No Place to Die (18 page)

For an hour after dinner was over, Beverly remained rooted to her chair at the card table, her mind spinning. Carl McClain had haunted her dreams for months following the trial, and she found it impossible to imagine
that the doughy, irresponsible kid she’d defended so many years ago had somehow morphed into the toned, determined, self-confident man who was now at the epicenter of her nightmares.

She could readily understand that, given the circumstances, McClain would be outraged. Anyone would be. He’d lost seventeen years of his life, branded as a killer and locked away in the company of society’s foulest rejects. Who wouldn’t be furious? And who wouldn’t feel some fundamental impulse to strike out at those he deemed responsible?

Still, that couldn’t possibly justify the actions he had taken. Unfortunately, the system was not perfect, and certainly Carl McClain was not the only innocent victim to be wrongly judged and punished by it. That such a thing could happen was more than a regrettable tragedy. It was unforgivable.

But it was also understandable. Justice depended upon the actions and the good intentions of fallible human beings who, sadly, could and did make mistakes. But for the most part, they were just that—mistakes—and nothing more. In McClain’s case as in others, well-intentioned policemen, prosecutors, witnesses, jurors, and a judge had screwed up, plain and simple. Not to mention McClain’s public defender.

As she’d told him, Beverly had done her best for him. And from the beginning she had feared that, as McClain had responded, her best had not been very good.

Beverly had been the youngest student in her law-school class, an idealist with the naive expectation that she could make a difference in the world. On graduating, she had rejected offers from several good law firms, opting instead for the Maricopa County Public Defender’s Office. She’d envisioned herself fighting on behalf of society’s downtrodden, impoverished, and innocent victims, only to find herself assigned to defend
the interests of a bewildering variety of sleazebags and genuinely terrifying amoral monsters, 90 percent of whom were guilty as hell of the charges levied against them and, doubtless, of much more.

Carl McClain had fallen somewhere into the middle of that range. Beverly had been assigned the case when a more seasoned attorney had abruptly left the office to go into private practice and when no one else was available to shoulder the responsibility.

She’d never found McClain to be particularly frightening. Rather, he’d always impressed her as an overweight, self-indulgent jerk who’d managed, by virtue of his own ineptitude, to get caught up in the system. He’d insisted, naturally, that he was innocent. But of course that’s what they all said. Beverly had never known whether to believe him or not, but that was beside the point. Even if McClain was the stone-cold killer that the prosecution described for the jury, the law still mandated that he was entitled to the best defense that she could provide for him.

In truth, Beverly was already beginning to question the merits of a system that insisted that wife beaters, drug dealers, burglars, rapists, and killers were entitled to the best defense that the Maricopa County taxpayers were willing to pay for. But she’d taken on McClain’s case with all the enthusiasm she could still muster for the job, and she’d worked as long and as hard as she could to win his acquittal.

She had begun second-guessing her efforts even before the jury delivered its verdict. And for months after McClain was delivered into the system, she was haunted by the fact that she might have allowed an innocent man to go to prison for a crime he had not committed. The evidence against McClain was strong, but it was not open-and-shut. And Beverly wondered whether, absent any eyewitness evidence beyond that of the second hooker, a more skilled attorney might
have been able to raise enough reasonable doubt in the minds of the jurors to have changed the outcome.

For weeks, she’d lain awake at night thinking about different approaches she might have taken and about the alternate arguments that she might have made. She mentally replayed her cross-examinations of the prosecution’s witnesses, now formulating questions that she might have asked but didn’t. And three months after the case ended—three more months in which she had defended the interests of mostly undeserving miscreants and worse—she’d thrown in the towel and accepted an offer to become a medical-malpractice specialist for the firm of Ballman, Nicholson, and Wyffels.

As the years passed, she immersed herself in the job, which she found to be more rewarding and intellectually challenging than she ever could have imagined. And in the process, finally, Carl McClain faded from her consciousness until he had become nothing more than a dim, distant, and regrettable memory.

When the news ended at ten thirty, McClain clicked off the television and pulled himself out of the living-room chair. He thought about putting the cable back on Beverly’s ankle, but decided against it. Moving quietly, he checked to make sure that the door to the bedroom was securely locked and then went out to the garage. He pulled on a pair of thin latex gloves and spent twenty minutes wiping down every surface on the van that he might have touched. Then he backed the van out of the garage, locked the garage door behind
him, and headed south and east toward the Sky Harbor Airport.

