When we arrived, the bitten away shoulder where a work crew member had fallen earlier today was raw and ragged. The man saved himself by holding on to a tree branch, while dirt and gravel landed below with a distinctly metallic ring. After rescuing their coworker, two men clambered down and found Redus’ Ford truck lying on its side, with him inside, very dead.
Nobody would have spotted the green truck from the road unless they stopped on the banked curve and looked directly down. Not an exercise I would have considered conducive to health.
Still, that’s what about ten men were doing—toes to the raw edge and peering down, down, down—when Diana parked the van behind a line of construction trucks, a sheriff’s department four-wheel and two private vehicles.
“So much for preserving the crime scene,” I muttered as we reached the outskirts of the group.
“Good thing for us, isn’t it?” said a white-haired man to my left. “I’m Needham Bender, editor of the Independence.”
I shook his hand. I liked his sharp gray eyes. I liked his easy smile. I liked the three pens in his checked shirt’s breast pocket. And I liked his newspaper. “Nice to meet you. I read the Independence every Tuesday and Friday. I’m—”
“Oh, I know you,” he interrupted. “Kinda surprised to see you here, though. Thought Fine’d bust a gut before he let you cover a story like this.”
“Let’s just say I caught him napping.” The deep lines at the corners of his eyes crinkled deeper. Chalk up another member in the Thurston non-fan club. “How come the Independence sent its editor and publisher—” I was showing off a bit, proving I read the masthead, “—out on this story?”
“I’m an old fire horse. Cagen’s got the assignment, but you couldn’t keep me away. Heard it on the scanner. You might want to grab those guys—” He tipped his head toward three men in dusty orange coveralls. “—they found him.”
Mike and Diana nodded and headed toward the three men.
“That was very generous of you,” I told Bender.
He laughed. “No need for suspicion. You’ll be on the air several times over before the next edition of the Independence is out, so we’re not really competitors. But you can’t do more than skim the surface—and that makes folks all the readier to read all about it.”
My hackles smoothed, I admitted glumly, “I know.”
He laughed again. “Shall we take a look?”
Even knowing what was there, it took a moment to find it. The truck rested on its passenger side, nose slightly downgrade, about a hundred feet below the road. From this distance, a couple major dents showed, especially in the front, but it looked pretty much intact.
The driver’s door was open, revealing what looked to be a bundle of tan cloth.
Foster Redus.
I traced the truck’s path backward to the top, following signposts of a sapling snapped in half, a brown and uprooted bush, a broken tree limb. They could have been the normal ravages of nature, and enough had grown back to make it clear the truck’s descent wasn’t recent.
To our right, I scanned beyond the newly missing chunk of shoulder.
“Notice anything?” Needham Bender asked.
“No skid marks.” He tipped his head in acknowledgment. “But would they be here this long after?”
“Good question. We’d had a snow that melted a couple days before Redus disappeared, left things muddy. Two days after Redus disappeared, it froze up hard. Stayed that way ’til spring. So if there’d been marks last November, they should be here now, especially since this road was closed—in theory, anyway—in mid-October and won’t open regular until repairs are done.”
The road climbed here, laboring toward the pass Mike had said was a couple miles ahead. Before the curve ahead, the otherwise narrow shoulder widened enough for a vehicle to pull over.
“If I accidentally lost control up here,” I said, “I’d have my foot on the brake so hard it would go right through the floorboard, and I’d end up like Fred Flintstone, leaving lots of signs of skidding, braking, something.”
“How much strength you think it would take to push a truck that size?”
“I would say that depended on whether you did it with brawn or brains.” Bender raised an interested eyebrow, so I continued. “Say you’re parked behind Redus, wouldn’t take much to use your vehicle to bump his over the edge. Especially, if you’re driving something about the same size, which as far as I can tell everybody in this county does except me and a couple other oddballs.”
“Good point.” He squinted at the edge Redus’ pickup had tumbled over. “If the pickup was in neutral, it wouldn’t take much of a push.”
I looked back at the hard-packed surface our hypothetical pushing vehicle would have occupied. Surface now covered by a layer of material the crew had laid down. If there had been tire prints, they were gone now. The throaty drone of more vehicular beasts coming up the road announced a sheriff’s department four-wheel drive.
Deputy Richard Alvaro emerged from one side, clamping his hat on his head and his jaw around a mouthful of mad. “What the hell are you doing, Lloyd? Where’s Sheriff Widcuff? Did he tell you to let everybody and his sister tromp around the scene?”
A tall, thin blond separated from four other guys. It wasn’t that he stepped forward, more like the others melted away. “Uh . . . no.”
Alvaro turned to the assembled representatives of Sherman’s media, all five of us. “All of you, get back over there.” He jabbed a finger to the far side of the roadway, against the face of the mountain. “Lloyd, get everybody’s name, address, phone number, who they work for, when they got here and an account of what they did after they got here—precisely. Then, see these media people on their way. No, not you,” he interrupted himself to point at one of the three highway construction workers who’d shown signs of wandering off. “You’re here for the duration.”
Alvaro glanced toward his vehicle where a gray-haired man who’d gotten out of the passenger side was unloading cameras and other equipment, then at the ledge, crisscrossed by footprints, then back to Lloyd.
