Then Erika stood next to her and said, “Just wait until Mr. Macho Man sees a spider.”
Gunnar knew that a large enough spider, or any insect for that matter, could elicit quite an interesting reaction from him as well. He had held a dread fear of insects since early childhood.
But when he saw Diane move on once more, he thought he too could give support by pointing out how everyone was afraid of something at one time. He abruptly waved his flashlight toward the ceiling, and when Erika looked up, he yelled, “Look! A bat!”
Erika’s body jerked from an uncontrollable spasm as if a jolt of electricity had passed through her. But soon enough, Gunnar was made to pay for it when he felt a well-applied jab of her elbow striking his ribs.
“Come on,” he said once he caught his breath after the hit. “Let’s stop clowning around.”
The next hour of wandering and winding through the labyrinths led the trio past more storage inlets, joined by office spaces and maintenance and tool storage areas, but there was no discernible sign of anything Holt could have hidden.
“I think we would have found a needle in a haystack by now,” Erika said after painting yet another arrow on another corner they rounded, all traces of optimism absent from her voice.
But Gunnar put an arm around her shoulder, gave her a playful squeeze, and joked, “And miss this bonding experience?”
But she didn’t appear to be willing to play along. “And I’m getting hungry,” she said flatly.
“We could take a break,” Diane suggested.
“Not yet,” Gunnar countered. He knew it was getting late in the day, but they were nowhere close to an idea of where to consider looking for Holt’s blackmail stash. “Let’s just get a couple of power bars and keep moving a little bit longer.”
Although none too enthusiastic, both Erika and Diane agreed, and they ate as they kept moving forward. As they did so, the silence between them was getting ever more conspicuous. Everyone’s just tired, Gunnar realized. They were here to do a job, and now it was time to just concentrate on it and get out when the job was done.
Unless he was completely wrong, he considered. Unless there were no blackmail materials here at all and this had all been….
“Wait a minute…,” he muttered.
“You sound like you just saw the glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel,” Erika said.
He took a sniff at the plastic wrapper of his power bar in reply, then chucked it across the tunnel. “Well, either the chocolate filling in our power bars contains some motor oil, or we’re somewhere near a former vehicle access area. Probably where they brought down the weapons by the truckload.”
“So?” Erika asked.
“Come on,” Gunnar asked in return. “Trust me.”
Following his lead, they soon got to a point in the tunnel where a ray of light invaded the darkness in the distance. After picking up speed, they found the origin of the illumination, filtering down around the edges of enormous machinery in a vast chamber that left them feeling like miniaturized experiments in a laboratory that had become a Brobdignangian world of extreme proportions in a science fiction plot. The cavernous space they stood in had a structure of beams and hydraulic presses reaching up to the ceiling as its centerpiece. Catwalks spanned the length and width of the room overhead, where two cranes stood on elevated railings.
“An elevator, it looks like,” Erika said, straining her eyes against the shadows in which the metallic juggernaut sat in the center of the cavern.
“Yeah,” Gunnar said. “That’s where they must have brought down the trucks with the weapons and ordnance. And look at the ground.” He swept his flashlight along the floor, passing it over rows of metal gratings.
“Like sewer grates,” Diane said.
“Yeah,” Gunnar said. “Trucks can leak oil, gas, whatever. You hose off the surfaces, and these ducts collect the runoff.”
Diane’s eyes widened. “Or they hide things.”
Gunnar thought the exact same thing. “Come on, let’s check it inch by inch.”
However, once again, that produced no results. The grates covered what must have been runoff channels, but they collected in several plummeting sewer holes. Within the channels themselves, they found nothing.
This chamber had access to the upper level at last, to what had been a warehouse overhead. Gunnar considered heading for one of the two stairways when Erika called out. She waved her flashlight over to one end of the room.
“Hey, Gunnar! Look at those slots,” she yelled.
He put the beam of his flashlight in the same direction and saw a series of ten-foot-wide inlets. As far as he could tell from that distance, they, like much of the chamber itself, were strewn with derelict pieces of debris, everything from empty oil drums to crates to garbage.
