by Sarah Atwell
Like hell. Maybe he was used to sweet docile women who liked their men rough and tough. Maybe frail Allison had been a pushover. Me, I wrestled with three-hundred-pound barrels of supplies and slung hot glass. No way was I going to simper and wilt in the grasp of this man. I drove one elbow backward into his solar plexus—he made a satisfying whoof at that—then stomped my sturdy boot on his arch. His footwear was better suited to city streets than to hiking in the desert, and he grunted in pain. As his grip loosened, for good measure I bent and grabbed a handful of sand and flung it in Sean’s face. He let go, but I wasn’t done yet. Having assured myself that Frank and Matt were watching this scene with amusement, I capped my performance with a well-placed kick where it would do the most good. Sean went down like a tree.
I stood over him, feeling like a Valkyrie, righteous indignation burning hot in my veins, and said, “All right, you piece of crap.” I stopped myself, mindful of the tender ears of my baby brother and the civilities due our foreign visitor. “Where is she?”
“You find her!” Sean snarled, or coughed, or something in between.
“You took your own sweet time,” I spat at Matt. “What kept you?”
“We had a slight change in plans. When you all turned off on this road, we pulled over and huddled and decided one car would be less suspicious than two out here. And Frank provided a handy diversion. Right, Frank?” Matt grinned at Frank; Frank grinned back. Men.
“Fine. Great. Well, Matt, since you two seem to have all the bases covered, you talk to that vermin there and find out where he put Allison.” I stalked away into the brush. Maybe it was residual adrenaline, but I was pissed at the whole boiling lot of them. I needed to cool off.
Cam knew me well enough to give me a little time before he approached me. “Em, you were awesome.”
I had to smile at him. “I was, wasn’t I? That self-defense course finally paid off. You okay?”
“Fine, except I feel like an idiot. I just stood there while you and Frank and Matt handled the whole thing.”
“Well, luckily I’m in better shape than you are. Computer-wrangling doesn’t exactly build muscles.” I decorously straightened my clothes and brushed off some sand. “Okay, I can go back without biting someone’s head off now. Let’s see about finding Allison.”
I turned to rejoin the group but stopped briefly, contemplating the tableau—and the absurdity of it. As a backdrop, the timeless mountains rose up to meet the deep blue sky in the distance. In the foreground, Matt loomed over his prone victim, while the sidekicks hovered around the fringes of the scene. All very Old West, and I almost looked for a white hat on Matt. Sean wasn’t a hat type of guy, but the black leather jacket—so de rigueur amongst the wiseguys of Chicago, so ridiculous in the Arizona desert—would do as a stand-in.
But as Cam and I approached, Sean had to spoil my pretty fantasy.
“I want a lawyer.”
Matt glared at him, and I wondered if he was contemplating physical violence. Nah, not the Matt I knew. Had known. I waited to see what came next.
“You’re not under arrest. I’m just asking you some questions.”
“I want a lawyer,” Sean repeated. Now I was contemplating kicking him again. Would that be legal?
Matt sighed. “Mr. Callahan, it is my understanding that you have knowledge of the abduction of Allison McBride from Ms. Dowell’s studio at approximately five o’clock last evening. This event was witnessed by both Ms. Dowell and her brother here. I’m asking for your cooperation in locating Ms. McBride. I can assure you that any cooperation you provide will be taken into consideration should you be prosecuted.”
“No way, cop. I want a lawyer,” Sean snarled. Stubborn cuss.
Matt surveyed the group of us, standing around like rocks. Frank had lost his smile; Cam had never found one. I was hoping for a miracle of some sort. When Matt spoke, he surprised me. “Em, why don’t you take Kevin for a little walk?”
I stared at him, and then it dawned on me. He wanted me to work my feminine wiles on Kevin, the weak link. Well, more likely my so-called “maternal” wiles. Be kind to him, win him away from Evil Sean. And hope and pray he knew where Sean had stashed Allison. If Kevin didn’t, we were all screwed. “Good idea. Kevin, come with me.”
