The Survivors Club

by J. Carson Black

  But in this case, there was no message. She was pretty sure of that now.

  Someone had tried to make it look like a hit.

  Which meant someone knew what he was doing.

  Steve Barkman had been obsessed with Hanley’s death. To be more accurate, Steve Barkman had been obsessed with the way Hanley died.

  Multiple gunshots.

  Tess had checked out George Hanley’s MacBook Pro from evidence. Maybe now she’d get some answers.

  She spent an hour going through his files. There were very few. She went through his bookmarks on Firefox and his history. There was very little in history, mostly stuff that didn’t mean much. How to fix a leaky faucet. A few cop sites and a gun catalog. Cabela’s online.

  There were a number of photos of places in southern Arizona. Many of them of buffelgrass and the volunteers. Pictures of Credo, some of the tours he led there. A few homes—maybe because he thought he’d be moving out of his apartment soon. One of them quite nice, up on a hill, with tall trees around it.

  And there were photos of Adele.

  Tess had a Mac, too. The first view in “Finder” was not of the photos themselves, except for little squares you couldn’t see to the right of the print, but letters and numbers: DSC120234.JPG through DSC120240.JPG. So at first Tess didn’t know what the photos would be, except for a brief description. But she figured “Adele” was a pretty good signpost.

  Tess clicked through the photos of Adele. Pretty dog. One side of her face was colored brown. Her chest and legs were white. The rest of her was that blue-gray color populated with black spots. One of the spots looked a little like a bow tie.

  There were times when her memory was a pain in the ass. Times when she didn’t want to remember the terrible things she saw. Like George Hanley’s desecrated body.

  But this time, she was grateful for it. This time it made her job a whole hell of a lot easier.

  Jaimie Wolfe stood in the center of the riding ring, shouting instructions to her students. When she saw Tess, she turned her back and ignored her.

  That was fine with Tess.

  The dogs came up. They milled around her, asking to be petted. Tess patted each one, rubbed their ears, let them sniff her hands, massaged their chests and rumps. Inundated with slavering tongues and wagging tails. She took a knee, the better to pat them, and let them surround her with doggy attention.

  Jaimie glanced back at her once, then pointedly ignored her once again.

  Tess rubbed her hands in the Australian shepherd’s luxurious coat. “Good Bandit,” she said. “Nice Bandit.” Jaimie Wolfe’s boy dog. Tess reached down and around the dog’s tummy. Slid her hands back, reveling in the soft, luxurious fur. Reached down and between the dog’s legs. She was gentle but thorough. “Good boy,” she said.

  Jaimie glanced her way.

  “Good boy!” But by that time, Tess knew Bandit wasn’t a boy at all.

  It wasn’t even Bandit.

  Back at the sheriff’s office, Tess pulled Jaimie Wolfe’s DL and put together a photo lineup. She chose five other women of approximately the same age and body type. All of them were photos from driver’s licenses. Then she took off for Animal Control and found Sally, the woman who had processed the dog’s adoption.

  “Do you recognize any of these women?” Tess asked.

  Sally pointed to the photograph of Jaimie. “That one. She was the one who adopted the dog you were asking about.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I can look it up. But I’m sure. I remember, because I really like her hair.”

  Yes, Jaimie Wolfe had glorious hair.

  In the car, Tess had the SABEL list printout. One of the members of SABEL was a woman named Bernadette Colvin—the woman who supposedly adopted George Hanley’s dog, Adele.

  Tess drove to her townhome and rang the bell.

  It was the same as last time. The street was empty. The blinds pulled in the window. The garage door closed.

  Tess was about to get back into her Tahoe when a car drove up the street and parked across the way. She hailed the woman when she got out.

  “Do you know the woman who lives here?” she asked. “Bernadette Colvin?”

  The woman saw her badge and her brow knitted. “Something wrong? I thought she was already gone.”

  “Gone?”

  “She’s in assisted living. Her family is putting the house up for sale.”

  Tess said, “Do you know how I can contact her?”

