Double Tap (14 page)

“Someone in the dinner party waiting for her. They got worried about her and called the security contractors at Isotenics. When they couldn’t reach her and she didn’t show up at the restaurant, they called the police. They asked for a drive-by. Cop went to the front door and saw the body on the floor through an opening in the curtain on one of the windows next to the door.”

“Do we have a name, the dinner guest who placed the call?”

Harry looks through the papers. “Hmm. That’s strange.”

“What?”

“No name. The police report lists all the witnesses, neighbors they talked to, people at dinner waiting for her, but it doesn’t say who placed the call.”

“It had to be somebody who knew her pretty well if they had her cell phone number,” says Herman.

“See if you can find out,” I tell him. Herman makes a note. “So let’s work the time frame,” I say. “Figure it took her, what, maybe fifteen minutes to drive home from the glass studio, depending on traffic.”

“And assuming she didn’t stop anywhere else.” Harry is milling through one of the files on his lap as he talks.

“That would have put her in the house maybe five-forty-five at the latest. So play out the theories. First one to consider is theft.”

“The art glass,” says Harry.

“Right. Let’s say someone who saw her in the shop got a good look at the piece, a sense as to its value. Maybe he over-hears the sounds of commerce, a figure mentioned. He’d have to know where she lives.”

“Or follows her home,” says Herman.

“He’d have to have access or find a way in. But most important, he’d have to find the gun before he could shoot her.”

“Figure he followed her,” Harry hypothesizes. “Waited to break in. Got into the yard, found the window. Even if she’s in the house, like you say, it’s a big place. She’s downstairs. So maybe the killer goes upstairs looking for the
Orb
, doesn’t find it immediately, so he starts going through drawers.”

“Why would he be going through drawers? We have pictures of the item. It was too big to fit in a drawer,” I tell him.

“Maybe he figured he’d grab a few other trinkets as long as he was already inside.”

“And he stumbles on the gun?”

“It’s possible,” Harry says.

I’m shaking my head.

“Why not? Cops didn’t find the body until almost eleven.”

“Yes, but if we’re right, she was already dead by the time the call came in from the restaurant. That was what?”

“Eight twenty-two,” Harry answers. “That means the guy had about three hours.”

“It’s not the lack of time: it’s
too much
time.”

“What do you mean?” he says.

“Think about it. You break in and you’re rattling around in somebody’s house, a strange place, going from room to room, going through drawers. If it was that easy to get in, why take the chance on getting caught? Why not just go back to your car, watch the house until she leaves, then go back in and take whatever you want, including the
Orb
?”

Harry mulls this over for a moment, the devil’s advocate at work. “Maybe she was in the shower. Didn’t hear the phone when they called her from the restaurant. In which case our guess as to time of death may be wrong.”

“No.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“Because he killed her in the first few minutes after she got home.”

“How do you know that?”

“Where are the crime-scene shots? The ones showing the victim.”

Harry looks at me, then starts pawing through one of the files. He finds a large manila envelope, opens the flap, and turns it upside down so that a half dozen eight-by-ten glossies slip out and slide across the table, stopping only when I slap my hand down on them.

I pick up the photos and finger through them until I find the two I’m looking for. One of them shows Madelyn Chapman lying facedown on the floor. Her left eye, the one I can see, is open, staring at eternity. What is left of her lower jaw is resting in a large dark pool of blood, strings of blond hair matted to the floor. Blood has soaked into her white silk blouse, turning portions of it along her left side into what looks like a mottled, formless shade of black. A shot like this can subvert notions of justice. Mystical abstractions like the burden of proof and reasonable doubt tend to get lost when jurors start having nightmares. If this photo makes its way into the jury box, Harry and I will need the overhead sprinkler system in the courthouse to put out the fire every time Ruiz makes eye contact with a juror.

I turn the picture toward Harry. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but according to witnesses, her secretary at work and the studio owner, this is the outfit she was wearing that day.”

“Ah. You’re right.”

