by Susan Dunlap
“Uh-huh. He’s the first thing you didn’t tell me about in that room. You say you were hired to find him, huh?”
“You want to see my private investigator’s license?”
“Yeah, yours and his.”
“He doesn’t have one; he works for me.”
Faye assessed Tchernak and settled her gaze back on Kiernan. “I’m holding my judgment on you two. Get your employee out of the way. The both of you, move back. Go on.”
Kiernan jumped in front of the door. “Faye, look through the door first. You know how long we’ve been here. There’s no way we could have done that kind of damage to the room. There’s blood all over. We didn’t create that. Grady’s got a bullet hole in his head. If one of us killed him, would we be standing here unarmed? Think before you endanger yourself.”
“Move, lady!”
Kiernan stepped outside and motioned Tchernak to follow.
A foot inside the door Faye stopped dead. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” She backed out, turned to lean against the motel wall, then jerked away as if it, too, was contaminated. The color was gone from her face, and her apricot hair made her look clownlike. But she held the automatic steady.
Kiernan knew better than to reach out a comforting hand, even if that hand had not been medically questionable. Faye was the kind of woman with whom you didn’t show softness. With her the battle of wills would be eternal. “Faye, why don’t we go inside the cafe. Nothing more is going to happen to Grady, and Tchernak and I aren’t going to run off.” She eyed Tchernak and he nodded back: the proprietress of the only all-night cafe in the area was too good a source to pass up. As an ally she could be invaluable, as an enemy treacherous; and another enemy in this dark, arid land they didn’t need.
Faye glanced toward the cafe, turned back to Grady’s room, and was almost through the doorway again when she clutched her mouth, turned, and ran for the parking lot.
“Tchernak,” Kiernan whispered, “we’re not going to get another chance. What’ve you got?”
“Let’s see. Louisa Larson. Office in a pretty shabby area, but she drives a blue BMW. Grady flew in from Panama City a week ago Friday. But he had a hotel receipt from down there for Tuesday night His predecessor, Ross Estes, was killed down there three months ago. Last people Estes was seen with were Nihonco reps.”
“Nihonco?”
“Japanese oil company.”
“Whew! Was Grady selling out Adcock?”
“Could be. Adcock’s hocked to the earlobes. And the two boys—”
“Where are those boys?” Faye emerged from behind the gold Jeep, still pale. The gun was now loose in her hand. “Grady said they were too sick to travel. Where are they? Who took them?”
“What makes you think they didn’t shoot Grady and light off on foot?” Tchernak asked.
“Too sick. That blood in there, if it’s not Grady’s, it’s theirs. Grady kept saying they had the flu, but I knew better. You don’t bleed all the hell over with the flu.”
“Did you call a doctor?”
“Didn’t have to.” Her hands were on her hips and she was nodding up at Tchernak. Chalk up another for his masculine appeal, Kiernan thought as she eased herself into the shadow and tried vainly to get her turtleneck tighter around her icy shoulders.
“Grady called Tremaine. Came into the cafe to use the pay phone—we don’t have phones in the rooms. Thought he was being smart. Waited till I was busy with a party of four.”
“So how do you know?” Tchernak’s tone was almost baiting.
“How’d I know? Redial. It’s not marked, but it’s on the phone. Come in handy more than once.”
“Did Grady call about the boys’ being sick?” Tchernak asked.
Faye shrugged. “Redial only tells where, not what.”
“Did the doctor come?”
“Not as I saw.”
“Faye,” Kiernan said, starting toward the cafe, “when did Grady make that call to Tremaine?”
“Soon as he checked in.”
“And he didn’t call again?”
“Nope. No calls to no one.”
“And the boys didn’t get better?”
“Not as I could see. Looked worse to me. But I wasn’t in the room. I don’t go in my guests’ rooms, not ’less I need to. Makes it easier all around. But I’ll tell you, I was tempted here. ‘Tomorrow,’ I told myself. ‘If those kids aren’t better by tomorrow, I’m going in.’”
Kiernan nodded, wondering what tomorrow would have brought—the doctor or chance at another tomorrow. If the boys lived that long. “Faye, who is it you think shot Grady?”’
