Unfinished Business

by J. A. Jance

  Ali rested a hand on her mother’s shoulder. “You did the best you could,” she said. “You made decisions you thought were right at the time, and second-guessing them now isn’t going to help. Dad left on his own terms, Mom. He did what he did in order to spare you from suffering, probably more than to spare himself. Yes, we don’t like it, but the decision was his and nobody else’s.”

  “But what am I going to do now?” Edie whispered brokenly.

  Ali remembered a time when she herself had asked that same question. The words were still engraved on her heart. She’d uttered them that dreadful long-ago night in the hospital in Chicago—the night Dean Reynolds died. Seven months pregnant with Chris, Ali had fled Dean’s hospital room only after he breathed his last. The line on the machine had gone flat, the pumping on the respirator quieted, and there was nothing else to be done. In the waiting room, she’d fallen into her mother’s arms.

  “What am I going to do now?” Ali had wailed. Remembering her mother’s words from back then, she repeated them now verbatim.

  “You’ll do what you have to do,” Ali said softly.

  “But…” Edie objected.

  “No buts,” Ali replied. “First you need to go shower and dress. Then you need to comb your hair and put on some makeup. You’ll be talking to lots of people today. You owe it to yourself and to Dad to look and be your best. It’s what he would want you to do.”

  “Really?” Edie asked.

  Ali nodded. “Really.”

  “All right, then,” Edie Larson said, hoisting herself to her feet. “I’ll go get dressed.”

  |CHAPTER 47|

  PRESCOTT, ARIZONA

  It was four in the morning when a call from Detective Morris came in on Dave’s cell. He grabbed the phone, silenced the ringer, and then hurried into the bathroom, closing the door before he answered. He needn’t have bothered. His wife, Priscilla, had long since learned to deal with overnight phone calls by wearing a superb set of earplugs to bed. She didn’t stir.

  “Sorry we took so long,” Morris said. “The guys at the jail in El Centro couldn’t get their act together. What should have been an easy-peasy handover turned into a bureaucratic shitstorm. We didn’t leave the jail until almost midnight.”

  “But you got him?” Dave asked.

  “We did.”

  “Where are you now?”

  “The GPS says we’re an hour and a half out. Our ETA is six a.m.”

  “All right,” Dave replied. “I’m on my way, too. I’ll meet you at the sally port.”

  And he did. After driving from Sedona to Prescott, Dave was there waiting when Morris’s unmarked car pulled inside. Sheriff Holman himself opened the back passenger door. When the prisoner stepped out, he was wearing an orange Imperial County Jail jumpsuit. He was also wearing handcuffs and a set of shackles, most likely compliments of Imperial County.

  “Welcome back home to Arizona, Mr. McCluskey,” Dave said pleasantly. “I’m the Yavapai County sheriff. I hope you had an uneventful journey.”

  “Screw you,” McCluskey snarled. “I’ve needed to take a leak for the past hour and a half, and jerkface over there wouldn’t stop so I could relieve myself.”

  “I’m sorry you feel that Detective Morris’s customer-service skills are lacking,” Dave observed. “When you fill out your satisfaction survey, be sure to mention that. In the meantime what say we get you booked into your new digs?”

  Detective Morris came around the back of the vehicle, suppressing a grin as he took hold of the prisoner’s arm. “Right this way, Mr. McCluskey,” he said. “I’ll get those cuffs off you now so you can visit the restroom.”

  While Morris escorted the prisoner into the building through a series of locked doors, Detective Rojo opened the trunk and removed two items. One appeared to be a dark leather gym bag. The other could have been a white plastic shopping bag, except for the logo printed on the outside—Imperial County Jail.

  “His personal effects?” Dave asked.

  Detective Rojo nodded.

  “Great,” Dave said. “I can hardly wait to take a look. Did he say anything?”

  “Hardly a word,” Rick replied. “He’s not exactly the conversational type. Grew up in Butte. Both his parents are deceased.”

  “Did he say how?”

  “Nope.”

