by Aimée Thurlo
“What about Pax’s attack the other night? He mauled that man’s forearm. Have you seen signs of that type of injury on the arm of any of your men?”
“No, I haven’t. With our uniforms being long-sleeved, I’ve had to look extra hard at the way the deputies handle themselves, but nobody appears to be injured.”
“What I still don’t get is why witnessing the exchange of an envelope would be enough to warrant an attempt on Sister Jo’s life—that is, unless it was Bennett paying off whoever killed Jane,” Sister Agatha said.
“That’s a real stretch. Keep in mind that we have no real evidence that Bennett was behind the murder. All we know for sure is that the two didn’t get along. There’s also the possibility that the attack on Sister Jo is unrelated. Maybe it was a transient who felt threatened, or a voyeur who was afraid he’d been discovered.”
“Then why attack her instead of running away? I’m sure the threats all tie in to what she saw, Tom. We’re dealing with a suspect who has some serious know-how, too. Look at the evidence—a small-caliber weapon with an effective silencer, someone playing psychological warfare with e-mails, now a night stalker with a stun weapon and knowledge of how to deal with police dogs. The very fact that there was no blood on the scene of Pax’s attack proves that the man knew how to keep himself from being torn to shreds. Doesn’t all that sound like the same highly trained individual?”
“Those are good points. I’m guessing you’ve got a theory that pulls all those events together?”
She nodded. “Consider last night. The man who attacked Sister Jo brought along a self-defense weapon meant to immobilize an opponent. If he’d really wanted to drown Sister Jo, instead of just trying to scare her, he would have shot her full of electricity. Then, while she was stunned and unable to defend herself, or scream for help, he could have easily held her head underwater. Or he could have just brought his silenced pistol.”
“Makes sense, and I’ll give you this much—it’s looking more and more like the perp is one of my people,” Tom said, his voice hard. “But all I can do right now is continue my investigation and try to weed out the innocent.”
“Let me help you. We have two very different ways of approaching a case, and by sharing information, we’ll get to the answers faster—and maybe save another life.”
“What have you got in mind?”
“For starters, I’d like to speak with Officer Bennett alone.”
“Not going to happen. For legal and a host of other reasons, I insist on handling my own men,” Tom answered emphatically.
Before she could argue, Sister Agatha’s cell phone rang. She looked at the caller ID and said, “It’s Sister Bernarda. Give me a moment.”
Sister Jo had been called to St. Charles to substitute teach for the remainder of the day. As Sister Agatha drove her to the school, she noticed that the young nun looked almost relieved to go back to teaching, a world she knew well. She couldn’t blame her. When Sister Agatha pulled up in front of St. Charles, Sister Jo almost ran inside.
Twenty minutes later, as she and Tom had agreed, Sister Agatha walked through the doors of the sheriff’s department. Fritz was nowhere to be seen. Learning from the duty officer that Tom was in his office with Deputy Bennett and that she’d been asked to join them, she hurried down the hall. Although Tom’s door was closed, she could hear loud, angry voices on the other side.
Sister Agatha knocked, and Tom opened the door, inviting her in. As she stepped into the room, Bennett glowered at her.
Sister Agatha took a seat, and Bennett immediately rolled up both his sleeves and bared his arms. “See? No bite marks, bruises, not even a scratch. I’m being framed. Can’t you two see that?”
“Jane tried to ruin your marriage,” Sister Agatha said. “I heard she was tracking you during her lunch breaks, hoping to catch you cheating on Evelyn.”
“Like I didn’t know,” he spat out. “She’d even snap photos of me with her cell phone whenever she’d see me talking to women deputies. I hated my mother-in-law. I won’t deny it. The old bat was determined to destroy my marriage. But understand this—I had absolutely nothing to do with her death, and I have no idea who killed her. I am not guilty, and I won’t allow anyone to convict me based on a ton of hearsay.”
