by J. A. Kerley
“Odd, right?” Harry said.
“I guess Bromley expects to make a haul off Krebbs’s case, wants to keep his golden goose close.”
We were reviewing details for about the fortieth time when my phone rang. The ID said VICKY. Victoria Miles’s house, Rein on the landline again.
“I’m getting ready to leave,” Rein said. “Miz Miles went to pull the hogmobile from the garage. You guys ready to give chase?”
“I’ll grab Miz Cruz and we’ll be in your tailwind.”
“My phone doesn’t have enough juice to power a jumping bean. It’ll be text from here, but not many.” I heard something in Rein’s voice, different, less of the detached calm and more of a quiet intensity. It gave me an eerie sense of déjà vu until I realized Rein was using a tone I’d heard in Harry’s voice when a case was turning into a crusade.
“Got it,” I said. “Any idea where you’re going?”
“They never say. But I’m hoping for Casa Rick, the weirdo who takes pictures of eyes. Didn’t Gail get to him about mid-point in her journey?”
“He was protector four out of the eight Gail stayed with on her journey to the Gulf.” Finding Rick might reveal all we needed. A police record could let us drag him in under suspicion, find out where he’d been the last few weeks. Ricky-boy had smelled bad from the git-go.
“If this trip doesn’t pan out, I’m going back inside the system, Carson. Until the perp is nailed. We’re cool there, right?”
“Stay safe, Rein,” I said, avoiding an answer. “We’re a half-step behind you.”
Two streets distant and with field glasses to my eyes, I watched the garage door open at the Victoria Miles household. “Here we go,” I said to Cruz. “They’re out of the driveway and heading east.”
Cruz dropped the van in gear and we were back in pursuit. “There are only a couple highways heading east or southeast. Nice to have a fire-engine-red Escalade to track. I swear that thing glows.”
“Harry and I once had to follow a silver Corolla from Mobile to Pensacola,” I said, setting the glasses in my lap.
“Ouch,” Cruz said, knowing how many silver Corollas cruised the road, resembling every other silver compact from a few hundred feet behind.
“Two dimwits rented the car to move a few thousand hits of meth, we dubbed them Beavis and Butthead. B and B stopped at a Mickey D’s for food, backed into the spot. Harry was getting tired of picking them out in traffic so he did the drive-through, got a fish sandwich and fifty packs of mustard.”
“Fifty?”
“The drive-through lady gives him a look and Harry says, ‘Lawd miss, I jus’ loves my mustard.’ So he gets about a pound of mustard in those little squeezy things. Beavis and Butthead are just getting into their chow. We park beside the Corolla and Harry paints the rear of the trunk with a foot-round smear of yellow mustard. Then he poked eyes and a mouth in the goo.”
“A smiley face, oh my God.”
“You could see that happy trunk a half-mile away.”
Cruz laughed, a high and pretty sound. “My favorite is the time Nautilus got the perp to throw back his Frisbee and snagged the unsuspecting guy’s fingerprints. That was classic. How come I never saw that Harry Nautilus?”
“Maybe you can visit us down Mobile way. I have a spare room for guests. Won’t cost you a cent to stay at the Carson Hilton.”
She didn’t say no, a good start. Cruz and I were getting along nicely, considering eighty per cent of our consciousness was focused on giving Rein the right amount of chain.
“They’re ramping toward Interstate 40,” Cruz said. “We’re going back into Oklahoma, thenceforth into Arkansas or Louisiana, I expect. We’re stair-stepping toward the Bama coast.” She paused, dainty nose sniffing the air. “Do I smell burning rubber?”
A red light began blinking on the dash. A buzzer sounded.
Chapter 39
His day over, Dr Thalius Sinclair filled his briefcase with papers and closed the door of his office behind him. Dr Bramwell was on sabbatical – nice to walk down the hall and not trip over one of her damn bicycles or listen to her constant cawing laughter. He passed the office of Liza Krupnik, empty. Was she at one of her volunteer activities again? When did she do his work?
