Desert Rage

by Betty Webb

  “One more question. How will this affect my investigation?”

  “Positively, as it turns out. Dr. Teague doesn’t believe Alison is capable of murder, and is eager to have his niece exonerated. In fact, he is so adamant that you continue your work, he’s authorized you to enter his brother’s house.” He cleared his throat. “The scene of the crime, so to speak.”

  “I need to talk to Dr. Teague.”

  “He’ll arrive in Phoenix this evening, so I’ll work with Mr. Showalter to arrange something early. In the meantime, you’ll be given free access to the property, always providing the police are amenable. They’ve had to station a patrolman at the house to scare away vandals and looters, but the crime techs have already gone over the place from top to bottom and cleared it. Shall I call Mr. Showalter and have him messenger the keys over to your office?”

  “Absolutely.” I couldn’t have asked for better news, because there was always the chance the crime techs had missed something.

  “Nice talking to you, then, Miss Jones.”

  “Nice talking to you, too, Mr. Zellar,” I replied, and for once, it was true.

  ***

  I’d been back at Desert Investigations less than an hour when an InstaMessenger dropped off the keys.

  Ten minutes later I drove through the entrance to Palomino Estates, a small enclave off Indian Bend Road, where house prices ran from eight hundred thou to a million and change. Designed for privacy, the main drag of Palomino Circle linked ten cul-de-sacs, where most of the custom-built homes, only three per cul-de-sac, backed up to the Greenway Golf Course. After a few wrong turns in this circle-within-a-circle development, I finally found 16733 East Yellow Horse Drive, where a uniformed police officer waited to escort me through the house. His name tag identified him as L. Bocelli. When I asked him if he was related to Detective Louis Bocelli, my former partner at Scottsdale PD, he smiled.

  “My uncle. I was named for him.”

  “Then tell Louie I said hi.”

  A makeshift memorial had been set up in front of the Camerons’ house. Smiling photographs of the victims, flowers—both real and fake—candles, stuffed animals, a toy rocket, and sympathy cards and notes sprawled against a hand-painted sign that said, in shaky blue letters, REMEMBER THE CAMERONS. I spent a moment reading the notes—one of them, unsigned, written in a delicate woman’s handwriting—said I will always love you. That singular “you” made me wonder which of the Camerons the note’s writer grieved for. Maybe Dr. Cameron had a lover. If so, we should find her. Rejected lovers sometimes revenged themselves in brutal ways.

  “Ready to go in?” Officer Bocelli asked.

  “Ready as I’ll ever be.”

  The architecture of the Cameron house wasn’t remarkable, just your basic Mediterranean sprawl. But its location explained why the bodies hadn’t been discovered until six p.m., when Mrs. Cameron’s book club had shown up to discuss Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom. Like its neighbors, the house was located at the end of a cul-de-sac, and backed up on the opposite side of the same golf course as Tiffany Browning-Meyers’ home. At midday on a sweltering mid-July Monday, that golf course would have been pretty much deserted. Not that the house’s isolated situation mattered, since photographs of the Camerons’ bodies showed duct tape over their ankles, legs, and mouths.

  “You might want to look in the garage first,” Louie’s nephew said, pulling me away from that image.

  “The garage? Why?”

  “To start off slow. The house, well, I was in there once, and it’s intense. Besides, what happened in the garage is interesting, too.”

  There’s not much I haven’t seen, but the fact that Bocelli wanted me to begin the tour in a four-car garage intrigued me. As soon as we rolled up the door, I understood why.

  The killer, whoever he/she was, hadn’t even spared the family’s cars.

  The windows of a 1957 Corvette convertible were smashed, its Polo White and Inca Silver body defaced with red spray enamel. Even the red Venetian leather upholstery was slashed. But it was the damage done to the 1955 Ford Thunderbird convertible that made me want to weep. The gorgeous turquoise thing was keyed in a crosshatch pattern, then spray-painted with red stripes. What looked like acid had eaten away at the whitewall tires and turquoise-and-white upholstery. Shredded bits of the soft top lay scattered on the garage floor. Similar damage had been inflicted on a silver Escalade.

