All the way downtown on Winkley Dell Drive, Noah thought about the way Geoffrey Stewart expressed himself, how there was almost a feeling of wistfulness about him that seemed edged with the hard acceptance of his situation's realities. He tried to imagine how much of a shock it must have been to him when he learned that Lauralee Dowey was bisexual, or how much honesty it'd taken to admit that there were not only women in Dowey's life, but other men, as well. All in all, it seemed that Geoffrey Stewart had gotten more than he had bargained for when he decided to place himself in the hands, and between the thighs, of Lauralee Dowey.654Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ5AWLFXcRZM
It was noon by the time Noah walked into the homicide squad room, maneuvered around the little knots of detectives and civilians and got back to his cubicle. He found them all there. Overpeck, looking a little bit touseled, was standing at his desk, putting labeled packages of Dowey's personal papers into a ragged cardboard box, his shirttail worked out and sagging over the seat of his pants. He was talking to Yung, Pittman, leaning on the door frame, spoke to Noah and smiled from under his mustache while Pittman, lounging in Noah's personal chair, ignored his arrival except to grudgingly move his legs a little so he could get to his desk. None of them looked as if they'd had enough sleep.
"Hi, kid," Overpeck said, interrupting his dialogue with Yung as he put down the Pepsi he'd gotten from the vending machine outside next to his computer. With exaggerated weariness, Yung lifted himself out of his chair and gave it a surly shove toward Noah with his foot.
Noah saw the manila package from Quantico on his desk. "Anybody have any luck here?" he asked, ignoring Yung's insolence as he moved around and propped an arm on top of the filing cabinet.
"Some," Overpeck said, stopping what he was doing and turning to her. Noah sat in his chair, kicked off his shoes, and popped the top on the Pepsi, tossing the tab into the trash can. "I went through the rest of her financial stuff, which didn't provide any useful information except for the payments to Ottie Needham. Her letters---there weren't many----were all from her folks back in South Carolina. I couldn't see anything there to help us. There were no letters from 'significant others' like I was hoping. It was pretty much of a dry run.
"But the address book is interesting," Overpeck added, going back into the cardboard box. "Aside from the businesses we'd noted earlier, there are a few men's names and numbers. I called them this morning." He found the book and flipped through it. "There's a hairdresser, a masseur, an electrical repairman, a guy who raises Dalmatians, a used-car dealer, a plumber, a TV repairman, a video store clerk, and a bookstore clerk. And then there's several dozen women's names, but only their first names, and the telephone numbers are apparently in code because none of them are working numbers. Some of them aren't even metro exchanges. We need to get this to somebody who can find a pattern here. I can't get to first base with it."
"Mind if I give it a try?" Pittman asked.
Overpeck tossed him the book. "I don't know. I think the names are coded, too. Except there is a Jeanette in there, and a Violet, and a Maria." He shrugged.
"Was there a Vicki?" Noah asked.
"Not that I can remember. You mean San Felipe?"
"Yes."
"Did you come up with a connection?"
Noah sipped the Pepsi, which was cold and sharp. "No, just hoping." He looked at Pittman. "What'd you get?"
Pittman had nicked himself shaving around his mustache that morning and had sustained a considerable wound just under his left nostril, which he'd managed to coax into a powerful scab. He monitored it occasionally, lightly touching it with the back of his right index finger.
"I talked to the Board of Pardons and Parole in Santa Fe, and they're sending Needham's prison records." Pittman closed Dowey's address book and looked at Noah wit his large, doleful eyes. "They're looking for him because he just dropped out of sight, quite checking in with his parole officer. Then, of course, this other stuff came up in Albuquerque. He tended to hang around with some pretty unsavory characters in the Penitentiary of New Mexico at Santa Fe, all of them in the pen except one. Guy named Jester Brooks, also in for aggravated assault, got out within a month of Needham and also came to Tolumura. He and Needham have continued to pal around together. There's a warrant out for him now on a parole violation. Nobody's heard from him in a couple of months." Pittman touched the side of his nose. "And I've put Needham on the computer and coming out in the next bulletin. That's all."654Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡeijEPTFSJN
Noah looked at Yung.
"Okay." Yung took the paper clip he had been chewing on out of his mouth and turned to face him. "I talked to the officer in Albuquerque who's looking for Needham. Needham was seen with an ex-con named Jon Smokes on the day of the night that Jon decided to commit mayhem and molestation on Gwen Carter, a student at NMU. Gwen was also attacked and raped by two men, but could only make one of them from the files. The second man was always behind her, she said, and when he came around front to do her, he covered her face with her dress. Needham was in the file along with Smokes, but she didn't make him."
