Vanished in the Night (23 page)

“Oh, it does my heart good to hear that. If there ever was a woman who needed to get laid, it was you.”

“Who got laid?” a male voice asked behind her.

Veronica whirled around. Matt Cassel was standing behind her. When had he gotten here?

“I’m guessing it’s you, based on how hard you’re blushing.” He moved past her to set a stack of papers on the nurses’ desk. “Hey, Tina.”

“Hey, Matt.” Tina smiled back.

“Girl talk, dude. You’re not included,” Veronica laughed as he walked away.

“We got another one.” Frank walked into Zach’s cubicle holding a piece of paper the next morning.

“Another what?” Zach grabbed the paper from Frank’s hand. A man had been murdered in his home in Placerville. There was no sign of forced entry. When he hadn’t shown up for work or answered his phone, his coworkers had gotten worried. One of them had gone over to the man’s house during the lunch hour.

He’d found his friend facedown in his bathtub with a broom handle stuck up his ass.

The man’s name was Ryan Arnott and he’d taught at the Sierra School for Boys from 1989 to 1992.

“How we doing with tracking down any of the other teachers from Sierra?” Zach asked. “Is there anybody else close by?”

“Yeah—this guy Lyle Burton lives right here in Sacto.” Frank dropped a folder onto Zach’s desk.

The name connected in Zach’s memory. “Are we talking about the Lyle Burton who’s about to become head of the CPS?”

“One and the same.” Frank crossed his arms over his chest.

Zach rubbed his forehead. The name had come up someplace else, too. He pulled out the list of calls to and from George Osborne’s phone the night he was murdered. There it was: a two-minute call to the home phone of Lyle Burton. He shoved the paper across to Frank and pointed to the name with his pen.

Frank’s eyebrows climbed halfway up his forehead.

Zach glanced up at the clock. It was only eight. “Bet he’s not in his office yet, but why don’t we make an appointment and see if we can stop by for a chat today?”

“After we go to Placerville or before?” Frank asked.

Zach sighed. He’d hoped for a lead in this case; now it seemed like he had more than he could handle. “Placerville first. Then Burton. I don’t think he’s going anywhere. Did we get any traction on tracing that money, by the way?”

“Cash deposits from twenty years ago? The guys in Financial laughed in my face.”

Veronica had had Joe, one of the security guards, walk her out to her car at the end of her shift. She felt ridiculous. The sun was already up and it looked like it was going to be another cloudless California fall day. She’d promised Zach she would be careful, though.

Matt Cassel was hanging outside the door, clearly waiting for Tina. Veronica waved as she went by.

“Thanks, Joe,” she said as they got to her car.

“No problem. All you gotta do is ask.” He hitched up his uniform pants and started back toward the hospital.

She got into her car. Asking for help didn’t come naturally to her. Her instinct was always to try to take
care of everything herself. She’d been told it was pretty typical of adult children of alcoholics. She’d had to assume caregiver responsibilities for her mother too early, and now it was an ingrained habit.

She drove home on autopilot. When she arrived, another little box was sitting on her doorstep.

She whipped out her cell phone to call Zach and got his voice mail. She stared at the box, tempted to skirt it like it was a dead rat. And then what? Hide inside her castle waiting for her McKnight to come save her? The very thought galled her. She went inside to get a pair of gloves.

They’d gotten nothing from the other box, and probably wouldn’t from this one. But someone was trying to tell her something. It was time she started to listen.

“So you think this case is related to your old bones in the construction pit?” Sheriff Ian Bell gave Zach and Frank a disbelieving look.

Zach didn’t blame him; it seemed pretty preposterous. But too many coincidences were stacking up. “Maybe, maybe not. It seemed like we shouldn’t ignore it, though.”

The man thought for a minute and then nodded. “I can see that.”

He started up the steps to the house tucked back from the road. “None of the neighbors saw or heard anything.”

Zach looked at the thick stands of pine trees between the houses and the distance between them. Hardly surprising that no one would hear or see anything. He glanced back toward the road. No streetlights, either. It was probably beautiful at night. Crisp and clear, with a thousand stars twinkling at you. It was an ideal place to commit a crime like this.

