“Any proof of that?” I interrupted.
She shot me a look. “Didn’t ask for it. The woman was clearly distraught.” She turned back to the page. “I asked who else might be in the house and she didn’t think anyone was. Her husband had left for Denver the day before, she said.”
“Was she the witness who said she saw him driving away?”
Michaela scanned the page quickly. “No, there was somebody else . . . I’ll come to it in a minute. As I was talking with Earleen, I remember that’s when someone shouted that they’d found a body. At that point Earleen fainted and I left her with the paramedics.
“The body was burned beyond recognition so we had the medical examiner’s office come for it.” She looked up from the file and took a deep, steadying breath. “Later, it was identified as Bettina and when I questioned her, Earleen remembered that it had been their scheduled cleaning day.”
“And the witness to David’s driving away?”
She shuffled a few more pages. “Guess I didn’t write it down. It wasn’t really a formal statement, but Jake Zellinger was one of them, I remember. Late afternoon of May 11th, he and Amanda were driving down to Red River, going out to dinner for her birthday, as I recall. David’s car was a red Mustang convertible. Pretty easy to recognize, even at a distance, around here. Most everyone drives pickup trucks or SUVs. Somebody else—can’t remember who it was—mentioned seeing the red car driving north out of town. You know how people talk about a tragedy like this for weeks afterward.
“Once the arson folks decided the gas leak wasn’t accidental, the talk really notched up. You know, people always remember where they were, what they were doing, when something bad happens. That’s when it came out that David had this big argument with Rocko Rodman the previous day.”
“And you thought maybe Rocko set it up so David would be killed in his own house?”
“Seemed logical. Hot tempered—always. He shouted a lot, and then he tended to bust up things. Break windows, vandalize a car, that kind of thing. It made sense that he and David get into this big screaming match, then he goes off and lets the steam build up, decides later to torch off David’s house.”
“Matches and gasoline weren’t good enough for him?”
She shrugged. “Who knows what goes through the mind of a guy like that. He’s a druggie and pretty much a nut job.”
“You interviewed him formally, I guess?”
“Of course.” She stiffened at my question, although I truly hadn’t meant anything by it. She turned to a new page. “According to his statement, George “Rocko” Rodman was at home the afternoon and evening of May 11th, sleeping off a hangover from the previous night and early morning. That would have been the night he got so drunk and confronted David—May 10. No one could verify this, but his motorcycle was in the driveway of the apartments where he lived.”
“Was he ever arrested?”
“Lots of times, but not for this. Never did find any physical evidence that tied him to the scene. Not much you can do these days unless you can build a strong court case. Couple weeks after the fire, Rocko got caught on an auto theft and that one had plenty of evidence. Sent him down to Santa Fe and hoped to be rid of him for good. Guess not, though. He did his time and, like a bad penny, has shown up here again.”
I got the address where he was apparently living with a brother, who rented a house on Quarter Horse Road. Maybe I’d drop by and ask a few questions, but I wasn’t sure what I could hope to learn. Outside of a bout of remorse and a full confession, there still wasn’t enough to tie Rocko to the crime.
“Anything else you can think of?” I asked Michaela. “Anything I could report to Amanda concerning her father’s whereabouts?”
“Nothing she doesn’t already know,” she said, shaking her head. “I do know that Earleen’s pushing to have David declared legally dead. Guess she thinks she can do some kind of legal maneuvering to get around the statute requiring seven years. Got a strong thing going with Frank Quinn, you know.”
“So, wouldn’t it be more logical to just file for divorce against David? Quicker?”
“Quicker, yeah. But then she wouldn’t be in line to get anything from the insurance. It would probably automatically go to Amanda as his next of kin.”
I thought of Earleen’s bitterness over her current living conditions, how adamant she’d been about her right to get back into a big, fancy home and have some money to spend. How angry was she?
