6.
Tess met Danny there midmorning. He’d already been up in the Atascosas, driving around talking to potential witnesses.
“You canvassed the whole area?”
“Uh-huh.”
“How’d it go?”
“I made it back to the car alive, so I’d have to say it was a success.”
Danny liked to joke but this time he was serious.
“That bad?”
“It’s like
He looked at the apartments and grimaced. “What’s a retired cop who won the lottery doing living in a dump like this?”
“He gave most of the money to the Humane Society,” Tess reminded him.
“Bet his daughter liked that.”
They’d had to wait for a warrant, so it was midmorning by the time they reached the apartments. Danny rousted the apartment manager from her desk and followed her as she scuttled down the walkway to his door. She’d taken note of their badges and Tess could tell she wanted to ask questions, but Danny just thanked her and closed the door behind them.
They gloved up and started looking around. At first, Tess folded her arms under her armpits and looked at everything without touching.
George Hanley was a neat man. A bachelor’s two-cup coffeemaker sat on the counter, lined up with the toaster. Issues of gun and fishing magazines were stacked neatly on the veneered-oak side table by the chair. Everything in the bathroom was lined up on shelves with military precision. Clean towels, spotless floors.
Tess noticed this because she did the same thing.
Danny took the kitchen while Tess took the bedroom. Again, she looked at everything, taking mental snapshots of the room layout and contents.
Next, she checked the desk by the sliding-glass door in his bedroom. The sun poured in, throwing a lozenge of light on the carpet. The desk top was completely clean, except for a jar of pens and pencils. She went through the desk drawers and found the usual stuff—from Post-its to a stapler to erasers and other detritus that didn’t warrant being seen in the open.
A MacBook Pro laptop sat on the bedside table. Tess called out to Danny. He came in.
He whistled. “Could be a goldmine,” he said.
“If we get it to forensics soon—”
“It’ll probably be a week before they get to it. They’re backed up, what with Guzman.”
The Guzman case was a big one. Several members of a prominent Nogales family had been gunned down during a wedding. The patriarch, Alejandro Guzman, owned several legitimate businesses and was a household name in Nogales for thirty years. But it was widely known that he played both sides of the street. He’d been careful to keep his illicit operations separate from his sweet old grandfather image. But he’d laundered money for the Alacran.
It had caught up with him in March, when he was shot once through the eye and once through the heart as he toasted his daughter’s wedding.
“They just confiscated about a dozen racehorses,” Danny said. “They’re gonna be busy for a while.”
“Probably,” Tess said.
Danny hung back in the doorway. They looked at each other.
“I guess we bag it and hope for the best,” Tess said.
“Probably has a password.”
“Yeah.”
“Crap.”
“Double crap with a cherry on top.”
“A fucking crap flambe.”
They both laughed at that.
“I’m gonna go back to his pantry,” Danny said. “Guy must have bought out Costco.”
Hanley had a four-drawer file cabinet. Folders were neatly marked with his credit card bills—one Visa and one American Express card—and several folders holding information on what appeared to be old crimes. Newspaper clippings and printouts, mostly, some of him at homicide scenes. Hanley was meticulous in his filing system. Tess also noticed he held no balance on his credit cards, paying in full every month. She found his rental agreement and a number of other business records. Tess photographed them all in situ and then stacked them and put them in the evidence box she’d brought.
George Hanley was a deliberate man.
She looked through the wall calendar and saw a few notations.
“Danny, check this out.”
Danny ducked his head in. “What?”
She motioned to the calendar. “Nice handwriting. What is that? The Palmer Method? My dad wrote like that.”
One on April 8, with the notation: “finance adv.”
“Financial advisor?” Danny said.
Another notation at the end of April: “SABEL.”
“What’s that?” Danny asked.
Tess typed the letters into her phone and got the answer. “Southern Arizona Buffelgrass Eradication League. Says here it’s a group ‘dedicated to ridding southern Arizona of a highly flammable invasive species of grass.’”
“Jesus. That’s a mouthful.”
“He must have belonged to the group.” Tess photographed the calendar and then took it down. They went through each month, Danny peering over her shoulder.
There were several notations. In January, there was a line across three days and the word “Conference.” In May, another line through three days, and the notation, “LA.” And under that, “look at wading pool.”
“Wading pool?” Danny looked at Tess. “You think…?”
“I dunno.”
“Hey, I know he’s old, but they say that never goes away. You think he was hanging out around the city wading pool trolling for kids?”
“It could mean anything. Maybe he has grandkids, and he was planning on buying them a wading pool for Christmas.”
“Do Pat and Bert have kids?”
Something else to ask them.
Their search went downhill from there. They switched rooms. Now Tess took the living room and kitchen and Danny took the bedroom, bathroom, and linen closet.
The first thing Tess saw was a dog’s water bowl and dish, both empty and sitting in the kitchen sink. “He had a dog?” she called to Danny.
“Looks like it. He’s not here now.”
Tess called the Scofield residence and Bert answered.
“Your father-in-law has a dog.”
“Adele. I took her to the pound this morning.”
“This morning?”
“I picked her up last night.”
Before the crime scene tape went up. “That was quick.”
“I couldn’t leave her there. She was my responsibility.”
“And you took her to the pound today?” Tess was hardly ever surprised at the things people did. Still, this was cold.
