"Q" is for Quarry (3 page)

“How’s he dealing with all of this?”

“Up and down. Too much time on his hands and not a lot to do except brood. I can’t tell you how many times I heard that one: guy retires after thirty years and the next thing you know he gets sick and dies. Stacey doesn’t say much about it, but I know how his mind works. He’s depressed as hell.”

“Is he religious?”

“Not him. He claims he’s an atheist, but we’ll see about that. Me, I always went to church, at least while Gracie was alive. I don’t see how you face death without believing in
something.
Otherwise, it makes no sense.”

Dolan glanced up just as Tannie appeared with two large plates loaded with freshly made sandwiches and fries, plus two orders for the other table. Dolan interrupted his story to have a chat with her. I occupied myself with banging on the ketchup bottle until a thick drool of red covered the southeast corner of my fries. I knew he was leading up to something, but he was taking his sweet time. I lifted the top of the kaiser roll and salted everything in sight. Biting in, I could feel the egg yolk oozing into the bun. The combination of spicy salami and snappy pepper-hot jack cheese turned out to be the food equivalent of someone hollering
Hot Damn!
on the surface of my tongue. I made one of my food moans. Embarrassed, I looked up at them, but neither seemed to notice.

When Tannie finally left, Dolan stubbed out his cigarette and paused for an extended bout of coughing so fierce it made his whole body shake. I pictured his lungs like a set of black cartoon bellows, wheezing away.

He shook his head. “Sorry about that. I had a bad cold a month ago and it’s been hard to shake.” He took a swallow of whiskey to soothe his irritated throat. He picked up his sandwich and continued his story between bites, taking up exactly where he’d left off. “While Stacey’s been laid up, I’ve been doing what I can to get his apartment cleaned. Place is a mess. He should be out of the hospital tomorrow and I didn’t want him coming home to the sight of all that crap.”

He set his sandwich down to light another cigarette, rolling it over to the corner of his mouth while he pulled out a cylinder of papers he’d tucked into his breast coat pocket. “Yesterday, I went through a pile of papers on his kitchen table. I was hoping to come across the name of a friend I could contact— somebody to cheer him up. Stace could use a little something to look forward to. Anyway, there was nothing of that nature, but I did find this.”

He placed the curling sheaf on the table in front of me. I finished my sandwich in one last bite and wiped my hands on a napkin before I reached for the papers. I knew at a glance it was a copy of a Sheriff’s Department file. The cover page was marked 187 PC, indicating it was a homicide, with a case number following. The pages were held together with fasteners, sixty-five or seventy sheets in all, with a set of handwritten notes inserted at the back. I returned to the cover page.

Under “Investigating Officers,” there were four names listed, one of them Stacey Oliphant’s.

Dolan leaned forward. “You can see he was one of the original investigating officers. Stace and me were the ones who found the body. We’d taken a Jeep up there and parked off the side of the road to go deer hunting that day. I guess there’s a gate across the road now, but the property was open back then. The minute we got out, we picked up the smell. We both knew what it was—something dead for days. Didn’t take us long to find out exactly what it was. She’d been flung down a short embankment like a sack of trash. This is the case he was working when he got sick. It’s always bugged him they never figured out who she was, let alone who killed her.”

I felt a dim stirring of memory. “I remember this. Wasn’t she stabbed and then dumped?”

“Right.”

“Seems odd they never managed to identify her.”

“He thought so, too. It’s one of those cases really stuck in his craw. He kept thinking there was something he’d overlooked. He’d go back to it when he could, but he never made much progress.”

“And you’re thinking what, to have another go at it?”

“If I can talk him into it. I think it’d make a world of difference in his attitude.”

I leafed through the photocopies, watching the progression of dates and events. “Looks like just about everything.”

“Including black-and-white prints of the crime scene photographs. He had another couple of files but this is the one caught my eye.” He paused to wipe his mouth and then pushed his plate aside. “It’d give him a lift to get back into this and see about developing some information. He can act as lead detective while we do the legwork.”