Chapter 7
I spent a restless night, alternating between my usual low-grade worry about Drake anytime he was out flying forest fire contracts and the myriad information about the case that kept floating persistently through my head. By five o’clock I was completely awake, staring at the pale light in the room.
Amanda would be leaving pretty early for school, but maybe I could catch her. Five just didn’t seem like an appropriate hour to call anyone though. I dressed warmly and took Rusty out for a walk across the frosty grass. He seemed overjoyed at the chance to explore all the strange animal smells at his leisure. Across the open field behind the motel, I spotted a herd of elk, unconcerned, simply munching on the grass. I reined in the dog and froze in place to watch them until some small noise startled them and they bolted, as a group, running effortlessly on their strong legs toward the tree line. I counted twenty-three of them.
Rusty watched them, his ears perked in curiosity, and when they’d all disappeared into the forest he turned to look up at me. Both our eyes were wide with wonder.
We finally broke our trance to head for Jo’s. By now it was six o’clock and she’d just flipped over the Open sign. I went in and came out a minute later with a bag containing two donuts so fresh they were still warm and a Styrofoam cup of her fragrant coffee. Back at the room, I figured the decent hour had arrived and I dialed Amanda’s home phone as I bit into the first of the donuts.
“I hope it’s not too early,” I said.
“I’m not going to work today,” she told me and I caught a distinct tremor in her voice. “Someone ran me off the road last night. My car’s totaled.”
“What!”
“Not far from the house. Just as I made the turn off the highway onto Piedra Vista.”
“Are you okay?”
I heard her take a deep breath. “Physically? Yeah, I think so. Sore muscles are showing up this morning in places I didn’t know I had muscles.”
“Do you know who did it?”
“It was so dark. I couldn’t tell much about the other vehicle. They didn’t stick around.”
“I’ll come over.”
“Jake’s here. I’ll be okay.”
“That wasn’t quite what I meant. I’m wondering if this could be connected to the case.”
A long silence came over the line, as palpable as a hum. Finally, she said, “Yes, maybe you better come.”
I wolfed down the rest of the donut and took the other one, the coffee and my purse with me. I missed one turn as I tried to remember the way to their home, but still managed to get there within ten minutes.
Jake opened the door and greeted me with a solemn face. “She’s in here.” He led me through the small foyer into a den whose most prominent feature was a big-screen TV.
Amanda lay on a leather sofa, propped in one corner with several large pillows and bundled into a fuzzy blanket of some sort. She held a mug of hot chocolate between her palms, pulling the warmth from the ceramic.
“I’ll leave you two to talk,” Jake said.
“He’s got to be glad you came over,” she told me after he’d closed the back door. “I could tell he was itching to get out to his lab but felt obligated to sit here with me.”
Her face bore the ravages of the accident—both eyes were deeply blackened, and a small row of stitches tracked over her left eyebrow. Her hair hung in greasy strands and a smear of blood hadn’t yet been washed from her chin.
“Guess I won’t be going back to work until I can do so without scaring the kids half
to death,” she said with an attempt at a smile. I noticed that one of her front teeth was chipped.
“What happened?” I asked, kneeling at the side of the sofa.
“I’d stayed late. We’re doing parent conferences this week, and I’d scheduled a couple of them for the evening, for people who can’t come earlier. It was probably eight or so when I got away. Dark already. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary. I just headed home.” Her voice wavered and she took a deep breath. “I’d turned off the highway and all of a sudden there were headlights right behind me. I swear, one minute there’s nothing back there and the next minute, the lights are right on me. The car—actually I think maybe it was a pickup truck, the lights were pretty high off the ground—well, it kept coming closer and closer. I sped up a little, but the road is so winding, I couldn’t go much faster. I was so scared.”
Her hands had begun to tremble and I took the mug of chocolate from her and placed it on the coffee table.
