Текст книги "The Survivors Club"

Автор книги: J. Black

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CHAPTER 17

Tess was halfway back to Nogales when she got the news.

By coincidence, she’d been asking a friend of hers, Terry Braithwate, with the Pima County Sheriff’s Office, about Steve Barkman.

“Just a minute,” Braithwate said. “You won’t believe this.”

Tess could hear the scanner in the background—Braithwate was monitoring the TPD frequencies.

“Small world—there’s a possible 01-01 at 5425A East Ft. Lowell Road.”

Possible homicide.

Tess heard it, and knew immediately. “That’s Steve Barkman’s residence.”

“Jesus.” A click of computer keys. “I’m looking…oh, I didn’t know that. The place is officially owned by his mother—Geneva Rees.”

“So what’s the nature of the 01-01? Do they know?”

“Still trying to figure it out.”

“But the deceased is…”

“Let me check—hold on.” He came back on a moment later. “Shit. It isSteve.”

“They don’t know if it’s a homicide?” Tess said.

“Not yet. Ds are at the scene though.”

Tess got off the horn with Braithwate and called Danny.

“Barkman? The guy you had to apologize to?”

“Yeah.” Tess told him how Barkman had seemed to be obsessed with George Hanley’s death.

“There might be something there,” Danny said.

Tess said, “I’m going back.”

“Hey, guera—I’ll meet you there.”

There he goes with the white girl comment again.

Sometimes it was such a pain in the ass to be Anglo.

Tess parked on Ft. Lowell Road. The dirt road into Barkman’s mother’s property was jammed with vehicles. She saw four TPD units—one of them a D car and another belonging to a detective sergeant—and a crime scene unit, TV satellite truck, and a regular TPD unit. All of which were parked either in the long driveway or along the side of the semirural stretch of road.

She waited for Danny. When he appeared, they walked toward the property.

The officer guarding the crime scene tape looked like he’d give them trouble, and he did.

Danny badged him. “We have an ongoing investigation involving Mr. Barkman—”

“Nobody can come in here.”

Tess glanced at the crowd beyond the tape and spotted a woman with a blonde ponytail in conversation with a crime scene tech and another detective. She wore a long-sleeved blouse, tan slacks, her weapon in plain sight, and most important, a silver shield clipped to her belt.

“Cheryl Tedesco!” Tess called out.

Cheryl Tedesco looked up, shading her eyes against the bright Arizona sun. She detached herself from the group. “Tess! Holy cow, girl! What’re you doing here?”

Tess introduced her partner. “We think your case links with ours.”

“I’m all ears.” Cheryl lifted the tape, and Tess and Danny ducked under. “Tell me what you’ve got.”

Three months ago, Tess and Cheryl had roomed together at an interrogation methods course in Lake Havasu City. Not only did they hit it off right away, but they shared an experience that bonded them. On their way to dinner the first night, they witnessed a car accident that nearly wiped them out and did knock down a pedestrian. Fortunately, the pedestrian survived with cuts and bruises, but the driver had to be cut out of her car. The woman was in a panic, because her dog was in a crate on the backseat. Tess and Cheryl took turns directing traffic and placating the woman as they waited for the paramedics. Between them, they were able to get the small dog carrier out and show the woman her pet was all right. This enabled her to calm down and cooperate, and eventually she was freed of the wreckage. She only went off to the hospital after they promised her the dog would be taken care of. And a day later, the woman and her dog were reunited.

Tess admired the efficient way Cheryl handled triage, the calmness with which she directed traffic and talked the panicked driver down. Maybe because Tess hoped that what she saw in Cheryl, she saw in herself.

“So what’s your interest in Barkman?” Cheryl asked.

“He was very curious about a case I’m working.” Tess told her about George Hanley, and about Barkman’s seeming obsession with the idea Hanley had been shot multiple times.

Cheryl looked mildly skeptical, and Tess didn’t blame her. It was a tenuous link. “Tell you what. I have to get back in there, but I’ll see who can brief you.” She scanned the group behind her. “Manuel—can you come here?”

A detective left the group and approached them. Cheryl introduced them and said, “Catch them up on what we’ve got, will ya? I’ll be back in a bit.”

The sun was high in the sky by now and hot, even for April.

