by Bill Bernico
“Elliott, it’s Dean. Your dad wouldn’t happen to be there by any chance, would he?”
“Sorry, Dean,” Elliott said. “He’s off on an important mission.”
“Peanuts for the pigeons?” Dean said. “I know he has a cell phone. Doesn’t he ever have it on?”
“Usually,” Elliott said, “But he shuts it off when he’s on that park bench. Says he doesn’t want to scare the pigeons away when it rings. Why do you ask?”
“I just needed to talk to him about one of his old cases from the late seventies,” Dean explained. “Do you know when he might be back?”
“Back?” Elliott said. “If you’re talking about here, he rarely comes back here anymore since he retired. And I couldn’t tell you where he might be later, either. But I do know that he has a strict schedule for feeding those damned pigeons every day. Says he doesn’t want to throw off their feeding time. He’s probably still there right now. You can still catch him there up until four-thirty or until he runs out of peanuts.”
“Thanks, Elliott,” Dean said. “Talk to you later.”
Dean Hollister hung up the phone and hurried to his cruiser in the parking lot. The park Elliott was talking about was just ten minutes away. As Dean pulled up to the curb he could see Clay sitting a hundred yards into the park on a wooden bench. He walked over and sat next to Clay, causing the pigeon to all fly off.
Clay looked into his still half full bag of peanuts and then looked at Dean. “Nice going,” he said. “They hadn’t finished eating yet.”
“Can it wait?” Dean said. “I have a few questions I need to ask you about one of your old cases.”
Clay folded the peanut bag shut and set it on the bench between them. “Which one?” he said.
“I don’t remember your client’s name,” Dean said, “But I seem to remember you working on it shortly before Elliott was born in July of eighty. That would put it sometime in late seventy-nine or early eighty.”
“You have to give me more to go on that that,” Clay said. “Do you remember what the case was about?”
“Seems to me you were looking for a woman who’d been missing for a few months,” Dean said. “Her family hired you to look into the disappearance.”
Clay rolled his hands in a circle. “Go on,” he said. “Give me a little more.”
If I remember correctly,” Dean said, “The family finally had to call off the search when they ran out of money, or something like that. Does it jog your memory now?”
“And this woman’s body finally turned up eight months later in some remote ravine in the mountains,” Clay said. “Sure, I remember that one. Gees, I had nightmares about it off and on for a few months. What about her?”
“A hunter came across a car down in a ravine in that general area,” Dean explained. “It was empty, of course and when we traced the plate it came back as being registered to George and Ellen Armitage from Pasadena.”
“And?” Clay said.
“And the couple has been missing for three days now,” Dean said. “The husband’s sister, Shelly called us about it this morning. She’s been trying to reach her brother since the morning after his surprise birthday party at the Burbank Elk’s Lodge. Coincidentally, I got a call from the L.A. County Sheriff’s Office that same morning about the car they found in the ravine.”
“You think there’s a connection between my old case and this one?” Clay said. “Hell, they’re thirty-two years apart. How could there be any connection?”
“I didn’t say there was,” Dean said. “Except for the area where the car was found. It was less than half a mile from where they found the woman from your case.”
“Dean,” Clay said, “Why are you getting involved in this case? Today’s your last day on the force, isn’t it? What happened to coasting through the rest of your life and letting the younger guys carry the ball for a while?”
“I’m still a cop until five o’clock tonight,” Dean said. “I can’t just turn my back on it, can I?”
“I guess not,” Clay said. “Just don’t take any unnecessary chances with that little time left on your clock. You know as well as I do that some good cops have been killed on their last couple of days on the job. I don’t know why. Maybe their minds wandered and they got careless. Who knows? Just try to make it through this day.”
Clay looked at his watch. “I think I can manage another hour and ten minutes. So, could you find me your case file on that case I told you about?”
Clay rose from the bench. “Come on,” he said to Dean. “You can follow me back to the office. Hopefully we won’t walk in on the kids doing something.”
Dean gave Clay a sideways glance and raised his eyebrows. “Ah, to be young again,” he said.
“I’ll save us a little time,” Clay said. “I’ll call ahead and have them pull the file for you. It’ll be waiting when we get there.”
“Thanks, buddy,” Dean said. “And I’m sure Elliott and Gloria thank you, too.”
The two of them got to Clay’s old office in just a few minutes. Gloria had the file in her hand. She handed it to Clay when he and Dean came into the office. “Thanks, Gloria,” Clay said, setting the file on Gloria’s desk. “Do you mind if we use your desk for a few minutes?”
Gloria gestured toward her desk. “Make yourselves at home,” she said and pulled a second chair over for Dean.
Clay opened the folder and sifted through the paperwork. He pulled out the original contract between him and his client and passed it over to Dean. “The husband’s name was Conrad Archer. He’s the person who hired me and Dad to find his wife, Kate.”
Dean examined the document and laid it back in the folder. “There’s not much here, is there?” Dean said.
“I wasn’t able to do much for the family,” Clay said. “Hell, your own file will probably tell you more than this one.”
Dean pulled another document from Clay’s folder and examined it. “Looks like the Archers had a son,” he said, handing the document to Clay.
