No Place to Die (25 page)

Jean and Herbert Wentworth lived in a small one-story brick home on Belfast Street in Mesa. When McClain drove slowly past, an elderly man was mowing the small patch of lawn in front of the house, stooped over behind an ancient power mower that looked to be about as old as the man himself. McClain assumed that the man was Drummond’s husband, Herbert Wentworth, and he watched as Wentworth maneuvered the mower around a yard sign urging the reelection of the incumbent mayor.

An aging Ford Taurus, not unlike McClain’s own, save for the fact that it was a faded blue, sat alone in the carport. McClain wondered if this was one of those elderly couples that had only one car and that went virtually everywhere together, going to church, doing the shopping, and running their other errands as a team.

To test the hypothesis, he pulled into the parking lot
of a Circle K convenience store a few blocks away from the home. At a pay phone on the edge of the parking lot, he dialed the Wentworths’ number again. This time the phone was answered by an elderly female voice. Leaning into the kiosk, trying to shield the phone from the street noise, McClain said, “Is this Mrs. Jean Wentworth?”

The woman answered in the affirmative, and McClain said, “Mrs. Wentworth, I’m Andrew Hardy from the Committee to Reelect Mayor Broder. I was wondering if you could spare a few moments of your time to respond to a survey that we’re conducting?”

“Just a minute, please,” the woman said.

McClain heard the sound as the woman set the phone down. For two or three minutes, he heard nothing more. Then, finally, someone picked up the phone again and an elderly male voice said, “Hello?”

McClain again repeated his lie and asked if Mr. Wentworth could spare a few moments for his survey.

“I suppose so,” Wentworth said somewhat tentatively.

“Great,” McClain said. “I promise that I’ll be brief. Our records indicate that you and your wife, Mrs. Herbert Wentworth, are both registered to vote in the city of Mesa. Is that correct?”

“Yes, it is.”

“And are you planning to vote in the upcoming primary elections?”

“Yes, we are.”

“And are you and Mrs. Wentworth happy with the progress that the city has made under the current mayoral administration?”

“Yes, I guess so.”

“Mr. Wentworth, what would you think are the three most important issues facing the city government at this time?”

The man hesitated for several seconds, then said,
“Well…of course we’re very concerned about keeping property taxes down. For those of us living on a fixed income, it’s very difficult when the cost of everything seems to keep going up so rapidly.”

“I certainly understand that, sir,” McClain said soothingly. “And I hope you know that the current city administration is working diligently to keep expenses down so that we can hold the line and prevent any increase in city taxes and fees.”

“Yes, we do appreciate that,” Wentworth replied, although his tone of voice suggested that he might be hard-pressed to cite any city initiatives designed to accomplish this laudable objective.

Without giving Wentworth the opportunity to list his other two priorities, McClain pressed on. “May I ask, Mr. Wentworth, are either you or your wife currently employed?”

“No, we’ve both been retired for the last few years.”

“I envy you that, Mr. Wentworth. It must be nice to have the time to travel and pursue your other interests. May I ask if either you or Mrs. Wentworth would be willing to volunteer some time to work on the mayor’s behalf in this important campaign?”

“Well…I don’t know if we’d have the time for that or not. What would that involve?”

“Well, we could use assistance with a variety of things,” McClain said, “depending upon what your schedule would permit and what you might be interested in doing. Do you and your wife both drive?”

“No. I drive, but my wife has macular degeneration and so she doesn’t drive anymore. And unfortunately she’s in the early stages of Alzheimer’s. I spend most of my time caring for her, and so realistically, it would be difficult for me to volunteer much time.”

“I see,” McClain said, sympathetically. “In that case, it would probably be unreasonable for us to impose on you, Mr. Wentworth. But I do appreciate your taking
the time to talk with me, and we will appreciate your support on election day. Thank you very much.”

“You’re welcome,” Wentworth assured him, and then hung up.

McClain got back into the Taurus and drove slowly back past the Wentworths’ house. Herbert Wentworth was back outside on the lawn in front of the house, talking to a small, frail-looking woman. The woman had short frizzy white hair and was wearing sunglasses and a print housedress that looked like something that McClain’s grandmother might have worn.

McClain pulled over to the side of the street for a moment and watched the couple. After another minute or so of conversation, Wentworth gently laid a hand on his wife’s shoulder. Then she turned and walked carefully back through the carport and into the house, while her husband returned to his yard work. McClain waited, watching for another few moments, and then drove away, shaking his head and mentally striking Jean Drummond Wentworth from his list.

McClain was four blocks away from the Wentworth house when KSLX segued from John Hiatt’s “Memphis in the Meantime” into a block of commercials.