Sinclair continued to the lair of the hapless Trotman. The lanky grad student was behind a desk buried in pages of figures and a scribble-laden atlas, keyboarding furiously while listening to twanging rock and roll on an iPod, the drums so loud they bled into the air. Sinclair stood in the doorway and cleared his throat. Nothing. He reached forward, grabbed the white cord and pulled twice, as if ringing for a butler. The grad student looked up with anger, blanched when he saw Sinclair. Trotman’s lips formed soundless words.
Sinclair waved his hand in front of Trotman. “Hello? Anyone in there?”
“W-what can I do for you, sir?” Trotman finally managed, yanking the cords from his ears.
“Where’s Krupnik?”
“She volunteers at a women’s center. She’s there tonight and in the morning.”
Sinclair scowled. “Why does she work there, you got any idea?”
“I never asked. I’m sorry.”
“Sorry for what?”
“I … don’t know.”
Sinclair shook his head. “Why are you here? I hoped – or rather I thought you had another symposium to attend.”
“I l-leave later today.”
Sinclair popped open his briefcase. “I need a few pages copied for a meeting. Is that within range of your capabilities?”
Trotman nodded like his head was in a paint mixer.
“Can you do it now?” Sinclair said. “Then I don’t have to worry whether it’s going to be done.”
Sinclair pulled a sheaf of paper from his briefcase, a thesis titled “Rising Voices: Feminism in the 1960s”, handing them to the grad student and following Trotman down the hall to the room holding the copier, a shelf of supplies, and a table for assembling materials. The room did have a window, however, angled west, in the distance the five angled plates of the Flatiron Mountains, the cobalt sky behind them like a luminous gel.
As Trotman set the copier into motion, Sinclair studied the grad student for a long moment, then stepped to the window and nodded toward the green peaks.
“Do you like the mountains, Robert? The Flatirons? The Rockies?”
Trotman nodded as the machine fed pages into his waiting hand. “Very much. They’re where I go to get away from all the –” Trotman caught himself in mid-sentence.
“From what?” Sinclair said.
“Uh, nothing.”
“From the pressures of work?” Sinclair demanded. “The quotidian demands of your day? That’s what you were about to say, right? Something to that effect?”
“I-I didn’t mean to imply th-that …”
“For Chrissakes, Robert,” Sinclair said, “I’m asking simple conversational questions, not interrogating you. Why do you like the mountains? Besides what you were about to say, that you went there to escape your hideous fucking part-time job.”
“I … like the quiet,” Trotman said, looking toward his shoes. “I like it when it’s just me and … the wind.”
Trotman looked supremely embarrassed and Sinclair fixed him with a questioning eye. “Are you talking about the wind as it hisses though the pines, Robert? Like on an early spring morning when a man can smell the pinesap and hear a stream tumbling down a ravine like it’s surprised by its own unimaginable joy? Do you like it when moon-bright snow is punched through with the tracks of mule deer and rabbits? Is that what you’re trying to tell me, Robert?”
Trotman looked like he was lost in a house of mirrors. “Y-yes, Doctor. That’s exactly it.”
Still shaking his head, Sinclair jammed the papers in his briefcase. “Christ, Robert. How hard was that to say?”
Sinclair left the building and wove his way home, striding past the Beacon tavern, feet and thirst wanting to turn inside the door for a Scotch, but he had t
hings to do. He glanced across the street at the Women’s Crisis Center, the door opening to disgorge a stout woman of military bearing carrying a handful of mail, probably to the box on the corner, though she clutched the envelopes as if conveying secrets to an exiled king.
Carol W. Madrone, Sinclair ruminated. W for Welles, a family name. Forty-four years old, unmarried – never will be. Degrees in Women’s Studies and Social Work. Lived at 2657-A Aspen Trace, a two-story duplex with two young lesbians renting the other side. Madrone was built like a bulldog, strode like a colonel, and – Dear Jesus, what kind of color is that for human hair? Madrone turned in Sinclair’s direction and he spun his head quickly away, hand patting at his hair to hide his face.
Cruz and I stood on the highway berm with traffic blowing by at eighty miles an hour. The beefy guy in the blue work shirt looked up from the steam-trailing engine compartment. His wrecker truck sat behind us, lights flashing.
