Читать книгу Hands Through Stone - James A. Ardaiz - Страница 15

5

Never Piss Off a Mother

Two Days Later

December 10, 1976

Fresno, California

Detective Sergeant Art Tabler sat at his desk in the office of the Fresno County Sheriff Detective Division, Crimes Against Persons. In the trade, that basically meant robbery/homicide/rape, not to mention the usual non-fatal Saturday night knifings. One could describe Tabler by saying his face was eminently forgettable. But that wouldn’t reflect the reality of the man. He was one of those people who looked like he worked some regular job, nothing distinctive or special, the kind of guy that you would walk by on the street and never notice. He wasn’t fat but he wasn’t thin. His face was fleshy but not round. What hair he had was dark but not gray. In fact, he was basically bald. That much you would remember; Art was definitely bald. If it weren’t for the fact he was bald, you wouldn’t remember much of anything about Art Tabler—unless, that is, he was asking you questions while you sat in a chair. Then you would remember Art Tabler forever, because you would most likely be under arrest for murder and he would be reeling you in like a fish. He had that way about him. Nobody ever really saw it coming until they heard the click of the cuffs.

Tabler picked up the report in front of him. It was about a call from the Sacramento sheriff’s department. Officers there had a robbery suspect in custody and, believe it or not, like most criminals, he had a mother. The reason the Sacramento S.O. contacted Fresno was because they had talked to the mother. Not only was she angry that her boy was in custody, she had a story to tell. Somebody had put her boy up to a robbery and then abandoned him, leaving him to fend for himself, and she wanted to get even.

You never want to piss off somebody’s mother by mistreating her kid. Even lousy mothers are, at some point, protective about their kids. Must be instinct. Yes, some mothers beat their kids half to death and then cry when the cops take their kids away from them. This mother was no different—with a few minor exceptions. Barbara Carrasco was in prison in Alderson Federal Penitentiary in West Virginia, and Barbara Carrasco wanted to talk about a murder. She wanted to name names. Like I said, never piss off a mother by hurting her kid.

The name that Carrasco gave up was Clarence Ray Allen. Tabler thought about it. This was the kind of case that his old partner, Art Christensen, should handle, and that thought reminded him of one of the downsides of being a sergeant; you no longer had a partner, now that you were a supervisor. He missed the field and he missed sitting around with Christensen, telling each other lies, but he had made his choice. You had to know when it was your time to come in out of the field. And, ten months ago, his time had come. Now he made a note and stuck it in Christensen’s box, telling Art to see him as soon as he came in. It wasn’t long before Christensen was at the door, along with his new partner, Tommy Lean.

There are many ways I could describe Christensen but all of them would start with the word “gaunt.” He was tall and he was thin. Actually, thin isn’t quite how you would describe him. Thin would mean that there was some beef on him but not much. With Art, there was skin on him and that was about it. Christensen’s nickname was “Blade,” but that was not because he carried a knife. It was because he was about as thin as a knife blade and the name distinguished him from his former partner, Art Tabler. Otherwise it would have been Art and Art so nobody would know who you were talking about. Blade didn’t mind what you called him, although Art Tabler did. Christensen was one of the last of the old-time sheriff’s officers, part cowboy, part good ol’ boy, and part wolf. One of the first things I learned about Art Christensen was that however he perceived the person he was talking to would dictate the role he would play in responding to that person—cowboy, good ol’ boy, or wolf. Most people were misled by his demeanor. They underestimated him. It was a serious mistake. His teeth weren’t straight and his light brown hair was always slicked back with Brylcream or something else that held it in place like Elmer’s Glue. Brylcream used to be big back then with people over forty, but you have to remember, “back then” was over thirty years ago. Yes, Blade was definitely a good ol’ boy. He liked his friends, he liked his wife, and he liked his horse. He always made it clear that he liked his wife best—but he liked his horse a lot.