“His girlfriend.”
“Louisa?” Tchernak said, moving in beside her.
“Oh, so he’s got more’n one. Can’t say that surprises me. I know men—see enough of ’em shacking up here—and Grady was too much a charmer for his own good. They only stopped for bottled water and picnic sandwiches—”
“When was that?”
“Sunday morning, ’bout ten. Before the after-church crowd.” Tchernak opened the glass door. Kiernan followed Faye inside through an almost visible curtain of grease. She didn’t turn to see Tchernak’s appalled expression, but Faye read it. “Yeah, mister, we get the after-church trade. May not look like much, but I’m a damned good cook” She moved protectively behind the counter and began wiping the Formica.
The cafe probably sat fifty at the tables or the booths by the windows. Now it was empty but for two egg-caked plates and stained mugs on the counter. In one sweeping motion Faye moved them into the dishpan and pocketed the dollar-fifty tip. Somewhere beyond her a refrigerator rumbled.
“You said the girlfriend’s name was not Louisa. What was it?” Kiernan asked.
“Irene. I remember because it’s such an old-fashioned name. But maybe that’s only in the Anglo world.”
“Irene was Hispanic?”
“Looked it. But she was dressed American, and by the sound of her, she could have been from Iowa City.”
“Wearing jeans? Nails polished a pale peach color?” In her mind Kiernan could see those manicured nails with skin grotesquely swollen around them.
Faye nodded so matter-of-factly that Kiernan had to remind herself that she had seen a normal, healthy woman with forty, maybe fifty years to live, a woman who had stood by this counter and assumed that her biggest danger was buying the wrong chocolate bar.
Faye squeezed out the rag and tossed it by the sink. “I’ll tell you, she had Grady pegged. She was already pissed.”
“About?”
“Time. She was carrying on to get him to hurry. You know the kind of thing you make a fuss about when it’s not the real issue. What the real issue was I couldn’t tell you.” She stopped and her face puckered as if she realized the ominous implications for Irene. “Is she the one who sent you? You a friend of hers maybe?”
Kiernan shook her head. Irene could have used a friend. Grady Hummacher might have seemed like a friend, but he watched her get sick, dumped her off at the morgue, and called Jeff just once to find out what happened. Some friend. Jeff must have told him the disease’s progress, and Grady would have recognized the increasingly ominous symptoms in the boys. But he didn’t gas up the car and drive like crazy to Vegas or Reno or even St. George, Utah. He didn’t even call Tremaine back. Grady Hummacher sat in his motel room and watched the boys dying. What kind of man was he? She shot an accusatory glance at Tchernak, but if Tchernak felt guilt by association, he wasn’t showing it. He’d only said he’d known Hummacher; he hadn’t said how well. And what about Jeff Tremaine? How, she wondered, did Grady Hummacher even know Tremaine?
But Faye’s focus was still on Irene. “Where is she?” Faye insisted. “She didn’t take those boys, that I can tell you, and she didn’t look like a woman aiming to go on a picnic in the park. I know people, and she wasn’t a woman all het up about kids, particularly those kids. I’d give you odds Grady never told her he was bringing them along on their date. You can see why she
was pissed.”
She couldn’t let Faye go on ignorant of the truth, not if she planned for her to be an ally. “Faye, Irene is dead. She was dead before Grady was shot.”
“Was she shot too?”
“Disease.”
“What the boys had?” Faye asked slowly, as if keeping herself at arm’s length from the words.
“Could be.”
Faye looked slowly around the room. She had the look of a woman who had held herself together as long as she could and was fading fast. “I’ll have to fumigate, the whole place. Be closed days for that—all today, and Wednesday too. Have to call”—she held up fingers on which to enumerate—“Tri-City Committee, before they head out of their meeting. Ministers’ group. Wednesday. Tell the Carson Clubbers to head out to Vegas from somewhere else.”
Kiernan was about to ask if the groups actually met in the cafe or just ate pie afterward. But Tchernak’s announcement stopped her. “Carson Club,” he said. “Grady Hummacher was a member of that.”
