Outside the Wire Page 5

  “Here’s a better idea. You go. Take me back to the station. I have a friend who works CCD. She might be able to help us find information on TidePool Security Consultants.”

  The Commercial Crimes Division investigated everything from white-collar crime to complex bunco cases like embezzlement, blackmail, and extortion. Davie agreed they might have access to information that could help them close the Woodrow investigation, so she dropped her partner off at the station and went east to interview Zeke’s ex-wife.

  Lynda Morrow lived in a long, low ranch-style house in the flats of Beverly Hills just north of Santa Monica Boulevard. The property sat on a wide, palm-lined street next to other upscale houses that had so far dodged the tear-down-and-rebuild craze.

  Davie parked on the street just beyond the circular driveway and made her way to the doublewide front door, which was made of etched glass and varnished wood. Two planters filled with spring flowers flanked the entrance.

  A woman opened the door, accompanied by a large designer dog. Not a Saint Bernard, Davie thought, but the other mountain dog, the one that sounded like a sauce—Bernese.

  Davie had called in advance, but when Lynda saw her standing on the doorstep, she seemed taken aback. Even the dog looked startled. Maybe it was Davie’s five-one frame or her hair—a mix of bright red and orange-brown that she labeled rust. She had once read that only 1 or 2 percent of people in the world had red hair. It’s uncommon, so folks notice. She had learned over time that either you allow the attention to annoy you or you own it. She had decided long ago to own it.

  Lynda Morrow looked youthful and fit with only a few fine lines around her blue eyes and full lips. Her artfully cut blonde hair, cherry red manicure, and silk pantsuit cemented her image as a woman who lived a healthy and affluent lifestyle.

  Lynda led Davie to the kitchen through a sitting room that had a fireplace edged by bookcases. The books were all hardbacks and mostly nonfiction from what she could see. Outside the French doors a young man in khaki shorts and a black T-shirt used a long-handled net to scoop leaves from a swimming pool. The dog flopped near the door to watch him.

  “I don’t have much time to talk,” Lynda said. “We’re having people over for cocktails tonight and I’m behind schedule.”

  “I just have a few questions.”

  Three cucumbers sat on the counter. Lynda picked up a knife, sliced each one in half and scraped out the seeds. “Yes, that’s what you said on the phone. I guess this is where I should say I’m surprised and deeply saddened by the news of Zeke’s death, but he’s not my problem and hasn’t been for many years.”

  Her unnecessarily harsh comment made Davie wonder what had broken the marriage apart. As she said, Zeke hadn’t been her problem for many years so the resentment must have been festering for a long time.

  “When did you last see him?” Davie said.

  “A couple of years ago. We’ve had to communicate because of Shannon’s disability and the care she needs, but that’s mostly done through email. My current husband is an attorney, so he usually handles the details.”

  Lynda picked up a pastry tube and squirted a zig-zag line of what looked like cream cheese on each cucumber half. From somewhere in the house, Davie heard the drone of a vacuum cleaner.

  “Zeke was career Army,” she continued. “Did you know that? He enlisted toward the end of the war in Vietnam.”

  “Your daughter told me.”

  “Shannon.” She said the name like an indictment. “Zeke babied her. She romanticized everything about him and refused to accept any alternate version, even when it was the truth.”

  Davie found the bond between Shannon and her father touching, but she didn’t know the full dynamics of this family and decided to reserve judgment for now. “What did Zeke do during Vietnam?”

  Lynda picked up a jar of caviar on the counter and twisted off the lid. “He killed people. Lots of them, I assume. Isn’t that what soldiers do in war?”

  “How long were you together?”

  “We got married just after high school, 1971. He’d already joined the Army. We both knew he’d be sent to Vietnam, so we didn’t want to wait. Our parents were against it. They thought we were too young. It seems ridiculous now, but I guess we were in love.”

  “Eighteen is young.”