“No. She was dead within minutes after she got home. Think about it. She’s going out to dinner, has to be there at eight. She’s going to want to change, and probably shower first. With most women that’s going to take at least an hour, and that’s if they’re speedy.”

“I wouldn’t know,” says Harry.

“Trust me, I’m an expert, having once been married,” I tell him.

“Go on.”

“By the time she selects and lays out her wardrobe, showers, puts on new makeup, fixes her hair, gets dressed, and selects her jewelry, you’re looking at a minimum of an hour. If she bathes, figure anywhere from ninety minutes to two hours. It’s going to take her at least a half hour to get wherever she’s going for dinner. Friday night south on Five to the city. She’d be lucky to get there and park in that time.”

Harry nods in agreement.

“She’d be getting ready by six-fifteen, six-thirty at the latest. But here she is”—I point to the picture—“still wearing the same outfit she wore to the office that day. She never even had time to get upstairs. Look”—I point at the victim’s feet—“she’s still wearing her high heels.”

Actually, one of Madelyn Chapman’s shoes came off of her foot as she twisted and went down, part of it still visible in the photo, pointing in the opposite direction as if she’d been walking in it backward. “No woman I know wears four-inch heels around the house after she gets home from work. She hadn’t taken them off yet because she hadn’t finished what she was doing when she came in the door.”

I turn the other photograph toward Harry. This one is less graphic, a shot of the kitchen, pieces of plastic bubble wrap and shipping tape strewn across the granite countertop and on the floor. Next to the sink is a small-wheeled cart of some kind. An empty cardboard box sits on the counter; the two corners facing toward the camera are slit from top to bottom, its side facing the lens, laid down like an open drawbridge. The knife is still on the countertop next to the box.

“The pictures tell the tale,” I tell him. “She came in from the garage and unwrapped it in the kitchen. We know that because her purse was found by Forensics on the floor in the garage where she dropped it while wrestling the box in. Uncrating it couldn’t have taken her more than two, maybe three minutes. Where the art glass went from there I can’t say. But when she was finished, she walked from the kitchen toward the front of the house, probably headed for the stairs to go up to her bedroom and bath to get ready for dinner. She would have been in a hurry. Her purse. Most women don’t go anywhere without it. If they’re home, they usually keep it in one place where they can find it. But hers was on the floor in the garage where she dropped it.”

“Maybe they tussled out in the garage,” says Harry. “Could be that’s where he first confronted her. Why she dropped her purse. The cops found some plastic bottles, cleaning fluid spilled on the floor in the garage. Indication is there could have been some kind of a struggle there.”

“If that’s the case, why was she shot in the entryway?”

Harry shakes his head. He has no answer for this.

“The answer is the cleaning cart,” I tell him. “In the photograph of the kitchen.”

Harry looks at the photo.

“I’m guessing she used it to roll the box containing the glass into the kitchen from the garage. It would have been easier than carrying it and safer if she didn’t want to drop it. If she was in a hurry, she probably just swept the bottles off the top of the cart in the garage onto the floor. Figured that hired help could clean it up later. The bottles on the floor are not a sign of struggle. It’s a woman in a hurry.”

“Which is why she forgot to go back out and get her purse,” Harry adds.

I nod. “One thing is clear: she never got any further into that house than the front entry. Otherwise her high heels wouldn’t be on her feet. Most women would kick them off at the first chance, but she had her hands full, first opening the box and then running upstairs to get ready. Only she never got there.”

Harry mulls this over for a few seconds, looking at the two photos. “So whoever killed her had to know where the gun was.”

“Yes. And he didn’t kill her over a piece of glass,” I tell him. “Oh, he probably took it, but that’s not the reason he went to her house. I could be wrong, but if I had to guess, whoever killed her really wanted to take only one thing: her life.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

S
ome years ago I came to the conclusion that of all my death-house clients, the worst are the talkers. The unavoidable impulse to chatter is usually egged on by a little absolution and some cheering from the cops who have collared the suspects, who will rattle on, talking with one hand while signing Miranda waivers with the other, conversing on every topic imaginable except the need for a lawyer.

