No Place to Die (2 page)

Carl McClain pulled his nondescript Ford Econoline van into the garage, jumped out of the vehicle, and pulled the garage door down behind him. He secured the door from the inside, then leaned back against it and let out a heavy sigh as the tension and the adrenaline rush of the last ninety minutes slowly drained away.

The house with its attached garage was in a gritty area of south-central Phoenix, a stone’s throw from the Sky Harbor Airport. It sat among a group of similarly aged homes, a few of which were now abandoned and others of which were slowly falling into ruin. McClain had rented the place three months earlier from a balding, overweight landlord who seemed exceedingly happy about the prospect of getting the rent and who appeared to care not at all about McClain’s plans for the house, as long as he paid the rent on time.

As was the case with many of the other houses in the neighborhood, the windows were protected by iron security bars. The yard, which consisted mostly of dirt, litter, and a few hardy weeds, was enclosed by a chain-link fence. These precautions notwithstanding, McClain had installed a new set of heavy-duty locks on each of the exterior doors. He’d also boarded up the windows in the larger of the two bedrooms, first closing the blinds and then nailing the shabby curtains in between the plywood and the glass. From the outside of the house it would simply look like he always left the blinds closed and the curtains pulled shut.

That done, he’d tacked fiberglass insulation over the walls and ceiling of the bedroom and the small connecting bathroom. The insulation would soak up any sound that might otherwise escape from the rooms in the unlikely event that anyone in the seamy neighborhood would be close enough to hear the noise and in the even more unlikely event that they would care anything about it.

Against one of the walls of the bedroom he’d built a platform, eighty inches long by sixty inches wide and twenty-four inches high. On the platform he’d put a queen-size mattress that he bought at a discount mattress outlet. He’d bolted two heavy iron rings into the wall at the head of the bed, and two more into the floor at the foot of the bed.

By the fifth of February everything was in readiness, and two nights later McClain opened the rear doors of the van and pulled an old painter’s tarp off of Beverly Thompson, who was lying on the floor of the van, still unconscious from the chloroform.

A little after nine o’clock that night, Beverly felt herself coming slowly back to life, but everything around her seemed hazy and out of focus, as if her life was happening at a distance. She had a vague recollection of driving into her garage and of shots being fired, then of bouncing on the hard floor of a vehicle that was being driven over a rough stretch of road. She’d had a fleeting moment of semiconsciousness when someone threw her over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry, but that was the last thing that she remembered.

As she now came to again, she found herself lying spread-eagled on a bed. Her arms were stretched wide apart over her head and her wrists were handcuffed to a pair of rings hanging from the wall above the bed. Her left leg was secured by a rope that dropped off the foot of the bed and was anchored somewhere out of
her sight. Her right ankle was secured in a metal cuff. A thick wire cable trailed from the cuff down to a ring that had been bolted into the floor about three feet from the edge of the bed.

The ceiling above and the walls around her were covered with pink fiberglass insulation, and the ultimate effect suggested a demented cotton-candy maker had run amok in the place. The room was warm, and she found herself perspiring.

Suddenly Beverly remembered the sight of David collapsing to the floor of the garage. She shook her head in an effort to drive the image away and gave a sharp little cry. Then she heard the sound of a chair scraping on the floor somewhere to her right. She turned her head to see a man rise from the chair and walk over to the side of the bed.

“Are we finally awake now?” he asked.

The man appeared to be in his late thirties or early forties, tall and well muscled. He was still dressed in the black jeans and black long-sleeve T-shirt he’d been wearing when he slipped under the door into her garage. Strong features, including an especially prominent nose, filled an oval face. The man was completely bald, and as Beverly’s vision drew back into focus, she realized that he also had no eyebrows.

In her mind’s eye again she saw David lying on the floor of the garage, and she began to cry. “Who are you?” she pleaded. “Why did you do this?”

The man gave her a hard smile, then climbed onto the bed and straddled her waist. With his right hand he began kneading her left breast, softly—almost carelessly. “You don’t remember me, do you, Beverly?”

She shook her head and asked again, “Who are you?”

The man removed his hand from her breast and began slowly undoing the buttons on her blouse. “Don’t worry about that now, Beverly,” he answered. “We’ve got plenty of time to get reacquainted.”

