Everyone Dies Page 22

  What would get them scrambling? He ran down a list of possible events in his mind and stopped when he got to the house that Kerney was building. From what he’d seen at the construction site, a lot of money was being poured into it. Although the horse barn was metal and the house was being made with adobe, there was enough wood lying around to start a really nice range fire, which would probably bring Kerney and his wife running.

  The idea of arson appealed to Samuel Green. All he needed to do was to find another way in to avoid being spotted by anybody on the main ranch road. That shouldn’t be too hard. On the east boundary of Kerney’s land a railroad spur and a maintenance road ran from the Lamy junction to Santa Fe. In the evening, he would check it out to see how close he could get by car.

  Even if he had to hoof it a bit, the site was remote enough to give him time to get away before the fire trucks arrived. Then he’d find a place near the highway to wait for Kerney to appear. After that, he’d just follow him back to town.

  It should work. But if it didn’t, there was still the fire to look forward to. He could picture flames raging in a night sky, turning the grassland charcoal black, burning up all the construction material lying around, maybe even getting hot enough to buckle the steel horse barn and kill all the big piñon trees.

  It was too bad that the explosion and fire in Mescalero had been kept from spreading, too bad that he’d been forced to leave in a hurry and miss the enjoyment of it all.

  Green took a deep breath to calm down and think straight. Before he got too excited about the plan, he needed to make a trial run to see if it was feasible. He’d do that tonight.

  The dryer buzzer pulled his thoughts away from the scheme. He folded his clothes neatly, placed them inside the pillowcase, and took one last look around the Laundromat. It had been a real kick to visit the scene of his first crime and tell the college kid about it.

  Bone-tired from a lack of sleep, Kerney sat at his desk and tried to stay focused as Sal Molina and Cruz Tafoya gave him an update. Clayton Istee was in Socorro with Ramona Pino and Russell Thorpe. Although there strictly to observe, Clayton was helping out with the canvass of Olsen’s friends and acquaintances to gain information about his recent behavior and state of mind.

  “That’s fine with me,” Kerney said, brushing aside the unasked question about Clayton’s role in the investigation.

  “So far, they’ve got nothing,” Tafoya said, “except for the fact that nobody’s seen Olsen for the past two weeks. He didn’t have many friends, and those who have been interviewed reported he seemed okay. No aberrant behavior, no verbal preoccupation about his criminal past, and no talk about a last-minute vacation to Scotland.”

  “That fits with what Olsen’s supervisor and coworkers told Detective Pino,” Molina added.

  “Also, the letters Olsen sent to his mother over the years contained no hint that he was plotting revenge or planning to go on a murder spree,” Tafoya said.

  “I doubt he’d admit that to his mother,” Kerney said. “What about Chacon’s interviews at the penitentiary?”

  “It was a mixed bag,” Molina replied. “The two other perps in the rape-murder case thought Olsen was more than capable of killing again. Of course, they laid the whole thing at Olsen’s feet. The Aryan brother who turned Olsen into his bitch doesn’t buy it. He pretty much said Olsen was a poser and a whiner while he was in the slam.”

  Kerney looked at Tafoya. “Do you think Olsen’s mother held back information about his whereabouts?”

  “No, I think she was genuinely upset that he’s missing.”

  “So, except for Charles Stewart and Archie Schroder, who probably have their own agendas, nobody else sees Olsen as a stone-cold killer,” Kerney said.

  “That’s affirmative,” Molina said, “and according to Probation and Parole, Olsen was the star of Victoria Drake’s caseload, a model parolee who went on to get a full pardon and his voting rights restored.”

  Kerney picked up the list of seized evidence Ramona Pino had faxed to Molina and waved it at him. “How do we explain all the goodies that were found at Olsen’s house? Or the fact that we have a police artist sketch that looks a hell of a lot like Olsen, and that’s based on information from reliable, local witnesses?”

  “Who encountered him near one of the crime scenes,” Tafoya noted.