  Lynda used a small knife to spread caviar on top of the cream cheese. “And stupid. But Zeke was hard to resist back then—tall, handsome, and muscular from working on his dad’s farm. All the girls in school thought he was a hunk and he was, especially in his uniform.”

  “How long before he went to Vietnam?”

  “He left for basic training a week after the wedding. Fort Benning.”

  “Did you go with him?”

  “I couldn’t afford to follow him to Georgia. I wanted to stay with my mom and dad, but Zeke insisted I move in with his parents to help them on the farm. They lived in the boondocks, but a girl didn’t challenge her husband in small-town Iowa back then—at least, I didn’t. I raised Shannon to be more assertive, for all the good it did. She idolized her father. Everything he said and did was gold to her.”

  Davie watched Lynda, still assessing the level of her pique. At least it seemed she had allowed Shannon to believe the best about her dad without tarnishing his image, which earned her a few points in Davie’s book. “What happened when he came home from the war?”

  Lynda cut the cucumbers into small diagonal slices. “He was intense, secretive, cold, and addicted to Dexedrine. I thought he’d heal and we’d start our life together. Instead, he told me he planned to make the Army his career. I was devastated. Wars didn’t end with Vietnam, you know. There were others.”

  “Where did he go after that?”

  “We lived on Army bases in a lot of places. He was a Ranger, so he was away a lot on assignment. When the first Gulf war broke out, he left for the Middle East. Shannon and I went back to Iowa to stay with my parents.”

  “Sounds like a lonely life.”

  She held the knife underhanded like a street fighter. “You have no idea what it’s like for a military wife. I spent days, months, years taking care of a household and a child on an enlisted man’s paycheck. I was alone night after night, wondering where he was, if he was in danger, if at dawn I’d get a knock on the door and find two men in uniform telling me my husband was dead. The worst part was he loved being a soldier. Loved the brotherhood, the idea of serving his country, fighting for liberty and the so-called American Way.”

  The blowback from Lynda’s anger threatened to set Davie’s hair on fire, but she continued lobbing questions. “Sounds like he was an Army recruiter’s poster child.”

  Lynda slammed the knife on the counter. “The Army doesn’t take you out to dinner on your anniversary or comfort a baby with colic. The military was more important to Zeke than anything, including me. When that finally sank in, I left him.”

  Davie felt she was witnessing some sort of confession. Shannon had said her mother didn’t like to talk about Zeke, so she probably hadn’t shared her negative feelings with her daughter. While Zeke was off fighting wars, Lynda had been home raising their daughter and hoping he’d come back to them alive. She seemed to have kept her frustrations bottled up for years, waiting for the right moment to unload on anyone who’d listen about the challenges faced by military wives.

  Davie waited for Lynda to remind her that she was too busy getting ready for a party to answer questions, but that never happened. Zeke’s ex was giving Davie the sort of emotional information dump the department shrink had hoped to get from her but never did. Lynda’s memories might be cathartic and helpful to the investigation, so she let the woman talk, occasionally slipping in another question.

  “Did he have any enemies who may have wanted to kill him?” she said. “Or was there any specific incident that might have made him a target?”

 
“Soldiers do things in war they don’t talk about to outsiders. I suspect there may be a long list of people who’d be glad to see him dead.”

  Davie wondered if Lynda Morrow might be one of them. “Did he ever mention names?”

  Lynda set the cucumber slices on a doily-lined tray. Her mood had turned reflective, almost sad. “After a while he stopped talking to me about his work. Since he worked all the time, we effectively stopped communicating.”

  “Are his parents still alive?”

  “They’re both dead. Zeke was an only child so Shannon was all the family he had—except for me, of course.”

  Davie noted Lynda spoke of herself as an afterthought. She moved closer and leaned against the counter. “What about his friends?”

  “I wouldn’t know about his current friends. Back in the day, Zeke was close to three guys from his Ranger unit. When they came home from Vietnam, they all reenlisted together. They were like brothers. All Ranger, all the time.”

