Act of Betrayal (16 page)

A couple of hours later she had rejected many of the eighty-nine cases for various reasons. The victim had no family to seek revenge. The convicted killer was still in prison. The killer was dead, either of natural causes or the ministrations of the State of Missouri, and there was no surviving family of the killer to resent that fact.

An even dozen remained on her desk. She filled out twelve requests to pull the broader case files, hand carried them to Records, and went home. She needed a few hours’ sleep.

Megabite greeted her and waited impatiently while PJ opened a double-size package of Tender Vittles and dumped it into the cat’s bowl. Megabite attacked her meal with predatory vigor. She left the cat in the kitchen and walked upstairs. The house felt very empty, and PJ’s anxiety expanded to fill the space. There were too many tough questions floating around in her head.

Was her course the best way to help Schultz? How had helping Schultz somehow eclipsed solving Rick’s murder, or were they one and the same? What was the significance of the missing answering machine tape? People didn’t ordinarily grab answering machine tapes and run out of their homes to console their ex-wives.

Did he kill Caroline Bussman?

PJ found herself wishing she could hear Schultz’s voice again, even if it was another enigmatic phone call.

By the time PJ got to her bedroom, Megabite had worked the feline magic of being in more than one place at a time—the cat was on the bed, delicately cleaning her whiskers. PJ pulled up the covers and got comfortable with the cat curled under her arm. Doubts mercifully faded, the world narrowed to the darkness behind her closed eyelids, and in moments she was asleep.

E
ARLY THURSDAY MORNING, SCHULTZ
awakened in his motel room. He went to the lobby for a cup of coffee. Heavy dark clouds hung down so low that he could feel them on his shoulders as he walked. The air held a lot of moisture, enough so that he couldn’t cool off by sweating, and a thin film of sweat and condensation formed on his skin almost as soon as he stepped outside his room. The hairs on his arms rose with every distant lightning strike. On the way back to the room, a few raindrops dampened his shirt and thunder rolled over the roofs of the buildings like the echoes of a giant’s footsteps. The air was oppressive and gloomy, setting the stage for the kind of storm that made people want to stay indoors and pull down their window shades.

He called Anita Collings at her home, looking for information. She came through for him without asking questions, and he’d remember that if he was ever in a position to do her a favor. He also appreciated her being his eyes and ears back in St. Louis.

“Nothing big on Rick’s murder,” Anita said. She told him about the chemical supplies purchased by Ginger Miller. Bursts of static from the approaching storm punctuated her account. “On the hit-and-run, Wall and company have been inside your house. The liquor bottles didn’t help your case.” There was no suspicion in her voice, just flat sarcasm.

“Well, shit, I could have figured that out myself.” He cursed the impulse that had led to the bottles’ presence in the first place, and his stupidity for leaving them there.

“What about Mandoleras?” he said.

“Found him. Personnel had a forwarding address. After his early retirement, he moved to Tucson.” She gave him the address.

“And that other thing?”

“No luck yet. I’m going back, and I’ll be a little more persuasive this time,”

“Good. I owe you, Anita.”

“Um, I never did get a chance to tell you directly. I’m really sorry about your son. And the way it happened. What a shitty way to go.”

It wasn’t the most eloquent expression of sympathy, but Schultz was deeply affected. He choked up for a moment, and tears stood at the corners of his eyes. While he had been on the run, he’d had to put his grief on the shelf.

Static crackled through the phone line.

“Yeah,” he said finally.

“Bye, Boss. Call again when you get the chance.”

It didn’t take Schultz long to pack after he got off the phone. He had acquired a small suitcase that held his supply of cash, a change of clothes, and a shaving kit—plus a .40 caliber pistol, a Glock 22.

The handgun made him feel a little safer, even though he knew he could be taken out by a sniper’s rifle before he had the time to use it.

Schultz turned in his rental car, paid the one-way fee for not returning it to the city of origin, and bought a bus ticket to Tucson. He was on his way to find Glen Mandoleras. He wasn’t sure if the guy would be at home, in St. Louis, or out on the road searching for his last target. But he hoped that sooner or later Mandoleras would check in at his home base.

