No Place to Die (24 page)

She shook her head sympathetically. “Jesus, Sean, you don’t have to be
sorry
. I know you’re going through hell. I just was wondering if anything else had gone wrong.”

I turned away for a moment, then looked back to her. “Yes…No…Shit, I don’t know, Maggie. My lawyer called yesterday morning. We have a trial date in April.”

Her face softened. “I’m sorry, Sean. I really am. I guess I just don’t know what to say.”

I shook my head and gave her a weak smile. “Thanks, Maggs, but there’s really nothing to be said. I have such horribly mixed emotions about it all that I don’t know what to say or think myself. Telling the doctors to remove Julie’s feeding tube was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do in my life. But then having to spend the last ten months fighting to let her go…I know that I have to do this, and I know that it’s what Julie would have wanted me to do. But it’s so incredibly hard.”

“I understand, and again I’m so sorry, Sean. I wish there was something I could do or say that would help…”

“I know you do. And I hope you know that I really do appreciate the thought, Maggs. Unfortunately, as I’ve said before, there’s just not much that anybody can do.”

We paid the check and walked back out into the parking lot. The temperature had dropped into the high thirties, and Maggie crossed her arms, hugging herself to stay warm. I walked her to her car and waited as she unlocked the door. We stood quietly for a moment watching the traffic pass by on the street. Then Maggie brought her eyes back to mine.

“I wish I could have known her.”

“Me too, Maggs. You would have liked each other.”

She nodded, and then, saying nothing more, she squeezed my arm and got into the car. I watched as she drove out of the parking lot, then got into my own car and headed home.

“So, how would you like to be a staked goat?”

It was nine o’clock Thursday morning. After getting three hours’ sleep, I was sitting in Mike Miller’s kitchen, drinking a bottle of water. Across the table, Mike took a sip of coffee, set down his mug, and said, “What did you have in mind?”

“We’re getting absolutely nowhere trying to flush this bastard out,” I sighed. “We’ve had his name and his picture out there for two days now, and we’ve had no credible sightings of the guy. Meanwhile, he continues to waltz around the Valley, picking off his victims one by one while we sit here with our collective thumb up our ass.

“To hear the receptionist tell it, McClain had absolutely no problem conning Larry Cullen into walking happily out of the Cadillac dealership with him yesterday, even though we’d warned Cullen that McClain was coming. Clearly he’s disguised his appearance somehow, which means that almost certainly he’s not going to get recognized off the pictures we’ve put out there.”

“No, probably not,” Miller agreed. “So where do I fit in?”

I took another sip of the water. “Look, Mike, given the people McClain has targeted so far, you’ve got to figure that your name is on his list. I mean, if he’s going to go after the jurors who voted to send him to
prison, then sure as hell he’s not going to ignore the lead detective who developed the evidence that convinced those jurors.”

“You wouldn’t think so,” he admitted.

“So, knowing that he’s almost certainly going to be coming after you sooner or later, I was thinking maybe we could accelerate the process a bit, which might give us a chance to nail him.”

“And you’d do this how?”

“I’m thinking I could put a bug in the ear of a sympathetic reporter, maybe like Ellie Davis over at Channel 12, who might have a few questions for the cop who put Carl McClain in the pen in the first place. You know, where is he now? How does he feel about McClain and his rampage? That sort of crap. You could make some disparaging remarks about McClain’s manhood—call him a sick chickenshit who only attacks defenseless old women or whatever. I’m hoping that McClain would see it, or at least read about it, and maybe he’d get all pissed off and decide to deal with you sooner rather than later.

“It’s apparent that the guy spends at least some time scouting his victims—he knows their patterns, when they’re likely to be at home alone, and so on. I’m figuring that you could stay close to home for a while. We’d put a very loose net around you, and hope that McClain would walk right into it.”

“So you spot some guy casing my house, figure that it must be McClain in whatever disguise he’s using to escape being spotted, and grab him up?”

“Well, it’s not quite that simple,” I sighed. “What complicates things is Beverly Thompson. Her body hasn’t turned up yet, and so there’s some small chance that she’s still alive and that McClain is holding her somewhere. We don’t want to snatch McClain—or worse, kill him in a shootout if he resists arrest—before we have a chance to find her. So what I’d hope to do is to
spot McClain scouting you and then tail him back to wherever he’s holding Thompson.”

