Dead Wrong

“Or who wants to be just like Ricky,” Trina said slowly.

“You got it. But beyond that, I want you to get him to tell his story about what happened the night Gillian Pappas was murdered. Just…listen.”

Trina nodded. “Is there anything you want to tell me about him?”

There was a history here she didn’t know.

But Lieutenant Patton shook her head. “Meet him, hear his story. I don’t want to predispose you in any way.”

“I have been reading police reports and the transcript of the trial.”

“But talking to him in person, that’s different.” She got to her feet. “I’ll call over to Salem, we’ll set it up for tomorrow.”

“If he’ll agree to talk to me.”

She snorted. “Oh, he’ll agree. Ricky Mendoza never misses a chance to tell someone he’s innocent.”

THE APARTMENT WAS DECENT, the rent exorbitant. That was the price you paid for being in a hurry.

Will unpacked his suitcases and made the bed. After signing the lease that afternoon, he’d visited the storage unit where most of his worldly possessions were stowed and managed to find boxes labeled Bedding and Kitchen. He hoped like hell his coffeemaker was in one of them.

When the doorbell rang, he abandoned the box of towels on the floor in front of the incredibly tiny linen closet and went to let Travis in. His friend glanced around the blandly furnished living room, wincing at the watercolor print of Juanita Butte that hung above the distressed leather couch and peeled pine end tables.

“You know, you could have stayed with me.”

“It’s looking like I won’t be able to buy until spring. You don’t need a roommate for months.”

“If I’m not on the ski hill, I’m in the studio. You’d have hardly seen me.”

“This will do.” Will nodded toward the kitchen. “Beer?”

“Sure.” Travis waited until he was popping the top of the dark German brew to say, “I talked to your mother today. She told me Amy’s murder had similarities to Gillian’s.”

“Similarities?” Will made a sharp sound. “More than that. It was damn near a carbon copy. Too close for coincidence.”

“Why didn’t you call me? This must have stirred up some hellish memories.”

Will deliberately took a swallow, feeling the cold, bitter beer slide down his throat. The pause enabled him to say almost steadily, “You could say that.”

“Do you need to talk about it?”

Will looked at his hand gripping the bottle and realized it was shaking. The tremor was fine enough he hoped his friend hadn’t noticed.

“That’s all I’ve been doing! Even Jimmy McCartin called to talk about it!”

“My fault. I ran into him when I stopped for an espresso on the way up to the hill. I tried to back out the door, but he spotted me before I could make a getaway.” His gaze rested on Will’s hand. So much for not noticing. “Come on, buddy. Tell me what you’re thinking.”

Will turned his back, staring out the small window above the sink. “What is there to say? Some sick son of a bitch thought it would be fun to copy another murder. Maybe it was chance he chose another woman I know. Maybe it wasn’t. Maybe he picked her because that’s another parallel. Either way… Do you know what he did to her?” Will asked in anguish.

Travis clasped his upper arm, just briefly, a gesture of support not so different from the reassuring slap on the back when one of them struck out on the ballfield, from the squeeze Will had given his arm when he visited him in the hospital after his career-ending pinwheel down the mountain at Kitzbühel. It meant something.

“Yeah,” Travis said. “I know what he did to her.”

Will felt his friend’s scrutiny. He lifted his beer and swallowed.

“Your mother asked me if I could think of anyone who hated you.”

Beer went down the wrong way. Still choking, he gasped, “What?”

“She looked scared, Will.”

Voice thick with fear of a different kind, fear that she was right and he was wrong, Will said, “She’s jumping to conclusions.”

“She’s looking at all the options. She was up at the Butte talking to Doug.”

“And?”

“He worked Wednesday night. He told me after he talked to her that he had been with other people until two in the morning or so. And his roommate swears he never left the condo.”

Will set down the bottle on the counter so hard it clunked. “This has to do with Mendoza.”

“But what?”

“Somebody is trying to get him off. To make everyone think Gilly’s killer is still out there.”

Travis would have made a hell of a lawyer. Mild enough to catch you off guard, he could still corner you. “Not many people are sick enough to kill like that. A man would have to enjoy it. You and I are good friends. I’d do a hell of a lot for you. But rape and murder? Nah.”

Savagely, not wanting to hear the logic, Will said, “You’ve been talking to my father.”

