Crimson Lake Road (Desert Plains)

by Victor Methos

  “No,” Baldwin said.

  “It’s on Forty-Two and Main. I was there the day after that girl’s story about her missing and all came out. I seen someone with her in the parking lot. They don’t serve under twenty-one, so he went in and got some food from the grill and came out and they left.”

  “Where was she when he went inside?” Reece asked.

  “In the car. It was, like, a red car. Little tiny car. She was in the passenger seat and waited, and he went inside.”

  “Was anybody else around?”

  He nodded. “Least five people were smoking outside. She even came outta the car and walked around talking on the phone.”

  Reece folded her arms and said what Baldwin was thinking. “She had a phone, huh?”

  “Yeah. She walked around the lot just talking to somebody, and then the dude came out with two Styrofoam boxes and got in the car, and they left.”

  Baldwin said, “You recognize the guy?”

  He shook his head. “Never seen him before. White dude, my height, wore a Padres hat.”

  Reece said, “Give this man’s money back before I arrest you.”

  “What? Why?”

  “She didn’t have no phone. We found her phone.”

  “Then it wasn’t hers, ’cause I’m telling you she was on the phone. And she didn’t look like she been kidnapped or nothing. She coulda yelled for help, and ten people woulda come running. She didn’t do none of that. She was there ’cause she wanted to be there.”

  “Mm-hmm,” Reece said, eyeing him up and down.

  Baldwin took a few notes and said, “What kind of car? Sedan, hatchback, four-door, two-door?”

  “Red two-door. Hatchback, I guess.”

  “If I showed you pictures of different cars, could you recognize it?”

  He lit a cigarette as he nodded.

  “What was she wearing?”

  “Just like a striped shirt and shorts. I was close, too. When she was out on the phone, she walked right past me. I was standing against the wall, and she came as far from me as I am to you now. It was her. I seen her picture the night before.”

  “Did you hear anything she was saying on the phone?”

  He shook his head. “She was laughing, though. She didn’t look like she was in trouble.”

  “Why’d you wait so long to call?”

  “I didn’t. I left a message a while ago, and no one called me back.”

  Baldwin glanced at Reece but let it go. “I’m going to need your phone number, and I’ll need you to get with a police sketch artist to get us a rendering of the man you saw.”

  “No, no way. I keep my head down and stay outta other people’s business, and that’s how I get by.”

  “How am I supposed to get you your hundred bucks if I can’t reach you?”

  The man thought about this a moment and said, “All right. But I don’t want to come down to no police station. You can meet me at a Del Taco or McDonald’s or whatever.”

  “That’s fair.”

  “My name’s Leonard.”

  “I’m Cason.”

  Leonard rattled off his phone number and then left the park the way he’d come.

  Reece said, “That was some bullshit. I can’t believe you paid the man.”

  “He’s a hardcore addict. How many addicts you know willingly call the cops to report a crime?”

  “He did it for money.”

  “Yeah, but he still did it. Two hundred bucks wouldn’t even make his bail if we arrested him for something. And he gave us his name and phone number. I’m not saying he’s the pope, but let’s at least follow up on what he’s saying.”

  “You sure you got time? Shouldn’t you be chasing someone embezzling money from Goldman Sachs?”

  “I think Goldman Sachs can survive without me. Harmony might not. Also, he could be the one who took her.”

  She nodded, looking off in the direction Leonard had walked. “I’ll follow him for now and get surveillance on him. Maybe it’s our lucky day.”

  56

  Kimberly Alley’s testimony had been bad, but Yardley figured she would put Garrett up on the stand again before closing and let him explain himself, then argue that suspicious behavior during a nasty divorce didn’t mean he’d framed an innocent man for no reason. She had no choice but to move on.

  Yardley called the pathologist to the stand next. Dr. Mathew Carrey was bright and calm, and she had found him to be a convincing witness. He did as well as he had with the grand jury when Jax had put him up.