Standing next to Blade was Tommy Lean. The contrast was clear. Blade favored cowboy shirts, jeans, and boots. Tommy looked like a poster boy for surfers. Lean was just like his name, tall and with the leanness of a college athlete, which he had been. He had blond hair that fell over his forehead that he routinely pushed back with his hand. He liked Hawaiian shirts and loafers. Unlike Christensen, during most of the year he carried his nine-millimeter automatic in a shoulder holster, which made his Hawaiian shirt bulge and look a little out of place, but in the winter he covered it with a coat. In the summer, Tommy conceded that a shoulder holster made people nervous, so he would wear a hip holster and drop his shirt outside his pants.

There was a difference in the way the two partners carried on their interrogations. Blade approached interrogation like he was circling his prey. Lean approached interrogation in a very laid-back manner, and he kept the intimidating demeanor to a minimum. By any stretch, they were an odd pair, the seasoned and cynical homicide detective who could look right through you and the younger detective who would ask how you were doing right after he slipped the cuffs on.

It takes a long time to develop a good partnership. And to make a good homicide detective takes even longer. A homicide detective, or any detective for that matter, has a different way of thinking than a street cop. The ability to size people up and slip inside their heads is more of a character trait than a learned skill. But it also requires experience and, often, a good mentor. Usually, the way you learned detective skills was from somebody who knew what he was doing, and Blade knew what he was doing. He and Tabler had been partners for twelve years before Tabler moved up to sergeant.

It was a difficult transition, changing partners, after years of getting used to being Art and Art. When Tabler and the captain asked Blade who he wanted for a new partner he remembered a young man who had done some work on a juvenile homicide. Blade told them, “Give me Lean.” If it takes a long time to become a good homicide investigator, it can take longer to make a good homicide team, to make a perfect fit, where each man knows what the other man is going to do before he does it. Blade was a plainspoken man and he didn’t pull his punches or worry about diplomacy or politics, nor did he have concerns about keeping his thoughts to himself. But so far, Blade hadn’t said anything bad about Lean, which for Blade was good. Lean had learned the first lesson—to keep his mouth shut, and he followed it most of the time. But he wasn’t one of those guys who could follow the lesson all the time. And he had a tendency to view regulations as suggestions, whereas Blade viewed regulations as a necessary inconvenience that you could bend but not ignore. Blade taught his younger partner restraint and Lean taught his older partner to loosen up. They had found a happy medium in their partnership, not unlike a marriage.

Tabler looked up and motioned for the two detectives to take a seat. “I got a call from an Inspector Leeper in the Sacramento sheriff’s office. He said they had a 211 the other day involving a kid named Raul Lopez or Raul Carrasco, depending on what name he wanted to go by at the time.”

In cop talk, a 211 is a robbery. The quickest way to show that you weren’t an investigative pro was to start referring to a crime as a robbery or a homicide or a murder. That would instantly mark you as some kind of wannabe. At least it would do so with experienced detectives, and these guys were experienced detectives. Part of the reason for using numbers instead of the names for crimes is for shorthand, part because of cop vernacular, and part because it depersonalizes the situation. Good cops and good detectives have to keep themselves separate from both the attitudes of the perps and the emotions of the victims. If you can’t do that, you lose your objectivity, and then you lose your perspective. You always have to remain outside the emotional box of the players.

Tabler threw a report toward the front of his desk, nodding for Blade to pick it up. “Anyway, this Lopez Carrasco kid, I guess, pulled a .45 auto out when he tried to rob some convenience store. Damn near shot himself.” Tabler smiled. “Just like some guys shoot other people when they try a cross draw with a shoulder holster.”

Blade picked up the report while Tabler continued. “Blade, you and Lean call Leeper and find out what he has for us. Could be nothing, but then it might turn out that we got a body we don’t know about.” Tabler drew out the moment before he said anything further. He knew Blade like he knew his own face in the mirror. “Anyway, you may be familiar with one of the names he gave me, Clarence Ray Allen. I told him Allen ran a rent-a-cop agency here in Fresno. He said the kid fingered Allen as the getaway driver.”

