The Fall Moon

by Blake Banner

  Sheriff O’Brien took a deep breath and levered himself to his feet as we came in. He was a hard, blond man with short hair and small, pale blue eyes. His hands were like granite and you just knew he loved being fair but firm with them.

  We showed him our badges and he studied them a while before sitting down and handing them back.

  “So how can we help the NYPD?”

  “You know Ingrid Njalsen?”

  “Sure. Everybody knows Ingrid.”

  “You recall she had a sister, Christen?”

  “I do. She moved to New York ’bout twenty years back, give or take a year. Hooked up with some low life.”

  Dehan gave a humorless smile. “No argument from me on that score, Sheriff. They had a daughter together…”

  “Gimme a second and I’ll recall her name. Pretty little thing. Sweet as candy. Broke my heart to see her with them bums. Amy. Amy was her name.”

  “Amy Redfern. As I am sure you know, Sheriff, six years ago Christen and Karl Redfern were murdered…”

  His eyelids drooped slightly over his eyes and without anything in his face changing, his expression became hard.

  “I did not know that.”

  We all stared at each other for a few seconds. Then I said, “On the same night that Amy’s parents were murdered, Amy and her boyfriend disappeared. We have reason to believe that they may have been intended targets, as well as Amy’s parents, but they managed to escape in Christen’s silver Chevy Impala.” I wrote down the registration number and slid it across the desk to him. “It may have been re-registered in this state. Sheriff, we think they may have come back to Garrison to ask Ingrid for help. We think she may know where they are.”

  He spent a while nodding, with his fingers laced over his belly. After a bit, the nodding became a soft rocking motion.

  “What do you want from me?”

  Dehan said, “We need to know if that Impala came out to Garrison. If it was ever registered with Iowa plates. If so, who owns it. Locating that Impala could help us to locate Amy and Charlie.”

  “Why are you so keen to locate them? From what you’ve told me, they haven’t committed any crime.”

  I said, “Mainly because their lives could be at risk. Right now, we know there are men looking for them. We believe they are the same men who killed the Redferns. But also because, the bottom line is, we don’t know if they are alive or dead, Sheriff. That was a very brutal murder, and we don’t know if Amy was taken away and killed elsewhere, or if she managed to escape. Right now, it’s even money.”

  “How long ago you say this happened?”

  “Late September, six years ago.”

  “I’ll make some inquiries for you. Where you stayin’?”

  “The Cobblestone.”

  “You got a number I can reach you?”

  She handed him her card. As he looked at it, I said, “There is just one more thing, Sheriff. There are two men in town, driving a dark blue Audi Q7. We have reason to believe they may be looking for Amy too, and that could lead them to Ingrid…”

  “I’ll keep an eye on her. I hope you’re not bringing a lot of trouble to my burgh.”

  Dehan stood. “We appreciate your help, Sheriff. Nobody wants those kids alive and well more than we do.”

  He stood and shook our hands, but didn’t say anything.

  Outside, Dehan crossed the road and sat on the trunk of the Jag with her long legs stuck out in front of her. I leaned on the lamppost, in the shade of a cedar tree opposite, and watched her a moment. I was struck, not for the first time, by how completely unaware she was of just how good she looked, and how damn lucky I was. She raised her face to return my stare.

  “What was he hiding? Am I turning paranoid or was he hiding something?”

  “He was hiding something. But I wouldn’t read too much into that, Dehan. Like I said yesterday, these are tight communities, they look out for each other. He’ll want to talk to Ingrid before he talks to us. There is not a lot more we can do right now save wait.”

  She gave me a funny look. “Wait and think,” she said.

  I nodded. “Wait and think.”

  TEN

  We stayed in Vinton. The afternoon was warm under a blue-white, cloudless sky. We wandered among the broad streets and the two-story buildings sited so far apart you got the feeling they’d originally planned a city, but wound up with a small town and now had too much space on their hands.

