Crimson Lake Road (Desert Plains)

by Victor Methos

  “No.”

  “How exactly is my appraiser supposed to appraise without the paintings?”

  “I’ll take him to them, and he can spend as much time as he needs with them.”

  He sighed and watched her a moment. “They’re in that car you parked two blocks north, aren’t they?”

  Tara didn’t reply.

  Vasili chuckled. “Little girl, I’ve been doing this since before you were born. You really are in a world you don’t understand. How did you even know how to reach me in the first place?”

  She didn’t say anything.

  “Hmm. I suppose it doesn’t matter.” He picked up the cigarette again. “Here’s what’s going to happen . . .”

  Two other men came out of the bedroom, both large, one of them with tattoos going up and down his forearms. A spiderweb on his elbow. Tara watched them as she heard the door shut behind her. The guard had locked them inside.

  Vasili inhaled a puff of smoke and let it out through his nose. “Well, I should warn you, you’re not going to like this part.”

  60

  The halfway house was a nondescript brick building by a park used as a campground for the homeless. Dim shapes of tents were haphazardly spread across the grass in the darkness.

  “I don’t remember this many tents here,” Yardley said.

  “Been an uptick of homeless the past couple years,” Baldwin said as he parked. “Don’t know why they come to Vegas. Hot as shit and we have terrible services.”

  The building had a statue out front, a male in the classical Greek style. His nose was missing, and the rest of him was covered in graffiti.

  There was no key-code entry, so they just went inside. The hallways smelled of mildew and were dimly lit. Dirty floors with a thin red carpet.

  At apartment A8, Baldwin knocked. Yardley folded her arms as she leaned against the opposite wall. He knocked again, this time louder. She heard the sound of a lock slipping out of place, and the door opened. A thin, sickly-looking man appeared at the door. When he saw Baldwin, his eyes went wide.

  “What the hell you doin’ here?”

  “Easy, Leonard. Just want to talk.”

  “I don’t wanna talk. I said I wanted to be kept out of it, damn it. So you can just go to hell.”

  Baldwin put his foot in front of the door as Leonard tried to shut it. Then he took out five twenties from his wallet. Leonard looked at the money and then to Baldwin. He took the cash and let them inside.

  The apartment was sparse and had only wicker furniture. A desk was pushed up against a wall, but there were no books or papers. Just some marijuana spread out on the desktop with a scale and pipes surrounding it.

  “So?” Leonard said. “What the hell you want?”

  “Leonard, my name is Jessica Yardley. I’m with the District Attorney’s Office. I’m helping with the disappearance of Harmony Pharr.”

  He glanced around nervously and shifted from foot to foot. He wouldn’t look her in the eyes. “I already told this one here everything I know. You want more, you talk to him.”

  She put on her best warm smile. “Agent Baldwin, would you mind if he and I spoke in private?”

  “Yeah, I mind,” Baldwin said, surprised. “I’m not leaving you alone with him.”

  “It’s okay,” she said. “Leonard’s not a threat. I can tell. Please.”

  Baldwin glanced between the two of them. “I’ll be in the hall.”

  Once the door was shut, Yardley took a casual stroll around the living room, looking at what few decorations there were. One poster of Iggy Pop caught her attention, the image taken live at a concert.

  “I wanted him to leave because he’s law enforcement. He’s a cop. I’m not a cop.”

  “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “Agent Baldwin told me about your meeting.”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “It seemed strange to me that you called and asked the detective to meet you, but you never said anything about money up front.”

  He shrugged. “Thought they’d say yes if I asked them in person.”

  “But the thing is, you didn’t know if they’d have money with them, did you? Or that they wouldn’t just arrest you? Why chance it? Every time a confidential informant has called into my office, the first thing they ask about is the money because they know we pay for good information. They work that out completely in detail before they offer anything.” She took a step toward him. “It’s odd that you didn’t care.”

  “So what?”

  She took another step forward, dipping her head to catch his gaze and then straightening up so they were face to face. “I think someone told you to make that call, didn’t they?”

  “No.”

  “Leonard, this is not the kind of attention you want. Trust me. I don’t have to tell you all the things I could do to you if you don’t help me. I think you’re smart enough to know that we will be watching you for weeks, if not months. Everything you do, every purchase you make, every outing you go on, every time you go into or out of work, someone will be there watching you. Any little infraction on your part, and we’ll swoop in and violate your parole and you can serve out the rest of that twenty-year sentence you received for dealing.”

  He swallowed and shifted from foot to foot again. “I want you to leave now.”

  “No, but I do have a suggestion for what comes next. I have a hundred dollars with me. I’m going to give you that hundred dollars, and you’re going to tell me who it was that told you to call in with that story and why. Or you’re going to ask me to leave again. In which case I’m going to go out into that hall and tell Agent Baldwin that I think you kidnapped Harmony Pharr.”

  “What! That’s bullshit. I ain’t done nothing.”

  “Then prove it. Who told you to make that call?”

  She waited a beat, and silence passed between them. He wouldn’t look her in the eyes, but suddenly his posture changed. His shoulders slumped forward, and his chest didn’t puff out quite as much.