Bell lifted up the crime-scene tape and let them through the front door. “No sign of forced entry here or anywhere else. We’re pretty sure he came in through the front door, though.”

Zach looked at the blood spray on the walls of the entryway and figured Bell had it right. “What do you guys think happened?”

Bell scratched his bald head. “Looks like our perp busted Arnott one in the face right here. A find howdy do, don’t you think? It’d be consistent with Arnott’s broken nose, too.”

Zach nodded as Frank shoved a piece of gum in his mouth. Lots of detectives had death scene rituals, little things they did to steel themselves against the smells and sights. Frank’s involved Juicy Fruit. He offered a piece to Zach, who shook his head.

Bell took the offered stick of gum, though.
“Knocked Arnott right over. He wasn’t a big man. Mean as a snake, but scrawny.”

“You’ve had previous dealings with Arnott?” Frank asked.

“Nothing much. Some spats between him and the missus that got kind of nasty before they split up. He hasn’t bothered her since she moved out. At least not as far as I know.”

So he was an abuser but not a stalker. Give him a posthumous medal. “Anything else?”

Bell wrinkled his brow. “I’m pretty sure there was a DUI. Maybe more than one. I’ll have to look it up.”

There was an idea. Get to know the victim.

“No chance the ex had anything to do with this?” Frank asked.

Zach surpressed a smile. If there was anything that struck fear into Frank’s heart, it was the idea that Doreen would try to exact vengeance on him. His thoughts had certainly turned to the victim’s ex pretty damn fast.

Bell shook his head. “Doesn’t seem likely. At least not working solo. She was an itty-bitty thing, and even with Arnott being scrawny, it would take a strong person to get all this done.”

“What all did get done?” Zach pressed.

“Well, there was the original altercation in the hallway. Actually, I’d be more willing to believe that Arnott
answered the door and got sucker-punched.” He pointed again to the blood spray on the walls as proof of that scenario. “Then it looks like whoever it was dragged Arnott down this hallway. After he trussed him up, of course.”

Zach looked at the trail of blood that led away from the spot. It seemed as good a conclusion as any. In addition to the blood, there were drag marks in the carpet. “Those don’t look like heel marks.”

“Nope. We didn’t think so, either. Our crime-scene guy thinks the perp dragged him by his tied-up ankles and let his head drag behind.” Bell hitched up his pants.

“Anything special about whatever the perp used to tie him up?” Frank asked, chewing hard.

“Nah, just the kind of stuff you’d keep in the back of your truck to tie things down. Get it at any hardware store from here to Timbuktu.”

Zach looked down the hall at the blood trail. “You guys done photographing and everything?”

Bell nodded. “Yep,” he said and led the way down the hall. “Perp dragged him down to the master bedroom. Looks like he let him lie here for a bit.” He gestured to a place where blood had soaked into the carpeting.

“Any idea why?” Zach crouched down next to the small pool of blood. A broken nose would bleed
pretty hard, but eventually it would slow down. Especially if the victim was lying on his back, the way it looked like Arnott had been.

Bell shrugged. “Maybe he let him lie there while he filled up the tub. We’re not sure.”

Zach stood up. “Okay. Show us the rest.”

All three men walked into the bathroom.

“This is where we found him.” Bell grimaced. “Couldn’t believe it when I saw it. Poor bastard. Facedown in the water. Pants around his ankles. Ass up in the air with a broom handle sticking out of it.”

Zach grimaced, too. “Any sign of anything else sexual?”

Bell shook his head. “Our ME wants a little more time with the body, but after a preliminary exam he thinks the broom handle was, uh, inserted postmortem. As far in as it was shoved, there would have been a lot more bleeding otherwise. Of course, the water could have slowed that down, too. Damn cold.”

Zach shuddered. What a way to go. “Arnott got any enemies besides the ex?”

“There’s plenty of people who didn’t care for him. But this?” Bell gestured to the tub. “This feels like an awful lot of hatred. It feels kinda personal, too.”

It did seem like a lot of personal hatred. It also seemed very calm and calculated. There was no effort to make it look like anything other than what it was,
either. Zach had a hard time believing that the same person who killed George Osborne had killed Ryan Arnott.

Susan Tennant, on the other hand? That seemed to fit.