  “Impound yard has the mother’s Lexus LS, the one the kids escaped in. Turned out not to be hard to spot, a brand new silver Lexus LS sedan partially sprayed red, paint all bubbled up in the acid attack. Still had the dealer’s tags.”

  “Acid’s rough on cars,” I said, still mourning over the Thunderbird.

  He looked down at the garage’s cement floor. “Yeah, but that’s nothing compared to what happened to the family.”

  I studied the young cop’s face. He was in his early twenties. “You saw?”

  “I caught the welfare check. One of the book ladies called it in when Mrs. Cameron didn’t come to the door. They noticed that it was ajar, so after repeatedly ringing the doorbell and rousing no one, they walked in. And saw what they saw. They’re probably still screaming.”

  “Finding the Camerons like that must have been rough on you, too.”

  “My first homicides, and wouldn’t you know one of them had to be a kid.” A quick, stricken look. “Whoever did this disabled the alarm first.” He jutted out his chin, making a big show of being tough.

  “You say ‘whoever,’ Officer Bocelli. Does that mean you don’t believe the story that Alison Cameron and her boyfriend committed the murders?”

  “What I think doesn’t matter. I’m just a patrolman. Ready to see the house?”

  “Let’s do it.”

  When I opened the door leading into the kitchen, the combined stench of blood, rotting Chinese food, and another odor I couldn’t quite identify rocked me back. Certain companies specialize in cleaning crime scenes, but probably because of the difficulty reaching the victim’s brother, they hadn’t yet begun their job. The kitchen looked and smelled like a battleground, which I guess it was. Glasses lay smashed on the floor, food cans and milk had been opened and dumped on the black granite counters. The same red paint that defaced the cars had been sprayed on the Sub-Zero refrigerator door, and it had dribbled down to collect in a pool on the black-and-white marble tile floor.

  After taking a few pictures with my iPhone, I moved into the formal dining room, Bocelli following close behind.

  When the murderer broke in, the Camerons had been eating lunch at a long mahogany table. The few dishes not broken or carried away by the crime techs still held rotting portions of Chinese takeout. The crime scene photos showed three takeout cartons from Zhou’s Mandarin Wok, but remnants of their contents—possibly almond chicken—were still puddled on the table. Because the house was almost hermetically sealed, as most Arizona homes are during the hot summer, insect infestation wasn’t too far along. Still, the food appeared to be moving.

  All it takes is one fly.

  A plate lay smashed on the floor, its contents spilled onto pegged-oak flooring. Other plates, riffled from the big mahogany china hutch, had been hurled against the wall, splattering the damask coverings with sweet and sour sauce. Or blood. Each chair was overturned, splintered into kindling. So, too, the hutch, either a Duncan Phyfe, or a good copy. Tiny bits of gilt and glass littered the floor and the dining table, a mystery until I looked up and saw the dangling remnant of a crystal chandelier.

  Black fingerprint powder was sprinkled everywhere.

  I took more pictures.

  The living room had once been beautiful, a symphony of oak, marble, and silk underneath a three-story vaulted ceiling. The oak floor was broken up by three Oriental silk rugs, their pastel hues mirroring beautiful peach- and blue-tinted sofas and chairs, but all the upholstery had been s
lashed to ribbons. Above the marble-fronted fireplace hung a life-sized oil portrait of Alexandra Cameron, who had also once been beautiful. Dark hair, dark eyes, perfect features accented by a lush mouth—her face and figure bore a strong resemblance to the actress Angelina Jolie. The painting was the only thing in the room that remained undamaged, almost as if the killer had relished the thought of it looking down on the carnage below.

  The walls and floor where the bodies had been found were dappled in blood spatter, so much so that it dizzied my eyes, forcing me to concentrate on the three darker areas where the Camerons had finally, and mercifully, died. The boy, next to an ottoman; the mother, near the fireplace; Dr. Cameron, duct-taped to a chair facing them. If the medical examiner was right, he had been forced to watch his wife and son tortured before dying himself.

  “Christ,” Bocelli muttered under his breath.