“Looks like garages,” he said. “Maybe to house and maintain the forklifts and loading equipment down here.”
“Let’s check it out,” Erika said and took off for one of the slots.
Gunnar followed her, about two paces behind until he thought something suspicious glimmered across the inlet. It looked as if the beam of his flashlight reflected off something glassy.
“Why I’ll be,” he muttered and put a hand on Erika’s shoulder.
She stopped. “What is it?”
“Over there. On the far wall.”
“Where? Oh, I see it now.”
“A camera,” Gunnar said, knowing immediately that they were in the right place. “This is it,” he added and rushed across the inlet. “And now I wish I’d brought Brad’s phone with me.”
“A security camera, you mean?” Erika called after him.
“Exactly. A simple, motion-activated security camera. Can get it off of Amazon and install it on your front porch before Christmas. Make sure no one steals your packages. And Brad’s phone is probably seeing a live video of us right now.”
Erika laughed at that. A hearty, exhausted laugh. “I do have one on my porch.”
Then Diane spoke up. “He’d know that metal box he hid under the grating is in jeopardy.”
When Gunnar and Erika looked at her, they found her kneeling next to a grating-covered runoff system similar to the ones in the main hall. They dropped beside her, shining flashlights under the grate and discovering a metal ammunition box placed inside the trench.
“Come on,” Gunnar said. “Let’s get this thing open.”
The grates weren’t bolted down, so they could lift them up and claim the ammo box.
Gunnar didn’t hesitate in opening the box, reaching inside, and finding what felt like sheets of paper.
CHAPTER 66
“Unbelievable,” Gunnar said in a husky whisper and read through the handwritten narrative on a voluminous pile of papers.
Although the notes were extensive and thorough, the physical evidence to prove their claims was provided by the set of Navajo County Department of Motor Vehicles records, one copy of the firearm registration papers for a Ruger .357 magnum revolver owned by one Earl Preston, and one copy of the weapon’s bill of sale a reregistration to a Wayne Crenshaw.
“You were right,” Erika said, looking up from the notes Gunnar had passed on to her. “This is it. The blackmail material. This is what Brad held over Laura.”
“I didn’t want to believe he could go this far,” Diane said quietly. “Brad had done a lot of things, but blackmail like this….”
“Don’t worry,” Gunnar said sourly. “I’m not shedding tears over Laura. She was ready to kill not just me, but Erika, Amy, anyone—you eventually—who stood to threaten her. She accidentally killed some dumb kid who happened to loan his truck to the wrong guys all those years ago, and she never came forward about it.”
The fact was, Gunnar realized that no matter how he tried to put this case into some sort of moral framework, it was nearly impossible to
do. Brad Holt might have been a sociopathic bastard, a blackmailer, but Laura Preston appeared to be just as capable of ruthlessly dispatching anyone who got in her way. It didn’t matter that she had been threatened by Brad because she apparently had no compunctions about targeting not only Gunnar but anyone close to him. She tried to have Erika killed, he still seethed.
“What are those records?” Erika asked, pointing at the Navajo County official paperwork.
“DMV records and gun ownership and registration records,” Gunnar said and gave Erika everything.
“So let me get this straight,” Diane said. “What happened was that Laura killed some guy in Arizona, and a pair of rapists knew this—?”
“This is what happened,” Gunnar cut in. It just made more sense to paraphrase Brad’s notes as quickly as possible. It was getting late, he noted. What little light penetrated the subterranean chamber from above was almost gone. “When Laura and her sister, Emily, were teenagers in Snowflake, Arizona, a pair of psychopaths working together, serial rapists, passed through town. They got temporary jobs on a road repair crew and went about attacking a number of local women. Including Laura and her sister. Except the night they stalked and attacked Laura and Emily, they had borrowed the pickup of one of the other guys on the road crew. Billy Webb.”
“And this guy had nothing to do with it?” Erika asked.
