was a resident who surprised a burglar. Antoniadas took one look at Dora's mutilated corpse and knew this one was different.

In the first place, most murderers, particularly those who kill for profit, during a burglary, or to settle a gang score, just kill and get out. They don't sit there and endlessly bludgeon the victim. On the walk-through of Dora's house, he saw the results of a prolonged heating that went far beyond what was needed to kill a victim of this age. One blow would have done it. This was a definite overkill with the severe beating and obvious signs of ligature strangulation. He was past feeling horror at seeing the victim's face battered beyond recognition, her hands still raised to ward off her attacker. It wasn't his job to feel. His job was to catch who did this and to calm down the people who were frightened of becoming the next victim. As he walked through, he considered the possibilities, trying to determine the sequence of the attack as well as the killer's motives. Though law enforcement doesn't have to prove a defendant's motive in court, it's usually helpful in identifying a suspect. Antoniadas saw a lot of rage in the way that Dora had been brutalized. Given the extent of the beating, one possibility was that the killer was venting anger on the old woman personally. Since there was no sign of a forced entry, it was possible that Dora knew her attacker. But the killer could also have conned his way in. If he did, he didn't attack her at the front door, because there was no indication of a struggle in the entryway or the living room. It also didn't look like Dora had surprised a burglar who had gained access to her home, because nothing was ransacked. Antoniadas didn't think this killer was there for monetary gain. Very little effort had been spent searching for valuables and far too much time had been devoted to brutalizing the victim. He could have dispatched her with one blow. This guy could be mentally disturbed like the guy who stabbed his mother. Or he could just be extremely violent. Maybe he had a fetish against old people. He knew it wasn't Louis Dormand. The old guy didn't have the strength to do this. Whoever it was, was definitely out of control.

When Antoniadas first arrived at the murder scene, he had dictated his observations into a tape recorder, documenting everything, starting with the weather and temperature, the open garage door, whether the day's newspaper had been picked up or not and which doors and windows were open, closed, locked or unlocked. Dormand said the front door was closed, but not locked. There were no broken windows, no scratch or tool marks that would indicate a forced entry.

After a hundred homicide investigations, he had no idea whether the time of death would emerge as the primary issue of the case. He had no idea how long that woman had been dead. He had no idea whether they would ever find a suspect or what was going to be important years from now at trial. The outside temperature, the temperature inside the house, open doors and windows and the setting of the thermostat could be important if the coronor had to estimate the range of time in which the murder occurred. It was impossible to pinpoint the exact time of death. But if the homicide investigator records the ambient indoor and outdoor temperature at the crime scene, as well as details like thermostat settings, a deputy medical examiner can plug those figures into a formula that calculates the amount of time it would take a body to cool, providing a span of several hours during which the murder most likely occurred. It isn't an exact science. But Antoniadas had seen clever defense attorneys at murder trials insinuate that detectives were sloppy if they missed a piece of evidence at a crime scene, and he'd seen them make points before a jury over evidence that wasn't important.

He once found himself on the witness stand at trial of one of his homicide defendants who was accused of bludgeoning his wife with a hard object. In his opening statement to jurors, the defense attorney had woven a tale of a sloppy police investigation and shoddy detective work. At the crime scene, years earlier, Antoniadas had dutifully documented, photographed and collected all of the objects that could have been used to strike the fatal blow, like fireplace tools, a hammer and a heavy candlestick. But under cross-examination, the defense attorney produced a crime-scene photo showing a large baseball bat that Antoniadas had never collected and hadn't mentioned in his police report. Antoniadas calmly acknowledged that he, indeed, never mentioned the big bat. Turning to jurors and waving the photograph in front of them, the lawyer finally asked why he never picked up the bat. Antoniadas testified that it was a plastic toy bat. The bat contained numerous holes in it to play Wiffle Ball and was designed to prevent injury if a child was accidentally struck with it. The bat could not possibly have been used to murder the victim. After the jury stopped laughing, the defense attorney slinked back to the counsel table. His client was convicted. Antoniadas would have told the lawyer about the bat before he got on the witness stand, but he never asked, and Antoniadas didn't volunteer it because he didn't know the lawyer was going to make some insignificant detail the centerpiece of his case. Antoniadas had no patience for that. He was not about to be shot down in front of a jury. That was why it would take 15 to 18 hours to process this crime scene.

He had another problem. The old folks were coming out of their homes to gawk and ask questions. Not only were they frightened, they were angry. They were former accountants, lawyers and business owners who, by the time they retired, had had multiple employees answering to them. They'd reached a point in their lives where they wanted to live out their years in comfort and safety. It was not acceptable that a murderer was stalking their neighborhood. There was nowhere they could go to escape, unless they left the homes they had worked for all their lives. These were the people who voted in every election, read the newspaper and had the time to phone the gas company when there was a problem with their bill. Now they wanted to know what the hell was going on. He'd talked to a handful of them when he arrived, but he was in no position to tell them anything of substance. The best he could do was to say yes, there'd been a homicide, they were working on it, and then try to reassure them that the police would do everything to catch the killer, and as soon as they knew anything, they'd let the neighbors know, but at this point, there was no reason to be concerned about safety. It was b.s., of course. Hell, they had a Freddie Krueger character on the loose. They had every reason to be afraid. But he couldn't tell them that.

As the evening wore on, the number of onlookers seemed to increase as more and more people found out about the murder and showed up at Dora's house. There must have been about 40 of them altogether, arriving a handful at a time. Antoniadas remained in the house most of the night, but the deputies keeping watch outside let him know.

By this time of night, the ID tech had placed numbered yellow placards by each piece of evidence. Antoniadas and the tech had started from the outside and searched around the side and backyards for anything of evidentiary value, like a shoe or some foot imprints on the lawn or the driveway, snapped or broken twigs, or marks in the dirt under the windows showing that someone had been outside looking in. Anything at all that simply looked disturbed or out of place. They found nothing.

Antoniadas found the home clean and orderly. From the front door, the living room was directly ahead and the kitchen was to the left. The living room was a mix of colorful but tasteful furniture. There was a floral sofa with soft blue stripes, a light blue velour recliner and a matching ottoman, an Oriental rug, a 1970s lamp and a few antiques. Framed portrait-style family photos of a man, a woman, a child and a teenager hung on the wall. The kitchen held a few clues—there was a half-eaten sandwich on the kitchen table and a half-glass of orange juice next to the sink. On the counter that separated the kitchen from the living room lay a daily calendar with the page exposed to March 16, a few clipped coupons, a church newsletter, a grocery list and a pair of bifocal glasses. A GTE phone book was open and lying face-down on the kitchen floor in front of the sink. A cane hung from the doorknob of the kitchen pantry. On one kitchen wall were more family snapshots—a baby in a red corduroy jumper, a school photo of a young boy, and a picture of Louis Dormand. There was an empty phone jack on the wall, but no phone.