“No ID at this point,” he said. “But a strange bit of evidence has turned up. Found a little bundle of personal items—a change of clothing, Buck knife, some matches and a blanket, all rolled up together like a person might put into a backpack or take with ’em for camping out.”
“Do they tie in to Willie McBride?” I asked.
“Well, yeah, they do. I took ’em over to the café and had Keith take a look. He said he remembered Willie carrying that bundle in with him a few months back. Now, why he carried the stuff into the café, rather than just leaving it in his truck, I don’t know. Could be he’d loaned the truck to Bud Tucker, something like that, I don’t know. But the bundle was with him shortly before he disappeared.”
“So, that might mean the body is his?” I felt a strong stab of disappointment.
“Can you hold on a second, Charlie? My other line’s ringing.”
A firm click stuck me on hold.
“Well, this is interesting,” he said when he came back on the line a couple of minutes later. “That was the coroner’s office. From the skeletal remains, they’re telling me the second victim was a female.”
“Really?” My pent-up breath released in a rush.
“Guess that pretty well rules out Willie. Now I got a job finding out who she was.”
“And I guess we go on looking elsewhere for Willie,” I said. “Any more details about Rory Daniels’s involvement with the drug materials?”
“Piecing that together slowly, I’m afraid. Can’t say for sure, but it ain’t uncommon for these little labs to pop up out in the sticks, finished product destined for the big cities like Albuquerque or El Paso. Rory traveled a lot ‘on business.’ Maybe we’re about to find out what kind of business.”
“Good luck with it,” I said.
I mulled over the possibilities after saying goodbye. I’d forgotten to ask just where Willie’s pack had been found but assumed it was close enough to the scene of the explosion that they found it in the course of processing that crime. Had Willie been hiding out in that same mineshaft? Maybe witnessed the drug dealers coming and going? Maybe they’d caught him spying and decided to do away with him.
If so, was Rory Daniels directly involved? He sure hadn’t acted guilty when I’d overheard his conversation at the café. But maybe he hadn’t attended Bud Tucker’s funeral just to see Bud safely buried. Maybe he’d been there to see if Willie would turn up. Maybe Rory’s deadlier business associates had threatened Rory, and he had to get a possible witness out of the way. Maybe I was going to drive myself crazy with all this speculation.
I heard Ron hang up his phone.
“Pow-wow?” I suggested, sticking my head in his doorway.
He motioned me to a chair.
“Were you able to find out anything about Felix?” I asked after sharing the phone call I’d just gotten.
“Some interesting stuff, actually,” he said, taking a sip from his coffee and frowning at it. “Cold. Anyway, Felix McBride is a little more than just a professor of geology at New Mexico Tech. He’s head of the department. Tenured. Been there close to thirty years.”
He made a scribble on his notepad.
“He told me he taught Geology 101.”
“The interesting part is that he has been checking on mineral rights in the north valley. A contact in the county clerk’s office told me there’d been an inquiry within the past six months, specifically on William McBride’s property. She took the call personally; there could have been others. It struck her as unusual because in her fifteen years in that office she can’t remember a single other call about mineral rights on land within the city limits. Odd, huh?”
“What was the caller asking, what kind of minerals they might find?”
“County clerk’s office wouldn’t know that. This person wanted to know who owned the mineral rights on this piece of land. She told them it would be the property owner unless the mineral rights had specifically been deeded to someone else. She confirmed that McBride held the deed, including all rights, and that no other deeds had been filed at that time.”
“Is that still true now?”
“I had her check it. Still in Willie’s name.”
“So Felix hasn’t tried, so far anyway, to get Willie to sell or give him just the mineral rights.” I said.
“Well, we don’t know what he’s tried. We just know he hasn’t recorded a deed.”
