by Rick Mofina
“Awesome, Dad. Can we go for a little ride?”
“Sorry, son. We don’t have time right now.”
Ann was tidying the kitchen, shutting cupboard doors a bit harder than necessary.
“Dad, remember last time you went to a prison, I think it was San Quentin, you went to their store where they sell stuff and got me the wooden stage coach a bad guy made?”
“Sure.”
“Can you see if they have anything like that at Folsom?”
“Zach, no!” Ann interjected. “That was a long time ago. Before ‘you-know-what’ happened. Dad won’t have time for gifts. Go brush your teeth.”
When they were alone Reed said, “Ann, Brader is sending me. It’s not like I have a choice.”
“You could always quit. Write your books.”
“Ann.”
“Tom, please don’t get him anything from Folsom. Or whoever you’re going to see in Las Vegas. Nothing. Not after everything he’s been through.”
“Sure, I understand.”
The cutlery jingled when she shut the dishwasher door. She stared into his eyes. “Tom. I’m sorry. It just worries me whenever you throw yourself into stories like this.”
“I know. But it’s my job, Ann. It’s what I do.”
“Will you be back in time for my banquet?”
“Banquet?”
She tapped the laminated calendar affixed to the refrigerator with flowered magnets. He saw the notation in her handwriting for the annual Bay Area women’s business event. It was in a few days.
“I should be back in time.”
“That would be nice.”
“Ann.”
“Are you packed?”
It could have been worse with Ann, Reed figured as the Chrysler glided across the Bay Bridge and beyond the Bay Area, eating up the asphalt of Interstate 80 to the capital, Pink Floyd pumping from the sound system.
It helped that he had eventually obtained a very detailed list of materials the contractors had used in renovating their house. That had pleased Ann, ending his banishment to the sofa bed in his office. But the doctors still couldn’t unravel the mystery of Zach’s illness. They needed more time for more tests.
Reed mulled over the real reason he had to leave town. Brader, the misguided fool, was still hot for a “contextual bride murder feature” on why cops go bad. He demanded Reed request an interview with Donnie Ray Ball in Folsom. Reed made the request and Ball had agreed. Then Reed had told Brader that in addition to the prison interview, he had discovered that the answer to how bad cop Donnie Ray Ball went bad was in Las Vegas. Donnie had family there that no one had discovered, “and,” Reed had told Brader, “I think they have a story to tell.”
Brader had approved the trip.
But Las Vegas was a lie. Reed blinked at the muted TV of his second-floor room at a Motel 6 in southeast Sacramento. It was true that he needed to go to Las Vegas. But it had nothing to do with his early morning prison interview with Donnie Ray Ball. It was about the bigger story. Iris Wood’s murder. Reed believed he had a solid lead on her killer.
They call it New Folsom because it was built next to the original. California State Prison, Sacramento, as it is officially known, sits on some 1,200 acres in the eastern portion of Sacramento County within the city of Folsom in an area called Represa.
Donnie Ray Ball, a muscular red-haired Irish American, who had robbed thirty banks, was among the nearly 3,000 inmates housed at Folsom in a Level IV, maximum security facility. These days the former detective was surviving on C Yard. He met Reed in a visitor’s room, dressed in prison-issue jeans, T-shirt, shoes. During the one-hour interview he revealed little, insisting that Reed report “how it was drugs, all drugs, that made me mess up bad.” That had to be made clear in the story because Ball’s first parole hearing was approaching. When the interview ended, Ball asked Reed to consider collaborating on a screenplay, about a bad detective.
Later while waiting for his flight at Sacramento International, Reed opened his laptop to transcribe the tape and begin writing the feature. At one point in the interview, Ball, who was a county homicide detective before he turned bank robber, was confident a real cop did not stop Iris Wood at Stern Grove. “It’s all too messy. Sure, I was usually stoned when I did my crimes, but this murder is calculated, planned. A cop would know about trace, about unit logs for unmarked cars. No way was that a real cop. The guy was posing, because how else is he going to stop a woman alone at night?”