“You know better than that.”

Will closed his eyes. Travis had stuck with him through the worst. And now he was being a jackass.

“Yeah. I know better. I’m sorry.”

Travis just shook his head. “No need. Are you going to be able to start work with this hanging over you?”

“Yeah.” Tension arced through him as if live wires were sparking. “I need to be busy. What am I supposed to do? Sit here and watch soap operas while I wonder if some other woman is being stalked?”

Relentless in his own way, Travis said, “If this guy stalked Amy, then that means he chose her. It had to be her. Why?”

“I don’t know!” Will all but shouted. He paced a couple of steps, turned back, bounced his fist on the counter. “I don’t know. I was using a figure of speech. Probably nobody is being stalked. Chances are the killer just grabbed Amy because she was available…”

“Has your mom figured out where she was snatched from?”

“Not as far as I know.”

“Then maybe she wasn’t all that available.” Travis still leaned against the edge of the counter, seemingly relaxed, but his eyes were both watchful and compassionate. “You know, maybe the guy picked her. Maybe he had to plan how to lure her to him.”

“Which brings us back to me.” Will swore under his breath. “What did you tell her?”

“Her?”

“My mother.”

“That I couldn’t think of anyone who hates your guts.”

“That’s the kind of thing I’d know.”

Travis gestured with the beer bottle. “I’m not so sure. If somebody is targeting women because you loved them, he hates you bad. It’s not like this guy is telling the world what an asshole Will Patton is. This is something that eats at him. Takes the stomach lining, then his soul.”

“I’ve put people away…”

“But you hadn’t, back when Gilly was killed.”

“Mendoza…”

“We’re just supposing.”

“That he didn’t kill her.”

“Or that somebody, somehow, put him up to it. Maybe it took that somebody six years to work up the nerve to do the dirty work himself.”

Will wanted to reject a suggestion so unlikely, but he’d spent enough years in the D.A.’s office to know anything was possible.

“Do you remember that guy who set the fires because he blamed my grandfather for his mom’s death?”

Travis accepted the seeming non sequitor. “I remember.”

The first fire had been set inside a pickup truck chosen because it looked exactly like Police Chief Ed Patton’s. The worst was Aunt Abby’s townhouse. She’d barely escaped with her life. Even Will, just sixteen, had been targeted. His bike, parked outside the grocery store, had been squirted with gasoline and set afire.

He remembered how he’d felt, knowing someone had been watching him, following him, hating him. For a while, until they caught the guy, Will had lived with the heightened perceptions of a soldier in a war zone. He’d searched the faces of people in line at the store or sitting in the bleachers at basketball games, been painfully conscious of anyone walking behind him, of every driver behind the wheel of an approaching car. It was like looking through a magnifying glass, so that his vision was both abnormally sharp and a little skewed. He hadn’t trusted that anything was as it seemed.

If he bought into this theory, he would once again feel like an infantryman walking down the street in Fallujah and realizing he’d forgotten to put on his body armor. The smiles of old friends would look like the veiled faces of Iraqi women whose dark eyes were unreadable to that soldier.

Even with friends, he’d have to wonder what he wasn’t seeing, what he might have done to provoke hatred so virulent.

He didn’t want to revisit that kind of paranoia. Every cell in his body rejected the idea that someone he knew, maybe even someone he’d gone to school with, could do something so hideous.

He unclenched his jaw. “You’re reaching. All of you are reaching. This doesn’t have anything to do with me. It has to do with that sick bastard who murdered Gilly, may he rot in prison until the gates of hell open for him.”

“You may be right.” Travis opened the refrigerator and handed Will another beer as if it were an olive branch. “Let’s just hope we find out before another woman gets murdered.”

“Amen to that,” Will agreed, and popped the lid from the bottle. Goddamn it, but his hand was still shaking.

CHAPTER FIVE

THE ONLY MAXIMUM SECURITY prison in Oregon, the penitentiary complex in Salem was sprawling and impressive. Trina had never had reason to visit it before. Even at the county jail, she didn’t like hearing metal doors closing behind her. The idea of being shut in forever gave her the willies. Today, she felt uneasy from the moment she drove in the gates.

