The connection was hesitant, broken, like an FM radio signal in a long tunnel, but sufficient. The truck’s driver was named Wes Colton, and he did repair work on Peggy Olsson’s cabins. She had called and asked him to come and look at some leaky roofs, and after putting her off for a few days—she was hot, even at her age, and with a kinky imagination, but she didn’t pay all that well and a guy could put more food on the table with cash than with pussy—he was on his way to do as she had asked.
He would have to keep an eye on old Wes. It wouldn’t do to have him getting suspicious, wondering where Peggy had gone. It especially wouldn’t do to have Wes calling the police. Not when he was so close.
He closed the door again and sat down on a rocker made of bent branches to plan his response. As much as he would enjoy killing old Wes (already, a vision of flaying him alive with pine branches, inside one of the empty cabins, passed through his mind like a comforting memory), he thought in this case it might be better to hit the road again. He wasn’t getting anywhere with Lulu here, and he was so far removed from the main event that he started to fear he would miss it altogether.
That was it, then. By the time Wes figured out Peggy Olsson wasn’t planning to throw another hump at him, he and Lulu would be on their way home.
5
Barry had heard about people waking up with someone’s mouth on their cock—mostly in men’s stroke magazines, although he figured there had to be some basis in reality—but he had never imagined it would happen to him. Then again, he never would have expected some of the things that had happened last night. Connie McKay had kept up her flirting late into the evening. When Barry suggested it was time for him to head home, she and Carl had both pressed him to stay. “There’s always an extra bed here for a good American,” Carl had said. Barry, tired and still a little buzzed, had finally agreed, and Connie offered to show him the spare bed.
Turned out, the “spare” bed was her own. And she didn’t plan to give it up. Before Barry could object, she worked his zipper down and reached into his pants. Barry thought there was something unseemly about the whole thing—he had only just met her, after all, and there were all those people in the house. But he couldn’t deny the effect she had on him. He was hard in no time, moaning and bucking under her ministrations.
Then she pushed him onto the bed and peeled off her own clothing. Her breasts were small and round, with hard nipples poking out at him. She explained a slight sag by saying that she almost never wore a bra, preferring the feel of men’s hands to cotton, silk or lace. Her stomach bulged and her ass was a little flat, but even with these minor flaws she was the sexiest woman Barry had ever seen naked for free. And the only one who had acted like she thought something similar of him.
That first time, she used her mouth and hands and vagina and ass, finishing him with her mouth again. Every time he thought he couldn’t hold back any longer, she sensed it and stopped what she was doing, squeezing the base of his shaft until the feeling passed. He felt like some kind of love god, a porn star who could go and go. Clarice had never known any tricks like that.
So when he woke up with her mouth on him once more, left hand squeezing his balls and the right one stroking the shaft between mouth and fist, he was pleasantly surprised but not as astonished as he might have been. She had already demonstrated her skills and her willingness to use them.
This time, she didn’t try to prolong it. By the time he was fully awake and aware, he was shuddering through his orgasm. Connie kept her mouth clamped over him for a minute more, squeezing out every last drop, then gently released him. When she looked up into his eyes, she was smiling broadly. “Breakfast of champions,” she said.
“That was…unexpected,” Barry said. “Great, but…”
“I’m glad you liked it,” Connie said. “I wanted to do something special for you. I’m just glad you slept naked last night.”
He hadn’t had much choice, since he hadn’t come over intending to spend the night. Carl had found him a new toothbrush he could use, but no one had volunteered any nightclothes. Not that Connie had left him with enough energy to dress if he’d wanted to. “So am I.”
Connie sat up, turning to put her feet on the floor. “Carl wanted to see you when you got up,” she said.
“Oh, okay.” He thought it was odd that she had already talked to Carl. But then, he was the one who had been sound asleep. She might have been up for hours. Connie dressed quickly and efficiently, tossing him some flirtatious smiles, but there was no further playful interaction. Just as well, Barry thought, or I’d be too sore to pee.
He met Carl at the big dining table, where coffee had been set out along with biscuits and gravy in a big stainless pan. Carl urged him to fill a plate, and they took those and their coffee outside, to a shaded ramada at the back of the house. Here they sat down on cushioned wrought iron chairs, setting their mugs on the matching white table. They sat in silence for a time, and then Carl indicated the field of tall grass stretching out toward the south, stalks swaying in a faint breeze as if waving a morning greeting. “That’s mostly blue grama,” Carl said.
“Blue what?”
“The grass. Blue grama. It’s a native grass, what a lot of this region used to be covered with, before humans came and brought livestock to graze it all away.”
“You really love this country, don’t you?” Barry asked.
“Bet your sweet ass.” Carl raised his mug for another sip, gazing off at the grass. He put it back on the tabletop with a chuckle. “That Connie, she’s something, isn’t she?”
The sudden topic change took Barry by surprise. How much does Carl know? he wondered. “I’d say so,” he answered, guessing that was noncommittal enough.
“She work you pretty hard?” Carl asked. “Once she gets going, she doesn’t always like to stop.”
“I kind of gathered that,” Barry said, uncomfortable with the conversation’s direction.