“And get the kind of shoes everyone’s wearing and their damn shoe size.”
It was nearly twenty minutes before Mike, Diana and I were processed—Needham Bender graciously suggested we go first.
I made a stab at getting a statement from Alvaro with no luck—he was back in the fold of silent law enforcement types—but Diana got some video.
“Back to the station?” she asked as we reached the van.
“Let’s go by Burrell’s, see if we can get a comment.”
Mike cut me a sharp look, but Diana handed him the keys and said, “You drive, Mike, while I set up.”
“Why not me?” I asked, mostly to keep Mike from expressing the reservation about our destination that I saw in his eyes.
“You kidding?” Diana asked, settling into the back seat and hooking her seat belt. “I don’t want a flatlander piloting me on these roads.”
* * * *
Three sheriff’s department cars, including Widcuff’s, were parked in Burrell’s drive. Widcuff stood in the open door of his car, talking to Tom Burrell, about four feet away. The two deputies stood by their cars, one to each flank, pretending they weren’t listening for all they were worth.
Mike slowed the van as we crossed the creek, and Widcuff looked around.
His face turned red, and he started shouting to the deputy closest to us. The deputy headed toward the van, waving his arms, emphatically indicating we were not welcomed.
“Circle to the left, Mike,” Diana ordered from the seat behind me.
“Okay.” He rolled down the window and shouted to the deputy, “We’re going, we’re going. But I gotta turn around.”
Diana lowered her window and shot as the van swung around.
“Hey! You can’t do that!”
The deputy’s shout didn’t deter Diana, but it brought Burrell’s head around.
He still looked like Abraham Lincoln’s good-
looking cousin. But the bones seemed higher, the lines deeper. Like Abraham Lincoln’s good-looking cousin after the Battle of Gettysburg.
No one said a word on the drive to the station.
* * * *
In the closest Les Haeburn probably ever got to a moral dilemma, he had to decide whether to infuriate his anchorman or skip the biggest story of the year.
Haeburn did what was best for him. He ran our video the way Mike, Diana and I edited it. And he gave Thurston Fine free rein for a long-winded, sideways voice-over recap. Since we’d incorporated enough facts—including that Burrell now was being questioned at the sheriff’s department—in the body of the segment, Fine’s narration didn’t bother me much more than a football stadium’s worth of fingernails on a blackboard.
Diana went home to her kids, Mike did his stint on the early news, and I punished myself by watching Fine on a newsroom monitor while I checked messages and planned out the next few steps.
It felt good. Not that a man was dead. But to know what to do. Instinct and training and experience kicked in. No questions. No wondering what to do or where to go. It fell into place in my head, crisp and clear and prioritized. No limbo.
Mike pulled up a chair as he loosened his tie. His on-air suit jacket was back on its hanger awaiting the late news.
“You want to get something to eat?”
Apparently we were back to normal, with the lost weekend past and forgotten. Suited me.
“On the way.” I stood and slung my purse over my shoulder.
“On the way where?”
“To Mona’s house.”
Chapter Seventeen
“I told you he was dead.”
I’d guessed Mona didn’t devote much of her day to keeping up on world events, so I thought we stood a fair chance of being the first to tell her Foster Redus’ body had been found.
I was right.
She answered the door in a flowing caftan of polyester chiffon. It was like a pink arrow to the sallowness of her skin and puffiness of her eyes. I caught a whiff of stale beer, stale smoke and stale perfume when she led us into the living room, where she clashed mightily with her sofa. She had the flu, she told us.
Flu? More like the day-after-a-night-at-the-Kicking-Cowboy, but maybe I’m getting cynical.
“They were all laughing behind my back, thinking I’d been dumped. Well, now they know. I wasn’t dumped. Foster was going to take me away. He adored me. Couldn’t do enough for me. And that’s why he’s dead.”
Better dead than gone was Mona’s motto, judging by her triumphant tone.
“You still think your ex-husband killed Redus?”
“Of course,” she snapped at me. “This proves it. Now maybe Widcuff will get his head out of his ass and do something. Arrest Tom, get him convicted. Nobody knows those mountains better than Tom. He was always going off to moon around somewhere up there when we were married.”
“If he knows the mountains so well,” I said, “he was damn unlucky to pick a spot that somebody found, wasn’t he?”
“If the man’d been lucky he’d’ve made something of himself.”
“This must be a shock, Mona. I mean,” Mike said, taking a seat, “even though you were certain Foster was dead, the reality . . .”
I sat in the chair opposite Mike, out of Mona’s line of sight as long as she focused on Mike, which she did.
“You have no idea, Mike. It’s a tragedy. We had our whole lives to look forward to. We had so many plans, so many dreams. Now, they’re all gone.”
She sniffled. Reaching to a brocade-covered box on the end table, she pulled several tissues free and dabbed at her eyes. She leaned farther over the arm of the sofa, reaching to the lower shelf of the end table, and Mike’s gaze drifted to the deepening V of her caftan before jerking away.
“I have pictures of Foster and me. Want to see them?”
