The Verdict on Each Man Dead

by David Whellams

  Henry nodded. “I’m beginning to think maybe so. Guys high on their own product aren’t always worried about resistance or collateral damage.”

  They sat there in silence for five more minutes, watching the clouds of insects on the river. Collins finished his investigation and started packing up. The bands of yellow tape were already drooping. Emerging blue patches in the morning sky encouraged them all to move out and head for Salt Lake City. Phil started his engine and Henry got out the passenger side.

  “There’s another possibility,” Phil said through the window. “Maybe they panicked.”

  They found the truck twenty minutes later, after taking the paved mountain highway out from the Provo River. Henry’s instinct that they might pick up a clue to the killers’ route was nothing more than a wild hope, but there it was, ten miles down the highway. Henry saw it first and honked, and put on his left turn signal. The truck, labelled “Salaberry Electric — Install and Repair,” squatted half-hidden at the rear of a grim, low-slung restaurant and bait joint set back from the road on a crumbling asphalt parking lot. They stopped near the entry so as not to disturb any tire tracks. A red CLOSED sign had been slotted in the front window of the building.

  They got out and scanned the parking pad. “You can see from the mud that fishermen and hunters use this place to turn around,” Phil said.

  Henry added, “They congregate here, it’s a staging point. But not deer hunters. It’s not the season for large game.”

  His partner fumbled in his coat pocket for his mobile and searched out a number. Henry heard the faint ringing; Collins answered on the third chime. Phil ran through their coordinates and demanded that Collins join them.

  Henry walked over to the façade of the shabby roadhouse. Cobwebs had formed on the CLOSED sign. He turned and looked up and down the highway. Hydro wires ran along their side of the road, and an offshoot line stretched from a main pole to the frame building. Anyone driving by might well assume the truck was there to repair the feed.

  Collins arrived ten minutes later and the three investigators walked Indian file to the truck. They took a few minutes to tiptoe around it, looking for obvious evidence. Phil picked up a flattened cigarette butt, though he had no reason to conclude that any of the killers had smoked it. Collins shimmed open the driver-side door.

  There was no blood to be seen on either the driver’s seat or the shotgun side. But there was blood to smell. And marijuana.

  Collins got behind the wheel and hit the hatch release, while Phil and Henry walked around to the rear and lifted the door. Tom Watson’s professional gear, tool belts, cables, voltage meters, and spools of wire had been repainted in red. The tech team had reported that eighty percent of Watson’s blood had drained onto the grow house floor, but the killers must have quickly moved him into the vehicle, where the rest of his fluids drained away. Although the odour of weed was sharp, Henry found no plants; he looked closer and spied seeds and desiccated stems among the blood and equipment. It was a horror chamber on wheels.

  The detectives contented themselves with a cursory examination of the vehicle, while Collins called for a full forensics unit. Soon there would be two red cube trucks parked on the rotting asphalt lot. Phil opened the glove box and removed the papers but found only the registration documents, a few customer invoices, and a pencil flashlight.

  Anxious as they were to tear apart the truck, they had no choice but to wait for Collins’s experts. Once again, they retreated to Phil’s car, sitting in the front like parents waiting at the schoolyard. Phil asked the question of the moment: “What were the killers thinking when they left the body by the river and then left the truck back here?”

  Henry turned to him. “The killers didn’t mind the stiff and the vehicle being found, but not too quickly. They figured to buy a delay of one or two days, and they succeeded.”

  Phil looked at Henry with respect. “You got it right, I think … At least we know now there were two or more perps.”

  “How so?” Henry said.

  “Somebody must’ve picked up the driver here when he discarded the truck.”

  “Yeah, can’t be any other way,” Henry conceded.

  Phil got out and peered again into the back of the truck. “Well, partner, now I understand why they didn’t take away the two bags of weed. They didn’t have room for them in the back of the truck.”

  “I dunno,” Henry said. “They might have stuffed them in.”

