Blind Vigil

by Matt Coyle

  “Let’s go.” I gave Midnight’s leash a gentle tug to the right, and we turned and descended the sloping sidewalk on Moraga. I kept a running step count in my head. Our walk downhill on Moraga left us no longer protected from the wind by the sets of parallel tiered streets above my house. A chilled breeze rolled over my face. A welcome reminder that I’d left my cocoon.

  The sounds of Midnight’s sniffs grew louder and more frequent. Unknown territory. Back when I could see, I took Midnight to the massive dog park at Fiesta Island where he could chase balls, run with other dogs, and swim in Mission Bay. Or I’d take him to Marion Bear Memorial Park off Genesee just south of the 52 Freeway and let him roam off leash as we hiked to San Clemente Park and all the way down the Rose Canyon Hiking Trail. Now, his routine was relegated to my much narrower parameters.

  Tonight, we were expanding those parameters by a few hundred yards. We continued to descend the hill. The night was still except for the breeze, which rattled the leaves of the occasional tree we passed. Midnight halted and shifted and I smelled the urine at the exact same time as I heard it spraying down on leafy-sounding ground cover.

  A car approached from below on Moraga as we started walking again. Probably coming from Balboa Avenue, the main artery that connected Clairemont to Pacific Beach. The sound of the engine told me it was a sedan before I could make out the boxy form approaching. Sounded a lot like Moira’s car. An Accord or similar sedan. Had Moira decided to drop by unannounced? The car slowed as it approached. I stopped walking, tightened the grip on Midnight’s leash, and kept my left ear angled at it instead of my eyes. One ear was better than two eyes. At least for now.

  The car picked up speed when it evened with us and continued up the hill. The engine sound dissipated, then silenced somewhere behind us. It wasn’t Moira.

  We walked down another block and turned around before we hit the Balboa intersection. I kept my eyes trained on Midnight’s head as he led along the sidewalk. My left foot stepped on something that gave and my ankle rolled. Sharp pain. I hopped a couple steps yanking on Midnight’s leash and managed to stay upright. But I’d tweaked my ankle. A sprain. Not too bad. I could still walk, but the pain was building and my left stride was more of a drag than a step.

  I removed my cane from my back pocket and unfolded it. Not for support, but to tap what I couldn’t see. Apparently, I wasn’t ready yet to break through the next barrier.

  Midnight angled left at step number four-hundred-seven. I looked up from Midnight’s head and my cane and could tell by the open space to the left that we’d reached my street.

  We walked toward my house. Two houses in, Midnight growled and snapped tension in the leash. This wasn’t a growl ending with a bark, noting another dog or a cat. This was low and guttural. Danger. Defend by attacking the danger head-on. I stopped and strained my eyes to try to see what Midnight saw. All I could make out were rectangle shapes and shadows.

  My home was only three houses away. I sniffed the air and caught a whiff of a neighbor’s pine tree. No Dove deodorant. I held tight to Midnight’s leash and we edged forward. Midnight’s growls intensified. He wasn’t a trained attack dog, but I trusted his instincts more than my own. He risked his life to save mine once. I didn’t want him to have to do it again.

  Two houses from my own, Midnight jerked toward the street, almost knock me over.

  “Wait,” I commanded. He settled but continued his attack growls.

  I still couldn’t even make out the outline of what he saw, but I followed the angle of his head to the middle of the street. Someone or something was out there. And Midnight sensed danger. I led him along the sidewalk toward my house, but he strained against me. I could hear saliva in his constant growl.

  “My dog is usually friendly, but for some reason he doesn’t like you,” I said to whoever or whatever was there in the street.

  No response. We continued forward, but Midnight’s attention and menace stayed directed to the right, somewhere in the street or on the other side of it.

  My fifty-seventh step in from the corner of the block put me at the edge of my front yard. A car door clicked open and then shut directly across from my house on the other side of the street. I snapped my head in that direction and saw a blurry rectangle. The car’s ignition started and the sound of the engine moved slowly away. But I lived on a cul-de-sac. The car would have to circle back by my house to exit the street.