“Your name keeps coming up in this investigation, Deputy,” Sheriff Green said, “so, officially, you’re a person of interest. That’s as far as it goes, for now. If I had any real evidence, you would have been suspended. You know how this department works.”
Bennett shook his head, a disgusted look on his face. “What galls me is that you’re still not sure I can be trusted, are you, Sheriff?”
“Give me a chance to complete this investigation, Gerry. It’s not like you’re the only one on our list.”
“Who are the others?”
Tom shook his head. “This is my case, not yours, Deputy. You know better than to ask that.”
“Then I’m out of here. I won’t work someplace I’m not trusted, Sheriff.” He took off his badge and slapped it down hard onto Tom’s desk.
Tom pushed the badge back in front of Gerry. “Put this back on, Deputy. I’m advising you to take bereavement leave with pay. Spend some time with your family, and use this as an opportunity to cool off.”
Gerry hesitated for a moment, looked over at Sister Agatha, then took back his badge and pinned it on. “Okay. You make sense, boss. My wife and daughter need me right now anyway.”
Once Gerry had left the office, Tom leaned back in his chair. “This is going to get a lot worse before it gets better.”
“Tom, I have an idea. Let me look into this from the outside. The envelope Sister Jo saw being passed might have been a payoff. If we speculate that money was exchanged, that means there’s a deputy out there with spare cash. You won’t be able to get a warrant to look into your men’s bank records, and it wouldn’t do much good even if you could. No officer with half a brain would sock that money away someplace where it could be traced. But I can nose around unofficially. Let’s see if Sergeant McKay, Craig Goodwin, or Deputy Bennett has made any large purchases lately.”
“I’m under orders to keep you away from my department. I can’t agree to that,” Tom replied.
“No, but you can’t stop me from doing this on my own. Just remember that a nun can talk to a lot of neighbors without raising even the slightest suspicion.”
Tom thought about it for a moment. “Be careful not to get yourself into any trouble. If one of my officers has to bail you out, everything’s going to hit the fan.”
“All I want to do is find out which of the officers is showing signs of a recent windfall.”
“Do not confront these men, and don’t let what you’re doing leak to the public—or, worse, the press. That includes Chuck Moody.”
“He already knows we’re checking into those three officers, Tom, and I need Chuck to provide me with their addresses. He can be trusted to keep his mouth shut for now.”
“He’s your source, Sister Agatha. You control him,” Tom said. “Meanwhile, I’m going to update my résumé in case the mayor gets wind of this.”
After leaving the station, Sister Agatha called Chuck, who quickly provided her with the officers’ addresses. She didn’t bother to ask him where he got the information, and he didn’t volunteer his source.
Sister Agatha drove to Craig Goodwin’s neighborhood first since it was closest. The deputy lived in an older section of town just west of the main highway, with modest housing. Nothing about his home, a rental, set off any alarms. Speaking to some of Craig’s neighbors, Sister Agatha learned that the deputy was young and single. He lived a quiet life, and his spending patterns were modest at best. Goodwin drove a ten-year-old pickup. The seventies-era muscle car undergoing restoration beneath a canvas shelter in the backyard looked like it belonged to a man who enjoyed tinkering with cars. If he’d taken any bribes recently, he’d also had the intelligence to keep from spending that cash ostentatiously.
> Disappointed but not discouraged, Sister Agatha decided to stop by Bennett’s home next since it was between where she was and Michael McKay’s. As she drove down the nearly deserted residential street, she saw no car in the driveway or carport, and from the drawn curtains it didn’t appear that Evelyn was home.
Sister Agatha parked the Antichrysler and took a leisurely stroll around the block, cutting through the alley so she could see the Bennetts’ backyard. There was an inexpensive swing set, a handmade playhouse, and an old brick barbecue that dated from the sixties. They also had an ancient picnic table, one of those redwood ones with the matching benches. Sister Agatha remembered one in her own backyard when she was growing up.
She was on her way back to the Antichrysler when she suddenly spotted an adult man’s bright red bicycle in the yard next door. It was a long shot, but since it matched the description of Louis’s stolen bike, knobby tires and all, it wasn’t something she could afford to ignore.
