Carla Schultz leans in to the door, clutching it, as if she hasn’t the strength to stand on her own. Her eyes brim with tears. “As soon as you called, I knew you’d found Barry,” she tells Mills.
“You figured he was missing?”
She studies him, confused by the question. “Well, yes. I called in a missing person’s report last night. In the middle of the night.”
She’s not just the man’s wife. She’s obviously his patient. Her breasts are exhibit A and B, respectively. Her lips, a collision of two air bags, are exhibit C. Then there’s the forehead, which refuses to budge. Otherwise, she’s an attractive woman of forty feigning twenty. Make that very attractive. Her face is pure porcelain, or Botox, it doesn’t really matter; it’s a smooth sculpture blessed with emerald eyes that, while welling up, beckon Mills to ask for more. Her platinum hair surrounds her face and falls innocently just below her neck. She’s wearing a tight T-shirt and, well south of the navel, jeans that make a statement of their own. She’s the kind of woman who . . . but Mills never could, never would . . . so he never does. He can appreciate the beauty of another female, but there’s only room for one on the pedestal.
“Would you like to come in?”
“I would.”
He follows her into the sprawling ranch, a homestead influenced in style by Taos, New Mexico, Arizona’s pueblo next door. There are roughened wood floors and adobe walls, earth tones and tiles, kiva ladders, mission tables, and leather so thick and fresh you’d think it was still alive.
They settle into a room that faces a wall of glass, like so many in the valley, looking out to a massive pool, an outdoor kitchen, a few canopies, some pergolas, you name it. Someone is killing wealthy men in the valley. So far that’s the only connection between Davis Klink and Barry Schultz. “The missing person’s report was not how we found him,” Mills tells her.
“Are you sure it’s him?” she asks, her voice trembling.
Mills is sitting on one of those well-nourished leather sofas framed with knotty wood. She’s opposite him in a matching chair.
“Yes.”
A sudden cascade of tears. She looks away, puts her face in her hands. Her body shudders. The appropriate reaction is for Mills to bow his head in protracted condolence, yielding to her private grief; the inappropriate reaction is to lunge forward, grab and hold her, and let her tears soak his shoulder. He chooses the appropriate reaction, but he’s aware the other one is too tempting for his liking.
After a few moments she lifts her face, chokes back a final sob, and dries her eyes. “Do I have to identify the body?”
“No. We positively ID’d him through fingerprints.”
She sighs heavily and says, “I didn’t know you could fingerprint a dead person.”
“We can.”
“But I don’t understand why you’d have Barry’s fingerprints. He’s never committed a crime in his life.”
Mills smiles. “I’m sure he hasn’t,” he assures her. “And, actually, we don’t have his prints. They’re in the database because of TSA PreCheck and a teaching job at U of A.”
“The medical school. They approached him about lecturing or something.”
“That’s a long commute.”
“It was just going to be one day a week.”
Mills opens a legal pad, then starts taking notes. “And I take it your husband traveled a lot,” he says. “With the PreCheck membership?”
“We’ve been looking at beach property in Mexico,” she tells him. “He’s been down there a lot.”
“Do you have children?”
“No.”
Her reply is conspicuously void of emotion. It’s a deposition reply.
“Was he worried about work, business, family? Did he mention anything or anyone suspicious to you?”
“No. I don’t think so.”
“Mrs. Schultz, I do have photographs of the watch and ring that your husband was wearing when we found him,” Mills says. “Would seeing them help you digest this in any way?”
She looks at him coolly but nods. He hands her his phone. Her chin drops, leaving her mouth agape. She is still but for the gentle rising and falling of her chest.
“Ma’am?”
She doesn’t answer.
“Mrs. Schultz?”
“Neither piece is custom-made,” she says, her eyes not meeting his, staring instead into the distance of disbelief. “So, there are probably thousands of men who have the same ring or the same watch, but”—and now she begins to sob again—“how many would have both? What is the chance that another man in Phoenix would be wearing exactly the same ring and the same watch together?”
