general conversation was a bust. Tadeo grunted, nodded, shook his head, or managed a monosyllable. Dora frowned at him and responded at length. I couldn’t blame her-if this was the level of interaction the guy offered on a regular basis, she was undoubtedly starved for attention.
I asked him if the group of kids in a picture near his elbow were his children. All he said was, “Grandchildren.” His wife was expanding on that answer when Tadeo interrupted her and asked Ethan, “How’d you get shot?”
“The usual way,” he said. “Being a fool.”
That won the slightest smile from the man.
“Saving my life,” I said.
“Not the same thing at all,” Ethan said. “And as I recall, you started out trying to save mine. Fool rescue is a dangerous occupation.” He looked across the room. “As anybody in law enforcement can tell you.”
Tadeo’s smile widened a little, and he said to Ethan, “Tell me what happened.”
So Ethan gave him the condensed version of the whole tale, minimizing his own role. Somewhere in there, he worked in the fact that he knew Caleb Fletcher. And as his brief account ended with his talking about staying with us, he also said, “Caleb has been over to visit me twice now. He’s not the kind of person who forgets people, you know? He’s good that way.”
“Does he visit his brother?”
“Every week. That’s as often as he can see him.”
Tadeo sighed. “I wasn’t happy with Dora when she told me you were coming over here today.”
“We picked up on that,” Ethan said.
That won a laugh. “Sorry. Nothing personal.”
“Like hell,” Dora said. “Not personal against the two of you, but personal to him. Those bastards in his department-”
“Dora…”
“It’s the truth. It’s eating you up, old man, and you know it. Tadeo’s union had to fight the department to get his detective rank back.”
Ethan and I looked at Tadeo. Thank God Ethan knows when to keep his mouth shut. He was probably thinking the same thing about me.
The silence drew out. Finally Tadeo said, “Dora told me you were just working on background. You won’t quote me?”
“I want to be completely honest with you about this,” I said, “so let me tell you what I told your wife. I’m not working on a story. I’m married to a homicide detective who works in the Las Piernas Police Department, so I rarely cover anything directly related to a crime. I know Caleb, though, and I know what was happening in our crime lab in the years when his brother was convicted.”
“Yeah, we’ve heard about your problems.”
“So I’m not doing this for a story, I’m trying to see what I can learn for a friend. If you tell me something that can be corroborated in other ways, I may try to convince you to go on the record with one of my colleagues. But it will be your choice.”
After another long silence, Tadeo said, “I made a suggestion at a crime scene, about how a murder might have gone down. It wasn’t…in agreement with the way the lieutenant saw it.” He rubbed a hand over his chin. “It’s a good department, no matter what Dora says. My problems were with this one guy. Anybody else I’ve ever worked with would have at least thought about what a more experienced detective had to say. Not this guy. We got into a big argument. He was newly promoted, and kind of insecure.”
“And he was a racist,” Dora said.
Tadeo shrugged. “Not the first I’ve met, undoubtedly not the last.”
“Your family has been in this country longer than his! Your cousin fought in Vietnam. Your dad fought in World War II. He sees brown skin and right away he assumes you were born in Mexico.”
“Nothing wrong with being born in Mexico, Dora…”
“That’s not what I meant and you know it.”
“And as for his attitude-I don’t know. You ask me, that wasn’t what bothered him most that night. It was his pride, after what happened.” He turned to me. “I knew we had press there. He showed up at the scene because of that. What I didn’t know at the time-there was a reporter with a parabolic microphone pointed at us. So my theory about the crime got reported in the paper.”
“Let me guess,” I said. “You turned out to be right.”
“Well, yeah. But by the time anyone figured that out, I was already in trouble. I had embarrassed him, so he had me written up for being insubordinate, and eventually he managed to get me reassigned and demoted.”
“Tadeo is not a politician,” Dora said. “That lieutenant, he was more politician than anything.”
“The union helped me out,” Tadeo said. “But I was miserable for quite a few weeks before it all got straightened out.”
“And it was during that miserable time that you were on patrol in the mountains?”
“Yes.” He paused. “It was the most exciting thing that happened the whole time I worked up there. But…that’s not why I remember it so clearly. I remember it because it has been eating at me for five years.”
“Why?” I asked softly.
He looked over to his wife. “Because I should have spoken up and I didn’t.”
“You’re speaking up now,” she said.
“About what?” I asked.
He took a big breath, as if he were about to dive into deep, cold water. “I think someone staged that scene.”
CHAPTER 33
Monday, May 1
11:15 A.M.
REDLANDS
THERE were all kinds of things at that scene that just didn’t make sense, and yet no one from Las Piernas seemed to notice them.”
“Give me some examples,” I said.
“First of all, the place he was found-makes no sense. He doesn’t have a cabin up there-I checked that out. He’s supposed to be smart enough to carry out a double homicide in broad daylight and manage to dump his sister’s body in some woods somewhere without anyone seeing him, but then he decides to drink and pop pills and get naked in the mountains? You know what the roads are like up there?”
“Curving, with cliffs and steep embankments.”
“Right. He’s supposed to be blasted-nearly died of the booze and barbiturates alone, but he doesn’t drive off a cliff. He doesn’t scrape a guardrail. He doesn’t even hit a tree. He makes it into a shallow little drainage ditch off a driveway. Hardly any damage, either-doesn’t even knock out a headlight. If I didn’t know better, I’d think he carefully backed into that ditch.”
“Backed into it?”
“The headlights were shining up into the trees, pointed away from neighboring cabins. I looked around-the shape of the ditch, the way the road and trees were lined up along there-the only way I could see the car ending up at that angle was if it had been backed in.”
He hunted up a piece of paper and drew a little diagram.
“This isn’t exact, just something to give you a rough idea. Okay. He supposedly drives into that ditch, and the sound isn’t loud enough to wake the neighbors-I woke them, shouting the little girl’s name.”
“Jenny.”
“Yes. But that’s not all that’s off about this scene. He isn’t bruised or cut-not even a scratch. Although he had two victims to kill, neither of them harmed him in any way. Okay, maybe he held them at gunpoint or knifepoint- but no. No weapons other than that metal sculpture. Some kind of award. Not many people get held up at award-