Sleep America was in the middle of another spectacular clearance sale with fantastic bargains to be found on mattresses of every size and brand imaginable. Debbie the Mattress Lady then gave way to the crew from Channel 12, which was hyping the news, weather, and sports reports they’d be featuring at six o’clock. James Quiñones suggested that there might be rain in the Valley’s immediate future, Kevin Hunt promised a report on the Diamondback’s spring training camp, and Ellie Davis touted an exclusive interview “you won’t want to miss!” with Detective Mike Miller, “the homicide cop who first tracked down suspected serial killer Carl McClain seventeen years ago.”

The commercials finally finished, the DJ announced the time and temperature over the opening bars of Bonnie Raitt’s cover of John Hiatt’s “Thing Called Love.” McClain wondered whether the choice was intentional or simply an accident. Then he checked his watch and recalculated his schedule for the rest of the afternoon, thinking that it might be nice to be home in time for the news.

A few minutes before four, I wandered past Maggie’s office on my way to the conference room. I found her sitting at her desk, staring off into space, apparently oblivious to anything that might be going on around her. I tapped on the door, walked into the office, and said, “Are we taking a brief mental vacation?”

She snapped out of her trance and looked over at me. “What? Oh, sorry. I slipped away for a moment.”

I shot her a look and she let out a heavy sigh. “Patrick Abernathy just called and invited me to go to a Suns game with him and his kids on Saturday afternoon. I don’t know what in the hell ever possessed me, but I lost my senses for a moment and said that I would.”

“And what’s so bad about that?” I laughed. “Jesus, Maggie, it’s only a basketball game.”

“Like hell it is,” she snorted. “You know damned good and well that what he’s looking for is an opportunity to see how the four of us might get along together.”

“Oh, Maggie, for God’s sake. The guy apparently likes basketball.
You
like basketball. Probably his girls like basketball. Don’t make such a big deal out of it. Go
to the fuckin’ game. Eat a couple of hot dogs. Root for the home team, and have a nice afternoon.”

“Right, there’s an image for you,” she laughed. “Me, eating a hot dog.”

“Well, it wouldn’t kill you, Maggs.”

“Maybe not the hot dog,” she conceded. “But the rest of the afternoon just might.” She hesitated for a moment and then shook her head. “Shit, maybe with a little luck, we’ll catch a nice triple homicide that morning and I can beg off.”

Maggie and I walked down the hall together and joined Pierce, Chickris, Riggins, and the lieutenant to plan the strategy for covering Mike Miller. “This was your idea, Sean,” Martin said. “How do you propose to implement it?”

Looking around the table, I replied, “As you know, Ellie Davis will air an interview with Mike on the six o’clock news tonight. They’ll run excerpts from the interview again at ten. The station is hyping the interview in its teases for the newscasts this afternoon and evening, and we’re hoping that McClain will see or hear one of the teases and tune in to the broadcast. Failing that, we hope that the print journalists will follow up, interview Mike themselves, and that McClain will see something in the paper.

“I suggested to Mike that he should taunt McClain in the interview, and my hope is that this will cause McClain to go after Mike sooner, rather than later. I want to put a net around Mike starting as soon as we’re done here, and hope that we can spot McClain scouting him. Mike’s agreed to stay pretty close to home for the time being, so most of the surveillance will be at his house, but we’ll cover him with a couple of teams when he leaves the house.

“I assume that we’ll use the Special Assignments Unit for most of the surveillance, although we all may
have to pitch in occasionally to help out. The house across the street from Miller’s is up for sale and is currently unoccupied. I’ve talked to the listing agent, who in turn has talked to the owner, and they’ve agreed that we can use the house to watch Mike’s, at least for the time being. There’s a sale pending on the property, so the realtor isn’t showing it any more. We can set up in there with a good view up and down the street.”

The others nodded their understanding, and Bob said, “What’s behind Miller’s house?”

“The back of another house,” I answered. “Mike has a privacy fence around his place and so does the neighbor behind him. They share the section of the fence that runs along the property line. It would be virtually impossible for McClain to scout Miller’s activity from the back of the house.”

“But he could get through the neighbor’s yard, over the fence, and into Miller’s backyard without us seeing him?” Elaine asked.

“Yeah, he could do that,” I conceded. “But the sliding glass door at the back of Mike’s house and all of the windows back there are wired into the alarm system. Mike assures me that the system is state-of-the-art and that there’s no way Miller could defeat it. If he tried to break in that way, Mike would hear him coming in plenty of time to deal with him himself.”

“Sounds like a plan to me,” Bob sighed. “I just hope the asshole is watching the news.”

