A Killer's Wife (Desert Plains)

by Victor Methos

She nodded. “The one that killed those couples.” She paused. “It’s him?”

  “We’re not sure yet; that’s why I’m here. I’ve read all the police reports in Jordan’s case, and they mentioned no boyfriends, but a friend of hers from her work said she may have been dating someone. She never saw him, but Jordan told her about someone she was infatuated with.”

  Isabella nodded. “She had a journal. A little white one with the rings binding the pages. Tacky thing, but it was a gift from my sister. I tried to find it to give to the detective, but it wasn’t in her room.”

  Yardley didn’t say what she immediately thought: He had it. Either it mentioned Wesley and he’d destroyed it, or he got a thrill out of keeping it. Going back and reading Jordan Russo’s most personal thoughts whenever he wanted to relive the killing.

  “Something else was missing, too,” Isabella said. “Her ring. Silver with a sapphire in the middle. On the back it said, ‘To My Bumblebee.’ It’s the only gift she still had from her father. She never took it off, even to shower. When they found her, she wasn’t wearing the ring.”

  Yardley nodded. The ring had been mentioned in the police reports. “Is her room still made up the way it was then?”

  “No. I kept it that way until Luke. He finally said it was time for something new. It’s my son’s room now. All of Jordan’s things are in the attic.”

  “Do you mind if I take a look?”

  She led Yardley to a set of narrow stairs that climbed to the attic and said, “I need to get dressed. Just please don’t take anything without telling me.”

  “I won’t.”

  The attic was coated in dust and cobwebs. The stacks of boxes weren’t labeled. Yardley opened the first one. It was filled with clothes, as was a second one. Mostly baby clothes and some from adolescence. Jordan’s teenage clothes had likely been donated, or her sister had received them.

  Another box held photographs of Jordan and her friends, makeup kits, perfumes, and lotions. Yardley lifted one of the perfumes and inhaled the scent. Earthy with a hint of amber. Something a young girl would pick out, thinking it made her seem older.

  A claustrophobic sadness came over Yardley as she closed the boxes: The Olsens’ lives had been put in boxes, too. Soon, they would be stored away somewhere with cobwebs to be forgotten.

  Yardley rose and slapped the dust off her hands. The bitter anger she felt as she stared at those boxes, the only things left of a beautiful young life brutally taken before it had even really begun, took her breath away.

  As she said goodbye to Isabella Russo, only one thought ran through her mind: You will not get away with this, Wesley.

  Yardley stood in what had been Wesley’s home office. Everything down to the last paper clip and pen, she had put in the storage unit until she could donate it, but now she realized she almost never came in here since Wesley had moved in. He’d told her that once his concentration was broken, it was difficult to get it back, so he should only be disturbed if absolutely necessary.

  The office had a large bookshelf, now empty, a massive desk she’d bought for him as a birthday gift, a chair, and a monitor. There was a closet off to the side filled with things she’d had in here before he had moved in.

  She went to the closet and opened the door. Her old office chair was stuffed in there, along with legal books, boxes of office supplies, a printer, and an old computer. Yardley began pulling everything out.

  It took her a few minutes to go through everything, but nothing seemed strange or out of the ordinary. She looked in the closet again and noticed the shelf near the top. Two boxes were up there she hadn’t searched. She took one down and opened it: nothing but reams of computer paper and a few wires and discs. She put it on the floor and took down the other one. Massive legal treatises, each thousands of pages in length. She remembered having to use these in law school, and even now, it gave her a twinge of anxiety as she remembered cramming for final exams that determined your entire grade for the course.

  As she was about to put everything back, the thought suddenly hit her that Wesley had hidden the DVDs in a book.

  She pulled out all the books and treatises and stacked them on the floor. She took off her shoes and sat down before flipping through them one by one. The smell of old wood-pulp paper brought back memories of late-night study sessions in high school, fueled by gallons of coffee because she was only getting a few hours’ sleep working two jobs and attempting to get straight As so she could receive a scholarship to college. Without a scholarship, she wouldn’t have been able to go.

  She tried to remember if her mother had ever asked her how the bills got paid, since she’d spent all their money on alcohol, but she couldn’t remember a time she ever had.

  A thick brown legal tome of medieval English law felt far too light for how large it was.

  She opened it.

  It had been hollowed out. In the center was a small white journal. Written in faded red marker on the cover were the words MY DIARY.

  59

  It was during lunch when Baldwin went for a run. He hadn’t had time today, but he preferred running in the mornings and sometimes even ran on the Strip. Las Vegas was a night town, and the early morning consisted of nothing but a few people drunkenly heading back to hotels after nights spent ravaging their bodies and wallets.

  He hadn’t gone for a run since going into the Deans’ bedroom.

  He grew winded within two miles and couldn’t finish his run, so he headed home. The last bottle of pain pills sat on the counter in the kitchen; he’d been telling himself they were there “just in case.”

  As he drank down a glass of water, he took the amber bottle, emptied the pills into the garbage disposal, and tossed the bottle into the trash bin.

  Yardley called his cell.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “He knew her,” she said.

  “Who?”

