Snake in the Glass

by Sarah Atwell

  Past Winkelman the road branched again, and we passed quickly through Christmas, hitting a long empty patch before Route 77 dead-ended at Route 70. To our east lay the aptly named town of Peridot and the San Carlos Reservation, including the Apache Gold Casino. Even I could tell that the land in that direction rose higher: the mesa, I assumed.

  A few miles later we came to the casino complex. Signs advertised the golf course, which I found slightly bizarre, since I knew how much water it would take to maintain anything like grass out here. The casino building itself was a low blocky building incongruously surrounded by palm trees; the parking lot surrounding it was well filled, although the majority of the spaces were occupied by not-new sedans and a scattering of pickup trucks.

  I had visited one or two casinos around Tucson, out of curiosity, and this looked no different. I knew that stepping inside would be like entering a different universe, one filled with artificial light and noise; one that deliberately cut hapless visitors off from the real world and tried to keep them trapped in the crazy world of slots and tables, where they were supposed to become so mesmerized that they emptied their pockets. It was interesting to me as a phenomenon, but I had no desire to participate.

  “Frank, you want to go in?”

  “Why not?”

  I eyed him dubiously. “You know, we aren’t authorized to ask questions. We don’t have pictures of any of the people involved. What can we accomplish?”

  “Ah, Em—I just want to get the lay of the land. Get a sense of how busy it is, and how much someone like Alex would have stuck out. Can you handle that?”

  “I guess.” Not my favorite idea, but Frank seemed to have pretty good instincts, and he’d probably have better luck worming information out of people than I would.

  We entered the casino and were greeted by the noise and lights that I’d expected. Frank headed toward the bar while I drifted among the infernal machines. Next time I looked toward Frank, he was deep in conversation with a guy who looked to be Native American. I took a look at my cash supply, then headed for a nickel slot. If I hit a jackpot, would that use up all my luck for the day?

  I didn’t. I kept feeding nickels into the silly machine and pushing buttons without even thinking, and had managed not to lose all of the five dollars I had set as my limit when Frank popped up next to me. I was happy to quit. “Anything?” I asked.

  “Said Alex was a regular, and wasn’t a big loser. Came in with a woman now and then. He didn’t remember Denis.”

  “Well, at least some small part of Denis’s story is true. Did he say if it was one woman or a whole raft of them?”

  “We didn’t get into details, but I gather it was only the one.”

  “Huh.” That didn’t add much to our treasure trove of knowledge, except that now we had an unknown woman in the mix.

  We were on our way to the door—if we could find it through the maze of machines—when I noticed another man behind the bar. I nudged Frank. “Is he the one you talked to?” I asked, pointing.

  “No. Looks like he just came on.”

  “He’s the guy we saw at the Gem Show, talking with the owners of the San Carlos peridot booth, isn’t he?”

  Frank squinted. “You’re right. Interesting.”

  We started to head in the man’s direction, but just as we did, he slipped through a door marked “Employees Only.” After ten minutes, he still hadn’t reemerged.

  I wasn’t sure what we hoped to accomplish even if we did talk to him. What were we supposed to ask? Who are you, and why do we keep running into you? “Well, this seems like a bust. Shall we go now?” I asked Frank. “I want to get back to looking for Cam.”

  “Fine by me. Me, I know rocks, so let’s keep looking at rocks. You know anyone who’d give us a guided tour of the reservation?”

  “No such luck. But let’s find a place to sit down and make a plan.” Anyplace but here—I couldn’t think in the casino, with all the lights and noise.

  “Sounds good to me.”

  I drove back toward Globe. The main street was lined with one- and two-story buildings that in a perverse way reminded me of the small New Jersey town I had grown up in, though the street itself was at least twice as wide, and New Jersey didn’t have mountains like these in the background. We settled on a nondescript diner, and Frank and I snagged a corner booth where he could spread out his maps. We ordered sandwiches and coffee, and then we huddled over the maps.