  “Her daughter used to come by here with her kids,” the woman said. “To see their grandma. But I honestly don’t know how you’d get in touch with her.”

  “Anything you can tell me about her family?”

  The woman thought for a minute. “One time they came over and the little girls were dressed to go riding.”

  “Riding?”

  “Boots, breeches. Like you see in the Olympics.”

  The DeKoven family:

  Tess started with what she knew: Michael was a financial advisor whose office was at the top of the highest building in the city. Jaimie was divorced and ran a riding school. The youngest, Brayden, was divorced with a little girl. She practiced real estate law and had put up her shingle at her home in Tucson. And the second youngest, Chad, lived in Laguna Beach, California.

  Tess spent some time looking for and accessing a Tucson Lifestyle article on the DeKoven family from a couple of years ago. There had been stunning photographs of the ancestral home—Zinderneuf—named by the great-great-grandfather after the doomed fortress in P. C. Wren’s epic novel, Beau Geste. The house was Moorish, built in the 1940s at the height of the architectural style’s popularity, on a bench of land overlooking the Rincon Valley not far from the old and now-defunct Rita Ranch. Michael and his wife and two children lived there.

  The article profiled the family in all its glory: the four heirs to the DeKoven dynasty.

  Instead of bored kids standing out in the sun for a ribbon-cutting ceremony, these were polished adults, posing for the beautifully orchestrated family photo. Inside the exquisite Moorish house, the light from the picture window filtered in, catching them perfectly coifed and handsome.

  A beautiful family, the DeKovens.

  Tess’s gaze fell on Jaimie. Why would Jaimie take George Hanley’s dog and pass her off as one of her own?

  The woman smiled vacuously into the camera.

  Tess knew Jaimie enjoyed the game. And it was a game. She’d bird-dogged her own brother, sending Tess his way by telling her Michael was George Hanley’s financial advisor, when in fact he wasn’t. Tess got the feeling that Jaimie enjoyed playing people one against the other.

  Tess found a few newspaper articles and accessed public records as she tried to put together a picture of the family.

  The history of the DeKoven family was similar to other cattle baron/mining magnate/politicians who made a fortune in the state in the early part of the twentieth century: wrangling over land, water and mineral rights, Apache attacks (back in the 1890s), and various ventures in the new era, including aviation and moving pictures. The story was always colorful and sometimes heartbreaking, like the time DeKoven’s great-grandfather lost his daughter when she played in a creek during a thunderstorm and was swept away.

  A couple of incidents were dramatic. Quentin DeKoven, Michael’s father, was the lone survivor of a small single-engine plane crash in northern Arizona. After dragging the dying pilot nearly three miles though rugged country and spending the night in frigid temperatures, DeKoven was found by the search team, nearly dead from exposure.

  He subsequently lost two fingers on one hand and a foot to frostbite.

  Tess read between the lines. Despite his heroism, Quentin DeKoven was not a nice man. He steamrolled over congressmen and governors, mowing down his opposition with money and lies. His businesses flourished. His business practices rode roughshod over the competition. He ran for governor and lost.

  He and his wife, Eloise, had five children. The eldest,
Quentin Jr., died at ten in a freak accident—a baseball hit him in the head during a Little League game.

  According to the magazine, life was never the same again in the DeKoven household.

  Zinderneuf was a beautiful place—but it was also an unhappy one. After Quentin Jr.’s death, Eloise rarely went out in public and wrote bitter letters to the editor of the local newspaper—screeds. Mostly about politics, but her vitriol regarding just about every subject, no matter how insignificant, was legendary.

  She died at a relatively young age—she’d been ill.

  Quentin DeKoven died ten years later almost to the day, when his private plane abruptly lost altitude and crashed into a wilderness area in the Pinaleño Mountains. The ensuing fire consumed a couple hundred acres of pristine forest.

  Tess called Cheryl Tedesco at TPD. “Have you interviewed Michael DeKoven yet?”

  “I’m doing it later today.”

  “You mind if I come along as an observer?”

  “Can you get here in an hour?”

  “Make it an hour and twenty minutes, and I’m there.”

  “See you then.”