All of this will generally result in enough lurid details to earn your client a ticket on a gurney ride to the gas chamber before you ever arrive at the police station.

There are those who will tell you that such people are simply stupid. Having seen enough of them over the years, I can tell you that this is not the case. Most criminal defendants who hang themselves do it because they want to, or because they have to. Call it an irresistible impulse, a death wish. They do it for the same reason that some fleeing felons commit suicide by cop. In their minds, and in the absence of a good exorcism, they see it as the only avenue of escape for whatever good remains inside of them.

Fortunately for Harry and me, Ruiz feels no such compulsion. Whether you can equate this to a total absence of guilt or a dark spot on his soul that has swallowed the human emotion of remorse, it is becoming clear that when all is said and done, the only person who will ever know with certainty whether he did the crime or not is likely to be Mr. Ruiz. He is tight-lipped, not only with the cops and the jailhouse crowd, but with his own lawyers.

“Let’s talk about this gap in your résumé.” Harry presses this issue with some vengeance. We are back at the jail, confronted by what appears to be a seven-year gap in Ruiz’s life, an apparent blank in his military records.

“All I can tell you is what I told Kendal. There is no gap. I don’t know what to say.”

Harry paws through the papers. “Says here your last posting was Fort Bragg.”

“That’s right.”

“Then there’s nothing, no activity until three years ago.” Harry puts the papers down in front of Ruiz and points at the dates and the brief blocks of print with his finger, some orders where Ruiz’s name is listed with three or four other military types traveling from one base to another.

“So we have a period of more than seven years where your name doesn’t show up anywhere. How is that?”

“I don’t know.”

“You were at Fort Bragg that entire period?”

“Correct.”

“Doing what?”

“Like I say, I was training. Mostly weapons and tactics.”

“You never traveled anywhere? Because if you traveled, they’d have to cut orders. Your name would show up somewhere.”

“Guess I didn’t,” he says. “It was late in my career. Once they post you like that, sometimes they don’t move you around much. It wasn’t like now. We weren’t at war.”

Harry isn’t buying it. “There are no pages missing,” he says. “They’re numbered and dated at the top.”

Ruiz looks at them. Concedes the point. He doesn’t have an answer.

“Tell us what you were doing.”

“I told you: training.”

“I assume this involved some shooting?”

“I told you it did. At the range.”

“Pistols, rifles?”

“Both.”

Like pulling teeth.

I enter the fray. “But you weren’t a drill sergeant.”

“No. It was advanced infantry.”

“Rangers?” I have made some phone calls, done a little research.

“Yeah.”

“How many Ranger outfits were at Bragg when you were there?”

“Jeez. I don’t remember. I know they had a jump school.”

“Did you do jump training?”

“No.”

“Did you get that at the shooting range?” Ruiz is wearing a loose tank top this morning. As he leans over the table in the little cubicle, there is a deep scar visible an inch or so from his right nipple.

Ruiz glances down and adjusts his top a little to cover this. “That? That was an accident.”

“Bullet wound, right?” Harry has seen enough of them over the years, mostly on clients, to recognize it.

“Yeah. Standing in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“A training accident?”

“You could call it that.”

“We’ve seen the booking report when they brought you in,” Harry tells him. “You’ve been shot at least four times. There’s enough metal inside of you to set off a magnetometer.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning that besides the bullet wounds, you’re carrying shrapnel from explosive rounds. Steel,” says Harry. “Fragments from artillery; mortars, maybe?”

“It was a grenade accident.”

“When?”

“I don’t remember. It was a long time ago. I was doing some training with a recruit. He had the grenade. He was supposed to pop the pin and throw it over a wall. Heave it as far as he could. He got nervous and dropped it. I tried to kick it into the sump. It would have gone down a chute and exploded harmlessly. I was a little late.”

“That’s all there is to it?”

“That’s it.”

“This happen at Bragg?” I ask.