A little after nine o’clock, a patrol officer found Beverly Thompson’s SUV abandoned on a dark side street only three blocks from Thompson’s home. Maggie and I interrupted our canvass of the neighborhood, collected Gary Barnett, and drove over to take a look.

The patrol officer had been smart enough to park her squad well away from Thompson’s vehicle, and I pulled in behind her. As Maggie, Gary, and I got out of my car, the officer walked back to greet us. I asked her if she had approached the car.

Nodding, she said, “After I called it in, I walked over to the driver’s side and used my flashlight to make sure that the vehicle was unoccupied. From here I could see that there wasn’t anybody sitting in the car, but I figured I should make sure that there wasn’t somebody lying on one of the seats or in the back who might need medical attention. There wasn’t.”

“Was there a gun or a purse lying where you could see it?”

She shook her head. “There’s a briefcase and a purse sitting on the passenger’s seat, but I didn’t see a gun.”

I nodded and turned to Gary. “Have the patrolmen seal Thompson’s house and get your team over here. Do a thorough check of the area around the car, then haul it into the lab and see what you can get out of it. Maggie and I will start knocking on doors.”

Barnett reached for his radio, and Maggie and I split up, with her taking the houses on the south side of the street while I did the ones on the north. I assumed that
the killer must have transferred Thompson from the SUV into a vehicle that he had parked there before walking the few blocks to Thompson’s home. With a little luck perhaps we could find someone who saw it go down.

I started with the house directly behind the Lexus, but the place was dark, and no one answered the door. A couple in the house to the west indicated that they had been home all night. Unfortunately, they’d spent the bulk of the evening out on the patio at the back of their home. They’d not seen any activity in front of their house and could tell me nothing about any vehicles that might have been parked there earlier in the evening.

I thanked them for their time and moved on to the house on the other side of the home where Thompson’s car was parked. I rang the bell, and a minute later the door was opened by a girl who was maybe fifteen or sixteen years old and dressed all in black. Her dark hair was cropped short, framing a pale heart-shaped face. She wore no makeup at all, save for the bloodred lipstick that slashed across her mouth. A small silver ring dangled from her left eyebrow, complementing the braces that lined her teeth.

I flashed my shield, introduced myself, and asked if her parents were home. “Nope,” she replied in an animated voice. “Why are you looking for them? Did Melvin embezzle money from some little old lady’s trust account or something?”

“Not as far as I know,” I smiled. “Who’s Melvin?”

“My stepfather,” she said, returning the smile. “You mean you’re not here to investigate him?”

“Not tonight.”

“That’s a pity,” she observed. “So why are you here, then?”

I pointed back in the direction of Beverly Thompson’s
Lexus. “I’m interviewing people along your street about that car over there.”

She leaned out of the door and looked around me at the SUV. “So what’s going on?” she asked.

“I was wondering if you might have seen the person who parked the car there, or if you might have seen any activity around the car?”

“Nope. Sorry,” she said, shaking her head. “I’ve been up in my room slaving over a term paper about Albert Camus. I hadn’t even noticed that car was there, and I don’t know who it belongs to.”

“You didn’t happen to see any other unfamiliar vehicles parked on the street here tonight, did you—maybe when you might have been taking a break from your paper?”

She thought about that for a second, then said, “Yeah, as a matter of fact, I did. I came downstairs a couple of hours ago to get a glass of juice and I noticed that there was a van parked right about where that car is parked now.”

“Did you recognize the van?”

“Nope. Never saw it before.” She gave a small shrug. “I don’t mean to sound snotty or anything, but it didn’t look like a car that would belong to someone who lives in this neighborhood. I thought that it probably belonged to a guy who was doing some work for somebody, like a plumber or something, you know?”

“Can you describe it for me?”

She scrunched her face in concentration for a moment, then shook her head. “Not really. It was black and sort of beat-up looking, like it had some miles on it. It didn’t have any windows on the sides—or at least not on the side that I could see—and that’s why I thought it probably belonged to a workman. It didn’t look like the sort of van that somebody would be using to haul
her kids from their piano lessons to soccer practice, if you know what I mean.”

“Yes, I think I do. Was there any writing on the side of the van that you could see?”

She simply shook her head.

“Any body damage, or anything else about it that would make it easy for someone to recognize it?”

Again she shook her head. “Not really. Like I said, it looked kind of old and dilapidated, but there weren’t any major dents that I could see.”