“She likes you, though,” Carl said. “She told me this morning.”
“I kind of like her too,” Barry admitted.
“That’s good,” Carl said. He shifted in his seat, so he faced Barry instead of the open fields. “We all like you here, Barry.” A grin flashed across his face, then was gone. “Not the way Connie does. But you’re good people, you know, and I think you’d fit in well here if you want to.”
“I appreciate that,” Barry said.
“Do you know what it is we do here?
“Near as I can see, you’re a, what would you call it? A border protection group.”
“Good a name as any,” Carl said. “We’ve been called a lot worse. Militia, paramilitary outfit, bunch of idiots with guns.”
“Well, I have to say I approve of what you do. Too many illegals crossing around here.”
“Not just here. Everywhere. Millions, and more every year. The economy down there just keeps getting worse, and as long as there’s money to be made here, even illegally, they’ll keep coming. The government keeps pretending the problem doesn’t exist, and there’s not much any of us can do about Mexico’s economy. So the only way to make an impact is to defend the border, and that’s what we do.”
“Someone’s got to.”
“I’d like you to consider joining us,” Carl said. “It’s a volunteer thing; we can’t really pay you. We do provide room and board for some of the guys, but since you’ve got your own place, you’d probably just want to stay put there. We can feed you, though, maybe help out with other things from time to time, as we can. That is, you know, if you’re interested.”
Barry sat there, speechless, for a couple of minutes. Every time he phrased a response in his head, he thought of something else and forgot what he wanted to say in the first place. He’d had the same experience at job interviews—so intent on answering correctly that he felt detached from his own brain and couldn’t answer at all.
“You don’t have to make up your mind right now,” Carl said. “In fact, I’d like it if you take some time
, think it over. It’s not the kind of thing you should just jump into.”
Barry nodded. He understood the wisdom of Carl’s words. He had been on the verge of jumping at the offer, but on Carl’s advice he held off. He couldn’t remember the last time a person, or an organization, had wanted him like these people did. Maybe running into Carl at the Rusty Spur had been accidental, but the man had apparently seen something in him. He had started trying to woo Barry—that’s what it was, almost like a romance—on the spot. Then Connie had upped the stakes, making it resemble a romance that much more. To hear the way Carl talked, she had slept with him and maybe others of the men here, maybe all of them.
Then again, a woman didn’t learn the things she knew without a little experience. Since he was the most recent beneficiary of that experience, he didn’t think he ought to complain about it.
“Best offer I’ve had in some time,” he said after a while. “Only one, come to think of it, but still. If you think I’ve got anything to offer, I’d be proud to throw in with you.”
Carl’s smile beamed at him like a spotlight. “I’m glad to hear it, Barry. I don’t think you’ll regret it.”
“I should keep looking for a job,” Barry hedged. “If I find something, I might have to rethink it, but till I do I got nothing better to do with my time.”
“Of course,” Carl said. “Like I told you, it’s all volunteer. Some folks put in a lot of time, some not so much. Whatever feels right to you.”
“We can kind of play it by ear or whatever?”
“That’d be great, Barry.” Carl finished off his coffee with a big gulp and put the mug down hard on the wrought-iron table. “I’m gonna let the others know.”
He scooted his chair back, scooped up his mug and plate and headed back into the building. Barry remained where he was. The ramada was warm and pleasant, the aroma of the grass sweet, the songs of the birds who hopped from the ramada’s roof, to a yucca stalk, to the ground and back, relaxing. He had no place better to go for the moment, and he wasn’t up to another round with Connie. He spread his feet out on the ramada’s brick floor, tilting his mug forward and back, watching the liquid inside swirl around with a tiny insect floating on top. He had felt like that—dizzy and without an anchor—until last night.
For the first time in a long while, he thought that maybe he had a purpose again.
6
Raul reached him by radio before he made it into the valley, and by the time Buck pulled up to the intersection of Double Adobe Road and Highway 191, Raul waited at the corner in his cruiser. Buck brought the Yukon to a bouncing halt beside Raul’s car and thumbed down the window.
Raul approached the vehicle with a manila envelope in his hand. “What’s up?” Buck asked him.
“I didn’t want you to get all the way up to Elfrida just to turn around again,” Raul said. “We got a possible hit on a visitor to Lulu’s blog.”
“And it’s down in Douglas?”
“Looks that way,” Raul said. “There’s a warrant in the envelope too.”
“You’ve been busy.”
“We have time not to be?”
“Reckon not,” Buck said.
“Anyway, Lulu’s blog didn’t get a lot of readers, and most who did check it out were friends of hers. Fortunately she had a tracker on it that recorded who her visitors were. I’ve been on the phone with ISPs last night and this morning, and was able to identify the most common ones. They turn out to be people like Jace Barwick, Paul Templeton, Becka Benedetti—friends of hers that we’ve already interviewed. But there was one IP address that hit her blog on a daily basis, sometimes twice daily, up until the day she disappeared.”
“But she wasn’t posting after that.”
“Which nobody knew until they checked,” Raul pointed out. “You told Jace that morning, but even he checked back a couple of times after that, like he couldn’t bring himself to believe it. But this one user was checking it religiously until that day.”
