Hello, Stranger

by Virginia Swift

  Hawk thought about it. “Somebody real stupid, somebody real cynical, or somebody who knew her and thought they were doing her a favor.”

  “My theory,” said Sally, “is that the somebody was her father. Try this out. Let’s say he owned some rental property, and she knew it. Her boyfriend needed a place to live. In one of their make-up moments, maybe she told Daddy she’d come back home if he’d rent sweet misunderstood Billy an apartment, and he said he couldn’t take the risk, and she talked him into it somehow by offering to sign the lease herself.”

  Hawk was following closely.

  “Then things went to hell between them as they always did, and Brad ended up deciding to kick them out. Maybe he was watching the market and figured it was time to sell anyhow. It took the rental management company a few days to get around to actually evicting them, and in the middle of all that, somebody got pissed off,” Sally finished.

  “Pissed enough to beat him to death?” Hawk asked.

  “I don’t know. There I lose the thread,” said Sally. “But as I told you, I ran by that place, and it’s been sold. I really want to know who’s buying and selling these party houses. I’ve hit kind of a dead end with the real estate side, so maybe it’s time to start talking to the tenants. Maybe make a few subtle inquiries with our students.”

  “Yeah. You specialize in subtlety, I’ve noticed,” said Hawk.

  “I can be subtle when I need to! But why not? Maybe there’ll even be somebody who could tell us more about Charlie’s situation. Anybody who parties a lot in this town probably gets around to all the usual places,” Sally said.

  Hawk gave in. “I can drop by the motor pool this morning and see who signed out a van. And then I’ll go talk to the guy.”

  “Call me. I’ll come with you.”

  “Sally,” said Hawk, “let me handle this one thing. For all I know, it’s one of my own students. And if it is, and he’s been drinking and driving in a university truck, we’d surely have to have a few words. One way or another, I can check it out, maybe work the conversation around to the party scene, see what I can dig up. For once, I can give you some cover.”

  She grinned at him. “I really like it when you give me cover.”

  Meanwhile, she’d practice patience.

  It was a beautiful Friday morning, not a teaching day. She had, remarkably, no meetings, no appointments until the afternoon. She futzed in their little garden, planting lettuce and spinach and beans and peas, things that would survive cool days and cold nights and be lush and delightful by the end of June. She fiddled with her next lecture for women’s history, took care of lagging correspondence, deleted a couple of hundred outdated emails. By then it was time for lunch, and she decided she’d just mosey over to Hawk’s office on the way to her own. Just, she told herself, to see whether he felt like grabbing a bite.

  To get to Hawk’s office, you had to navigate the wonderful old geology building, a mazelike cabinet of curiosities. The hallways were lined with display cases full of rocks and maps and scale models of oil wells, and, of course, photographs of windburned, hearty geologists grinning their heads off in scenic places. Hawk’s office was around about fifty corners, and she’d been known to lose her way.

  “...budget crunch time, son,” she heard him say as she came around the last corner and spotted him sitting at his desk, addressing a young man who looked very much as if he’d been ridden hard and put up wet. “If you had a mishap with that truck, how long do you think it’d be before the university had the bucks for another one? In case you’ve forgotten, you checked out that van to do a little something we call fieldwork. We can’t be put in the position of getting jerked around when we need vehicles, and trust me, they’d hold it against us at the motor pool if one of our drivers was irresponsible enough to screw up one of their trucks. Am I getting through to you, Mike?”

  The guy looked absolutely miserable, and not just because Hawk was tearing him a new one. His jeans were muddy, his boots a mess, and he appeared not to have combed his lank, shoulder-length hair in a week. He slouched so low in the chair, he seemed in danger of sliding right out of it and onto the floor. His eyes were slitted nearly closed, and he was working his mouth in a way that made her suspect he was badly in need of a toothbrush.

  “I’m really sorry, Dr. Green,” he finally managed. “I know what you think. But I didn’t drive drunk, I swear it. I was out in the field all day yesterday, and on my way back to the motor pool when a friend called up and asked me over for a beer. Uh, well, you know how it is. Sometimes you have one beer, and sometimes you have two...”

