The big gamble kk-6 Page 17

  As she drove to the club, Ramona pushed pleasant thoughts about Jeff Vialpando out of her mind and ran over the cover story she'd laid on Cassie Bedlow. Whatever she told Adam Tully had to match what Cassie Bedlow "knew" about her.

  Good undercover cops always built fictional personas based on reality. Ramona's previous assignments had taught her the importance of character development. Blending fact with fiction made the role more natural and authentic, easier to pull off. But there couldn't be any gaps or lapses that might give you away.

  In fact, Ramona had been both a waitress and a sales clerk in Durango during the year she'd attended college there as a transfer student. She'd returned to the city several times since then, so dredging up recollections and recalling places and streets wasn't much of a stretch. She did it anyway, because you never knew what could trip you up.

  She stepped inside the club and let her eyes adjust to the dim lights. The man standing at the end of the bar talking to the hostess matched Vialpando's description of Adam Tully. Five eight, narrow shoulders, a thin frame, with an arched, slightly turned-up nose. Tully smiled as she approached, and Ramona smiled back.

  Adam Tully liked what he saw. She was all that Cassie had told him in her phone call and more: great Hispanic features with dark, liquid eyes, a tight, shapely body with a tiny waist, and creamy skin with a golden hue.

  "You must be Ramona," Tully said.

  "Yes, I am."

  Her baby-doll voice ran through him, right down to his cock. If everything panned out, he could work this bitch every night for five, maybe eight years, and make a hell of a lot of money. He knew a Major League baseball player who'd pop fifteen or twenty grand for a week with her, easy, as soon as she started tricking. Plus, a former Colorado congressman who favored the thin, schoolgirl type with nice knockers. Put her in thigh-high stockings, lacy panties, a push-up bra, some candy-apple-red platform mules, and braid her hair, and the guy would get a hard-on just looking at her picture.

  "Let's talk," Tully said, leading her to his office, where he eased back in his thousand-dollar ergonomic chair and inspected the woman more closely. Thick dark hair, small bones, comfortable with her body, five three, one-ten at the most, perfect teeth. She took his gaze without flinching. She was used to getting attention from men, wasn't put off by it. That was good.

  "Tell me about yourself," Tully said.

  Ramona licked her lips and ran out her cover story: Durango and her failed marriage, the need to make a change, dreams of becoming a model, looking to have some fun and excitement. Tully nodded all the way through it.

  "Have you waitressed before?"

  Ramona named the restaurant in Durango where she'd worked.

  "Isn't that in the old downtown Victorian hotel?"

  "No, it's by the railroad station. When were you in Durango?"

  "Some time ago. I rode my Harley from Denver for the annual motorcycle rally."

  "Every September," Ramona said with a nod. "It's a lot of fun."

  "Why did you leave the restaurant?"

  "My ex-husband didn't like me working nights."

  "The jealous type?" Tully asked.

  Ramona remembered her ex-boyfriend and made a face. "He thought every man I talked to I wanted to take to bed."

  Tully laughed. "Do you smoke dope, get high, use drugs?"

  Ramona paused. "Sometimes," she said in her tiniest voice. "But not a lot."

  "If I hire you, you can't come to work high."

  "Okay," she said seriously. Was she playing it too Goody Two-shoes?

  "You see how my girls are required to dress at work. They show a lot of skin, a lot of T and A. Is that a problem for you?"

  "I bet they get good tips," Ramona replied with a grin, "and I can use the money. Besides, I don't mind men looking."

  "Do you like men?"

  "Most of them."

  "I have a girl leaving in a week," Tully said. "See Lisa. She's the hostess. She'll give you a tour and an employment application. I'll work your schedule around Cassie's classes. You'll have to take an alcohol beverage server course before you can start. Lisa will set it up."

  "Thank you, Mr. Tully."

  "You'll do just fine," Tully said. He watched Ramona leave, wondering how long it would take to get her strung out and in debt big-time to one of his dealers. He figured maybe two or three months, if he played it right.

