“Interesting. Sergeant, can you remember what the gun looked like?”
“Yeah, it was a revolver with a fancy handle.” Grant saw Moffat’s eyes widen. Moffat said nothing. He wanted to avoid planting any suggestion that could influence Grant’s recollection.”
“Was the handle ivory?” No reaction from Moffat. Grant smiled. “No that was General Patton, but it was very unusual. It was like a pearl. You know, mother of pearl. My wife has a jewelry box that looks just like it.”
“You’re sure that’s what it looked like?”
“Oh, yes. That gun got me into a lot of trouble but then turned out to be very lucky for me. I can see it now.”
“Thanks, Sergeant Grant. You have been very helpful.”
“I won’t ask you but I think I know why,” Grant said. “Captain, would you like to take a short ride? It’s a spectacular day for it. We’re great with beginners.”
“I really would but I’m short on time. I’d like to bring my wife here. She hasn’t been on a horse in six or seven years but she would love it.”
Grant pulled his horse over to a two-step wooden platform. He stepped onto the platform, put his left foot in the stirrup and hoisted himself easily into the saddle. He smiled at Moffat with just a trace of embarrassment. “You have to make some allowances for middle-age. I wouldn’t want to hurt my back getting onto the horse. That’s why I wait for the customers to leave before me. It would disappoint them to see an old cowboy take the easy way up. Hope to see you soon, Captain. Adios.”
~ ~ ~
CHAPTER 44
Back at the station, Moffat walked through the door of the team center and saw De la Peña, Fat, Duncan, Tashara, Schoenberg and Peake gathered between the two front rows of tables. With the exception of Tashara who was slumped in a red molded plastic and steel stacking chair, the others sat on the edge of the tables between keyboards and monitors.
“You’re looking refreshed, Sergeant,” Moffat said.
“A couple of hours sleep and I feel great,” De la Peña responded.
“What is it?”
“It seems like we’re getting somewhere. This Harold Etcell showed up at the winery.” De la Peña brought the team up to date on the reappearance of the Sentra. “Now, look at this.”
An hour earlier, when Tashara returned with the surveillance video tapes, she and De la Peña wired the VCR to the input jack of his computer and created short video files of the middle aged man identified by McLean. They saved them on the network drive and then e-mailed links to the videos to the team members. Moffat saw a grainy image of the laundromat interior fill De la Peña’s screen. He leaned in watching a man walk behind Officer McLean at the dryer then return to his chair.
De la Peña addressed the group. “This may be Harold Etcell, the owner of the Sentra. He matches the physical profile. If it is him, he has taken the bait. He knows where she works and where she lives.”
“How do we know that, Sergeant?” Fat asked.
“Assume that Etcell followed McLean from the laundromat to Denny’s, then to the house. He was waiting for her this morning on the corner when Duncan and Peake saw him follow her to the winery. He came back there at lunchtime and drove past her car in the employee lot.”
“Sounds believable,” Peake said. “When the Sentra reappeared, well…that told us somebody has taken an interest in her.”
“Here’s a problem,” Tashara read from a single sheet of paper. “I’m looking at Etcell’s DMV record. He’s sixty-four and only five feet eight. The man in the laundromat is about six feet and looks maybe ten years younger.”
“Maybe there are two of them,” Schoenberg offered.
De la Peña nodded. “Yeah. Who knows at this point. Whatever may have happened so far, we have to stick with the plan. But if we get a chance to stop the driver of the Sentra, let’s do it. We don’t want any obvious police activity around McLean, the laundromat, Denny’s, the bungalow, the winery…if the Sentra driver doesn’t turn out to be our suspect, we don’t want to scare off the real one if he is around.”
“Right,” Schoenberg said. “We follow the Sentra away from McLean and stop him somewhere out of sight. Hey, if he is our man, we want him off the street as soon as possible.” Schoenberg looked at Moffat for a sign of agreement. Moffat said nothing. Schoenberg continued. “OK, Sergeant, I’ll give the Patrol Division instructions to look for the Sentra. We’ll have them check with us before they pull him over.”