  Midnight quieted once the car moved away. Danger contained. For him. I followed the car with my eyes but lost it in a couple seconds. I waited. The sound of the car grew louder as it rounded the cul-de-sac and started back toward us. I aimed my face at the sound. An outline emerged and moved slowly along the street toward me. It paused for half a second directly across from me. All I could see was a rectangle outline. The car accelerated and drove away.

  My head followed its path. I lost sight of it, but listened until the sound of the engine faded into the night.

  Someone had parked across the street from my house. The driver had gotten out of the car and approached my home. At the least. At the most, he’d gone onto my property, then watched me as I approached. If he had an innocent reason for coming to my house, he would have answered when I called out to him. Who was he? What did he want? Did he wear Dove deodorant?

  The Invisible Man?

  I walked up the path to the front door and ran my hand along the jamb feeling for a business card. Nothing. I sniffed around the porch, which was slightly enclosed by the eaves hanging overhead. No Dove. Just the gluey smell from the rubber plants that bracketed the front door.

  Maybe he’d gone to my neighbor’s house. Or was just leaving there after visiting. I hadn’t noticed his car when I left my house earlier, but my limited vision had been pointed at the Midnight’s head.

  Or, maybe he was afraid of dogs. Especially those that growled at him.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  MY PHONE RANG on the Uber ride to the county jail the next day.

  “Rick, it’s Ellis.” Concern in his voice. “I got a look at the autopsy report. It was brutal. She fought for her life. She had a fractured eye socket … It was awful.”

  “What about her stomach contents?” I wished Shay Sommers had died in her sleep, but, right now, I had to figure out how to free the man she loved from jail.

  “You were right about the cake and champagne. There were remnants of both in Shay’s stomach when she died. But only a tiny amount of champagne.”

  I was right. Shay had celebrated something the night she was murdered. But I still didn’t know what she was celebrating.

  “And she was pregnant,” Elk added.

  “Whoa.” That was the concern I’d heard in his voice.

  “Yes. Another motive, as if the prosecution doesn’t already have enough.”

  “Maybe not. Turk told me he wanted to have kids with Shay. This was before she was murdered. So, he’d be happy about her pregnancy. Maybe that was what Shay was celebrating.”

  “Except that she’d been pregnant for eleven weeks. She had to have known well before the night she bought the cake and champagne.”

  “I’m guessing no DNA on the child, yet?”

  “None that the state would show me if they already had it, but the test probably isn’t back from the lab yet. If it comes back with any DNA other than Turk’s, we’ve got a real problem.”

  “We don’t even know if Turk knew she was pregnant.” If he did know, why didn’t he tell me when he told me he wanted to have a child with Shay? What else hadn’t Turk told me?

  “I’ll find out when I see him today at 3:00 p.m.”

  I had a two hour jump on Fenton. He’d be able to talk to Turk in a private, non-monitored room. I didn’t have that option. I wasn’t an official member of the defense team. Fenton had a job to do. I needed to find the truth.

  “Roger.” I kept my visit to myself.

  “There is one bit of decent news in the autopsy. The medical examiner described the bruising on Shay�
��s arms as mild. Detective Denton made them sound like Shay had been squeezed in a steel vice when she questioned Turk the day after the murder.”

  Decent, at best. But at this point, anything that wasn’t negative was positive.

  “That’s something. Is Coyote going to look into Keenan Powell?” I knew in my gut that Powell was an important puzzle piece in solving Shay Sommers’ murder. I just didn’t know where he fit in the puzzle yet, but I didn’t want to sit on the sidelines while someone else figured it out.

  “Yes, of course.”

  “When?”

  “We already discussed this, Rick.” A frustrated tone edging toward anger that I’d never heard Fenton use outside of a courtroom. And never directed at me. “This will be my eleventh murder trial. I’ve gotten four acquittals and two hung juries that didn’t result in retrials in the previous ten. I’ll put that record up against anyone. I know what I’m doing. I have a process. I’d appreciate if you’d start trusting it.”