  “Do you remember their names?”

  After having just ranted about her ex, her gentle smile was surprising. “How could I forget? They were always hanging around our house, drinking beer, and laughing at their corny jokes.”

  The drone of the vacuum cleaner had stopped. The house was quiet except for the sound of Lynda Morrow calling out the names of Zeke’s Army buddies like taps playing at a military funeral: Harlan Cormack, Dag Lunds, and Juno Karst.

  Davie recorded all three names in her notebook—Zeke Woodrow’s closest friends, his band of brothers.

  Davie poised her pen over the notebook, prepared to make another entry. “Do you know where they are now?”

  Lynda shook her head as she covered the cucumber slices with plastic wrap and slid them into the refrigerator. When she turned to face Davie, her eyes were moist and her tone raw. “All I can tell you is that one was originally from somewhere in the South. One was from Oregon. The other was a Midwesterner. Why do you keep asking me about Zeke’s war buddies? Nobody cares anymore.”

  “Mr. Woodrow was wearing his Army dog tags when he died. His killer removed one of them. That made me think the murder might be related to his military service.”

  Lynda blinked, sending a tear rolling down her cheek. “I find that hard to believe.”

  “Truth often hides in the most unlikely places.” Davie thanked her and turned to go.

  “Wait.” Lynda walked out of the kitchen. A short time later, she reappeared with a photograph, which she handed to Davie. It was an image of four young men, lounging on a worn couch and grinning at the camera. “It’s all of them, taken in our living room,” she said. “I’m not sure why I kept it all these years.”

  “I’ll make a copy and return it,” Davie said.

  Lynda stared at the photo, her lips trembling. Sometimes people reacted to grief with anger. If so, Lynda’s seemed to have died somewhere during the search for that picture and was now replaced by memories of a man she’d once loved.

  “Keep it,” she said. “I don’t need it anymore.”

  Davie nodded and set out toward the front door. As she entered the living room she noticed the carpet, newly vacuumed for Lynda’s party that night. She paused for a moment and then stepped around the edge, like she would at a crime scene.

  Davie returned to the station and entered through the back door. As she made her way through the squad room to her workstation in the Homicide area, she noticed a half-eaten birthday cake on the table near the printer and remembered she’d chipped in a few bucks to buy it for a civilian clerk in Records. None of the other Homicide detectives was in the squad room, including her partner. A subpoena sat near her computer, ordering her to testify in an old theft case she’d worked at Southeast Division.

  She pulled Zeke Woodrow’s Murder Book off the shelf above her desk and felt the smooth stainless steel of the bookends, a gift from Detective Giordano. Each one formed the numbers 187, the penal code number for homicide. She squeezed them together to hold the other manuals in place and opened the blue three-ring binder to Section 11, Victim Information. The photo of Zeke and his Army buddies slid easily into the plastic sleeve. Finding them after all these years wouldn’t be easy, but she logged onto her desk computer and started searching.

  9

  She found Juno Karst first.

  Juno Karst’s death notice was posted online in a Tonopah, Nevada, newspaper. William “Juno” Karst died on March 29. Mr. Karst was born February 11, 1952, in Macon, Georgia. He was a US Army veteran. Arrangements by Birch & Birch Mortuary.

  It wasn’t much information. Nothing about survivors. Nothing about how he died. Nothing specific about his military career. Lynda Morrow claimed all four of the men in Zeke’s Ranger unit had reenlisted after Vietnam and stayed together, at least, Davie assumed, for the next several years. There was no indication of what had happened after that. Karst may have retired years ago and lost touch with the others. But somebody must have known enough about him to fill out the death certificate. Whoever that was might know the rest of his story or, if not, might know others who did.

  Davie printed a copy of the article about Karst’s death and looked up the telephone number for the mortuary. She opened the Murder Book to a page in Section 1, noting that the interview with Birch & Birch would be conducted by telephone in the Pacific detective squad room. She initialed the entry and called the number. A woman answered. The voice had the quivery timber of someone who was elderly. Davie identified herself and asked if she remembered Juno Karst.