  We did a lot of thinking, and occasionally we did a lot of talking, but just as we wound up walking in circles around the town, so we also ended up talking in circles, and it always came back to the same thing. I said it to Dehan as we pushed through the door of the Lotus Chinese Restaurant and sat at a table near the window.

  “What has Camacho got against Amy and Charlie?”

  She said, “Two spring rolls and chicken and cashew nuts, with vegetable rice.”

  I looked up to see the waitress standing there with two menus. “You don’t want see menu?”

  Dehan said, “No. Thanks. He’ll have two spring rolls too, and sweet and sour pork with vegetable fried rice.”

  She gave a cute smile and went away. After a moment, I heard her say something in Chinese and there was a lot of laughter in back.

  I frowned at Dehan. “I have just been verbally castrated in Chinese. Do you know how painful that is? You have destroyed my reputation as a man who wears the pants. Everywhere I go now, Chinese people will look at me askance and snigger. How did you know I wanted sweet and sour pork?”

  “Eliminate the impossible, right?”

  “It’s impossible I should want chicken and cashew nuts?”

  She continued to ignore me. “There is, realistically, a very narrow range of reasons why the Camachos should be after Amy and Charlie: they stole from them, they have information on them, or one of the gang wanted Amy and she said no.”

  I stared at the ceiling a while and she stared at the table, trying to think of another plausible reason. Then I stared at the sunny, silent street through the plate glass window. The cute waitress came back with the spring rolls and a pink sauce, grinned and said, “Enjoy!”

  When she’d left, I said, “Sex, money or power.”

  “Right. So here is what I am thinking. What did Pam tell us about Charlie? She said he was dyslexic and dyspraxic, which can mean you are awkward and socially dysfunctional, in severe cases, but it can also mean you have an above average IQ and think in unusual and original ways.” She waved her fork at me. “I have been looking into this, and I discovered that a lot of brilliant entrepreneurs are dyslexic. So let’s stop thinking about Charlie as an ineffectual nerd for a moment and start thinking about him as an entrepreneur.”

  “OK, I like this. He approaches Feliciano, who gives him the brush off, so he approaches Adolfo and Mateo, and they listen to him. They take his request to Julio and he agrees to give them a probationary deal…”

  “Good. Now it is Karl who screws up. Maybe he uses some of the merchandise instead of selling it. Adolfo and Mateo put Karl in hospital as a warning, but Charlie, as Pamela’s son—and Pamela is still valuable to them—guarantees that from now on the operation will run smoothly…”

  “And it does…” I waved my fork at her. “For the six months that Karl is in hospital. In the meantime, our dyslexic, dyspraxic, original thinking entrepreneur has opened a bank account elsewhere, with the three and a half grand he had in his account, plus whatever Amy added to that. And month by month, he starts stashing away whatever he is making from his deal with Julio Camacho….”

  “Exactly! Now, maybe he is smart enough to know that when Karl gets out of hospital he is going to screw up again, and Julio is going to go all Sinaloa on his ass, or maybe he has bigger plans. Either way, the timing fits. Karl gets out of hospital, he and Christen get murdered and Amy and Charlie disappear.”

  I ate a spring roll in silence. When I had finished, I said, “We have a very basic theory that seems to fit the basic facts, but there
are questions. For example, who killed Adolfo and Mateo down by the Fish Market? And if they were already dead, which they were, who killed Christen and Karl…?”

  She was chewing a spring roll and started smiling and nodding. I was smiling and nodding back, because we had both had the same thought. She swallowed.

  “Adolfo, Mateo and Charlie had a scam running—or at least Julio thought they had. Julio had them killed, then went after Amy and Charlie. But by the time he got to Amy’s place, they had taken the Impala and run. Karl and Christen didn’t know where, so they paid the price.”

  I ate my second spring roll, thinking it through. “It’s the first theory we have that actually seems to hang together, at least roughly. I have two big questions, though.”

