Maestas smiled as though he'd won the lottery, thanked Kerney, packed up his paperwork, and left. Almost immediately, Sal Molina stuck his head inside the open door.
'Got a minute, Chief?' he asked.
'Sure,' Kerney replied.
'We've cleared last summer's drive-by shooting. The Albuquerque PD picked up our suspect on a fugitive warrant early this morning during a DWI traffic stop. He's hooked into the county jail.'
'That's good news.'
'I couldn't find a record of any calls made by Applewhite to Taos,'
Molina said.
'I even checked to see if she'd placed calls to some nearby resort communities like Red River and Angel Fire. I struck out there too.'
'Let it go, Lieutenant. The case is closed.' Kerney held out the hand-delivered FBI report.
In it was a copy of Gatlin's handwritten confession and the initial DNA test results confirming that the pubic hair and semen stains found at the crime scene were from Gatlin.
Molina shook his head as he read the paperwork.
'This is bogus, Chief. How many rape-murders do you know about where the perp quarrels with his victim, lets her dress and pack for a trip, and then stabs her with a pair of scissors?'
'I can buy it,' Kerney said.
'We know there was no forced entry at the house. We can assume with very little doubt that Terrell knew her murderer. It's also pretty clear by the killer's choice of weapons that the attack was an act of passion or rage that wasn't premeditated. Put that together with the fact that Terrell and Gatlin had been lovers, that prior to the murder Gatlin had repeatedly threatened violence, and you've got a case.
Gatlin's confession and the lab findings ice the cake.'
Molina dropped the paperwork on Kerney's desk and looked at Kerney with angry eyes.
'How does that explain Ambassador Terrell coming to town with two cleaners in tow who remove and erase any pertinent evidence we might have found during a full house search? Then Charlie Perry shows up waving national security in our faces, takes over the investigation, won't give us squat, and watches our every move. Then, big surprise, within two days Perry dumps a neat and tidy solution in our laps that we have absolutely no way to verify.'
'Agent Perry made it clear there would be elements to the investigation we would not be privy to. National security matters do not fall within our domain.'
Molina leaned forward and put his fists on Kerney's desk.
'Let me and my people keep working this case, Chief. You know it's the right thing to do.'
Kerney bit his lip and shook his head.
'No, Lieutenant, and that's final.'
Without another word Molina turned on his heel and stalked out of the office.
Kerney stared at a blank wall and tried to remain calm. Molina was right, of course, and his blistering indictment of Kerney's decision was perfectly reasonable.
He got up, turned out the lights, and walked to a window that gave a view of the shopping mall on the other side of Cerrillos Road. A van with dark-tinted glass covered with curtains and several roof-mounted antennas had been parked in the lot day and night since Charlie Perry had arrived on the scene. Preoccupied with all that needed doing, Kerney had taken a full day to snap to the realization that he was under electronic surveillance.
He rationalized his slow uptake by thinking he'd never been spied on before, at least not to his knowledge. It gave him no satisfaction. He hoped that Charlie Perry would be lulled to sleep after listening to the tape of his conversation with Sal Molina. What he would do while Charlie was snoozing still had to be thought out.
Charlie Perry waited in his car for the custodian to turn out the lights and leave the college administration building. Earlier in the day, pretending to be gathering information about the college for a cousin, Perry had met with an admissions counselor. During his visit he'd scoped out the exit doors, located the faculty mailroom, and noticed the absence of a security system. Then he'd taken a self guided walking tour around the campus.
The custodian drove away. Perry put on plastic gloves, walked from his car to a side entrance, picked the lock, and hurried down a long corridor to the mailroom. Using a pocket flashlight he located Father Mitchell's empty mailbox.
He searched a bin of unsorted mail and found nothing addressed to the priest.
The manila envelope Randall Stewart had mailed for Phyllis Terrell had to be around somewhere, but where? He checked every mailbox to make sure the envelope hadn't been mis routed and looked through the outgoing mail bin in the hope it might have been forwarded by the clerk to Mitchell's home address. Nothing.
He found a dog-eared campus directory and paged through it for Brother Jerome Brodsky's office location. Mitchell's resident scholar appointment had been in the social science department, which Brodsky chaired. Maybe Brother Jerome had picked up Mitchell's mail. If not, Perry would be forced to go through every faculty office in the department until he found it.
Outside, Perry stood in the shadow of the administration building as a group of students walked by on their way from the nearby library. Night classes had ended over an hour ago and Perry figured the faculty had long since departed from both classrooms and offices. The lone security guard on duty was parked some distance away, next to a dormitory, keeping an eye on female students returning to their rooms.
He hurried across the parking lot and made his way to a row of ratty old army barracks that served as faculty offices. Getting in the darkened building was a breeze, but it took him a few minutes to gain access to the locked suite of offices and another thirty seconds to open Brother Jerome's door.
Perry saw the envelope lying address-side up on the top of Brother Jerome's desk. He grabbed it just as the hinges on the outer suite door squeaked. Lights flicked on in the reception area. He flattened himself against a wall by the door, stuffed the envelope in his waistband, and pulled his handgun. Brother Jerome walked in and Perry tapped him once with the barrel at the base of the skull to put him down, and again a little harder to put him out.
Perry quickly trashed the office, took a laptop computer to make it look like a burglary, stepped over the unconscious body, and headed for the parking lot, his hands sweating inside the plastic gloves.
A squad car with flashing lights, two unmarked units, a campus security vehicle, and a fire department EMT ambulance were parked outside the old army barracks.
Inside a small reception area a woozy Brother Jerome sat in a straight-back chair while an EMT tended to him. A useless-looking campus security officer stood nearby giving a statement to a patrol officer.
Sal Molina and Bobby Sloan conferred in the open doorway to an office.
They stopped talking when Kerney approached.
'What have you got?' Kerney asked.
Molina spoke first.
'Brother Jerome interrupted a burglary in progress, Chief.
He came back to grade some papers, found the doors open, and got cold-cocked when he walked into his office.'
'There's no sign of forced entry,' Sloan said.
'But just about anyone could have picked the locks on the door to the reception area and the office.'
'Or they were left open,' Molina added, 'which isn't unusual. Sometimes the brothers don't lock up if they're just stepping away from their desks for a few minutes.'
'Did Brother Jerome find the entrance unlocked?' Kerney asked.
'Yes,' Bobby Sloan said.
'Did he see his attacker?' Kerney asked.
'Nope,' Sloan said.
'He saw that his office door was open, walked in, and got clobbered.'
'How is he?' Kerney asked.
'He's got a mild concussion,' Sloan said.
'The EMTs are gonna transport him to the hospital for a medical evaluation. Except for a laptop computer he doesn't know what else was taken. But the file cabinet where he keeps his test exams wasn't tampered with, so probably a student didn't do this.'