  Phil grimaced. “Not with that mess all over the trunk. Can’t get anyone to buy two bloodstained trash bags of grass, no matter how good the quality.”

  “I keep coming back to the killers’ strategy. How can they not have realized the likelihood of being observed? What’s the basic mindset of a fisherman, Phil?”

  “Mind-numbing boredom?”

  “Right! You’re out there before dawn, nothing to do. Think there might be bears. You consider trying a few casts in the dark to fight off the tedium, even knowing that’s a good way to break your leg. You’re bound to be on the alert for any interruption. Nothing like headlights on a truck to raise your trigger-happy paranoia …”

  “Hey, didn’t Robert Redford do a movie about fishing?”

  “A River Runs Through It.”

  “Liked fishing that much, huh? So he makes the movie, decides to set up a film festival down the road.”

  “No. Sundance predates the movie. He loved the book. I don’t think Redford loves fishing particularly.”

  “Too busy being a movie star.”

  “And director, producer, and festival founder.” Henry and Theresa had attended Sundance the previous winter.

  “Just looking for connections, Henry. They filmed it on that river back there.”

  “No, they didn’t. The book is set in Montana, and they filmed it in Montana. A few scenes in Wyoming, I understand.”

  Phil turned fretful as the rain started again. “Henry?”

  “Yes?”

  “Did you see that stomach wound?”

  “Mm.”

  “One drive to the guts. I bet the blade went right through our Mr. Watson.”

  “So?”

  “Consider this theory, Henry. The executioners — that’s what they are — stabbed Gabriella Watson. That was premeditated and organized. Cut her head off, waited for the husband to come home. They decided to leave the wife behind, so it didn’t matter what they did to her, but the husband had to be loaded in the back of the truck, transported into the hills, carried to the edge of the river, and tipped into the water. Why gut Tom Watson in his living room if you know he’ll be bleeding out in the truck?”

  “You making a point?” Henry prompted drily.

  “I’m not sure. The first execution might have been controlled, however nasty. The second stabbing wasn’t. The knife man panicked. I’m also betting he was shot after being stabbed to make look like an execution.”

  Before Henry could comment, a state police vehicle, lights flashing, pulled into the roadhouse parking lot. One of the troopers from the river got out and waved Phil over for a chat. A minute later, a red cube truck arrived, followed by another cruiser. Even the DEA showed up. Henry and Phil spent the next two hours arguing jurisdiction in the rain while Collins’s people did their work. They never left the parking lot, except to pee in the woods behind the restaurant. By afternoon, they were in such a jumpy state that they were sure Boog DeKlerk had sicced the feds and the Staties on them; if he couldn’t have the case, Homicide couldn’t either.

  Phil placed a call to update Chief Grady. Every police agency and media outlet in Utah would soon latch on to the significance of their discovery. The double stabbing and the attempt to dispose of a body in the fishing grounds of the Wasatch made Hollis Street a major case, potentially bigger than Susan Powell.

  CHAPTER 10

  That night at dinner, Henry wove the fulsome
saga of his misty day in the Wasatch. He knew that he was revealing too much but he convinced himself that Theresa, a tax accountant, understood discretion. In truth, Henry had begun to rely on her common sense commentary on the investigation. The fact that the Hollis Street puzzle seemed to revive her only encouraged his disclosures.

  Theresa nodded at everything he said, until he reached Phil Mohlman’s theory.

  “Panic? Henry, don’t you see? Nobody panicked. Psychopaths don’t panic.”

  By now they had moved from the dining room to the patio, which faced west onto the raw and seemingly infinite desert. They often sat there until nightfall, and they had become connoisseurs of sunsets. The desert had grown into Shangri-La for Theresa. With the move to Coppermount, they had uncapped a wellspring that comforted her each day. Now, in their tranquil refuge, it did not seem at all odd to Henry to talk about the Hollis murders.

