I needed links.
After an hour spent removing the Jeep’s seats and carpets, hosing it out and reinstalling everything to pre-raccoon freshness, I sat at my computer, as I did so ever-increasingly.
Election Day for Delman Bean was November 8, 1994. That meant that three of the four musketeers – Shea, Piser and Halvorson – had left Chicago sometime right after the first of November, seemingly to take good-paying jobs.
It took less than four minutes to find the right county database to confirm what the old man told us in Reeder. Willard Piser, as Dainsto Runney, had paid cash for his church. He’d paid fifty-eight-thousand dollars for it on December 5, about a month after he quit the Bean congressional campaign. It meant Willard Piser had come up with a significant amount of money in less than a month.
I called Lieutenant Beech. ‘Your pal Bohler is off the case. It got transferred to real sheriff’s detectives.’
‘Don’t relax. That firecracker will hound you until she learns what you know about that Marilyn Paul, even if it means arresting you.’
‘You don’t think I’m a killer?’
‘She does. Me, I just think you’re withholding a ton of information.’
‘When did Arlin arrive in Laguna Beach?’
‘Early to mid-November, 1994.’
‘Did he come with cash?’
‘I doubt it. He went to work selling kitchen and bath hardware on straight commission and lived in a tiny apartment miles from the water.’
‘Straight commission means no advance for living expenses up front?’
‘I suppose he could have arrived with money and just didn’t flash it around …’ He paused, thinking. ‘Three years later, he had enough to buy out the distributorship.’
‘For cash?’
‘There’s no way to trace purchase details back that far. The owner is dead. Arlin is dead … I mean, Arlin is supposed to be dead.’ He stopped to consider what I wasn’t saying. ‘Why are you asking about cash? And if Arlin came here with cash, why would he bide his time before spending any of it? What was he hiding? And where did he get the cash?’
‘I don’t know, yet. You found that Crown Victoria?’
‘Right where you said, in Ajax’s lot and registered to Dainsto Runney. It’s too soon to compare DNA from the car to the corpse but our medical examiner just got something almost as good. He located a doctor in Oregon where Runney went with a broken arm. The doctor is a genuine small-town practitioner, a few miles from Reeder. He still had Runney’s X-rays. They show a break that matches the one in our corpse. Who is Dainsto Runney, Elstrom?’
‘A man who showed up in Oregon about the same time Arlin arrived in Laguna Beach. Runney paid fifty-eight-thousand dollars in cash for a church. He tried passing himself off as a preacher, holding services before spending the next twenty years chasing other ways of making a buck, like a mini-golf course and selling used cars. Nothing worked. He mortgaged his church and borrowed from everybody else he could tap. He slunk out of Reeder, dead broke and owing everybody, a few days before Arlin’s house blew up.’
‘You’re thinking his money trouble links him to Arlin?’
‘I think if you check out Runney you’ll find out he has no past, just like Arlin. And both of them were in financial distress at the time Arlin’s house exploded.’
‘You’re convinced it was Arlin who blew up Runney?’
‘Him or that red-headed man you refuse to look for.’
‘We’ve gone door-to-door in Arlin’s neighborhood. No one other than that old lady saw the red-headed man but she backed up what you’re suspecting. He lingered.’
‘Lingered, I think, to be remembered.’
‘So you said last time.’
‘Or, the man might have been Gary Halvorson, an old pal of Arlin’s and Runney’s from Chicago. His friends called him Red. Or …’
‘This Halvorson, he doesn’t have a past either?’
‘Just the opposite. He’s got a past but no visible present, at least not for twenty years. He probably arrived in Tucson about the same time Runney hit Reeder and Arlin landed in Laguna Beach.’ I gave him Halvorson’s address. ‘You should make a friend in the Tucson police department.’
‘I still don’t get the connection.’
‘I don’t either,’ I said, and hung up.