Ruiz looks at me, thinks for a half a beat before he answers, then says: “No.” He knows that if he says yes, it won’t square with the military records on the table in front of him.

“The bullet wounds—those are all accidents too?”

“Some of them.”

“What about the rest?” Harry asks.

“What do you mean?”

“Where did you get ‘em?”

“Different places. One in Panama. You remember that?”

Harry nods.

“Can’t remember the other one.”

“There’s three more.”

“You ever been in the military?” Ruiz looks at him.

“Reserves,” says Harry. “A long time ago.”

“When you been in the infantry for twenty years, you pick up things. You don’t always remember where you got ‘em.”

“I think I’d remember where I got shot,” says Harry.

Ruiz shrugs his shoulders and takes a drag on the cigarette he started when he came in. “By the way, I wanted to thank you,” he says.

“For what?”

“For getting them to dispense with the leg shackles when we meet.”

Harry has gone to bat for him with one of the muni court judges. He got an order two days ago directed to the sheriff that Ruiz is not to be shackled when inside the confines of the jail.

“Trust me,” he says. “None of this, the military stuff, has anything to do with the case.”

“We’re just trying to fill in the blanks. You can bet that if we put you on the stand, the DA’s gonna ask the same questions.”

“And he’s gonna get the same answers,” says Ruiz. “Trust me. You don’t want to know.”

That’s enough to pique Harry’s curiosity. “Is that why Kendal dropped the case?” says Harry.

“I have no idea. You’d have to ask him.”

“We have. He’s not talking.”

I shoot Harry a look. This is a sore point with my partner, the fact that Dale Kendal test-drove the case through the preliminary hearing, kicked the tires, and put his head under the hood, only to walk away. Whatever it was that scared him off, Kendal isn’t telling us.

“You’re gonna have to trust me on this.” Ruiz is adamant, so we leave it for the moment and move on to other issues.

Ruiz has had months to meditate on his fate. Alone without family or friends for support, he has had endless opportunities to make his situation worse by talking to the cops immediately after his arrest or by purging his soul in the jailhouse confessional, passing damaging tidbits of information to other inmates in the lockup in return for camaraderie. He has done none of this.

I switch gears. “Let’s talk about the murder weapon. The handgun.”

“What about it?”

“Where did you get it?”

“The military. It’s in the records.” He points to the pile of papers in front of Harry on the table.

“They issued it to you at Bragg?”

He nods.

“Was it a training weapon?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s not a standard sidearm?”

“No.”

“Did they issue you one of those as well?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean a Beretta. Nine millimeter. That is the standard sidearm for the Army, isn’t it?”

“Yes. They issued me one.”

“And where is that? Did you turn it in when you were discharged?”

“I did.”

“But not the forty-five. Why not?”

“Like I told you. That weapon was heavily modified. We used it at the range all the time for special training. You give it back to them, they’re gonna junk it. It’s had too much wear. Changed out the barrel at least twice. The trigger was set for my pull. Would have been worthless to anybody else.”

“So you used the forty-five for training all the time, but you didn’t use the nine millimeter?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“But you didn’t wear the nine millimeter out?”

He sucks on the cigarette, expels the smoke through his nose. “True.”

“One thing I don’t understand,” I tell him. “Why did you bring the gun to her house in the first place if you never carried it for security work?”

“Huh?”

“Why did you bring the gun to Chapman’s house?”

“If you wanna know, I brought it there because she asked me to.”

“She
asked
you?” Harry cuts in.

“Yeah. She wanted me to take her to the range, show her how to shoot. She kept pestering me, so finally I agreed. She had a thing for firearms. Handguns. Some women do.”

“Forty-five auto’s a pretty heavy piece for a woman,” says Harry.

“That’s what I told her. I suggested a twenty-two, something light. She said no. She wanted something challenging, a real firearm. So I brought the HK over.”

“Bag and all?” I say.

He nods. “I figured she would fire it once and that would be the end of it. I was wrong. She actually liked it.”

“You let her fire it?”