The cops were looking for a black van now, and even though they didn’t have a plate number, McClain decided that the van had already served its purpose and that it was probably time to dump it for safety’s sake.

He stuck to the side streets until he reached the airport, which was only a couple of miles from the house. Once there, he grabbed a ticket from the automated dispenser at the entrance to the parking garage immediately across the street from terminal 2. He drove up the ramp to the exposed upper level and parked the van in the middle of the lot.

On the way down the stairs, McClain stripped off the gloves then he threw them along with the key and the parking ticket into a trash barrel at the bottom of the stairs. Then he walked across the street to the terminal and grabbed a cab. He instructed the driver to drop him at a bar seven blocks away from the house, and he stayed in the bar long enough for one quick drink. Then he walked on home, watching carefully and keeping his hand on the pistol in his jacket pocket all the way there. As he’d warned Beverly, it wasn’t the best of neighborhoods.

It was just after midnight when McClain got back to the house. He put the gun into the backpack in the hall and stood in the living room for a couple of minutes thinking about drinking a beer and watching some late-night television. Then he thought back to Beverly and the way she’d looked, sitting at the card table in her oversized T-shirt while he told her who he was and what he was doing.

He quietly unlocked the door to the bedroom and stepped in. The lights were on, and Beverly had fallen asleep on top of the bed, still wearing the clothes he had given her this afternoon. McClain locked the door
behind him and slipped the key ring back into his pocket. Silently he undressed and lay down on the bed beside her.

She came awake slowly as he slipped his hand under the T-shirt and cupped her breast.

“No,” she said. “Please, Carl, no.”

She tried to push him away, but he threw a knee over her leg, pinning her down. He peeled off the sweatpants and the panties, careful not to tear them this time, and forced himself into her. For a few more seconds she tried to push him off, but then she gave up and lay still beneath him, letting him have his way.

McClain built to his climax slowly and deliberately, and then, when he was nearly there, Beverly arched up into him and shuddered. “No,” she cried again. “Please no.”

He finished a few seconds later and rolled off beside her. Beverly turned her back to him and began sobbing into her pillow.

Valentine’s Day fell on a Wednesday.

I was already awake when the alarm began buzzing at five
A.M.
I punched it off, snapped on the light, and sat on the edge of the bed for a minute or two, contemplating the picture of Julie that faced me from the nightstand. Sighing heavily, I got up, quickly made the bed, then brushed my teeth and made a pass at combing my hair.

I pulled on a T-shirt, a pair of running shorts, and my Asics and did five miles through the neighborhood in just under forty minutes. The temperature was
somewhere in the high forties, and at that time of the morning, traffic was still fairly light. A good portion of my route paralleled the Kierland Golf Club, and as I ran along the broad sidewalk that bordered the course, the city around me slowly came back to life for another day.

By the time I’d gone to bed a little after one
A.M.
, we’d had scores of calls from people who reported seeing Carl McClain or a black van matching the description we’d released. We’d follow up on any tip that looked even remotely promising of course, but I knew that it would be mostly busywork that would not get us any closer to catching the guy.

My gut instinct told me that we wouldn’t find him anytime soon, unless we got incredibly lucky. McClain had been out of prison for a little over three months before beginning his killing spree, which convinced me that he was not acting impulsively. Obviously, he’d taken the time to scout his victims and was working carefully from a plan of some sort.

I assumed that he’d used the time between his release and the murder of Alma Fletcher to create a base of operations somewhere and to lay the groundwork for the actions that were now unfolding. I wondered if he had also used the time to alter his appearance, and if so, in what way.

I found it interesting that he had abducted Beverly Thompson and Walter Beckman, rather than simply killing them in their homes, as he had the other victims. What had been his purpose in doing so, and was he still holding them for some reason or had he killed them and hidden the bodies?

And where did Richard Petrovich fit into the scheme of things? Why had we found his DNA at the scene of the crimes and not McClain’s? Was Petrovich assisting McClain, or had McClain somehow engaged in a bit of clever misdirection?