An hour later, I was sitting in the second-floor bedroom of the house across the street from Miller’s with Brenda Perkins and Dale Johnson, two members of the Special Assignments Unit. The room, like the rest of the house, was empty of furniture, and we’d brought in a card table, four folding chairs, and the rest of our surveillance equipment. Through the lace curtains that hung in front of the bedroom window we had a
clear view of the front of Mike’s house and of the street between the two homes for a couple of blocks either way.

I handed Perkins a cell phone and said, “If Mike decides to leave the house for any reason, he’ll call this phone and let you know. He’ll also call downtown so that another team can pick him up as he leaves the house and shadow him wherever he might be going. We’ll be manning this room around the clock in four six-hour shifts. You guys need to be alert. We may only get one chance at this asshole.”

Perkins and Johnson insisted that they’d be vigilant, and when they had no questions, I left them to the job.

The six o’clock newscast opened with helicopter footage from a three-car fatal accident that had turned the Loop 101 into a parking lot for miles in either direction of Shea Boulevard. With that out of the way, Lin Sue Cooney introduced Ellie Davis’s special report on the hunt for Carl McClain. McClain hitched his leg over the arm of the chair, punched the remote to turn up the volume a bit, and took a pull on his Miller Genuine Draft.

Davis was a petite, attractive blonde, and the opening shot framed her in front of a one-story house that McClain recognized immediately as Miller’s. She quickly summarized the investigation into the recent killings in which McClain was a “suspect,” and described the intensive and thus-far-unsuccessful manhunt that the police had launched to find him.

Pointing to the house behind her, Davis said, “Seventeen
years ago, Detective Mike Miller, now retired and living here in this quiet Phoenix neighborhood, led the investigation that culminated in the arrest and conviction of Carl McClain for the brutal murder of a local prostitute. This afternoon I spoke with Detective Miller to get his reaction to the current manhunt.”

The scene shifted, now showing Davis sitting with the retired detective at a table, apparently in the backyard of Miller’s home. Miller was dressed in a black T-shirt, and at least from the waist up, he appeared to be trim and in very good shape for a man of his age. He sat looking at the reporter as though oblivious to the video camera that was hovering just off his left shoulder.

“I remember Carl McClain as a fat, pudgy kid,” Miller was saying. “He wasn’t particularly bright. He seemed to be one of those guys who just drifts along, living in the moment, trying to gratify whatever impulse might be driving him at that particular instant—drugs, women, liquor, whatever. The night he got into trouble, of course, it was a woman.”

Davis: “Were you surprised when it turned out that he was actually innocent?”

Miller: “Definitely. Given the technology available to us at the time, we put together a good, solid case. McClain admitted to having sex with the woman. We found her earring in his vehicle. The clothesline that the victim was strangled with matched clothesline that we found in McClain’s possession. And of course, McClain’s blood type matched up to what we found in the victim.”

On the screen, Miller looked away for a moment, then back to the reporter. “Of course you have to understand that McClain didn’t help himself a lot. The guy’s apparently a congenital liar, and as the evidence against him piled up, he changed his story several times, trying to invent some lie that he thought we’d
buy into. The only result was that in the end, nobody believed him, including the jury.”

Davis: “And were you surprised to learn that McClain might be attacking the people who were involved in sending him to prison?”

Miller, sneering: “Astonished would be more like it. I wouldn’t have thought that he’d have the nerve to do something like that, let alone the brains to carry it out. But then so far, of course, he hasn’t actually killed anyone who was in a position to defend himself. I imagine that any gutless moron can shoot a couple of seventy-year-old women if he’s of a mind to.”

Davis: “Detective Miller, do you worry that McClain might be targeting you, since you were so instrumental in sending him to prison?”

Miller leaned back in the chair and gave her a small, satisfied smile. “Not for a moment, Ellie. In the first place, I have every confidence in the detectives who are working this case, and I’m sure that very shortly, Carl McClain is going to be back behind bars again for the rest of his life, which is exactly where the little rodent belongs. And if he’s crazy enough to knock on my front door, he’ll discover in a damn big hurry that
I’m
not a seventy-year-old woman.”

Davis flashed him a bright smile. “Retired Phoenix Detective Mike Miller, thanks for insights into the suspect who’s at the center of the most intensive manhunt in recent Valley history.” Then, turning to the camera: “This is Ellie Davis in Phoenix. Now back to you, Lin Sue.”

Cooney nodded, thanked Davis for her “timely report,” and then segued into an alarming story about the health department’s discovery of mice droppings found in the kitchen of one of the city’s most popular upscale restaurants. McClain picked up the remote, clicked off the television, and took another pull on his beer.