  Yardley only got a couple of hours of testimony in before Weston called a dinner break. She lifted her satchel after the jury had gone, and when she turned around to leave, she saw River sitting in the back of the courtroom.

  “Let’s get dinner,” Yardley said, noticing the makeup that had washed down her cheeks with tears and then been wiped away.

  River nodded. “Yeah, okay.”

  The courthouse had its own cafeteria. It was run by a single man in a chef’s uniform. Yardley and River ordered salads and soup and sat at a table next to a window looking out onto the street. Only a handful of people were there, mostly attorneys and judges.

  “Are you holding up okay?” Yardley asked.

  “No.”

  Yardley swallowed and waited a beat. “Angie, a detective followed up with everyone they could find at the conference and with the airlines. Zachary was on the flight out to San Diego and the flight back, but he never signed the attendance sheet, and he didn’t pick up the packets they handed out at the conference. They couldn’t find a single organizer or attendee who could say he was there. I think he flew out and then rented a car and drove it back to throw off suspicion.” She paused. “You knew he didn’t go, didn’t you?”

  River had a napkin between her fingers, and she slowly tore at the edges. “He didn’t do this.”

  “Angie—”

  “I know that man. He did not do this.”

  Yardley sighed. “Then who, Angie? Who would go to all this effort to get him convicted for something he didn’t do?”

  “I don’t know. If you thought he was innocent, what would you do next to prove it?”

  “What I would do next is try to find someone who would benefit from Zachary being convicted of this.”

  River nodded. “Then do that. I know I have no right to ask, but please, for me . . . will you do that?” She reached out and took Yardley’s hand. “I don’t want to lose him. If he didn’t do this . . . I mean, I can’t even think of something more tragic than if he’s convicted.”

  Yardley looked down at River’s hand. “I’ll look into it. But if there’s nothing there, if I don’t find anything—”

  “I know . . . I know.”

  57

  Yardley didn’t sleep much the next couple of nights, and she sipped double espressos before court started. Aster and Ricci were joking with each other at the defense table. Yardley glanced behind her but didn’t see River there. She hadn’t come yesterday either.

  When Weston came out and the jury was seated, he covered a yawn with his hand and then said, “Next witness, Ms. Yardley.”

  “The State would call Special Agent Cason Baldwin to the stand.”

  Baldwin wore a black suit and had some scruff from not shaving for a few days. He was sworn in and sat down in the witness box, giving a shy grin to the jury. Yardley asked for his name and occupation and ran through his qualifications, slowing down only briefly to discuss his law enforcement history with the navy and the San Francisco Police Department. When she finished, she said, “What do you recall about this case?”

  They’d worked together enough that they had a rhythm. Yardley would ask broad, open-ended questions, and Baldwin would tell stories to the jury, creating a closer bond with them.

  “Well, I first heard about this case from a colleague at the Sheriff’s Office. He mentioned the particular pose and the ritualistic way in which Mrs. Pharr was killed. It struck me initially as an occult killing.”


  “How so?”

  “With occult killings—for example, satanic murders—there’s a lot of ritual involved. It’s not just about the killing but about killing in a certain manner. So we’ll find symbols painted on the walls and floors or on the victims themselves. Many times cut into their flesh with sharp instruments. We also see things like burned-out candles or dolls or scraps of paper from some document they think is sacred. The ritual requires symbolism, and there’ll be a lot of evidence of that. Most of the time, there’s no effort at cleaning up. The scene itself is the message they want to send. So I thought initially, from the way it was described to me, that Kathy Pharr’s murder was an occult murder, and occult murders don’t just stop at one.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because they believe they’re fulfilling some higher purpose. They’re fanatics, and death or incarceration are the only means, in my twenty years’ experience in law enforcement, by which a fanatic can be stopped.”

  “So what did you do after you learned the details of Kathy Pharr’s murder?”

