Blood Truth

by Matt Coyle

  “In Dina’s name?”

  “No. Her assistant, Glen Mathews, rented it.”

  “Did he drop it off?”

  “I couldn’t get that detail, only where and at what time, but you probably can. The Hertz by Lindbergh Field is less than a ten-minute drive to the Gaia house. I’m sure you can check taxi or Uber records to see if anyone got a ride at about four thirty that Saturday morning from Hertz to the house on Lucinda Street or somewhere in that neighborhood.”

  “So, what’s your theory?” Sheets folded his arms across his chest. “I have to get back to my real cases. Like who killed Edward Armstrong and Jamal Ketchings. You remember them, don’t you?”

  “Yes, I do.” I leaned into the table. “Here’s how I think it went down. Dergan has her assistant bring the rental car to the office. She takes it down to La Jolla and parks it somewhere near Parker Real Estate. She takes the Coaster or a cab or Uber back to the office after hours and drives her car to Coasterra to have dinner with the client. After dinner, she goes to the Gaia house where she meets Sophia. She kills her, probably in the shower. Then she drives up to Del Mar to make sure she’s home when her son arrives. She waits until he’s asleep, drives back to Point Loma, puts the body in the trunk of the Corvette, drives it to Parker Real Estate and leaves it there—”

  “I got the rest. She drives the rental she left there ahead of time to Hertz and takes a cab back to the house and then drives home.” Sheets rested his elbow on the table with his hand up like the head of a cobra. “This is a forty-seven-year-old woman carrying around a dead body like it’s an empty laundry bag.”

  “Dina Dergan is five-ten and physically fit. Sophia was no taller than five-two and weighed about a hundred pounds. Not easy, but doable for a woman in Dergan’s shape.”

  “How did you obtain the car rental information?” He gave me the cop look this time, like he knew the answer.

  “I found a way, Detective. In the interest of justice, I found a way.”

  “My partner was right about you, Rick.” Sheets stood up and grabbed the file off the table. “You have a hero complex. You do whatever the heck you want, legal or not, to satisfy your sense of justice.”

  “I don’t give a shit what Detective Denton thinks of me.” I grabbed air with my right hand. “I’m just trying to keep an innocent man from going to prison. I don’t even like the guy, but he didn’t do it.”

  “How heroic. I have to follow the evidence and the law, not a whim or some need for self-aggrandizement.” Sheets held the folder out in front of him and tapped it with his right index finger. “Jeffrey Parker’s skin was under Ms. Domingo’s fingernail. He had a scrape on his face when we interviewed him on Sunday. He lied about leaving Las Vegas on Friday afternoon. Sophia Domingo lied to him about PRE becoming the realtor for the Scripps development and conned him out of ten percent of his business. He was seen leaving The Pacific Terrace Hotel with Sophia on Friday night. He had motive and opportunity. We’ve got the right guy. Why else would he lie about being in Las Vegas?”

  “Because he was cheating on his wife. Hardly original. And the skin under her fingernail could have happened during sex.” I pulled out my phone and found the photos I’d taken at Dina Dergan’s murder house. “I’ve got motive, opportunity, and evidence.”

  I stood up next to Sheets and scrolled through the pictures I’d taken from the Gaia house. The empty towel racks. The new shower curtain. The spot on the rug.

  “Empty towel racks? A spot on the carpet? This is evidence to you?”

  “The whole house had been cleaned and smells like bleach. Except for one room that is musty and probably hasn’t been cleaned in years. No need to, because the killing took place in the bathroom. The towels were used in the blood cleanup and then discarded somewhere. Dergan probably wrapped the body in the shower curtain when she transported it. Except it leaked blood onto the carpet, so she used bleach on that one spot to destroy any DNA.”

  “What were you doing in the house?” Sheets narrowed his eyes down on me.

  “Visiting.”

  “Really?” Sheets shook his head. “Whatever the case, the one thing missing from your fantasy is a motive. Not that it would make any difference. Like I said, we have our guy.”

