CHAPTER ELEVEN

THURSDAY, MARCH 17, 1994, 2 A.M.

Greco was dead tired, but he didn’t know it yet. He was in “the zone,” the Zen-like state that cops get into after staying up for 36 hours straight. They don’t feel the cold, can’t smell the corpse at a crime scene, and they’re immune to fatigue. All they know is they gotta collar their suspect and they don’t stop until they do. Even though he was done interviewing Dana, his night was far from over.

He was thrilled to finally, formally arrest and book Dana for murder. She was curled up in her chair, clutching a tissue. For all the bluster from Antoniadas, she got away with telling him less than she told Greco. The hours of interrogation left Dana subdued and a little irritated. When Greco stood in front of her, she barely looked up.

“You know you’re not going home tonight,” he said, the words seeming less threatening in his soft-spoken voice. “You’re under arrest. I need you to stand up and turn around and put your hands behind your back.”

Once the handcuffs were on, he talked to her back.

“You’re under arrest for the murder of June Roberts,” he said. “You’ll be transported to Riverside County Jail tomorrow and arraigned in forty-eight hours. After the arraignment, you’ll have a preliminary hearing.

“Do you have any questions?”

“When do I get a lawyer?” Dana asked.

“One will be appointed unless you want to hire one,” Greco said, gently pushing her elbow to steer her out the door. “Come on.”

All night, he had been escorting Dana back and forth down the hallway. This time, it was different. Starting tonight, her life was going to consist mostly of being led in handcuffs from one place to another, wearing ugly blue jail jumpsuits and eating crappy food. If everything went right, she would never see her home or sleep in her own bed again.

The tears that had flowed freely during the interview were gone. Greco was intrigued with how she could turn them on and off. When she wanted them off, they stayed off. He was also impressed with her ability to hold them at bay and extract information from them while they were trying to get information from her. Greco was a little frustrated that he hadn’t obtained a full confession to make the case airtight. Other than Dorinda, they had no live witnesses, which meant that the case would rest on a jury’s ability to piece together circumstantial evidence. No one saw her going into Norma’s house, June’s house, or Dora’s house. As far as they knew, she left no fingerprints, blood or hair, although the evidence gathered at the crime scenes would be examined and tested. Their case consisted of showing jurors that Dana had spent June’s credit cards and used Dora’s bankbook less than an hour after each of them was murdered. Greco hoped that Dorinda would identify Dana. There were no credit cards or checks with Norma’s murder. He hoped the search of Dana’s house turned up the shoe that had left the shoeprint. Greco thought that the June and Dora murder cases were strong, but he wanted something indestructible.

Getting a confession could have been instructive. She could have told them how she chose her victims, how she killed her victims, why she so brutally slaughtered them and why she used household items, like the iron and the wine bottle. In the case of Dorinda, he wanted to know why she attacked a woman in a retail store during business hours.

Greco walked behind Dana, as he did with every other prisoner he arrested, guiding her by the elbow out of the carpeted, softly lit interview room and down the hallway past the detective bureau and the report-writing room.

They turned a corner past the dispatch center, to the hard linoleum floors and bright lights of the lock-up area. Dana squinted slightly, her red-rimmed eyes swollen, her sandals making a soft noise on the hard floor. Greco paused by the office where the on-duty watch commander sat at his desk behind a row of video monitors. Video cameras were aimed at prisoners in each cell for two reasons—so they wouldn’t hurt their officers, and wouldn’t hurt themselves. If they were busy trying to make some kind of a weapon or using something to hang themselves with, the police could intervene. Over the years, Perris had lost two prisoners to suicide.

“I have a prisoner,” Greco said to the watch commander, who wrote the information in the station’s jail logbook. “Dana. Sue. Gray, with an ‘a.’ 187,” he said, giving the penal code section for murder. The watch commander also wrote down the time—2:08 a.m.

“This is going to be a no-bail, special circumstances case,” Greco said. He wanted that entered into the logbook so no one would make a mistake and release her in the morning. After she was booked, the watch commander would come by to see if she wanted to eat. At this time of the morning, it would be breakfast. Greco thought the food was putrid, although it was the same stuff supermarkets sold in the frozen food section. Eggs, sausages and pancakes in a cardboard box, plus a little tin of maple syrup.