  Clouds had thickened outside, but not enough to promise rain. The April sun broke through the cover, casting patches of yellow light on the brick walkway that led to the old adobe house near the state capitol where Mark Shuler ran his research and polling company. Shuler was round, had probably been round all his life, but he wasn't fat, although if you only looked at his chubby cheeks you might think so. Add a foot to his solid stocky frame and he'd pass for an NFL line-backer. He pressed his lips together when Kerney mentioned Tyler Norvell.

  "I understand you went to college with Norvell," Kerney added.

  Shuler closed his office door on the four researchers who worked in office cubicles in a room just behind the reception area. "Why the interest in Norvell?"

  "I'm told you don't like him."

  "Don't trust him would be a better way to put it."

  "Why is that?" Kerney asked.

  "Are you going to tell me why you're investigating Norvell?"

  "No," Kerney said with an apologetic smile.

  "Then it's probably best for me to keep my thoughts to myself," Shuler said. "I make my living in the political world, Chief Kerney, and while it's public knowledge that I'm not a member of Senator Norvell's fan club, I keep my personal opinions to myself."

  "I'll do the same with what you tell me," Kerney said. "You went to college with Norvell. What kind of person was he back then?"

  Shuler found his way to his desk chair and settled in. "Are you familiar with F. Scott Fitzgerald's work?"

  "I read The Great Gatsby in college."

  "Norvell was like Gatsby, always full of subterfuges, superficially charming, good at keeping up appearances, but basically unscrupulous. He was quickwitted, ambitious, and smart enough to align himself with people who would help him socially. By the time he entered law school, he'd transformed himself from just another college student who was scraping along into a big man on campus."

  "How did he do that?" Kerney asked, as he pushed an office chair to the front of Shuler's desk and sat.

  "He joined the right clubs, hung out with the right people, especially the popular jocks, and got involved in campus politics-member of the student senate, student rep on an activities planning committee. That kind of thing."

  "So, he played the angles," Kerney said. "How was he unscrupulous?"

  "Drugs, women, and gambling," Shuler answered. "While the campus cops and narcs were busting the longhairs and student radicals for using, Norvell and his pals were allegedly selling drugs to frat boys, sorority girls, and students living off campus. He supplied women for bachelor parties, took bets on sporting events, even organized spring vacation gambling jaunts to Denver."

  "You know all this as fact?" Kerney asked.

  "I got some information from an anonymous informant while I was editor of the college newspaper, but I couldn't confirm it. I spent a lot of time trying to corroborate the story through other sources. All I got was second- and third-hand rumors and gossip."

  "What stood in your way?"

  "I was the longhair liberal running the college newspaper. The enemy, so to speak. Norvell's customers were the kids who saw themselves as the elite. They were well-off, clannish, spoiled brats. Socially, they kept to themselves and partied pretty much out of sight. They'd rent a suite of rooms in a nice hotel, gather at private houses away from the campus, or go out of town for their big bashes."

  "How did the anonymous information come to you?" Kerney asked.

  "By letter. Two of them."

  "Did you happen to save them?"

  "You bet I did," Shuler replied. "I kept hoping someone would com
e forward and give me something tangible that I could verify and print."

  "Were they typed or handwritten?" Kerney asked.

  "Handwritten."

  "I need to see those letters," Kerney said.

  "They prove nothing."

  "I still need to see them."

  Shuler rummaged around in a file cabinet, pulled out a folder, and handed two sheets of paper to Kerney. They were note size, no dates, with writing on one side only. The first letter read: Tyler Norvell is supplying drugs to a young friend of mine and taking advantage of her. He has parties at his house and gets her high on drugs. She tells me that she sometimes wakes up in the morning in bed at his house with a boy or a man she doesn't know, and can't remember what happened. She says there are lots of girls at his parties who have had the same experiences. I think he and his friends are drugging these girls and then raping them. My friend also tells me that Tyler and his friends take some girls to Denver on weekends once a month and the girls come back with expensive gifts. Something very bad is going on. If a student who is supposedly a campus leader is doing these kinds of things, I think it should be made public knowledge.