  “It was, um, just some guy.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know who it was,” he mumbled. “He came into the bar one night. Henry’s. Asked if I wanted to make five hundred bucks.”

  “Doing what?”

  “He said I needed to call a cop and tell them I seen a guy with some missing girl. I told him I didn’t want any part of that.” He glanced at her and then sat down on the wicker couch and stared at the floor. “So then he said he’d make it a thousand.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I just went out on my phone and left a message for the detective. He said I had to do it again until she answered. So he came back another day. He knew where I lived. I don’t know how. But he knocked and he made me call. When she said she wanted to meet, I said no, but he told me I had to do it.” He swallowed. “He’d been friendly up till then, but he didn’t seem friendly no more. I think he coulda hurt me.” He took a deep breath. “So I called, and then I went down and told ’em what he told me to say. The two hundred was just to, I dunno, get a little something extra.”

  Yardley considered what to do next. If she showed him pictures of their suspects, the identification could be tainted because it wasn’t done in a lineup. But she also couldn’t wait. Harmony Pharr was still out there somewhere, and Yardley had no idea how long the Executioner would keep her alive.

  She took out her phone and pulled up a picture of Michael Zachary.

  “Ever seen him before?”

  “No.”

  She pulled up a photo of Tucker Pharr. “Was it him you spoke with?”

  “No.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Positive. He was a white guy, but that wasn’t him.”

  Yardley thought a moment. “Did you see what he drove?”

  “No. Told me his name was Don, that’s it.”

  “Did he say anything else to you?”

  “No.”

  “And you didn’t ask?”


  He folded his arms. “I figured the less I knew, the better. Thousand bucks is two months’ rent for me.”

  She nodded, her eyes narrowing on him a little. “That girl is fourteen years old, and she’s been missing for weeks.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “You mean you didn’t want to know.” Yardley glanced at the poster again. “Stay here. I’m going to get a sketch artist out tonight.”

  She went into the hall and told Baldwin what had happened.

  “Shit,” he said. “So either Zachary is working with someone we don’t know, or he’s telling the truth and he had nothing to do with all this.” He shook his head. “What a shitshow they’ve turned this into. If Jax and Lieu had just let us work this from the beginning without getting involved—”

  “We might still be right where we are. We don’t know.” She bit her thumbnail as she paced the hallway. “It’s Sarpong. Those paintings weren’t chosen randomly; they mean something, and we don’t know what. If we can figure it out, we’ll find him.”

  “Maybe. Or maybe he chose them precisely because he knew we’d think they meant something.”

  She kept pacing. “You’re supposed to testify again tomorrow. I can’t let you up there.”

  “Sure you can. You just gotta disclose this to the defense.”

  She shook her head. “Aster’ll tear us apart, and if Zachary is one of the people involved, he’ll walk. I need to delay the trial.”

  “How?”

  “I’ll worry about that. Can you get a sketch artist out here?”

  “Might take a few hours to find one, but yeah, I think we can drum one up.”

  “I’ll let you know about court as soon as I find out,” she said, turning to leave.

  “You don’t have your car.”

  “I’ll call an Uber.”

  As she was heading out of the building, her phone rang. It was Jude Chance.

  “Hey,” she said. “Little busy right now. Can I call you back?”

  “You owe me an update, J.”

  “Haven’t you been following the trial? There’s been plenty of journalists in court acting like they’re not journalists.”

  “No, I can’t do that. Weston knows my face too well. That’s why I need an update. I’m selling a piece to the Tribune in two days.”

  She let out a long breath as she stood on the sidewalk. “Off the record for now?”

  “Okay . . . for now.”

  “There might be a witness. That’s all I can say right now.”

  “Witness that saw the Executioner?”

  “That’s all I’m saying. I promise you, as soon as I have more, you’ll be the first to hear it.”

  “Huh. That’s crazy. Well, all right, I’ll trust you. Don’t screw me on this, J.”

  “I won’t.”

  “And hey—gimme a call anytime. I’m a night owl.”

  Yardley got an Uber to take her home so she could get her own car, then called Dylan Aster.

  “Hello?”

  “Hey, it’s Jessica. We need to talk.”

  61

  The four men stood motionless while staring at her. Tara could feel their eyes on her. She glanced from one to the other and was acutely aware that the one behind her had taken a step closer. Her hands slowly went into her pockets, and she didn’t move.

  “Hand your keys over,” Vasili said.

  “Is the money here?”

  He glanced to the guard behind her. “I don’t think you understand what’s going on here. Give me the keys and maybe we let you go. Or maybe I let my boys here pass you around and then put a bullet in your head. I haven’t decided yet. How cooperative you are right now is going to make that decision for me.”

  Tara’s gaze didn’t waver from his. “You keep scratching your arm. Are you itchy?”

  “What?”

  “Your arm. You’ve scratched it four times since I’ve been here. One of your men keeps scratching his neck and the other one his fingers. I’ll bet the one behind me is scratching somewhere, too. Probably right now.”

  Vasili said nothing, his eyes narrowing on her.