Mike nodded. “You realize, of course, that even if you should get lucky enough to spot him, and even if he should lead you back to wherever he’s hiding out, and even if he is holding the woman there, your chances of getting her out alive are still pretty damn slim. Once this asshole realizes that you’ve got him bottled up, he might very well kill her and himself rather than go back to the pen for the rest of his life. At the very least, he’ll try to use her as a negotiating tool.”

“I know,” I said. “And we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it. But for the moment, I don’t have any better ideas. Do you?”

“No, not really,” he said, shaking his head. “And I’m certainly game for my end of it. I’d much rather have the bastard coming after me now, when I’m expecting it, as opposed to waiting indefinitely, wondering when he’s going to show up. I assume you’ve run this grand scheme by your lieutenant?”

“Actually, no I haven’t,” I admitted. “I didn’t want to take it to him until I’d had a chance to talk to you about it first.”

Mike drained the last of his coffee and set the mug back on the table. “Well, go see what the man has to say, then let me know. And,” he said, smiling, “you’d also better pray that McClain doesn’t somehow get to me before you can get your troops into place.”

Back downtown, I followed Maggie’s advice and slipped up the rear stairs to the third floor, avoiding the lieutenant’s office and trying to postpone for at least a few more minutes the inevitable conversation about my confrontation with Chris Doyle. On my desk, I found a message, asking me to call Tony Anderson over at the crime lab. I got him on the phone, and he said, “You’ll find this interesting.”

“Oh? What’ve you got?”

“Richard Petrovich apparently got out of jail long enough on Tuesday to visit the scene of Harold Roe’s murder.”

“Say what?”

“The Crime Scene Response team brought back hairs from the chair where Roe was sitting that match up to Petrovich’s.”

“But, Jesus, Tony. We both know that he wasn’t there. What the hell is going on here?”

“Well,” he sighed, “we both know that
Petrovich
wasn’t there, but his hair definitely was. My best guess is that McClain somehow collected some of Petrovich’s hair and planted it in Roe’s chair as a diversion, knowing it would go back to Petrovich and hoping to send you off on a wild-goose chase.”

I hung up the phone and, no longer able to delay the inevitable, walked down the hall to the lieutenant’s office, ready to face the music. I found him polishing his reading glasses. He looked up for a moment, waved me in, and directed me to a chair in front of his desk. Before I could open my mouth, he went back to polishing the glasses.

“I don’t know if you heard or not,” he said, “but Doyle slipped in the conference room last night, fell against the table, and broke his nose.

“The stupid shit thought he might try to make something out of it, like maybe suing the department for not properly mopping the floor or some damn thing, but I told him not even to think about it. I also told him to take a week off and give some serious thought to the question of how long he really wanted to remain a member of the Homicide Unit.”

He finished with the glasses, held them up to the light for a second to make sure they were clean, and then set them on his desk. That done, he finally looked
up at me and said, “So, what’s up with you this morning?”

I swallowed hard, more relieved and grateful than I ever could have imagined, and then relayed the news from the crime lab. Shaking his head, the lieutenant said, “So McClain gets out of the can and spends a few days with his old buddy Petrovich while he’s looking to get settled someplace. Then, to repay Petrovich for his hospitality, he gathers up a few samples of Petrovich’s hair and sprinkles them around the crime scenes?”

“Yeah, it looks that way,” I replied. “Petrovich just never felt right to either Maggie or me from the beginning, and the only thing we had to tie him to any of this business was the DNA evidence. But we know that he couldn’t have been in Harold Roe’s house on Tuesday, and so I think we can safely assume that he was never in Beverly Thompson’s Lexus or in Karen Collins’s home either. McClain’s been jerking us around and using Petrovich to do it. We need to kick Petrovich.”

“Okay,” he sighed. “What else have you got?”

I briefly outlined my plan to use Mike Miller to bait a trap for McClain. Martin clasped his hands behind his head, leaned back in his chair, and thought about it for a minute or so.

“You don’t think McClain will see you coming?”

“There’s always that chance,” I conceded. “But if we play it right with the reporter, it should look like it was her idea, not ours. In fact I’m surprised somebody hasn’t thought to interview Miller already. It would certainly seem like a logical thing to do.”

“Yeah, you’d think so,” Martin agreed. “Okay, call your reporter and get the ball rolling. And let’s figure on meeting at four this afternoon to plan out how we’re going to cover Miller.”

