She parked her car well away from the cones. Before exiting the car, she grabbed a pack of cigarettes and a lighter out of her glove box. Yes, Patty was a smoker, but she didn’t want to be tempted into creating a smoking room outside the back door of her post office. So the cigarettes stayed in the car and the car stayed safely at home when she was working. This afternoon all bets were off.
Wearing an orange traffic jacket, Jimmy stood in the middle of the small side road that led to the Tewksburys’ house, doing nothing while he waited to direct nonexistent traffic. “Hey, Ms. Patton,” he said when he saw her. “Sorry.”
“Your mom called,” Patty said.
Jimmy nodded. “I thought she would.”
No doubt Jimmy had been instructed to keep his mouth shut, but Patty Patton had known him all his life, and she didn’t hesitate to play that card. “Is it true Phil is dead?”
Jimmy nodded. “Yes, he is. The body’s already on its way to the morgue.”
“What’s going on in there, then?” she asked, blowing smoke in the air and nodding in the direction of the house. Most of the activity seemed to center around the free-standing garage a short distance away from the Tewksburys’ kitchen door.
“Crime scene investigation.”
When Eunice had told Patty that Christine was responsible, Patty had assumed the deadly assault had played out inside the house. “You mean it happened inside the garage?” she asked.
Deputy Carson sighed before he answered. “I shouldn’t be talking to you like this, Mrs. Patton, but yes, it happened inside the garage, and Christine has been taken into custody. When I came by this morning to check on Phil, the way you asked me, I rang the door and nobody answered. Since it was a welfare check, I let myself in, and there she was, sitting in the living room. I asked her if she knew where her husband was. There was a bat sitting on the floor next to her chair. She picked it up and told me to get out. So I did.
“But on the way out, I decided to check the garage. I looked in the window and saw the tarp there on the floor with a pair of feet sticking out from under it. The door was locked, so I broke it open to check on Phil. He was already dead as a doornail, with his head bashed in. I immediately called for backup. When we went back into the house, Christine was sitting there, still holding the bat. I guess I’m damned lucky that she didn’t use it on me.”
“I don’t believe it,” Patty declared.
“I’m sorry,” Jimmy said. “Phil really is dead. He must have been dead for a couple of hours before I found him.”
But Patty was looking at the distance between the back door to Phil’s house and the stand-alone garage. “I mean I don’t believe Christine did it,” she said. “According to Phil, she hasn’t set foot outside the house in years. He claimed she was agoraphobic-that the very idea of leaving the house caused panic attacks.”
“I’d call it a rage attack, not a panic attack,” Jimmy observed. “She went off again a little while later when Sheriff Renteria showed up with the chief detective. One of the crime scene guys told me that the bat has something on it that looks like bits of blood and hair. They’ll have to examine it before they know for sure if what’s there belongs to Phil. Christine must’ve been ashamed, because she even covered the poor guy with a dropcloth before she finished him off.”
Patty was sure this was Jimmy’s first homicide ever. He was visibly excited and talking way too much. She also doubted that anything she said to him would be given much credence. “I want to talk to whoever is in charge of the investigation,” she said.
“That’ll be Detective Zambrano,” Jimmy agreed. “But you’ll have to wait until he’s done in there.”
“All right,” she said. “I’ll wait.”
Finished with one cigarette, Patty lit another, then retreated to the Camaro and leaned against the back of the trunk to wait. Minutes later, a blue SUV-a fancy one Patty didn’t remember seeing before-pulled up to the barrier. When a tall blond woman got out and started toward the house, Jimmy rushed forward to head her off.
“Sorry,” he said. “It’s a crime scene. You can’t go there.”
“My name is Ali Reynolds. I’m looking for Sheriff Renteria. Someone has broken into the home of one of his deputies. I’m here to report it.”
“He’s busy.”
“Then I’ll wait.”
“Okay,” Jimmy said, motioning toward Patty. “You and everybody else.”
39
1:30 P.M., Monday, April 12
Tucson, Arizona
Al Gutierrez didn’t know when he’d ever had a better day off. At the Border Patrol headquarters in Tucson, he and Detective Rush bypassed Sergeant Dobbs’s office and went directly upstairs. That was the location of the massive library where miles of temporary checkpoint security videos were transferred onto permanent DVDs and cataloged by date and location. Within twenty minutes, Al and Detective Rush were in a viewing room with one of the library techs, scanning through the videos recorded the previous Friday afternoon at the Three Points checkpoint.
One vehicle after another passed without eliciting any interest. Most of the drivers and passengers were clearly Tohono O’odham, going and coming from one of the villages on the reservation, or elderly RV-driving snowbirds heading north after wintering in Arizona. Some were clearly ranch vehicles, a few of them pulling livestock trailers with and without livestock.
“Wait,” Ariel Rush said. “Go back. Let’s take a closer look at that white van.”
Al was pretty sure Detective Rush was quite capable of running the video monitor on her own, but Homeland Security rules meant that only a properly qualified technician was allowed to handle the DVDs and the controls.
“Can you freeze those frames and expand them?” she asked the tech once the white van reappeared on the screen. “If possible, I want to get a look at the driver and the passenger as well as the license plates. And what’s the logo on the side?”
Because the resolution was high enough to capture license plate information, the images offered a good deal of other information. The faces of both the driver and passenger were clearly visible. They were ordinary-looking guys who were waved through, traveling westbound, without any question. The logo on the driver’s door was easy to decipher: RUG RUNNERS OF SCOTTSDALE.
A quick Google search on Ariel’s laptop showed lots of sites about runner rugs for hallways and entryways but no firm of that name anywhere in the country. A quick check of the license plate revealed that it had been stolen from a Lincoln Town Car parked in a long-term lot at Sky Harbor Airport sometime during the preceding week.
On Friday afternoon the van with the switched-out plate had driven through the checkpoint westbound at 3:58 and returned eastbound at 5:02. On the second trip, the van was examined by a drug-sniffing dog before it was waved through.
“If you’re driving westbound on Highway 86, how far could you go in half an hour?” Detective Rush asked.
Al shrugged. “Not far,” he said. “You’d have to push it to get from there as far as Sells and back in that amount of time. There are a few ranch houses out that way in between, and some smaller Indian villages, but I can’t think of many places where someone would be buying an upscale rug. Most of the people I’ve met on the reservation are more likely to do their shopping at Home Depot or Target or Wal-Mart than they are in some arty kind of shop in Scottsdale.”
“That sounds like racial profiling to me,” Ariel said.