"The Albuquerque police thing Smokes and Needham are together?"
"That's what they're guessing. I also had a long conversation with a good man in their central crime analysis," Yung continued. "Guy'd been there forever, one of those photographic memory types. I went over the whole thing, and we talked about a dozen or more cases. None of them really seemed to mesh, but a few were interesting. One of them, a woman with one nipple removed, the right one, not the left one like San Felipe's, was also a blond, but her body was not made up, and she was posed in a sexually suggestive position, not laid out like San Felipe and Dowey. She was also found in an abandoned house in a sleazy part of town. Not our man's kind of terrain."
"It's interesting, though," Pittman put in, "that NMU's in the swankiest part of Albuquerque."
"Carter's rape occurred on the 8th," Overpeck said. "And San Felipe was killed on the 13th. That's just five days between."
"It only takes a few hours to make the drive," Noah said. "What about Peyton Pristino?"
"Oh, yeah," Yung said, sliding his eyes at Pittman. "Todd talked to him, mostly."
Pittman's calm eyes lingered a second on Yung, then he picked it up. "Pristino's a VP at Dawn Financial. Fortyish. Married, no children. Claims he dated Dowey two years ago before he married. He's only seen her casually since then. Didn't have any idea about her S&M business, didn't know anything about her during these last three years. Didn't know Stanley Needham."
Shifting his feet, Pittman once more touched his finger to the side of his nose. "I think he's lying. The man was really careful about what he said, tied into a knot about it, but trying to come across cool. We should do some background and make another run at him. As for Curtis Somebody, there's a woman in the registrar's office at the University of Tolumura trying to track it down for us."
"So what about you?" Overpeck asked. "Did you get to see your people?"
"Yes, I did," Noah said, pulling a tissue out of the box on her desk and wiping up the wet spot from the Pepsi. "There are some surprises."
He went straight through each of the interviews, Burr again at her place with Craig and McKinney, Maria Tyler, Ottie Needham, and finally Geoffrey Stewart with his astonishing revelation.
"Dykes!" Yung feigned an exaggerated incredulity. "These babes are dykes?! Hey, I don't know about Tyler," he laughed, his eyes widened at Noah as he shook his head, "but this Carolyn Shultz is a real baby doll. What a waste!" He cackled again, and looked at Pittman. "I love it."
"We don't know about Tyler and Craig," Noah corrected him. "The information only goes for Dowey and Burr."
"Shit," Yung said, still grinning. "I don't have to be hit over the head with it. I'll bet they're all cream puffs."
"Well, that explains why Dowey used first names for the women in the address book," Overpeck said.
"Seems kind of an elaborate system." Pittman looked at Noah. "Did Stewart really think they were that secretive about it?"
"He seemed to." Noah drank the last of his Pepsi. He didn't know why it offended him that Yung, still shaking his head and grinning, was enjoying the lesbian angle so much. I don't think we can assume that Jeanette Craig, Violet Poole and Maria Tyler are lesbians, but even if they are, I don't know where that gets us. We don't have any connection between them and Stanley Overpeck. So far they've all spoken of him as if he were contaminated. Unless they can be considered potential targets."
"So what are we supposed to think about Vicki San Felipe, then?" Overpeck said. "That the little lady was a closet bisexual?"
"I think we have to," Noah said. "Considering the group's composition."
"There's her S&M stuff," Yung said.
"There's not a Vicki in the book." Pittman was already flipping through the pages again.
"How did Needham meet her?" Overpeck asked.
"It's this way," Yung speculated, his legs straight and his hips leaned back against the filing cabinet. "Dowey was lying to Stewart about her ex being a bastard. Needham and Dowey are together in the S&M deal. There's the photographs of Dowey----who took the photographs? She procures these women, lesbians, for their trios. They were doing San Felipe together and she dies, maybe accidentally. They make it look like a psycho job just to screw up the investigation. Later Needham does Dowey because she's the only witness. Needham's been around. He knows how to clean up after things like this. And he stages it to look just like the first one."
"If Dowey was lying to Stewart about Needham being a bastard," Noah countered, "then Ottie Needham is lying about it too, and so are Maria Tyler and Nolie Burr. I think Needham's criminal record backs them up."
"Okay, okay. So the guy was a certified bastard, all the more reason why he and his ex-wife were turning S&M tricks together," Yung persisted.
"You're missing the point, Yung," Noah snapped. "It's not likely any of them would have wanted to work with him."
"Bullshit!" Yung came back at him. "You don't know that. Some people will do anything...."