“OK,” De la Peña said. “So if we have a suspect interested in the decoy, how long will he wait before he makes his move? We can’t keep this up for weeks, can we?”
Moffat spoke. “I know this is just more conjecture, but if our man really does identify victims who are new to the area, he would have to move quickly before these women make new friends and maybe a boyfriend--people who would spend time with them and most importantly, miss them if they disappeared. If this is true, he would not be likely to drag out the stalking phase. He would make a move as soon as he was satisfied with the victim he had chosen and thought it would be safe for him.”
De la Peña’s was still elated. “Well, if we’re lucky, we’ll see the Sentra follow her from the winery or maybe we’ll see Etcell in the laundromat and at Denny’s.”
Next De la Peña reviewed plans with the team for repeat visits to the laundromat and Denny’s before McLean would return home about the same time as the previous night. In a few minutes, Peake would drive an unmarked police car past the winery, timing a u-turn so as to pick up McLean’s car on the way back into town. McLean would be on her own in the laundromat but with surveillance from across the street. In early evening, Schoenberg would pick up his wife and arrive at Denny’s in time to see McLean enter. After dinner, they would follow her up to the point where she would turn onto the street to the bungalow, then Schoenberg would be off for the night. De la Peña and Fat would relieve Lang at the van, spending the night observing the rear of the bungalow. This night, a reserve officer already at the van would assist them. They also would monitor audio from a microphone placed just today near the bungalow’s front door.
* * *
There were a few disappointments that night. McLean’s car was followed into town by a white pickup and a minivan full of girl scouts, but no brown Nissan Sentra. Although the day’s laundromat surveillance tapes would not be replaced and transported to the station for review until the middle of the night, neither the officer above the hardware store nor McLean herself noticed anyone resembling the man seen in Thursday’s video. Etcell or whoever had been in the video also was a no-show at Denny’s.
De la Peña, Fat and the reserve officer had a good time in the van. De la Peña recognized the new man from the gym. He was a forty-year old dentist, with glasses, a receding hairline and the body of an Olympic gymnast. The three ate sandwiches, coffee and fresh pears while waiting for McLean to return home. The dentist was a natural comedian. Fat and De la Peña made themselves laugh silently to avoid attracting attention to the van, but they were an appreciative audience. Settling in at the bungalow for the evening, McLean shocked them all when she put in a DVD of the 1974 thriller Stranger in the House. The sound spilled out of the bungalow and was captured by the microphone.
“Oh, man. She’s got nerves of steel,” De la Peña whispered to the others as they heard eerie music, moans and screams.
Fat said, “I know this one. Some maniac is making obscene phone calls to a bunch of girls in a sorority house. The police trace the calls. They’re coming from inside the house.”
The dentist chuckled. “We should phone McLean right now. Ask her to go up and check on the children. Remember that one about the babysitter? It’ll keep her up all night.”
De la Peña’s phone rang. All three men jumped slightly, then laughed at each other.
“Sorry. I’ll put it on vibrate.” De la Peña said. Then into the phone he said “Hello, Captain.”
~ ~ ~
CHAPTER 45
Sa
turday, May 20
Like a poker player sticking with his strategy through a string of disappointing hands, on Saturday the team stayed focused on carrying out each element of their plan, perfectly but with no perceivable results. In the van, the dentist lightened the load of the long hours of surveillance with entertaining stories from dental school, most concerning the antics of a brilliant but immature fellow student whose presence in the dental profession somewhere in California sent fear into Fat’s and De la Peña’s hearts. After the scary movie, McLean slept soundly, late into the morning. Her guardians watched but were not even provided a false alarm to break up the monotony.
Fat went home at eight a.m. The dentist stayed an extra two hours to bridge a scheduling gap, then he and De la Peña turned the surveillance over to two officers borrowed from the patrol division. A female reserve officer arrived at the laundromat at opening time and spent the entire day there looking out for a visitor to the shop who looked like the man in Thursday’s video. While there, she washed four loads of laundry - for herself, her boyfriend and her parents - read a paperback mystery and ate a rather large brown bag lunch.