“You didn’t by any chance get a look at the license plate?”

“No. I didn’t see the back of the van, only the passenger’s side.”

“And you didn’t see anyone in the van or hanging around near it?”

“Nope.”

“Is there anyone else at home with you, Ms…?”

“Chasen. And no, there’s no one else here. Melvin and Cheryl are over at the club sucking down gin with their lame-ass friends, and I’m here wrestling with Albert.”

I handed her a card. “Okay, Ms. Chasen. Thanks for your help. I’ll let you get back to your paper. But if you remember anything else about the van, please give me a call, okay?”

“No problem,” she responded, taking the card. She looked at it for a moment, then looked back up to me with bright blue eyes. “You don’t know anything about existentialism, do you, Detective Richardson?”

“Nope,” I smiled. “You’re on your own there, Ms. Chasen.”

She shook her head. “I was afraid you’d say that.”

Back at the car, I radioed Dispatch and asked them to issue a crime-information bulletin for the van the young woman had described. The chances of finding it were exceedingly slim, especially without a plate number, but this was the only viable lead that we had so far. Maggie and I continued our canvass of the remaining homes along the street but found no one other than the Chasen girl who’d noticed the van or anything else of any consequence.

On the desk in David Thompson’s study, we found a studio portrait that one of the neighbors identified as a fairly recent photo of Beverly Thompson. Back at the station, we duplicated the photo and released it to the media, asking anyone who saw the woman to call a special hotline number immediately.

That done, we gave it up for the night a little after two
A.M.
, and twenty minutes later, I finally made it to the nursing home. The night-shift supervisor buzzed me in and said, “Are we really late tonight, Detective, or really early this morning?”

“I’m afraid that we’re really late tonight, Mrs. Reilly,” I responded. “Unfortunately, it’s been one of those days.”

She nodded, gave me a sympathetic smile, and returned to her desk. I walked up the stairs to the second floor and pushed through the doors that led to the critical-care unit. Here the lights had been dimmed to the overnight setting, and at the far end of the hall an elderly Hispanic custodian was quietly mopping the floor.

I continued on down the hall and found that, as usual, Julie’s door was standing slightly ajar. Her room was illuminated only by a small night-light burning on the table next to the bed and was completely silent, save for the barely audible sound of a car passing on the street below. I went in, closed the door behind me, and stepped over to the bed. I kissed Julie lightly on the top of the head and said, “I’m finally here, babe. Sorry I’m so late.”

As had been the case every night for the last eighteen months, she made no reply. I stroked her long blonde hair for a minute and then took her hand and sat down in the chair next to the bed.

Looking back to the bedside table, I noticed that there was one message on the answering machine. I pushed the button to play the message and listened as my mother-in-law said, “Sean, if you find the time to visit Julie tonight, I wanted you to let you know that Denise will be arriving at four thirty tomorrow afternoon. We’ll be going directly from the airport to the nursing home and will probably be staying with Julie until seven thirty or so. Denise and I would like to have some private family time alone with Julie and so if you are going to visit tomorrow, it would be best if you could arrange to do so at some other time. There’s no point in making this any harder on all of us than it has to be.”

Shaking my head in weary frustration, I erased the message, squeezed Julie’s hand, and said, not for the first time, “How could that miserable shrew possibly be your mother?”

Julie had been born and raised in a wealthy suburb of Minneapolis. Her father, John, was president of one of the largest banks in Minnesota and a pillar of the community. Her mother, Elizabeth, was the quintessential executive wife-society matron, whose world revolved
around a hectic schedule of club meetings, parties, charity functions, shopping, exercise, and spa treatments.

As children, Julie and her sister, Denise, had attended only the finest schools, had vacationed only in the trendiest locales, and had associated only with the “best” people. Denise, who was a year younger than Julie, bought into the program early on and had rapidly become the apple of her mother’s eye. Much to Elizabeth’s consternation, though, Julie had graduated from high school and then effectively opted out of her mother’s master plan.

Julie refused to attend Elizabeth’s alma mater, a fairly conservative private college in Connecticut, and insisted on putting some distance between herself and her mother, not to mention the cold, gray, gloomy winters of Minnesota. To her mother’s mortification, she enrolled at Arizona State in Tempe and graduated with a degree in business. Much more her father’s daughter than her mother’s, Julie then remained in Arizona and took a job with a bank in Phoenix.

