Orsulak had lived in a small yellow ranch house with stucco walls in South Phoenix. It was a marginal neighborhood. I counted three junk cars parked on gravel lawns and two Sunday morning garage sales in full swing on the block.
Rachel used the key she had gotten from Grayson to cut through an evidence sticker spread across the front doorjamb and then unlocked the door. Before pushing it open she turned to me.
“Remember, they didn’t find him for three and a half days. Are you up to this?”
“Course.”
For some reason I was embarrassed that she had asked me this in front of Thompson, who smiled as if I were a rookie. That annoyed me, too, even though in actuality I was less than a rookie.
We were three steps in before the odor engulfed me. As a reporter I had seen plenty of bodies, but I’d never had the pleasure of entering a closed structure where a body had rotted for three days before discovery. The putrid odor was almost palpable. It was like the ghost of William Orsulak, haunting the place and all who dared enter. Rachel left the front door open to help air the place out some.
“What are you looking for?” I asked once I was reasonably assured that I had control of my throat.
“Inside, I don’t know,” Rachel replied. “It’s already been gone over by the locals, his friends. . .”
She went to the dining room table in the room to the right of the door and put down and opened a file she had been carrying. She began leafing through the pages. It was part of the package the local cops had turned over to the agents.
“Have a look around,” she said. “It looks like they were pretty thorough, but you might come up with something. Just don’t touch anything.”
“Right.”
I left her there and started slowly to look about. My eyes first caught on the easy chair in the living room. It was a dark green but the headrest was stained darker with blood. It had flowed down the back into the seat of the chair. Orsulak’s blood.
On the floor in front of the chair and near the wall behind it, chalk circles outlined two holes where bullets had been retrieved. Thompson knelt here and opened his toolbox. He began probing the bullet holes with a thin steel pick. I left him there and walked further into the house.
There were two bedrooms, Orsulak’s and an extra that seemed dusty and unused. There were photos of two teenaged boys on the bureau in the bedroom the detective had used, but I guessed his kids never used the other, they never came to visit. I moved slowly through these rooms and the hallway bathroom but I saw nothing that I thought mattered to the investigation. I secretly hoped I would come upon something that would help and that would impress Rachel, but I came up empty.
When I stepped back into the living room I saw neither Rachel nor Thompson.
“Rachel?”
No answer.
I walked through the dining room to the kitchen but it was empty. I went through the laundry room, opened a door and glanced into the dark garage but saw no one there either. Coming back into the kitchen I saw the door ajar and glanced through the window over the sink. I saw movement in the tall brush at the rear of the backyard. Rachel was walking, with her head down, through the brush, Thompson behind her.
The yard was cleared for maybe twenty yards going back. A seven-foot-high plank fence ran down both sides. But at the back there was no fence line and the dirt yard dropped down into a dry creek bed where there was a lot of brush. Rachel and Thompson were on a trail moving through the brush away from the house.
“Thanks for waiting,” I said when I caught up. “What are you doing?”
“What do you think, Jack?” Rachel said. “Did the Poet just park in the driveway, knock on the door and pop Orsulak after being invited in?”
“I don’t know. I doubt it.”
“I do, too. No, he watched him. Maybe for days. But the locals canvassed the neighborhood and no neighbor saw a car that didn’t belong. Nobody saw anything out of the routine.”
“So you think he came in through here?”
“It’s a possibility.”
She studied the ground as we walked. She was looking for anything. A footprint in the mud, a broken twig. She stopped a few times to bend and look at pieces of debris alongside the trail. A cigarette box, an empty soft drink bottle. She didn’t touch any of it. It could be collected later if necessary.
The trail took us under a stanchion holding up high-tension power lines and into a stand of heavy brush at the back end of a trailer park. We reached a high point and looked down into the park. It was not well kept and many of the units had crudely fashioned add-ons like porches and toolsheds. On some of the units the porches had been enclosed with plastic sheeting and were being used as additional bedrooms and living spaces. An aura of crowded poverty emanated from the thirty or so dwellings jammed together on the lot like toothpicks in a box.
“Well, shall we?” Rachel asked, as if we were going for high tea.
“Ladies first,” Thompson said.
Several of the inhabitants of the park were sitting on door stoops and old couches set in front of their units. They were mostly Latinos and a few blacks. Maybe some Indians. They watched us emerge from the brush with no real interest, which showed they recognized us as cops. We showed the same lack of interest in them as we started walking along the narrow lane between rows of trailers.
“What are we doing?” I asked.
“Just having a look,” Rachel answered. “We can ask questions later. If we take it slow and calm, they’ll know we’re not here to kick ass. It might help.”
Her eyes never stopped scanning the park and every trailer we passed as we walked. I realized that it was the first time I had seen her at work in the field. This wasn’t sitting around a table trying to interpret facts. This was the gathering time. I found myself watching her more than anything else.
“He watched Orsulak,” Rachel said, more to herself than to either Thompson or me. “And once he knew where he lived, he started planning. How to get in and how to get out. He had to have a getaway route and a getaway car, and it would not have been smart to park it anywhere on Orsulak’s street.”
We were coming down the main street, as narrow as it was, to the front of the park and the entrance off a city street.
“So he parked somewhere over here and walked through.”
The first trailer at the entrance had a sign on the door that said OFFICE. A larger sign, attached to an iron framework on top of the trailer said SUNSHINE ACRES MOBILE HOME PARK.
“Sunshine Acres?” Thompson asked. “More like Sunshine Half Acre.”
“Not much of a park, either,” I added.
Rachel was off on her own, not listening. She walked past the steps to the office door and out to the city street. It was four lanes and we were in an industrial area. Directly across from the trailer park was a U-Store-It and on either side of that were warehouses. I watched Rachel look around and take in the surroundings. Her eyes held on the one streetlight, which was a half block away. I knew what she was thinking. That it would be dark here at night.
She walked alongside the curb, her eyes scanning the asphalt, looking for something, anything, maybe a cigarette butt or a piece of luck. Thompson stood with me, kicking at the ground with one foot. I couldn’t take my eyes off Rachel. I saw her stop and look down and bite her lip for a moment. I walked over.