“That’s enough for a man so obsessed with Billie Welch that he probably does a Google search for her five times a day, and now you’re his target,” Obershan explains, folding his hands in his lap. “In Richard Knight’s deranged little mind, you’re standing between him and his one and only true love. His plan is probably to eliminate you.”
“That’s encouraging,” Gus says. “What am I supposed to do?”
“We have a better photo of him than what Johnson showed you. It comes from his release three months ago from prison,” the detective explains. “I’ll leave you a copy out front. If you recognize him and you think he’s following you, please try to snap a picture. Don’t approach him. But if he happens to be watching you from across the street or staking you out at work, get pictures or video. Any bit of evidence you gather is beneficial.”
“Sounds kind of risky, but I’m good.”
“You can file for a restraining order,” the detective says. “But if you don’t, you should probably mix up your routine if you have one. Make sure someone knows where you are at all times. And you have to be vigilant about knowing who’s around you.”
“Not easy for a guy like me whose head is normally in the clouds,” Gus confesses.
“Alex Mills over in Phoenix tells us you’re supposedly psychic,” Obershan says. “Maybe that’ll compensate for your head in the clouds.”
“No guarantees.”
The detective stands. So does Gus. “We’ll be on the lookout for him. Don’t worry,” the man says. “We know a lot about this guy. We’ll pick him up. Maybe not tonight, but soon. Again, I’m sorry he’s out there bothering you.”
“Me too.”
“Do you own a gun?”
“No,” Gus says.
“I think you should learn how to protect yourself,” Obershan warns him. “It’s the way of the world.”
Gus doesn’t say anything, just sees Johnson nodding affirmatively as the detective leaves the room.
On the way home Gus studies the photo Obershan had left for him. He can’t take his eyes off it until, suddenly, he’s at the edge of a stranger’s bumper, avoiding a crash by maybe an inch. So, he pulls into a strip mall parking lot and searches Richard Knight’s face. It’s wide and framed by jowls. There’s the scar of a frown, not inflicted by prison, Gus intuits, but by an entire life of disappointment. Richard Knight stares back at Gus with eyes that have known the warfare of mental illness, the deranged, unmedicated theater of battle. What a frenzied man! What a lost soul! How is Gus so lucky and this man so discarded? Just as he begins to feel a wave of sympathy for the guy, Gus feels the cord around his neck again. It tightens. He gasps. His fingers can’t break the cord loose, can barely clutch at the space between the cord and the skin of his neck. His head snaps back. Mind over matter. He repeats this to himself like a mantra. Mind over matter. This is only fear. Only fear. Mind over matter. Richard Knight stares back at him from the rearview mirror.
“What do you want?” Gus begs.
“Her,” the man says. “I want her.”
“You cannot have her,” he says to the mirror. “You will not have her.”
The poor face of Richard Knight swells and vomits. The entire image explodes, instantly obliterating the man, and yet Gus sees everything in slow motion: the streams of blood and other fluids squirting like latent fireworks, body parts catapulting, teeth loosening one by one like shingles from a house during a violent storm. Whether in slow motion or fast motion or real motion, the images give Gus that cold vertigo of motion sickness. He grips the wheel to steady himself. When he looks again to the rearview mirror he’s pleased to see Richard Knight is gone and that it’s Gus staring back at Gus.
Mills is scrambling to pack it in for the day and to head home when his cell phone rattles on the desk. He eyes the mobile fucker with chagrin. To answer? To ignore? To hurl the phone across the wall? For some reason that escapes him, answering feels like the road of least resistance. “Mills,” he groans.
“It’s Carla Shultz, Detective. Barry Schultz’s wife. Is this a bad time?”
“Uh, no. Not at all. What can I do for you, Carla?”
“I’m just checking to see how the investigation’s going. . . .”
Of course she is. He feels himself pausing a moment too long. “Well, I think we’re making progress. We’re learning more about common threads between Davis Klink and your husband. But I can’t discuss details.”