Kevin looked at Sean, who gave him a look that would blast paint off a battleship, with a short shake of his head to reinforce it. Then Kevin looked at me, and I smiled with all the warmth I could muster. He followed me. His mama had brought him up right: He was polite to women.
We strolled at a leisurely rate toward . . . nothing. Just a couple of pals, taking in the scenery. I loved it now, but to him it must look alien. He had the pale, mushroomy look of a city boy. I tried to figure out how best to approach this, with so much at stake.
“Kevin, how old are you?”
“What? Me? Nineteen.”
A baby. “How long have you known Sean?”
“A couple years, mebbe. He’s been helping me, bringin’ me along.”
“Are you from Chicago originally?”
“Yeah, sure. Me ma’s there, and my brothers and sisters.”
“Is that how you know Sean? From your old neighborhood?”
“Yeah.”
Oh, we were doing a great job of bonding here. Soon we’d be swapping recipes. “What about your father?”
“Gone.”
I waited for Kevin to elaborate, but he didn’t. Now what?
“Kevin, did you know Jack Flannery? Or Allison?”
He shook his head. “Nah. Not before this.”
“Did Sean ask you to help him find Jack?”
We had drifted to a stop, and Kevin was kicking at a clump of dead mesquite. A lizard darted out from under a rock, and Kevin flinched. No lizards in Chicago, apparently.
“Yeah. He said I could learn from watchin’ him.”
“How did you know where to find Jack?”
Kevin shrugged. “Sean knew.”
I filed that away for consideration. It still wasn’t clear to me how the guys from Chicago had kept up with Jack.
“And you caught up with him in Tucson—at my studio.” Part of me was going nuts, wanting to hurry this conversation along, cut to the chase. But the more intelligent part of me was telling myself that I needed to build a connection to Kevin, forge some tenuous trust. “What happened there?”
From the corner of my eye I could see that Kevin looked miserable. “We followed him from that restaurant to your place. He broke in the back door and got inside, but we were right behind him. So Sean asks him, ‘Where are the diamonds?’ And Jack laughs at him. ‘You won’t get your hands on them,’ he says. ‘This is my deal, and you’ll get no piece of it.’ And then Sean goes off on him. Sean’s got a temper.”
Like that was a surprise.
Kevin kept talking. “And they get to fighting, and somehow Sean gets ahold of him and bashes him into that big thing of yours.”
“The furnace,” I murmured, not wanting to interrupt his flow.
“Yeah, and then Sean pushes his head into the front part, but Jack goes limp real fast.”
Breathing hot air at two thousand degrees will have that effect.
“And then Sean hauls him out and kicks him a couple a times, but he ain’t moving, and Sean checks and finds out he’s dead. And then he goes on a real tear, cursing up a storm. Me, I just want to keep out of his way. But suddenly he gets hold of himself. He goes back to Jack and searches him, but he doesn’t find the diamonds. So he says to me, ‘They’ve got to be here somewhere. Start looking.’ So we go through everything we can—I mean, we know that Jack hadn’t been in the place more’n a minute before we got there, so if he had the diamonds on him, they had to be there. But we couldn’t find nothin’, and then we hear the dogs upstairs and somebody coming and we hightail it out of there.”
That was when I had arrived on the scene.
Kevin eyed me. “So they really were there all the time?”
I nodded. “They wer
e.”
Kevin looked like he wanted to cry. I couldn’t blame him.
I thought hard. “Kevin, from what you’ve told me, it was Sean who was responsible for killing Jack, whether or not he intended to. You may be in trouble for breaking and entering, but not for the murder.” I wasn’t sure what the legalities of all this were, but all I needed to do now was convince Kevin. “But kidnapping’s a pretty serious offense too, and if Allison dies”—no way was I going to ask if she was already dead—“then things will go badly for you. Just tell me where she is, and it’ll be a lot better for you.”
“Sean’ll kill me.”
“Not if he’s in jail, and I think there’s a pretty good chance of that. Listen, Kevin—do you love your mother? Your sisters?”
He looked at me in confusion. “Yeah, sure. What’s that got to do with this?”