  “And sometimes,” said Hawk, “you have six. And a couple-three shots of tequila, maybe, or was it Southern Comfort?”

  The kid groaned softly.

  Hawk looked sympathetic. Sally felt the same way. It wasn’t as if they were unfamiliar with the feeling of having nails pounded into your skull. And it wasn’t as if it hadn’t taken them both years to learn that you could avoid that unpleasant sensation merely by, well, not drinking until you lost the use of one or more senses.

  “Well, at least you showed good judgment in not driving after you’d started drinking,” Hawk conceded. “But you’re sixteen hours late turning in the truck. You’re my frigging student, not to mention the fact that I need you as a field trip driver. You’re a candidate for the doctorate in earth sciences, a grown man. What, may I ask, were you thinking?”

  “I dunno. I’m a jerk. I have no self-control. It wasn’t supposed to be a party, but you know how these things go. First it was just a few of us sitting around. Then somebody started taking up a collection to get a keg. Then everybody started making calls, and more people started coming around, and the next thing I knew, the cops showed up and busted a bunch of kids for MIP. People were screamin’ out of there, tryin’ to get away before they got popped.”

  “MIP? What’s that?” Sally asked, deciding she’d lurked in the hallway long enough.

  “Minor in possession,” said Hawk. “So it wasn’t just grad students, or even college kids?”

  “Not hardly. Some of those chicks looked like they were still suckin’ on pacifiers,” said Mike.

  Sally frowned. “How old would you say the youngest are?” she asked.

  “I don’t hang with them. I’m not interested in jailbait,” the boy answered. “But lots of guys are. And they’re not asking for IDs, if you know what I mean,” he finished.

  “I bet that’s a big reason the cops show up,” said Sally. “Sounds like a perfect setting for date rape.”

  Mike shook his head. “I’d hate to say what I’ve seen on a couple of occasions.”

  “Have you been to a lot of these parties?” Sally continued.

  Mike shrugged. “A few. Fewer and fewer. After last night, never again.”

  She laughed and asked him if he’d ever been at a party at the building where she’d watched the eviction.

  He scrubbed his face with his hands. “Who hasn’t? That place was notorious. Of course, they were only there a couple of months, but by the time they got booted, they’d acquired, uh, a reputation.”

  “But that’d hardly be your crowd, Mike,” said Hawk. “You’re a fine upstanding student in an advanced degree program. You’re a scientist, for chrissake. What the hell are you doing hanging around with a bunch of little thugs and thieves whose idea of upward mobility is bigger bling-bling?”

  “Not that I’d know anything about it,” said Sally, “but I’m guessing somebody in that household might have been dealing some weed.”

  Mike looked uncomfortable.

  “Look,” said Hawk, “I don’t give a damn if you smoke a splif every night before the evening news. I don’t actually care if you wake up every morning and fire up a big one. But if there’s somebody at that house selling dope to little kids, that’s another story. A really bad one.”

  The boy squirmed in his chair.

  “What’d you see, Mike?” Sally asked.

  He bit his lip. Rubb
ed his face some more. Made his decision. “Okay. Remember I said I’d seen some things I wasn’t crazy about? Well, I was there exactly once. I was just stopping off to, uh, I mean, stopping off with this friend of mine.”

  “Uh-huh,” said Hawk. “Everybody’s got a friend like that.”

  “Er, yeah. So, uh, they had a big scene going on when we went to see this guy, just, you know, to purchase a very small amount for personal use, as they say. And when we found him, he was, like, getting all these little chickies baked on this bomber stuff, and his buddies were putting the moves on a couple of them. Shit, those girls looked like they couldn’t have been more than fifteen or something. And then one of the housemates comes in, this chick with all this face hardware, and she starts getting all freaked out ’cause she knows one of the little girls. So she ends up hauling off and belting this one guy, and she’s, like, screaming that he’d better get the fuck out of the house before she gets his ass thrown in jail. The guy told her to fuck off, and the little kid just sat there staring—I guess she was wasted by then. The girl with the piercings was pretty out of it herself, but she just kept yelling, and then she starts hitting the guy, and finally this other guy came in and pulled her off and grabbed the little girl too and got them both out of there. So, um, yeah. I guess you could say there was some dealing going on.”