Again, he yields to her tears. The house is airtight. There’s no noise, not even white noise, save for her. It’s a tomb. After the pause runs its course, he says, “I think you’re right, Mrs. Schultz. There’s very little chance of a coincidence like that. And, of course, we have the fingerprints.”
“My name is Carla, and can we please go outside so I can smoke?” she asks, looking up from the lingering tears.
He thinks it an odd request coming from the wife of the doctor, but, in her grief, who is he to question her nicotine habit? He simply nods, and she leads him out to the pool, where she unzips a small, woven pouch and withdraws a joint and a lighter.
Instinct overcomes sympathy, and Mills says, “You know I’m a police officer. Right?”
She nods. “I do.” Then she lights the joint and takes a massive toke. She holds it in until it seems she’s about to burst—her face red, her neck clenched, her visitor concerned enough to pry her mouth open. Before he does, she lets out, finally, a billowing cloud of herbal smoke. “But it’s practically legal everywhere now,” she says.
“Not exactly.”
“Are you going to arrest a widow?”
“No.”
“Where did you find him?” she asks and takes another long hit off the joint.
“We found the body in a shallow grave at a South Phoenix cemetery.”
“South Phoenix? Why there?”
“We have no idea, Mrs. Schultz—Carla.”
“But I don’t understand,” she says, a soft, childlike quality to her voice now. “Someone buried him without telling me?”
Mills clasps his hands tightly, interlacing patience and mercy. “No one found your husband and buried him. We believe the grave, as crude as it was, was part of the MO. The grave and the homicide went hand in hand.”
Carla Schultz offers him the joint. She actually offers him the joint! He shakes his head, doesn’t know whether to laugh out loud or rip the thing out of her hand and toss it in the swimming pool. He chooses neither. Instead he says, “I’m going to ask you to stop smoking this in front of me. Is that okay?”
She nods. “I’m sorry.” She stamps the joint out on the side of a firepit. “I’m fine now,” she says. In other words, buzzed. Which is fine, really. Mills doesn’t give a shit. That’s not his job.
“Do you have any idea who would want to hurt your husband?”
By the look on her face he might as well have asked her to recite act 1 of Hamlet.
“I take that as a no.”
“I can’t think of anyone,” she says.
“No disgruntled patients?” Mills asks. “Has he ever been sued for malpractice?”
“Yes,” she replies. “But people don’t kill you for a bad facelift.”
“That we know of. . . .”
“He’s had some disputes with some of the doctors in his practice.”
“What kinds of disputes?”
“Money,” she says. “Isn’t it always over money?”
Mills tells her that he’ll be speaking to the other doctors as part of his investigation. “Carla, do you know most of your husband’s friends and acquaintances?”
“I’m not one of those hovering wives, but yes, I think I know who he golfed with, played poker with, that kind of thing.”
“Did he know a man named Davis Klink?”
<
br /> “Who?”
“Davis Klink. The CEO of Illumilife Industries. He was found dead about a week ago.”
For a moment, the woman turns to the sky and lets the sun warm her face. It’s only a moment, because Mills can see a sudden awareness in her eyes, the kind that connects the dots. “Right,” she says. “I read about that.”
“That’s it? You read about it?”
“Yes. It was in the news. But I don’t think Barry knew him. If he was buddies with some kind of CEO, I think I would know,” she says. Again, there’s acumen in her eyes. “You think the two of them were maybe murdered by the same person. . . .”
“Davis Klink was found in a shallow grave like your husband.”
“I don’t remember that part.”
“We didn’t release details of the crime scene to the press.”
Without saying a word, she leads him back indoors. He’s not sure if this is the end of the conversation, if maybe she’s showing him out entirely, until she sits again in that room of leather and wood.
“I’ve never heard of Davis Klink before.”
