No Witness

by Warren C Easley

  “Right. I called her back. We’ll meet next week.”

  “And I’m almost caught up on the filing.”

  I clapped him on the back good-naturedly. “Okay, then, I’d say you earned your keep today.” Silently, I thought, wouldn’t Gertie be pleased?

  Timoteo broke out in the broad smile I was beginning to associate with the Fuentes family. He retrieved his phone from a shirt pocket and glanced at the time. “Olivia should be here any time now.” Ten minutes later a text pinged in. He read it, looked up, and shook his head. “She’s late to a fundraiser in Newberg. Luis is going to pick me up, but it’ll be another half hour.” He smiled and shook his head. “Why am I not surprised? Olivia always runs late.”

  “I can give you a lift home.”

  Timoteo looked embarrassed. “Um, thanks, but I’ll just wait for Luis outside.”

  I laughed. Another front was passing through. “In the rain? Where do you live?”

  “Off of Valleyview at Angel Vineyard. They provide a house for the vineyard manager.”

  “We’re practically neighbors. Come on, let’s go.”

  The cloud cover had extinguished most of the remaining light, and the rain intensified, coming straight down in big, pelting drops. We dashed to the car, and Timoteo texted his brother that he had a ride home. It was nearly dark as we arrived at the turnoff into the winery, a narrow road that bisected the planted acreage.

  “Our driveway’s down on the right,” he said, pointing to a break in the rows of grapevines extending in either direction. I turned in, and after rounding a gentle curve a weathered pickup came into view, tendrils of smoke exiting the tailpipe. The truck was canted at an odd angle to the driveway, which was lined with big rhododendron bushes. Further on, I could just make out a small, ranch-style house with an attached carport.

  “Huh, that must be Olivia,” Timoteo said. “She’s using my father’s truck.”

  I let Timoteo out and made a U-turn. As I pulled away, I glanced in the rearview mirror and saw him waving frantically and shouting at me. I stopped, told Arch to stay, and got out of the car.

  “Olivia’s hurt. Oh, my God, she’s bleeding,” he cried out, his face twisted in anguish. “Oh, my God. We need to get her to a hospital.”

  “Where is she?”

  “In the truck.”

  I rushed past him to the idling truck. Olivia was slumped against the steering wheel, her head covered by the hood of the camo sweatshirt she wore. It was stained with blood. I eased off the hood as small shards of glass from the driver’s-side window slid off it and scattered on the seat and floorboard.

  I sucked a sharp breath, pulling back in stunned disbelief. Her hair was wet and matted with blood, and she didn’t appear to be breathing. I put two fingers on her wrist and thought I caught a weak pulse. I unclipped her seat belt, gathered her up, and lifted her out of the car.

  “What happened to her?” Timoteo said. “Is she okay? Oh, God, Olivia.”

  “Call 911 and tell them we need an ambulance and the police,” I answered as I carried her into the carport and gently laid her down next to another car. I searched for a pulse again, and this time I knew she wasn’t breathing. I began administering chest compressions. After Timoteo made the call, I said, “Find a cloth you can press to her head. We need to stop any bleeding. Hurry.”

  He produced a handkerchief and dropped to one knee next to her. “There’s glass in her hair. What the hell?”

  I shook my head. “Looked like the passenger window was blown out.” I was sure of the cause, but I couldn’t bring myself to say it. I kept administering the chest compressions to avoid having to tell the young man his sister was most certainly dead.

  “Jesus, Timoteo. What’s wrong with Olivia?” a voice rang out behind me. I turned my head enough to see a young man staring at us, his mouth agape. Luis.

  “We don’t know,” Timoteo answered, he voice quavering. “Get Papi and Mamá .” His brother ducked back into the house. Timoteo gently stroked his sister’s forehead with his free hand. “Come on, Olivia, open your eyes. Please.”

  The next few minutes seemed an eternity. The rest of the family hovered around Timoteo and me, sobbing and wailing. Finally, with sirens in the distance, he looked at me with disbelieving, tear-soaked eyes. “She’s gone, isn’t she?”