  The second letter read: I wrote you before about the illegal things Tyler Norvell is doing. Now my friend is addicted to cocaine and says that Tyler loves her and wants her to enter a treatment program in Denver, which he will pay for. I think he just wants to get her out of town. She's planning to drop out of school and move to Denver. I've talked to a psychologist and have tried to use his advice to help her, but it hasn't changed her mind about going. Can't you expose this criminal in your paper? All students should know about the terrible things he does.

  "When did you receive these letters?" Kerney asked.

  Shuler checked his file and read off dates that corresponded with Anna Marie's cousin Belinda Louise Nieto's time in Albuquerque.

  "Whoever the person was," Shuler added, "I don't know why they didn't go to the police."

  Kerney knew the answer to Shuler's question. There were millions of reasons why people shied away from talking to cops. It didn't matter if they were friends, family, relatives, or total strangers. He'd seen women protect abusers; parents lie on behalf of felonious teenagers; people confirm false alibis for friends; and witnesses deny they'd seen a crime occur. The rationales for either lying to or avoiding the police were endless.

  If the author of the letters had been Anna Marie Montoya-and Kerney was virtually convinced that she was-he would never know why she had chosen to deal with her cousin's situation so obliquely. At this point it didn't really matter.

  "Who were Norvell's pals in this enterprise?" he asked.

  "Luis Rojas, a football jock from El Paso; Adam Tully, a high school buddy from Lincoln County; and Gene Barrett and Leo Silva, both from Albuquerque. Tully was part of the campus brat pack. That's how Norvell and the others got accepted into the clique."

  "Barrett and Silva are state legislators, right?"

  "That's right," Shuler replied.

  "I heard they got behind Norvell's political ambitions big-time after he moved back from Colorado."

  "Right again."

  "Any old rumors about them?"

  "Just what I've already told you," Shuler replied. "They were rarely on campus, except to attend classes. I don't really know how large a role they played in what went on."

  "How do they make their money?"

  "Silva has a successful law practice, and Barrett owns a management consulting and CPA firm."

  "What about Cassie Bedlow, Norvell's sister?"

  "I never heard anything bad about her. She had her own circle of friends, mostly sorority types and fine-arts majors."

  "And Rojas?"

  "A lady's man who cut a wide swath. But not your average dumb jock. Along with Tully, he was Norvell's off-campus roommate. They shared a large house in the North Valley. People thought that maybe some rich alum was subsidizing Rojas. He dressed nice, drove a new car, always had money to spend."

  Kerney held up the handwritten notes. "I'm going to need to hold on to these for a while."

  "Just as long as I get them back," Shuler said.

  Kerney nodded. "Of course. You've been very helpful."

  "Maybe I'll read something about this in the newspaper someday," Shuler said with a slight smile.

  "Maybe you will."

  Kerney found George Montoya outside, planting bare-root rosebushes in a flower bed. He wanted to know why Kerney needed a sample of his Anna Marie's handwriting. Trying not to raise false hopes, Kerney explained that he'd been given some letters which might have been written by Anna Marie. But he wouldn't be sure until he could have her handwriting compared and analyzed.

  A bright eagerness lit up Montoya's eyes. "What do these letters say?"

  "It won't matter what they say if Anna Marie didn't write them," Kerney replied.

  "But you think maybe she did," Montoya said.

  "It's worth checking into."

  "Why do you tell me so little?"

  "Because I want to give you facts when I have them, not unfairly raise your expectations with speculation."

  Montoya's eyes shifted away and his shoulders sagged a bit. "We want so much for there to be justice."

  "It can happen," Kerney said. "Always believe that."

  Montoya nodded, pulled himself together, gave Kerney a weak smile, and gestured at his house. "Come inside and take what you need."

  With a handwriting sample and the letters in hand, Kerney met with the state-police-lab documents specialist and asked for a quick turnaround. In Kerney's case, it paid to be a former deputy state police chief. The man said he'd have a preliminary comparison done in an hour.