They passed the cluster of six cells where Dana had been kept off and on during her interrogation. One of those cells was the drunk tank: no bunk, no blankets, just a cold floor with a drain in the middle. The smell permeated the lockup and booking areas. Every time Greco had to go back there for a prisoner or to book someone, he was glad he’d never been arrested. The stench alone was enough to keep him out of jail.

When she hesitated, Greco said, “Just keep walking straight. Now turn right.”

Once they turned the corner, they entered the booking room, an open area consisting of a computer on a counter and a wooden bench secured to a wall about eight feet away. A Breathalyzer was in an adjoining room. For some reason, the booking area was a lot colder than the rest of the station. It was always colder in there. That and the smell spilled over from the drunk tank.

Greco sat Dana on a bench and cuffed one hand to a solid steel eyebolt on the seat while he pulled out the booking forms and grabbed a Polaroid camera. She gave him a blank face for her booking photo and, in contrast to hours of cat-and-mouse interrogation, Dana obediently answered all of his questions regarding her vital statistics, employment history and next-of-kin. Greco took his time and double checked all of the information, including the murder charges, and making certain it was clear that she was a “no bail” case. Her booking information would accompany her to the Riverside County Jail, which would be her home while she was arraigned and awaiting trial. Because she’d killed more than one person, Greco expected Bentley to file special circumstance allegations, California’s legal gateway to the death penalty or a sentence of life in prison without parole.

Greco called a twenty-four-hour nursing service to take blood and saliva samples and scrape underneath her fingernails in hopes of collecting evidence linking her to the murder of Dora Beebe hours before. He also arranged to have a community service officer take photos of Dana without clothing to see if she had any bruises or cuts, particularly on her arms and hands. He unhandcuffed Dana and fingerprinted her. Even though James had taken a set that night, he needed additional sets for regional, state and national law enforcement databases. As Greco rolled her fingers, he examined her hands and fingers for cuts and saw nothing.

By the time he was finished, Julie, the community service officer, had arrived to take pictures. He walked Dana back to her cell and went back to the detective bureau to do paperwork.

He picked up the phone and called Wyatt to see how the search was going at her house. Wyatt briefed him about the merchandise they found from Mervyn’s, Nike and the other mall stores. They’d also found some credit card slips as well as the receipts for the massage from Murrieta Hot Springs, Baily’s Wine Country Café and the Ferrari Bistro. Greco asked about the Nike shoes and Wyatt said there were plenty. They were taking all of the Nikes. Greco said he’d be out there soon and hung up, satisfied that the search seemed to be going well. He was happy that he and Wyatt were working well together. With Dana in custody, they knew the importance of the case took priority over personalities.

At 3:20 a.m., Dispatch rang his desk to let him know the nurse was there. He escorted the nurse to the lock-up and stood by as he took fingernail scrapings and clippings, a saliva sample and a vial of blood.

The nurse gathered up his equipment, packed away the vials and left Greco with the evidence samples of Dana’s genetic material. Dana stood there for a moment surveying her surroundings. The bars were about six inches apart with heavy-gauge mesh between them. A cot built into the wall had a wafer-thin plastic mat with an olive-green wool blanket folded on top. The rimless, stainless-steel toilet had a sink and drinking fountain built into the tank portion of the toilet. A window, too high to look out of, had double-paned glass and was covered with bars and the heavy steel mesh. The concrete floor and walls, painted a faint peach hue, were unadorned except for stains left by prior occupants. Dana had been bagged and tagged and was now an official prisoner with no control over when she would eat, when she would sleep and when she could make phone calls. Every half-hour, the watch commander would come by her cell to see what she was doing and make a note in the logbook. If Dana was hungry, the watch commander would feed her. Unlike the severe emotional outbursts Dana had displayed during her interviews, she hadn’t even sniveled.

