As Jack fell, he saw a man stagger across the parking lot and get into the old car he had seen earlier. He could hear the sound of the starter grinding as the engine resisted, and then finally it turned over. As Jack sank to the ground, the car moved out of the parking lot, and Jack lost sight of the car, lost sight of everything, as his body fell below the line of the fence.
Joe Rios heard the second shot as he ran, stumbling through the darkness. Fences blocked his way. He pulled himself over, his left arm useless. Dogs were barking. He didn’t want to jump over a fence into a yard with dogs. He could feel nothing except fear of the man who was behind him. Someone had shot at him. Someone was still shooting. Suddenly, he felt the sharp drop before he realized where he had run. The shallow ditch took his footing. He could feel himself falling, losing his balance, his knees coming up against his body as he rolled into the ditch. He could feel himself gasping for air. But he couldn’t stop. He forced himself up. There was a light, a house. He ran toward the light.
The shooter could feel his left foot throbbing. The person who was outside when he came through the storeroom door managed to get off one shot and he unloaded one when the man yelled at him. He heard the sound of the gravel and pavement as the shot went low but he caught something in the foot, probably pellets. He couldn’t tell and he wasn’t going to stop to look. He was sure he had gotten the guy who shot him, but how badly he couldn’t tell. His woman was still in the store. He wasn’t going to go back. It never even occurred to him.
He pulled open the door of the aged Mercury Comet and shoved the keys into the ignition. The starter kept grinding; the engine wouldn’t start. He kept turning the key in frustration; the tired engine coughed, but finally caught. He pushed on the accelerator, feeling the pain in his foot as he shoved it against the floorboard. Gravel shot out from behind the tires as the Comet made a feeble attempt at exerting its long-sapped power against the worn surface of the parking lot. He pushed down on the gas as hard as he could, willing the car to speed up, to carry him out onto the street. Darkness and distance were his only safety now. He needed to get rid of the car in case somebody had seen it. And he had to make a call.
2
“We have a triple …”
Friday, September 5, 1980
8:30 P.M.
Fresno, California
By September, the nights in Fresno can move quickly from the daytime heat of the waning days of summer to the growing evening bite of autumn chill. This happens more quickly than the shortening of the days. When the pager on his belt buzzed, District Attorney Investigator Willie “Bill” Martin grabbed his jacket. He immediately called his supervisor, the chief of homicide in the district attorney’s office, at his home. That was me, Jim Ardaiz; I was the chief of homicide. My given name is actually James, but I only use that in court—more impressive sounding. Before you ask, my name is Basque and it’s pronounced Ar-daiz, with a long “i” and a silent “a.” It rhymes with “lies,” but that’s a defense lawyer joke that I never thought was very funny.
If you don’t know who the Basque people are, then I will tell you that they are the indigenous people who inhabited the Pyrenees Mountains between Spain and France long before there was a Spain and France. They speak Basque, a language without a Latin root. You hear about them now and then, particularly when certain rebellious Basque factions blow up things or people on either the Spanish or the French side of the border. Anyway, that’s what I am on my father’s side. Besides that, I am a little over six-feet tall and I have green eyes. However, at this particular moment, my attention wasn’t focused on what defense attorneys called me, but on the reason I had received an urgent call from the sheriff’s office.
“What do we have, boss?” It was an affectation Bill cultivated, calling me “boss.” I was his supervisor in title and pay, but we both knew that Bill was the more experienced investigator. I, the “boss”, was the legal mind. I treated Bill as an equal out of respect. Bill treated me as an equal out of deference—as for equality of respect, he was getting there. Ours had proven to be a mutually beneficial relationship, with me, the young prosecutor, learning from the older homicide investigator. Over time, we had grown in respect for one another’s abilities, and our friendship had grown after the many nights we shared, standing around at murder scenes, spending weeks and sometime months sifting through evidence and, later, savoring beers with other detectives at our favorite bar after we had finally brought our man down. In some aspects, our job was like that of hunters, but our prey walked asphalt and concrete and usually carried a gun.
“We have a multiple murder at Fran’s Market. Just got the call from sheriff’s dispatch. Get on the horn, Bill, and find out what’s going on. They didn’t seem to know much, just asked for us to respond.” We knew Fran’s Market was a small rural market, located on the outskirts of Fresno. We had been there before, almost three years before, during another murder investigation. I knew Bill would call in and then fill me in the details on the way.
“I’ll pick you up, boss.”
“I’ll be outside, Bill. We have to move.”
I knew what Bill was thinking as soon as he put down the phone. Like the kid needs to say “we have to move.” When do we not? We always have to move when we get a call. Bill put down the phone and walked into his home office to get his service weapon, a nine-millimeter automatic. He never carried it anymore unless he was going to a homicide scene or to an arrest. Most people think cops carry their service weapons all the time. Some do, usually the young ones and always the ones in uniform, but with detectives, the older they get, the more most of them just put it in the glove box when they are driving or they use a small revolver or automatic that can be carried in an ankle holster or, more comfortably, in the small of the back.
Bill always laughed at the television cops who pulled out some cannon they carried in a shoulder or hip holster. You only had to sit in a car with a gun stashed somewhere on your body to realize how uncomfortable it could be. Besides, a gun on your hip or in ruined your clothes. And Bill liked his clothes to look good. “For the ladies,” he would say. As for the shoulder holster, we had all heard stories about the guy who pulled his gun out of his shoulder holster and shot his partner standing next to him as he swung the gun around. Bill would leave the shoulder holster to Dirty Harry. But this was a homicide—Bill’s service weapon would be with him at all times on his hip, as would the .380 Walther PPK in his ankle holster. Bill always carried a backup when he went into the field. Old habits die hard. “So do cops who don’t carry a backup,” Bill would add with a small smile.
“In my forties,” Bill liked to say if someone asked. A tall, African-American man, he looked younger than his years, and he was definitely older than he would admit. He would never tell his exact age. Bill had coffee-colored skin and a well-formed mustache that he liked to rub when he was thinking. His given name was Willie, but nobody called him that except guys with whom he had ridden patrol with as a young man. Now he was “Bill.” For some reason, the younger guys hadn’t liked calling him Willie. It seemed to make them uncomfortable, political correctness being what it was, even back then. They assumed that his given name was William rather than Willie, so they just made him Bill. He knew they were trying to be respectful and had grown accustomed to Bill. If you asked him his name, he would size you up and decide whether he was a Willie or a Bill. Although I had reached the point where I could call him Willie, I called him Bill.
Before he became a D.A. investigator, Bill had been a member of the sheriff’s department homicide unit. After a while, he realized that working nights and weekends was taking a toll on both his marriage and himself. That’s why he had come to the D.A.’s office, for regular work hours and weekends free. But that had its downside, too. It could get pretty boring just interviewing witnesses. When he was offered the chance to work the D.A. homicide unit as primary investigator, he jumped at the chance,