  Frank lined up the printouts he had made of the geological maps alongside the roughly outlined property maps. I’m glad he was handling this, because I would have been lost on paper, not to mention the sites themselves. “What do you see?” I asked.

  “Okay, here”—Frank stabbed at the map with a pencil—“here, and maybe here, you’ve got what might be basaltic intrusions, places you’re most likely to find peridot. If you look at the topographic maps, you can see which way the gullies run, so we might also look at the downstream bits, where stones might have washed out.”

  I studied the maps. “That’s still a lot of territory.”

  “It is. Nobody said this’d be easy.”

  Our sandwiches arrived and we took a moment to refuel. When we’d taken the edge off our hunger, I asked, “So what do we do now? Call in helicopters? Guys on horseback? What?”

  “Impatient, aren’t you?” Frank grinned at me.

  “Shouldn’t I be? Cam may be out there, in trouble.” His grin vanished. “Sorry, Em—you’re right. But we’ve hardly given your Matt time enough to rally his troops for a full search. Which means we’re on our own. There are a couple of sites that look likely, and there are roads, if only bad ones, leading to them. If your brother doesn’t have an ATV, I’d wager he didn’t go far from a road. It’s a start, isn’t it?”

  Frank looked so enthusiastic that I didn’t have the heart to discourage him. One discouraged person at the table was plenty. The two of us hunting through how much desert? Yet we were it. My watch told me it was just noon, and if we were going to do any searching it would have to be before dark, which gave us maybe five hours.

  “Where to first?”

  Chapter 21

  Holding a peridot under the tongue was said to reduce the thirst of a person suffering from fever.

  After our lunch, equipped with a couple of bottles of water and a full tank of a gas, Frank and I set off to retrace our steps along the mostly empty highway. Frank was intent and focused, and every few miles he would point to a small road running off perpendicular to the highway. I would turn and follow the road for as long as I could. Some petered out to sand after a mile or two, and I figured if I couldn’t make it any further, neither could most people without an ATV. Cam’s middle-aged car certainly couldn’t have handled them.

  After the fifth or sixth try, the sun was low in the sky. I stopped at the end of yet another nowhere road, turned off the engine, and got out of the car. I guess I’d been clutching the steering wheel hard, because my neck was stiff. It felt good to be standing in the open air—but that just drove home how futile our task was. We were very small, and the desert was very big. I wrestled with a wave of despair.

  “Frank, are we crazy to think we can find anything at all out here?”

  Frank was scanning the horizon, and judging from the deep wrinkles that settled around his eyes, he’d done this plenty of times before. Without looking at me he said, “Em, if you know what you’re looking for, you can read this like a book.”

  “You mean all those old television shows I watched when I was growing up were right? You can look at a bent twig and tell me a six-foot-two man who walked with a limp and was blind in his right eye passed this way a week ago Tuesday?”

  Frank glanced at me and smiled slightly. “Not quite. But I can tell you that nobody’s passed along these roads in the last week or two. Or at least, nothing human. So I think we can pretty much write off these parcels.”

  “Well, I guess that’s something. How many more did you flag?”

 
; “Three. Might get them in before dark, or we can pick up again in the morning.”

  I wanted to keep going until all options were exhausted; I couldn’t take another night of uncertainty. But neither did I want to miss finding a trail because it was too dark. “Maybe when we get back, Matt will have something.” I hoped. Oh, how I hoped.

  We made the rest of the drive back to my shop in silence. Upstairs we found Nessa settled in an easy chair, the dogs at her feet; she had been joined by Allison, which didn’t surprise me. They all looked up as we came in. “We covered about half the sites, and we thought we’d try again tomorrow. Have you heard from Matt?”

  “He called to say he’d be by after six,” Nessa said.

  “Maybe we should all hunker down and plan?” I suggested.

  “Why don’t I go get some takeout?” Allison volunteered. “I’m sure you don’t want to cook.”

  Smart woman. “You’ve got that right. Okay, I’ll take care of the dogs and you’ll get food and Matt’ll come, and we’ll solve all the problems of the universe.” I caught myself: I was sounding a little ragged. “Sorry—it’s been a long day on top of too little sleep. I’m sure if we pool our resources we can come up with something. I’ll see you in a bit, okay?”