  “What time do I have to be at the courthouse Tuesday?”

  “I’ll pick you up at 8:00 a.m.”

  “I’ll be waiting.” But not behind Fenton in line at the jail to talk to Turk. I may have been a cardboard cutout of support on Turk’s defense team, but I was a flesh and blood friend. One who needed to know the truth to see where that friendship stood.

  Now.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  THE SAN DIEGO Central Jail is on Front Street downtown. It’s a cement building with a squat foundation and a twenty-three-story tower shooting up from it. Even at that, it can barely hold all who have been charged and await trial and those convicted of misdemeanors and serving sentences of less than a year there.

  The visitation room was really a long, narrow concrete bunker. Smells of sweat, fear, and desperation closed in from all sides. And I was on the freedom side of the reinforced glass. The stench from the other side permeated any pores in the windows, walls, and seals it encountered. The room was a fetid bog of despair.

  I sat on a metal stool riveted to the cement floor. A guard handed me a phone handset from the hook on the wall dividing me from the next visitor over.

  A hulking presence appeared in front of me on the other side of the glass. The outline I’d learned to recognize as Turk. His hand went up to the partition on his side.

  “Everything in here is being filmed and audio recorded.” His voice slightly tinny in the old-school phone receiver.

  “I’m not worried about that. Neither one of us has anything to hide.” But I was worried. About his end. I peered through the glass, trying to see features on his face. Just a blur. “Fenton doesn’t know I’m here.”

  I guess I did have something to hide.

  “Why not?”

  “He’s got another investigator. I’m here as a friend.”

  “Got it. Sorry about your nose.” Flat. “It looks broken.”

  “It’s fine. How are you?”

  “I’m in jail. Cooped up in a cell with a lowlife for half the day and among the scumbag general population the rest of the time.” An edge in his voice that I’d never heard before. I’d heard him angry, but this was different. Visceral. He’d only been inside two days, but you don’t go into jail and come out the same. No matter how short your stay inside.

  “Any progress on bail?”

  “I don’t have a spare hundred grand laying around to pay a bail bondsman.” Still the edge. “Nor do I have another nine hundred in collateral.”

  “Your house has to be worth well over a million.”

  “To the bank. I took out a home equity loan earlier this week just in case I got arrested. Prophetic.” He hit the “P” hard. “I’m using it to pay Fenton. It was either bail and rely on a public defender or stay in jail and pay Fenton.”

  “What about your sister? I thought she was contributing to your defense.”

  “She is, but Fenton is sucking it all up. Murder trials are expensive. Even when you’re innocent.”

  “Shit.”

  “Yeah, shit.”

  “Fenton got a hold of the autopsy report.” I pressed the phone hard against my ear and shifted forward toward the glass between us. Freedom on my side. Bars on his. The truth in between. “Shay was pregnant.”

  I squinted and moved even closer to the glass, but only saw a blur on the other side. I couldn’t read Turk, not even if I took off my sunglasses and pressed my face against the glass. Surprise or confirmation? I didn’t know. Truths or lies, I couldn’t see. I had to hear or feel them.

  “I know.” An ache. For what he’d lost or what Shay had done behind his back.

  “Was the baby yours?”

  “Fuck you, Rick!” A blast of anger vibrated my ear.

  “Muldoon.” Movement on Turk’s side out of the corner of my eye. A large squarish outline approached Turk. “Knock it off or you’re going back to your cell.”

  “I’m cool.” The square outline receded out of my vision.

  “Were you the father?” My voice just above a whisper.

  “Yes, of course I’m the father. Was the father.” Anger and sadness on the wrong side of a glass wall.

  “Why didn’t you mention Shay was pregnant when you told me you wanted to have a child with her?”

