Camouflage(73)
“I can’t tell you what having him with me again would mean.”
“Don’t try. I think I know.”
“I wish he were here now; I wish I could hold him, comfort him, tell him how much I love him.”
“You’ll have the chance soon.”
“How soon?”
“As fast as the lawyers can make it happen. Murphy will contact you tomorrow morning.”
“You arranged all of this? When?”
“I had a talk with Dragovich before I came over here. He’s the one doing the arranging.”
“But it was your idea.”
“Call it a mutual resolution.”
“You’re such a good man. And I’m such a fool for not trusting you, lying to you the way I did.”
“Let’s not get into that again. You did what you felt you had to do.”
“But I caused you so much trouble.…”
“Trouble’s my business.”
“Don’t joke—please. I’m serious.”
“So am I. Helping people in trouble is what I do, you know that. Helping people I care about makes it twice as rewarding.”
“… Will you do one more thing for me?”
“If I can.”
“Stay with me tonight.”
“You don’t need to show me gratitude, Bryn.”
“It’s not that. No, really, it’s not. I don’t want to be alone tonight. You’re the only person besides my son who makes me feel needed and I want to be close to you. You feel the same way, don’t you? At least a little?”
“More than a little.”
“Then you’ll stay?”
“You know I will.”
“And not just while it’s dark. Until morning. From now on, every night we’re together—until morning.”
29
The woman we knew as R. L. McManus remained a fugitive approximately six and a half hours after her flight from the Chileno Valley property. Officers from both Marin and Sonoma counties, using helicopters and search dogs, found her hiding in an outbuilding on an occupied ranch three-quarters of a mile to the north and arrested her without incident.
Her real name, we found out later, was Shirley Pulaski. She and Carson, real name Veronica Boyle, were wanted fugitives, all right. In their native state, Minnesota, for grand theft and attempted murder and in Washington State for theft and coercion. They’d been working variations on the same scam for at least six years before they disappeared into their new stolen identities in San Francisco, making a total of thirteen—targeting elderly people with money and other assets who either were alone in the world or had far-flung relatives, at first ripping them off and using threats of bodily harm to keep them quiet. Pulaski and Boyle’s nonviolent MO changed when one of the Minnesota victims caught wise and refused to be intimidated. They broke the old woman’s neck, probably would have killed her if a neighbor hadn’t intervened. It was that incident that turned the two of them into fugitives.
They’d set up another room-rental scam in Spokane, operating under aliases. A spooked victim had blown that one up, too, and again they’d managed to slip away and disappear. Likely that was when they’d headed for California and hatched their plan to steal new identities and not take any more chances on being caught by disposing of their fleeced marks. The real Roxanne Lorraine McManus and the real Jane Carson may have been their first two murder victims, each chosen as much because of the resemblance factor as for the profit motive. Odds were that no one would ever know exactly what had happened to the genuine McManus and Carson. Or to the remains of the pair’s elderly prey prior to Rose O’Day.
Neither Pulaski nor Boyle had confessed to any of the crimes. They weren’t talking to the police, the media, apparently not even to their public defenders. A couple of homicidal sphinxes. Didn’t matter, though. There was more than enough hard evidence on the Chileno Valley property and in the Dogpatch house to convict them. In one of the boxes stored in the barn the police discovered more than fifty thousand dollars in cash and active bankbooks belonging to Rose O’Day, Gregory Pappas, and one other victim. The police also found a .32-caliber Beretta that later matched the slug the coroner removed from David Virden’s skull.
When the forensic people got everything sorted out, the body count in that cistern was five—two men, three women. Virden had died of a single gunshot wound to the back of the head, no doubt on his second visit to the house; the stain on the living-room floor proved to be his blood, confirming that that was where he’d been caught off-guard and shot. The other four had been fed lethal doses of prussic acid. None could be positively identified because nothing was found anywhere for their bone-marrow DNA to be matched to.