I asked, “Speaking of being fooled-Jaris Slocum blew it, didn’t he? His piece of the investigation.”
Sam nodded. I’d expected him to mount a defense of Slocum, but he didn’t. He said, “I’ll deny this if it’s ever repeated, but Slocum didn’t ever lay eyes on the Millers’ neighbor. After the initial search of Chandler’s house was negative, Slocum did the follow-up interview by phone-by frigging phone-not in person.” Sam paused and grimaced like he had a bad tooth. “And he never ran him.”
I was incredulous at the last bit. Sam was admitting that the Boulder Police had never put Doyle Chandler’s particulars through the NCIC-National Crime Information Center-database.
“He never ran him? If he’d simply run him, you guys might have focused on Doyle a day or two after Christmas?”
“Something like that.”
“Would have changed everything. Everything. For Mallory, maybe for Diane,” I said. I’m a master of understatement.
“Woulda, coulda.”
Sam didn’t seem particularly contrite about his support for Jaris Slocum. Did I want him to be? I guess I did. It seemed to me that a whole gaggle of Sam’s colleagues had been complicit in covering for Jaris. “Well?” I asked. Sam wasn’t looking at me; he was staring at his right hamstring, which was the size of a pork tenderloin.
“Jaris is meeting with the bosses now. They’re trying to find a way out of this that doesn’t smell too bad for the department. But no matter what, it’s not going to turn out too good for Jaris.”
I considered what I’d witnessed at dinner at the Sunflower. “Alcohol?”
“That’s part of it.” Finally, he looked up from his leg.
“You knew?” I said.
“His wife left him a year ago, got his kids after a nasty custody eval. As you might expect, Jaris had developed a little animosity toward mental health professionals and lawyers after that little fiasco. He should never have been sent out to Hannah Grant’s office that night, but that’s hindsight-who knew that he’d be spending his evening hanging out with shrinks and lawyers?”
“Sounds like his superiors should have known enough to rein him in. You did. Darrell Olson did.”
“This all started right after Sherry left me. Despite the fact that I’d never really liked him, I had sympathy for the guy. I thought he just needed some room, some time to sort through all that was going on. We covered for him, all of us did. Could’ve been me, Alan. Could just as well have been me. Or you. You done chewing on him? I have other stuff I want to tell you.”
“He was still drinking the other night at dinner, Sam.”
“Couple of beers.”
“That he downed like Gatorade after a marathon.”
“And?” he said. He said it provocatively.
“And what?”
“You’re doing it again, Alan.”
“I’m doing what?”
“Cops are people. Guess what? We have problems. Sometimes we handle them, sometimes we don’t. Same as shrinks. Same as teachers. Everybody. Jaris Slocum screwed up. Happens. People cut him some slack. Nice people like Darrell Olson do that. Slocum hung himself with it. Happens. Get over it. Nobody knew he fudged his investigation of Doyle Chandler. And nobody guessed what was going to come of it.”
Sam offered me nothing but a stony face that was more punctuation than anything else. I read the punctuation to be a period.
I said, “Okay, I’m done.”
“Wise. The partials we found in the search last night? One of them is Bob Brandt’s right index finger.”
“Oh shit,” I said.
“Yeah,” Sam said. “Oh shit. We have his fingerprint in the basement theater and we have his car leaving the garage of the house at the other end of the tunnel during the window when Mallory disappeared from her home. Circumstantially speaking, it doesn’t look too good.”
“But nothing on the BOLO?”
“It’s a rare car. It shouldn’t be as hard to find as it’s turning out to be. I’m thinking it’s parked inside someplace. I don’t think he’s using it; we’d have it by now. We’re going back into his place on Spruce later, this time with a warrant. We’re going to test that blood.”
“Pine.”
“Pine then.”
“Say hi to Jenifer for me.”
“Jenifer?”
“The cute kid? The one who wants to go to Clemson?”
“I’ll be sure to send your regards,” Sam said sarcastically.
63
Sam wasn’t talkative as we ran, nor was I. My lungs were trying to recover from their shock at being forced to process enough oxygen for cardiovascular exercise in Colorado’s best impression of a deep freeze. After his initial, “Let’s go,” we covered a good quarter-mile before Sam grunted anything more. He had been running on my heels, but pulled up astride me and said, “News.”
I thought it was a question, that Sam was asking me what I’d heard about Diane. Tapping my pocket I replied, “Nothing. Got my phone with me in case Raoul calls.”
“No, I have more news for you. About the neighbor.”
“Doyle?”
“You’ll hear this soon enough: Doyle Chandler’s not Doyle Chandler. It’s a stolen identity. We don’t know who he is. Was.”
“You’re kidding.” I knew he wasn’t kidding.
“The Doyle Chandler whose social security number matches that of the guy we found murdered yesterday died in a car crash with his parents, Renee and Dennis, in 1967 in Roanoke, Virginia. He was six years old at the time. The man who lived next door to the Millers filched the kid’s identity. He’s been using it for sixteen years.”
“So whose body was it?” I suddenly didn’t even know what to call Doyle.
“We don’t know, and we may not ever know. AFIS doesn’t pull a match on the index print he gave for his Colorado driver’s license. NCIC has bupkis.” Sam paused to allow his breathing to catch up with his talking and running. “Animals had chewed off almost all of the fingertips and most of the face before the body was discovered. We’re not going to get usable prints from what’s left. We have his teeth, of course, but the guy hadn’t seen a dentist in a while.”
“What about the house? There must be prints there.”
“The techs aren’t hopeful-the place had been professionally cleaned after he moved out. Need to match them with something, anyway.”
“This case,” I said.
“Tell me about it,” he agreed, and fell back into position on my heels.
Five minutes later, from the ridge top above the neighborhood, I watched a sedan without headlights approach the junction of dirt lanes that leads toward our house. It wasn’t a car I recognized. Light in color, GM in ancestry, its boxy shape dated it back a decade or more. Our neighbor Adrienne’s latest nanny? Possibly. I kept an eye on the car as it took the turn onto our lane, but our route carried us down the other side of the ridge and I couldn’t see the car’s ultimate destination.
Sam passed me on the downhill and increased the pace for the final mile. I was exhausted after the run. He, too, seemed unnaturally winded. We both knew it wasn’t just the jog. “Coming in?” I asked. “I’ll make you breakfast.”
I’d already looked around for the GM sedan. It wasn’t at my house or at Adrienne’s.
“Have to get to work,” Sam said. “Simon’s with Sherry.”
I was perseverating on Sam’s news that Doyle wasn’t Doyle. But I had no easy way to digest that news, so I refocused on Sam’s implication that Bob might be deeply involved in Mallory’s disappearance, but couldn’t get anywhere with that either. Bob was a schizoid personality. He was as schizoid as anyone I’d ever met. Bob kidnapping Mallory-or anyone else-made no more sense to me than a pedophile breaking into an old folks’ home.
“You no longer consider Mallory a runaway, do you?”
Sam said, “I go back and forth. If she is, it looks like she had help getting out of the house. If she isn’t, we have a different problem. What was the neighbor’s role in all this? Did he take her? Did he help her? What was Camaro Bob’s? Did he have something to do with it? Looks like he did. What’s what exactly, I haven’t decided. I still want to know why Doyle dug that tunnel in the first place. Why did he want into the Millers’ house so badly?”