Schultz was going to be waiting for him.

One of the advantages Schultz had in his detective work was an uncanny ability to connect with a killer. It came to him as an image of a thread that connected him to the person he was seeking. When he started out, the thread was insubstantial and not anchored on the far end, the end away from him. The far end waved in the darkness. The deeper he got into a case, the more solid the connection became, until it was a gleaming cord that terminated in the heart of the killer. It enabled him to make the last leap toward solving a crime, sometimes crossing a gap of information in a sudden blaze of understanding. It was almost as if he could swing hand over hand along the cord to the person he sought. He knew it sounded crazy, so he kept quiet about it, preferring to say that he had good instincts. He had told one person about it, and that was PJ. She hadn’t laughed, but he didn’t think she grasped the significance of it either. In any case, they’d talked about it once and then never mentioned it again. Schultz wasn’t about to push his explanation.

He didn’t fully trust the mysterious ability. It wasn’t reliable. It couldn’t be commanded to perform. And he was convinced it had misled him before, possibly even more than he realized. If he was pinned to the wall about it, he’d say it was probably just an intense visualization of wishful thinking, like the process cancer patients used to mobilize the body’s internal defenses by imagining an army of defender cells.

As the Greyhound moved out into waves of rain, Schultz leaned back, closed his eyes, and cast the thread out to see if the connection was there between himself and Mandoleras.

The thread was cold and dull, and couldn’t penetrate the gloom.

Idly, Schultz wondered how many other passengers on the bus were carrying handguns in their luggage.

T
HURSDAY MORNING PJ GOT
an early start, expecting to have to ride herd on her archive records requests. To her surprise she found twelve thick folders in two side-by-side stacks on her desk at 7:00 A.M. She shook her head in wonder. It was probably more of Louie’s doing.

The folders represented only a small amount of the actual case material. Homicide cases generated a huge amount of written reports, photographs, interview transcriptions, notes, and evidence logs. If every scrap of paper that existed for the cases had been sent, there would have been boxes filling her office and probably spilling over into the hallway.

Even though the folders were greatly streamlined, it looked like a big job. It was time to call in reinforcements. PJ dialed Dave Whitmore’s number. He was already in the office too, and picked up on the first ring.

“What are your plans this morning, Dave?”

“I thought I’d go on over to Schultz’s neighborhood later on and do more interviews. If his car was stolen from right out in front of his house, somebody should have seen it.”

PJ thought about the flash of reflected light across the street from Schultz’s house when she had been there. “No one’s said anything?”

“They were all at work or asleep or walking around with their eyes closed, something like that. Neighbors see more than we’d like to think they do, but getting them to open up about it can be tough.”

“You don’t think he did it, the hit-and-run.”

“Who, Schultz? Nah.”

He sounded so certain. She wished she could get a transplant of his confidence.

“How do you know for sure?” PJ asked.

There was a pause. She could picture him holding the phone, frowning, his brows creased in deep thought.

“I just know, that’s all. He wouldn’t have run if he’d done it. Schultz would face up to it, no matter how bad it was.”

Then why is he gone?
She didn’t voice her concerns to Dave. And she didn’t mention the potential Mrs. Dollins to him, either.

PJ wanted help, and she had turned to Dave. He was more approachable than Anita, who always seemed aware of the gulf between cops and civilians, and which side of that gulf each of them was on. PJ thought Dave would go along with what she was about to ask. She cleared her throat.

“I’ve got an idea I’d like you to help me check out,” she said. “Is Anita there?”

“I haven’t seen her yet this morning. I can leave her a message and come on over to your office.”

“No, that’s all right,” she said quickly. “It’s you I want to talk to. Are you willing to help out on something that I’d prefer to keep just between the two of us for now?”

“Sure,” he answered immediately. “Just say the word.”

She didn’t know whether to be pleased that he agreed so easily or worried that he would do and had done the same for others, namely Schultz.

“I’ve got an idea I’d like to bounce off you, then,” PJ said. “See you in a few minutes.”

Dave appeared soon afterward, bringing a small sack of homemade cinnamon rolls. He tore open the bag and offered PJ a choice.