  “Wesley knew Jordan Russo. I spoke with her mother. She said Jordan kept a journal but the police never found it. I just went through the closet in the office I kept for Wesley. I found the journal in a hollowed-out treatise.”

  “Why would he keep it there?”

  “It probably gave him a thrill to have it here in my house. To read it while I was just outside the door.” A pause. “Anyway, the entries three weeks before she was killed talk about meeting a man older than her with a southern accent, who she called Wes. I called Isabella Russo about it, and she said the only times she had seen Jordan with an older man was when she went to pick up Jordan at her work. Jordan worked two jobs, one at a restaurant as a hostess and the other as a personal trainer at a gym. Isabella is certain it was at the restaurant she saw him. I didn’t want to taint any lineup, so I haven’t shown her a photo of Wesley. I sent you all the police reports and the autopsy results this morning. Go through them and give me a call back.”

  Baldwin puffed his cheeks and blew out a breath before hurrying to the shower.

  The café bustled with activity as Baldwin sat in a corner and read through Jordan Russo’s police reports. The homicide detectives, forensic investigators, and ME had done an excellent job with the investigation, but there just wasn’t much to go on. They’d assumed sexual assault before her death since the body had been found nude, though the clothes had been on scene next to the corpse.

  In the hot desert sun for twenty-two days, she had been completely drained of moisture, and there were plenty of signs of animals feeding on the body. The medical examiner couldn’t make many determinations, and even the time of death was a rough guess. The only method of determining time of death after that long was body decomposition, but because of the heat, it had accelerated.

  No journal was listed in the evidence logs.

  They had no witnesses to the kidnapping or dumping of the body, and the case had been moved to the open-unsolved files of the LVPD eighteen years ago.

  Baldwin texted Yardley.

  The reports said she had a ring that was missing.

  Yar
dley replied, Her father had given her a silver ring with a sapphire in the middle. It’s her birthstone. The ring has an inscription on the back that says To My Bumblebee. It’s what her father used to call her. I think Wesley kept the ring.

  There wasn’t a ring found in his storage unit.

  I know. Come over to my house and pick me up.

  60

  Yardley watched as Baldwin pulled up in her driveway. She got into the passenger seat and said, “I put all of the things he had here into storage. I didn’t go through them. I had movers do it.”

  “You think we’re going to find the ring there? No way. He’s too careful. If it’s even him.”

  She bit her thumbnail. “It’s him. And if it thrilled him to keep her journal in my home, I’m certain it would thrill him to keep other things as well.”

  He put the car in park. “Jess, you shouldn’t be part of this. You have a conflict in this, and what if you’re the one that finds something? How is that going to look?”

  “No one else can do this, Cason. I wish to hell someone else could, but I’m the only one. We have to risk it.”

  He watched her a second. “You can come, but you’re staying in the car while me and some other agents search. But even if we find it, he could just say she gave him that ring.”

  “I’m sure there’s more if we start digging. The detectives at the time didn’t know about Wesley.”

  He put the car in drive and pulled away. She watched him a second and then looked out the window. “I think Emilia’s alive, too.”

  “Why?”

  “An insurance policy, maybe. He would want to see if he could use her as leverage down the line. If he’s somehow convicted, he’ll try to bargain. She’s more valuable alive than dead. So if he drove from Oscar’s to his condo, he had to drop her off somewhere along the way. Someone is watching her.”

  “He could have locked her up somewhere and planned to go back himself to feed her.”

  She shook her head, though she didn’t look at him. “No. He knew he was going to get arrested and that bail would be denied. Someone has her. I would get as many people as you can and go door to door.”

  “That would take months.”

  “Go to the media again. Get more volunteers from the public. The story’s off the news. We need to get it back on. Wesley didn’t have any friends that I knew of. He paid someone to watch her, and I’m guessing that person doesn’t know who Emilia is.”

  At the storage facility, two men in dark suits were waiting for them by the gate.

  Baldwin and his men sifted through everything quickly. The storage facility had been the remotest one Yardley could find. She’d wanted Wesley’s things as far away from her house as she could get them.

  From inside the car she could see the items they stacked on the ground as they emptied the boxes. Clothing, shoes, office supplies, trinkets he’d gathered on trips to Kenya or Cambodia. There was what looked like a replica of an ancient mask, faded and with water stains underneath the eyes that gave it the appearance of weeping. Beneath that was Wesley’s orthodontic retainer, which he occasionally wore at night, a perfect replica of his teeth. It made her sick to think of her tongue ever being inside that mouth.

  “Got something,” Baldwin said.

  He lifted a small wooden box with a lock on it. It appeared to be a cigar box from the eighteenth or nineteenth century and had silver trim.

  “You seen this before?” he asked Yardley.

  “He kept it in the office. I never asked him about it. I assumed it was cigars.”

  “The lock’s really sturdy. More than cigars deserve.”

  Baldwin retrieved something from the trunk of his car. He laid the box down on the hood and lifted a collection of what looked like smooth keys and slipped them into the lock one by one.

  “Stop,” Yardley said.

  “Why?”

  “I’m getting a warrant,” she said, lifting her phone to her ear.

