Disturbed Ground (13 page)

Mrs. Puente answered each question, never balked or flinched, but she was not going to budge on her story
.
With elbows propped on the table, she looked straight across at Detective Cabrera and maintained that Bert's brother-in-law had taken him to Utah.

Cabrera turned contentious. "Now, Mr. Sharp says he hasn't seen him for three months. And the social worker hasn't seen him. So who is lying to me? Who is lying to me, Dorothea?"

"Well, I'm not," she insisted. "He [Bert] was here Saturday and Sunday."

Cabrera was not to be deterred. He kept after her, phrasing things this way and that, trying to trick her into a contradiction, and finally stating baldly, "Mr. Montoya's dead."

Puente scoffed, "No he's not," as if this were a ridiculous suggestion.

Cabrera vigorously queried and quizzed, yet Puente maintained her soft-spoken calm. Throughout a barrage of questions, she stuck to her story, appearing somewhat distraught, yet eager to help. She didn't know why John Sharp had cooked up that story about her making him lie, but supposed it was because he was mad at her because she'd asked him to move. And she certainly knew nothing about the bones they'd unearthed, in fact, she suggested, once they found out how old the bones were, they'd find that she had nothing to do with it.

Frustrated, Cabrera told Mrs. Puente that he held her accountable for the bones they'd found. He tried a bluff. "Dorothea, I know if we dig, we're going to find more," he said ominously. "I know that, I know that."

"Well, I didn't put 'em there," she replied. "I couldn't drag a body any place."

No one had said anything about "dragging" bodies.

"I believe that," he conceded, "but I believe there's somebody else involved here. Somebody else. Because here's people that are still getting checks and they haven't even been seen, hide nor hair, Dorothea. You have to look at it from my view, dear. I look at it, and I think,
nothing makes sense."

"Sir," she interjected with dignity, "I have not killed anybody."

This seemed to be going nowhere, but Cabrera pressed on, raising questions about the whereabouts of Ben Fink.

Dorothea maintained that she'd kicked him out of the house, and he'd gone up to Marysville "I told him not to ever come back on the property," she explained.

She looked awfully old and small to be a killer And with each of Cabrera's questions, she'd blink uncomprehendingly
,
blameless as a house cat, then offer up some semi-plausible reply. Asked about finding in her yard a curious amount of corrosive lime (a substance used in treating sewage, which might also be used to dissolve human tissue), Puente explained that she was using the lime to "soften the dirt."

She also made extravagant proposals: They could tap her phone, she suggested, so they could monitor any incoming calls from Bert. Or, she offered, she could hire a contractor to dig up the yard, so they could see she had nothing to hide. And of course she had no problem with taking a polygraph examination, though she thought it might be better to wait until Monday, to give her nerves a chance to settle.

At times, Cabrera goaded her about her criminal record. He even claimed that they'd known about bodies in her yard for a whole year, which seemed to startle Mrs. Puente.

Finally, the interview wound down, Dorothea seeming tired. "Well," she said wistfully, "I wish Mr. Montoya would show up right now."

"I just don't think he's going to," Cabrera replied.

"He is, he is," she insisted. "I believe in God, and I know he's going to show up."

Cabrera remembered something else, "Okay, one thing I need to ask you is, ah, we'd like to dig some more, okay?"

She nodded.

"And that might entail, ah, digging up that concrete where those flowers are."

"That's okay."

"Okay, do you have any problem with us digging, or—"

"No."

"None whatsoever?"

"No."

"Because you don't have to let us."

"Look, I want to get this over with."

Meanwhile, the investigation at 1426 F Street was becoming something of a spectacle. Bright yellow police tape cordoned off the crime scene, announcing to all who drove past on busy F Street that something was up. Now crime scene investigators had arrived, and other officers stepped aside as they methodically examined the site, plotting
diagrams, taking photographs, measuring and marking locations. City workers had arrived, and since rain was on the way, a protective canopy was quickly erected over the grave site.

Of course, a body cannot be discovered within a mile of the state capitol without the press showing up. Damp reporters strained against the police tape, calling across to various people at the scene who looked to be in the know. They queried and scribbled, working for the facts, hoping for a scoop, while brazen cameramen stomped about, looking for the best angles.

Next-door neighbor Will Mclntyre meanwhile titillated the media with the choice bit of news that he had contacted health officials, complaining about a foul stench coming from Puente's yard in May and September. "It was a rancid, sweet, nauseous odor—almost like a dead body," he told them, adding, "I smelled them in 'Nam, unfortunately, so I know what a dead body smells like."

The police were less forthcoming, but Lieutenant Joe Enloe, supervisor of the homicide field unit, finally relented and briefed reporters on what was going on. At one point he told them, "We don't think the body found is the one we're looking for," volunteering a quote for the first brief reports.

All agreed that Puente seemed the key suspect. By now, everyone knew that police had swept the old woman away to police headquarters for questioning, which only fueled suspicions of her guilt. But speculation was brought to an abrupt halt when a car rolled up, the door opened, and Dorothea Puente stepped out onto the sidewalk.

