Sarah's List

by Elizabeth Gunn

  ‘Is he compos mentis yet?’

  ‘Well, they tell me he’s sobering up, and his fever’s gone down, so he can talk. What do you want to interrogate him about – you think he’s got something to do with that car chase at the senior living place?’

  ‘The DeShawn he was trying to boost out of St. Mary’s is the usual driver of the Fairweather van, so Eduardo’s in the mix some way.’

  ‘You think he’s one of the shooters that killed the replacement driver?’

  ‘He doesn’t fit the description, but I’ll be glad to consider him if we can match a fingerprint, or … you know, it would just be swell if we could get him to say why he wanted to grab DeShawn out of the hospital. He can’t deny that’s what he was doing there – we saw him getting ready to do it.’

  ‘Right. And I suppose you’ll want Jason in there in the box to help you with the questions, won’t you? And while I’m setting that up you can try to get Bogey up and running, right?’

  ‘Sure. I’ll look around in the closets at home, see if I can find that old cattle prod Ma used to use on us down on the ranch.’

  ‘How can you tell such awful lies about that nice lady?’

  ‘Listen, Aggie used to be fierce – still is, some days.’

  ‘Delaney told me to report to you,’ Bogey said, walking into her workspace the next morning. He had changed a little, she thought, in the scant two weeks since she had first seen him in Delaney’s office. His appearance then had triggered a memory of a word she couldn’t quite spell or define, and on a busy morning with plenty else to think about, the word had kept bothering her, like an itch she couldn’t scratch. Finally she pulled up the dictionary app on her phone and found it: ‘insouciant’ and read the definition – ‘carefree, nonchalant.’ The perfect word, she had thought that morning, for the way this new guy walks around.

  In the bizarre crime scene they were soon working together, he had behaved with as much care as she did. But that first impression remained – even more than most cops, Bogey moved like a man who knew how to take care of himself.

  Watching him approach her desk this morning, it seemed to her that his confidence had ebbed a little. Delaney must have been hard on him.

  ‘Have a seat,’ she said, and after a few pleasantries she described the search she wanted him to try today. ‘You can have all day for this, even tomorrow if you think you’re making progress, but if you don’t find anything promising by tomorrow night we’ll have to turn it over to the stolen car guys. The terrain will be familiar for you, it’s where we worked together before.’

  ‘The senior living place, with the van in the garage door? I sure as hell remember that.’

  ‘Right. You remember the story – the van being chased by a pickup that took off as soon as the patrol cars showed up? And how the chase got reversed then, the pickup running away with our guys after them? The riddle that bothers me is how fast that pickup disappeared.’

  He frowned. ‘We never actually saw the pickup, did we?’

  ‘You and I? No. But the two patrol cars were in close pursuit from the minute it pulled out of the Fairweather Farms yard. Yet they lost it, within a few blocks. They had it in sight and were gaining on it until it turned off on Camino Del Cerro. Right there at the light, they had some kind of traffic pile-up for a minute, and by the time they got free to follow it again it was out of sight and they never found it again.’

  She handed him the copy of the incident report she had printed out. ‘This has all the details, including badge numbers of the officers in the pursuit vehicles that day. I want you to find them, get them to show you exactly where they were when they last saw the Dodge, and which blocks they drove around before they abandoned the search.’

  He raised a quizzical face from his notetaking and said, ‘And then – what?’

  ‘Take a city map, draw a circle around the place where they lost him – say twenty blocks. Within that grid, drive it, walk it, make it your own. Mark any place you see where they might have hidden that Dodge pickup in under five minutes. When you think you’ve exhausted the possibilities, bring the picture to me, and we’ll decide whether to investigate further.’

  His no-color eyes met hers briefly and went back to the incident report he was holding in his left hand. ‘Wasn’t there something about a partial plate number?’

  ‘Yes, it’s on that report somewhere. But in the very unlikely event that you find that Dodge pickup, those plates are even more unlikely to be still on it.’

  ‘Why am I searching if you don’t expect me to find anything?’

  ‘Because if you get a strong hunch about where that Dodge went to ground, we might be close to finding somebody who knows what’s going on at Fairweather Farms.’ She didn’t say, but thought he knew that this was a test.