  I didn’t answer, but I’m sure they could see it in my eyes. Olivia’s mother screamed out in denial and tore at her hair as the father tried to restrain his wife. But their daughter was dead. Every fiber in my being wanted it not to be so, but there it was.

  My heart shrank into a shriveled knot.

  Chapter Five

  The paramedics and the Dundee-Newberg police arrived almost simultaneously. The paramedics confirmed that Olivia was dead, and the police, after questioning each of us and examining the car’s blown-out side window and the wound in Olivia’s temple, immediately cordoned off the area with crime tape and called in two detectives from the Major Crimes Response Team.

  “What? Who would shoot my sister?” Timoteo cried out as I struggled to restrain him. We’d just been given a preliminary assessment by a young detective named Darci Tate.

  “No! Nobody would shoot Olivia.”

  Word got out somehow, and friends of the family began to gather at the entrance to the winery, cordoned off on orders from Tate and her partner. However, they did let a young priest through to be with the family. By this time, Mrs. Fuentes was slumped in a chair on the porch, having fallen into a stunned, almost catatonic, silence. Timoteo, Luis, and their father were huddled around her, speaking in low tones. When the priest arrived, they opened the circle, and he knelt in front of their mother, taking her hand.

  Detective Darci Tate approached me, notebook in hand, with a follow-up question regarding Timoteo’s and my arrival time. Mid-forties, with sharp features and short blond hair, dark at the roots, Tate had a no-nonsense approach bordering on brusqueness. We’d known each other since I handled her divorce four years earlier. After I answered her question, she said, “Ms. Fuentes was alive when you found her?”

  I winced. “I thought I felt a weak pulse, so I took her out of the truck to try and save her, but when I checked again in the carport, she was gone.” I shook my head. “I’m really sorry if I mucked up your crime scene, Darci.”

  “No apology required. I understand.”

  “What do you think?” I asked.

  She exhaled. “Looks like the shooter waited behind those rhodies along the drive. The truck was parked in the carport. Ms. Fuentes came out of the house, got in, and began backing out. The shooter came out of the bushes, walked up to the truck, and put a round in her temple. He shot through the glass, so the murder weapon was not a twenty-two. He picked up his brass, so we don’t know the caliber. The round didn’t exit, so there’s a chance we’ll get ballistics. The younger brother thought he heard a faint pop but didn’t think anything of it. Nobody else in the house heard the report. It’s possible the shooter used a suppressor, although the rain at the time could have masked the sound.”

  “A hit?” The inflection in my voice indicated a question, but there really didn’t seem to be one.

  “Yeah, looks like it, but a nineteen-year-old girl? Jesus Christ.” Tate looked at me, her eyes etched with pain. She had yet to acquire true cop eyes, the kind that no longer flicker with emotion. I hoped she never would. She exhaled a weary sigh. “You can go now, Cal. Should have your statement ready to sign tomorrow. I’ll send you a text. Call if you think of anything else.”

  The family remained huddled on the porch with the priest. I went to them and offered my heartfelt condolences, keenly aware that my words were utterly and completely inadequate. They thanked me and so did the priest, who had brought some comfort to them, but obviously not to Mrs. Fuentes, who was sobbing yet standing upright, clutching a crucifix. Mr. Fuentes’s eyes were damp, and his expres
sion reflected a mixture of grief, anger, and disbelief. Luis’s shoulders were slumped, his head down.

  Timoteo stood apart from the group, his hands on his hips, watching as they loaded his sister’s sheet-covered body into the ambulance. When they shut the doors, his mother emitted a primal scream that carried across the silent vineyard.

  As I turned to leave, Timoteo pointed a finger at his brother and said in a low, threatening tone, “This is your fault, Luis, isn’t it? Olivia was wearing your hoodie. Whoever did this wanted to kill you, not her.”

  Luis looked up, his face contorted like he’d been struck a blow. “No, that’s crazy.”

  Timoteo took a step toward his brother. “No, it isn’t. You—”

  Mr. Fuentes stepped between his sons and put his arms out. “Stop it. You are both disrespecting your sister. I won’t stand for it.” His voice was low, like a hiss, but it commanded respect. Both brothers dropped their heads in shame.

