Acid Bath Read online




  Acid Bath

  * * *

  Nancy Herndon

  An [ e - reads ] Book

  No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, scanning or any information storage retrieval system, without explicit permission in writing from the Author.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locals or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright 1995 by Nancy Herndon

  First e-reads publication 2003

  www.e-reads.com

  ISBN 0-7592-6742-1

  Other works by Nancy Herndon

  also available in e-reads editions

  * * *

  WIDOWS’ WATCH

  For the critique group

  Joan Coleman

  Terry Irvin

  Jean Miculka

  Table of Contents

  * * *

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty–one

  Twenty–two

  Twenty–three

  Twenty–four

  Twenty–five

  Twenty–six

  Twenty–seven

  Twenty–eight

  Twenty–nine

  Thirty

  Thirty–one

  Thirty–two

  Thirty–three

  Thirty–four

  Thirty–five

  Thirty–six

  Thirty–seven

  Thirty–eight

  Thirty–nine

  Forty

  Forty–one

  Forty–two

  Forty–three

  Forty–four

  Forty–five

  Forty–six

  Acknowledgments

  * * *

  Special thanks to editor Irene Zahava and The Crossing Press of Freedom, California, who published in Woman Sleuth III and IV, different versions of chapters two, three, and forty-six; to Zelma Orr for access to her research on plastic explosives; to Marion Coleman for information about city government; to my husband, Bill, for advice on acids and bases; and to my son, Bill, for computer expertise.

  Various members of the criminal justice system in El Paso were very generous with their time and expertise. If I got it right, it’s because of their help. Any errors can be chalked up to poetic license or my failure to ask enough questions. I would like to thank Judge James Carter, jail magistrate; Sergeant Clint Porter, who gave me a tour of the El Paso County Detention Facilities; District Attorney Jaime Esparza, First Assistant District Attorney Marcos Lizarraga, and their colleagues; and from the El Paso Police Department Sergeant Bruce Manvell of Community Services, who took me on a tour of headquarters, Sergeant Pedro A. Ocegueda of Crimes Against Persons, Latent Print Examiner Robert Feverston, Toxicologist Suki Castaneda, Thelma Rivas in Photography, Captain William Adcox, and Officer Neftali Cano and his colleagues, with whom I did an eight-to-midnight patrol shift on the Westside. I can’t imagine a more interesting week than the one I spent with these dedicated men and women.

  One

  * * *

  Friday, March 27, 8:15 P.M.

  Fine weather late in March had brought the Los Santos gangs out in force, armed and belligerent. Detective Elena Jarvis figured every Crimes Against Persons detective who handled homicide and aggravated assault was out in the field that night. Sergeant Holiday’s entire squad had been called in to cover a teen party in the Northeast, shot up by uninvited guests.

  Her own squad, under Sergeant Manuel Escobedo, was investigating four deaths and seven injuries in a gang fight at Ascarte Park when Lieutenant Beltran radioed new instructions from headquarters. Elena was reassigned to an attempted homicide at Herbert Hobart University. Campus police would serve as her backup because Crimes Against Persons was stretched so thin. Unlike the state university, whose police force investigated its own crimes, H.H.U. had an agreement with the city police to handle felonies committed on its property. The campus police assisted.

  As she drove across town, Elena wondered whether she had just been subjected to a sexist division of responsibility, H.H.U. being the less dangerous situation. On the other hand, Beltran might simply have decided that a female detective with a college degree would be more acceptable to the powers that be at H.H.U.

  That heavily endowed, lushly landscaped oasis of education for the wealthy dominated the foothills of Los Santos to the west of the mountains. Los Santos itself was an arid, poverty-stricken city on the Texas-Mexico border. It hardly spoke the same language as Herbert Hobart, its articulate faculty, and its privileged student body. H.H.U. was to Los Santos what a magnum of Tattinger Extra Dry was to a can of Tecate. Although Elena customarily drank Tecate, with lime and salt on the side, Tattinger’s was not beyond her experience. She and her ex-husband, Frank, had celebrated their sixth and last anniversary with a bottle.