  Tess took I-19 to I-10, amazed as usual at the sprawl. Tan-colored houses spread like a circuit board across the desert valley. She’d been to Vail a few years ago, and was surprised by the change in the area. Once Vail had been a collection of old buildings and a beautiful Catholic church in a rural area. Now it was a sprawling outlet-mall-slash-fast-food jungle. She spotted Cheryl Tedesco’s car at a pull-out just off the freeway. Cheryl flashed her lights and pulled out onto Colossal Cave Road. Tess followed.

  By the time they reached Old Spanish Trail, the jillions of Monopoly houses had disappeared in favor of more expensive homes on larger lots, and finally to open land. Tess glanced at the wrinkled flanks of the Rincon Mountains, still pristine for the most part, especially the higher you looked. The road curved and dipped in and out of a mesquite bosque. Now they were in ranch country. There was a sprinkle of expensive new homes in the foothills—Thunderhead Ranch. On the right a dirt road headed up into the wilderness. Cheryl turned onto the dirt road.

  Tess dropped back to avoid the chalky dust funneling up from Cheryl’s vehicle—so dry out here. The road was a washboard. They went several miles. They rounded a curve and Tess spotted a house a couple of miles ahead, looking down at them from a high promontory. Shaded by giant eucalyptus trees and Aleppo pines, the walls in the afternoon sunlight were dull red brown.

  Zinderneuf.

  Up the hill and into a clearing for parking.

  There were two cars in the lot. One was a silver Toyota 4Runner with a rack for bicycles on the back. The other still had the temporary sticker in the window. The car was a dark blue luxury sports sedan Tess didn’t recognize—but she knew it was expensive. It was also unusual—sleek and dangerous-looking. She leaned down to read the make and model just behind the front wheel: Fisker Karma. Both cars were parked outside, but there was a four-door garage, painted to match the house, at the edge of the lot. Tess wondered how practical a low-slung car like that was, given the flash floods that inundated Tucson in the summer. There were a few low spots in the dirt road up here.

  “This guy really is rich,” Cheryl said.

  “No kidding.”

  The Moorish building could have been in Tangiers. Royal palms clustered around the entrance. A tall wall surrounded a courtyard. In the wall was a gate inset with a mosaic of peacocks. The house was two stories high and sprawled along the hilltop. Beyond, Tess saw a rectangular swimming pool that must have gone in in the forties, and a smaller, similar house on the other side.

  “That must be their Mini-Me,” Tess deadpanned. With Danny out of commission, she felt it incumbent upon herself to be the wisecracker.

  Cheryl pressed the doorbell. They waited. She pressed it again. “He said he would be here.”

  Tess glanced back at the parking lot. She assumed the Fisker Karma belonged to Michael. It looked like something he would drive.

  Then the door opened. Michael DeKoven greeted them. He was wearing a bathrobe. He said, “Don’t tell me. You’re here to sell me a magazine subscription.”

  The inside of the house didn’t look as nice as it had in the Tucson Lifestyle spread. There seemed to be furniture missing, and some of the beautiful things Tess had noticed—like a Tiffany lamp—were gone.

  DeKoven excused himself to change. Tess realized that this was the second time she’d met him when he was half-dressed.

  He returned, wearing a Ski Aspen T-shirt, madras shorts, and boat shoes, sans socks. Tess had seen his well-developed cyclist’s calves before.

  He caught her looking and smiled. “Real men shave their legs.” Then he said to Tess, “You get around, don’t you?”

  Cheryl said, “How about the kitchen table? We might as well sit down.”

  He led the way to a kitchen that had been remodeled to accommodate industrial-size appliances. They sat around the table. Tess farthest away, hoping to fade into the woodwork and let this be between the two of them. She would watch him for truthfulness, or any tells that might show he was lying.

  Cheryl set down the minirecorder and made her introduction—the date, time, who she was interviewing, who was a witness, the case number, and the name of the victim. She started with asking him simple questions—his occupation, who was in his immediate family. Then she asked DeKoven if he knew George Hanley.