"I think we'd better decipher that damn address book," Overpeck broke in. "And talk to every person listed there."
"I'm betting the women's names won't get us that much," Noah said. "The man value of that address book is that it does list the names of more men. Admittedly the odds are on Needham, but what if it's not Needham? There are eight or ten men's names in there who ought to be checked out. Did they have a connection to Vicki San Felipe? Did the TV repairman repair her TV too? Did she regularly buy more video movies from the same store as Dowey? Did she use the same plumber?"
"Noah's right," Overpeck said. "We need to go through the service records for each of those names. And we'd better keep our eyes open for any woman's name that might come up in the records or client lists of any of these men."
Noah's telephone rang and he answered it. It was for Yung, who took it, said yeah and great, then hung up.
"Caine's got some lab results for us," he said, going for the door. "I'll be right back."
While Yung was gone, Overpeck opened another Tupperware lunch packed by Molly. He ate it without much pleasure, offering some brownies to Pittman, who said he had already eaten. Noah's stomach was rumbling, but he pushed his hunger to the back of his mind as he looked through his notes from the Stewart interview.
It didn't take Yung long to get back, carrying the report and a fresh Coke. Yung had a thing about Cokes, and the thing was that he poured a little bit out of each can and spiked it with rum. He thought no one knew it, but Noah and Overpeck had been keeping tabs on him for a long time, and Noah was sure it was no secret to Pittman.
"Okay," he said, rolling the typing chair from the squad room ahead of him. "We've got some things here that tie in."
He swiveled the typing chair around and straddled it and leaned forward with the back of it against his chest, his legs splayed out toward Noah. The ultimate macho posture, lots of sex appeal. Noah thought it was pitiful that Yung always had to be on for her, always had to swagger and strut. Having his penis pinched must have done something to his psyche. Maybe Yung really did have his brains between his legs.
"Fingerprints: they didn't find any other than Dowey's in the bathroom and bedroom, though they got some unknowns from other parts of the house, mostly from the kitchen and study. Same with palm prints.
"Footprints: we got some, but they're a woman's, on either side of the bidet.
"Nothing on the clothes folded in the chair.
"Dowey's blood groups: ABO---P; PGM---2; EAP----BA; Hp--1. Common as house dust. Even more common than San Felipe's. All the blood found on the sheet taken from the bed and all the traces found on bath towels matched their descriptors.
"Head hair, unknown: bed sheet submitted to the lab yielded five strands of long blond hair. Four of these hairs matched Dowey's head hair; one definitely did not. These head hairs were found in the carpet on the right side of the bed, next to the closet, all matched Dowey's. Two head hairs found at foot of bed: one Dowey's, one not. Two head hairs found on left side of bed, next to bath, neither matched Dowey's. Of the four uknown head hairs three match, one is dissimilar.
"Fingernail scrapings yielded only traces of hand soap matching the hand soap in Dowey's bathroom.
"Mouth swab: cotton fibers matching the towels in Dowey's bathroom, not from any of the other bathrooms where the towels were a different color.
"Swabs and smears for mouth, vagina, and anus: no seminal acid phosphates. Same as with San Felipe.
"Loose pubic hair: the combings yielded nine pubic hairs of which five did not match Dowey's. All the unknown hairs were telogen hairs, third-growth state, dormant, so there weren't any sheath cells that could be blood grouped. Also, of the five unknown hairs three came from one source and appeared to have been vaginal hair; the other two appeared to have come from another source and seemed to have been from higher up on the pubic bone.
"Since the only unidentified hair collected from San Felipe's scene was two eyebrow hairs, they couldn't make any match.
"Bite marks: good impressions from Dowey, but because the San Felipe bite marks were superficial and poorly defined, they're not sure they can make a match. And because Dowey had been washed, like San Felipe, there was no saliva on the swabs.
"Cosmetics: the makeup on Dowey's face did not match the same source as the makeup on Vicki San Felipe's face. It looks like that ginger-hole's bringing along his own stuff.
"That's it," he said, tossing the report onto Ovepeck's desk and taking a swig of Coke.
"Dowey had had sexual relations with two people, then," Overpeck said, picking up the paper. "At the same time after her last bath. There could be an eight- or ten-hour differential on that possible time span, depending on whether she usually bathed before going to bed at night or whether she usually bathed after getting up in the morning."
"And the encounters within that time frame could have been at widely-spaced intervals," Pittman said, "or at the same time----a ménage a trois."
"All of the hairs blond?" Overpeck asked, flipping through the pages.