  “We don’t need one. It’s with his things that are in your possession, and we have probable cause anyway from the mother and the journal.”

  “I’m not taking any chances.”

  Yardley called in the warrant to her office, and her paralegal had it drafted and said she would run around until she found a judge that was off the bench and could sign it. While they waited, Baldwin lay on the hood of his car and stared at the sky. The other two agents leaned against the storage unit.

  “You see your life this way when you were a kid?” Baldwin said.

  “What way is that?” she said through the open window.

  “Dealing with the people we deal with? I always wanted to be a fireman as a kid. Help people. No matter who it was in that fire, I would help them. Seems like you’d have a positive outlook on life, even seeing all the death and tragedy you would see. What we deal with is different. It changes your view of what people are. I just sometimes wonder where I’d be if I had pursued what I wanted to pursue.”

  “Impossible to know. You might be worse off than you are now.”

  “Or I might be married with a houseful of kids and working a job I love, rather than chasing freaks and eating fast food every night.”

  “Thinking that way serves no purpose.”

  He turned his head to look at her. “Let’s make a deal. If you’re single in five years, and I’m single in five years . . .”

  She grinned. “You’d have to cut your hair first. I’m not marrying Bon Jovi.”

  Her phone buzzed: the warrant had been signed and emailed to her.

  “We got it?” Baldwin asked.

  She nodded. “Open the box.”

  It took Baldwin less than a minute to pop it open. He retrieved latex gloves from his trunk.

  “Sapphire, right?”

  “Yes.”

  He lifted first a lock of brunette hair, then a silver ring with a bright sapphire in the middle. Turning it over, he said, “There’s an inscription. It says ‘To My Bumblebee.’”

  Got you, Yardley thought.

  61

  Tara was asleep in her room, and Yardley watched her from the doorway. She wondered if Ortiz was staring at an empty crib in his own daughter’s room right now.

  Steven Cal sat on the couch, his feet up on the coffee table, the volume low on the evening news. He smiled warmly as she kicked her shoes off and sat next to him, tucking her legs underneath herself.

  “How was she?” Yardley asked.

  “I think she had a lot of fun, but we didn’t see her that much. She was out with her friends most of the day. She did tell us about that boy. She said she’s nervous because he might try to call her.”

  “I’m having her number changed. I haven’t told her this yet, but I’ll probably have to take her out of school, too. She can’t be near him again.”

  Steven’s eyes never left the television, and she knew he’d already rehearsed whatever he was about to say. “We have excellent schools near the ranch. Fifteen kids per class, and everyone knows each other. There’s a private school a few miles farther, too. I could easily provide that for her.”

  “She needs to be near her mother, Steven.”

  He nodded. “I know. But she’s already starting life with disadvantages because of her father, so we have to give her as many advantages as we can.” He looked at her. “This city is no place to raise a young woman. Maybe you’ve had enough of it, too.”

  Yardley rose. “Want a drink?”

  She made two gin and tonics and handed him one. They sipped in silence as they watched television, though Yardley was certain neither of them paid attention to it.

  “Are you going to visit him?” she said.

  Steven took a long pull from the drink. “I haven’t decided.”

  “He’s still your son.”

  “I don’t need to be reminded that he’s my son. I know.” Steven stared down into his drink, clinking the ice against the glass. “This is horrible to say, and it took me a long time to put it into words, but I wish
he would’ve died when the police shot him. I prayed secretly that he wouldn’t live. What kind of father am I to think that about my own son?”

  “You’re a father, but you’re a human being first.”

  He shook his head. “I thought that if he was dead, maybe it’d bring those families of the people he killed some peace. Give his mother some peace. It took years for her to finally take down his pictures from around the house. Longer to get off the meds the therapist prescribed. If we went and saw him, it would dredge all of that back up. Everything we went through.”

  Yardley carefully crafted the words she wanted to say next. “You might regret seeing him, but you might regret it more if you didn’t, because you’re not going to get another chance.”

  She put her drink on the coffee table, kissed his cheek, and said, “Good night, Steven. And I’ll talk to Tara about at least coming for a visit.”

  “Good night.”

  When she glanced back, she saw him wipe tears away on his wrist before covering his eyes with his hand and crying.

  62

  The charges for the murders of the Deans and Olsens and the attempted murder of the Mileses were dismissed for lack of evidence after Wesley’s confession and everything in his storage unit was suppressed. The FBI arrested him for Jordan Russo’s murder the moment the judge granted the dismissal.

  Everything lined up over the next few days. Isabella Russo stood in a darkened room and identified Wesley from among six men in a lineup as the man she’d seen speaking with her daughter in front of the restaurant she’d worked at and the man in the driver’s seat as he drove out of the parking lot. All the proper procedures were followed, and Isabella insisted she hadn’t watched any of the recent news reports about Wesley’s other crimes or seen his picture anywhere.

  The ID would stand up in court, and if Yardley had any qualms about how quickly Isabella had identified Wesley, she kept them to herself. It was possible that the memory of Wesley’s face had been burned so deeply in her mind that even twenty years couldn’t diminish it. It was possible. Yardley decided she had only a finite amount of energy to worry about things, and this was one thing that didn’t need to be high on that list.