Forcing Amaryllis

by Louise Ure

  “And what was that caliber?” Pollock asked.

  “A .41 Magnum, just like the gun owned by the defendant, Mr. Cates.”

  McCullough leaped to his feet to erase that “just like the defendant’s gun” line, but Queen outmaneuvered him.

  “Of course it’s just like the defendant’s gun,” Queen repeated. “The only .41 Magnums with five lands and grooves and a right twist, as shown on this bullet, are the Smith & Wesson Models 57 and 58. The defendant owns a Smith & Wesson Model 57.” It sounded as if he was correcting a child’s math homework.

  McCullough asked about the number of these guns in Arizona. “Assuming that the killer was even an Arizona resident!” Like he was offering to fight with one hand behind his back.

  “They’ve been around for more than twenty years, so I’d estimate something like two or three thousand were sold in Arizona.”

  “Did you or the sheriff’s office at least check on the whereabouts of the owners of each of those other several thousand Smith & Wessons?” Pollock was on her feet objecting before the words even left McCullough’s mouth.

  “My apologies, Your Honor,” McCullough said. “I forgot myself. I guess I was just asking myself the same question that’s probably on the jury’s mind right now.” He had learned a few things about showmanship and shenanigans from Gideon Merchant.

  Dee Dee sputtered a renewed objection, and the judge glared at the defense table. “That’s enough, Mr. McCullough. The jury will disregard Mr. McCullough’s last statement.”

  Three jurors jotted notes on their pads. It didn’t look like a game of Hangman. McCullough had made his point.

  29

  Tonio and I met on the courthouse steps, but I wasn’t sure I could eat anything after the morning’s grisly session. As we moved north on the narrow sidewalk, I filled him in on the morning’s testimony and on spotting the highway patrolman in the courtroom the day before. He said he’d ask Enrique if there was any way we could get a roster of the officers patrolling I-10 the day I was pulled over, but who also might have been at court yesterday. I breathed a sigh of relief, and Tonio guided me around pedestrians and parking meters with a hand on my elbow.

  We took a table on the front porch at El Charro. I ordered a topopo salad, and Tonio chose the citrus-marinated ceviche. I could only pick at the salad.

  “How do you think it’s going?” he asked.

  “I can’t tell how the jury responded to Deputy Thompson’s testimony, but there was nothing really controversial in there. Niles’s parking ticket sure woke them up.”

  Strike nodded, but seemed uneasy about my comment on Deputy Niles’s testimony. He spooned a scallop onto my plate without my asking. “How’s Miranda taking all of this?”

  “I hope she’ll be okay. She couldn’t sit through that graphic description of the murder.”

  Strike pushed his plate away. “There’s something I’ve got to tell you. It’s nothing illegal, but it’s been bothering me. I found the mystery boss. You know, the potential real estate job Chavez was looking for.”

  “Who was it? Did he see Lydia and Cates at the bar?”

  “Name’s Tim Badger. Works for Argent Realty on Speedway. He was interviewing Lydia as a receptionist. And, no, he didn’t see Lydia or Cates.”

  “What did he see?”

  “Nothing. He got the bar wrong. Or Lydia did. He was at The Blue Grotto, not the Blue Moon. Over a mile away, and he’s got receipts to prove it.” He dipped his fork in the seafood but didn’t taste it.

  “Merchant’s going to have to do some backpedaling,” I said.

  “That’s what makes me mad. McCullough isn’t going to introduce him. Says it isn’t relevant if Badger was in another bar a mile away.”

  I was fuming. “What right does he have to withhold evidence?” I downgraded McCullough’s stock in my mental portfolio.

  “He’s just trying to keep the specter of some other bad guy—another suspect—out there.”

  “Why didn’t Badger come forward?” I asked.

  “He saw that someone had been arrested. Thought it was all over with and he wouldn’t have to get involved.”

  “Can we do anything about it?”

  “Not if I want to keep working for this law firm.” Strike took a long swallow of iced tea. “It may be legal, but that doesn’t make it right.” It sounded as if he was already weighing just how much he wanted to keep working for Whitcomb, Merchant & Dryer.