Tabler waited for Blade’s reaction. Blade had been bumping up against Clarence Allen since he had been out on patrol years before in the late fifties. There had been snitch reports and rumors about Allen, the owner of a local security agency, for years. Word on the street was that he was using the agency to case businesses for burglaries. People were saying that Allen Security offered its services, but if turned down, the next thing they knew the business was burglarized. However, nothing ever amounted to solid evidence. Blade remembered that when he was a patrolman, a liquor store had been cleaned out in a burglary. They took everything except the shelves. The liquor store owner said that he had received a call from Allen Security about protecting his business, but he hadn’t thought he would need it. And look what happened next. Ray Allen and his criminal activity had managed to remain nothing more than whispers on the street. Blade and Tabler had come close to getting him a couple of times, but never closer than a good sniff.

Blade glanced up sharply. Allen irritated the hell out of Blade and Tabler knew it. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that Blade could smell a crook, and if he couldn’t nab him, he was like a dog chasing a bone. Both Tabler and Blade heard the rumors, but nothing stuck. In any event, they knew rumors were like smoke—somewhere there was a fire. Blade nodded his head in the slow, laconic way he reacted to most news. “Allen, huh? Well, that could be interesting.” He picked up the report. It had Leeper’s phone number written in pencil across the top. He looked at Leeper’s title and then he looked up and leaned back in his chair, carefully balancing on the back two legs. “Says here this Leeper is an Inspector,” he said with a touch of sarcasm, drawing out the word for emphasis. “Is that what I’m supposed to call him, Inspector? How come I’m not an Inspector?”

Tabler tilted his head and pushed his mouth to the side in a smirk. “You’re not an Inspector for the same reason you’re not a sergeant. Anyway, we don’t have inspectors in this department but we do have sergeants.”

Lean genially slapped his partner on the back. “He has a point. He does have a point, Blade. Anyway, you wouldn’t want to be an Inspector. Sounds too much like a sergeant or some kind of cop who doesn’t really work.”

Blade nodded. “You do have a point.”

Tabler waited until the two were through with their little routine. “Okay, I don’t care if he’s a lieutenant colonel, just call this guy and see what you can find out.”

Lean stood up. “We’re on it. We’ll get back to you as soon as we know something.” Blade stood up and nodded. His ears had perked up for other reasons when he heard Clarence Allen’s name. Blade ran horses and Allen often showed horses at some of the same auctions. A bad guy running horses interfered with Blade’s image of himself as a modern cowboy.

Blade and Lean walked back to their desks in what passed for the detective division offices. Actually, it was just a large room with as many desks shoved into it as the area allowed. If it was full of detectives, the room would be crowded, but it was rare that more than two or three were there at any one time. Most of the teams were out working and their paths crossed only at odd hours.

Blade picked up the phone and called the number on the report. “Inspector Leeper, please.”

Tommy motioned for Blade to put the call on the speaker. “Yeah, Inspector, this is Detective Art Christensen, Fresno S.O. How you doin’? Look, my partner’s here. I want to put this on speaker so he can hear. That okay?” He waited a moment and then nodded to Lean. A voice came through the speaker. It was definitely a cop voice, to the point, carrying just a hint of “I’ve been around.” “Here’s what I got. Two days ago, we had a 211 attempt at a local stop-and-rob. A kid tried to hold up the place—name Raul Lopez, aka Carrasco. That means ‘also known as’ to you boys down in Fresno.” Both Christensen and Lean gave the little polite chuckle that they knew was expected, rather than the “up yours” that they knew was deserved. It’s kind of a cop thing between agencies. Leeper left a little gap in his briefing until he could hear the sphincter tightening at the other end of the line and kept on. “Anyway, the kid used a .45 auto. Lucky he didn’t shoot his dick off when he pulled it out of his pants. The clerk hit a silent alarm and when our boys got there the kid was still standing there. He didn’t give us any trouble, but the guy who was supposed to be driving the getaway car left him holding the bag. He sped out of there when he saw us rolling up.”