  “We asked if he was married. He said he was once but not anymore. Just for the record, he didn’t bother mentioning that said wife died on their honeymoon the day after they tied the knot. Based on what Lauren’s paper trail told us, his not saying anything about that strikes me as a red flag.”

  “Me, too,” Dave agreed. “You’re probably worn out, but if you’re not too tired, once McCluskey’s in a cell, I want the three of us to go into an interview room and turn on a camera while we inventory his property. We need to have a video record of everything we find.”

  At that hour of the morning, the booking area was fairly quiet. Most of that night’s drunks were already locked up and sleeping things off in their own cells. While escorting McCluskey over to the intake clerk, Detective Morris passed an evidence bag to Sheriff Holman. Inside was a shiny pair of handcuffs.

  Holman dialed the desk sergeant. “Who’s on duty right now? I’ve got something that needs to be driven to the crime lab in Phoenix within the next couple of hours.”

  “Deputy Hawkins is available,” the sergeant replied.

  “Good,” Dave replied. “Send Merrilee to the booking room right away.”

  Merrilee Hawkins might have been new to the department, but she certainly wasn’t new to law enforcement. She had transferred in from Baltimore because as a black single mom she wanted to raise her two young sons far from what some people liked to call the murder capital of the world. She was able to do shift work because her mother had moved to Yavapai County with her. Merrilee was fair, tough, and smart, and Dave Holman expected her to go far.

  “What do you need, sir?” Deputy Hawkins asked when she turned up a few minutes later.

  Dave handed her the evidence bag. “Do you know where the crime lab is in Phoenix?”

  “No, but I’m pretty sure I can find it.”

  “This needs to be handed over directly to a criminalist named Barbara Lemon,” he said. “She should be at work by the time you get there, and she knows it’s coming. She also knows this is a rush job.”

  “Got it,” Deputy Hawkins said, and off she went.

  As the booking process wrapped up, McCluskey seemed to become more and more agitated. “What about all my stuff?” he wanted to know. “Isn’t it supposed to be turned over to a property room or something?”

  “It is, and it will be,” Dave assured him, “once we finish inventorying it.”

  “But…” McCluskey began.

  Sheriff Holman cut him off midsentence. “We need to evaluate whatever was found on your person at the time of your arrest in order to determine whether items in your possession have any bearing on our case. The folks in California wouldn’t have had any idea about what might or might not be pertinent. The inventory process will be conducted under video surveillance. Once it’s finished, you’ll be presented with a complete list of what’s been taken into evidence and what will be sent along to the property room.”

  Clearly McCluskey wasn’t thrilled with that answer, but as a jailer led him away, there wasn’t much he could do about it.

  In the interview room, Dave turned on the video equipment. He started the process by announcing the time and date as well as who was in attendance. They began with the gym bag. The contents in that consisted mostly of clothes, and the officers kept track of each individual item as they sorted through them. At the bottom of the bag, they came across a sizable roll of Mexican pesos along with a file folder.

  While his partner counted the cash, Detective Rojo opened the file and removed what turned out to be a wedding photo. “Looks like the bride’s a lot younger than the groom.” Still holding the photograph, he picked up a second item. When he rea
lized what he was holding, the detective’s eyes bulged.

  “Look what we have here,” he said, passing both items to Dave. “A wedding picture and a death certificate, both in the same file folder.”

  Taking the documents in hand, Dave examined them in silence. McCluskey was much younger than he was now—probably in his midthirties. The radiantly smiling woman at his side was at least a decade younger. “It says here that Maureen Annette Richards died in 2004. Obviously they hadn’t been married long enough for her to change her name.”

  “Because she just happened to take a fatal plunge into the Grand Canyon the day after he married her,” Morris growled. “Dollars to doughnuts the asshole killed her.”

  “And got away with it, too,” Rojo added.

  “Until now, maybe,” Dave said, “but we’ve got him in our sights, and there’s no statute of limitations on homicide.”

  It occurred to Dave that in terms of their being recorded at the time, they all could have been a bit more discreet, but even cops are entitled to their opinions.