Ellie Davis was a rarity in local television news circles—a reporter who was actually even brighter
than she looked—which, all in all, was pretty damned good. We’d first met a couple of years ago when she did a series of stories on an investigation that I’d led, and since that time, we’d been somewhere on the border with each other—more than simply acquaintances, but not quite friends. She’d interviewed me several times since our initial meeting, always treating me fairly, and in return I’d tipped her to a couple of stories, allowing her a head start on the competition. She was at her desk when I called, and after exchanging preliminary pleasantries, I said, “How’d you like to do us both a favor?”

She gave a throaty laugh. “What sort of favor did you have in mind, Sean—something professional or something personal?”

“Well actually,” I said, returning the laugh, “I was thinking along the lines of something professional. But as far as anybody else was concerned—like your boss, for example—they’d have to think that this was your idea.”

“Okay, what idea did I just have?”

“I saw your piece last night on the McClain manhunt. I was thinking that you might find it interesting to interview Mike Miller, the detective who led the investigation that sent McClain to the pen originally. He’s been retired for several years, but he’s still here in the Valley. He’s a very interesting guy, and I’m sure that an interview with him would make for a great sidebar to the stories you’re doing about McClain’s current activities.”

“Is there anything in particular Mr. Miller would want to talk to me about?”

“Not that I know of,” I said. “But I’m sure that he’d have a perspective on Miller that your viewers would find enlightening.”

“And just out of curiosity, how did I happen to have this bright idea?”

“I would imagine that, being the enterprising journalist that you are, you probably called me with a couple of questions about the current investigation. I would further imagine that in the course of our conversation, you inquired as to whether any of the detectives who were involved in the original McClain case were still around. In answer to your question, I would have suggested Mike.”

“You said that I’d be doing both of us a favor. What do you get out of this?”

“Nothing more than the satisfaction of seeing that the local public is further enlightened about this vital investigation. But again, you need to make sure that I’m not connected with this idea in any way.”

“Right…Okay, it actually does sound like a good idea, and it’s one I probably should have had myself. I’m willing to be your cat’s-paw here, but if there are any important new developments in this case, I hope you’ll remember who your friends are.”

“I certainly will,” I promised.

“Good. And when you have a chance, let’s get together for a drink and catch up. It’s been a while.”

“Will do,” I said. “And thanks, Ellie.”

Just after nine o’clock on Thursday morning, McClain brought Beverly her breakfast along with a couple of pieces of fruit. He left the food on the table while he attached the cable to Beverly’s right ankle and then explained that he’d be gone for much of the day. Once out of the house, he drove the Taurus to the Burton Barr branch of the Phoenix Public Library
on Central and parked in the lot on the north side of the building.

McClain had been amazed when he first saw the new central library. The futuristic combination of glass, concrete, and steel looked like something out of a futuristic film, and totally unlike any other structure in Phoenix. McClain still hadn’t decided what he thought about the building, but he did like the high ceilings in the reading rooms and the well-designed workspaces. It certainly didn’t look or feel like the libraries he had known as a child, but the place was definitely a huge improvement over the prison library he’d been using for most of his adult life.

It was snowbird season in the Valley, and as happened every winter, the sunshine and the moderate temperatures had attracted a considerable number of homeless men and women to the Phoenix area along with their more conventional counterparts. A number of them were gathered on the sidewalk in front of the library along with their meager possessions, and McClain dodged past them as he made his way to the entrance.

Inside, the library appeared to be moderately busy for a Thursday. Patrons, many of whom were Hispanic, were working in the reference room and in the computer area, or browsing through the stacks. A few of the homeless people had made their way into the building and a couple of them had dozed off in chairs. A number of school-aged children, apparently on field trips, were involved in various projects.

McClain took the stairs to the second floor and scanned Alan Fischer’s library card into a reader, requesting to use a computer. Fortunately, there was an open station, and the printer spit out a ticket assigning McClain to a computer in the middle of the room. He found the machine and sat down to work.

On leaving prison, he’d had seventeen names on his
list—the twelve jurors, Judge Walter Beckman, Prosecutor Harold Roe, Detectives Ed Quigly and Mike Miller, and, of course, his PD, Beverly Thompson.

The list could have been longer. It might have included, for example, the four technical experts who had testified against him. But to McClain’s way of thinking, they were less culpable than the others. Unlike the detectives, who’d built the case against him; the prosecutor, who’d so eagerly turned a few pieces of circumstantial evidence into an indictment and a conviction; the judge, who’d consistently ruled against him; his own attorney, who’d failed him so miserably; and the jurors, who’d refused to give him even the benefit of a reasonable doubt, the technical experts were actually just doing their jobs, guided by the cops and the prosecutor, who had pointed them at McClain and then pulled the trigger.