“Yes,” Clay said. “I remember him. That whole ordeal was pretty traumatic for the kid. He couldn’t have been more than five or six at the time.”
“What about the husband?” Dean said. “Is he still around? He’d have to be a pretty old guy by now if he was. Probably close to your age.” He winked at Clay.
“Hey,” Clay said, “you’re only a year younger than me.” He looked again at the husband’s name. “I remember this guy. His obituary was in the paper a couple of years back. Ironically he died in a single car crash in almost the exact spot where they found his wife all those years ago. I guess his mind wandered when he took that curve and he went over. They didn’t even notice his car down there for a week or more. His body was in pretty bad shape when they finally pulled the car back up onto the road.”
“What about their kid?” Dean said. “Ever see him again?”
Clay shook his head. “Never heard what happened to him,” he said. “He’s probably married with kids of his own by now. Is it important?”
“Probably not,” Dean said. “Just curious, is all. I took a shot. I thought you might have more information than you do. I’ll have to check my own records again. Thanks anyway.”
“What do you think you can accomplish in the next hour before your retirement becomes official?” Clay said.
Dean shook his head and shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe nothing, but I can’t leave the job having done nothing, now can I?”
“Why not?” Dean said. “A hundred years from now who’ll now the difference, or care what you did with your last hour?”
“At least one person will know,” Dean said, hiking his thumb at his own chest. “I’ll have to live with it for the rest of my life and I’ll be able to do that easier if I at least put forth the effort. And the longer I stand here talking to you, the less time I’ll have on it. Catch you later.”
“So we’re still on for seven-thirty, aren’t we?” Clay said. “Remember, the movie?”
“Sure,” Dean said, waving over his shoulder as he left the office.
Elliott turned to me. “And he doesn’t suspect a thing?”
“If he does,” Clay said, “it isn’t from anything I did or said.”
“I can’t wait to see the look on his face tonight at his party,” Gloria said. “Did you let Helen know your plans?”
“Now what kind of a party planner would I be if I didn’t let his wife know what we were planning?” Clay said. “She’ll be there. She’s leaving the house right after Dean and I leave. I’ll take it slow so she can beat us there.”
Dean climbed back into his car and started for his office, but something made him turn and take the road that led to the mountain pass where sheriff’s deputies found the Armitage car in the ravine. Dean stopped at the side of the road where the car had gone down, trying to get a mental picture of the circumstances leading up to this point. It didn’t make sense that the car was found in the ravine empty. If the Armitages rolled down there with it, they’d have been seriously hurt or killed. But the car had been found empty. That meant one of two things. Either they weren’t hurt and crawled out of the car, or the car went down the ravine empty.
If they were in it at the time and survived, someone would have found them by now or they would have made it back to the road somehow. If the car went down there empty, who sent it down and why? If the Armitages sent it down and walked away, then where were they and why haven’t they made their presence known? If someone else sent the car down there, what did they do with the Armitages?
Clay slid back into his car and started the engine. He rode the brake down the sloping road, letting his idling engine carry him along. He watched out both windows for signs of anything or anyone who might have come up to the road along this route. He saw nothing. A little way further down, Clay saw a road. It was actually more of an overgrown path, but he decided to see if led anywhere. He eased his car onto the path and slowly made his way into the thicket of trees. When he came to an open area, he stopped the car and got out. He wasn’t sure what he was looking for or if there even was anything to see here, but something drew him into this area.
He picked up a fallen branch, about the size of a walking stick and swiped at the dead leaves on the ground as he walked. The action reminded him of when he was a boy and played in woods similar to these. Back then a fallen branch became a sword or a rifle and his twelve-year-old imagination would lead him on one adventure after another. Here in these woods, nearly fifty years later, the branch was just a branch and the only adventure he was facing was waiting for him back in his office. He wondered if his men were planning anything special for him on his last day.
Dean walked along, swatting the piles of leaves. He wasn’t sure what it was exactly that made him look down at the leaves. But there seemed to be fresh dirt scattered all over the top of the fallen leaves. That struck him as unusual and it made him scatter more leaves as he walked. He brushed away a large pile of leaves and saw that a large area had recently been disturbed. He continued walking, looking more closely now at the ground.
There, ahead of where his car had stopped, Dean saw the distinct impression of tire tracks and they weren’t old tracks, either. These were fresh, probably only two or three days old. The tracks made a large circle and ended up under Dean’s car. He looked around the back of his car and saw his own tire tracks. A second set of tracks lay next to his and those tracks pointed toward the road. Someone had been down here recently.
Dean returned to the large area of disturbed dirt and scraped at the ground with his stick. He scraped enough of the leaves away to see that the area of fresh dirt was more than six feet long and two or three feet wide. A grave, he thought. He returned to his car, opened the trunk and withdrew the shovel he’d kept there. He carried it back to the site and set the pointed blade on the dirt and stepped on it. Dean removed several shovelfuls before the blade hit something solid. He set the shovel aside and dropped to his knees, pushing the dirt aside with his hands.