Greco slammed the door shut and turned away. He was glad she was behind bars, but it wasn’t his style to pat himself on the back. Arresting and booking Dana at 2 a.m. that morning had triggered the forty-eight-hour time limit within which the system had to file charges and arraign her. They had a little leeway because the time would technically run out Saturday at 2 a.m., so she wouldn’t have to be in court until Monday. Greco had to pull the paperwork together and present the case to the DA’s office later that day. A committee of DAs would review the case, decide what charges to file and do their own paperwork so she could be arraigned. Even though arresting Dana was the slam dunk to a successful investigation, the game wasn’t over. Now they had to prove it.

Greco yelled into the microphone for someone in Dispatch to let him out. A second later, he heard the buzzer, pushed open the door and left.

THURSDAY, MARCH 17, 1994, 6:45 A.M.

As Greco was driving home, the rosy sunrise cast a warm glow on the large “M” marking the entrance to Moreno Valley, where he lived. He felt happy, satisfied, and a little numb from fatigue. He’d solved a high-profile case—and the case seemed pretty tight—all in one month. It was only his second homicide case and the experience had been overwhelming. But within that month, he’d come a long way from the near-crippling feeling of self-doubt.

He’d gone by Dana’s house again to take a longer look at her environment and see how she lived her life and what magazines she read. When the police had asked Jim whether he and Dana had been reading any newspaper articles about the murders, he said that Dana had been buying papers recently to look at the want ads. Now Greco picked up the Canyon Lake paper and thumbed through it. The front-page article was about the murders, but the little paper carried no classified ads.

Wyatt and the ID techs had also made another discovery. They’d found a coiled plastic ring with keys that seemed to match those described by Dorinda Hawkins, hanging from a hook on Dana’s entertainment center. That, along with Dorinda’s description of Dana—provided that she identified Dana as her attacker—would solidify that charge. They’d also found one of Dora’s credit cards in Dana’s sock drawer, where she said it would be. Dana’s purse held two bundles of cash: $1,900, just short of the $2,000 she withdrew from Dora’s account, and $170 in her wallet, which came from writing checks for $50 over her grocery store purchases. They’d also found six pairs of gloves in her room, an unusually large assortment for a dry, desert climate where winter temperatures rarely dip below 50 degrees in the daytime. Another pair of gloves and several hanks of rope, including water-ski tow rope, were taken from the laundry area. More rope was found in the kitchen cabinet and several lengths of rope were found in the hallway, including new water-ski tow rope still wrapped in plastic. Outside, more rope turned up in the garage, and in a small tool shed. A pair of white latex gloves were found in the trash.

That was about 4 a.m. Greco came back to the station to do the paperwork that the DA’s office would need to file charges. Wyatt closed the search at 4:40 a.m. and they hauled 86 bags of evidence back to the department. One of the community service officers who had assisted on the search organized the evidence into piles all over the detective bureau so she could categorize everything while she booked it into evidence. It looked like a yard sale.

Greco sat down with the bags of Nikes at his desk and started going through them, examining the soles. Between Jim and Dana, they had a lot of Nikes, particularly Dana. He had pulled his own copy of the one-to-one picture of the dusty shoeprint from his file cabinet and compared shoe after shoe to the imprint. Each matching pair had been strung together with plastic ties. He didn’t know there were so many different patterns on the soles of athletic shoes. About halfway through the bags of shoes he found a white pair of Nike Air athletic shoes, size 6½, that seemed to match. The shoe obviously belonged to Dana, whose smaller sneakers were dwarfed by Jim’s size 11s. He placed the shoe over the photo of the imprint. It looked good to Greco, but a forensic shoeprint expert would have to render an expert opinion. Greco was satisfied, though. He didn’t have any credit cards, checks, cash withdrawals, key rings or any other evidence directly linking Dana to Norma’s murder. Dana said she hadn’t been in Norma’s house in two years. There’s no way that shoeprint should have been in Norma’s house. This would do it.

Greco was still excited about the arrest. Discovering the shoe gave him a renewed burst of adrenaline. He returned the remaining shoes to the bag, took the pair that he thought matched to the community service officer and told her to send them to the DOJ for comparison, then he tackled the DA paperwork. He was so excited, he couldn’t stop working. Those shoes would definitely place Dana at the scene, he kept saying to himself. With his paperwork just about done, he decided to book the videos of the interviews. It only took a few minutes.

