4th of July

Chapter 27

I WAS ABOUT TO drive into town for dinner when the late-evening newspaper landed with a whomp on the lawn.

I picked it up, shook out the folds, and felt the headline reach out and hook me: POLICE RELEASE PRIME SUSPECT IN CRESCENT HEIGHTS SLAYINGS.

I read the article all the way through.

When Jake and Alice Daltry were found slain in their house in Crescent Heights on May 5, police chief Peter Stark announced that Antonio Ruiz had confessed to the crime. According to the chief today, the confession didn’t jibe with the facts. “Mr. Ruiz has been cleared of the charges against him,” said Stark.

Witnesses say Ruiz, 34, a maintenance worker for California Electric and Gas, couldn’t have been in the Daltrys’ house on the day of the murders because he was working his shift in the plant in full view of his coworkers.

Mr. and Mrs. Daltry had their throats slashed. Police will not confirm that the husband and wife were tortured before they were killed.

The article went on to say that Ruiz, who’d done some handiwork for the Daltrys, claimed that his confession had been coerced. And Chief Stark was quoted again, stating that the police were “investigating other leads and suspects.”

I felt a reflexive, visceral pull. “Investigating other leads and suspects” was code for “We’ve got squat,” and the cop in me wanted to know everything: the how, the why, and especially the who. I already knew the where.

Crescent Heights was one of the communities along Highway 1. It was on the outskirts of Half Moon Bay—only five or six miles from where I was standing.