by Tyler Dilts
We’d gone back to Jen’s apartment after dinner. She lived in a building on Fourth and Elm that had been renovated a few years earlier. It was nice enough, but the developers remodeled most of the character out of the building, and she didn’t really feel completely comfortable there. For all of her talk about the financial advantages of a buyer’s market, I believed that was the biggest reason why she was looking for a house. To find someplace that felt like home.
“How hard should we push back?” Jen asked.
“You know me,” I said. “I’m the king of pushback. It doesn’t usually do me much good.”
She took a sip of herbal tea from a Smith & Wesson coffee cup and gave me a quizzical look.
“What?” I asked.
“Nothing. That just seemed like a surprisingly self-aware comment.”
I couldn’t decide if that was a compliment or an insult.
I’ve always worked too much. And I got even worse when my wife died. Work has always been a kind of refuge for me, and after Megan’s accident, I dived headlong into it. My injury and subsequent leave left me facing something I had little experience with and little interest in—free time.
Even with surgeries and all the medical attention I required, I was left with a seemingly infinite amount of time. I grasped and groped for ways to fill the emptiness.
I embraced digital technology. Got a Kindle. Got a giant Vizio flat screen. Got an Xbox. Really learned how to use iTunes. Read more books than I had in years and joined Goodreads so I’d have someone to discuss Ross MacDonald and Neal Stephenson with. Realized Netflix made the wasteland much less vast and watched every episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Wire, and Fringe. Discovered a passion for video-game violence. An assault rifle with a chainsaw for a bayonet? Fuck yeah. Downloaded so much music that it would take more than a month of continuous play to listen to it all. Found myself more excited about mixes than I had been in seventh grade when I got a dual-cassette boom box for Christmas and made them for everyone I’d ever met. Jen listened to them all. Dave asked me if I was hitting on him.
And all of those things waited for me on the weekends. As much as I enjoyed them, and even got lost in them, they reminded me of the pain. One of the things I welcomed most about the Benton case was its size and scope. It was the first time since I’d been back that I’d been on a case big enough to justify working through the weekend.
I couldn’t really bear the thought of taking a day off.
But there was one weekend tradition—a relatively recent development—that I was looking forward to.
Megan, who had very different literary tastes than I, once said, “It is a truth universally acknowledged in Long Beach that a hungry person in possession of an appetite for Mexican must be in want of Enrique’s.”
You might not guess from its location in a mini-mall on PCH, sandwiched in between a vitamin store and a Botox clinic, but Enrique’s has always been a popular lunch and dinner spot. A few weeks earlier, they started serving breakfast as well. On my second visit, I asked if they could add carne asada to the potato, egg, and cheese breakfast burrito, and when they did, it turned out to be the greatest and most wonderful thing that ever happened in the entire universe. I’m not exaggerating.
I’d been there every time my schedule allowed since then and ordered the same thing every time. Michelle, Enrique’s wife, told me on the fourth or fifth visit that they’d made a special button on the register for my order. It was the proudest day of my life.
If that weren’t enough, there was never a crowd in the mornings. Dinner—at least between the hours of five and seven—always required at least a half an hour wait. Not breakfast. I figured that would change, though, when word spread.
Blissfully stuffed full of burrito and lemon-herb potatoes, I wobbled out of Enrique’s and back into reality.
That afternoon, my BlackBerry vibrated. I had a new text. It was Patrick’s automated reply—Bradley had, for the first time since the murders, used a credit card. I didn’t know where, and I wasn’t close enough to log in to Patrick’s program and find the location. While I was still trying to figure out what to do, I received another text, this one actually from Patrick himself. It read, Bradley’s out. He spent $28.75 at Whole Foods on PCH.
I wondered if there was a way I could make it there from my duplex by the time he got back in his Porsche and out of the parking lot. There wasn’t.
Thanks, I wrote back. He’d probably be home by the time I could get there. Too far.
Next time, he wrote.
I noted that since I’d joked about proofreading my texts, Patrick hadn’t used a single abbreviation. Had he always done that? I couldn’t remember. Maybe he really was that adaptable.
In Ruiz’s office Monday morning our suspicions were confirmed. “The deputy chief’s making some noise about turning the Seal Beach crimes over to the FBI.”
“On what grounds?” I asked.
“He’s saying the weapon and the MO make it look like a Homeland Security issue.”
“Funny how they never say that when MS Thirteen winds up with military hardware,” I said.
“Do you know if it’s coming from the congressman?” Jen asked.
“No,” Ruiz said, “but I’m guessing that it is. Danny’s right. There’s not enough to justify federal jurisdiction without someone pushing hard for it.”
“Who else would do that?” Jen asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s pretty ugly. Maybe the department brass just wants to get it off their hands.”
“Could be,” Ruiz said. “We should know more later. Young and Goodman are coming in for another update. See if you can get anything out of them.”