"All of them. Well, to be accurate, blondish. They're different shades."
"Like the San Felipe eyebrow hairs."
"I guess they couldn't tell what brand of cosmetics any of it was," Noah said.
"I asked. No way."
"Damn. Slim pickens," Overpeck said. "But, the guy brings his own ligatures, his own makeup, cleans up after himself to a practical nurse."
"The thing is," Pittman said, "he does a good job with his makeup. He seems to take pains with it. Could be a morgue worker----beautician----transvestite..."
"Theatrics," Noah offered. "An actor, a makeup artist."
"The guy could just be good at it," Yung countered. "Likes to do it. Doesn't have to mean his profession's connected with it."
"True, true," Overpeck put in, tossing his empty Styrofoam cup into the trash. "Hell, he could also train fleas and sleep with coyotes. It doesn't have to have anything to do with his profession at all. Guys like this....who the hell knows what makes this boy tick?"
"And Stanley Needham," Pittman said. "Do we know, or have reason to believe, that he'd be particularly inclined to know anything about makeup?"
"Hell, no," Yung snorted. "Guy's a common ass geek."
"Okay, then, what do we know about him?" Noah was getting impatient. "He's blond."
"Don't jump the shark," Overpeck interrupted. "We don't know the guy had anything sexual to do with her. I mean as far as getting his pubic hairs mixed in with hers. There's no evidence of penile penetration----anywhere."
"He didn't have to penetrate her, Zev," Noah said.
"Fine, fine." Overpeck held up a hand. "But don't forget she's bisexual. Plenty of rubbing going on there, I'd imagine. Those hairs could have been a woman's."
"Sex-type it," Noah counterd.
"Can't do that," Yung checked Noah. "Remember, they're telogen, third-stage. No sheath cells. Besides, even if there were sheath cells it would have to be a DNA test and that'd take weeks. And that's expensive."
Noah looked at Overpeck, and the frustrations must have shown on his face.
"We don't know shit about him," Overpeck said almost apologetically. "For sure, anyway."
"Okay, fine," Noah said. "But let's move on to something. Todd," Noah addressed Pittman, not wanting to give Yung the satisfaction, "do you and Yung want to start checking out the men listed in Dowey's address book, trying to tie them in to San Felipe?" Pittman nodded. Noah didn't even look at Yung. "Zev," he turned to Overpeck, "what about this? We're checking on three service men. Why don't we go back and get the names of the people at the other end of the scale too---doctors, dentists, ophthalmologists, whatever----that San Felipe and Dowey might've shared?"
Overpeck nodded. "Good idea. I'll do it."
"I'll go back to Burr and get samples of comparison hair since we've got to have exemplars for the unknown hairs found in Dowey's combings. If those hairs are Burr's, it's likely she had sex with Dowey after the 'happy hour,' much closer to the time Dowey was killed. She could very well know something she's not telling."
The phone rang again, and this time it was for Pittman. He stepped over and took it at Overpeck's desk while the rest of them went on discussing their assignments. After a moment Pittman interrupted them to ask for the case file, took it from Overpeck and turned around, laid it on the desk and started flipping through it as he cradled the receiver between his neck and chin. He named several dates, listened, named two more, listened, and started taking notes furiously. "I'll be damned," he said, listening and weighing rapidly. He said, "You sure about that?" Listened. "I'll be damned," he repeated, and underlined something. Then jotted a few more notes. "No, we're much obliged. Yeah, well, if you could send us some kind of confirmation on that for our file we'd appreciate it. You bet. Yeah, if you get up this way I'll buy you a chicken-fried steak. Okay, 'bye."
Pittman turned around, shaking his head and looking at his notes. He stuck his pencil behind his ear and wiped at his mustache.
"That was state trooper Sid Clarkson calling from Deming down near the border. He said he'd been out of touch for several days, working a double murder near Las Cruces, but had come in last night. This morning he was in the office checking the new NMCIC listings that had come on line while he was gone. He caught Albuquerque's flag on Needham, and then Albuquerque put him onto us. He said that a week ago last Tuesday." Pittman turned and looked at the calendar on the desk, "that'd be on the twenty-third, nine days ago, three days after Carter's rape up in Albuquerque, Stanley Needham and Jester Brooks held up a liquor store in Loving, just off Highway 285. The deal went bad, there was a shoot-out. Brooks was hit but fled the scene and hasn't been heard from since. Needham killed one of the two liquor store clerks, and almost simultaneously the second clerk blew Needham's face off with a shotgun. That was two days before Lauralee Dowey was strangled.654Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡsn3PT999cT