  “I called the assigned detective, Lucas Garrett, and asked if he would fill me in on any calls involving suspicious activity on Crimson Lake Road. The cabin chosen for Mrs. Pharr’s murder was abandoned, and that area has many such cabins and homes. It’s out of the way and doesn’t have its own police force, so it takes a while for the nearby police to reach it. Detective Garrett and I both agreed that the killer or killers might come back to deposit the next victim because the chance for detection was so low. So we thought it best to have it monitored a bit more closely. That’s when we got the call about Angela River about a month after Mrs. Pharr was found.”

  “What happened with Ms. River?”

  Baldwin described the call from the neighbor who’d seen a car pull up and a man dragging another person inside one of the cabins. “I quickly drove over to meet Detective Garrett, who had three deputies with him, and the five of us went down to the cabin. We didn’t see a car, but we did see fresh boot prints in the dirt leading to and from the back door. We were worried about another potential victim inside the cabin, so we didn’t have time to wait for a warrant. Detective Garrett had a small battering ram in the trunk of his vehicle, and he brought it out.”

  Yardley placed a blown-up photo of the kitchen near the jury and had him describe finding River there, still alive, as well as his initial interview with her at the hospital.

  “When did you first meet the defendant in this case, Michael Zachary?”

  “It was the next night at their home.”

  “What was your impression of him?”

  “Objection,” Aster said, “he’s not a psychologist.”

  Yardley turned to Judge Weston. “He’s a veteran law enforcement officer, Your Honor. I think he’s earned the right to tell us his general impressions.”

  “Overruled. Go ahead and answer.”

  Baldwin said, “He seemed extraordinarily nervous. Some of his answers didn’t make sense, and he seemed to have a difficult time answering our questions without stuttering or looking around. Fidgeting and shifting in his seat. He asked to go to the bathroom twice when he was stumbling over his answers. In my experience, those are signs of deception.”

  “Why do you think he was trying to deceive you?”

  “I’ve been in these types of situations before, where a wife or girlfriend is attacked and I have to go speak with the husband or boyfriend. In my experience, the husband or boyfriend usually bombards us with questions about what we’re doing to catch the perpetrator. They know their wives or girlfriends won’t feel safe while the perpetrator is still out there unidentified, so they want to know what’s being done to apprehend them. There was none of that with Mr. Zachary. He asked almost no questions. In my opinion, I think he knew we were looking at him as a suspect. He also fit the profile that our expert and I later worked up.”

  “What is that?”

  “Well, it’s my understanding that Dr. Daniel Sarte, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School who works with the Bureau on special cases like this, will be testifying more thoroughly about profiling and the profile we created, but in essence profiling is where we determine a set of characteristics the offender we’re after might have, extrapolated from the crime scenes and victims. In this case, we postulated we were looking for a white male Mr. Zachary’s age who had medical training. As Dr. Carrey testified, the eyes and tongue are the sections of the body that are most difficult to detect as an injection site during an autopsy, something that’s not generally known, and so our perpetrator having some medical training was a good assumption since we never found an injection site. We also determined that he would have some compulsive disorders and be prone to being overly neat and in control. I noted in my report that the first time I visited Mr. Zachary, his home was spotless, everything arranged perfectly. In fact, I moved a coaster on the coffee table to place my recorder down, and Mr. Zachary moved it back as we were speaking.”

  “And you noticed all this right away?”

  He nodded. “I did. In cases where a female is a victim, unfortunately, seven or eight times out of ten, the husband or boyfriend is the perpetrator. So I observed Mr. Zachary carefully in that first meeting and wrote my report that night while my memory was fresh.”

  Yardley glanced at the jury and noticed they were all paying attention. With Baldwin’s smooth voice and good looks, he held their attention well.

  “Tell us about the search warrant and what you found in the garage, Agent Baldwin.”