  TWELVE

  Monday

  Wheelchair man, newly recovered from alcoholism, chlamydia, and an overdose of Oxycontin, perversely looked fresh as a daisy. He was younger than she’d thought, and the brown eyes that had been so bloodshot when Jason tased him were clear now. The asthmatic rasp was gone from his breathing and his greasy brown pigtails had been combed out and shampooed into a nice shoulder-length bob. The chains that held him securely in his seat in the box, the no-frills interrogation room at North Stone, almost looked like child abuse.

  ‘What’s happened to this guy?’ Sarah said, peering through the observation window. ‘He looks like Prince Valiant.’

  ‘I’m resentful too,’ Delaney said. ‘What can I tell you? He’s nineteen and he’s just had two weeks of the best medical treatment money can’t buy.’

  ‘Has he got a record?’ Sarah asked.

  ‘He’s a US citizen,’ Delaney said. ‘Born in Douglas, Arizona.

  But his father’s Mexican, and so are the grandmother and aunt who mostly raised him. So he spent most of his childhood in Mexico but went to school for a few years in Arizona. Speaks both languages but doesn’t claim to be very fluent in either. I’m trying to figure out if he knows more than he lets on. He’s waived his right to an attorney.’

  ‘Hard to believe he’s the same guy I barely got the cuffs on in the ICU,’ Jason said, taking his turn at the window. ‘I wonder if he still wants to eat me.’

  ‘The way you look today, I could hardly blame him,’ Sarah said. Jason was resplendent in a three-piece charcoal suit. ‘Why are you so spiffed up?’

  ‘I’ve got a dream date, right after work,’ he said. ‘I’m taking a classy young woman to the Bach concert at Saint Andrews. Going to upgrade my public image.’ He did a little ballet twirl and then, seeing Delaney start to look disgusted, drew himself up into Mountain position and asked, ‘What do we want to learn from the loathsome little man-eater today?’

  Sarah said, ‘I want him to tell me why he tried to swipe DeShawn Williams out of the hospital.’

  ‘Come on, you know the answer to that. He wants to chop him up and scatter the pieces in the desert. You think he’s going to share his motives with you?’

  ‘Not if he can help it. But sometimes if you talk a while, little pieces of truth just sort of pop out.’ She asked Delaney, ‘Anything you want us to ask?’

  ‘I’m looking to make a deal. This kid has warrants up the yazoo. He and the partner you killed have a string of break-ins and home invasions in every town and village between here and Agua Prieta. They’ve been careful about prints but he doesn’t seem to realize how many places have automatic cameras – and they were quite a striking couple so we have enough to keep him incarcerated till he grows up.

  ‘So while you beat up on him about the car he stole from ABC Rental, I’ll be listening to find out if he knows anything useful about the drug business in Tucson. If he can help us enough, we might be able to winkle out a sentence in the state system for him. Otherwise he goes to the feds, and that’ll be the end of this pretty boy.’

  ‘Don’t feel bad,’ Jason said. ‘He’s all shined up today, but just underneath that top layer is a paranoid drug
addict. What could he have that you want?’

  ‘What I always want,’ Delaney said. ‘The truth.’ The air around the interview room was developing an electric crackle – truth was a tough nut to crack, when Jason and his supervisor searched for it in the same room.

  But it was today’s job, so Sarah and Jason walked into the room with the spit-shined felony suspect, and Delaney hooked himself up to the watching and listening apparatus outside.

  Sarah started, telling the suspect their names, asking him, ‘I understand you’re bilingual. Are you comfortable speaking English, Eduardo?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ he said, but then shrugged. ‘Not perfect.’

  ‘Well, ours isn’t perfect either – don’t worry about that. But you know enough plain words to answer the usual questions, do you? OK, let’s get the boring stuff out of the way first.’ Her tone was matter-of-fact, not chummy but not threatening either. ‘Where do you live, Eduardo?’

  ‘Mmm … kind of between places right now,’ he said, looking at his shoes.

  ‘Been travelling, have you? But when you’re at home, Eduardo, where would that be?’

  ‘Mmm, most times, I stay with my nana in Agua Prieta.’

  ‘What’s your nana’s name?’

  ‘Mmm, Rosa.’ It wasn’t exactly a stammer. More like a little hum to help him think. He seemed to be asking himself if he should trust Sarah with this precious information.