  “How do you know that the girl with the piercings was one of the housemates?” Sally asked.

  “She said so. She was all, ‘This is my fucking house. And what I say goes.’ Like they gave a crap,” said Mike.

  Charlie Preston. To the rescue. Of at least one young girl. Maybe Aggie Stark.

  “Did the dealer live at the house?” Hawk asked. “How about the guys who were hitting on the girls?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. I had the impression people were in and out.” Now he sat up, leaned over, put his head in his hands. “Fuck. I feel like somebody ran over me. Can I go home and get some sleep?”

  Chapter 18

  Creeping Jenny

  Boy, Laramie. The boosters liked to think of it as an all-American hometown. They weren’t wrong. Inside of a month, Sally had encountered domestic violence, murder, drug dealing, runaway real estate speculation. How much more all-American could you get?

  And how much more cynical? But that wasn’t really her nature. As she made her way home from campus, Sally bounced from cynicism to worry, anguish, and fury. And in the background, all the time, was that pinprick of a feeling that she already knew something that mattered. That, at least, ought to be reassuring. But it wasn’t. Recent experience had taught her that knowing something without knowing what it was, or why it mattered, could be a very dangerous thing.

  There was a Toyota 4Runner parked in front of her house. Scotty Atkins leaned against the driver’s door. He was wearing a salmon-pink polo shirt, khaki Dockers, and his usual poker face. “It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood,” he said as she approached. “Let’s go for a ride.”

  She eyed him warily. “Where?” she asked.

  “Get in,” he said.

  Of course, she knew. When they pulled into the alley where she and Hawk had found Bradley Preston, she was not in the least surprised. Scotty Atkins believed that returning to the scene of a crime was a real good way to jog a witness’s memory. He didn’t give a damn about the feelings of the person he was dragging along. In fact, he wasn’t above exploiting strong feelings of all kinds to get answers to questions. And in fairness, why shouldn’t he? He was a cop, not a kindergarten teacher.

  Scotty pulled the 4Runner to the side of the alley, shut off the motor, got out, and walked to the place they’d found the lug wrench, now trampled down by investigators, at the least, and who knew who else? What could she do but follow?

  And now, despite the trembling in her chest, the visceral response to the place she’d seen violent death, she was surprised. She didn’t feel hysterical or horrified or overwhelmed. Instead, she experienced a weird combination of detachment and passionate curiosity.

  Why?

  Maybe it was the change of the seasons. The last time she’d stood in that alley, trying very hard not to look at a body, it had been cold and windy. Blowing dust had stung her eyes and lodged grit in her clothes, coated her teeth. Today, by contrast, was a purely gorgeous spring day. There weren’t all that many such days in Laramie, and she’d come to treasure them in a manner so bone-deep that such weather, after the long, dark winter, was simply delightful. She could very nearly feel the ice cracking in her chest, the thawing of her heart. She couldn’t help it. The return of the sun, the warmth, the green made it impossible not to feel a trickle, then a gush of hope.

  Even that trashy alley bore signs of the awakening season. Where brown stalks had crackled and shaken, tufts of patchy green broke the surface. New shoots of a viny plant twined around and sprouted among the garbage can frames. She knew the vine would bloom in early summer, with delicate pink-white trumpet-shaped blossoms. She’d always thought it pretty, even though Hawk told her that the common name for it was “bindweed,” and that it was a bane to cattle ranchers and lawn lovers. But she couldn’t quite hate the plant. She’d looked it up in the Audubon wildflower guide Hawk had given her, the first Christmas they’d known each other, so very many years ago. And she’d discovered another common name for the vine, one she’d used ever since: creeping Jenny.