The drive home wound him down somewhat, but a million thoughts were jumping around in his head. Later that day, he would have to go to the DA’s office and brief a committee of prosecutors that decides which criminal charges will be filed in murder cases. For example, if Dana had taken credit cards out of the house after killing someone, they could file one count of murder and one count of burglary for that incident. They could also file charges of forgery and credit card fraud.

Something else struck Greco as he was driving. He rifled through his notes to find the phone number and reached for his cell phone.

“Mr. Owens?” Greco said. “This is Joe Greco. I thought you might want to know that I have a suspect in custody who’s going to be charged with your mother-in-law’s murder.

“I think we have a pretty strong case against her.”

Greco waited a moment. He could hear Owens sighing, as if he was emotional.

“I’m, I’m really relieved,” Owens said, stammering somewhat. “I just want you to know, well, uh, I really appreciate your, everything you’ve done in this investigation. I have to say, well, I really didn’t think you could do it.”

Greco listened.

“I just want you to know, if you ever need a job in Nevada, just let me know.”

THURSDAY, MARCH 17, 1:30 P.M.

The new, modern-looking Robert Presley Detention Center in downtown Riverside doesn’t even look like a jail. Its smooth, sculpted concrete curves and lines resemble an attractive office building instead of housing for hundreds of inmates. The telltale difference is that there is very little foot traffic through the front doors. Prisoners enter the building through a secure rear entrance and the guards, all sheriff’s deputies and a few civilian employees of the sheriff’s department have a separate, secure entrance. Inmates are transported to and from the nearby courthouses via underground tunnels to reduce the potential for escape. Very few people ever enter by the front door except on visiting days, when the lines of mostly women and squalling children line up for hours to visit their husbands, boyfriends, sons, nephews and fathers. The inmate receiving center processes upwards of 100 men and women a day. Some are just getting arrested and others are being released after spending a weekend, a few days, a few months or a few years inside. They get interviewed by the staff about gang affiliation, sexual orientation and experience in the jail system to determine where they will be housed. All inmates are screened by medical personnel, and by psychiactric personnel if they’re suicidal, clearly psychotic or schizophrenic. Their housing can be determined by type of offense, sexual orientation or gang affiliation alone. Members of known rival gangs are not housed together. Male transvestites are housed separately from the rest of the male inmate population. High-profile, violent offenders will not be housed with an inmate arrested over the weekend on a traffic warrant.

It takes a couple of hours for deputies to process each inmate through the jail’s receiving center. Dana, like the other women in her holding tank, had removed her “civilian” clothing, shoes and underwear and was physically searched and given jail-issue underwear, a blue jumpsuit with “RCJ”—for Riverside County Jail—stamped in huge black letters on the back, and brown plastic sandals. Her clothes would be stored either until her release or until they were retrieved by a relative. Greco had already taken her earrings as evidence. Dana was taken from the holding tank and again fingerprinted, photographed and formally booked, having to spell her name, her date of birth and other vital information. Dana was assigned a booking number—#9408779—and placed in a holding cell while a clerk ran her name and fingerprints through separate state and national law enforcement databases to determine if she had any other wants, holds or warrants for her arrest. A deputy asked her questions about her gang affiliation, sexual orientation and experience in the jail system. He took a look at the murder charge and determined that she should be housed in protective custody, with other women who do not mix with the rest of the inmate population, and sent her to medical screening.

A nurse took her blood pressure, her temperature and pulse. Dana told the nurse her height was five feet, two inches and her weight was 136 pounds. She told the nurse about a dog bite to her hand the previous July and that she’d had four miscarriages, two more than she’d told her friends, her husband, her boyfriend and her father. She denied having problems with seizures, heart problems, TB, diabetes, hepatitis and AIDS. She answered “no” when asked about crabs, lice and venereal diseases. She was experiencing menses at that time and asked for an ob-gyn exam due to menstrul pain as well as a mammogram. She admitted drinking two alcoholic drinks a day. She complained of weakness, lethargy, weight loss, night sweats, loss of appetite, and chronic diarrhea after “slowing down on drinking,” claiming that her “symptoms have increased since incarceration. Wants vegetarian diet.” She said she was suicidal and wanted to see a counselor.

