Collecting the Dead (20 page)

Whenever you order cable TV at your new apartment, apply for a loan, get a new cell phone, apply for water and sewer service, or set up just about any other “public” service, the data is added to the tens of billions of public records stored in various corporate databases.

These are the databases that CLEAR calls upon when a query is run. And for those in law enforcement there’s a special version of CLEAR that provides more and better information. It’s a bit Orwellian, but the database is an indispensable tool and a favorite of Diane’s.

“P. Nichols is most likely Peggy Nichols,” Diane continues, “the twelfth name on the list; she moved to Florida last month. Looks like she just closed on a three-bedroom rancher in Punta Gorda—that’s a bit south of Sarasota. I’ll include her new phone number in the e-mail.”

“Can you call the Punta Gorda Police Department as soon as you’re off the phone and advise them of the situation? And if they don’t have a PD, call the county sheriff’s office.”

“I called both before I called you. They tended to agree that the chance of Sad Face going all the way to Florida is remote but promised they’d notify Peggy and take the appropriate precautions until we give them the all-clear.”

“Well … good, then. You’re one step ahead of me.”

“Of course I am.”

The tap dance of fingers on the keyboard drifts through the phone and then Diane continues. “Number thirteen, M. Milne, is Melissa Milne. I’m close to a hundred percent on that because there haven’t been any other Milnes pictured in any of the fifty-seven newspapers I’ve scanned, at least not in the last year and a half. Melissa lives in Redding; the address the sheriff’s office has for her looks like it’s still good. Same with number fourteen, Nikki Dearborn, and her husband Tyson. Their place appears to be a twenty-acre mini-ranch just outside Anderson.”

“How about B. Contreras?” Jimmy asks.

“That one was a little tougher, but it’s most likely Becky Contreras,” Diane says. “I had four different addresses for her in the last two years. After some cross-referencing, which wasn’t pretty, I was able to trace her to an apartment in Corning.”

“Corning?”

“It’s a small town fifteen to twenty miles south of Red Bluff, population less than eight thousand. It’s also known as Olive City and is home to the Bell-Carter Olive Company. Wikipedia says it’s the largest ripe olive cannery in the world.”

“Fascinating,” Jimmy replies dryly. “Do you have an address?”

“It’ll be in the e-mail with the others,” Diane replies a bit tersely, taking Jimmy’s lack of interest in the mechanics of olive production as a snub against olives and, by association, olive lovers—which must include her.

“And when can we expect this e-mail?”

“I just sent it, didn’t you hear the
click
?”

“I must have missed it.”

“I thought as much.”

“Bye, Diane.”

“Mm-hmm.”

*   *   *

Within the law enforcement community there are nicknames and acronyms for just about everything. It’s much like the military in that sense. For example, a
holster sniffer
is a police groupie, a woman—or man—who loves the uniform and the authority it represents. At the opposite end of the spectrum is your standard
asshat
, a drunk or high knuckle-dragging degenerate looking for trouble.

Flip-a-bitch
means to make a U-turn; a
fishwalk
is the ground-dance a suspect does when being tased, also known as
doing the funky chicken
; and
leering and peering with the intent to creep and crawl
is generally what an
Adam Henry
(asshole) is up to when you just can’t figure out
what
he’s up to.

Within this extensive cop vernacular is the term
law-enforcement-friendly
, which describes a citizen who generally appreciates the police and is cooperative; an upstanding citizen who is always ready to help.

Melissa Milne is not law-enforcement-friendly.

Melissa Milne hates cops.

Jimmy is nearly speechless. “Miss Milne, I just told you that a serial killer has you on his target list.”

“And I told you to get off my porch, ass monkey.”

Ass monkey?
I mouth to Walt; he just shrugs.

“Ten women are dead,” Jimmy practically pleads. “It’s been all over the news.”

“I don’t give a— Hey! Where are you going?” she suddenly barks, pointing two cigarette-encumbered fingers at me as I start walking toward the side of the house.

“I’m just checking to see where that smell’s coming from,” I reply, glancing down the side of the house. “Smells like … fresh marijuana; a lot of it.”

“The hell you say.”

