Chapter 9 – Spin
Bobby Dixon knew every car in his nine acre lot. They baked in the hot New Mexico sun while Bobby sold parts out of his shack. It was a dusty old lot outside a forgotten town forty miles west of Albuquerque, with nothing around it except desert and Highway 40 to the north. Bobby Dixon's lot was where old cars went to die.
He didn't even pay for most cars. He had a separate drop-off lot, and people would dump their wrecks there. He recorded the VIN of each car and then towed it to its final resting place in one of his recovery lots. They were mostly wrecks or cars that wouldn't go anymore. Every once in a while some police agency phoned him up and asked him if he had a certain car. That's why he recorded the VINs.
Bobby made his money selling parts. People came onto his lot with their own tools, and unbolted what they needed from an old heap, and Bobby charged them for the parts they took. He kept a detailed map of his site, so when someone came in looking for a part for a certain make of a certain model of a certain year, Bobby could look on the map and tell them exactly where to find it. But he never needed the map. He knew every car by heart. Bobby found that, by keeping the map up to date, it helped him remember later on, so he still marked every car on his map.
Bobby was certain he didn't have a 2015 convertible black Ford Mustang on the map. But there it was as he towed an old heap of a Chevy behind his tractor around a corner in the southwest recovery lot. Damned if it didn't look brand new – not a scratch on it.
He didn't need to look at the map to know it wasn't there last week. And he didn't put it there. People are supposed to leave their car in the drop-off lot, then Bobby tows it into the proper recovery lot. Someone put it in the wrong place – this Mustang was in with all the Chevys. Right away Bobby knew something was up.
He dismounted his tractor and took a better look. It was all locked up, and he didn't see any keys. He always carried a jimmy in the tractor, and before too long, he opened the driver door and ignored the pulsing blare of the horn when the anti-theft system triggered. Still no keys. The inside was beautiful. It smelled new, but there was another smell – something not so new.
One thing Bobby knew was cars. Gerry Tucker owned the only auto mechanics shop in twenty miles, and Gerry would call up Bobby for advice from time to time on how to fix a peculiar problem. Bobby was never a certified mechanic. He didn't even have his high school diploma, so he couldn't get a proper job as a mechanic, but even Gerry Tucker knew Bobby fixed cars better than most mechanics with papers. Locals still bring their cars to Bobby for repairs. He fixes them in the barn and charges half what Gerry Tucker does. Cash only, no service records.
Bobby pulled the hood release lever inside the driver door, and popped the front hood to the Ford Mustang's engine compartment. He pulled out his jack knife and cut the wire to the horn, silencing the anti-theft alarm, allowing Bobby to work in peace. Then Bobby opened the fuse and relay cover over the radiator. He studied the map on the inside cover, and then Bobby pulled the relay for the luggage compartment, leaving an empty socket. He found an old piece of copper wire on the tractor, and used it to short two connectors on the empty socket together, and he heard the trunk pop. Bobby put the relay back into its socket, and closed the relay housing cover, and shut the hood. Then Bobby went around back, lifted the trunk lid, and found two naked, decomposing bodies – a man and a woman. She had a deep cut in her throat, and he seemed to be generally messed up in the stomach.
"Fuck!" he yelled at no one who could hear. It wasn't the sight – he'd seen dead bodies before. And it wasn't their nakedness, or the stink that bothered him. It wasn't even the obvious violent nature of their deaths. "Now this fuckin' new car is worth no fuckin' good to me," Bobby cursed. He pulled out his cell phone and called fuckin' 911.
- - -
As so many of these things do, it started out innocently enough. Trish Marples used to work at the Boston Globe. Now she was a semi-retired a freelance journalist, which most print journalists were since they were downsized from whatever paper they worked at. Trish stayed true to the concept of investigative journalism. She barely made enough money to cover her costs, but that wasn't the point. She lived a decent, albeit frugal life with her husband, Bill, a retired school principal three years ago. Bill always pestered Trish to fully retire.
Trish and Bill were visiting their northern friends. Marla and Grant McKenzie were their neighbors from their Boston years, and they had become good friends over the decades. In the winters the McKenzies would visit Trish and Bill in their modest Arizona retirement home for a week, and in the summer Trish and Bill would return to the city they loved and stay with Marla and Grant in Boston.
It was over dinner in Boston one night that Marla told Trish about three wide-eyed, naïve, young girls who had just become clients of the firm she worked for, McTavish, Taylor, and Strong. Marla was in accounting and payments. She made sure the money was handled properly, and so she knew the arrangement surrounding Christina, Kelsey, and Mary. Most clients in her firm played the system – they hired a heavy hitting law firm to evade the law, but not these three girls. They were so overwhelmed by their unfamiliar circumstances, it was heartbreaking just to watch them. Even more curious, some man they claimed not to know ponied up the whole fee. Marla handled the escrow account he opened with over a quarter million dollars in it, and he signed an agreement to put over two more million in if needed.
He turned out to be that catnap passenger, the one who saved that stewardess's life. He paid the whole bill. He claimed a benefactor put up the money, but the escrow account was in his name – a benefactor never just trusts money to someone like that. It was his money, and he was hiding that fact.
Marla found that peculiar. She didn't think it a violation of confidentiality telling Trish this story, as Marla didn't mention any details of the girls' legal situation, and Joel Winkman wasn't the client. She did relate what was in the newspapers; that the girls just jumped up on the bar where they worked, stripped off their clothing, and danced naked. They were later quoted as saying they had no idea why they did it.
Trish and Marla chalked the girls' indiscretion up to another example of exuberant exhibitionism common among the younger generation – something the elder ladies never understood. But the story haunted Trish back in Tucson when she heard about the Albuquerque orgy, where women reported they didn't know why they went along with it. The stories shared oddly similar qualities.
So Trish asked Marla to email everything she could about the Boston case, and she started looking into both cases in greater detail. Finally, she drove to Albuquerque, and stayed with friends there to look around some more. When she went to the Lovelace Woman's hospital, Joel Winkman's name came up again. One of the nurses said he was working with the police, and Joel himself was interviewing the victims.
Trish immediately knew she was onto something. Joel Winkman's involvement in two cases separated by two thousand miles was not a coincidence. It was one thing if he was a traveling therapist for hire –
are there such people
? But this guy put up a quarter million dollars for legal fees, and therapists don't make that kind of money.