He handed Bell his card. “Keep us posted, will you? I can’t tell if this is related to our case or not, but I don’t want to miss something for lack of looking.”

“I hear you.” Bell tucked the card away. “I’ll make sure you get copies of all the reports.”

They shook hands and Frank and Zach headed back to their car. “What do you think?” Frank asked.

“I’m not sure what to think about any of it at this point.”

“Me, neither.” Frank started the car and they headed back to Sacramento.

17

“I’ll have to do a more detailed analysis to be certain, but it certainly looks as if the dirt from the back of Susan Tennant’s van matches the dirt from Max Shelden’s bones and the sample you brought back from the Sierra School site.” Dinsmore pushed back from his lab bench.

All four detectives stared at each other.

“So Susan Tennant dug up Max Shelden and dumped him in that construction site?” Elise shook her head. “Why? What possible reason could she have for doing that? If our theory is that she spent her whole life trying to make up for letting him be beaten to death, why would she suddenly dig him up now? Why not when she first got out of the loony bin? Or after she started her foundation?”

“Why ask why?” Frank offered her a piece of Juicy Fruit. “At least we know who, which is a damn sight more than we knew yesterday.”

“True that,” Josh said, staring off into the middle distance. “It also doesn’t tell us who killed her, though.”

“No. But it might give us a motive, and that’s not a terrible place to start.” Zach suggested.

Josh nodded. “Okay. Let’s say she had her reasons. Whatever they were, she wanted the world to find Max Shelden now.”

“And as a nurse, she probably knew that we’d figure out he’d been murdered,” Frank chimed in.

“I’m guessing there’re quite a few people who don’t want us digging into what happened up at that school, and to Max Shelden in particular.” Elise drummed her fingers.

That was an understatement. “We started a list,” Zach said.

“Can we see it?” Josh asked.

Frank looked over at Zach. “I think it might be a nice time to share. They did give us the evidence from their van.”

They all headed back to police headquarters and met up at Frank’s and Zach’s desks.

When Frank pulled out the 1991-to-1992 staff roster for the Sierra School, Elise tapped her finger on Ryan Arnott’s name. “Why does he sound familiar?”

“Because they just found him drowned in his own bathtub, riding a broomstick in a very uncomfortable fashion.” Frank leaned back in his chair and smiled.

“Ohhh.” Realization dawned on her face. “He’s that dude.”

“Yep. That dude,” Zach confirmed.

“So you think that’s connected, too?” Josh had taken up a position half sitting on Frank’s desk.

“We think it’s possible. We don’t have anything but the Sierra School connection to tie it in, and that’s twenty years old. From what we heard, Arnott wasn’t the most popular guy around, but that seemed, well, pretty personal.”

And very deliberate. There’d been a basement room with a bathtub in it at the school. Zach had only taken a quick look at it, and the crime-scene guys were still processing information. He almost didn’t want to know what they found, at this point.

“Bell up in Placerville is still going to be working the case, checking the ex-wife’s alibi and all that, but we’re keeping an eye on it,” Zach finished.

“Totally different MO,” Josh observed. “There’s no ritual. Serials usually have a ritual.”

“We noticed that, too,” Frank said.

“Most serials have a sexual component, as well,” Josh continued.

“Broomstick up the ass seems kind of sexual.” Elise cocked her head and looked over at him.

“True that.” Josh thought for a minute. “Nothing sexual with Tennant, though. It looked like it could have been some bondage thing at first, but they didn’t find any sign of sexual trauma.”

“Maybe our guy’s a little light in the loafers,” Frank suggested. “Maybe he only likes guys.”

“Maybe he’s not a classic serial killer,” Zach said. Just because the FBI said most serial killers behaved a certain way didn’t mean they all did.

“Any other cases you got simmering on the back burner that you think might be related to ours?” Elise asked.

Zach slid the file on George Osborne across the table. Josh flipped it open and started to read, Elise reading over his shoulder. “This is even less like Tennant than Arnott is,” she said after a few minutes.

“We noticed that, too. He’s the Shelden boy’s stepfather, the one who had him sent away to the Sierra School in the first place. What with the timing and all . . .” Frank let his words drift off. The other two detectives didn’t need him to lead them by their noses.