  “I didn’t expect Moira to bring you with her when we met at the restaurant. Do you know how hard it was for me that you knew I had to hire a private detective to find out if the woman who was pregnant with my child was cheating on me?” The walls came down. No glass between us. Seven years evaporated. “You were like a brother to me. You used to look up to me. I haven’t laid a bet since I was shot, but I’ll always have that hole in my life. The thing that drove us apart. I know you saved the restaurant for me. I don’t know what you did, but I know you saved it. And you never said a thing to me about it. You never held it over my head. But I knew we couldn’t be friends anymore. I couldn’t bear to see you and wonder what you saw when you looked at me.”

  “I saw my brother.” A swell of emotion tightened my throat. “Ever since you took me under your wing at the restaurant. I still do. That’s why I’m here. But I can’t help you without knowing the truth. All of it.”

  “I lost my whole family the night Shay died.” The words came out on whips of heavy air. Laden with despair. “I was upset that Shay was cheating on me. But I didn’t kill her. I’d be killing myself.”

  “We don’t know if she was cheating on you. There’s too much I don’t know about Shay and I need you to fill in the blanks.”

  “Like what?”

  “How much do you know about Shay’s childhood back in Idaho?”

  “Not that much. Why?”

  “Remember the guy I told you about who Shay met at La Valencia the night before she died and a few weeks before that at Nine-Ten? Keenan Powell, the guy Kris saw with her?”

  “Yeah?” Wary.

  “I dug up his background and found out he’s from Idaho. Undergrad degree at Boise State and law degree at University of Idaho. Here’s the kicker, though. He went to a community college in Twin Falls for a year. Sixty-five miles south of Bellevue, Shay’s childhood home.”

  “All I know about Idaho is that Shay lived on a ranch when she was young and that her father stole the proceeds from its sale from her mother and abandoned them both.”

  “What? How much did he get away with?” Shay’s father was a real gem. Not only abandons his family but leaves them destitute. Another hook into Idaho. Something about a ranch itched along my scalp, but I didn’t know why.

  “I’m not sure, but I think it was a lot. Shay didn’t like to talk about it, so I didn’t press her.” A huffed laugh with no mirth. “You know me. I don’t sweat the details.”

  “What else do you know about her father?”

  “Nothing really. I don’t even know his name.”

  “According to the research Moira did, his name was Colton Riley Benson,” I said.

  “She never told me his name. Just that he ran away with the money.�
�

  “According to what Shay told Kris, some friend who knew Benson when he was still alive twenty-plus years ago somehow tracked Shay down in La Jolla or vice versa. I’m positive that friend was Keenan Powell. He’s forty-three; Benson died in 1997 when he was forty-six. That would make Powell twenty at the time. How many forty-six-year-olds do you know who hang out with college kids?”

  “None, but what’s your point? What does all this have to do with Shay’s murder?”

  “I’m not sure, yet. But I’m going to find out.” I leaned on the waist-high metal shelf that was attached to the glass. “The other thing the autopsy showed was that Shay had remnants of chocolate cake and champagne in her system when she died. Neither you nor Kris knew of any parties or birthdays coming up. Shay was planning to celebrate something ten minutes after she left her last meeting with Keenan Powell. What if she’d just won some concession from him worth celebrating and he wasn’t happy about it?”

  “You think this Powell dude killed Shay?”

  “I don’t know, but I need to find out if he had an alibi for the time of the murder.” I stood up to leave, but still had the phone in my hand. “One other thing about the autopsy. The marks on Shay’s arms were classified as only mild bruises.”

  “Yeah, but they were still bruises.”

  We said our goodbyes and I went outside to wait for an Uber pickup. Two minutes in, the tingle I’d felt along my scalp when Turk said Shay grew up on a ranch hit my spine. A ranch. Keenan Powell’s bio on the Blank Slate Capital website stated that he worked on a cattle ranch when he was a teenager. Is that how he and Shay knew each other? Her mother’s ranch in Bellevue, Idaho?

  Keenan Powell was the key to solving Shay Sommers’ murder, and Bellevue, Idaho, might be the lock.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  MOIRA ANSWERED ON the third ring.

  “I need your help.”