“Turns out this kid has an old lady who’s doing hard time at Alderson Federal Prison in Virginia or West Virginia, anyway someplace in one of those Virginias. She’s in for alien smuggling. The kid tells us that the getaway driver’s from your area, name of, ah, of,” and there was a moment’s pause, “Ray Allen. According to your Sergeant you boys have heard of him. Guess Allen just left the kid to fend for himself. Well, the mother put Allen at the 211, because she had talked to him in Sacramento and to her son right before the robbery. The kid gave us the motel where they had been staying. Anyway, the kid wanted us to call his mama, so we did. It took a while to get her on the phone, but as soon as we ran down what happened she blew up. She talked to the kid and told him to talk to us, and then she got back on the phone with us. Told us that she had been a girlfriend of this Allen and that they lived together for a while in Tijuana. She said that the kid was her adopted son and she brought him in off the streets. Said that when she got popped for alien smuggling—this part’s a little unclear—that she either left the boy with this Allen to take care of him or told the kid to go to Allen’s house. Apparently, Allen told her that he would help the boy make some real money. She told me that when she got picked up by the feds she was with a white male adult, approximately twenty-five to twenty-six years old, named Lee Furrow. He also goes by Eugene Furrow. Said that before they were arrested, Furrow had some kind of attack of conscience and told her that Allen forced him to kill a female in the Fresno area because she was aware of a burglary and that this Allen and some others had been passing money orders of some kind that they got in the burglary. I don’t know much more. She said this whole thing happened sometime in August of 1974. I already called the Fresno police department, and they say they don’t have any unsolveds involving the murders of young females.

“All I got on Carrasco is that she is one hard broad. She’s got a whole bunch of aliases, Richardson, Picklesimer—there’s a name for you, Betty Picklesimer. Also goes by Wood and LaFaye. We’re getting a warrant for Allen, with bail set at $25,000 for 211 and conspiracy. I would appreciate some help from you boys in picking him up. That’s all I got.”

Blade had been writing. So had Lean. Blade put his pencil down. “Okay, Inspector, we’ll get on it. It may take us a while. We just got radios down here in Fresno, you know. Appreciate your help. We’ll see what we can do on Allen. We been hearing things about him for a while. It won’t break our hearts any to bring him in. As soon as you get the warrant out, give us a call. We’ll let you know.”

Blade hung up and stared at his partner. “Okay, let’s run this Furrow guy and see what we get. I’ll go down to records and see if we have any unsolveds that fit the description, or any missing persons. You get a Soundex of Clarence Allen to this Leeper and get what you can on Furrow.” Lean nodded. “Oh, and run his rap sheet. Let’s see what we come up with on Allen and on this Furrow, too.”

A Soundex is a telephonic transmission of a photograph. This was way before fax machines, and e-mail was basically a note that you left on somebody’s desk. There weren’t even any little yellow sticky notes.

When Lean returned, Blade was looking at a report on his desk. Tommy put his notebook down. “Allen’s been running a security agency here, probably out of his house. He’s listed as living out on East Belmont.”

Blade nodded. Belmont at that location was largely rural, with a lot of nice houses in the area on several-acre lots. Lean could sense that Blade had something, and he was pleased to be slowly getting a feel for the way Blade operated. “You got anything as a possible on the woman?”

Blade nodded. “I got two. One, a Kathy Parker, age 17, body dumped. Fits the age. And I got another one, missing person, Mary Sue Kitts, nineteen years, reported missing November 6, 1974. Last seen July 15, ’74. Any guesses?”

Lean knew better than to guess. Blade already had something. “So go ahead. What you got?”

Blade leaned back as far as his chair would allow in the confined space. “It took me a while, but I remembered that Tabler and I did a missing persons report two years ago. It was a young woman and it didn’t hit me right away, but the girl was last seen leaving her home in July of 1974 with Roger Dale Allen. They were in a security patrol vehicle belonging to Allen Security. Roger is Clarence Ray Allen’s kid. It took some scratching through our records until I found it. I couldn’t remember her name, but I remembered the missing person report and the connection to Allen.”