  I left at that point, shaken to my core, and although I knew I’d done everything I could for Olivia Fuentes, I felt a lingering, hollow feeling, a sense of failure. I also knew from my criminal justice background that what I felt was to be expected. Something akin to survivor guilt. But that insight didn’t help a damn bit.

  I skipped dinner that night, opting instead to drink Rémy Martin while listening to Yo-Yo Ma playing Chopin. The plaintive chords, so close to the human voice, were somehow soothing and, like the crucifix for Mrs. Fuentes, helped keep darker thoughts at bay. Not only thoughts of what I’d just witnessed, but the death of my wife, Nancy. A place I’d learned to stay away from.

  Sleep, when it finally came, brought swirling dark images overlaid with Timoteo’s voice, asking his sister over and over again, “Come on, Olivia, open your eyes. Please.”

  Chapter Six

  When I awoke the next morning, Archie was standing silently next to my bed as if trying to will me awake. His coppery eyes were doleful, his demeanor anxious. After all, it was past eight o’clock on a Saturday, and we weren’t out running. I reached out and patted his head, and he unleashed a couple of high-pitched squeals of frustration. The sound reverberated in my head like a point-blank siren. I groaned and swung out of bed. “Don’t do that again, Big Boy,” I pleaded, holding my head with both hands. Stumbling down the back staircase to the kitchen, I let him out, then steamed some milk, made a double cappuccino, and downed three aspirins with the first swallow.

  Two hours later I was loading chunks and slabs of blue basalt into a wheelbarrow. The air was crisp, the sky clear, and my hangover had eased off just enough to allow some wall-building. The events of the night before teetered on the brink of flooding back to me. Block them out, I told myself. Stay focused on the physical work at hand, no matter how much your damn head aches. Archie lay off to one side, obviously pouting about not getting a run, and up in a nearby Douglas fir, a pileated woodpecker had joined us, his bright red plume bobbing as he pecked around for his breakfast.

  My goal was to complete the foundation course of the wall, which consisted of hefting the biggest slabs I could find into the shallow trench I’d dug around the herb garden. The slabs were heavy and awkward to carry, but the physical effort was satisfying. Just what the doctor ordered to keep my head clear. When I finally laid and leveled the last slab three hours later, I stood back to have a look.

  “Damn,” I said to my dog, “Whataya think of that?” Archie raised his head to acknowledge my comment but made it clear he wasn’t that impressed. Meanwhile, the woodpecker didn’t miss a beat.

  I took a break to run errands, get the week’s shopping done, and swing by the police department to sign my statement. Detective Tate wasn’t there, so I learned nothing new about Olivia Fuentes’s murder. The visit prompted me to call Timoteo to check in and see if there was anything I could do for him and the family.

  “Thank you, Cal,” he answered. “We’re in a state of shock here. Olivia’s body is with the medical examiner right now.”

  “An autopsy’s mandatory.” I said.

  He puffed a breath in disgust. “I know, but tell that to my mother. In our tradition, the body rests in the home before burial.” He paused, and I imagined him trying to rein in his anger and frustration. “We’ll be opening our home later this week. I’ll, um, let you know when it is, if you’d like to stop by. You don’t have to, of course.”

  I told him I’d be there.

  I finally got back to my dry-stack wall late that afternoon. The next step was to fill the gaps of the base course with smaller, stabilizing rocks. This required bashing larger rocks with a sledgehammer, a process that felt good, almost cleansing. But, despite the physical effort, my mind drifted back to the murder, with Timoteo’s question echoing in my mind—Who would shoot my sister?

  The thought of that cowardly act caused bile to rise in my throat again. Was Timoteo right about the intended target being Luis? What caused him to say that? I felt the gravitational pull of those questions on my curiosity, to say nothing of my heart. Darci Tate and her partner would dig into them. They were good detectives. Maybe they’d catch the shooter in short order. One could always hope.

  In any case, I told myself, let it lie.

  I continued the rock-bashing until the head of my old sledgehammer flew off during a downstroke. I wedged it back on, but after a couple more strokes it was clear the head wasn’t going to stay put. The sun was low, but I had a stack of rocks I was intent on breaking up before I knocked off.