Released after more than two hours of questioning, the landlady looked somber but unshaken. Having no comment for the hungry press, she moved through the crowd, reentered her house, and shut the door behind her.

What a surprise.

Though floodlights had been brought in, work outdoors ceased as the early November darkness fell. Still, some police work continued. An all-night watch was ordered, and police continued to question boarders.

John Sharp, who had been taken to headquarters for about an hour of questioning, was returned to the house. A lone officer stood by and watched while he gathered up his belongings. When he came out a reporter called to him, "Are you moving out?"

The reply was immediate: "You bet."

It's impossible to say what Dorothea Puente might have done during those long, quiet hours of the night while she was left unattended in her home on F Street. She could have paced the floor, occasionally stopping to pull back her lace curtains and spy on the officer beneath her window. She could have sorted through papers, carried a neat pile to the kitchen sink, and burned them, washing ashes down the drain. She could have emptied the contents of vials, bottles, and jars into the toilet bowl, flushing them away. She could have poured herself several stiff drinks. She could have fumed and planned. Or, exhausted after such a trying day, she may have simply curled up in bed and fallen asleep.

The next day dawned gray and drizzly, but any neighbors hoping to sleep in that Saturday found the morning stillness shattered by the hard growl of heavy equipment. Homicide detectives were back at 1428 F Street, along with a small crowd of coroner's deputies, crime scene investigators, and others.

Forensic anthropologist Dr. Rodger Heglar presided over the recovery of the skeletal remains, which were slowly exposed as the hole was enlarged around them. Using shovels and then hand trowels, the diggers sunk a circle around the body to a depth of about three and a half feet, sifting the dirt for evidence. Final layers of soil were swept away with brushes, the body being photographed at every stage of exhumation.

The remains, which were wrapped in a sheet of some sort, now rested on a pedestal of dirt. Eventually, a sheet of plywood would be slipped beneath the strange bundle, and the body, which weighed very little, would then be slipped into a zippered plastic body bag. An unmarked van waited to take the remains to the coroner's office, where they would be examined. For now, Dr. Heglar surmised that they'd uncovered "the entire skeletal remains of a gray-haired, rather petite, elderly female."

Now the police were gearing up for some major excavations: if there were more bodies to be found, they were going to find them. They selected a site at the side of the house—a concrete slab of about six-by-eight feet—and moved the back-hoe into place. The pounding backhoe easily broke through the rectangular slab and moved it aside, ready to dig up the ground beneath.

Shortly after 8:30
a.m.,
Dorothea Puente was poised to make her move.

Grizzled old John McCauley, Puente's tenant and confidant, stepped out onto the porch and beckoned Detective Cabrera. Calling through a beard of gray bristles, McCauley said that Dorothea wanted to talk to him.

Cabrera climbed the stairs and found Mrs. Puente wearing a smart pink dress and purple pumps—the very antithesis of understatement.

"Mister Cabrera, am I under arrest?" she asked.

He told her no, and the little landlady then asked if he would mind if she and her friend John McCauley went to the nearby Clarion Hotel to meet her nephew for a cup of coffee. She promised to be back soon.

Dorothea Puente had been so cooperative, there was no reason not to let her go, was there? Cabrera quickly consulted with his superiors, who said they lacked enough evidence to arrest the woman. She was free to go.

Cabrera returned with this news, and Mrs. Puente went to get her coat.

Stepping back into the room in her red wool coat, she suddenly remembered, "Oh, my soup!" and spun off toward the kitchen, Cabrera at her heels. A big pot was simmering on her stove, and she took up a spoon to stir the bubbling liquid. Glancing shyly at Cabrera, she asked, "Would you mind very much, while I'm out, keeping an eye on my soup?"

An amicable fellow, the detective agreed. Then, peering out the window at the gathering crowd, thinking that Puente might be intimidated by the press, Cabrera chivalrously volunteered to escort her out.

Puente hastily grabbed her umbrella, then the threesome went outside and down the steps into the chill morning air. Cabrera lifted the yellow police tape, then shepherded his charges past the throngs of reporters and onlookers. After a couple of blocks, he stopped and watched as Dorothea Puente and John McCauley walked away.

No one followed.

Minutes later, back at the house, this error in judgment became painfully clear. Just fifteen inches underground, Cabrera's shovel uncovered a second body. And the sky
,
which had been threatening rain all morning, now wept upon the disturbed ground of Dorothea Puente's yard.

CHAPTER 12

Saturday, November 12, 1988, would not be a good day for Sacramento's police department. They'd discovered graves—plural—in the yard of a downtown Sacramento residence, they'd just let their primary suspect walk away, and TV vans with satellite dishes were sprouting like mushrooms around the crime scene. While microphones hungered for sound bites, the most natural spokesperson in such a serious situation, Police Chief John Kearns, was away at a convention in southern California—"golfing," as one cynic put it.

With the body count hovering at two and Dorothea Puente nowhere to be found, the unsavory job of facing an indignant press fell to Lieutenant Joe Enloe. He composed himself, took a breath, and floated out the official explanations. He declared that there hadn't been enough evidence to arrest Dorothea Puente that morning, and that following Puente would have violated her rights.