She’d been working at the bank for little over a year when we met at a party thrown by a mutual friend. While it might not have been exactly love at first sight, it was something very close. Two years younger than I, Julie was bright, warm, and articulate, and she possessed a great sense of humor. We shared many of the same interests and held very similar political views. The fact that she was also one of the most beautiful women I’d ever met was simply an added bonus. After dating for five months we moved in together, and six weeks later, Julie took me home to Minnesota to meet her family.

Her mother was decidedly unimpressed.

Elizabeth had simply taken it for granted that her daughters would follow her example and marry someone in their own social and economic stratosphere. She vehemently refused to accept the possibility that Julie
might “settle” for an unsophisticated, middle-class police detective. Julie’s father, on the other hand, had supported her decision to go to college in Arizona and took it as an article of faith that she was intelligent enough to make her own decisions when it came to matters of the heart. He was much more supportive of our relationship and welcomed me into his home.

The breach between Julie and her mother was completed at the end of our visit, when Julie informed her family that we would be married the following month—in Arizona in front of our own friends, rather than in Minnesota in front of Elizabeth’s. In the end, only Julie’s father had attended the ceremony and proudly gave his daughter away, while Elizabeth and Denise stubbornly remained at home.

Five years later, Elizabeth was still waiting for Julie to come to her senses, when a drunk driver who was still on the road despite two previous convictions for DUI ran a red light and smashed broadside into Julie’s Acura. The Acura’s airbags deployed, and amazingly, Julie had walked away from the crash with no apparent injuries, save for a slight bump on the head. But two days later she collapsed while at work and had never regained consciousness.

For the last eighteen months, she’d remained in what her doctors described as a persistent vegetative state with no cognitive brain function. She was able to breathe on her own, but otherwise was kept alive only by remaining attached to a feeding tube that pumped chemical nutrition and hydration into her stomach.

For the first few months after the accident, the doctors held out some small hope that Julie might eventually regain consciousness, but they warned that there was little hope that she could ever function effectively on her own again. For several critical minutes after she collapsed, her brain had been deprived of oxygen, and the damage done, the doctors argued, was irreparable.

My world completely shattered, I’d taken a leave of absence for three months and had spent virtually every waking moment at Julie’s bedside, willing her to regain consciousness. But hard as it was to admit it, I ultimately understood that this was not going to happen. And as a bedside witness to the indignity of what had become Julie’s “life,” I also knew that she would not want it to.

Shortly after we were married, Julie and I had gone to a lawyer and drawn up our wills. At the lawyer’s suggestion, we’d also made living wills, declaring that our deaths should not be postponed by artificial means in the event that either one of us should incur an incurable and irreversible injury, disease, or illness. We’d each also signed a power of attorney for health care, granting each other the authority to make these medical decisions in the event that we were unable to make them for ourselves.

Six months after Julie had been hospitalized, the doctors indicated that they no longer held out any hope that she would ever regain consciousness, and in the most difficult and heartbreaking decision of my life, I instructed them to honor her wishes and remove the feeding tube. Before they could do so, however, Elizabeth obtained a court order preventing it. She then filed a lawsuit attempting to set aside both Julie’s living will and the medical power of attorney that Julie had granted me.

While the legal case worked its way through the system, Julie was moved from the hospital to a long-term-care facility. Elizabeth bought a condo in Scottsdale and now spent several days a month in residence, meeting with her lawyers and devoting more time and attention to Julie than she had ever deigned to spare in the five years between our marriage and the accident.

My relationship with Elizabeth was barely civil and was conducted mostly through our respective lawyers.
She tried as much as possible to avoid being at the nursing home when she thought that I might be there. When direct communication between us was unavoidable, we managed it mainly by leaving messages for each other on the answering machine that had been installed on the phone line in Julie’s room. My affection for Julie’s father notwithstanding, I very much regretted my decision to have offered her family the opportunity to be at her bedside when the feeding tube was to be removed.

I sat there for an hour or so, holding Julie’s hand, thinking about all of the things that I would have wanted to share with her at the end of the day, and inevitably giving free reign to the memories that so sweetly haunted my days and nights. Finally, at about three thirty, I got up from the chair, leaned over, and kissed Julie on the cheek. “I love you Jules,” I said quietly.

Then I gently laid her hand back at her side, slipped out of the room, and made my way home alone to our empty house.