“The hell I
do
say,” I shoot back. Jimmy’s giving me a confused look and hustles off the porch and over to my side. “What are you doing?” he hisses.

“She has a grow-op upstairs,” I say flatly. “The windows are covered with newspaper and she’s got a pretty good ventilation system going. Plus, she’s making eight to ten trips to the shed in the backyard every day. Nobody makes that many trips to their shed
every day
and still has a yard that looks this crappy.”

Jimmy’s impressed. He steals a glance at the second-floor windows to confirm the newspaper and sees that every single window is covered.

“How’s that help us check for Sad Face’s shine?”

“Watch.”

Turning, I make my way back to the ass-monkey expert and lean on the bottom porch rail. She’s just glowering at me, not sure what to think or say. “Here’s the way I see it,” I tell her. “You let us walk around the edge of the property, let us check the outside of the doors and windows to see if they’ve been tampered with, and we won’t need to get a warrant to search the inside of the house … particularly the upstairs.”

She catches my meaning immediately and the corner of her left eye gives an involuntary twitch. She stands there a moment—fuming mad; she knows I have her cornered. “Fine!” She spits the word at me, thrusting her head to add force. “But you better be gone next time I look out.” Without waiting for a response, she turns and lets the screen door slam behind her.

It takes less than five minutes to give the place a thorough walkabout. There’s no sign of Sad Face. Not on the ground, at the windows, on the cellar door—we even check the mailbox.

Nothing.

Still, she’s on the target list, so Walt assigns a deputy to park discreetly on a parallel street that offers a good view of the entire property. It’ll be that way with the other targets as well: a twenty-four-hour protection detail, seven days a week, until Sad Face is caught. It’s not going to be cheap, but it’s better than the alternative.

The next stop is the Dearborn Farm just outside of Anderson, California. After following I-5 south from Redding for about twelve miles, we exit onto Riverside Drive and make our way to Dersch Road. Three or four miles down the road we cross over Cow Creek and soon turn into the driveway on the left. A black metal arch stretches over the gravel entry announcing
DEARBORN RANCH
in large white letters.

It’s not
really
a ranch. I know this because ranches have longhorn cattle and horses and five hundred acres of grazing land and a ranch house with a metal triangle that you ring when it’s time to come in for lunch or dinner.

All I see is goats, hundreds of them.

It should be called Dearborn Goat Farm.

The sign at the road points to a small nine-hundred-square-foot store where they sell goat milk and goat cheese and goat ice cream, none of which sounds appealing. They also have a wide range of other goat products I didn’t know existed, like lip balm and body lotion and soap, just to name a few. Much of it they produce at the farm, but some items are purchased elsewhere for resale … which means there are other goat farms masquerading as ranches.

Jimmy’s already decided we need to get a goat-cheese pizza and make an early dinner of it. When I curl my nose, he starts extolling the many health benefits and the excellent flavor of goat cheese; personally, I think he’s just making this stuff up as he goes. It doesn’t matter. He can spout off all he wants; I’m not eating goat cheese.

The Dearborns are salt-of-the-earth people, and after we assure them they’re not in any trouble, they immediately invite us up to the house for some lemonade, leaving the store in the hands of their only employee. As we make our way to the house, I give Jimmy a silent nod, letting him know that Sad Face has been here.

His shine was in the store, and it was recent. Apparently he was interested in the goat-based shampoo, because he picked up a bottle and handled it extensively, though this was probably a ruse so that he could watch Nikki while pretending to read the label. The intensity of the shine suggests he was here within the last week or so. Unfortunately, I didn’t see any surveillance cameras in the store.

I’m guessing there aren’t a lot of shoplifters targeting goat products.

Inside the house Tyson introduces us to Hannah, their two-year-old brindle boxer. While I’m not much for dogs, Hannah is under the misguided belief that I’m her biggest fan and shames me into scratching her behind the ears. She’s a pushy little thing because whenever I stop, she sticks her nose under my hand and lifts it up, prompting more scratching and petting.

“So what’s this all about?” Tyson says with a nervous laugh.