  When the three men finished with the contents of the gym bag, they turned their joint attention to the plastic tote from the Imperial County Jail, where they removed one item at a time. On top was a collection of clothing, most likely consisting of the things McCluskey had been wearing at the time of his arrest. It was only at the bottom of the bag that they found anything of any real interest.

  First out was a worn leather belt. Next came a fake passport, already stamped with a visa allowing him to travel into the interior of Mexico. It was an amazingly well-done forgery that featured McCluskey’s photograph but bore the name Harold Wilson McBride. A faded leather wallet came next. It held a little folding money and a driver’s license in McBride’s name. Behind a small flap at the back of the wallet was another driver’s license—this one in Harvey’s own name. There were no credit cards and no photos of any kind. The roll of pesos Harvey carried in his gym bag was apparently all the money he had.

  The only remaining item was a small see-through evidence bag. In it was a gold chain—an expensive-looking one at that—with three items strung on it—two rings and a larger gold circle of some kind. Emptying the bag onto the table, Dave unclasped the chain and removed the three baubles so they could be examined individually. One appeared to be a gold wedding ring with a minuscule diamond embedded into the metal. After studying the ring for a moment, Dave passed it along to Detective Morris. Next up was something that appeared to be nothing more than a hoop of gold.

  “What’s this?” Dave asked with a puzzled frown as he held it up so the others could see it more clearly.

  “Looks like one of my wife’s earrings,” Morris answered. “She loves those hoopy things, the bigger the better.”

  The final item was clearly a class ring, complete with a blue stone at the center. On one side of the stone were the letters THS and on the other a D, a G, and the year 2007. As Dave handed the ring over to Morris, Detective Rojo suddenly lurched from his chair and hurried toward the door.

  “Where are you going?” Dave asked.

  “To find a damned magnifying glass,” Rick Rojo responded. “I think there’s something engraved on the inside of the wedding band.”

  While Rick was gone, both Dave and Dan took a crack at studying the ring. Yes, there was something written there, but neither of them could make it out.

  Rick returned a few moments later, magnifying glass in hand. “Luckily our crime lab had one,” he said.

  By then Dave was holding the ring, so Rick passed the magnifying glass over to him. With the lens trained on the inside of the ring, two different sets of initials jumped out at him—IMM and MAR.

  “Well, my, my, my,” Dave muttered under his breath. “What do we have here? Unless I’m mistaken, IMM stands for Harvey’s mother, Ida Mae McCluskey. The MAR would be for Maureen Annette Richards. Good spotting, Rick,” Dave added, handing both the ring and the magnifying glass back to the detective.

  Once the inventory was complete, Dave could see that both detectives were exhausted. “You two go home and get some sleep,” he told them. “When you’re both back on duty, we’ll be taking a look at a couple of cold cases—two in Montana and the other a lot closer to home, right here in Arizona. We may not have any direct proof about those, but it looks to me as though we’re sitting on a whole slew of circumstantial evidence. We’ve got Harvey McCluskey in jail on a kidnapping charge at the moment, but I’d much rather see him go down for murder. Let’s see what we can do to make that happen.”

  It was breakfast time by then. Once Detectives Morris and Rojo went home, Sheriff Holman left the department as well, walking a couple of blocks to his favorite diner, the Chuck Wagon on Whiskey Row. It was just after 8:00 a.m. The bar at the back had some of Whiskey Row’s regular denizens on hand for their morning dose of hair of the dog, but Dave was there for food only, his customary breakfast order—eggs over easy with crisp bacon, well-done hash browns, and whole-wheat toast. Tina, his usual waitress, had delivered a cup of coffee to his favorite spot on the counter by the time he finished stepping through the entrance.

  “How’s it going?” she asked with a smile.

  “It’s going,” he said. “As to how well? That’s currently up for grabs.”

  While Dave tucked into his breakfast, he was thinking about Barbara Lemon. He’d dealt with her on several occasions during his years as a homicide cop, and she was by far his favorite criminalist. He knew that the state’s crime lab had recently come into possession of the latest in DNA technology. Years earlier creating a profile had been an expensive, time-consuming process. Now all that had changed. These days a profile could be obtained in a matter of hours, but demands on the new system were overwhelming. Dave was well aware that he had used his longtime relationship with Barbara to jump the line. Still, he was hopeful. His gut was telling him he and his investigators were onto something important.