  I grabbed the dogs’ leashes, hooked them up, and fled before I could say anything else stupid. I really was tired: the steps seemed to go on forever. Once down the stairs, I took the dogs around the block, but even they seemed subdued, or maybe they were worried about me. As we were coming home, I met up with Nessa and Allison returning with the promised takeout, which smelled wonderful. And no sooner had we distributed plates and food on the table than Matt arrived.

  He looked tired too. But then, he’d looked tired when all this started, and things had gone downhill from there. At least I had the sense not to bombard him with questions immediately, much as I wanted to. “Sit down. You want a beer? Or are you on duty?”

  “Yes, and no. Beer would be great.”

  Nessa beat me to the refrigerator and retrieved a six-pack, which she set on the table. We all settled ourselves around the table, and I had a strange wish to say grace. Please bless those gathered here with wisdom, insight—and a big shot of luck. Amen. We dug into the ample food and paid it the attention it deserved, for the first few minutes anyway. I thought I saw Matt loosen his belt buckle, but I wouldn’t swear to it. Funny how much better everything looks with a full stomach.

  Finally I thought I had been tactful long enough. “Okay, gang, time to share. Matt, how did your meeting with the sheriff go?”

  “He’s busy, I’m busy, two heads are better than one, et cetera. I don’t think he’s been giving Cam’s continued absence much attention, but he’s going full bore on Alex’s murder. Alex was a respected member of the Pima County community, and this will not be tolerated, and so on. He’s good at that.”

  “What did you two do? And what about Denis?”

  Matt helped himself to another bottle of beer. “Denis went over his whole story again, but he didn’t have much to contribute. Alex did this, Alex did that. The sheriff kindly delegated to my department the privilege of going through Alex’s office at the university and his home, since both are within city limits. That is going on as we speak. We did get a few crumbs.”

  “Yes?” Nessa, Allison, and I said in unison. Matt certainly had an eager audience.

  “We checked with the DMV. Alex had a car registered, but he also had an RV. Denis told us Alex liked to use the RV on his geology field work—saved on hotel bills, and I gather some of the places he went didn’t exactly have convenient hotels. The RV wasn’t parked at his home, so we’ve put out an APB for it. But, Em, there’s something else. . . .” Matt hesitated.

  I didn’t like the look in his eyes. “What?”

  “We found Cam’s car parked in Alex’s garage. That made the sheriff pay attention.”

  That was something I had not expected to hear. It took me a moment to process the simple fact, but Allison’s reaction was quicker—and more heartfelt. “Oh, Matt, what does that mean, that his car was there?”

  “Allison, I wish I knew. The car looked fine, and some of Cam’s stuff was in it, but I’d guess not all.”

  “His computer?” I asked sharply.

  “No computer.”

  I relaxed a little. If Cam had taken his computer with him, there was a better chance that he was all right. Cam might not worry about clean underwear, but he would never let his electronic friend out of his sight.

  “So what’s your guess?”

  “The most innocent explanation is that Alex volunteered to take Cam out to the site he was supposed to study, either because he thought it would be easier than explaining how to get there, or he thought the trip would be too hard on Cam’s car. And I’m betting he parked the RV wherever the stones are.”

  Frank and I exchanged a quick glance.

  “Let’s say Alex offered to let Cam stay in his RV,” I said. “Wouldn’t that have to be somewhere reasonably accessible? I’ve never driven one, but I’d guess they aren’t easy to maneuver, especially not on rough ground.”

  “That’d be my guess,” Matt agreed. “Not that it narrows down the choices much.”

  “Hey, I’ll take anything I can get. Can we run through the time line? Cam shows up here last Saturday, I tell him about Allison”—I sneaked a glance at her, and she looked away—“so he hightails it off to meet Alex, whom he’d already contracted with to do this computer-modeling project. Matt, how long did the ME think that Alex had been dead when he was found?”

  “A day or two. Hard to be precise, when a body’s left out like that.”