With a bright smile, she waved at the man wearing ear protectors and safety goggles as he fed a piece of lumber through a table saw.
The first four “Yoo-hoo, sirs” went unheeded. The man, in his early sixties, finally finished the cut he was making and turned off the saw. Taking advantage of the silence, she called out to him again. This time, the man turned around, surprised to see her standing by the fence.
“Can I do something for you, Sister?” he asked, removing his ear protection.
“I was just admiring your bike! It looks almost new.”
“Yeah, that’s what I was thinking. I was cleaning out my garage, hauling stuff over to the big trash bin the county brought for our neighborhood’s cleanup day, and there it was, sitting right on top. Someone had just tossed it in, apparently. I got it out and brought it home. Even the tires are new. People throw out perfectly good things these days. I thought it might have been stolen, but it didn’t have a license plate and there was no name on it anywhere. So I figured I’d watch the newspaper for a few days, and if it wasn’t listed as missing, I’d sell it.”
He opened the side gate and let her into his yard. “The reflector’s broken, but otherwise it’s in perfect condition. You interested?”
Sister Agatha studied the bike. “I think I know someone who might be.”
18
THE MAN SMILED. “SEND HIM OVER. I’M RETIRED, USUALLY here, so anytime’s good. Joe Gomez’s the name,” he said, offering her his hand.
Sister Agatha shook it. “I’m Sister Agatha, Mr. Gomez. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
“That’s where I found the bicycle,” he said, pointing toward the easement behind his property.
She looked at the big green metal bin again, having passed by it just a few minutes earlier.
After thanking Mr. Gomez, Sister Agatha made her way back in the direction of the Dumpster. Suddenly she was very glad she hadn’t brought Pax along with her this morning. Knowing she might have to climb in there herself was bad enough, but dogs love trash, and if Pax had been around he’d have insisted on jumping in, with or without her.
As soon as she reached the Dumpster, Sister Agatha realized it was taller than she’d initially thought. Even standing on a metal support, she could only see the debris and trash at the full end.
There was no other choice. She’d have to climb in, and the full end was the place to do it. Grateful that she was wearing the black sneakers she reserved for motorcycle use instead of her usual convent sandals, Sister Agatha pulled herself up and over. She landed on an old door lying atop some broken cinder blocks. Normally, nothing could have compelled her to crawl inside a giant trash container. Yet pieces of evidence were still missing, and something was urging her to keep looking.
The bin was only half full, and most of the items thrown inside it were worn-out appliances, scrap building materials, and broken furniture too big for normal trash pickup. Except for that one corner, where someone had dumped in branches from pruned rosebushes, the search wasn’t as hard as she’d expected. Though the missing piece of reflector was nowhere to be found, what kept her in the bin searching was the hope that the killer had discarded the murder weapon here.
She was using a piece of wood to shift some of the lumber resting on the bottom when she heard a dull metallic clunk. A few feet in front of her, resting between two broken pieces of plywood, she found the frame of a partially disassembled automatic pistol.
She made no attempt to touch it. Instead, she reached for the cell phone and called Sheriff Green.
“I’ll be there in less than ten minutes. Don’t let anyone near that trash bin.”
As Sister Agatha crawled back out, a telephone lineman parked beside one of the phone boxes along the easement saw her. He waved and jogged over.
“I knew the monastery was having some tough times, Sister, but I never realized things were this bad.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a twenty. “God bless you.”
Stunned, Sister Agatha stared at the twenty in her hand. As the man walked away, she suddenly realized what had happened. He’d thought she’d been scavenging. Seeing the man driving away in his repair truck, she knew she couldn’t give the money back now. She placed it in her pocket. With a gentle sigh, she took comfort in the sure knowledge that God would bless him a thousandfold for the gift he’d just given them.