That brought up some unpleasant images. I pictured Felix with his strong, tan face, unnaturally black hair and pencil-thin mustache—the cruel glint in his eyes. I told Ron about how Felix had been arguing about something with Dorothy that day in the hospital. Maybe Felix knew Willie was already dead because he’d done it himself. Maybe he was trying to convince Dorothy to call off the investigators and forge a signature on the will. If she didn’t know her father was dead, his request may have seemed strange to her. But if, say yesterday, he’d convinced her to fire me it could certainly account for her tirade.
And what kind of minerals could Felix possibly hope to find on Willie’s land? From what I knew about the natural resources in the state, we had rich deposits of coal along with oil and natural gas but they were concentrated in the northwestern and southeastern corners of the state. The gold, silver, and copper mines had mostly played out by the early 1900s. I’d never heard of any mineral exploration at all in the Albuquerque area. The big issue these days was water shortages, with the city imposing a myriad of rules about its use and turning neighbor against neighbor with the lawn sprinkler police. But water rights were another issue entirely. What was Felix up to?
“Any of it sounds plausible,” he agreed. “People have been known to take drastic measures to get a will changed in their favor.”
“But how on earth will we prove it?”
He jounced a pencil between his fingers, tapping it on the desk. “Okay, let’s backtrack a little. You told me Willie’s truck was found in Las Cruces?”
“Parking lot of the bus station.”
“And his ATM card was used twice after that.”
“Once in Las Cruces, once in Phoenix. Or maybe it was the Phoenix area,” I said.
“Hmmm, I’m wondering . . . Old people don’t tend to go for the modern technology of ATM cards,” he mused. “I wonder if this was a regular habit with McBride. Do you know if Buckman’s office got his banking records, whether the bank was able to provide a video camera image of the person actually using the card?”
“He was checking on it, but I don’t know what he found out.” I said.
Another call to Buckman’s office. He was on another line and Deputy Montoya answered. He remembered me and was willing to pull the file.
“Looks like that’s a loose end we haven’t gotten to yet,” he said. “Sheriff Buckman is running pretty ragged these days, with this explosion and the drug thing and all.”
“Well, this really is a minor detail,” I agreed. “I doubt it has anything to do with your case, but I’m still treating McBride as a missing person. Do you think Randy would mind if I made a few calls directly to the banking people? I’ll fax over anything they send me.”
“Well . . . it’s not normal. Civilians aren’t usually privy to that kind of thing.”
“I understand. And you guys are so busy . . .”
“Hold on,” he said. He put me on silent hold for what seemed like ages.
“Tell you what,” Montoya said, coming back on the line. “Sheriff Buckman authorizes you to call them and tell ’em you’re calling on behalf of our office. Ask them to fax the information to our office. I’ll send you a copy.” He gave me the fax number, along with the dates and locations of the transactions.
“Well, now we have official authorization to work on this,” I told Ron on the intercom a minute later.
“I’ll call them if you’d like. I have a contact at First Albuquerque who might help move it through a little faster.”
“Any luck?” I said, peeking into Ron’s office a few minutes later
when I realized he was off the phone.
“Yep. Told you it pays to have contacts. Vivian personally looked up the information. She’s put in the request for the video images to be faxed to the Sheriff’s office, and a second set faxed to us.”
I narrowed my eyes. “Are we going to get in trouble for that?”
“Nah. They probably won’t even know. If it ever comes up, you gave me the instructions correctly but I misunderstood them. What’s the harm?”
“And the bank statements? If McBride never used that ATM card before those two times, I’m willing to bet it was stolen from him.”
“Viv says the local branch is only able to access a customer’s statement for sixty days. Earlier than that and they have to go to some archive and it takes a couple of weeks.”
“Sixty days isn’t going to help us a whole lot,” I muttered. “That’s about when Willie disappeared.”
I turned toward my own office, then spun around.
“Wait—I have an idea,” I told Ron. “I still have the key to Willie’s house, heh-heh.”
Chapter 17
I grabbed my purse and keys. Rusty rose from his spot on the rug. “Yes, you can go too,” I told him.
