animal clinic and had a live-in boyfriend named Ernest Arnett who worked as an independent electrical contractor. Interviews with the woman’s employer, neighbors, and friends verified that she’d been in North Carolina during the time of the two homicides.
When told of Tim Riley’s murder, Eunice was unable to think of any person who had reason to kill him. However, since she’d had little contact with him for over eight years, she had no idea who Riley’s current friends or enemies might be.
When asked about her son, she stated she had no knowledge of Brian’s whereabouts, noting that the boy had left home soon after turning eighteen because of a personality conflict with her boyfriend. She expressed surprise on being told of Brian’s visit to Santa Fe, saying she had not known about it and stating he and Tim had not been close since the divorce. According to the interviewing officer, she showed little sorrow about her ex-husband’s death.
Kerney and Hewitt ended the meeting with four priority goals established: find Brian Riley as quickly as possible and determine if he was to be treated as a suspect; identify the unknown person Denise Riley had been secretly seeing; delve deeply into Denise’s past, particularly those years when she was living away from Santa Fe; and complete the gathering of saliva samples for DNA comparison testing.
Outside the conference room, Clayton gave Paul Mielke the scoop on Matt Chacon’s conversation with Denise’s employer and the tale of the office desktop computer that had crashed the day after her murder.
“Detective Chacon secured the computer,” Clayton noted, “and will let us know if he finds anything.”
“Do we know if Riley’s son is a computer whiz?”
“That’s a good question,” Clayton replied. “We should ask the North Carolina authorities to check it out.”
“I’ll give them a call,” Mielke said as he walked away.
A few minutes later Paul Hewitt caught up with Clayton in his borrowed office. “We’ve got to find Brian Riley,” he said from the doorway.
“I heard you and Chief Kerney loud and clear on that, Sheriff. I’m on it.”
“How are you on it, Sergeant?”
“Ramona Pino is en route to the restaurant where the boy worked to see if she can scout up some information. Two SFPD detectives are making the rounds of juvie hangouts in the city to locate anyone who knows him or where he is. I’ve got a deputy calling the North Carolina high school authorities and Tim Riley’s ex-wife to get a list of classmates he might have stayed in touch with. We’re also putting the word out to snitches on the street.”
“Very good,” Hewitt said. “I’m heading home to Lincoln County. I want daily updates from you, Sergeant.”
“I’ll route them through Chief Kerney and Sheriff Salgado,” Clayton replied.
Hewitt nodded. “You’re going to make a first-rate police chief someday.”
“Thanks for the compliment, Sheriff, but that’s a long way off, if ever.”
“You never know,” Hewitt said as he waved good-bye.
The downtown restaurant where Brian Riley had briefly worked as a busboy catered to patrons who could easily afford a two-hundred-dollar bottle of wine to complement their perfectly plated, expensive gourmet meals. Except for Chief Kerney, who’d inherited some megabucks from an old family friend, Ramona Pino thought it highly unlikely that any member of the Santa Fe Police Department had ever eaten at the establishment.
The swanky restaurant, according to several old-timers on the force, stood on the site of the long-gone downtown bus depot, which had housed a small diner renowned for serving the best green-chili cheeseburgers in town. Back in those days, uniformed officers assigned to Plaza foot patrol almost always chowed down at the diner, which had a varied menu, good food, and reasonable prices.
But that was then, and the new Santa Fe was now a vastly different place. Since the transformation of the bus depot into a world-class restaurant, just about everything else in the downtown part of the city had also changed. Plaza businesses that catered to locals had vanished, replaced by stores and eateries that served the tourist trade. The price of a nice dinner in a fancy Santa Fe restaurant to celebrate a special occasion was now way beyond the means of the average citizen, which definitely included the men and women sworn to protect and serve.
Many officers, including those who had working spouses, were holding down part-time second jobs. A growing number couldn’t afford to live in Santa Fe and were now commuting from the boomtown city of Rio Rancho that sprawled along the Rio Grande west of Albuquerque. The joke going around the department was that when a major disaster hit the city, FEMA would probably lumber into Santa Fe faster than the officers who lived out of town could arrive.
Inside the restaurant, the hostess area at the top of the stairs was unoccupied. Servers were setting up a long row of tables for what appeared to be a large dinner party. At the bar in the back of the room, a bartender was polishing glassware and talking to a man who wore a chef’s coat with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows.
Ramona approached, identified herself, and asked to speak to the manager, owner, or whoever was in charge. The man in the chef’s coat told her the manager, Pearce Byers, was in the back. He went through the kitchen double doors to get him.
While Ramona waited, the bartender, a strapping six-footer with a leering smile on his pretty-boy face, gave Ramona the once-over. The guy looked to be the bad-boy type who preyed on women and lived off them when he could.
Ramona stared him down.
Pearce Byers came out of the kitchen and advanced quickly on Ramona. Dressed in a linen shirt and wool slacks, he had a scowl on his face that pinched his eyebrows together. “What can I do for you, Officer?” he asked.
“I’m Detective Sergeant Pino,” Ramona said as she handed him her business card, “and I need a few minutes of your time.”
Byers glanced at the card and stuck it in his shirt pocket. “Certainly. A few minutes. Sorry to be so rushed, but I have a party of twenty arriving any time now and a number of early pre-concert bookings for the piano recital at the Lensic Performing Arts Center.”
Ramona surveyed the dining room. All was ready for the alleged onslaught and there wasn’t a customer in sight. “I need to talk to anyone on your staff who might be able to put me in touch with Brian Riley. He worked as a busboy here last summer.”
Byers looked thoughtful. “The name doesn’t ring a bell.”
“He was here for a very short period of time,” Ramona said. “No more than a month. I was told he was fired for tardiness.”
“Oh, yes,” Byers said, touching his finger to his lips. “I tend to forget the problem children we hire who slip through our screening process. As I recall, we took a chance on him because his father was a police officer. But he wasn’t fired for tardiness; he was canned for coming to work stoned.”
“On drugs or alcohol?”
“Does it really matter?” Byers answered. “But to answer your question, not only did he show up stoned, but he was caught smoking pot on breaks behind the building with an apprentice cook. We fired them both.”
“Who was the cook?” Ramona asked.
“Randy Velarde. He was enrolled in the culinary arts program at the community college.”
“I need to see Velarde’s employment application. Riley’s also.”
Byers looked past Ramona toward a large group of people who’d arrived at the hostess area. “Can’t this wait until later?”
“No, it can’t,” Ramona answered.
Byers sighed in frustration, called one of the servers over, asked him to seat the waiting party, and told Ramona he’d be right back with the employment applications.
The pretty-boy bartender, who’d been listening with great interest, leaned over the bar. “If you can’t find Randy at home, he may be in class at the community college.”
“Do you know that for a fact?” Ramona asked.
Pretty Boy nodded. “When I ran into him a month or so ago, he said he was working days as a grocery store stocker and taking classes at night and one morning on his days off.”