“I’m getting impatient, if you don’t mind me saying,” she says.
Fuck, she doesn’t need to tell him about impatience. His impatience is impatient; his hindsight is already chiding him well before it has a right to. This case, most cases, are fucking snails in real time—every step forward, two steps back. What looks like a simple task on paper (canvass a neighborhood, locate a car, get a warrant) is most often a clusterfuck on the street.
“I understand, and I’m sorry. Sometimes, oftentimes, these things move slowly,” he explains as a headache begins to clench. “We can’t afford to make a mistake. I hope you understand.”
No response for a moment. And then, weeping. Sniffles and tears.
“Carla?”
“I’ve decided not to do a public funeral, just a private service,” she says, as if that grounds her. “But I’m so tired. I don’t know how . . .”
Her voice trails off, but she’s still with him. He can hear her breathing. He gives her a respite and then says, “I know, Carla. I know what kind of toll this must take.”
“I don’t know what to do,” she says, her voice shaking.
“About what?”
She begins to say something but stops. The hesitation sounds sketchy around the edges.
“Are you all right?” Mills asks, his head throbbing.
“I think so.”
“Okay, then, I appreciate the call,” Mills says, looking at his watch. “I’m sorry I don’t have much of an update, but I’ll be in touch if we find anything. I promise.”
He’s about to hang up, his migraine fully descending, when the woman cries, “Wait!” A bone-chilling moan follows. “Please meet me at my house, Detective Mills. I have something to confess.”
Then the woman disconnects before Alex Mills can respond.
20
“I have a confession to make,” Gus says when he walks through the doorway to Billie’s home studio.
Billie doesn’t blink, doesn’t ask, just says, “I wasn’t expecting to see you tonight, but so glad you showed up.”
And there it is. The stripped-down, unvarnished treaty of no expectations. No schedule. No clock. No dependence. That should be fine for Gus, but something like a fist shook his heart. “Did you hear me?” he asks. “I have to confess something.”
She strums a few more notes on the guitar, looks up again, and smiles. “You have a way of entering a room, Gus. What’s on your mind?”
He has clearly interrupted her muse. He can tell this by the strum of her voice; she’s there, but she’s not. She’s deep in the process of fusing words to melodies or melodies to words, and she can’t be two places at once.
“We’re being stalked,” he says. He sits and describes the note that arrived at her security booth and the postcard that came to his house. He tells her about the surveillance video and his discussions with Detective Obershan. Billie’s sudden crash from her creative retreat is palpable. Her moony eyes turn wide and fearful. She puts down the guitar and watches Gus intently. Seeing this, Gus reaches for her hand, holds it in his, and says, “They know it’s Richard Knight.”
She shakes her head back and forth; he has to squeeze her hand to make her stop. “No,” she whispers. “I won’t go through this again.”
“I think I’m more the target than you,” he says.
“How did this happen?”
“I don’t know. He got out of prison, and now he’s violating his parole. He must think of you as his full-time job, and he’s returning to work.”
She closes her eyes for a
moment, then places a fist to her mouth as if she could cry or scream. Then, abruptly she gets up. “Okay, I’m out of here. I’ll catch a flight to LA.”
“What? You’re flying to LA right now?”
She tilts her head toward the door. “Come on,” she says. “I’m not staying here, and neither are you. You’re coming with me.”
“I can’t.”
“You must,” she insists. “I’ll charter a fucking plane, and we’ll take the dogs, and we’ll get the fuck out of here, Gus.”
He follows her to the master bedroom, bargaining all the way. It’s no use. She’ll go. He says he’ll fly out there for the weekend.
“You promise?” she asks.
“I promise.”