Manuel hitched his trousers. “The victim fell through a glass-topped coffee table headfirst. What it looks like, he was in the process of changing a light bulb in the ceiling fan—there was one of those short stepladders like you’d use? He could’ve slipped and fell and hit the coffee table with his head, which is what it looks like he did. And his head went right through the glass. We think he bled to death.”

Tess stared at him, tried to assimilate this.

Danny said, “You saying it was an accident?”

“We don’t know. But it looks that way.”

“Man, that’s a weird one,” Danny said. “Talk about a freak accident.” He added, “If that’s what it is.”

Tess asked, “The ceiling fan was close to the coffee table? Close enough—”

“That he could take a header into the coffee table?” Danny finished helpfully.

“We’re trying to figure that out now.”

“Can we get in to see the scene?”

“I don’t know—”

“Hey!” It was Cheryl, walking toward them. “Thanks, Manny. All right, here’s the deal. I can slip you in to take a look, but it’ll have to be quick, okay?”

She went to the trunk of her car and handed out blue booties and gloves.

They went up to the house. A thick-trunked eucalyptus tree towered above the flat roof of the brick ranch. The desert around here was basically untouched, populated by creosote bushes and a few mesquite. A bank of vertical windows framed by posts from roof to foundation looked out on the carport. The carport was just a pad of concrete with a ramada covering above. Tess recognized the Range Rover parked on the pad.

Cheryl passed around the Vicks VapoRub.

Tess dabbed some in her nostrils. It would help, but if the smell was bad, it wouldn’t help a lot.

The door was open and the crime scene techs were already working the scene.

Tess wasn’t prepared for the carnage.

Steve Barkman had been driven by his own weight nose-first into the coffee table, shattering the glass. One shard had pierced his eye. His face had stopped five inches from the floor, and blood collected on the slope of his nose and then dripped and spattered on the Saltillo tile below.

His neck and spine had accordioned into the table—part of the force that drove his head through the glass—and the forward momentum of his torso had been stopped instantly in an awkward sprawl. He’d tried to avoid his fate by throwing out his hands, but it was too late.

He wore shorts and a T-shirt, similar to those he’d worn when Tess had met him in Credo.

It seemed like a hundred years ago.

She looked around. There was the aluminum stepladder, three to four feet tall. It had fallen to the floor. Iridescent orange paint circled the broken light bulb lying on the tile. Above, Tess saw the empty socket for the light. Barkman must have set the light globe on the coffee table; now it lay on the floor, one side broken open.

Tess kept her hands under her arms and stared at the body and the environs.

The television was on. She looked at Cheryl.

Cheryl said, “The maid said he always had the television on.”

Tess saw the logo on the bottom right-hand corner of the screen. Fox News.

“You seen enough?” Cheryl asked. “We haven’t even got a body temp yet. We’re gonna have to clear out and let the techs get to work.”

Outside, the sun shone down on them, a mockingbird sang in a tree nearby, and the air smelled like fresh laundered clothing on the line—a memory from her childhood. It smelled like spring.

But the death smell lurked underneath. It sat in the membranes of her nose and lay at the back of her soft palate.

It happened at every death scene. Tess carried the residue on her, like a thin film of dust mixed with sweat, just gritty enough to stay on her clothes and her hands. She knew this was her imagination, but it didn’t stop the odor from taking up inside her, from clinging to her pores.

Tess thought it was the price she paid to do the work she did. It was something she took from the crime scene, a part of people who had lost their lives. And it resonated for a while.

A physical manifestation of a respect for the dead.

Like a mortuary that knew part of its job was to comfort the survivors, speaking in low, respectful tones, the flowers beautiful but not glamorous, the music lovely but muted.

Just part of her job.

“So what do you think?” she asked.

“Everyone’s thinking—not just me—that it looks like an accident. Anything out of place other than what we saw?”

“Let’s wait for the techs to finish with the body and then we can go back in.”

It took about an hour, and finally Steve Barkman was on his way to the morgue.

Inside, they looked around. The place was pretty neat. There was a plate in the sink that had been rinsed, and a bottle of beer out.

“He drank about half,” Cheryl said. “We’ll submit it for DNA.”

“No other glass, no other beer?”

“No.” Cheryl pulled out a plastic tub from below the sink. “There were several bottles of Rolling Rock and an empty of Jack Daniel’s. Have no idea what the timeline for that will be. We’ll draw blood.”

Tess glanced around the place. There was a laptop, which TPD would put into evidence, and a printer.