  ‘What’s Rosa’s last name?’

  ‘Ahhh, Rodriguez?’ As if he might be wrong.

  ‘How do you spell that?’

  ‘Mmm spell? Don’t know.’

  It went on like that – simple questions giving rise to short answers that evidently had to be considered carefully. His English accent was street American, though, on the words he knew. So presently she asked him if he’d learnt English in school.

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  ‘In Agua Prieta? Or …?’

  ‘In Douglas,’ he said with a little nod. ‘When I was young?’

  The detectives both smiled at his suggestion that he was no longer young. Their smiles perked him up a little; he volunteered a bit of information.

  ‘I live with my Tia Luz there.’

  ‘So you could go to school in Douglas?’

  ‘Si. Yes.’

  There were many arrangements like that in border towns, hard-up Mexican parents and grandparents sent their kids to uncles and cousins who were US citizens in sister towns north of the border, so they could get an education, become bilingual, and have a shot at a cross-border career later on. People on the US side grumbled about the burden on their school systems. Mexicans saw it as payback for the millions in payroll taxes undocumented Mexicans left unclaimed when they went north to work. Sarah thought they were both right.

  ‘How many years did you go to that school?’

  ‘Mmm three years? A little over – till Tia Luz got a boyfriend.’

  ‘Ah, the boyfriend wanted you gone?’

  ‘Yes.’ A dark look – shamed, Sarah thought.

  ‘The boyfriend was bad news?’

  An angry nod. ‘He tied me up and beat me.’

  ‘Did you go back to Agua Prieta then?’

  ‘After I got away. Yes.’ Getting away, his look said, took a while.

  ‘Did you go to school there?’

  ‘No. No money there.’

  ‘So what did you do there?’

  ‘Yes, well, eso es’ – he shrugged and turn his hands over, one cuffed and one free, side by side on the little table – ‘the problem.’ He pronounced it about halfway to Spanish, PRO-blem. ‘In Agua Prieta, no es … very much.’

  ‘Did you go back to your nana?’

  ‘Yes. My nana says, “Always be rice and beans for you here, Hijo.” But she lives on little bits her daughters send … two girls … mmm, clean rooms in Tucson. So I can’t be a burden, I look for work. Pick fruit, till grown-ups, mmm’ – he made shooing motions – ‘chase?’

  ‘They chased you out of the fields?’

  ‘Yes. But at racetrack—’ He made shoveling motions.

  ‘You cleaned stalls?’

  ‘Yes. And walk horses. Also learn to run … mmm?’ He had to think about it. ‘AY-rands?’

  ‘You ran errands for the jockeys?’

  ‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘Run AY-rands for girls at casa de …’ he made a crude gesture with his hands.

  ‘The girls at the whorehouse?’

  ‘Yes. Very nice women, give tips.’

  ‘So you did a little of everything for not much money, is that right?’

  ‘My nana kept a bed for me. But I’m hungry some days, until I meet Russ.’

  ‘Is that – um – Russell Sexton?’

  ‘Yes. My friend,’ he said proudly.

  Sandy hadn’t matched any fingerprints yet, but Sarah had the torn slip of notebook paper she’d found in the shoe of the man she killed with the name, ‘Russell Sexton,’ in bold handwritten letters, that she hoped the shoe’s wearer had written. ‘How long ago was that?’

  ‘Mmm, almost … one year,’ he said. So she was right about the name. She waited, nodding encouragement, and finally he said, ‘Meet him at work.’

  ‘What kind of work?’

  ‘Mmm. Pues, we, mmm, help this man to build a shed? Carried some sticks? Mmm … boards?’ A shrug, a little wave-off with his free hand, and then he added, ‘Russ got a truck?’ There was a lot about getting the truck that couldn’t be explained, evidently, but after some more shrugging he thrust his hand out, palm upward, in a gesture that seemed to mean, Here’s the deal, and added, ‘He said he could help me. So we can, mmm, work together.’ Another nod and then, proudly, ‘Worked out very well.’

  The gesture and statement seemed uncharacteristic and Sarah felt certain they were copied from Russell Sexton. She asked him, ‘What was good about working with Russell?’