Was McClain still driving the black van, and if so, would we have any chance of finding it among the hundreds of similar vehicles in the greater metro area? Most important, how many more names did McClain have on his list, and who would he be going after next?

Heading north toward home again, I dropped down into the pedestrian tunnel that would take me under Greenway Parkway, and my thoughts flashed back to Julie.

This was the second Valentine’s Day since the accident. Three years ago tonight, I’d taken her to dinner at Mary Elaine’s at the Phoenician—an extravagance, but well worth it, especially in hindsight.

The dinner had been excellent in every respect, and Julie had looked especially beautiful in a black cocktail dress with thin spaghetti straps. She’d worn her hair up that night, something that she did only rarely, and usually only when she was wearing the diamond earrings that I’d given her for her thirtieth birthday.

After dinner, we’d gone out to the patio off the Thirsty Camel bar for a Cognac. The stars sparkled overhead, and directly below us the waters of the resort’s sprawling pool complex shimmered bright and blue. The landscape lighting threw the palm trees into shadowed relief, and off in the distance, planes glided soundlessly into the Sky Harbor Airport. I remember draping my suit coat over Julie’s bare shoulders as the temperature turned cooler and kissing her softly as we waited for the valet to bring the car at the end of the evening.

It had been a perfect Valentine’s Day celebration, and as I let myself back into the house at the end of my run, I knew that I’d never have another to approach it again.

I got into the office, showered, and shaved at seven thirty and checked my messages. Then I opened my
first Coke of the day and pulled out a gray legal pad. Twenty minutes later, Maggie walked in, dressed in a navy blue suit with a skirt that reached her knees, a taupe blouse, and dark blue pumps with a medium heel. She shook her head and said, “How can you possibly be drinking that crap at this time of the day?”

“It’s the pause that refreshes,” I countered. “Besides, it can’t be any worse for a person than that coffee you’re drinking.”

“Richardson,” she sighed, “you are fuckin’ hopeless.”

Pointing at the chart I’d drawn on the legal pad, she said, “What’ve you got there?”

“So far, nothing at all,” I replied. “I’m putting all of the people we identified as McClain’s possible targets onto a grid along with their addresses, their roles in his apprehension and prosecution, and whatever other information seems to be relevant. I’m trying to see if there’s any pattern that emerges out of the victims he’s attacked already. If so, it might point us in the direction of whomever he’s going after next.”

“And?”

“And nothing,” I sighed. “At least not so far. If there is a pattern here, I’m sure as hell not getting it. Why don’t we go see Petrovich again?”

Twenty minutes later, a guard brought Petrovich into an interview room at the jail. He took a chair across the table from us and said, “I hear on the news that the guy who prosecuted McClain got himself shot yesterday while I was sitting here in the can. You still think I’m tied up with McClain in all of this?”

“Are you?” Maggie asked.

Petrovich shook his head. “Fuck no. Jesus, what do I have to do to convince you people of that?”

“Well,” I said, “you could start by explaining how your hair wound up at two of the crime scenes.”

“I wish to God I could,” he answered.

I dropped McClain’s photo on the table between us. “When you last saw McClain, did he still look like this?”

Petrovich studied the photo for a few moments and then said, “Yeah, only a little thinner.” Tapping the picture with his finger, he continued, “He was really heavy when I first met him in the can, but over the last couple of years he dropped a lot of pounds and toned up a bit.”

“Did he lose weight in his face?”

“Yeah, his face is definitely thinner now.”

“What about the glasses and the hair?” I asked.

Petrovich shrugged. “The same as in the picture, I guess. When he was at my place after he got out, his hair might have been a little longer than it is here, but it’s still jet-black, and he’s still wearing the same geeky glasses.”

“Okay,” I said, putting the photo back in its envelope. “We’re going to send a police artist over here later this morning. I want you to work with him—help him do some sketches showing what McClain looks like now, with his thinner face.”

“And then you’ll let me out of here?”

“No,” I said as Maggie and I got up from the table. “At least not right away. But you’ll be doing a favor for yourself as well as for us, because the sooner we can catch McClain, the sooner we’ll have a chance to ask him whether you’ve been helping him out or not.”