“It’s what she wanted. And Madelyn always got what she wanted. Tell you the truth, she didn’t even flinch, not even the first shot. It had a laser sight and a silencer. Course we couldn’t bring the silencer to the—”

“What did you say?”

He looks at me, a question mark. “It had a laser sight.”

“Where?”

“In the bag.”

Harry and I look at one another. “Not when the cops found it.”

“What are you talking about? It was there.”

“They found the gun outside in the backyard in some bushes near the back wall. The silencer they found on the rocks out near the water on the other side. The bag, according to the evidence report, was upstairs in the bedroom, on top of a dresser. They found an extra loaded clip with the bag and that was it.”

Ruiz takes the cigarette out of his mouth and looks at the two of us.

“You’re sure the sight was in the bag when you brought the gun to the house?”

“Positive. I was a little nervous about the silencer.”

Under federal law, possession of a silencer or sound suppressor for a firearm by anyone other than the military or law enforcement is a felony.

“I’d been meaning to crush it, throw it away,” says Ruiz. “I should have done it.”

I’m making notes as he talks. The silencer explains why none of the neighbors heard the shots that killed Chapman. The laser sight could be critical. Up to this point the cops have been operating on the theory that only a crack marksman could have placed the two shots that killed Chapman. It is one of the key points of their case, that Ruiz owned the gun and in their own words is a “world-class expert marksman” with a handgun.

“The laser sight. How does it work?”

“Red dot. You put it on the target and pull the trigger. The sight slides in a rail under the barrel. It runs off a nine-volt battery.”

“I assume this would lower the marksmanship threshold for the shooter. Make it easier for someone shooting the gun to hit what they were aiming at.”

“You bet. As long as you can see the laser dot and the sight’s aligned properly. You put that dot on your target and that’s where the round’s gonna go. I used the sight when I took Madelyn to shoot. It was an indoor range, a shop out near Escondido. She shot the shit out of the center ring at twenty-five and thirty yards. Then nothing else would do: she wanted a silhouette target.”

“This was with the laser sight?”

“Yeah. Truth is, she had a kind of natural talent. Steady hand and a good eye. And that’s a piece with some recoil. She held it, two-handed the thing, and laid down a pretty fair pattern. Tight, if you know what I mean.”

“What you’re telling us is that somebody who was unfamiliar with that particular gun, if they could have figured out how to use the laser sight, could have made the two shots that killed her pretty easily?” Harry asks.

He makes a face. “I don’t see why not, if your target isn’t moving and it isn’t shooting back. Piece of cake,” he says. “There’s no trick to the double tap. The key is hitting the target with the first round. You don’t sight-align your second shot. You set up and just pull the trigger twice in quick succession—bang, bang. Like that. They use it to clear close-in targets, make sure of the kill.”

“According to the cops, the shooter was thirty feet away when he killed Chapman,” says Harry.

“It’s a little long,” says Ruiz, “but doable. Especially with the laser sight. Probably froze her in place if the laser got in her eyes. The red beam tends to put you in a daze.”

A client facing capital charges usually leaks more acid than the average battery. Closeted in a cell with only their own dark thoughts for company twenty-three hours a day, even rock-hard cons used to doing long stretches can sometimes lose it. Some exude enough sweat that you would swear every cell wall in their body is collapsing, leaving you to wonder how it is possible to fashion a defense around a formless bag of saline. After a few jailhouse visits, you can usually smell it in the air, fear dripping from them like the psychic odor of warm urine. But Ruiz emits none of this. It causes me to wonder what makes him tick.

“Who else knew that the gun was in that drawer?” says Harry.

“Madelyn, for one.”

“You told her you kept it there?”

“She asked me about it. When she came back for protection, after the security detail was disbanded. Said when she was alone in the house, it made her feel better knowing it was there if she needed it. That’s why I didn’t take it when I left. I’ve got half a dozen handguns. That was one I didn’t use much. It was too large for concealed use. I used it at the range with her and that was about it. I figured if it made her feel better, I’d leave it there.”