  Despised and weedy, hardy and stubborn, sending out tentative, defiant, and all too fragile pale flowers. People did what they could to kill it. They yanked it out, sprayed it with poison, cursed and kicked, but here it came again. Creeping Jenny had something in common with Charlie Preston.

  Sally thought of Charlie, still, she’d been told, under heavy sedation at Ivinson Memorial. She hoped the girl was half as tough as the creeping vine.

  Sally walked up and down the alley, Scotty at her side, pretending he wasn’t staring at her, willing her to talk. She wanted to observe and to think. The feeling was familiar to her. Similar emotion came to her every time she sat down in an archive or library amid books and files and boxes of documents. She was preparing herself to search and examine and rearrange facts and impressions, to try to make sense of random things, to construct a convincing explanation.

  Detectives and historians had a lot in common that way. And of course, both were in the business of dealing with the dead.

  Most of the backyards bordering the alley were hidden behind wooden fences. Here and there, a loose slat revealed a glimpse of greening lawn, of bedded daffodils, a barbecue grill, a flock of plastic flamingos, a Tuff Shed festooned with antlers. Laramie homeowners, feathering their domestic nests. The fences marked the edge of order and family and prosperity, separated from the utilitarian, dirty public space of the alley.

  Well, maybe not all the fences. About halfway down the alley, one homeowner had gone in for chain link instead of wood, the obviously cheap option, revealing a yard that was the picture of neglect. Once there had been a lawn, judging by the presence of a rusting push mower in one corner. But the ground had mostly been reduced to bare dirt, dotted with aged car parts, festooned with cigarette butts and cans and bottles, a couple of rotting tennis shoes tied together and thrown over a carousel clothesline that looked as if it would topple over the next time the wind blew.

  The house didn’t look so great either. Dirty windows, one cracked and patched with cardboard, flanking a sagging back porch.

  The scene made a statement: rental.

  “Hey, Scotty,” said Sally, “what do you know about Laramie real estate?”

  He inspected the barren yard beyond the chain-link fence. “Judging by the state of that lawn, the landlord isn’t paying the water bill. Or maybe the tenants are just dead lazy.”

  “Or maybe there aren’t any,” Sally said.

  He looked at her. “There were when we went to talk to all the neighbors after the murder,” he said. “College kids.”

  “But there’s no sign of life here. Let’s go around front,” sai
d Sally, “and knock on the door.”

  She watched him wipe momentary annoyance off his face. “I’ve already talked to these people, Sally. I don’t usually knock on a door unless I have a good reason,” said Scotty. “In case you hadn’t heard, people don’t like to have police officers come knocking. Especially kids.”

  “Fair enough,” she said. “Let me try to give you a reason. I’ve got this theory.”

  “You and Charles Darwin,” said Scotty. “Plenty of people in this town wouldn’t give either of you the time of day.”

  “How about you?” Sally asked.

  “I brought you here,” he answered.

  “Okay. Think about that eviction. Think about the fact that Charlie’s name was on the lease. Can you imagine any landlord, or landlady, for that matter, within their right mind, who’d rent to somebody like Charlie?”

  “People who become slumlords don’t care if the properties they rent are maintained. They just care that some-body’s paying the rent,” Scotty said. “Did you see that place? It’d take a pretty desperate person to want to rent a hellhole like that. Or somebody so out of it, they wouldn’t even expect things like safe electricity, no gas leaks, a toilet that worked.”

  “That’s enough—I don’t need the details. But look, Scotty. It’s more than that. Lots of renters in this part of town are being kicked out, because property values are exploding. Somebody’s manipulating the real estate market. And I’ve got this theory—”

  “You already said that,” said Scotty.

  “This theory,” said Sally, “that maybe Brad Preston was involved. There’s a whole lot of money changing hands in this town right now. I can’t imagine anybody who’d rent to Charlie, except, maybe, her father. I admit, there are a few loose ends, but what if he was here for reasons having nothing to do with her, but something to do with property?”