  “What?”

  “What was the scam they were running for six months that Julio didn’t spot?”

  She leaned back against the red vinyl bench and wiped her mouth on a paper napkin. “I have another question. It’s related, but right now it might be more relevant.”

  “What’s that?”

  “How much could they make in six months?”

  I nodded and spread my hands. “Well, that depends on what the scam was. The most likely thing would be that they were adding a percentage to the price and creaming it off for themselves. If that’s the case, over six months it could run into hundreds of thousands of dollars. On the other hand, if they spent five months gaining his trust, and then on month six they screwed him out of a whole shipment, it could be a couple of millions or more, depending on the size of the shipment.”

  The chicken and the pork arrived.

  “Chicken cashew nuts for the lady. Sweet sour pork for the man…”

  A wink and a grin and she was off.

  “Yeah.” She gave a small, ‘that’s self-evident’ shrug. “That’s what I thought. So they are not in Vinton and they sure as hell are not in Garrison. They were passing through. They stayed with Auntie Ingrid a few days, or long enough to change the registration on the Impala, and maybe paint it another color. Then they move on somewhere where they can change their identity and spend their money.”

  I chewed on the sweet and sour pork. It was good. “Not Mexico,” I said.

  “No, not Mexico. Too many friends and relatives of the Camachos. This is good.”

  I said, “Arizona, California or Washington State.” She stuffed her mouth with food and chewed, watching my face. I went on. “I would rule Arizona out for the same reason they wouldn’t go to Mexico. Southern Cali, the same. So, for my money we are looking at San Francisco or Seattle.”

  She suddenly shook her head and flopped back in her seat. “Choomush hpekoorashum.”

  “I agree, too much speculation. But we have a shape, at least, Dehan, and that is good. It would be nice now to have some evidence to confirm that shape.”

  Right on cue, the phone rang.

  “Stone.”

  “Sheriff O’Brien here.”

  “Good afternoon, Sheriff. You have some news for us?”

  “Maybe so. You still in town?”

  “We are at the Lotus. Damn fine Chinese.”

  “It surely is. We have a nice town here... We aim to keep it that way.” He sighed, like what he was going to say would make his town less nice. “I spoke to Ingrid. She says she’s willing to talk to you again—if I’m there.”

  “She has something to say to us, then…”

  “Yup.”

  “OK, we’ll just finish up here and…”

  “Meet me at Ingrid’s place, that’s where I am now.”

  “We’re on our way.”

  Dehan was already wiping her mouth and sliding off her bench. She paid and we made our way past the Benton County Courthouse, through the gardens, to where the Jag was waiting for us. I threw Dehan the keys and she grabbed them left handed without looking. The doors slammed, the Burgundy Beast growled, and we were on our way.

  She drove without speaking. Four minutes later, we pulled up behind the sheriff’s Dodge outside Ingrid’s house and crossed the lawn to her porch. All the way I had been looking for the Q7, but I’d seen no sign of it.

  The sheriff opened the door for us as we climbed the steps to the porch.

  “She’s in the parlor.”

  She didn’t look up as we went in. I said, “Good afternoon, Miss Njalsen. It’s very kind of you to see us again.” She glanced at me from the corner of her eye, but didn’t answer.

  Dehan sat on the sofa without being invited, with her elbows on her knees and her hands clasped like she was trying to break a walnut. She smiled at Ingrid. It was a nice smile and it looked genuine.

  “Hi, Ingrid. I’m really very grateful to you. I mean that. We are actually quite worried about Charlie and Amy, and we would like to know what happened to them, if they are OK. And we think that if we can find them, they might help us to find whoever killed your sister.”

  She didn’t meet Dehan’s eye. She said to the floor, “Sheriff O’Brien already explained. You don’t need to tell me again.”

  I sat in the armchair, and O’Brien settled himself beside Dehan. “Tell them what you told me, Ingrid.”