The list also might have included Barbara Clausen—the infamous “Bambi”—who had set the whole chain of events into motion with her goddamn little green notebook. But immediately after the trial, Clausen had disappeared back into the netherworld of the low-rent streetwalker, and McClain assumed that she might well have been dead for years. In any event, he figured, Bambi would be impossible to find at this late date.

The list certainly would have included Charlie Woolsey, the motherfucker who’d actually committed the crime for which McClain had been convicted. Woolsey was now in the system himself, of course, which certainly did not put him beyond McClain’s reach. After nearly seventeen years inside, McClain well understood that for a tenth of the price of his “new” Ford Taurus, he could easily find someone to deal with Woolsey on his behalf. But after seventeen years inside, McClain also realized that Woolsey would pay a much dearer price for his sins if McClain simply left him alone to do the time.

McClain had managed to keep tabs on several of his targets through the vehicle of his recent appeal. His new lawyer had tracked down several of the people involved in McClain’s conviction, and McClain left the prison system with their current addresses in the materials that his attorney had collected and given him for review. Upon his release, McClain had begun the process of tracking down the others.

His problem was complicated by the fact that Arizona was a “closed records” state, meaning that most vital records were not open to the public. But he was able to utilize a number of public-access databases as well as more traditional sources—phone books, city directories, and the like—to trace most of his targets.

Three of the jurors no longer had local addresses and phone numbers. McClain’s research disclosed that two of the three had died, cheating him of his revenge. He was still trying to track down the third. He had also discovered that Detective Ed Quigly, whom he remembered as a particularly obnoxious son of a bitch, had retired and moved to Montana. He was still trying to track Quigly as well.

In the meantime, he’d begun to work his way through the list, patiently scouting his targets and taking them as the opportunities presented themselves. McClain assumed that the opportunities would not be presenting themselves nearly as readily now that the police had announced that McClain was likely hunting them. But this was a development that he had anticipated.

He had allotted himself a period of two weeks for what he thought of as his first offensive. During that time, he’d hoped to settle with his principal targets, which included Walter Beckman, Harold Roe, Mike Miller, Ed Quigly, and of course, Beverly Thompson. He’d also hoped to deal with at least a few of the jurors during that period, before the police figured out
the connection between his targets and began to alert them.

Once the cops had made the connection, McClain’s task would be significantly more difficult, but he still assumed that he could remain safely in Phoenix for the full two weeks. He would then finish with Beverly Thompson and make a strategic retreat for three months or so while he began to establish a new life with a new name, far from Arizona. He figured that after some time had passed, his remaining targets would inevitably settle back into their old routines and would once again be vulnerable. He could then return briefly to Phoenix, take as many of the remaining targets as he could in a quick second offensive, and then ride off into the sunset, satisfied and never to return.

Ed Quigly had complicated matters somewhat by disappearing from the state, and Beverly and the judge had been more difficult to get at than McClain had anticipated. Still, he was very happy with the overall progress of his campaign to date. And he was confident that when his initial two weeks expired roughly forty-eight hours from now, he would leave the city pleased with a job well done.

On the computer, McClain went to the Yahoo home page and called up the People Search form. He filled in the appropriate spaces, indicating that he was looking for an E. Quigly in the state of Montana. The computer spent a few seconds searching the relevant databases, and then the screen refreshed. The machine reported a phone number and an address for an E. Quigly in Missoula, and for an E. P. Quigly in Lakeside, wherever the hell that was.

McClain logged off the computer and walked up the stairs to the fifth floor. There were two pay phones near the restrooms, but a woman was using one of them, and so while he waited for her to clear out, McClain
wandered through the stacks to the north end of the building.

Through the large windows that made up the north wall of the library, he could see several of the high-rise office buildings that lined the Central Avenue corridor. To the north and east, the Phoenix Mountains and Camelback Mountain rose out of the desert, and beyond them the McDowell Mountain Range. Although it was an otherwise beautiful sunny day with bright blue skies, a curtain of ugly brown smog hung in front of the mountains, obscuring the view.