She showed her credentials and surrendered her weapon, then allowed herself to be escorted to a glassed-in visitor room, furnished only with a single wood table in the middle and two chairs. Grateful she’d been allowed a “contact” visit and wouldn’t have to attempt to interview Ricardo Mendoza through a telephone and thick glass, she set the tape recorder and her notebook on the table. Then, while waiting for him to be brought, she prowled the room. Trina prayed that Lieutenant Patton was right and he’d be eager to talk to her. She’d feel like a failure if she had to go back and admit she couldn’t get him to open up.

A guard escorted a handcuffed inmate past the windows looking into the hall. The inmate shuffled with head bent, lank blond hair shielding his face. A moment later, a man and woman passed, both carrying briefcases and wearing dark suits. Attorneys.

Trina wondered if Will Patton had come here to see inmates when he was an assistant D.A. in Portland. She’d heard that he was a hotshot there, quickly advancing from prosecuting misdemeanors and doing prelims to Domestic Violence and then Major Crimes. Supposedly he hadn’t lost a trial.

So why on earth would he quit and take a job in Butte County, where half a dozen assistant D.A.s handled the entire caseload? Did he think he could make it to District Attorney faster on his own home turf? Most D.A.s seemed to end up being appointed to the bench. Maybe he wanted to be a judge so bad, he’d grabbed for the fastest route.

Or maybe something had gone wrong and his standing had sunk. Will Patton, she suspected, wasn’t the man to hang his head and accept a demotion to some unit like Consumer Protection or Juvenile Crime. He might have to handle those cases in Butte County—all the D.A.s did—but he’d also get a shot at the big cases. The headliners. The ones that would put his face on the nightly news.

More footsteps in the hall. Why was she thinking about Will Patton? Trina turned to face the door.

She’d seen the photo taken of Ricardo Mendoza when he was booked. Not much more than a kid, he’d stared at the camera with a mix of defiance, fear and feigned indifference. The man who nodded at the guard and stepped into the room had changed in ways that had more to do with being an inmate than with the six years that had passed.

In the blue prison garb, he looked thin and tough. A scar, pale against swarthy skin, curled from his temple onto his cheek. No longer the cocky young man, he was still handsome despite the disfigurement, the complete lack of expression on his face and the lines carved by bitterness. She thought she saw a flicker of interest in his dark eyes as he studied her, but that might be because she was a woman, not because of her mission or her job.

“Mr. Mendoza,” she said. “I’m Detective Giallombardo. Thank you for agreeing to see me.”

“It’s not like I have anything else to do.” He went to the chair on the far side of the table, facing the glass wall and the guard who waited outside the room.

Trina sat across from him.

When she didn’t immediately begin, he said, “You here to find out what makes me tick, so you’ll be able to catch other guys like me?”

He was curious after all. She was interested, too, in the irony in his voice.

“I’m actually hoping you’ll tell me about the night Gillian Pappas died.”

His body jerked. Good, she’d surprised him.

“What’s the point of that?”

“I’ve read your testimony. I’m hoping to hear what happened, as well as you can recollect it. Including anything you weren’t able to say in the courtroom.” She held up her hand when he started to speak. “I promise, I’ll tell you why, but I’d like to hear your story first, un-colored by what I have to say.”

She’d thought his face expressionless. Now, for a moment, emotions she could only guess at boiled to the surface. Finally, he gave a jerky nod.

“Like I said, I got nothing better to do.”

“Thank you. Do you mind if I tape the interview?”

He shrugged. “Why would I?”

Trina turned on the recorder and had him repeat his consent. Then she began. “When did you move to Elk Springs?”

He answered her questions, explaining that his father was a migrant worker, but legal, and that he, Ricky, had been born in this country. His parents still followed the harvests: strawberries, peas, apples, even tulip bulbs in Skagit County in Washington State. He had managed to graduate from high school and learn some mechanics along the way. Two years before Gillian Pappas’s murder, Ricardo Mendoza had gotten a job in Elk Springs, at an auto body repair shop.

“They had this bullshit reason for firing me.” Remembered anger roughened his voice. “That’s when I got drunk and stole a car from the shop. I wrecked it on purpose. Yeah, I know. I was a goddamn genius.”