Lean nodded, “Kitts would be my guess.”

Blade leaned his head back and pulled a picture of Mary Sue Kitts from the missing persons file on the table. “Yeah, lucky guess. You got anything on Furrow?”

Lean picked up the picture, a high school graduation picture of an attractive eighteen year old with long, light-brown hair, and stared at it before putting it back down on the desk. “There isn’t much. White male, twenty-six, five-foot, ten inches, 150, with brown hair, brown eyes. Has a record. Got popped for alien smuggling down in El Centro, California, so that fits. On parole. But there isn’t much else that fits the story. Doesn’t have the profile of a murderer, at least not the kind we’re looking at.”

Blade shook his head. Murder was a unique kind of crime. Most people thought a murderer looked like a murderer, like he would be drooling or wild-eyed. The fact was that Blade had arrested hundreds of men and quite a few women for murder, and most of them didn’t look like murderers until you finished with the case. But there were certain kinds of murderers that were always different. Premeditated murderers—murder in cold blood—those kinds of killers are different. You don’t see many of them. It takes a special kind of person to think for a while about killing another human being and then do it without anger or without being in the grip of a sudden spurt of unbridled passion. Most murders happen because the killer is angry or drunk or scared or some combination of the three. People who kill in cold blood—well, you don’t see many of those, and when you do, you can feel it when you are around them. Some would say that those type of people were crazy, but Blade knew better. People who can kill in cold blood aren’t crazy. They know precisely what they are doing. No, those people were missing that thread of conscience that is present in almost everybody else.

Conscience is what Blade sought most when he sat somebody down in a chair. It is the thing he would gently massage until the person broke. All he had to do was bring it to the surface. Sometimes, he had to poke pretty hard, but if he could sense a glimmer of conscience, he would slowly take advantage of it. But if it wasn’t there, you had to break them down with evidence, and if they broke, it was because they couldn’t see any other way to make a deal, or they had become caught up in their lies. He knew what Lean meant when he said Furrow didn’t fit the profile. The kind of person who committed premeditated murder almost always had a record that included violence or something in their background that made you take a step backward. They usually had something missing, that aspect that stopped most people from hurting other people. Furrow didn’t have that record, and if Carrasco’s story was true, Furrow had a conscience. It didn’t mean he couldn’t do it and it didn’t mean he didn’t do it. It just meant that something didn’t fit. At least, it didn’t fit yet. And that was their job—to find the pieces and make them all fit.

Christensen rocked his chair back until all four legs settled on the floor. “You get Allen’s rap sheet?”

“There isn’t as much as I would’ve thought. Born in Oklahoma in 1929, brown hair, brown eyes. Just under six-feet tall, about one hundred seventy-five. Most of what we have is applications for security guard licenses, but he does have a ’62 arrest for grand theft, reduced to a misdemeanor. Nothing much came of it. Our office gave him a concealed weapons permit. Can you believe that? He has an arrest for attempted robbery last year, but that apparently didn’t go anywhere.”

Blade’s smile pulled his lips back over his teeth. It gave him a wolfish look, which usually appeared when he had some new realization about a case. “I know that case. Detective Badiali was working nights. Some guy came in; I don’t remember his name. Anyway, he said he was a night watchman at a lumberyard. Claimed that Allen wanted him to participate in a phony robbery. Badiali and some of the boys set up a surveillance, and they caught Allen inside the lumberyard, but Allen must have spotted our people. Anyway, we jumped a little too soon. We couldn’t make the case. The thing I remember is that the guy who snitched Allen out was threatened by Allen, at least according to the guy’s wife. Anyway, he just disappeared. No witness, no case. Sounds familiar doesn’t it.” He stared at Lean. “What do you think?”