For the second day in a row, there was a high-pollution advisory in effect, and McClain silently cursed the fucking developers who were largely responsible for the problem. Relentlessly plowing up the desert to throw up one cookie-cutter subdivision after another, the builders day after day threw huge clouds of dust into the air. That, combined with the emissions of tens of thousands of vehicles, industrial plants, and who-could-possibly-guess-how-many goddamned gas-powered leaf blowers, meant that Phoenix residents were now forced to endure some of the worst air-quality problems in the United States.

Normally, the prevailing winds would carry at least some of the foul air out of the Valley, drawing fresh air into the Valley in the process. But over the last several days, a combination of cooler temperatures, a stable atmosphere, and light winds had left Phoenix’s infamous Brown Cloud hanging over the metro area, destroying the views and making life miserable for everyone, but especially for those prone to respiratory diseases.

Federal, state, and local agencies seemed powerless to deal with the problem in any meaningful way. They levied token fines against builders who routinely violated ordinances designed to minimize the dust raised by construction and who simply wrote off the fines as a cost of doing business. Mass-transit initiatives that
might help reduce vehicle emissions were largely nonexistent or ineffective. And certainly no one in any position of authority was about to suggest that it was time to rein in the Valley’s explosive growth.

As a result, people simply shook their heads and wrung their hands while the Valley went to hell in a handbasket. McClain was thoroughly pissed about the whole situation and was damned glad to be on his way out of town. After standing at the windows mourning the situation for several minutes, he returned to the pay phones and found that the woman had finished her call and left. He dug a handful of change out of his pocket and piled it on the phone in front of him.

He picked up the receiver, dialed the 406 area code and the number in Missoula for E. Quigly, and then deposited the coins demanded by the automated “operator.” The phone rang twice before an answering machine kicked in. A bright female voice that sounded like it belonged to a woman in her late teens or early twenties said, “Hi! This is Ellen. Either I’m not here right now or I’m doing something much more interesting than answering the phone. Leave me a message and I’ll get back to you whenever. Ciao!”

McClain declined to leave a message and crossed “E. Quigly” off his list. Then he dialed the number in Lakeside for E. P. Quigly. This time the phone rang four times before again defaulting to an answering machine. A whiskey-edged voice that McClain recognized immediately, even after seventeen years, said, “You’ve reached Ed Quigly. Leave your name and number and I’ll return your call when I get home.”

Smiling, McClain circled Quigly’s phone number and address in Lakeside and added a triumphant exclamation point to the note. Feeling like he was on a roll, he decided to move on to Jean Drummond, the one juror whom he had not yet been able to locate.

He had absolutely no recollection of the woman at
all and knew from his files only that Drummond would now be seventy-two years old, assuming that she was still alive. For nine years after the trial, the
Phoenix City Directory
showed Drummond still at the address where she’d been living at the time she voted to convict McClain, but he’d been unable to find any trace of her since. A check of the Social Security Death Index, ObitsArchive.com, and Ancestry.com produced no record of her death, and so, on a hunch, McClain decided to check marriage certificates.

Fortunately, this information was open to the public; unfortunately, it was not available online. Thus McClain left the library, got back in his car, and drove over to the Arizona Vital Records Department.

The agency was housed in an ugly concrete fortress on Jackson Street, in the middle of what looked like a no-man’s-land. McClain circled the building three times before finding a parking place that looked relatively safe and made sure to lock the Taurus behind him. In the lobby, a guard pointed him to the records department downstairs, and a clerk showed him how to use the public-access computers to search for the record of a marriage license.

McClain typed in Drummond’s name and hit
ENTER.
The screen refreshed, indicating that eight years earlier, a woman named Jean Drummond had taken out a marriage license with a groom named Herbert Wentworth. His anticipation building, McClain hurriedly filled out a form to request an uncertified copy of the marriage license. He then stood impatiently in line until finally he got to the counter, where a clerk charged him fifty cents for a copy of the certificate.

And there she was. At the ripe old age of sixty-four, Jean Drummond of the same address as McClain’s juror had married Herbert Wentworth, age sixty-one. Well, Jean, you sly old cradle robber, McClain thought, smiling.

In a phone booth in the lobby upstairs, he found a Herbert Wentworth listed in Mesa. He dug thirty-five cents out of his pocket and dialed the number. The phone rang four times before handing him over to an answering machine. McClain listened as an elderly male voice said, “You’ve reached Jean and Herbert. We’re sorry but we can’t come to the phone right now. Please leave your name and number and we’ll call you back just as soon as we can.”

Pleased with the results of a very good morning’s work, McClain hung up the phone, made a note of the address, and decided to take a ride down to Mesa.