Mills nods. “It’s very possible they didn’t know one another. It could be that we have a killer targeting high rollers, so to speak. You know, successful men, but randomly selected.”
“Unless this Davis Klink was a patient,” Carla suggests. “That’s the only thing I can think of.”
“Tell me what happened last night.”
Carla leans forward, wipes a tear away, and describes a night at home, the two of them in their home theater, watching Beetlejuice, when Barry’s cell phone rang.
“It’s one of his favorite movies, so he was a little pissed off about being interrupted,” she says. “But he was obligated to take it.”
“Why?”
“He was on call, and somebody’s patient was freaking out.”
“Not his patient?”
“No,” she replies. “I thought we were just in for a quiet evening at home. I don’t remember this being an on-call weekend, and we argued about it, but not long enough for a knockdown, drag-out fight, you know, because he had to call the patient back.”
“And then he left the house?”
“Oh, yeah. Like superfast. The patient was frantic. She said her butt job was causing her ass to leak a cream-cheese-like substance. Pretty disgusting, but you get used to it when you’re married to it. Anyway, I did think it sounded a little fishy, but he was out of here in a flash to go meet her at the hospital.”
“What time was that?”
“About eight thirty,” she replies. “I must’ve fallen asleep around ten. I woke up out of the blue around four o’clock this morning, and I noticed he wasn’t here. Hadn’t come home. I couldn’t reach him on his cell. So I called the police.”
“You said the call sounded fishy. What was fishy about it?”
“Come on, Detective! Cream cheese coming out of your butt?”
Mills tries to muster a serious look on his face. “I’m not familiar with your husband’s work, ma’ am.”
“Well, I have never heard anything remotely related to cream cheese.”
“Did you actually overhear the other end of the conversation?”
She shakes her head. “No, of course not. But Barry shared the highlights as he was flying out of here.”
“And you never left the house after that?”
“No.”
“You were home alone after he left?”
“Yes. Here. Alone.”
Mills is still scribbling his notes in the pause that follows her answer. He senses in the static between them that she desperately wants him to get out of her house. It’s a palpable shift in the energ y. But he can’t get up and leave. He hands her his legal pad instead.
“Please write down your husband’s cell phone number and the name of his wireless carrier,” he tells her. “Also, I need you to give me the make and model of his car. And his tag number if you have it.”
She freezes, wide-eyed.
“Something wrong, Carla?”
She shakes her head. “No. Of course not.”
A few minutes later she hands Mills the notepad.
“I’ll have to get a search warrant for some other items,” he says.
“No, no, no,” she begs, “please don’t search the house. My life is already turned upside down. I don’t think I can take it. Please . . .”
She sinks deep into her chair and sobs. Mills gives her a few seconds and says, “We don’t need to search the house. But I imagine your husband has a home computer.”
“A laptop, sure.”
“That kind of stuff,” he says. He rises from the sofa and hands the woman his card. “Anything you can think of, even the smallest detail that might help us find who did this, please call me.”
On the path to the front door, Carla trailing him, Mills tries to calm his brain from all the colliding question marks. It’s one of those moments when he knows he has to silence the voices and nearly start from scratch to start at all. Clear the mind, then do the work. Remove the pieces, start again. He’s almost successful, very close to a complete reset, when he hears the voice of Gus Parker. It’s not a psychic thing. It’s just a reminder, a nagging one, to get what he needs.
“Carla, if it’s not too much trouble, I’d sure like to have some kind of object that belonged to your husband.”
“You have his jewelry.”
True. But Gus can’t get near the man’s jewelry. “I’m thinking about something that’s not already in evidence that we can use, maybe to compare.”
“Oh, you mean like DNA? That sort of thing?”
No, that’s not what he means. “Yeah,” he says, “something like that.”
“How about a toothbrush? Or what about his beret? He wears the most stupid-looking beret when he golfs,” she says. “Oh! And his golfing gloves!”