Lean hesitated; he knew better than to have a thought that Blade would think was stupid and then let him know it by blurting it out. “Don’t know; I guess first things first. We need to go talk to Mary Sue Kitts’ parents and see what we can find out.”

The lines on Blade’s leathery face grew deeper while he thought for a minute. “No, not yet. First, we need to talk to this Carrasco woman and see if we really have anything. No point in talking to Kitts’ folks until we know something.”

Lean nodded. He wasn’t any more enthused about calling the parents of the Kitts girl than was Blade. The parents had been waiting for two years to find out about their daughter. There wasn’t much news, but it was going to be hard to keep them from guessing that their little girl was dead. Even when their child mixed with bad people, the parents only remembered the little girl with a ponytail.

Working homicide is never an easy job, but you got used to many things—the blood and the trauma, the smell of loosened bowels, and the sickly odor left by a body after several days in the sun. What you don’t get used to is the grief. Both men knew that there was going to be grief for a family and they would be the messengers of death. Although they hadn’t caused it, they were going to bring news of it to parents who had been holding onto hope for two years and were still holding on to hope to this day. It was a hard thing to do when you took away hope. Sometimes, you were taking away all that people had left to keep them going. And there was no point in taking away hope until you are sure.

Blade stood up. “We’re going to have to have more than we got now. First, we call that federal prison and talk to Carrasco. If she confirms what she told Leeper, then we got something to go with to get approval to go to West Virginia.”

Unlike television, where the supervising detective never asks how much it’s going to cost to run a case, in real life the supervisors always ask. Everybody is on a budget. The boss wants to know if the case is going to go anywhere. Tabler would instantly get it—without talking to Carrasco, the case wasn’t going to work out. This was a murder lead. You had to at least investigate it to see how warm the trail was. But Tabler wasn’t the captain and the captain signed the authorizations. They had to sell the captain. Blade already knew what it would take with Tabler.

It took all day to get Barbara Carrasco on the line. It is never easy to get the feds to do anything, and that includes federal prison authorities. Most state cops think the feds are born with a stick up their ass. They hate to ask them for anything and they know better than to expect much. It’s like bank robberies. The feds always take the cases with the picture and the confession. If they don’t have that, then they turn it over to the state. No wonder they don’t lose many. It’s not hard to win when you’re holding all the cards.

Getting into the prison to talk to an inmate without providing a long, drawn-out explanation took forever. You would think you could just tell them who you were and give them a number to call back and confirm. But no, that would be too easy. If it was another state agency, you could wrap it up in ten minutes. With the feds, it was an all-day affair.

Finally, they heard a woman’s voice that identified herself as Carrasco. You didn’t have to see her to know she’d been around. It was a voice that had been burnished by secondhand smoke and a life that hadn’t been easy. She got right to the point. Yes, she told Leeper about a murder. She wanted to share that information and she wanted a little help with her boy. But most of all, she wanted a piece of Clarence Ray Allen’s ass.

Like I said before, never piss off a woman by hurting her kid.

Blade and Lean walked into Tabler’s office without knocking. Blade folded his thin frame into a chair. As usual, he rocked the chair backward. “Okay, Art, this is what we got. This Carrasco woman is in the joint in West Virginia and we talked to her. She says she can give us Clarence Ray Allen for murder. She says we come back there and we’ll get what she has. We think maybe the victim is this Mary Sue Kitts, who went missing about the right time.” Blade slid the photograph of Mary Sue across the desk for Tabler to look at. “Carrasco wants some help with her kid, who, by the way, isn’t really her kid. He’s some street kid she picked up in Tijuana, but she raised him. Kind of like a mother wolf, I guess. Anyway, we need approval for two tickets to Alderson, West Virginia, courtesy of the County of Fresno. Also, you could throw in some overtime approval, and a cash advance would help. Any questions?”

Tabler gave them a wry expression that for him passed as a smile. He remembered the missing person report and the reminder about Roger Allen, the son, brought it all back to him. Tabler would go to the captain, but not before they had something more to go on. “Sacramento says they’re going to have a warrant for Clarence Ray Allen. Let’s wait for the warrant, arrest him, and maybe he can be shaken a bit.”