  We finished the tea and walked back to the courthouse. Strike still seemed preoccupied and said he had other business to attend to. I had a crossword to keep me busy until the judge returned, but once I figured out the joke in the puzzle, I didn’t want to finish it. In every themed clue you were supposed to leave one square blank, to represent the word “nothing.” An eleven-square answer that was supposed to be a “description of a Seinfeld plot” became “a show about (nothing).” A nine-letter answer for “just business” was “(nothing) personal.” I felt as empty and full of nothing as those gaping, blank squares.

  In the afternoon the prosecution moved on to the cat hair evidence. Their expert witness was Sara Davidson, the criminalist from the Department of Public Safety who had done the hair analysis. She testified that the sample of cat hair taken from Lydia’s body was consistent with the sample taken from Cates.

  I remembered Pollock raising her fourth finger when she talked about the cat hair in her opening statement. It was right before she curled her fingers down and made a fist to slam her evidence home with the jury.

  Merchant didn’t seem at all daunted; he pranced up to the witness box. “So you can tell that these hairs came from Ms. Chavez’s cat, is that right?”

  Davidson shifted in the chair and looked past Merchant to direct her answer back to the prosecution table. “No, I said the cat hair found on the defendant was consistent with the hair from Ms. Chavez’s cat.”

  Pollock gestured under the table for the witness to look at the jury, the way all expert witnesses are taught to testify. Jurors give more credence to witnesses who look right at them. “He looked me in the eye when he said it,” some jurors comment.

  “Did you do a DNA comparison between the two samples?” Merchant sounded as if he would actually be interested in the answer.

  “No. This was shed hair. No follicles.”

  “I see. So you can say you have two samples of yellowish hair from a cat or cats, is that right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Imagine that. Two yellow cats in Tucson,” Merchant muttered as he turned back to the defense table. A woman in the front row of the jury shook her head in a “tsk, tsk” motion.

  “Oh, one more question, Ms. Davidson. Did you take hair samples from Deputy Thompson’s clothing or car?”

  Davidson looked confused. Why would she take samples from the deputy? “No.” She drew out the long O.

  “Then you can’t say whether Deputy Thompson was the one who carried the cat hair from the victim’s clothing to Mr. Cates’s clothing, isn’t that right?”

  “The deputies and crime scene analysts are very careful not to contaminate or move evidence.”

  Merchant wanted to drill his point home. “You don’t know whether Deputy Thompson was the carrier of the cat hair, do you?”

  “It’s not likely, sir. But—”

  “Just answer yes or no.”

  “No.”

  The bullet and cat hair evidence were beginning to look coincidental rather than incriminating. But I didn’t see how the jury could look past the parking ticket that placed Cates’s car at the crime scene that night.

  Pollock decided to move on to the tire tread evidence. Under cross-examination, this expert from the sheriff’s department didn’t fare well with Merchant either. He admitted that the tracks at the murder scene were from tires so new that there were no unique wear or cut marks that could be linked to Cates’s tires. And under heated questioning he also said that several other brands of SUV might have used the same kind of tires and h
ad the wheels a similar distance apart.

  Then Merchant decided to push his luck. “You can’t even say when these tire marks were made, can you? Mr. Cates might have been there earlier in the day, or even two days before, isn’t that right?”

  The analyst smiled. “Except for the fact that it rained the night of April first. Any tracks that were there before seven o’clock that night when the rain started would have been washed away.”

  Merchant looked as stunned as the man who picks the wrong card in a game of three-card monte. A furious red flush rose from his neck to his cheeks. He turned away from the jury box.

  “Nothing more for this witness.”

  Pollock wanted to press her advantage. “So does this mean that those tracks must have been left between seven o’clock that night and the time the body was discovered?”

  “Yes.”

  The same three jurors who had taken such deliberate notes about the parking ticket wrote this down as well.