“No. Just some clueless local kid who’d never even had a speeding ticket. A Mormon. Never even drank, and never smoked. He was being a good Samaritan and inadvertently loaning his truck to the wrong guys on the wrong night.
“Now Laura, although she never saw the faces of her attackers—they wore ski masks—she saw the truck quite clearly. Then, when she saw it in town again a few days later—”
“She went to take things into her own hands,” Erika said, looking up from Holt’s notes.
“Yeah,” Gunnar said. “She followed him and shot him. Except here’s the kicker now; one of her two attackers was also on his way to pay Billy a little visit. He saw Laura driving away from Billy’s brother’s house—he lived with his big brother—and saw her license plate. It could have made it convenient to track Laura down, could they find a way to get ahold of license records, but the investigation into Billy’s death turned up the heat around town. The rapists decided to get out while the getting was good. Seems like the cops figured out that Billy was a mistaken identity, and someone was out evening a score for the rapes.”
“How?” Diane asked, throwing a glance at the papers in Erika’s hands.
“Laura’s first shot castrated the kid,” Gunnar said.
“So now the cops weren’t just looking to close a murder case, but they were under the gun to find the rape suspects and quiet down their sleepy little town again,” Erika said. “Right, Gunnar?”
“Yeah. Exactly. But the rapists didn’t enjoy their freedom too long. A year later, they were cornered by cops in Colorado, following a home invasion and the assault on a twelve-year-old girl.”
“Jesus,” Erika sighed.
“One of the two got blown to hell by the cops,” Gunnar explained, “and the other one, Arlo Boyd, was caught a month later and put away for fifty years. It seems no one paid attention to his claims of information about a small-town vigilante killing. Except Brad, years later, when he was planning his return to WBBF stardom.”
“This is unbelievable,” Erika said.
“On the WBBF charity tour,” Gunnar said. “The WBBF’s program of donating workout equipment and money to fitness programs in at-risk-youth centers, juvie halls—”
“And prisons,” Erika cut in, picking up some of the information from the notes.
“The maximum-security prison in Colorado,” Gunnar said. “Brad makes an appearance there, distributes lots of WBBF publications, and many of them have pictures of the WBBF President of Operations inside.”
“And now Boyd finds someone who listens to his story.” Diane understood the last chapter of the story. Her voice was quiet, ashamed.
“That’s basically it,” Gunnar said. “He even went ahead and got the records on Laura’s old license plate. He got the records of a very orderly and legal gun sale by Earl Preston—Laura’s father—to one Wayne Crenshaw. The gun which can, no doubt, be I.D.’d as the weapon that killed Billy Webb. And Laura, of course, and Emily, were the last victims of the Snowflake serial rapists. I would also guess that Earl Preston has an airtight alibi for the time of Billy’s killing. So Laura would be the only suspect in a new investigation.”
“Well, it’s all come together,” Erika said. “Except there’s still something we don’t exactly have.”
“I know,” Gunnar said. “Evidence that proves Laura actually killed Brad.”
CHAPTER 67
Gunnar paused to take a breath and think about how to reiterate his point to Diane. She wasn’t quite getting the fine details of how precise, physical evidence needed to be put forth for a criminal conviction to happen.
“That’s right,” he said. “We have a flawless, perfect motive set up for Laura. She killed this kid over a decade ago, and she’s kept it secret since. We have the DMV records—even though the info is coming from the mouth of a rapist, mind you—and we have the gun records. We have the Snowflake Police Department’s original suspicion of Laura—”
“And not to mention everything about David Montgomery and the listening devices,” Diane cut in again.
“But we need an indisputable link to Brad,” Gunnar said and leaned back against the dusty, rusting office table behind him, taking a bite out of the sandwich he’d started on a couple of minutes ago.