  Molina shrugged. “It gets even more confusing. Sergeant Istee found tire tracks from the blue van at Olsen’s house, so we know for certain the vehicle was there. He also found evidence that someone may have been kept prisoner in a utility room inside the house, and two footprints that match those found on your property but don’t square up with Olsen’s shoe size. The crime scene techs are on it.”

  Kerney rubbed his hand over his chin. “Anything else?”

  “Olsen left his passport and six hundred dollars in traveler’s checks behind,” Molina said. “They were hidden in a coffee can in the kitchen pantry. Why would he do that if he wasn’t planning to go back there? And if he was planning to return, why would he leave so much physical evidence that connected him to the murders lying around for us to find?”

  Kerney held up two fingers. “Add to that these two questions: Who, if anyone, was held captive, and why did Olsen kill Victoria Drake? Olsen had to know it would lead us right to him.”

  “He made a mistake,” Tafoya replied.

  “That’s what I was hoping for last night,” Kerney said. “But I’m not so sure this is it.”

  “He wants us to know who he is,” Molina said.

  “Maybe, but let’s dig a little deeper.”

  “We have one new possible lead,” Molina said, pulling a piece of paper out of his case file. “The techs found fingerprints in the engine compartment of the van that belong to an ex-con in Tucson. The guy’s an auto mechanic who did a dime for armed robbery. I’ve got the Tucson PD tracking him down.”

  “Good,” Kerney said as he pushed his chair back and stood. “Get Pino started on looking into Olsen’s finances. If Sergeant Istee is willing to continue to help out, all the better.” He picked up his file folder. “Is this everything?”

  “Right up to the minute,” Molina said, “except for the photographs we took of the protestors outside the building. Olsen wasn’t with them. Do you want me to get you copies?”

  “Not now,” Kerney said as he walked to the door. “I’ll be at Andy Baca’s house if you need me.”

  Kerney left headquarters and drove to Andy’s house with an eye glued to the rearview mirror looking for a tail. There was none. He waved to the patrol officer parked at the curb and walked to the front door, wondering if he had anything positive about the investigation to tell Sara. It sure didn’t seem so.

  Chapter 12

  The three agents left for Santa Fe with the evidence just as the crime scene unit arrived. While techs examined the utility room, Clayton, Thorpe, and Pino went looking for the people in Olsen’s address book that they hadn’t been able to contact by telephone. All were local and relatively easy to track down at work.

  Clayton finished his in-person interviews first and drove back to Olsen’s house. Everyone he’d talked to was unaware that Olsen was supposedly on vacation in Scotland, but they all simply shrugged it off as Noel’s quirky ways. According to the informants, Olsen had a habit of dropping out of the social scene for long periods of time, only to eventually resurface at his favorite watering hole, some community event, or a party. Apparently, the two most consistent things Olsen did was work hard at his job and play on a coed volleyball team during the fall league season.

  Several people noted that Olsen had a strong bias against gay men and, to their knowledge, never dated any women, at least none that they knew of. When they encountered Olsen in town after one of his frequent unsocial spells, he’d be polite and joke about having been in one of his solitary moods. No one found him or thought him any stranger than the other techies or eggheads who worked at the college.

  Inside Olsen’s house, the crime s
cene techs had expanded their search to the bedroom. Clayton went into the home office and paged through the folders he’d emptied out of a file cabinet and dumped on the floor earlier in the day. One of the folders contained bank statements, the most recent a month old. It showed a combined checking and savings account balance of just over five thousand dollars. No checks in large amounts had cleared.

  He scanned more files and found an annual pension fund statement which hadn’t been touched, an up-to-date home mortgage payment book, and credit card statements with low balances.

  Clayton searched unsuccessfully for Olsen’s checkbook and then went back to the bank statement. According to the closing date, Olsen should have received a new statement. Clayton didn’t remember seeing any unopened mail in the house.