Faye nodded, and glanced into the dark where the highway lay. In the silence that surrounded her hesitation, the growl of an approaching engine seemed to startle her out of her I-know-people persona. “Could be,” she muttered, more to the window than to Tchernak.
The engine sounded smooth, tuned, powerful. Kiernan didn’t have to look to guess who was driving. “You called the sheriff before you came out, right?”
Faye shrugged. “What did you think—I’d let you just drive off into the night?”
Right, what did she think? “Come on, Tchernak.” She strode out the cafe door into the darkness that in a minute would be filled with pulsing red lights. Faye didn’t follow. She had done her job.
“Tchernak, Jeff Tremaine was a member of the Carson Club.”
“That could be how Grady knew him.”
“Exactly. So, try this. Irene gets sick on their picnic, too sick to drive three hours back to Vegas. Grady calls Jeff and leaves her with him.”
“And flies off to Panama and back.”
“What that means is the call Grady made to Jeff Tremaine wasn’t about the boys at all. It was about Irene.”
“Sure. If he was worried about the boys, he’d have taken them to the doctor’s office. Obviously he knew where it was.” Tchernak hesitated. “So why didn’t he?”
“That’s the question. Because Jeff told him Irene was dead? Because Jeff panicked?”
“Or because Grady had some other plan for the boys when he brought them up here.”
Kiernan nodded, impressed. “Maybe so.” The patrol car was pulling up at the cafe. She stepped into the shadows and passed Tchernak her cell phone. “You said Grady arrived in Vegas a week ago Friday, was up here Sunday and back in Panama City Tuesday night. By Friday Adcock’s so pushed out of shape about it he calls me and hires you. The questions are: why did Grady do an overnight trip, and why not on a commercial flight? Was he on a Nihonco charter? I’ll keep the sheriff busy.”
“Kiernan, I’ll take him—”
“Right, and leave me to try to get something out of Persis? I’m better off with the sheriff. Go!”
She made it to Grady Hummacher’s doorway moments before the sheriff slammed on his brakes.
CHAPTER 45
SHERIFF FOX SHOT OUT of his car and planted his ursine form in front of her. “Ms. O’Shaughnessy, you’re under arrest.”
She couldn’t afford to be locked up somewhere while the virus spread—maybe through Tchernak, herself, and who knew who else. But the last thing she’d tell Fox was that she’d been exposed. “Sheriff, Grady Hummacher was dead when I got here.”
“Under arrest,” he repeated, shouting over the whine of the gusting wind, “for breaking and entering the mortuary. What you’ve been up to here I’ll deal with later.”
From nearer the cafe behind her she could hear a soft groan, Tchernak’s shorthand for No taunting! No speeding! No defenestration! She should be so lucky as to defenestrate! And as she would remind him if they made it out of Nevada alive, she wasn’t diverting Fox just so Tchernak could spend the time critiquing her performance. If he didn’t get through to BakDat, they were going to be running blind. “What proof do you have, Sheriff?”
“Fingerprints, for starters.”
“Of course my prints are there, I was in the mortuary for an hour this afternoon. That’s no proof.”
“Hmm. Are you a lawyer, too, besides being a doctor and a detective? No? Well, then, we’ll leave this question to the D.A.” He turned to the patrol car and held out a thick arm. “In the meantime be my guest. Hands against the car.”
“Why don’t you charge me with breaking into the saloon too? My fingerprints are there. And in your jail.”
“You won’t have to break into the jail. This stay’s on me.”
She took a step toward him, hands planted on hips. “This is the United States, Fox. We don’t do guilty until proved innocent here. You’re talking false arrest.”
“Hands against the car, miss.”
“I need to speak to my lawyer.”
From the shadows a form started forward. Tchernak. Racing in to protect his quarterback. She turned quickly and started into the parking lot.
Before Fox could grab her or Tchernak reveal himself, three dark cars cut into the parking area, tires screeching. They slammed to a stop in a row next to Fox’s. “Stay where you are,” Fox hissed at her as he strode toward the cars.
She shot a glance at Tchernak as he slipped back into the shadows. Did “buying time” mean nothing to him? The only reason he wasn’t right here with his big hands on the car next to hers was Fox’s lack of manpower. Now, with the arrival of three deputies, Tchernak’s future freedom was limited to seconds. He didn’t have time to dial Persis much less hear her answers.