Mills parks his car at the foot of Carla Schultz’s driveway. There’s no answer when he knocks at her door. He rings the bell. Then knocks again. The house is dark. He presses his ear to the door but hears nothing except a vacuum of air. A stoned person is not a reliable person. A stoned person forgets. Falls asleep. In the course of hunting criminals for a career, Mills has stood outside many dark, veiling homes, left to guess, to speculate. No matter how long he stands here, the stillness stays stiller than the night; the darkness hides whatever it hides, and he could be, in a split second, shot in the face, stabbed in the back, but awareness and worry are two different things in a career of hunting criminals. He doesn’t worry. Awareness is enough. Fed up, he pulls out his phone and dials Carla Schultz. He hears three rings and then the screech of tires, followed almost instantly by a thundering and unfortunate collision of metal against metal, breaking glass, the creak of a car door. His heartbeat quickens. He rests his hand over his gun and moves down the path to the driveway. There, at the bottom, is Carla Schultz stumbling out of her Mercedes, which is impaled rather indecently on Alex Mills’s bumper.
“Are you all right?” he shouts as he runs to her. “Are you drunk?”
With tears streaming down her face and her makeup trailing in rivers of black and blue, she shakes her head and says, “No. I’m not all right.”
He grabs her. She falls into his arms like a fragile bird.
“I’m so sorry,” she says, pointing to the collision.
“Don’t worry about it,” he tells her. “Your car took the brunt of it. We’ll deal with it later.”
“I’m not drunk,” she says, looking up into his face like a lost child. “I’m tired. Haven’t slept in days.”
“You asked me to come by. I was worried when you didn’t answer the door.”
“Sorry, Detective. I had to run out to the pharmacy before it closed.”
“Are you on something?”
“Klonopin,” she says. “For anxiety.”
He lets her go as she opens the front door and leads him in. He follows her into the kitchen, where they sit opposite each other at a curved counter area.
“You told me you have a confession to make,” Mills says. “Do I need to read you your rights?”
She looks down to avert his gaze. “I don’t know.”
From somewhere comes a polite scuffle on the floor, a fast march of thumbtacks, and then a copper-colored Chihuahua launches itself into Carla Schultz’s lap.
“Oh, Benny!” she cries. “Benny, meet Detective Mills.”
Mills takes in the minor spectacle and says, “The pleasure is all mine.”
The woman wipes the streaks of makeup from her face with a tissue. She talks baby talk to the animal. “Oh, you little baby, you little mischievous one, you little pooper with paws, you sweet girl, Mommy loves ya, boo-boo,” she says. “I’m going to tell Detective Mills all about the tracking device on Barry’s car. I think it’s a crime, but I’m not sure, little poopy girl, little treasure.”
A fucking tracking device?
Mills knocks twice on the granite island. “Hello? Mrs. Schultz? Can you direct the conversation to me? If you don’t mind.”
She looks up. She pats the Chihuahua’s bum and sets it on the floor. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I find this very hard to admit.”
“That you put a device on your husband’s car to track him?”
“Yes.”
“Is that your confession?”
“Yes.”
The migraine comes knocking again. “I’m not going to arrest you for that. The law is vague on this, but if both of your names are on the car, then it’s definitely not illegal,” he explains. “Frankly, ‘Find my iPhone’ would have been easier.”
“It wasn’t an iPhone,” she says. “And he’s too smart for that anyway. He was always checking his settings.”
“Paranoid?”
“Maybe.”
“I asked you about a possible affair, and you clearly rejected that notion.”
“I know. It’s embarrassing,” she concedes. “I suspected he was screwing a drag queen.”
Mills yanks on the stoic mask as quickly as he can. “Well, that’s an interesting twist,” he says.
“I don’t have a lot of evidence. But he did spend a lot of time at drag shows. Late nights. Midweek. That sort of thing.”
“I see. Well, there could be another explanation for that,” he assures her. “But for now, let’s get back to the tracking device. You know where your husband went the night he disappeared?”
She confesses with a hesitant nod.
“But you didn’t tell us? You withheld the information.”
“I thought you’d arrest me for the tracking device,” she says quietly.
“It’s probably more problematic that you withheld evidence.”
“I know,” she whimpers. “I know.”