“I decided I’d just pull over and let him pass, but when I got to the side of the road he bumped me. I lost control and went off into the drainage ditch. With the speed and all, I couldn’t hold it. My car rolled. I just remember the air bag hitting me in the face. Then I was upside down, hanging by my seatbelt.” Tears spilled from both eyes. “The worst part was when I tried to move. My weight shifted the whole thing and it rolled again. I ended up hanging sideways, screaming, wondering if it was going to just keep rolling forever.”
I reached out to hug her but she flinched in pain.
“Everything hurts,” she said. She pulled back the shoulder of her sweatshirt to reveal a nasty purple stripe on her left shoulder where the seatbelt had saved her life by scraping and bruising a swath of her skin.
“Jake found me,” she whimpered. “Luckily, I’d called him as I was leaving school. When I didn’t show up, he came looking. He was pretty shaken, especially when the sheriff ordered an ambulance to get me. We were in Segundo almost all night.”
“I’d like to ask you a few questions, if I could, then I’ll leave you to sleep.”
She nodded and reached toward the mug of chocolate. I handed it to her.
“You said you didn’t recognize the other vehicle. Think really hard. Can you narrow it down to what kind it was or what color?”
“Big, like I said. Probably a pickup truck or a big SUV, like a Suburban or something. Dark, I think. But the lights were so bright in my eyes.”
“Can you think of anybody who owns a vehicle like that?”
“Just about everybody,” she said. “This is a mountain town. If you don’t have four wheel drive and high clearance, you don’t make it through the winters here.”
“Do you think the other vehicle sustained any damage? Think. What part of his car hit yours?”
She squinted in thought. “I guess it would be his right front section. But he didn’t actually hit hard. Just came in close and nudged me off. If only I’d steered in the other direction, maybe. I don’t know.”
The tears threatened to spill again and I waited quietly while she composed herself.
“I’m sure Sheriff Michaela asked you all this stuff already. I’m sorry to put you through it again.”
“It’s okay. I’d rather you did it. I don’t think Michaela is especially understanding toward me.”
“What do you mean?”
“Oh, it’s probably nothing. She’s just been chilly lately. One of her grandkids is in my class and I just get this feeling whenever she comes around. It’s been that way since the other . . . the fire and all. She didn’t like my dad and she’s not crazy about me either, I guess.”
I wondered where that came from. I hadn’t sensed any ill feelings when I talked to Michaela, but then I’d never seen her interact directly with Amanda either.
“Are you saying that you don’t think she would thoroughly investigate a crime—either this one or the fire—just because it involved your family?”
Amanda shrugged but it turned to a wince of pain.
“Okay, I’ll poke around, see what I can find. If, like you say, she’s not doing a thorough investigation, we may turn up some additional evidence.” I asked her if there was anything else I could do for her and she had me retrieve a small wireless intercom device from the kitchen counter so she could call Jake out in his lab if she needed anything.
“I’ll be okay,” she said. “Sleep and painkillers will get me on the road to recovery.”
I locked the front door behind me and went back to my Jeep. Rusty waited patiently, fogging up the windows with his doggy breath. As I drove away from the Zellinger house I wondered what was going on here. Would Michaela actually subvert a police investigation because she didn’t like the victim? I thought about the fire and the fact that Bettina was Michaela’s cousin, the poor girl everyone felt sorry for. Maybe Michaela had a personal interest in seeing David Simmons pay for the crime, and maybe she’d never seriously pursued any other possibilities.
But how did that relate to Amanda’s close call? Someone had tried to kill her and I felt a steely resolve to find out who and why.
Chapter 8
I spent the next hour and a half cruising the town, including a lot of winding residential roads, looking for a large vehicle with a broken headlight or damage to its front fender. As Amanda had warned, about half the vehicles in town fit the description in size and color. And by including the lighter colored ones, I discovered her assertion was true—it could be just about any one of them. And the bad news was that I didn’t spot one with the kind of damage she’d described. Either the vehicle hadn’t sustained so much as a broken headlight, or someone had wisely parked it in a garage.