Deputy Potter hauled himself out of the nearest car and opened the door for Jeff Tremaine.
Kiernan’s breath caught. The door Jeff had emerged from was the patrol car’s back door—the cage. Connie had been right—Jeff was a prisoner.
“Ah, Jeff,” Fox said, making no move toward him but signaling one deputy to circle the lot while the other one waited. “Tell me now, did you invite Ms. O’Shaughnessy to break the airshaft window and let herself into the mortuary tonight?”
The wind was flapping Tremaine’s short sandy hair, and it was a moment before Kiernan realized he was shaking his head no—and avoiding her gaze. He turned toward the motel room, his back to her now. “Which room is the death scene?”
Where had she heard that wooden tone before? It was a moment before she recalled coming up behind him on the ward in Africa as he was assuring a terrified shopkeeper that his fever just seemed like Lassa. Two days later the man was dead.
She watched as Jeff walked to Grady’s room, his movements as lifeless as his voice. His slumped back revealed no jerking in shock; he gave no audible gasp of horror.
Fox turned his attention to her. “Potter, pat her down and put ’er in the cage.”
Kiernan turned away from the death scene and positioned her hands on the patrol car roof. It wouldn’t be a new procedure for her. And Potter, while not swift, seemed less intrusive than some as he ran his hands down her legs. He stood, gave a weary sigh, and opened Fox’s back door. “Okay, miss, you know the routine.”
“Yeah, but not before I use the bathroom. That’s what I drove in to the cafe for half an hour ago and I still haven’t had a chance.”
“I don’t know. Sheriff? She wants to pee.”
Fox stuck his head out of the bloody motel room. His face looked not the green she might have expected but merely scrunched in irritation. “What? You looking for another back window? Yeah, I know about that trick in the saloon.”
“Sheriff, this is a legitimate request.”
“Yeah, right. Okay. Go. Potter will be right outside. No, wait. Potter, come in here with O’Keefe and keep an eye on the scene. I’ll take her. She clean?”
“Yeah, nothing on her. Probably all in tha
t fanny pack.”
Fox held out a hand, and with a sigh she gave him the pack. Her Swiss Army knife was not going to cut her out of here or uncork the identity of Grady’s killer, but the loss of it underlined just how helpless she was.
“I could have left it with you, for all the good it’ll do you,” Fox said as he tossed it in the front seat.
“Yeah, you could have been the Dalai Lama too.” She jammed her hands into her jacket pockets and headed to the cafe.
He chugged after her and she couldn’t tell whether the gurgle of breath from him was a snort or just a sign of poor fitness. He moved in front of her. “I’m not even going to watch the Ladies’ door. Go ahead out the window if you want. Walk as far as you want across the desert in any direction. But, word of advice, take a good long drink before you do.”
“You major in sarcasm at the sheriff’s academy?”
“Sheriff,” a deputy called. “I found this guy out back.”
“Kiernan!” Tchernak loped toward her and had his arms around her before his keeper changed gears. “Left Persis a message,” he whispered, slipping the phone into her pocket.
“Hey, cut that out right now.”
“It’s okay, Sheriff,” Tchernak said, “I’m her partner.”
Fox shook his head. “Don’t expect that to be a plus, fellow. Okay, Cioffi, put him in the cage.”
“Yessir.”
Kiernan was already at the cafe door. Inside, Faye stood behind the counter like an admiral on the bridge. Kiernan veered left into the Ladies’, and sighed at the age-stained yellow walls, speckled brown linoleum, and counter scoured down to the metal. The single window was large and low. A rhinoceros could have walked through it. But Sheriff Fox was right, the Doll’s House was a landlocked Devil’s Island, and all she’d get for her defenestration would be dehydrated. She used the toilet, then unfolded the little phone, hit Redial, and listened with relief as long distance beeped its way to California.
“BakDat.”
“Persis. Did you get Tchernak’s message?”
“Who’s this?”
“Kiernan O’Shaughnessy.” As if you didn’t know.
