evidence bag, which he quickly closed, but isolating the finger did little to diminish the odor. It had bonded onto the leather itself, leaving the gagging stench to cloud the air. Gil zipped the purse closed. That helped some too.
At that point, John reached into his pocket and extracted a cell phone. “This was in the purse,” he said. “I heard it ringing. When I tried to answer it, I found. . that. .” He nodded in the direction of the evidence bag.
“I called the number later on my own phone and talked to an old woman named Camilla Gastellum who lives in Sacramento. She said the purse probably belonged to her daughter and that I should bring it here and talk to you. She said her daughter’s name was Brenda. Brenda Riley.”
He put the lid on the Bankers Box. He would inventory all this later and then he would send it to the crime lab.
“There’s a pair of shoes too,” John said quickly, handing over a paper grocery bag. “Tennis shoes. I found them at the same time. They were with the purse.”
“Where did you find all this treasure?” Gil asked.
Will Connor answered before his son had a chance to reply. “John and some friends were up by Scotts Flat Reservoir earlier tonight. That’s where they found them. He and his buddies were just hanging out. .”
Will was talking quickly, trying to gloss over the where, when, and why. And Gil got it. He understood. He recognized John Connor because he had seen his photo before in the sports section of the
Gil remembered how, as a kid, he had walked on the wild side-gone to wild keggers and hung out with the wrong crowd. For a while during his senior year, it looked like he wasn’t going to graduate with his class, but he managed to pull his GPA out of the fire at the last minute. Gil knew that no one would have been more surprised than his high school principal, Mr. Dortman, to learn that Gilbert Morris had grown up to be not only a cop but a well-respected homicide detective.
So Gil didn’t need to ask what John Connor and his pals had been doing on a Sunday afternoon and evening at the Scotts Flat Reservoir in the middle of the winter. He already knew. They had definitely been up to no good, probably with booze or girls or both.
“Who else was there?” Gil asked.
John sighed. “Me and Tony Alvarez, Pete Bishop, and Jack Whitney.”
Gil recognized those names as well. All four of the kids were starters on the Grass Valley varsity basketball team. If they got booted off the team, it was the end of what was starting to look like a championship season. Even so-even with all that at risk-John Connor had nonetheless done the right thing. He had picked up the purse and the shoes and had brought them to Gil.
“Tell me about the shoes,” Gil said. He held them up to the outside light. They were Keds, white Keds. Considering what had gone on at Richard Lowensdale’s house, they should have been speckled with blood. They weren’t, and they weren’t especially dirty either.
That struck Gil as odd. If someone had been out tramping around in the woods in them, they should have been a lot dirtier.
“They were right there on the edge of the lake,” John Connor was saying. “Like somebody walked up to the water, kicked off their shoes, and went for a swim. I looked around. It’s real sandy there. There could have been footprints coming and going, but I couldn’t see them in the dark.”
“Any sign of a struggle?”
John shook his head. “It was like she just took off her shoes and walked into the water on her own.”
Gil nodded. “We’ll need to check that out.”
There was a problem with that. The Scotts Flat Reservoir was out in the country. That made for a whole other set of complications.
“Let’s get your statement first,” Gil said. “Then we’ll need you to go back up to the lake so you can show us where all this went down.”
Gil picked up the box and the bag. “I’ll take these inside so we can maintain the chain of evidence,” he said. “Then we need to go to an interview room so I can ask you some questions.”
John nodded.
“I’ll be recording the interview,” he said. “It’s important that you tell the truth. You know it’s against the law to lie to a police officer.”
John looked briefly at his father for guidance and then nodded again. The hopeless slump of his shoulders told Gil that the kid knew he was screwed, that he understood his hope of going to West Point was all over.
“All right,” he said, sounding resigned. “Let’s get this done and over with.”
“Just to be clear,” Gil added, “I have no particular interest in knowing what you and your friends were doing up at the reservoir tonight. You weren’t drinking, were you?”
John Connor’s eyes shot up and met Gil’s questioning gaze. His shoulders straightened. “No, sir,” he said. “I was not.”
It was clearly an honest answer. John Connor had not been drinking, but that didn’t mean the others hadn’t been.
“Who else saw the shoes and the purse at the lake?” Gil asked.
“No one else. I was the only one.”
“All right, then,” Gil said, leading the way back inside. “We’ll do the interview first. That shouldn’t take long, and then we’ll go back out to the lake so you can show me what you found where. Then we’ll get you home to bed. Wouldn’t want you to miss school tomorrow.”
“No school tomorrow, sir,” John Connor said. “Martin Luther King’s birthday.”
John didn’t mean anything by that remark. It was informational only. Still it hit Gil like a blow to the gut. If his own kids were still here, he would have known that tomorrow was a school holiday.
“Come on,” he said gruffly. “Let’s get going.”
During the interview, Gil asked only a few cursory questions about what John and his friends had been doing at the reservoir in the middle of the night. He let the answer “Hanging out” pass without demanding any more details. Gil focused instead on what had happened after John and his unnamed friends came back to town. How John had gone off on his own to open the purse, what he had found there, and his phone call to Camilla Gastellum.
When the interview was over, Gil picked up his phone and called one of the county detectives, Frank Escobar. He and Frank had worked together before on occasion, but they also went back a long way-back to some of those same wild high school keg parties. Gil wouldn’t have to explain the situation with John Connor and his friends to Frank in any great detail.
“I’ve got a problem,” Gil said, once Frank came on the phone. “A kid from Grass Valley was out at the Scotts Flat Reservoir tonight, hanging with a couple of his buddies. They found an abandoned purse and a pair of women’s tennis shoes beside the lake. I’m thinking this could be a suicide, but according to the kid there’s no sign of a body.”
“Wait a minute,” Frank said. “If I’ve got a possible suicide out in the country, what does it have to do with you?”
“It has to do with a homicide I’m working here in Grass Valley,” Gil said. “The perp whacked off a few of the victim’s fingers. Guess what the kid found inside the purse?”
“A finger?”
“Yes, and puked his guts out too.”
“Okay,” Frank said. “So my possible suicide turns out to be your possible prime suspect.”
“That’s it in a nutshell,” Gil agreed. “So if you don’t mind, once I inventory all this stuff, I’ll turn it over to the crime lab for analysis. Later on, if your potential suicide turns into an actual suicide, we’ll trade evidence as needed.”
“Can you tell me where on the Scotts Flat Reservoir?” Frank asked.
“Somewhere close to the dam,” Gil said. “I’m sure the kid can show us, but we’re going to need to give him some cover on this.”
“What kind of cover?”