Jimmy takes a deep breath and then explains the situation in the most direct and thorough manner he can without compromising the investigation. Walt and I sit silently by. We watch the faces of Nikki and Tyson go from shock, to concern, to abject terror. By the time Jimmy finishes, Nikki’s nearly in tears … and that was the sugarcoated version.

It’s going to get worse.

After a well-timed and subtle suggestion, Walt stays with the Dearborns as Jimmy and I walk the property and check the exterior of the house. In a low voice I tell Jimmy about the store, but as we work our way around the property, I see Sad Face everywhere. He’s been in the barn and around the house; I even find his handprint on several windows and a couple doors. The prints are flat and lack any dermal ridge detail, indicating he wore gloves, probably latex. That’s unfortunate.

The only good news is he never made it inside the house. It looks like he tried but failed, for some reason. My guess is Hannah scared him off.

On the outside of the master bedroom window, tucked down in the corner, we find a small wireless camera. It’s well hidden by the bushes outside the window, as are the two wires going down the side of the house to a D-cell battery pack on the ground.

“He’s got them strung together for longevity,” Jimmy says, referring to the batteries. “He can probably run the camera for two or three weeks like that. Then all he has to do is park nearby and intercept the signal: instant Dearborn TV.”

“Do we tell them,” I ask, leaning my head toward the house, “or just remove the camera and not say anything? They’re already freaked out.”

“They should be.”

“So you’re going to tell them?”

“I think we have to.” He studies my face. “You disagree?”

I shrug. “I think they already get it. There’s such a thing as too much information and, frankly, a camera peeping into your bedroom is about as intrusive and unsettling as it gets. The thought of Sad Face parking nearby or crouching in the woods and watching them in the privacy of their own bedroom, well, I think that’ll push Nikki into a bad place. They still have to live in this house and sleep in the bedroom and work in the shop.”

“They’ll have twenty-four-hour security,” Jimmy argues. “From what we’ve seen, Nikki’s high on the target list, so in addition to one of Walt’s plainclothes detectives, we’ll request an FBI surveillance team. We’ll have our own cameras watching the house, the shop, even the woods and the road. There’ll be three or four people here day and night.”

“All the more reason not to mention the camera,” I say. “We can loosen one of the wires on the battery pack so it looks like the batteries went dead. That way if Sad Face comes back he won’t be able to get the signal. Maybe he’ll think it too risky to replace the batteries. But even if he does, that gives us one more chance to catch him.” I shrug. “Maybe we can chain up a noisy dog outside the bedroom window. That would keep him away.”

We go back and forth a few more minutes before settling on a compromise: we’ll tell the Dearborns that Sad Face has been to their property, that he’s been around the house and barn, but we won’t mention the camera.

Even at that, the news doesn’t go over well and Nikki goes into full-blown meltdown. Who can blame her? Between comforting her and talking to us, Tyson makes a couple phone calls from the kitchen. By the time we leave, two of Nikki’s brothers have arrived, each carrying a hastily-thrown-together backpack over his right shoulder—just the necessities: underwear, socks, a toothbrush, toothpaste, clothes, and five hundred rounds of .223 ammunition. The ammo is for the matching pair of AR-15s they carry slung over the other shoulder.

They’re here for the duration.

It’s good to have brothers.

*   *   *

Becky Contreras isn’t home when we reach her place in Corning at 6:27
P.M.
Her apartment is on the third floor, which narrows Sad Face’s abduction options considerably. Since there’s no sign of him on the stairway, we focus on the parking lot and the laundry room and come up empty. No footsteps around the edge of the complex, no handprints on the back gate, no cameras in the bushes.

Looks like Becky hasn’t made it to the A-list yet.

Either that or we have the wrong B. Contreras.

Since we’re now outside Walt’s jurisdiction, having left Shasta County and crossed into Tehama County on the drive south, Walt places a call to Tehama County Sheriff Paul Meeker, who he’s on a first-name basis with, and fills him in.

Soon a Tehema County deputy arrives in the parking lot and backs into a free space that gives him an unobstructed view of Becky’s apartment.

“Paul says he’ll talk to Becky personally when she gets home, so he can explain the situation without terrifying the girl,” Walt says. “She’ll have whatever protection she needs and an escort everywhere she goes.”