  Elena turned her unmarked police car off the interstate and headed up the mountain through middle-class suburbs that showcased NeoMission architecture, rock landscaping instead of grass, and cactus instead of flowers. At the ornate iron gates and stucco guardhouse of the university, she stopped for directions and was told that outsiders couldn’t enter the campus after eight. “Even police?” she asked sarcastically. “Even city police called in by the university force?” The guard didn’t know; nothing much ever happened here, so why would anyone have called the city police? He tried to telephone for instructions, but nobody answered.

  Maybe they were at the scene of the attempted murder, she suggested. He peered at her suspiciously and asked to see her badge again. Then he decided to take a picture of it and her, which he did. They had to wait twice for the camera to whir, whine, and spit out the pictures, which the guard admired from different angles. Elena had heard that Herbert Hobart was a dingbat school. She now had supporting evidence.

  “I suppose if someone dies while you’re fooling around with that camera,” she said, “you and the university would be legally liable.”

  He gaped at her, his Polaroid hanging in one hand, the other hand clutching an excellent photograph of her badge.

  “If the students are as rich as people say — “

  “They are,” he assured her.

  “Then the parents will have plenty of money to hire the best lawyers.”

  “Someone tried to kill a student?”

  “Beats me,” said Elena. “Here’s the address. Is that a dormitory?”

  “Nah,” said the guard, relaxing. “That’s the faculty apartment building. Still — attempted murder? You sure?” He decided to let her in; however, he provided poor directions, as if letting her in but keeping her from arriving at her destination would protect him from responsibility. In the police department they called it C.Y.A., cover your ass. Look for a ship-type building, the guard had said. What kind of sense did that make? She’d heard the architecture was funky, but she could hardly see it in the dark. The spotlights shone from the ground up so that everything above the second floor disappeared, as if a dense black cloud sat menacingly on top of the university.

  What kind of attempted homicide had it been? Elena wondered. Two faculty colleagues attacking one another over some arcane scholarly point? Or a domestic squabble? Su
ddenly she wasn’t sure about Lieutenant Beltran sending her alone. More officers died responding to domestic disputes than to gang fights. Her backup would be a campus cop, possibly as dumb as the one at the gate. He might have let the situation get out of hand. He might be dead. Or the victim might be dead. And why not? What did these campus police do on an ordinary working day — keep the rich kids from spray-painting the genitalia of the university statuary? Fine them if they defaced the tropical Florida shrubbery, which soaked up huge amounts of water from the university’s private wells?

  Elena scowled. The sprinklers here would have been spraying all day, while at her house, across the mountain, city water regulations forced her to water before breakfast and after dinner. But then nobody on the city council wanted to gainsay Herbert Hobart University, which brought a lot of money to town. The least she could do in the name of water conservation, Elena decided, was bust a few of the faculty, who probably took long showers and flushed their toilets excessively.

  Two

  * * *

  Friday, March 27, 8:40 P.M.

  They didn’t look dangerous, just mismatched, Elena thought as she inventoried the collection of people in the living room of faculty apartment #104.

  One fair-haired female Caucasian, early forties, wearing a beautifully cut rose-colored suit. (Elena would have traded a week of vacation for a suit like that.)

  One red-bearded Caucasian male wearing a sweat shirt that read, “Poets Do It In Iambic Pentameter.”

  One blond airhead in Reeboks and an expensive jogging suit. (Elena didn’t jog; she got her exercise trying to delay the collapse of her house.) The poet and the airhead had greasy yellow spots on their clothes, as well as red marks and peeved expressions on their faces.

  And last, one officer from the Herbert Hobart University Campus Police Force, wearing a lavender uniform that looked as if it had been inherited from the cavalry unit of a World War I middle-European army. He had put in the call and now wore a peculiar expression, almost as if he were about to laugh.

  Suddenly it occurred to Elena that Frank, her ex, might have arranged this as his most elaborate practical joke to date — more attention-getting than the ad he’d placed in the newspaper, which resulted in seventeen people calling to offer homes to eleven Irish setter puppies she didn’t own. She’d known Frank was behind the ad because once, when she’d wanted an Irish setter, he told her that they were too stupid to find their way out of a small doghouse. Frank’s motivation for these jokes was less easy to figure out. He might be getting even because she’d divorced him. Or he might be reminding her that he was available and always a barrel of laughs, in case she decided to take him back. Fat chance!