I pressed on, struggling to hide my growing desperation. “Would you want to see your mother or sisters treated like this? Allison hasn’t done anything to anyone. She didn’t know about the diamonds—she was just trying to get away from Jack. Why should she die for something she wasn’t even involved in, if you can prevent it?”
I crossed my fingers and prayed.
Kevin thought. Slowly. If this mess hadn’t involved people I cared about, I might even have felt sorry for him. “I seen the place, but I dunno if I could find it.”
Elation and frustration surged through me—he was coming around. “Were you with Sean when he hid her?”
“Yeah. But it was dark, and I couldn’t tell where we were.”
I fought to remain rational and radiate calm. “All right. Tell me about it, step by step.”
“We grabbed her at your place, right? And we took her out back and gagged her and stuffed her in the trunk, quick. Then Sean drove around for a while. He was mad as hell, so I kept my mouth shut. After a while he cooled down. And finally he says, ‘We’ve got to find a place to put her.’ So I says, ‘Can’t we keep her in the car?’ And he says, ‘No, she might make noise.’ And I says, ‘What about the motel?’ And he says, ‘Nah, somebody might see us hauling her in. We need someplace where nobody’s watching.’ And then it’s like this lightbulb goes on in his head, and he says, ‘The desert.’ ”
That did not inspire confidence in me. There was a lot of desert around Tucson.
“So you just started driving?”
“I guess.”
I wanted to strangle Kevin, to shake some sort of answer out of him, but I knew I couldn’t. “You’re doing fine, Kevin. I’m sure you remember more than you know, so let’s keep going. You left my studio and you drove around for a while, right?”
“Yeah, but kind of in circles.”
“Sean was driving? How well did he know Tucson? Had he ever been here before?”
“Nah, but he had a long talk with this bartender the other night, just kind of shooting the breeze.” Kevin thought for a moment, and then he brightened. “I know— we went toward the airport. I remember seeing the lights from the planes, low.”
Ah, now that was getting me somewhere. The airport was south of the city—and not far from the truck stop or the casino, and where we were standing. “Did you take a main road—a multilane?”
“Yeah, but there weren’t a lot of cars around. It was dark. And then we turned off. Right, I think.”
“Do you remember seeing any road signs?” Unfortunately there weren’t a whole lot.
“Oh, yeah—I think there was one for the casino. I thought it was funny—diamonds and all. And I think we turned off right about then, but not toward the casino.”
So Sean had been telling the truth when he had pointed. The casino lay on Pima Mine Road. And in the opposite direction was the Pima Mine, a working mine and a tourist attraction as well. And it was large, and there were lots of buildings scattered around the landscape, many no longer in use.
“Kevin,” I said carefully, “I think what you’re describing may be an old mining area not far from here. Did you see any signs about it?”
He shook his head. “No. We went along that road for a ways, and then Sean pulled off on a side road. He must have known where he was going. So he stops the car and says, ‘this’ll do.’ And we went around back and opened the trunk and got the woman out.”
Allison. She has a name. And I was almost afraid to ask the next question. “And she was still alive then?”
“Yeah, sure she was. So we set off across this desert and we walk for a while, and we come to this weird place, a big hole in the ground. At least, I think that’s what it was—it was pretty dark.”
The pit mine. “Then what?”
“Well, we’re stumbling around in the dark, and the woman’s dragging her feet, and finally Sean says, ‘Screw it’—oh, sorry—and we head for the nearest building we can see. There was lights on far away, but this building was dark, and it didn’t look like anybody’d been near it for a long time. Sean, he busts the lock and goes in, then comes out and says, ‘This’ll be fine.’ So he drags the woman in and comes out again and tells me, ‘Let’s go.’ And I say, ‘Shouldn’t we lock it?’ And he says, ‘Don’t bother.’ And we go back to the car and work out a plan to get the diamonds. That’s when we called you.”
My head was whirling. Maybe it was the sun, rising steadily higher and beating down on me; maybe it was the lack of sleep. Or maybe it was the image of Allison lying dead in one of any number of shacks scattered around the working mine. But I knew we had to find out fast. If there was any chance that she was alive . . .