  “Similar to the motive you attribute to Parker, but stronger. Dergan and Sophia had been lovers—”

  “Whoa.” Sheets smiled and cocked his head. “Where did you come up with that? Ms. Dergan is married. Heterosexual.”

  “I told you right here a couple days ago that Sophia and Dergan kissed each other on the lips at lunch last week.”

  “That doesn’t mean they were lovers.”

  “They were, Detective. It wasn’t a European touch-and-go kiss. It was on the lips like they’d done it before and it meant something.”

  “Even if this is true, you’re saying Ms. Dergan killed Ms. Domingo over a lover’s spat?”

  “Sophia used Dergan just like she used Parker. She got enough information to steal the Green Builders Alliance of San Diego from Dergan Consulting in time to grease the skids so they’d get the Coastal Commission’s okay for the Scripps purchase. Add on the jilted lover aspect and you have enough motive for two murders.”

  “All speculation.”

  “Add everything up. Check with Hertz and Uber and the local taxi companies. If I’m right, you’ll get enough for a search warrant at the Gaia house. You’re going to find evidence of blood in the bathroom and on the carpet.”

  “There’s nothing here, Rick.” He opened the door and held it open for me to leave.

  I walked over to him and stopped under the door jam.

  “I know you don’t want to put an innocent man in prison, Detective Sheets. That’s not who you are. You haven’t been here long enough to be corrupted. I’m sure your partner must be chipping away at the edges. Maybe it’s already starting to take hold. The arrogant certainty that you know the truth and will make the facts match it.”

  “You mean the way you do, Rick? We’re done here.”

  Sheets walked down the hall to Robbery/Homicide leaving me standing half in and half out of the square white room.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE

  I PULLED OUT of the Brick House parking lot and headed north on Wall Street. That took me right past Parker Real Estate. I thought of Kim and how I’d failed her. Detective Sheets had tunnel vision on her husband. Sheets probably zeroed his focus on Parker as soon as he found out he’d lied about being in Las Vegas the night Sophia was murdered. I might have done the same in Sheets’ position. LJPD had DNA, motive, and opportunity, just as Sheets said. But I had new facts and the truth.

  I just couldn’t tell all of it.

  I called Ingrid Samuelson as I drove up Torrey Pines Road. No answer. I’d intended to ask her to set up a meeting with her daughter for the three of us. Maybe Callie or Tonya would be more comfortable talking to me if her mother was there. I left a message for a call back.

  The University of California at San Diego was only a five-minute drive from where I was. I decided not to wait for Ingrid and took Torrey Pines North at the light. The road wound up a canyon that always brought back a bad memory when I drove it.

  I was a senior in high school and hadn’t saved enough money to go on the Grad Night outing to Disneyland. I earned enough money for the trip working at Muldoon’s Steak House on my weekends. I just hadn’t been able to save any. All the money I earned went into the household expense fund. Which my father would pilfer for booze money. All while he had an envelope full of fifteen thousand dollars hidden in a safe.

  Why hadn’t he spent that money? His family was just eking by. He had to steal from his son to pay for his booze. But he left fifteen grand sitting in a safe untouched. If he were still alive, that would be the question I’d ask him above all others.

  The night of the Disneyland trip, a couple buddies and I hid in the bushes and egged the Grad Night buses to the amusement of our classmates inside as they went up Torrey Pines North. We�
��d broadcast our intentions all week and someone had ratted us out. A cop car had been tailing the buses, and I’d been the one who’d gotten caught because I’d run the wrong way.

  Unfortunately, the cop who caught me, Officer Martinez, remembered my father and decided to make an example of me once he learned my name. He cuffed me and took me to the Brick House.

  Martinez didn’t print me or put me in a holding cell. He removed my handcuffs and sat me down in front of the desk sergeant and told everyone within the sound of his voice that he’d caught Charlie Cahill’s kid throwing eggs at buses. Blue unis came over one by one to look at me. Some smiled and shook their heads. Some just shook their heads. The desk sergeant, older than the rest, just looked sad.