  “I met him once or twice. He’s a friend of my sister’s.”

  “Did you ever work with him professionally?”

  “I thought this was about Barkman. You mentioned him on the phone.”

  “We’ll get to that, but would you please answer the question?”

  “I’ll tell you what I told Ms., uh…” He looked at Tess, as if he had forgotten her name. “My sister suggested I take Mr. Hanley on as a client. The old guy came in, we talked, and he left. I never saw him again.”

  Cheryl asked if he knew Steve Barkman.

  DeKoven folded his arms and pressed his index finger to his lips. “Mr. Barkman’s mother is a sitting judge in Pima County. I might have met him once or twice—maybe at the symphony. No—a fundraiser. His mother…introduced us.” He looked from one to the other, all innocence. “What does this all have to do with me? You weren’t clear on the phone.”

  “What would you think if I told you that Steve Barkman was investigating you? Would that surprise you?”

  He stared at her. Then he frowned—all innocence. “Investigating me?”

  “He seemed to center around April tenth. Were you in town on April tenth?”

  He looked bemused. “I’m sure I was.”

  “You’re sure.”

  He crossed his leg to the other side and rested his hand on his chin. “What are you saying here? Should I have a lawyer present?”

  “These are just questions,” Cheryl said. “If you like, we could have a more official interview downtown.”

  He absorbed this, then smiled—no harm, no foul. “No, that’s okay. I have nothing to hide. April tenth…I worked all day at DeKoven Financial—I’m pretty sure of the date because I had a big account that I had to ride herd on—deadlines are a bitch—and after that I came home for dinner here at the ranch. Ask my wife, she’ll tell you.”

  “We’ll do that.”

  “Have at it.”

  He was sure of himself on this point. Maybe it was because his wife would lie for him, or maybe because he was telling the truth. Any way you looked at it, Tess was pretty sure Michael’s wife wouldn’t say anything.

  Cheryl said, “Is your wife here?”

  “No, she’s out with friends at the moment.” He held Cheryl’s gaze.

  Tess couldn’t tell if he was lying or not. There was a hint of a dare in his eyes, which went well with the self-satisfied smirk.

  She had to remind herself that just because she didn’t like him, just because he made something recoil inside her, didn’t mean he was anything more than a sociopathic
financial advisor.

  Cheryl said, “What about March twenty-eighth? Were you here in town?”

  “I’d have to look. I’ve gone to Phoenix twice in the last month.”

  “Could you do that?”

  He pulled out his phone and looked at dates. Held it up for her to see. There was nothing marked for those dates, which didn’t necessarily prove anything. But it didn’t disprove anything either.

  “You weren’t in Houston?”

  “Houston? Why would I go to Houston?”

  Cheryl moved on. “Do you know a man named Alec Sheppard?”

  He looked mystified. “Who?”

  “Alec Sheppard. He lives in Houston.”

  DeKoven shook his head. “I’m sorry, no.”

  “Don’t be sorry, I’m just asking you about him.” She smiled.

  He smiled back.

  Cheryl Tedesco said, “Alec Sheppard has indicated that he knows you. He claims you were in Houston at the SkyView Center.”

  Tess and Cheryl both knew that there was no record of Michael DeKoven going to Houston. No flight information, no hotel information. Tess knew that Cheryl had been scrupulous in her search. But that didn’t mean he didn’t go.

  “Mr. Sheppard says he recognized you,” Cheryl lied.

  All’s fair in love and war.

  “Then this Mr. Sheppard is either a liar, or needs to get new glasses, or there’s something screwy up here.” He wound his finger around his ear. “You might want to do more research—especially on this guy. Because I don’t know him from Adam.”

  “He claims you made a gesture.”

  “What kind of gesture?”

  “That’s what I’d like to hear from you.”

  He stared at Cheryl. His eyes were dark glass. You could not see into them. There seemed to be nothing there. Not anger, not worry—nothing. “I haven’t been to Houston in years.”

  He sounded solid. Just the right amount of outrage—not over-the-top. Other than the strange feeling that he was above it all, and better than them, he gave them nothing.