Dana was handed a bedroll consisting of a gray wool blanket, two white sheets, a towel, a pillowcase and a small cardboard box, known as a “welfare pack,” containing a toothbrush, toothpaste, soap and a razor. A second empty cardboard box was to be used to store her own belongings: books, magazines, mail, pencils and personal hygiene items. Dana was probably the only inmate at the county jail who’d traveled to Germany and Sweden, windsurfed in Australia and New Zealand, partied in New Orleans, gone to Hawaii three times a year to sail and play golf, had pedicures religiously every month and was so meticulous about her hair that she never let her roots show. Dana didn’t find any shampoo in the welfare pack. One of the guards told her that if she didn’t have money on her books to buy shampoo from the commissary, she could use soap, and she was shown to her new home, a concrete cinderblock cell.

Dana was hungry, having not eaten since lunch the day before. She hungrily eyed the trustee, in a white jumpsuit, making the rounds with food trays stacked on a cart. The trustee shoved the tray through the horizontal slot. Dana took one look at the tray and shoved it back.

“This is moldy!” she said to the trustee. “What is this, some kind of microwave crap? I’m not going to eat this! Can’t you give me something else!”

The trustee gave her a blank stare.

THURSDAY, MARCH 17, 2:57 P.M.

The criminalists were going through Dana’s Cadillac at the impound yard, listing the evidence they were removing. They took photos of the interior, the exterior and the tire tread. Strands of hair were removed from the driver’s seat, the seat belt, the head rest, handwritten directions, a pager from the front passenger floor, a cassette labeled “Dana’s tape,” a box of latex surgical gloves and a variety of lengths of rope from under the rear driver’s side floor mat, a bath towel, three boxes of women’s hair coloring—in blonde and brown—and a Von’s receipt.

The trunk held some interesting items: a black plastic bag containing fossil bones, legal divorce paperwork involving Tom Gray, and an assortment of ropes and straps. The last thing the criminalists did was cut out a sample patch of vinyl material from the front passenger seat.

The criminalists also photographed and took material from the front bench seat of Jim’s truck. They confiscated hairs and fibers from inside the car and from the floor mats as well as some ropes from the small compartment under the driver’s seat.

THURSDAY, MARCH 17, 6:20 P.M.

Dana recited her history to the intake psychologist: four miscarriages, divorce, fired from her nursing job just before Thanksgiving. She had gone to marriage counseling during the divorce last year, but that was it. She told the counselor she was very fearful, depressed, distraught and unable to cope. She said she had experienced suicidal thoughts during the last several months. She admitted a history of alcohol-abuse as well as marijuana and cocaine use. She said she was on anti-depressant medication.

The psychologist noted that she was oriented as to time and place, was not delusional, and was not experiencing hallucinations. Dana said she was not suicidal at that moment, but the counselor decided to take precautions anyway and place her on observation status. She would be briefly interviewed in follow-up exams and evaluated, possibly medicated. She would have one hour of free time out of her cell each day and she’d be locked up the rest of the time. The interview lasted less than 15 minutes.

She was allowed a phone call a few minutes after that. By 8 p.m., she was back in her cell.

FRIDAY, MARCH 18, 6 A.M.

The deputy showed Dana to a holding tank where she would await her arraignment sometime later in the day. They got her up at 4:30 a.m. for transport to court, which was across the street. Dana looked around at her temporary environs.

“Hey!” Dana shouted. “The toilet in here is grossly clogged!

“Hey!”

The deputy was long gone.

FRIDAY, MARCH 18, 11 A.M.

The phone was ringing as soon as he got home.

Tom Gray, his long, narrow legs clad in jeans, raced across the studio to get it.

“Tom, what’s Dana’s middle name?”

“Why?”

“Just tell me!”

“It’s Sue.”

“Oh my God, you’re not going to believe this!”

“What’s the matter?”

“Well, Dana … Did you see the paper this morning? She’s been arrested.”

“What?”

“For murder.”

“What are you talking about? You mean … Dana?”

“Yes, Dana! Can you believe it?”

Tom hung up the phone, stunned. His entire body felt numb, as if he had been struck. It was the weirdest thing he’d ever felt.

He thought, Are we still married?