  After breakfast he went back to the office and tried to turn his hand to his usual administrative duties, but his heart just wasn’t in it. He kept watching the clock—watching and waiting.

  Finally, a little before eleven, his cell phone rang with Barbara Lemon’s name on caller ID.

  “I’m holding my breath,” Dave said into the phone. “What do you have for me?”

  “The big kahuna,” she replied. “Not only do I have a profile, I have a hit on CODIS!”

  Sheriff Dave Holman felt a wave of gooseflesh sweep down his leg. “Are you serious?”

  “Absolutely. I’ll be sending an official notification in a few minutes, but I wanted to give you a heads-up. Harvey McCluskey’s DNA matches that found at the scene of an unsolved homicide in Nye County, Nevada, from August 2007.”

  “What’s the victim’s name?” Dave asked.

  “Dawna Marie Giles,” Barbara said. “She was a seventeen-year-old runaway who disappeared from her parents’ home in Tonopah. She was last seen alive on Saturday, August fourth, 2007. Her partial remains were found later that same day, two miles off Highway 95, twenty miles south of Beatty.”

  “Does the sheriff there know you got a hit?”

  “He’s not yet been informed,” Barbara replied, “and I’d appreciate it if you’d wait to contact him until after you both receive the official notification. I’ll be sending one to him and to you at the same time.”

  “Don’t worry,” Dave said. “I won’t blow your cover on this, Barbara, but I owe you big.”

  Before Dave did anything else, he located the non-emergency phone number of Nye County Sheriff’s Department. Then, for the next ten minutes, he paced the floor in his office, waiting for an incoming e-mail notification. When it arrived, Dave picked up the receiver on his landline and dialed.

  Eventually someone answered. “Nye County Sheriff’s Office, may I help you?”

  “I’d like to speak to your sheriff.”

  “May I say who’s calling?”

  “Sheriff Dave Holman of Yavapai County, Arizona,” he
replied. “I’m calling about the 2007 homicide of Dawna Marie Giles. I’m currently holding a suspect in my jail whose DNA matches your crime scene.”

  |CHAPTER 48|

  Once Nye County sheriff Bill Longren came on the line, it turned out the whole thing was a big surprise to him. Before Dave called, Longren had been tied up in a board of supervisors meeting and had not yet seen Barbara’s e-mail. As soon as he realized what was going on, he asked to put Dave on hold.

  “Let me get my cold-case gal in here,” he said. “Mike Priest, the original investigator, passed away from cancer two years ago. Detective Susan Moore is the one currently assigned to the case. Dawna Marie’s murder may be cold as ice, but it sure as hell ain’t forgotten!” he added.

  Once Detective Moore was in Longren’s office and the phone on speaker, what followed was an hour-long three-way conversation. With the full agreement of both sides, the entire call was taped. Dave broke the ice by telling the Nevada-based officers exactly what he knew about Harvey McCluskey—how he’d been taken into custody in the kidnapping case, how they’d used handcuffs to gather his DNA, and how the state crime lab in Phoenix had discovered the CODIS connection to their case. He finished off by supplying the last piece of the puzzle—the class ring taken from McCluskey’s gold chain—a ring with the initials DG built into the design.

  Then it was Susan Moore’s turn. She got straight into it. “Dawna Marie was last seen leaving a friend’s home in the early hours of Saturday morning, August fourth, 2007. After a serious altercation with her mother over underage drinking and breaking a midnight curfew, she spent the remainder of the night with her best friend, Brianna Lester, who reported that when Dawna Marie left her house that morning, she was on her way to Vegas to hook up with her boyfriend, Jason Tuttle. He was later interviewed and eliminated from the investigation due to the fact that he had a rock-solid alibi—he was cooling his heels in the Clark County Jail on a DUI arrest that whole weekend. No other viable suspects were ever identified.