Yeah, he’d shoplifted, too, when he first got to Elk Springs. “I was hungry,” he said with a shrug. And, sure, he’d beaten the crap out of this guy who’d insulted Ricardo’s girlfriend in a bar one night. “I had a temper.”

After plea bargaining, he’d done six months for the auto theft. “Detective Patton actually put in a word for me. She helped me get a job when I got out. Otherwise I probably wouldn’t have stayed in Elk Springs.” His laugh was harsh. “Big favor, huh? God, I wish she hadn’t done me any favor.”

No, his girlfriend hadn’t stuck by him. He didn’t have a girlfriend after he got out of the joint.

He’d worked the day Gillian Pappas was murdered. It wasn’t as good a job as his last one, it didn’t take any skill, all he was doing was changing oil in one of those quickie places where people sat in their cars while guys with oil embedded under their fingernails worked in the pit, but it was okay.

“I mean, I figured, six months, a year.” He shrugged. “I could show what a good employee I was. Then maybe a car dealer would hire me. Detective Patton…” His face closed.

“Detective Patton?”

“She knew someone at the Subaru dealership. She said she’d talk to him.”

No wonder the lieutenant had wanted Trina to come alone. She’d had more history with Mendoza than she’d admitted. It sounded as if he’d been some kind of project of hers. Cops sometimes got involved this way, when they thought someone had gotten a raw deal or maybe just believed they saw a spark in someone who’d made bad choices. They thought if they fanned a little, the spark would burst into a warm, crackling fire. Sometimes it even worked. People did get raw deals. Kids with crappy backgrounds could turn around because someone said, “I see promise in you. I know you can do better.”

But Ricky Mendoza hadn’t turned his life around, according to a jury of his peers. Instead, he’d brutally raped and murdered Gillian Pappas. Trina didn’t like imagining what the lieutenant had felt, knowing that without her intervention Mendoza would probably still have been in prison.

“After you got off work that day, what did you do?” Trina asked.

“I went home and had dinner, then decided to go have a couple beers at this bar. Maybe shoot some pool.” He was silent for a moment, looking at Trina but seeming no longer to see her. “I stayed a couple hours. I was about to go when I saw this girl come in.”

“Did you approach her?”

“Not at first. I figured she was meeting someone. But I kept an eye on her. She ordered a drink, then another one real fast. A couple guys hit on her, but she handled them. I went to take a leak, and when I came back this guy was giving her a hard time. I gave him a shove and told him to back off. I guess she was grateful, because she asked my name.”

“Did she tell you hers?”

“Yeah, Gilly. Gilly Pappas.”

He described how they talked. She had another drink, and he persuaded her to eat some chicken wings because he could see she was getting plastered.

“All of a sudden she stood up and said, ‘You wanna screw?’”

“Did anyone else hear her?”

“I don’t think so. I guess people did see us leaving together. Nobody seemed to be paying any attention, but turns out I was wrong.”

“What did you say?”

“I asked if she was getting back at someone. She grabbed my shirt and said, ‘Do you care?’”

“Did you?”

For the first time, he looked angry. “Shit, yeah, I cared! She was…she was classy. Okay? I knew that, but we really talked, and I thought…” He jerked his shoulders. “Well, I quit thinking. I’d have rather it wasn’t revenge sex. You know? But it had been a while, and she was real pretty. So I said, ‘No.’”

“You lied.”

“Yeah, I lied. So sue me.” He guffawed. “No, convict me of murder. Worked even better, didn’t it?”

“Please tell me what happened next.”

Lightning-quick, he reverted to anger. “What do you think happened? She came out to my car, told me to drive back to the alley and park. Then she unzipped my pants, lifted her skirt and bit my neck. She didn’t want to come back to my place, and she didn’t want pretty. Afterward, I thought she’d wanted to get it over with as fast as possible. It was like something she had to do.”

“Did you have a condom?”

“No, and she didn’t ask me to put one on. I figured she was on the pill or something. Or maybe too drunk to care. I don’t know. I wish I’d worn a condom.”

Trina bet he did.

“Did you talk at all after?”

“No. She got real quiet. Scrambled into her panties and adjusted her clothes like she felt dirty. She started to get out and I told her I’d drive her back to her car. She shook her head and just took off. Walking so fast she was almost running. I drove around the block and saw her come around the side of the bar. She was crying. I felt like shit.” He fell silent.