  He checked to make sure the mail hadn’t been overlooked, and then walked to the mailbox at the end of the long driveway. It was stuffed full, mostly with junk flyers, a few credit card solicitations, an appointment reminder from a dentist, the latest issue of an engineering society magazine and the bank statement.

  He opened the envelope. Olsen had written a two-thousand-dollar check made out to cash.

  Clayton dialed Pino’s cell-phone number. “This is Sergeant Istee,” he said when she answered. “Are you free to talk?”

  “Yeah,” Ramona said, “I just finished my last interview. Are you done?”

  “Yes. When, exactly, did Olsen ask his boss for vacation time?”

  “Just a minute,” Ramona said. “Here it is. On the twelfth of this month.”

  “He cashed a check for two thousand dollars the day before,” Clayton said.

  “So he did take quite a bit of money with him.”

  “Yeah, but not all of it. He left over three thousand in the bank,” Clayton replied.

  “Which brings us back to the question of why he left his passport and traveler’s checks behind,” Ramona said.

  “It was the largest withdrawal he’d made in the last eight months. I’m going to the bank now.”

  “You’ll need a court order to get the records.”

  “I’m not interested in the paper trail,” Clayton said. “I want to see the video surveillance tapes.”

  “Ten-four,” Ramona said. “I’ll meet you back at Olsen’s.”

  “The techs are still working the scene.”

  “Have they got anything?”

  “I haven’t asked.”

  “I’ll see you there,” Ramona said.

  Russell Thorpe sat in his unit outside what once was Walter Holbrook’s house and wrote up his last field interview note, which didn’t take long to finish. Holbrook had quit his job at the college some time back, divorced his wife, and moved to California. The ex-wife, who ran a private counseling practice out of the house, hadn’t heard from him in months. She remembered seeing Noel Olsen at Holbrook’s volleyball games and talking to him casually once or twice. She gave Russell a phone number where the ex could be reached.

  Russell had hoped to score some important new information about Olsen. Instead, all he got were comments that the guy didn’t like queers, didn’t have a girlfriend, didn’t talk about his personal life, but played a solid game of volleyball.

  He put his clipboard away, closed the driver’s-side window, and turned up the air conditioner a notch. State police cruisers were painted white over black, and heated up quickly in the New Mexico sun. On day shifts in the summer, they turned into blast furnaces the minute the air conditioning was cut off.

  Russell thought about the blue van. The whole deal with the vehicle bothered him. Assuming Olsen was the perp, why had he used it to go back and forth to Santa Fe? Why did he go to the trouble to buy the junker, get it fixed up, and steal plates for it? Was it part of a plan to keep Chief Kerney from zeroing in on him? If so, why deliberately blow the scheme by killing Victoria Drake?

  He wondered if he’d discovered another anomaly. The thought made him think about Clayton Istee. He liked the man and the way he processed information, paid attention to the details, and asked smart questions. Even Ramona Pino, who was no rookie, had seemed impressed with Istee.

  Russell decided to follow Clayton’s example. Along the road to Olsen’s house he’d seen Bureau of Land Management signs posted on fences. He reached under the front seat for a binder that contained reference materials and pulled out a map from a plastic sleeve that showed all the public land holdings in the state. Except for several small private inholdings, the hills east of Socorro where Olsen lived were owned by the state and federal agencies.

  Why had Olsen picked such a remote place to live? Did he simply want privacy while he plotted and carried out the murders? If Clayton was right about someone being kept prisoner in the utility room, that made sense. But what if he was wrong?

  Russell’s first assignment as a rookie had been at the Las Vegas District, which covered a lot of big empty territory. He knew by experience that country people were usually very observant.

  Maybe one of them had seen the blue van, or knew something interesting about Olsen. Thorpe figured it might be worthwhile to talk to the neighbors.