Danny looked at the printer. “Hey, he’s got all the bells and whistles.”

Tess came over. The printer was older—a Hewlett-Packard Office Pro L7780.

“Wow, lots of features on this baby.”

“What do you mean?” Tess asked.

“Look at this—space for a whole bunch of micro card slots—anything you want. Wonder if he’s a photographer.”

“We’ve been all over this place,” Cheryl said. “He doesn’t have a camera.”

“Not even a digital one?”

“Nope.”

“Huh.” Danny shook his head. “Sure is a lot of space.” He shrugged. “Have you checked his phone?”

“They did. I don’t remember them saying anything about a micro SD in there, but I’ll ask.”

“Maybe the laptop will tell the tale.”

Cheryl said, “If there’s a tale to tell.”

As Tess and Danny came back outside, someone called out to them. “Excuse me, could I talk to you a minute?”

Tess looked in the direction of the voice and saw a man approaching them from the road.

Danny said, “Hey, man, we’re not—”

“A minute’s all I ask.”

The guy was in his midthirties. By the way he walked, and the expression on his face, Tess discarded the notion that he was just a spectator. She tried to file him somewhere. He could be with another law enforcement agency, or he could be a reporter. He had no credentials that she could see. She glanced at Danny.

The man reached them. He was dressed casually—Docker-type slacks and a short-sleeved shirt. Casual or not, the clothes were several cuts above Macy’s. He had brown hair, was tanned and fit. Tess couldn’t see his eyes because he wore aviator shades.

“I’m Alec Sheppard,” he said, holding out his hand to Tess and then to Danny.

The guy had a way of taking over. It was subtle, but Tess knew it when she saw it. Not overbearing. He was used to starting the conversation and setting the tone—she guessed he was successful in whatever endeavor he pursued.

“Are you with homicide?” he asked.

“We’re homicide,” Danny said, “But with Santa Cruz County.”

Tess thought her partner sounded eager to please.

This guy Sheppard had a way of making you want to talk to him.

“Maybe you could help me anyway. Do you know what happened to Steve Barkman? This isa homicide scene?”

Tess said, “What’s your interest in this, Mr. Sheppard? Are you related to Mr. Barkman?”

“No. We’re friends. He was doing a job for me, and now I’m wondering if it got him killed.”

CHAPTER 18

Tess and Danny sat in on the interview at the Tucson Police Department midtown substation. The substation was located near the Reid Park Zoo—Tess thought this was appropriate, considering the many strange people who found themselves under the bank of fluorescent lights and in trouble. Cheryl Tedesco found a room big enough for the four of them. She rounded up sodas, water, and coffee and sat Alec Sheppard down at the postage-stamp table. Tess and Danny were strictly observers.

After her introduction on the tape recorder, Cheryl got down to it. “You told us that Steve Barkman was working for you?”

“Not officially. He was looking into something for me.”

“But you paid him?”

“I did, yes. I paid him expenses, and sent him some money for his time.”

“What was he looking into?”

“It’s a little hard to explain.” Sheppard was one of the few people who didn’t look washed out like aged cheese under the fluorescent lights. “This is going to sound outlandish. Steve was looking into an incident that happened to me a couple of weeks ago.”

“This was a job he was doing for you?”

“He wanted to do it as a favor to me, but I thought he should be paid.”

“Why would he do that?”

“We were roommates at the University of Arizona. A long time ago.”

“What work did he do?”

“He was looking for someone for me.”

“And who was he looking for?”

“He didn’t say.”

Tess tried not to react. She kept her face bland. Now Barkman was dead and the lead he was following might be dead with him. “Why didn’t he say?”

“He told me he wanted to be sure first.”

“And that’s why you’re here?”

“I wanted to see for myself if the person Steve was tracking was the guy I saw last month on a jump.”

“On a jump? What do you mean by ‘on a jump?’”

“I’m a skydiver.”

“And this guy Barkman is tracking, he’s also a skydiver?”

“I don’t know.”

“But you said you met him on a jump.”

“It’s a long story.”

It was going on five p.m. and the sun was lowering in the sky when Tess and Danny walked out to the parking lot.

Danny said, “So this guy Sheppard comes here because Steve Barkman has a hot tip on a guy who aimed his finger at him?”

“The guy aimed his finger at him right before he jumped out of a plane and his chute didn’t open. I can see why he’d come here.”

