“We’re here to talk to you about what happened to your husband,” Renteria said.
“No,” Christine insisted. “No one is supposed to come here when Phil isn’t home. Come back when he’s here.”
“You know we can’t do that,” the sheriff said. “Phil is dead.”
Christine’s response to that was one of immediate rage. “No!” she shrieked, half rising out of her chair. “That’s a lie! Phil’s at work!”
On the way to the house, Renteria had anticipated finding Christine a wheelchair-bound invalid. Deputy Carson had warned them in advance about the bat, and it was a good thing. Reaching down to pick it up, Christine had exploded out of the recliner like a crazed jack-in-the box. While she screamed and brandished the weapon, it had taken all three officers and two shots from Detective Zambrano’s Taser to subdue her enough to put her in cuffs.
Ultimately, they managed to wrestle her out of the house and into the back of a patrol car, where she continued to scream and pound her head against the window as she was driven away.
Once she was gone, Sheriff Renteria had spent hours at the house and in the garage, following his crime scene techs as they photographed the scene and searched for evidence. Renteria gave the guys full credit. They had found two tiny and almost invisible screw holes in the outside of the door frame on the garage door. The holes had been plugged with a dollop of toothpaste that was crusty on the outside and still semi-soft on the inside.
From the distinct straight lines visible on both of Phil Tewksbury’s legs, they had deduced that Christine must have used something-most likely a string or a wire-to trip him. So far, they had found no evidence of string, wire, or wire screws in the house or in the trash. Tomorrow the sheriff planned to have his officers perform a grid search of the entire property to see if Christine had disposed of the evidence by tossing it into the yard.
In other words, what had happened was obvious, but as he stared at Midge’s smiling face in the photo, what Manuel Renteria still wanted to know was why. After all those years of being cared for by her husband, why had Christine Tewksbury suddenly snapped? What was it that had driven her over the edge and into a murderous rage?
If, as Patty Patton claimed, Christine hadn’t set foot outside the house in years, why had she done so now, not once but twice-once to lay the trap with the trip wire and once to do the actual killing? Why kill her husband in the garage when she could just as easily have attacked him in the house-when he was asleep in bed, for instance? If she’d been intent on murder, wouldn’t it have been easier to do the deed inside the house? Why go to all that trouble of setting the trap outside? Was it to deflect suspicion?
More than that, why do it at all? And then, almost as though Midge had spoken aloud, Sheriff Renteria had his answer. He immediately picked up his phone and called Detective Zambrano again.
“Whenever you see Patty, ask her about Phil’s private life.”
“What do you mean his private life? Like an affair or something?”
“Exactly,” Sheriff Renteria said. “If he was having an affair, that might supply a motive. What if Phil Tewksbury was fooling around with some other woman and Christine found out about it?”
“After what we saw today,” Zambrano said, “you could hardly blame him.”
“Maybe you couldn’t blame him, but Christine sure as hell could,” the sheriff said. “And if he did have an outside interest, Patty will know about it.”
“What if the other woman turns out to be Patty Patton?”
That one set Sheriff Renteria back on his heels. He hadn’t even thought about that.
“Crap,” he said. “I don’t know. I guess you’ll need to ask her.”
He hung up the phone and went back to staring at Midge’s silent photo.
47
6:30 P.M., Monday, April 12
Patagonia, Arizona
By the time Patty made it home from dinner, she was done. Eating at the cafe had been a tactical error, because she’d been forced to do far too much talking. Was it true Christine Tewksbury had murdered her husband? People had heard rumors that bundles of drugs had been found in Phil’s garage. How was it possible that the nicest guy in town was actually a drug dealer? In other words, everyone wanted to know what Patty knew and how long she had known it.
When she came in the front door and saw the voice-mail light blinking on her phone, she was tempted to ignore it. After all, it was bound to be more bad news. But when she saw the number listed on the display and realized it was Ali Reynolds calling, she picked up the phone and dialed back.
“Sorry it took a while for me to get back to you,” Patty said. “I stopped off and had some dinner on the way home.”
“I’m doing the same thing on the way to the hospital,” Ali said. “Some relative or other of Teresa’s showed up this afternoon to help with the little ones, so I got a break. But I did stop by to see Christine.”
“And?”
“She seems to think Phil had a girlfriend.”
For a moment Patty said nothing. This was not news to her. She had suspected Phil had a girlfriend for a long time, and why shouldn’t he? He was devoted to Christine, but Patty was of the opinion that, after years of being punished for his daughter’s death, he deserved to have some kind of life and some kind of fun.
Months ago Patty had noticed Phil starting to take a little more pride in his appearance: He didn’t wear the same uniform two days in a row; he took more trouble arranging his comb-over; sometimes he even whistled or hummed as he took the mail bins out to his truck.
Yes, Patty had noticed, and she hadn’t said a single word about it to Phil or to anyone else, either, because it was no one else’s business. That didn’t mean she hadn’t wondered, though. Who was it? Where had he met her? Phil wasn’t the kind to hang out in bars. Maybe it was someone he had met at the cafe, but if that were the case, someone probably would have noticed and mentioned it. When she noticed he was often late coming back from his route, especially on Mondays, Patty concluded that it had to be someone on his route.
The idea that Phil would casually pull his mail truck off into someone’s yard and park it while he indulged in a nooner was more than a bit disturbing, but obviously, he and his gal pal were incredibly discreet, because not a whisper of it ever came back to Patty. The previous week, when he had come back later than usual, claiming he’d had to help a stranded motorist change a tire, Patty had started to tease him about it, but then she had let it go. She had already decided that if Zambrano asked her about it in his interview, she would keep it under her hat. For one thing, it was nothing more than a rumor. Patty knew no details of any kind. Besides, why bring something up like that at a time when all it would do was hurt Christine? Now, to her surprise, word about a possible girlfriend had come from Christine herself.
“Hello,” Ali asked. “Are you still there?”
“I’m here,” Patty said. “Just a little taken aback is all. What did she tell you?”
“That she found a letter he had written sometime back-a letter to someone named Ollie.”
“That’s an unusual name for a woman,” Patty said. “It’s not one I recognize.”
“It was like a pen name or something,” Ali said. “He signed his letters Popeye, and Ollie was evidently short for Olive Oyl.”
Patty blinked in surprise. That was the tune she remembered hearing Phil whistle on occasion, the theme song to that old cartoon-“I’m Popeye the sailor man.”
“What’s really important,” Ali continued, “is that Christine thinks Ollie, or whatever her name is, was at their house this morning.”
“She saw her?”
“No. Christine claimed she smelled the girlfriend’s perfume, and she was offended that Phil would bring another woman into the house when she was right there.”