“Kevin, thank you. You’ve been a big help, and I think we may be able to find the place.” At my compliment, he beamed. Damn, it took so little to manipulate this kid. I wondered if he had any chance of straightening out his life.
Not if he was an accomplice to a kidnapping that ended in murder.
So I went on, “We need to go back to the others and tell them what you’ve told me, so we can start looking.”
We made our way back slowly to where we’d left the guys. Sean was now standing, but sporting handcuffs. Trust Matt to arrive prepared for all contingencies, even on his time off. Had he arrested Sean? Did it make any difference?
When Kevin and I were within earshot, I said without preamble. “Kevin says she’s somewhere on the mine property, in a shed.” When Sean gave Kevin another of his glares, I knew we were on the right track.
Matt didn’t look very happy. “That’s a lot of territory to cover. Can you narrow it down any?”
“They didn’t come in by the main gate but by a side road, and they didn’t walk very far. Right, Kevin?”
“Yeah, maybe ten minutes. Oh—and there was this really weird cactus. Looked like an alien or something. Spooky.”
Cam spoke for the first time. “Kind of lumpy at the top?”
Kevin nodded. “Yeah, all knotted up.”
“Cristate saguaro. That should help—there aren’t too many out there.”
Frank cleared his throat, and we all turned to look at him. “Fellas—and lady—this doesn’t look too different from the Australian brush, and I don’t think these guys were trying to hide their tracks, right? So I’ll lay odds I can pick up the trail, no worries.”
I felt better, if only a little.
Then Matt said, “All right, let’s go.” He did a quick head count and didn’t look happy. “We’re going to have to take both cars, evidence be damned. Frank, you take Cam’s car with Cam and Em, and I’ll take Sean’s, with Sean and Kevin. We can swap for mine back at the road.”
Kevin didn’t look to happy with the idea of sharing space with Sean, but there weren’t a lot of alternatives. Kevin and Sean were officially suspects, and even if Kevin was no more than Sean’s dupe, he was still implicated. Matt produced a second pair of handcuffs—where had he been hiding them?—and made sure that both Sean and Kevin were secured in the car.
But before we pulled out, he came over to me. “Em?”
I looked up at him, feeling numb. “What?”
“I don’t know. Kevin . . . didn’t say she was dead.” Of course, he hadn’t said she was alive either—and Sean had been with her last.
“Then we’ll find her. You did a good job back there, getting Kevin to talk.”
“Thank you.”
He laid a hand on my arm. “We’ll find her, Em,” he said gently.
Chapter 22
fuming chamber: a barrel or box with an exhaust fan and filter, used for applying chemical effects to the surface of the glass, when the fumes or dust are potentially poisonous (Mike Firth, Glossary of Tools & Equipment for Glassblowing)
When we reached the main road, we got out of the cars again. If there had been any traffic to notice us, we would have looked like a bunch of college kids pulling a Chinese fire drill at a stoplight. Maybe there was a twisted logic to what we were doing. Matt wanted to preserve Sean’s car in case there was any evidence to be had, like in the trunk where he had stuffed Allison, bound and gagged. . . . No, I couldn’t think about that. Anyway, that meant we should mess with it as little as possible. So there were six people for two cars. Somewhere in the sane world there was a formula for the number of permutations that allowed, but right here and now there were simpler considerations. Sean and Kevin were the only two who knew where we should be going. Sean had clammed up, and I didn’t expect him to change his mind anytime soon. That left Kevin. But Kevin was clearly scared of Sean, so I guessed that we might have better luck with him if we kept the two of them apart.
I pulled Matt aside and told him so. “Look, I’ve got Kevin talking to me, and I think he’ll do better without Sean glaring at him every step of the way.”
Matt looked at me, conflict clear on his face. “Em, the man’s a suspect, and that goes against all procedure.”
Those pesky rules again. Or was it laws? “Matt Lundgren, you’ve already broken half the rules in the book today. What’s one more?”