I found myself staring. “You and me.”

“Sure, why not? We can pay for your time. For now, all I’m suggesting is the three of us sit down and talk. If he likes the idea, we’ll go ahead. If not, I guess I’ll come up with something else.”

I tapped the file. “Not to state the obvious, but this is eighteen years old.”

“I know, but aside from Stacey’s interest, there hasn’t been a push on this since 1970 or so. What if we could crack it? Think what that’d do for him. It could make all the difference.” It was the first time I’d seen any animation in his face.

I pretended to ponder but there wasn’t much debate. I was sick of doing paperwork. Enough already with the file searches and the background checks. “Stacey still has access to the department?”

“Sure. A lot of folks out there think the world of him. We can probably get anything we need—within reason, of course.”

“Let me take this home and read it.”

Dolan sat back, trying not to look too pleased. “I’ll be over at CC’s from six until midnight. Show up by eight and we can swing over to St. Terry’s and bring Stacey up to speed.”

I found myself smiling in response.

I spent the early part of the afternoon in my new office digs, hammering away on my portable Smith-Corona. I typed up two overdue reports, did my filing, prepared invoices, and cleaned off my desk. I started in on the bills at 3:00 and by 3:35 I was writing out the final check, which I tore from my checkbook. I tucked it in the return envelope, then licked the flap so carelessly I nearly paper-cut my tongue. That done, I went into the outer office and moved all the unpacked boxes back into the closet. Nothing like a little motivation to get the lead out of your butt.

My supper that night consisted of a peanut-butter-and-pickle sandwich, accompanied by Diet Pepsi over ice. I ate in my minuscule living room, curled up on the sofa tucked into the window bay. In lieu of dinnerware, I used a fold of paper toweling that doubled as a dainty lip wipe when I’d finished my meal. With spring on the move, it was not quite dark out. The air was still chilly, especially once the sun went down. Through the partially opened window, I could hear a distant lawn mower and the occasional fragment of conversation as assorted people walked by. I live a block from the beach on a side street that provides overflow parking when Cabana Boulevard gets jammed.

I slid down comfortably on my spine, my sock feet on the coffee table, while I settled in to work. I went through the file quickly at first, just to get the lay of the land. A detective named Brad Crouse was lead investigator on the case. The other investigating officers, aside from Stacey Oliphant, were Detective Keith Baldwin, Sergeant Oscar Wallen, Sergeant Melvin Galloway, and Deputy Joe Mandel. A lot of manpower. Crouse had typed the bulk of the reports, using multiple carbons, which Stacey had apparently then photocopied from the old murder book. Judging from the number of strikeovers, I had to guess Detective Crouse had not been first in his class in secretarial school. I fancied if I put my ear to the page, I’d pick up the churlish echoes of his long-ago curses embedded in the lines of print.

It’s odd going through an old file, like reading a mystery novel where you spoil the ending for yourself by peeking ahead to the very last page. The final document, a letter from a soils expert in San Pedro, California, was dated September 28, 1971, and indicated that the sample submitted by the Santa Teresa County Sheriff’s Department would be impossible to distinguish from samples taken from similar deposits across the state. Sincerely. So sorry. End of the line for you, bub. I went back to the beginning and started reading again, this time taking notes.

According to the first officer at the scene, the girl’s body had been rolled over the edge of an embankment, coming to rest about fifteen feet down, some fifty feet from the highway. Con Dolan and Stacey Oliphant had spotted her at approximately 5:00 P.M. on that Sunday—1700 hours if you’re talking military time, as this report did. She was lying on her left side on a crumpled canvas tarp, her hands bound in front of her with a length of white plastic-coated wire. She was wearing a dark blue Dacron blouse, white cotton pants with a print of dark blue daisies with a dot of red in each center. There was a leather sandal on her right foot; the matching sandal was found in the brush a short distance away. Marks in the dirt suggested she’d been dragged across the grass near the road.