“It’s your coolant hose,” he said, wiping his hand on a rag dangling from his belt. “The clamp busted. No big deal.”
“How long?”
He nodded to the wrecker. “I got a clamp in the truck I can put on, refill the radiator. Twenty minutes and you’re fixed.”
I studied the fading daylight and pulled out all the cash in my wallet, waving it at the mechanic. “Do it in ten and it’s all yours.”
“Early will be on the highway,” Cruz said, taking my arm and nodding up the road. “I’ll call the staties and get a light-and-sound escort. We’ll move at warp speed until we find her.”
“Sure,” I said. “Piece of cake.”
The mechanic slapped the new piece on in seven minutes and made a hundred-thirty bucks. Cruz’s people called their Texan contingent and explained how our surveillance had bumped into trouble. Two minutes later an officer sirened up to our taillights, Sergeant Willis Layton. We filled in the details. Layton studied the van through mirror sunglasses.
“That thing go faster than it looks?”
“A hundred for sure,” Cruz said. “Maybe one-ten.”
Layton nodded toward the bumper of his vehicle, said, “Stay tight.”
We highballed until we hit Oklahoma. We’d cut across its panhandle on the road south into Texas, were now hitting the fat part of the state. I always wondered why more states didn’t meet as efficiently as Utah, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico, Pythagorean borders.
“State line coming up,” Layton radioed.
Cruz looked at me. “At the speed we’ve been moving, we would have caught up by now. They turned off somewhere.”
We pulled to the side, thanked Layton and pressed eastward into Oklahoma. Day became night and we found a motel in the Midwest City section of Oklahoma City, allowing fast access to major highways once we nailed Rein’s location. I paced the floor and stared at a map like it had the answer. Cruz leaned the wall in jeans and a bright aloha shirt, arms crossed.
She said, “How about we call Miles and take the chance she’s not involved.”
“What if Miles and the killer are in this together?” I argued. “Vicky and Ricky, the Bonnie and Clyde of abduction?”
“After that story Miles told officer Early?”
“I’ve known sociopaths who invented stories on a finger snap.”
Cruz pulled the band from her hair and shook it loose, a brown swirl. She thought a moment, dark eyes scanning the ceiling. “Didn’t Miles say her sister’s name was Nina? That she married an abusive, uh –”
“Dentist,” I interrupted, seeing where she was going. “And the sister who shot him went to prison.”
“Macon, Georgia, right?”
I pulled my laptop, Googled Dentist, wife, suicide, trial, Macon. Hits galore. I opened the top link, scanned, and held the screen to Cruz so she could read the archived newspaper headline: Macon Dentist Cleared in Wife’s Suicide. The subhead said, Lawyer proclaims client a ‘Wronged Man’
“Miles is for real,” Cruz said. “I’m calling.” She put her phone on speaker and set it on the desk, taking the chair. I stood at her back as she dialed.
“Miz Miles, my name is Detective Amica Cruz. I’m with the Colorado State Police.”
Hesitation. “Yes?”
“You just delivered a woman somewhere along the women’s underground railroad. Her name is Reinetta Early and she’s an undercover officer investigating the deaths of several women who might have been targeted because they’re in the system.”
“I’m not sure if I –”
“Please listen, Miz Miles. We were tracking you until our vehicle had problems. The red Escalade. We’ve been your escort since you retrieved officer Early at the truck stop in Oklahoma. We need to know where you left officer Early … the transfer point.”
Fear. Confusion. “I can’t … I’ve been told not to –”
“officer Early called from your home phone when you were watering your yard. She said you were a hero. She told me about your sister, Nina, and the tragedy in your family. Miz Miles, I hate these people almost as much as you do.”
A long pause before Miz Miles spoke.
“I took her to Sayre, Oklahoma. I was to drop her at a crossroads. He’d be nearby.”
“He?”
“I’ve spoken with him before. We did a transfer earlier this year in a city north of Amarillo. Last Fall this gentleman left a parcel – a woman – for me. If you know the system, you know all I hear is a voice. But I left your colleague in Sayre hours ago. She could be anywhere by now.”
