The Death File: A gripping serial killer thriller with a shocking twist. J. Kerley A.
on the Pima Highway.
“Where are we going, Adam,” Zoe asked, after fifteen minutes of watching Phoenix go past.
“It doesn’t concern you, Zoe.”
She went back to looking out the window. Adam drove for another ten minutes, then took an off-ramp into a residential neighborhood of tidy middle-class homes. He zigged and zagged a few times, finally pulling under a stone arch. Beside the arch a sign proclaimed, “Eastwood Memorial Gardens.”
“Adam …?”
“Shhh.”
He drove what seemed a memorized route, left then right and another right, past a fountain spraying water twenty feet into the air. He pulled off to the side of the slender asphalt road, parked. He looked all directions. They seemed the only living people in the cemetery.
“We’re all alone,” Adam said. “Good.” He got out and Zoe started to follow.
“No, Zo. You have to stay here. This is for me and me alone.”
She nodded, somehow knowing, and pulled the door shut.
The gravestones were all set at ground level, simple. Elijah Kubiac, perhaps planning on living to be one hundred, had died without making funeral and burial plans. Adam had left that up to some whispery asshole at a funeral home, after picking out the cheapest coffin possible. He’d first thought about cremation, but the idea of the old bastard slowly rotting away underground sounded better. He’d picked Eastwood as the cemetery simply because he’d driven by several times and remembered the name.
He continued past two large palo verde trees and turned down a row of black granite headstones, some with small bouquets of flowers stuck into the ground beside them. He stopped. Looked down at a headstone. Stared for a long minute.
Then pulled out his penis and began urinating.
The dark headstone below, its engraving quickly filling with urine, proclaimed simply, Elijah T Kubiac, 1959–2017.
Adam zipped up and walked away, whistling.
* * *
Tasha Novarro had awakened at eight in the morning; Mountain Time, creeping softly into the living room to find her brother snoring gently, the covers kicked off. As predicted, he’d missed the bucket.
After cleaning the floor and spraying the room with half a can of air freshener, Novarro went to work, returning to Dr Meridien’s house and office and spending fifteen minutes searching closets and drawers until finding what she’d hoped for: Two albums of printed photos. Meridien was a chronicler: the back of each picture noted with date and place and others in the setting.
“Sedona, August 24 2007, me and Taylor Combs and Lanie Buchwald. Hot day, 89. Just finished Pink Jeep tour. Now lunch at Taco Rancho!”
They were standard travel shots. But eight of forty-seven photos of Meridien showed her wearing the same brooch, a stylized owl’s head of silver half-orbs of turquoise forming the eyes and obviously a favored piece. Novarro also noted other pieces of jewelry and accessories in the photos. She marked them with corners of sticky notes and took the shots to tech services.
Twenty minutes later a tech handed Novarro close-ups of three different earring styles, two necklaces, a silver-and-turquoise bracelet, and two angles of the owl adornment.
“Nice brooch,” the tech said. “Looks expensive.”
Novarro started driving from pawnshop to pawnshop across the Phoenix basin, hoping killer or killers – perhaps aching for dope – had tried to sell the jewelry for fast cash: a long shot. Novarro wished she had a partner to handle half the work, but dual detective teams had been cut back with the economic downturn, now only assembled when entering a dangerous situation. Even that was discouraged, the suggestion being to take along a uniform when danger loomed.
When she was on the seventh pawnshop, her phone rang. The screen said CASTLE. She sighed and answered while bending low to inspect a jewelry case. In every shop it was the same, row after row of pawned wedding rings, probably not a good social indicator. “I’m kinda busy at the moment, Merle,” she said, knowing to hold the phone two inches from her ear, Castle incapable of talking softly.
“Doing what?” Castle bayed.
“The pawnshop rounds. Meridien had a favorite piece of jewelry, a silver owl. Plus I’ve got shots of other pieces.”
“Any luck?”
“Think, Merle. If I had luck I’d no longer be going from pawnshop to pawnshop.”
“The shops all smell the exact same, right, Tash? Like your grammaw’s attic. And in the Hispanic shops no one speaks English the moment you step inside.”
Castle was right. A clerk who minutes before would have been arguing the price in perfect, unaccented English was suddenly all wide-eyed puzzlement and “No inglés.”
“What do you want, Merle?”
“Let’s go eat somewhere tonight. It’s been months.”
Novarro sighed. “We’re done, Merle. If we’d been jigsaw puzzles no edges would match.”
“I thought we fit together real good,” Castle chuckled. “Especially at night.”
“Come on, Merle. Grow up.”
Silence. Castle veered a different direction. “You’re right, Tash, it was my fault. I was, uh …” he searched for a word.
“You were yourself, Merle. It’s OK. You seem happy with it.”
“C’mon, Tash. I think we can —”
Novarro clicked the phone off and pondered faxing Castle a single sheet of paper with the word NO! running from edge to edge.
After sending the material to Dabney, Harry and I headed to the U. Nothing of interest had been found at Warbley’s home, but we hadn’t been to his office since his death.
Warbley’s office knew he had died and expressed it by emitting an aura of stillness and a scent as dank as if it had been weeks without habitation. Whatever life-force vibes Warbley’s presence added had gone elsewhere, and the space was now just space. I took the filing cabinets, not knowing what I was looking for, if anything. Harry sat and found Warbley’s desk locked but seven seconds with two bent paper clips popped the simple mechanism. He scraped around for a few minutes, putting the standard trappings atop the desk and looking morosely through nothing of merit.
“I don’t think we’re going to find anything in the papers and trinkets,” he said, finally swiping it all back into the drawer with his forearm. “I think we’re going to find it in you.”
“Me?”
“Why was your name in Bowers’s desk? Why did she follow it with question marks?”
“I don’t know. We’d never met. Maybe she had a stalker, saw my name in the news. Wondered if she should call.”
“I’d think if Doc Bowers had a stalker she’d call, not dither about it or keep files on individual cops.”
“Yeah.” Harry was right as always.
“You’re sure you two never crossed paths? Met at a psychology function or whatever.”
I shook my head. “I really haven’t done a lot of that since coming to Florida. Just a few. And they weren’t about psych stuff, per se, mainly groups of law-enforcement types there to hear about how the dark people think … or as much as I can tell them.”
“Nothing at the U?” Harry said. “Where she might have wandered in and sat in back?”
I