  “Have you ever heard of batrachotoxin? It’s an amazing poison. It comes from one species of frog, Phyllobates terribilis. Some of the native tribes in western Colombia put the frogs near a fire to make them sweat and then scrape the poison onto their arrows. It kills their prey almost instantly. Poisons have a numeric value on what’s called the lethal dose scale. It has one of the smallest LD values in the world. Just two micrograms can kill an adult human. About two grains of table salt.”

  The man behind her took a step forward, and Tara quickly moved out of the way. She continued speaking as she backed up near the wall.

  “What’s really interesting about batrachotoxin is that you can make it into a spray form and spray it onto surfaces. It has a half-life of dozens of hours. So if anyone were to spray it on, say, a bunch of doorknobs and the arms to an office chair, just touching them even for a moment would get the skin to absorb the toxin. First it causes itching as the sodium ion channels in your muscles and nerves can’t close. After the itching come the convulsions, and then paralysis. It’s really slow, actually. It starts in your feet and works its way up, and you just have to sit there and wait while you feel it crawling up your body.”

  Vasili’s eyes were wide now, as were the other men’s. They were watching him, trying to figure out what to do. One of the men scratched his arm and the other his neck. The large bodyguard took a step forward to grab her, and Tara quickly said, “I have an antidote.”

  The men froze.

  “I want the money. You can have the paintings and the antidote, and we’ll each go on our merry way.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “It’s possible. It’s also possible I’m telling the truth and you have”—she took out her phone and looked at the clock—“about an hour to live. Breathing should already be getting more difficult, and twenty minutes from now you’ll break out into violent convulsions. Then the paralysis will start with your feet and work its way up. When it gets to your lungs, you’ll suffocate to death. By then there’s nothing you can do. You need the antidote within the first few hours of exposure, or it’s useless.”

  The men looked at each other. She saw something she had been waiting for just then: the first hint of true fear. It wasn’t from Vasili or the bodyguard but from one of the other two men. He was sweating, and he kept swallowing, as though testing whether he still could.

  He was slowly becoming crippled by fear, and panic wouldn’t be far behind.

  “Where’s the money?” she said.

  “You’re not getting a cent.”

  “Then you’re all going to die.”

  Vasili took out a handgun he had tucked in his waistband and put it on the desk. “If we die, you die with us.”

  He gestured with his head to the guard, who moved toward Tara to grab her. She reached underneath her hoodie and withdrew a silver canister and held it low, waiting for the guard to get a little closer.

  Someone knocked on the door, and they all froze.

  62

  Aster lived in a plain one-story house on the outskirts of the city, in a small town Yardley had only driven through. She noticed toys out on the front lawn but didn’t remember him having children. The front door was open but the screen door locked. He was sitting on a couch and came and opened it for her.

  “Find it okay?”

  “Took a few wrong turns. It’s not on Google Maps.”

  “It’s unincorporated territory, so they don’t come out here. Want something to drink?”

  “I’m fine, thank you.”

  The home was small and clean. She saw a few drawings up on the mantel, one of them a child’s handprint in paint on a white plate.

  “I didn’t know you had kids.”

  “I don’t. It’s my little sister’s. I live here with her and my mama.”

  She glanced at a photograph on the side table of Aster wit
h a young girl and an older woman. “I wouldn’t have expected all this. You seem like a big-city person to me.”

  He sat down where he’d been on the couch, and she sat on a love seat. The magazines on the coffee table were all legal journals.

  “My mama’s really ill. Has been for a long time, so I asked her and Markie to move in with me so I could look after them.” He turned the television off. “It’s late, Jess. What did you need to talk about?”

  She took a quick breath as though building up her courage to jump off a cliff. “I need to postpone the trial.”

  “Postpone? We’re almost through.”

  “I need to take a recess. A few days, maybe.”

  “What? I’m in the middle of crossing your primary LEO. No way.”

  She leaned forward, placing her elbows on her knees. “The girl, Harmony Pharr, we have a lead on her. It’s the closest we’ve come to finding out where she is, and if I don’t move fast with all this, we’ll lose it.”

  “What lead?”

  “A man claimed to have seen her. When Agent Baldwin and myself confronted this man, he admitted that someone had paid him to call into the police and say that. We believe whoever paid him, if he’s telling the truth, is the man who kidnapped Harmony Pharr and now wants us to believe she ran away willingly.”

  Aster leaned forward now, excitement clearly written on his face. “And he’s the one who killed Kathy Pharr and tried to kill Angela River.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe they worked together, maybe it’s a coincidence, or maybe Michael Zachary isn’t to blame. I don’t know. But what I do know is that I won’t have an answer until I follow this through.”

  He thought a moment, then lifted a beer and took a swig. “Three days?”

  “I think that’ll be enough.”

  “Let the doc out while you’re investigating.”

  “You know I can’t do that.”

  “How about this, then: I’ll stipulate to continue the trial three days, but if it goes past that, you have to stipulate to bail. Take it or leave it. If you don’t agree, the first thing I’m going to do tomorrow is cross Baldwin on the kidnapping of Harmony Pharr, and then I’m subpoenaing your man to tell the jury what you just told me.”