Sayre was over a hundred-fifty miles away. Cruz and I rolled in at midnight and grabbed a cheap motel room, all that’s needed when you’re gonna fall across the mattress and crash. We were drowsing on a bed with the lights off and a soundless Weather Channel throwing light across the walls and ceiling. We’d taken showers and changed in the bathroom while the other babysat my cell phone. Food had been a bag of soggy objects from a fast-food joint. Most of it occupied the trashcan.
My phone pulled me from a tattered dream into a swirl of color, the pretty lady on the television gesturing to a brightly hued map of high and low pressure. The clock said 3:34 a.m. I grabbed at the phone, knocked it to the floor. By the time my hand was reaching for the device, Cruz was handing it to me. I flipped the cover, read the message and my shoulders slumped. I held the phone so Cruz could read the screen. The message was simple:
w Rick. Sty cls.
“With Rick. Stay close,” Cruz translated unnecessarily, her voice a dry whisper.
Chapter 40
Cruz sat cross-legged on the lumpy bed, phone to her ear, pen and paper at the ready. The clock changed from 4:12 to 4:13 a.m. The room was on the highway side and every time a loud motorcycle or truck passed by Cruz stuck her finger in her other ear.
“How’s it coming?” I asked. “The cell info?”
“The tech guy keeps saying any minute.”
“It’s been twenty-seven minutes.”
She shrugged. Cruz had set us up with the phone company’s tech services people, made the usual nods to privacy rules. The vast computer network of the phone service ensured every call was tracked for billing’s sake, and the machines knew the exact routing of every blip of information.
“Yes,” she said into the phone. “I’m still here. Ready.”
She wrote, frowned, wrote some more. Said, “Thanks,” and hung up.
“Where’s the tower?”
“Tower 1165-A4. About a dozen miles southwest of Tulsa.”
“Not overly far,” I said, taking anything hopeful I could get.
“The coverage is a circle. The south side is farmland, spare housing, a couple exurb neighborhoods. North is urban sprawl, about five thousand households.”
We tumbled back into the van and were in south Tulsa by eight in the morning. We grabbed another motel room, staying stationary to await information and needing more room to pace than the van allowed. I stood on the second-floor balcony of the motel and studied the cloud-strewn morning sky, psychic antennae bristling, t
rying to feel Rein’s presence.
“She’s near, Ryder,” Cruz said, patting my hand. “She’ll send another text soon. We’ll set up camp Nautilus style, right in Rick’s side yard.”
I grunted and gnawed a power bar, feeling it turn to wood halfway down. My phone rang with a voice message and I grimaced at the screen. I’d hoped to hear from Rein before I heard from Harry. I put the phone on speaker so Cruz could be part of the conversation.
“What’s happening?” Harry said. “Everything fine? Where’s Rein?”
“We don’t know where she is, Harry. We had her in sight when a clamp on the radiator hose died. We got the cell-tower site from the wireless company, so we’re close, just south of Tulsa. It’s been a long night.”
Five seconds of black silence.
“Why not just call her and –”
“She’ll get a message to us, bro, she always does. Calling gains us nothing, not yet.”
“Who is she with, Carson?” Harry asked. “Did she get a name?”
Cruz saw my slumping shoulders and stepped in. “It was Rick, Detective Nautilus … the eye guy.”
I jumped in and explained how we’d made Rick with the call to Miles and confirmed with the text from Rein. I expected an explosion. Instead, Harry’s voice came back calm to the point of cold. I was hundreds of miles away, but I swear I could feel him thinking.
“You’ve got to take the chance there’s no involvement on the Colorado end, Carson. Maybe we can sneak up on Rick from the Boulder side.”
“You’re saying we should contact the Boulder women’s center?” Cruz asked, raising an eyebrow at me. “Take the chance someone might know Rick, how to get to him?”
I’m not sure Harry had forgiven Cruz, but Rein’s safety superseded anger. “Everyone vows the system is super tight,” he said. “A chain of territory-based cells, each its own enclosed world. It’s bullshit.”
“How’s that?” I asked.
“It ignores human nature, Carson. People need to talk, to gossip. And how do these fucking cells get set up in the first place? By magic?”