  30

  Thursday was as steamy as a romance novel; a cotton wool feeling with every breath. I sat in front of the swamp-box cooler to dry off after my shower, then pulled a gray blouse and slacks from the closet. The coloring of the female peacock rather than the male.

  My new car stuttered to life. At least its air conditioner worked well.

  I reached the courtroom before trial started for the day and had stopped in the doorway when I was jostled from behind. I swung around and ran face-first into Kevin McCullough.

  “Hey, Calla, nice to see you,” he said. “You come to watch the show?”

  “Yeah. It seems to be going well for you.”

  He didn’t seem poised to sue me for libel and slander. I’ll bet Jessica never even told him about Giordano’s visit or about firing me. She probably wanted to sweep it discreetly under the rug.

  I envied McCullough his calmness and ease, if not his ethical treatment of the mystery boss as a potential witness. This was still just a job to him. A chance to shine and be center stage, certainly, but also a way to use his skills to make money. And if he had to bend a few rules to win, he had no compunction about doing so. It was just like that “nothing” puzzle. A nine-letter answer for “just business”? (Nothing) personal.

  For seven years I had vacillated between forgiveness and revenge, denial and acceptance, and back again. If Raymond Cates was found guilty of the Chavez murder, maybe I could begin to put my life back together. It would mean that a bad man was put away—maybe even the man who had hurt Amaryllis.

  Dee Dee Pollock entered the courtroom at a fast trot, approached the prosecution table, and began a whispered conversation with her colleagues. Her face was tight with urgency. Merchant preened when he came in, and grinned like the smart kid in the front row with all the answers. Something was up.

  After a hurried discussion at the prosecution table Pollock and Merchant went into the judge’s chambers at the back of the courtroom. They came out with Judge Gutierrez a few minutes later, and he called for a recess, saying we would resume the following morning. I waited until the courtroom had cleared, told Miranda to wait for me out front, and sidestepped down the line of chairs toward Kevin McCullough.

  “What happened?”

  “Just about the best thing Cates could have hoped for,” he said, stuffing his files back in his briefcase. “The body of a woman was found this morning at a picnic area at Madera Canyon. She was shot with a .41 Magnum.”

  I shared the news with Miranda on the front steps and, as she turned to go back to her car, I called Enrique. “Is the sheriff’s office looking at Red Blanken for this murder in Madera Canyon?”

  He sighed. “It’s an ongoing investigation, Calla—”

  “C’mon, you and Tony Strike were the ones worried about him in the first place. You have to tell me, please.”

  His voice dropped to a whisper. “We’re way ahead of you. The foster family he spent the most time with owns a cabin in Madera Canyon. And we found a witness who thinks he saw a light-colored Taurus parked next to the victim’s car on the highway that night.”

  I wondered if an innocent-looking Highway Patrol vehicle might have been parked near her car sometime that night as well.

  Strike and I sat on the living-room floor with our backs up against the couch. It was lunchtime, but neither of us was hungry. The local TV channel broke away from its regular programming to give us the details on the new murder. Strike leaned forward and turned the volume knob to the right.

  The hair-sprayed reporter stood with her back to the barbecue pits and concrete benches of a public picnic area in the woods. Crime scene tape was strung like a Maypole decoration and waved in the breeze.

  “Sunrise this morning revealed the gruesome remains of a partially burned and half-naked body here at a picnic area at Madera Canyon, forty miles south of Tucson. Bonnie DeGroot, a twenty-nine-year-old Sahuarita resident and mother of two, was raped and then killed by the gun that was shoved inside her. The county coroner reported …”

  “A bit sensationalistic for daytime television, don’t you think?” I asked.

  “Not for the channel that measures Tucson traffic congestion by counting the number of cars in the Krispy Kreme drive-thru,” he replied.

  I swallowed a grin and turned back to the reporter. DeGroot’s car had been found out of gas on Sahuarita Road, only four miles from her home. Her husband called the police at nine p.m. when she hadn’t returned from her workout at the gym. Her body had been doused with gasoline and set ablaze, and the fire had alerted forest rangers in the predawn hours. Her arms were underneath her, and the fire hadn’t reached them. The reporter said an “anonymous source close to the investigation” had leaked the information that DeGroot was tied with the same kind of cord and the same knots as those used on Lydia Chavez.

