Michael McGarrity - Everyone Dies

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.

T he 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 scene 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?