It looked like spring had finally arrived. The late April day was clear and warm. Fruit trees were in full bloom, forsythia sent sprays of brilliant yellow skyward. Along Rio Grande Boulevard the overhead deciduous trees were filling in their bare winter branches with pale green shoots. I pulled into the dirt turnaround area on McBride’s property.
It was hard to tell whether anyone had been here since my last visit. We’d had enough wind that any tire tracks in the dust had been swept clean. Inside the house, the gas odor was gone. Apparently Dorothy had followed through and called the gas company. I glanced casually through the rooms but nothing looked different. I made my way to the bathroom where I’d previously found the drawers full of check duplicates.
I pulled out a handful of the small bound packets. The dates didn’t appear to be in any certain order. A few inches into the pile, I came across an old bank statement, postmarked November of the previous year. It had never been opened. More checks, another statement for December, also unopened. Lower into the drawer, a January statement. None of them opened, so obviously he’d never balanced them. In fact, I’d not come across a checkbook or register where he would record his transactions. My accountant mindset went into spasms at the thought.
How could a person never balance a bank account? Wouldn’t he worry that he was running out of money? It made me twitchy to think about it. While I might not know to the very dollar how much I have in my accounts, I certainly know if one of them is getting low enough to worry about. I certainly don’t start writing checks until I know what I have to draw upon. Sheesh.
I located and set aside statements going back six months, except for the two months since Willie’d disappeared. What had happened to them? Although the bank would be faxing us copies, I was curious about what had happened to the original ones they would have mailed. I remembered finding several bills on my first visit. I’d turned them over to Dorothy to handle. But there hadn’t been any bank statements. I set aside the statements and piled all the check duplicates back into the drawer.
“C’mon kid, let’s go,” I called to Rusty.
At my Jeep, I set the paperwork on the front passenger seat and let Rusty into the back. A large metal mailbox stood on a wooden post at the road, just outside the haphazard barbed wire fence circling the property. I walked over to it and pulled the door open. A few pieces, probably not more than what would collect in a day or two. Hmm. I decided to ask Dorothy if one of the family members had been gathering the mail regularly.
For the first time I paid attention to the stand of trees near the back of the property, large cottonwoods and shorter, brushier cedar. Willie’s fence ran along the edge of a low dip in the earth, following it until it disappeared into the foliage. It was one area I hadn’t checked out yet.
The temperature was quite a bit cooler in the shade and last autumn’s fallen leaves carpeted the ground with a brown pad that was almost mushy in places. I stepped gingerly around a massive spider web that hung between the branches of a scrub oak and the low-hanging limbs of a cottonwood. Ahead I caught the faint odor of sulfur blended in with the smell of damp leaves and general mold.
A clearing opened before me and in its center was a small rock outcrop with water trickling from its center. Brilliant yellow and orange coated the rocks, along with a smooth white substance that reminded me of white chocolate poured over a mound of ice cream. A mineral spring. I knelt beside the gently bubbling water.
“What do you think you’re doing here?” a male voice demanded.
My stomach did a massive bounce down to the bottom of my feet and back to my throat. I spun toward the sound.
“Felix! You just about scared the shit out of me” I hadn’t heard a vehicle arrive.
He wrinkled his brow, unable to place me.
“Charlie Parker. I came to the hospital to see Dorothy,” I reminded.
“Oh, yes.” His tone was cool. He stood with his hands in the pockets of his twill slacks, a casual pose with a somehow threatening undertone. “What are you doing here?” he repeated.
“I came by to get some information on your father’s bank accounts. Dorothy gave me a key.”
“I seriously doubt you’ll find any bank records out here,” he said, with a pointed look at the surrounding trees.
I didn’t have a very good reply to that so I started to leave the clearing.
“Ms. Parker, I don’t what you think you’re going to find. Obviously, my father isn’t hiding out here at the back of the property. I suggest that you confine your searches to the places he might reasonably be found.”