  “Don’t see him around.” After I’d photographed every drop of blood, spilled food, and gutted piece of furniture, I said, “There had to be a lot of noise while all this was going on, even with their mouths taped shut.” When bones break, they don’t break silently. A baseball bat hitting a skull makes some noise, too. As does a gunshot.

  Bocelli cleared his throat. “I hear these high-end houses are pretty much soundproofed. Even if they weren’t, the neighbor on the left was in Venice, the one in Italy, not California, and the neighbors on the right were at their ranch in Wyoming.”

  In Scottsdale, everyone who could manage it left town during the summer months. Those who had to work remained, such as maids, cops, and Emergency Room physicians.

  “Yeah, and since the golf course in back was pretty much deserted on a hot Monday afternoon—my research says the temp made it to one-seventeen that day—few golfers would have been around to hear anything, either,” I responded.

  “If two kids really did do this, it would make you think twice about having a family, wouldn’t it?” Bocelli said.

  There was nothing to say to that, so I just kept snapping pictures until it was time to check the other rooms. With Bocelli trailing behind, I walked down the hall to Dr. Cameron’s den, where a new stench met me. Most dens are small hidey-holes, usually repurposed bedrooms. Not the good doctor’s. Two brass-plated oak doors opened into a suite-sized space furnished with a wall of built-in mahogany cabinets and an antique desk the size of the ruined Escalade in the garage. But like the dining and living rooms, the desk’s beauty had been destroyed, this time by a brown smear of what looked and smelled like feces across its surface.

  Seeing my expression, Bocelli volunteered, “Dog shit. That’s what I hear, anyway.”

  “Why dog shit?” I’d seen plenty of feces-smeared rooms in my career, but in every case, the feces had been human. This departure from the norm unsettled me.

  Bocelli shrugged. “Who knows what went through those sickos’ minds.”

  I moved away from the reeking desk and studied the walls. The glass-covered prints of classic cars had been knocked off their hangers, and lay shattered and ripped on the oak floor. More red spray enamel took the artworks’ place. Near the sliding glass doors to a private patio, the remnants of a Samsung E2420L monitor lay on its side, but the hard drives of every computer in the house, along with every iPhone, were at the police lab. Their read-outs were in the case file back at Desert Investigations.

  Wreckage this complete and planned—the killer or killers, plural, had to transport a giant helping of dog feces to the household—signaled an intense and personal animus, not random violence. The fact that Dr. Cameron’s body was positioned so that he was forced to watch the torture-deaths of his wife and child identified him as the target victim. The agonies of Alexandra and Alec were merely a means to that end.

  Further searching revealed nothing useful left in Dr. Cameron’s den. Every drawer in the desk and file cabinets had been opened, their contents confiscated by the police.

  “Lots of rage here,” I said, to Bocelli.

  “Seems to be everywhere these days, doesn’t it?”

  Another unanswerable question. Leaving the young cop to reflect on the state of the world, I got busy taking pictures. Since so little was left, I wound up spending much less time in the den than in the previous rooms, so a few minutes later I was climbing the stairs to the second floor, Bocelli trailing behind me like a loyal puppy.

  The master bedroom was a disaster, with the mattress slashed to a fare-thee-well, but at least the Camerons’ attacker hadn’t massaged dog feces into the Tempur-Pedic. The master bath was worse. Every mirror had been shattered, the long granite countertop split in two, the porcelain top on the toilet bowl smashed against the tile floor. More feces had been smeared in the sauna-sized bathtub. I held my breath as long as I could, but finally had to inhale. Due to the hard surfaces and closed nature of the bathroom, the stench was worse than the den’s.

  “You about done?” Bocelli called from the window, where he stood looking out. By this point, he had seen all he wanted to see.

  “There’s still the kids’ rooms,” I called back. “And the maid’s.”

  “No damage in the maid’s.”

  I still wanted to see for myself, but a quick check found Eldora Morales’ room immaculate. The Camerons hadn’t skimped on her comfort. As maids’ rooms go, hers was large and well-furnished, with a roomy double bed, a dresser, a chest of drawers, a small desk-and-chair setup, a comfy-looking recliner, a radio, and a flat-screen TV. It could have served as a room in any mid-priced motel, except for the photographs. Like most live-ins, Morales surrounded herself with pictures of her family. From the landscape in the backgrounds I could see they lived in Mexico. I recognized the beach at Rocky Point.