Blade snorted. “Art, this guy isn’t going to shake. You know that.”

Tabler was unmoved. “Just the same, we have a tight budget. You wait until we have the warrant and then go arrest him. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”

Blade shrugged. Becoming a sergeant did the same thing to everybody. They forgot what it was like to be picking up momentum on a case. Tabler could read the look on his old partner’s face. “Blade, I have to justify things now. I can’t just go off and spend department money by myself even if I think it is a good idea. I have to ask and I have to have a good reason. See if you can give me one.”

By Monday, the warrant for robbery had come into the office. Blade and Tom drove out Belmont Avenue to serve the warrant. A few years earlier, nothing was out near where Allen lived; it was just citrus groves and walnut trees. Now, expensive houses on large lots were being built between working farms whose owners were holding out for a good price, or else holding on because they didn’t want to give up the life they had always known. Houses like Allen’s weren’t the exception out there—the pools and stables, everything reflected the lives of people who had money. The only problem was neither Blade nor Tom could see Allen’s money coming from a nickel-and-dime security agency. No, he wasn’t getting his money from wearing a plastic badge and shaking doorknobs.

They walked up to the long, ranch-style home and knocked on the door. Both men stood slightly to the side, with their hands in position to pull their weapons. The man who answered the door was definitely Clarence Allen, but he didn’t look like his picture. He had put on some weight and his hair was graying. “Can I help you?” he asked the officers.

Both men shifted position. Over the years, a cop gets a feel for people. Most of what you can see comes from body language, but the real message is the eyes. Some people show fear. Others stare at you and you can tell they are resigned. Still others give you a look that tells you they’re going to fight. Some people have dead eyes. When Allen stared at them, what they saw were the eyes of a person who wasn’t afraid and wasn’t resigned. What they saw were the eyes of a man who would kill them if it was necessary and he wouldn’t think twice about it. When you look in a man’s eyes and you see nothing but emptiness staring back at you, you can be sure that he’ll do whatever he decides is best for himself—and that includes doing what is not good for you. You won’t know until he does it. Ray Allen had dead eyes. Both detectives felt the adrenaline surge. They waited a few seconds.

Blade spoke first. “You Clarence Ray Allen?”

“You know I am.”

“Fresno County sheriff’s office. We have a warrant for your arrest for armed robbery in Sacramento. Please step outside. Keep your hands where we can see them.”

Allen stepped out and allowed Lean to turn him around while he was handcuffed. He didn’t resist, but he obviously wasn’t afraid, either. All he said was, “Oh my goodness.” It was like he was just shocked that he would be accused of something like that. Then his voice hardened. “Well, I got nothing to say to you, so let’s just get on with it.”

They pushed Allen into their car and drove back to the jail and booked him. The only thing that had been impressive about their contact was his lack of reaction. As they walked back to the detective division, Blade muttered, “Told Tabler he wouldn’t talk. Now we go talk to Tabler and then the captain. We need to talk to Carrasco.”

Captain Bud Lauter asked, “Why can’t just one of you go? Just get the interview and then we decide.”

Blade didn’t hesitate. “Look, Captain—Bud—it all fits. The Kitts girl disappeared at the right time. She was with Allen’s son, Roger. It’s just too close to be a coincidence. If something happens to one of us or our credibility is questioned, then the other one is there to back up the report. We both need to go.”

Captain Lauter nodded. It was part of his job to ask the question. He already knew the answer. “I’ll talk to the sheriff. We’ll get you approval, but you better come back with this asshole’s head on a platter. We don’t have the budget for you two to go on some vacation. Get it done.”

They left joking about how the captain had made it sound as if he were approving their going on a spree to Paris and not merely 3,000 miles away to the bleak environs of a woman’s prison. Still, it could be interesting. Neither had never been to a federal women’s prison. At least, it would be different.