  Without telling his wife, Henry had consulted her physician in Alexandria. “I have never been to Utah in my life,” the white-haired diagnostician declared as he stared at a climate chart for the Beehive State, “but be careful where you choose to live. The Goldilocks principle applies. Nothing extreme. High mountains in the …”

  “Wasatch.”

  “That altitude may be too dry, leave her gasping for air. But the desert can be too much, too. Moderation, Henry. I note something else. The pollution in Salt Lake City has become very bad, according to National Institutes of Health numbers. I guess climate change is operative everywhere.”

  The respirologist’s jumbled advice actually pleased Henry, for it meant that Henry had to make the big decision, and he resolved to impress his wife with his determination. He glanced out the window of the doctor’s office at the concrete and glass wasteland of Alexandria. Yes, Utah was what his wife needed.

  Not that their firm decision made the next steps easy. Both of Theresa’s parents recoiled, in their own solipsistic way. Her father was heartbroken: to move east, he felt, should mean never moving back west. Theresa’s mother’s decline complicated their move even more. For Ruth, Theresa’s announcement that she was coming home should have been a triumph over Mitch. But a month later, a stroke robbed her of victory, rendering her near-catatonic. Mitch, hoping to win back some favour from Theresa, set up an account to cover the costs of the nursing home. “The guilt keeps piling on me, doesn’t it?” Mitch said. Henry, swamped himself by all the affliction swirling around him, in his morbid moments wondered if his mother-in-law’s flash of triumph had triggered her stroke. But all in all, he could cope with in-laws. What chilled him was the possibility that his wife was going home to die.

  They pursued the standard home-hunting ritual of young couples, looking at everything in the Salt Lake market in order to figure out what they wanted. Theresa was shrewd about real estate, in a minute sizing up the potential of every kind of house — new and old homes, traditional and adventurous designs, dull neighbourhoods versus trendy communities. She took ten seconds to reject Hollis Street. In hindsight, it seemed inevitable that they would embrace the desert. Still, she surprised Henry by her final choice. They drove west from Salt Lake City one afternoon, not intending to locate that far out, and she instantly fell in love with Coppermount Drive, even though it displayed mostly vacant lots and no human residents. Coppermount, Henry observed, was a last-chance-to-gas-up outpost in the desert, except without the gas pumps. It had been started in the boom era but had stalled with the recession, like so many other housing projects in America.

  “That’s it!” she had declared.

  “I didn’t know that ‘potential’ meant ‘not finished,’” he said.

  “Look at the view from the back patio,” she argued.

  “You mean the patio with no railing and no steps that trails off into infinity?”

  “So you have to jump into the desert. Consider it some kind of metaphor for our new adventures.”

  “What are we buying into? The builder is likely bankrupt.”

  Theresa brightened at the rumble of a front-end loader. “Henry, there’s a tractor rolling down that street over there. Someone’s working.” The machine approached the limit of civilization at the end of Coppermount and turned out of sight behind the last, partly built house. Henry held back from remarking that it might be fleeing the neighbourhood.

  The incompleteness of the project held no terrors for Theresa. The agent understood that she had a sale and permitted Henry and Theresa to spend a night in the house with sleeping bags and takeout dinner. Theresa yearned to see the sunset. Later, Henry concluded that what clinched the deal for Theresa — that night they seemed to be alone on the windswept street — was the spectral sight that emerged on the western horizon. As the setting sun burned deep red and prepared to flare out, a figure in a black suit strode out of the desert towards them. He paused two hundred yards away and, almost deferentially, moved laterally away to the north. Theresa, perhaps hyper-alert for omens, smiled at the stranger. Even with the blinding sun, Henry knew a Mormon when he saw one.

  The next morning, Thomas Abraham Tynan, black suit, string tie, grinning like a salesman, knocked on the front door and introduced himself. “I’m building on the last property down the slope. It’s a folly, but it’s my folly.”

  Tynan became their first friend in their new life.

  “What panic? I don’t see that the killers panicked,” Theresa reiterated. She finished her allowance of wine for the evening and twirled her glass as she waited for him to challenge her.