They had moved out of the underground storage area once the setting sun had made even a discussion difficult. It was more convenient to try and think through and review where they stood with the case in someplace where they didn’t need to shine flashlights in each other’s faces. Above ground, after Gunnar and Erika kicked and broke apart several barriers of wood and metal to get to a stairwell leading to a warehouse overhead, they found themselves in what had once been a large administrative center for the storage facilities. After the work it took to get upstairs, they realized it was time to slow down and get something more than a power bar to eat.
“What kind of link, though?” Diane insisted once more.
“An air-tight one,” said Gunnar.
“A smoking gun,” Erika added, a tired, knowing tone to her voice.
“Exactly,” Gunnar said. “A smoking gun.”
“What would be a smoking gun?” Diane asked.
“Some piece of evidence that can only be tied to Laura and no one else,” Gunnar said. “Like if we had that second water bottle and there was poison in it. Along with Laura’s fingerprints all over it. That would be a smoking gun.”
Diane frowned, thinking for a moment. “Do you think she still has it?” she asked, although her voice was quite hopeless.
“I doubt it. No, scratch that. I highly doubt it.”
Erika sat up on the desk, and Gunnar thought she had the right idea. Exhaustion was becoming a burden on his back as well—his back, his legs, his bum right knee.
“But even if she had it and we got ahold of it,” Erika said, “it would still be useless.”
Diane’s eyes widened. Frustration was obviously stoking her.
“Probably,” Gunnar said and looked at Erika.
“Why?” Diane asked.
“All you have is a bottle of poison and Laura’s fingerprints on it,” Erika said. “So what?”
“So what?” Diane replied, agitated.
“There is no clear finding of poison inside Brad’s body,” Gunnar said. “And not just because of the late autopsy.”
“That’s right,” Erika said. “There are poisons that won’t leave an obvious trace in the body.”
“I don’t believe this,” Diane said, more defeated than
angry this time.
Of course, Gunnar could hardly blame her. He felt the exact same way.
“The more I think about Laura,” Erika said, “and the aftermath of the rape, her sister, the more convinced I am that I can take a good guess at how she killed Brad.”
“How?” Diane snapped.
“There are antidepressants and antipsychotic medications that can kill when administered in an overdose. The results will look like Brad’s death. The only traces might be the damaged liver tissue. But, of course, Brad could have gotten that from all of his steroid use. We could probably find medication like that among her sister’s meds.”
“Or at least she could have had access to them when visiting her sister’s hospital,” Gunnar added.
“This is a farce,” Diane whispered and shook her head.
Erika said, “We need to think in terms of indisputable, airtight evidence. Evidence beyond a shadow of a doubt.” She glanced at Gunnar. “Right?”
“Yeah.”
“And it’s depressing,” Diane said.
“I know,” Gunnar agreed with her. “Depressing, and actually exhausting.”
Erika pressed the Muscle Quest issue into his hands suddenly and said, “That’s why you need to finish your food and relax. It’s going to take us a long time to get back to L.A. anyway, and you should replenish the energy to your little grey cells. And take a look at the new pictures from the contest and see if they jog any memories. Maybe you saw something there you can’t remember you saw.”
Gunnar flicked a quizzical eyebrow at her but appreciated her light tone. The time had come for light tones right now. So he finished off his sandwich in two big bites and took the magazine from her. “Yes, ma’am.”
He flipped through the magazine, looking for the Sun State Classic coverage. When he reached a three-page photo montage, he caught sight of a shot of Holt flexing on-stage. A caption underneath read, BACKSTAGE TRAGEDY—THE EXCLUSIVE IN NEXT MONTH’S MQ. There was a shot of one female competitor backstage, studying rival Christy Gilmore, the now-reigning Ms. Sun State, in her eye-catching pink posing bikini as she rehearsed a double biceps pose in front of the mirror. A picture of Laura walking past Christy Gilmore as she did a light set of dumbbell curls in her posing bikini backstage followed. They had a shot of Frank Jankowsky doing his most muscular pose in the pose-off. One picture taken in front of the stage caught a glimpse of Laura and Jeanie as one of the camera crews was either about to begin or was just finished interviewing the TV personality.
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