Patrick went over the Shevchuk murder with Goodman and Young, and then we walked them through the chase and everything that came later. It was the first time we’d seen them since I had taken Goodman to The Potholder. He nodded a lot and asked a question or two but didn’t really say much of anything else. I wondered if my attempt at ingratiation had done any good. He was dressed more casually than we’d seen him previously, in khakis, a blue button-down, and a pair of brown New Balances. I recognized them because I had a pair of the same ones.
“Nice shoes,” I said.
“Thanks.”
“Think you guys might be able to help at all with the ID on the M4? The basic serial number check came back clean, but we’re thinking maybe we might be able to trace it to the source.” I wasn’t actually hoping for any help, but I was hinting at an implication of a possible government connection in the rifle’s history and watching to see if either agent picked up on it.
It seemed to go right past Young. He said, “We can put in a request with ATF, but I doubt they’ll get back to us any quicker than they’ll get back to you.” That may or may not have been true, depending on how they put in the request and on other mitigating factors, such as whether or not they dropped the congressman’s name.
Goodman, though, saw what I was implying and studied me as I studied Young. I thought about just laying our cards on the table and asking him about their intentions with the case. And maybe a few other things, too. How much are you telling the congressman? What’s his intent? Is he looking to make things right or to cover them up? I suspected the two agents could shed a bit of light on the situation. But I seriously doubted they would willingly tell us anything.
When they’d packed up their briefcases and left, Jen and I sat down in Ruiz’s office.
“You get anything off of them?” he asked.
“Not really,” I said. “Goodman knows we’re suspicious of their involvement, but he’d have to be pretty dense not to.”
“Like Young,” Jen said.
“No sense of where they’re going to go with this?”
“Not really,” I said. “You get anything from upstairs?”
“I’m meeting with DC Baxter and the chief of D’s after lunch. We’ll see what they have to say.”
“Good luck,” Jen sa
id.
“Anything come back from the Shevchuk scene?” Jen asked Patrick.
“Nothing yet,” he said.
“We don’t know if the feds are going to try to grab it. We didn’t get anything off the two feebs, either,” I said. “And Ruiz hasn’t heard from the brass yet. Where do we go next?”
“What do we have if we lose Shevchuk?” Jen asked.
“We can go at Turchenko again,” I said. “With his partner dead, maybe he’ll be willing to give something up.”
“Assuming there is anything to give up,” she said.
“The DVD,” Patrick said. “Maybe we should try to figure out everywhere that Bradley’s been sticking his dick.”
“So where do we start?” Jen asked.
“Well, we could try the art professor and the nanny again, or we could start running down people from the video,” I said.
Patrick said, “Let’s do both. You guys start with people we know, and as soon as I get back from Shevchuk’s autopsy, I’ll get online and see what I can find on the cast of the epic deposition.”
We made a call to the Bentons’ most recent nanny, Joely Ryan, and set up an appointment to talk to her later that afternoon.
The CSULB website informed us that Catherine Catanio had lunchtime office hours, so we decided to drop in unannounced.
There was a student in her office asking about an assignment, so we loitered outside the door.
“It just seems like a lot of reading for one week,” the young man said. “I thought it was art class.”
“It’s art history,” Catherine said with a surprising amount of patience. “As I said on the first day of class, it’s a lot more than just looking at pictures.”
That shut the student up.
“Is there anything else?” Catherine asked.
“No,” the student said.
Jen and I could hear the shuffling of a backpack being loaded and zipped shut. As he came out, we got our first look at him. He wore a blue oxford shirt tucked into his jeans, and his light-brown hair was neatly trimmed. I expected something a bit more slovenly from the conversation we’d overheard. Maybe he was a frat boy.
I stepped in front of the open door and tapped my knuckles lightly on the faded yellow paint.
“Professor Catanio?” I said.
She was surprised to see us, but the expression passed quickly from her face and was replaced with a gracious smile. “Hello, Detectives,” she said. “Please come in.”
“Sorry to stop by unannounced,” Jen said.
“Oh, it’s no problem. What can I do for you?”
“There have been a few developments in the case,” Jen said. “And we were hoping you might be able to give us a bit more information.”
“Of course,” she said.
“We’ve come across some new evidence that confirms Bradley Benton’s infidelity,” I said. “And, honestly, goes quite a bit farther than that.”
“Really?”
“Yes,” Jen said. “Were you aware that he was accused of rape?”
The professor’s eyes widened and her lips parted for a fraction of a second. But the surprise quickly turned into something else. Something very unpleasant. “No,” she said. “But I can believe it. When was this?”
I glanced at Jen. She gave me a slight nod.
I told Catherine the date mentioned in the DVD from Sara’s safe; she did a bit of silent mental calculation and said, very quietly, “Yes.”