  After the freak show, Martinez picked up the desk sergeant’s phone and called my house. My mother was visiting my grandmother in Grass Valley that week. Anything to stay away from my father and, I thought at the time, me. My sister was in college up at Berkeley. That left my father alone in the house.

  Martinez held the phone receiver to his ear and listened, then grabbed my jacket and yanked me up. He shoved the receiver into my hand. I put it to my ear.

  “Hello? Hello?” My father’s voice wasn’t slurred, but I could tell from the tone that he was half in the bag. I’d had eight years of experience hearing that voice and the gradations it would change with each new scotch rocks.

  “I’m down at the Brick House and I need you to come pick me up.”

  “What the hell did you do?”

  “Just come. Now.” I reached over the sergeant’s desk and hung up the phone.

  My father didn’t arrive for another forty-five minutes. The drive from our house to LJPD took no more than ten minutes. I wasn’t a perfect kid, but I’d never been taken to a police station before. Most parents would run right out the door and jump in the car if their kid was being held by the police. Not my father. He wasn’t trying to teach me a lesson and make me sweat. He’d taken the extra half hour to sober up.

  He wore tan slacks, a blue dress shirt, and a tweed blazer. They were all at least ten years old. He hadn’t worn them since his last days on the job. I hadn’t seen him in anything other than sweats or jeans and stained t-shirts in over two years. The clothes hung off him like saggy skin. He’d lost twenty pounds since he’d been a cop. Compliments of a liquid diet. His wavy, unkempt hair was combed back and tamed by hair gel. He’d shaved for the first time in a couple weeks, memorialized by nicks on his neck, cheek, and chin. Bloodshot raccoon eyes. He looked like a vagrant cleaned up for a court appearance.

  He took careful steps up to the desk sergeant’s desk. I stood up, ready to grab the car keys from him and drive us both home. Officer Martinez spotted my father from his desk off to the left and walked over.

  “Charlie.” He smiled and stuck out a hand. My father shook it once and dropped it. He wouldn’t make eye contact with Martinez. “I’m afraid Rick here was engaging in some unlawful behavior tonight. Once I found out he was your son, I decided to cut him a break. But I’m worried about him, Charlie. I wouldn’t want him to take the wrong path. That can ruin a man’s life and hurt a lot of other people along the way.”

  “I’ll make sure he doesn’t do it again.” He stooped, staring at the floor.

  “I hope so, Charlie. Cuz he won’t get another chance.” Martinez leaned into my father’s space. “Not everyone gets to walk away free after they commit crimes and ruin the reputation of an entire organization.”

  My father didn’t say anything. The man whom I worshipped as a child. The best man I used to know didn’t make eye contact. He just took it and stared at the floor. Beaten without a fight. An empty shell of a once great man.

  “Fuck you, Martinez.” I stood up and slid between my father and the cop. “Charge me or let me go home.”

  “What did you say?” Martinez grabbed me by my jacket and pushed me against the raised desk. I wanted him to hit me. Not so I could get him for battery. I wanted some physical pain to drown out all the rest. And I wanted him to hit me to keep me from hitting my father.

  “I said fuck you, you fucking pig.” As a cop’s son, a word I’d never directed at someone in uniform before. Or since.

  Martinez pulled his right hand off my collar and punched me in the face. I saw it coming. I’d fought Golden Gloves for four years. I could have blocked the punch and countered with a right that would have shut Martinez’s mouth until the doctor took the wires off his broken jaw. But I left my chin up and took the punch. The crack told me my nose was broken before the blood started flowing. I staggered but stayed upright. Woozy, but smiling as I tasted blood.

  “Martinez!” The sergeant ran from behind the desk, along with a couple of unis from the adjacent room.

  My father just stared at the floor.

  “Fuck you, Martinez.” I spat blood onto his shirt.

  Two uniforms grabbed Martinez and pulled him away from me.

  The sergeant shoved him in the chest and snapped his head at my father.

  “Take your fucking kid and get the hell out of here, Charlie.”

  * * *

  I never spoke to my father again. I put him to bed when he couldn’t do it himself and I cleaned up his puke when he couldn’t make it to a toilet or a sink. But I never spoke another word to him.