FRIDAY, MARCH 18, 1 P.M.

It was Jim again on the phone and he wanted to know when the hell he was getting his truck back. Greco had talked to him the day before—twice. Jim was upset and he had a right to be. Greco sympathized with him: it was a real inconvenience, he said, but some of the store clerks said that Dana had driven away in a dark sport utility vehicle or a dark pick-up truck, and they had to process his car. He told Jim he should have it by Monday at the latest, and that he’d call the criminalists again. They had a lot of evidence to process from four different crime scenes as well as a truckload of evidence from his house. Greco wasn’t about to rush them, but he didn’t tell Jim that.

He hung up the phone, finding it revealing that every time Jim called about his truck, he never asked about Dana. She’d barely spent two hours in the Perris jail until the watch commander shipped her off to Riverside County Jail. She arrived at the Riverside jail at 5:45 a.m., about two hours after the nurse had taken her blood, saliva and fingernail scrapings. Greco hadn’t realized that until he came into work early Thursday afternoon. Her purple dress, her pristine off-white leather Birkenstocks and the contents of her purse were now in a storage locker at the Riverside jail. There was something satisfying about knowing that she was now clad in a baggy blue jail jumpsuit with “RCJ” stamped across the back.

When he saw Julie Bennett, she said she’d taken photos of the front and back of each hand, each side of her forearms as well as full-length shots from the front, back and sides. Julie told Greco that it was unusual to have a murder suspect with manicure-perfect nails. Knowing that Dana had committed a homicide earlier in the day, Julie noticed that Dana hadn’t even broken or chipped a nail.

Greco chuckled to himself at this. He also wanted to know how she went shopping in public without blood all over her clothes minutes after committing extremely violent murders. Julie said she was submitting the photos for processing and that they’d be ready next week. Dana’s arraignment was scheduled for Monday. He had presented the paperwork involving the murders of Norma and June to the committee of district attorneys on Thursday, but Rich told him they didn’t have enough evidence to file charges for Norma’s murder. Greco was disappointed, but he knew they were reluctant to file charges until there was more evidence linking Dana to that crime scene. Like the shoeprint. They needed a positive match, and that would take time. Antoniadas had presented his evidence about Dora and Riverside sheriff’s detectives had presented evidence regarding the attack on Dorinda. They had filed charges of murder for the June Roberts and Dora Beebe slayings, one count of attempted murder for the attack on Dorinda Hawkins, and a robbery charge for stealing money from Dorinda’s purse.

“Hey, have you seen this?”

James McElvain was holding up the front page of the Press–Enterprise. Greco scanned the headline: “Nurse, 36, Is Prime Suspect in Three Slayings and Assault.” The front-page story had a map of the region and the locations of the murders, like the pin map that Greco still had up behind his desk. There was a second story quoting neighbors and friends of Dana, including her father-in-law, expressing shock over her arrest.

“Thanks,” he said. He took the newspaper and said he’d read it later.

Greco was curious to know what the papers had said about his case. The reporters had called yesterday, but he’d been buried in reports, then had to rush off to the DA’s office to present his case. Not that he shunned the press, he simply didn’t have time to talk to them. Even that afternoon, he knew there was a press conference about Dana’s arrest scheduled at Canyon Lake. Wyatt would be the center of attention there and that was fine. If Wyatt wanted the glory, he could have it. Wyatt hadn’t even asked Greco to go. Greco probably wouldn’t have gone anyway, not when he had reports to write. A couple of Perris officers had stopped by his desk to congratulate him on his work and he appreciated that. It chafed at him that none of his supervisors had even said a word to him.

FRIDAY, MARCH 18, 3 P.M.

Why did Dora let Dana into her house?

Why did Dana use an iron?

Did she strangle Dora first and then hit her?

How did Dana choose Dora in the first place?

Antoniadas was sitting on Dora’s bed, just thinking. After everyone had cleared the crime scene, he usually returned a day or two later to sit by himself and let everything sink in and let ideas come to him. What he had seen seemed cold and calculating. There was an element of deliberation in the attack: the suspect had grabbed the phone cord ahead of time. But there had also been a bit of spontaneity: she seemed to have grabbed whatever was handy to hit them with. She was a very physical person who overpowered her victims. The attacks were definitely overkill, showing that she was expressing a lot of rage and hostility. This was not about credit cards and bankbooks. When he’d talked to her, he could easily see her doing this. The crime fit her personality. She didn’t care about anyone but herself.