“These all look so good. Did your friend make them?”

“She’s into that kind of stuff. I think she started these last night. Put them in the refrigerator to rise overnight. Does that sound right?”

PJ shrugged. She had made yeast rolls once in her life, and the results hadn’t encouraged repeat attempts.

“Um, could be,” she said.

“All I know is when I woke up this morning the place smelled great.”

“Marry her.”

Dave laughed. “Maybe I will, at that. If she’ll have me.”

He glanced at the stacks of folders on her desk, then looked at PJ expectantly. She explained her connection theory, including Schultz’s phone call during which he said he was being framed. Excitement grew in Dave’s face.

“Sounds like there might be something to it,” he said when she finished. “What do you want me to do?”

“I don’t want Wall to know about this yet,” PJ said. “Not until there’s something to show for it. And I did promise Schultz three days. He’s got until tomorrow.”

“My lips are sealed. Except when it comes to cinnamon rolls,” he said, taking the last roll.

It wasn’t until several hours later, when the smell of the cinnamon rolls had long since dissipated and PJ was beginning to think about taking a lunch break, that she found something that clicked.

“I think I’ve got something,” she said. Dave looked up. His elbow had been resting on her desk, and his cheek on his hand. He might have been asleep. She knew no one on the team had gotten much sleep since Rick’s body had been discovered.

“Yeah?”

“Jeremiah Ramsey, executed for murdering his sister Eleanor. Get this, Dave—he was put to death one year ago July twenty-ninth,” she said.

“That fells in the range for Rick’s time of death.”

“One year later.”

“Revenge on the anniversary of the death. Like placing flowers on the grave, only a lot worse.”

“There’s a list of family members in here somewhere…” PJ flipped the pages in the folder. “Here. Father, Elijah Ramsey. Mother, Libby. One surviving sister, Darla.”

“No girlfriend?”

“Nope. Not in this folder, anyway. Might have been a more recent development, after the trial. Are you thinking Ginger Miller is Jeremiah’s girlfriend?”

Dave nodded. His eyes held a light she hadn’t seen before, the hard glint of a hungry fox in the dead of winter that’s just scented a rabbit. She hadn’t thought of Dave as a predator, but prolonged exposure to him in Schultz’s absence was changing her mind.

“Let’s not get carried away,” she said. “This looks like a connection, but it could also be coincidence.”

“Party pooper.”

PJ smiled as she checked farther into the family information. Dave was coming through loud and clear. Schultz obviously had a dampening effect on Dave.

“At the time of the trial, Jeremiah’s dad was a janitor at an elementary school,” PJ said. “Mom ran a day care center. Darla worked in a children’s clothing store.” PJ twirled a pencil between her fingers. “Seems like everybody wants to be around kids, doesn’t it?”

“Why does that sound bad when you say it?”

“Because I’m a shrink,” PJ said. Her mood had shifted. She felt she was onto something.

“So what’s the plan, boss? Jump on this?”

“I think we should finish the last couple of folders,” she said. “If nothing more promising comes up, we go on this one. I’ll track down the family and find out what they’re up to now—there’s a last known address in here. It’s been about twelve years since the trial, so there’s no telling if this information is still accurate. You can check out whether Jeremiah got a girlfriend while he was in prison.”

“What kind of girl falls for a guy on death row, anyway?”

“I know of a case where a woman fell in love with a convicted serial killer awaiting execution. They got married over the telephone.”

“Different strokes, I guess. But I wouldn’t want to live next door to her.”

They raced through the last two folders, finding nothing compelling.

“Okay, the Anniversary Killer it is,” Dave said.

“I’ve just had another thought,” PJ said. “If revenge by the family is the story here, why stop with the prosecutor and the detective? Aren’t there other obvious targets?”

Dave’s eyes widened. “The judge,” he said.

“And the jury,” PJ finished.

PJ sat across from Lieutenant Howard Wall. His face, which could be described as craggy at best, seemed as lined as the surface of Mars, which had deceived early astronomers into believing an advanced civilization had built canals. New worry lines seemed to pop into being as she talked.