  “What have we got, Officer Pollock?” Elena asked the campus policeman, suspicion edging her voice.

  “Hard to say for sure, Detective. Attempted murder. Assault with a deadly weapon.” The patrolman made an odd, snorting sound.

  “What weapon?” She didn’t see any weapons.

  “A snail, ma’am.” Pollock then succumbed to a series of undignified snickers.

  Mr. Iambic Pentameter, flushed with indignation, snapped, “You think this is funny, do you? My ex-wife tried to murder me.”

  “How?” asked Elena. “Did she hurl the snail at you?” The call had to be a Frank-joke, but how had her ex-husband gotten these people involved, and who were they?

  “I don’t like your attitude,” snarled the poet.

  Elena didn’t care much for his, either. “Let’s start with your names.”

  The woman in the tailored suit, who had been looking amused, murmured, “As hostess, I suppose the introductions are my responsibility.”

  “I don’t see why,” said the poet combatively.

  She ignored him. “I’m Dr. Sarah Tolland, Chairman of Electrical Engineering at the university. That’s Miss Kowolski, my ex-husband’s fiancée.” She nodded toward the blonde in the jogging suit. “Miss Kowolski is, she tells me, an aerobics instructor as well as a vegetarian.”

  “I didn’t want to come here,” said Ms. Kowolski, sounding whiny and accusatory. “At least not to dinner. People like engineers and atomic scientists eat poisonous things — red meat and eggs — and they hate vegetables, and they . . . ”

  Did she think she’d been poisoned? Elena wondered. With a snail? Neither Ms. Kowolski nor the poet was gagging — or vomiting — or dead.

  “The alleged victim is my ex-husband, Angus McGlenlevie,” continued Dr. Tolland.

  Elena found herself rather liking Dr. Tolland, who spoke with wry humor.

  “I’m sure you’ve heard of Gus.” Dr. Tolland glanced at her former husband. “He’s the author of the well-known poetry collection, Erotica in Reeboks, published by the Phallic Press of Casper, Wyoming.”

  Phallic Press? For a moment Elena had found the professor at least plausible. Now once again she suspected that they were putting her on.

  “Phoenix Press,” snapped Angus McGlenlevie, “and you needn’t sneer, Sarah. Erotica in Reeboks is about to go into its third printing.”

  “A tribute to the taste of the poetry-reading public,” said Dr. Tolland, and she turned back to Elena. “Be that as it may, Gus seems to feel that I attempted to injure him with a snail.”

  “She did,” said McGlenlevie. “She lured me over here promising snails in garlic butter and then exploded one in my face — and Bimmie’s.”

  “Bimmie?” asked Elena.

  “That’s me,” said Ms. Kowolski, “and this is a designer jogging suit. It cost almost a whole week’s salary. Now it’s got garlic butter all over.”

  “Soak it in cold water,” Elena advised. An exploding snail? McGlenlevie had to be kidding. “How did your ex-wife cause this explosion?” she asked. Their marital tiff had had an authentic ring to it, but Elena seemed to remember a news report about exploding snails.

  “She turned on the blender in the kitchen.”

  “You think the blender triggered the explosion?”

  “Yes,” said McGlenlevie. “She probably had it wired.”

  “And here I thought I was making hollandaise sauce,” murmured Dr. Tolland.

  “You’ve never made hollandaise sauce in your life, Sarah,” snapped McGlenlevie. “I couldn’t believe it when you offered to make snails in garlic butter.”

  “Everything comes prepackaged, Gus,” said Sarah dryly. “You stuff the canned snail in a shell, melt the garlic butter from the jar, pour it over the snails, and voilà! Escargot!”

  Elena was amazed to hear that gourmet-type stuff could be prepared like that. It sounded easier than those easy taco boxes her mother found so offensive. “So it was at Dr. Tolland’s suggestion that you came here, Mr. McGlenlevie, you and Ms. Kowolski?” Elena could imagine Frank howling with laughter, telling this story to every officer at Five Points; he probably had the apartment wired. On the other hand, if this was for real — and it was! she realized suddenly. It had to be, because Beltran had sent her here. He didn’t like jokes, and he’d never team up with Frank on anything. So she had to ask questions. That’s what homicide detectives did — asked questions. And what was that snail story she’d read?