  “Were either you or Enrique following Blanken last night?”

  “No, we got our signals crossed. We each thought the other was on it. God, I hope Bonnie DeGroot didn’t pay the price for that.”

  I hoped not, too.

  “What else did McCullough and Enrique say?” Strike asked over the reporter’s nasal voice.

  “Enrique said the sheriff’s deputies thought there were so many similarities to the Chavez case that they put a rush on identifying the bullet. The results came in—a .41 Magnum like Cates’s gun—just as we were about to start the session today. By now they’ve probably done the comparison to the bullet found under Chavez.”

  “Blanken never used a gun before in any of his attacks, did he?”

  “Not that we know of,” I said.

  “Merchant must be laughing.”

  “I suppose so. I’ll bet he tries to get this new murder introduced as exculpatory evidence during the defense presentation. Or maybe he can get them to drop the charges altogether. If it’s the same gun, don’t they have to end the trial? They’ll know the killer is someone else.”

  Strike leaned forward and shut off the TV. “Pollock can always say that Cates discarded the gun and someone else picked it up. That’s probably the dance she’s doing right now.”

  “Not if the cords and the knots were the same.”

  “That does make it trickier,” he admitted.

  I thought the prosecution had intended to wrap up its presentation today, but I didn’t know how the news of DeGroot’s murder would affect that decision.

  Pollock and Merchant both had decisions to make, but I knew what I had to do. Realign my world to conform to the fact that Cates hadn’t killed Chavez or DeGroot and probably wasn’t Amy’s attacker either.

  I felt like a Magellan who had just discovered that the world was flat after all. I had built a shaky house of logic that said that the Chavez trial would also tell me if Cates was Amy and Miranda’s Sweet Thing rapist. It wasn’t any kind of real proof. But if he was convicted of one rape and attack, then it was more likely he’d committed another as well. It would make my catalogue of belt buckles and black trucks and damaged fingers seem downright pre
scient. And he would serve his time for one crime, but I would know that he was paying for three.

  Now my assumptions seemed absurd. How dare I have magnified those tiny crumbs of coincidence into proof against him? I had taken my sister’s nightmare ramblings and turned them into a gospel. I had taken a truck and a belt and turned them into a gallows and noose.

  It was like waking up from a dream of flying. Suddenly grounded, weighted down by the reality of another, almost identical murder, I could no longer sustain my belief in his guilt.

  I exhaled, blowing away the suspicions of Cates I’d held on to these last three months. I had been caught up in a dream of revenge against him. Now that dream could focus on a highway patrolman or a man with cherry red fingers and a turquoise snake knife.

  31

  The court session didn’t start on time the next morning. Gutierrez was closeted with both teams of lawyers until almost ten thirty. I wasn’t sure what had been decided behind those closed doors, but it didn’t look like Merchant was able to get the State to drop the charges altogether. Maybe the judge had been swayed by the hypothesis that Cates had thrown the gun away and a copycat killer had found it.

  Dee Dee Pollock had dressed in her most formal and funereal garb. She wore a black business suit with its high collar buttoned all the way to her earlobes, black stockings, and alarmingly high heels. She called the bartender from the Blue Moon as her first witness of the day.

  The checked shirt he wore did nothing to dispel the Howdy Doody image his square jaw and red hair suggested. He told the same story he’d told Strike earlier: Cates was an annoying and impatient customer who had accused him of shortchanging him. He would recognize him anywhere, and he swore that Cates didn’t leave the bar until after nine thirty. Merchant tried to cast doubt on the identification.

  “How crowded was the bar that night?”

  “It was pretty busy. NCAA finals and all.”

  “Had you ever seen him before? Did you know what kind of drink he preferred when he came in?” No. “So this was the first time you had seen this gentleman. Did he pay by credit card or maybe introduce himself?” No. “So you have no proof that it was Raymond Cates.” No.