  “So it’s possible that Alex took Cam out to wherever the RV is parked, the same day he left here, and promised to come back and collect him in a few days. Except he died shortly after that, so he couldn’t. Which means Cam might be sitting out there somewhere in the desert, wondering where the heck Alex is. But why wouldn’t he just walk out? It’s not high summer, and Cam’s in good shape. Surely he had food and water.” I was more or less talking this out for myself, but everyone else was following me closely.

  “Maybe someone wouldn’t let him.” Matt’s voice was quiet, and I could tell he knew that I didn’t want to hear that.

  “Our mystery buyer? Why would he detain Cam?”

  “Em, we don’t know. We still don’t know anything about him. There’s no paper trail that we know of, and we have only Denis’s story about what Alex told him. Maybe—if he exists—he thought Cam had discovered too much or was trying to horn in on the find.”

  I sat there, stewing, my dinner turning to lead in my stomach. There was a chance that Cam might have innocently blundered into something he knew nothing about, and he might have paid heavily for it. No. I was not going to think like that. We still had paths to follow. “I . . .” I began and then stopped, horrified when my voice cracked. I swallowed and looked at Frank. “Tell him what we did today.”

  Frank turned to Matt. “Em and I took a drive north, toward the San Carlos Reservation. We were looking for sites where the rock formations might be right for peridot, where they overlap with properties that Alex and Denis own. We got through a few before we lost the light, but those looked pretty much undisturbed, so I think we can rule them out. There are three or four likely ones we might try tomorrow. If that’s all right by you.”

  “You got hold of the land records?” Matt’s voice was ominously quiet.

  “Yes.” Frank nodded. “With a little help.”

  “That would be from me, or more precisely, my daughter’s husband, who’s in real estate,” Nessa volunteered.

  Matt looked like he was swallowing a lot of words. He was silent for a long time, his expression carefully blank. I had a pretty good idea what he was thinking: that we should not be interfering in an official investigation; that if we, or rather the sheriff’s crew, didn’t act quickly, it might be too late; that the missing RV might be the murder scene where Alex was kil
led, and our finding it might compromise evidence. I felt for him, really I did—but Cam was my brother. Once again I think he read my mind.

  He sighed. “Em, if I say no, you’ll probably go anyway. No, don’t say anything yet. This isn’t my investigation, it’s the sheriff’s, and it’s not a good idea to tick him off. But having said that, I can’t stop Frank from taking a drive to see the desert, can I?”

  I thought I heard a qualified “okay” in there somewhere, so I picked up where Matt had left off. “And of course he needs a helpful local citizen to direct him. It would be a shame if Frank got lost, wouldn’t it? And if he and his helpful guide were to happen to stumble over anything that might be of interest to the sheriff, we would know enough not to touch anything or move anything, and we would contact the sheriff immediately.”

  “That about covers it. I guess it’s not worth saying that I’d rather you didn’t put yourself in the middle of this? One man is dead, you know.” Matt looked at me, his gaze steady but unreadable.

  “I’ll be careful, Matt, and Frank will be with me. All we want to do is check out a few more sites, and now that we know there might be an RV, we can look for that too, and sites that would accommodate one. There’s no guarantee that we’ll find anything.”

  “Take my vehicle,” Matt said.

  “What? The police cruiser?”

  “No, my own—my truck. It’s got four-wheel drive, and it’s a lot sturdier than yours. I’ll take yours tonight.” Matt yawned, then looked contrite. “Sorry—not much sleep. I should go. Em, can you give me your car keys?”

  “Sure, and I’ll walk you out.”

  Outside in the cool darkness, I asked Matt, “Was there anything you didn’t want to say to the group up there?”

  “No, not really. I think Denis has told us what he can. The sheriff is disinclined to think that Cam’s been the victim of foul play until it’s shoved in his face, and I can’t say that I blame him. He’s pulling out all the stops on Alex’s death, anyway. I’ll get a report on what my guys find at Denis’s and Alex’s homes, and maybe there’ll be something there.”