He’d attended Dora’s autopsy that morning. He’d attended more than 100 autopsies, including a few elderly victims of homicides. The frailty and vulnerability of elderly victims never failed to make an impression on him.

Antoniadas figured the findings of Dora’s autopsy would be similar to those of June and Norma’s autopsies. Multiple modes of death linked all of the victims. Dora, like June, was killed by manual strangulation, ligature strangulation, and multiple blunt force trauma to the head. The blows to her skull were so hard, they had literally split her head open, which explained why chunks of hair were strewn on the carpet. When they brought the body in, she was virtually unrecognizable, she was so swollen and bloody. Like June, one eye was hugely purple and swollen shut. An ID tech took pictures from multiple angles, her head still turned to one side and her right hand still raised in a protective posture, even though she was on a gurney. She had defensive cuts and bruises on her hands and her right thumb as well as bruises on her right shoulder and on her chest. A criminalist took tape lifts from her clothing, even though it had also been done at the crime scene. Once the autopsy attendant swabbed the blood from Dora’s face and hands, the ligature mark around her neck emerged and the skin on her face was stippled with red dots, the result of the hemorrhaging during strangulation. There were five blows on the left, rear side of the head.

That was the same conclusion drawn by criminalist Ric Cooksey, who’d just spent a few hours diagramming the blood splatter marks in the hallway. Antoniadas was amazed that Cooksey made the same finding as the coronor just by looking at blood dots on the walls. The ID techs had taken photos of the splatter the night of the murder, but Cooksey plotted the marks on graph paper, transferring the gruesome blood splats so they looked like some sort of hyperkinetic graph. Cooksey was good. From the arc, angle and direction of the splatter marks, he surmised there were five blows and was able to approximate the source of the splatter: the location of the victim’s head when each blow was struck. Because small drops don’t travel far, he could tell the head was very close to the wall when certain blows were struck, but he didn’t theorize which blows came first. Splatter marks near the floor by the bathroom and the oblique angle of splatter in the door jamb indicated that the victim’s head was near the floor several inches away from the jamb. Cooksey noted that some of the drops had demarcated edges and were very low, leaving open the possibility that two or three of the blows occurred with the head between the attacker’s legs. Given the location of the head when the blows were struck and the angle and arc of the splatter, Cooksey also suggested that a left-handed attacker might have produced the blows.

*   *   *

Dana was so goddamned cold. She was smart, but she was also stupid in the way that criminals are stupid. Smart criminals don’t talk to cops. Dana had never been arrested and had never been through the system. She’d thought she was smart enough to control the interview and for the most part, she had. But she was not smart enough to express sympathy for the victims. Antoniadas had been around more clever killers who were conniving enough to say, “I have no idea who did this, but I sure feel terrible about what happened to those poor ladies.”

Dana thought she was smarter than the cops, felt superior to the cops and wasn’t afraid of the cops. She had a controlling attitude and a lack of sensitivity. It was those qualities that made her a killer. What was he missing? What else did he need? What was he leaving out?

He tried to look at his cases from the standpoint of a defense attorney to see where the holes were and how they were going to attack. Like Bentley, Antoniadas also saw an insanity defense emerging. Right now, he had a paper case. He knew the taped statements would never see the inside of any courtroom since she was screaming for a lawyer. He just wanted to make sure she was working alone so they didn’t have to try finding someone else. Now he had to build a profile on her, talk to her friends, find out what she was like and get as much information as possible about her work habits, her finances, her relationships.

