After Hewitt finished, Salgado passed out a synopsis of Riley’s known personal history that included updated information. He had entered the air force at the age of eighteen, after graduating from high school. He rose to the rank of master sergeant E-8 and served twenty years and two months before retiring. His service record showed overseas postings to England, Japan, Germany, and Kuwait, where he was stationed during Gulf War One. His last duty assignment was at Holloman Air Force Base adjacent to White Sands Missile Range near the city of Alamogordo, less than an hour’s drive from Lincoln County.
Riley was the father of one child, an eighteen-year-old son named Brian, whereabouts currently unknown, who had stayed with Tim and Denise for a time last summer. While in Santa Fe, Brian worked for a month as a busboy in a downtown restaurant before being fired for tardiness. A National Crime Information Center criminal records check showed no wants and warrants and no arrest record for the boy.
Tim Riley had moved to Santa Fe soon after his retirement and applied for a deputy sheriff vacancy with the Santa Fe Sheriff’s Office. Because of his extensive experience as a noncommissioned military police officer and criminal investigator, he was hired and sent to the New Mexico Law Enforcement Academy to complete an accelerated police officer certification course. Upon his return to the S.O., he was assigned to the patrol division, where he remained until he resigned to accept the Lincoln County job.
A year after arriving in Santa Fe, Riley married Denise Louise Roybal in a civil ceremony performed by a county magistrate. Financial records showed that the couple had lived within their means and neither were deeply in debt nor had unusually large unexplained monetary assets. Riley’s vasectomy had been verified by autopsy, and there was no evidence of surgery to reverse the procedure.
Riley had divorced Eunice, his first wife, ten years ago. Eunice, currently living in North Carolina, had been interviewed by the local police. According to their report, she was employed as a veterinarian’s assistant at a small animal clinic and had a live-in boyfriend named Ernest Arnett who worked as an independent electrical contractor. Interviews with the woman’s employer, neighbors, and friends verified that she’d been in North Carolina during the time of the two homicides.
When told of Tim Riley’s murder, Eunice was unable to think of any person who had reason to kill him. However, since she’d had little contact with him for over eight years, she had no idea who Riley’s current friends or enemies might be.
When asked about her son, she stated she had no knowledge of Brian’s whereabouts, noting that the boy had left home soon after turning eighteen because of a personality conflict with her boyfriend. She expressed surprise on being told of Brian’s visit to Santa Fe, saying she had not known about it and stating he and Tim had not been close since the divorce. According to the interviewing officer, she showed little sorrow about her ex-husband’s death.
Kerney and Hewitt ended the meeting with four priority goals established: find Brian Riley as quickly as possible and determine if he was to be treated as a suspect; identify the unknown person Denise Riley had been secretly seeing; delve deeply into Denise’s past, particularly those years when she was living away from Santa Fe; and complete the gathering of saliva samples for DNA comparison testing.
Outside the conference room, Clayton gave Paul Mielke the scoop on Matt Chacon’s conversation with Denise’s employer and the tale of the office desktop computer that had crashed the day after her murder.
“Detective Chacon secured the computer,” Clayton noted, “and will let us know if he finds anything.”
“Do we know if Riley’s son is a computer whiz?”
“That’s a good question,” Clayton replied. “We should ask the North Carolina authorities to check it out.”
“I’ll give them a call,” Mielke said as he walked away.
A few minutes later Paul Hewitt caught up with Clayton in his borrowed office. “We’ve got to find Brian Riley,” he said from the doorway.
“I heard you and Chief Kerney loud and clear on that, Sheriff. I’m on it.”
“How are you on it, Sergeant?”
“Ramona Pino is en route to the restaurant where the boy worked to see if she can scout up some information. Two SFPD detectives are making the rounds of juvie hangouts in the city to locate anyone who knows him or where he is. I’ve got a deputy calling the North Carolina high school authorities and Tim Riley’s ex-wife to get a list of classmates he might have stayed in touch with. We’re also putting the word out to snitches on the street.”
“Very good,” Hewitt said. “I’m heading home to Lincoln County. I want daily updates from you, Sergeant.”
“I’ll route them through Chief Kerney and Sheriff Salgado,” Clayton replied.
Hewitt nodded. “You’re going to make a first-rate police chief someday.”
“Thanks for the compliment, Sheriff, but that’s a long way off, if ever.”
“You never know,” Hewitt said as he waved good-bye.
The downtown restaurant where Brian Riley had briefly worked as a busboy catered to patrons who could easily afford a two-hundred-dollar bottle of wine to complement their perfectly plated, expensive gourmet meals. Except for Chief Kerney, who’d inherited some megabucks from an old family friend, Ramona Pino thought it highly unlikely that any member of the Santa Fe Police Department had ever eaten at the establishment.
The swanky restaurant, according to several old-timers on the force, stood on the site of the long-gone downtown bus depot, which had housed a small diner renowned for serving the best green-chili cheeseburgers in town. Back in those days, uniformed officers assigned to Plaza foot patrol almost always chowed down at the diner, which had a varied menu, good food, and reasonable prices.
But that was then, and the new Santa Fe was now a vastly different place. Since the transformation of the bus depot into a world-class restaurant, just about everything else in the downtown part of the city had also changed. Plaza businesses that catered to locals had vanished, replaced by stores and eateries that served the tourist trade. The price of a nice dinner in a fancy Santa Fe restaurant to celebrate a special occasion was now way beyond the means of the average citizen, which definitely included the men and women sworn to protect and serve.
Many officers, including those who had working spouses, were holding down part-time second jobs. A growing number couldn’t afford to live in Santa Fe and were now commuting from the boomtown city of Rio Rancho that sprawled along the Rio Grande west of Albuquerque. The joke going around the department was that when a major disaster hit the city, FEMA would probably lumber into Santa Fe faster than the officers who lived out of town could arrive.
Inside the restaurant, the hostess area at the top of the stairs was unoccupied. Servers were setting up a long row of tables for what appeared to be a large dinner party. At the bar in the back of the room, a bartender was polishing glassware and talking to a man who wore a chef’s coat with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows.
Ramona approached, identified herself, and asked to speak to the manager, owner, or whoever was in charge. The man in the chef’s coat told her the manager, Pearce Byers, was in the back. He went through the kitchen double doors to get him.
While Ramona waited, the bartender, a strapping six-footer with a leering smile on his pretty-boy face, gave Ramona the once-over. The guy looked to be the bad-boy type who preyed on women and lived off them when he could.