FORTY-FOUR
Reed had written nearly half of his story on Donnie Ray Ball by the time his jet connection, crammed with high rollers from Portland, landed in Las Vegas at McCarran International Airport.
It was scorching in the lot where he picked up his rental, a Neon. The illicit element of the trip to Nevada underscored its urgency. Before driving off, Reed let the air conditioner do its work as he stripped off his damp shirt, pulled on a fresh one, then punched a local number on his cell phone.
“Hello,” a woman answered.
“Mrs. Purcell? Carla’s mother?” Reed turned the A/C fan down.
“Yes.”
“Hi, it’s Tom Reed from San Francisco.”
“Oh yes.”
“I just arrived. I’m at the airport. I’d like to drop by now, if this is a good time?”
“Now is fine, Mr. Reed. I’ll give you directions.”
Reed began unfolding his crisp new map of Las Vegas, snapped off the cap from his pen, and traced a route to the new suburb where Mrs. Purcell had promised to tell him of her daughter’s murder.
Pulling from the lot, he switched on the radio and heard Johnny Cash singing “Ring of Fire” as he drove the streets of Las Vegas, reflecting on what he knew about Carla Purcell’s case.
She had been a thirty-four-year-old woman who lived alone in a quiet apartment building. She had worked at a day care looking after the young children of mostly single mothers employed as showgirls, dealers, waitresses, and bartenders. A year ago, after attending an evening community meeting, she never made it home. Six days later, her compact car was discovered at the western edge of Las Vegas at a strip mall storage site that had single-garage-size units. Her car was empty. Her body was found in a church nearby, according to what Reed picked up from reports in the Review-Journal.
Reed had learned from Roland Snell in Arizona that the Phoenix homicide detective on his daughter’s case had let slip that the FBI and Las Vegas Metro police had considered the Purcell file in Nevada as having a possible link to the Phoenix murder.
Reed located and contacted Carla’s mother, Darlene Purcell, a short time ago. Yes, she confirmed, Las Vegas homicide detectives had told her recently that they were optimistic about a potential lead on her daughter’s case out of Phoenix, which Reed suspected stemmed from San Francisco. She agreed to meet Reed, to trade information.
The guard at the booth of the gated community where Darlene Purcell lived was expecting Reed. He checked his ID, then cleared Reed’s entrance with a polite salute and directions to her home. It was a picture-perfect bungalow, shaded by desert fan palms. Darlene Purcell was in her late sixties, a white-haired, obese woman with a waxen face and a breathing condition. She wore a tent dress, walked with a cane, and used a wheeled oxygen tank with a slender clear hose affixed to her nostrils, as if she were a hospital patient. A colorful budgie in an ornate cage in the kitchen chirped a greeting from its swing.
“I see Lulu’s happy you’re here. Thank you for coming, Mr. Reed.” She tottered into her cozy living room, inviting Reed to sit in a large cushioned chair.
“Thank you for seeing me,” Reed said.
She positioned herself over the sofa, lowered herself, sighing as she sank into it. “Have you talked to Hank Fiero? He’s the detective on my girl’s case.”
“No, ma’am. At this point --”
“Call me Darlene, Tom.”
“No Darlene, not yet.”
“Well now, seeing how you came all this way, how can I help yo
u?”
Talking to her, Reed was amazed at her warmth toward him. He noticed silver- and gold-framed photographs of Carla on the TV stand shelf, next to ceramic figurines on doilies and a picture of a young soldier, Carla’s father. He had died in Vietnam when Carla was little. She’d had no other relatives.
“My girl found out early on she couldn’t have kids, Tom. Never really had a boyfriend. Carla had a little speech impediment. She was very quiet. For a few years she considered becoming a nun. She was a churchgoer. Worked cleaning hotel rooms on the strip. Then she got the job at the day care. The kids there meant everything to her. So did her volunteer work.”
“What sort of volunteer work?”
“With her church’s anti-death-penalty group.”
“That was not in the Review-Journal.”
“Fiero asked me and the church to keep quiet about that, keep it out of the papers.”