“You believe the guy.”

“What does he have to gain?”

“Hey, guera, if you don’t know…”

Tess knew what Danny was talking about: people who liked to attach themselves to investigations, who got a vicarious thrill from being in on what the police were doing. “He doesn’t strike me that way, Dan.”

Danny mumbled something.

“What did you say?”

“Guy bothers me, is all. What about this bullshit about a jogger putting a sticker on his chest?”

Tess had to admit that bothered her, as well. What an outlandish claim.

“If this is true,” Danny said, “it shoots the hell out of the freak accident theory. It could be the guy who threatened Sheppard—and I use the term ‘threatened’ loosely—might have objected to Barkman finding him, In a big way.”

“I think Cheryl’s going to look at Barkman in a whole new light.”

“Barkman’s death was a homicide staged to look like an accident?”

“Could have been a smart move,” Tess said. “The way it looked, we spent a lot of our time concentrating on how freaky it was.” She stood by her car, which she’d managed to park near the shade of a eucalyptus tree. “It could have happened like this. Someone was there, hanging out with him, having a beer, and noticed the light was out.”

Danny nodded. “Yeah. So. Whoever it was—and now maybe we’ll never know—pointed it out to him. Like: hey, your light’s out. And while he’s up on the ladder, the guy kicked it out from under him. But how’d this guy know falling into the coffee table would kill him?”

“Maybe Barkman hit hard and while he was out—”

“Or at least disoriented.”

“They helped him along.”

Tess knew they were thinking about the same thing: the shard of glass that went straight through Barkman’s eye and into his brain.

After Danny drove out, Tess waited a while. She watched some joggers follow the path at Reid Park, enjoying the smell of the sprinklers on the grass at the golf course.

When Alec Sheppard came out of the substation, Tess walked over to see if he’d like to go out for a drink.

They met at a bar called Badwater on Fourth Avenue. It wasn’t far from the Marriott where Alec was staying, and he told her it brought back memories of his college days. By now the sun was almost down. They sat outside at a picnic table under the lights, surrounded by a kite-string of moths. There was a lot of babble of beer-drinking patrons, but not so loud they couldn’t talk.

Cheryl Tedesco had been thorough, but Tess wanted to go over it again, in case there was a revelation she might be missing.

After some small talk, how he’d liked the U of A, what he did for a living—he’d run a company that had specialized in oil cleanup in the Gulf—Tess said, “You said Steve Barkman worked for you. But he didn’t give you a report?”

“No. He’d only been looking into it for a few days.”

“How many days?”

“Four? Five. Five days.”

“Did you talk to him during that time?”

“I thought we went all over this before.”

“Bear with me. What did he say?”

“He said he thought there was a connection.”

“What kind of connection?”

“He didn’t say. But he recognized him. He wanted to be careful because the guy had money, and he didn’t want to get in the middle of a lawsuit. Maybe he was worried about defamation of character.”

Tess said, “Could you wait a minute? I’ll be back.”

“Sure.”

Tess left him and headed for her car. She’d put a copy of Tucson Lifestylemagazine in the murder book, which now resided in her briefcase under the front seat of the Tahoe. In a perfect world, she’d have other, similar photos of men the same age to go with it. But who was she kidding? It wasn’t a perfect world.

Back at the bar, Tess handed Alec the magazine. “Would you mind looking through it?”

There was a question in his eyes, but she just nodded at the magazine. “Just flip through it.”

He stopped where she expected him to stop.

Looked up at her, his face grim.

“That’s him.”

“The man you saw at the jump center?”

“That’s him.”

“Had you met him before?”

“I don’t think so. But I meet a lot of people. I can’t say I’m absolutely sure about that. But Steve knows—knew him.”

Tess remembered at DeKoven’s office, the look on Michael DeKoven’s face when she mentioned Steve Barkman. She wondered if Barkman had made contact with him by then. “What did Barkman say about the guy he was investigating?”

“He said something about pulling the surveillance tape at the center.” He added, “Wish I’d thought of that.”

“But he didn’t tell you who it was.”

“He wanted to be sure.”

“But you were surprised whoever it was lived in Tucson?”

“A little. It’s been a few years since I got my degree. Maybe he knew me from a jump. At the time I chalked it up to making an enemy here somewhere along the line, and maybe that’s what happened—could have been when I was jumping at SkyDive Arizona in Eloy. Skydivers live in a small world. We’re always running into each other.”