“And where might that be, Felix?”
“For a start, you might search the mines where he said he was going prospecting. And you might question those people in White Oaks. Someone there knows more than they’re saying.”
He stepped aside, practically ushering me out. I felt his eyes on my back as I walked the length of the property, back to my vehicle. When I got in, I looked back to see him standing at the edge of the treeline, hands still in pockets, staring at me. I pulled out, past his white Lincoln, and drove back to my office.
“I don’t think anyone’s been collecting Dad’s mail,” Dorothy told me later. I’d called Melanie’s house as soon as I got back to the office. As luck would have it, she wasn’t home and Dorothy answered the phone. “I’d forgotten to ask anyone to do it.”
“You might ask around,” I suggested. “Some bank statements are unaccounted for and perhaps some other bills.”
“I went ahead and had the gas and electricity and phone shut off,” she told me. “No reason to run them until he comes back.”
I thanked her and hung up. I didn’t mention my encounter with Felix. Thought I’d see where our other inquiries might lead us before bringing the rest of the family into it.
“Anything from the bank yet?” I asked Ron. He was seated at his desk, a half-eaten cheeseburger in a Styrofoam container at his side, reminding me that it was well past noon and I hadn’t eaten anything since my one slice of toast with coffee at home this morning.
“Not yet,” he said, not noticing that the smell of the burger was practically making me drool.
“Has Sally gone for the day?” I asked.
“Yeah. Said she was taking some typing home with her.”
“Good. I think we’ll get along just fine without Tammy,” I said.
“I know I will,” he grinned. “That girl was driving me crazy, making me keep my desk neat.”
“I thought you liked the new, neater you,” I said.
He rolled his eyes. “Sorry, Charlie, I’m just not cut out to do things that way.”
Now that he mentioned it, I noticed that his usual clutter was creeping its way across the desk. Just since this morning a stack of file folders had appeared and y
ellow sticky-back notes dotted the lampshade, telephone, and calendar.
I held up the few bank statements I’d pilfered from McBride’s house. “I’ll see what I can get from these,” I told him. I went down to the kitchen and scrounged up a handful of Wheat Thins and a yogurt whose expiration date wasn’t too far past.
Back in my own office I neatened a pile of papers and placed the newly delivered mail to one side. I aligned my stapler, tape dispenser, and calculator precisely across the front edge of the desk, as if they were some kind of voodoo icons that could protect me from the encroaching clutter across the hall.
An hour later, I’d come to the conclusion that McBride’s finances were probably doing just fine, although no one might ever really know. His small pension check and Social Security were automatically deposited each month and he wrote all the checks he wanted to, apparently without having to keep any record of them. And somehow it all worked out. The only thing of probable significance I learned was that Willie McBride apparently did know how to use an ATM card.
While withdrawals were few, there were some. It could also explain how he knew he wasn’t overspending—simply by frequently checking his balance at the ATM machine. Maybe Willie McBride wasn’t as close to senile as his daughter wanted me to believe.
“I need to get going,” Ron said. He stuck his head in my doorway. He had on his spring straw Stetson and his cell phone was jutting out of his shirt pocket. “Got to get some groceries and do a few things before I head home. No fax from the bank yet, but it will probably take some time. I’ll come in early the next few days and over the weekend to get some of my work caught up. Will you be here?”
“I don’t know. Probably, unless Drake gets released from this fire. Which is doubtful—it sounded like it was still blazing away when he told me about it last night.”
“Okay. See you tomorrow.”
I didn’t stay too much longer either. While I’d gleaned a bit of interesting information from Willie’s old bank statements, it was nothing that could point me toward his current location. I switched off my computer and the lights, set the answering machine downstairs and left our one night lamp burning before Rusty and I headed home.
Reunions Can Be Murder: The Seventh Charlie Parker Mystery Page 15