A moment later he brushed a little more dirt aside and found himself staring at a human ear. Dean sprung to his feet and jumped back, quickly looking at his surroundings to make sure he was alone. He pulled his .38 from his shoulder holster and turned in a complete circle. Dean hurried back to his car and grabbed the microphone for his radio.
“Headquarters,” Dean said into the mic, “This is car nine do you read me?” There was no response. “Headquarters, this is car nine. Come in.” Still no response. Then he remembered that he was in the mountains and then further down this road. He was probably in a dead spot for radio transmission. He threw the shovel back into his trunk and slipped behind the wheel again.
Dean threw his arm over the back seat and backed the car up to the road again, unwilling to contaminate the scene any further. Once on the road again, Dean turned and drove up the way he’d come until he got to the highest point on the road. From there he could look down onto the city. He tried his radio again. This time headquarters answered.
“Car nine, this is headquarters, go ahead. Over.”
“Headquarters,” Dean said. “I’m on the mountain road where the deputies found that car in the ravine. You’d better send backup and the coroner to my location. Over.”
“Car nine, be advised that cars twelve and three are en route to your location,” the dispatcher said. “I’ll notify the medical examiner to meet you at that location. ETA is fifteen minutes.”
Dean sat there in his car and waited for what seemed like an hour, but was probably closer to twelve minutes. Over the next rise, Dean spotted two black and white patrol cars coming his way, their red lights flashing. Dean got out of his unmarked car and flagged them down. When the first patrol car stopped, Dean leaned in to the driver’s window.
“Follow me,” Dean said. “If you didn’t know the road was there, you’d miss it. “Probably better if we leave the cars on the road and walk down.” Dean looked past the driver and told the other officer to stay on the road with the cars and to direct Andy Reynolds, the M.E. to their location when he arrived.
Dean got back in his car, made a U-turn on the mountain road and headed back down, the two patrol cars close behind him. He stopped at the entrance to the narrow road and locked his car. The driver from the first black and white along with the two officers from the second patrol car followed Dean down into the thicket of trees. When he got to the spot where he’d been digging, he instructed the officers to scour the area for any clues at all. He also told them to be care where they stepped. The three officers split up in different directions.
Five minutes later Andy Reynolds came walking down the overgrown road, flanked by two ambulance attendants, pulling a gurney. Dean walked up to meet Andy before he got to the grave.
“Down here,” Dean said. “Once I uncovered the ear, I stopped digging. The scene’s all yours now.”
Andy Reynolds cautiously approached the fresh dirt and looked down at someone’s left ear as it poked up above the dirt. He got to his knees, brushed away a little more dirt with his gloved hands and exposed the rest of the victim’s head. It was a man, probably forty or so with dark hair.
One of the three officers who’d been sent to scout the area came back to where Dean stood watching Andy. “Lieutenant,” the officer said, pointing to where his partner stood, marking a particular spot. “I think we found something over there.”
Dean followed the officer back to the spot and looked down at a large maple leaf with a dark stain on it. Dean bent down and carefully picked up the leaf and examined it closer. It was blood, all right, and it looked too dark to be and fresher than a couple of days, at least.
“Keep looking,” Dean instructed the officers. “This can’t be all there is.”
“Yes, sir,” the first officer replied.
By now another patrol car had arrived on the scene. A television news van pulled up along the road where the four police cars and the ambulance had stopped. A cameraman and a woman h
olding a microphone stepped out of the van and started down the path. The officer at the road stopped them, telling them that the area was a crime scene and that they’d have to wait up at the road. The woman reported complained but complied.
Dean returned to the grave to find Andy had brushed away enough dirt to expose the man’s shoulder and upper torso. He’d brushed away a little more dirt and then turned to look up at Dean.
“We’ve got a second victim,” Andy said. “Looks like a woman lying next to him.”
Other television stations must have also been monitoring the police band radio because now there were three news trucks on the road. Somehow one of the reporters managed to sneak past the cop on the road and was making his way toward the grave.
Dean looked up and saw the reported coming and motioned to one of his officers to intercept him. “Get him out of here,” Dean said. “If he resists, cuff him and throw him in the back of the squad car.”
The officer complied and turned the reporter around and nudged him back toward the road. The cop remained up at the road, assisting the only other policeman with the onlookers.
Dean turned to another officer who had been searching the area for clues. “Officer,” Dean said, “Go on back up to the road and put in a call to the crime lab. Tell them we’ll need the whole works down here, including flood lights and stands. It’ll be getting dark soon.”
“Yes sir,” the cop said, and hurried up to the squad car.
Half an hour later a dark colored van pulled up alongside the black and whites and a crew of three men emerged, all carrying equipment down the path to the crime scene. They made several trips back to the van until they had everything they needed to process the scene.
By now Captain Blake had gotten wind of the situation and had driven up into the mountains to look in on the operation. He walked down the path until he found Dean and his men. Blake watched as Andy Reynolds and the ambulance attendants pulled the two bodies from the shallow grave. They laid one body on the gurney, covered it head to toe and pulled it back up to the ambulance. They returned with a second gurney and repeated the process for the second body. Once the second body had been loaded into the ambulance, the two attendants drove off, their red light clearing their way.