She returns from a brief scavenger hunt and hands Mills a tote presumably with the suggested objects inside. She’s happy to help. It gives her some relief. He can read that on her face. He thanks her, then says he’ll be in touch.
He’s driving for about four minutes when he encounters his first red light. This gives him enough time to flip through his legal pad and send in a BOLO for Barry Schultz’s vehicle. It’s a white Maserati. Tag number: GR8LOOK. Mills shakes his head and scoffs out loud. “You can’t make this shit up,” he says to the dashboard, to the windshield, and to his snarky expression in the rearview mirror.
10
When Sergeant Jacob Woods enters a conference room rolling his eyes, those rolling eyes practically preceding him, the entrance means it’s Monday morning, it’s a debrief, things are getting messy and unfortunate, and nobody has the patience for lingering question marks, or unconnected dots, or murders with no leads. He stands at the head of the table, tosses his notebook in front of him, stares at the group (Mills, Powell, Myers, and Preston), and folds his arms across his breastplate.
“I know this is going to sound premature,” he says, “but with two similar homicides on our hands, we should brace ourselves for the wrath of Hurley.”
Scott Hurley is the beloved mayor of Phoenix who has built his reputation on reducing crime. He has a fucking coronary anytime a kid steals a Kit Kat from a 7-Eleven, never mind a homicide.
“Obviously the two cases are related,” Mills tells the boss. “But we don’t know yet if the victims have anything in common.”
“Except their autopsies,” the sergeant quips.
“We only discovered the second body yesterday,” Mills reminds him. “We’re comparing cell phone records, bank records, anything we can get our hands on. I sent out a BOLO for the doctor’s Maserati. I’m assuming it’ll stick out like a sore thumb and we’ll have it soon. But for now, I want Preston and Myers to share what they’re finding on Klink.”
Preston swallows a swig of coffee and says the banks are complying with the subpoena, but it will be a few more days before they have anything to look at. He then gets up, w
alks over to the precinct map hanging on the wall, and points to a square of Phoenix. “This is where Klink’s cell signal was last picked up.”
He traces a finger from north to south and then reverse.
“This is Sixteenth Street, between McDowell and Thomas,” Preston continues. “If we want to canvass the neighborhood, we’ll need some support. Meanwhile, Myers, here, brought in the surveillance video from the Safeway where we found Klink’s BMW. Not great quality, but it looks like Klink could have been taken at gunpoint to the cemetery. We can’t verify the weapon, actually.”
Preston looks to his colleague for a seamless segue, but Myers is face-first in love with a doughnut, white powder leaving chalk marks around the death of the man’s diet. Preston sits, but that still doesn’t prompt his colleague.
“Morty?” Mills says. “Take one more bite and then tell us what you’ve learned about Klink’s automobile.”
Morton Myers lets out a powdered sugar laugh and says, “Sorry! I haven’t had breakfast. It’s an SUV. A BMW. It was called in abandoned behind a Safeway not far from the cemetery.”
Powell clears her throat and says, “It was towed from the scene. Still being processed by the lab.”
“We went out to the Safeway, Preston and me,” Myers says. “It’s walking distance to Valley Vista.”
“So, you think Klink met his killer at Safeway, dropped his car, and walked to his own grave?” Woods asks.
Myers rubs his chin. “That’s not exactly what I think, Jake. But it’s a possibility. The video and the timeline would suggest that, but we do lose his cell signal much earlier in the evening. Over at Thomas and Sixteenth.”
“No chance he was killed at Thomas and Sixteenth and had his body dumped at Valley Vista?” Woods asks them.
Mills shakes his head. “I don’t think so,” he says. “First, the video suggests otherwise. He’s alive at Safeway. He’s walking. He’s not far from the cemetery. Plus, we have a cardboard sign at the gravesite that he supposedly inscribed himself.”
Dig Your Grave Page 10