“Did you see her get into her car?”

He shook his head. “It was one-thirty, two o’clock. The place was still busy. The parking lot’s not that well-lit. She kind of disappeared behind a pickup.”

“What did you do then?”

“I drove home. Got up, went to work in the morning. We listened to the radio in the shop. Late afternoon, I hear about this woman’s body that was found. I didn’t think anything about it. That night, I see her face on TV. That’s when I started to feel scared.”

“Did you consider going to the police and telling them that you thought you were the last person to see her alive?”

“Sure,” he jeered. “Yeah. I screwed this girl without a condom, she bit my neck and drew blood, her fingerprints are all over my car, and anybody is going to believe I didn’t kill her? Well, here’s a news flash.” He looked around as if in exaggerated surprise at their surroundings. “Nobody did believe me.”

She wanted to argue that it might have been different if he’d come forward on his own. But she wasn’t so sure. It had looked bad. His semen, her fingerprints in his car, the wound on his neck and scratches on his shoulder. His skin under her fingernails. The cops had had Gillian Pappas’s boyfriend saying, “She would never have had sex with a strange man she picked up in a bar.” And then they’d had Ricky Mendoza, a seeming loser with a record that included violence because of his temper. How could they call it any different?

“Did you have friends, family, to give you character references?”

She saw a flash of pain on his face.

“My parents. They came a couple of times. But they don’t speak such good English. They kept saying, ‘You wouldn’t kill no girl, would you? We raised you to respect girls.’”

“You must have other family.”

“Because we’re Catholic? You think I must have ten brothers and sisters? Well, I don’t. Just a sister. She’s ten years older than I am. Back then, she was already married and had kids. Her husband had cancer. I think he got it from using so many pesticides in the fields. You know? But he was an illegal, so who cares? He died, and she had enough to do, raising three kids.”

“You never heard from her?”

“She called once and said, ‘I’m sorry, what happened to you, Ricky. I know you wouldn’t hurt some woman like that.’” He shrugged, as if it didn’t matter. “She sends me a Christmas present. And she writes sometimes.”

“How old are her children?” Trina asked softly.

“Her oldest is eleven, her youngest is six. Ricardo. They named him after me.” He sounded both proud and defiant, as if to say, Somebody thinks I’m worth naming a son after.

“Do you have other family? Cousins?”

His mood shifted. His eyes narrowed. “Why do you care?”

“I’ll explain, I promise.”

In a hard voice, Ricky Mendoza said, “I have cousins back in Mexico. Not here.”

“Friends?”

“Nobody who stuck around once I was arrested.”

Mildly shocked, she asked, “So people who knew you thought you might have done it?”

“I don’t know if they thought that, or just didn’t want anything to do with the cops. They were, like, people I had drinks with. My best buddy, he got knifed in prison. He ran this chop shop, see. Three months inside, and he was dead.” Another shrug, more feigned indifference.

“Let me ask you this, Mr. Mendoza.” Trina leaned forward. “Can you think of anyone who cares enough about you to try to get you out of here?”

He was either a heck of an actor, or he was stunned. “Get me out of here? You mean, like someone’s planning a break?”

“No,” Trina said. “Not a break. Someone murdered another woman and displayed her body in exactly the same way Gillian Pappas’s was displayed. The crime is almost a perfect copycat.”

“You think…” He swallowed. “You think someone did that so it would look like I couldn’t have murdered Gilly. So you’d get a pardon for me because I must not have done it.”

“We think it’s a possibility that’s the motive. Yes.”

“Nobody would do that for me.” He actually shuddered. “You think somebody would do something like that just to help out a friend?”

“We do think it’s a possibility,” she repeated.

“Yeah, well, the only people who care about me are my family, and they’re not murderers!” He flattened his hands on the table and half rose. “You’re not going to be trying to haul them in, are you?”

She didn’t move and kept her voice nonthreatening. “We might look into their whereabouts. That’s all.”

“They live in Union Gap. They wouldn’t be down here. It’s winter. There’s nothing to pick.”

“If we can verify that, they’ll be out of the picture.”

His angry stare clashed with her steady one. Finally he dipped his head abruptly and sank back into the chair. After a moment, he asked, “This girl. The one that was killed. Did she look like Gilly?”