Hours later, Sister Agatha was sitting alone in the sheriff’s office. When Tom came back in, he placed a hot dog on a napkin in front of her. “Lots of mustard, chili, and onions, just the way you like it.”
“You remembered my weakness for hot dogs! Thanks,” she said, taking a large bite.
He filled her in after swallowing a huge bite from his enormous submarine sandwich. “You stumbled across a treasure chest of evidence this morning, Sister. Not even the mayor is going to complain this time. Your find could crack this case wide open. Underneath all the rose cuttings, crime scene officers found the rest of the pistol, including a crude but effective silencer. It was patterned from a design available in a widely circulated early seventies publication called The Anarchist Cookbook. They also found the magazine—loaded except for one round—and a spent .22 shell casing. The bad part is that they were unable to lift any prints at all. It’s especially frustrating because human blood was found on the outer metal casing of the silencer, and its type matches the victim’s.”
“Have they test-fired the pistol yet, and did the bullet match the slug recovered from Jane Sanchez’s body?” Sister Agatha asked.
“The bullet that killed Jane was too deformed for us to make a positive match, but the firing pin strike and the ejection marks on the recovered shell casing match the pistol. That’s how we were able to determine that it was fired from the same weapon.”
“So what now?” she asked.
“The serial number on the pistol was filed down, but we’ll be sending the frame to another lab. Maybe experts there can recover some of the numbers using an acid etching technique. If we’re lucky, we’ll find out who the original owner of the weapon was, and that’ll narrow the field some more.”
“Anything else?”
Tom nodded. “We also found Jane’s cell phone in that Dumpster. It had been stomped to pieces but I sent the SIM card and the rest to a forensic lab to try to restore the memory. I checked, and not all the data is stored on the card, so we might get lucky, who knows?”
“Jane struck me as someone from the written message generation,” Sister Agatha said. “What about those missing memo pads? Find any?”
“As a matter of fact, yes. There were three or four pads, all hot pink, right next to the cell phone. Jane’s fingerprints were on the bottom of two of the pads. I asked the lab techs to check for impressions of words on the paper—in case Jane had written something incriminating that had slipped past the killer. I mean, why else would the killer want to take them?”
“Has Louis identified the red bicycle at Mr. Gomez’s as the one Jane gave him?”
“He didn’t have to. Jane had sa
ved the sales receipt from the bike shop, and the serial numbers match.”
“The killer obviously saw no need to change those—he knew that the bike couldn’t be used to positively ID him unless he’d left his prints on it—but the way he removed the serial numbers from the gun and dumped the physical evidence screams of someone well acquainted with police procedure. All that points right back to Officer Bennett, who conveniently lives within a stone’s throw of that trash bin.”
Seeing Tom scowl, she added, “The problem with all this, of course, is that the trail’s much too obvious. Any police officer would know better than to go through all those evidence-concealing measures, then turn right around and dump the murder weapon, the bicycle, and all the rest within sight of his own home. The killer must have known that the bicycle would be found by the next person using the bin. Any kid walking by would have pulled it out.”
“Agreed. So if we assume Bennett was set up and rule him out, that leaves Goodwin or McKay—and no apparent motive.”
“Goodwin leads a very simple life, from what I managed to learn. He doesn’t strike me as the kind who’d be money hungry.” She described what she’d seen.
Tom nodded. “He likes to tinker with cars. If anyone in our department is having a problem with their personal vehicle, he’ll fix it for a six-pack and the cost of parts. Still, he might have a money stash and is just waiting for things to blow over before he starts setting himself up with a first-class auto shop.”
“What do you know about Sergeant McKay?” she asked and saw him stiffen. “Tom, I’m sorry,” she added softly. “I know this is hard on you, having to decide which one of your deputies has gone bad.”
“My people all work hard and give the job everything—including, at times, their lives. Our department has a lot to be proud of, but when one officer is dirty, the rest of us pick up the smell. That’s an incredibly frustrating fact of life, particularly because most of my officers live for the department. The trail of divorces is ample proof of their dedication to the job,” he answered.