“Why?”
“In case her murder was connected to her volunteer work to abolish Nevada’s death penalty. She was part of some research the church helped with on a specific case.
“Which case?”
“Chad Kyle Snow.”
Reed was familiar with it. “He was exonerated.”
“He was on death row, always said he was innocent. Carla’s group took up his case; then the DNA proved he didn’t do it.”
“I remember.”
“That was about two years back, maybe longer. She used to go with the group up to Ely, go to the prison. They prayed for him.”
“You think it was connected to her murder, Darlene?”
“I don’t know what to think.”
“Police ever say much on that possibility?”
“Not really.”
“Anything else you can tell me?”
“Well, Carla was pretty good on her computer. The detectives looked at it, but they told me it wasn’t working all that good. She never mentioned that to me. I guess it worked well enough for her.”
“What do you mean?”
“She used it to go on-line about death penalty stuff and she also told me it was a good way to not worry about her speech and sort of meet new people.”
“She had on-line friends.”
“Lots.”
“She ever go meet any of them face-to-face?”
“No. She was so shy about her speech. Very private. In some ways I think she, I won’t say liked, but preferred living alone. That way at least she did not have to face people stumbling over her words. But I think she ached to have a family.”
“Darlene, this could be hard, but it might help my research. Did the police or the coroner ever tell you details of her death?”
Tears welled in her eyes. She closed them and nodded. “Hank Fiero told me never to tell anyone this, said they needed it to catch him. Tom, please don’t print it until then. Promise me you won’t.”
Reed promised.
“You know she was found in the church, but it was never published about how she was found.” She paused to breathe. “He laid her in the arms of a statue, a full-sized copy of Michelangelo’s Pieta. “Oh Lord, I still have dreams about holding her in my arms when she was my baby girl.”
Reed moved near her and patted her knee as Lulu chirped from the kitchen.
After several moments, Darlene collected herself. “I’ve got some reports the police gave me for insurance, Tom. Her death certificate, the Clark County coroner’s report, and some other things I kept from her apartment and things they released to me. You’re welcome to see them.”
She directed Reed to an empty room filled with boxes of clothing, books, kitchenware. All were simply marked, CARLA and another folder with documents and a note from Detective Hank Fiero, Las Vegas Metropolitan Police. Actually there were several files, thick with standard letter-size sheets as if they had been professionally copied.
Darlene: I’ve talked to powers that be and decided to copy and give to you things of Carla’s we can release, or no longer need. Hank.
Reed sat on the floor and went through everything, flipping first through the files from the police. They looked rather innocuous, stuff about abolishing the death penalty, prayers, poems, her own collected papers, letters, notes. Several files, almost as thick as the Las Vegas yellow pages.
“Anything there like your case in San Francisco, Tom?” Darlene was leaning on her cane at the doorway. She was wearing a robe. Reed had not realized night had fallen. It was late.
“I lost track of time.” Reed looked at his watch. “I am sorry. I better go. I have to get a room and catch an early morning plane.”
“Tom, take whatever you need with you. Take a good look at it in California, then send it back to me. I trust you with it.”
“Thank you. For everything. Reading some of her letters here, I can understand she was a very loving person.”
“I think she had something special. She always believed in forgiveness. I think she even forgave God for making it so she couldn’t have kids. But I’ll never forgive Him for making the man who took her from me. I hope they find him, Tom, so he can pay for what he did to my girl.”
Reed checked into a Holiday Inn, ordered a club sandwich from room service, and studied the massive paper file. He supported his back with pillows, with the file folder on his chest. He began reading every document. He battled exhaustion from a day that began in Folsom Prison and ended in Las Vegas with Carla Purcell’s innermost thoughts running through his mind. Sleep swept over him as he gripped a page that had no detective or date stamp from the LVMP. Maybe it got in the file by mistake? Or was overlooked. Or misplaced? Reed yawned. His eyes closed. Man he was wiped out. He tried to concentrate on the page. It had anti-death-penalty stuff on one side. She appeared to be using recycled paper, because on the other side there appeared to be Carla’s printout of an old e-mail exchange she had saved from a lonely heart she met on a chat room.