  Henry took his time responding. He disagreed with his wife and bought into Phil Mohlman’s theory. The whole killing process had been cumbersome and largely improvised.

  “So you think they had it all planned and under control?”

  “No, not all the details,” she said, “but the killers always planned to kill both the Watsons. They were decisive on that point. And they were sending a message, like you agreed.”

  “Right.”

  “And that doesn’t mean they were very efficient or neat about it.”

  “So what are you saying?”

  Theresa stared, as she often did, into the desert horizon. “Look at it this way. The killers didn’t care about the risk.”

  “Oh, really?”

  “I take that back. Put it another way: they were willing to take their time. Time to sever a head, remove a body, plant a bomb, drive up to the Wasatch, and transport the victim to the edge of a cliff.”

  Henry tried to sound neutral. “All calculated to send a message?”

  “Yes.”

  Henry smiled. A product of the evolving roles in their marriage as they began a new life on the “frontier” (his word) was Henry’s growing awareness of his own increased affection for her. Theresa needed him more than ever, and that was good for his ego. At the same time, his debriefings on the Hollis file had brought out a shrewdness in her that he could only envy and indulge.

  “Henry, two contrary things can coexist. That’s why they invented accountants. You think they panicked, because all you see are the mistakes they made. Assume for a minute the killers didn’t panic, even if they didn’t necessarily act in their own best interests. The problem I have is this: the slaughter of the wife and then the husband might amount to an elaborate plan to send a message to rogue drug traders, but wasn’t it all incredibly … exhausting?”

  “Mexican police recently found several dozen heads by the highway near Monterrey. That would be exhausting.”

  “Don’t be facetious. Forget about planned-versus-impulsive. How did the killers on Hollis Street sustain their bloodlust?”

  “Desperation?” Henry said.

  “Nope. It was something else.”

  “So, my love, what sustained them in their demented work?”

  Theresa walked out to the edge of the desert and turned to her policeman husband.

  “Deep anger.”

&
nbsp; CHAPTER 11

  For three weeks, despite a maximum hand-in-glove effort by Mohlman and Pastern, they got no closer to the killers. The detectives knew what was at stake, and the importance of speed. Murders weren’t frequent in West Valley, and double homicides were unthinkable. The execution of the Watsons would stick in the headlines until resolved, and the echo of Susan Powell upbraided them every day.

  Chief Grady’s method of pressuring the Homicide Squad was to convene two-hour meetings every other day and harangue the detectives. “I need a storyline for the media,” he stammered. “Is it terrorism? Drug lords? A disgruntled brother-in-law?”

  Grady understood the need for a focused media line, and “drugs” remained the simplest theme. As the days passed, Phil and Henry felt control shifting more and more towards the Narcotics Squad. “We will keep the big-city scourge of illicit drugs back from our peaceful community,” Chief Grady vowed at one press conference, with Boog DeKlerk, rather than Phil Mohlman, standing beside him.

  DeKlerk faced his own challenge from the relentless insinuations of the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and the FBI. It was too big a drug case for West Valley, they argued. Their subtext was that federal agencies could better handle its cross-jurisdictional dimensions, despite no evidence so far that the killers came from outside Utah.

  The onslaught by the feds temporarily muted the rivalry between the West Valley Drug and Homicide Units.

  “It’s like a game of three-dimensional chess,” Boog declared at the Rose one afternoon.

  “Three-dimensional checkers,” Phil answered. “Don’t let’s flatter ourselves.”

  Henry assembled a binder of profiles of every Hollis Street resident, including the previous owners of vacant units 6 and 8. For each owner, he charted his or her location at the time of Gabriella’s murder and the estimated moment of Tom Watson’s death and removal. Phil and Henry, with support from Jackson, followed up with the locals to lock in the details. They put up an impressive collage of the street layout in one of the interrogation rooms at West Valley headquarters, using a blueprint of the lots as a backdrop, and when that space was needed by other detectives, Henry reinstalled it in his cubicle.