“As if he knew she wouldn’t be posting anymore,” Buck said, nodding as Raul’s meaning sunk in.
“Exactly.”
“So who is it?”
“That’s what you need to find out,” Raul said. “At least, I figured you’d want to. I can do it if you’d rather.”
“You’re losing me here, Raul.”
“I was able to identify the computer that’s been visiting Lulu’s blog, but not the person. It’s down in Douglas, at the Geronimo! Internet Cafe.”
“There on Tenth?”
“Yeah, near San Antonio, I think. Kind of across from Sonic and down a little.”
“I’ll go down,” Buck said.
“Figured so. There’s a list in here of all the exact dates and times the computer—actually two different machines in the same place—was used to access her blog. I don’t know if they can track who the user was at those times, but in case they can, that’s why you’ve got the warrant.”
“I’m on it,” Buck said. “Thanks, Raul.”
“De nada.” Raul left the package with Buck and returned to his car.
Buck watched him pull out, then put the Yukon into gear. Instead of turning left up 191 toward Elfrida, he turned right and sped down past the airport and prison complex and into Douglas. He had to slow as he entered town, but he still made it to Geronimo! in less than twenty minutes.
The Internet cafe shared an old brick building with an insurance agency. A small storefront window didn’t let much light in, and the cafe’s sign, hand-painted on weathered plywood, didn’t impress. A floodlight had been mounted on the wall over it, shining down on the sign at night. Buck believed the nights to be their busiest time, but he had never seen more than one or two vehicles parked in the paved lot out front.
At the moment he saw only one, a red pickup that looked as if it had been driven over from Japan across the ocean’s floor; stained, weathered, with the rear window glass shattered and huge rust spots everywhere. He parked next to it, not too close in case whatever it had was contagious, and went inside.
Geronimo! smelled like the Internet access, not the coffee, drew what business it did have. The stink of burned coffee left on a warmer hit Buck before he got the steel-framed glass door open. Maybe they made a pot in the morning and left it brewing all day, he guessed. With any luck they made a fresh pot at night, when there might be a customer to imbibe it. A bell dangling on a piece of string from the inside door pull rang when he went in.
“Right with you!” a voice called from a doorway behind the sales counter. Young, male and casual, all of which Buck had expected. The counter looked like it had come with the space, as if maybe a retail store had occupied it before. On a flat cabinet against the back wall stood a two-burner hotplate, with a metal coffeepot cooking on one burner. He couldn’t see where the coffee was actually brewed, and guessed it was in the back room.
Along the wall opposite the sales counter stood eight wooden folding tables with computers on top of them. Each table had a rolling office chair in front of it. The computers were turned on; screen savers showed on the screens, some pinging and bonging as they worked. One computer was an Apple and the rest off-brand PCs. Cables snaked along the floor behind them, and at the back of the room on another table a printer waited for anyone to send it a file.
Less than a minute passed before the proprietor emerged from the back room. “Help you?” he asked.
“You the owner?”
“Owner, manager, CFO, janitor,” the man said. He was thin but with a paunchy gut. His blond hair was short, crew cut style, and what Buck guessed were Celtic symbols had been tattooed on his neck and arms. “You need a computer, or is this official business?”
“It’s official,” Buck told him. “There’s a young lady missing. It’s possible that her abductor used one of these computers to stalk her online. If you have a logbook or something—”
“Shit,” the man said. “I knew that was a danger—so many creeps out there these days. That’s why I instal
led those.” He ticked his eyes toward the ceiling. Buck followed his gaze. Cameras had been mounted at all four corners of the room, pointing in, and a fifth one, about a third of the way back, pointed toward the front door and window. “Well, that and getting broken into once just about put me out of business. Figured if it happened again, I wanted to know the bastard who did it.”
“Do you keep the tapes?” Buck asked him, heartened by the presence of the cameras. He would owe Raul a beer if this panned out. Hell, a case. “If I give you some dates and times, can you show me who was using specific computers at those times?”
The guy eyed him, squinting suspiciously. “I could,” he said. “Seems like maybe there are privacy issues involved, though.”
Buck fished the warrant from the envelope he carried. “Like I said, a girl’s life might be at stake. If that’s not good enough for you, I got a warrant too.”
The guy’s head began to bob. “Sure, sure,” he said. He didn’t even glance at the warrant. Privacy, Buck guessed, only went so far. “That’s cool. I got tapes going back two weeks, then I reuse them. They’re in back. You got those times?”
Buck put Raul’s list of IP addresses and the dates and times they had accessed Lulu’s blog on the counter. “These machines,” he said, pointing. “These times. I need to know who was using them, and pictures would be great.”
The man studied the list for a moment. “Yeah, okay, got it. Got it.” He bent over and pulled a wire-bound student’s notebook from beneath the counter, then flipped pages. Each page had a date inked on top and names, check-in and check-out times written beneath it in different hands. He stopped at the most recent date on which Raul had found that one of his computers was used to visit the blog—the day before the murders at the Lavender house.
“Says here that Michael Blaine used that machine that day,” the guy said.
Missing White Girl Page 17