Even from the top of the slope, Dolan and Oliphant could see numerous stab wounds in her chest. It was also apparent her throat had been slashed.

Oliphant had made immediate CB contact with the Lompoc PD. Because the location was in the county, two on-duty sheriff’s deputies were dispatched to the scene. Deputy Joe Mandel and Sergeant Melvin Galloway arrived twenty minutes after the initial call. Photographs were taken of the decedent and of the surrounding area. The body was then removed to a Lompoc mortuary, pending arrival of the coroner. Meanwhile, the deputies searched the vicinity, took soil samples, bagged the tarpaulin along with a nearby broken shrub and two pieces of shrub stem that appeared to be stained with blood.

On Tuesday, August 5, 1969, Mandel and Galloway returned to the crime scene to take measurements—the distance from the highway to the spot where the body had been found, the width of the blacktop, the location of the stray sandal. Sergeant Galloway took additional photos of the various areas, showing the embankment, damaged shrubs, and drag marks. There were no crime scene sketches, but perhaps they’d become separated from the rest of the file in the intervening years.

I took a minute to sort through the photographs, which were few in number and remarkably uninformative: eight black-and-white prints, including one of the roadway, one of an officer pointing at a broken shrub, one of the embankment where the body was found, and four of the body from a distance of fifteen feet. There were no close-ups of Jane Doe’s face, no views of her wounds or the knotted wire with which her hands had been bound. The tarp was visible beneath her, but it was difficult to judge how much of the body, if any, had been covered. Times have changed. Current practice would have dictated fifty such photographs along with a video and a detailed crime-scene sketch. In the same envelope, I found an additional five photographs in faded color showing the girl’s sandals, pants, shirt, bra, and panties laid out on what looked like a sheet of white paper.

The autopsy had been performed on August 4, 1969, at 10:30 A.M. I squinted, inferred, surmised, and otherwise faked my way through the report, deciphering enough of the technicaltalk to figure out what was being said. Because her body was in a state of advanced decomposition, the measurements were estimates. The girl’s height was calculated at 63 to 65 inches, her weight at 120 to 125 pounds. Her eyes were blue, her hair dyed a reddish blond that showed dark roots. In the left earlobe she wore a thin gold-wire circle with a horseshoe configuration. In her right earlobe she wore a similar gold-wire loop with a bent clip in its lower end. Her facial characteristics were indistinguishable due to skin slippage, gas crepitation, and decomposition. Examination of the body showed eight deep stab wounds in the middle of the back below the shoulder blade area; two stab wounds at the base of the neck on either side; five stab wounds between her breasts; and a large stab wound under the left breast, which had penetrated the heart. There was considerable maggot activity. Because of decomposition, the pathologist was unable to ascertain the presence of any scars or identifying marks. There were no skeletal fractures or deformities, no visible injuries to the external genitalia. Her fallopian tubes and ovaries were unremarkable and her uterine cavity was empty. Cause of death was listed as multiple stab wounds of the neck, chest, heart, and lungs.

At the conclusion of his exam, the pathologist removed Jane Doe’s fingers, the nails of which she had painted with silver polish. These were tagged by an officer and turned over for shipping to the FBI Identification Division in Washington, D.C. Films taken of her upper and lower jaws showed multiple metallic restorations. She also suffered from what is commonly referred to as buckteeth, with one crooked eyetooth on the left side. A dentist, consulted later, suggested that extensive dental work had probably been done in the two years before her death—that being 1967 through 1968. He judged her to be in her late teens to early twenties. A forensic odontologist, examining the maxilla and mandible at a later date, narrowed the girl’s age to fifteen years, plus or minus thirty-six months, noting that she probably died before she reached the legal age of eighteen.

On Wednesday, August 6, Sergeant Galloway submitted the following clothing and evidence to the deputy in charge of the property room: