The Color of Death (12 page)

Scottsdale

Thursday morning

When Sam slid in and shut
the door behind him at three minutes after nine, Ted Sizemore’s suite was packed with crime strike force personnel. Sam looked at the assembled people with tired blue eyes and an expressionless face. At least he hoped it was expressionless.
Mother of all clusterfucks
wasn’t an observation his SAC or SSA would appreciate.

As for Sizemore, he was a bomb looking for an excuse to explode.

Screw him,
Sam thought.

The fact that Sam had spent the hours just after dawn reviewing the bloody crime scene might have had something to do with his impatience. Of all the others in the room, only Mario had been to see the trailer. No one else had been interested in the murder of a third-rate gem dealer and his shrew of a wife. The beating and robbery of a gem courier had drawn a lot more strike force attention.

But then, Sam was the only one who had a gut certainty that the Purcell deaths were linked to the disappearance of a courier five months ago in Florida.

A ringing telephone punctuated conversations erupting around
the room. No one picked up the phone. Everyone knew what would be on the other end—the media yammering for interviews with anyone who wanted the cheap fame of a sound bite on the six o’clock news. Normally, Ted Sizemore would have leaped to line up an interview, and the free advertising, but this wasn’t one of those times when Sizemore Security Consulting wanted to be linked to a sensational crime. Sam knew why Sizemore was being coy this time. The Purcell murders had unsolvable written all over them. No glory there.

“All right,” Kennedy said in a loud voice.

Everyone shut up.

The telephone rang.

“Yank that mother out of the wall,” someone muttered.

Kennedy ignored everything but the agenda in his mind: Cover Your Ass.

“For those of you who just came in,” Kennedy said with a slicing look at Sam, “I’ll summarize.”

Sam hoped the look was because he’d been three minutes late, not because he hadn’t had time to shave.

Kennedy flipped through his notes. “Yesterday one of the Mandel Inc. couriers was waylaid in Quartzite. She was delivering a package to Branson and Sons. We should have a complete list of the missing items in a few hours.”

Kennedy lit a cigarette.

Sizemore got up, bummed a smoke, and sat down again. Usually he preferred cigars but knew better than to choke up the motor coach that way.

The NYPD cop whose marriage had just ended looked grateful and lit up her own cigarette.

Sam gave the room five minutes before it became uninhabitable.

The phone stopped ringing. The message light blinked urgent red. Nothing new there. It had been blinking since dawn. Ditto for the phone in the other room, the one with a supposedly private number.

“The courier hasn’t regained consciousness after the surgery to remove bone fragments from her brain,” Kennedy said. “She won’t be any use to us until she wakes up. Probably not even then.”

A few murmurs around the room made it plain that none of the cops figured the courier would be good for anything in the way of information, or anything else, after that kind of brain trauma.

“The MO was pretty much same old same old,” Kennedy said, exhaling heavily. “She was intercepted at an obvious stop and—”

“What was she doing being so careless?” the NYPD cop asked.

Mario said from the back of the room, “This isn’t Manhattan. If you’re driving from L.A., stopping in Quartzite isn’t a choice, it’s common sense. You’ve been through hours and miles of empty desert. The car needs gas to get to Phoenix. If you don’t do it in Quartzite, you have more hours and a lot more empty desert before you get to another gas stop. Only an idiot drives out of Quartzite without water and a gas tank at least three-quarters full.”

“Who’d want to live like that?” the NYPD cop muttered.

“After the thief intercepted the courier,” Kennedy said, “he drove or forced her to drive to a deserted place. Then he beat her unconscious, stole the package, and left.”

“How did he leave the scene?” Sharon Sizemore asked.

The telephone started ringing again.

Everyone ignored it.

“Either the robber had a confederate who followed the courier’s car and picked him up or he simply walked to another car he’d parked nearby. I get the impression,” Kennedy said, looking around the room for confirmation, “that Quartzite isn’t real big.”

“Not unless it’s January,” Mario said. “Then you have a few hundred thousand swap-meet fanatics dry-camping everywhere.”

The phone rang in the second room.

“Dry-camping?” the NYPD woman asked.

“No water but what you bring in yourself,” Sam explained.

“What about toilets?” she asked.

“Bring your own shovel.”

“Jesus.” She shook her head and shuddered. “Give me a crack house any time.”

The phones kept ringing.

“Okay,” Kennedy said, speaking loudly. “The point is that the heist was easy because everybody stops in Quartzite and it’s a damn small place.”

“He could have followed her from L.A.,” Sizemore said, looking at the burning end of his cigarette. “The desert is empty but the Interstate isn’t. That way he would know exactly where the courier stopped. He parks his car, waits for her to finish whatever she was doing, takes her, and drives her somewhere close by where they won’t be noticed.”

Kennedy nodded. “Chances are, that’s just what happened.”

“What about inside information?” Sam asked.

One of the phones quit ringing. The other didn’t.

Kennedy gave him a look that was anything but encouraging. “So, has your fancy confidential informant given you information that Branson and Sons is a front for the South Americans?”

“Nothing like that, sir,” Sam said, keeping his voice even. “I’m simply pointing out that a variety of people had access to the courier’s schedule—Sizemore Security, hotel security, Branson and Sons, plus everyone on the strike force who reviewed the schedule of incoming couriers.”

“Do we look like South Americans?” Sizemore asked sarcastically.

“My college roommate married a Hungarian gypsy,” Mario said. “Does that count?”

Muffled laughter went around the room, but everyone was careful not to be caught at it because Kennedy wasn’t even smiling.

The SAC took his balls in his hand and stepped up. “Special Agent Groves has a point,” Doug said. “If we assume too much, we risk missing something.”

The phone rang.

“She-
it,
” Sizemore said. “What do you want, a fucking business card left at the scene by the South American gangs?”

“Naturally, we’ll look at every possibility,” Kennedy said curtly to Doug, “but I can’t allocate resources on the basis of a wild-ass theory. I have to stick with what’s most likely according to past and present information.” He looked at Sam. “Any questions?”

“No. Sir.”

Kennedy gave Sam a look that had Fargo, North Dakota, written all over it.

The phone shut up.

“Next on the list,” Kennedy said grimly, “are the murders of Mike and Lois Purcell in the employee parking lot of the Royale, about ninety feet from the strike force’s headquarters.”

A murmuring went through the room.

“Yeah. Really sweet.” Kennedy’s voice was ripe with disgust. “It’s not anyone’s fault. We weren’t supposed to be guarding the gypsy brigade camped out all over the lot. But since the media picked up on our proximity to the murders, we’re going to spend too much time covering our asses and not enough time investigating. I want the murderer or murderers busted before we look like fools on the network feeds.” He paused to glare around the room. “Now, I know that everyone here has media favorites. I have a piece of advice for dealing with the media that I don’t want to have to repeat: shut the fuck up.” He waited for a long three count. “Any questions about how to handle the media?”

No one spoke.

The telephone started ringing again.

Kennedy leaned over, picked it up, and hung it up an instant later. “Here’s what we have on the murders so far.”

Everyone leaned forward a bit, not wanting to look inattentive. Kennedy was in a pisser of a mood.

The phone rang.

Sharon Sizemore picked it up, put the line on hold, and hung up without a word.

“Thank you,” Kennedy muttered.

“My pleasure, sir.”

The phone in the second room started in.

“I’ll take care of it,” Sharon said, standing up.

He nodded at her, then went back to his notes. “We can’t be sure at this point, but from the evidence gathered so far, it looks like a one-man job. Any more and they’d be tripping over each other, the motor home was that small. The perp was a pro. He opened the service bay on the motor home, took out the electricity, which took out the alarm, and picked the lock on the motor home door.”

“No other sign of forced entry?” one of the Phoenix cops asked.

“None. Just scratches consistent with what you’d expect from rakes and picks working a lock,” Doug Smith said.

Sharon came back to the room and sat down.

“We’re taking fingerprints throughout,” Kennedy said, “but we don’t expect anything to come of it. Like I said, a pro. He would have worn gloves. He was in the motor home with the door shut behind him long before anyone had a chance to spot him.”

“What about the Royale’s roving night security?” Sizemore asked.

“Never saw anything,” Doug Smith said. “My guess is he made predictable rounds and the murderer knew it.”

“When I had my conference with all the employees, I emphasized that the security personnel shouldn’t be predictable. Did they listen? Shit.” Sizemore took a final drag and crushed his cigarette out on a plate that had once held fried eggs and sausage and still held the fresh fruit that he hadn’t touched. “The hotel security is a bunch of square badges, dumb as they come.”

Snickers rippled through the cops. “Square badges” was the ultimate insult. Real law-enforcement officers had oval shields.

“You get what you pay for,” Sam said. “Your breakfast probably cost twice what that poor security slob makes per hour.”

“Square badges” was all Sizemore said.

“Once the murderer got inside,” Kennedy said, “he went to the bedroom and tied and gagged the victims with garden-variety duct tape. No leads there. We don’t have the autopsies yet, but from the
beer cans piled around, it looks like the Purcells took on a load of brew and passed out in bed. No sign of struggle. The wife’s eyes were covered with tape, but not Purcell’s.”

“He was the target,” Sizemore said. “Guy didn’t care if Purcell saw him. Dead men don’t give descriptions.”

Kennedy put out his cigarette. “That’s our thinking too. From the evidence of trauma to the victim’s genitals, we assume he was tortured before he died. Either that or his wife was into really kinky sex.”

Someone laughed.

“Was there a safe?” someone asked.

“Just locked specimen cabinets,” Sizemore said. “The murderer opened them with a master key.”

Smiles went around the room. “Master key” was cop slang for a crowbar.

“So there was no reason to torture the victim?” Sam asked. “Nothing to gain by getting a bigger haul?”

“The murderer was a South American thug sending a message,” Sizemore said. “When he was finished, he slit Purcell’s throat, reached in, and pulled down his tongue so that it came through the opening.”

“Colombian necktie,” Mario said. “Haven’t seen one of those in a while. Nowadays they mostly just cut the genitals off and stuff them in the victim’s mouth.”

“Ah, progress,” Sam muttered. “Ain’t it grand?”

“All the evidence we have now points to the idea that Mr. Purcell pissed off some South Americans,” Kennedy said, “and they made an example of him.”

“What about the wife?” Sharon asked. “What killed her?”

Kennedy flipped to the next page. “Bad sinuses. She suffocated before she was found.”

“Yikes.” Sharon grimaced. “Well, it was probably better than waking up in a blood-soaked bed and seeing her husband’s tongue sticking out of his throat.”

Kennedy smiled slightly. “If I ever see her in heaven, I’ll ask. But the murderer bled Purcell out pretty well before he cut his
throat, so the place wasn’t wallpapered with blood and neither was the perp.”

Sam nodded to himself. A pro wouldn’t get so messy he’d stand out on the street.

“As for the wife,” Kennedy said, “there was no rape, no skin under her fingernails or her husband’s, nothing indicating a defensive struggle of any kind. From blood traces in the kitchen sink, we’re assuming he washed off there before he left.”

“Did Purcell have an inventory of his stones?” Sam asked.

“If it was in the trailer, it’s gone,” Kennedy said. “After the perp did the magic trick with Purcell’s tongue, he ransacked the place. Even trashed the stuff in the refrigerator. Only one set of tracks in the mess. Guy wears a size ten shoe and had on clean room boots over them.”

“Did any wear pattern show through the paper boots?” Sam asked.

Doug shook his head. “Shoes were new. We’re trying to match treads now, but the boots are making it hard.”

“Well,” Sizemore said, “he sure didn’t leave much for us.”

“We’re going over the motor home for hair and fiber,” Kennedy said. “Since Purcell used the place to meet clients and other traders, we aren’t pinning our hopes on making the case that way.”

Nobody argued. Lab work was very useful in convicting people, but it wasn’t much good at helping cops to make up a list of suspects. Having DNA was one thing. Matching it to a perp was another thing entirely.

“Who found the bodies?” Sam asked.

“Some local dealer who was coming to see if Purcell felt like swapping some inventory,” Kennedy said.

“What kind of inventory?” Sam asked.

“Gems, what else?” Sizemore said sarcastically. “Where you been, boy.”

“Most of these dealers specialize,” Sam said to Kennedy. “Did Purcell?”

“That will be your job,” Kennedy said with a cold smile. “Find
out everyone who was Purcell’s client and interview them. Divide it up with Mario. You’re homeboys, so you handle the local media. The rest of us will stumble along on the main job without you two.”