McLean arrived at the laundromat at ten fifteen. She modified the plan, which had called for her to wash the drapes from the bungalow. McLean saw that preparing the drapes from the living room and bedroom windows for cleaning would require removal of the metal hooks for each pleat. She saw no reason to go to that much trouble. Instead she pulled the slipcovers from the living room couch and chair and dropped them in the laundry basket. She kept up the act of looking shy and just a bit lonely but attracted attention only from an elderly woman and a mother with two small children.
Back at his apartment De la Peña showered and fell into bed, barely dry. He slept several hours from late morning into the early afternoon. When he awoke he remained in bed and immediately began to worry. The Nissan Sentra’s two appearances had sent his hopes upward. What if we had somehow scared him off? Maybe they should have set up the operation so that a black and white could have stopped the driver and questioned him. Of course, De la Peña couldn’t have known that checking the license plate would lead to an apparent dead end. In spite of Moffat’s guess that Nicole’s attacker would strike again soon, De la Peña worried that the decoy operation would drag on for many more days. The cost and the drain on manpower could not be supported for long by an organization the size of Segovia’s police department. De la Peña knew that if the operation ended without capture of a suspect it would be considered a failure. He and Moffat would be blamed. The new guys goofed up. The confidence the chief placed in these two imports from big city police departments was misplaced. What would be unfair, though, was that going in he and Moffat both considered the probability of success for the decoy operation as something less than fifty-fifty. They just didn’t have any better options. They would play the hand out and hope for some luck.
“That’s enough,” De la Peña said aloud. The sunlight streaming through the window showed dust on the surface of a dark walnut bookcase. De la Peña leapt from his bed, pulled on a pair of turquoise boxer briefs and a gray tee shirt and began the comforting chore of dusting and vacuuming his apartment. Forty- five minutes later he walked into Mr. Whelan’s Pub and, after an update to the proprietor on his family, social life and career, sat down with a cider and cheese and onion pasty to watch his beloved Dodgers win a twelve inning pitchers’ duel.
From the laundromat, McLean phoned an order for pick up, drove to Denny’s then backtracked to the bungalow. The afternoon was as uneventful as the morning. At six, as planned, she drove a mile and a half to the Village Theater, bought a ticket, then walked next door to Main Street Coffee for a medium coffee of the day Costa Rican dark roast. Fat and a female officer from the traffic Division walked up to the glass window of the ticket booth five minutes behind McLean. They bought their tickets and pretended to window shop for the next forty-five minutes. It had been decided last night, based on McLean’s risk in a darkened theater and of walking to her car that Fat would not bring a civilian date. It was just as well because Fat was on a two year losing streak with the opposite sex, a special concern to his Chinese grandparents who were about to take his love life into their own hands with a series of arranged meetings with eligible granddaughters of their friends from Sacramento to Fresno.
The movie “Atonement” was considered by Lang, Schoenberg and even Duncan to be a “chick flick” but Fat and the two female officers considered it excellent. As far as they could tell, McLean drew no special attention during the course of the night. Fat followed her home in his car then phone calls were exchanged among the occupants of the van, the bungalow, Fat and De la Peña. “Nothing to report” was reported throughout the evening and night.
Two discoveries were made Saturday but would be unknown to De la Peña and Moffat for two to three days. Both were the work of technicians earning premium pay for Saturday work, who recorded them in notebooks for later incorporation in reports. One discovery was in Sacramento at the office of the California Bureau of Investigation and Intelligence, the second from just north of the city of Segovia at the laboratory of Doggie Ancestry.com.