Mona flipped past several pages in the album she’d retrieved before she held it out to Mike.
He looked at the photos with grave interest, while I itched with impatience. All I’d seen of Foster Redus so far had been a grainy official photo in the clips from the Independence.
“You look very happy,” he said at last.
“We were. So happy.” Mona sniffled again. When she brought the tissues to her eyes, Mike passed the album to me.
While Mona talked of happy times with Redus, I considered the images of the late deputy.
He was about Mona’s height, with a compact build. When he smiled all out, as he did in several photos, his top lip curled, forming a rectangle, pushing his cheeks up and squeezing his eyes closed. It sounds repulsive, but it wasn’t. I shouldn’t have been surprised that he was appealing, since he had enthralled, at one time or another, Gina, Mona, Marty Beck and reportedly many others.
I flipped to the photos Mona had passed over. Three formed a sequence, with Foster and Mona on the front steps of this house. In the first two Redus’ smile was in full force. In the third, he was looking partly over his shoulder, and the smile had become a sneer. Behind him, shadowed by the screen door stood Tamantha.
“But I can’t dwell on all that,” Mona said. “I can’t live in the past. I’m too young to let this ruin my life. My future’s ahead of me.”
I’d be surprised to find it anywhere else.
No, I didn’t say it. Antagonizing the person you’re interviewing isn’t necessarily a good tactic.
Then her phrase echoed in my head like it had been shouted in a distant cavern. My future’s ahead of me.
Did I believe mine was ahead of me? Or was this limbo of mine a towel I’d tossed in, saying I figured my future was long-gone? Accepting what divorce and demotion had said about me—that I no longer offered any appeal, personally or professionally. I might not be in a position to assess that first part—I might never be as long as my image was reflected back to me daily amidst that sickly green bathroom—but the second part, that was something I needed to face.
Was my reluctance to do a final sign off on news and consider a talk show professional pride? Or refusing to face the facts? Because there were two levels of sign offs—the anchor signed off a newscast, sure, like Cronkite’s iconic “And that’s the way it is.” I’d already done my version of that.
But stations also signed off. Ending broadcasting for the entire day—or forever—and going to static. Was some childish part of me dreaming that the network would come crawling back, begging me to return to my former position and saving me from my personal static?
Wasn’t going to happen.
The acceptance that came with that certainty was almost a relief. Had I been holding myself in limbo by refusing to let go of that hope? Maybe I should—
“What’s with you?”
Mona’s demand snapped me out of my trance.
Apparently, she’d been keeping an eye on me and having me stare unblinking at nothing had disturbed her concentration on herself.
And she was right. This was not the time for me to sort out my past, present and future. There was a story to follow. I felt my mind click fully into reporting mode, and I could have sung hallelujahs.
“Never mind her.” Mike recaptured her complete attention with three words. “What about your future, Mona? You’re a young woman, attractive and unattached. What’re you going to do?”
I savored those words. There could come a time when I could exact great pleasure from reminding Paycik of them.
Mona savored every word, too.
“I’ll go on. I’ll cry inside, but I have to go on. I’ll try to find a little happiness in this life. And security.” I noticed she didn’t mention going on for her daughter. “I was just wondering, was anything said about Foster’s leather case? I mean, was it found? He had a little bitty key to it, kept it on the chain with all his other keys.”
“No,” said Mike. “Why?”
“Oh . . . I’d sure like to have it. To remember him by. It had . . . uh, real personal things in it, you know, mementos from our
being together.” Had Redus gone in for risqué photos of his conquests? It would fit. “I’d like to have those.”
“It’s a credit to you that you are thinking about the good times and memories when you must have so many practical concerns weighing on you.”
“Like what?”
Mike faltered at her blank reaction. “Well . . . the funeral.”
“The funeral? I’m not doing that. Why should I?”
“You lived together, you and Foster.”
“Gina’s his widow. That’s for her to do, not me.” If she’d dusted off her hands, it couldn’t have been clearer. No funeral duty for Mona. Maybe Tamantha’s single-mindedness hadn’t all come from her paternal gene pool.
“How about financial matters, Mona?” I asked. “How are you going to support yourself and Tamantha without Foster’s help?”
She stifled a mild snort; apparently Foster hadn’t been all that helpful in that regard. “Going to do it the same way I’ve been doing it. I’ve got alimony, don’t I, and child support. Tom’s doing good enough that he shouldn’t leave his wife and kid to scrimp along.”
“That could change if his business keeps suffering,” I pointed out. “And what if he’s convicted of murder? How will he pay alimony and child support then?”
“He’s got things he can sell. The ranch. That business.”
“Legal fees eat up a lot of money. Especially for a murder defense.”
Her eyes narrowed as she chewed on her top lip. At first I thought it was irritation, possibly divided between me for bringing it up and Tom for considering using her money on such frivolity. But I changed my mind when she spoke.
“Maybe I’ll have to be looking into other sources of income.”
“Like what?”
She blinked her eyes wide and smoothed over her lip with her tongue. “Oh, I don’t know. Something might occur to me.”
* * * *
Rather than return to the station and watch another round of Fine, I went home. I had an early date the next morning with the telephone to catch people on the East Coast.
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