Antoniadas didn’t feel like his case was weak, but he knew the second you say you’re done, some defense attorney down the road will try to poke holes in your case by filing motions to ban items of evidence or statements made by his client. If the judge agrees with any of it, your case has the potential of biting the dust, in which case the defendant walks. You can never have too much evidence. That’s one reason he liked to pick up everything at a crime scene, even if it seems superfluous, because you can’t collect it three or four years later when the case is in trial. There was one murder case where some woman was stabbed to death and they found what looked like candy at the crime scene. When Antoniadas asked the criminalist to pick it up, they found that it was Tic Tac breath mints and Excedrin. While they were at the crime scene, some guy kept riding by on a bicycle again and again, staring. Antoniadas got a funny feeling and sent a unit to talk to the guy. When they shook him down, he had Tic Tac and Excedrin in his pockets. Apparently, some had fallen out while he was stabbing the victim. At another crime scene, it looked like someone had taken a bite out of a big chocolate bar and left it in the bathroom. The criminalist didn’t want to pick it up, but Antoniadas wanted it. It turned out to be a bar of soap. When they went to talk to the victim’s son, Antoniadas went to the bathroom and saw the other half of the bar of soap. He arrested the guy. Antoniadas had no idea why the guy had left a half a bar of soap at the crime scene.

He knew they would not use all the blood, all the fibers, the carpet exemplars, every single blood smear, the hair chunks, the hair combings from the autopsy, the tape lifts from the body and the blood splatter patterns in this case. The most pressing matter was to get a documents examiner to compare the signature on the checks Dana passed at the grocery stores, the stationery store, and the health food store against the handwriting from her own checks and checkbook and the exemplars she wrote out during the interrogation. He wanted the same checks compared to Dora’s signature in her own checkbook. He’d also coordinate with Greco and get the examiner to compare Dana’s handwriting to the signature on the credit card slips where she signed June Roberts’ name. There was no doubt in Antoniadas’ mind about what the examiner would say about who had signed those checks.

There was something else. Antoniadas pulled out his cell phone and dialed a familiar number.

“Yeah, Detective Antoniadas, Elsinore station. I want to put a mail cover on this inmate. I want everything sent to me.”

He waited a moment.

“Dana. Sue. Gray. G-R-A-Y. 187. She was arrested on the sixteenth. She’ll probably be in P.C.,” he said, the shorthand for protective custody. Antoniadas asked that everything be sent to the Southwest station of the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department in Temecula, which covered Sun City.

From now on, every piece of mail Dana sent and every piece of mail coming to her would be copied and sent to Antoniadas. They would also conduct periodic sweeps of her cell, common for many inmates, and collect any unfinished letters and anything else she had written, copy it, return the originals to her and send the copies to Antoniadas. Her phone calls would be monitored and her jail visits would be monitored and taped. What they could not review or copy were incoming and outgoing letters marked “legal.” Other than legal mail, prisoners have no right and no expectation of privacy. If she was going to confess or describe her crimes to someone in a letter, he wanted it. He also wanted to protect the only living witness, Dorinda Hawkins, in case Dana had worked with a partner.

FRIDAY, MARCH 18, 3 P.M.

Tom fished the yearbook out of the box. There were still a few unpacked boxes from when they’d moved out of their home in Canyon Lake. The little house they’d bought on Ketch Drive for $108,000 several years ago was ratcheted up in value by the real estate market, but they had taken a second and a third mortgage to pay off the credit card bills that Dana had run up. When they’d split up, they moved out of the house and Tom had moved to a small studio, his personal belongings taking a back seat to his drum set and his recording equipment.

Music had always been a big part of his life. Even though he drove a backhoe to make a buck, he dressed like a hard rock musician—ripped jeans, long, wild, wiry blonde hair and lizard-skin boots, black leather jacket. He’d been playing drums since he won a talent contest in junior high in Covina, a suburb of Los Angeles about fifty miles northwest of Riverside County. It was in junior high that he first laid eyes on Dana. She was so beautiful, he had a hard time breathing when she was around. He couldn’t help but look at her and stare. She was a little blonde spitfire, full of energy and sassy attitude, a free spirit.

From that moment, he was head-over-heels in love with Dana. But for all he knew, she had no idea he existed. His boyhood crush never went away and he continued to worship her from afar in high school until she moved away after her freshman year. Ten years passed and when he ran into her at a grocery store, his knees felt weak. He took her to his tenth high school reunion and a little more than a year later, they married. Tom was the happiest man in the world and knew that with the golden-haired, athletic goddess of his dreams, they could tackle anything together. But after he and Dana got married, everything changed.