Dear CP:
I just have to know, if you found the right man, could you forgive him the sins of his past life?
FORTY-FIVE
Vryke heard the wail of the siren, saw the flashing red lights in his rear-view mirror, and shifted his grip on the wheel.
His right foot spasmed on the gas pedal. Instinct urged him to flee. But he reconsidered, pulled his rented car off of the road. The unmarked police cruiser inched up behind him, its radio crackling in the tranquil mountain air. Vryke swallowed hard. Hands visible on the wheel. Stay calm. It was pretty here. The sun was setting. He studied his rear-view mirror. A young cop in his cruiser. Talking on his radio. Calling in the plate of Vryke’s rental.
Easy. Take it easy.
The cop was listening, waiting for a radio response. Vryke had left his hotel in Banff earlier that day, deciding to go east to Highway 22, then south on the ribbon of road that parallels Alberta’s Rockies. He then went west, taking the Crowsnest Pass, which becomes Highway 3, the breathtaking southern route across British Columbia that threads through the mountains and stays close to the U.S. border. He had just entered British Columbia when this cop materialized from nowhere. Now he was stepping from his cruiser, adjusting his cap, approaching Vryke’s car.
“Evening, sir.”
The officer was in his late twenties. Six feet. Athletic. Dressed in navy pants with a wide yellow seam stripe, a khaki shirt, and over it, a blue kevlar vest. A brass name plate reading: CONST. ALLAN KRELL. Vryke noticed the gun holstered in his leather utility belt. He could see from his shoulder patch the letters RCMP GRC. Beneath the brim of his cap, the Mountie had quick, intelligent eyes that met Vryke’s. Not even a flicker at his scars.
“Hello, Officer.”
“Could you turn the ignition off, please.”
Vryke did.
“Where you headed?”
“Vancouver. Is there a problem?”
“Did you just come from Alberta?”
Vryke nodded, noticing the cop’s gold wedding band.
“The speed limit changes when you enter B.C.”
“That miles-to-kilometers thing can trip you up.” A white-toothed smiled. “Sir, I’m going to need your driver’s license and registration, please.”
Driver’s license. Vryke’s pulse quickened. He had his authentic Maryland license. The several fake ones he used for his mission were hidden in the lining of his luggage, in the trunk.
“Sir. Your license and registration, please?”
“Sorry. Long day. The car’s a rental.”
“Should be in the glove compartment, or on the visor. I’d like to see the rental contract as well, please.”
Vryke found the rental agency’s registration, realizing the rental agreement was in yet another false name. He hadn’t prepared for this scenario. He passed the registration along with his actual license to the officer.
The Mountie unfolded the agreement, looked at Vryke’s license. “Who rented this vehicle?”
“A friend.”
“It lists only one insured driver. Where’s your friend?”
“He had to fly ahead. I’m going to meet him in Vancouver.” Careful not too much information. Liars give too much information.
The Mountie was thinking. “Sir you have the right to refuse, but would you mind opening your trunk for me?”
The saliva in Vryke’s mouth dried. Open the trunk? Don’t hesitate. Cooperate. “I don’t mind.” He popped the latch.
The officer stepped around to take a look at the luggage and computer bags. Oh, Jesus! The luggage tags! Did they match his license or the rental contract? Vryke’s mind raced.
Thud! The trunk closed.
“Be right back, sir.” The Mountie returned to his cruiser.
Vryke studied his mirror, reading every tick and reaction on the Mountie’s face. The cop radioed Vryke’s data to his police dispatcher, who would run it through the CPIC, the Canadian Police Information Center, which provides data on crimes, criminals, and alerts. Do not turn around. He could have a camera going. It sounded like a female dispatcher from the radio conversation spilling into the still twilight. Vryke saw the Mountie smile at a shared joke. Then he wrote something on his clipboard. Should he run? Vryke distinctly heard the dispatcher say, “…no hits, Al.”