“Can you think of anything that might have made the guy go off on you like that?”

He stared into space, thinking. Shook his head. “No, I can’t. But he looked at me like he knew me. When he pointed the finger gun at me, he acted like it was a big joke. No, that’s not right.”

“Not a joke?”

“It was a joke, but it was a mean joke. It was…I guess the closest thing I can describe it to is celebrating in the end zone.”

“Why do you think he did that?”

“If he found a way to sabotage my rig, then I think he did it because he knew he could.”

“You mean if you were killed.”

“Yeah. No one would ever know.”

Tess noticed that he seemed to take the idea of being killed in stride. “If it’s true, he really screwed up.”

He grinned. “I guess I’m just naturally a survivor.”

Tess said, “There’s no doubt your rig was sabotaged?”

“None. My reserve rig was up for repacking—I wouldn’t be allowed to jump without having it done. Every hundred and twenty days the rigger has to repack the reserve. It’s a safety issue.”

“You think DeKoven bribed the rigger?”

He sat back. “He didn’t have to. Since it’s a long wait, the owner of the rig doesn’t usually stick around, so all the guy who wants to sabotage the pack has to do is wait until no one’s watching, find the rig he’s looking for, and cut the cables.”

“It’s that simple?”

“Oh, yeah. He could pretend the pack is his and he’s checking it—all he’d have to do is lift the flap to the cable housing and cut the cables with wire cutters—the cables to the main canopy and the reserve canopy. No one would ever see it. The pack is sealed with a red cord and a lead seal. Extremely doubtful the pack’s owner would recheck it. There’d be no reason to. Isure didn’t.”

The band, a local group called the Blasphemers—they were loud and pretty good—struck up, and it was hard to talk for a while. Finally they took a break.

Tess asked him, “Did you ever meet Jaimie DeKoven?” Michael DeKoven went to Stanford, following in the footsteps of his father, but his little sister Jaimie spent a couple of semesters at the U of A.

“Who’s that—a sister? No, I don’t remember her. I don’t remember anyone by that name.” He grinned. It was an attractive grin. “I met a lot of girls in college.”

“I’m sure.”

“Did you go to college? Can you remember every guy you ever met, or even dated?”

“Nope. Not a one of ’em,” Tess lied.

Unfortunately, she remembered every single one of them. She’d pushed them to the back of the file cabinet and let the cobwebs grow. She said, “Tell me again about the tagger.”

He ran down the facts. His jog on the roof of the Hilton Atlanta. The sinking sun in his eyes, the jogger coming toward him and slapping the tag on him.

“You didn’t get a good look at him?”

“He wore a hoodie. And I was looking right into the sunset. It was just a shape, just a jogger—I didn’t pay any attention until he smacked me in the chest.”

“And you went after him.”

“Eventually, but he got a head start.”

“Height?”

“Shorter than me.”

“Sex?”

“We’ve been through this. It was dark, hard to tell, what he was wearing—a jogging suit with a hoodie.”

“I was hoping the beer goggles would help.” She glanced at the half-full beer glass at his elbow. “Quick—height.”

“Shorter than me.”

“You’re six foot one, two?”

“Two. I’d say, maybe, five eleven.”

“Build?”

“Slight. A jogger, or maybe more like a long-distance runner.”

“Do you think the tagging and incident in Houston are related?”

Sheppard hesitated. Then he said, “It had the same kind of feeling.”

“What feeling?”

“Like the joke was on me.”

Tess asked about the tag.

“I threw it away. I thought it was just some stupid punk playing a prank.”

“It had the number five on it?”

“Yeah, but they could have gotten that anywhere. I saw it kind of like tagging, like graffiti. Only I was the surface instead of a wall.”

“You were assaulted.”

“Yes.”

“You said it was like tagging. But you know what it makes me think of? Wilding.”

He thought about it. “But those are bands of kids, right? And they don’t just stop at assaulting somebody. They’ve killed people. So you think it was random. Some kid showing off for his friends? That I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time?”

“Could be. Anything else you can remember?”

Sheppard looked inward. She could see him trying to come up with something. When you tried, it usually didn’t work. But then he shifted his gaze to her, and if he’d been a slot machine he would have rolled three sevens.

“The shoes,” he said. “They were expensive. Athletic shoes.”

Tess thought: So the kid had money.

If it was a kid.