~ ~ ~
CHAPTER 46
Sunday, May 21
Shortly after nine thirty, McLean laughed to herself as she walked a narrow path through the bright green grass leading to Main Street. I’ve left the front door unlocked and the back bedroom window open, she thought, in the hopes that a psychotic serial killer will sneak in while I’m gone. What a cheery thought! It was hard not to have cheery thoughts on a morning like this. Sunny, temperature in the low 60’s. Blue stellar jays and rust-breasted robins swooped from tree to fence post to shrub, accompanying her on her walk. McLean reached the El Dorado Bakery two blocks north of the place the brown Nissan had been parked on Friday morning, waiting to follow her to work. She ordered a strawberry and cream cheese filled croissant and a venti cup of light roast arabica and took them to a redwood bench under a patio canopy. McLean watched the Sunday pedestrians as they left apartments, old Victorian homes and B&B’s to fill Segovia’s sidewalks. She had bought a newspaper which she now unfolded A riot at Guantanamo prison, explosion in a Kentucky coal mine, the Chinese completed their giant dam for hydroelectric power, West Nile Virus fears in Segovia…She thought she would get back to the front page section later. Sports would be more pleasant to read right now. Martina Hingis beat Venus Williams in the semifinals at the Italian Open. Who would she play next? A Russian, Danica Safina. Let’s see if that’s on TV tonight.
It really was a nice assignment. McLean had caught up on her laundry, read novels: The Da Vinci Code, Wicked and a Chief Inspector Barnaby mystery, and made valuable contacts within the Segovia P.D. in case she might want an opportunity for promotion sooner than the Sonora Sheriff’s Department was ready with one. The break from her boyfriend was a good thing as well. She could tell by their phone conversations that he was missing her. She felt the same way. Like the old folks say “hearts grow fonder,” she thought.
* * *
At eleven o’clock Sunday morning, in the Church Canteen, Martha Pane washed twelve coffee cups and placed them on a plastic drainer to dry. Catherine Martius wiped a long yellow Formica table with a pink sponge. Martha moved away from the sink and took a towel and began to hand dry the cups and place them in a cupboard. Catherine removed the filter basket from a 50-cup coffee maker and washed the grounds down the drain.
Finished with their regular Sunday clean up, the women set off in silence on a walk that would take them on a two mile path through Miner’s Flat, zigzagging to avoid the steepest hills, looping to end on the street to Catherine’s house. Ten minutes into the walk, Catherine spoke.
“Dear, for Heaven’s sake, what is it? You’ve been sighing and staring off into space all morning.”
“I’m sorry, Catherine. I’m so worried. I tell myself it’s ridiculous but I can’t help it.”
Catherine placed a hand on her friend’s shoulder. “
Let’s hear it. Whatever is bothering you, talking about it will help.”
“Captain Moffat interrogated me. He asked to meet for coffee but then he treated me like a criminal.”
“Come on Martha. That man is so polite, you know he didn’t really…”
“Well, no. It was the questions he asked. I think he thinks Reverend Pane may have committed the murder. A minister of the church suspected of something like that…” She shook her head forcefully.
“What makes you think that?”
“He asked a lot of questions about something that has nothing to do with Mrs. Gillis’ murder but when you put that ‘something’ together with the fact that she was taking the church and throwing us out of our home, it all looks…well, a person might think…that he would have had a reason to do it.”
“Martha, you’re not making any sense. What are you talking about?”
Mrs. Pane hesitated, fearful of how her next revelation might appear to her best friend. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about this earlier, Dear. A few weeks ago, Major Franke told us he was going to make a bequest, leaving us something from his life insurance. I’m sure it was to help out with the church…although, Lord knows, it’s too late for that. He couldn’t leave it to the church, because of the lawsuit over Clement Jones so he made it to Reverend Pane himself. Catherine, I didn’t want you to think…”
“Of course not. Not for a minute. You and the Reverend aren’t that kind of people. She patted Martha on the shoulder with her left arm. “How much did he leave?”
Martha had hoped not to be asked that. Accepting a large sum of money from a sick old man you are caring for, well, that could make a person seem unprincipled…greedy, really.
She told Catherine. Catherine showed no sign that she disapproved. At least that was a relief.
“What does that have to do with Veronica Gillis?”
“I just know that the Captain must think Reverend Pane could have done it to stop the work on the property. She was planning to demolish almost everything, you know. Now it’s all up in the air.”