  “Sure, I remember him. We handled his cremation.”

  “How did he die?”

  “Suicide. Bless his heart. Shot himself in the head. What a mess that was. My nephew’s the sheriff over at Goldfield. He told me the man was found in a rental car just off Highway 95 in Esmeralda County. Not many services in Goldfield. We’re about thirty miles away, so they brought the body here.”

  Dread settled in Davie’s chest. “I’d like to talk to his next of kin if you have their contact information.”

  “We didn’t deal with the family, so I can’t help with that. Some attorney paid for the arrangements. Told us to put him in a nice urn and he’d foot the bill. We left a message for him when the ashes were ready for pickup. That was almost a week ago, but so far he hasn’t called back. They’re still on the shelf in the storage room.”

  Davie kept her tone steady, even though her heart was pounding. “Do you remember the attorney’s name?”

  “Not off the top of my head. It was unusual, though. I can look it up if you’d like.”

  “I’d appreciate that.”

  Davie heard the receiver clunk against something hard and a chair scrape the floor. She waited on the line for a couple of minutes before she heard papers rustling.

  “Here it is,” the woman said. “His name’s Alden Brink. He wired the money direct to our bank account. I’ve never had that happen before. Had to call the bank to find out how it’s done. My husband and I were suspicious at first, so the next day I called the bank again. The money was there, all right.”

  Davie leaned forward, elbows on her desk, staring at the computer screen but seeing nothing. Alden Brink was the attorney who represented the owners of Zeke Woodrow’s leased Topanga Canyon house. Now she was learning Brink was also connected to Zeke’s military buddy Juno Karst. Davie jotted his name on the interview sheet followed by an exclamation mark.

  She tried to swallow but her throat was too dry. “Did the money come from a law office or some other company?”

  “Says here it came from TidePool Security Consultants. The deceased was an employee.”

  Given that the attorney paid for the cremation, it made sense that Karst also worked with Zeke at TidePool. “Did your nephew investigate Karst’s death?”

  “Like I said, honey, it was a suicide. He’d have told me if it was more than that.”

 
Davie wasn’t so sure. She heard someone call her name. She looked toward the door of the squad room and saw Jason Vaughn striding toward her with both thumbs pointed up. He stopped when he saw she was on the phone.

  “Was there a police report?” Davie said.

  “You’d have to ask my nephew about that.”

  Vaughn sat on a chair next to her desk.

  Davie held up her hand to stop him from interrupting. “Was anything else found with the body?”

  “Mr. Karst came to us with only the clothes on his back,” she said. “The sheriff’s office kept the gun. I think there was a wallet, probably a rental agreement for the car. That’s how they identified him. My nephew might have kept other property, but you’d have to ask him about that. I can tell you for sure, Mr. Karst wasn’t from around here. Is there anything about him I should know?”

  “What will you do with the ashes?” Davie said.

  “Hold ’em for a month or two. If nobody picks ’em up, we’ll scatter him in a pit the cemetery uses for the unclaimed.”

  “Can you hold the ashes until you hear from me?”

  Silence and then a sigh. “I will until I need space on the shelf.”

  “I can send you an official Preservation Letter signed by the Chief of Police,” Davie said, “ordering you to—”

  “That’s not necessary.” Her tone had grown testy. “I’ll hold the ashes.”

  Davie ended the call quickly after that. Zeke Woodrow had died of a gunshot wound to the head. A military dog tag had been found on Zeke’s body; the other was missing. Now Juno Karst, his friend and TidePool coworker, was also dead. Like most cops, Davie didn’t believe in coincidences. It was possible the two deaths were linked. The cause might be workplace violence associated with TidePool or some unrelated dispute. If the motive was connected to their military service, the question was, what new event had occurred since they’d retired to prompt the killer to take action now?