“Yes what?” Jen asked, only slightly louder.
“The timing’s right.”
“The timing for what?”
“For when Sara finally gave up on him. I knew roughly when it happened. Her attitude changed. She actually became less angry and hurt. I thought she’d somehow been able to make some kind of peace with his behavior. Maybe she had. Maybe. I think that’s when she gave up the last of her hope that she could save their marriage. That’s when she gave up on him.”
“Did she ever tell you that?” Jen asked.
“No, she was very good at maintaining the front. But something changed in her. It was subtle. I doubt anyone else would have even noticed it.”
“Do you think she might have been planning to leave him?”
“I didn’t. But I’ve been thinking quite a bit about Sara and Bradley. Now, I have to say, I do think that’s a possibility.”
That didn’t completely confirm our suspicions that Sara might have been using the DVD as leverage in a potential divorce proceeding, but it certainly supported them. And it strengthened my belief that Bradley may indeed have had a motive for killing his wife.
“We need to ask you something else,” I said. “The rape accusation came from a former nanny. With what you told us before, we’re starting to see a very distinct pattern in Bradley’s behavior.”
“I understand,” she said.
“Do you know how many other nannies the Bentons have had?”
She counted in her head. “Four, I think.”
“Did they fit the same profile? Were they all young? Attractive? College aged?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said. She was sitting up straighter in her chair than she had before, and there was a level of tension in her posture that I hadn’t seen before.
“We know he victimized at least one of them. Do you think he might have done the same to the others?”
She nodded, her anger now palpable in the small room.
In the car, Jen asked, “So what were you trying to do back there?”
“I wanted to get her riled up. See how much she had on Bradley.”
“Did you really need to push so many of her buttons?”
“Maybe not. But I thought the vulnerable college student angle would get to her teacher instincts.”
“It did,” she said. “She was seething when we left.”
“I’m confident she gave us everything she had,” I said, trying to put a pleasant spin on it.
“Me too. Just hope she doesn’t pop a cap in Bradley’s ass.”
“I’m not sure that would be such a bad thing.”
“I wish you were joking,” she said.
Joely lived with her parents in Costa Mesa, close to the South Coast Plaza. Fortunately, they were both still at work when we got there.
We parked on the street in front of the olive-green house, and she opened the door before we could ring the bell. She’d been waiting.
“Hello,” she said as she led us into the kitchen. It looked like it had been remodeled. The house itself was a relatively typical Orange County midsixties three-bedroom tract home, but the granite countertops and veneered cabinets weren’t original to that period. Her family wasn’t rich, but they weren’t poor, either.
“How are you holding up?” Jen asked.
“Okay, I guess.” As soon as the two of us sat down at the table, she asked, “Can I get you guys something to drink?”
“No, thank you,” Jen said. “We’re fine.”
I wondered if we should have asked for coffee so Joely would have something to focus on other than the questions we were going to ask her. She sat down across from us at the oval oak-topped table.
“This is your parents’ house?” I asked.
“Yes,” Joely said. “I lived in the dorms freshman year, but I didn’t really like it, so I came back home.”
“UCI, right?”
“Yes,” she said.
“What are you majoring in?”
“Education.”
“You want to be a teacher,” I said. “What grade level?”
“I’m not sure yet. Elementary. Probably third or fourth?” She was easing up a bit and becoming more comfortable. That was good.
“No class today?”
“No. I have a two-day-a-week schedule this quarter. They’re really long days, but it’s better that way for work.” She seemed as if she were going to continue but stopped as she remembered what had happened to Bailey and Jacob. “I guess I don’t need to worry about that now, though.”
“I’m sorry,” Jen said to Joely, who was beginning to tear up.
There was a box of tissues on the counter on the other side of the room. I got up and brought it back to the table. Joely took one.
“Do you know who did it yet?” Joely asked.
“Not yet,” I said.
Jen picked up the ball. “But that’s why we’re here. We just need to ask you a few more questions.”
“Okay,” she said, dabbing at the corners of her eyes with a Kleenex. As far as I could tell, she wasn’t wearing any makeup, but she wiped at the tears as carefully as if she were.
“What we have to ask might make you uncomfortable,” Jen said. “But please think about the questions and be as honest as you can, all right?”
“Yes,” she said.
“In the time that you worked for the Bentons, was there anything at all unusual about Mr. Benton?”
“Unusual? In what way?”
“In any way,” Jen said. “Anything that comes to mind.”
“No. I can’t think of anything at all.”
“Was he a good boss?”
“Well, I really thought of Mrs. Benton as more of my boss. But he was always nice and everything. Why? Do you think he had something to do with—”
“Oh, no,” Jen said. “Nothing like that. We’re wondering if there might have been someone trying to get back at him for some reason.”
“Okay. Because I can’t imagine him doing anything like that.”