  He died a year later.

  CHAPTER SIXTY

  I PARKED IN the gym parking lot on campus just off North Torrey Pines Road. I didn’t know if Ingrid Samuelson’s daughter was teaching a class or even where her classes or office were. I pulled out my phone and Googled the UCSD Linguistics Department faculty. I knew Calista Phelps had changed her first name to Tonya, but I hadn’t asked her mother about her new last name. Then I found a Tonya on the list.

  Tonya King. Tonya. Sometimes short for Antoinette. The name on the checking account at Windsor Bank that paid the monthly fee for my father’s safe deposit box.

  I called the number listed for the department. A young woman answered.

  “May I speak to Tonya King?” The blood pounding in my head almost drowned out the voice on the other end.

  “She’s teaching a class until two thirty, then she has office hours until four.”

  I got her office location and hung up.

  Calista Phelps was Antoinette King. The daughter of the man whose murder my father was connected to had paid for his safe deposit box for eighteen years after his death? The safe deposit box that held the empty shell casings from the bullets that killed her father. It didn’t make sense. King told me she’d met my father when the laundromat was robbed and all she knew about him was what she’d read in his obituary after he died.

  She’d lied to me. What did she really know?

  Tonya King arrived at her office at two forty-five. I’d been waiting in the hallway for thirty minutes. She looked like her mother. Tall, blond, Nordic beauty. However, she tried to hide it under long bangs and dark, loose clothing. She was in her midforties, but looked younger than me. The only thing that gave away her age was the way she carried herself. Erect, but weary. Small steps for a tall woman.

  “Can I help you?” No smile. Flat voice. She put a key into the lock of her office door and unlocked it.

  “I wanted to talk to you about auditing a class.” I used a southern accent in case she’d recognize my voice from our phone call. Better to talk to her in her office behind a closed door. I didn’t think she’d invite me in if she knew who I was.

  “You’re lying.” A statement, not an accusation. She turned from the door and looked at me. “You can drop the accent. You’re Charlie Cahill’s son. I told you I didn’t want to talk to you.”

  “Stupid of me to try to fool someone who teaches linguistics for a living.” I smiled to try to lighten things up.

  “You lied to try to get what you want. I’ve been lied to enough in my life. Good-bye, Mr. Cahill.” She pushed open the door and entered the office, flicking the door closed behind her. Except the door bounced off my foot j
ust inside the door jam.

  “I’ve been lied to enough in my life, too.” I eased the door open with my hand. “That’s why I don’t appreciate you lying to me about not knowing my father very well.”

  Tonya stared at me with cool blue eyes. No fear, no panic, just weariness.

  “Tonya.” A male voice behind me. “Should I call security?”

  I turned and saw a man standing in the doorway of the office across the hall. Late twenties. Scraggly chin hair. Emaciated under a gray cardigan.

  “It’s okay, Geo.” She walked over and opened the door all the way. I walked in and she shut the door behind me without another word to Geo.

  The office was immaculate. No messy stacks of papers on the antique desk. Not the way I remembered my professors’ offices from college. Dark oil paintings of women wearing blindfolds over their eyes hung on the walls. Actually, all the paintings were of the same lone woman. She looked a bit like Tonya, but more severe. They were captivating but sad. Self-portraits of a broken life.

  I looked at Tonya, then back at the paintings. “Yours?”

  “You came here to accuse me of lying, Mr. Cahill. Not talk about my paintings.”

  “I just want to know the truth.” I turned back to her. “Why is your name on a shared checking account that funds my dead father’s safe deposit box at Windsor Bank?”

  “Sit down, Mr. Cahill.” She took the seat behind her desk.

  “Rick.” I sat in a leather armchair opposite her.

  “He gave me money to set up a checking account to fund the safe deposit box twenty-five or so years ago.”

  “Why did he need you? Why not just open a checking account in his own name?”

  “He wanted me to keep the box funded in case he died.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “He said there was evidence from my father’s murder in the box that he wanted to preserve.”