“You do realize that had you given me this information sooner, we might have a suspect in custody by now.”
She lights a cigarette. Mills doesn’t know which is more offensive—the fact that she smokes inside the house, or the fact that she smokes. He readies his eyes, nose, throat, and lungs for the noxious fumes. “Do you have an address?” he asks.
She exhales a column of smoke. “You mean, where he drove to that night?”
“That’s what I mean.”
“Yes,” she says. “I have the basic area. I printed it out. That’s why I called you.”
“Okay,” he says tentatively.
“Are you going to arrest me?” she asks, then takes another drag.
“I already told you no,” he replies. “Give me the printout, and I can probably get some help knocking on doors tomorrow.”
“I’ll be right back.”
She leaves the cigarette burning. He walks over and puts it out. When she returns with the tracking report, Mills scans it quickly and immediately recognizes one stop on the doctor’s journey of death. The intersection of Thomas and Sixteenth. This is key. Both victims ended up in the same neighborhood before heading off to their respective graves. The tracking on Schultz’s car seems to suggest a stop at the gas station there. There’s not a big radius to work with, and that’s good. But it’s an area as unlikely for the good doctor as it was for Davis Klink. It’s not an area synonymous with society and success, certainly not Maseratis. It appears, from Thomas and Sixteenth, that Schultz drove straight to his death. The tracking reveals his next stop was on a side street by the South Phoenix graveyard, where his body was found. But it wasn’t the last stop. The car moved on an hour or so later, driven either by the killer, an accomplice, or by the ghost of Barry Schultz. Of course, Mills is convinced it was the killer driving, which makes what he sees next much more problematic. He sees that the killer did not go far, four miles or so, nine minutes of driving. He sees where the Maserati has been hiding all this time. And he can’t fucking believe it. It makes sense. But it’s a dead end. The trail goes fucking cold. The next and final stop after the cemetery, the killer presumably at the wheel, was Sky Harbor International Airport. A Maserati parked at the airport for almost a week would not necessarily raise suspicion. He’s guessing it’s in one of the parking structures and, save for some random admirers of its pedigree, that
it’s probably gone unnoticed. Fuck. Just an exponential fuck to the investigation. Away flies the killer. Perfect plan. Kill a couple of guys, then hop aboard a jetliner to execute the perfect Hollywood escape. There are some upsides to this, though Mills knows he could be kidding himself—every vehicle that enters a parking structure at Sky Harbor is photographed, and the earliest flight the killer could have made was probably 11:30 p.m. There can’t be that many flights that leave at that hour of the night, if you eliminate the possibility that the suspect hunkered down somewhere out of sight until a morning flight. Fewer flights mean fewer manifests to comb through.
Wishful thinking.
But the alternative is a needle in a nationwide haystack. Or an international haystack. The guy could have flown to LA, connected to a flight bound for New Zealand where he’s been happily fucking sheep for the past several days. It all goes to motive. Not the sheep thing. The murder thing and the subsequent escape plan.
The killer could’ve hopped on a private jet and soared into the clandestine beyond.
First things first. First they have to search the neighborhood at Thomas and Sixteenth.
“Detective? Does this stuff help at all?”
He snaps out of his stupor. He forgot she’d been standing there.
“Oh, yes. I’m sorry, ma’am. Yes, it does.”
“I’m glad,” she says.
“Better late than never,” he says, pointing to the GPS printout.
“I’m so sorry,” she concedes with a deep sigh, followed by sniffles.
“Sorry enough to give me a tour of the house?”
“A tour?”
“We’re getting a search warrant,” he reminds her. “It will list specific items of interest, but it will also give us latitude to seize other property.”
“So you’re going to search the house?”
He shakes his head. “I didn’t say that. I said I wanted you to show me around, tell me about some of your husband’s belongings.”
“Okay, but please don’t let them search the house,” she begs. “I don’t want strangers in here going through my things. It’ll feel like a home invasion. This place will never be mine again.”
Dig Your Grave Page 19