At Woody’s Chevron—the same Woody who’d been Drake’s fishing guide—I found Amanda’s mangled Blazer, still resting crookedly on the bed of the tow truck. I pulled over to take a look, just as Woody himself came walking out.
“Hey,” he said in a friendly tone. His mouth barely revealed a set of even, white teeth between the overhang of his dark mustache and the abundant growth of beard below it.
“Hey,” I said back. “This is Amanda Zellinger’s vehicle, isn’t it?”
He nodded solemnly, giving me a sideways look.
“I’m Charlie Parker,” I said. “You took my husband Drake fishing a few days ago.
“Oh yeah. Helicopter pilot. You’re the investigator.”
“I was just over at Amanda’s. She’s pretty bruised up.”
“She okay though? Sweet gal. Looked pretty shaken when they put her in that ambulance last night.”
“She’ll be okay, I’m sure. In a few days.ont I’d worked my way around to the rear end of the Blazer’s crumpled remains, looking for any trace of contrasting paint against Amanda’s own white. “Any idea who might have done this?”
He unlocked the truck and started to climb inside. “Sheriff was there. You might ask her.” He started the tow truck and drove it through an open gate behind the station, into a chain-link enclosure. I trotted along beside and waited until he’d killed the engine and climbed back out.
“I’ll talk to Michaela, for sure. Just wondered whether you’d heard anything. It’s a small town.”
He shrugged and turned to work a set of levers on the side of the truck. A hydraulic motor whined and the bed of the truck began to tilt the load aft. I stepped back and watched in fascination until the Blazer rested on the ground and the truck was ready to drive away.
“Guess there’ll be an insurance adjuster coming out to decide that it’s totaled,” I said. I circled to the back of Amanda’s vehicle again and studied the rear bumper. Near her broken-out taillight, just below the side window, was a small smear of red paint, in clear contrast with her own white.
“Yep.”
“Woody, you’re a man of few words, I can tell, but give me a break here. You’re a professional when it comes to cars and damage. You’ve got to see all kinds of wrecks. Can you give me any little clue about who might have caused this?”
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He paused with one leg already in the cab of his truck. “I’m a family man, don’t hang out at the bar much, but I’d look there, I was you. Somebody had a few too many last night.”
I considered that as he started the tow truck once more and drove it around to the other side of the building. Could it be that simple? A drunk driver? In Amanda’s mind the collision was no accident and someone had deliberately come after her, but the terrifying moments of the crash may have magnified it in her mind.
I walked back to my Jeep, thinking it all over.
Outside Jo’s Diner the breakfast crowd was out in force. I pulled into the lot and parked next to the brown and gold police cruiser, an Explorer four-by-four I’d seen at Michaela’s office on my previous visits. As I walked toward the door I checked out the front fenders of every red vehicle in the lot but I wasn’t destined to get that lucky.
Every table in Jo’s was occupied, primarily by men in denim and plaid, working guys getting a big breakfast before heading out for the day. Jo nodded from across the room as she circulated among the tables with her coffee pots in hand. I spotted Michaela alone at a table and I pulled out the chair across from her.
“May I?”
She nodded and pushed her morning newspaper aside.
I caught Jo’s attention and asked for eggs and toast, with another order of the same packaged to go. Rusty had been pretty patient this morning and he deserved a little extra treat.
“Late night, I guess,” I said to Michaela.
She tilted her gray head in a small nod.
“Any idea who caused Amanda’s accident?”
“Not yet,” she said, her voice a little tight. A stranger showing up in town and questioning her police work wasn’t setting well. “I’ll get over to Woody’s and look at the vehicle in a little bit. Got pictures last night but it was too dark to tell much.”
I could tell her that it was a high-sitting red vehicle but decided to keep my mouth shut. She wasn’t the kind of woman who wanted advice, and I imagined that extended into other aspects of her life besides her job, too.
Obsessions Can Be Murder: The Tenth Charlie Parker Mystery Page 5
