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
