He walked into the building and nodded hello to the person at the front desk. When he was a new sheriff nineteen years ago, he was attacked with memos, signature requests, overtime slips, and interview requests the moment he stepped foot into any precinct. But now he had insulated himself well. He had four assistant sheriffs who handled most of the work he used to do himself. Over them was an undersheriff who saw to the day-to-day business. He also had heads of staff for finance, general counsel, administrative staff, and intergovernmental relations. He delegated most of his work so that he could keep his eye on the big picture: cutting bureaucracy so that cops could focus on actually solving crimes. Striking that balance was tough, considering he had added more bureaucrats to the payroll than any sheriff in the city’s history.
The elevator was about to take him up to his office when a hand parted them. Orson Hall stepped on, a coffee in his hand. He faced forward, waiting for the doors to close.
“I need to talk to you,” Keele said.
“’Bout what?”
“Daniel Steed’s case and that detective you flew in.”
“I can’t believe it myself. I keep hoping he shacked up with some hooker and just has his phone off, but the assistant I assigned to him says he’s been incommunicado for an entire day. I’m not quite in panic mode, but I think that we should-”
“They found him.”
“What?”
“They found him. Jon Stanton, right? They found him. He called the emergency line from a gas station.”
“Why wasn’t I told about this?”
“Take your dick out of that filly you got on the side and turn your damn phone on sometimes, Orson.”
Hall took out his cell phone. It was off. “Oh. Didn’t realize I did that. Where is he now?”
“He’s here.”
“I need to go talk to him.”
The elevator dinged, and they stepped off. They said nothing else until they were behind the closed doors of Keele’s plush corner office. Keele pulled a glass bottle out of a drawer and poured a glass of brandy. He offered some to Hall, who turned it down.
“You can’t talk to him yet,” Keele said. “I gave him to Alma.”
“For what?”
“He seems to think your boy is the prime suspect in that homicide from a while back, the burn victim. He asked if he could have an hour with him alone before anyone else, and I said it was okay.”
“Tom, he’s a friend a mine, out here as a favor to me.”
“I didn’t authorize pullin’ off his fingernails or anything. He’s just gonna talk to him.”
“Yeah, ’cause that’s all Alma does, right? Talk?”
“He’s got some fire in him. That’s for sure,” Keele said, sitting in his chair with a grunt, his knees creaking. “But I trust the tough bastard more than I trust anyone here. Even you.”
“Thanks, Tom. I appreciate that.”
“Oh, quit bein’ so sensitive. Your friend’s gonna be just fine, and as soon as Alma’s done with him, you can go down there.” He took a long drink and swirled the liquid in the glass. “I wanted to ask you if you think he could actually do something like that.”
“Murder somebody? Jon Stanton? No way.”
“How do you know?”
“I know him well enough to know he’s not a killer.”
“That’s not what his file says.”
“You looked up his file?”
“Made a call to the chief over in San Diego. His file says he’s had eight shootings in the line of duty. Seven were cleared as clean shootings, but they ain’t sure about this last one.”
“Every cop gets in that situation. Hell, how many shootings did you have? Ten? Twenty?”
“I’ve been at this three times as long, and I came up in the days when bank robberies ended in machine-gun battles. Different times.”
“I can’t picture him doing anything like that.”
He finished the brandy and set the glass on the desk. “My old man was a philanderer. Slept with anything that moved. I didn’t want to believe it, and neither did my mama. We ignored it as much as we could. Then he gave my mama syphilis. She died’a that. She was too proud to go to a doctor, so it ate away at her mind. Damn thing lays dormant so long, you don’t even know you have it until it turns your brain to Swiss cheese. That’s the trick, Orson. You gotta face that everyone is capable of everything.”
Orson took a deep breath. “What’d you wanna do?”
“Nothing yet. All we got is rumors from some wetback dope dealers. I don’t wanna move on a good cop if that’s it. Give Alma a chance to play this out. If there’s anything there, he’ll find it.”
28
It took Parr nearly half an hour to get through to someone at NV Energy who could answer his questions. He spoke with a manager named Nate, who had a Texas twang. Parr gave him the address and asked who had been out to read the meters in the past three days.
“Sir, we barely do that anymore. It’s only on some of them older homes. Usually, we can just read ’em right here on our computers.”
Parr thanked him for his time and hung up. The next step was to re-canvas the neighborhood. Uniforms had already canvassed two blocks in every direction, but they hadn’t asked about someone claiming to be from the electric company. Parr would have to grab some men and do it again. He looked at his watch and realized it was noon-most of the neighbors would be at work. He would have to wait until five or six and pull overtime. Besides, he had something much more important to do.
He had been purposely stalling, and now forty-five minutes had passed. That was enough time for Stanton’s nervous anticipation to cook a little in the interrogation room. Parr picked up his notepad, a pen, and a photo of the unidentified body that had been nearly incinerated in a ’97 Ford Taurus. He walked down the hall to the interrogation room where Stanton was waiting.
Jon Stanton didn’t look like much. He was slender, with a boyish face. He looked like the kind of guy who would stop to help someone on the side of the road, the type who celebrated every holiday and never had anything to complain about. Parr thought he looked like a Mormon missionary who was just a little too old to still be out there, trying to convert people.
He sat down across from Stanton and looked him in the eye. He took Stanton’s wrists softly in his hands and looked at the deep purple bruising that wrapped around them.
“You sure you don’t want a medic?” Parr asked.
“No,” Stanton replied. “I’m fine, thanks.”
“We didn’t get a proper introduction earlier,” Parr said, flashing his best smile. “I’m Alma Parr. I’m the captain over Robbery-Homicide.”
“Alma. Do you know that’s the name of a prophet in the Book of Mormon? He was a warrior. He left his people to wander through the wilderness and convert his enemies.”
“Yeah, well, it’s also an old German name, and my grandparents were fresh-off-the-boat Germans.” Alma placed his pen down on the pad. “I know you went through the story and what happened with the detective from Missing Persons ’bout an hour ago. That was just a formality. He needed that interview to close your case.”
“I didn’t know one had been opened.”
“Mindi pulled some strings and had it opened. We usually wait seventy-two hours. Anyway, I was outside the mirror, watching. So you picked the lock with a nail?”
“It’s easy to do. Hairpins and paperclips actually work better, but you use what you have.”
Parr shook his head. “Quick on your feet. I like that.”
“You must have been the same to get out of Iraq without a scratch.”
Parr glared at him. “How’d you know I was in Iraq?”
“Oh, sorry. The tattoo.”
Parr looked down at his biceps. Part of a tattoo of a rifle half-buried in the ground, a helmet propped on it and boots set in front, poked out from under his sleeve.
Stanton said, “The tattoo’s really dark, so I guessed it was pretty recent.”
Parr shifted in his seat. “Yeah.”
“Where were you?”