  Kerney spent his time waiting by questioning Nick Salas, a fifteen-year veteran who now served as a lieutenant in the district headquarters housed next door to the Department of Public Safety. Salas remembered the Norvell DWI incident that had been swept under the rug by the sheriff's department.

  "How did you hear about it?" Salas asked, cocking an eye at Kerney.

  "Ellsworth Miller," Kerney answered.

  "You got something going on Norvell, Chief?"

  "Maybe."

  Salas laughed. "What do you need to know?"

  "Date, time, place, name of the woman with Norvell-if you've got it-name of the deputy who made the DWI stop."

  Salas snorted. "You think I can remember all of that?"

  "No, but I bet you've got the information stashed somewhere. You're one of the biggest pack rats in the department."

  Salas grinned and got up from his desk. "That's affirmative, Chief. Like I tell the rookies, hold on to everything. You never know when you might need stuff you once thought was useless. Give me a few minutes to search through my old paperwork."

  Salas was back in fifteen minutes with a dog-eared pocket notebook in hand. He rattled off the day, time, and place. "The deputy was Ron Underwood. He's still with the sheriff's department. He got bumped up to patrol sergeant about the same time I made lieutenant. We tipped a few together at the FOP to celebrate. I've been catching his radio traffic lately so he's back on day shift. I didn't ID the woman."

  "Did you see Norvell?" Kerney asked.

  "Yeah. I watched Underwood put him through field sobriety tests. He was almost falling-down drunk."

  "Thanks, Nick."

  "No problem," Salas said, reaching for the phone. "Where are you going from here, Chief?"

  "I should be back in my office in thirty minutes."

  "I'll give Underwood a call. Maybe he can dig out his report and get it to you today."

  "That would be a big help," Kerney said.

  Kerney returned to the crime lab to wait for the document specialist's report, and spent his time chatting with the officers and civilian staff who passed him in the small waiting area. During his tenure as deputy state police chief, he'd worked with all of them, so even though he cooled his heels longer than expected, he enjoyed catching up and making small talk.


  Stan Kalsen, the document specialist, a burly man with a raspy voice, finally appeared and led him back to his office.

  "Sorry to make you wait," Stan said as he spread out the documents, which had been placed in clear plastic sleeves. "I took a quick look at slant, connection, formation of letters, size of letters, punctuation, and embellishments on the questioned documents." He pointed out each element he'd reviewed with a pair of tweezers. "Comparing the two samples, I'd say they were written by the same individual. If you can get the subject to write out the complete texts of the documents again, I'll probably be able to make an unqualified judgment to that effect."

  "I can't do that," Kerney replied. "The subject was murdered."

  Kalsen nodded. "I thought so. The note written to her mother was signed Anna Marie, so I figured it had to do with the Montoya homicide. I took photographs of the anonymous documents under oblique light to pull up any indentations on the paper. That's what slowed me down. Take a look at this one."

  Kalsen held up a photograph of the second unsigned note. Down at the bottom were the indentations of Anna Marie's signature. "It's identical to the standard you gave me," he said.

  For the first time, Kerney had a bonafide suspect. Surely, as a newly elected state senator, Tyler Norvell might have had reason to silence a woman who had knowledge of his prior criminal activities. But proving that would be a whole different matter.

  Still the information made Kerney smile. "Excellent," he said. "Thanks, Stan."

  "Anytime, Chief."

  His cell phone rang as he left the lab. Helen Muiz reported that Detective Pino was on her way back to Santa Fe with an APD vice sergeant in tow, Sal Molina had just returned to the office looking to speak with him, and a sheriff's sergeant had dropped off an envelope for him.

  "I'm on my way," Kerney said. "Anything else?"

  "As always, we're in complete disarray without you," Helen said. She hung up before Kerney could think of a comeback.

  Chapter 10

  To save money, a new police headquarters had been built some years before on city-owned land near the outskirts of Santa Fe, which of course made it inconvenient for everybody except south-side and some west-side residents.