  She spent a while looking down at her left hand, rubbing it with the thumb from her right. After a while, she said, “Amy never phoned me. None of them did. Christen was too far gone in sin. I don’t believe she even remembered she had a sister. Karl was possessed of the devil, ain’t nobody going to persuade me that wasn’t so. But Amy, she used to write me.”

  Dehan frowned. “Letters?”

  “Of course letters! What else was she going to write me? They used to come pretty regular, about once a month, just giving me the news, such as she was willing to tell it. There was things we didn’t talk about, like the drugs, but she would say to me, ‘Mom ain’t feeling so good these days…’ and I would know that she’d been taking drugs, or she had overdosed or some such. And I would tell her, ‘Well, give her my love and wish her better. I’ll say a prayer for her,’ and she would say that she prayed for her every day, and we both knew that we understood each other. She was a good, God fearing child, and God blessed us with that kind of understanding.”

  She paused, glanced a moment at the sheriff, then back at her hand.

  “So when she called me on the telephone, I knew that something was wrong.”

  She didn’t speak then for a while, until the sheriff said to her. “What did she say to you, Ingrid?”

  She shifted around in her chair a bit. Her breathing had become shallower and now there were tears in her eyes. She blew her nose before speaking again.

  “She said something bad had happened. Karl and Christen had been killed. She said she couldn’t tell me how it happened, but the police were going to be in touch with me and ask me to go to New York. She said she was on her way, with Charlie, and they wanted to stay a few days. She begged me not to tell anybody. They had taken Christen’s car, and they wanted to hide it in the garage out in the yard while they changed the registration and painted it.”

  For the first time, she looked at Dehan. “That was why I never reported the car missing in New York. I knew where it was and I didn’t want to draw attention to it, or to Amy. When I got back home, I begged her to tell me what had happened. She told me she wasn’t sure. She said Karl had got involved with some bad people, a gang. He was selling drugs or something, and he had tried to double-cross these men, and they had punished him. Killed him and…”

  There was no great display of grief, no sobbing or begging God to make it not so. She just bit her lip, kept her eyes fixed on the window and allowed her tears to flow. Her nose turned red, as did her eyes, as though she had a bad cold. She dabbed at her eyes and blew her nose, and occasionally opened her mouth to steady her breathing. But all the confusion, all the pain and the rage against a world that had robbed her of the only family she had, the only connection she had to love, all of that stayed inside. It belonged to her, and to her god, who had his own, mysterious motives for visiting
this suffering on her.

  After a while, she said, “Amy and Charlie, thank the Lord, were able to get away with the car, and make it to Garrison without the gang finding them. Otherwise they might have killed her too.”

  Dehan asked, “How long did they stay here, Ingrid?”

  “Just a couple of weeks. They never went out, and they kept the car in the garage. I know some of the neighbors saw them, but nobody minds nobody’s business in Garrison ’cept his own. They’re good folk.”

  She paused. Nobody spoke. Outside, a truck rattled by and faded, leaving eddies of silence in its wake. She took another deep breath. “Then they left. They left late at night, when no one would see them. She said they was headed south, but they wouldn’t tell me where, for my own safety, they said. They told me they’d be in touch when it was all over, but I never heard from them again.”

  Dehan sighed. I knew how she felt. If this was it, it did little more than confirm some of our theory, but not much. Above all, it didn’t tell us where they were.

  “Ingrid, did they say anything at all about the gang who murdered your sister? Is there anything they said, however irrelevant it may seem, that you can tell us?”

  She thought for a while. “There were names that they repeated a few times. Adolfo and Mat, I got the impression they were friends. They usually mentioned them together. And sometimes they mentioned Felix. I got the feeling he was important, a friend of Charlie’s mom.”

  Dehan chewed her lip at me and I asked, “Did you, while they were here, form any kind of idea, or suspicion, about where they might have been headed? Did they mention any towns, locations, anything at all that might…”