  Obviously, the killer held no grudge against her.

  But the fact that the murders happened during the maid’s trip to Mexico made me wonder about the timing. A coincidence? Or did the killer know the maid’s schedule? If it was the latter, then the killer was either someone who knew them well, or someone who had been casing the house over a period of time. That, as well as other things I’d seen since entering the house, nagged at me.

  “Ready for the kids’ rooms?” Bocelli asked.

  “Not really.”

  “Me neither. In a way, those are the worst.”

  When I looked into Ali’s room, that nagging feeling grew even stronger. Girls were hyper-protective of their belongings, and I couldn’t see her allowing anyone to slash her collection of stuffed animals, or smear dog feces all over her pink walls. But everything in here was as savaged as most of the other rooms I’d seen.

  “Used to be very girlie,” Bocelli remarked, behind me. He didn’t step into the room.

  “Not so much now.”

  Alison Cameron’s white-carpeted room had once been a young teen’s dream. A canopied bed stood in the middle of a room painted a muted pink, trimmed in darker, but still muted, lavender. It had been spray-painted, then finished off with dog feces. The bed’s white coverlet and hangings hung in ribbon-like tatters. Degas prints of horses and ballerinas still decorated the walls, both species flaunting long, muscular legs. Their protective glass frames were shattered. No laptop or cell phone, of course; the police had confiscated them, whatever condition they’d been in.

  Just about the only intact items in the room lay on Ali’s dresser—a silver-backed brush and comb set and an emptied jewelry box. The box had been dusted with the same fingerprint powder I’d seen on other bits of carnage, but a few smashed pieces of jewelry remained on the floor. Of most interest to me was the antique silver locket that might have been a family heirloom. It was now bent, the chain snapped. When I opened the locket, I saw a tiny photograph of Ali’s mother. The mother who wasn’t a biological mother. As I held the locket, Alexandra’s picture fell out, revealing another photograph, this one of the handsome young man whose picture I’d seen at Mrs. Daggett’s. In this one, too, Kyle looked harmles
s enough, but despite what most people believe, most killers do.

  I took a picture of the picture.

  For all her pink-and-white frou-frou, Ali was a reader. Scattered in front of the bookcase across from her bed was a full set of C.S. Lewis’ Narnia books, Tolkien’s Ring series, and a veritable shrine to the young adult novels of Judy Blume. All ripped in half. Safe enough reading for a young teen, but lying on the bottom shelf, oddly untouched, I saw the complete set of the Hunger Games books, as well as a scattering of other harder-edged sci-fi, such as Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother, and Ursula Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven. Fantasy and violence. At least that’s the way the county attorney would play it if this case ever went to trial.

  After finding nothing more of interest, I moved down the hall to Alec Cameron’s room. No casual reader, Alec. If he’d set up any shrine, it was to the Arizona Diamondbacks, Cardinals, and Coyotes. Remnants of sports pennants and posters covered the walls, the one exception being a large photograph of Albert Einstein. The only books around were textbooks, but they looked advanced for a boy of ten. Supersymmetry and String Theory. Introduction to Astrophysics. No cell phone, no laptop. Like Ali’s room, everything was either ripped, smashed, or covered in dog feces.

  There were two upstairs rooms left to check out, a hobby room Alexandra Cameron had used for weaving—shreds from a brightly colored blanket hung from a small loom—and a nicely appointed guest room. Neither of those rooms had been defiled—not personal enough, I imagined—but I photographed them anyway while Bocelli, now confident that I wasn’t about to pocket anything, waited in the hall.

  I was about to leave the guest room when I noticed something out of place. Like the other rooms, it had been tastefully decorated in a soothing, if bland, color scheme: beiges, browns, and rusts, accented by discreet touches of turquoise. Yet resting behind the Indian-print pillows tossed on the bed was a small, navy blue bolster, looking out of sync with the room’s overall color scheme. Curious, I walked closer. Was it my imagination, or was the bolster slightly misshapen?