“Turns out this kid has an old lady who’s doing hard time at Alderson Federal Prison in Virginia or West Virginia, anyway someplace in one of those Virginias. She’s in for alien smuggling. The kid tells us that the getaway driver’s from your area, name of, ah, of,” and there was a moment’s pause, “Ray Allen. According to your Sergeant you boys have heard of him. Guess Allen just left the kid to fend for himself. Well, the mother put Allen at the 211, because she had talked to him in Sacramento and to her son right before the robbery. The kid gave us the motel where they had been staying. Anyway, the kid wanted us to call his mama, so we did. It took a while to get her on the phone, but as soon as we ran down what happened she blew up. She talked to the kid and told him to talk to us, and then she got back on the phone with us. Told us that she had been a girlfriend of this Allen and that they lived together for a while in Tijuana. She said that the kid was her adopted son and she brought him in off the streets. Said that when she got popped for alien smuggling—this part’s a little unclear—that she either left the boy with this Allen to take care of him or told the kid to go to Allen’s house. Apparently, Allen told her that he would help the boy make some real money. She told me that when she got picked up by the feds she was with a white male adult, approximately twenty-five to twenty-six years old, named Lee Furrow. He also goes by Eugene Furrow. Said that before they were arrested, Furrow had some kind of attack of conscience and told her that Allen forced him to kill a female in the Fresno area because she was aware of a burglary and that this Allen and some others had been passing money orders of some kind that they got in the burglary. I don’t know much more. She said this whole thing happened sometime in August of 1974. I already called the Fresno police department, and they say they don’t have any unsolveds involving the murders of young females.
“All I got on Carrasco is that she is one hard broad. She’s got a whole bunch of aliases, Richardson, Picklesimer—there’s a name for you, Betty Picklesimer. Also goes by Wood and LaFaye. We’re getting a warrant for Allen, with bail set at $25,000 for 211 and conspiracy. I would appreciate some help from you boys in picking him up. That’s all I got.”
Blade had been writing. So had Lean. Blade put his pencil down. “Okay, Inspector, we’ll get on it. It may take us a while. We just got radios down here in Fresno, you know. Appreciate your help. We’ll see what we can do on Allen. We been hearing things about him for a while. It won’t break our hearts any to bring him in. As soon as you get the warrant out, give us a call. We’ll let you know.”
Blade hung up and stared at his partner. “Okay, let’s run this Furrow guy and see what we get. I’ll go down to records and see if we have any unsolveds that fit the description, or any missing persons. You get a Soundex of Clarence Allen to this Leeper and get what you can on Furrow.” Lean nodded. “Oh, and run his rap sheet. Let’s see what we come up with on Allen and on this Furrow, too.”
A Soundex is a telephonic transmission of a photograph. This was way before fax machines, and e-mail was basically a note that you left on somebody’s desk. There weren’t even any little yellow sticky notes.
When Lean returned, Blade was looking at a report on his desk. Tommy put his notebook down. “Allen’s been running a security agency here, probably out of his house. He’s listed as living out on East Belmont.”
Blade nodded. Belmont at that location was largely rural, with a lot of nice houses in the area on several-acre lots. Lean could sense that Blade had something, and he was pleased to be slowly getting a feel for the way Blade operated. “You got anything as a possible on the woman?”
Blade nodded. “I got two. One, a Kathy Parker, age 17, body dumped. Fits the age. And I got another one, missing person, Mary Sue Kitts, nineteen years, reported missing November 6, 1974. Last seen July 15, ’74. Any guesses?”
Lean knew better than to guess. Blade already had something. “So go ahead. What you got?”
Blade leaned back as far as his chair would allow in the confined space. “It took me a while, but I remembered that Tabler and I did a missing persons report two years ago. It was a young woman and it didn’t hit me right away, but the girl was last seen leaving her home in July of 1974 with Roger Dale Allen. They were in a security patrol vehicle belonging to Allen Security. Roger is Clarence Ray Allen’s kid. It took some scratching through our records until I found it. I couldn’t remember her name, but I remembered the missing person report and the connection to Allen.”
Lean nodded, “Kitts would be my guess.”
Blade leaned his head back and pulled a picture of Mary Sue Kitts from the missing persons file on the table. “Yeah, lucky guess. You got anything on Furrow?”
Lean picked up the picture, a high school graduation picture of an attractive eighteen year old with long, light-brown hair, and stared at it before putting it back down on the desk. “There isn’t much. White male, twenty-six, five-foot, ten inches, 150, with brown hair, brown eyes. Has a record. Got popped for alien smuggling down in El Centro, California, so that fits. On parole. But there isn’t much else that fits the story. Doesn’t have the profile of a murderer, at least not the kind we’re looking at.”
Blade shook his head. Murder was a unique kind of crime. Most people thought a murderer looked like a murderer, like he would be drooling or wild-eyed. The fact was that Blade had arrested hundreds of men and quite a few women for murder, and most of them didn’t look like murderers until you finished with the case. But there were certain kinds of murderers that were always different. Premeditated murderers—murder in cold blood—those kinds of killers are different. You don’t see many of them. It takes a special kind of person to think for a while about killing another human being and then do it without anger or without being in the grip of a sudden spurt of unbridled passion. Most murders happen because the killer is angry or drunk or scared or some combination of the three. People who kill in cold blood—well, you don’t see many of those, and when you do, you can feel it when you are around them. Some would say that those type of people were crazy, but Blade knew better. People who can kill in cold blood aren’t crazy. They know precisely what they are doing. No, those people were missing that thread of conscience that is present in almost everybody else.
Conscience is what Blade sought most when he sat somebody down in a chair. It is the thing he would gently massage until the person broke. All he had to do was bring it to the surface. Sometimes, he had to poke pretty hard, but if he could sense a glimmer of conscience, he would slowly take advantage of it. But if it wasn’t there, you had to break them down with evidence, and if they broke, it was because they couldn’t see any other way to make a deal, or they had become caught up in their lies. He knew what Lean meant when he said Furrow didn’t fit the profile. The kind of person who committed premeditated murder almost always had a record that included violence or something in their background that made you take a step backward. They usually had something missing, that aspect that stopped most people from hurting other people. Furrow didn’t have that record, and if Carrasco’s story was true, Furrow had a conscience. It didn’t mean he couldn’t do it and it didn’t mean he didn’t do it. It just meant that something didn’t fit. At least, it didn’t fit yet. And that was their job—to find the pieces and make them all fit.
Christensen rocked his chair back until all four legs settled on the floor. “You get Allen’s rap sheet?”
“There isn’t as much as I would’ve thought. Born in Oklahoma in 1929, brown hair, brown eyes. Just under six-feet tall, about one hundred