  ‘Hmm? Mmm … Russ makes things … mmm … fun.’ Eduardo was warming up; words were coming back to him. ‘Antes – before? Yes. I tried marijuana before? Makes me dizzy! Hmm … but Russ knows how.’

  ‘Russ knows how to find the good stuff?’

  ‘Yes. Also where other fun stuff is, so I learn about rum? And good things to eat and who, mmm, has handy stuff to sell?’

  ‘Handy stuff? Like what?’

  ‘Like bed for me. And good chair for me, almost free – at yard sale.’

  ‘So you did whatever Russ said, is that it?’

  ‘Sure, because Russ knows how to make the money go.’ He spread his hands.

  ‘Makes the money go around, you mean? So you have enough?’

  ‘Exacto.’ He laughed. ‘That’s how he says, eggs-acto!’

  ‘Russ is fun, huh?’

  ‘Yes. And plus Russ is best at finding jobs. Knows to sit around in bars where men … you know … bullshit? Yes. So then we learn how to deliver las drogas, fun stuff.’ He sat, nodding, pleased that he had remembered enough words to tell the story.

  ‘Did you get to use some of that fun stuff?

  ‘Some time. Yes.’

  ‘So you met Russ and did some jobs and started eating better and having fun, is that the story? And how long have you been working for the gang, outfit, whatever, that’s selling drugs off the Fairweather Farms van?’

  ‘We mmm not work for them. Mmm, we do one job, one time. But … just free … um, como se dice?’

  ‘Freelance?’

  ‘Si, exacto. One job, one pay, correcto? Freelance. Independent.’ He came down strong on the last word, he was proud of that one.

  ‘All right,’ Sarah said, ‘so you agreed to independently grab DeShawn Williams out of his bed in St. Mary’s Hospital. Why?’

  ‘So he be out.’

  ‘Well, sure. But who wants him out and why?’

  ‘No se who wants. Russ says friends. Friends want to help him, mmm, free him out of jail.’

  ‘Do you believe that?’

  ‘Sure I believe. I do same for Russ if he’s in jail, and he d
oes for me also. He said “he doos for me.” Watching Eduardo inch his way through his second language to describe his life of crime was weirdly unsettling. He seemed like a child who’d been carefully reared by vicious criminals. Yet his account of his nana in Agua Prieta seemed tender and sweet and the truest part of his story.

  It was hard to believe he was as gullible as he seemed, Sarah thought, but he’d have to be a brilliant actor to be playing her for a fool. He didn’t seem that bright. Thinking she would like to watch for a while, maybe make up her mind about Eduardo, Sarah asked Jason, ‘Are you ready to talk about the ABC Rental job now?’

  ‘Sure.’ Jason put some notes on the desk, cleared his throat, and began to tell Eduardo a short version of the story he had told Sarah earlier, about walking into ABC Rental with the keys to a two-year-old Nissan, and being greeted by a crew that was not aware, till that moment, that anything was missing.

  ‘But after they got done praising me for bringing back the car, they still wanted to know, how did somebody do this?’ Jason said. ‘Because the original keys were in the rack where they belonged. And now the car was back and they had two sets of keys. But there weren’t any signs of forced entry.’

  Jason sat still a minute, watching the pale young man with the noble face. Eduardo was paying rapt attention, trying to follow the story. His face was intent but not hostile; he didn’t appear to remember that Jason was the man who had shot him with a taser and tied him up. After a short wait elicited nothing but a quizzical look, Jason leaned forward and asked him gently, ‘So how did you get in there?’

  ‘Mmm. No se. Russ gets in. Russ is, mmm, inteligente?’ His Spanish pronunciation was better than his English; he got the silky sibilant of ‘hen-tay’ just right.

  Jason said, ‘Smart?’

  ‘Si, smart.’

  ‘Also, it helps to have these, doesn’t it?’ Sarah said. She had been silent, trying to give him the benefit of the doubt about how much he knew or understood, but now she was annoyed by his claim that he didn’t know how to go through a lock. She held up the ring of burglary tools and shook it so it gave off a nice jingle before she dropped it on the desk in front of her. ‘Russell’s tools got the two of you in, right? So then you must have taken the Nissan keys to a twenty-four-hour copy shop and got them copied, and returned the originals to the rack before you took the car.’