  Noel Olsen did his banking at a state-chartered institution situated on the main drag close to the old plaza. A block away down a side street was one of the best western-wear stores in the state. Locally owned, it catered to real ranchers and cowboys, which meant that Clayton could always find jeans that fit, hats and boots that didn’t cost an arm and a leg, and reasonably priced western-style shirts that weren’t ridiculously gaudy. There were equally good deals on clothes for Grace and the kids.

  Many of the store’s customers were Navajos from the remote Alamo Band Reservation in the northwest corner of the county, and the place had a homey feel to it, with polite, friendly clerks who made shopping there enjoyable.

  On family trips to Albuquerque, they’d often stop to do a little shopping at the store and have lunch at the restaurant in the old hotel a few steps away.

  Inside the bank, Clayton met with a vice president, showed her the canceled check, explained the nature of his inquiry, and asked if he could view the video surveillance tapes for the day in question.

  The woman, a round-faced Anglo with an easy smile, took Clayton to a back room, found the tapes, and sat with him while he watched the monitor, using the remote to fast-forward through the frames of customers at the teller stations inside the bank. Olsen wasn’t on the tape.

  “What, exactly, are you looking for?” she asked.

  “I’m not sure,” Clayton replied. “Can I view the tape from the drive-up window camera?”

  The woman got up and replaced the tape. Clayton pressed the fast-forward button, and froze it when a van came into view. He did a slow-motion picture search, watching Olsen lower the van window and reach for the transaction tube. He stopped the tape. The passenger seat was empty.

  Clayton advanced the tape frame by frame and watched Olsen conduct his transaction. He didn’t look very happy, and twice he turned his head and said something over his right shoulder. A curtain on the side window blocked the view into the rear of the van. But it didn’t matter. Clayton was certain another person was in the vehicle with Olsen. He ran through the frames again just to be sure.

  “I may need a copy of this,” he told the woman.

  “You saw something?”

  “Yeah,” Clayton said, thinking that he might have been wrong about Olsen working solo. “But don’t ask me what it means.”

  Two of the private parcels were tracts of vacant land, and a third looked to be an abandoned mining claim. Thorpe took the turn-off from the county road and traveled over rock-strewn ruts deep into the hills to a small ranch house situated in a shallow finger of a valley.

  It wasn’t much of a place to look at. The front porch of the weather-beaten house was filled with wooden crates, barrels, and piles of rusted junk. To one side stood an empty corral made out of slat boards, a windmill that fed water to a stock tank, and a broken loading chute. Except for an old picku
p truck with current license plate tags parked on the side of the house, the place seemed unoccupied.

  The sound of Thorpe’s cruiser brought a man out of the house. He stood with his hands in his pockets and watched as Russell approached.

  “Don’t get many visitors out here,” the man said. Tall and deeply tanned, the man’s face showed years of wear and a day’s growth of white whiskers. “Especially law officers.”

  “I expect not,” Russell replied, extending his hand. “I’m Officer Thorpe.”

  The man shook Thorpe’s hand. “Frank Lyons. What can I do for you?”

  “Tell me what you know about Noel Olsen.”

  “Can’t say I know much,” Lyons said. “I met him when he bought the place and moved in some years back, and I wave to him when I see him on the road. Occasionally, I’ll run into him in town. That’s where I hang my hat. I only come out here once in a while to keep an eye on things. Damn land isn’t good for squat.”

  “Have you ever seen him driving a blue van?” Thorpe gave Lyons a full description.

  Lyons shook his head. “Nope, just that little car he scoots around in.”

  “When was the last time you talked to him?”

  “About two months ago, when we were both fueling our vehicles at a gas station.”

  “What did you talk about?”

  “I asked him if he’d gotten a letter from the BLM, offering to buy up his property. They want to purchase all the inholdings and turn these hills into a wildlife preserve, which is just dandy with me. They quoted a fair price. Of course, knowing the government, I’ll probably be long gone by the time the deal closes. Still, it’ll put some cash money in my grandchildren’s pockets.”