Brookings found a smile at the corners of his mouth. “You telling me you don’t already know? Shep, I’m surprised at you.”
Shepherd permitted few people to call him Shep, a nickname he detested, but Paul Brookings could get away with it.
“I admit it’s a lapse in my customary omniscience,” he answered mildly. “But Hector and Janice and I were all tied up with that freak who said he stole people’s faces.”
Janice Hirst wasn’t part of the task force, but Hector Alvarez had been on the case almost as long as Shepherd. Alvarez nodded. “We thought we had something, maybe.”
Marty Kroft looked puzzled. “Guess I’m not so, uh, omniscious either. What’s this all about?”
“False alarm.” Shepherd explained about the magazine photos, the warehouse that had become a gallery.
Steve Call snorted. “Sounds like a man who could use some serious downtime.”
“He’s on vacation in the psych ward now,” Alvarez said.
“These street people,” Don Rivera muttered, “man, they just get weirder….”
Then he fell silent, and for a moment so did everyone else, because they had remembered that Shepherd was in the room.
Brookings was first to speak. “Anyway, that’s the shit storm I referred to. Some idiot leaked the story. Major break in the White Mountains case, blah blah blah. Local radio picked it up and ran with it. Story will be in the
The Tucson
“They give any details?” Yanni Stern asked. Stern worked vice. He’d been drafted by the task force to find out about any local perverts who had a yen for snuff films or an interest in mutilation beyond the body-piercing variety.
Brookings filled out the story. “You can see what happened here. Some jackass blabbed about crazy Mitch’s arrest.”
“Radio said it was a nine-one tip-off,” Rivera said. “What’s that all about?”
“Something different entirely. We’ll get to that part of it in a few minutes.” Brookings sighed. “Bottom line, it’s a royal mess. Graves has been on the phone ever since the story broke.” Graves was the sergeant who handled public relations. He knew every local reporter. “We’ll get a retraction, but hell, it still looks bad. People get all worked up, and then when they’re disappointed, look who takes the blame.”
Shepherd was bored. He tuned out Brookings and listened to the sounds of the station house. Phones rang in a shrill cacophony. Somewhere a woman was talking loudly in Spanish, her voice rising operatically. He made out enough words to know she was not making threats, just venting. She was upset. Most of the civilians who paid a visit to police headquarters were upset.
Brookings and the others were still hashing out the media strategy. Shepherd had never felt any interest in the media. To his way of thinking, reporters always got everything wrong, and anybody who listened to them was a fool.
His wife had found his attitude harsh. He smiled a little, thinking of Ginnie. She had believed in people. She had thought most folks, even reporters, tried honestly to do their best and deserved encouragement for it. There had been nothing cynical in her, nothing sour.
Maybe if she had been less trusting, less sure of the fundamental goodness in people, she would still be alive.
Brookings moved to the second item on the agenda, the latest in a series of jurisdictional squabbles between the Apache County Sheriff’s Department and TPD. The dual investigations were not always impeccably coordinated.
Another waste of time. Shepherd shifted in his chair, the metal legs scraping on bare tiles. The room had been carpeted once, but too many agitated prisoners had puked or peed on the floor. It was the innocent ones who got the most nervous. The guilty took arrest in stride.
The discussion was winding down when a community service officer, one of the civilian volunteers who relieved the department’s manpower shortage by doing clerical tasks, wheeled in a reel-to-reel tape player on a cart.
Brookings set the player on the table. “This brings us to that nine-one call our friends in the news media got so excited about.” He glanced at the service officer, an affable septuagenarian named Rudy. “All cued up?”
Shepherd knew Rudy. A week after his retirement from the insurance business, the man had simply shown up for TPD’s civilian training classes, explaining that seven days of inactivity had nearly brought on premature senility, and he could stand no more.
“Yes, sir, Captain.” Rudy nodded. “I matched it to the entry in the nine-one-one log.” All 911 calls were recorded, and the time of each call was marked by the operator in a duty log.
When Rudy was gone, Brookings explained what they were about to hear. “We got an anonymous tip this morning. RP was a woman. She gave us a name. Of course, this had nothing whatsoever to do with crazy — what’s his name?”
“Mitch,” Shepherd said.
“Right. Crazy Mitch. But the call and the arrest happened pretty much at the same time, and you know how things get put together even when they have no connection. Tip-off in the case, and then an arrest of a guy who says he steals faces — bingo, the killer’s in custody.”
Alvarez snapped his gum.
“Now we all get to hear what our anonymous source had to say.” Brookings smiled. “Pretty exciting, huh, Shep?”
“I’m thrilled,” Shepherd intoned with the required ironic frown as he pushed back his chair.
The truth was, he did feel a mild rush of adrenaline. So far the various tips that had come in by phone and mail had proven worthless, but somebody out there might know the killer’s identity.
Maybe this woman was the one.
Brookings played the tape. Shepherd listened, jotting notes on his memo pad, as the voices of the 911 operator and the nameless female caller trembled through the tape deck’s tinny speaker. He liked the woman’s voice. It was soft and breathless, suggestive of vulnerability. He wanted to believe her. But belief got harder as the tape played on.
“I’m not crazy,” she blurted out at one point.
Shepherd wrote down the words. The crazy ones were always quickest to assert their sanity. A normal person never imagined that anyone would doubt his basic rationality, but a person with a history of mental problems, a person accustomed to being prodded and poked by psychologists, learned to be defensive on that subject.
The call lasted less than three minutes. It ended with a click, and the 911 operator saying, “Ma’am? You there? Hell.”
Brookings shut off the machine. “So what do we think?” he inquired of the room.
Rivera looked bored. “Probably a squirrel.”
“That’s what the nine-one operator thought. It’s why he wanted her picked up, and Bentley concurred.” Bentley was the watch commander on the morning shift. “But she was GOA when the beat car got there.”
“And the satchel?” Call asked.
“
Rivera grunted. “Squirrel,” he said again.
“I’m not so sure.”
Shepherd hadn’t known he was going to speak until the words were out of his mouth. Everyone looked at him.
“Maybe she did have the evidence,” he went on slowly, “but she got scared off before she could leave it for us.”
Brookings frowned. “Other than pure wishful thinking, is there any basis for that supposition?”
There must be, but Shepherd hadn’t worked it all out yet. He knew that he wanted the tip to pan out. He wanted proof that somebody named John Cray, who lived and worked near Safford, had sliced off Sharon Andrews’ face and taken it home with him. He wanted this case cleared, justice done. He wanted closure for Sharon’s young