  “Come on, Big Boy,” I said to Arch, “let’s go see what Gertie has in her barn.”

  We walked across the north field, through the gate separating the properties, and up to the barn, which was padlocked shut. Using a key hanging from a nail on an adjacent window frame, I let myself in and turned on the overhead lights, which flickered a couple of times and promptly went out.

  “Damn fluorescents,” I said as I fumbled around with my phone before figuring out how to turn on the flashlight app. “Should have looked here in the first place,” I said a few minutes later, after finding a sledgehammer-chisel combination with a short handle, a tool I imagined a geologist or archaeologist would use in the field. Finding the perfect tool didn’t surprise me. After all, Gertie’s husband—who died of cancer a year before I moved to the Red Hills—was known to have more tools in his barn than the local hardware store.

  The hammer was on a shelf beneath the workbench, and just as I reached for it, a voice sounded behind me. “What are you doing in here?”

  I whirled around to see who spoke and smacked my head on the underside of the bench. “Ouch.” A figure stood in the doorway, a silhouette backlit by what was left of the sunlight. “Uh, who are you?”

  “Who are you?” the voice parroted back.

  Archie emitted a single bark and approached the stranger. I said, “I’m Cal Claxton,” as I gingerly touched my sore head. “I live next door.” I pointed at my dog. “That’s Archie. He’s friendly.” I waited, noting that Archie wasn’t reading the confrontation as threatening.

  “I’m Zoe Bennett, Gertie’s niece. We spoke on the phone the other day.” Archie came up to her, and she offered her hand for him to sniff.

  “Of course. You arrived early, I see. Sorry, I was looking for a tool. I’m building a wall over at my place. The lights in here burned out just as I switched them on.”

  She moved, and I saw a glint of light on metal at her side.

  “Is that a gun?”

  “Yeah. Sorry about that. My Ruger. When I saw the door to the barn was suddenly open, I figured I might need it.”

  I laughed. “We come in peace, Zoe.”

  She returned the laughter as she tucked the gun in her waistband, then turned her attention to Archie. “You have beautiful markings, big fella.”

  “He’s an Aussie tricolor.”

  “Well, nice to meet you, Archie.” She turned back to me. “A
ctually, I’m glad you’re here, Cal. Would you mind coming in for a few minutes? I haven’t been here in years, and I have some questions about the place.”

  Archie and I followed Zoe through Gertie’s raised-bed gardens and up the back stairs. By this time a walnut-sized knot was throbbing on the side of my head. Under the kitchen lights, Zoe saw the lump and gasped. “Oh, dear. Does that hurt?”

  “Only when I breathe,” I answered.

  Suppressing a smile, she looked more closely, then made a face. “Ugh, it’s bleeding a little.” She stripped off a paper towel from a dispenser and handed it to me. “Here. I, ah, I’m not the nurse type. Don’t like the sight of blood.”

  I pressed the towel against the wound and pointed at an opened wine bottle with a half-full glass sitting next to it. “You could at least offer me a drink to ease the pain.” It was a bottle of 2012 Le Petit Truc pinot noir. “I see you’ve found the good stuff in your aunt’s wine cellar. It was made just down the road.”

  She looked a little embarrassed. “Okay, you caught me. I know this mark. I’m a big Oregon pinot fan thanks to Aunt Gertie, but I’ve never tasted a Petit Truc with this much age. It’s incredible.” She poured a glass, handed it to me, and picked up hers. We raised our glasses. Her ash-blond hair hung straight, brushing her shoulders, and her eyes reminded me of Gertie’s but with deeper-blue irises. Her smile came easily, but she held something back, a wariness, perhaps.

  We drank our wine and chatted for a while. I knew from Gertie that Zoe taught at the University of Puget Sound, clinical psychology, if memory served, and she was on sabbatical to write a book. This allowed her the flexibility to care for her aunt, whom she adored.

  “It was no problem finding someone to take care of my parents’ place,” she explained when I asked her how she managed to get here so soon. “They live on Bainbridge Island looking straight out on the Seattle skyline. One of my girlfriends jumped at the chance to housesit there.”