  Baldwin went into detail about why the warrant was necessary and how the search had been conducted. Yardley was able to get him to say that he and other officers had been in close proximity to Garrett when he’d found the gauze and the syringes, something she hoped would persuade the jury that Aster’s earlier insinuations were unfounded.

  “Anything you want to add, Agent Baldwin?”

  It was a question they had worked out in advance through the years: if Yardley missed anything Baldwin wanted the jury to hear, he didn’t interrupt her but instead added it at the end.

  He hesitated for a moment, and she guessed he was wrestling with whether to say something about Harmony Pharr. Yardley had already warned him that Weston had excluded any mention of her. It was good evidence that should’ve been allowed in, and he shared her frustration.

  “No,” he finally said. “Nothing to add.”

  “Thank you. Nothing further for this witness, Your Honor.”

  “Mr. Aster, the floor is yours.”

  Aster didn’t go to the lectern and had no notes with him. He just went to the center of the courtroom, halfway between Baldwin and the jury. He kept quiet, his eyes on Baldwin a long time before he finally said, “You said you had a profile in this case, right, Agent Baldwin?”

  “We did, yes.”

  “What is a profile?”

  “As I said, it’s a system of analysis where we try to determine various behavioral characteristics of offenders based on aspects of the crime scenes they’ve left behind.”

  “So you take a guess at what an offender is like based on the crime itself?”

  “It’s more complex than that. We go through different intricate stages before writing up the profile, like the crime assessment stage, the motivation, crime scene dynamics, victimological traits . . . but in general, I suppose you could describe it as trying to determine what an offender is like based on the crime itself, yes.”

  Aster took a set of papers off the defense table and handed them to Baldwin. “Could you read the profile the FBI had for the murderer of Mrs. Pharr and the attempted murderer of Ms. River, please?”

  “I believe Dr. Sarte—” Baldwin started.

  “I’m sure Dr. Sarte can explain his involvement in the creation of the profile. Right now, I’m interested in your involvement and who you thought did this.”

  “Well, it’s not who I thought did it; it’s just probabilities of certain characteristics the offender may have.
”

  “Sure, just read that portion. Please, Agent Baldwin.”

  Baldwin flipped through some of the fourteen pages and began reading.

  “It’s believed the offender would be a male, Caucasian, between thirty-five and forty years old. He would likely be highly educated and in fact would have some medical training as a nurse or physician. He is likely unmarried and has a difficult time maintaining steady relationships.

  “Based on the orderliness observed at both scenes, he would have an affinity toward compulsive behaviors. A diagnosis of obsessive-compulsive disorder along with concurrent personality disorders would not be surprising. He would likely have a history of abandonment beginning with his parents, which would lead him to a life of unstable relationships. His self-image, from this fear of abandonment, would constantly be shifting to protect his conscious mind from his deep-seated belief of inferiority. He would also display a history of self-destructive behaviors, but rarely to the point of law enforcement involvement. Though he would possibly have an explosive temper due to the deep insecurity, his intelligence would give him enough self-control to avoid contact with law enforcement.” Baldwin stopped and flipped the page. “That was the section I wrote. Dr. Sarte then goes into more detail on the psychological aspects of the crimes that led to each conjecture.”

  “No need to read that, thank you.” Aster went to the lectern and leaned on it with one arm. “That was damn detailed, Agent Baldwin. My hat off to you.”

  “Thank you,” he managed to say without a hint of annoyance.

  “Now I’d like you to read something else.”

  He took some documents off the defense table and laid a copy down on the prosecution table before approaching Baldwin. Yardley lifted it. It was a profile from a previous case Baldwin had worked.

  “What did I just hand you, Agent Baldwin?”

  “It looks to be a profile I made in a previous case.”

  “Yes, and I would like to start with the top page there. It says Leo Ester Nolan. Who is he, sir?”

  Baldwin hesitated. “He was a suspect in a murder out of Henderson, Nevada, who we apprehended three years ago.”